They arrange the handoff and Datsvan excitedly examines the alien technology. They send him tiny rectangular things with tiny cameras and hidden microphones and screens of glass showing pictures that glow slightly and aren’t the right color, as if the camera doesn’t pick up the same wavelengths of light as he sees. He’s yearns to start dissecting the spare immediately after it’s disinfected the second time (just in case the aliens missed a spot). Instead he gets one of them working and sits with it where he can see his crystal ball and the camera can’t see anything interesting. The screen shows his own face as seen by the camera. He watches the aliens in the crystal ball. They watch a screen that’s barely within Datsvan’s view.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
Datsvan’s voice echoes back to him through the scry, from some unseen source on the alien ship.
“Yes,” says the alien he’s been talking to. “I can hear you. I’ve been working on teaching my computer this language so that it can translate for everyone, but it’s not good enough yet. Also, you should know I’m recording this conversation.”
“I would ask more about that but it’s not the most urgent topic right now,” says Datsvan.
“Quite. How are your scans coming along?”
“About fifty percent complete now. You wanted to know about the planet. What did you want to know about it?”
“Do you have your observations in a form you can redact and share for us to read at our leisure?”
“Do you want to figure out compatibility between our information-storage media?”
“…Yes but not immediately.”
Datsvan aims the camera at the crystal ball, then refocuses his scrying on the landscape below. “I can’t hear you while I’m doing this but let me just show you…”
----------------------------------------
The planet X-Ts-56789-v looks like if it’s dying. This is mostly for reasons that have held true for hundreds of thousands of years, but by sheer coincidence, right now the impression is accurate. As seen from the crystal ball, a rusty reddish ocean surrounds a rugged, mountainous continent and a small chain of tropical islands. The continent extends into the tropics but the rainclouds bound for the interior spend themselves on a chain of mountains and reach the continental interior as faint scraps of themselves. The highest several peaks in the range reach more than thirty thousand feet above sea level. Most of the rivers follow steep quick paths right back to the southern sea. Only a few run down the north side of the range, merging with each other and with the few rivers running west from the eastern mountains until just one river makes its way, finally, past the desert that takes up most of the continent and to the western sea. The rivers running north are visible on the crystal ball, standing out in purple and black against the pale desert.
North of that, the continent is even worse; there’s a basin surrounded by more mountains, very dry and nearly barren, and north of that there’s tundra.
But the view from on high isn’t the whole story, not by a long shot. And the crystal ball can zoom.
On the north side of the southern mountains there is a pond maybe ten feet across, fed by a small stream, from which spills a small waterfall. The water is clear enough to see right to the bottom. Surrounding the pond are a few bushes with spiral-shaped leaves and slick-looking stems with raised green patches, short trees with thick rough bark, and sparse ground cover in red and purple and green and black. Aside from the sounds of the water, it’s almost quiet, with only faint insect noises and the rare croaking of creatures with more than a few similarities to frogs.
Most of the froglike creatures have drooping leaves in varying shades of rusty gray. Two have leaves of glossy black. Datsvan has been tracking the average leaf color; it's getting paler. In any given time period, the paler the leaves, the likelier the frog is to die. Fewer insects fly high enough to visit mountain pools like this lately—not that there were ever many, when if they stick to the lowlands they can grow so much bigger in the dense and well-oxygenated air, but those species that do visit the mountains are getting rarer. That puzzle Datsvan has solved already: it’s a fungal disease decimating their populations. Some of the ones around right now show signs of it, too. There’s one right now struggling to fly and only succeeding in flopping and buzzing on the ground because its wings are too damaged, lacy with holes edged in white fuzz. A frog eats it.
The lowlands are dying too. It’s harder to say what’s going wrong there. Near the delta there’s still a dense forest of dark red and purple and black vegetation—tall trees with broad canopies, encircled by dark webs of vines, holding their own miniature forests of epiphytes, where scaly birds perch briefly before flitting off to the next branch. The ground is covered in something that looks at a glance like crabgrass. The water hosts at least a dozen species of fish and thousands of species of plankton. The river bottom is full of half-buried creatures. It’s loud with the sounds of hundreds of species making a cacophony of shrieks and songs and drumbeats and cackles and whistles and hums and buzzing and fluttering and all sorts of sounds. It looks, at a glance, alive.
But Datsvan has been watching closely enough to notice the fish populations declining. And without the fish the animals on land would starve.
Datsvan finishes up his explanation and focuses his crystal ball on the alien ship.
“Now I can hear you if you ask questions.”
“What’s wrong with the fish?”
“I don’t know! They spawn upstream, except that increasingly often they go upstream and stay there and they seem healthy and happy and then they go back downstream and they don’t spawn. It’s like they’re practicing abstinence-based population control. I don’t know what’s wrong—I don’t know if anything is wrong. And it’s just those three species but I think without them most of the others will also die.”
“Is this entire planet dying?”
“Well, three out of five land biomes are. I don’t think the halophiles in that salt lake are going to suffer much unless the loss of plant biomass leads to runaway warming…”
“We can figure out whether it will do that if we have much more data and can get to the world we’re going to.”
“How would you figure it out?”
“Models. Very complicated models. I don’t believe we can run them here—the local laws of physics are very bad for our computers.”
“What, does your world have a higher theoretical maximum intelligence?”
“Other worlds we’ve visited completely lack the property where increasing the number of parallel computations forming a single mind beyond a pitifully small limit requires literally infinite energy and would if achieved start breaking the concept of space.”
