113: SENTENCE

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By popular agreement and lighting coordination, the whole crew is on the same basic 24 hour schedule, so we tend to have breakfast together unless somebody’s busy or feels like sleeping in. We also tend to have our crew meetings over breakfast, so nobody’s particularly surprised when Captain Klees tells us that we have business to discuss and to all make sure we get to breakfast on time.

What is a little surprising is the platter of tiny cakes on the table, decorated with steamed crimson jellyblooms. There’s a larger one in the centre, more elaborately decorated than the rest; I recognise this ritual. Texans do this to celebrate personal milestones, and the fancy central cake is for the guest of honour. I scour my memory for any milestones I might have forgotten. Someone’s birthday? But we’ve never celebrated birthdays on the ship before. (How would we even calculate them?)

Oh, taproot and stars, someone isn’t pregnant, are they? That would be truly horrible timing. We can’t drop an infant onto an alien planet!

Whatever’s going on, the target becomes clear pretty quickly. As soon as Denish sees the spread, the blood rushes to his face. He sits on the very edge of the picnic bench and mumbles something under his breath while Captain Klees waits for everyone to gather.

“Everyone!” he announces as we all take our seats. “It’s a very special day. Denish, congratulations! Do you have anything to say?”

“It is not a big deal,” Denish mumbles, somehow blushing harder.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” Tal says. So that’s three people who know what’s going on; am I the only clueless one? No. Pretty much everyone else looks confused. “Why are you surprised? It’s your day!”

“I did not think anyone would notice,” Denish mumbles.

“You didn’t think I would do the math? Me? C’mon, man. I know what day you were revived; it’s a simple count.”

“What day…” Tinera’s experession brightens. “Oh, ‘Nish! You don’t mean…?”

“It is not a big deal,” he mumbles again, but he’s trying not to smile.

“I would argue that, given the circumstances, it’s pretty significant,” Captain Klees says. He clasps his hands. “Everyone, I’m pleased to announce that today is Denish Calhurn’s Freedom Day. As per our contracts, our sentences resume upon revival, meaning that our dear crewmate here has managed to complete his on the ship itself and will reach Hylara a free man in the eyes of Texan and international human law.”

“It will not matter,” Denish says, his grin contradicting his denial, “because we will build a free society on Hylara and begin with an amnesty for everyone.”

“I hope you’re right in that, my friend,” Captain Klees says, “and we’ll certainly try. But succeed or fail, you will reach the planet with no criminal debts and no hold over you. I know that this whole journey has been a shitshow from launch, I know that none of us expected to wake up early, on this ship, and go through all the things we’ve been through, but this, at least, is something good that’s come of it.” He plates the fanciest little cake and hands it to Denish. “Congratulations.”

Not even trying to hide his grin any more, Denish takes the first bite, as per tradition, before Captain Klees starts plating cakes for everyone else. They’re quite tasty. The captain can steam a good jellybloom.

“Will anyone else finish their sentences aboard?” Tinera asks as she picks her cake apart.

Tal shrugs. “Depends on if we take a really, really long time to get down to the planet. The cap and Lina both have a bit more than two years to go, so if we hit orbit on schedule it depends on how long it takes us to get down. And that’s probably gonna depend on Kae Jin’s crew, unless we intend to just orbit and run out the clock. I assume when we wake them, they’ll probably want to take charge.”

Makes sense. The original plan called for joint leadership between Reimann and Kae Jin, with one probably taking control of ship operation and the other of ground operation, depending on the conditions on Hylara. But none of us are trained for this. I expect that when we start waking actual astronauts, they’ll take charge, and so long as they don’t plan on endangering my friends I, for one, intend to let them.

“I think we probably should run down the clock in orbit,” Lina says. “For the captain, at least. We don’t know what Captain Kae Jin’s like. She might be like Captain Sands. I’d feel a lot better if Captain Klees was in a stronger legal position, so far as the contracts we signed go.”

“That’s a point,” Captain Klees says, “but also, this spaceship is hardly a safe place to be. The sooner we get facilities running on the planet, the safer we’ll all be, physically. And I’d rather have trained eyes on that.”

After the party, the captain puts Tinera in charge for the day and goes to take his neurostim dose (“You can’t trust my decisions for a day or so after,” he explained to us the first time, “I’m too impulsive,” which prompted the usual barrage of jokes about Tinera’s impulsivity), and a small group of us gather to write a speech for him to broadcast to the planet when we get closer. I’m automatically drafted because apparently ‘sociology book writer’ and ‘writer of grand historical speeches to be studied by future generations and also possibly radio-bearing aliens’ are similar professions.

“I still think we should go with ‘we come in peace’,” Tinera says. “Classic.”

“Do we, though?” Denish asks. “If anyone is there to listen, we cannot promise that. We do not know what colony will do.”

“It’s a good aspiration for our descendants,” Sam says. “They’re going to grow up on a living alien planet. Starting with something promoting harmony with the planet is sensible. ‘People of Hylara, we bring greetings from Earth, et cetera, we come in peace.’”

“’We look forward to a peaceful coexistence’,” I mumble, writing. “No, too pretentious to go straight too coexistence. To just assume we can move in.”

