To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

My legs were still shaky from a week and a half spent in microgravity, but I ran across the corridor anyway, entering Chikondi’s cabin without a knock.

  ‘There’s a—’ I began, but didn’t need to explain, because Chikondi was observing a sight very much like mine on his own window. He was watching the creatures intently, taking notes on the tablet in his lap. I sat beside him on his cot, and we watched the weird little thing push itself across the thick windowpane, leaving a trail of gummy saliva in its wake. Chikondi and I watched a new species together in companionable quiet, like we’d done many times before. For a moment, I thought that everything would be okay.

  The animals were not limited to our cabin windows. We could hear more of them noisily creeping across the hull, and within an hour, every window on the Merian had at least one of the creatures slinking across to shriek awful hellos. Within two hours, you could barely see the world beyond them.

  We dubbed them Fortisostium horribilis in our official report, but Jack called them rats.

  ‘Why rats?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I hate rats.’ He glared at the airlock window, nearly solid grey. There was no way we could get outside with so many creatures covering the hatch, not without potentially jamming the door mechanism with their bodies and giving others opportunity to come inside. One or two, we could shoo away. This many, we’d only be asking for trouble.

  ‘They’re just checking us out,’ Chikondi said. ‘They’re allowed to observe us, too. We’re the ones in their home.’

  But the rats didn’t care much about us at all. It’s difficult to know what their senses were, because they didn’t have obvious sight organs, but our movements inside the ship were of no concern to them. We were scenery, nothing more.

  Elena frowned. ‘They could damage the hull if they keep this up.’

  ‘The hull’s tough,’ I said. ‘Plus, they’re not chewing it. It’s probably fine.’

  She looked at me. ‘“Probably” has a lot of room for error.’

  ‘Ah, get out of here,’ Jack said to the rats. He’d gone into the airlock and up to the outer door. He watched the rats for a moment, annoyed at their presence. He raised a fist and pounded the door three times in quick succession. The rats were startled by him, some scattering away, others freezing in place. Jack was encouraged. ‘Yeah, go on, get out of here.’ He pounded the door again. This resulted in more scattering, but less than before. To Jack’s consternation, other rats moved in to fill the gaps, undeterred by the angry man telling them to fuck off.

  ‘We’ll have to wait,’ Chikondi said. He sat on the floor and began to sketch on his tablet. The activity did not animate him, as it typically did. He did his job, but it appeared more like muscle memory than true enthusiasm.

  ‘I’m going to go look at the storm data again,’ Elena said to me. ‘Could you check on the comms?’

  ‘I already did,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She thought for a moment, visibly rifling through some list in her head. ‘What about life support?’

  ‘I was going to do that later, but I can do it now, if you’d prefer.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ she said, though she offered no explanation as to why. It shouldn’t have mattered to Elena whether my checks were done now or three hours down the road, but clearly, it was bothering her. If I could help relieve that little bit of worry, at least, then I’d easily change my schedule. One of us needed a break that day.

  I left for the upper decks, leaving Chikondi drawing by rote and Jack banging on the door.

  The rats did not leave at night, nor at dawn, nor the day after. The hull was blanketed with their bodies and their spit, the combination effectively blocking out the sun. We managed to steal some looks outside, if the rats shuffled in such a way that, by chance, they left a gap in a window and one of us was there to see it. The shallows were largely featureless, but there were rocks out there – craggy pillars jutting up from the seabed like stalagmites. Jack and I took to wearing binoculars around our necks in hopes of an opening, and we eventually were able to see that the rocks were likewise covered with dense coatings of rats. In basic shape, our conical spacecraft must have seemed familiar to them: a tall thing you can crawl up and cling onto.

  ‘Could be mating behaviour,’ Jack posited.

  ‘Could be,’ Chikondi said.

  ‘Or some other kind of seasonal thing,’ I added. ‘External thermometers say it’s chilly out there, they might do this to get out of the water.’

