154: CHILDREN

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Tinera, Tal, the Friend, and Captain Klees gather outside the door, peering at me anxiously. I give them a little wave. “How is everyone?”

“How are you?” Captain Klees asks.

“Feverish. Not dying, I’m pretty sure. This isn’t causing any major impediments, is it?”

“There’s more rhetoric starting up about the ship bringing deadly diseases from Earth to kill everyone, but nobody’s really listening. The drop schedules are between the Hylarans and the ship at this point, and they don’t have all the parts ready to repair that radio yet anyway, so.” He shrugs. “Honestly at this stage, apart from passing on news of the Vault once the radio’s fixed, I don’t think any of us are really a vital component of this process. Just focus on getting better.”

“I think that’s more in the hands of the antibiotics than any focus on my part.”

“Well, tell the antibiotics to focus on getting you better.”

“You guys are all in the clear, then?”

“Well, Dr Kim says she’s doing some more thorough tests – ”

“So we really should be in quarantine, too,” the Friend says. “The Hylarans are very cavalier about biohazards.”

“Does it matter, at this point?” Tinera asks. “We’ve all interacted with them, so – ”

“Every interaction is its own infection risk. Previous interactions don’t change anything. If Aspen should be quarantined, we all should be. Although this Friend maintains that quarantining Aspen isn’t necessary, either; it’s a bacterial infection in the spine. How exactly are they going to transmit it to anyone?”

“It’s in my spine?” Maybe that was why my back hurt. I should asked this stuff of the AI. It would’ve told me. Although maybe not, because now I wish I didn’t know. The spine. Gross. Is nerve damage likely? Are my nerves at risk? That’s something to get information on when everyone’s gone and my questions can’t freak them out.

“This is starting to sound like the plot of Hadrian’s Last Ride,” Tal mumbles. “Do you think, Aspen?”

I don’t know of any actual media called that. ‘The plot of Hadrian’s Last Ride’ is one of our code phrases, set up with the crew still aboard the Courageous. It means ‘hostage situation’.

It was a question, not a statement. The crew are waiting for me to confirm or deny the suspicion. I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so.” If the Hylarans wanted to take one of us hostage, this would be a way to do it, but there’d be no point – we’re already dependent on them for survival. Locking one of us up separately is just a waste of time and resources for everyone.

Besides, the fact that the crew are even asking answers the question. You can’t use a hostage unless the people you’re leveraging their safety against knows they’re a hostage. The Hylarans would have to threaten me to the crew; there wouldn’t be uncertainty. “I think,” I say, “it’d be pretty clear if we were about to live out that plot.”

Tinera seems to have followed the same logic as me – the group probably had this discussion before coming – and frowns. “There’s a lot of complicated stuff going on with the Hylarans that doesn’t directly involve us.”

Now there’s a possibility I hadn’t considered. Someone might be leveraging the life of Aspen Greaves against another group of Hylarans. That’d be a reason to separate me from the group and they’d probably keep the truth hidden from the ground crew if they could, if only to avoid complicating things further. Possible, but there’s no reason to think so. Infections are fairly routine; quarantining someone who might be a health hazard in a settlement like this is expected. There’s no reason to think anything political is happening here. No reason it can’t be happening, either. We already know that Dr Kim wasn’t a fan of the ship arriving.

“I don’t think they would directly involve us,” I shrug. “The ship’s here, they’re coordinating drops. It doesn’t matter how many radios get broken, the ship can’t go anywhere else. The issue will solve itself, we don’t need to be involved.”

“I’m not worried about the result,” Tinera practically growls. “Settlement is unavoidable at this point. I’m worried about what damage might occur in the meantime. A radio isn’t the only thing that can be broken.”

“You guys look after each other out there, alright?”

“You look after yourself in here.”

“I always do.”

“That’s a lie,” the Friend says. “That’s a straight-up lie.”

We trade some more random assurances with each other, and they leave. Once there’s no one else around to freak out, I round on the AI. “The infection is in my spine?!”

