To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

  This further suggests that life in the galaxy typically does rely on concentrated deliveries of organic molecules via meteorite in order to get started, but this is not the only way it can happen.

  Now, to be fair, we’re basing that hypothesis on the Lawki data, which represents only a handful of planets. We would need a larger sample size to be sure.

  If you are a person of science – whether it be your career or your hobby or a passing interest – I would imagine this fact ignites you as it did us. We haven’t answered the biggest Why yet, but damned if we didn’t get a step closer.

  But what if science isn’t your world? I admit, I don’t know whether people outside of my social sphere would care about this at all. I’ve spent my entire adult life embedded with scientists and the people who love them. I take it for granted that this sort of knowledge is cherished, is yearned for. And I am keenly aware that in order to tell you what we found, it required a thousand words of explanation before I could get to the crux. Is this discovery of ours too obtuse? Did you skim through the science in search of the point? I won’t judge you if you did; I’m genuinely curious. Facts about amino acid chirality will affect nothing in your daily life. They won’t put food on the table. They won’t build a roof over your head. They won’t strengthen your relationships or keep you healthy or help you do your chores. They change nothing about the everyday. But what I hope is that when you’re lying in the dark and wondering – when you’re asking that big Why – what we found will help you fall asleep with the comfort of a little more context than you had before.

  Does it? Or am I wrong? Are we out here chasing useless things? I can’t escape my bias, just as my cells can’t use right-handed amino acids. I want to know whether you care about our arcane work in the sky, given your immediate struggles on the ground. I will not be upset by the answer. I just want to know. All of us aboard the Merian want to know what you want of us.

  So, here’s how this is going to go.

  After I finish writing this, and after my crewmates give it their approval, and after we send the file back to Earth, we’re going to finish our remaining three-and-a-half years on Votum. After that, we’re going into torpor.

  Where we go from there is up to you.

  I’ve reconfigured the Merian’s torpor system so that it will keep us asleep until the craft receives a message from Earth. We’ve provided the technical transmission instructions separately, but essentially, the Merian will be awaiting a simple yes or no.

  ‘Yes’ sends us to Tivael.

  ‘No’ takes us back to Earth.

  If we receive no answer, we’ll remain in torpor until old age or equipment failure takes us.

  We are comfortable with any of these scenarios.

  What we want you to ask yourselves is this: what is space, to you? Is it a playground? A quarry? A flagpole? A classroom? A temple? Who do you believe should go, and for what purpose? Or should we go at all? Is the realm above the clouds immaterial to you, so long as satellites send messages and rocks don’t fall? Is human spaceflight a fool’s errand, a rich man’s fantasy, an unacceptable waste of life and metal? Are our methods grotesque to you, our ethics untenable? Are our hopes outdated? When I tell you of our life out here, do you cheer for us, or do you scoff?

  Are astronauts still relevant in your time?

  We have found nothing you can sell. We have found nothing you can put to practical use. We have found no worlds that could be easily or ethically settled, were that end desired. We have satisfied nothing but curiosity, gained nothing but knowledge.

  To me, these are the noblest goals. The people who sent us here believed the same. But if you share that belief, do you understand that we might fail? You must understand the cost here – the reality of what we do. Because sometimes we go, and we try, and we suffer, and despite it all, we learn nothing. Sometimes we are left with more questions than when we started. Sometimes we do harm, despite our best efforts. We are human. We are fragile. Are we who you want out here? Would you be more comfortable with the limited predictability of machines? Or is the flexibility of human intelligence worth the risk of our minds and bodies breaking?

  We believe the potential answers are worth the challenges. We do not know what you believe, what Earth believes. And ultimately, it is Earth that sent us. Four people alone cannot decide whether it is right for us to venture further into the galaxy, desperately as we want to. I don’t operate under the delusion that OCA represented – represents, if you’re still there – all of humanity. But space travel is a grand enough venture, a daunting enough task, that it requires the dedication of the many, not the mere fervour of a few. We are four. It took the work of thousands to get us here, and the resources of thousands more. Our days out here have been largely autonomous, but we live within a home that was lovingly built by other hands. Everything we do, we do on the shoulders of others. And for that reason, a consensus of four is insufficient. If no one is listening, if no one cares, then we would be staying out here only for ego. We will have abandoned you, and that’s unacceptable to us.

  We are ready to live out our lives without ever seeing Earth again. We’re happy to do it. It is the most natural end I can imagine, the best death I could hope for. But we can’t accept that fate if no one is ready to pick up where we left off. If we die out here with your blessing, then we die as your family. If we die without it, we die alone. And if that is the case, we would rather come home. We feel it is better, in that scenario, to spend our remaining years in your company, sharing our stories in the hopes that we might relight the spark. Either way, we will carry this torch. All we’re asking is: where will it burn brightest?

  We leave that question to you.

  Follow Becky Chambers here

  As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organisation of one hundred and forty seven member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship – to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

  – Former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, 1977, as recorded on the Voyager Golden Record

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Like Ariadne, I’m not a scientist. I have no experience in that field of work, nor any formal education within it. Science fiction is my transformative fandom, and as in all heartfelt fic, I revere the canon but play fast and loose with details of my choosing. Still, for this book, I wanted to be as close to the mark as the story would allow, and to that end, I received some help that deserves proper thanks.

