From: Chris Maldonado

To: Sameen Lee

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Subject: Love from Esperance

Date: 7 Apr 2419 21:57:18 +0000

Date-Local: 21 Sep 2421 20:33:18 +0000

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I promised myself I wouldn't talk too much about the memorial. But

that was before...

I don't know what I was expecting. Rows of seats, I suppose. Trying

to find a comfortable spot while Director Soloviev talked too much

about people he didn't really know or remember very well. Our

friends, our loved ones - his employees. Because it was the

expected thing, the thing that people do at a time like

this. Trying to bring closure, whatever that means.

Instead, we made a garden together. Right at the center of our hab,

in a roundish open space that I hadn't got around to asking why it

was even there. Now I know.

The first thing we did, right in the middle of what was to be our

garden, we brought in a piece of Voortrekker herself and stood it

on end in a deep trench we'd dug to receive it. A tombstone, I

suppose you could call it, but I don't think any of us really

thinks of it that way. Four meters high, two wide, a jagged chunk

of hull plating with just the top left corner of the 'V' from her

name still visible on the charred surface. We helped a lot, those

of us who've changed, bringing it in from the crash site and

setting it in place. But I don't think there's a living pair of

hands on this planet which didn't touch it, didn't help carry it at

least a little way.

Once we'd got it set in place, once we had the concrete curing

around it and the braces set to keep it upright until its footing

could take the weight, the Director did say some things. I won't

try to write them all down here - I don't remember them all, and

anyway Jen and Eve and I were crying together, just like everyone

else - little knots of people, big groups, I don't think anyone was

alone in it. I hope no one was, anyway. I wish I could remember all

of what he said, but what I do remember, I don't think I'll ever

forget.

I don't know how long I'll live, as I am now. But thinking back on

what the Director said, I don't mind if I live a million years, or

a thousand, or ten, or one. I never liked to think about it. Not

for myself, and a thousand times as much, not for the people I

love. I never could imagine anything coming after, anything except

the end of everything. It's not as if I know otherwise, even

now. But I think I might not mind not knowing, because not knowing

doesn't mean I can't hope, and now I know what I can hope for. I

can hope that it's not the end of everything, after all. I can hope

that it's only a little time we have to spend apart, and when that

time is done, we'll be together again, in a place where no shadows

fall.

There were freshly turned patches of earth in that roundish place

at the center of our hab. I suppose we all knew they were

graves. Does it seem ghoulish that they're also part of what gives

our new garden life? I don't think it does. When our trees and our

flowers are grown, when our memorial garden has become the cool and

quiet place of solace that we'll help it be, we'll see our friends

and our lovers in every blossom, every branch, every blade of

grass. We'll walk and stand and sit and lie with them, all the time

we spend there. And they'll be there with us, too. And when new

people come to join us here on our new world - you among them, both

of you, I dearly hope - we'll bring them to our garden of memory

and tell them the stories of those who came before, and have gone,

and whom we hope some day to meet again, in a place where no

shadows fall.

That's what we did for one another, too. All the time we were

laying paths, building benches, planting seeds. We told each other

stories, and laughed together, and cried together, and somehow by

the time we were done, it...it wasn't so much. We still miss them,

and we always will. But the cloud that'd been over us - I'd hardly

even noticed it was there, with all the time I'd spent hidden in

Main Control, but it had settled in on me too, it had found me once

I came out of my hiding place and met everyone else again. It's

gone now. Like taking a deep breath when you hadn't even realized

you weren't able to, before. I think it's that way for all of us

now, and I think that's the way it was meant to be. We're not

carrying such heavy hearts, any more, now that we've laid our dead

to rest.

Well, and for one other reason. We've never really called this

planet anything other than "Ross", and that makes sense, doesn't

it? Our star is Ross 128, and our planet is in the catalogue as

Ross 128 b - but that's a bit of a mouthful, so we shortened it for

comfort. We never really had time to think about calling it

anything else. But the Director evidently has, because as we

finished our planting and mourning, he told us he hasn't been

thinking of this planet as "Ross" for a while now. He said he

thought it was time for us to decide on a name, and asked us for

suggestions, and he had a name of his own in mind to suggest:

Esperance, which means 'hope'.

So our planet isn't Ross 128 b any more, except in the catalogue,

which can do what it likes. We live on Esperance now. And our hab,

the colony that we're building? That's Hope.

Director Soloviev did all that for us, in the space of a few

hours. I'm not sure if I underestimated him before, or if he's

changed more than I would have imagined he could. Either way, I'm

glad I was wrong about him. We need the person he's become.

