SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“I got cables, you need me to jump you?”

Horst thumped his shoulder into Rene’s. “Second date. Second date .”

“Your call, Mahiinkan.”

“That’s gonna be less funny when I learn the Ojibwe for Big-Ass Bear .”

The trail led to a stretch of bush with a groomed ski trail where their footprints wouldn’t show, and they turned to follow it. Rene put his arm around Horst’s shoulders. “Maybe I’ll teach you.”

Horst decided maybe the rest of the year might not suck too hard, after all.

Originally published in Accessing the Future (Futurefire.net Publishing)

Soraiya Courchene wasn’t sure she’d heard Rotational Captain Genevieve Makwa correctly; but it sounded, as the captain peered at her monitor and held her chin thoughtfully, that she’d said, “Well, here’s something new.”

In four generations aboard, even in the one-thousand-odd days of that that they’d been orbiting the planet, that wasn’t an expression you heard every day. It was the sort of thing reserved for events such as seeing the sun set in open air—something Soraiya would have dearly loved, but knew she would probably not live long enough for.

Soraiya turned to face the captain. She liked her; Captain Makwa usually remembered to look right at her when speaking, and she always welcomed her to the bridge with an old Anishinaabe compliment: “You’re so fat!” Which, coming from the captain with her big smile and dark eyes, never sounded like the whispers from some of the other crew that fluttered at the edge of what Soraiya could hear and couldn’t; and of course the whispers were meant to prick at her hearing loss as well as her weight. Soraiya, at 60, was long since sick of it. Most of the rotational command crew respected her ability to read the old data files, crusted in archaic monolingual constructions rather than in the current blend of the language they shared more with every new generation. But there were always some who thought it was a waste of time to study anything Prelaunch.

Soraiya cleared her throat. The air on the bridge was more stale than usual and it made her want to cough, but she made the sound mainly to get the captan’s attention. Captain Makwa looked up and faced her. Soraiya noticed that she hadn’t been looking at the blue/red/white whorls of the planet below, but rather the sensor array they used for tracking meteorites. “It’s moving,” said the captain.

Soraiya’s heart started to pound. “Evasive?” she asked, her fingers itching to engage the thrusters, which hadn’t been used since they’d manoeuvred into geosynchronous. A thousand-odd days ago.

The captain might have grinned if it were only a matter of positioning their massive hollowed-out asteroid out of the way to avoid a collision. Captain Makwa sometimes cackled at the thought of something so dangerous, but not this time. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it’s coming to look for us.”

She patched over the data stream to Soraiya’s monitor. There it was: not just a tracking signal showing a tiny object headed straight for them, slowly, but a hail. Soraiya recognized the Mandarin text immediately, and the English, somewhat; the third was written in Cyrillic characters, but she had not studied Prelaunch Ukrainian much. The Mandarin had many unfamiliar phonetic characters, and the English dialect before her was very odd.

“What do you think?” asked the captain. Meaning, Do we wake the rest of the command crew two hours early for this? And is it worth alerting all 435 people aboard?

“The ID isn’t one of the other generation ships,” said Soraiya, stalling, afraid of what the rest of the hail signified. “They’re saying they’re here to check on our ‘progress’.” Soraiya felt her throat tighten as she spoke; she knew that meant she was talking more quietly, so she forced herself to speak up, which always meant she ended up shouting. No use cursing the loss of her hearing aids; they’d been repurposed into a stethoscope when she was thirty-two, and not all the headsets on the bridge still worked. She called up a sidebar display to check some of their oldest records, and the Prelaunch dating system. She swallowed. “It says they left Earth 28 days ago.”

Captain Makwa sucked on her teeth. Soraiya always thought that made her look older than her 46 years. “They got here faster than light. I’d say that was new.”

Things might have been simpler if the captain’s rotational duty hadn’t ended before the new ship got close enough to dock. For the first time in two generations, the ship might have to halt its gravity-simulating rotation to allow the FTL craft from Earth to couple. The entire population of the asteroid they all called Home was abuzz.

Soraiya spent her off hours with friends chatting by one of the crowded observation decks, huge transparent panels beneath their feet allowing them to watch the planet as it passed by like clockwork. The population of the ship, renamed Home generations ago, had (eventually) unanimously agreed the planet they had journeyed so long to explore should be called They Are To Be Respected. The deep blues of seawater sworled into the white of clouds, the crimson and indigo vegetation seeming like swaths from a painter’s brush this far out. The planet rose and set while they watched. Before the hail from the Earth craft Soraiya had enjoyed the spark and argument of discussions over ecosystems, flora and fauna, the wonder of the smells their molecular scanners had detected at ground level and clumsily replicated in their labs. Like most aboard Home, Soraiya couldn’t bear the thought of intruding on the planet’s surface. The early days of Home’s journey, they had grown up learning, were filled with the incomplete attitude that you had to take what you needed and if you didn’t have enough, take more or take from someone else. That had worked, somewhat, as they were still mining the asteroid they travelled in for resources to sustain the journey; but when their ancestors (some of them) had begun fighting over them, there had been trouble. Murder. Strife. And, briefly, worse. But they had eventually changed their attitude, adopted a way of life that allowed them to survive in the frigid emptiness of space, and sometimes it took generations to see the best decision. Theirs was not the only way to do it, perhaps; but then they were the only generation ship that had been able to complete the journey.

They would not rush a human visit to the surface of They Are To Be Respected. Even their satellites stayed at a high enough orbit that (they hoped) indigenous life would never see them. That was, of course, at total odds with the Prelaunch goals, which Soraiya now found herself poring over, wondering less how the FTL craft had made the journey than why .

And while she was a firm believer in leaving They Are To Be Respected untouched and unsettled while they undertook a long study of it—how much of that was bound up in simply not wanting to leave Home, for all of them?—she felt more than curiosity to walk in its wildly coloured forests, rather than the clean but manufactured halls of Home, and to feel on her face the wash of sea spray in the wind, not just the comfortable, stale climate they depended on.

Now the conversations raged over what the new arrivals would look like, why they talked so differently, what news they had from Earth. The younger generation was most excited by this last part. The middle-aged and older, like Soraiya, had suddenly eager audiences for stories handed down. But in her few moments alone Soraiya stared out at They Are To Be Respected and wondered whether their practices of studying the planet from afar for the next generation were about to change.