  In early 2018, I was a guest at the Melon conference in Hong Kong, and it was there – at a welcome reception, blindingly jet-lagged – that I met Lisa Nip, a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab with a bold goal: using synthetic biology to solve the challenges of human space travel. She gave a talk on that topic the next day, and I sat in the audience, still jet-lagged but on the bleeding edge of my seat. Her vision of genetic engineering as practical supplementation, rather than dystopian eugenics or transhumanist evolution, is one I found both radical and beautiful, and without her blowing my mind wide open, this book wouldn’t exist at all. Lisa took the time to Skype with me from her lab while I was in the early stages of figuring everything out, and I am enormously grateful for her generosity and patience in walking me through her science and the possibilities therein. If anything in this story strays too far from the realm of reality, that’s a reflection of me coming at this from the sidelines, not of her fine teaching.

  This book is likewise better for the counsel of astrobiology educator Nicoline Chambers, my long-time science advisor (and, y’know, my mom), who never seems to tire of my sloppy late-night emails about whether I should use this term or that, whether my planets make sense, and so
on. Among my many questions was that of what gear the Lawki 6 crew would bring along for the ride. The Merian’s labs were stocked by both her and her colleagues Charles Cockell, professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, and Caroline Williams, assistant professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. My thanks to them for helping me assemble a shopping list.

  I also must give a hat tip to some folks who I don’t know at all but would be very happy to have a beer with. My inspiration for OCA came in part from real-world citizen-funded spaceflight efforts, whose creativity and tenacity sets me on fire. If this concept appeals to you, I encourage you to check out the ongoing work of Copenhagen Suborbitals, Pacific Spaceflight, and the Planetary Society’s LightSail project.

  As always, this book wouldn’t be a book at all if it weren’t for the people who unfairly do not have their names on the cover despite all their hard work: Sam Bradbury, Oliver Johnson, David Pomerico, and the amazing teams at both Hodder & Stoughton and Harper Voyager.

  Most importantly, love to my family, love to my friends, and love to my wife, all of whom kept me upright through a beast of a year. I’d be lost without you.

  Not ready to land back on Earth?

  Turn the page for a short extract from Becky Chamber’s debut novel

  THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET

  Day 128, GC Standard 306

  TRANSIT

  As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things. First, she was traveling through open space. Second, she was about to start a new job, one she could not screw up. Third, she had bribed a government official into giving her a new identity file. None of this information was new, but it wasn’t pleasant to wake up to.

  She wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, not for another day at least, but that was what you got for booking cheap transport. Cheap transport meant a cheap pod flying on cheap fuel, and cheap drugs to knock you out. She had flickered into consciousness several times since launch – surfacing in confusion, falling back just as she’d gotten a grasp on things. The pod was dark, and there were no navigational screens. There was no way to tell how much time had passed between each waking, or how far she’d traveled, or if she’d even been traveling at all. The thought made her anxious, and sick.

  Her vision cleared enough for her to focus on the window. The shutters were down, blocking out any possible light sources. She knew there were none. She was out in the open now. No bustling planets, no travel lanes, no sparkling orbiters. Just emptiness, horrible emptiness, filled with nothing but herself and the occasional rock.

  The engine whined as it prepared for another sublayer jump. The drugs reached out, tugging her down into uneasy sleep. As she faded, she thought again of the job, the lies, the smug look on the official’s face as she’d poured credits into his account. She wondered if it had been enough. It had to be. It had to. She’d paid too much already for mistakes she’d had no part in.

  Her eyes closed. The drugs took her. The pod, presumably, continued on.

  Day 129, GC Standard 306

  A COMPLAINT

  Living in space was anything but quiet. Grounders never expected that. For anyone who had grown up planetside, it took some time to get used to the clicks and hums of a ship, the ever-present ambiance that came with living inside a piece of machinery. But to Ashby, those sounds were as ordinary as his own heartbeat. He could tell when it was time to wake by the sigh of the air filter over his bed. When rocks hit the outer hull with their familiar pattering, he knew which were small enough to ignore, and which meant trouble. He could tell by the amount of static crackling over the ansible how far away he was from the person on the other end. These were the sounds of spacer life, an underscore of vulnerability and distance. They were reminders of what a fragile thing it was to be alive. But those sounds also meant safety. An absence of sound meant that air was no longer flowing, engines no longer running, artigrav nets no longer holding your feet to the floor. Silence belonged to the vacuum outside. Silence was death.

  There were other sounds, too, sounds made not by the ship itself, but by the people living in it. Even in the endless halls of homestead ships, you could hear the echoes of nearby conversations, footsteps on metal floors, the faint thumping of a tech climbing through the walls, off to repair some unseen circuit. Ashby’s ship, the Wayfarer, was spacious enough, but tiny compared to the homesteader he’d grown up on. When he’d first purchased the Wayfarer and filled it with crew, even he’d had to get used to the close quarters they kept. But the constant sounds of people working and laughing and fighting all around him had become a comfort. The open was an empty place to be, and there were moments when even the most seasoned spacer might look to the star-flecked void outside with humility and awe.

