To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

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

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

Even if there had been, those who held the purse strings so often had motives beyond the glorious dawns they claimed to support. If you wanted the funding and facilities for spaceflight, you could either appeal to your government, whose support for the sciences might prove hollow as soon as there wasn’t a war to win, or to a corporate entity, which would chase scientific progress provided that there was a positive correlation to their bottom line.

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

Doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire who kept our lights on every year or somebody who donated a spare tip to the cause a grand total of once. 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.

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.

That first moment on Mirabilis rendered me a child – not joyous, like we’d been on Aecor with our glowing swimmers, but overwhelmed. A toddler surrounded by the knees and noise of adults, tasked with learning the entire world from scratch. That said, the joy was quick to follow.

The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.

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.

But I’m not a moth. I’m human. And in humans, there are far more stages than just two. I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself. I might not be able to return to the other Ariadnes, but I would not always be the Ariadne floating in front of the mirror, either. I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her.

What we want you to ask yourselves is this: what is space, to you? Is it a playground? A quarry? A flagpole? A classroom? A temple? Who do you believe should go, and for what purpose? Or should we go at all? Is the realm above the clouds immaterial to you, so long as satellites send messages and rocks don’t fall? Is human spaceflight a fool’s errand, a rich man’s fantasy, an unacceptable waste of life and metal?