136: DOME

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One thing to be said about the Hylarans is that they work quickly. Even as we eat, we can hear people moving around outside the dome, doing something around the door. By the time we’re finished, there’s a hastily assembled decontamination chamber there.

Well, it’s a little canvas room with some big spray canisters of some kind of orange disinfectant. Not exactly high tech. But it’ll do the job. We finish before Max gets back, and I get up from the table. “I’m going to look at the bedrooms. Call me when it’s time for the tour.”

“You want to take a nap now?” Tinera asks as I leave.

“Not a nap! A population count!”

“We know the population,” Tal says, sounding puzzled. “They told us.”

I’m not interested in a total population. I’m interested in knowing the family size. The table we ate at has 8 seats, which gives some idea of how many people are supposed to live in this dome, but it’s not a reliable count. It’s common for societies that use tables to have larger ones than they need, for guests. It’s equally possible that a lot of people live in these domes and eat in two shifts. It’s also possible that the table was brought in specifically for us – it’s set up in the middle of a living area, and it’s possible that the Hylarans eat communally and brought one in for us since we’re in quarantine. It would fit through the door, with some careful maneuvring.

Beds are a more reliable indicator of population, although they’re not completely reliable either because there’s no standard for how much space someone needs to sleep. In some societies, individuals sleep in individual beds, or share a bed with one partner. In others, whole families share a single sleeping palette. It’s not unusual for cultures to not have permanent beds at all, but merely roll out blankets on the floor when it’s time to sleep.

The Hylarans, as it turns out, do have beds, although not quite the kind I’m used to. Instead of a mattress, some kind of fabric is stretched over a narrow bedframe. Narrow enough that I can be reasonably sure the beds are each designed for one person, which makes a count easy, and there are indeed eight of them. So. This sized living dome is for a maximum of eight people.

Good to know.

The bathroom facilities are approximately what I’m used to on the ship except the shower, although the pipes are all exposed since the walls are canvas. Everything is hooked into a pipe leading to a rainwater tank outside that I was able to glimpse on my way here. The wastewater lines port outside and are presumably buried. The shower is replaced by a seat and a hot water basin with ladles and cloths, a much more Arborean sort of system than the spaceship has. I wish I knew more about Antarctic culture. I’ve never been to Antarctica, but taproot and stars, if I had… examining the differences between everyday Hylaran and Antarctic culture would be fascinating. The colonists who arrived here were almost certainly Antarctic, but the environments are so different…

Well, I can always interview the colonists about it later. For now, the most interesting thing about the bathroom is that it doesn’t have any kind of self-contained water recycling system. Water’s ported in via the rain and out via the wastewater line, presumably for treatment elsewhere. Aside from keeping enough oxygen to breathe, there’s almost no attempt in this colony to separate the colony from the environment. Dangerous choice, on an alien planet.

The second most interesting thing is the soap. It’s solid soap in little bricks, not too harsh and with some kind of vaguely pleasant scent that I don’t recognise. The bricks have rough edges, and a couple of them are cut unevenly – hand cut. So probably hand made. Couple of possible reasons for that. It’s possible that they don’t have anything so specific as a soap making factory, but everything I’ve seen so far suggests that Hylarans simply like working with their hands.

I put the soap away carefully, fully aware of what a precious resource it must be in a place like this. It can’t be reclaimed from the water system once it’s used; every brick of soap means making more oil, growing more calories that won’t be used as food. It means manufacturing lye, which might be sourced from the planet itself depending on its chemistry, but is more likely sourced from burning wood – more precious plant growth. Providing us with this much of it suggests that they’re either working very hard to make sure we’re comfortable, or their prosperity is far in excess of what they need to feed themselves. I can’t wait to see their farms.

Or it might just mean that they’re expecting a large influx of soap from the Courageous’ supplies and don’t need to ration it any more. That’s always a possibility.

I inspect the cleaning cloths, but they tell me very little. Machine woven, which is hardly a surprise – even a culture that values crafting has to bow to practicality, and the difference in time and effort between hand weaving and machine weaving is so incredibly vast that it just doesn’t make sense to supply a colony this size in this situation with hand woven products. I have no doubt that there are Hylaran grandmothers knitting colourful belts for their grandchildrens’ tunics out there, but it’s not remotely surprising for the vast array of common use fabrics – the cleaning cloths, the bed fabrics, the tunics – to be machine made. A lot of it is probably polyester, given the situation – algal cultures can make ingredients for plastics a lot faster than plants can grow fibres, and the harvesting and processing is much faster and easier to automate. The condition of the dome canvases makes it clear that they don’t have the sophisticated setups needed to make the high integrity dome canvases, but they obviously have basic manufacturing capabilities, or they wouldn’t be able to keep the AutoDoc supplied.

I wonder how recent this indifference to the open sky is. I would’ve thought that it would be fairly recent, after they’d realised that the Courageous wasn’t coming and that their canvas integrity would fail eventually without a resupply. At that point, there’s no reason not to remove the inconvenient airlocks and get used to carrying oxygen tanks. But that would mean that the living domes initially had contained water systems… did they pull those out and replace them with these systems? Why?

