To Be Taught, if Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

  Elena walked in from the gym a few minutes after I started running a diagnostic on the comms system. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  I told her. ‘I’m checking to make sure we’re still receiving signal.’

  A frown formed on her face as well, but it was directed at me, not the problem. ‘Weren’t you running daily diags?’

  ‘Of course I was,’ I said, which was part of what bothered me. The comms system had never shown any issues, and yes, I checked it every day. A problem that had arisen over the past twenty-four hours wouldn’t account for six months of missed messages.

  Elena watched over my shoulder as the diagnostic ran its course, as if I wouldn’t tell her the second I had any news. Whether she intended the implication or not, it stung.

  The final report appeared. Green lights all around.

  Jack entered the room, hair wet from his last shower before the next round of torpor. ‘What’s up?’

  I explained. He didn’t like it.

  ‘What if the diagnostics are wrong?’ Elena asked. ‘Could there be a hardware problem?’

  ‘It’s unlikely,’ I said. ‘I spent the whole week doing pre-launch checks.’

  ‘Do you think we should do them again?’ she asked. It wasn’t really a question.

  ‘Well, hang on,’ Jack said. A third frown joined the party. ‘What if we don’t have anything because they didn’t send us anything?’

  OCA lived and breathed by mission plans. If they wanted you to set your wake-up alarm differently, you got a mission update. If they wanted you to change your toothpaste, you got a mission update. News bundles were a scheduled part of our expected communications. If they were going to stop sending them, we’d have received a mission update to that effect. But nothing had appeared in that folder, not once.

  ‘Let’s—’ Elena began.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, opening the most recent bundle. I glanced around as the file unpacked itself. ‘Where’s Chikondi?’

  ‘I think he’s still in his cabin,’ Jack said.

  I looked at the clock. It was after ten. That wasn’t like Chikondi. ‘Should we get him?’

  Whatever Jack started to say, it was lost as the video started. There was an OCA logo and an OCA employee in an OCA office … but something was off.

  ‘Hello, Lawki 6,’ the man on screen said. He cleared his throat. He seemed to be uncomfortable in front of a camera. ‘I hope you’re all doing great.’ His eyes were fixed off to the side; he was reading from a prompt.

  ‘Can you turn it up?’ Elena asked.

  I checked the volume. ‘It’s already all the way up,’ I said.

  ‘Can barely hear him,’ she said. I agreed; the sound quality was mediocre at best. I listened to the man’s delivery, and though I had no proof, I was willing to bet that he wasn’t a member of the comms team. He felt like a stand-in, the person who’d said I guess I can do it after a long silence at a meeting. I started to notice other miniscule oddities as well: the sun-faded fabric of the OCA flag, a small corner of chipped paint on the wall, the heavy jacket the man was wearing indoors. Something wasn’t right.

  Whatever that something was, the news bundle shed no light on it. All we got was a dizzying melange of conflicts without context, political leaders whose names we didn’t know, all-consuming dramas that would likely be forgotten a generation later. Have you ever looked at the headlines on a foreign news site, and felt completely adrift? The experience was like that, but on the scale of the entire planet. The plot escaped us entirely.

  ‘Stay safe out there,’ the man said with an awkward wave. ‘We’ll talk to you next month.’

  And that was that.

  We three sat silently for a moment, our frowns all the more pronounced.

  ‘Try the one before that,’ Jack said.

  So we did. We watched another, and when that told us nothing, we jumped back ten months to see if chronological order would help. Chikondi joined us at last, saying little of anything, but present for the puzzle at hand. A few pieces started to fall into place. They only raised more questions.

  OCA was experiencing funding problems – we’d gathered that much, even though the bundles did their best to make light of it. Nothing was said of where the shortage in finances was coming from, but the greater context of the stories relayed to us made it plain. There was war. There was famine. There were too many people in cities that already had too many when we’d left. It is difficult to give thought to the stars when the ground is swallowing you up. And if thought is difficult, it stands to reason that money is even harder. We watched as the clothes got more and more tired. The faces did, too. But in every bundle, the closing sentiment was the same: We’re proud of you. Stay safe. We’ll talk to you next month.

