110: GRAVES

“So how’s our new home planet?” I ask Sam as we check the atmosphere in the Habitation Ring.

They shrug. “Still orbiting. Presumably still mysteriously oxygenated. It’s passing in front of the sun right now so we won’t get much in the way of reliable readings for months yet.”

“When it is on the other side of the sun, how well will we be able to see it with the light telescope?”

They look at me out of the corner of their eye and grin. “You want to see if it’s green, don’t you?”

“Of course I want to see if it’s green! There’s oxygen down there, that’s like the first question! Well, second question. First question is liquid water. Do they have oceans. Because that’s going to affect our colony development a lot.”

“I can get a water answer for you from the Kleiner array, when we’re close enough for me to get a clear reading despite the ozone and magnetic field. But we won’t be close enough to see it clearly, no. The problem there isn’t the capability of our telescopes, it’s the faintness of the light over such distance and, more importantly, the movement of the ship. We’ll be spinning; that puts a limit on the kind of image resolution we can get no matter how good the telescope aiming software is.”

“Fair enough,” I say, trying not to sound disappointed. But we’ll be close enough for a good visual image eventually. I just need to be patient. Our approach feels somehow too slow and far, far too fast at the same time.

“We should radio the planet?” Sam says.

I stare. “What? Like, send it a hello message?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been monitoring for radio, right? We’re dead certain that there’s no radio signals coming from the planet, right? Even on the absolutely miniscule off-change that there’s something we’d consider intelligent down there, we know they don’t use radio. And even if they did, they sure as rootrot wouldn’t know any of our languages, or even how we encode our radio signals. So we wouldn’t be able to talk to them anyway.”

“We’re not receiving any radio signals, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use radio. Weak enough signals could be contained by the magnetic field. Or maybe there’s a subterranean civilisation radioing each other beneath the stone.”

“Both cases where they wouldn’t have the equipment set up and aimed to pick up space transmissions anyway, right? Beside the whole understanding thing.”

“it’s not for them. It’s for us. It doesn’t matter if what’s down there can’t understand us, or is just algae, or if the ozone reading is wrong and there’s no life at all. We are the creation myth for a new humanity that will very likely have no communication with Earth for generations, possibly ever, and if they do communicate it’ll be a 120-year round journey for the messages. We are the beginning, the root, the cause. We are the story that will be told for as long as humanity survives out here. If there’s any chance, any chance at all that there’s someone down there, we should approach Hylara with a message of peace and hope; not because we expect it to be received by the planet, but because we expect it to be received by our descendants. We need to behave like the sort of people they can be proud of; we need to start a culture that they can develop into a good one. And it’s not like a little speech costs us anything.”

Now that, my sociologist brain understands. I’m kind of mad that I didn’t think of it. I’ve been too busy being distracted by everyone’s mental health and by the future task of terraforming the planet to even remember my own actual profession.

I’m going to get to watch a society develop right from the start. Assuming we don’t all die first. How exciting.

“We should propose this to Captain Klees,” I say. “Give him plenty of time to write his ‘we come in peace, Hylara’ speech.”

“He’s going to hate it.”

“Too bad. He owes it to the future of our colony.”

The atmospheric readings are all within acceptable ranges, of course. I’m heading to the Greenhouse Ring when I run into Captain Klees.

“Aspen! Just who I wanted to see.” He glances about, as if to make sure we’re alone. “Do we have anything in the greenhouse that’s good on cakes that’ll be ripe in about two weeks?”

“Um. We have passionfruit ripening right now. Also jellyblooms, which come up sweet if you steam them.”

“Yes! Perfect.” He lays a finger across my lips, eyes sparkling. “Tell nobody that I asked.”

“Um. Yes, captain.” Is something happening in two weeks? “Why do you need to – ?”

“Don’t worry about it.” He rushes off.

Right. Well. I’ll learn what that’s about in two weeks, I guess.

I make it to the Greenhouse Ring. Meringue, who suffers from a pathological inability to tell tasty bugs apart from human toes, pecks at my feet while her more sensible sisters scratch among the weeds. I pull up another of those rottingly persistent dandelions, look up, and freeze.

Somebody’s visiting the graves. That’s not particularly surprising.

What’s surprising is that it’s the Public Universal Friend.

I toss the weed aside (the chickens go for it immediately, dandelions are their favourite) and head over. The Friend doesn’t look up as I approach, just keeps gazing at the plant-covered lumps in the ground that were once our crewmates.

“Hi,” I say.

It nods, but doesn’t look away.

“How are you, um. Feeling?”

“You can ask the question, Aspen.”

I feel my face warm. “Can you even… you know…?”

“Feel grief?”

“Yeah.”

It cocks its head, like it’s considering the question, even though it must have an answer if it knew what I was going to ask. “Friends are very capable of feeling regret,” it says. “These are crewmates who are dead as a result of multiple bad decisions, made by the living and the dead. They did not have to die. Contemplation of such things is important, to make better decisions in the future.”

