177: DESTINATION

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. Next> ………. Last>>

The letters are written, read and discussed by the crew, read and discussed by the Leadership, rewritten, checked carefully for inconsistencies, rewritten again, and eventually sent. Captain Klees receives a stern letter back informing him that all orders related to major colony decisions should be confirmed by Antarctica before implementation, and an emphatic and several-times-repeated command that ALL resource drops from the Courageous are to cease IMMEDIATELY. The Leadership receive a much thicker letter full of extremely angry admonishments, threats and accusations, a demand that Tana (who decides to take the fall on the matter) be removed from any and all leadership positions immediately, that a full accounting of all facilities supplied by the ship be provided to Antarctica, and a much-emphasised reminder that ALL resource drops are to CEASE IMMEDIATELY.

So the next day, Tinera and Dandelion sit down with the Leadership, including Tana, to figure out exactly what to tell Antarctica we do and don’t have on the ground, while the rest of us ground crew head out with Max and Hive to pick up a particularly important resource drop from the Courageous.

Hive drives the little truck, eyes fixed on the sand ahead, an expression of intense concentration on their face. The concentration isn’t all that necessary; we’ve all had a lot of experience driving various Hylaran vehicles by now, and while I’d certainly have more difficulty on the treacherous dunes and craters than on the ‘road’ to the Hypati launcher, compacted as it is by hundreds and hundreds of wheels, Hive’s quite used to venturing out among the dunes to pick up these drops. They don’t use any kind of navigation aid; the ship told us the package’s exact coordinates when it landed, and while we are well outside the day-to-day travel range of the colony, Hive knows these hills well by now. Nevertheless, their eyes stare holes into the sand as their hands grip the controls hard enough to tremble.

I decide to leave them alone.

In the back, Max asks us, “Why not just go back to Earth?”

“What?” Captain Klees asks.

“On the ship. The plan is to take it to another uninhabited planet and settle it, right? But you know how hard that is. We wouldn’t be able to live here without the Vault, and you can’t take a Vault with you because we can’t build them. Everything you need, you’re going to have to get from space, and if something goes wrong with the ship, there’s nowhere to run to. If you’re going on a long journey anyway, wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to Earth?”

“Too many people died to bring us out this far,” Captain Klees says with a sudden venom that I haven’t heard in his voice since he was under suspicion for murder. “We’re not going to just give up and go home to a planet that didn’t want us.”

Max hesitates before saying, “You left the planet more than a century ago. And it’ll take even longer, a lot longer, to go back, if you’re harvesting resources on the way. Nobody who leaves on that ship is going to actually see Earth or any other planet.”

“And if our children want to pint the ship at Earth after we’re dead, we can’t stop them,” Captain Klees says. “Their futures are their own to decide, and we have options for target planets that don’t involve us going any further away from Earth than we already are.”

“Going back to Earth,” I explain to Max, “isn’t really all that much safer than going somewhere else, because the Courageous has to be capable of surviving indefinitely in space anyway. For the whole journey, there’ll be nowhere to go if something goes wrong. The new colony might be spaceship-dependent for centuries, but the spaceship needs to be able to survive that long anyway. Why waste an opportunity like this to go back to the one place in the universe that we know is stably populated? I don’t care what the Antarcticans had planned with their Vaults, the Courageous’ mission was to populate a new world, and if it goes out there again, that’s what it’ll be aiming to do. If we only care about safety, the best option is to just keep it in orbit around Hylara for as long as it can stay together.”

That is, of course, the failure option for the mission – if we can’t turn the Courageous into something that we can trust the future to, it’ll stay where it is now. A permanent space station for colonists to live out their lives on to avoid overwhelming Hylara. A solution to our immediate problems, sure, but a waste of a spaceship. A place for people to live out their lives with the main goal of staying out of the way.

I try not to think too hard about what Dandelion had suggested about the whole mission being a lie, about the ship only needing to stay together long enough for the natural lifespans of the people aboard, headed for a planet that it’ll never reach. Same thing, but comfortably out of sight.

I reach into my belt, where I’ve tucked Note’s gather-ring, and clutch it. I’m going to get that ship permanently spaceworthy if it’s the last thing I do.

