8: Seven

First — Prev— Archive — Next

The number blocks were easy to use. There were little blocks that could be added together or taken away or sorted into groups to find out the answers to math questions. There were longer sticks, twelve blocks long, to represent twelve blocks so that we could work with big numbers without needing to count lots and lots of tiny blocks. There were big slabs of a hundred and forty four blocks, too, but we didn’t need those ones yet. After a few days of using the blocks, Ross showed us how to use an Abacus, which was the same thing except with beads on wires so there was no chance of dropping little blocks all over the place. (I liked the abacus more. It was neater.)

We only did about half an hour of math every day, because it was easy to get bored if you did it for too long. For the rest of the two hours we learned about history, and the ship, and facts about space and nature, and also writing. We learned about putting together the fifteen glyphs we knew into words, about the four quadrants in a logogram and why a glyph might go into different quadrants for different words, and memorised some new glyphs, but I already knew a lot of the new ones.

When we were all really good at using the number blocks, Ross wrote the numbers one to thirty six on the projector wall again and explained to us the difference between a number and a ‘digit’. He showed us how there were twelve different digits (zero to eleven) that could be used to make any number ever, which we already knew, except for knowing what they were called. Numbers below twelve used one digit, and numbers between twelve and a hundred and forty three used two, and bigger numbers used more. We fidgeted in our seats. We knew this.

“So now for the big question,” he said. “Why?”

I frowned. I didn’t understand the question. It didn’t look like anyone else did, either.

“Why are there twelve digits?” he asked. “Why not eight, or ten, or fifteen, or twenty three?”

“Twenty three would be too many to remember!” somebody protested.

Ross laughed. “Yes, probably. But why not a different number?”

“Because then you wouldn’t be able to write down all the numbers,” I said impatiently. “If there were only eight digits, how would we write the number nine?”

“Yes you would!” Hitan said. “It would be a one and a one!”

“That’s thirteen!”

“Only because we have twelve digits! If we had eight digits, it would be nine!”

I frowned again, but before I could say anything, Ross said, “That’s right! Very good, Hitan.”

I kept quiet. I’d have to spend some time thinking about it, maybe ask my parents if I was still confused by the end of class. Hitan got it, so I surely could.

“The first two digit number is called a ‘base’,” Ross continued. “We use base twelve, so we count up to eleven and then twelve is a one and a zero. For computer things, people sometimes use base sixteen – this can be easier to use with computers, because it can be halved over and over again until you get down to one, and computers work well with those sorts of numbers for… reasons that are hard to explain. But they’re because computer chips use base two, or binary. And on old Earth, a very, very long time ago, most people used base ten.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“I’m not really sure. But why do you think we use base twelve?”

I thought about that. It seemed obvious – that was just how numbers worked. But if numbers could work with other ‘bases’, with other amounts of digits, why did we use twelve digits?

Ross had said that computers sometimes used base sixteen because sixteen was an easy number for them to work with. And I’d hear the word ‘binary’ before, from Auntie Lia, when she was repairing chips. I didn’t know it was about numbers, but I did know that it had something to do with how the chips worked, how parts of them could be ‘on’ or ‘off’, two states. So they used base two because it was practical for how they worked.

Was base twelve practical for us? Well, yes – lots of things we did, we did in sets of twelve. But I was pretty sure that we used twelves because it was a nice round number, not the other way around.

After we all thought for a little bit, Ross asked, “If I had twelve charms, and wanted to give them to four children and be fair about it, how many charms would each child get?”

“Three,” we all answered right away. Nobody needed to work it out, we remembered from all the block and abacus practice.

“And if I had ten charms, and wanted to give them to four children and be fair about it, how many charms would each child get?”

We had to work that one out. I pulled out my abacus; Hitan took out his blocks. But there were a couple of charms left over that couldn’t be given fairly to the children.

“There’s not enough!” someone said. “Or too many.”