  Chikondi watched a pair jostle each other for space, their mouths still holding firmly to the glass. ‘Or could be this is a normal day,’ he said. ‘Maybe they just do this, and we’ll never know why.’

  After two more days of staring at scaly bellies, we began to debate whether we should simply take off and find a new landing site. But we’d kill the rats in lift-off, we knew, and nobody wanted to do that, despite the obvious problem they’d become. Given the numbers we were seeing outside, though, lasting damage to their population seemed unlikely.

  Opera made the decision for us. The storm system that had been so safely distant made a sudden swing south, and the winds kicked up to a speed downright dangerous for launch. The shallows swelled and roiled. Rain lashed at our windows like a hail of arrows fired sideways. We could go nowhere.

  The rats hung on to us, their port in the storm. They weren’t leaving, either.

  When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. I was convinced of wicked eyes watching me from the corners, shivering hands reaching up to pull me into the void below my bed. That’s just in your imagination, my mother told me. Tell your imagination to go somewhere nice instead. So when the lights went out and the door closed, and all I could hear was my own frightened breaths, I would ask myself: Where do you want to go? The answer went through phases, depending on age and fancy. Sometimes it was a treehouse in a peaceful meadow, the contents of which grew more and more elaborate with every night that I fussed with its interior. Sometimes it was a pirate ship, with me as the kick-ass captain, waving at the merfolk who led me to treasure. Sometimes I’d build from someone else’s scaffold, replaying the best bits of a story I’d read or a game I’d played, revamping the scenes I thought could be better. The question worked, is the point, and for years, that is how I fell asleep, curled up in a nest of my mind’s weavings.

  I could not sleep in Opera’s shallows. If it had been the storm alone, I could’ve acclimated to that. The wind howled like an engine, but that din was constant, certain. The rats, on the other hand … God, the rats. I couldn’t tune them out, no matter how I tried. The human brain is conditioned to shout danger at unseen animal sounds, opening a fire hose of adrenaline so as to awaken you to whatever prehistoric unpleasantness is about to bite your toes or foul your grain stores or drag your babies off into the night. It didn’t matter that the rats were on the other side of a wall. It didn’t matter that they were only adjacent, not in my actual space. Their sounds were unpredictable, and my brain reacted accordingly. Pushing my blankets around my ears helped with the uneven percussion of their feet, but nothing would drown out their shrieks, which they would unleash every hour, or half hour, or a few minutes after the last, wrenching me out of whatever half-formed dream I’d managed to sink into and back into puffy-eyed misery.

  With intent, I began to ask myself the question that had guided me into the deep slumbers of my childhood: Where do you want to go?

  Mirabilis, I replied. I want to go back to Mirabilis.

  I forcibly conjured memories of that lush world, but they had become bittersweet. I knew that those smiles would fade, those adventures would end. All days on Mirabilis led to Opera. To look at them was to look back on the path that had led to howling and skittering and sleepless nights. The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.

  If the sounds of the rats were chaos, the sounds of Elena were clockwork. I didn’t need to be on the same deck as her to know what she was doing.

  She left her cabi
n around 06:00 every morning.

  She’d run a full systems diagnostic.

  She’d check the comms folders, even though no notifications had been received.

  She’d check on the airlocks to see if the rats had given us an opening.

  She’d go over that day’s weather data from the cubesats. She’d study it with meticulous focus, then update her forecasts accordingly.

  She’d exercise for an hour. Weights, rowing machine, treadmill.

  She’d shower, ten minutes.

  She’d work on a project. Sometimes it was reviewing her old reports, rewriting sections she’d had better thoughts about, then rewriting them again. Sometimes she’d go through the cargo hold, rechecking the inventory. Sometimes I had no idea what she was working on, because she didn’t want to explain.