“We are just moving in, though,” Denish says.

“If we actually find anything intelligent down there, you can bet I’ll be fighting tooth and nail against that plan,” I say. “‘We look forward to cooperating with you and learning from each other.’ Something like that. Too clumsy?”

“It’s very corp-speak,” Tinera says, “but aliens probably wouldn’t know that. Anyway, we have months to refine the tone.”

“Would aliens even know what to do with ‘we bring you greetings from Earth’? Maybe they do not know other planets.”

“If they have equipment set up to receive a radio signal from space, they know about other planets. Besides, you don’t need to know about other planets to comprehend people coming from them. Humans had stories about other beings that lived in the sky long before we knew anything about the weird rocks we saw up there – if anything, learning about planets reduces the expectation of life up there, once you see how hostile to life their conditions are.”

“I don’t think we can base how hypothetical radio aliens think on how humans think,” Sam points out.

“We kind of have to, though? To write this speech at all?”

I stare at our work so far and try to imagine what it would sound like to a hypothetical radio alien. Like nothing, I suppose, until a common language is established. The Big Monumental First Message would have to be followed by an extremely monotonous period of trying to establish basic communication protocols with a new species through nothing but radio waves, knowing nothing about the equipment they might use to interpret those waves. It’s not like we could just send them images of us and expect them to get a clear picture on Alien Holovision.

I mean, obviously it won’t matter. We’ve been listening for any radio activity on the planet and have gotten nothing. Zilch. Dead air. The only evidence we have that there’s any life at all down there is the existence of an ozone layer, and boy, are we all going to feel silly if we take a closer reading when the planet’s past the sun and it turns out that ozone reading was a mistake. Even if the ozone is real and photosynthesis is happening down there, there’s absolutely no reason to think that anything with radio, anything intelligent, even anything multicellular, is down there. No reason to jump to such conclusions based on so little evidence. We all know that.

But what if there is, though?

What if we do go down there and find that, after an eternity of being alone in the void, there is other life down there, something new and wholly separate from us and probably biologically set up in ways we’ve never though of, and what if it’s smart, and what if it can talk to us? What if?

It would be ridiculous to expect something like that. But it’s not, like. Impossible. It’s not impossible that there might be someone down there who could hear us and learn alongside us that hey, aliens exist.

So we should probably make this speech as good as possible. That’s just, you know. Being prepared.

When we’re done nitpicking word choices for the moment, I do a quick round of our inhabited rings to check the atmosphere in each (it’s not time to do so yet, I just like to be sure), and run into Captain Klees in Storage Ring 2, sitting on a random crate and wiggling his ankle back and forth.

“Everything alright?” I ask him.

“Yeah.” He scowls at his own foot. “The regrown nerves play up a bit right after my dose.”

Ah, that’s right. He has an artificial foot. One of those low-market internals. “The doctors can’t help?”

He shrugs. “They could cut and reimplant the nerves, it’s not hard. But they grew like this because I was on neurostims when we regrew them the first time. The neurostims mess with nerve biofeedback and can create problems like this; regrowing them while on the drugs is just rolling the dice again. I’d rather go cold for a couple of weeks and regrow it properly, but I just know that if I do that now we’ll hit a crisis immediately and nobody wants their captain handling a crisis while in withdrawal. Current plan is to live with it until it’s time to rouse Captain Kae Jin.”

‘When we regrew them the first time?’ On Earth, when he lost the foot? My eyes drift to the tattoo around his ankle, the one written in a dead language in an ancient alphabet that I can’t read. I’ve never gotten round to asking him what it actually says; I could, but I’m worried that it might be something sad. Plenty of people get tattoos to memorialise dead loved ones.

“When we regrew them the first time?” I ask.

“You know. After…” he taps his chest, over his heart, and grimaces.

Ah, right. After his little dip through the ship’s shielding. That terrifying moment that had nearly killed him, and to save him I’d cut holes in his space suit and pumped nitrogen in until he passed out. Horrible moment for everyone involved, but the most horrible for him. At least it had successfully knocked out his heart implant, along with his artificial foot nerves. If that hadn’t worked then the Friend would be dead, so, ‘yknow.

Terrible experience, though. I remember clinging to the frame of the electrostatic shield, feeling the field severely cramp my arm and leg muscles as I crawl towards the front of the ship. I can’t imagine clinging to the underside of it after my entire body –

Hmm.

I frown. I rub at my right hand.

“Aspen? You alright?”

“You and the Public Universal Friend have both been through the ship’s electrostatic shield.”

“Um, yeah. We all have, except you and Sam. It was terrifying. I’m never doing it again.”

“I need to go to the medbay,” I say, spinning on my heel and striding toward the airlock.

“Aspen?!”

“Not a new problem!” I assure him without turning around. “Nothing’s wrong! It’s all fine!”

I find myself jogging to the medbay which is, upon reflection, probably slightly alarming to Lina and the Friend, who are running some kind of bloodwork on some machine I know little about as I charge inside, flushed and gasping.

“Is everything okay?” The Friend asks, striding forward and automatically reaching to take my pulse. I ignore this and point at it instead.

“I know why your synnerves are different,” I say.

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