Distance changes trust because it changes what can be checked in real time. For the Children of Luna, that forced a gradual shift away from presence-based trust toward continuity-based trust. A branch became reliable not because someone nearby could always watch it, but because its history under delay remained coherent.
This favored lineages that could preserve memory discipline, survive long silent intervals, and still resynchronize without civic rupture. Trust became historical before it became immediate. That is one reason remote branches often seem both more self-contained and more formal in their claims.
The political result is subtle but important. Distance does not destroy community if continuity is strong enough. It changes the evidence on which community rests.
In that sense, outer colony trust looks less like intimacy and more like durable institutional recognition.