The humans emerged from their shuttles and landers, intent on striding onto the surface of this new planet. And then they all fell on the ground, in pain. The higher gravity, the stinky air, the white light, all made them go fetal. They stayed down, moaning, for ages. Some of them never got up again. Many of the colonists who had survived the wars and accidents and atrocities onboard the Mothership died soon after arrival.
Far away, in the night, the Gelet set about trying to understand these people: how they lived, how they communicated, what they worked for. After some of the humans had tried to go into the night, and the Gelet had been forced to bring down their flying machines and wreck their lorries, the Gelet understood about speech. But even once they reproduced the vibrations, the Gelet couldn’t replicate them.
They couldn’t ask the magistrate for advice, because she had been dead for generations, and as far as she was concerned the dusk remained quiet, a clean buffer before the turbulence of the day.
People in Xiosphant never knew how close the city came to destruction. The Young Father is a dormant volcano, and the Gelet had a lot of experience controlling those. They couldn’t understand us, but they took our machines apart, and our technology told a story about people who never quit building and killing. They swapped ideas back and forth, of what could happen: humans invading the night in force, launching some extreme terraforming project, ordering the Mothership to drop meteorites on the midnight city. Plus if they waited, Xiosphant could become too well protected for them to destroy.
The city survived because the Gelet made a better assessment of humanity’s technical abilities. They saw we were losing touch with the Mothership, and we didn’t have the meta-materials we needed to keep building onboard control systems, weather shielding, and various other things. We showed lots of ingenuity in inventing new ways to produce food and handle our waste, and keep people alive in this environment, but most of our technology was sliding backward. But also, they saw us digging up metals from our mountains and the meteors we’d brought down—copper, bauxite, cobalt—and saw how we could be useful.
After many visits to the hammocks in the plaza, sharing the collective memory/dream, I realize that human civilization is based on forgetting. If I own a pair of shoes that used to belong to you, then my ownership relies on your forgetfulness. Humans are experts at storing knowledge and forgetting facts, which is why we saw this city from orbit and then pushed all the evidence into a hole. And I can’t help thinking of what Bianca said when I asked her about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre: that progress requires us to curate the past, to remove from history things that aren’t “constructive.” I don’t know if our power to forget makes humans stronger, more self-destructive, or maybe both.
The Mothership still has a store of ancient media from Earth, and when I find my way back to the bottle-shaped room with the computer I call up images and films of Nagpur. They called it the Winter Capital, but the holographic recordings show a red sky and people wearing light summer clothes in bright colors. They move along walkways and tramlines that look like filaments, strung high above the gleaming domes and stupas on the ground. There are films of people dancing in unison; doing a coming-of-age ritual that involves wrapping a thread around a boy about Ali’s age; building vast swarms of tiny robots that soar outside the weather-shield; sharing a meal of thick bread and vegetables that look like nothing I’ve seen before; sending probes deep inside the Earth to harvest geological energy. These clips have numbers at the bottom that start with things like “2439,” and I’m realizing this is some archaic calendar. Then I find a hologram stamped with “2527,” showing a family from Nagpur: mother, father, squirming giggling son, all wearing modified CoolSuits with an emblem on them. Someone I can’t see asks in Noölang, “Are you excited to be leaving home? What are your hopes for this long voyage?” The father jokes, “I just hope those Calgary idiots don’t make a mess of the sewers, or it’s going to be a long flight.” The mother slaps his arm, lightly, and looks straight ahead. “I hope Partha makes plenty of friends on the ship, and doesn’t end up mixing with the wrong kids. Peer pressure in an enclosed environment is always the worst.” Her husband rolls his eyes, but she ignores him. “Partha’s children, or maybe his grandchildren, will live to see this new planet. I hope they remember where they came from.” The image fades. I’ll never know what happened to Partha, though I can guess. But now that I’ve seen these things, I can share them with everyone, and they’ll never disappear, even after the Mothership’s systems fail.
Jean has a broken left tentacle that the Gelet could not fix, even with all their advanced biohacking. She can still lift small objects with her other tentacle, and can make adjustments to the great machines underground with her cilia. She worked some stints in the farms, the foundries, and the water-treatment canals, but the physical labor wore her out, and meanwhile she has a good personality for teaching and counseling. That’s why they encourage Jean to spend time with me. She shows me the memory of traveling across an ice floe in the middle of a violent snowfall, when a nearby outcropping broke just as she passed, sending sharp rocks cascading down. From her viewpoint, the snow grew teeth. She was trapped under the rock for a painful age until her friends could get her out, and her whole left side is still racked with chronic pain. She also shows me the rockfall from the viewpoint of a few others who witnessed it from a distance: the mountain crag coming apart, the boulders in free fall. By now, she remembers the disaster as much from far away as up close, because she and others have shared the distant vantage point so many times. Maybe that’s good for her recovery.
The Gelet work hard, without getting rewarded with food dollars or marks, or threatened with conscription. Instead, they just talk about work all the time. Everyone shares their memories of all the work they’ve done, and thus everybody knows just how hard everybody else has worked since the last time they’ve gotten together. Nobody ever lies, and I don’t know if they’re exactly capable of lying.
Jean still moves different from the others, and everybody knows her story. After her accident, Jean fell into a deep depression that nobody could shake her out of, according to another Gelet, whom I’ve started calling River. River and I are sitting in a sort of canteen, eating stewed roots that look odd but taste like roast pheasant, and her pincer is wide open so I can extend my tendrils and entangle them with hers. I’m still getting used to doing that.
According to River, Jean wasn’t depressed just because of the chronic pain, but because everybody treated her different. Every time they shared memories, even of unrelated things, the Gelet couldn’t help letting their worry about Jean, even their pity, leak through, and this made her flesh crawl underneath her carapace. Everyone talked among themselves about how to make Jean feel better, and then they couldn’t hide this from her. Their concern for Jean became an infestation that left sticky strands of poison through every thought and desire they shared, however benign.
This had happened before. Long before humans arrived on January, another Gelet was caught in a tectonic experiment that went awry. This scientist was unhurt physically, but she kept reliving the fear and pain, the feeling as the plate shifted and everything came unstuck. The moment when she realized everything was not under control after all, and then the rest of her team died. All the others revisited her memory of that instant when power gave way to powerlessness, but it was not their memory, it was hers. They all observed her sullenness since the accident, and they talked endlessly about how to cheer her up. So they showed her comforting memories of when someone else had survived a bison attack, or they shared with her their recollections of happy occasions. But the more they tried to help her, the more they reminded her of how bad she was feeling, and the worse she felt. This turned into a self-reinforcing spiral, and eventually she killed herself.