“Do you remember pushing Pascal off the wall?” asked the kindly old man.

“Look, I’m so sorry about last night. It was all very silly,” replied Kaitar. “The last few weeks have been hard for me. The voyage from Terraform 8 nearly drove me insane. There wasn’t a soul on my section of the ship. Week after week of it. Two months of interactive gaming basically. Never done so much MERGE in my entire life.”

“That doesn’t sound like A.S.”.

“No, it wasn’t. It was a non-scheduled flight. Arranged by the High Command. It’s in the constitution apparently - something to do with freedom of human diplomacy. They tried to sort it out, but it was all too late. Undersubscribed, they said. After all that solitary confinement I went straight into the party last night - new people, new culture, a whole new planet. And…” she checked his expression, which remained benevolent, “…and I got steaming drunk. But not so drunk that I can’t remember it. So in answer to your question, yes, I do remember why I pushed him over the wall. But I had no idea it was such a big drop on the other side. It was all so stupid. I hope his shoulder’s ok. Am I in deep trouble? Where exactly am I, by the way? Consuelo was with me, wasn’t she? I think I fell asleep in the transport.” She began massaging her forehead with her fingertips, allowing her eyes to close in the shade of her hands. “Do you have painkillers?”

The old man handed her a glass of water and then one of the steaming mugs he had been preparing.

“I took the liberty of putting some feverfew in yours.”

Kaitar eyed the brew suspiciously and gave it a sniff.

“It’s a herbal remedy,” he added. “Get it down you and have some breakfast. You’ll be right as rain.”

He was being very good to her, considering what she’d done.

“Are you a member of the Biology Department then? Where are we exactly?” she repeated.

“I’m connected to the research centre, though not actually a member of the Department. Never been a big fan of other people’s deadlines. They work with me for field trips. Actually, I was the one who suggested they brought you here. Consuelo got in touch. It must have been a good party – we had to carry you up here!”

“Oh no! Seriously?” She buried her face in her hands again. “I was hoping I’d made it to bed by myself.”

“No, no, nothing to worry about. Consuelo brought you in here and put you to bed. The last thing she said was to make sure I got you a good breakfast in the morning. Oh and that she’d be back in the evening to pick you up. So you can just relax today.” He smiled. “This is not completely unprecedented, you know. We’re quite used to revelry round here. We have similar shenanigans once a month. Don’t worry about last night now. You have a lot to see, my girl. And we have a lot to discuss!”

Kaitar wondered what she could possibly have to discuss with this unkempt old stranger, but her headache was peaking and her facial expression revealed nothing but discomfort.

“Breakfast awaits,” he went on enthusiastically. “I’m going to leave you now. There’s a shower space behind that curtain, if you want. Just come down one level and you’ll see the breakfast laid out.”

He took his leave.

Kaitar let her head flop back against the armchair, closed her eyes and took a series of deep breaths. She felt the hot drink begin to work its soothing magic on her pulsing temples as she looked around the room.

Sunlight was streaming in through a large rounded window, giving the whole room a golden hue. Her muddy boots by the door took on a strange significance in that light, the symbolic motif of her life, a narrative painting she was yet to understand.

Tears began to well up in her eyes.

“What the fuck was I thinking?”

Earth had been more than her North Star. It had been her destiny for as long as she could remember. And on her first night on the planet she physically assaults one of her colleagues: The very people who had made it possible for her to get to Earth in the first place.

She stood suddenly and walked over to the mirror. Wiping her tears, she checked over the general state of her face, then snapped out of it and gave herself a look of steely determination.

She walked over to the shower area, pulling off her clothes as she went.

Halfway through her shower, her eyes closed and the face of the girl flashed before her. At some point during the night she had woken to see a young girl standing at the end of her bed. Either she was lucid dreaming in her drunken state, or the girl had found her way into the room expecting it to be empty, because the minute Kaitar opened her eyes, the girl had fled in panic. Kaitar waited to hear if she would return, meaning to go and look, but within seconds had fallen back into her drunken slumber.

Noticing the air had got heavy with steam, Kaitar pushed open the small window. It only opened a couple of inches, obstructed by the branch of a tree. Hurriedly she dried herself off, went back into the main room and stepped up onto the little platform to take a look out of the arched window and get her bearings.

Her jaw dropped.

She was in the canopy of a forest, looking out from halfway up a huge old tree. There were other trees with buildings in them, rope walkways between them. And the buildings were made of stone, built into the very trunks and boughs of the trees, which had embraced the stonework with old growth. This was the famous Ash Redoubt she’d read so much about.

She knew that the Research Centre was located quite close to it, but never imagined she’d wake up in one of the trees of the Ash Redoubt on her first morning on Earth.

