11: Observation

First — Prev— Archive — Next

The month ended, and Grandma still hadn’t spoken up. On one of my free days I waited until I was home alone and went to the red button in the garden.

“Treegrave?”

“Hello, Taya. How can I help you?”

I shrugged. “I’m just alone and bored and thinking about animals.”

“You’re bored? Would you like to play a game with me?”

“Not right now. I’m thinking about insects. What do you think about baby butterflies?”

“Baby butterflies?” It paused for a few seconds. “Baby butterflies are called caterpillars. They’re actually very interesting, they don’t look like grown up butterflies at all. Would you like to hear about them?”

“No, thanks. I might go and play with my friends.”

“Have fun, Taya.”

Some kids, I knew, talked to the treegrave a lot. It had probably had lots of conversations like that one all morning. But I learned a lot. I knew that Gamma-ma wasn’t there, because she would have reacted to the baby butterfly thing. I knew that the treegrave didn’t know I was looking for her, and wasn’t pretending she was there; if it thought that it might be a test, it would have checked its recordings of my conversations with my grandma and known about the baby butterfly thing. I also knew that the treegrave wasn’t suspicious or worried about me in general, because if it was paying attention to me then it would have remembered our last conversation, and talked about my grandma. But it didn’t seem to think it was weird that I’d called it to talk about nonsense just because I was bored, and not mentioned her. So it wasn’t paying close attention to me.

Good. Then I might be able to find Grandma without it getting suspicious and telling any grown-ups what I was doing.

When I found her, I would be in trouble. The treegrave had to have cameras up where its bodies were, and it would definitely think that a seven year old wandering around up there was weird and maybe dangerous. But I just needed to not get its attention, or the attention of anyone else, until I found her. If it wasn’t watching me closely, maybe I could do that.

The treegrave was in the middle of the ship, in the cylinder right in the middle of the ring like an axle with a wheel spinning around it (except that the treegrave was, of course, also spinning with the wheel). Lots of Administration and Engineering stuff happened up there, too, so there were always people going up there in the elevators. But they were grown-ups with important jobs. How could a seven year old go up there without making people suspicious?

The tours. I had gone on one a couple of years ago, with other kids, before I started the jaunt. Little kids went on at least one, but you could go on as many as you wanted, any age you wanted. The treegrave was really, really important; my dad went up with some other grown-us once a year to “remind ourselves of our purpose”. I wasn’t sure what that meant, I mean, it as hard to forget our purpose and if he did forget he could just ask someone down here, but he went. And I could, too, with a tour group.

But the tour guides were always very careful, and security guards were around to stop anyone from wandering off. I wouldn’t be able to get away and look for the treegrave’s bodies. I needed a way to go up alone.

I started watching the elevators. There aren’t as many elevators going up to the treegrave as you might think, because they’re a lot of work to maintain and not all that many people need to travel up and down, but there is one near the playground I usually go to. It’s right next to the moving ramps that go up to the trolleys. There are a lot more of those ramps than there are treegrave elevators – they only need to go up to the top level of the ring, where the big trolleys trundle around the entire ring on tracks and can take people and materials to places that are too far away to bike or push a cart. And ramps are a lot easier to maintain than trolleys, and even if they break down and stop moving they can still be used as normal ramps by most people until they get fixed, unlike a broken treegrave elevator which can be really, really dangerous.

Lots more people use the trolley ramps, which makes it a little bit hard to tell who is going into the elevators from far away. The part of the playground I usually play in is pretty far away from the elevator, but there’s some interesting stuff that’s much closer to it; special machines for climbing and lifting weights and letting you cycle or run or walk without actually going anywhere. They always seemed a bit silly to me (you can just cycle or run down the main avenue through the middle of the ring, and then you even get to run to somewhere interesting; why run if you don’t even get to go anywhere?), but they were perfect for what I wanted.

I started spending a lot of time on one of the walking machines, watching the elevator. When my parents asked me about it I told them that I wanted to make my body stronger for the jaunt. Laisor going to Arborea Celestia had made me start thinking about going to other ships on my jaunt, and there are some ships that you can only jaunt to if you pass the right medical tests, because they have different inertial pull and air pressure and stuff. So if I’m more fit, I have more options when I’m old enough to jaunt to other ships.

I didn’t really care about any of that. I wasn’t looking forward to going to other ships anyway. I had been born on the best and the oldest ship in the fleet, the most important one and the centre of our whole mission to spread life through the universe; why would I want to go anywhere else? The other really good ships, other old and important ones like Arborea, were mostly pretty similar to the Courageous when it came to stuff like inertial pull, so I already qualified to go to those. It was the people on the low-pull ships who really had to worry about this kind of thing. My Grandma had come from a lower quality ship, and that was why her old bones had failed her when other people her age were fine.

