The Trade of Blind Jumps

Master Velo used to say that anyone can fly a charted route, and that the people worth respecting are the ones who made the chart, because making a chart means jumping somewhere no one has ever been and trusting that you will survive to write it down. I was his apprentice for nine years. Cartography is not a clean profession in our galaxy. The jump-engines work, they have always worked, but they cannot see ahead, and so a new route is made the old brutal way, by a cartographer who runs the calculation, commits, jumps blind into the dark, and either emerges somewhere and records the somewhere, or does not emerge, and becomes a gap in someone else's chart. Velo had made four hundred routes in his life. Four hundred times he had jumped not knowing. He taught me the calculations and he taught me the courage, and the courage was the harder lesson, and when he died, quietly, in his bed, of being old, it felt like the wrong death for him, and I think he would have agreed.