The package comes into view. It is, like everything dropped by the spaceship, far too large to be hauled back to the camp in one piece, although the heavy duty vehicles used for extending the Hypati launcher can carry a lot more of the payload than Hylara’s older vehicles. Others will be out to collect some of the bulkier stuff later; we’re only here for some more delicate and time-sensitive resources.

Hive brakes the truck without taking any particular care about it, sliding through loose sand and pressing us all momentarily forward in our seats, and jumps straight out. We rush to help.

Hive pulls the door open, and we dig through bags and boxes until we find a pale orange crate, carefully secured in the middle of the pod and surprisingly small. The payload, I know, is even smaller; most of its bulk is insulation, to keep the cryogenic contents within safely frozen. In black, somebody has stencilled a cute cartoon bee on the side.

Hive and Max lift the crate very carefully, although it’s solid enough to survive the drop. “Can we open it?” Hive asks.

“Best wait,” Captain Klees advises. “You don’t want them to wake up until they’re safely inside the greenhouse atmosphere. Best not to disturb the insulation or let the atmosphere in.”

Hive nods, and the two carry the crate of frozen honeybees to the truck. The rest of us start hauling more goods, because coming all the way out of here just for one tiny crate would be ridiculous. Once the truck starts nearing its recommended capacity, we jump back in, and Hive suddenly becomes the most careful driver int eh universe.

Honeybees aren’t as diverse as pollinators at people give them credit for, and can’t carry the weight of a planet alone. They do, however, make excellent trial cases in the closed environment of an agricultural greenhouse. They’re domesticated, they pollinate all the insect-pollinated crops that they Hylarans are growing without any trouble, and they produce valuable honey and even more valuable wax. So they’re Hylara’s first insect pollinators – three hives of honeybees, with enough supplemental sugars to get them set up while we grow enough plants for them.

Once in the underground tunnels that we’ve converted to agriculure, it’s with trembling, almost reverent hands that Hylarans carefully take the frozen bees out of the crate and place them in the boxes that will become their hives. Honeybee hives can be kept relatively close to each other without major issues, but the Hylarans insist on ‘giving them their own space’ and spacing them throughout the long tunnel of hydroponics and fresh new garden beds. The whirring of air pumps that I’m so accustomed to is lessened here, in this airtight facility behind new airlocks; this is the only place in the colony that carefully preserves a 70% nitrogen atmosphere, for the plants. And now, for the bees, although they don’t care about nitrogen any more than human lungs do. (They do, like humans, care about air pressure, though.) The Hylarans were warned not to interfere too much with the new bees before they’re settled, lest they decide the bee boxes aren’t safe and try to fly off to make a home somewhere else, so they stand well back and squeal and gasp in fascination as the slowly warming insects take their first trembling steps outside the boxes to look about. Looking at the faces around me, I’m struck with the sudden enormity of what I’m seeing – these are the first nonhuman animals on the entire planet. These are the first nonhuman animals that any Hylaran has ever seen in the flesh.

An old man, like a child, ignores the warnings about crowding the bugs, and reaches a hand towards a bee. He giggles uncontrollably as she flies back to avoid him. Others pull him away, warning him not to crowd them, but they’re giggling, too.

I stand back. Silent. I stay out of their way, trying not to intrude as I grapple with…. some kind of feeling… related to how I can’t experience what they’re experiencing. I don’t remember the first time I saw a nonhuman animal; I was born into a living and reactive world, and took it for granted as the normal state of things. I can comprehend the logic of what’s happening, but I can’t really understand how they’re feeling. I’m not sure I can even observe it properly. I’m a fucking sociologist, blessed to be able to witness something like this, and I’m somehow not doing it right. Look at this! I’m standing here thinking about me instead of watching them! Wasting this incredibly important historic moment! I fix my eyes on the Hylarans and their bees.

And can’t stop thinking about my bees. I mean, the bees on the Courageous. I’m sure they’re fine, and even if something happened to them, the crew up there could easily revive new bees for the greenhouses. They’re just bees.

