Terror is a different flavor from pure anxiety, both harder and easier to handle because it’s grounded in reality. I’d been terrified plenty of times that month, of everything from saying the wrong thing to falling into the Potomac in the middle of a hurricane, and anxious most of the rest of the time. But for an utter mash of reasonable and unreasonable fears, I can only suggest trying to help several hundred alien dignitaries half-ass a values-based crowdwork session while trying not to think too hard about what they’re using it for.
Did I mention that this involved trying to elicit clear value statements from the people who’d just tried to kidnap my child?
We started by giving some examples of our values: the things our algorithms normally input to balance the human tendency to fixate on short-term goals and immediately salient stimuli. Rhamnetin, and several of his colleagues, turned out to be particularly good at coming up with arguments from statements like The complexity of natural systems has value even when we don’t yet know what all the moving parts do and All people are owed equity in shaping the systems they’ve consented to. Cytosine didn’t do too badly either. Then we tried some basic ecological exercises, getting people to speak for the ocean we’d landed beside and the forest we’d slept in. Athëo walked them through a basic conflict resolution between the two. Nutrient runoff was an issue they were familiar with, a source of friction here as at home, and it was fascinating to hear how much of that conflict remained even with vastly advanced technologies for reclaiming and reusing nutrients. They still struggled over the right balance of resources, and what species they most wanted to support in each ecosystem.
But sitting down with Phosphorus, who’d despised me without ever meeting me, was so much harder. On Earth, people like her had never given in—only died and made way for those more willing to listen, or been stripped of the power to make reality out of their bigotries. Part of me—a big part, really—wanted those solutions here, now. But this couldn’t wait generations, and the dandelion revolution wasn’t happening in the Rings this afternoon. I could only hope that fresh-sown hatred could be more easily weeded out.
I put Dori deliberately to my breast, grateful when she latched on. Carol took her hand, letting Dori’s little fingers grasp her own. From a Ringer perspective, it was the most pointed thing we could have done. “All right. I’ve heard your arguments, and to me they sound more like fears than values. You don’t trust us to know our planet, you don’t trust us to keep our kids safe. But what’s—” I took a steadying breath. “What are you trying to preserve, or build? Separate your goal from the means you use to reach it. I’m trying very hard to make that separation.”
Phosphorus curled and uncurled, her kid wriggling in response. She hadn’t contributed much to the earlier exercises, treating them as another symptom of our irrationality. Her body language now was like nothing I’d encountered on the Solar Flare. Dismissal? Inattention? Even at Cytosine’s worst, she’d thought us worth speaking with. If Phosphorus allowed us even that minimum of respect, she’d have to concede that we’d deserved it earlier.
“When a mother swings out over an abyss,” she repeated at last, “you catch them, or their children if they won’t reach for you. You don’t wait to see if their absurd risk succeeds.”
“That’s fear speaking,” I said again. “You’re afraid that we’re wrong. You’re afraid of the complexity of planets. But risk aversion isn’t a strong enough value to live on.” I stopped, realizing that there was only so far I could explain without worse insult.
“We value catching people who fall. We value having been caught ourselves—our ancestors were saved, and thus we were.”
“Cytosine said something about that,” said Carol. “That one of her ancestors wanted to stay behind on your homeworld. How do you know that if their choices had been respected, they wouldn’t have thrived?”
“Rivers dried in their beds and storms flooded cities with salt. Earthquakes spread from mines and wells; fires turned oxygen to searing poison. They could barely breathe, and still they clung to what they knew.”
I wanted to say it was the corporations who’d given us our forest fires and megastorms—that her family was helping them birth new monsters. But I held my tongue; I wasn’t trying to win an argument. I was trying to change it. “So you value a safe home for your descendants. You value clean air, stable ground, safety from storm and drought.”
“That’s right. And we have those things in our habitats. Your children should have them too.”
I nodded, hoping the movement made sense to her. “That’s two things: the value and the means to achieve it. I’m trying to tell you that we share the value. Our ancestors either didn’t share it, or didn’t act on it, but we do. And we do because we’ve developed technology for not only identifying our values, but for consistently acting on them.
“We’ve put fifty years into that technology, using it to undo the damage to our world and make it right for our children. You’ve put a thousand years into making your habitats right for your children. But no matter the ecological damage, it’s easier to sow fertile seeds in an inhabitable planet than in raw vacuum. What were your habitats like at the beginning? Was it perfectly safe, living in space for the first time? Did you escape from risk?”
A shiver ran across the sections of her armored skin. “There were disasters. But they were nothing to the risks on-world, and we’ve overcome them. You wouldn’t face the same dangers—we’ve scouted the way for you.”
