6: Mammals

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We did the rest of Farming, and most of it was stuff I knew and didn’t have to pay much attention to. Arai wasn’t paying much attention either, except for the basic attention that she always paid everything; I didn’t think that she’d choose to do a second pass with Farming.

I might. I wasn’t sure yet.

We’d meet up with Hitan sometimes after our jaunt shifts (he really liked Textiles, to everyone’s surprise, because there were lots of big exciting machines) and climb the Big Spiderweb on the swings or borrow bicycles to race on the bicycle track, but sometimes I would instead book a projector room and go off by myself.

The projector rooms were the easiest places to look at the ship’s records, and I wanted to see if they had anything about other mammals. They did. After asking Dad how to spell the names of the different mammals in Farming, I got to look at videos of sheep, and pigs, and cows, and alpacas, and even some very very tiny mammals (though still bigger than bugs) like mice and weasels.

The mice and weasels looked the most human-like, with little hands, and the mice could even stand upright. But most of the mammals we had, I learned, were more like the sheep. They walked on all fours, and didn’t have hands and feet so much as just caps made of thick fingernail, and if they wanted to pick something up they used their mouths. I concentrated the most on sheep; I saw videos of them eating together, and little babies jumping and chasing each other, and of them getting sheared by a farmer using the big clippers that they used to shear the wool wall. I kept watching and watching until they didn’t bother me any more. Until they didn’t look like a human all stretched out of shape any more, but like a sheep, a different thing. And that was okay, for them to be sheep.

I wasn’t going to be bothered the second time I got to see one.

It was the very last day of farming when Juss interrupted us in our boring, routine job of fishing chunks of freshly grown bone out of the bone pit to put in the big oven to make bone char, and asked if anyone would like to see the sheep again. Four of us wanted to, so she sent everyone else home and led us back to the big room with the plant-covered floor.

Arai didn’t want to see the sheep again. I said goodbye to her and followed Juss.

There were five sheep this time. I couldn’t tell which one was the one we saw last time. Maybe none of them were. They made that horrible baby sound as they pushed their heads against Juss’ hands and legs.

“Can we touch them?” one of the other jaunters asked, a bit of a tremble in his voice.

“You can,” Juss said. “Just be careful, because they might feel playful and try to push you over.”

I didn’t want to be pushed over, so I went to the smallest sheep. It looked at me with its big eyes and made the baby sound. I reached out and put a hand on its body.

Sometimes, if I’m sure that my hands are very very clean, Dad lets me touch the wool walls. I thought that touching the sheep would be like that, and it was a little bit, but not fully. The wool on the sheep was thick and soft and I could sink my hand into it, like the walls. But it was also stiff and dirty, and a little bit oily, like clothes that haven’t been washed in way, way too long. I pushed my hand all the way through to the skin, which was warm, like I knew it was going to be. There was blood under there. Not the thin synthetic blood pumped through the wool walls, but real blood, like mine. And the sheep’s body moved when I touched it, reacting to me like a person. The walls never did that.

I had to pull away when I felt the ribcage. Animals shouldn’t have a ribcage, that was a human thing. None of the bugs ever had a ribcage.

I looked at its legs instead. (All the stuff I found about sheep called its arms legs instead of arms. That made it easier to think about. It made it less scary that it didn’t have hands.) I touched one of its legs, and it pulled away a little bit but it let me. I touched its foot.

I had learned about this, looking at the videos of sheep. I knew that it had the same skeleton as me, stretched out differently. Its arms and legs weren’t cut off at the wrists and ankles and capped off; they just looked like that. Actually, the sheep was standing on its tippy toes. The caps on the end, the hooves, looked like fingernails because they were; big, thick fingernails to protect its fingertips and toes when it walked. I found its wrists, and its elbows, and its shoulders, and then it decided it didn’t like what I was doing and walked away. I let it.

Once everyone had finished looking at the sheep, Juss said, “I have one more thing that you can try, if you want to. But you don’t have to. This is entirely up to you.”

She was holding a metal tray, high enough up that the sheep couldn’t get it. On the tray were some thin strips of something brown. They smelled… strange. Sharp and smoky and a little bit, though not much, like the smell of white loaves baking in Kitchens. Not bad. Just strange.

