To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Author:Becky Chambers [Chambers, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781473697171
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2019-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Opera

I remained in front of the mirror for much longer than I had the two times before. The sun was large in Opera’s sky, so I did not need to shine. The gravity was on par with Earth, so I did not need to be strong. There was much about Opera that was like Earth, in fact – its size, its atmosphere, its temperature range. I needed nothing special for Opera, so I was given nothing. My previous gifts were gone, no longer maintained by the patch on my arm. The radiation and antifreeze supplementations remained, of course, but beyond that, I was just … me.

Looking in the mirror, I wasn’t sure I liked what that equated to. I was almost eleven years older than when I’d left Earth. That’s not so much time, but the changes of ageing had largely escaped my notice, distracted as I was by the more dramatic differences of somaforming. I didn’t mind the lines in my face, but I also didn’t remember their development. My hair hadn’t grown too much in the five years spent in torpor, but the frequent shaving meant I never saw it much longer than maybe a centimetre. Now, I saw frequent threads of wintry grey among the black tufts. My body was average, healthy, nothing out of the ordinary. That was the problem. Without the glitter, I felt dull; without the brawn, puny. To my eyes, I looked ill, and the sight made me sink.

I found my crewmates where I’d bid them goodnight, down in the control room, arranged around the comms monitor. Jack shook his head at me as I floated through the door.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nothing?’

He shook his head again.

‘Have you run a—’

‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘Everything’s as it was when we left. All green lights.’

Chikondi floated in the corner, silent in thought and distant in gaze.

‘They can’t just be gone,’ I said.

‘No,’ Jack said in agreement. ‘Even if funding ran out entirely, they’d tell us. They wouldn’t just say, whoops, oh well, no more paychecks, guess we’ll fuck off. No, something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.’

‘I’ll check the comms again,’ I said. ‘I’ll do another full hardware check.’ My gut said the problem wasn’t on our end, but with this, we couldn’t be too sure.

‘What do we do,’ asked Chikondi, ‘if we hear nothing?’

‘What we came here to do,’ Elena said. ‘We’ve received no mission updates, so that means the mission stands. We do our job here, we go to Votum, we do our job there, we go home, and we find out what happened.’

I stared at her, and the weight of what she was saying sunk in. From my internal sense of time, we hadn’t heard from OCA in seven months, which, to me, was a problem I’d discovered the day before. But of course, that wasn’t the shape of things at all, not when you factored in the transit time. We hadn’t heard from OCA in five and a half years. Chikondi wasn’t asking what we would do now, in the absence of contact.

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