4: Change

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I spent as much time as I could with Grandma over the next month, but it wasn’t easy. We have a big family, and she had old friends, so a lot of people wanted to spend time with her. And she had to spend lots and lots of time with the doctor, learning how to join the treegrave.

Also, I had to go on my jaunt every day. We learned how to recycle all kinds of things, one at a time. I learned how to pull the bulky rubber insulation off old drive units so they can be recycled as air monitoring units, because they need the insulation to protect them as drive units but it also makes them overheat easily and they have to do more work as air monitoring units and can’t constantly be cooling down, and they don’t need insulation for that anyway, so we take it off. The rubber goes into the catabolic biotanks where it gets eaten by special bacteria, so its atoms and energy can be turned into sugars and oils that can be turned back into other things (or into new rubber for insulation). It’s a little funny that making the new rubber releases a lot of carbon dioxide (which will need to be taken in by other plants and algae and turned into food and fibres, all a part of the recycling system) that the air monitoring units will see, so they’ll know about their old insulation being broken down.

Well, not ‘know’. They’re just computer chips. But you know what I mean.

We learned about wood, which is precious because it’s versatile and useful and very easy to break down but also takes a really really long time to make, so it doesn’t get used very much except for special things that aren’t about being practical. We learned about ceramics, and about the differences between the more fragile ceramics that can be used for normal day to day stuff and the really strong ceramics that form parts of the ship’s hull and structure. We learned about radiation, and how dangerous it is out in space outside the ship, and how to safely recycle irradiated peripherals and stuff, but we weren’t allowed to actually do that part because it’s too dangerous. On our last day with Rubbish & Recycling, they lead us into a sorting room, all full of bins and conveyor belts and little screwdrivers and scissors and other tools for breaking down and sorting old rubbish, but with no rubbish in it to sort. And they pointed at random objects and machines that we’d been using all month and asked, “if this broke, how would you fix it? If it can’t be fixed, how would it be recycled?” And I picked up the little metal screwdriver that I’d spent yesterday using to take teeny tiny screws out of broken machines and realised that that, too, would someday need to be recycled. All of the tools that I thoughtlessly used every day would, and the walls and floors of the rooms I walked through, and the thick ropes on the Big Spiderweb and the red casing on the button in the garden that gets the treegrave’s attention. Everything.

Nothing is exempt.

That night we had a big party for Grandma, because in the morning she would be joining the treegrave. We had three days of rest between different jobs on the jaunt, so I could be there to see her go, though really I could have been there anyway because they would’ve given me the day off for something like that, but I was glad I didn’t have to take a day off and miss learning new things. But I would probably miss learning a lot at the new job anyway (we were doing Kitchens next) because I was going to be so sad. We all gathered in the family garden, which the wives had spent all morning pruning and cleaning and making perfect, and ate all of Grandma’s favourite foods (including oat biscuits, which were precious because they had to use real actual oats that grew in the ground to make those and not just flours and oils from the biotanks, but anything for Grandma) and Dad played the flute for a little bit while Auntie Moli played the drums, but they only played a little bit before putting music on through the speakers instead, so that they had plenty of time to talk to Grandma.

Everyone was there, of course. Dad and Mum and all three of my aunties and all my siblings running around, even Plia who was all grown up and had moved out ages ago. And also Grandma’s friends, mostly old people like her but some younger people, like the man who made her tea at her favourite cafeteria, and some of the people she did storyweaving with, and Vorn, who picked up our recycling two times a month. I sat next to her for most of the party and fetched her drinks and snacks, and she stroked my hair and talked to me between talking to everyone else.

And at the end of the party, after everything had been said, the doctors came.

Grandma took one last walk around the garden by herself, in the quiet, and had one last private conversation with dad, her only child, and sat in the wheelchair (one that the doctors had brought, not her own), and they wheeled her away.

And then my grandma was gone.

“How long will the integration take?” I heard Dad asking the doctors before they left.

“It varies,” one of them said. “A minimum of three months. Possibly longer. Some people take to the system quicker and easier than others.”

At least three months before I could talk to her again. I tried not to look sad. I didn’t want Grandma to remember me as being sad.

