To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Becky Chambers

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Please Read This

  If you read …

  Aecor (and Earth)

  I never knew …

  Mirabilis

  The glitter was …

  Opera

  I remained in …

  Votum

  Our species evolved …

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  © Julie Branson

  Becky Chambers is the author of the Wayfarers books, which currently include: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; A Closed and Common Orbit; and Record of a Spaceborn Few. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others, and won the Prix Julia Verlanger in 2017. She grew up in a family heavily involved in space science, and hopes to see Earth from orbit one day.

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  Also by Becky Chambers

  THE WAYFARERS SERIES

  The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

  A Closed and Common Orbit

  Record of a Spaceborn Few

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Becky Chambers 2019

  The right of Becky Chambers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 9781473697171

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Emily, who doesn’t have to read this, but did make me think the right thing.

  Please Read This

  If you read nothing else we’ve sent home, please at least read this. I ask knowing full well that this request is antithetical to what I believe in my heart of hearts. Our mission reports contain our science, and the science is by far the most important thing here. My crew and I are a secondary concern. Tertiary, even.

  But all the same, we do have a lot riding on someone picking this up.

  You don’t have to rush. This file will have taken fourteen years to reach Earth, and assuming that we have the good luck of someone reading it right away and replying straight after, it’d take that file another fourteen years. So, while we can’t wait around forever, the urgency – like so many things in space travel – is relative.

  You could, I suppose, skip right to the end. You wouldn’t be the first person to do such a thing, and honestly, that’s where the bit that affects us most will be laid out. And maybe, if you already know who we are and what we’re about – if you’re someone who sent us here, perhaps – you can do that and still understand. But even if that’s the case, I do think the why of what we need from you is important. I’m biased, of course, and doubly so: Not only is this account about me and my crew, but we’re scientists. We live and breathe why.

  It’s been fifty years since we left Earth, and I don’t know whose eyes or ears this message has reached. I know how much a world can change within the bookends of a lifetime. Causes shift and memories blur. I also don’t know how much you personally know of the universe beyond our home planet. Perhaps you’re one of the knowledgeable sorts I’ve already mentioned, who can rattle off spaceflight history better than even I can and who shares the same goals as me. Or perhaps you’re someone who lives outside my bubble. Perhaps this is all new to you. When I use words like ‘exoplanet’ or ‘red dwarf’, do you know what I mean? This is not a test, and I absolutely do not judge if terms such as these mean nothing to you. On the contrary, I want to speak to you as much as I want to speak to my peers – maybe even more so. If I ask what I’m asking only of people who agree with me at the outset, with whom I already share a dream and a language, then there’s no point in asking at all.

  For this reason, I’ll do my best to speak to expert and novice both. I likewise feel it important to start from the beginning, so that the context of our situation is clear. I doubt what I write will be objective. I will almost certainly contradict myself.

  I do promise that I’ll tell the truth.

  My name is Ariadne O’Neill, and I’m the flight engineer aboard the OCA spacecraft Merian. My crewmates are mission specialists Elena Quesada-Cruz, Jack Vo, and Chikondi Daka. We’re part of the Lawki program, a broad ecological survey of exoplanets – that is, planets that do not orbit our sun – known or suspected to harbour life. Our mission (Lawki 6) is focused on the four habitable worlds in orbit around the red dwarf star Zhenyi (BA-921): the icy moon Aecor, and the terrestrial planets Mirabilis, Opera, and Votum. I’m currently stationed on the surface of the last on that list.

  I was born in Cascadia on July 13, 2081. On that day, it had been fifty-five years, eight months, and nine days since a human being had been in space. I was the two-hundred-and-fourth person to go back, and part of the sixth extrasolar crew. I’m writing to you in the hope that we will not be the last.

  Aecor

  (and Earth)

  I never knew an Earth that was unaware of life elsewhere. The Cetus probe scooped up bacteria-laden samples from Europa’s geysers twenty-nine years before my birth; the first rover photographs of fossil arthropods on Mars arrived while my parents were still in trade school. I don’t know what it was like in those lonely years before, when our view of Earth’s place in the universe was one of a solitary haven, an oasis in a galactic desert. In some ways, I wish I did. I wish I could’ve been there the day the first positive results were radioed back from Cetus. I wish I could tell you what it was like to be in one of the old mission controls or research labs or newsrooms, learning in real time with the rest of the planet that our small worldview had been magnificently blown apart. But by the start of my life, just three decades later, extraterrestrial life was common knowledge, something every kid took for granted. Humans are nothing if not adaptable.

  Another wish: that I could tell you I always wanted to be an astronaut. That’d be a much better story, wouldn’t it? Some of my colleagues could (and can) claim that. An entire life set in motion by the sight of Saturn’s rings through a sidewalk telescope, or a furious sense of purpose imbued the instant they saw those first fuzzy images of a cloud-flecked blue-green exoplanet. I can claim none of those inspirations as my own. I was four when the Tarter space telescope photos came back, and I do actually remember being shown them. My mother lifted me onto her lap in front of her tablet. Her voice was hushed with wonder, and she held me tight.