  Ashby welcomed the noise. It was reassuring to know that he was never alone out there, especially given his line of work. Building wormholes was not a glamorous profession. The interspatial passageways that ran throughout the Galactic Commons were so ordinary as to be taken for granted. Ashby doubted the average person gave tunneling much more thought than you might give a pair of pants or a hot cooked meal. But his job required him to think about tunnels, and to think hard on them, at that. If you sat and thought about them for too long, imagined your ship diving in and out of space like a needle pulling thread … well, that was the sort of thinking that made a person glad for some noisy company.

  Ashby was in his office, reading a news feed over a cup of mek, when one particular sound made him cringe. Footsteps. Corbin’s footsteps. Corbin’s angry footsteps, coming right toward his door. Ashby sighed, swallowed his irritation, and became the captain. He kept his face neutral, his ears open. Talking to Corbin always required a moment of preparation, and a good deal of detachment.

  Artis Corbin was two things: a talented algaeist and a complete asshole. The former trait was crucial on a long-haul ship like the Wayfarer. A batch of fuel going brown could be the difference between arriving at port and going adrift. Half of one of the Wayfarer’s lower decks was filled with nothing but algae vats, all of which needed someone to obsessively adjust their nutrient content and salinity. This was one area in which Corbin’s lack of social graces was actually a benefit. The man preferred to stay cooped up in the algae bay all day, muttering over readouts, working in pursuit of what he called ‘optimal conditions.’ Conditions always seemed optimal enough to Ashby, but he wasn’t going to get in Corbin’s way where algae was concerned. Ashby’s fuel costs had dropped by ten percent since he brought Corbin aboard, and there were few algaeists who would accept a position on a tunneling ship in the first place. Algae could be touchy enough on a short trip, but keeping your batches healthy over a long haul required meticulousness, and stamina, too. Corbin hated people, but he loved his work, and he was damn good at it. In Ashby’s book, that made him extremely valuable. An extremely valuable headache.

  The door spun open and Corbin stormed in. His brow was beaded with sweat, as usual, and the graying hair at his temples looked slick. The Wayfarer had to be kept warm for their pilot’s sake, but Corbin had voiced his dislike for the ship’s standard temperature from day one. Even after years aboard the ship, his body had refused to acclimate, seemingly out of pure spite.

  Corbin’s cheeks were red as well, though whether that was due to his mood or from coming up the stairs was anyone’s guess. Ashby never got used to the sight of cheeks that red. The majority of living Humans were descended from the Exodus Fleet, which had sailed far beyond the reaches of their ancestral sun. Many, like Ashby, had been born within the very same homesteaders that had belonged to the original Earthen refugees. His tight black curls and amber skin were the result of generations of mingling and mixing aboard the giant ships. Most Humans, whether space-born or colony kids, shared that nationless Exodan blend.

  Corbin, on the other hand, was unmistakably Sol system stock, even though the people of the home planets had come to resemble Exodans in recent generations. With as much of a hodgepodge as Human genetics were,
lighter shades were known to pop up here and there, even in the Fleet. But Corbin was practically pink. His forerunners had been scientists, early explorers who built the first research orbiters around Enceladus. They’d been there for centuries, keeping vigil over the bacteria flourishing within icy seas. With Sol a dim thumbprint in the skies above Saturn, the researchers lost more and more pigment with every decade. The end result was Corbin, a pink man bred for tedious labwork and a sunless sky.

  Corbin tossed his scrib over Ashby’s desk. The thin, rectangular pad sailed through the mist-like pixel screen and clattered down in front of Ashby. Ashby gestured to the pixels, instructing them to disperse. The news headlines hovering in the air dissolved into colored wisps. The pixels slunk down like swarms of tiny insects into the projector boxes on either side of the desk. Ashby looked at the scrib, and raised his eyebrows at Corbin.

  ‘This,’ Corbin said, pointing a bony finger at the scrib, ‘has got to be a joke.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Ashby said. ‘Jenks messed with your notes again?’ Corbin frowned and shook his head. Ashby focused on the scrib, trying not to laugh at the memory of the last time Jenks had hacked into Corbin’s scrib, replacing the algaeist’s careful notes with three-hundred-and-sixty-two photographic variations of Jenks himself, naked as the day he was born. Ashby had thought the one of Jenks carrying a Galactic Commons banner was particularly good. It had a sort of dramatic dignity to it, all things considered.

  Ashby picked up the scrib, flipping it screen-side up.

  Attn.: Captain Ashby Santoso (Wayfarer, GC tunneling license no. 387-97456)

  Re: Resume for Rosemary Harper (GC administration certificate no. 65-78-2)

  Ashby recognized the file. It was the resume for their new clerk, who was scheduled to arrive the next day. She was probably strapped into a deepod by now, sedated for the duration of her long, cramped trip. ‘Why are you showing me this?’ Ashby asked.