“Do other worlds work like we used to think ours worked? Space is space, thought is thought, and no amount of either can change the other?”
“In the world we came from, space is time,” says Vethani.
“So instead of a world where true understanding and wisdom are permanently beyond your grasp you had a speed limit.” It feels like being in a bad science fiction movie, but then again Datsvan thinks if he were in a movie it would be one of the best movies ever made. Still, that’s exactly the premise of that movie Xreygh’s friend consulted on.
“When you say it like that, I admit it sounds stupid,” says Vethani.
“Are you enjoying being able to move as fast as you want?”
“You have no idea.”
“My home planet is nine parsecs away. I think I have some idea.”
“We crossed an entire galaxy on the way here.”
“That’s far.”
“Very. Do you have any plans to do anything about what you showed us?”
“No. I can’t know enough to confirm my guesses about the problems and can’t do much more than daydream with the resources I have. How sure are you that the world on the other side of the portal will allow your computers to model the planet in enough detail?”
“The portal might be in the middle of a star. I’m not sure we’ll even survive going. What would you like to do if you had more resources?”
“Save them. I don’t want to stand by and watch them all die.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re alive now, and if they die they’re gone forever and for all eternity there will be no way to take that back.”
“And if it’s a mistake?”
“What kind of mistake?”
“You tell me.”
“They could… turn out to be intelligent enough to achieve spaceflight and come to kill us all? But I don’t think any agent should do that to someone who does nothing but help them. I guess the fungus could be intelligent and object. This could be the work of different aliens who don’t want us to interfere. Maybe every creature on the entire planet has chronic pain so horrible they would all rather be dead. Maybe we can’t keep from letting one of our microbes infect them and wipe them out more thoroughly or faster or more painfully. Maybe it’s the other way around, and it’s too fast for us to notice in time to immunize ourselves.”
Vethani nods, as if he’s passed some sort of test.
Datsvan adds: “What would you call a mistake here?”
“Anything that made the future worse from my point of view,” Vethani says with a wry smile. It really does look like a wry smile. Why does it look like that? Why are their faces so similar? “Death is a horror. Loss of information is a worse horror. But I have seen things worse than both put together.”
“…I have no reason to expect we agree on what things are worse, given that you’re an alien.”
“That’s why I asked what I asked. I’m not certain we’re entirely in agreement but I think we agree enough that we might be able to work together. But do your people make oaths?”
Datsvan laughs. “Here I was wondering if I was in a sci-fi movie, when really I’m in a historical novel. Not anymore.”
“Odd. Why not?”
“Cultural change. I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“I’d be reassured if you could swear some things. But we can work together without that.”
And they might only be talking about saving this planet of unintelligent alien life, but somehow it gives Datsvan hope that maybe this could be a way to fix everything else.
----------------------------------------
Meanwhile, one universe back, on Kara’s planet, things have been happening all this time.
Kara daughter of Sali of Zai, who stole a goat, shares her given name with several other people, and is, like most of them, named after Kara daughter of Gval of Nguevi, Prime Minister of the Great Utari Empire. The Great Utari Empire is not the only country on the planet, but the others are only nominally independent from it.
Kara’s planet was visited by aliens for the first time in millennia. An alien craft passed through a work camp and an infrastructure project, ripped up the bedrock under them, and then just vanished. That was when the Utari government tried one more time to contact the mothership parked on Utari's moon, not that it had answered the last time.
“We know that humanity has friends in the stars,” their spokesperson said over the radio. “We want to talk to you. We want to know why you damaged our infrastructure. We want you not to do it again. That is very important to us. We would like to welcome your peaceful immigration to our moon.”
And this time, finally, after a wait of only a few minutes, the aliens responded.
“We experience the sorry but however our Sueli is too new. We had the urgency and not knowing that place was anything you value.”
The assembled politicians listened to the message, and listened to a recording of the message, and compared their best guesses at what the alien might have been trying to say through their thick accent and poor command of Sueli.
“Well, first of all, we’re still working on building the capacity to get people into space and fight space-based entities,” said the prime minister. “We want to do that whether these people mean well or not. And we can’t attack them yet, so we won’t, whether they mean well or not. But did anyone else notice how human that voice sounds?”
There were scattered nods.
“We already thought we might have cousins in the stars,” said the general sitting across from her, Dlazi. “So the aliens are humans. Doesn’t make them not aliens and doesn’t tell us anything about the universe that we didn’t already know.”
“It tells us a lot about their environmental needs and biology, though,” said the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. “It tells us they could live on our planet. They could eat our food. And they came here for some reason. And they’re not leaving.”
“That’s better for us than if they’re hostile and can’t live on our planet,” said the general. “Otherwise they’d have the option of scouring our planet clean of life from orbit. As long as they’re not going to do that, they have to come down here where we can reach them.”
“So our unlikely worst-case scenario is that they’re here to kill us all and we can’t stop them, right?” said Kara.
“Yes. The worst case scenario we can realistically plan for is that they come down here to fight us with their superior technology and—that might not be any different from the scenario where they destroy us from orbit but it might be that we can fight them in that case,” said the general. “I don’t think we know enough to guess at this point what weaponry they’d be able to use in that case.”
“Is it possible that they could want us as slaves?” asked Kara.
“Quite frankly they probably have robots better than us at anything humans can do.”
“So the best-case scenario here is that they’re here to embrace their long-lost cousins and give us what we need for a spacefaring civilization where no one has to work for a living ever again.”