Of course, we need all of us, really. We aren't trying to keep to

the original build schedule - that'd be impossible even if everyone

had survived the crash, because almost all of our lifting gear,

earthmoving equipment, and heavy machine tooling didn't. But even

at the slower, merely backbreaking pace we're setting, there's so

much work to be done! As soon as we were done building our garden,

Jen got together most of us who've changed, along with the Director

and about a dozen others who haven't, and we went to work setting

up solar collectors.

That engineering problem she mentinoned, right after she got me out

of the ship - one of our reactors was getting dangerously unstable,

and we were going to have to shut it down soon. That'd only leave

one up and running, and we'd need almost all its output to run the

QEC and maintain our cryo systems so we can keep from losing our

livestock embryos - there'd be almost nothing left for the hab, the

labs, and the heavy equipment we've got left. So we needed as much

solar capacity as we could get, in a hurry.

As soon as Jen said that, I knew why she'd got all of us who'd

changed and didn't have other work to do that they absolutely

couldn't let wait a while. All that gear is really heavy! Usually

you'd need six or eight people to carry a single panel, but two of

us could manage it - the balance was a little tricky, and it was

thirsty work, but we could do it, and we managed to clear out most

of one whole cargo hold in the space of twenty, twenty-two

hours. Somewhere in there I think most of the unchanged people went

to get some sleep, and others came onto the job? I was mostly in

the hold and not paying much attention to anything except the work,

but I started seeing new faces after a while.

Anyway, most of the unchanged people started setting up panels once

we had enough of them out, while we switched to hauling storage

batteries. Even for us, it took five to a battery, and we only

managed to bring out nine of them in twelve hours before Eve made

us stop - we didn't really mind, we were mostly played out by

then. But nine will be enough, at least for a few sols! We'll have

to watch our consumption at night, and some of the high-energy

experiments will have to wait until we can bring the reactor we

have left back onto the hab power grid, but we'll still have enough

power for almost everything. None of our systems even flickered

when Jen isolated the failing reactor, and it's in cold shutdown

now.

By that time we'd all gone to the refectory, though. I hadn't

realized how hungry I was until I smelled food, and then I was

ravenous! I think we all were, even the unchanged people who'd been

working with us - it was getting late in the sol by then, and most

people were in bed or on shift, but we spent a solid hour and a

half in there anyway before people started leaving. Tired as I was,

it felt really good! I mean, eating, of course, but more than that

just...just being together, all feeling good about the work we'd

finished together, laughing and joking and sharing a sense of

accomplishment. I never really knew what that was like, before - I

never really quite knew how to get along with people, mostly, so I

mostly just hid in my lab or at home, and even on the ship I tended

not to spend that much time just being around people outside my

quarters or the bio section.

You both know that, of course! It's a wonder we ever even met -

Sam, if you hadn't kept coming and finding me at that

convention...But here, it's just different somehow. I mean, you'd

think it would be weird! With how different we are, how different I

am especially. But people just seem like they're not quite the same

somehow. Or maybe it's me, I don't know - maybe it really is

me. Whatever it is, though, it felt really wonderful just to be

sitting together laughing and talking with everyone over supper,

and all of us knowing we'd all just done something amazing

together. I think that might've been my favorite time here so far.

I am pretty worn out, though - amazing or not, it was a lot of

work! But there's one other thing I want to tell you about before I

finish up and send this. It really is amazing, and I'm honestly not

sure how I feel about it.

So, I mentioned that we planted trees and flowers in our

garden. You're probably wondering how we knew whether they'd even

germinate! Well, I did end up finding Gareth in botany the other

day, like I was talking about in my last message. I didn't get to

ask him right away about joining a fetch team, though, because he

and Elva were checking on one of her experiments. I don't know if

I've ever mentioned the two of them, but they're adorable

together - he's built like a wall, and even by my standards she's a

little tiny thing, maybe a meter and a half and so slight you

almost expect her to float from place to place instead of

walking. They spent a lot of time together back on the ship, and

they're almost inseparable now, which is no surprise

considering. But the experiment...

Remember before I left, when I was telling you all about the ship

and our plans for the colony? Hydro farming was an interim measure,

just while we worked out how to cultivate in the ground here? We

thought it'd take a couple of years! Elva was just doing basic

testing with one of the ADM maizes and a couple of hardy cereals,

planting them in our new soil and watering them with our new

rainwater. We do that mainly just to find out what stops them

germinating, what kinds of fertilizers they need, simple stuff like

that, and we expect it to take a long time for two totally

different ecologies to fit together. But when I came and peeked

over their shoulders, what did I see but three dishes, each with a

sample of Ross's sandy soil and a half dozen green shoots poking up

out of it!

