145: UNDERGROUND

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The metal doors leading into the side of the dune are thick. Heavy. Free of sand, although the angle suggests that sand would fall past the guards and onto them easily with the slightest wind; probably swept clean regularly. Tinera narrows her eyes as we get close, thinking, probably, of the ridiculous weight of metal that must have been trucked across lightyears from Earth to make them.

Unless the metal was mined here. It wounds absurd, but if the metals are close enough to the surface, if they brought processing systems, if they were lucky enough… well, they’re doing the impossible with the atmosphere. Why not with metal mining?

And it does look like metal. It’s not always easy to tell true metal from lighter, more flexible synthetics, but I’ve been on a spaceship for a long time and I’m reasonably sure that this is titanium, probably. The Friend, frowning, presses one hand to the door frame, probably thinking the same thing.

Then the door begins to open with a clank and a shake, and the Friend jumps back out of the danger zone as the metal pulls shakily aside to reveal a tunnel into the dune.

Metal walls and ceiling. Aluminium, I have to assume. Rubber grip paint on a metal floor, somewhat gummed up with sand – this stuff is impossible to keep clean. Light strips on the ceiling, enough to see by but leaving the place almost dark in comparison to the outdoors. I put my right hand, my blind side hand, to the wall to avoid any embarrassing mistakes, and follow the group forward.

The path moves down at a noticeable angle, but not enough of one to make walking difficult. It feels almost like being on the Courageous again, constantly fighting the deceleration when moving aft. We’re moving not just into the dune but below it. Below the level of the village. Probably not, I don’t think, as low as the valley below the village of domes, but lower than the village itself, certainly.

And metal walls, where plastic on synthsteel supports would do. I try to catch Tinera’s eye, but she’s lost in thought.

The tunnel turns a sharp ninety degrees, and we face a locked security gate, with two guards on the other side. A manned security gate in such a small, isolated community isn’t a good sign, sociologically speaking, but it’s entirely possible that they only started manning it since our arrival. The two guards look us up and down. Max steps forward to speak to them.

The conversation is too quiet and too laden with local slang for me to follow, but after some rapid back and forth, the guards reluctantly unlock the gate and let us through. I try not to react as one falls into step behind us. Probably procedure.

“The nursery is up here on our left,” Max says cheerfully, voice echoing in the tunnel, and indeed I can hear something else, the sound of some sort of machinery up ahead. “We can’t go all the way in because some people are still nervous about immunity when it comes to the kids. I’d argue that childhood is when somebody is supposed to be exposed to viruses, but I don’t make the rules. We can see the front, though.” They pick up the pace, leading the way to a strangely bulky door some way down the corridor, and as we approach, I realise that this isn’t where the sound in the hallway is coming from – that’s from somewhere further ahead. This door is silent. And bulky. And synthetic. And round. And very, very familiar-looking.

It looks just like the airlock doors on the Courageous.

Max opens it, and it is indeed an airlock, although altered. The machinery has been stripped out and a coat rack glued to one wall, where a few personal effects hang. Max opens the inner door, which doesn’t require closing the outer one, and waves us all in.

The walls and floor are familiar, the same sort of materials that we’ve been walking on for five years. The floor is much more worn than the Courageous, though – maybe a factor of time, or foot traffic, or both. A shiny path is worn into it by thousands of feet, leading to a door at the other end of this chamber.

I can tell right away that this ship wasn’t designed like the Courageous, using rotation to simulate gravity. There’s a specific ‘down’ here, a flat floor and a solid ceiling, and just taking into account the size of the dune above us it simply isn’t possible that this is one room in a large ring, unless the room was cut out of the ring and brought here. No; this place was designed either to be used with propulsion directly underneath, pushing the room ‘up’ at 9.8m/s², or designed to be used in gravity.

The room itself is unremarkable. Four tables sit along one wall, three with chairs and some papers, one with a big, solid computer interface even clunkier and simpler in design than those aboard the Courageous. Along the opposite wall is some large cabinets. And straight ahead, a door. Large, thick plastic windows sit on either side of the door, and the door itself is transparent. The view of the room beyond is obscured only by a large display screen, significantly more modern-looking than anything else in the room, bolted to one of the windows. It’s blank. And in the room beyond, are children.

Very young children, I suppose. These are presumably the children who haven’t reached adulthood by Hylaran standards, children younger than seven; most of them look significantly younger than that, judging by their size. About twenty of them are in the room, some talking or playing together, some concentrating on computers along the edge of the room. And they look wrong.

Or different, at least. Different to the children I’m used to. On Arborea, kids learn to walk and climb and tend the plants at a very young age, but Arborean kids can’t match the grace of Hylaran kids. Their bodies are far from adult proportioned, but the young ones don’t have heads quite so oversized as I’m used to seeing on kids, and they walk and move with a smooth dexterity beyond their years. (Or maybe I’m not correctly estimating their years. Maybe Hylaran kids are just small.) They look as heavily engineered as the adults, which is to be expected; unusually hairy, large ears, thin frames. As I watch, three children no higher than my waist collaborate on building a carefully balanced, elaborate block tower as high as they can reach.

“We can’t go in,” Max reiterates. “But we can talk to Mama. Hi, Mama!”

The screen mounted on the window comes to life. “Hello, Max! You’ve grown so big!”

