To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

  It ended up being far easier, once the science matured, to engineer our bodies instead.

  We don’t change much – nothing that would make us unrecognisable, nothing that would push us beyond the realm of our humanity, nothing that changes how I think or act or perceive. Only a small number of genetic supplementations are actually possible, and none of them are permanent. You see, an adult human body is comprised of trillions of cells, and if you don’t constantly maintain the careful changes you’ve made to them, they either revert back to their original template as they naturally replace themselves, or mutate malignantly. Hence, the enzyme patch: a synthetic skin-like delivery system that gives our bodies that little bit extra we need to survive on different worlds. If I were to stop wearing patches, my body would eventually flush the supplementations out, and I’d be the same as I was before I became an astronaut (plus the years and the memories).

  Somaforming is an elegant solution, but not an immediate process. If enzyme patches are still used medically, you know this already – if you’re diabetic, for example, and can’t produce insulin on your own. But if you’ve never worn a patch (or if they’re old news by now), you might imagine something more dramatic than is accurate. I once spoke to a kid at an outreach event who was very disappointed to learn that applying a patch does not result in instant transformation (complete with an animation sequence and a theme song, I’d imagine). We astronauts are not superheroes, nor shape-shifters. We’re as human as you. While our bodies are wondrously malleable things, they still need time to adjust. Life-saving organ transplants or helpful medicines can often be met with some level of physiological resistance; the same is true of somaforming. It is more preferable, by far, to be unconscious while your body sorts itself out.

  Again, I’m as biased as can be, but I believe somaforming is the most ethical option when it comes to setting foot off Earth. I’m an observer, not a conqueror. I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me. I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.

  At first glance upon waking at Aecor, I did not look particularly different. The enzyme patch on my shoulder – regularly swapped out during torpor by a helpful robotic mechanism – had been supplying me with the same sort of basic astronaut survival kit that I’d maintained since my first training mission in low-Earth orbit. My blood produces its own antifreeze to survive the extreme temperatures of both space and ground. My skin passively absorbs radiation and converts it into sustenance. These additions I have had for a long time. But as my weightless body shifted in microgravity, drifting like kelp in a gentle sea, a new supplementation made itself clear.

  Glitter.

  I can think of at least one lab tech back home who would frown at me for calling it glitter. Technically, what I possessed was synthetic reflectin, a protein naturally found in the skin of certain species of squid. But … come on. It’s glitter. My skin glittered, and for a moment, I felt childlike glee, like I’d emptied a bunch of craft supplies on myself, like I’d had my face painted at a carnival, like I’d flown here in a cloud of pixie dust. But it was practical, the astroglitter. Aecor is roughly as far from its star as Uranus is from our own, which makes for a sun no bigger than a fingerprint in the sky. Night and day do not look dramatically different. Here, glitter served the same purpose for us that it does for sea-dwelling animals back home: it catches and refracts light. While we would be clothed for the majority of the work day, being able to spot your crewmates’ glittery faces on a pitch-black ice field certainly wouldn’t hurt. We also needed to limit the use of work lights on said pitch-black ice fields, because light means heat, and we didn’t want to cause melt. And indoors, reflectin means less energy spent on indoor lighting, which is great when on a world where solar panels are useless and everything runs on battery.

  Besides which: I glittered. It felt like a damn shame to put my clothes on, but I managed it all the same.

  Chikondi was the first person I saw that day, and his face was far more startling to me than my own. To my memory, I’d said goodbye to him about an hour prior, but there he was, scruffy-faced and sparkly-skinned … and noticeably older. He is the youngest of us, and that two years of ageing had a more marked effect on a face in its twenties. He was thinner, too, and so was I, but I’d spent so much time mentally preparing for how I’d be different that I hadn’t thought much about how my friends might change.

  Clearly, Chikondi felt the same, because he stared at me for a moment before ending the awkwardness with a laugh. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning,’ I returned. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘I had this weird dream. I was helping my brother reorganise a massive library, and the books were written in gibberish, and suddenly I realised they weren’t books at all but cake—’

  I frowned. Nothing about his conscious mind should have been active. I began to mentally rifle through what this could mean, everything that could’ve gone wrong with the chamber, the malfunctions I’d obviously missed during inspection, the unforeseen consequences this could mean for his brain …

  Chikondi smiled slyly at me. ‘Ariadne, I’m kidding.’ He laughed again.

