To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

  So for Mirabilis, I’d been given extra muscle fibre. Lots and lots of extra muscle fibre.

  I am well aware that we Homo sapiens are great apes. Even if gene sequencing hadn’t proved that fact long ago, it’s evident in everything from our grasping hands to our lanky limbs to our fat, omnivorous skulls. There’s an anecdote about Queen Victoria visiting the London Zoo and becoming repulsed at the obvious familial resemblance of an orangutan (‘frightfully, and painfully, and disagreeably human’ was her verdict). But I’m sure she went back to her gilded palace full of tea and paintings and whatnot after that, thus assuring herself of her God-given degrees of separation. Even today, while we largely view our forest-dwelling cousins with far more affection and respect, we like to think we’re immeasurably different from them. After all, don’t we wear clothes and build houses and talk at length about how very smart we are for understanding that we’re apes?

  When I looked at the body OCA had given me for Mirabilis, the real difference was made plain: human beings are the runts of the ape litter. We’re scrawny. We’re sickly. You’d need to be a champion weightlifter to get within spitting distance of the strength possessed by the most wilting gorilla. Perhaps you’ve seen an ape in a zoo – a chimpanzee, let’s say – and noted, as they shimmy up two-storey ropes with the ease of strolling through a park, how ludicrously ripped they are.

  Trust me when I say you can’t begin to understand muscles like that until your body is made of them.

  I’ve been in 2Gs for brief periods countless times over – launches, landings, sharp turns in training planes. It’s a squeeze, a pressure. Like being underwater, but without the benefit of buoyancy. That feeling still existed on Mirabilis, but thanks to somaforming, I had the means to work within it. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s often misused, operating on the false interpretation that fit means physically fit, therefore expressing a dog-eat-dog ethos. The strongest wins the day. But that’s not what Darwin meant, not at all. He meant most suited to, as in, the creatures most suited to – or most fit for – a specific environment are the ones with the best chance of passing on their genes. A sloth is fit for a slow life in the branches. A worm is fit for chomping decaying leaves in the damp dark. A tick is fit for patiently waiting on a blade of grass, waiting for a sanguineous passerby to drink from.

  By the same token, I was fit for life on Mirabilis. The fact that I was also physically fit was just a nice bit of synchrony – not to mention novelty, in my case. I know what it is to be smart. I know what it is to be creative. I’ve never before felt strong, not like that. My body was powerful. My limbs were stocky. My thickened heart thudded boldly, a drumbeat deep and hale. My bones had likewise been altered for the task, dense enough to provide a more reliable framework. I wasn’t some sort of demigod or fairy-tale hero. I was simply me, reinforced.

  I couldn’t wait to see what I could do with that.

  I want you to picture the following creatures: a bat, a bird, and a bee. Specifically, picture their wings. All of these limbs serve the same purpose, but structurally, they’re quite different. Their wings, to put it simply, are not related to each other. In biology, this is called convergent evolution – two or more species independently developing similar features that weren’t present in their most recent common ancestor. Bats and bees can both fly, but this doesn’t mean they’re cousins. These creatures did not branch off from one airborne great-grandparent. Bats have a ground-dwelling lineage, and left their rodent-like family on the ground around fifty million years ago. Bees, on the other hand, are part of a very ancient line of flying insects that dates back to the Carboniferous Period – more than three hundred million years ago. Wildly divergent evolutionary paths, resulting in the same essential means of locomotion.

  I find this concept so beautiful.

  On Earth, the term invertebrate – anything without a spine – covers an astounding variety of body types. Spiders, sea hares, millipedes, cuttlefish, dragonflies, and clams all fit the bill. By comparison, vertebrates – snakes, zebras, condors, you and me – are tediously similar below the skin. The spine evolved only once in Earth history, and every being with a skeleton can trace itself back to the same root. We follow a basic template: a bilateral arrangement of skull, ribs, and pelvis, typically accompanied by four limbs. We have two eyes, one mouth, and a brain. The inner structure of our limbs is similarly predictable: one large upper bone, two parallel lower bones, the many little bones that form the wrist or ankle, and digits. We’re all working off of the same blueprint.

