Short science fiction · 20-minute read
The First Sunset on Kael
The first sunset on Kael lasted eleven minutes, and Malik spent nine of them arguing with a fish.
He was sitting on the high ledge with his boots dangling over the drop, helmet in his lap, suit peeled down to the waist so the warm air could reach his arms. Below him the cliff fell away in tall stone columns, like organ pipes, to a curve of pale sand. Beyond the sand the sea lay flat and copper-coloured, broken only by one long, moving shadow. Red scrub grew in the cracks of the rock, and the wind coming up the cliff smelled of salt and hot stone and something like crushed pepper. It would have been a perfect evening if there had been enough oxygen in the air to keep him thinking straight, and if the thing in the bay had not just slapped the water with a tail the size of a rowing boat.
“It is not a fish,” Lena said, from the lower ledge. She had her visor up and a tablet on her knee, marking where the domes would be bolted to the rock. “It breathes through gills, yes. It also has a head you could park a van in. Do not call it a fish where it can hear you.”
The creature rose again. It was the colour of wet slate, longer than their cargo truck, and it hung in the copper water as if it had been poured there. One eye, set far forward, found the cliff. Malik lifted a hand, because that is what you do when something looks at you and you were raised by people who waved at buses. A clear inner eyelid slid across the eye. Then the animal sank, and the bay smoothed over as if it had never been interested.
“See,” Malik said. “Judgement.”
Above them, the sky was doing the thing the scientists had promised and nobody had quite believed. Kael had two suns. The bigger one was a white coin sitting on the sea, flattening as it sank. The smaller one, redder, was already climbing over the mountains to the east, dragging a second dawn up behind the first dusk. Both suns had official names that were really just long catalogue numbers, so the crew called them Big Sun and Little Sun, and astronomers back home were welcome to complain. Between them hung a huge ringed planet the crew had named Laundry, because its stripes looked like shirts left too long on a washing line. Kael was one of Laundry’s moons, which explained the crowded sky. So was a big rocky world they had named Next Door, so close you could watch its weather move without a telescope. A third world, pale and thinly ringed, sat higher in the haze like a button left on a windowsill. Kael’s sky was never empty and, where they had landed, never dark. When one sun went down, the other was already up. The eleven minutes between them were the whole of the night.
Lena closed the tablet. “There’s still only about half the oxygen you’d get at the seaside back home. Same as living at Everest base camp. Fine for the algae. Embarrassing for us. Dome Three is sealed. If you fall off that rock I am not carrying you, and this air will make you stupid long before it makes you dead.”
“We crossed four million light-years through a hole in space,” Malik said, “and now we die of a sprained ankle and thin air. The newspapers will love it.”
The wormhole had been the part everyone argued about, and then, annoyingly, the part that worked.
A wormhole is not a tunnel you dig. It is a shortcut: a fold in space that joins two places a very long way apart, the way folding a sheet of paper can bring two far corners together. The laws of physics allow such a thing, but only grudgingly, and a great many clever people had spent nine years persuading this one to stay open. SpaceX had spent so much money on it that the lawyers had to go and lie down in a dark room. There had been three arguments about Nobel Prizes, and one very patient engineer named Priya, who had a sticker on her laptop that said DO NOT FEED THE WORMHOLE. The Earth end sat in a fenced square of New Mexico that still smelled of welding, inside a shed tourists were not allowed to photograph. The Kael end opened above the ocean like a soap bubble on a wire loop. It spat out a landing craft, two cargo pallets, four people and a crate of coffee that had not survived the trip with its dignity intact. Then it held steady for a while, which the scientists called excellent and everyone else called “please do not touch it.”
The trip itself had felt less like flying and more like the universe hiccupping. Malik remembered a lurch, a taste of metal, and Priya’s voice on the radio saying the crossing was boring, which, from Priya, meant nobody had died. Then Kael was under the nose of the lander: blue-brown water, a cliff coast like a broken comb, and a sky already too full. He flew the landing himself, because someone had to, and because the alternative was letting the autopilot introduce humanity to a new galaxy with a bounce. The landing legs touched down on a wide shelf of rock above the spray. Behind them, the wormhole closed. Four million light-years away, in a shed, someone started crying into a headset. On Kael, the first thing the microphones picked up was wind, and under the wind a low thump, steady as a heartbeat, coming up through the rock.
