To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

  ‘Turn off your lights.’ I did. She did. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing.

  For a moment, there was nothing. My eyes hurried to conform to the darkness, trying to parse the edge between black sky and black ice. But before they could, something else appeared, about a meter ahead of us.

  Red. A small patch of soft, fluorescent red, shining quietly up through a hazy pane of ice.

  It moved.

  I should note that autonomous movement detectable to the human eye is not a conclusive indicator of life. A rock slipping down a hill is not alive. A river is not alive. Lichen, on the other hand, is very much alive, as is pond scum and the yeast in bread dough, but you won’t see any of these pick up and scurry across a room (one would hope). Even so, if you see something wiggle its way forward when nothing else around it is moving, there’s not a scientist in the world that wouldn’t make an assumption there.

  Elena remembered protocol before I did. ‘Camera,’ she said.

  Her voice snapped me into action. ‘Camera.’ I heard a faint click in my helmet as the onboard recording equipment got to work.

  ‘There’s a light in the ice ahead of us,’ she said, delivering her words with academic composure. ‘We noticed it a few seconds before we began recording. Not sure how long it’s been there. Flight engineer O’Neill and I are approaching carefully to take a closer look.’

  The ice crunched beneath our boots as we walked. My pulse raced as my brain helpfully supplied images of angler fish and glow-worms, luring in the hypnotised to a toothy end. I imagined the ice splintering, the solid surface destroyed as a monstrous alien maw rose up and swallowed us whole and screaming. But Elena walked steady, and so I walked steady, wearing her bravery as my own.

  To my relief (and perhaps surprise), there was no splintering, no swallowing. What there was was light – more light, another and another and another. We could tell their sources were bright, and I’m sure if we’d seen them in clear water, their silhouettes would’ve been crisp and precise. But the ice muted the light, blurring its edges, scattering it in hazy auras that shimmered well beyond the source. New colours joined the party – orange, pink – and new shapes as well. There were snake-like things, full-bodied things, worms and flowers and combs. Some shoaled by the dozens. Some travelled alone. Some bobbed. Some chased. The ice sheet below us became a luminescent symphony, and Elena stopped narrating for the camera. I understood why. None of our words in the moment were good enough. Imagine a summer carnival behind a wintered windowpane. Imagine the most fabulous aurora you’ve ever seen, shining below your feet.

  Elena and I laughed. I grabbed her hand. She pulled me in, her arm wrapped snugly around my shoulders, the top of my helmet resting against the bottom of hers. We were one being, one moment, all boundary of body and person dissolved in the presence of shared euphoria. We stood like children, pointing and gasping. I forgot why she’d gone out onto the ice. It seemed she had as well.

  I heard the faint rush of the airlock behind us, followed by a clatter down the ramp and a burst of running. Chikondi – undoubtedly having seen the feeds of our cameras pop up on the monitor – came barrelling toward us, a man on fire. Jack came out of the airlock a few seconds later, running for a few steps, stopping to fix the boot he’d hastily shoved himself into, then continuing onward.

  Chikondi was beside himself. The dance of light was in full force now, and he turned this way and that, crying out wordlessly. He took a deep breath, and shouted in crescendo: ‘Multi … cellular … ORGANISMS!’ He raised his face to the sky, thrusting his gloved fists in the air like he’d just scored a championship goal.

  ‘Holy shit.’ Jack laughed. He put his palms on the top of his helmet. ‘Holy shit.’ He looked at me and Elena. ‘Are you still recording?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘Every word you say.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ Jack walked over to her and turned his gaze straight into her camera lens. ‘Holy shit.’

  Chikondi wasted no time in training his flock of camera traps on the ice. For ten days, the little machines recorded the glowing soirees taking place in the water below. We did plenty of work in the meantime, harvesting vegetables in the greenhouse, doing routine inspections of the Merian’s systems, studying the orbital imagery the cubesats sent back every day. We began environmental studies as well, at Elena’s lead. She was in her element atop a frozen sea, where there were ice cores to pull and wind speeds to measure and scrapings to melt down on microscope slides. She worked with laser focus, efficient as ever.

