The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)

by Becky Chambers

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.

An absence of sound meant that air was no longer flowing, engines no longer running, artigrav nets no longer ...

Silence belonged to the vacuum outside. Sil...

Most Humans, whether spaceborn or colony kids, shared that nationless Exodan blend.

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 lab work and a sunless sky.

“Is Jenks coming?” Rosemary asked. “Jenks always waits until the end of the speech,” Kizzy said with a fond smile. “Just to be polite.” Rosemary looked back to the jittery AI. “That’s not a sentient model, is it?” “I don’t think so,” said Ashby. “But try telling Jenks that. He always gives AIs the benefit of the doubt.”

Survivalists were as extreme as Gaiists could go. They weren’t just xenophobic, but technophobic to boot. They believed that technology was what doomed their planet from the beginning, and the only way to achieve redemption was to live like the animals they were. Survivalists were strict hunter-gatherers and genetic purists, abstaining not just from routine gene therapies, but from vaccinations, too.

“She almost died during childbirth,” Kizzy said. “Seriously almost died. Can you believe that? Who dies in childbirth? Fucking archaic.

As open and generous as Aeluons generally were to their galactic neighbors, interspecies coupling remained a mainstream taboo.

An Aeluon could lose her family and friends over an alien relationship.

She could lose her job, especially when on a government contract. And for someone like Pei, who took pride in being a hard worker with a honed skill set, that kind of shame would cut deep.

Reminiscent of inter-racial relationships. Inter-species could be more complicated though if there are differences in cognitive ability or culture.

He had no idea what she’d been through prior to this meeting, and until he had a clear sense of where she was at, he was going to let her make the first move. And even if she was on the same page as him . . . well, he still had good manners. Even if his body was getting ahead of itself.

Good to see mention of consent

and they still did, if you watched where the credits flowed, but they weren’t in the habit of subjugating indigenous sapients anymore).

They control the galaxy through capitalism now instead of subjugation. Is this any better?

She had once read a paper by an Aeluon historian who suggested that the Harmagians’ physical frailty was exactly what had helped them develop a technological edge over other species. “Want and intelligence,” the historian had written, “is a dangerous combination.”

When she considered the historical context, Rosemary thought their presence in the shop made for a rather odd tableau: a Harmagian (an aging son of a former empire), an Aandrisk (whose people had moderated the talks that granted independence to Harmagian colonies and ultimately founded the GC) and two Humans (a meager species that would’ve been ripe for the picking if they had been discovered during the days of Harmagian conquest). All standing together, amicably discussing the sale of soap. Time was a curious equalizer.

But are they really equal? There still seems to be different power dynamics between species

“Hand speak expresses things that are either too basic to waste words on or too personal.”

“Yeah, stuff that’s really important or hard to say. Like about love or hate or stuff you’re scared about. You know how when you have something big to tell someone, you stammer through it or sit in front of your mirror practicing what to say? Aandrisks don’t bother with that. They let the gestures take care of all the awkwards. They figure that big, deep feelings are universal enough to be defined with just a flick of the hand or whatever, even though the events that cause those feelings are unique.”

“Okay, well, on her wall, there’s this big fancy frame with a mess of Aandrisk feathers hanging from it. Every Aandrisk’s got one, as far as I know. See, if you’re an Aandrisk and somebody really touches your life in some way, you give that person one of your feathers. And then you keep the feathers you get from others as a symbol of how many paths you’ve crossed. Having a lot of feathers on your wall shows that you’ve had an impact on a lot of people. That’s a pretty big life priority for most Aandrisks. But they don’t give feathers out casually, not, like, for helping you carry something or giving you a free drink or whatever.

Like all Aeluons, her “voice’ was a computerized sound that came from a talkbox embedded in the base of her throat. She controlled the talkbox neurally, a process she likened to thinking up words while typing. Aeluons lacked a natural sense of hearing, and had no need for a spoken language of their own. Among themselves, they communicated through color—specifically, iridescent patches on their cheeks that shimmered and shifted like the skin of a bubble. Once they began interacting with other species, however, verbal communication became a necessity, and so, talkboxes came to be.

Humans can’t handle war. Everything I know about our history shows that it brings out the worst in us. We’re just not . . . mature enough for it, or something. Once we start, we can’t stop. And I’ve felt that in me, you know, that inclination toward acting out in anger. Nothing like what you’ve seen. I don’t pretend to know what war is like. But Humans, we’ve got something dangerous in us. We almost destroyed ourselves because of it.”