There were four of them, with a list of orders written by people who had never stood under two suns. Build four domes. Get the air machines and the algae panels working. Prove a human being could sleep here. Lena Voss built the domes, and had the temper of someone who had watched too many beautiful designs spring a leak. Inez Ortega was in charge, and was also the doctor, and had already threatened to sedate anyone who skipped a rest. Jun Park studied the living things. He had cried, once, privately, at his first clear sample of Kael’s sea water, then blamed the stale air and gone back to labelling test tubes with the devotion of a man who believed the universe could be filed.
Kael had been the surprise. It was not dead. It just was not quite ready for people. It had oceans, weather, and cliffs the sea had been wearing down for longer than anyone could count. It had plants, too, in the water and in the red scrub, busily making oxygen. They just had not been at it long enough for anyone to take a helmet off and keep it off. The sea was busy with floating mats of red weed, with darting silver fish no bigger than a finger, and with the long shadows. And the gill-breathers, it turned out, had been listening for longer than the crew had been a crew.
The second slap was closer. A wave ran up the beach and broke under the ledge in a line of white. The creature’s head came clear of the water, and with it came a sound: not a voice, more of a pressure, a long, careful thump that Malik felt in the fillings of his teeth. It came again. Three beats, a gap, three beats.
Lena went very still. “That’s a pattern.”
“That’s knocking,” Malik said. “We have been here thirty hours and the neighbours are already knocking.”
“Thirty hours,” she said, “and you are already negotiating from a cliff edge without a helmet. Inez is going to put that in the log as a lifestyle.”
They had come to put up domes, and the domes were going up, ugly in the way that things which keep you alive are ugly. Fat white bubbles of tough plastic over a light frame, bolted into the rock and already scuffed where the wind had thrown grit at them. Inside, the air was thicker. You could take your helmet off, and the air meter on your wrist stopped beeping at you. Outside, you lived by the rules: twenty minutes with your helmet off, no more, and don’t be a hero. Dome One held the kitchen and the argument about where the mugs went. Dome Two held Jun’s lab and a smell like a harbour at low tide. Dome Three, the one Lena had just sealed, was meant to be bedrooms once they trusted sleep again. Dome Four was still a frame and a prayer.
Sleep was the problem nobody had taken seriously enough.
Kael turned once every thirty-six hours, so a day there lasted a day and a half by Earth time. That alone would have been manageable. People had lived on odd clocks before, in submarines, at polar research stations, and in the old pretend Mars missions back on Earth, where the lights were a suggestion and the complaints were a way of life. The real problem was the sky. The two suns sat so awkwardly that Little Sun came up over the eastern mountains before Big Sun had finished sinking into the sea. There was no dark. There was white light, then golden light, then white light again, and an eleven-minute truce in which the sea turned to metal and the rings of Laundry caught fire along their edge. The human body has spent a few hundred thousand years waiting for the dark to tell it when to sleep. On Kael the dark never came, so the message never arrived. And a person’s mood, which likes a night to put its tools down, kept its tools in its hands.
By the third day Malik had stopped trusting his own temper. He snapped at the radio about a bolt that was perfectly fine. He rechecked a seal he had already rechecked, then rechecked Jun for rechecking it, then stood in the airlock trying to remember which way the handle turned and felt a bright, clean anger at the handle for existing. He ate standing up and did not notice he had eaten. At what should have been midnight, with Little Sun high and the rock the colour of old brass, he went out to the cliff because the dome felt small and the sky felt like a lamp someone had forgotten to switch off. He counted waves, because counting was something to do with a mind that would not switch off either.
Inez spotted it on his health readings before he noticed it himself. His heart rate was jumpy. The two times he had tried to lie down in ordinary daylight, it had taken him hours to fall asleep. She did not lecture him on the cliff. She sent Lena, which was worse, because Lena did not do bedside manner. Lena did structures.
“It’s not the hours,” Lena said, sitting down beside him, which made the drop a shared bad idea. “It’s the missing off-switch. In constant light your body clock drifts. People get odd. Then they get odder. Ask anyone who has spent a summer at the South Pole, where the sun never sets. Some people get sharp. Some get flat. A few get religious about the coffee. Nobody gets funnier, which is a loss to the mission logs.”