“Yep.”
“They seem hostile,” said the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.
“They haven’t killed us yet,” said the general. “And they weren’t trying to, with whatever they did. I think they’re… aliens. Worried about things that don’t have anything to do with us, except that they had to go through our planet to get to them.”
“Can we trade with them?” Kara mused. “If we assume we can’t do anything for them, and their technology is better than ours… all we have that they could possibly want is land. I really don’t like that.”
The problem, she thought, was that technological progress hadn’t been fast enough. It would be stupid to blame herself for that when they were probably more than a century behind and she’d done very well at expanding public schooling. But it was the sort of thing that made her want to do more. Assuming of course that Utari survived. Assuming also that Utari could actually manage this kind of feat of cooperation and engineering, which was hard to imagine. Maybe the aliens were a hive mind of some kind?
“Can we steal from them?” said the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.
“I really doubt it but I think as we find out more about their capabilities we can start drawing up plans just in case,” said the general.
“Yes, do that,” said Kara. “For now we’ll let them know we’re listening if they want to talk to us but we understand why they’d want to wait and learn more Sueli—wait, how are they learning Sueli? Are they listening to our news?”
“That’s my guess,” said the general.
“That has implications for what we let them say. But that’s another question. For now we send them a response.”
----------------------------------------
The mothership received their response.
“See?” said Vyl. “They totally bought that we just don’t speak their language yet. We can just pretend to learn it in another week or something. They won’t know any better, and we can wait as long as we need to to figure out what we want to say to them.”
“I’m still not sure we should be talking to the torture planet without Vethani here.”
Vyl rolled her eyes. “Vethani’s great but the rest of us do have our own brains and we can use them. Also, you totally thought they’d notice I was making fun of them and I have a recording of us arguing about it and they did not.”
“They didn’t acknowledge noticing in any way we could pick up on.”
“Yeah, fine. Look, I’m just saying, if we do have to stay here…”
None of them wanted to do that. There were so many other worlds from which you could reach into this one. There had been too much time for other civilizations to take root here, too. Too many ways for someone (or something like Udhail) to come after them. And if they found themselves making the call that they had to stay, if the advance party didn’t come back, then…
Well, if they ended up needing to be on good terms with this planet, they were kind of screwed anyway. But the thing was… those people down there torturing each other were human beings. And it was hard to turn away from them.
----------------------------------------
Eventually they contacted Utari again.
“Hello. This is the spaceship Freedom’s Courtyard, addressing the lawful authorities of Utari. We would like to begin by apologizing for not realizing that our shuttle would injure any people or that you claimed the territory we excavated. Based on our earlier observations of your behavior we understood it to be a garbage dump. However, we urgently needed to send our advance scouts that way, and will need them to return. We will not be able to contact them to warn them that the path is blocked. We have immense but finite supplies and are nearing the end of a very long journey. Delaying to learn your language and ask permission could therefore have made the difference between life and death for all of us. We could still turn out not to be able to finish the journey. Our goal is to find a new planet to live on—and not to steal yours, which is only marginally suitable—and to escape the exploitation of our people by the immensely powerful creatures which treated us as property before. While we are here, we would like to offer your people some of our scientific knowledge and we would like to ask for safe passage when our scouts return. We await your response.”
Kara rubbed her temples. “Do we actually have any choice other than offering them safe passage?”
“Might be able to bury them,” said the general. “But they can clearly dig through bedrock.”
“They didn’t actually say this was an offer we were allowed to refuse,” said the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.
“They did not,” Kara agreed. “But if we say yes they might let us pretend. And I do want advanced scientific knowledge.”
“But why, if they’re so powerful, do they want to pretend to deal with us as equals, ask our permission to pass through our territory, and give us something in return?” asked the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. “They’re not even presenting it as charity. It could still be charity and they don’t want us to get hurt trying to fight them over the mysterious buried thing. Do we know what the mysterious buried thing even is?”
“It’s a place they went and then teleported away from. They say they expect to be able to teleport back to it. And most places don’t work like that. I think that’s as good an explanation as we’re going to get,” said the general.
“I think maybe they just want to see what we’ll do,” said Kara. “For fun. When you’re that powerful maybe you can afford to do that.” It was what she would do if she were that powerful but she didn’t say that. “As far as not wanting to bother conquering us, I don’t know as we should be surprised. I wouldn’t conquer this goddamn planet.”
“Madam,” the general began.
“I would conquer this goddamn planet if I were young and stupid. Are you suggesting the immensely powerful aliens who hold our fates in their hands are young and stupid?”
“I sure hope not,” said the general. “But they could be.”
“I don’t think they are but I don’t see how we can protect ourselves if they are. I think we should go ahead and accept their offer. If the knowledge is dangerous or wrong, it’s not like they couldn’t find some scientists to tell it to secretly and get them to, I don’t know, destroy the world or something.” And honestly whatever happened next might make for a fascinating show.
----------------------------------------
But going back to the present and the shuttle. They study the planet and collect data to analyze later when their computers are more power-efficient. They come to an agreement with Datsvan and eventually send Lilan to find out just how dangerous it is to interact with vrna.
The world beyond Datsvan's portal is hard to reach; there may be no other portals to it at all. It's out on the ragged edge of the multiverse. They can be alone in it.
The portal doesn't leave them in the middle of a star. The portal leaves them tens of millions of miles from the nearest star and so close to the nearest planet that they have to get farther, not closer, to get into the orbit they want. The gravity is nearly equal to that of the planet Yn ate, just slightly lower than that of Kara’s world, but the radius is less than two thousand miles; for it to be so dense the planet must be mostly iron.