“We all try to give gifts to the future,” said Carol. “It doesn’t mean they’ll use them the way we envision, or even in ways we’d approve of. You have to give gifts lightly—that’s one of my values. I’m going to tell you something.”
“You’ve been telling us things already,” said Phosphorus, I thought a bit sharply.
“Something new. We haven’t talked about it yet, because we didn’t want you to think that our genders work exactly like either plains-folk or tree-folk. Humans are kind of like your species, in that our genders aren’t set at birth. But it’s not completely uncertain, either. Parents can guess, and be right most of the time. Some choose to guess, and some don’t.
“My parents guessed. They gave me a male name, instead of one that could fit anyone, and when I realized they’d been wrong I had to change it. But it was okay, because the name was a gift given lightly. Because my parents loved what I was more than they loved their guess about what I’d be, they picked backup names in case I needed them, including one that fit my true self. And so I was still able to have that gift from them, and the relationship that goes with it, because they were willing to let me use it in a way they didn’t expect.”
I leaned against her, loving her for her courage, and Dori’s fist tightened against my skin in response. “You know, there aren’t many firsts left for people like us, but I think you just won ‘first coming out in another solar system.’”
“I hope posterity appreciates it.” She gave Phosphorus a piercing look. “Telling you this is a gift, given lightly. We can use your gifts in ways you don’t expect, too—if you can cope with us using different means to achieve our shared values. Your technologies for making habitats livable could help save Earth. The structures you use to keep people connected across a solar system could help us maintain shared values across the watershed networks. Symbiosis with Ringers could give us both new tools, new ways to survive in a cold universe. You want to grab people who’re swinging over abysses; we want to string nets over the drop. And neither of us wants our children to fall.”
“Planets are too complex to control,” said Phosphorus. “Our technologies work in constrained systems where we understand all the parts.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “You haven’t actually tested it. And the idea that just because you create a complex system you know everything that it does—you have to know that isn’t true, or your so-called constrained systems would have fallen apart long before this.”
Phosphorus hemmed and hawed. She wouldn’t admit that we did share values or that there was more than one way to act on those values, but her arguments grew less confident. Eventually she made noises about talking to her family, and left us sitting alone. St. Julien, also freed from whatever conversation she’d been in, came over to join us.
“I’ve always wondered if network governance was really that different from congressional debates.” She patted Brice against her shoulder; the baby seemed torn between looking at the strange world around them and whatever digestive uncertainty they were presently experiencing. “Turns out it really is. If we tried to force our senators to be this blunt about how their goals and policies connect … I don’t know. Either everything would come to a standstill, or we’d get fewer stupid laws.”
“Your senators are human,” I said. “Sapient, even. I think they’d get smarter outputs. We have.”
“Hm.” Brice spit up, and St. Julien smiled fondly at them before gazing over their shoulder. “I still want this for my kids. Room to grow as a species, and more than one place to try more than one solution.”
“I’ve been looking at how they live here,” I said. “The habitats have amazing ecologies, and they seem like exciting places to grow up. But I can’t help thinking about what they’ve lost—species and marvels and history and prehistory they’ll never discover because they left their worlds behind. Can we have both? Let the people who want to leave Earth come here, or explore new systems, without giving up our monuments and rainforests and all the dinosaurs we haven’t uncovered yet?” I glanced at the Asterion team. “And without giving our worst mistakes room to take root and grow alongside the best of what we’ve learned?”
“I think we could,” said St. Julien. She switched Brice to her other shoulder. “But I do think you’re right that we should be mindful about it. We need to think consciously about what values to bring along. I’d like to see you run one of these workshops for us in the States. We’ve been going along the last few decades trying to preserve what we were; maybe it’s time to pick a direction before we take our next steps.”
“Assuming these people don’t decide to kidnap the whole species en masse,” said Carol.
“Assuming that, yes.” St. Julien jerked her chin in the direction Phosphorus had gone. “How did talking with the kidnappers turn out?”
“So-so,” I admitted. “I think we got through, but I don’t think we got through enough.”
“I was looking for something dramatic,” said Carol. “Something that would make them see that they don’t know everything about us.”
“I think you managed that,” I told her. I let Dori back down, stood and paced. The ease with which she crawled on alien ground, the similarity of her play to Diamond’s and Chlorophyll’s, seemed like a sign that connection was possible. But as soon as we went from kids to mothers we found places to disagree.
