Becky Chambers [Chambers - To Be Taught, if Fortunate

Contents

Julie Branson

Becky Chambers is the author of the Wayfarers books, which currently include: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; A Closed and Common Orbit; and Record of a Spaceborn Few. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Womens Prize for Fiction, among others, and won the Prix Julia Verlanger in 2017. She grew up in a family heavily involved in space science, and hopes to see Earth from orbitone day.

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THE WAYFARERS SERIES

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

A Closed and Common Orbit

Record of a Spaceborn Few

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Becky Chambers 2019

The right of Becky Chambers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781473697171

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

To Emily, who doesnt have to read this, but did make me think the right thing.

If you read nothing else weve sent home, please at least read this. I ask knowing full well that this request is antithetical to what I believe in my heart of hearts. Our mission reports contain our science, and the science is by far the most important thing here. My crew and I are a secondary concern. Tertiary, even.

But all the same, we do have a lot riding on someone picking this up.

You dont have to rush. This file will have taken fourteen years to reach Earth, and assuming that we have the good luck of someone reading it right away and replying straight after, itd take that file another fourteen years. So, while we cant wait around forever, the urgency like so many things in space travel is relative.

You could, I suppose, skip right to the end. You wouldnt be the first person to do such a thing, and honestly, thats where the bit that affects us most will be laid out. And maybe, if you already know who we are and what were about if youre someone who sent us here, perhaps you can do that and still understand. But even if thats the case, I do think the why of what we need from you is important. Im biased, of course, and doubly so: Not only is this account about me and my crew, but were scientists. We live and breathe why .

Its been fifty years since we left Earth, and I dont know whose eyes or ears this message has reached. I know how much a world can change within the bookends of a lifetime. Causes shift and memories blur. I also dont know how much you personally know of the universe beyond our home planet. Perhaps youre one of the knowledgeable sorts Ive already mentioned, who can rattle off spaceflight history better than even I can and who shares the same goals as me. Or perhaps youre someone who lives outside my bubble. Perhaps this is all new to you. When I use words like exoplanet or red dwarf, do you know what I mean? This is not a test, and I absolutely do not judge if terms such as these mean nothing to you. On the contrary, I want to speak to you as much as I want to speak to my peers maybe even more so. If I ask what Im asking only of people who agree with me at the outset, with whom I already share a dream and a language, then theres no point in asking at all.

For this reason, Ill do my best to speak to expert and novice both. I likewise feel it important to start from the beginning, so that the context of our situation is clear. I doubt what I write will be objective. I will almost certainly contradict myself.

I do promise that Ill tell the truth.

My name is Ariadne ONeill, and Im the flight engineer aboard the OCA spacecraft Merian. My crewmates are mission specialists Elena Quesada-Cruz, Jack Vo, and Chikondi Daka. Were part of the Lawki program, a broad ecological survey of exoplanets that is, planets that do not orbit our sun known or suspected to harbour life. Our mission (Lawki ) is focused on the four habitable worlds in orbit around the red dwarf star Zhenyi (BA-): the icy moon Aecor, and the terrestrial planets Mirabilis, Opera, and Votum. Im currently stationed on the surface of the last on that list.

I was born in Cascadia on July , 2081 . On that day, it had been fifty-five years, eight months, and nine days since a human being had been in space. I was the two-hundred-and-fourth person to go back, and part of the sixth extrasolar crew. Im writing to you in the hope that we will not be the last.

I never knew an Earth that was unaware of life elsewhere. The Cetus probe scooped up bacteria-laden samples from Europas geysers twenty-nine years before my birth; the first rover photographs of fossil arthropods on Mars arrived while my parents were still in trade school. I dont know what it was like in those lonely years before, when our view of Earths place in the universe was one of a solitary haven, an oasis in a galactic desert. In some ways, I wish I did. I wish I couldve been there the day the first positive results were radioed back from Cetus. I wish I could tell you what it was like to be in one of the old mission controls or research labs or newsrooms, learning in real time with the rest of the planet that our small worldview had been magnificently blown apart. But by the start of my life, just three decades later, extraterrestrial life was common knowledge, something every kid took for granted. Humans are nothing if not adaptable.

Another wish: that I could tell you I always wanted to be an astronaut. Thatd be a much better story, wouldnt it? Some of my colleagues could (and can) claim that. An entire life set in motion by the sight of Saturns rings through a sidewalk telescope, or a furious sense of purpose imbued the instant they saw those first fuzzy images of a cloud-flecked blue-green exoplanet. I can claim none of those inspirations as my own. I was four when the Tarter space telescope photos came back, and I do actually remember being shown them. My mother lifted me onto her lap in front of her tablet. Her voice was hushed with wonder, and she held me tight.

Look, honey, she said. Thats a planet from around a different star. Its got air and oceans just like we have.

What I said next is lost to time and the fluff of memory, but what I do recall clearly is utter nonchalance. The picture was boring, and while the factoid that came with it was new and somewhat interesting, I was four. New and somewhat interesting applied to about ninety percent of my day, in everything from the development of a scab, to a cartoon Id never seen, to an unexpected flavour of juice at lunch. Its difficult to assign value to discovery when you havent sorted out the parameters of reality yet. As such, the significance of the first photographic confirmation of a habitable exoplanet was lost on me. I suppose every childhood is one of blind assumptions.