They check that their computers are working more efficiently again and get started on the planetary climate model for Datsvan. Meanwhile they investigate this new planet and its solar system.
The planet they’re in orbit around turns out to be at least the second of at least seven and probably more in the system. The star has billions of years left (plenty of time to figure out how to revitalize a dying star once it becomes urgent). And, most important, the portal is in this system. Unless the planet below the portal is utterly awful, they will need a base on it at least, and once they’re already investing in a settlement there…
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
So it’s with a claustrophobic, choking sense of inevitability that Vethani tries to steel himself to look at the data they’re getting from the planet. This is what the universe has presented them with and they will accept it and be satisfied—and he’s not sure if he feels sick from the thought or just from the weightlessness now that they’re no longer accelerating.
Neth is already reading, and frowning thoughtfully. Lilan would be looking now too if she were here. Vethani doesn’t yet. He closes his eyes and thinks it through. The portal is important but they can look at the other planets in the system. In some ways being farther from it might even be safer.
If life on this planet would be unbearable he will simply not ask it of his people. If it would trap them in arcologies—well, the one and only time Lyrail has ever looked happy was when she stood outside on Yn’s dead planet and breathed what was left of its atmosphere and looked up at the blue and grey atmospheric haze that obscured the stars. The gravity brought her to her knees at first, and even once she was on her feet she was unsteady, but… she has never, since he’s known her, seemed less weighed down than she did then.
There are forty people—forty-one now, with Kara—that Vethani has to make sure their new home is acceptable for. That’s few enough that he can. No arcologies. No unending daytime or unmoving sunlight. No type A stars. No icy precipitation.
And for himself—he hasn’t put it into words better than “nothing ugly” and that’s not quite right but it’s not quite wrong either.
If he can’t have all that, he will find another world.
And now he faces the data. The air isn’t breathable. It isn’t dangerous, either—a lungful of it wouldn’t be fatal or even particularly harmful. There’s almost enough oxygen. He does some quick mental calculations; they might be able to excavate a deep enough trench that the air at the bottom would have a high enough partial pressure of oxygen but at that point the other gases might in fact be dangerous.
“Maybe we can get the oxygen back out of all that rust,” Neth says.
“Probably not safely or cheaply or quickly.”
“Isn’t this what we have the cyanobacteria for?” asks Lyrail.
“Yes but they’re slow,” says Vethani. “Maybe if we could seed a large body of water with them but those lakes aren’t large and there aren’t many of them. We could have the air breathable in a few centuries.”
“‘Breathable’ meaning…?” she asks.
“Oxygen at about a hundred sixty millimeters of mercury?”
“At a hundred no one’s going to die if there’s a leak.”
“I’d have thought you’d be the first to object to an atmosphere people can’t live in.”
She’s silent for a moment and then she smiles at him. “Supplemental oxygen’s not a hard problem to solve. And some altitudes will be better than others here.”
“They will, but I don’t think any part of this planet is habitable as-is.”
“Comets, maybe,” says Neth. “Might have some oxygen and be redirectable.”
“Do we even want this one, setting that aside?” Var asks. “It’s awfully small and if something comes through the portal we’ll have no warning. Unless we put a base on the portal moon in the other world, maybe.”
“We should do that,” says Vethani.
“But setting the oxygen issue aside, would we want to live here?” says Var. “Some of these areas look like they have problems with blowing dust. The days are an awkward length. And suppose we cover it in photosynthetic forests and the oxygen goes way up and in three or four centuries the carbon dioxide levels have gone way the fuck down. Will it still be warm enough then?”
“There’s not enough water on the planet to cover it in forest,” says Neth. “A forest, definitely, if we can keep bringing the water where it’s needed…”
“And if we had more water we’d have more water vapor in the atmosphere,” says Vethani. “But it’s probably possible to find a place that’ll still be habitable if the temperature goes up or down a degree or two.”
“And by ‘habitable’ you mean…” says Var.
“I mean daytime temperatures consistently above freezing and wet-bulb temperature consistently below thirty-five. And not underwater. And—something I am taking for granted about every part of this planet—being exposed to the atmosphere will not kill anyone. Standing on the surface will not crush anyone.”
Var makes a skeptical face at that last part.
“Really. We’ve been accelerating nearly that fast this leg of the trip.”
“And it’s terrible.”
Vethani sighs. “We’ll obviously look at everything else in the system. And—is it worth it to you to look outside this system?”
Var bites her tongue for a while, thinking. “No, I think if we’re going to have a base on that other moon anyway…”
“It would be so much better to be able to leave the livestock anywhere and everywhere and to just… have enough air for everyone to breathe everywhere they go… but I don’t think we’re going to find anywhere better. This much oxygen is already not that common on uninhabited planets. I think realistically this is what we have,” says Vethani.
“Hey,” says Lyrail. “Probe’s got a good angle on that ridge and—take a look.”
Vethani looks. There’s a chain of old reddish hills that were once, long ago, volcanoes. The photo was taken at just the right angle, and in just the right lighting, to show the golden zircon inclusions off to their best effect. It looks the way sunsets in nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere look, though it’s not in fact sunset in the picture. He would like to sit and watch those hills with an audiobook and a cup of tea. He would like very much to show them to Lilan.
“I want it,” says Var.