  She said nothing of Tampico. The rest of us decided not to ask.

  We were her lab techs during this time, and happily so. No astronaut is a pure specialist, and no scientist works alone. To survey an ecosystem, you need to have a base understanding of all its factors. A biologist cannot draw conclusions without knowing how the oceans move and what the air is like. A meteorologist cannot study the composition of the atmosphere without knowing what’s breathing into it. And me – I may be the engineer, but not only are my hands as good with a Petri dish as anyone else’s, but it helps me to know what my tools are being used for. I want to know. If each of us retreated into our own private dens of specialisation, we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot. We benefit from knowing what the other is doing – even Jack, who complained every day about the lack of rocks.

  ‘I would do anything for a handful of dirt,’ he’d moan. ‘Just a spoonful. A crumb.’ He’d sigh dramatically at every sparkling ice core we dissected, but it was all in jest. Anytime something new was brought into the clean lab, his eyes lit up as much as anyone’s.

  At the end of Chikondi’s first period of photography, we gathered at his request in the data lab. The three of us sat around the table, tablets and attention at the ready.

  Chikondi stood at the sketch board, hands full of styluses, his whole body about to burst with excitement. ‘Draw anything you haven’t seen before up here on the board, and call it out when you do, so we don’t end up “discovering” the same thing twice. Now, at first, everything’s going to be something we haven’t seen before, so we’ll begin with reviewing images as a group until we start getting familiar with the phenotypes that are out there. Okay?’

  Jack looked at me. ‘Can you draw for me? I’m shit at drawing.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Elena, would you—’

  Elena’s expression answered his question beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  ‘So long as it’s got the right number of legs and an approximate body shape, you’ll be fine,’ Chikondi said.

  ‘But it’s for posterity.’ Jack gestured in protest at the sketch board, which would digitally record, archive, and transmit everything we scribbled on it. ‘I don’t want the history books to say, “This is Jack Vo, trailblazer, Renaissance man, but ultimately, tragically, shit at drawing.”’

  Elena gave him a look. ‘You’re being an infant.’

  Jack wrinkled his nose at her. ‘You’re being an infant.’

  Chikondi handed Jack the first stylus. He passed styluses to me and Elena as well, then set down the remaining fistful on one of the lab benches.

  ‘Why did you grab so many?’ Elena asked.

  ‘Well, just in case one breaks,’ Chikondi said. ‘We’re going to be here for a while.’ He tapped his tablet, syncing his screen to the larger display next to the sketch board, then settled into one of the lab chairs. ‘Okay, get ready, everyone. Day one, image one.’

  We leaned forward.

  Standing on the ice and watching the life forms in motion had been mesmerising. Seeing a snapshot of said same – a dozen or so glowing creatures frozen in time, their forms finally still enough for us to bloodlessly dissect – made us pine.

  Jack leapt to his feet, artistic insecurities no match for the siren’s call of raw data. ‘Put a grid on it.’

  Chikondi tapped his screen, and a neat net of squares appeared over the image. He got up, too, his rest in the chair short-lived. He looked electric, like if you t
ouched him you’d feel a snap. ‘Okay, okay, ah – first row, first column—’

  Jack nodded and began to draw. ‘AnA, yeah?’ By this, he meant Annelid Approximate, one of OCA’s many official classifications. You don’t want to call an alien creature a fish or a spider in a field research context. It may look like an animal back home, and may even behave like an animal back home, but it’s not the same thing, and shoving everything we find out here into the categories we have on Earth is a dangerous trap. You have to give some kind of name to the things you find, though, and as taxonomy is the sort of long-game activity best done back home, we survey teams use simple acronyms based on terrestrial phyla, to help us visually sort things until proper classification can be determined. So, because it’s not very fancy to say ‘worm-like,’ we say Annelid (e.g. earthworm) Approximate: AnA. You can find this acronym on the same list as Avian Reptile Approximate (AvA), Amphibian Approximate (AA), Mammal Approximate (MA), and so on – plus the ever-exciting ‘NP’ for ‘New Phyla’. Everybody wants to find an NP.