  This is not the case on Mirabilis. Our time there was too short to do a full evolutionary study, but from the moment we touched down, it was obvious that life on that world had followed a very different trajectory. From observation alone (and with the mountain of caveats that implies), we hypothesise that on Mirabilis, spine-like structures independently evolved at least three times.

  It’s impossible to predict, as progeny of Earth, how shocking a thing it is to walk into a tableau of vertebrates sporting different skeletal templates. We think we know what biological diversity is. Imagine standing in a wild place – let’s say a riparian meadow in a North American forest. Let’s also say that it’s late spring, and that you’re particularly lucky with the animals who have chosen to cross your path that day. It’d be only natural to marvel at the assortment before you – elk, bears, squirrels, hawks, salmon, salamanders, raccoons, turkeys, maybe even a bobcat. No two alike. Animals with physical differences so stark and overt, they’re one of the first things we teach to young children.

  And yet, all of those creatures possess two eyes, one mouth, limbs with digits, and so on. They are, at the core, the same.

  Jack won the dice roll on Mirabilis. It’s fortuitous that we lacked the live video coverage of the Apollo and Eridania missions, because the immortal words that flowed forth from mission specialist Jack Vo’s mouth as he became the first human to set foot on this new planet were: ‘What the fuck is that?’

  We left that portion of audio out of our official report.

  The worst part is, I can’t tell you what the fuck that was, in Jack’s eyes, because everything before us conjured the same question. I’m struggling to explain to you what we saw as we descended the ladder a few hours after we landed (we had to give the local residents some time to calm down and perhaps forget about the loud fiery thing that had landed in their midst). Every word in my vocabulary uses something from Earth as a reference point, and Mirabilis posed challenges for all of them.

  Take, for starters, the ground cover. If I am to be a good scientist, I shouldn’t say we landed in grassland, because the stuff around our feet was not made of blade-like leaves peeling away from stems, but rather flexible spiralling stalks, each rising up to knee-height in a tight corkscrew (Spirasurculus oneillae). We learned later that these autotrophs (organisms that don’t need to consume a living source of energy, as animals do) do not photosynthesise at all. They chemosynthesise, like the creatures you find clinging to ocean vents back home. Spirasurculus suck the energy and nutrients they need from the groundwater below them. They grow upward not to reach for the sun, but to provide a landing place for a tiny flying creature we dubbed Murmurus voii, with which they are symbiotic. But, again, if I were to say we landed in ‘a field of curly plants’, this would lead you astray, because Spirasurculus are not plants. Yet ‘plant’ is the best word I have if I want to paint you a mental picture. Spiracurculus would mean nothing to you if I had not explained it, nor would the inaccessibly academic descriptor monocotoloid chemoautotroph. If I have to pause at every word to explain what it actually means, most of you would understandably wander off before I’d finished setting the scene.

  So, for the moment, let’s sacrifice accuracy for the sake of impressionism: we landed in an alien ‘grassland’, surrounded by spindly ‘trees’ frocked with black ‘leaves’ – black, like all plant-approximates on Mirabilis, so as to absorb more of the subtle light. The hi
lls undulated, pillow-like, so rounded they almost looked liquid. The sky was pale orange, an aesthetic I can only describe as ‘bright dusk’, despite it being midday. Due to the closeness of Mirabilis’ orbit, the sun was huge in the sky, yet not blinding. There was an ornamentation of other orbital bodies up there as well: a selection of Mirabilis’ seventeen moons, plus its sibling planets Opera and Votum, patiently waiting for us. We had landed in summer, mild and carefree. There were clouds, as an afterthought. There was a breeze, but barely. It was, to our human sensibilities, a perfect day.

  The creatures before us seemed to agree.

  I noticed their strength first. Everything on Mirabilis is robust, bold, built for heavy Gs and a cool sun. The imposing muscularity of this menagerie struck me immediately. My own supplemented strength felt like a cheap facsimile when faced with the genuine article.

