‘Low?’ Jack asked, looking around for our agreement. We all nodded. ‘Low. One is best.’
Elena rolled, and scoffed. Five.
Chikondi went next. Three.
Jack followed him. He laughed as the die came to rest. Another three. ‘Beard buds,’ he said to Chikondi, and gave him a high five.
‘You didn’t keep your beards,’ I said.
‘Thank God,’ Elena added.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Jack said. ‘Beard buds are more of …’
‘A state of mind,’ Chikondi said.
‘A state of mind,’ Jack affirmed.
I rolled my eyes, then the die.
I stared.
Two.
I kept staring, even as Jack hooted and Chikondi clapped me on the back.
I’d be the first out the door.
If the OCA media archives are still around, you can find footage of Lawki 6’s launch party. The campus hall was decked to the nines, the tall ceiling under which I’d attended so many meetings almost unrecognisable behind its costume of banners and coloured lights. The place was packed, as was to be expected. In addition to the project teams and the project teams’ families, you’ll see the press, and the press’ families, and citizen supporters from all over the world.
If you watch the footage, you’ll see us, too: four people weaving our way through a sea of humanity, shaking hands and giving hugs and accepting gifts. You’ll see Elena, in her sharp suit and her cresting hair, the consummate professional, as effortlessly approachable in a throng of a thousand as if she’d been in a lecture hall of one hundred, or at a family dinner of ten. You’ll see Jack, a rakish grin on his face and his jacket rumpled just so, getting high on the OCA Oceania crowd going batshit for their Melbourne-raised hero. You’ll see Chikondi, handsome as a portrait and the most nervous I think he’s ever been in his life. He loves people, and I wouldn’t categorise him as shy, but he’s infinitely more comfortable in an audience than in the spotlight. That’s why you’ll see me at his side – the one in the blue dress, whispering stupid jokes in his ear to keep him smiling in a sea of cameras. I’m smiling, too – partly because his laughter fuelled my own, partly because this was not my first time at a PR circus, mainly because I was having a good time. A party is a party, and when it’s a party for you and the people you love best, it’s hard not to enjoy yourself.
If you watch closely, though, you might catch a moment when my face falls. I don’t know when in the evening it happened, but it’s the thing I remember most. That’s the moment when I saw my family in the crowd: my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my little nieces. I knew they’d been there, but I hadn’t expected to see them in the context of my public rounds on the floor. They cheered for me, my family. They cheered and called my name and jumped up and down. But I could see the pain in their eyes, too, a pain that matched the same I’d buried behind my practised smile.
A return to Earth is a key component of all the Lawki missions. OCA was vehemently opposed to putting people aboard a one-way flight. Our mission is to catalogue, not to colonise. Returning to the world you’d laboured to gather knowledge for is psychologically vital. You had to remember who you were doing the work for. You had to know the finite spacecraft that carried you would not be your final home. Without a restful full-circle ending awaiting you, an astronaut under duress might decide to cut the cord, to make a home on a world that was not theirs. Lawki 6 would return to Earth, our mission briefing unequivocally declared.
We’d just be doing so in eighty years.
We astronauts are taught to compartmentalise the realities of interstellar flight. The launch party is a public celebration; the family day that begins the following morning is a time of private grief. There is no schedule that day; our PR shepherd was not tapping his foot and checking his clock while holding a pack of tissues. The day belongs to you and yours.
I will not detail here what I did or said on family day, or repeat the words that still echo in my ears. That belongs to me alone. I’m not going to perform that part of myself for anyone. I won’t say, either, how it went for my crewmates (though we’ve unpacked that baggage among ourselves many, many times). I’ll explain family day for you in the most astronautical way I know how: a simple briefing.
You get in a car and you go to a place of your choosing. A park, maybe. A beach. A house rented for the occasion, complete with doors that lock and blinds that lower.
You hold everyone, as tightly as you can.
You tell them you love them.
You tell them you know.
You tell them goodbye.
You cry. A lot.