  Chikondi got blindingly close to the monitor as he weighed Jack’s assessment of the creature in the top left grid. He thought for a minute, then shook his head. ‘It’s not segmented, it’s smooth. And stocky. I say CA.’ Cnidarian Approximate, the phyla that includes sea cucumbers.

  ‘Hold on.’ Elena joined the fray. ‘It’s got feet.’

  ‘Where?’ Chikondi asked.

  Elena pointed at a different grid. ‘This is the same species, right?’ She made a pulling motion on the monitor, zooming in. ‘Look. Isn’t that a foot?’

  I got up to look, too. We all squinted at the tiny blobs sticking out of the larger blob.

  ‘Hard to say,’ Jack said.

  ‘It’s in motion,’ I said. ‘We need a clearer image.’

  ‘I swear that’s a foot,’ Elena said. ‘Or a digit of some kind.’

  ‘Cnidarians have feet, so CA would still be accurate,’ Chikondi said. ‘Although …’ He shook his head with the kind of frustrated puzzlement every scientist longs for. He zoomed in closer and frowned. ‘Does it have bones?’

  We leaned even further forward with cartoonish synchrony. We looked, and we looked, and we looked, the pixels somehow becoming less clear with each second that went by.

  ‘Mark it as inconclusive until we see more specimens,’ Chikondi said to Jack.

  Jack began to write on the sketch board below his drawing of the creature.

  Elena looked at Jack’s handiwork. ‘You really are shit at drawing.’

  He casually gave her the finger with his free hand as he wrote: CA0001 (incon.).

  So it went for two hours, until all fuel for categorical bickering had been spent. A menagerie of crudely sketched body types filled the board – thirteen suspected new species in total. Thirteen unique animals with their own lives and stories to tell. Thirteen things no human before us had ever seen.

  The camera trap is one of the most humane inventions in the ecological survey toolbox, and it excels when paired with its best friend, image recognition software. In the old days, scientists had to manually review every image they took of a jungle road or a wildlife corridor, painstakingly tagging each file with whether it contained elephants or bears or whatever biological quarry they were after. It took a tremendous number of work hours, and often had to be completed by volunteers, simply because there was never enough funding to actually pay the number of people such a task would require. Software that could do the work in a fraction of the time was a godsend, and its development revolutionised the field. There’s only one problem with that approach: you have to teach the software what to look for. If you’re dealing with creatures nobody’s ever seen, you can’t do that, not at first. The only way forward is old school.

  ‘Okay,’ Chikondi said energetically, tapping his tablet. ‘On to day one, image two.’

  ‘How much time lapsed between each photo capture?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Two minutes,’ Chikondi said.

  Jack exhaled and cracked his neck. I clapped him on the shoulder in solidarity. Elena smiled silently and folded her arms, looking ready – no, eager to forgo sleep for this. She was made for this work. We all were.

  A scholar could review the reports we made on Aecor in days, maybe weeks. For the layman, our discoveries can be summed up as follows:

  We found an animal with a previously unknown method of propulsion: Tubuspiscis quesadae, which looks like a sport sock with the entire toe cut out, if that sock were made of the flesh of a jellyfish instead of fabric. It squeezes the sides of its hollow body to propel itself through the water, gathering nutrients in the dense fur of filters that coats its inner side.

  We found no large animals on Aecor during the extent of our survey. This does not mean they do not exist, but we found no supporting evidence that they do. The largest organism we found is Doliopiscis aecorii, a fish-approximate species that can reach about half a meter in length. We surmise that Aecor’s challenging aquatic environment has hindered the evolution of larger creatures.

  We found that much of the life on Aecor is nocturnal. Why this matters at such a great distance from the sun and beneath an ice cap, we don’t know. (Chikondi is still stuck on – and agitated by – this puzzle.)

  We found enormous mats of an algae-like organism (Pigertapete aecorii) that ride the convection currents in a predictable circuit. A host of animals cling to these mats as a means of rather sedentary migration.

