2: Closed System

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I didn’t tell my friends about the treegrave thing at Rubbish & Recycling the next day. They wouldn’t have understood. They would’ve congratulated me, and when I explained why it was sad, they would’ve told me that I was wrong.

My friends don’t have grandmas. Hitan is growing up in the orphanage, like most kids; he doesn’t have any parents at all. Arai has a mum and a dad and a guv, a “nuclear family” with three parents, one of each of the genders, but none of her parents have any parents. When I talk about my grandma, they always act like I’m talking about one of the older orphanage caretakers, who I just happen to like. They wouldn’t get it.

Day Two of Rubbish & Recycling had us sorting scrap fabrics into type. It got boring fast even though Rubbish & Recycling is great because it was really really easy. Most things are obviously wool or cotton or whatever just by looking and smelling, unless they’re combination fibres, and even then you can usually tell if you know what the fabric was used to make. Anything difficult goes into a big bin for more experienced sorters to look at. Anything that’s too damaged to recycle goes into another big bin for compost and fabric fillers. And everything else goes into its type tubs to get cut up and turned into new clothing and tea towels and ribbons and things. They didn’t say it, but I already knew (because Arai asked someone who works in resource allocation weeks before) that even a lot of the good stuff would end up in fabric filler, because we produce more wool and stuff than we need and they’ll need a lot of fabric filler for insulation and bulk and stuff at Dragonseye so we’re starting to stockpile it now. Meaning that this job wasn’t even all that important, because half of the ‘good’ stuff would end up in the ‘bad’ bin later anyway.

I guess that’s why they give this job to jaunt kids, since we don’t really know what we’re doing yet.

I could’ve just thrown anything I wasn’t sure about into the ‘bad’ bin since it will end up there anyway, and that would be faster and more efficient, but this was about learning how to do something, so I did it properly. A lot of the things that we do are more about learning how to do something than about being efficient.

“Tomorrow we get to start working with electronics,” I said to my friends. “I wish we were doing that today.”

“It’ll be the same thing but with bins for rubbers instead of bins for fabric,” Hitan groaned. “It’ll still be boring.” He pushed back his hair, which was woolly like Grandma’s and didn’t sit back behind his ears properly and was too short to go below his shoulders, so it kept falling into his eyes. (At least, that’s what he always complained about, but I think he did it on purpose, to make everyone notice his hair when he pushed it back. Hitan’s hair isn’t as dark as most people’s; even when he’s not in bright light, it looks brown instead of black. His skin is black like most people’s, but his hair isn’t, and he gets a lot of compliments about it from grown-ups.)

“It’s not boring,” I snapped. Well, this was boring, but for different reasons for me than for him. I was bored with the fabric because it was too easy and I was ready to move on to harder recycling jobs. He was bored because he didn’t care about doing recycling because he was stupid.

“If sorting bores you, you’re really going to hate Records,” Arai said, not even looking up from her own bin. She was the smallest of us, even though she was the oldest, and the bin looked so big in front of her, ready to swallow her up. Her hair wasn’t in her eyes because it was all braided up like mine, but hers was much neater, even though she has the smooth shiny kind of hair that’s harder to braid properly.

“That’s okay because we don’t have to do records for years yet,” Hitan said. “They won’t make us do that until they’re sure that everyone can read.”

“Actually,” I said, “since us three can all read, they could give us Records at any time. They usually take older kids, but it’s not like the jaunts to other ships, where you have to be older. If you’re smart enough, you can do it young.” I pretended to think for a minute. “Which means that you’re probably safe from Records until you’re a grown up, Hitan.”

He threw a scrap of cloth at me. I caught it and tossed it into the right bin.

After we were finished for the day, we went to the playground. (I wanted to spend time with Grandma, but she was with the doctors learning how to join the treegrave.) We all knew where the playground was because we went there all the time. It wouldn’t even matter if we didn’t know because it’s really easy to find anything on the Courageous. I’m told that some of the smaller ships, the ones that are designed to move around a lot and change directions fast, can be easier to get lost on, but on the Courageous, everything is in one big ring and it’s impossible to not know your directions. (Well, everything except the treegrave and some of the engineering and administration stuff, but if you’ve taken the big elevator all the way up one of the spokes to the middle of the ship then you know where you are).

There’s only six ways to go, and they don’t change. You can go up or down a level, towards or away from the middle of the ring. You can go ship-forward or ship-back; moving with the direction of the ring’s spin, or against it. Or you can go ship-left or ship-right, which is left or right when you’re facing ship-forward.

And you always know if you’re facing forward or backward or left or right because of the signs and the painted lines to show you where stuff is, and if you can’t read or understand the lines then you know because of the angle of the walls. It’s not a very big angle but it’s enough that you can tell if there’s something dangling, or you can look at ramps or steps or whatever between rooms to see which side has the floors moving up a bit and which side has them moving down a bit.

The Dragonseye is on the left side of the ship and we’re slowing down as we get closer to it, meaning that all the walls on the right are tilted just a little bit in and the ones on the left just a little bit out. And the floors need to be level, for people to walk on them and wheel carts and stuff without going uphill or downhill all the time, so to be flat to us they need to be at a bit of an angle to the walls, meaning that all the rooms on the left are a little bit lower and on the right are a little bit higher. Every time the ship changes how much it’s speeding up or slowing down, people have to re-level all the floors and the steepness of the ramps and steps between them changes, but if you know how the ship is moving then you know which side will have higher floors. So you can tell where ship-left and ship-right are really easily, and that means you know forward and backward, and up and down is always easy of course, so you can’t get lost.