Of course, I’m only looking at one living dome. Maybe older domes had contained systems, and they’ve expanded since deciding we weren’t coming. Our dome might be built post-realisation. Or maybe they had some disaster that damaged a lot of their initial canvas early on and made the choice immediately. I wish I had more to work with. I wish I had more than three rooms. I wish the previous occupants of this place had left behind some personal effects or something. I wish I could look at other living domes.

Well, once we’re no long a biohazard, maybe I can. In the meantime, I’m sure I can learn a lot from the tour.

It’s not long before it’s time for the tour. We suit up, undergo the tedious process of disinfecting each other in the little ad-hoc decontamination chamber, and meet Max outside. Max, not coming into the dome this time, doesn’t have to wear their protective suit, and I for one am incredibly envious.

As we walk away from the dome, I reconsider my previous stance on the ground of the planet being wrong. I don’t think that’s what upset me at all; sand and mud isn’t particularly disturbing. I think my actual problem with this planet is the sky.

It’s really, really far away. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that. It’s an ominous reddish colour under the ever-present clouds, probably a fault of the neon, and being able to see so far in all directions is disorienting. I banish the thought; I lived most of my life on a planet, skies aren’t new to me, I’m just out of practice with them. I’ll adapt in a few days, same as I adapted to the eye. (And soon I’ll have to adapt to a new eye all over again, I guess. Lots of adaptation recently.)

“So, what would you like to see first?” Max asks us with a bright smile.

“Medical facilities and medical records,” the Friend says. “Your medbay looks decently equipped for the population, but we absolutely need to prioritise expanding your medical capabilities before we bring colonists down. It would be helpful to know what your systems and supplies are currently like, and what sorts of medical complications your doctors deal with regularly, as well as what training they have.”

Tinera points in the direction of the metal door leading underground that I’d noticed on our way in. “You’ve got underground facilities. You’ve only been here fifty years and there’s hardly any of you. Were they hard to build? Can we see them? I assume the power station is down there; are your farms and factories down there? I don’t see anything up here.”

“You have real computers, right?” Tal asks. “I saw the doc with one. And that ring radio, I assume it does more stuff. It’s pretty compact. How does it work?”

“Before we do anything,” Captain Klees says, “we should probably contact the ship and tell them what we’ve learned so far. Can we go to the radio station?”

I want to see all that stuff too, but what I do see is the slight panic in Max’s eyes. Too aggressive, they’re all being too aggressive. This is no way to treat a group of people who are terrified that you’ve showed up to invade them.

“Guys,” I pipe up. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a long and terrifying day. Maybe we could start by learning a bit about the Hylarans? Settling in a bit? Max, can you show us around the settlement? Don’t worry, the Friend here made absolutely certain that the outside of our suits are thoroughly decontaminated.”

Max smiles again. “Of course! I’m sure everyone will be delighted to meet you all. Some of the people here have read your books, Aspen.”

I make sure to turn my radio off before responding to that, then turn it back on again to say, “That’s nice. How many homes are there?”

“Ninety three houses, plus the central meeting area.”

We’re on the very outskirts of the little town. As we weave between the houses, I notice that about two thirds of them are our size, and about one third are smaller. That is extremely interesting. Most of them have rainwater tanks attached, although there’s a few situations where a cluster of houses share a tank. The doors don’t seem to be built to accommodate airlocks that have since been removed; they’re just singular supposed-to-be-airtight doors.

Also extremely interesting.

The people we pass all wear identical tunics, although there’s variation in the belts – woven belts, flat plastic belts, cord belts. They all look at us curiously, but cautiously; a few look openly hostile, and some of the kids look frightened. We wave uneasily at them, but there’s only so much goodwill you can convey when you’re in a space suit and it’s unlikely that they can hear our radio conversations. A couple of people are wearing breathing masks like Max, but most of them, moving between nearby buildings or peeking outside to look at us, don’t bother.

I’m not paying a huge amount of attention to them right now. I’m running the math. Houses set up with water tanks and that never had airlocks were presumably built after the colony gave up on a contained atmosphere (they couldn’t possibly have planned not to have one from the beginning, it’s another planet), suggesting a rapid expansion after that. As we approach the middle of town, I see some doorways set up that clearly used to be airlocks; older homes, probably. And with canvas in better repair than further away houses… some kind of class difference, there. Houses for the privileged.

Anyway. About two-thirds of the houses are large enough to fit eight occupants, and many of them are not the initial houses, despite smaller houses also clearly being available (let’s call those four-occupant houses for now). At a rough guess, space for six hundred people. Of course, that’s assuming that all the larger domes fit 8 people; it’s possible that 8 is just a maximum. But it’s also worth noting that the dome we’re living in has clearly been lived in a lot. And the population has no elderly, and more than half of them are children.

“I’m sorry if this is insensitive,” I ask Max over the radio, “but has your colony suffered through some sort of disaster recently?”

“Disaster?”

“Something that’s caused a great loss of life.”

Their lips tighten under their oxygen mask. “Famine,” they say shortly.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well.” The bright smile returns. “We don’t need to worry about that sort of thing any more, do we?” They raise their voice slightly, and I realise that while nobody without a radio can hear my side of the conversation, the various onlooking locals can hear Max. “Now that the ship is here, we won’t need to worry about famine ever again!”

Famine, huh.

Interesting.

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