5: The Stranger

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We didn’t see any food making machines on the rest of the jaunt through the Kitchens, but that didn’t mean that I was wrong. They were probably just too dangerous to let kids our age close to. Maybe people who did a second pass in Kitchens got to see them.

After Kitchens was Farming, which I was looking forward to because I knew a lot about the biotanks, since Dad worked with them. I had seen some of the areas of Farming before when I’d gone there sometimes to see Dad, and I knew some of the people, so I should have a bit of a head start in Farming.

Not that it mattered. The jaunt wasn’t supposed to be a competition.

We gathered at the first wool wall, all twenty four of us. Hitan wasn’t with us this time; he was learning Textiles and would do Farming later. It towered over us, just a big wall covered in white, fluffy wool. Some of the other jaunters had never seen wool growing before, and didn’t seem to understand what it was, but I knew.

People think of wool as something that comes in long threads that get woven into fabric, but it isn’t actually grown like that. Actually, wool is hair. It’s hair that grows the same as our hair, and has to get all twisted together into long threads first at Textiles. So to grow all the wool that we need, the Courageous has big, big frames covered in skin, skins from animals that have way more hair than we do. The skin-covered frames look like thick walls, all covered in thick hair, and that hair is wool. When it’s long enough, a farmer comes along with a big set of clippers and shaves it all off to send to Textiles. (There’s artificial blood and stuff pumped round inside the frames to keep the skin alive, so they have to be careful not to cut into it with the clippers.)

The first wall, the one we were in front of, had the skin of an animal called a “sheep”. My dad had told me that a long time ago and I’d been careful to remember it. It was white and puffy and looked like soft poached albumin, but like everyone else, I stayed behind the yellow restriction line painted on the floor and didn’t touch it.

Our guide for this jaunt was someone I knew; one of Dad’s friends, a woman named Juss. She didn’t greet me or anything because she had to treat everyone the same on a jaunt. She explained the wool wall to us, and then took us to the biotanks. She explained about how almost all the first level organics that the ship used were made from algae grown inside the massive glass tanks, and told us about feeding the algae and how to check that its environment was good and that it was healthy, and let us take samples from the tanks to look at under a microscope to see how all the cells were doing.

Then, two weeks into Farming, she showed us something very strange.

She took us to a part of Farming that I’d never seen before. Past the wool walls and the biotanks. Past the huge machines that pump and filter blood for the walls, past the sealed rooms we weren’t allowed in that make medicines, past the calcium pits that grow chunks of bone for Materials to use in ceramics, and even through hydroponics, where precious complex foods are grown on plants. She gathered us in a really big chamber with a floor covered entirely in plants, deep in Farming, and showed us someone new.

They were the most horrifying-looking person I’d ever seen.

I had seen some strange looking people. I’m not a total shut-in. I knew that on the other ships, people were sometimes made differently to live in different environments; people with thin bodies and long fingers like Storn, people who were very short and thick and strong, people with large eyes that could see in almost no light and with thick radiation-blocking skin and with no hair, or with lots of hair. Most differences, like being good at breathing in really low air pressure, you couldn’t even see, but some of them you could. And some of those people chose to move to the Courageous, or came her as part of their own jaunts, so I’d seen them.

I had never, ever seen anything like what was in front of us.

They had two arms and two legs and a head, like you would expect, but everything else was all bent and twisted. Their nose was huge, so huge that it had taken up most of their face, pulling everything else out of shape. They didn’t even seem to have a chin; everything had been stretched out to make room for the nose, pulling the mouth out of shape and forcing the big eyes with massive pupils really far apart. Their skin was disgustingly pale, almost transparent-looking. The most horrifying part was that they didn’t have hands or feet; they’d either been born without them or had them chopped off, and replaced with thick caps, so it was impossible for them to hold anything and also impossible for them to stand up; they had to walk around on all fours, balancing on the caps at their wrists and ankles. They looked terrifyingly, utterly helpless, unable to hold things or stand up or, looking at the shape of their face, even speak. I couldn’t even tell what gender they were, because they weren’t wearing any sort of fashion that I knew; normally you could guess from someone’s hairstyle or from the type of wrap or style of belt they were wearing, but this person was dressed in wool, not in clothes made from wool, but in wool that puffed out like the wool wall, like they’d peeled a section of skin off the wall and wrapped themselves in it.

And that was when I realised. Not clothes. Skin.

This wasn’t a person. This was a “sheep”.