  Until, some nebulous day before April 2162, they stopped. They simply stopped.

  We sat in silence around the monitor. We’d screwed up our launch schedule by cramming the news all day, but that no longer seemed like the bigger priority.

  Jack shook his head at the screen. He stood. He paced. ‘Where are they?’ he said. ‘Where did they go?’

  Opera

  I remained in front of the mirror for much longer than I had the two times before. The sun was large in Opera’s sky, so I did not need to shine. The gravity was on par with Earth, so I did not need to be strong. There was much about Opera that was like Earth, in fact – its size, its atmosphere, its temperature range. I needed nothing special for Opera, so I was given nothing. My previous gifts were gone, no longer maintained by the patch on my arm. The radiation and antifreeze supplementations remained, of course, but beyond that, I was just … me.

  Looking in the mirror, I wasn’t sure I liked what that equated to. I was almost eleven years older than when I’d left Earth. That’s not so much time, but the changes of ageing had largely escaped my notice, distracted as I was by the more dramatic differences of somaforming. I didn’t mind the lines in my face, but I also didn’t remember their development. My hair hadn’t grown too much in the five years spent in torpor, but the frequent shaving meant I never saw it much longer than maybe a centimetre. Now, I saw frequent threads of wintry grey among the black tufts. My body was average, healthy, nothing out of the ordinary. That was the problem. Without the glitter, I felt dull; without the brawn, puny. To my eyes, I looked ill, and the sight made me sink.

  I found my crewmates where I’d bid them goodnight, down in the control room, arranged around the comms monitor. Jack shook his head at me as I floated through the door.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Have you run a—’

  ‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘Everything’s as it was when we left. All green lights.’

  Chikondi floated in the corner, silent in thought and distant in gaze.

  ‘They can’t just be gone,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Jack said in agreement. ‘Even if funding ran out entirely, they’d tell us. They wouldn’t just say, whoops, oh well, no more paychecks, guess we’ll fuck off. No, something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.’

  ‘I’ll check the comms again,’ I said. ‘I’ll do another full hardware check.’ My gut said the problem wasn’t on our end, but with this, we couldn’t be too sure.

  ‘What do we do,’ asked Chikondi, ‘if we hear nothing?’

  ‘What we came here to do,’ Elena said. ‘We’ve received no mission updates, so that means the mission stands. We do our job here, we go to Votum, we do our job there, we go home, and we find out what happened.’

  I stared at her, and the weight of what she was saying sunk in. From my internal sense of time, we hadn’t heard from OCA in seven months, which, to me, was a problem I’d discovered the day before. But of course, that wasn’t the shape of things at all, not when you factored in the transit time. We hadn’t heard from OCA in five and a half years. Chikondi wasn’t asking what we would do now, in the absence of contact. He was asking about the complete a
bsence of contact. The absence of any contact at all.

  I remember our introductory mission briefing about Opera at OCA Oceania. Sophie Thomas, one of my favourite people on the planetary science team, led the presentation that day with her usual energetic charm.

  ‘This one’s going to be a real kick in the tits,’ she said cheerily. ‘The surface of this planet is almost entirely ocean.’

  ‘Water ocean?’ Elena asked, taking notes on her tablet.

  ‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘So you don’t need to worry if your boots get wet, but you haven’t exactly got a fine choice of landing sites, either.’ A map appeared on the screen behind her. ‘There are four small islands, and your survey activity will be limited to those locations, plus however far out you can fly your drones in a given day.’

  ‘Four islands,’ Chikondi repeated. ‘On the whole planet.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘When you say small,’ Jack said, ‘d’you mean, like, there’s room for a quaint fishing village but you won’t have many dining options, or glorified rocks?’

