Somehow, surprisingly, nothing went wrong.
Obviously, unsurprisingly, it was the scariest thing I’d done in my life.
There I stood, with the three historians and our safety supervisor, a man named Piko, in an airlock. An airlock that was cycling.
Right from when they can first walk, every kid is told to never EVER be inside a cycling airlock. If you are inside a cycling airlock, you die. That’s how airlocks work. (Of course, that would never actually happen, at least not on the Courageous. Nobody would ever cycle an airlock without checking inside first, and even if they somehow did, the treegrave would never let an airlock cycle without checking inside first. But it’s best to tell kids, anyway, just to be safe.) And here I was. In an airlock. While all the air around me was sucked away.
I was safe, of course. I was in a space suit. And it was the worst piece of clothing I had ever worn. The jumpsuit I had to wear underneath it was already weird; I’m not used to wearing clothes that wrap around my arms and legs like that. But the space suit itself… it wasn’t even like wearing clothes. It was like being in the smallest room ever. Like being in an elevator so teeny tiny that it barely fit my body inside. It was hard not to panic. And it was so, so heavy. That didn’t matter if I stayed still, since we were in zero pull, but if I tried to move…
I used to wrestle a lot with Hitan, when we were younger. And when Laisor would watch me and my younger siblings, ke would hold me down and tickle me sometimes. Being in a space suit felt like that; like being held down. Every time I tried to lift an arm or leg, the heavy space suit would pull back like somebody trying to hold me still. The difference was that if I told Hitan or Laisor to stop, they would. But if I took the space suit off, I would die.
My space suit had three hours of air. That was bad. That was very bad. I mean, it was enough air; we were planning to be out for somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. Even if something went wrong, they’d have over two and a half hours to rescue us, and we were barely leaving the airlock anyway. But the idea of having limited air was so frightening. I had never had a limited air supply before.
(I mean, I guess every spaceship has a limited air supply. But they usually recycle air faster than people breathe it. The space suit didn’t recycle air at all; it just had a tank of it to breathe from. Terrifying.)
But I could do this. I was brave and mature and I could do this without panicking, and then later on I wouldn’t have to do it on the Courageous.
“Okay!” Piko said through the radios in our suits. “Everyone tethered? This airlock doesn’t open until everyone’s tethered.”
Yes, everyone was tethered. We each had two tethers, plus a third spare that we probably wouldn’t have to use. One of them tethered our suits to an anchor in the airlock, and the other was waiting to tether us to an anchor on the outside of the ship, so that when we undid the airlock tether we’d still be attached to something. Rule Number Two was ALWAYS be tethered to the ship with at least one tether. (Rule number one was that if anything unusual or unexpected happened at all, absolutely anything, alert the supervisor and don’t just quietly fix it yourself even if it has an easy or obvious fix. Tether clip won’t clip? Don’t tie it on, tell Piko. Belt feels loose? Don’t tighten it, tell Piko. Problem solving was for experienced external workers.)
The airlock opened. With everyone else, I dragged my space suit through it. And froze in terror.
There was a little beeping alarm going off in my ears, but I ignored it. It was the heart rate alarm, to tell Piko that I might be having some kind of health problem. But I wasn’t. There was just… space. Open space. It was like stepping into an Arborean ring for the first time except a hundred thousand million times worse. Where were the walls? Where was anything? I had never been outside of a room before. I wasn’t in a place, I wasn’t anywhere! I tried to pretend I was just in a view port but no, that didn’t work. I wasn’t anywhere!
“Hey,” Plia’s voice was saying gently in my ear. “Hey, it’s okay.” She turned me around to see the ship and I reached out and grabbed at an anchor next to the airlock and held on tight.
“Getting high heart rates from everyone,” Pika said, but he didn’t sound worried about it. “Anything more serious than panic?”
“Fine here,” Tima said, followed by Plia, and then Halis aying, “ I’m pretty sure I’m fine, but I forgot how rusting scary this is.”
“Taya?” Pika asked, and I managed to choke out, “Fine.”
Looking at the spaceship helped. I wasn’t nowhere, I was in Hexacorallia. The walls just curved away form me instead of around me. That was fine. We anchored our tethers, unclipped the tethers inside the airlock, and moved on.
