172: LIFETIME

I stare at Dandelion. “Reaching another exoplanet is the entire plan.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t actually solve anyone’s problems, does it? The Hylarans want to avoid having their settlement overwhelmed by a refugee population five times the size of their own, but don’t want to kill anyone. Captain Kae Jin’s crew are used to the spaceship and don’t have all that much interest in leaving it, and her crew and ours both want the sleeping colonists under our care to live out their full natural lives and not die in chronostasis. All of those goals will be achieved before the ship gets anywhere near its new destination. Those colonists have to be woken up fairly soon, they’ve already been in chronostasis far too long. And then it’s just a matter of keeping the ship together and comfortable for a single human lifespan.”

“They can have kids to run the ship after they’re gone. That’s the whole plan. They have artificial wombs and freezers full of embryos. A lot of the colonists are in repro, or at least on reversible birth control. As many generations can live on the ship as need to.”

“They can, yes. But that’s not relevant to the problems anyone’s trying to solve. If the ship can last long enough for that to be a possibility, great. If it can make it to another exoplanet, fantastic. But my point is that that might be our goal, but we don’t have to reach it to actually solve the problems we’re trying to solve. The crew up there might have a different bar for mission failure than you – you’re talking like if we can’t be confident in reaching another planet, we should scrub the mission. There’s a good chance – I’m not sure, nobody’s actually said it out loud, but a good chance – that Captain Kae Jin’s crew, at the very least, would disagree. They might want to launch even if there’s not a good chance of reaching another exoplanet. So long as the ship can hold together for one human lifespan, that might be enough. So the things that you’re considering a dealbreaker on this mission, they might not.”

“I wonder,” Captain Klees says thoughtfully, “if their great-great-whatever grandchildren to make it to the next habitable exoplanet… if they’ll decide to land or not.”

“The whole point is them landing,” I say. “Why wouldn’t they land? They can’t just live in space forever.”

“If they make it to the end of the journey, they’ll have proven that they can just live in space forever. It’s not like an unterraformed exoplanet would be any easier to live on, especially without a Vault.” (He’s right about that; we’d asked the Hylarans if they could build Vaults, with the hope of maybe linking the Courageous’ new home to Hylara, and they’d said they absolutely do not have either the technology or the industry to do that. Which is what we’d expected.) “Planets are home to us because we grew up on them, but one without a breathable atmosphere – and it’s not going to have a breathable atmosphere, any more than Hylara would be able to have one without a Vault – wouldn’t be all that different to living on a ship. It’d be harder to get resources, in fact, than just parking the ship in an asteroid field. Would someone raised on a spaceship, by multiple generations raised on the same spaceship, recognise a planet as a home? We have people up there already who have only been living on a spaceship for a couple of decades, and are already more comfortable up there than on an exoplanet. Even if they reach the goal, they might change their minds. Or the direction of the spaceship mid-journey. They might just park in an asteroid field for centuries at a time if they can get enough resources there. And if they have the technology to indefinitely repair the courageous, they might also be able to use it to build more ships, provided they can source enough nitrogen and soforth to fill them. Antarctica changed its whole plan with Hylara when we didn’t show up, and that was after what, one century? We can’t predict the goals of what we’re seeding if things do go for that long. And if they don’t… Dandelion’s right. One lifespan solves everyone’s problems, at least from the perspectives of the Hylarans and Captain Kae Jin’s crew. It would be fantastic to build something that can live out there until it gets to a new home, but if that’s impossible, that’s probably not the end of the mission.”

I scowl at my pancakes. What they’re describing, drifting lost in space in a ship until you all die or the systems fail, sounds depressing as fuck to me. A dead end life.

But isn’t this colony the same thing? Isn’t life everywhere the same thing? We all keep going until we die. Maybe I’m just spoiled, growing up on Earth, a place so saturated with life in general and humans in particular that we can behave as if everything will last forever. Out here, being cut off from the possibility of repopulation from other populations of people, they’re right; there’s nothing all that different between Hylara, or another exoplanet, or the ship itself, in terms of perpetuity. If we’re careful and lucky, Hylara will spread into new settlements and stay populated through crises that can wipe out just one. And maybe the Courageous’ new planet can do the same, or maybe the Courageous can do the same, by building new ships. Or maybe it won’t. But the idea of launching if we can’t be fairly confident in keeping the ship together in perpetuity… that plan, I can’t get behind. Sending off the crew and colonists to live out their lives in space and then leave behind a dead, empty ship out among the stars where it will never be found in the vast distances of space? That’s way to depressing. There’s no way that Kae Jin’s crew would go ahead with a mission like that, surely. It’d be better to scrub the mission and drop the colonists on Hylara and deal with the social fallout. Dandelion has to be wrong about that part.

If we do our jobs right, then we’ll never need to find out.

“With all this, it sounds like it’s not even worth launching,” I shrug. “Just fix up the ship and keep it in orbit around Hylara indefinitely. Or stay in this system, at least, harvesting local asteroids.”

