Page 46 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

Chapter 21 Signy, Fortune

The OCTA Primer for Successful Societal Development was a perpetual source of discussion and argument, but in the end, it was mostly just a database. All citizens of Fortune had viewing access for its files, and literally everything Signy used in a given day—from forks to air filters to ferry boats—began in the Primer. That was her starter source for seed templates, plus reference materials on crops, diseases, and medicines. Every other imaginable topic lived there as well: theater, astronomy, ceramics, public transit, economics, mechanical engineering, fermentation, arithmetic, Earth history, Argosan history, sewage treatment, everything. The social implications of the Primer were of little interest to Signy. Did she believe the Primer was definitive? No. Did she think it likely its authors had left a lot of things out, either through deliberate obfuscation or unconscious bias? Yes. Did that anger her? Yes. Would that anger help her do her work? No. And therefore, as far as she was concerned, her opinions about the Primer—because of course she had opinions about the Primer, every person alive had opinions about the Primer—were moot. She saw no point in bemoaning what wasn’t there, not when she could be making use of what was.

When it came to finding things of use in the Primer, few were as quick as Otto. Perhaps there was a research librarian somewhere who had tricks he didn’t, but Otto was voraciously interested in everything, and his skill in assembling a quick grab bag of facts on whatever you wanted to know about could not be denied. “Where do you want to start?” he asked as Signy reentered the living room carrying a second round of chicory and a tiny pitcher of oat cream. He gestured at his computer screen, which he’d managed to fill with tabs on rorquals in the approximate ten minutes she’d been in the kitchen.

She set their beverages down next to Otto’s keyboard. Many of the letters printed on it had long ago eroded beneath his fingertips, leaving the keys blank and shining. She pulled up a stool beside his chair and skimmed his spread of Primer pulls. “What did you find?” she asked.

He pointed at the screen, eager to share. “We don’t have to watch much of this,” he said, pulling up a tab with a lecture called Rorquals: An Out-Of-This-World Working Animal. The file path below the plain-text title indicated this video wasn’t from the original Primer database, but rather the Argosan supplement.

“Are rorquals from Argosy?” Signy asked. “Are they not from the Solar System?”

“No, no,” Otto said. “A second-phase species, I know that much.”

Signy was familiar with some second-phase species, in the realm of plants. Canvas plants were the most famous example, even though she didn’t work with those herself. There was rockfuzz, shale berry, canyon copper. Once, just for fun, she’d had some success splicing Earth’s aloe vera with Argosan miner’s balm, and technically, that made it a third-phase species. But, as she’d done so illegally and in secret, it would never be added to the Primer. None of her templates would. She highly doubted Fortune would ever be capable of continuing OCTA’s chain of colonies, and therefore, like just about everything else on this planet, her work would end here.

Signy rested her chin on a folded fist. “Let’s see it.”

Otto hit play, and a video of a long-dead woman from a planet in the orbit of another star sprang to life. “Welcome to the Common Knowledge educational series on colonial livestock,” she said. “My name is Elizabeth Thompson, and in this video, I’m going to be giving you a basic introduction to Rorqualis astralis, the common rorqual.”

“God, I love her accent,” Otto said, speaking over the video. “Don’t you just love Argosan accents?”

Signy smiled as she poured a splash of cream into his mug (about twice as much as she poured into her own, as was his preference). Otto’s enthusiasm was her primary entertainment here, but yes, she did like Argosan accents. Their first generation had been taught to speak by robots and Primer videos, just as Fortune’s had, but the Argosans had taken their shared language in a different direction. There was a musical quality in how the woman spoke, a rhythmic flow that both confused and compelled.

Despite the foreign novelty, Signy wasn’t paying half as much attention to the accent as she was to the video’s background. Their host, Elizabeth, was seated at a mock-up teacher’s desk in the middle of a park—no dome, no windows, no protective gear. Hedges of blooming flowers billowed behind her, an explosion of color stretching up to meet a terraformed sky of exotic blue. There were trees, too, their leaves shifting hypnotically in the breeze, like the ribbons some people decorated their air filters with.

Signy thought the trees might be birch. She’d never seen a tree outside of a video, but she’d spent a stretch of childhood afternoons in the staff room of her mother’s clinic reading about them. She remembered the white bark, the black scratches. She was fairly sure birch was the right name.

The woman with the musical voice had continued on despite Signy’s lapse in focus: “. . . Our planet was not home to life before our lander arrived. Rorquals’ wild predecessors were found in orbit of Midnight, a gas giant in our system. Through a highly successful domestication program, we utilized rapid-mutation genetic selection to breed this species into a dependable working animal. Incorporating rorquals into our workforce has revolutionized our approach to transporting product from our mining operations in the asteroid belt to our settlements here on Argosy.” She gave a slight nod to the scratched-white trees.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Otto mused. He was incapable of watching or listening to anything without making commentary.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“Do you ever think about how all our water comes from the moons?” He gestured to his mug, which he was holding against his left knee so as to let the warmth soothe the ache. “Every time you have a cup of something, every time you cook, every time you take a shower—moon ice. It’s all moon ice! And it gets pulled along by these things.” He gestured again, this time at the screen—at the animals described but not yet shown.

Signy nodded. “Do you ever think about how that’s true of your blood, too? And all the cells in your body?” She took a tight-lipped sip of her scalding chicory, looking at him over the rim of her mug. “We’re mostly moon ice, you and me.”

Otto stared at her, then off into the distance. “Well, that’ll keep me awake.”

The dead woman onscreen kept speaking: “. . . This video is intended for the general public, not for those training to work directly with rorquals. Rorquals are fascinating creatures, but they can also be very dangerous, and should not be—”

Signy reached across Otto and hit the pause button. She was not convinced this video had the answers she wanted. “How do people work directly with them?” she asked. “What do pilots have to . . . do?”

“They talk the rorquals through it, right?” Otto said. “Talk them into flying to wherever they need to go?”

“Yes, but—” Signy thought again of Cora, who looked for all the world like an ordinary person off the street, not somebody who regularly went to space and talked to an alien with her brain. “How?”

Otto raised a single finger, then sauntered through his open tabs. “Let’s try this.” He pointed to a dry technical article called “Effects of Rorqual Piloting on the Human Body,” then began to read. “‘The process to become a rorqual pilot is a six-year interdisciplinary program that involves a rigorous combination of standard spacecraft pilot training, rorqual behavioral studies, and targeted cognitive training.”

Signy leaned forward. “I only know about that last one in a therapeutic context. How do they mean it here?”

Otto searched the screen, clicked a link, and breezed through. “Let’s see . . . looks like they spend a boatload of time with specialized psychologists, plus—oh, ew, no, there’s a picture, nope nope nope—”

Signy caught a glimpse of a surgical photograph before Otto cast it from his screen. Neural implants, she gathered. She could look the procedure up on her own later.

Otto sighed with relief as he found a picture taken from the outside of a pilot’s skull. “I assume your pilot has these?”

Signy leaned in to look. One matte metal node embedded behind each ear, plus a horizontal row of four across the back of the neck, just below the brain stem. “I didn’t notice,” she said.