Lightspeed: Year One

greet the room and establish the purpose of this second wake cycle’s assembly of Bo. My own remarks were simple: I tried to draw them out in appropriate Bo-style but did not last ten minutes, though in that time I had already explained my journey, how far I’d traveled, how I first learned of my father’s case, and what it was like to arrive on Bo—how different everything seemed, and how deeply sorry I was if any of my words gave offence in their brevity, as concision was all I was used to back home.

Now we come to the part of the trial for which my father has given clear instructions, and at which I can feel his gaze surreptitiously upon me. The Inquisitor Bo asks me if I think to plead my father’s case in this matter, and after five minutes, when its question is completed and fully translated, I glance at my father and then turn to the incessantly murmuring room.

I say to them: “My father has caused the death of a Bo. Of this there can be no doubt. You know it and now I know it too. Therefore I do not come to draw out a game of the courts, of misdirection and passive deceit as it is played on my world, but to serve in another role, an honest role, secondary to my father’s testimony, which I hope you will take into consideration before verdict is passed.” I bite my lip before the last: “To that end, I stand before you, Nia Palino: Character witness in my father’s defense.”

The conversation in my father’s laboratory two wake and rest cycles prior was not so remarkable in form, the whole of it oversimplified by my shock at his last words, as in function, and thrust. After my father’s self- congratulatory answer regarding the dead Bo there was really only one thing I could think to say, so I said it:

“What the hell have you done?”

“Easy,” my father said, holding out his hands. “It was consensual. The Bo agreed. We followed every precaution. It’s just that, this time, it failed.”

“This time! What do you think you were doing, putting its life at risk even once like that?”

“‘Like that.’“ My father’s mouth twitched in annoyance. “You don’t even know what that is.”

“I know a Bo is dead because of it. I know it could cost you your life, too. What else do I need to know? What the hell were you doing that was so important you’d risk everything—even your own damned life—to see it through?”

A glint returned to my father’s eyes, and he smiled. “What do you think?” he said. “Go on. Try me.”

I set my teeth against the smugness in his voice, the goading. “You and your goddamn science,” I said. But this seemed only to feed into his pleasure, his aggravating tone.

“Exactly. So you’ll be my character witness, then?”

“Character witness! Now that’s a laugh. I don’t even know you. At all. How could you possibly . . . ?” I was too angry to finish my sentence, and stalked back to the body instead. Though considerably decayed, there were strange features upon the remains that stood out—clear differences between this Bo and the Bo to my right, still guarding the door. If I’d been any more level-headed I might have paused long enough then and there to question my father about each incongruent detail—but of course, I was not. How could I have been?

“Right again,” my father said, not even remotely giving me pause to cool down. “And why don’t you know me? What did I choose over you, and your mother?”

I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, my skin hot to the touch. “Goddamn you, dad,” I said.

If my words deflated his humor then, they did not also strip him of his relief, the sense of it clear in both voice and expression when I faced him again. “God? Yes,” he said softly, meeting my sudden, asserted gaze. “But with your help, Nia, at least not the Bo.”

I am a good speaker, even under unusual circumstances. Even when obliged to be more bombastic than even the most pompous human windbag I know (which, in my profession, is always saying a lot). And so I tell the assembly of Bo that my father’s scientific ideals are so important to him that he even abandoned his family in their pursuit over thirty years ago, knowing full well that humans cannot regress, and thus that such opportunities for kinship, once forsaken, almost never emerge again. Considering the ignorance of my audience, the Bo’s absence of preferential family bonding from which to draw comparison for this loss, I then explain what it means to be a father, and a husband, and also a daughter or a wife lacking the desired presence of one of the former two.

I close by offering up a variation of the words my father gave at yesterday’s first assembly of Bo: my conviction that the Bo’s death happened in the name of science, as a consensual act to that end alone, and that if any among the Bo in attendance grieved the loss of their companion, rest assured they could not even begin to approach the grief my father had felt at the time of its passing and every moment since, having sacrificed so much of himself, his mortality, and all claims to happiness therein to those same scientific ideals, only to see his greatest work destroyed in the sunset of his life. (I have to backtrack here alone, to explain the term “sunset,” and then to emphasize how the term’s very strangeness among the Bo only furthers my point about the sanctity of life to a human being.)

The verdict comes back in four days, taking another full day to be delivered, during which time I fall asleep regularly in the courtroom, while my Bo ducks out on occasion to provide us with food and drink. Twice I linger by the waste receptacles, nauseated by the poorness of my sleep, stalling my return to that ceaseless chatter of spectator Bo as long as I can, clamping my hands to my ears in an effort to recall the sound of pure silence: A fairy tale I hold deep in my heart. I have my white noise buds on their highest settings by the end of it all, and still the Bo-speak trickles through, my ears damnably attuned by then to the chorus of them against all odds, all internal appeals for sanity, and peace.

Finally, the summation arrives: guilty, but pardoned. I close my eyes and sink in my seat. My father is silent, unmoving beside me. I fall asleep again, the whole of my body tingling and drained, and when I wake anew he is gone: The gathering space, empty, save for one Bo with a dark cast over its left eye, waiting patiently off to one side.

“Can I go home now?” I hear the words come out in a croak and think only, to hell with convention and prudence: Let the Bo’s anger pour out. But to my great surprise, the Bo hesitates, parting its long, thin mouth in turn, and with clear effort musters a mere three words in response:

“It is done.”

It is not, of course, done. Captain Sedgwick greets me grimly when my shuttle docks in the dark cavern of his ship. He knows nothing of my father’s verdict save the language of my body, and my body is tired and defeated. We speak scarcely at all before the inevitable unraveling of tensions between us, my blissfully dry berth turned doubly warm-blooded for a spell. Only after, in the darkness, which I find at last I am learning to bear, do I allow myself to think through all of my lingering doubts.

That my father was experimenting with regression was apparent, but so too, it seemed to me, were the aims of his work. Perhaps the Bo at large could not see what I had seen—the discordant number of digits on the dead Bo’s shriveled body, the unusual nature of its legs, its head, and its chest. But my father had also said the Bo sought out companion songs when regressing. Could the Bo have missed that, too? Had none of them wondered who had been this Bo’s singer as it regrew?

In the long, dark night that followed the trial, my thoughts had grown wilder still: Perhaps saying the names did not sustain the universe, but what if the ritual of it could sustain even one creature, one Bo at a time? And if those songs changed—if the singer changed—what of the Bo in regression? Could it take on other forms through the right song alone? These might all have been the idle, fool thoughts of a non-scientist, an outsider—easily pondered, that is, and just as easily let go—if it hadn’t been for the last conversation I had on Bo.

I knew it would also be the last time I saw my father, that conversation in the last wake cycle before the shuttle arrived to take me home. My father was back in the laboratory by then, dusting the rank and file of his reclaimed research shelves, when I entered for one last look around. The dead Bo, I quickly noted, was now gone.

“I’ve buried it,” my father said. “In case you’re wondering. The Bo don’t care, don’t mind what happens to the flesh.”

“Do you mean that?” I said. “It?”

My father paused in his cleaning to look at me. “What else would I mean?”

My heart was pounding at his scrutiny, and I knew then that the anger I felt for him, the coarse utilitarianism of