As she came down the narrow, stone stairway from her room to the small courtyard where the trunk of the tree divided into three huge boughs, the old man got to his feet politely. He was alone at the table, which had an impressive array of breads, cheeses, herbs and nuts, laid out haphazardly for them to pick at. He began pouring her a cloudy, green drink.

“Come! You must be hungry!”

“It’s very kind of you. I don’t think I caught your name…”

“Dimitri.”

“Nice to meet you, Dimitri.” She took her seat. “Russian, isn’t it?”

“So you know a thing or two about Earth then!”

“Oh you’d be surprised, Earth heritage is very important to us on T8. I have a friend whose mother’s family were Russian as it happens. None of them have ever been to Earth of course, but he’s given his pod a kind of Russian look!”

“Well to be honest I’ve never been to Russia either,” Dimitri responded. “My ancestors moved over here sometime around 2070, we think. Probably a merchant seaman on the Northern Sea Route. The Arctic Ice had already melted back by then, giving Russia the open sea route it had always craved. Suddenly mother Russia found she was not just the major trading hub, but also the bread basket of the Northern Union, what with the thawing of the permafrost and the intensive cultivation of Siberia.”

“Actually, one good thing about my voyage here,” she interjected, “was that I got a lot of cortical streaming done. I now have the entire six volumes of Dawoud’s A History of Earth in the Interplanetary Era. I can’t say I’ve had the opportunity to contextualise pathways yet, but what you’re saying is familiar to me. I guess your family were some of the lucky ones.”

“Yes, absolutely. I mean, just look around you. This place is paradise - hardly representative of the planet. A lot of our ETs come straight to the research centre from the Space Port – like you did – so one of the first things I tell them is that this corner of the world is very much the anomaly. But then they usually know that, to be fair, because they’re biologists, so it’s natural people like you end up here, where all the life is.”

“Well, all I can say is that after the cortical stream of Dawoud’s work, a kind of sadness settled in me that I’ve never experienced before. In fact, it kind of helped me, put everything into perspective, made me less lonely somehow. Cortical streaming’s weird like that, isn’t it? You know, before you do the contextualisation - when you haven’t recalled any details but you’ve got this new knowledge and its emotional weight. Like waking up from a dream you can’t recall that sets the mood for your whole day.”

“I don’t do cortical streaming, Kaitar. I’m one of those annoying people,” he chuckled in self-deprecation, “and I can’t say I’ve read the great tome of which you speak, but I can tell you that the human cost of planetary degradation is far greater than any work of literature could possibly convey. And the thing is, Kaitar… nobody can really weigh these things… I mean, the reason why it doesn’t feature much in the historical knowledge of ETs is that it has no shape – it’s been so unremitting, so mundane in a way. It’s not like a war. Wars are dramatic – stick in the memory. Crops failing year after year, malnutrition, gradually increasing child mortality, destitution, migration, interminable processing camps – this has been the reality for hundreds of millions of souls on Earth now. It wasn’t just planetary degradation – human degradation came with it.” He gave a sardonic laugh at the memory of something. “Most of the ETs that come to the centre seem to think the Battles of Exodus were some kind of global squabble over the colonisation of other planets. It coincided with all that of course, but that’s not the exodus that the Battles of Exodus were all about. Anyone with any knowledge of Earth history should know that. It was the movement of people out of the uninhabitable zones - Southern Europe, North Africa, great swathes of Asia and the Americas, the Middle East. Here in the Northern Hemisphere that meant constant migrations of people fleeing drought and poverty from the South. And then the inundation of coastal cities, even in the habitable zones. Nations suddenly had to adapt, not just to a new geopolitics, but to a new geography, a changed climate – and all the while, the refugees were building up at the borders of the habitable zones. The development of the Intrazones and the processing camps during the Battles of Exodus, is one of the greatest tragedies of human history, not just in terms of numbers, but because it has become the norm. I hate to say it, but what you see around you here is a kind of lie, Kaitar. We like to think that this little enclave of peace and plenty is important as an example of what’s possible on Earth, but the truth is that any happiness on this planet now comes with an unpayable historical debt.” The old man seemed to return from a reverie and remember the original point of their conversation. “So yes, my old great great great great grandfather, or whatever he was, was one of the luckier ones – born in a part of the world that was once very poor and actually prospered from Global Warming. And of course when the Treaty of Estonia gave pollical union to the habitable zones of Russia and Northern Europe, he was able to relocate easily.”

“Well he picked a great spot.”

“That he did! He probably didn’t know it at the time, but the rise in global temperature was nicely offset by the failure of the Gulf Stream in this western corner of Europe, so the climate has hardly changed in hundreds of years - as these giant ash trees bear testament.”

“They’re absolutely incredible. Can’t believe I’m here. And this breakfast looks amazing.” But she couldn’t go on with the platitudes, and her tone dropped its polite gaiety. “Actually, Dimitri, I still feel pretty shit – about last night, I mean. Mortified. I don’t know what came over me. It feels wrong to be receiving so much kindness after all that.”