  I awoke one morning to her knock on my cabin door. Jack’s knock is a melody, if he knocks at all, and he never waits for a response. Chikondi’s is a polite drumming, almost a little too quiet. Elena’s knock is three solid taps, loud and direct. I glanced at my clock after I heard it. 05:36. I’d managed about forty-three minutes of sleep from the last time I checked it. I sat up and rubbed my face. ‘Yeah,’ I called.

  ‘Hey,’ she said as she entered. There was a softness to her voice that I hadn’t heard in a while, and I warmed to it. ‘Sorry to wake you.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘It can wait,’ she said.

  ‘I’m awake now.’

  She stuck her hands in her pockets and leaned against the door frame. ‘I was thinking about doing a hardware inspection.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Of which system?’

  ‘All of them,’ she said.

  I blinked. ‘All of them.’

  ‘I know, it’s a lot of work.’ An understatement. A full, proper, by-the-book hardware inspection took days. ‘But we’ve been sitting in water for three weeks, and those things—’ As if on cue, a chorus of shrieking erupted. We covered our ears and waited for it to end. ‘Those things outside are doing God knows what out there.’

  None of that would impact the internal hardware, but I knew she knew that. ‘We’ve got green lights across the board,’ I said. ‘Have you noticed any malfunctions? Anything acting up?’

  ‘No. I just—’ She looked restless, on edge. ‘I just think it doesn’t hurt to check. Better safe than sorry.’

  I rubbed my face again. My temples throbbed. My eyes twinged. I felt drunk, and not in the fun way. Flimsy thoughts strained for one another, evaporating before connection could be made. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sure, we can do that.’ We stared at each other for a moment. ‘Did you mean right now?’

  She put up her palms. ‘Whenever you’re up for it. I know it’s a pain,’ she said. Her face gave a different answer. Yes, it said. Right now.

  I got dressed, and we got to work.

  ‘Okay, let’s give it a go,’ Jack said.

  I lay in the cockpit, my control panel lit and ready. At Jack’s suggestion, I’d reworked the launch sequence to allow us to simply ‘rev up’ the engines without heading into full lift-off. They’d rumble a bit, enough to be loud, and without causing thrust. A rumble is all we were after. We were hoping to scare the rats off. The wind still prevented us from launch, but in lieu of that, we might be able to go outside. And if that wasn’t safe, then at least we would be rat-free, even if only temporarily. Uninterrupted sleep sounded like victory enough.

  I got on the comms. ‘Engine test commencing,’ I said.

  I hit the right buttons. Outside, the engines rumbled good and proper. Some Pavlovian part of me reflexively reacted to the sound with excitement; I reminded it we were going nowhere.

  A second sound emerged. A split second after the engines kicked in, every rat on the hull began shrieking in alarm.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jack said, slamming his hands over his ears.

  The din made me shut my eyes, but I forced them open to look at the window. The rats, by their standards, were bellowing, the vocal holes in their sides straining as wide as they could. But I noticed something else, something that made my stomach sink. The viscosity of their mouths changed. They were clinging on tighter. In the face of danger, they held fast.

  ‘Give it another minute,’ Jack yelled.

  ‘It’s not working,’ I shouted back.

  ‘Just another minute.’

  We sat in the noise for a few seconds more, the hellish harmony of straining metal and terrified animals clawing its way into my teeth, my torso. I looked at my readouts. I looked at the stubborn fuckers clinging to the window. I turned the engines off.

  The rats took several minutes more to calm down.

  ‘Shit,’ Jack said, wiping his brow as they quieted.

  I let my eyes fall shut, savouring the relative peace. The storm still bellowed, but that much I could manage. ‘It makes sense, with what we know of them,’ I said. ‘If they evolved alongside storms like this, and if their response to them is to find a rock and hang on, then maybe … maybe they interpret noise and rumbling as the weather getting worse.’

  ‘They double-down, is what you’re saying.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘It was a stupid idea,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have suggested it.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ I said. ‘We had to do it to know that it wouldn’t work.’

  He shook his head again. ‘Stupid,’ he repeated. He climbed down the ladder without another word.