Well, there was probably other stuff involved too. Luck and genetics and stuff. Some people from lower pull ships had good bones even on the Courageous, and some people born here got bad bones even earlier than Grandma. But the lower inertial pull didn’t help. That was why people on their jaunt on other ships had to come back after a month, so their bodies didn’t weaken on other ships because of inertial pull or radiation or air pressure or whatever. (And the rule was for all ships, even ones like Arborea that had normal inertial pull, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.)

Anyway, wanting to get fit was a good excuse for spending a lot of time on the walking machine. I set it pretty slow and just walked and watched the elevator secretly. When I got tired I would sit on a bench and rest and watch the elevator, then walk again. It was pretty boring.

About half of the people who went up the elevator wore jumpsuits instead of wraps. Almost nobody wore jumpsuits unless they were for work, for Engineering or External work (where their clothes had to fit under the space suits they had to put on to live outside the ship), things like that, so I didn’t usually see people walking around in them unless they were going to or from work. But a lot of the Administration staff also wore jumpsuits, which confused me a lot, because they didn’t need to crawl around in tricky spaces or wear space suits or anything, they just looked at records and talked to computers and told people what to do. When I’d asked Mum about this, she’d just shrugged and said that maybe it was because the treegrave had almost no inertial pull and wraps weren’t great for no pull, which made sense. Auntie Moli had rolled her eyes and muttered about ‘status symbols’ and people who like to look powerful by wearing clothes that are a lot harder to make and take more cloth than wraps, which I didn’t really understand, because jumpsuits are really boring and look uncomfortable, so why would people wear them if they didn’t have to?

I liked jumpsuits now, because they told me a lot about the people going up. When someone was in a jumpsuit, you could see clearly where they carried their things, because they all had the same belts and pockets, so it was easy to tell the engineers and doctors from the Administrators. (The gardeners were harder. A lot of the people who looked like Administrators might be gardeners. I think the gardening tools and stuff stay up in the middle of the ship, but it was easy to notice that some people came back down with spots of water and dirt on their jumpsuits and some didn’t.)

The half who went up wearing normal clothes, they were harder to learn much about. When I’d gone on a tour up there, I’d seen some security guards, and they were wearing normal wraps, so they might just be security, but did the treegrave have that many security guards? I didn’t think so. The only way to get up was through the elevators so it wasn’t like there were that many places to guard. And the treegrave itself probably had lots of cameras up there, so one person could watch a big area and the treegrave could help them find security problems. (My mum’s job was like that; she worked in security but she spent most of her time working with cameras.)

Maybe a lot of the doctors and Administrators also wore wraps, not just jumpsuits. Or maybe there were other types of work up in the treegrave that I hadn’t thought of.

I watched the elevator whenever I could, and after a while, I saw something that gave me an idea.

Someone in a jumpsuit (a woman, I think, from the hair? It’s sometimes hard to tell when someone’s in a jumpsuit) was going into the elevator with a boy. He looked about thirteen. He wasn’t someone I knew. I could tell right away that he knew the woman really well, and also that he was nervous and trying to hide it. An access card was in his hand and he was holding it really tightly.

I knew what access cards looked like because of Mum. People who work in places that the public can’t go have them. It stops random people from getting lost or causing trouble in important areas. Some of the areas that I’d done my jaunt in had them too, like the deeper rooms of Farming or the Textiles rooms with big dangerous machines in them. And when I had gone up to the treegrave last time, a tour guide had used one for the elevator.

The boy must be on his jaunt, going up to do something up in the treegrave, and he was feeling very nervous about such a big important job. He was too young to be working on the treegrave or anything, and most kids didn’t go up to the treegrave for their jaunt, but it looked like he knew that woman really well and she was in a jumpsuit, so he might have gotten lucky. He might be her son, maybe, and she had gotten him the chance, something like that. So some kids got to go up there as part of their jaunt, maybe? If I could pretend to be one…

It was hard to make sure I was there exactly when the boy came back down, but after a couple of days, I managed it. I couldn’t follow him all the way home without being seen, but he did walk with the woman, so she was probably his mum or at least someone close to him. Watching the elevator, I also saw two other teenagers going up there with grown ups at different times, and I heard one of them talking about the jaunt as they got in the elevator. They were both older than the boy. All three of them were at least teenagers.

Could I trick people into thinking I was a teenager? Probably not. I’d never seen a teenager as small as a seven year old. There probably were lots of them on other ships, they can make all kinds of strange looking people on different ships, but I needed to not stand out. I’d have to think of something, some way to look older. I could probably trick people into thinking I was ten… would that be enough?

Getting a keycard was easy; I would steal Mum’s while she was asleep. I would get in lots of trouble, but I was going to get in lots of trouble anyway. That would work for looks, but Mum’s keycard wouldn’t actually work in the elevator, unless Mum’s job took her to the treegrave and she’d never mentioned it. No, no; she would have mentioned that.

I was going to have to find some other way to make the elevator work.

This was going to be really hard.

First — Prev— Archive — Next