“Let me stop you there, Kaitar. Between you and me, Pascal has got quite a reputation. To be honest, I don’t really understand why he came here in the first place. He’s already had two disciplinary hearings, and by all accounts you were in the right last night. Consuelo said you were defending a potted plant or something…” He looked at her quizzically.

“Don’t remind me! Yes, it was all about the damn pot plants – that was it. He was sitting on the wall - I kept telling him to move his feet off the pots. His boots were damaging one of the plants. I started kicking his feet off the pots. It became like a game. He was going on about how the biological sciences attract people who like to ‘nurture’ - being very sarcastic - I think he was trying to wind me up or something. He must have been drunk too - trying to get a rise out of me. It was all so ridiculous. He more or less dared me to push him off the wall in the end. And I am the biggest idiot ever. Was he alright in the end?”

“It seems he may have broken his arm…”

“Oh you’re joking. Oh shit! Really?”

“Yes, but look, you need to get this in perspective. Like I said, he’s had these complaints made about him. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say, you’re already something of a legend for quite a few people at the research centre.”

“But I never meant to break his arm! I had no idea it was such a long drop on the other side.”

“I’ve lived here most of my life, Kaitar. I can tell you now that last night’s little episode will have done you no lasting damage. There will be some apologies to be made of course, but in time you’ll see the funny side of it.”

“I’ve no idea how I’m gonna handle it next time I see him.”

“Don’t worry about that now. Sit down and eat! You’ll feel much better for it.”

He allowed her time to get stuck into her breakfast. On tasting the fresh produce she realised just how hungry she was. The crunch of a fresh walnut added to some smoky cheese was a new sensory delight, though she still had to shake her head every now and then to dispel thoughts of the previous night.

“I read your thesis, Kaitar,” began Dimitri, having decided to take her mind off recent events by engaging her in deep discussion. “Professor Yang likes to have a second opinion when choosing the new recruits. And I like to keep up with the latest science. It’s not often that I feel the need to talk about something that a student has written though, and I’ve found myself mentioning your ideas in conversation quite a bit. You certainly picked a grand topic! I’m amazed your department let you follow that line.”

“It wasn’t easy, believe me. ‘Specialize!’ That’s what they kept telling me. But no, not me. I guess I’m the kind of girl who won’t take no for an answer.”

“Clearly!” He laughed.

“Oh, you mean the wall - the kind of girl who pushes people off walls. You see, this is exactly the sort of thing I didn’t want to happen.”

Dimitri was laughing hard now, his head thrown back so that the sun caught the white stubble on his unshaved chin. Despite his good intentions, he could never resist a joke. “I’m pulling your leg, Kaitar.”

She gave him a look of exasperation, surprised at how quickly they’d become friends.

“But yes, I was very taken by your focus on Evolutionary Slices. The idea that our understanding of evolutionary processes is radically affected by the timescales we adopt. So looking at small slices of time will lead one to a teleological view of evolution heading towards greater complexity, while the biggest slices of time tend to show that the universe favours simplicity - resilience over intelligence. That’s correct, isn’t it? So you get the rise and fall of complex organisms like the reptiles and the mammals on Earth, but all the while it tends to be simpler organisms that survive all the resets - the really heavy mass extinctions -and outlive them?”

“Based on current evidence, yes. Especially when we look at the evolutionary spans of micro-organisms and simple lifeforms on other planets. Calynolista faxum, the bacteria that covers planet Chomsky, contains DNA that can be nearly a million years old. That’s a single individual we’re talking about – cellular repair and maintenance that’s been going on for a million years in a single organism. That’s the kind of timespan that would suffice for an entire species of mammal on Earth.

“Yes, that was it – those graphs in your paper. Very persuasive.”

“Things that can survive in a wide variety of chemical environments or within a much larger temperature range for example. But the flaw in the theory of course is that the biggest slice of time is always getting bigger, so it’s just possible that some life-form we haven’t yet discovered, or even humans, might eventually upset the paradigm. I highly doubt it, but that slim possibility seems to be enough for everybody else!”

“Quite! There always seems to be an anthropic perspective people won’t let go of.”

“Yes, of course, because we’re on the crest of an evolutionary wave. If you think of terrestrial evolutionary processes as the surface of an ocean, we are at the tip of the highest wave in the biggest storm. But that wave-tip point in space and time is very rarely reached by the ocean. The most likely coordinates for the field are closer to the surface of the ocean in a dead calm – if you take the average of a very large slice of time.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Dimitri, still thinking her contorted analogy through.