“It won’t look like that all the time and we can always decorate if we find an uglier planet that seems more habitable,” says Vethani.
Lyrail rolls her eyes. “Can everyone in this conversation stop doing that. That thing. That thing where everyone is arguing the opposite of their own position.”
“I think it’s beautiful and I want to move to this planet,” says Vethani.
“I’m sold,” says Var. “Gravity or no.”
“It seems fine,” says Neth. “We should still look at the others and talk to Lilan.”
“I… hate it, but realistically nothing’s going to be any better,” says Lyrail, “and I want to get out of this shuttle sooner rather than later.”
Var laughs. “Me too.”
“Maybe that’s why she wanted to go meet the alien,” says Lyrail.
And that’s when the model they’re running for Datsvan lets them know it has three guesses about the fish and can’t do better with the data it has.
----------------------------------------
They come back. They share what they’ve learned. Datsvan starts trying to answer the remaining questions in the way of saving X-Ts-56789-v. Lilan agrees that the tiny iron planet sounds like a fine place to move to.
They go back to find out more about the rest of the solar system and drop off some cyanobacteria on the new planet. Then they go back to X-Ts-56789-v’s moon one more time, to confirm that, so far, Lilan hasn’t caught anything from Datsvan. But she’s willing to wait longer, in case there’s anything with a very long incubation period... and, just a little bit, because she wants to be with someone she hasn’t known all her life.
They leave her and return to Utari.
----------------------------------------
Vethani isn't happy at all when he hears how much they’ve taught Utari but Vyl, it turns out, doesn't care very much what anyone else says when she knows she’s right.
“Look,” she says, “they’re stuck there. They don’t have enough to eat. They didn’t know about lead. They keep losing sleep for stupid reasons. They don’t want to be like this. They just can’t do better. And they could with better technology. Half the shit they pull is on the excuse that their vaccines aren’t good enough and their immune systems aren’t good enough and they have no effective antivirals. Well. Had.”
“I want you to talk to Kara,” he says, getting up.
“I did.”
“You did? Oh, no, a different Kara, not that one.”
The background shows him heading for the shuttle garden. He calls out and waves to someone in front of him and behind the camera. He says something in Sueli and Vyl hastily turns on subtitles.
Then he offers his computer to someone with a criminal’s tattoo on her face.
“Hi,” the person who is apparently also called Kara says in Sueli. She sounds odd; Vyl wonders if she’s from one of the supposedly independent countries full of oppressed minorities. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”
“Vethani’s worried it’s irresponsible of me to give Utari any scientific knowledge given they’re horrible. I did anyway because everyone there is obviously poor and obviously wouldn’t have to act like this if they had any choice. Like if you had effective antivirals. Which I’ve told them some stuff about.”
“Okay. Make sure the old lady’s not hoarding it all.”
“The old lady?”
“The prime minister. You know. The name stealer.”
“You’re older?” She’s remarkably well-preserved if so, considering Utari hasn’t cured aging yet.
“No, that’s the joke. Anyway, don’t let her hoard it.”
“I’m not exactly going out of my way to encrypt information about effective antivirals.”
“Uh, in that case, don’t tell them about weapons. Actually don’t do that anyway.”
“Everything can be a weapon but I’m making them do their own legwork figuring out how.”
“That’s fair. Antivirals would be good but would they be like antibiotics? Do the germs end up resistant?”
“It’s kind of complicated but if you’re careful about it they can stay a strict improvement over not having them available pretty much indefinitely. Actually, antibiotics too, but there are a few tricks to making that work. Oh, also I gave them plans for better windmills and more efficient solar panels. I wanted to explain nuclear but I am not actually stupid so I stuck to wind and solar but you have to get off of coal. Eventually if you burn too much of it the tiny atmospheric changes build up to something you probably don’t want given that your planet is already habitable and doesn’t need a greater greenhouse effect. I guess it could stand to have a little more of one.”
“A what?”
“You know how blankets work? Well, the atmosphere is a blanket, and you can make it a fuzzier one.”
“That sounds amazing but having worked in hundred-degree heat I think we should not do that.”
“Hundred? Sorry, I think you use different temperature units.”
“Freezing is thirty-two.”
“Yep, different units. Anyway I’ve told them a lot.”
“I hope it doesn’t just make things worse somehow.”
“Is that likely?”
“No but you never know with the old lady.”
“We’ll be careful. It’s just… look, I don’t want to offend you, but Utari is horrific and so is the entire rest of the planet.”
Kara smiles. It reminds her weirdly of Vethani. “Do you know what I did?”
“You stole a goat,” Vyl says, reading it off her cheek.
She waves dismissively. “That’s just what they caught me at. I was saving people. From the old lady—do not let anyone catch you calling her that. It’s very rude.”
“Well, but anyway, Vethani thinks this is a bad thing and I shouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s a risky thing and doing it could have gone horribly—could still go horribly—but how else are you going to stay on good enough terms with them to get everyone through the portal?”
“Oh, we don’t need that, really, Another ten years of space-war-focused technological development and it could have been a problem. I was thinking about that. We could have had problems, if the expedition was stupendously unlucky. But… it’s not a problem we expected to have and it’s not a problem we have. I just thought you all were doing the best you could and you’d do better if there were more you could do.”
“Mostly I’ve always thought it’d be better if the old lady could do less but…”
“She says everything she’s done to hurt you is about keeping your planet safe and peaceful, and even if it’s not true it would probably help if she didn’t have the excuse.”
