Lightspeed: Year One

Before then, as a child embroiled in misconceptions, I dreamed of my father trapped at the bottom of the Bo’s oceans, assailed by giant barbed tentacles in underground caves. Now he is indeed held prisoner, as best the Bo understand the term, and while hurtling towards him in a prison all its own, my subconscious returns to these vague, inky nightmares of my youth. When I wake for meals, taken with the crew in a long, narrow galley sporting tiny portholes to the stars, we can hear the Bo singing through the ventilation shafts. I find it hard sometimes just to chew.

The captain sits with me the day before our arrival. He has the appropriate look of a spaceman—hardened, lank, with an indifferent cast about his beard, hands lanced with burns and calluses from his work. I think he expects some move on my part for his companionship—the novice traveler’s last, desperate cleaving to the familiar before ejection into the great and terrible unknown—but I’ve decided to wait for the return trip to make such an overture, and only then if I can’t bring my father home.

Captain Sedgwick sets a small parcel before me.

“What’s this?”

In the wrapping I find two small devices, each the size of an earbud.

“White noise,” he says. “You’ll need it. To work, to sleep.”

“Is it that loud?”

“It’s that constant.”

“I have a portable.”

“That’s not enough. Here—” He shows me the settings, each one’s capacity to block out Bo songs on select frequencies. “You’re going to be speaking, I gather? For the trial?”

“Of course. But surely then—”

“It never stops. It can’t stop. You know the story of the first ambassador?”

“And the last, yes.” I worry he’ll go on anyway, but the captain accepts my response at face value, or at least seems not to unduly favor the sound of his own voice.

“Well, hold to it, then. They abbreviate nothing. Sentences can go on for days, and they don’t take kindly to being told to keep it short. You’re better off just blocking out the background bits.”

“Thanks.”

I remember the story of the ambassador from Conflict Differentials at the Academy, where it served as a classic anecdote on the limits of preparation. The poor, over-educated man in this case thought to ask what the Bo called themselves and their home world, so he might see both proper names used throughout the galaxy in place of other species’ words. Pleased by this gesture, the Bo proceeded to speak the names as they did everything else—at length, and sparing no historical or biological detail. For the first three hours, captivated by the sudden wealth of data, the ambassador recorded everything, noting patterns where he could, grappling with obscure referents whenever they emerged, but by the fourth, exhausted, and thinking at last of the realpolitik of his original query, he asked if there might be some shorter variant he could write down instead.

Though slow to speak, his counterparts were surprisingly quick to anger, abbreviation an act of offense, of disdain, with no equal among their kind. In the immediacy of their contempt, they gave the ambassador one syllable, Bo, to serve for both requests, and thereafter declared a complete disinterest in diplomacy with the rest of the galaxy, its vast species all clearly lacking either the intelligence or civility to learn real words.

The utterance of these vehement declarations of course took a week all its own, during which time the ambassador suffered a massive heart attack from the constant, thunderous rebukes directed against his person, and soon after—one hopes with a modicum of regret—the Bo shipped his body and field notes home. No ambassadorship has since existed on their planet, and even scientists avoid the territory. My father is the first in four human generations to make Bo his home.

Captain Sedgwick hesitates at the entrance to my berth. “Your father . . . ”

“Yes?”

“If he’s found guilty . . . ”

Now it’s my turn to hesitate. “Like you said, the Bo don’t abbreviate anything. And they don’t take kindly to those who do.”

Captain Sedgwick nods, drumming his hand once on the frame of my door. I study the floor so as not to watch him when he goes.

I had never even seen a picture of my father until his vid showed up at my office, requesting my presence on an alien planet with no readily discernible criminal code. Still, when the Bo bring him to meet my shuttle—his hair long, matted and graying; his body broad, and lean, and gaunt—I can’t help thinking how much he’s changed, how tired he now looks.