I was actually really surprised by how hard it was to stay sad, though. I mean, of course I missed Grandma, and when I was at home sometimes I’d look over to where I expected her to be and then remember and then want to cry, but when I was out and about, it was different. Sometimes I’d forget about her when I was playing, or working, or helping Auntie Moli in the garden. In the month before she’d gone I had been thinking of her all the time, feeling bad when I wasn’t with her, because it felt like I was wasting precious time. But after she was gone, I only thought of her sometimes. And even that wasn’t as sad, because now, I was waiting for the opposite – I was waiting for her to come back, in the treegrave. The treegrave would tell me when it was her, I was sure. She would tell me.

So I didn’t need to feel guilty about wasting time on other things. I could focus on my friends, and on my jaunt.

Kitchens wasn’t going to be as good as Rubbish & Recycling, I knew, but it was still good. For this part of the jaunt I was in a group of fifteen, including Arai and Hitan, and our guide was a tall and gentle woman named Storn. I could tell right away that Storn had come from a different ship, like Grandma. With Grandma, nobody knew unless she told them, but with Storn it was obvious, because she was from a foreign geneline.

People born on the Courageous come from Earth stock, from the genes of the first colonists and the ones they carried on the ship. Not all of the genes get used – we don’t use genes that cause certain diseases, and everyone has the genes to let them join a treegrave just like everyone on any ship in the fleet – but they all come from there. The only reason that anyone would be born on the Courageous with foreign genes is if their parents from another ship move here and decide to give their genes to their child, and that’s really rare. The Courageous is Aspen Greaves’ ship, it’s the ship that took on the all-important mission of spreading life through the galaxy, the centre of the fleet and the last echo of Earth in it. We have a responsibility to keep that memory alive.

Other ships don’t. Most people on other ships are the same as us and come from the same genestock, but some have special invented genes to help them live on their ships better. Some can breathe less oxygen, or are resistant to radiation, or are really strong or really tall, or have hair all over to keep them warm. Storn had thin arms and long, long fingers, way too long to be from our genestock, and wore really long shoes that hinted that she probably had long toes as well. She looked over all of us jaunters, smiled, and clapped her long hands together.

“Now,” she said, “who has cooked food before?”

Eleven hands went up. I didn’t know all of the other jaunters very well, but from the ones I did know who had their hands up, they were all orphans. Orphans usually had a head start in learning things because they would do lots of activities together in the orphanage as a sort of mini-jaunt. It’s easier, I think, to do things like cooking with kids when there’s lots of kids around to do it at once, instead of one of my aunts having to do it with just me. So they got to do some stuff that I didn’t.

I tried not to be jealous. I got things that they didn’t, too.

“Great!” she said. “Those who have done it before, help the others, okay?”

I didn’t need help. Some cooking was probably really hard, but the stuff they let us do was easy. We got big canisters of oils and flours and proteins that were grown in the biotanks in farming, and mixed them together, and put them in a heated box called an “oven” to cook them, and the different mixtures made different food. I made white buns (2 cups #1437 [powder] and a quarter cup #4472 [powder] mixed together, stir in half a cup #2343 [liquid] and half a cup water, make into bun shapes for the oven) and protein bars (1 cup #9473 [powder] and half a cup #1437 [powder], mix in a quarter cup of #1131 [liquid], press down into bar shape for the oven), and at the end of the session they let us take some of it home.

“I bet machines could do this,” Hitan said as we left, snacking on his protein bars. “They could pour everything out and stir it all up and press it into shapes. Humans don’t need to do it.”

“Humans would have to service the machines,” Arai pointed out. “We’d need more engineers. Would it be worth it?”

“Machines probably do do a lot of it,” I said. “We didn’t see all of the Kitchens, and lots and lots of food has to get made to feed everyone on the ship. Maybe later on they’ll show us rooms of machines that do it.”

“If machines can do it, then why do we have to?” Hitan asked. “I just want to get to the cool stuff!”

“The cool stuff?” Arai asked.

“Yeah! Like piloting ships or, or building stuff!”

“We just built stuff,” I said, pointing to my food.

He ate the last of his food. “I meant building cool stuff.”

Arai and I looked at each other. It would be a long time, we thought, before Hitan got to build “cool stuff”.

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