“Hm. Yeah, maybe. It’ll be… a different place, if she stops saying she has no choice about it all. No matter what else happens.”
“I hope so. While I have you, what’s the news lying about?”
Kara shrugs. “I don’t know what it’s saying anymore. Oh, I know they covered up an outbreak of Hani’s disease a few years ago. That’s the kind of thing that you wouldn’t hear about.”
“…Should I worry about that?”
“About catching it somehow while not leaving your airtight spaceship on one of the moons? No. Maybe. Fuck, sometimes it seems like it spreads by magic. Uh. Anyway. I just mean… things like that. They want you to think everything is… maybe more backwards than you, but smooth. Like everything just works.”
“Does it?”
“No, nothing works and the entire country runs on bribery.”
“Why?”
“God, I don’t know. Maybe because we have more than forty people who don’t all like and trust each other.”
Vyl makes a face. “Well, that’s not great.”
“No.”
“Maybe Vethani can keep that from happening.”
Kara scoffs. “I don’t think giving one person enough power to stop it would improve anything. I really don’t.”
“Yeah. I… should finish talking with Vethani.”
“So should I, but later. Hey, Vethani!”
But there’s some time while the camera’s still pointed at Kara. “Let’s talk again later,” says Vyl.
----------------------------------------
When Vethani is done talking to Vyl, Kara insists on talking to him.
“Vyl told me some things about your plans for getting people through the portal that made me realize I wasn’t sure you were planning on bringing anyone else with us.”
“What, from Utari? I want to. I have concerns but I do very much want to.”
“What concerns?”
“First, we don’t have vaccines for a full set of the local diseases—even Utari doesn’t. Second, we don’t have the ability to take everyone who might want to come at once, and it might be feasible to maintain relations so we can make another trip. Third—what if they recognize you and demand you back?”
Her smile is tentative and confused and she seems stunned into silence.
“What? I don’t want you tortured anymore.”
She smiles warmly. “I like you too. We can try to disguise me. But, Vethani, I don’t want myself safe that badly.”
“I—” need your eggs, he almost says, and then he catches himself and doesn’t say that because it’s the sort of thing Udhail would have said, and then of course he remembers that if he trades her for a hundred others he really doesn’t need them anyway.
It seems like a bad trade somehow in a way that’s very hard for him to pin down and seems purely arbitrary.
“I will miss you,” he says.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” she says slyly. “I’m very good at what I do. But get me some really, really opaque makeup, will you?”
“…You realize we can get rid of that tattoo, don’t you?”
“Oh.” She makes a face. A confused face, he thinks, as if maybe she doesn’t know what she’s feeling. He’s not sure when he got this confident about reading her expressions; she’s a stranger and yet she doesn’t feel like one.
But then, Datsvan feels oddly familiar, too. So maybe some of what he attributed to knowing people for a long time is really just… people, in general.
“I feel like I should want that,” says Kara. “And I… do.”
“Why should you want that?” he asks.
“Because I hate them and this is how they tried to mark me so everyone would know I’m not a citizen anymore. It means no one should listen to me and even if they let me go I shouldn’t get to teach kids or publish books or—or bear children. Because I’m not—something there should be more of in the next generation. And I don’t see why they should get to decide that, when they’re worse, but I wasn’t going to become a teacher anyway and now I can’t have kids so I don’t see why it should be written on my face so everyone knows.”
He doesn’t know how to deal with all of that but he knows how to deal with some individual parts of it. “This is a tangent but what sort of can’t have kids is it?”
“Tubal ligation. Why?”
“That’s reversible. But… later, obviously.”
“Huh. So I can—social construction of gender is more of a tangent.”
“It’s one I’ve been desperately wondering about.”
“In… cultures Utari calls primitive… they believe in some kind of thing that’s different between men and women. Something that stays with you your whole life. But in Utari we don’t believe in souls and we do believe there’s nothing men can do that women can’t, and nothing women can do that men can’t, except when it comes to having children. It’s just biology, and we’re learning how to change biology. So if you can’t have children, and you’re not even the kind of person where that’s a problem to solve, you’re something else. A—third thing. Criminals and—I don’t know if you even have this concept, but very, very stupid people. People with nothing to pass down to the next generation.”
“…Well, we can certainly change our biology, but all of the rest of that sounds stupid,” says Vethani. “My opinion of whether you should teach anyone anything doesn’t depend on whether you can bear children, which you can do if you want to.”
“So you still think of me as a woman?”
“Obviously. Now I’m terribly curious what you think I am.”
“A man? No, if that were true you wouldn’t ask. Why are you an edge case?”
“I can’t father children without technological assistance right now, but I could change that if I wanted to. I do have children, but I provided the oocytes for them and I didn’t gestate them, so I’m not sure whether you’d call me their mother or their father. And I’m waiting until I’m not so busy before I have any more major surgery.”
It seems to take her a moment to react to that. Then she raises her eyebrows. “I was not expecting that. You’re an alien and ‘man’ and ‘woman’ aren’t categories that make sense here.”
“If you say so. So you want us to try to bring more of your people with us. Is there any reason that shouldn’t wait until after our people are safely established on another planet?”
“…There isn’t except that I don’t want them to stay here and be tortured the whole round trip. How long does it take, anyway, by our calendar?”
“It’s been a quarter of a year or so. It was the same amount of time here as it was for us.”
“Did that part not go without saying?”
“There are worlds where time passes differently depending on how much you’re accelerating.”