“Define odd.”
“Inez has a chart. You are currently in the column marked ‘will fight a rock.’ I am in the column marked ‘will alphabetise the rocks.’ Jun is writing poetry about algae and denies it. I read a verse. It rhymed. I am concerned.” She tipped her head at the bay, where the long shadow had come back and was holding still, as if the cliff were a conversation it intended to finish. “Inez has a fix. Twelve hours in the dark pod. Not sleep, exactly. A forced rest. Cool the pod a few degrees below comfortable, shut out every scrap of light, and let the body remember what night was. Someone wanted to call it hibernation. I told them humans are not bears, and we are calling it lights-out like adults.”
“Twelve hours in a fridge.”
“Twelve hours not being shouted at by two suns. The other twenty-four we build. Miss it and Inez will put you in the pod herself, and she has the upper-body strength of someone who has carried air machines up cliffs. She also has a look. You have met the look.”
Malik had met the look. It was the look of a woman who had once put a man’s helmet back on for him, gently, while explaining that being short of oxygen was not a personality.
The creature came back at the turn of the light, which was what they had started calling the eleven minutes, because “night” was a word that made Inez scribble notes in the log. It brought another. The second was smaller, scarred along one flank with three pale commas, and it circled the first with the unhurried manners of something that had never had to hurry and did not intend to start. They did not come ashore. They hung in the copper water and sent the same three-beat thump up through the rock. Malik, who had once taken tourists out over a coral reef and been told off by a guide for tapping on the glass, had the good sense to tap back. Three beats, with a stone.
The answer was four.
Lena laughed, her first real laugh since the wormhole had closed behind them. It startled a silver finger-fish in the pool below the ledge into a brief, glittering panic. “Congratulations. You have just become pen pals with something that breathes water and has opinions.”
“I’m telling it the dome is rented.”
“You’re telling it we have hands and no plan. Try not to promise it the wifi.”
Jun, when they played him the recording from the underwater microphone, went quiet in the way that meant he had cancelled three other thoughts and would like the room to do the same. The animals were not whales, whatever they looked like. No blowhole, no milk, no lungs at all: gills the size of doorways, and blood that could pull oxygen out of water a human would drown in. Nature, Jun said, had given them a whale’s shape and an octopus’s patience. They fed by swimming slowly into the current with their mouths open, sieving in clouds of tiny sea life and the little silver fish. Were they intelligent? He would not yet say so on the record. Then he spent the next hour slowing down the four-beat reply and laying it against the three-beat call, until Inez took the headphones away from him and pointed at the pod with the look.
“Language is a guess,” she said. “A pattern is a fact. Go and be a mammal in the dark.”
“They gave the beat back,” Jun said, already walking, because he was not stupid. “That is not nothing.”
“Neither is your stress level. Pod.”
They built through the bright hours and shut themselves away through the hours that should have been night. The pod was a smug little room inside Dome One, blacked out so thoroughly that the builders had called it unreasonable, in writing. It was cooled a few degrees below comfortable, with a hiss of air that engineers had argued over until it sounded like rain against a window. Malik hated it for twenty minutes. He lay in the dark and felt the mission carrying on without him: the domes unfinished, the bay unwatched, the not-fish writing further complaints about the noise. His thoughts arrived dressed for work. Then, one by one, they clocked off. The cool air did something very old to his blood. He slept as if sleep were a place he had been walking towards since New Mexico and had only just found the door.
He woke with his good mood returned to him, slightly creased, like a shirt that had at least been folded. Outside, Little Sun was high, Laundry was wearing a storm the colour of a bruise, and the bay was empty except for one long shadow that paused, once, below the new dome and then moved on, like a building inspector who had seen worse.
On the ninth day the smaller creature, the one with the commas on its flank, surfaced beside the buoy that marked their seawater pipe and nudged it, gently, back to where it belonged. The tide had pulled it out of place. Nobody had asked for help. The three-beat thump came anyway, followed by a longer phrase, rising and then level, which the underwater microphone caught and which Jun refused to call language and also refused to stop playing at meals. Inez, who had no romance in her and a great deal of sense, pointed out that a large animal moving their equipment around was a safety problem. Malik pointed out that a large animal putting their equipment back was a different safety problem, and possibly a better one. Lena, who had moved out of the column marked “will alphabetise the rocks” and was now merely brisk, wrote both versions into the rule book and made them all sign it.
