Lightspeed: Year One

Bo is a tidally-locked world, one side of the planet forever scorched by the heat and light of its sun, the other cast in perpetual darkness and cold. Yet for a particular stretch of land along the circumference between opposing halves, the constant flux of hot and cold creates an oasis where life somehow prevails. What manner of life is debatable, however: where the shuttle sets down—presumably a metropolis, from the intensity of Bo songs alone—it is foggy and dark, and I think it no wonder that a human should look wilted under such an oppressive absence of sun.

At the very least, the Bo do not have my father in restraints when I arrive; indeed, they seem perfectly uncertain how best to handle him, and say as much in ceaseless song to one another, their hind-legs and throat sacs rumbling with agitated words on at least two different wavelengths apiece. I wish I could be so open with my own uncertainty, approaching my father for the first time with no sense of what to do next. Shake hands? Embrace?

My father bows his head, then looks at me with an uncomfortable smile. “Hello, Nia. I’m glad you came.”

Be angry. Yes. This is an option I’d forgotten, a feeling I’d pushed aside for years. It rears its head now at my father’s proximity, the almost amused quality of guilt upon his face. Be angry, yes, and make damn sure the Bo spare my father’s life, so I have time to be angry some more.

The Bo have not yet finished their death songs for the one my father is said to have killed, and the city rumbles with this unrelenting grief as we walk the briny length of the docks under escort. Marsh homes emerge to either side of us in the fog, while a thread of golden light persists on distant waters, recalling the intractable sun just beyond. Absent a routine for criminal courts, the Bo permit my father to move where he will during waking hours, but he is under strict curfew, and no Bo will look favorably upon escape.

“If they cannot speak the way they must, they are silent,” my father says. “The Bo who came with you—he said nothing, of course. That’s how they survive on the rare occasions they travel among us.”

“So if they’re suddenly silent, no one’s going to come running.”

“Right. But it’s still uncommon. Most often, it signals an impending regression.”

“Which they do alone, away from the noise?”

“Quite the opposite. They regress in plain sight, with as much noise around them as possible.” My father pauses, a measure of excitement rising in his voice. “Actually, it’s what I came here to study—the function of that regression, its mechanisms.” When I make no reply he continues, gathering steam:

“You see, evolutionarily, the Bo are already extraordinary. They exist in a narrow margin of viable territory in the middle of a planet of extremes, so of course there’s little competition, and few possible niches to fill. Consequently, they lack the evolutionary incentive to evolve fully out of vestigial forms, and boast a wealth of intermediate features practically unheard of at this level of sentience. But then, as if that weren’t enough, there’s also their ability to regress, a process we’ve only seen among rudimentary species before—aquatic animals, mostly, and some insects. On Vega III, even, there’s a squid—”

“Yes, I know.”

He registers my tone and cuts his lecture short. “Nia,” he says, gently.

I find I can’t look directly at him. “We have a lot of casework to cover.”

He waits, but my position does not improve. “All right,” he says at last. There is an unpleasant weight in his words now, a pointed brevity. “What do you want to know?”

The Bo assigned to me has a large, dark patch of skin around his left eye, a welcome distinction that allows me to pick it out from others in a crowd. I think to wish it good night after my father is taken away and I’m escorted to quarters of my own, but I worry the cursory words might cause offense. And, of course, with the sky here dark at all hours, illumined only slightly by twin orange moons on the horizon, the concept of “night” also seems moot. I am thus neither surprised nor upset when the Bo leaves without speaking one word to me, its hind-legs humming general notes of exhaustion as it lurches into the street. Better silence, I imagine, than diplomatic incident.