150: VALLEY

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Captain Klees goes in to consult more about his foot replacement the next day and reports that the replacement is growing well. I go in to talk to Dr Kim about my eye. She’s very excited about me getting feedback from the eye, and gives me a set of visual exercises to ‘train’ it. “You should practice navigating and doing simple tasks for half an hour or so each day with your real eye closed,” she says, “to teach your brain how to use the information it’s getting. Nothing dangerous, obviously; you’ll be starting out doing them basically blind, after all.”

“Will it feel like normal sight when it’s finished,” I ask, “or like a new sense?”

“It’s hard to be certain, as I’ve never done this before, but I think you’ll interpret it as normal sight once you’re used to it. Your visual abilities might increase, as that eye interprets light slightly differently to a real eye, but that’ll just seem like expanding the sense you already have. The brain is very good at taking in all kinds of information from different senses and incorporating it into a single experience; two eyes taking in light from the same scene will almost certainly be interpreted as using the same sense. But then, a lot of the brain is still a mystery. I suppose we’ll have to wait and find out.”

I consider, not for the first time, abandoning this ridiculous venture and just waiting for a surgeon for the real eye. But the eye is already installed; I might as well use it. We can kill off the synnerves and take it out if there are any problems.

“What do you think about the radio tower?” I ask Dr Kim as I’m leaving.

“Hmm? Oh, that. I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.”

Total disinterest. That’s a new one. Even Hylarans who aren’t worried about the attack on the tower are usually pretty alarmed that members of their community would do such a thing. I’ve even caught a couple of stray remarks that us ground crew, being sneaky Earth system people (which is essentially just being Antarctican), did it ourselves to sow panic and dissent. Dr Kim doesn’t care. Possible guilt? Judging by the questions she asked when we’d met, I’m pretty sure that Dr Kim is on Celti’s side of the issue of ship contact.

No. Dr Kim was busy preparing for Captain Klees’ surgery at that time. It’s not impossible that she could’ve ducked out for a quick spot of public systems sabotage, but there’s no reason to think that she did. Some people just don’t care very much about current events. Besides, my eye is probably a revolution in medical science, using a new type of synnerve that’s unusually safe for DIVRs to interface with bionic implants. That probably has lots of cool medical applications. I don’t know what they are, but I can see why Dr Kim wouldn’t have much excitement for anything else while this is going well.

She insists on another blood test, even though she did my blood a week ago, and lets me go.

With the distraction of the radio tower and us out of quarantine and knowing about the Vault, nobody’s hovering over us and trying to control our movements any more, so I take a little walk. Not up the hill to the radio tower, but downward, into the valley. I keep an eye to the sky, still somewhat clear, as I travel – with the lay of this land, a fairly light rainstorm could turn that smooth dry flat into an unstoppable river in minutes, and ‘drowned in a flash flood because you’re too stupid to know how valleys work’ would be the stupidest possible way to die on an alien planet.

I wouldn’t even need to drown. The oxygen tank I’m carrying keeps me conscious in this thin atmosphere. I’m much better with low oxygen than most people, but everything has its limits. If I damage that tank getting out of the water, I might not make it back up to the camp without passing out.

Hmm. Maybe I shouldn’t be walking so far from the domes.

But I spot a familiar, pale figure down in the valley – the Public Universal Friend. I rush down to join it.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

It glances at me and shrugs. “No idea. This Friend has very little scope for making such judgements. It’s a doctor, not…” it shakes its head. “This Friend spent a lot of time working in war-torn areas and smuggling refugees across borders. But these are not the sort of politics it has any experience with.”

“Well, all my ‘experience’ with this kind of thing is academic, so I’m about as lost as you are,” I point out. “I’m just playing the part of a living textbook.”

“How’s the eye?”

“I can feel bright light more than weak light. I guess that’s expected. That’s about all I’m getting. Dr Kim gave me some exercises, and, y’know. It’ll either work out amazingly or terribly or somewhere in between.”

“That just about describes everything going on here.” It looks up the valley. “The pod they scattered the seeds from isn’t within easy walking distance, not for us. We’d wear ourselves out and run out of air trying to get there and back.”

“You wanted to go there?”

The Friend shrugs. “The shoots will be popping up soon. The Hylarans will probably send out squads to uproot them, to try to hide our presence from Antarctica for as long as possible. It would have been nice to see the first ever plants to grow on the planet.”

I shrug. “Maybe they’ll come to their senses before then, about the inevitability of us. Today’s drop has seeds and algae in it, by request. Maybe they’ll decide to let the seeds grow.” I think about that a moment. “Now that’s an interesting sociological puzzle.”

“What is?”

“This is the first ever human society, that we know of, completely divorced from any nonhuman biological cycle. Even places like Luna have gardens; spaceships cultivate houseplants. Societies living on ice sheets or boats wait on the life cycles of seals and fish. These people’s interactions with the world around them, inside and outside their homes, have been entirely human-directed, from building their water tanks to altering the climate itself. Presumably there’s microbial contamination in the water, but we’ve already been told that it does nothing useful to them; it’s probably more a hazard than anything. They don’t even raise their own children. I haven’t seen a pregnant Hylaran, and we know they raise them in sets of eight – they very likely artificially incubate new Hylarans, just putting a new set into production when there’s a predicted need. This might be the first society in all of history where the concept of just letting something grow is something they’ve never dealt with. I wonder if that has any effect on their decision-making.”