You keep crying after you’re back at campus. You cry until you run to the sink and vomit. You cry through that as well.
You wonder if you’re a bad daughter, a bad friend, a selfish asshole placing her own intellectual wankery above the living, breathing people who poured everything they could possibly give into her, and were rewarded with the sight of her walking away forever.
You never answer that question, and you never will.
You strap into your rocket ship anyway.
Somehow, you leave.
My heart pounded as I put on my suit. We wear suits, of course: TEVA suits for the ground – that’s Terrestrial Extra-Vehicular Activity – and the infinitely bulkier EVA suits – plain old Extra-Vehicular Activity – for spacewalks. TEVA suits are partially for our own protection, but mostly to protect the world from ourselves. This is another misconception people have about somaforming – the notion that our supplementations mean we can stroll around alien environments in brilliant nudity, passing through any biome with no more impact than a soft breeze. It’s a romantic image, but one that would be reckless in the extreme. Even after washing, human skin is laden with bacteria that are, to us, good and necessary, but would wreak havoc in a new ecosystem. We exhale bacteria, too, in the micro-droplets of moisture that travel through our airways. Symbiotic microbes aside, there’s no telling what human contaminants could do to an environment. Is our skin oil toxic to the life there? Do we shed allergens? Are we passively poisonous? There’s no way of knowing. Plus, we could get sick, too, and that’d be the end of the mission (and likely ourselves). Hence, suits.
This was not my first step off Earth. I’d spent a summative year and a half at the New Millennium Lunar Base. I felt transcendent the moment my first spacecraft touched down there, and had an echoing thrill every morning I woke up in my bunk and remembered oh my God, I’m on the Moon. But in some ways, the experience was not so removed from travelling on Earth. The Moon was not a mystery, but a place visited by many others before me. It’s difficult for me to explain this feeling, because I’m afraid of coming off as yep, went to the Moon, no big deal. The Moon is incredible, I assure you. I felt my daily share of reverence. But I felt a similar reverence, a related reverence, when I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time, or stood breathless and shivering atop Mount Fuji. Places I had learned of and longed for, suddenly manifest around me. I felt the same on the Moon, in what I thought was the end-all-be-all. I thought I had reached the summit of wonder, that all natural spectacles would enchant me in much the same way.
Not so.
I descended the ramp. My thoughts were dizzy, dreamlike. I was so overwhelmed that I was afraid I wouldn’t remember the moment later. But I did. I do. I’ll never forget it.
Impossible quiet waited beyond the airlock, as if this moon were holding its breath with me. My boots clunked lightly on the ramp, each foot headed a little further down. The sound changed – not the clap of machine-made metal, but the soft crunch of ice. I could feel it give ever so slightly beneath my weight, then hold fast. Endless ice surrounded me, untouched and undisturbed. A flawless canvas. A smooth block of clay. And it looked more like clay or mud than the water I knew it to be comprised of. Thanks to the red-light spectrum bestowed by the sun above, the ice did not appear white or blue, but rather shiny black. It reminded me more of a lava
field than anything.
I stood there, without thought or words. Despite the inviting bounce of low gravity, I remained stock-still. On Luna, I visited the Apollo sites, as all astronauts do. It’s our pilgrimage, our rite. I viewed Neil Armstrong’s footsteps, preserved behind their protective glass domes, and as I stood in that same lunar dust, I felt the way I had on Earth when I visited the Cave of Altamira and raised my palm so that it nearly touched the painted print left by someone thirty-six-thousand years prior: a tiny link in a mighty chain.
Aecor was different. My footprints would not stay there, I knew. I was standing on ice, not rock, and the same geysers that had polished the frozen ocean smooth would do so again, given time. But I was forging a new chain, and the immensity of that is a feeling I doubt can be matched.
Jack broke my reverie. ‘One small step, hey, Ari?’ he said, reading my mind. I turned and looked. All three of my crew were waiting in the airlock, and I suppose I’d been standing there for a while, because they were laughing at me. Well, not Elena. She let out a bit of a chuckle, but it came with a knowing smile. She’d been the first to stand on an asteroid, after all. She understood.