The tether anchor outside the airlock was a long bar that ran up the side of the HEX, so we didn’t have to keep clipping and unclipping tethers from anchor points; they could just slide up the bar. While Pika drifted easily up the side of the Hex, barely even touching the ship, the rest of us climbed the tether anchor like a ladder, not wanting to let go of the ship for too long. So it took quite a while to make the very short trip up the side of the HEX. The HEX itself was very big, for a HEX, but still.
And there it was. On top of the HEX, a small lump of metal and rock clamped in place, and a tiny plant growing out of it. It was one of Ella’s vines. Set up around the plant was a wide metal grid that didn’t look like much to me, but I knew what it was, and knew that behind their helmets, the historians were probably staring at it.
“There it is,” Pika said. “Electrostatic shielding. We have better designs now, of course, but some people are just traditionalists. That shield will destroy electronics on contact, including the life support systems in your suit, so don’t – hey! What did I just say?”
That last part was aimed at Hali, who had stuck his hand through the shield. He pulled back right away. I couldn’t see body language inside the space suits, but I had to guess that Hali was probably looking super guilty, and Pika was glaring at him.
“Is safety a joke to you, kid?” Pika barked.
“No! Sorry! I wasn’t thinking.”
“Don’t think out here and you die. And I’m not having any idiots die on my watch. So start thinking!”
“Yes, chi. Sorry, chi.”
Pika started talking about the shield while the historians, being very careful not to put anything between the bars, took pictures with their suit cameras and asked a lot of questions. I did my best not to look up from the ship and waited for them to be done. Luckily, it only took about two minutes, and Plia kept a hand on my back for most of it. Then we went back down and went inside. Back into the real world. Back out of the suits, into the open air. Back into normal clothes.
I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do external work when I grew up.
I decided to think about something else for a while. It was about time to message Tikka. I headed for a view port, or an observation HEX, as they were called here. I didn’t really want to see the stars, but the Hexacorallians didn’t use the viewports much so it seemed like a good place to ask the treegrave to record an audio message for me without being interrupted by orphanage or creche kids. (I would do it in our room, except that the treegrave can’t hear people in the bedrooms, for privacy reasons.) I sat in the back half of the observation HEX and just didn’t look through the door at the stars.
Okay. What did I want to say to Tikka, exactly? “Oh, hey, the humans on your ship seem kind of weird about the capuchins, but I don’t exactly have other capuchin ships to compare it to so maybe it’s normal and I just don’t know. What’s going on?” “Oh, hey, now that I’m on Hexacorallia, this place looks like it would be great for capuchins. I bet being small and climbing so well would really suit you guys to these little ships, and also, there’s all kinds of HEXes that can be made really different, so whatever it is that keeps you alive on your ship, I bet they could put it in a HEX. What is that thing you need, exactly? Why aren’t any of you here? That seems really weird. Do you all really truly just not want to leave the Stalwart? All of you? Every single capuchin?” “Oh, hey, I’ve never met a person that wasn’t a human before! Mind if I ask you a lot of personal and maybe some suspicious-sounding stuff, just because?”
It was hard to decide where to begin.
I spent over half an hour thinking about it before I realised that I was being stupid. It was obvious where I should start. When Tikka had contacted me, it wasn’t because she wanted to tell me all about her people and her ship; it was because she wanted to hear about mine. Obviously I should give her what she was interested in first, and if she messaged me back, I could get what I was interested in later. That was just basic manners.
So I told her about Hexacorallia, and about what was the same as the Stalwart and what was different. I told her about the kids, and about what was the same as my family at home and what was different. I told her about Kichi the snake, and that was hard because it was kind of hard to describe a snake to someone who hadn’t seen one before. I mean, it was easy – living, moving piece of rope covered in dry skin – but it was hard to describe it in a way that anyone would actually believe. I described him anyway. I had learned that snakes were based on an animal from Earth, so there were probably filed on the Stalwart about their Earth ancestors, and Tikka could look them up.
I should do that too, when I got back to the Courageous. I had thought that I knew lots about animals after looking up all those things about mammals. But I had never even imagined something like a snake. How much weirder did animals get?
I recorded the audio message. I sent it. I went back to HEX-46 and had dinner and played with some of the kids. I went to bed.
I had nightmares about the external. I mean, obviously I had nightmares about the external. Obviously.
Derin Edala 