“Indeed,” Ross said. “Later on, you’ll learn how to divide up numbers like this, but for now all we need to know is that some numbers divide easily into groups and some don’t. And there’s lots of times in life where we need to divide something by two, or three, or four. Twelve divides those numbers really easily, so it’s really useful. That’s also why a week is six days – it divides up really easily. So if you want to do something every second day or every third day, then it’s always on the same days of the week.

“Twelve is a really handy base to work with because of this, and time is measured in twelves or sixes because time has to be divided up a lot. There’s five-twelve seconds in a minute, five-twelve minutes in an hour, two-twelve hours in a day. Half-twelve days in a week, which is six; five-six weeks in a month. Personally, I think there should be four-six weeks in a month, because that’s two twelves, but you can’t have everything. And twelve months in a fleet year, of course.”

I didn’t try to follow all the numbers. Just the fact that they were all even and divided easily made sense. But I did have one question, and I raised my hand.

“Yes, Taya?”

“When we get to Dragonseye,” I said, “the year will be different, right? Because a year is supposed to be how long it takes to go around a sun. And it can be whatever we want when we’re not going around a sun, but…”

“The orbital year will almost definitely be different than a fleet year, yes,” Ross said. “But that’s okay. Sometimes you have to use more than one calendar and they don’t always match up. We don’t really know how important the orbital year will be until we get there, because we don’t know what sort of colony we’ll be building. For planet-based colonies, a year is usually really important, because if they have some kind of weather cycle then it will almost definitely be related to their orbit around their sun. But it looks like we’ll probably be building a colony in the asteroid belt and letting them decide later on whether or not to colonise the planets, since colonising planets is a lot harder and it’s a really rich asteroid belt. In that case, the orbital year might not matter very much and they might stick to a fleet year. Or maybe it will matter, if there’s something about the motion of the asteroids that’s important to the colony. We won’t know until we get there – in fact, we might never know; they might stick with fleet time until after we leave and then have a cultural shift when they’re on their own. But to answer your question, Taya, a fleet year is always the same, and time inside this ship and the other major ships will be the same.”

I relaxed. That was good to hear.

My own birthday was shortly after Education finished, during the half-month break. I only invited Hitan and Arai, which was plenty because the home was full of all my siblings running around, and wondered if I needed more friends. Was it bad that I mostly played with two people? Was it normal to have more? I didn’t know. I was with my siblings a lot, but that wasn’t really the same thing, because we live together. (Then, most orphans make most of their friends with other orphans, and they lived together. So maybe it was okay.) I had six siblings, not counting Plia because she was grown up and didn’t live with us any more, so including Hitan and Arai that was eight kids. That was a lot, right? I mean, Laisor was fourteen and would be going to another ship soon on kes jaunt, but seven would still be a lot.

Yeah, I was fine.

Not much happened at the party, except that my birthday egg had a silver eye charm in it. That meant that I would learn a lot of new important information over the next year, which, yeah, of course. I’d just started my jaunt.

Then Dad did what he did at every birthday, which was bait somebody into asking him about eggs so that he could explain that a long, long time ago there were animals called chickens that laid eggs and farmers gathered them to eat, sort of like our sugar and gelatin eggs, but I was ready this year. I’d looked up chicken eggs in the projector room and seen that they were shaped weird, all stretched out, not like our round eggs at all. I pointed out that lots of insects laid little round eggs and our eggs were probably based on those. Then Hitan and Arai and Laisor started talking about how big a bug would have to be to lay an egg the size of a birthday egg.

When everyone went home, I went to my room and hung my birthday charm on the little chain where I hung all my birthday charms. Most people only keep their charm for the year, but some people, like me, like to keep them all. When I was very old, I’d have a big long chain of them; for now, just the seven looked a little sad. I could hang the charms I’d gotten from other birthdays (I still had a few I hadn’t given to Recycling yet), but that would be sort of cheating.

I sat on my bed. Seven.

I didn’t feel any different.

First — Prev— Archive — Next