  ‘Look, honey,’ she said. ‘That’s a planet from around a different star. It’s got air and oceans just like we have.’

  What I said next is lost to time and the fluff of memory, but what I do recall clearly is utter nonchalance. The picture was boring, and while the factoid that came with it
was new and somewhat interesting, I was four. New and somewhat interesting applied to about ninety percent of my day, in everything from the development of a scab, to a cartoon I’d never seen, to an unexpected flavour of juice at lunch. It’s difficult to assign value to discovery when you haven’t sorted out the parameters of reality yet. As such, the significance of the first photographic confirmation of a habitable exoplanet was lost on me. I suppose every childhood is one of blind assumptions.

  My parents had an apartment on the twelfth floor of a complex overlooking the Fraser river. That sounds nicer than it was. Urban crush was all I knew, and the closest access I had to nature were the hydroponic planters on our boxy balcony, where my father grew the vegetables we ate for dinner. A hydroponic planter is a far cry from the real outdoors, but it’s an ecosystem all the same. I would sit out there for hours in the hot city air, fascinated by the insects that had been likewise drawn to green and growing things. They were a small miracle, those bugs – tiny, wondrous monsters, completely incongruous with the concrete blocks that surrounded us, miniature beasts that appeared like magic and belonged in places far wilder than my father’s bell pepper crop. There were beetles and bees, spiders and caterpillars. I watched them flit and rappel from leaf to leaf. I let them crawl on my palm. I marvelled at how something so small had found its way to a location that seemed impossibly high up even for me, the unfathomable giant sharing their space. They had their own dramas, their own goals. They did not need me, like a dog or a goldfish might. It was that independence, that complete separation from the human realm, that I loved about them most.

  Some insects are born twice, in a sense. First, an egg is laid. Eggs are the given path for most species on Earth, and among larger animals who reproduce this way, this is a simple affair. The egg hatches, an infant emerges – a duck, let’s say – and its form is not terribly different than that of its parents. A baby duck is still recognisably a duck. It will get bigger and more hormonal and lose its endearing fluff, but it swims and waddles and pecks. For insects, the process is more complicated. Let’s take the moth as an example. A larva emerges from the egg; we know this as a caterpillar. This creature has legs, organs, a mouth – everything a living critter needs. It’s perfectly adapted for its current business, which is eating everything in sight and trying to stay hidden from predators. It walks and eats and walks and eats and walks and eats, until one day, it stops. It finds a branch or a leaf. It wraps itself in a protective net of protein. And then, improbably: it dissolves. The caterpillar disintegrates into organic goo, leaving only a few scant essentials intact. In a matter of weeks, the goo recombines, creating another form entirely. Once the creature’s body is remade, a second hatching occurs, one that reveals a creature so different from its previous state that if you hadn’t witnessed the stage of metamorphosis, you’d make the entirely reasonable assumption that caterpillar and moth were two different species.

  Habitable exoplanets may have been lost on me then, but metamorphosis never was. It has always been a thing of beauty to me, the fluidity of form.

  Waking from torpor is not my favourite experience. On the scale of discomforts, I’d put it on par with a moderate hangover, or the kind of cold where your sinuses creak if you press on your face. The actual sensation feels like neither of those things. Physically, I feel a little stiff, a little weak, but otherwise fine. Waking is more of a mental discomfort, a period in which your consciousness has to reassert itself after years of dormancy. Keep in mind that medically-induced torpor is not the same as sleep. Sleep conveys the passage of time, even if you don’t dream. Not so with torpor. First you’re awake, then you’re not, then you’re back … but something’s missing. Something’s missing, and you’ll never be able to put your finger on what.

  As soon as the Merian established orbit around its first target, a signal was sent from the navigation computer to our crew’s torpor chambers. An automated system added a chemical solution to our nutrient drips, and that solution made its way to our respective brains, where it began the business of waking us up. I am told this process takes about an hour, but from my perspective, it happened in an instant. Light. Shapes. Confusion. I had to walk myself through the basics, as if I were reviewing every fact I’d learned during infancy. I have hands. I have a mouth. Those things I see are colours. I’m Ariadne. I exist. Then came memories, and context, and finally, a smile.

  We’re at Aecor.

  I began to unpack the proverbial cotton from my mind, and walked myself through protocol. First, I pulled on the tabs that freed my wrists from their soft fabric restraints, then undid the ties around my waist and ankles as well. This may sound macabre, being tied up inside what amounts to a high-tech shipping crate, but the restraints are for a good cause, and removing them by yourself is a breeze. They’re snugly attached to the sides of the torpor chamber, keeping me suspended in the middle of the container while I’m unconscious so that I don’t float into the sides. This is far preferable to waking up with bruises all over.

