152: SKY

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It’s not a nice reminder of home.

I’d seen my fair share of storms. Arboreans had all sorts of responses to all sorts of different storms. Your high velocity winds with little to no ocean movement or pressure change? Get in a building, or as close to the roots as you can; if you’re in the water, get in the diving bell. Heavy rainfall and lightning, high water movement? Get away from the water, let it drain away between the roots; if you can, get in a building. The true storms, where the waves buck the ground and pull and tear at it, trying to rip the edges of the land off? Get in a building, any building, or risk death. Don’t be on the ocean. Don’t fall into the ocean. Tie yourself to a tree if you have no other choice, but if there’s a building, go there. Nodes that are further inland don’t have to worry so much about such things, they mostly affect the edges of Arborea. But we lived near enough to the edge for me to worry about them.

Hylaran rain is not like those storms. It’s just rain. Rain I’ve seen in most places I’ve lived, not counting the moon of course. It falls regularly, rhythmically, relentlessly, thick enough to be like standing in a shower if one were reckless enough to go out into it, while lightning flicks between the clouds that have refilled the sky and lights everything with a gentle, eery glow without ever seeming to come near the ground. The ground itself accepts very little water, which runs in rivulets thickening to little streams past our dome and down the slope to the smooth-worn valley below. We ground crew watch through the door of our tent as a downpour that could be deadly in the bottom of a large crater or something is a mere inconvenience, swept away as quickly as it lands through small grooves and channels between the tents that I hadn’t really noticed until now. After a couple of minutes of watching this, I do a quick inspection of our walls and floor and find that the dome is sufficiently waterproof, repairs and all. Not a drop has come inside, and there doesn’t seem to be any sagging parts of the dome where water can gather in tiny pools on it. The town doesn’t look capable of standing up to anything that I would consider a storm, which tells me something important – they don’t have weather that severe here.

Reasonable. The atmosphere is pretty thin. I wonder what the evaporation point of water is, outside the tent. How does that affect the rain cycle? My childhood climate science education didn’t cover ‘rain patterns in a thin, primarily neon alien atmosphere where the existence of air and liquid water is still a pretty new phenomenon’. There are sandy craters, not too far away, out of sight of the camp and over the hills, that have mostly maintained their shape and filled with water, not been washes away in this kind of rain. This kind of rain is probably relatively common, given the constant cloud cover and the way the whole settlement is set up to handle it, and their dependence on rainwater, and the nonchalance of the Hylarans. The craters must be older than the rain because if such impacts were common in this area then there’s no way the Hylarans would be living aboveground in tents here. So that tells me… what?

Nothing, really. Gentle rain, dense and heavy sand. Very low wind, this close to the ground. I don’t know how dirt works. Dirt was never something I learned much about.

The rain keeps everyone indoors for most of the day, and then stops suddenly, the sky clearing very quickly. It’s strange to be under dense cloud cover for days, only to have rain immediately preceded and succeeded by clear skies.

I go to see Dr Kim. She has me look at various colours and patterns with one, the other, and both eyes, while she takes scans. Sometimes they’re moving, sometimes they’re still. It’s very boring.

“I can’t help but notice,” I say, “that nobody else here seems to have prosthetics.”

“You met Sarin. Our distributor.”

“Yeah.”

“Sad case, that. Bad fall, infection – long before my time. Has external prosthetics – you know, fake feet that can be buckled on – but just doesn’t like them.”

“You made me a robot eye but you can’t make feet like Adin’s?”

“We didn’t make that eye. We don’t have the tech or the manufacturing to make prosthetics that good. Some prosthetics came with the ship that brought us. Honestly, you’re lucky that we have the same sized eye sockets – we wouldn’t be able to replace your captain’s ankle with anything in his size. We ran out of internal foot prosthetics a couple of decades ago. The ship didn’t bring very many.”

“If I’d known supplies were so limited, I wouldn’t have accepted the eye,” I say, uncomfortably.

“Supplies aren’t limited any more. Your ship has the technology we need to make more. Look at this pattern, please.”

Dr Kim takes my blood yet again (I’m not going to have any blood left at this point) and by the time I leave the medical dome, it’s dark outside. For the first time since landing on Hylara, I look up at a sky coated in stars.

I have plenty of oxygen in my tank. I take a quick walk around the settlement under the starlight. Very few people are moving around at night; presumably, they’re in bed, asleep. There’s lights on the radio tower despite the destruction; presumably Elenna, or someone, is up there working, monitoring what weather ke can with what’s still intact, and maybe the Vault as well, I don’t know how often the Vault is in operation. I do see two people outside a living dome, watching the stars together.

One I recognise – Hive Cattail. The other is the oldest Hylaran I’ve ever seen. Her skin is thin and papery, and a lot more bald than most Hylarans; her back stooped, her eyes squinting. Hive helps support her with one arm as the pair have a soft conversation I can’t hear, then Hive starts to lead her gently inside. I try to avoid them, but Hive spots me and shoots me a tired-looking smile; they pass the old woman to someone inside the dome and jog over to me.

“Aspen! Is everything alright?”