The rules, once they existed, were almost embarrassingly simple. No lights shining into the water during lights-out. No sonar pinging into the sea, which ruined one of Jun’s favourite toys and improved his manners. Rubbish went into the recycler, not over the cliff. If a creature came near a dome, you did not bang on the wall to see what it would do, a rule written specifically for Malik and read aloud to him twice, the second time while he was holding a spanner in a way Inez did not care for. In return, the crew got the eleven minutes. Helmets off for as long as the air meter allowed. A stone in your hand, if you were the sort of person who answered when knocked. Jun was allowed to play back the four-beat phrase once, quietly, at the turn of the light, and he was not allowed to add harmony.
He added harmony once. The scarred animal sank and did not come back for a whole day. Jun spent lights-out composing an apology he could not send, and Inez, reading the log, wrote in the margin: do not jazz the neighbours.
The scarred one came back. It came within a body-length of the beach and held there, gills working, eye on the cliff, while Big Sun sat on the horizon and Little Sun rose behind the mountains and the eleven minutes did their brief, metallic work. Jun played the phrase clean, with no harmony, and then he played nothing. The animal listened. It did not repeat the phrase. It rolled, once, so the commas on its flank caught the double light, and then it sank with a care that looked, even to Inez, like manners.
On the eleventh day the neighbours knocked during lights-out.
Malik felt it before he heard it. Not through the air, which the pod was built to keep quiet, but through the floor: up the frame of the bunk and into the bones behind his ears. It was not three and four. It was not anything with a gap in it. It was a fast, unbroken drumming, like a neighbour leaning on the doorbell.
He lay still and counted, because counting was what he did now instead of fighting rocks. Twenty beats. Forty. It did not stop. Across the pod, Jun was already sitting up, his face lit grey by a wrist screen he was absolutely not supposed to have switched on.
“That’s not the phrase,” Jun whispered.
“Lights-out,” said Inez, from the dark, in the voice of a woman who had written the rules and then laminated them.
“It’s not the phrase, and it’s not stopping, and eight minutes ago the earthquake monitor picked up a tremor and marked it as small and far away.” Jun swallowed. “I’m not saying those two things are connected. I’m saying I would like permission to say it.”
Lena was up before he had finished. Lena did structures, and a structure was anything that might shortly be under water. She put the earthquake reading up on the pod wall, squinted at it, and did sums under her breath.
“Out at sea,” she said. “About two hundred kilometres away, under the sea bed. Small, for the rock. Nobody has told the water.” One more sum. “If the sea bed moved, a tsunami is coming. In deep water those travel about as fast as a jet plane. Call it ten to fifteen minutes. Less, if I’ve been kind to myself about the maths.”
“A wave,” Malik said. “Fine. We’ll see a wave.”
“You won’t. Not this kind. This kind looks like the tide has remembered an appointment.” She was already reaching for her suit. “The domes are high enough. The panels aren’t.”
The six algae panels sat at the bottom of the rock shelf, a stride above the sand, where a pipe could feed them seawater. They were bolted down against wind, not water. They were also the only part of the air supply that grew.
Inez looked at the three of them, at the floor, which was still drumming, and at the rules she had written specifically to stop people doing exactly this. “Helmets,” she said. “Safety lines. Nobody below the shelf after ten minutes. Malik, if I see that helmet in your lap I will sedate you on the beach and roll you uphill.”
Malik already had it on. He noticed, with mild surprise, that nobody had told him to.
Outside, Little Sun was high and the bay was copper and calm and wrong, the way a room is wrong when someone in it has stopped talking. Both long shadows were in the shallows below the ledge. Malik picked up a stone, crouched, and knocked on the rock: three beats, a gap, four. Heard you.
The drumming stopped. For a moment nothing came up through the stone at all. Then both shadows turned and raced for the mouth of the bay, fast and low, straight out towards deep water.
“They’re leaving,” Jun said.
“They’re being sensible,” said Lena. “Panels. Now.”
