To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

If I ask what I’m asking only of people who agree with me at the outset, with whom I already share a dream and a language, then there’s no point in asking at all.

Waking is more of a mental discomfort, a period in which your consciousness has to reassert itself after years of dormancy. Keep in mind that medically-induced torpor is not the same as sleep. Sleep conveys the passage of time, even if you don’t dream. Not so with torpor. First you’re awake, then you’re not, then you’re back . . . but something’s missing. Something’s missing, and you’ll never be able to put your finger on what.

Say what you will about Homo sapiens, but you can’t argue that we’re a versatile species. On Earth, we can survive a decent swath of both heat and cold. We eat a mind-boggling variety of flora and fauna, and can radically change our diets according to need or mood. We can live in deserts, forests, tundras, swamps, plains, mountains, valleys, shorelines, and everything in between. We are generalists, no question.

Again, I’m as biased as can be, but I believe somaforming is the most ethical option when it comes to setting foot off Earth. 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.

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?

They’d been sold on a vision of discovery and progress accessible to everyone. A global mindset. An enlightened humanity. Instead, they found that dream inextricably, cripplingly anchored to the very founts of nationalistic myopia and materialistic greed that said dream was antithetical to. I imagine many despaired at this reality, and perhaps lost heart.

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?

Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. 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.

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.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s often misused, operating on the false interpretation that fit means physically fit, therefore expressing a dog-eat-dog ethos. The strongest wins the day. But that’s not what Darwin meant, not at all. He meant most suited to, as in, the creatures most suited to – or most fit for – a specific environment are the ones with the best chance of passing on their genes. A sloth is fit for a slow life in the branches. A worm is fit for chomping decaying leaves in the damp dark. A tick is fit for patiently waiting on a blade of grass, waiting for a sanguineous passerby to drink from.

On Earth, the term invertebrate – anything without a spine – covers an astounding variety of body types. Spiders, sea hares, millipedes, cuttlefish, dragonflies, and clams all fit the bill. By comparison, vertebrates – snakes, zebras, condors, you and me – are tediously similar below the skin. The spine evolved only once in Earth history, and every being with a skeleton can trace itself back to the same root. We follow a basic template: a bilateral arrangement of skull, ribs, and pelvis, typically accompanied by four limbs. We have two eyes, one mouth, and a brain. The inner structure of our limbs is similarly predictable: one large upper bone, two parallel lower bones, the many little bones that form the wrist or ankle, and digits. We’re all working off of the same blueprint.

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.

We’ve been impotently worrying about what a solar flare could do to electronic infrastructure since the 1900s. But my generation was so preoccupied with fixing the mess left by the unaddressed-and-fully-known-about environmental disaster of the previous generation that we committed the same sin of criminal procrastination against yours.

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.

Molecules have a ‘handedness’ as well. This is called chirality, and if you’ve never encountered this concept before, it’s one of those that can make you sit back and stare into the distance for a while.