But none of that mattered because we already knew where the playground was anyway.

There’s probably lots of playgrounds on the ship, but the one we went to was close to Hitan’s orphanage and to Arai and my family homes. It was really wide, taking up the whole middle part of the ship with some storage and toilets and things against the walls on either side, and really long. On the left side was courts and fields for sports, and on the right side was other play equipment, climbing frames and swings and stuff. (Down the middle, of course, was a big, wide, flat path, the same as there was in most of the public areas of the ship, or the parts I went to anyway. It was full of people walking or riding bikes or pushing trolleys to different places on the ship.) The back end had stuff for really little kids, simple ladders and bouncy rides and things, and it got more and more complicated as you moved ship-forward until all the way near the front was running machines and weight machines and climbing walls for grown-ups. The stuff for us, small enough that we could use it but not boring like the little kid stuff, was about a quarter of the way through. Sometimes we just had competitions on the swings and tried to make them swing us all the way around in a circle, or jumped off them to land on the big mats and tried to fly further than everyone else, but when we had lots of energy we liked to climb the Big Spiderweb, which was a lot of crisscrossing ropes that got harder and harder to climb the higher you went. I broke my wrist on the Big Spiderweb once.

Today I made it nearly all the way to the top of the Big Spiderweb (it was really important that I got higher than Hitan), before I heard a voice calling up at me from the ground. “Taya!”

I looked down at the chubby man with the big bristly beard. He waved up at me, grinning.

“Daddy!” I squealed. I climbed down really fast. Hitan got higher than me but that didn’t matter any more. My dad picked me up and threw me into the air, high enough to be fun but not high enough to be scary, and then hugged me really tight.

“And how’s my precious big girl, all off on her jaunt and learning how to be part of the ship?” he asked. “Are you having fun?”

“Yes!” I settled onto his hip as he tried to put me down, so he would just carry me home instead. “Do you know what a closed system’ is?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“A perfect fleet would be a closed system. That means that nothing gets in or out, all the stuff just goes around and around forever, all the rubbish getting recycled. That’s why Rubbish & Recycling is the most important thing on the whole ship, even in the whole fleet. Because it takes a really, really long time to go between stars where we can’t get any more supplies, so we have to reuse everything; the oxygen goes around and the carbon goes around and the metal goes around. And the hydrogen goes around. And some people think that recycling is just turning one thing into another thing, that the easier it is to turn one thing into another thing, the better it is, but that’s not true at all! What matters is how easy it is to turn it all the way back into the original thing. Because you will always need more of the original thing, for the next generation, and if it all ends up only being able to turn into other stuff then that’s no good. So, like, the Holdean rubber on the chips that Auntie Lia works with, that melts down really easily to make rubber cushions and coatings for other machinery, but it’s actually really hard to make that other stuff back into Holdean rubber; well, not really hard, but you have to use hydrochloric acid to do it, which is fine, only the byproducts it makes with the acid are really hard to turn back into water to make more hydrochloric acid or whatever. So you have to look at the whole cycle of recycling a thing, and recycling everything that you changed in order to recycle that thing. So a lot of people are wrong about what is easy or hard to recycle. And that’s why your farm work, dad, is so so important.”

“Is it now?”

“Yeah, because first order organics are almost always very easy to recycle. And they’re good at recycling tricky second or third order organics as well. That’s what I learned in Rubbish & Recycling.”

“Well,” he said. “You’re sure learning a whole lot. You’ll help this fleet be a closed system, I’m sure.”

“No, that isn’t possible. A perfect fleet would be a closed system, but a real one can’t be. Ships are always going to leak a tiny bit of air, especially when airlocks get used, and there’s always going to be some things on the outside that get too much radiation to safely recycle with the stuff inside the ship, and stuff is going to break and get knocked away into space. And there’s power. We’re very lucky because we’re living in a time where we’re very close to Dragonseye and can use solar panels, but when the ships aren’t near a star, they have to be very very careful with electricity.”

“Indeed they do. I couldn’t use power willy-nilly when I was your age.”

“Right, so it’s not a perfect closed system because power gets used up. And becomes heat and gets beamed out into space so it doesn’t cook us all. But the really big thing is rockets. Solar sails are great, but sometimes to speed up or slow down you need rockets. All the little ships moving between ships like the Courageous need rockets, and the Courageous needs rockets to help it spin. And the rockets have to push stuff out to make the ships move, so whatever they push out, you lose. The faster the rockets speed up or slow down the ship, the more stuff they lose, but also the shorter amount of time before getting tot he next star, so there’s less time to lose stuff in other ways. And that’s the sort of thing that Navigation has to think about when deciding where we’re going and how fast.”

“You have learned a lot over just two days,” Dad said, and he sounded impressed. I didn’t tell him that a lot of that was stuff that Arai had told me and it had taken longer than two days. Only the recycling part was stuff that I’d learned in Rubbish & Recycling. That and the term ‘closed system’.

“That’s what I’m supposed to do!” I said. “I’m supposed to learn everything!”

He just laughed. “And I’m sure you will, Taya. But if you learn too fast, you’ll run out of new things to learn pretty quick.”

That was stupid, though. The fleet was huge. Practically endless, so far as I could tell.

There would always be more things to learn.

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