“You didn’t make the bad decisions. You were unconscious for most of it.”

“This friend was unconscious for most of the fallout. Not for most of the time when decisions were made. Problems in the leaf – ”

“ – are problems in the root,” I finish.

“The origin of the bad decisions is irrelevant, anyway,” the Friend continues. “This Friend will presumably be conscious from now on, and may be involved in causing or preventing further disasters.”

“Now that you know about your immune thing and can take Fancy Neurostims if there’s another problem?”

The Friend smiles. “Calling such drugs ‘fancy neurostims’ is a bit of a misnomer, but yes. We don’t know exactly what triggered the problem, but if there are further flare-ups, this Friend can medicate before they become potentially fatal.”

“I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“This Friend is also glad to keep serving this crew. It suspects that its assistance will be very valuable when we reach Hylara.”

“You and Lina are almost definitely the most experienced chronostasis recovery doctors on this ship at this point. And there’ll be a lot of people recovering from chronostasis.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you miss Earth?” I find myself asking.

It shrugs. “This Friend would not have seen much more of it in any case.”

Right. Because of the whole jail thing.

“This Friend can do far more good out here. Do not worry for it, Aspen.”

“Did you have a life sentence or something?”

It looks at me sidelong. “It was convicted of thirty seven murders.”

“Did you do them?”

“Yes.”

It had implied killing more, I remember, when Captain Sands had confronted it. “They call you an Angel of Death. Is that, like, a euthanasia thing, or…?”

“You would regret knowing.”

“Not necessarily. I mean, plenty of people get convicted for – ”

“You would regret knowing,” it says firmly.

“Okay. Fair enough.” I’m not exactly being open about my past either, so it’s hard to blame it. Besides, we’d agreed that our lives before the Courageous don’t matter.

Also, it might be right. And I want to keep being able to trust at least one of my doctors.

Meringue picks that precise moment to try to eat my little toe. I yelp and leap back, then nudge her gently aside with my foot, only to hear Tinera gasp behind me.

“Violence! Violence and cruelty!”

“She’s fine.”

Tinera sweeps the chicken up into her arms. “Did the meanie gardener kick you, sweetheart? Did theykick you like the football?” Meringue squawks indignantly, but with her wings pinned, there’s not much she can do but endure the affection.

“Why did we vote to let you have those, again?” I sigh, as Omelette starts to inspect my foot instead.

“Because they’re precious and useful and make tasty eggs? Meringue, tell the meanie gardener how good you are for the soil.”

Meringue does not tell me how good she is for the soil. Instead, she bites Tinera’s ear. Tinera swears and drops her.

“Anyway,” Tinera says like nothing happened, “the reason I’m here is because Lina needs your help with some medical thing, Friend.”

The Friend nods and heads for the airlock. Tinera comes to stand next to me by the graves.

“This is strange,” she says, gesturing at them.

I nod. The Lunari don’t bury their dead. They don’t have the advantage of an open atmosphere and biosphere encompassing the whole planet (or moon, in their case); the natural terrain of the moon is hard as concrete and contains structures that nobody wants in the food chain. They decompose their dead in biovats to recycle their nutrients directly for farming.

“Arboreans do it sort of like this,” I say. “But we don’t mark the specific burial sites. The divers tie them into the roots wherever the structures are needed and we memorialise them at the node tree. This is the dominant method across most of human cultures, though, historically. Graves and burial cairns and suchlike.”

“Wasteful,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “And depressing. They’re not even going to be decomposed by the time we reach Hylara, are we?”

“I don’t think so, no.” I’m not an expert on human decomposition, especially in soil. In Arborea, anything edible would go to the fish, either directly put in their ponds after butchering or picked off the bones among the roots. But there are no decently sized scavengers in the greenhouse ring. I don’t know how long the worms and slaters and soforth will take.

I suppose that there probably won’t be graves on Hylara for a while. Memorials, perhaps. But we’ll want to get the photosynthetic biomass up as quickly as possible, and probably won’t have the space. The rest of us will probably go into a Lunari-style biotank.

I point at Sunset’s grave. “I want to propogate the ferns in the Habitation Ring pots there.”

“The ferns she liked?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“I think so. It seems like the kind of thing that the Texans would like. Do you think they’d like it?”

“Have you asked them?”

“I’m worried it might offend them somehow? In most such cultures, it’d be a good move, but cultures can be strange, and I don’t know all that much about Texas specifically. I haven’t found much in the computer files.”

“You should ask Tal. I think ke would like to do it kemself.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.” I glance at a stray paper flower. Crafted offerings for the dead. Transplanting ferns might count.

I need to start focusing specifically on Texan culture. Most of the Hylarans will be from Texas. Their roots are going to be my leaves. I need to learn Texan, that’s what I need to do. I can’t just assume that the Interlingua will be the main language when we’ve woken everyone else up. Frankly I’m lucky that almost all Texans are bilingual and I’ve been able to get by with it this far.

This is serious business, I think, as a chicken tries to eat my foot again.