Don't. Fuck. Up.

My dad taught us to live by a single motto; a few simple words of advice. Don't. Fuck. Up. Of course, he then spent the next eighteen years teaching us how not to fuck up, in a myriad ways - usually by warning us and sometimes by example. He was a good man, sweating himself dry by bringing us both up and working often well into the night to keep us both in good condition while he himself got thinner and older. He kept the memory of our mother alive in us and taught us the virtues of hard work and clean living. When we became teens, he went back to travelling with us, to the far flung and inhospitable corners where conflict and confusion thrived. His job was to make observations and report back. With all the dangers of his job, he never let either of us out of his sight and was devastated when Sam finally closed the iris and went out alone to seek a fortune, never to be seen by either of us again.

On our next trip after, our first without Sam, we went to Antarctica to learn that wild emperor penguins have abandonment issues. Antarctica was both empty and crowded, depending on if we were inside or outside the ancient steel box that served as a station. I spent hours making notes while I learned about the mental makeup of the birds outside. It was a big change from the usual round of politics and diplomacy and tense negotiations between warring cultures.

Father emperor penguins keep their eggs on their feet through the long winter night, huddling in mass packs against the icy blasting winds that are endlessly trying to scour the rock clean of life. They keep the baby chick on their feet too, passing it to their mother who feeds it on fishy vomit until it's too large to shelter that way and, coincidentally, large enough to survive being in the wind. In zoos, where it's so much warmer, daddy penguins can drop their eggs occasionally without consigning it to instant death by freezing, and some of them are lazy and let the chicks sit on the concrete while they nip off to do their own thing. Those neglected young show a bizarre pattern of behaviours, calling endlessly and much louder than their cohorts, and wandering off to be as far from the other penguins as they can get.

My father described and catalogued the same behaviours cropping up, albeit rarely, in wild penguins who apparently could not cope with the sight of their beloved walking off to the ocean. They called constantly and often abandoned their eggs to go and fish beside their lady love. Some lasted a bit longer and then went crazy, heading off into the interior as if seeking enlightenment in the distant mountains. They walked at a fairly constant rate for hundreds of kilometres and then they died, usually calling pathetically to the last. As a project goes, it was damn depressing, but it allowed us both to empty our minds.

*

We froze several fingers off following these sorry specimens of avian mental health to their deranged and lonely doom, a situation we both agreed was a clear case of breaking the family motto. Once the grafts had taken and we'd healed, my father chose a dusty baked desert for the next assignment. I assume it was by way of contrast. We were leaving zoology behind and going back to the real work of dealing with human beings. Even with all our equipment, we travelled by the fast method, so as not to have the exciting situation we were going to change too much by the time we got there.

We were attached to a diplomatic mission, looking for a group of nomads who had been messing about with some unknown and worrying technology. Their region had collapsed into a prolonged and bloody anarchy, and this group had disappeared as outlaws into the desert some hundred years before, staying out of all contact except for sporadic trades with other outlaws. They talked freely to no one but themselves. We didn't even have a name for them, other than local derogatory terms it would be unwise to use. According to what little intelligence there was, they had some sort of motorbike that could skim the rocky desert without getting a puncture or sucking up dust. It seemed possible they were personal hovercraft, but the make and model were wholly unfamiliar and there was no indication of where they were getting all of that fuel to run the things. Nor was it apparent how they managed to have a single small bike carry up to three nomads and all their belongings, and still travel smoothly at speeds approaching Mach one. They were a tough bunch of people and, of course, they all had guns and learned to shoot at the same time they learned to hold a spoon. They mistrusted all outsiders, with good, historical reason.

My dad's job was to make observations of gestures between the nomads while the diplomats opened a channel of communication. My job on this trip was to look after the goats - tough, intelligent little things, a pain to keep tethered, but able to live on almost nothing and still stay fat and juicy. It was easiest to keep them in bags tied up around their necks while we were actually moving and they looked pretty cute that way, with just their heads sticking out. We travelled this maze of a desert for five days, and each morning we put ourself firmly in mind of the family motto. I remember how he laughed at that, waggling his hand and repeating it with me as a chant. Don't! Fuck! Up! while the others looked on us in polite bewilderment at the daily family ritual. And then there was a call on the radio and things got immediately busy as we found a route to our quarry, through the endlessly winding mountains and canyons that guarded them from inquisitive visitors.

The place that we eventually met them was comparatively open; a set of rolling hills covered in iron-heavy rocks and pebbles, encrusted in a reddish brown desert varnish. We'd tracked them down, but it was clear that they could both shoot and run if they needed to. Man, woman and child, they all wore trousers tucked into buckled boots, trim block-printed tunics and a sort of bandanna with the same printed patterns, and gloves made out of some sort of dyed leather, worn supple so it was like a second skin. The patterns shared some similarities, but every person there wore a different design - I think down to personal preference, but I can't be sure. They had a clear leader, an imposing man wearing gold about his wrists and a blue bead necklace around his neck.

Up close, the bikes didn't look like bikes at all. They were strangely organic in shape, oozing down from a carapace of unknown material, to touch the ground at two or more points. They were black around their outer edges, green towards the centre and textured a bit like hammered metal or the rind of certain varieties of melon. Not all of them were bikes - there were a few wider shapes, twice as big and almost like cars, carrying goods and youngsters on their backs. Given the rest of their belongings, it didn't look as though the nomads could possibly have made these things themselves, and it was a real puzzle as to who could be selling them to such a group, or why. They had been armed, certainly, but their rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers were archaic, a definite case of army surplus being used to make a profit without care for local politics or keeping things stable.

