Lightspeed: Year One

Vosth-Menley was stretching his stolen muscles by the shore of the Starve. I could see the muscles moving under his skin. He laced his fingers together and pulled his hands above his head. He planted his feet and bent at the waist so far that his forehead almost touched the ground. I couldn’t do any of that.

I went through the usual colony-prescribed exercises every morning. The envirosuit pinched and chafed, but like hell I was going to show off my body any longer than I had to. Vosth-Menley didn’t have that problem. The Vosth could walk around naked, for all they cared, if they had a body to be naked.

The Vosth noticed me and Vosth-Menley turned around. He clomped his way over, and I tried not to back away.

The air is temperate at this time, at these coordinates, Vosth-Menley said.

I looked over the turbid water. It caught the turquoise of the sky and reflected slate, underlaid with silver. “Why do you call this the Ocean of Starve?”

Vosth-Menley turned back to the Ocean. His gaze ran over the surface, eyes moving in separate directions, and his mouth slacked open.

Our genetic structure was encoded in a meteorite, he said. We impacted this world long ago and altered the ecosystem. We adapted to rely on the heat of free volcanic activity, which was not this world’s stable state. When the world cooled our rate of starvation exceeded our rate of adaptation. Here, underwater vents provided heat to sustain our adaptation until we could survive.

My stomach turned. “Why do you take people over?”

Your bodies are warm and comfortable.

“Even though we proved sapience to you,” I said.

Vosth-Menley didn’t answer.

“What would you do if I took off my envirosuit?”

You would feel the air, Vosth-Menley said, like I wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t answered the question.

“I know that. What would you do? You, the Vosth?”

You would feel the gentle sun warming your skin.

I backed away. Nothing was stopping him from lunging and tearing off my suit. Not if what Endria said was true: that it was the law of the wild out here. Why didn’t he? “You don’t see anything wrong with that.”

I wished he would blink. Maybe gesture. Tapdance. Anything. You have been reacting to us with fear.

The conversation was an exercise in stating the useless and obvious. “I don’t want to end up like Menley,” I said. “Can’t you understand that? Would you want that to happen to you?”

We are the dominant species, the Vosth said. We would not be taken over.

“Empathy,” I muttered. I wasn’t expecting him to hear it. “Learn it.”

We are not averse to learning, the Vosth said. Do you engage in demonstration?

Demonstration? Empathy? I shook my head. “You don’t get what I’m saying.”

Would we be better if we understood? he asked, and stumbled forward with sudden intensity.

I jumped back, ready to fight him off, ready to run.

We want to understand.

[Can the Vosth change?] was the first thing I wrote to Endria when I sat down at my terminal. I don’t know why I kept asking her things. Maybe despite the fact that she was five years my junior and a pain in the rectum she was still less annoying than the diplomatic auditors. Maybe because she was the only person who didn’t look at me like they might have to call Security Response if I walked up. I didn’t really talk to anyone on my off hours.

She never wrote me back. Instead, she showed up at my door. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

“Hello, Endria,” I said as I let her in. “Nice of you to stop by. You couldn’t have just written that out?”

She huffed. “You have a pretty nice room, you know that? The quarters I can get if I want to move out of our family’s allotment are all little closets.”

“Get a job,” I said. “Look, when you said the Vosth—”

“Don’t you ever take that suit off?” she interrupted. “I mean, we’re inside about five different air filtration systems and an airlock or two.”

I ran a hand around the collar of my envirosuit. “I like having it on.”

“How do you eat?”

“I open it to eat.” And shower, and piss, and I took it off to change into other suits and have the ones I’d been wearing cleaned. I just didn’t enjoy it. “Can you reason with the Vosth?”

Endria shook her head. “More specific.”

“Do they change their behavior?” I asked.