A couple of Hylarans set up some cameras to watch the bees and start ushering everyone out. It’s my job to teach these people how to keep bees, but it’s not a particularly hard job – honeybees are pretty easy, and they have thousands of books on the practice from the Courageous. There aren’t even any bee diseases or parasites here to worry about.

I go for a walk, and run into Dandelion, avoiding the crowds by taking a little trip to inspect the health of the pioneers growing out on the surface. The grasses are hanging on better than I’d expected, although they’re hardly thriving. The ground is sandy and non-fertile, the rainfall heavy and unpredictable, and the carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen all too sparse. Even the upper atmosphere and the sun itself affects the plant growth; chlorophyll is specialised to pick up specific wavelengths of light to allow for a high but reasonably steady energy supply on Earth. The light on Hylara is slightly different, and we’re not sure how much of a problem that is, among all the other problems.

“The clover’s almost certainly not going to grow here,” she says as I approach. “It’s not even worth trying.”

She’s right. I don’t even have to run any tests to know that. “We should try anyway.”

“Yeah.”

“There has to be some kind of nitrifying plant that’ll grow here. These soil conditions exist on Earth; if we can find something that can deal with the thin atmosphere that can pump at least some of this nitrogen into the soil – ”

“We’re not on Earth. Why bother? It’s a waste of time to try to turn this place into another place.”

I know that, I know she’s right. Adapting to the environment we have and working within that space to build things is what we do. That’s why Arborea was made. I know better. I just… I grew up in such a vegetation-filled place, and the idea of an entire planet with the sparse ecology of a desert or a salt flat…

But there’s nothing wrong with the ecology of a desert. A desert isn’t a dead or inherently hostile place. It’s just unfamiliar to me.

I should be used to things that are unfamiliar to me by now.

“The crew on the ship wan to go to Trellin,” Dandelion tells me, “if we manage to launch the ship.”

“Trellin.” I vaguely recall that as the name of one of the potential target planets. “Any reason why?”

“The most direct route there takes the ship through the nearest planetary system to Hylara.” She grins, a rare sight. “And in that system is a particular gas giant that, according to the Kleiner readings, contains reasonably high levels of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and helium in its outer layers.”

That gets my attention. “How long a journey?”

Dandelion shrugs. “Century, century and a half? We don’t know the acceleration or safe speed of the rebuilt Courageous yet.”

“That’s doable,” I breathe. “On the supplies on the ship right now, if they’re careful about rationing airlock use and don’t have too many leaks… that’s doable, right?”

“Easily.”

Doable. Yes. If they can find a way to harvest the gases without falling out of orbit… it might even be a good place for a settlement if they can establish some sort of source of metals. They wouldn’t need much; if they can find hydrogen in there, they can create unlimited algae and make unlimited plastics, they’d only need metals for wires and things… if they can somehow find materials to use as fuel for a reactor, then… I have a sudden, fanciful vision of a permanent colony not on the surface of a ‘liveable’ planet but inside a gas giant, huge sails and small engines keeping it moving among the currents of the upper atmosphere to avoid falling into the centre. Outside of Earth and its trade networks, the surface of planets isn’t any more liveable than space itself; there’s nothing inherently better about Trellin, or indeed about any part of Hylara out of travel range of the Vault, than about a spaceship. Maybe the Courageous, after all of us planning this mission are long dead, will decide to live in or around a gas giant. Or maybe they’ll harvest the resources they need and head on towards Trellin. Or maybe they’ll harvest what they need and head towards Earth. Or maybe they’ll turn around and come right back here.

Arborea is a very static sort of place. It grows and expands slowly, building on centuries of accumulated knowledge, a place designed around maintenance and stability. We have to kick our children out for a few years on the cusp of adulthood just so they get a chance to see other ways of life, and they either come home or they don’t; someone like me or Shia, who spent so much time abroad and still came home regularly, was an anomaly. The sheer potential before us, the expansive array of options existing on a time scale too vast for any single generation to have full control over where they lead, makes me feel dizzy. And a little afraid.

“How are the bees?” Dandelion asks, and I’m pulled back to the present, to our little community where our limits are defined by the air tanks on our backs or the battery lives of our trucks. I relax.

I know about bees.

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. Next> ………. Last>>