“That may not be the best description actually. Because it’s usually long periods of relatively stable conditions that allow the steady evolution of any group of animals towards great complexity – so the idea of a violent storm doesn’t sit so well with that. I mean, when you take a really big slice of time on planet Earth, you’re including massive amounts of climatic instability: Ice Ages, periods of Global Warming, Asteroid Strikes… you name it… at any given point in that timeline you can look at the most successful species on the planet and marvel at the pinnacle of evolution, but within a few hundred million years, it’s all changed and something else is on the rise. Meanwhile there’s some simple tardigrade or tiny microbe that’s cracked the problem of staying alive in permafrost, or surviving thousands of years of dormancy travelling through space or something – now that’s the tortoise that beats the hare. I mean, you could say, it’s all just life of one sort or another, but the point is, what kind of life is going to inherit the universe.”

“Mmm, interesting. But aren’t you thinking of species timespan as the only measure of evolutionary success? What about if you consider that consciousness is evolution’s greatest achievement?” Dimitri elevated his voice into a mock-heroic to recite the first lines of the Estonian High Command Credo:

“We believe in the supremacy of Human Consciousness

In our right to ever greater knowledge.

We pledge our allegiance in the service of universal discovery

And the enlightening of the darkest reaches of Space…”

“That sounds very much like a conscious mammal telling itself that the length of time it survives as a species is the only measure of its evolutionary success.” She winked at him, knowing that he wouldn’t have thought of it in quite that way before.

He nodded slowly.

“But what is the message then?” he finally asked. “What can we take from your Evolutionary Slices? Isn’t it just another way of framing the Great Filter? Aren’t you basically saying that the universe seems to have a cut-off point for intelligence?”

“Not exactly. I’m putting the emphasis on biological resilience and the criteria for planetary habitability. It seems obvious to me. You just have to look at how astrophysics and astrobiology come together. The universe couldn’t give a shit about intelligence – if there’s a Great Filter at all, it’s that the universe is mightily indifferent to intelligent life. People imagine that the problem lies within intelligence, or in some inevitable rivalry between intelligent lifeforms, but the universe is only impressed by things that stay alive if you set light to them, freeze them, leave them in a radioactive environment for a million years and then stamp on them repeatedly.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Dimitri gave her comic turn a charitable chuckle.

“The whole ethos of the High Command and the Colonisation Program,” she went on, “when you strip away the stirring language of the Credo, I mean - what you’re really left with is survival of the species. That’s the basic biological drive. That’s how Elon Musk first made the multi-planetary proposal all those years ago. At least, that was the sales pitch – and very successful it was too. So we’re back to basics. Now my Slices Theory tells us that the more complex and intelligent the species, the less likely it is to survive for an extended period of evolutionary time, due to the energy-related costs and environmental limitations that come with biological intelligence. In trying to buck that trend we have put all our efforts into spreading out across the Galaxy. But without exception, all of our new homes are less likely to sustain us over the long-term than right here, the planet we evolved on. We have already suffered the loss of 158,000 lives with the catastrophe on Terraform 1, and nearly all human life outside Earth still depends on industrial systems for their biological necessities. Even T3, which has the biggest Eden Project of all and abundant water reservoirs, depends on asteroids for most of its mineral resources – and we know too well what happens if the atmospheric systems fail for any reason. None of these settled planets are as fully independent as Earth. There will be further catastrophes. Earth itself will see further catastrophes, but the great thing about Earth is that it has resilience built into its very astrophysical being – it can sustain life over the long-term due to the immense luck of its precise location and history within the Solar System. It is an independent life-sustaining entity. Even all-out thermonuclear war would probably not finish humans off completely on this planet.”

“Mmm…” Dimitri signalled his reservations and there was the briefest silence in which they seemed to share the acknowledgement that the discussion of Interplanetary Politics was best left for another time.

“On an evolutionary scale this is all baby stuff,” she went on, “very much Small Slice time, but you can use the same methodology to see what works. If we were to zoom forward a few thousand years and find that humanity still existed in the universe, we would be on Earth, not the other planets we’re currently camping out on. Think about it. The only reason the Colonisation Program was able to continue after the rupture on Terraform 1 was because of Earth. If Earth had not existed, the rupture on Terraform 1 would have meant the end of humanity on Mars too, sooner or later. OK, we have A.S. and all sorts of clever systems, but AS itself has run the models - it knows the story is most likely to continue from Earth. This is the great paradox of the Interplanetary Era. Places like my planet, T8, were colonized on the understanding they would be humanity’s back-up system, but one can say with almost total assurance that in the long run it will be Earth that is the back-up for Terraform 8.” She took a piece of home-made bread buttered with an ochre-coloured paste of nuts and berries, placed a couple of sprigs of wild garlic on top, and took a bite.

“It’s certainly more resilient than people gave it credit for,” added Dimitri.

“What is?”

“Earth! I mean, look at us now. This forest is as teeming with life as it’s ever been. We really screwed this planet’s atmosphere, caused mass extinction, and turned half of it to desert, but still there are pockets of life like this, which by sheer climatic luck, survived and are thriving.”