“Creepy. You think it’s worth—you think I should think it’s worth leaving people behind that long?”
“Longer. We’ll need to make multiple trips and we should start with people who are free to leave.”
“Ugh.”
“We’ll only be able to bring prisoners once before they start trying to get in our way.”
“What if we topple the goddamn name-stealer? What then?”
“Then things get complicated and I don’t know if we’d be able to save anyone.”
“But it might fix everything. If the goddamn empire wasn’t in charge of the entire world. If people had more choices and could leave Utari without needing to move to another planet.”
“It might. Of course, deposing Kara isn’t the same thing as breaking Utari hegemony.”
“Do you want a list of people who’d be able to take over so you know who else to get?”
“Do you know what happens when an entire country falls like that? Your world’s political history wasn’t available to you without Utari’s censorship. The parts of mine that were available to me were ancient and involved societies very different from yours. We have to guess from first principles and I don’t like that.”
“Worst-case scenario,” says Kara, “is that all the propaganda is true. They wouldn’t not mention reasons the empire is good, and I don’t think they believe their own bullshit—not all of them, at least—so they shouldn’t be very wrong. So basically it’s just which of their warnings we believe and care about. They say there’d be wars and rebellions, and they’re lying about how many of those already exist and they constantly slander rebels—I’m really confident about that part—and actually it’s sort of like there’s a war already, in that everyone’s afraid and a lot of resources go into keeping people in line, so I don’t think that part matters. And they say strong central governments are necessary for high rates of vaccination and literacy. But actually if they’re the only people who could have secret bioweapons, they don’t want their people immune to everything. If there are more… I guess there are rebels already, though, so I’m not sure if that argument is relevant… I guess it’s possible there’d be problems there. With vaccines, since they’re hard to make. Literacy I don’t buy. I don’t think there’s that much of a benefit from scale there. Hmm… contact tracing might break down but if they’d repeal the goddamn mask ban it wouldn’t matter and—actually I think this is just a bad trade and epidemics are better.”
“In which case the question of vaccination rates is much less important, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. And the empire standardizes language but I think that’s actually a bad thing, too. There’ll be a price to pay but it’ll be worth it. And then… it’ll be different living in whatever there is after the empire falls.”
“You’re going back?” He can’t put his finger on why he’s disappointed about that. He won’t stop her, though; Udhail kept people.
“I… don’t want to abandon my friends or leave the name-stealer in power, and Utari is where I have… you know, job skills that matter, where I speak the language and where I know people. I guess if we’re getting my people out then I won’t know people there and I will know people on your planet. And I do want to learn Krydhav. And I want kids someday, and not in a place where their lives are circumscribed by a horrific dictatorial regime that makes up public safety concerns to justify keeping them in—god, if you’d asked me a year ago I would’ve said ‘in a fancy a prison’ but now… I don’t know. Maybe that’s still what I think.” She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ve changed my mind on that. Just… the fanciness matters.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, I don’t want to have them in a world that’s still reshaping itself, either. And if I want to have them at all I guess I need your help.”
“You could get that fixed while we’re here. I think if I were you I wouldn’t, because it’s not like there’s much reason to want to conceive that way when you could instead create embryos in vitro and try only your favorites. And I don’t see why you’d want to get pregnant at all, let alone on a primitive world where they can’t guarantee your safety and probably don’t even want to try.”
“…Right, obviously you have some kind of option besides growing babies in your own bodies. Why did I assume you didn’t.”
“Right now we don’t but once we’ve gotten everything set up we will. We haven’t been having children on the trip and we don’t at all have the facilities for it.”
“Well. Sounds like I should be moving to the new planet with you after I save Utari.”
“That would… make me happy.” That’s okay to say, right? That doesn’t make him like Udhail, right?
“Vethani, you sound very much like you’re trying not to let me know you have a crush on me and if that’s happening I think you should just tell me so I can turn you down and promise you I like you in some way that isn’t that one.”
“I don’t know all your relationship words and I have no idea how relationships are structured on your planet and I also don’t know how to categorize my feelings toward you except to say that they’re not the same as my feelings toward anyone else. But I think all of these problems can be solved by learning new words, which means we should solve them immediately.”
She smiles. “You’re so right. Well, there’s romance, where you date people—you start out with two or three at once, and talk to each of them alone, and do things like see movies together and go for walks in the park and maybe try kissing, and then maybe you stop or maybe you pick one and focus on that one and talk about what it would be like if you got married, and then you talk about children and you kiss some more and go on more dates and then you maybe have sex with them and maybe get married after a while—marriage is the one where you have children together because you want kids and you want them to have kids and you think you could love their kids, and you want to promise to be together and, like… every day you wake up next to them. Is that the thing?”
“That’s what I have with Lilan. Not that I would mind waking up next to you, exactly.”
“Hmm. There’s friendship. That’s the one where you do things together but the things are mostly less… atmospheric… and you’d do the same thing with two friends at once. And—a lot of this is sort of squishy and not actually really distinct, okay? But romance is about figuring out whether you want to make a life together and friendship is about making space in your separate lives for each other. Is that the thing?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure how I’d tell.”
“Seems like a weird thing not to be sure about but, uh… there’s friends with benefits, which is where you have sex but you’re just friends outside of the sex. And there’s a different thing where you have… just the benefits and not the friendship.”
“It’s not about sex.”