  The limbs were what I registered next, of which Mirabilis has three main phenotypes. First, the pairs of three: lumbering spotted behemoths with six pillared legs, and flap-like lips that rolled back in four directions to accommodate entire treetops. Pinch-faced herbivores with two pairs of on-pointe legs for locomotion, plus two intimidating scythe-shaped arms (primarily used for nothing more threatening than the alien equivalent of threshing wheat). Social flocks of tendril-covered fliers, each about the size of a skunk, held aloft by six wings that folded efficiently back whenever they left the air to wriggle through pondwater.

  Next, the pairs of seven (seven!): a fleet-footed arboreal climber with long silky fur and a face like the ghost of a greyhound, breathtaking in its oddness and shocking in its beauty. A small group of split-snouted, hog-like scavengers in the midst of a violent argument over a fruiting shrub. A solitary smooth-skinned thing that has no Earthly equivalent, which everything else was avoiding or shouting at. It shivered through the shadows, watching the hog-bodies intensely but never making a move. It did not open its mouth, as we stood there, but I was afraid of whatever it held within.

  And finally, the single pairs, the most unexpectedly unsettling of the lot. Bipedalism is not a common trait on Planet Earth, and typically we associate it either with ourselves – and thus an unfounded indicator of intelligence – or birds, which are physically so unlike us in every other way that we often forget we both walk in roughly the same manner. But though birds are without arms, they still have four limbs. When you look at the skeletal wings of a bird, you can see the shoulders, the wrist, the phalanges. You understand that the template is the same as ours. Not so with the trio of bipedal creatures we found at the first Mirabilis landing site. They had legs, which attached to a stump of a torso, which in turn attached (without any approximation of a neck) to something akin to a head, except it had no orifices beyond a sucking tube. A thick fringe of hairy feelers was its only guide to the plants it absent-mindedly drained, bumbling clumsily from one feeding spot to the next in a manner that felt like a pointed insult toward everyone who had ever assumed ‘two legs’ means ‘smart’.

  We had known there was life on Mirabilis. The atmospheric data gathered by OCA were indicative of virtually nothing else. We had not known said life would be anything like this. This was a jackpot, an offering so absurdly rich it almost seemed as if the planet was pulling a prank. Have you ever seen one of those dinosaur paintings from the 1800s, in which the artist crammed every known Jurassic species onto a single teeming riverbank? That was what lay before us, only the artist’s palette was robbed of green and blue, and every assumption of vertebrate evolution had been thrown out the window.

  ‘Camera!’ we each commanded, nearly in unison. Elena looked ravenous. Jack kept muttering ‘wow’ again and again, punctuated with reflexive swearing. Chikondi wept silently. But I can’t say what I felt in that moment, any more than I can properly call Spirasurculus a grass. As an astronaut, you know conceptually that you’re going to another world, that you’re going to see alien life. You know this, and yet there is nothing that can prepare you for it. It’s going to the zoo and seeing an animal you’ve never heard of. It’s seeing footage of a deep sea jelly whose body shape makes you feel as though you’re going mad. It’s the uncanny valley, pumped full of breath and blood. That first moment on Mirabilis rendered me a child – not joyous, like we’d been on Aecor with our glowing swimmers, but overwhelmed. A toddler surrounded by the knees and noise of adults, tasked with learning the entire world from scratch.

  That said, the joy was quick to follow.

  ‘I’ve got the news downloaded, whenever you’re ready.’

  If Chikondi registered what I’d said, he didn’t show it. His camera traps had been chugging along for a few hours, but he couldn’t wait. He was in the data lab, going frame by frame through his helmet recordings from landing – playing a little, pausing the video, drawing what he saw, repeat. It was a tedious way to review material. He didn’t care in the slightest. He was drawing in a frenzy, scribbling limbs and notes so furiously that his normally tidy handwriting was nearly illegible.

  ‘Hey. Chikondi,’ I said.

  He looked up at last, surprised. He hadn’t even heard me walk up.

  ‘Want to watch the news?’

  ‘Oh. Um.’ Chikondi blinked, thrown off track. He thought for a moment, then pointed at the video monitor. ‘Can I—’

  I nodded easily. ‘Yeah, sure. No rush. Do your thing.’