She nodded assent, busy with her mouthful.

“But wouldn’t the High Command say that it was still spreading the risk,” persisted Dimitri, “even if only for a very unlikely event like an asteroid strike or some freak occurrence that completely obliterates Earth – using technology to extend our range onto planets that not even bacteria can cope with.”

“Yes, they’d probably justify all the loss of human life and pointless hardship on barren rocks in space like that. And they certainly wouldn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they had put a highly dubious species survival above the survival of the individual. The modelling has already been done by AS, so anybody can take a look at the probabilities involved. There’s room for interpretation and spin though. That’s probably what they’d say about my Slices Theory of course, but anyone can see it’s the statistically relevant interpretation!”

“I tend to agree. You’re not the only one to think like that.”

“Oh, I know. My theory just adds scientific support to that awareness. Hell, it would be difficult not to know. AS has been pointing it out ever since GAF! It spotted from the beginning that the only logical goal of Planetary Colonisation is to find one of the millions of needles in the galactic haystack - another Earth - and set up stall there. Why, one wonders, has this not become the one goal? What role does the High Command really have in these decisions? How much of this is really driven by AS? I sometimes think these crazy projects are just an excuse to do something, anything, that requires political leadership, direction, power… that the High Command just ignores the scientific advice of AS… and that AS just ignores the power politics of the High Command as insignificant to its own mysterious goals… whatever they might be.” She stopped herself. “I’m rambling now – none of that’s in the paper of course.” She laughed. “By the way, that drink you gave me is like a miracle cure – my headache’s completely gone.”

“Good, isn’t it? We call it ‘Talking Tea’ in these parts. There’s some root extract in it that loosens the tongue.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I see…” Having worked on the interactive Earth II, she was no stranger to psychoactive agents, but he didn’t have to know that. She felt more than confident in handling Earth’s little homegrown rituals. “…that explains a lot then.”

“Actually, it’s partly the air here in the trees. We have another saying in the Ash Redoubt: ‘Drunks and Hangovers!’, meaning they’re the only two things that don’t last long up here – hangovers because of the oxygenated air you get in the tree canopy, and drunks because they fall out of trees!”

“Mmm” she replied, reminded of her own drunken behaviour from the previous night.

Noticing her misgivings, Dimitri quickly picked up the conversation again.

“Anyway, I was very impressed with your paper. It’s an interesting discussion and a clever critique of EHC policy. Very grounded, goal-oriented research. But more than that, I felt a strong connection to it, Kaitar. I think it’s your natural sympathy with biological functionality.”

“’Sympathy with biological functionality’ Oooookaaaay. So that’s a new way of putting it,” she gently mocked him.

“I’m not just saying that. I really think you have a way of looking at the natural world that I recognize in myself. What happened last night just confirms that for me. You were clearly motivated by a value system that includes plants.”

“Ah but please don’t judge me on that Dimitri. I was very drunk. I’ve been building up to this moment all my life. To come here, to Earth. And then I’m confronted by this person who doesn’t seem to give a shit. Something just flipped in my head. It was bad timing. I thought he’d just dust himself off and curse me a bit.”

“I’m curious about one thing though, Kaitar,” said Dimitri, deciding that ignoring her worries was probably the best policy now. “I’m wondering how someone who grew up on Terraform 8 can have such a strong connection with the natural world of Earth. It’s something I ask to all our ETs.”

For a second, she felt like a fraud, an outsider. This was coming from someone who had lived their whole life on Earth. Here was a man asking her why she loved his planet so much. She quickly put her mind into gear.

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe now I’m here I have to accept that I’m an outsider. I see what you mean. It’s going to be more complicated than I thought. And yes, perhaps I had a simplistic idea of Earth, projecting my hopes onto your planet. I think that’s partly why that happened with Pascal last night. It’s a kind of culture shock. I guess I need to step back a bit.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant at all. We’re all outsiders in our own way. Over the last couple of hundred years nearly everyone on this planet has had to move for one reason or another. We were left behind, Kaitar – forgotten by you lot! The Battles of Exodus turned out to be a charade! A shadow-play! A horrible, violent shadow-play. We just couldn’t get beyond the national mentality. And when we were finally forced to reconfigure the boundaries, it was fences and walls all the way. We had no alternative. That’s what we told ourselves. And by then it was true. We’d let things go too far – forced ourselves into inhumanity through lack of foresight and organisation.”

He shook his head and let out a long sigh or regret. He’d had so many conversations reach this point, and then they’d just move on, like casual betrayal.

“But Kaitar, I am genuinely interested to know how you developed such a strong connection with all things natural. Because for me, it was far more straightforward, you see. I was born in the heart of it. I grew up just down the road in Lower Snipefoot. I spent my whole childhood in these woods. They’re in my blood.”

