This piece was dually inspired by Becky Chamber’s novella “To Be Taught If Fortunate” and a real life magical moment. In the novella, a team conducts ecological surveys of a number of habitable worlds. On the planet Aecor, the crew discovers dozens of species of colorful, glowing aquatic creatures swimming around underneath the vast sea of ice. This moment of the book came back to me while pond skating at night on our own planet Earth. The ice was so exceptionally clear that the orange “shadows” of koi fish could be seen following us around the pond. “If they’d sent us here just for this, that’d be enough.”