Max usually sounds chipper, but a tenderness I’ve never heard enters their voice as they talk to the screen. “Yeah, well. I’m an adult now.”

“You sure are! And is life as exciting as you expected?”

“It sure is, Mama. I’ve brought some visitors. These are Adin Klees, Tinera Li Null, Aspen Greaves, Tal Smithson, and a Public Universal Friend, from the ship in the sky.”

“Hello, our guests from the ship in the sky! Is the colony as exciting as you expected?”

An AI. Mama is definitely an AI, with a response like that.

“It is,” Captain Klees says, in good humour.

“I’m so glad. It’s good to see you, Max. Do you need anything?”

“No thank you, Mama. We’re just doing a tour.”

“If you ever need anything, you know I’m here for you.”

“Always. Love you, Mama.”

“And I love you, Max! Say hello to your set for me!”

Max’s voice breaks as they respond. “I-I will.” They brush at their eyes and pull their bright smile back on. “So that’s the nursery! Shall we move on?”

“You grew up there?” the Friend asks Max as we head back into the corridor and meet the guard waiting out there for us.

“We all do, until we’re old enough to join the community.”

“By the AI?”

“By Mama and the human caretakers, yes. We try to get as many people involved as possible, so that the kids are prepared for living in a community, but it depends on who is available and with what time. Technically, Mama can do the whole job herself if she has to. She managed the first generation just fine.”

The first generation. A nursery built out of a spaceship that might not have been designed to be used in space. An AI sophisticated enough to raise children alone; genetically engineered children who seemed, although it was only a hunch at this point, to mature faster than the children I was used to, at least in terms of physical capability, and were considered adults at age seven. A population born entirely on the planet, even though the colony was young enough that some of the initial astronauts could be expected to be alive.

The acceleration of the javelins had to be slow, given the sheer mass of the ships and the physical limitations of the chronostatic colonists. A smaller ship with a small, awake crew and no chronostasis pods could move much faster; awake, trained astronauts can be put under greater physical stress than unconscious people floating in pods.

What kind of acceleration could you get with no living crew at all? Just robots and frozen embryos, ready to be gestated and born on the planet?

“Max. The ship that brought all of this here. Did it have a crew? Did anybody actually come here from Earth?”

They shoot me a puzzled look. “No, we were all born here. Didn’t we cover that already?”

“Wait,” Tal says. “The ship had no one aboard? They didn’t die, they just didn’t exist?”

“We were aboard,” Max says. “In the freezers. Not born yet, obviously.”

As we walk down the corridor, I recalculate some things. This colony was founded by children born here, under the guidance of AI. No connection to Earth at all, beyond any tools and media brought with them (which they certainly had; they speak the Interlingua and have my books). It makes the young adult age make a little bit more sense; the first generation would’ve been put to work at an incredibly young age, as there are pretty severe limits to what robots can do without human repair and supervision. It certainly makes the group raising in sets make more sense. Young adults introduced into the community would need to join with older adults to help show them how to live in the community, but this setup doesn’t allow for parents. I’ve never seen a society without parents before, until now – but this society has never had parents, has it? They have carers and guides… and Mama.

“The ship buried itself in this dune upon landing,” Max says as we continue down the corridor. “The people who programmed everything couldn’t know what the conditions would be, so all the systems were set to maximise protection from weather and radiation. The first decade or so was spent in this dune, and most of our manufacturing facilities were never moved out of it.” They stop outside another door. This one isn’t an airlock, and there’s a lot of sound behind it. “A lot of the basics are inside the ship, where we can’t go because of infection risks to the children. But the rest of our manufacturing is through here.”

The room beyond was a mishmash of various incredibly small-scale manufacturing facilities. This was no large factory; no big steel machinery would be assembled here. A set of medium-sized part printers sits lined up against a wall; metal, plastic, ceramic, a few printers I don’t recognise. I’d already assumed their existence from the Autodoc. Through a sheet of darkened glass, I see another room where a couple of Hylarans are hand-welding something. Welding in an enclosed space sounds like a bad idea to me, but that’s my Earth upbringing talking; the air down here is of course pumped and filtered.

The doors get wider; wide enough to accommodate the large metal crates we see stacked in storage rooms as we move further into the manufacturing area. At one point, Max points to a ladder leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling and tells us that at the top of a very long climb is the monitoring station that the colony has repurposed into a radio tower to communicate with the Courageous – if we wanted to test our stamina and our knees, we could climb back up to where we’d recently conversed with the ship. Good to know.

There’s one glaring, clear omission from the tour so far.

“Where are the farms?” the Friend asks. “Back in the ship, behind the children?”

Max and our guard exchange a tense look. The guard shrugs.

“That’s sort of a complicated question,” Max says with a smile. “One that’s perhaps faster to show you than tell you. Come on.” They lead us deeper into the facility, past another locked gate with another two guards who don’t look at all happy that we’re there. That pair attaches a guard to us, too, so now our escort is our liaison and two jumpy-looking guards who won’t stop sneaking glances at us. I remind myself that if this colony was started here with no astronauts. We might very well be the only people who look anything like us who have stepped on this planet.

We pause outside one final door. A big cargo door, wide as the corridor, heavy and locked. Max rubs their hands together and looks at all of us.

“So. Welcome to the Vault.”

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