“I can’t tell you how envious I am of that. Man, it was like waking up in Rivendell or something, this morning.”

“Yes, we’re very proud of the Ash Redoubt, but you’ll soon discover there’s more of the Dwarf about its inhabitants than the Elf!”

Kaitar laughed at this - pleased to find they had some common ground in Tolkien. “You mean to say the people of the Redoubt are a bit feisty? That doesn’t surprise me somehow.”

“We have a long history of resistance.”

“Of course, yes. The Occupation of Fenridge Forest and The Seige of Ash Redoubt. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve played the MERGE campaign a lot. Obsessively, you might say. The topology is an exact virtual replica of the battlegrounds as they were, so I kind of feel like I know the area quite well already. This is a surreal experience for me, Dimitri. Being here I mean.”

“Let’s get things the right way round, Kaitar. The MERGE game was surreal; THIS is the reality.” He laughed. “That’s how they get us in the end: You win the battle, but they still turn you into a virtual game.”

She lowered her gaze bashfully.

“Having said that, maybe there’s something in what you say. Perhaps this isn’t quite reality either. Are you familiar with the AS Statistical Dispatches Compendium?”

“Not all 974 million pages of it, no.” They both laughed at that.

“It’s one of the famous summary sections, in natural language. XVII. 3.4, I think. It’s all based on raw social data, a lot of it predating the Interplanetary Era. I think it contains some insight that we can actually understand. It discusses trends in human fiction – gives the exact degrees to which we have made the future imaginatively before we did so physically. So there was a point in time when there was a cross-over of fantasies like your Lord of the Rings, which were basically pastoral and cautionary, warning against the alienation and inhumanity that can come from technological development - industrialisation in those days, with that of ‘cyberpunk’, science fictions that were grappling with a denatured future, which, even when somewhat dystopian, were set in an irresistibly exciting universe of intrigue and possibility. Two sides of the same coin, and both half true, half lie. The fact is that, on the whole, pastoral fantasies were constructed by people who didn’t have to grow their own food.” He gave her a knowing look – she, a young woman who had never even seen plants grow outside the controlled conditions of Terraform 8 until that day. “Now, I have lived self-sustainably for many years, and I have been lucky to find myself in this bountiful region and to be able to share with the members of our enclave - but I can tell you that even here it is not easy, that it leaves you little time to spare, and that you are completely at the mercy of the whims of nature. Likewise, the cyberpunk genre that imaginatively paved the way for the civilisation on your planet, was concealing the reality of life beyond Earth. At the turn of the Millennium, just prior to the Interplanetary Era, as the Earth seemed to be floundering beneath us, we were ripe for the Muskian Dream. Like lions disturbed by flies on the endless savanna, we imagined the novelty of life in a zoo: regular meals appearing by magic, and a whole host of weird and wonderful neighbours.”

A memory sprung into Kaitar’s mind. Richard Stellon sitting on her bed, explaining something about his flight training and the Autonome Free Zone. She now felt that she’d misunderstood his predicament. Or that he had misunderstood his own predicament. That they were both caught in something much bigger than they could possibly grasp.

“But then AS goes further,” Dimitri continued. “It talks about this human approach to future possibilities as being an extension of our perception of the present, which itself is an act of sensory modelling slightly after the event – that all reality is, if not exactly imagined, then imaged by humans either before or after the event, but never actually during. In that sense, Kaitar, the Ash Redoubt is indeed a kind of fantasy. Not to mention our political status as the Free Enclave, which is certainly fantasy. In fact, it’s a bloody joke.”

He laughed heartily at the absurdity of it all.

“But getting back to you, Kaitar: So there’s fantasy literature and role-playing games on MERGE. Yes, I can see how that might shape you and bring you here, but what made you decide to study astrobiology then?”

She didn’t answer straight away. There were various ways of framing the subject. She’d trotted out a variety of answers at academic interviews over the years, and she had ways of embroidering her answers, giving particular emphasis to one or other of the scientific disciplines most relevant to the interviewer in question. Now though, she found she had no ulterior motive. Honesty is the best policy if you want to build a friendship.

“My mother,” she said automatically, surprised at the words coming out of her mouth. “She used to grow things. Bean plants, apple seeds, anything that was viable really. Under the UV lamps in the corner of our pod. She always had something there poking its head up through the agar jelly, shaking off its seed casing and opening out its first leaves. It was like magic. As a child, I always had this strong sense that that little corner was where the magic was. These tiny little capsules that seemed to know everything about what they were going to be, each unfolding their blueprint but into something completely unique. It was like my Mum kept this corner to remind us all what life really is, despite all the confusion of our lives.”

There was a blank expression on Dimitri’s face as he gently nodded assent. Her candour had allowed him to drop the courtesy of polite smiles. He searched her eyes for more information on that last phrase ‘the confusion of our lives’, wondering what kind of childhood she had experienced.