  Once my limbs were free, I hit the button that opened the chamber door. The light in my room was low, but I winced all the same as my eyes remembered how to adjust themselves. Torpor chambers regularly wash their occupants, but a daily spray of cleaning solution isn’t the same as a proper bath. My eyes, nose, and mouth were all crusty around the edges. Twenty-eight years without a real scrub will do that to you.

  My hair, shaved before launch, had grown well past my shoulders. My nails had reached a hideous length as well, about what you’d expect after two years of no clipping. That’s about how much I aged in twenty-eight years of transit – two years. Torpor slows you down, and interstellar travel at half the speed of light further stalls the clock, but neither presses pause entirely. Cells divide and the heart keeps beating. We buy ourselves time while in torpor, not immortality.

  I opened the hygiene kit, which some clever interior engineer had bolted to the wall within arm’s reach of my chamber. Nail clippers were the first item I retrieved, followed by a tiny collection bag. I pruned myself, returning my digits to usefulness. Curved keratin shards floated unattractively before me; I hid them away in the little bag as quickly as I could. My unruly hair would have to wait, but I took an elastic band from the kit and tied back my mermaid-like floating locks. The ground teams really do think of everything.

  One by one, I removed the electrode patches that covered me from face to feet. Their steady pulses had kept my muscles from atrophying, and for that, I was grateful. Next, I removed the nutrient drip from my arm, bandaged myself, and collected the few drops of blood that had floated free. I then took a breath, readied some therapeutic profanities, and removed the catheter from the place where catheters go.

  Ah, the glamour of space travel.

  I could hear the faint rustle of my crewmates going through the same checklist of waking. The walls aboard the Merian are thin, but there are walls, and that point’s key. I’ve seen stills from classic movies in which space-travelling crews are put to sleep, but their chambers or pods or what have you are always lined up side by side, these grim rows of morgue-like containment. Let me be clear on this point: when you’ve woken up from nearly three decades of induced unconsciousness, and every orifice has gunk around it, and your nails look like talons, and your skin smells like a cross between a freshly-washed hospital bathroom and an abandoned pen at a zoo, and you’ve just pulled a tube wet with urine out of yourself … you need a minute alone. And that’s only taking basic hygiene and vanity into consideration. There’s an even more important psychological matter at hand during this time.

  The mirror.

  Once you remember who and what and where you are, your first impulse upon leaving torpor is to look. But just as waking up after a visible surgery can be jarring, so, too, can be those first moments taking in your altered body. You’re different. You need a moment to prepare, and likely several moments to process, and you definitely don’t need to be working through all of that in a group setting. And so
, every astronaut’s cabin has a full-length mirror, which is yours and yours alone. The mirror is not facing the torpor chamber. It’s on the wall to the right of it, out of your line of sight but visible the minute you decide to float forward. The mirror knows you’re anxious to see yourself – but take your time, it says. I’m here when you’re ready, and not a second before. It is the kindest object placement I’ve ever seen.

  On the chance that our methods have been forgotten or misrepresented – or you simply never learned about them – let’s take a moment to discuss somaforming.

  Say what you will about Homo sapiens, but you can’t argue that we’re a versatile species. On Earth, we can survive a decent swath of both heat and cold. We eat a mind-boggling variety of flora and fauna, and can radically change our diets according to need or mood. We can live in deserts, forests, tundras, swamps, plains, mountains, valleys, shorelines, and everything in between. We are generalists, no question.

  But take us away from our home planet, and our adaptability vanishes. Extended spaceflight is hell on the human body. No longer challenged by gravity, bones and muscles quickly begin to stop spending resources on maintaining mass. The heart gets lazy in pumping blood. The eyeball changes shape, causing vision problems and headaches. Unpleasant as these ailments are, they pale in comparison to the onslaught of radiation that fills the seeming void. In the early decades of human spaceflight, six months in low-Earth orbit – a mere two hundred miles up – was enough to raise your overall cancer risk a few notches. The farther you head into interplanetary space, away from the gentle atmospheric shores of Earth, the worse the exposure becomes.

  Human spaceflight was stalled for decades because of this, crippled by the technological nut that could not be cracked: how do you keep humans alive in space during the length of time it takes to reach other planets? We beat our heads against the drafting table, trying to build tools that could do what our anatomy could not. We wrapped our brains around algorithms, trying to create artificial intelligence that could venture to other worlds for us. But our machines were inadequate, and our software never woke up. We knew there was life on other worlds, yet we couldn’t leave our own front yard. And while probes and space telescopes shed ever more light on our galactic neighbourhood, there’s only so much you can see looking through a peephole. To properly survey a place, you need boots on the ground. You need human intuition. You need eyes that can tell when something that looks like a rock might be more than a rock.