Lightspeed: Year One

I too am exhausted, but even with Sedgwick’s white noise buds turned on I lie awake in my pod, replaying my father’s words and reconstructing the scene of the Bo’s sudden death. According to my father, the deceased was his laboratory assistant, a Bo who predominantly sang words of discovery while collecting soil and water samples from the metropolitan marshlands. Listening to my father’s detailed description of events—the circumstances under which he and the Bo met and hashed out a working relationship, the hours preceding the Bo’s unfortunate demise, the means by which its death became suspect—the complexity of my task grows painfully apparent. The Bo are so suspicious of brevity, so dependent on motive for truth, that to ask potential corroborating witnesses their side of the story bears all the tell-tale signs of walking a minefield. Will they trust me? Will they speak? And if so, how long will all their answers take?

My father’s answers alone are slower and more drawn out than I am used to in my work, a consequence I nonetheless expected of his thirty-odd years among the Bo. How does a human manage so long without its own kind, I wondered. We have ritualistic orders on Vega III that emulate emptiness, silence, and of course celibacy, but for the singing out of our very existence, our every interaction in minute and protracted detail, I can only conjure up one god cult that believed the universe would cease to exist if its singing ever stopped. All of its members perished in an avalanche thousands of years back, of course. The universe, to my knowledge, has not.

My thoughts drift eventually to Captain Sedgwick, though the air is clammy and cold, and my pod, an unusual texture, a truly alien space. There are few places, I had thought, where human desire could not reach, and yet my father seems to have found one—even sought it out. I think of my mother, the robustness of her figure, the strength of her mind, given up for over thirty loveless years in the far reaches of space. What kind of man was my father then, to commit such an act of self-denial? What kind of man is he now, having done it?

I turn off the white noise buds, having given up on sleep. One sacrifice, I think, as Bo songs rumble about me, in the foolhardy hope of ever understanding another’s.

In the first waking hours on the dark side of Bo, my father takes me to his laboratory, the scene of the incident in question. Nothing has been moved since that wake cycle—not even the dead Bo, its mummifying remains giving me a start when I approach the head of the room. There are no morgues here, no cemeteries: To the Bo this is cast-off matter, a skin one might find at the site of regression. The Bo that accompanies us does not so much as eye the mound of gray and crumbling flesh. It looks bored, standing guard by the door, and hums impatience alongside its standard mourning chord.

“There have been deaths before,” my father says, his hands ghosting, but not touching, the long array of enclosures sustaining samples of other lifeforms on Bo. “It’s rare, since their proximity to one another, their constant chatter, sings out potential threats. Few environmental disasters ever claim a life, but it does happen. The last was a year after my arrival, a Bo in the middle of regression when a sandstorm hit in the drylands, where the light touches the black rocks and makes them molten, and plant life turns to fire in an instant. The Bo was in a bad place, an inopportune place, and it also caught fire. There were Bo about it, saying its names, minding its abandoned skins as it sought to escape the heat through regression, and they might have caught it when the winds struck—but they didn’t. They missed. They were slow. To this day they sing mourning songs that are heard over the escarpments, down in the valleys with the hot and the oxidized rocks. They sing for all their poor timing, and the poor timing of the Bo in their care, and their fears of regression even now. None of those watchers has regressed again yet, that I know of, though their warts have grown heavy and stiff, and their sacs hardly move when they speak . . . ”

In his lumpy Bo cloak my father looks toad-like himself, hunched over to peer at old notes on his desk. He has been speaking this rambling, proto-Bo-speak since our arrival, and even without my earbuds I quickly tune him out. Instead of lending him my ear I muster the courage to approach the decaying corpse, slumped over in the bottom of an open tank. But what was it doing inside? How could it have fallen in? My eyes narrow at the thread of a plastic tube still affixed to the back of its wrist.

“I thought you said this Bo was assisting you.”

“It was.”

I turn to my father, my gaze flicking quickly to the Bo by the door. “Can we talk in private?”

My father straightens, glancing at my Bo in turn, then back to me. His longwinded speech comes to its end with one word: “No.”

“As your legal counsel I’d strongly advise—”

“You’re not my counsel, Nia.”

“Excuse me?”