“Uh… what other kinds of relationships do people have… there’s mentorship, where one person teaches another things and invests in their future—in primitive cultures, this is considered exclusively parental, which is a reasonable idea in the conditions where people came up with it but not useful in a modern society. And, mmm… the complement of that is trying to model yourself on what someone else thinks you should be. That’s called having a role model.”
“I do want to teach you things and invest in your future. But it feels like a glaring problem to be fixed that you aren’t my equal yet.”
“I like you.”
“How?”
“Uh… I like that you want me to be stronger and I like that you… want me to want the things I want to want? Sometimes people used to think it’d be good if I were more mature and stopped worrying so much about how awful Utari is or stopped wanting to be really completely free. And you don’t want me to sand down the sharp parts of myself. I… I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
“You’re welcome, of course, but how would you categorize it?”
“It’s like… it’s a little like what I wish I had with my parents, but I wouldn’t exactly want either of us to be the other one’s kid. I think maybe it’s like you’re the brother I never had. Like it would be weird to walk away from it. Like you’re someone who… is trying to get better at things, and so am I, and we’re going to be here for each other and make each other stronger. Like we’re… weirdly similar people, and it means we have an easy time of a lot of things that are usually hard in relationships. I don’t know. I wonder if this is what having siblings feels like.”
“I have full siblings but I don’t have insight into what that feels like when not everyone is raised and owned by the same person and there are enough people for an incest taboo.”
“We could do research about that but I think the important thing is that we know what we’re talking about and we have a word for it. And I guess secondarily whether other people assume the right things when we tell them.”
“Well, no one I know will assume anything but that we’re being silly.”
“Hmm. Can’t we tell them it’s an important Utari thing that they just don’t understand?”
“Of course. But then it won’t be an assumption.”
“Fair. I think people I know would assume we were… very closely allied and definitely not having sex. And maybe think we remembered each other as children and thought of each other in a way that was… influenced by that, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound entirely right but I suppose it wouldn’t be terrible.”
“I want to make it formal somehow but… in Utari you adopt people through the courts and I don’t respect Utari’s courts. And in primitive cultures they did bloody rituals that could give you hepatitis. So I don’t know how we’d mark it.”
“With oaths before witnesses, obviously.”
“…Nothing involving oaths is obvious to me. That’s the sort of thing people do in stories and in the stories it’s always a mistake. There’ll always be some completely ridiculous coincidence and it’ll turn out your oaths contradict each other or some silly nonsense like that and then you’re screwed.”
“I suppose. Oaths have historically been extremely important for my people’s safety and freedom.”
“I guess stories are just stories but… still.”
“Oaths are too important to ask you to make one if you don’t want to.”
“Okay. We’ll figure something out.”
“Yes. And right now let’s table it until everyone is safe.”
----------------------------------------
They end up needing to mine Utari’s moon for extra metal and deconstruct the mothership entirely to bring everything safely down to the planet’s surface and through the tunnel. Eventually their very large fleet of rather cramped ships makes it to the portal moon where they met Datsvan.
Nearly everyone goes through immediately to start working on the colony. But Vethani’s written up all his plans, and there’s Lilan to check in with. He stays behind on the moon for a while. Kara asks him privately if he’s hoping to be left alone in the shuttle with Lilan; he just kind of blinks at her and eventually points out that he’s going to be busy doing alien diplomacy and has never actually had the space to cultivate the same level of privacy intuitions as people in Utari. So she gives Lyrail a hug goodbye and stays on the shuttle.
Lilan is still healthy and eager to be somewhere familiar again. Kara hides in Lyrail’s bunk for the first hour or so after Lilan gets back.
Datsvan has looked at the planet some more and been able to answer the remaining questions about its dying ecosystem. After Vethani and Lilan have had time to catch up, all four of them get together to talk about that. Well, sort of together. Datsvan stays on his own ship, watching by crystal ball. He waves to the camera once everyone’s in view.
“I know what’s wrong with the planet,” he says. “It’s the fungal disease that’s been affecting the insects. The leafy creatures that eat them up in the mountains are starving. Their leaves produce chemicals that the river fish use to let them know they’ve reached the right place to spawn. There are additional substantial problems but they all flow from the disease, I think, and I think they might resolve if we dealt with the disease. Any ideas?”
“Vaccine?” asks Vethani. “If I understand correctly, your magical version would be easier to distribute.”
“It would be but it wouldn’t work—it’s not something their immune systems can respond to adequately with arbitrary forewarning.”
“Well, that makes it harder,” says Vethani.
“There are insect species that aren’t susceptible but they’re exclusively ones that never visit the mountains and I don’t think that’s a coincidence—I can show you some of my notes…” He holds a page up to the camera. “So as you can see unless I’ve missed something it’s not possible for any of the high-altitude-adapted insects to resist the pathogen.”
“Replace them as a food source for the highland animals, then,” says Vethani. “Some genetically engineered organism that produces the same nutrients and isn’t vulnerable.”
“Can you do that? Because I can’t.”
“When everything is set up for the colony, yes. Not while most of our supplies are either packed up or in use.”
“How long will that take?”
“Oh, less than one of this planet’s years to be ready to start. Do you think it can last that long?”
“Probably.”
“Listen. I have a colony to build. I’ll lend you some equipment and I think this is a worthy goal but if one of us is going to spend the time while I’m freeing up that equipment pinning down our plans it should be you. You can read about our genetic engineering and ask me questions but most of my attention will be elsewhere.”
“Of course. I’ll try to figure out something more specific than ‘some kind of plant’ and let you know when we need you.”
And they arrange all that.