A Human Kind of Hope

Welcome to Bei-Yawa, just in time for the traditional autumn Ceremony. But as terraforming remakes the planet over, how much longer will there be anyone left to perform it?

Will we ever learn from our history and make wiser choices? And who is to say what is wiser? Those questions were deeply on my mind when I wrote this story.

Content warning: Colonization (no violence depicted)

Reading time: About 11 minutes

---

I landed our hovercar and stepped out onto the bare patch of dirt that was the parking lot on the edge of Ta-grue lands.

“It looks like there will be a good-sized audience this season,” Anabelle remarked as a dozen hovercars parked around us. I nodded while holding out a hand to help her from the car. She didn’t go into the non-terraformed areas of Bei-Yawa enough to be fully comfortable in her atmo suit. Once she had stepped out, I turned back just in time to catch our guest, Mason Gill. He had been looking out over the rolling hills of singing grass, and tripped over the edge of the door.

“Sorry, sorry,” Mason said nervously. I have been told humans are uncomfortable in their atmo suits, that the suits feel too fragile to hold out the unbreathable air of the planets humans colonize. They feel this way even though there is nothing on my planet or theirs that will tear the reinforced fabric. I am often amazed at the power of human fear, and how it has reshaped worlds.

“We’re walking?” He asked, surprised. The other visitors were headed toward a path that ran out into the grass, winding between the hills.

“No cars allowed on Ta-grue lands on Ceremony days,” Ana said. My wife took Mason’s arm and led him to the path. I followed, watching them while they talked. Mason was small and pale, with a long thin face and a hunched-over posture that made him look ten years older than he was. Ana was stouter in comparison, just as pale but brimming with exuberance where Mason looked drawn and worried.

It felt good to walk out across the plain, even in the atmo suit. I listened to the wind through the grasses. Ana has told me that Earth’s grasses don’t sing. But she thought the singing grass was lovely, and had some planted in her memorial garden. I don’t know if she planted them because she actually likes their harmonizing bell tones, or if she did it for me.

“Stan?” Ana looked back at me. “How would you describe the Ceremony?”

Heartbreaking was the only human word that came to me. What else was there to say? If the humans had really wanted to know about our customs, they wouldn’t be terraforming our planet. “We will see it soon enough,” I replied.

The two of them slowed down and drifted apart, until I was walking in between them.

“I’m very interested in alien cultures,” Mason said. “That’s why Ana invited me.”

“I thought you were looking for employment,” I said.

“Oh, no. Well, in a way. I work with immigrants and refugees, trying to get them settled on their new home planets while continuing to honor their ancestral traditions.”

“Mason was on Jellis Plume, darling. Helping those orphan bird-people find proper housing,” Ana put in.

“You built them Ferisian aviaries?” I asked. Humans slept on beds, and seemed confused when they learned other intelligent species did not.

“I tried,” he replied glumly. “But the local design council had a complete fit. Ended up passing legislation to ban them completely. Along with certain traditional garb, just out of spite. The Ferisians very politely told me to stop helping and go away, that they were more than happy to fit in with their human neighbors.”

“I’m surprised you tried,” I said.

“Stan!” Ana said.

“It’s alright Ana.” Mason made a gentling motion toward her. “We all know that human policy toward aliens is despicable at best, murderous at worst.

“I failed miserably on Jellis Plume. I’m off to a farm community on Hellas 9, to help the Rataysin immigrants there start a business to protect their interests,” Mason explained. “Your Bei-Yawa was on my way.”

The Rataysin people had been unhomed, forced to leave their native planet once the humans had finished terraforming it. Hellas 9 had similar enough atmosphere and terrain to Ratays, and for a while the humans hadn’t been interested in it. But Ratays had recently been mined out, so the humans were looking at Hellas 9 for a source of raw materials.

“You wish to protect them from the corporate human scavengers?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Mason said. He had a face built for earnestness, and it shone out of him. It was a quality of attention I found laudable, exhausting, and annoying, all at once.

“You’ll need more than laws and agreements,” I replied. “They’ll find a way around those, they always do. What brings you to this work, Mason Gill?” I know not all humans are ruthless colonizers, but I’d never met one that tried to protect aliens from other humans. Even my wife and her relentless promotion and preservation of art is more focused on contributions than injustice.

“Ask anything but that, Stan!” Ana laughed. The sound wove in perfect harmony with the bell-tones of the singing grass around us. I reached out and put my arm around her shoulders to pull our forms close together, a human but deeply satisfying display of affection. She snugged in, walking in step with me as she continued. “Our Mason is a bit of a radical.”

Mason’s face reddened. “Perhaps I am, but the human race is on a path to its own destruction, and barely anyone seems to notice. We take what isn’t ours by force and then destroy it beyond recognition. Sooner or later, we’re going to run into a species with bigger guns who won’t suffer our delusion that we have a right to own everything we see. Either that or we’ll run out of useful planets we can reach on the technology we have and find we used up everything and there’s left nothing for anyone. It’s a sickness, our culture.”

“You see?” Ana said. Mason’s face reddened even more.

“Yes, well, perhaps I do go on a bit,” Mason mumbled. He took a deep breath and I could see him mentally change tracks. “This is why I am so interested in helping non-human cultures flourish, to keep their customs and histories from being assimilated into human consumption and greed. It’s why I’m thrilled to see your Ta-grue Ceremony today. I really appreciate your invitation. Will you be participating?”