“This,” Juss said, “is meat. It’s a very primitive form of protein bars. Long before our ancestors knew how to make biotanks, they had to get their food from elsewhere, as you know; from plants and animals. This is food, made from the muscle of a dead sheep. Would anybody like to try some?”

Three of us did. I turned the strip of meat over in my hands, looking at it. It didn’t seem anything like a protein bar; it was strangely greasy, and it wasn’t a nice smooth bar but instead made up of little chunks of something all glued together with thin white strings. Before I could get too grossed out, I made myself take a bite.

Chewing it felt how I’d thought it would. Strangely rubbery, somehow both hard and easy to chew up at the same time. It didn’t taste like a protein bar either. It didn’t have very much taste at all. A little bit, but not much.

I made myself swallow, though I didn’t want to, and put the rest in my pocket when nobody was looking, so I could throw it away later. If our ancestors had to eat stuff like that, I was surprised that they’d lived long enough to get off Earth.

And just like that, Farming was over. I went to play with Arai and Hitan, after throwing the meat away. I didn’t tell him about the sheep, or either of them about the meat; it felt like something you had to be invited into and choose to learn about. I did ask Hitan a lot of questions about Textiles though, because I would be doing Textiles next. As we climbed the Big Spiderweb, he told me about the machine that made the huge ropes in our hands.

Textiles would be my last stop on the jaunt for a little while, so I wanted to be good at it. On the first pass of the jaunt, you do each job for one month, with a three day break between. You do four jobs, then one month of Education, which is learning more about numbers and letters and stuff, and that all takes five and a half months (because of the three day rests), and then you have half a month off before the next job. So it’s four jobs every six months; eight jobs per year. As we got older and stronger and better at reading, we’d get to do harder and more dangerous jobs, and then finally we’d leave the Courageous to try out some jobs on other ships. (Hitan and Arai were looking forward to that. I wasn’t.) Once we’d done all of the jobs in the jaunt, we’d do a second pass, where we got to spend longer at our favourite places and do harder more useful work there, and decide which ones might be good careers for us. And then after the second pass we could decide what we wanted to train in.

Not all of the types of jobs were part of the jaunt. About three quarters of the Courageous jobs were, as well as a handful on other ships to help people decide of they wanted to move to other ships, but for some jobs, you had to try them out and train in them after the jaunt was over. This was because there was some work that was dangerous, or distressing or uncomfortable for some people, or that people just thought it wasn’t fair to make someone try if they didn’t already want to do it. Working in a red house was off-jaunt, and so was external ship work, and maintaining the treegrave. So there were still decisions to make after the jaunt, if you wanted to do something like that – you had to apply special, and do an extra jaunt just for that job.

That wouldn’t be a problem for me, though, because Rubbish & Recycling was on the jaunt. It might be for the others, because Hitan likes exciting and dangerous work and Arai was very clever.

“What jobs do you think we’re all going to have after the jaunt?” I asked, as we climbed down from the Big Spiderweb.

“I think you’re going to be a scientist,” Arai told me.

“A scientist?” I shook my head. “I don’t know anything about science. I’m going to work in Rubbish & Recycling.”

“You’re only saying that because we haven’t done Science yet. But you love learning stuff and getting proven right.”

“Maybe you’ll be a scientist,” I said.

“Nah,” Hitan said. “Arai will work in Administration, I bet. There’s so much math and reading and writing files and stuff. You love that boring stuff.”

“It’s not boring,” Arai snapped. “I bet you’ll do something stupid.”

“He’ll do something dangerous and exciting,” I said. “Probably external work.”

Hitan frowned. “What, like hull repair? That doesn’t sound very interesting.”

“No, probably something on a small ship, dodging asteroids and stuff. We’ll be at the asteroid belt in twenty years, remember? I bet we’ll have a whole lot of little ships out there looking at asteroids and getting metal and ice and stuff.” (I wasn’t really sure how any of that worked, but it stood to reason, right?) “You’ll probably pilot one of those little ships or something.”

“That does sound fun,” Hitan said thoughtfully. Which is what I thought he would say.

Me, I didn’t think so. Being on a tiny ship sounded really scary. Even leaving the Courageous to go to another big ship sounded scary.

I was going to have to do that one, though, later in the jaunt.

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