  Chikondi’s cabin door was closed, so I knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed as I entered, watching the rats on the window. His tablet lay on the floor nearby, switched off.

  ‘Why are your lights out?’ I asked. It was mid-afternoon.

  ‘I was trying to get a feel for the sunlight,’ he said. ‘Such as it is, anyway.’ There wasn’t much of that to see. You could see a little, shining weakly through the rainwater that ran without pause through the gaps between silhouettes. The effect was like stained glass in reverse, in a grim sort of way.

  I sat on the bed beside him, likewise pulling myself cross-legged. We sat in silence, watching the rats shuffle. I glanced at him, remembering when he’d been a baby-faced trainee with a million ideas. I wondered what that kid would think of the lean, serious man, pondering fragments in the dark. I wondered what he’d think of me.

  I reached out and rubbed my knuckle over his cheek. ‘You could use a shave,’ I said.

  He gave a single chuckle. ‘I probably could.’

  We sat quietly, again. ‘Out with it,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is.’

  Chikondi exhaled. ‘Do you think it’s right for us to be here?’

  ‘Elaborate.’

  He nodded at the rats. ‘We’re annoyed with them because they’re in our way. But they’re in their element. This is their niche, not ours.’

  ‘Species migrate,’ I said. ‘Most of evolutionary history can be summed up as chance encounters between species that hadn’t crossed paths before.’

  ‘We’re not migrating, we’re sticking our noses in. We’re not here because we need food or territory. We’re here because we want to be. We’re flipping over rocks because we’re curious.’

  ‘You’ve always been a guy who likes flipping over rocks.’

  ‘Yes, I like it. The animals underneath do not. Say there are worms under the rock. Worms hate sunlight. It hurts them. Is it fair to the worms, to cause them pain so that I can know more about them?’

  ‘You always put the rock back. We always put the rocks back.’

  ‘It still hurts before we do so. Is that a fair trade, their pain for our knowledge?’

  ‘If that knowledge means we can do right by the general population of these figurative worms? That we can alter our behaviours and practices so that everything in an ecosystem, worms included, won’t be harmed in the future? Yes, I think that’s a very fair trade. A sacrifice on behalf of one, or a few, to benefit the many.’ />
  ‘You can only call it sacrifice if it’s consensual. Nobody asked the worms under the rock what they thought about the whole thing.’

  ‘If we don’t hurt a few worms, we won’t know that worms can be hurt. That path’s got far more potential for destruction.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  He thought silently. ‘I probably do,’ he said at last. ‘But I don’t know right now.’

  I watched him as he watched the rats. ‘What are you looking forward to most about going home?’

  He blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s the first place you’re going to go, once we’re out of quarantine?’

  I’d thrown him off of his mental track, and I could see him struggling to shift gears. ‘A cafe,’ he said.

  ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Any particular cafe?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t care which.’ He looked at me; I was still waiting. ‘The sort that looks like they cleaned out their grandmother’s garage and put everything they found on the walls. Comfortable chairs. Good music, but not too loud. I want a cold drink and a dessert that looks ridiculous, and I want to sit in a corner and read a book and listen to conversations I don’t understand between people I don’t know.’

  I instantly understood the appeal of his last point, and did not take offense. ‘What kind of book?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Sure you do. Come on.’

  He considered. A little smile pushed at his cheeks. ‘Something with a heist.’

  I laughed. ‘Since when do you read heists?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t. Just seems like the sort of thing you read at a cafe while eating dessert.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And where is this cafe? Back in Lusaka, or near campus, or someplace you’ve never been?’

  ‘I really don’t care,’ he said. ‘Cafes are pretty much the same wherever you go.’

  ‘I’d—’

  My answer was cut short by the scream of a rat. Chikondi and I jumped. The sound died down within a few seconds, but Chikondi remained shaken. I looked down at the sheet and saw it gripped between his fingers, as if he might fall. I’d gotten five cumulative hours of sleep the night before; how had he fared?