It was always like this with humans: their unthinking fascination that can turn a sentence into a knife. Mason watched me with a hopeful expression. Ana watched me too, but her eyes were soft. She knew our love wasn’t enough to wipe away the pain of what I had given up for it.

“No,” I replied. “It’s not my Ceremony any more.”

“We’re here,” Ana said.

---

I looked up and saw the familiar Ceremony grounds at the base of the mesa where the Ta-grue lived in the winter months. The mesa looked far off, but I knew that was only because I had become used to judging distance through human eyes. We joined the rest of the visitors to stand and watch while my people gathered at the far end of the open space. The Ta-grue were dressed in ancient costumes, passed down through family lines for thousands of generations. Their four work arms were draped with voluminous cloak-like fabric in pale, washed-out colors.

Once every Ta-grue was lined up in order of age and rank, the musicians on their ceremonial instruments started playing our traditional songs. The procession began, marking the beginning of the autumn Ceremony. When the performance area was full, the anti-grav posts along the edge of the performing space switched on. The Ta-grue floated a few feet off the ground, their long fabrics swirling around them as if they were underwater. Freed from gravity, my people started to glow. They started twisting their limbs, moving their bodies in the ritual patterns, in the primordial speech of consciousness to DNA. Minutes passed and bit by bit they twisted faster, following the music as it sped up and became more intense, their glow brighter and brighter.

I felt the ache all over my body, right down into my cells, to bend, to twist, to transform. To honor the change of the seasons, the change of work that needed to be done to support Bei-Yawa, the change of our purpose as our planet traveled around our sun. Yawa’en peoples changed across the year, enjoyed the rhythm of our planet in the best form for that time, that place.

As we had all done for millennia, before the humans came. But now more and more of us lived with the humans on our planet. We stopped shifting and locked our variable bodies in a human form that breathed human air and spoke human speech and heard with human ears. I had made that choice for love, to live my life with Ana. But as the terraforming proceeds, it is a choice all my people will have to make: become like the humans or die.

The Ceremony reached its crescendo. The glow from the Ta-gru flashed out so bright it was momentarily blinding. My eyes watered from it, or perhaps from memories of the ecstasy of becoming that which I was meant to become. Ana took my hand in hers, and I leaned against her soft human form with my own.

The anti-grav posts slowly turned off, lowering the Ta-gru in their harvest forms—bulky, solid forms with three arms, one longer with a curved claw like a sickle—to the ground as they rejoiced. The humans shouted and clapped, caught up in the moment. The celebration would last the rest of the day. Already floating shelves of food and art and wares were being set up.

---

Ana looked at me like she always did after every Ceremony, with a mix of love and guilt. I leaned over and kissed her cheek. We smiled at each other, doubts erased until the next turn of the seasons.

At that moment Mason Gill said in a shaky voice: “This must be preserved.”

He looked like he was in shock. He was trembling as he watched the Ta-grue in their new forms like they were food and he was starving.

“Mason, are you all right?” My wife asked.

“No,” Mason said. “Don’t you see? The Ta-grue have what humans lost, or maybe what we never had: how to live within nature, how to be nature—this is what human culture needs most. They embody the past as they cast power and value forward to the future….and they’ve held on to it, to their spirit, in spite of what we’ve done to them, to their planet.

“I have to help them. I will. This must be preserved. If humans could learn from Yawa’ens how to be this in touch with each other and with their biospheres, to become what the planet needs most to help sustain life within it, then maybe, finally there would be peace among us.”

Ana and I stared at him. His reverence and intensity almost seemed to make the shocked pallor of his face glow slightly, almost like one of my people.

“Can you stop the terraforming?” I asked.

Mason grimaced. “That’s the most important part, isn’t it?” He ran his hands through his hair, yanking at the ends before letting them go. “Maybe. Maybe I can get them to stop some of it. To leave most of the zones where native Yawa’ens are located now bubbled so you can practice your way of life without interference.”

“And humans will learn from us how to be better?” I asked.

“There will be a time when humans will need this knowledge,” Mason said. “And beyond that, haven’t your people suffered enough? This is your planet. You need your own sovereignty to live your lives in your native places, and to protect and nurture those places. You need justice, and I will help you get it.”

I heard what he was not saying: that if we waited for the humans to be better, to be the kind of species that doesn’t subjugate everything in its path, then we would be too late to save any of Bei-Yawa.

“I’ll do my best for you,” Mason promised, his usual earnestness transcendant in his moment of epiphany. “And we can pray that enough of us together can make this right.”

Was putting my trust in this human right? I felt uneasy but I knew the ultimate truth of the matter: the path we were on now would end in the carefully planned sunset fade of my people and our culture until there were no Yawa’ens left. Mason offered a human version of hope, something slightly better than nothing.

“I will talk to the leaders of the Ta-grue,” I said. “You should not expect much. They have been betrayed by humans in the past.”

But in spite of what I said, Mason’s small hope had already begun to grow in my human-shaped heart.

---

This story was born from a single moment in history, how that moment has shaped our world today, and my very mixed feelings around it. If you are curious, click below to learn more.

---