What does it say about me, being relieved that you can do the thing I condemn my own species for?”

Raw ambi—the stuff Ohan envisioned torquing around the skimmer combs—was difficult to gather. Ambi could be found everywhere and in everything, but the way that it weaved itself around ordinary matter made extracting it a troublesome task. With the right technology, it could be wrenched apart, but the process was so tedious and reaped such small rewards that it wasn’t worth the effort. It was far easier to gather ambi somewhere where matter was already being ripped

apart by forces greater than anything any sapient could build—like a black hole.

Black holes were always surrounded by turbulent seas of free-floating ambi, but getting close enough to gather it posed an obvious risk. For ambi traders, the risk was worth it, especially since it allowed them to charge a premium. As expensive as ambi cells were, they were the only thing that could power the Wayfarer’s interspatial bore. It was a necessary exp...

Every pattern represented a cosmological truth, every series of clicks an abstraction of the universe’s underlying mathematics. These were symbols and sounds every Sianat Pair knew. They wore the layers of the universe upon their skin, drummed its beat with their mouths.

This was the first stage of the Wane: stiffness and muscle spasms. Eventually, the pain would spread to their bones, and their muscles would become increasingly difficult to control. The pain would then disappear completely, but this was a devious mercy, as it indicated that their nerve fibers had begun to die. Death would come afterward, in its own time.

Solitaries—blasphemous Hosts that avoided infection, a crime punished by exile—reportedly could live well over a hundred standards, but no Pair had ever lived to be more than thirty.

The Wane was a fair price to pay for enlightenment.

When they reached for the higher parts of their mind, they knew that death was nothing to fear. Why should they fear something that came to all life-forms? In some ways, having reached the Wane was a comfort to Ohan. It meant that they had been successful in avoiding a sudden, premature end.

Dr. Chef’s purpose was to heal and nourish. Ashby’s purpose was to bind his crew together. Accepting the Wane ran contrary to those purposes. For them, accepting the death of a crew member was difficult. Ohan hoped they knew how much the effort was appreciated.

A black hole was the perfect place to contemplate death. There was nothing in the universe that could last forever. Not stars. Not matter. Nothing.

How is it that life, so diverse on the surface, has followed the same patterns throughout the galaxy—not just in the current era, but over

and over again?

The answer, of course, is that the laws of biology are nearly impossible to test, and scientists hate that. We can launch probes to test theories of gravity and space-time. We can put rocks in pressure cookers and split atoms in classrooms. But how does one test a process as lengthy and multifaceted as evolution? There are labs today that struggle to find the funding to keep a project running for three standards—imagine the funding needed to run a project for millennia!

But when it comes to evolution, we are hatchlings, fumbling with toys. I believe this is why many of my peers still cling to theories of genetic material scattered by asteroids and supernovae. In many ways, the idea of a shared stock of genes drifting through the galaxy is far easier to accept than the daunting notion that none of us may ever have the intellectual capacity to understand how life truly works.

if you ever meet a modder who will implant teenagers, run like hell. Modding isn’t just about getting sewn up with cool tech, it’s about orchestrating a balance between the synthetic and the organic.

“That guy on the news,” she said. “Quentin Harris?” “Yeah?” “He’s my father.”

Tweaking your body, it’s all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside. Not that you have to tweak to get that feeling. Like me, I like to decorate myself, but my body already fits with who I am. But some modders, they’ll keep changing themselves their entire lives. And it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes they seriously mess themselves up. But that’s the risk you take in trying to be more than the little box you’re born into.

A solitary cup of tea required more care, a blend carefully chosen to match his day. He found the ritual of it quite calming: heating the water, measuring the crisp leaves and curls of dried fruit into the tiny basket, gently brushing the excess away with his fingerpads, watching color rise through water like smoke as it brewed. Tea was a moody drink.

Kizzy had accused him once of “bottling up his feelings,” but this was a Human concept, the idea that one could hide their feelings away and pretend that they were not there. Dr. Chef knew exactly where all of his feelings were, every joy, every ache. He didn’t need to visit them all at once to know they were there. Humans’ preoccupation with “being happy” was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.

Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.

Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them—not all, but most—who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they’d done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable.”

all any of us can do—is work to be something positive instead. That is a choice that every sapient must make every day of their life. The universe is what we make of it. It’s up to you to decide what part you will play.

There are few things as unsettling as a lack of control in an unfamiliar situation.”