“Oh yeah, perfectly fine. I’m just taking a walk. How are you? Really?”

“I’m fine.” They look puzzled by the question. “How are you? Your ship must be freaking out over the radio thing.”

I shrug. “They probably expect strange delays. Anyway, it’s not all that hard to build a radio. People can smash the ones we have as much as they like and you guys can just print up the parts for a new one.”

Hive looks a little wary at that. “You know how to build a radio?”

“Not in specifics, but I know it’s supposed to be a really simple machine made from pretty simple parts. Tal could make one. From the way I’ve heard Elenna talk, ke could make one. Anyone who maintains your equipment probably could. The Courageous isn’t all that far away in terms of transmission distance. Seriously though, are you okay? You were gone for awhile, and when you came back you seemed a bit… worn out.”

“Yeah, Mama was really, really mad at me.” They rub their temples. “She gets like this. She hates people breaking really big rules. Nobody, nobody, can lecture like an AI can. They don’t get bored. But that’s all fine now, and we achieved what we wanted. They’re not going to find and pull all those sprouts in time. The dandelion will survive on Hylara.”

I nod. Generally, putting plants directly into dead soils has a pretty low success rate, but terraforming plants are designed specifically to cope with adverse soil conditions like that. Besides. I have no idea what the microbial community in this sand is like. The microbes here (at least before our crew contaminated it) would all be descended from whatever cocktail was used to inoculate the Hylarans, but bacteria and protists adapt to new conditions very, very quickly. Will they be a help or a hinderance to plants? We’ll have to wait and see.

“That woman you were with,” I ask.

“Lorna.”

Their setmate. Makes sense. “Lorna. How old is she?”

“Eighty seven.” They smile fondly. “The second oldest person in the settlement.”

I don’t even bother doing the math on how old that is in Earth years. It’s somewhere just under fifty. I give Hive a subtle look-over while they look up at the stars.

The thing about genetics is that some genes have one effect and some have multiple. For some genes with one effect, other genes with other effects can enhance their one effect. The DIVR-32 geneset, developed to help us adapt better to pressure and temperature differences when diving, also makes us allergic to citrus. The gene altered to make dolphins smarter also increases the number of capillaries in their skin and makes them pinker in colour. And this person, with their short body and solid frame and fuzzy skin…

“Hive. I have what’s maybe a rude and intrusive question.”

“Good thing there’s no one else around to see you be rude and intrusive, then.”

“Why are you guys so heavily engineered? What was the point?”

They shrug. “There’s a few different benefits, but mostly, I think it’s development time. I’ve seen video of Earth babies. You guys are utterly helpless. Can’t walk, can’t even move around, for ages! Born unable to lift your own heads! The first colonists were raised entirely by AI; can you imagine putting babies in the care of Mama and Mama alone for that long? Some kind of mistake would be made on a timeframe like that. They’d all die. The sheer number of years before they’d be capable of setting the Vault up and making contact with Earth… no. Hylara needed colonists who could look after themselves and get work done.”

“And your natural lifespan. Short?”

They shrug again. “Eighty to ninety years is pretty good.”

“We live twice that.”

“I know.” No resentment in the reply. Makes sense; people get used to their natural lifespan. If I met some alien that could live two hundred Earth years, I wouldn’t get all upset that the human lifespan (well, Earth system born human lifespan; I guess the Hylarans make the concept of a ‘human lifespan’ somewhat more vague) isn’t that long. From Hive’s perspective, we’re the anomaly.

“Look.” Hive points up in the sky. “Storgalthan and Zamanna. It’s not often that the sky’s clear enough to see them, these days.”

I look up. There’s just stars. “Huh?”

“From the star game. You make shapes in the stars. The first Hylarans made Storgalthan and Zamanna, who they decided were setmates looking for the rest of their set lost in the stars. The game is finding other shapes in the stars of the amazing things they see in their search. But not other people, because if they find their setmates then they’ll stop looking. Zamanna’s the shorter one out front – see her arms and legs, there? And she’s carrying a long stick to help her move through the sand. Storgalthan’s there behind her. And if you look between his legs…” Hive grins. “He’s got testicles, see, and one star is way brighter than the other. I hope one of his setmates is a doctor.”

Huh. Hylara does have constellations. It’s a pity we hadn’t brought Sam down; they’d love this.

“When Lorna was a kid, the sky was clear all the time,” Hive says. “Of course, you couldn’t breathe outside back then.”

“You guys built an atmosphere in one lifetime,” I say. “It’s not complete yet, but still. An atmosphere in one lifetime. Do you have any idea how big an accomplishment that is? I still don’t see how it’s possible. The rate of oxygen conversion, the sheer volume of neon… amazing.”

Hive shrugs. It’s normal to them, I suppose.

My neck and head are hurting. I’ve been looking up at the stars too long. I drop my head and rub the back of my skull, careful of the port, but it just hurts more. My back hurts, too; I must have pulled something.

“I need to – ” I manage to say, before dropping to the ground.

“Aspen? Aspen!” Somebody’s hands are on me. The sand below me is wet. The air is hot.

And then everything goes dark.

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