Like any good guests, we carefully checked our surroundings before setting up our temporary home. A probe can scout out a good spot for you to plant your spacecraft, but it’s only when you’re on the ground that you can tell if you’re about to unroll a habitat module into a puddle, or worse yet, onto something’s home. I sent everybody away from the lander, each in a different direction, walking counter-clockwise. We scrutinised the ground below us for anything better left alone. We do our best to leave no trace.
It’s difficult to know where to draw a line with that. If you overthink it – a classic human trait if ever there was one – you start to fall down a rabbit hole of potential disasters. What if the lander itself crushed something? What if the noise of landing scared something away and disrupted their breeding season? What if the exact place where your craft landed is where two bacteria of separate species met for the first time, and what if their meeting would have resulted in a symbiosis that would have led to the emergence of a new species, and you, you bastard, just wiped out that entire reality?
I used to stay awake at night stuck in these worries. But if you live by that logic, you can never take another step. The way I look at it, if the impact of one house-sized object is enough to disrupt an entire evolutionary thread, that thread didn’t have much of a shot to begin with. A spacecraft landing is no different than a boulder shifting, a meteor crashing, a tree falling. And unlike those objects, we do leave, and we do clean up after ourselves. We try to be mindful tenants and ethical observers, to have as minimal an impact as possible. As possible. At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.
These moral quandaries nagged at me from afar as I examined the ground. I initially turned on my headlamps, but this made for a jarring juxtaposition. Unlike the weak sunlight straining from above, my lamps emit a full white-light spectrum, thus creating colours around me that hadn’t existed earlier (think like shining a blacklight in a dark room). Under my mobile pools of light, the black ice became white, stained with streaks of yellow and brown. It was disorientating, in that moment, so I found it easier to let my eyes adjust to Aecor in its native state.
‘Anybody else find any vents?’ Chikondi said over the comms. ‘I’ve got a little one here. Man, I wish I could smell it.’
Jack was less than enthused. ‘I’ll take you to a storm drain when we get back home,’ he said. ‘Throw some old eggs in it. It’ll be about the same.’
That’s the thing about these majestic icy moons. The surface ice is a lovely postcard, but the liquid water beneath stinks to high heaven. It’s an entire ocean of undisturbed brine, warm as a bathtub, brimming with bacteria, chock-full of the remnants of every birth and death that has ever occurred within it. It is, as evidenced by Chikondi bemoaning his clean canned oxygen, a smell only a biologist could love.
‘Are vents something we need to worry about?’ I asked. I found one of my own, a small, steaming hollow leading to depths unknown.
‘No,’ Elena said. ‘We want vents, within reason and at a safe distance. Think of them like a pressure valve.’
‘Yeah,’ Jack added. ‘Something without holes might pop.’
‘And no one wants that,’ Chikondi said.
‘No one wants that.’
Visual check complete, we brought out the auger to check the ice’s thickness, to make sure that it would hold our craft for an extended period. Green lights all around. At last, it was time for the fun part.
Inflatable habitat modules are one of my favourite inventions. The Merian comes equipped with two of them – one for the greenhouse, one for the clean lab – each attaching to an airlock on the side of the capsule. They nearly double our living space, but pack away into containment units about half the size of a small car. All we have to do is remove the storage covers, roll out the nigh-indestructible fabric, hit a button, and watch them go.
Even with the modules extended, the space within our habitat is roughly that of a spacious single-family home. You might think that spending years in such a dwelling might start to feel claustrophobic, but consider the fact that ours is the only human home – the only building at all – on any world we travel to. Even the most rural humans can’t understand what it means to be standing on an entire planet that has no cities, no streets, no artificial structures at all. If you’ve been lucky enough to go to a wildlife preserve or some other wide-open space, you might have a glimmer of what that means. The absence of machine sounds. The awesome, fragile humility of knowing you’re the only human around for miles. But even in such places, even up remote mountains or on the longest backpacking trips, you know that somewhere out there, there’s a road. There’s a ranger station. There’s a hotel with a bathtub and a breakfast buffet.