“That’s right!”

“And you couldn’t mention that before?”

“I can mention it whenever you like, Aspen. Are you upset with me?”

“No,” I lie. But the AI is right. It’s a computer program designed to raise children; I can’t expect it to be able to anticipate what medical knowledge I might want. It’s my job to ask.

“It’s okay to feel upset, Aspen. It’s good to feel and know your feelings. Anger isn’t bad, we just have to be careful about what we decide to do when we’re angry. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t want to talk to a computer about my feelings,” I sigh, flopping down onto the bed.

“Okay!”

“What long-term risks does the spine infection pose to my body?”

“Any fever poses some risk, but the inflammation is well under control. The risk of long-term damage is negligible.”

“Nerve damage?”

“Not unless the inflammation greatly increases. Dr Kim wants to runs scans every day to ensure that that won’t happen.”

“Great.” I glance at the screen on the wall. “Do you guys have any interesting movies?”

“There are many entertaining education and work training videos!”

Potentially useful, but I’m more interested in learning about the cultural norms of Hylara, and you can get a lot more of that out of fiction. Did these guys grow up with the same movies as me? Wait, of course they wouldn’t; I left Earth over a century ago. Entertainment would have changed drastically in that time. “Any dramas? Fiction?”

“Certainly! We have many filmed plays. What would you like to see a story about?”

The soft points in cultural research are generally the same across most cultures – origin stories, hero stories, romance. The Hylarans know their origins with perhaps more clarity than any other culture. “Any good romance stories?”

The show that comes up on my screen is utterly fascinating. Not the story itself, which I can follow just well enough to realise that I’m missing pretty much all of the nuance, but everything else. Firstly, it’s an amateur production featuring Hylarans and filmed here with inconsistent lighting and sound, I have to assume with cameras usually used for something else. Some questioning of the AI reveals that almost all of its video footage is like this; the only movies it has from Earth are some very old equipment training videos and a couple of very sparse documentaries. There’s no media trade between modern Earth and Hylara, or if there is, it clearly only goes one way. Their entertainment, like their computer games, are things that the Hylarans have made for themselves.

I make a mental note to watch all the documentaries I can find later, and read any books about Earth they have (I know they have at least some; they definitely have mine). It would be very helpful to know just what the Hylarans do and don’t know about Earth, if only to make it easier to communicate and work together. For now, though, this movie.

The movie is familiar in a strange sort of way, on a level that very little of the movies we watched on Movie Nights is – while I’d asked for ‘a romance’, it’s immediately clear that while the AI understood and did its best to fulfil the request, the Hylarans would probably be as confused as an insular Arborean who hadn’t yet left the island. This isn’t, I can tell immediately, a pair bonding culture, and like Arborea, it isn’t a culture that seems to make any particular distinction between what Texans or Lunari call ‘romance’, and other forms of relationship. The story is about two young Hylarans who are in different sets who find themselves drawn to each other, and they face various social challenges because of other difficulties between other members of their sets. They have to balance their duty and feelings with their setmates with their desire to spend time together. Sex is implied and not considered scandalous both between the leads and also between people within the same set, which is valuable sociological information – no sexual taboo either within a set or between sets. The actors are mostly within the same age range, so I get no information on age-related sexual taboos. (I can just ask the AI, I suppose, but it’s giving me the impression of something more likely to give me the answer that’s supposed to be true rather than the answer that is actually true.) I can’t follow a lot of the details of what conflicts the pair are actually facing, but there is something that I’ve been wanting to ask about ever since I learned what a ‘set’ was, something starkly visible in this movie.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Aspen?”

“None of the sets in this movie have children in them.”

“Of course not! Children live in the nursery. Would you like to see a movie made with the help of children?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean… you raise children in batches of six, right?”

“That’s right!”

“From artificial wombs?”

“Correct!”

“What happens if a Hylaran gets pregnant?”

“They don’t.”