A lot of the other jaunters were backing up and trying to hide behind those of us who stood our ground. Some of them were crying. “It’s okay,” I told them. “It’s a sheep.” And I got an approving smile from Juss.

“Very good, Taya,” she said. “It is indeed a sheep.”

“Why does it look like a person?” someone asked between sobs.

“It doesn’t. This is what sheep look like. Now, I know that most of the animals that you’ve all seen are bugs, but actually we have embryos for millions of types of animals in storage. And humans, you may not know, are a type of animal. We’re the same type of animal as this sheep, a kind called a “mammal”, which is why we look so similar. Mammals are warm, and have hair, and have two arms and legs and one head with two eyes and a nose and a mouth.” She patted the sheep’s head. It made a sound like a crying baby, which made the crying jaunters cry harder, but Juss didn’t look bothered.

“What is it for?” Arai asked, clearly doing her best to look reasonable and not upset at the horrible thing. “It’s got a lot of space in here.”

“Actually, thirty sheep live in here,” Juss said. “The others have been put away while we do this. And a very, very long time ago, back before our ancestors knew how to make biotanks or wool walls, they used sheep to grow their wool and make milk and all sorts of other things that they would use. Animals like sheep are ancient versions of first-level organics factories. As for why we have them, well, it’s true that they’re not very useful or efficient by modern standards. This think is a whole lot harder to shear than a wool wall, and the wool is a lot less consistent in type and quality.” She patted its head again. “But we take care of animals so that we know how to take care of animals. Remember; our job, our whole reason for being, is to spread life throughout the universe, and we don’t know what sorts of places we’ll be spreading life to. In some places, farming animals will be a more stable way to make things than using biotanks. We need to know how it’s done, to prepare for that. The more things that we as a ship know how to do, the safer we are, and the better we are at making new settlements.”

So it was like remembering how to be pregnant. That made sense.

Later, I sat on Dad’s lap and inspected his arms. I rubbed his thick, tough fingernails and his strong fingers and imagined if they were gone, chopped off at the wrist. I looked at the hair on his arms and imagined if it was thick and white and hid his skin, like wool.

“What’s up with you today?” he asked me while I bent his arm to look at it from a different angle.

“I saw a sheep today,” I told him.

“Oh.” A pause. “And what did you think?” he asked cautiously.

“It was weird.”

“Yes, they can be a bit weird. It’s the first mammal you’ve seen, right?”

“No. Juss said that humans are mammals.”

“Ah, yes, that’s true. The first mammal apart from us, though, right? The other animals you’ve seen have been bugs? Butterflies and bees and things, in the gardens?”

“And in the treegrave. Last year they took us to look at the big forest up there, and there were little tiny bugs that lived in groups and long ones that looked like sticks, and bugs that were strange wriggly noodles with hundreds of legs.”

“Did you see birds up there?”

I shook my head.

“Well, birds aren’t as much like us as mammals, but they’re more like us than bugs. They have two legs and two eyes, and their wings are sort of like our arms.”

I wondered if they could hold things with their wings.

“I didn’t like that the sheep didn’t have any hands,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It looked so helpless. It can’t do anything. I felt so sad for it.”

“Sometimes people lose their hands, and they’re not helpless.”

“Yeah, but that’s different. Someone might lose hands or accidentally be born without them and they have to not have hands for a while and that’s fine, but to be designed on purpose without hands or feet or a clever mind or being able to talk, it’s… it’s like someone had a baby and then cut its hands and feet off on purpose to make it helpless, which would be really horrible and cruel.”

“That sheep is exactly what a sheep is supposed to be. I bet the butterflies think that we’re tragically helpless because we can’t fly, when flying is so important to them. Is your life horrible and cruel because you were designed without wings and can’t fly?”

“I… guess not,” I said. I wished I’d gotten a better look at the sheep. I’d been so distracted by how much it wasn’t quite like a human that I hadn’t paid much attention to what it actually was. “I want to see it again,” I said.

“The sheep?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you’re in luck. Don’t tell the other kids this, but near the end of the Farming jaunt, the guide takes anyone who wants to see the sheep to look at it again. And that’s usually not everyone, so you’ll probably be in a smaller group next time. And if you decide to do a second pass of Farming, you’ll see the sheep a lot more, and probably some other mammals, too.”

“There’s other mammals?”

“Yes.”

I tried to imagine what the other mammals might look like.

I had no idea where to start.

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