  We estimate, from the ice cores, that Aecor’s surface replaces itself at a regular rate every six thousand years. An impact event appears to have interrupted this cycle some two thousand years ago. Determining the ecological effects of this would require greater study. Based on satellite data, we believe this impact occurred near the Jemison Peninsula, in the southern hemisphere.

  We catalogued nine hundred and twenty-six species of multicellular organisms, including thirty-two we happily classified as NP. We additionally catalogued over three thousand species of bacteria. These are not final numbers, by any stretch of the imagination.

  Based on our findings, we recommended Aecor as a future site for long-term, dedicated ecological study.

  It’s staggering to see these things written out like that, because in reality, those seven short summaries represent four Earth years spent on that little moon. Science, you see, is boring. I don’t mean discovery, and I don’t mean knowledge. I mean the activity of science – the process, the procedure. That list above can only be written thanks to four years of ice cores, of photo captures, of wind logs, of melt measurements, of databases, of arguments, of launches and landings, of packing and unpacking and repacking the lab, of washing pipettes and stacking slides and decontaminating gloves and goggles exactly the same way every single time. The work is tedious. It is slow. It is not for everyone, even though the end results are.

  I took solace in that work, monotonous as it was. The Merian ran so beautifully on Aecor that I had little to do for her beyond standard maintenance. I spent most of my time in the lab, helping to process brine samples and program image recognition software (which yes, we were able to use, after about a year). Any task that needed an extra pair of hands, I was there for.

  I remember one night in particular, when we were stationed in the place we nicknamed the Misty Plateau. It was late, and the lighting of the Merian’s interior wrapped us in warm contrast against the pitch-black beyond the windows. Geysers burst outside at a safe distance, a scattered bouquet of them spreading out across a frigid plain. There was always one going off – sometimes two or three at once, their boiling water hissing loud enough against the stubborn ice for us to hear it through the hull. But there was nothing threatening about the sound. It was a wave crashing, a wind blowing, a geothermic lullaby. I was alone in the clean lab, but I knew where the others were. Elena and Jack were in the data lab, in the throes of a passionate dispute about the nature of the moon’s core (I am sure they both relished every second of it). Chikondi was in the greenhouse, tending
his leafy crop with care. And there I was, washing Petri dishes – the most mundane, new-kid-in-the-lab chore there is. I stood there, scraping out stubborn growth medium with my gloved fingernail, and I was happy. Content like I could never remember being. I was surrounded by people I loved, safe in a place free of noise and performance and the empty trappings of civilisation. Here, nobody cared about status or money, who was in power, who was kissing or killing whom. There was only water, and the wonders living within it. The right things mattered on Aecor. I’m a secular woman, but that moon felt to me like a sacred place. A monastic world that repaid hard work and dogged patience with the finest of rewards: Quiet. Beauty. Understanding.

  ‘I want to stay here,’ I said to Elena one night as we lay nose to nose in her cabin. ‘If they’d sent us here just for this, that’d be enough.’ Her face shimmered, and I imagined the light waves bouncing from the reflectin in her skin to the reflectin in mine, then back to hers, then back to mine, an endless reciprocity.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. She thought for a moment, stroking my cheek with her thumb. Something shifted in her, and she smiled. ‘But think about what we get to do next.’

  Mirabilis

  The glitter was gone from my skin, but something new had rooted itself beneath. Remember: the human body evolved for Earth gravity and Earth gravity alone, and its internal structure has adapted for that specific force. Just as too much time in microgravity can pose problems without supplementation, so it goes in the opposite direction. Mirabilis is what we call a ‘superearth’ – a rocky giant nearly double the size of our homeworld. On its surface, my body’s weight would double (even though my mass would not). So, too, would the weight of everything I needed to lift – crates, tools, toothbrushes, the clothes on my back. Even in the best of shape, the strain would chip away at me if I were unaided. Tears and fractures and stress injuries galore, plus the very real, very frightening likelihood that my circulatory system would eventually give up the laborious task of pushing blood to my brain. That wouldn’t be particularly conducive for mission success.