  I cuffed his shoulder gently, then flipped my head down, floated past the ladder, and pushed myself along the walls with my hands. ‘So you are all right, right?’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Chikondi said. There was a pause. ‘I hate catheters.’

  I nodded in solidarity. ‘Truer words.’

  We found Elena in the control room, starting a systems check. I wondered if she’d needed much time to look at herself, or if this was all old hat by now. Elena’s the oldest of our crew by a minimum of nine years, and thus, her résumé has more to boast. She was part of the Eridania 8 mission to Mars, as well as the first to set foot on Ceres. This was not her first rodeo. But whatever her feelings about her body were, her keenness to get to work could not have been more plain. I’d seen that same glint in her eyes every morning we’d done field training together, every time she’d strapped on her boots for a hike or filled a bag with sample jars. I had a feeling that to her, otherworldly skin was just a sign that things were about to get good.

  ‘Good morning,’ Chikondi said to her.

  ‘Good …’ She glanced at a monitor. ‘Afternoon, actually.’

  ‘Right,’ Chikondi said. Aecor’s day was eight of ours, but we were still keeping Earth time.

  Some of us were, anyway. Jack came floating downstairs a half hour later, late as always. I’ve been on crews with Jack since my early days at OCA, and we’ve long kept close company outside of that, but in that moment, I’m not sure I’d have recognised him in a crowd. I’d never seen him with long hair, or a beard that was anything but artfully groomed.

  He looked at us each in turn, and burst out laughing. ‘You all look like shit,’ he said.

  ‘So do you,’ Elena said, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jack stuck his nose into his shirt and grimaced. ‘Ugh.’ He touched the thick bun bobbing at the crown of his head. ‘This needs to get murdered. Might keep the beard, though. Chikondi? Wanna be beard buds?’

  They grinned at each other from within their respective thickets. ‘Sure,’ Chikondi said. ‘But I think yours constitutes a fire hazard.’

  Jack chuckled heartily. ‘You’re not doing much better, mate.’

  I floated over to the comms monitor. ‘We’ve got files coming in,’ I said.

  ‘Anything urgent?’ Elena asked.

  Any information OCA had sent us would be fourteen years out of date, but even problems that old were well worth knowing. I skimmed over the download list. No protocol updates, no emergency notices. I shook my head. ‘Parameters are unchanged,’ I said. ‘Mission is a go.’ I watched the progress bars inch forward, byte by byte, and the sight sparked a warmth within me, the same sort I’d got whenever a drone had dropped supplies at the OCA mobile base in Antarctica, or when my parents had sent me care packages while I was away at school. When the world you know is out of reach
, nothing is more welcome than a measurable reminder that it still exists.

  In terms of formal training, I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer. I build the machines and provide the propulsion that gets scientists where they need to go. I’m a support class, in essence. I’ve always felt most comfortable in that role. The day I applied for trainee work at OCA – just shy of nineteen – I walked in the door of the Vancouver campus with no thought beyond keeping my feet firmly on the ground. I imagined a life of craning my neck back as my work vanished into the clouds. I had no idea how far I would go – but then, I’m not sure OCA knew that about itself, either.

  It’s understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you’re stuck on – those most vital criteria of home and health and safety – remain unanswered?

  Keeping probes and satellites spinning is one thing; keeping astronauts alive is quite another. In the throes of the Great Shift, there were none with sufficient stable resources – human, monetary, or material – to keep that latter work going. Even if there had been, those who held the purse strings so often had motives beyond the glorious dawns they claimed to support. If you wanted the funding and facilities for spaceflight, you could either appeal to your government, whose support for the sciences might prove hollow as soon as there wasn’t a war to win, or to a corporate entity, which would chase scientific progress provided that there was a positive correlation to their bottom line.

  So much for the benefit of all mankind.