Not so on Aecor. Not anywhere off Earth. As of yet, we have found no other life forms that build cities or machines. When standing on one of these quieter worlds, you know that the entire sphere, in every direction, is wilderness. Go too far from your lander, and your surroundings quickly remind you that you’re only an animal, and that there’s a reason our forbears invented tools and walls.
Faced with such enormity, I find the close quarters of the Merian to be a massive comfort. When you spend day after day after day doing fieldwork in an environment of endless expanse, the most welcome sight in the world is a snug bunk behind a locked door.
I enlisted my crewmates in monitoring the module inflation with me. We took up posts, watching every crease and corner for hidden tears.
‘I love these so much,’ Jack said, watching with satisfaction as the marshmallowy cylinders puffed themselves up. I, too, enjoyed the sight, but I was even more eager for what came next: unpacking our toys.
Have you ever been camping? If so, when you bought your first batch of gear, did you have a moment where you laid it all out in front of you and marvelled at the smorgasbord of clever little bits? The tiny tinderbox? The quick-drying towel? The pop-out kitchenware? The pocket-sized tool that contained a magnifying glass and three knives and a fish scaler you’d never use? That is how I feel every single time we set up our surface labs. Storage space is at a premium in any spacecraft, and being able to fully kit out multi-purpose research facilities obviously requires a lot of stuff. But this need is handily met aboard the Merian, which boasts a cargo hold crammed with a treasure trove of scientific necessities. Microscopes, thermometers, altimeters, light sensors, camera traps, pH probes, turbidity tubes, handheld sonar, ovens, quadrats, shovels, sample dishes, 3D printers, tweezers, molecular scanners, core samplers, seismic monitors, wildlife blinds, tape measures, audio recorders, aerodrones, hydrodrones, gloves, masks, tags, slides, and more goggles than you can shake a stick at, all as lightweight and compact as the best minds on Earth could make them, all securely stowed away in pe
rfect crates with perfect labels in perfect rows.
It is immensely satisfying.
Modules deployed, we went back inside and unpacked our bounty, forming an industrious bucket brigade. ‘Greenhouse first?’ Chikondi asked.
‘Lab first,’ Elena said.
‘Aw,’ he replied. The clean lab was the bigger task, but he was eager to begin the business of growing vegetables. You might think this was a pragmatic desire – radiation alone doesn’t give us all the nutrients we need to survive, and the sooner we start seedlings, the sooner we get snacks. But no, Chikondi just wanted to start playing with plants, just as I knew Elena was itching to collect steam from the vents, just as Jack wanted to go on a hike to search for rocks. Me, I was already in my happy place. Landing had worked, the suits worked, the modules worked, the perfect crates were being unpacked. In order to do science, you need tools, shelter, and a means to get where you’re going. I was responsible for all of these. I was building a trellis where good work would grow. There was nothing I wanted more than that, nothing that brought me more pride.
‘Do you miss coffee?’
I asked this of Jack as he awoke beside me. We’d moved his cot into my cabin the night before, as we do sometimes. Or vice versa. Or not at all.
Jack considered as he blinked at the painted metal ceiling. ‘Nah,’ he said, scratching his stubble. His answer wasn’t surprising in the slightest. Jack doesn’t miss having to eat throughout the day. Back on Earth, he was always the sort of walking disaster who would eat heartily – prodigiously – when you put food in front of him, but would otherwise neglect it entirely, getting lost in work or play until the onset of a roaring headache and a foul mood reminded him to shove a protein bar into his face so he could keep going. Of all of us, he had the easiest time letting go of the contentment of a full belly. For Jack, adopting an alternative means of sustenance was liberation. He couldn’t wait to be free of the need to stop for lunch.
I got up and got dressed. Jack stretched like a cat, folding his arms behind his head, savouring his simple pillow as if he were in a fine hotel.
To Be Taught, if Fortunate Page 3