  ‘Glorified rocks,’ Sophie said. ‘You’ll be able to go for a short walk, and that’s about it.’

  Elena twirled her stylus as she processed that. ‘That is a kick in the tits.’

  In the control room, looking at the satmaps of the planet below us, our demeanour was far less flippant. No one was smiling. I doubt even Sophie Thomas would have smiled in the face of the two big problems conveyed by our satellites.

  Problem the first: they’d only found three islands. The one we were supposed to land on first was missing.

  ‘Could the folks back home have made a mistake?’ I asked. I doubted it, but as a scientist, you have to consider every possibility.

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘I reviewed the landing maps with them.’

  ‘We all did,’ Elena said. ‘There should be something right there.’ She pointed at the screen.

  ‘Those maps were made over forty years ago,’ I said. ‘Something must have happened. Some kind of volcanic event, maybe?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jack said, ‘or an impact event. That could do it.’

  ‘Could be sea level rise,’ Elena said. ‘The planet could be undergoing some kind of climate change.’

  ‘That’d be consistent with an impact event,’ Jack said.

  ‘Or any number of things.’ She gestured emptily at the map. ‘We don’t have any data. There’s no visible crater. There’s just … water.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘we’ll solve this mystery later. We can sic the cubesats on it. For now … foul weather protocol?’ Foul weather protocol is a fancy way of saying that the landing schedule OCA provides us with is a guideline, not a mandate. They know their info will be outdated by the time we arrive, and as with all things, we have autonomy over making changes as needed. If a landing site doesn’t work out for any reason, we have the freedom to mix things up.

  ‘About that,’ Jack said. He rotated the satmap on screen so that we could see the other three islands. Except we couldn’t see them, because of the second problem: the grand majority of Opera was choked with raging storm clouds. We could see flashes of lightning, grey swirls of hurricane. The textbook example of what foul weather protocol was intended for. We’d seen storm clouds out the window, naturally, but we hadn’t realised the global scale we were dealing with.

  Elena was fixated on the cloud patterns, her expression conflicted. The meteorologist in her was fascinated. The astronaut who needed to put a spacecraft down was concerned.

  ‘What if I put us into a stationary orbit for a few days?’ I said. ‘We can collect more satellite data, we can see if the storms ease up, and we can make an informed decision from there.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Elena said.

  Jack was antsy to land, but he nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s smart.’

  I turned my head. ‘Chikondi? Consensus?’

  Chikondi blinked himself back from wherever he’d been. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s fine.’

  For ten days, we waited and watched.

  The storms did not ease up.

  Our island did not reappear.

  Our comms folders remained empty.

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ Jack said. ‘We’re not learning anything more than a probe would.’

  ‘Those storm systems are going to last weeks,’ Elena said, standing on solid data at last. ‘And those wind speeds—’

  ‘Are something we know now. We can do the math.’

  ‘This isn’t landing a fucking rover packed in airbags. We’re talking human bodies.’

  ‘Yeah, my human body, I’m aware. It’s not doing anybody any good just dicking around up here.’

  ‘It’s not going to do anybody any good smashed to shit down there, either.’

  ‘Will you both please stop?’ I said wearily.

  Jack folded his hands around the back of his head and exhaled, looking at the satmap. His face shifted.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘What about the shallows?’ he said. He pointed at a region in the planet’s northern hemisphere. ‘This whole stretch right here. Radar says the water there’s – what? Between one to two meters deep?’

  Elena squinted. ‘You want to land in the water.’

  ‘I’m saying we could land on the rock that’s under a small amount of water. Look. The weather’s not as bad there.’

  ‘It’s still bad.’

  ‘But not as bad. You can land in those wind speeds. And the worst of it’s way up here, yeah?’ He circled his hand over the angry swirls on the map. ‘That’d put us out of harm’s way.’

  ‘No,’ Elena said, speaking to the idea in general. ‘We could land the main craft in shallow water, we could anchor it to the rock, but we can’t inflate the modules. They haven’t got solid floors, nothing would stay in place.’