Each panel was the size of a door and weighed about as much as an unwilling person. They unbolted one, lifted it, staggered up the slope and came back down for the next. Lena called out the time in a flat voice that made everything sound like a sum. Inez hauled the seawater pipe up hand over hand and coiled it on the shelf with the care of someone who had once been made to coil a great deal of rope. Jun carried his end of every panel and did not speak once, which for Jun counted as a medical event.
Five panels came up. The sixth had a bolt that would not turn.
Malik put his weight on the spanner. The bolt considered this and declined. Eight days ago he would have fought it, with the same bright, clean anger he had once felt for a door handle, and he would still have been crouched at the bottom of the shelf when the sea arrived to settle the argument.
“Ten minutes,” Lena said.
He let go of the bolt and climbed.
The sea went out first. It slid back off the sand, further than any tide they had seen, and kept going, leaving finger-fish flapping in silver handfuls and the marker buoy lying on its side on the wet sand, looking embarrassed. Then it came back. It did not break or curl or do anything a surfer would respect. It simply rose, steadily and without hurry, over the sand, over the bottom of the shelf, and around the sixth panel, which lifted, considered its options, and left. The second surge was bigger. It licked the edge of the shelf a stride below the frame of Dome Four, then went away again to think about it.
It came and went three more times over the next hour, each time a little less sure of itself. When it was over, the four of them sat on the shelf in their helmets with their safety lines still clipped on, and nobody said anything for a while, because there was nothing to say that the sea had not just said louder.
From far out, past the mouth of the bay, faint through the stone: three beats, a gap, four.
“That was a warning,” Jun said.
“That was a pattern,” said Inez. She looked at the five panels lined up on the shelf, at the empty bolts below, at the sea already going back about its business. “A pattern that saved five panels. Log it as a fact. You may write ‘warning’ in the margin.”
Before the next lights-out, Lena added a line to the rule book, directly under the rule about not banging on the walls: If the neighbours knock during lights-out, answer the door. Inez signed it first.
Then, because the suns were still up and the rules said so, they went back to the pod. Malik went first. Inez noted it in the log without comment, which, from Inez, was practically a medal.
By the twelfth day the domes were all sealed, and the shelf looked lived-in, the way a place looks lived-in once someone has argued about the mugs and lost. The five surviving algae panels, bolted down again well up the slope, were drinking in the double daylight and giving back a thin, honest trickle of oxygen. It would not save anyone yet, but in a few years it would make the air machines less smug. Jun had a wall of test tubes and a theory he was not allowed to call a theory: the gill-breathers stayed in this bay because of a warm current, and they stayed near the crew because the crew had started answering. Next Door turned a slow lane of cloud towards them, a storm the size of a sea. Laundry’s rings caught Big Sun and threw a pale road across the water. The red scrub on the cliffs had put out new growth on the side facing both suns. Nobody had told it about night, and nobody was going to.
Malik sat on the high ledge in the eleven minutes, helmet off, air meter ticking on his wrist, and watched Big Sun sit down in the sea while Little Sun stood up behind the mountains. He had, he noticed, stopped wanting to fight the rock. The pod was ridiculous. The pod worked. His temper fitted him again, with room at the elbows. Somewhere under the copper water a mind the size of a chapel was swimming alongside the beach. Not a whale. Not a neighbour they had earned yet, just one they had managed not to insult. The larger animal rose far out, a slate-grey hill with an eye, and the sound that came up through the stone was three beats, a gap, and then four, unhurried, as if the reply had been ready for some time and sending it was a courtesy.
Lena’s voice came up from the lower ledge, amused and already halfway to her own lights-out. “Pod time. Your fridge is ready. Inez says if you are late she will log it as a psychological incident, and the incident will be you.”
“Tell them we’re keeping the bay,” Malik said. He tapped the ledge once, not a signal, just a habit he was not ready to think about. From the water, faint through the stone, the phrase came back, three and then four, close enough that the pool below the ledge shivered. “And tell them the locals have already checked our plumbing.”
“I’ll tell them you waved at a bus again,” Lena said. “Lights-out. The suns will still be here when you wake up. That is the whole problem, and also, lately, the point.”
Little Sun cleared the ridge. The eleven minutes ended. There was no darkness on Kael, only the discipline to make some, and the long, bright work of learning the names of everything that had lived there first.