  He threw himself back into it, drawing with gusto.

  I went looking for the others. Elena was in the control room, tinkering with a digital thermometer. The entire table was filled with meteorological gear, lined up in neat rows.

  ‘Something wrong with it?’ I asked, ready to fetch a toolbox.

  She didn’t look up, but she heard me. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Just making sure everything works for tomorrow.’

  ‘I already ran diagnostics on everything,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just double-checking.’ She continued sorting.

  I knew her well enough to not take this as an insult, but it needled me a bit all the same. ‘Do you want to watch the news?’

  Elena needed no time to consider this. She shook her head. ‘I’ll watch it later,’ she said. She looked up at me and gave me a short smile – the sort of smile that says you’re not annoying me, and I appreciate you, but leave me alone so I can work. So I did.

  It wasn’t hard to find Jack. I could hear him huffing and puffing across the corridor as he hit the exercise equipment hard.

  ‘Hey,’ he exhaled. His cheeks were flushing fire, and rivers ran down his temples. ‘This sucks in double-G.’ He grinned as he said the words. The challenge delighted him.

  ‘Looks it,’ I said. I watched him heave himself back and forth on the rowing machine, beads of sweat flinging from his freshly shorn scalp. ‘You do know we’ve got plenty of fieldwork ahead.’

  ‘Yeah.’ One rep.

  ‘And walking.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Another rep.

  I paused, waiting for him to acknowledge that a normal work day would give him all the exercise he needed. He did not. I shrugged. ‘I’ve got the news downloaded.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. Two reps. Three reps. Four.

  ‘Do you want to watch?’

  Five. Six. Seven. Eight. He stopped, panting hard, and reached for his water bottle. ‘Nah,’ he said.

  ‘Just … not at all?’

  ‘Not right now, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  He took a gulp of water and mopped his brow with his shirt. ‘I saw things today I’ve never imagined. Could never have imagined. Things were good, on Aecor, but this—’ There was an awed look in his eyes, a boy standing in a dream. ‘I mean, God.’ He laughed, words falling short.

  ‘I know,’ I said, and I did, I truly did. ‘But the news—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said simply.

  I frowned. ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘It’s over a decade out of date. It doesn’t affect us, and there’s nothing we can do to chan
ge any of it. We know what our mission is. We know how to do our jobs. Why should we distract ourselves from that? Especially when the distraction sucks.’

  ‘But we— they—’ I disagreed with him, but I felt like I was standing on shaky ground. ‘The news is what’s happening to the people who sent us here. We should care about that.’

  ‘Of course we care. We wouldn’t be doing this job if we didn’t care. But our work is how we contribute. Listen, every time we watch the news, the air in here gets heavy for a few days. Or longer. It eats at us. Why are we letting something millions of kilometres away and fourteen years behind fuck up our ability to focus on the thing we were actually sent here to do?’ He finished his water. ‘If there’s something important, we’ll get a mission update. But the news – I mean, how does it help me to know that some fuckwit I’ve never heard of is leading a coup, or whatever? It doesn’t. So, that’s how we show we care – by doing a good job. We can catch up on world history anytime we want to. Because it is history by now. We don’t need to know every shred of political bullshit that’ll happen over the next decades in order to fit in once we get back. Nobody on Earth stays that up-and-up. Why do we have to?’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Something in it didn’t sit right, but I could find no argument. I didn’t want to watch the news either, not really. Maybe Jack was right. Why should I fill my head with something I couldn’t change? What was a war on Earth to us? What was an economy to us? To the creatures outside? To the spiralling plants? Nothing around me changed if I chose to not watch the news, but something within me always did. I thought of my crew, each doing in that moment exactly what they wanted to be doing. That seemed like a much saner way to be. I remained unsure, but I nodded.

  Jack smiled, stood, and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’m gonna go shower,’ he said.

  ‘Please, please do,’ I said, wrinkling my nose.

  He gave me a smug look – one that said he knew he was a mess, and that he knew something else, too. ‘Wanna come with?’