  ‘We can set up some of the lab equipment up here. We just won’t bring samples inside.’

  ‘I’m not thinking about the lab, I’m thinking about the greenhouse.’

  ‘True,’ Jack said, ‘but I’m not saying we stay in the shallows long term. Just until one of our other sites opens up. You said the storm systems could last weeks. So, we go a few weeks without eating our vegetables. Sounds like my childhood.’

  ‘And your adulthood,’ I added.

  He shot me a quick wink. ‘We’ll live.’

  ‘What about the airlocks?’ Elena said.

  ‘What about them?’ he said.

  ‘Two meters at high tide, estimated. That means we can’t go outside during that time.’

  ‘We can schedule around it. Fieldwork during low tide, lab work during high tide.’

  ‘Partial lab work. You won’t have a full lab.’

  Jack groaned with frustration. ‘Fuck me, can you please try to focus on the possible here? We’re allowed to be flexible with protocol when the situation demands.’ He gestured at the satmap with both hands. ‘This is a bad situation. I’m trying to work with it. Our other option is to orbit indefinitely, which would continue to be a waste of time. Or we can just leave and go on to Votum, which would be a colossal waste of time.’

  Elena let out a long sigh and looked at me. ‘What about propulsion?’ she asked.

  I thought about it, carefully. ‘It should be fine,’ I said. ‘The engines are designed to get wet.’

  ‘They’re designed for rain and snow,’ she said, ‘not sitting in a tidepool for a few weeks.’

  ‘I’m aware. And granted, it wasn’t tested for that … but it should be fine. I really think so. We can seal the engine bells as soon as they cool off.’

  Elena looked at the map for a long time. I could see her mentally going through the Herculean task of changing a plan. ‘We need four for consensus,’ she said. I had a feeling that was as close to yes as she would say aloud.

  ‘Is he still taking a nap?’ Jack said.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. I pushed off from the wall, angling myself toward the cabin deck. ‘I’ll go get him.
’

  We landed at night. We could see nothing out the windows, but the sounds from outside told me much. I heard the wind whipping around the inconvenient obstruction of our hull. I heard the lapping of the disturbed shallows. I heard rain drumming like impatient fingers. It was not a cosy storm, a curl-up-with-a-book-and-a-blanket storm. This was weather that resented us.

  Heading out into an unseen landscape, even with headlamps and flashlights, is a foolish idea, so we spent the dark hours assembling a ramshackle lab. The end result was cluttered and vaguely irritating, but it was only for a few weeks, we said. We could deal with disarray for a few weeks.

  I dozed off in my cabin for an hour or two before dawn. The morning light wasn’t what woke me. It was a sound. A shuffling sound. A sucking sound.

  I sat up and looked out. There was an animal affixed to the outside of the porthole, roughly the size (and to a lesser extent, the shape) of a rugby ball, its sandpaper skin a limp lint grey. My first thought was slug, but that wasn’t right, because its belly was not a foot, and that’s not what it was holding on with. Its point of suction was its mouth, an ovular orifice surrounded by a shaggy fringe of feelers. I could see sharp structures waiting within. It had limbs as well – twelve feeble-looking legs. The animal did not appear to use its legs for bodily support, but rather to scoot its anchoring mouth forward.

  I was attempting a better look at the legs when the animal raised its stump of a tail. Two neat rows of holes opened up along its sides, and from these a bone-chilling sound rang out. I am sure to its own ears – or whatever sound receptors it had – the sound was as normal as anything. To me, it was somewhere between squealing metal and a dying horse. I was taught to be objective, as a scientist, but I cannot help the fact that I am also an animal with instincts of my own. Everything about the sound told me to run.

  The sound wasn’t meant for me. It wasn’t a threat; it was a summons. Two more not-slugs shoved their slimy mouths into view, invited by the call of the first.