To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

My name is Ariadne O’Neill, and I’m the flight engineer aboard the OCA spacecraft Merian.

Humans are nothing if not adaptable.

It’s difficult to assign value to discovery when you haven’t sorted out the parameters of reality yet.

That’s about how much I aged in twenty-eight years of transit – two years.

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.

When the world you know is out of reach, nothing is more welcome than a measurable reminder that it still exists.

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?

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?

A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence.

The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not.

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.

Nobody wants to take a bath before they go out to play.

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.

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.

Elena and I laughed. I grabbed her hand. She pulled me in, her arm wrapped snugly around my shoulders, the top of my helmet resting against the bottom of hers. We were one being, one moment, all boundary of body and person dissolved in the presence of shared euphoria.

determined. So, because it’s not very fancy to say ‘worm-like,’ we say Annelid (e.g. earthworm) Approximate: AnA. You can find this acronym on the same list as Avian Reptile Approximate (AvA), Amphibian Approximate (AA), Mammal Approximate (MA), and so on – plus the ever-exciting ‘NP’ for ‘New Phyla’. Everybody wants to find an NP.

‘I want to stay here,’ I said to Elena one night as we lay nose to nose in her cabin. ‘If they’d sent us here just for this, that’d be enough.’ Her face shimmered, and I imagined the light waves bouncing from the reflectin in her skin to the reflectin in mine, then back to hers, then back to mine, an endless reciprocity. ‘Mmm,’ she said. She thought for a moment, stroking my cheek with her thumb. Something shifted in her, and she smiled. ‘But think about what we get to do next.’

Mirabilis is what we call a ‘superearth’

Spirasurculus suck the energy and nutrients they need from the groundwater below them.

She told me when we got home that she missed when my hair was long enough to pull,

day. I fell asleep that night with her curled around my back like a protective shell. I knew she was still pondering the fragile things that live in clouds, and it made me press my spine against her all the harder.

‘It still hurts before we do so. Is that a fair trade, their pain for our knowledge?’

‘You can only call it sacrifice if it’s consensual. Nobody asked the worms under the rock what they thought about the whole thing.’

The next day, I got up. I didn’t want to, but I did. I don’t know why. There was no good reason to.

I have never stopped hating what that says about me.

My breath caught, then quickened. I wanted him to go away, I wanted all of them to disappear. I wanted to disappear.

no beginning or end to us.

Red dwarf systems have a tendency toward tidal locking –

think about the way our Moon looks from Earth. When looking up at a full Moon on a clear night, you will always see the same friendly arrangement of craters shining back. Some cultures see a face in the Moon; others, a rabbit. Whatever the interpretation, the underlying truth remains the same. One side of the Moon is always facing Earth. The far side never does. This is a tidal lock.

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.

a home can only exist in a moment. Something both found and made. Always temporary, in the grand scheme of things, but vital all the same.

Even though your left hand has the same physical parts as your right, it will never, ever be the same shape.

Sometimes we do harm, despite our best efforts. We are human. We are fragile.

where will it burn brightest?