To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

The Cetus probe scooped up bacteria-laden samples from Europa’s geysers twenty-nine years before my birth; the first rover photographs of fossil arthropods on Mars arrived while my parents were still in trade school.

I don’t know what it was like in those lonely years before, when our view of Earth’s place in the universe was one of a solitary haven, an oasis in a galactic desert. In some ways, I wish I did.

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

Habitable exoplanets may have been lost on me then, but metamorphosis never was. It has always been a thing of beauty to me, the fluidity of form.

Twenty-eight years without a real scrub will do that to you.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I had thought to steel myself for the march of history. I’d neglected to factor in fashion.

We were one being, one moment, all boundary of body and person dissolved in the presence of shared euphoria.

He whipped his head toward her, eyes shining with tears. ‘I don’t want it to die afraid,’ he said.

The thing was, she’d spent so much time focused on what could go wrong, she’d forgotten the possibility of something going right.

There were no winds here, no crashing waves. Only the cold constancy of stars, to which I was just a crude bit of wet carbon, a flake of skin you brush aside.

Tomorrow arrived, followed by another, and another, and another. Lawki 5 did not contact us again.

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.