The diplomats took the pose of traders, offering salt and rations, water sterilising kits and goats. After accepting a gift of salt, the leader passed us off to his spokesman, assuming a pose of silent dignity from then on. Their trader was a confident looking man with designs in deep red, black and mustard yellow on his clothes. He wasn't any fatter than the rest, but he looked as though he took care of his appearance and he smiled a lot more than the people around him. He offered delicately carved stone of high quality and some amazing emeralds, of a sort I thought had been mined out everywhere decades ago. They obviously had a source as mysterious to us as the origin of the bikes.

Guards had rifles ready and watched us closely, while most of the nomads sat back a little their faces set stiff while they looked at far horizons. A child took off her glove, only to instantly have it jammed onto her hand, almost roughly. She cried as she was scolded in sharp tones, too fast for anyone to follow. At the crying, several of the nomads gave us a sharp look, as if it might be our fault. Times had clearly been hard and trust was low. We all did our best to look non-threatening.

In the time this secretive group had been sequestered away, their dialect had evolved into an impenetrable slang. The linguist managed to translate a few words here and there, more and more as she got the hang of the changed dialect, and conveyed as best she could that what we wanted was not gems but information and that we were not there to try and kill them or recruit them to our own ends. As they backed off to confer, my father called her over and managed to share the gestures he'd picked up - all those little non-verbal cues that would show we understood them, and help us not to display crass manners out of ignorance. They shared words, their heads close in a display of deep accord that bordered on affection, something I noted with amusement and slight alarm. His hand on her back, they went back to the knot of traders to try again.

Things went quite well. They were cagey with information, but keen to trade after a rainless year and we were making a concerted effort to offer much for little. Since nobody had a damn clue where the bikes were from, anything we could take back would make this trip a success. I carried over to them a sextet of stinking goats, taking them as directed, back towards a knot of women standing away from the bikes. The goats cried Bah! Bah! in human-sounding voices and some of the kids perched on the cars giggled and shouted Bah! Bah! back at them. This little exchange of silliness lifted the mood of the whole group.

Once all the goats had been set down, I waited and smiled nervously as two competent-looking women with no-nonsense faces checked each animal and passed them back to be loaded. They discussed in detail the merits of each one between themselves before reluctantly accepting it. At the end, the older woman gave me a beaming smile that knocked years from her thin face and hit me on the arm in what I assumed was a friendly fashion. I grinned back, relieved. We exchanged awkward, amiable goodbyes and I retreated away from all the rifles and back to the truck, circling far away from the bikes and cars. Similar scenes were going on behind me, with everything being checked for quality before being eventually accepted. The trader explained that he wouldn't tell us were the bikes were from, but in return for a hefty consignment of goods, their leader allowed some of us to go up close and have a look.

And then my dad broke the family motto. He fucked up.

We should have taken a clue from the gloves and all that covered skin and definitely from the way the child had been so sharply told off. They must have thought that it was obvious. The nomads hadn't set up any sort of trick, and were as shocked as we were when it happened. The leader shouted a sudden terrified warning as my father, carried away in negotiations, reached out absently and rested his hand on a bike. There wasn't time to save him. The black skin of the bike caught his fingers and flowed rapidly up his arm and over his head, until he had been absorbed utterly and was gone. Now it was larger, just another of several car-like vehicles amidst the bikes. It was suddenly horribly apparent what the bikes used for fuel.

Things went to hell for a while. I screamed as loud and as long as any abandoned penguin chick and our guards upped the levels of hostility to dangerous levels. I got bundled into the back of the truck and pretty much tethered down with the goats. I'm honestly surprised they didn't put a bag over my head. I'm told that things calmed down quite quickly when it became clear we weren't reaching for our guns or our radios. I know we eventually left, having traded all we agreed and without any dead bodies. There was a tick-tock scattering of rocks as the nomads went away at speed, and then the engines started up and I was jolted back to the city, screaming at the goats the whole way until my voice was hoarse. I never found out a damn thing more about the bikes, and I'm frankly scared to make a noise about it to anyone.

*

My shrink says I have abandonment issues. It's not really surprising. I still find myself shouting at nothing much and driving people away. I feel desperately, desperately alone in crowds. I bought some land with the compensation money and I've found some consolation in my work of raising this bright and hardy breed of desert goats, but I'm restless. The urge to set off into nowhere, to leave all I know behind, is becoming overwhelming.

There's a colony ship being built. Now that we've terraformed sections of Mars, it's time to head out to some of those billions of prospective planets we've found. To take the long, slow journey out to a kind of oblivion. Anyone who goes along will be pretty much dead to those they leave behind, with no way back and no knowing what will happen to us. We'll travel for twenty years in subjective time, but it's going to be hundreds of years into humanity's future when we get there, even if we had a way to communicate faster than light, which we don't. Anyone who is willing to go has to be just a little bit insane, so they've dropped some of the psych requirements. I've signed up, and I am taking the goats with me.

I'll be bearing the family motto in mind.