“That makes total sense. Thanks for that, Kaitar. I had hoped it might be something I could understand, like that. And I must now tell you a similar story. It’s only fair.” He poured them both some more Talking Tea, filling both mugs to the brim with the green broth. “I grew up not far from here - Lower Snipefoot, a village on the edge of the forest, just nine miles East of where we are now. I used to spend all my free time in the woods, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

“I certainly can! I spent most of my childhood imagining exactly that! Pretending I was in the Ash Redoubt or Middle Earth, when all I had was the Projects, the biospheres and my Mum’s seedlings.”

“Yes, we were lucky growing up here. You know something Kaitar? It might surprise you, but a lot of people on Earth look up at the night sky with envy, dreaming perhaps that one day they will be rich and powerful enough to emigrate from Earth and become someone of power and standing in the Galaxy – some kind of executive for the Estonian High Command on your planet perhaps, or one of the engineers overseeing some aspect of the Colonisation Program on the Outer Planets. But not me. No, I’ve never been interested in that kind of thing. And now that I’ve met so many Extra-Terrestrials, academics mainly, through my work at the Research Centre, I’ve become even more certain that I was born in exactly the spot where I was meant to live my whole life.” He stopped abruptly and changed tack. “Now, having already done your first bit of interplanetary travel, you may be thinking: ‘Listen to this old bore – he has no idea about adventure – never even stepped off his home planet’,” Kaitar shook her head emphatically as he continued, “but I’ve seen more real adventure than anyone I’ve ever met from out there.” He made a broad dismissive sweep of the skies with his arm. “Real adventure!” His eyes seemed to sparkle in the morning sun. “The kind that involves your own physical body directly.” Then he sat back again and the zeal that was in his voice seemed to drain. His expression became grim. He turned from her, his eyes working over the boughs of the mighty ash tree. “This peaceful community has seen great violence, you know. You might get a chance to visit the cemetery later on today. You’ll notice there are lots of graves dating to the Battles of Exodus. But then there’s that other date of course, a much more recent date. I was still a teenager when the Exemption Movement really got going. Up till then, everyone had accepted the need for Autonomous Society. It was a step up, after all. The unregistered were slowly dying out on the depleted soils of the Inter-zone. A.S. made sense, even from an environmental standpoint. Something had to take control where us humans had failed so badly. But as things improved under AS and the new atmospheric equilibrium was approaching, many of the surviving unregistered had gradually migrated to the last of the habitable zones where a subsistence life was not just possible, but could even be joyful.” What he was saying seemed to be hard work for him. “We now know that it wasn’t AS that instigated the Siege. The Russo-European government of the Northern Union had never fully converted to AS protocol. I know it’s difficult for you ETs to imagine, but when you have a long national history, dogged self-determination is the default in politics, or so went the story. The only reason the Northern Union became possible is because the refugee crisis had become an existential threat to individual nations. They had no option but to present a unified front against the pressures from the South. But handing over the reins of power to full AS protocol was considered a step too far. Anyway, they didn’t like it so much when people like us, a mixed band of immigrants and stubborn natives, wanted our own autonomy. A.S. registration was used as a suitable pretext under which to round up all the remaining unregistered communities and have them processed, re-housed, whatever. In the year of my eighteenth birthday, we lost half the village. It’s true that we were the first to open fire, but a cornered animal who doesn’t put up a fight has already accepted captivity. I witnessed the death of my closest childhood friend that same year, carried him back to his family, my clothing drenched in his blood.”

He turned back to face her. She instinctively looked away, some sense of respect in the unshareable.

“Such sacrifices can never really be justified, Kaitar, but we prevailed in the end. We were given special status; we could remain unregistered within the Union on the understanding we would renounce its social provisions, oh and we would be responsible for a higher refugee intake. Politics. Swings and roundabouts.” He sipped his Talking Tea. “I am old now. And when you get old, you begin to see the shape of your life more clearly. I can now see that, despite all I’ve lived through, it was something completely uneventful that has sustained me.”

He looked down at the edge of the table in front of him, though his eyes were looking inward, recollecting something.

“I must have been about twelve or thirteen, so we’re going back a long way. It was Springtime. I know the exact spot where it happened. I can go back there today, though it looks very different now - the trees quite changed, some of them gone completely. But on that morning, I walked off the beaten track in answer to some childish whim. Wound my way over fallen trunks, thickets of brambles, jumped over boggy streams, ducked under spider webs. Everywhere I looked buds were unfurling the lime greens of their first leaves. Eventually I came across a natural clearing. Patches of bracken and the hollow trunk of a long-dead tree, hung with woodbine. The birds were singing, insects busy at work in the wild flowers. I felt the life of the forest surging through me, Kaitar. Just like your mother’s seedlings. But this was a cathedral of life, and I felt as if I’d been summoned there. Right to that spot. It was extraordinary. I don’t know, some strange concoction in the woodland air. I just stood there, a child who knew nothing. And my heart filled with the kind of joy that goes far beyond words. I had never felt such belonging. Total acceptance and joy. It might only have been seconds, but from that day onwards - I see now - I have always been connected to that moment. Still today, I cannot think of my death as anything other than a walk back into the depths of the forest.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much about someone in such a short time”, said Kaitar after a while. Dimitri gave an awkward laugh, although Kaitar had intended no joke. She was just being honest. “And you’re right,” she said. “I do understand that feeling of connection to plants. Not everyone has that.”