Yeah, that’s what I’d suspected. Sterilised as children? No; more likely, born sterile. It’s a simple genetic tweak. Horrible idea for a colony like this, absolutely awful for stability; if the artificial wombs break down, the colony is doomed. You need a fertile population. I ask the obvious question.

“Why not? Why can’t they have kids?” What kind of dumbfuck planning committee put such a clear and likely point of failure in their distant colony?

“Your development is strictly limited by what a human carrier can produce. You’re born weak and helpless, because a body can only provide a fetus with so much for so long. Those born here don’t have those weaknesses, but it does mean that they need far, far more nutrients than a human can provide in the womb, and need to develop for longer. If the Hylarans could reproduce biologically like you do, it would kill them.”

Oh. Okay. Reasonable answer. “Why didn’t Antarctica design things to make a couple of generations of fast-growing Hylarans, and then replace them with normal humans?”

“They did! Future generations were carried on the Courageous.”

Well. Fair enough.

I watch the rest of the movie. I watch a video about welding. I feel sorry for myself and my aching bones. I find paper and a pen in a drawer in the desk, get distracted by the unfamiliar and very archaic design of the pen for a moment, and try to think of what sort of industry and supply questions the others would want answers to, because while I’m talking to a relatively open AI instead of a cagey Hylaran, why not?

The centre of all Hylaran industry is, of course, the Vault. The Vault consists of two materials ports, each connecting to a different location in Earth’s solar system. The AI has almost no information on the condition of said solar system, beyond the Vault being part of a supply chain of Vaults where the other ends are owned and operated by Antarctica. Because Hylara has no photosynthetic or chemoautotrophic organisms (and nowhere reachable for chemoautotrophs to feed anyway), all biomass is ultimately dependent on sugars and soforth imported from said network; Hylara has no way of growing foods or organic materials of their own that aren’t grown on imported food. They do have mining capabilities, but for such a small, underequipped population, digging metals out of the ground isn’t really worth it.

All of this, I already know. I start to look into details. The vast majority of the materials that pass through the Vault are passed on; it’s not for the colony itself. Because weight differences are so crucial in transport, material theft is almost impossible not to notice, and carries an incredibly high risk of retaliation, which is one reason why the Vault is so high security. The colony receives some communication from the Earth solar system, mostly in the form of instructions, although people working on either ends of the Gate also exchange (carefully weighed) letters. Hylara sends photographs for both educational purposes on Earth and to allow Antarctica to assess the condition of the colony and what’s needed. Most of the materials kept by the colony are supplies for survival (food, plastics, medicines, soap) or things for large projects that will make ongoing survival cheaper for Antarctica to finance in the future (such as the machinery and materials to change the atmosphere). Hylara would, being a critical hub on a long-distance goods supply chain, be in an incredibly strong negotiating position as far as payment for use of the Vault were concerned, and able to leverage much better supplies for themselves, if their entire food supply wasn’t dependent on Antarctica. That’s why Antarctica had come down so harshly on their one attempt to strike – if they weren’t willing to kill Hylarans, Hylara could negotiate for better and massively increase Antarctica’s transport costs for goods. The costs would still be negligible compared to moving the goods through physical space, but a cost is a cost to a big organisation of any kind. Empires are not generally known for respecting the lives of their distant subjects.

This is why Antarctica was so deadset on not letting us land, although I’m still not sure what they expected Hylara to actually do about it. And now Hylara stands between Antarctica and the Courageous, trying to play a delicate game of maintaining control of their own society without being invaded or starved to death. So far, they’ve managed to keep our presence from Antarctica; Antarctica believe that Hylara and the Courageous are not in contact, and are still supplying enough food for 464 Hylarans. For as long as they could keep anything the Courageous brought out of their photos and communications, including the dandelion seeds now growing over the hills, they –

“Wait a minute,” I say, sitting up in bed. “Just wait a minute, Mama. What do you mean, 464 Hylarans?”

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