“You can write a new book about it,” the Friend says drily. “We’ll send it to Earth in the Vault. Get your career kickstarted again.”

“I can see the headline now. ‘Presumed dead sociologist comes out of one hundred and fifty years of retirement, still available to do stupid talk shows about space colonisation.’”

“Do you think the Hylarans told Antarctica that you were alive on the ship?”

“They probably sent them a copy of my approaching speech. That’s what I would have done.”

“Some kid on Earth who’s a fan of ancient sociological theories watched the news and had the weirdest day ever.”

“Taproot and stars. My work must be so outdated by now. I bet there’s entire books out there devoted solely to explaining to young sociologists how wrong I am about everything. What an embarrassing time to still be alive.”

“The Hylarans seem to like your work.”

“My work was used as PR for the program that put us all out here, so that’s not surprising. I have to wonder how good the education is out here. They’re trained to run the Vault and do jobs that support running the Vault. Max made it sound like they’d never heard of a strike before they decided to have one, triggering that famine. Somehow I don’t think they’ve been provided with the most thorough or nuanced training in the social sciences, especially since they hit adulthood before some Earth kids even learn to write.” Then I think about that for a moment. “Actually, I wonder what the literacy rate is here. At least some of them have to be literate, because the computer they gave us uses written language. Dr Kim must be able to read and write or her job would become a lot harder. But I haven’t seen anybody reading r writing; it’s entirely possible that the literacy rate could be really low. They have voice recorders and they don’t need signage in a community like this. Most people probably wouldn’t need to read.”

“We know at least some of them have read your books.”

“Could be written versions. Could be audio versions. Something to look into. Writing might be a really archaic skill in a society like this. Their technology is all over the place here – might be just what Antarctica thinks they need, or it might be because of limitations on what can go through the Vault – but at least some of what they have is far more advanced than anything we’ve ever seen. Have you seen their material printers? And I can’t imagine what they could be using to melt the polar ice and liberate oxygen from the water on this massive a scale in such short a time; I would’ve called that physically impossible based on the technology from our time. They were raised by AI and have microphones and radio transmitters that can fit in rings; for all we know, they might view reading in the same way that we’d view being able to use a drop spindle. A niche hobby that’s been overtaken by other, more efficient technology.”

“You could ask them about the literacy rate.”

“Yeah, I will,” I sigh. Being able to ask for the right answer takes the fun out of it.

Somebody’s coming down the other side of the valley in a little vehicle. Four people, hemmed in by packages. They have a trailer, also chock full of packages. A retrieval, probably from today’s resource drop. As we watch, one of the riders shoves another off the moving vehicle. The victim rolls down the hill and the attacker leaps off after them; the victim struggles to their feet and the two begin grabbing and kicking at each other. The driver hurriedly stops the vehicle; the other two riders leap off to try to physically separate their companions.

“Would we make things better or worse by interfering?” I ask the Friend.

“More bodies to stop the violence is more bodies,” it points out, running out over the sand. I follow.

By the time we get there, the fight has broken up. Both fighters bleed from the face and arms, mostly cut lips and bruises on the face and actual bite wounds on the arms, where they apparently just sank their teeth into each other. An oxygen tank lies in the dust; one of the fighters is shouldering a spare one, not even pausing in their yelling.

“Storgalthan shit on you, you piece of shit! I knew we couldn’t trust you!”

“I didn’t break it! You must have broken it! You’re going to get us all killed! Zamanna crush you!”

“Eat shit!”

“You eat shit!”

“Both of you calm the Vault down unless you want to have a serious talk with Mama!” the driver says sternly. She looks to be older than the other three, so far as I can make out Hylaran ages. The fighters calm down and glare at each other. “Let’s get both of you to medical. Come on.”

“What happened?” I ask.

The Hylarans, who must have seen us coming up the hill for several minutes, regard us without surprise. The one who hasn’t spoken points to some kind of machine among their luggage. I recognise it immediately. It’s a long-range stationary radio kit. Presumably powerful enough to reach the Courageous, which is, in terms of direct distance, not really all that far away.

It’s also very clearly broken.

“They must have seen that ours was down and sent us a replacement,” the driver says wearily.

“And one of them broke it?” I ask, glancing at the fighters.

“Maybe. Or maybe it just broke in the drop. The Leadership can sort it out. Do you two want a ride back?”

The Friend and I climb onto the vehicle without comment. Both of the fighters glare at us resentfully, which is a little confusing, since the fight suggests that only one of them would be opposed to ship contact. But I still don’t understand the details of what’s going on here. At least fixing a smaller unit like this should be faster than forging a new dish for the tower. I think. I don’t know much about electronics. Tal will know.

And we speed off across the sand, back towards the settlement, in silence.

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