“A feeling of sympathy with biological functionality in all its forms. As I say, that has been my guiding principle. It’s why we fought so hard to keep our lives in the forest. It’s not strange at all, Kaitar. It’s the way things work best. People have forgotten, that’s all. And I’m heartened to find that gift in someone who grew up on a planet without any life to call its own.” As he scratched his neck, Kaitar noticed the sinewy muscularity of the old man’s weathered hand. He seemed to be considering something, and at length began to unburden himself again: “That sympathy with functionality can even go beyond the biological – you can extend it to the inanimate, you know. Everyone has a different way of opening a door. I can usually tell who’s entering or leaving my rooms just by the sound the doors make. Some people force it open and then just pull the door to as they leave. And at the other end of the spectrum you have the people who grasp the handle in such a way that they can feel the mechanism as it disengages.” He enacted the motion with his hand over the table. “They ease the handle down until they can feel the precise moment of mechanical release, and only then will they gently pull the door open. They are sensitive to every sound it makes and carry out the procedure with the smallest amount of friction or noise.”

For a millisecond, in a wave of acute embarrassment, Kaitar thought she was listening to a madman describing a weird fetish, and struggled to suppress a guffaw. They didn’t have door handles on T8.

“Why do they do this, these people?” he went on. “It’s because they’re in sympathy with functionality. You see, we have relationships with objects too. The way a door handle or a bicycle or even just a chair is used will affect the way that object changes through time and ultimately it will determine the length of that object’s functional life. Our relationship with plants is even more reciprocal. They not only provide us with the air we breathe, but also the door that the handle opens, and the table it opens onto, and the food on that table. People who treat other humans as means rather than ends, tend to slam doors more often. If you can't think of a person you interact with as a whole life like your own, it will never occur to you that a door has a functional lifespan, or that a boot on the stem of a plant can end years of growth, the rise and fall of insect empires, in the blink of an eye.” Dimitri glanced at his Talking Tea, as if to gauge whether he had drunk too much of it. “Now I am not saying anything controversial here. I am not arguing, as some do, that all these things are conscious. That’s just words. But people, for whatever reason, who have made that connection between the functionality of a door handle, the sense of purpose in an ant heading back to its colony, and the projected anger of a child towards its parent as it slowly comes to understand its own psychological flaws; these people have grasped something fundamental, and they will need little more from the universe.” He smiled. “Some people don’t like to hear that, I know. They have been to taught to hold their head up above nature. But there are many ways of interpreting the human spirit and it’s far more inclusive to view consciousness as a biological function. People seem to ignore the fact that we turn our minds off, each night we go to bed. Consciousness ebbs and flows throughout our lifetimes. And many animals have it too.”

At the precise moment that Dimitri came to the end of his strange philosophy, a girl appeared by his side and placed her hand on his shoulder. The Talking Tea had put Kaitar under a kind of spell and she had been so engrossed in what the old man was saying that she hadn’t noticed the child approach. She was taken aback to see the same face that had stared in shock from the end of her bed in the night.

“Ah, Alyona. Perfect timing, as usual,” Dimitri said with an ironic smile. “This is my daughter, Kaitar. I was blessed with her late in life. She is the apple of her father’s eye.”

“Actually we’ve already met,” said Kaitar, turning to the little girl, “haven’t we Alyona?”

“Oh she won’t answer you like that,” interjected Dimitri, in a matter-of-fact tone. “She has her own way of… how should I put? …creating sympathy with her biological functionality.”

Kaitar looked confused now.

“Alyona is autistic.” He kissed the little girl’s hand, but the girl pulled away and hurried off as if she’d heard someone call her. “Did she come into your room, then?”

“Yes, I think she got more of a shock than I did…”

“I did tell her that someone would be sleeping in there, but you never know what she takes in and quite how she will react. I must say though - she seems very accepting of you. Some people send great waves of anxiety through her. Anyway, I’ve no doubt she’ll make me fully aware of the disruption to her routine in due course.” He suddenly fixed Kaitar with a look of naked sincerity. “It’s not always easy for her, what with the changeable weather on her little island. I always say that Alyona and the forest have taught me everything I needed to know. I love her more than anything in the universe, Kaitar. There is so much we don’t understand.”