Of course, that was true with human parents, too. We argued with Athëo and Dinar, and sometimes our perspectives seemed as different as if we came from different species, but we worked through it and came out as family. And the working through had been okay—more than okay, had helped us all learn things from each other that we’d never learned from our childhood families. I thought about that, and about what it took to build that kind of relationship.
And then—because I wasn’t only a child of the Bet anymore, because I’d learned from my wife and co-parents and children, because I was starting to learn from Rhamnetin and Cytosine and their siblings and cross-siblings and mates and offspring—I sat with my conclusions, feeling them quietly until I could speak something I was sure of. Something for which, I found, I did have the courage.
“We need both,” I told Carol. “Ways to show that we aren’t what they expect, and ways to show that we have enough in common to solve problems together. Athëo! Dinar!” Our co-parents looked up as I waved urgently. They stood, got their conversation to some sensible stopping point while I bounced anxiously, trying to hold onto that core of courage and certainty.
“Excuse us, please,” I told St. Julien, and she rolled her eyes and wandered off to find her own spouse.
“What’s going on?” asked Dinar, and I started explaining what I’d thought of. Excitement, embarrassment, and fear made my words tumble over each other, but Carol caught the thread and helped me get it across. And Dinar and Athëo, who somewhere in the past weeks had finally become people I could communicate with in all my anxiety-addled glory, got it too. I’d become someone who could communicate with them, who could listen to their input without deciding that the original idea had been a mistake in the first place.
That freshly discovered comfort made this new idea—for all I was sure of it—even more terrifying.
Gathering the Solar Flare crew took time, but eventually they joined us in a dip in the moss. Cytosine let the twins down to play with our kids. That was appropriate: this was family business, not diplomacy, and the kids’ interactions mattered at least as much to its success as our own.
“Go ahead,” said Athëo. “This was your idea first.”
That “first”—the acknowledgment that he and Carol and Dinar shared the idea now—gave me the strength to speak.
“The stories your people tell about symbiosis,” I said. “They’re all about people forging personal connections across sides and species, learning how to share strengths and compensate for weaknesses. They’re about families. And our people tell stories about finding new ways to come together to overcome long odds: crowds and teams, and families that we make in whatever shapes work for us.”
I was going to get tangled in this speech if I wasn’t careful; I took a deep breath and forged on. “We’ve been getting along pretty well with Rhamnetin since we first met you. Cytosine, we’ve crossed wires and swords a few times, but I think we’re figuring each other out. And we’re still getting to know the rest of you. But I think all our species need someone to learn how we can mesh our stories along with our cultures and our different ways of living, and show them by example.
“So we were wondering if you might like to join our family.”
“What would that look like?” asked Cytosine after a moment. She didn’t sound entirely shocked, at least. Or completely opposed.
“We’d have to figure that out as we went,” said Dinar. “When you’re creating new ways of doing family—or when you don’t think everyone has to do it the same way—that’s usually how it works.”
“We wouldn’t all just answer to you,” I warned her. “We’re more democratic. If that would be an issue for your nursing, we’ll need to figure out something else.”
“I’m not mating with you.” She sounded reassuringly exasperated. “You don’t smell like anything sensible to begin with.”
“She’ll forget sometimes,” said Rhamnetin, “even if she agrees to it. Especially when there are fewer plains-folk mothers around to keep her pheromones in check.”
“We can manage that,” said Dinar. “We manage with each other, after all.”
“Where would we live?” asked Rhamnetin.
That, we’d discussed. “Can we spend time in both systems? We don’t even have to all be in the same place all the time—I doubt we’re up for raising Dori and Raven aboard ship on any kind of extended basis—but the goal is to show people how we can make both lifestyles work. It would give you more experience with how scary a planet is and isn’t, and give us the chance to learn more about how you make your habitats work. And together we’d figure out what each system has to learn from the other.”
“It would get people’s attention,” said Rhamnetin thoughtfully.
“They’d tell stories about us,” said Cytosine. “And it would prove that we really do trust you with children.”
“Especially if we went into orbit when your atmosphere throws tantrums?” suggested Carnitine.
“We’ll think about it,” I said. At the height of summer, a vacation on a starship might not sound like such a bad idea. It would give our kids more chances to see the moon, even when the nights were sweltering. Though we might have to show the Ringers a lot of data, to convince them that the unbearable nights were growing fewer every year.
Humans would have huddled in a corner, checking in with brothers and sisters and co-parents, or sent private texts. The Ringers … made rings. Plains-folk reached for tree-folk, who reached limbs to other plains-folk, an intimate network of skinsong and quiet consultation. At last they broke apart.
And it mattered, I suspected, that it was Rhamnetin they chose to give their answer: “Let’s try it.”