  For the people who worked on those programs – the astronauts, yes, and the breakthrough scientists, yes, but also the thousands upon thousands of everyday engineers, mathematicians, doctors, lab grunts, and data hounds whose names and stories are lost to us – these were not the futures they were chasing. They’d been sold on a vision of discovery and progress accessible to everyone. A global mindset. An enlightened humanity. Instead, they found that dream inextricably, cripplingly anchored to the very founts of nationalistic myopia and materialistic greed that said dream was antithetical to. I imagine many despaired at this reality, and perhaps lost heart.

  But our history remembers those that did the opposite. People of science, after all, are stubborn beyond the point of sense.

  Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling.

  The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground.

  I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence.

  As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told.

  The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

  And we did.

  Their names are on the root-level glass, those original twelve, in font no bigger than any other. So are the names of everyone who has ever given anything to the cause. Doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire who kept our lights on every year or somebody who donated a spare tip to the cause a grand total of once. The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not. All those little cobbles were enough to pave the road back to Luna, then to Mars and the asteroid belt and beyond.

  I tried to find my name on the wall – I’d given all my beer money to an OCA employee I’d heard speak at school four months prior – but the lights came back before I located myself. I was returned to the world of tendrils and worms, fungus and rock, locked together in an unbreakable web. Viewed in this way, you can never again see a tree as a single entity, despite its visual dominance. It towers. It’s impressive. But in the end, it’s a fragile endeavour that can only stand thanks to the contributions of many. We celebrate the tree that stretches to the sky, but it is the ground we should ultimately thank.

  A hundred and fifty odd years of people making spacecraft that can land themselves on other planets has made my responsibilities as pilot more of a backup plan than anything else. I absolutely need to be there with my hands on the proverbial wheel in case something goes wrong, and I approach that job with deadly seriousness. Even if nothing ever does go wrong, I have to prepare as though it might.

  On Aecor, it did not. We descended into the atmosphere without a hitch. The air allowed us through, and physics led the way from there. My body travelled through a spectrum of gravity – first nothing, then a fast crescendo of sluggish weight that transitioned into ever-increasing lightness. The change plateaued in an unfamiliar state, one that was lighter than Earth, but heavier than its moon. This was a gentle world, one that wouldn’t drag you down or trip you up. It was a small delight, that point-six-G. The gravitational equivalent of a sip of cold soda or a quick shoulder rub.

  The Merian’s landing legs had barely finished deployment before Jack was undoing his safety restraints. ‘Dibs on shower,’ he said.

  The rest of us groaned in protest. Showering is an utterly impossible activity in a weightless environment, unless you like the idea of floating in the middle of a spray of spherical blobs that go everywhere but where you want them to. We hadn’t been able to properly clean ourselves up since coming out of torpor, and we were all aching for a turn in the stall.

  ‘You don’t want a haircut before you shower?’ Elena asked, unbuckling her own restraints. Hair we could’ve addressed in microgravity, but then you have to use a vacuum cleaner. It’s so much easier when the clippings fall straight down.

  Jack pointed at Elena in agre
ement. ‘Dibs on clippers.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, heading down the ladder. ‘But first haircut means last out the hatch.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not fair,’ he said, following after.

  I punched buttons. ‘All systems nominal, if anyone cares,’ I said. I wasn’t actually fussed in the slightest. If anything, I took it as sign of their trust in the Merian, which, by extension, was something of a compliment to my ability to keep an eye on her.

  Chikondi flashed me a thumbs up as he descended the ladder. ‘I care.’

  ‘Thanks, Chikondi.’ I finished my landing sequence, and followed the others down the ladder. It’s always odd, being able to only move downward in a space I floated in minutes before.

  Despite our collective grunge, there was a fizzy impatience in the air as we buzzed our heads and took turns in the compact shower. There was a whole moon waiting outside, but first, we had to bathe. If you want to see highly-trained astronauts devolve into twitchy five-year-olds, this is the time to witness it. Nobody wants to take a bath before they go out to play.

  We gathered in the cargo hold after we’d finished putting ourselves together. Jack produced a six-sided die from his pocket and set it on a storage crate. ‘Who’s feeling lucky?’

  Elena picked up the die and turned it between her fingers. ‘High or low?’