To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

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.

Why should I fill my head with something I couldn’t change? What was a war on Earth to us? What was an economy to us? To the creatures outside? To the spiralling plants? Nothing around me changed if I chose to not watch the news, but something within me always did. I thought of my crew, each doing in that moment exactly what they wanted to be doing. That seemed like a much saner way to be. I remained unsure, but I nodded.

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.

I did not feel joy in this simplicity, as I did on Aecor. I don’t know what to call the feeling. ‘Emptiness’ sounds depressing, ‘stillness’ dull. I think that Votum is like the mirror in my cabin. It doesn’t presume anything, doesn’t force any decisions. It doesn’t angle itself toward me. It just lets me think. I respect it deeply for this.

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.

I know that if I try to apply the scientific method to stuff I’ve made up, it will fail, because . . . I made it up. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, is posing as the real thing, even though it, too, is a fiction. It’s claiming that the world is different than it actually is, rather than suggesting that the world could be different than it actually is. And that’s infinitely worse than just telling a bad story, because in many cases, you’re playing with people’s lives.