“They very well might do that,” Captain Klees shrugs. “The ship might hover around this star system for decades. Or maybe the next generation will give up on their mission and turn around and come back to orbit Hylara, where they know people already live. Who knows? They’ll do whatever makes the most sense to them at the time, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Maybe I should never have suggested this plan. This conversation is making me uncomfortable, although I’m not certain why. Maybe it is my bias, as someone born on Earth, that makes all these possibilities other than successfully populating a planet sound so unsettling, especially the idea that they might launch with the expectation of simply living their lives out in space and then dying and that being it.

But there’s no way to cancel the plan now, not with everyone behind it. So if Dandelion is right, if the crew really would launch even if they can only get a century or so out of the ship, then my only choice is to solve all the problems and do the impossible and make sure the ship can survive the whole journey. So that’s what I’ll do. It’s what I was going for anyway.

It’s the least I can do for the colonists still in chronostasis, most of whom won’t get a choice. The people currently awake can choose to launch or to come down here and watch the ship launch into whatever future they want, even if it’s just a century on a dying ship, but for the people who won’t get to choose, I owe them perpetuity. If I’m taking Hylara away from them.

“Right!” I leap to my feet, rubbing my hands together. “Let’s get to work solving every single problem ever!” Everyone looks a bit startled, except for Tal, who doesn’t even disengage from the computer as ke raises a fist for a fistbump. I cross the room to provide it.

Of course, my skills aren’t all that relevant to the spaceship work. I’m much better employed working with the Hylarans to arrange things so that the introduction of the colonists they’ll need won’t result in any further miscommunication-based disasters. So I have a meeting to get to.

The Leadership I’m meeting with are a group of four – Celti, who I know, and Tana, Bentlebob, and Spruggent, who I don’t. The four wait for me in another living dome, presumably belonging to one of their sets, that everyone else has vacated for out meeting. I see signs of life everywhere; someone’s embroidery left on a chair, unpacked supply boxes against one wall, dirty dishes in a tub waiting to be washed. Bentlebob looks very old by Hylaran standards, and we might be in his home simply so he doesn’t have to move around too much. Spruggent, by contrast, couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve, and is already pacing energetically when I enter. Tana, closer to Celti’s age, sits very still, only moving her eyes to keep them on whoever’s speaking, looking very focused at all times.

“We absolutely can send people down and house them in set of eight,” I find myself explaining, “but it’s not going to stick. The colonists won’t think of a ‘set’ the same way you do. In time, they’re going to want to peel off into the sort of family structures they’re used to, which for the vast majority of them is between one and three adults raising their children, possibly with their own parents (once they’ve been here long enough for that to be a possibility) and maybe some adult friends to help out. They can be housed in groups of eight, that’s no problem. But most of them won’t want to stay that way forever, and will fall into stronger social connections with other people, in smaller groups. And most of them absolutely will want to raise their own children, or have a say in how they’re raised. They won’t leave them to Mama and the nursery. They’re from cultures with parents. Most of them won’t fall into your system.”

“They’ll want to raise children in their own homes, like in the books and movies?” Spruggent asks.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Tana asks. “I understand that that’s how things had to be done on Earth, for whatever reason, but we’re more advanced than that here. Why would they want to spend so much time and energy on something so primitive?”

“Not primitive, just different.”

“Wouldn’t the children get in the way? And how can you be sure they’re all getting looked after, and taught properly?”

“It’s messy and dangerous,” Bentlebob agrees. “I’m sure they’ll listen to reason.”

Which is probably what they thought about forcing surgery on my crewmates, too, but I don’t say anything, because I know these people still don’t understand why we’re so upset about that. Instead I say, “They’ll think the same about the way you do things. But I’m telling you right now: neither culture is going to completely sway the other, at least not quickly. In four or five generations, maybe we’ll all do things the same way, although personally I have my doubts given the reproductive and lifepsan differences between us. It’ll be an interesting sociology study for somebody either way. But I can tell you that the people who come down, and their children, and possibly their children’s children, aren’t going to merge completely into your culture, and your children aren’t going to merge completely into theirs. All we can do is make sure that there is space for both ways of doing things, and allow them to grow into each other, or not, over time. And I can tell you right now that however we house these people, most of them will fall into the family structures they’re used to over time, and want to live accordingly. Within a few years they’ll start to build their own smaller homes, or move around in the ones they have. They won’t stay in sets. Your government, specifically your setmeets and leadership structure, will need to account for that, unless you want them to form their own government, which I don’t recommend.”

“Right,” Bentlebob says, not sounding convinced but making a note. “So we can house a lot of them in our existing spare housing for now. There’s plenty of room to expand, if they want to do that later. We need to start negotiating a lit of the sorts of people coming down. Dr Kim has specifically requested colonists with the DIVR-32 geneset, which sound like a very good idea for – ”

“No,” I cut in.

The others look puzzled. “Why not? Given the better chances of waking up and the low oxygen environment, they’re perfect candidates.”

“There aren’t all that many DIVRs,” I say, “so we have to plan for non-DIVRs anyway. And you all lack the geneset, don’t you? And do just fine here. There’s no reason to prioritise DIVRs.”

“If this is an issue of unfairly prioritising people,” Celti says, “the fact of the matter is that some colonists are going to be prioritised, whether for their DNA, their health, or their expertise.”

I’m not worried about unfair priority. I’m worried about what Dr Kim, specifically, wants as many DIVRs as possible for.