They were laying out new experiments on a slate and talking a mile

a minute, and I didn't want to interrupt, so I got my hand unit off

this terrible armband and took a look at the experiment files. This

was actually the fifth attempt, and the first four had been

inconclusive - the seeds had sprouted and then just sort of died, a

day or so later. Looking at the microscopy, the cell walls had odd

little punctures, and the cells themselves didn't look right. Like

the stain hadn't taken properly, or something - it took me a minute

to remember where I'd seen something like that before: in the blood

samples we tested with the bug, not long before I went down.

After I told Gareth and Elva what I thought I was seeing, we took a

sample from one of the new shoots and looked at it under the scope,

and - there's no way those plants should be alive right now,

because they are just full of this bug, swimming freely in the

vascular tissue and apparently sessile in the parenchymal

cells. Then I had an idea - well, what I really had was an absolute

certainty, but those still don't count until you confirm them. I

checked Eve's med files on those of us who've changed, including my

own. She hasn't had time for more than the most basic micro

studies, but looking at blood samples is pretty basic, and guess

what? Sessile in the leukocytes, and swimming freely in the

plasma - just like in the plants, only adapted to the mammalian

cell structure and circulatory system. Nothing like what I'd seen

before. More like...

I said before that I don't want to assume "why?" is a question that

makes sense here, and I still don't. But just think about it a

minute. No one's ever seen anything like this before - a

prokaryotic pathogen that can cause disease in plants *and* humans?

It's been four or five hundred years since anyone even thought

seriously about the possibility! But what we're seeing here is even

more unlikely than that, because I'm increasingly convinced that

"pathogen" and "disease" aren't the right words for this. Not at

all.

What we're seeing looks a lot more like some kind of

endosymbiosis. We're not sure yet whether it's commensal or

mutualistic, and we haven't ruled out some kind of novel

parasitism, but it doesn't really matter - the point I'm making

here is, we only have one other example of anything even remotely

like this, and that's the relationship between eukaryotic cells and

mitochondria. But that took millions of years to evolve, and this

has happened inside of a couple of months.

I don't know what to think right now. This thing, whatever it is,

is truly incredible - it's beyond anything we could ever have come

out here hoping to find! And what it's already done is so

astonishing that no one's even making any guesses about what it's

going to do next. I don't have the words to describe what I'm

feeling right now, as a scientist and as a human being, just to be

witnessing this at all. To say nothing of helping investigate it!

But at the same time...I'm not even sure I still am a human being,

and whether I am or not, what I am now is what the bug has made of

me, and it's still in me now. Eve and I haven't taken biopsies yet,

but I see no reason not to assume it can't colonize any and every

type of cell in a human body. And part of the reason I won't make

any guesses about what it might do next is because I see no reason

not to assume that, whatever it does next, it won't do to all of us

who've changed. To me. And that's terrifying.

I miss you - I miss both of you so much! I know you'd both comfort

me if you were here right now. As much as I wish you were, though,

I'm almost glad you're not. I don't know what's going to happen

next, to me or to any of us. It hasn't hurt us yet, not in ways

that are lasting, but we don't know that it's going to keep on

being so nice. So, much as I miss you and wish you were here, right

now I'm more glad you're both back home where you're safe.

I'm going to stop here, I think, and go find Eve. Wake her up, if I

have to. She's got to be thinking about this too, and maybe she can

tell me something that'll make me feel better...if not, maybe just

talking about it with someone who's in the same situation will

help.

Silly as it is to say, please try not to worry too much about me -

a lot of this is just the way you start to think when you're up too

late on a lonely night. Writing to you about it has helped some,

though, and one way or another, I'm sure I'll be fine

tomorrow. After all, we don't have any reason to think it will do

us harm, either, and I think I'll have an easier time remembering

that once the sun's come up again.

I think I'll sit in the garden and watch that sunrise, when it

comes. Voortrekker's shard faces west, and there's a bench in just

the perfect spot to let me watch the orange light of our new sun

touch its tip and spread down over its surface. I put that bench

there myself, and I'm going to sit there and watch the sun rise and

remind myself that, if our new home wanted to hurt us, it would've

done so long before now. And until then, I'll go find Eve, and

we'll get through the night together.

I love you both. Stay safe and look out for each other, and Lia,

you heal quickly and get back up on your feet again, please! Both

of them.

With love as always - your Kit.