I started watching teenage girls. Watching how they walked, and what they wore, and how they did their hair. They liked wraps that were plainer than the wraps me and my friends wore, and hair braids that were more complicated, sometimes with ribbons (like grown ups), but not with beads. And some of them wore bracelets braided out of hair ribbons. They weren’t all braided very well – I saw some girls making them in the playground one day and learned that they made them for each other. Listening to them, it sounded like the different ribbons had different meanings, but they didn’t all agree on what the meanings were, and they seemed to change a lot anyway.
Something I found out a long time ago (nobody told me, I just learned it myself), is that when you say things with your body, people believe you. When you say things in words then people might think you’re lying, but when you cry, or walk straight, or ball up your fists, or relax your whole body, people believe what they see. I was too small to look like a normal thirteen year old, but if I dressed older and walked and acted like I was meant to go up the elevator, people would probably believe it for a little while. Long enough to find my grandma. It was okay if people were a little bit suspicious – they just had to not be suspicious enough to stop me too quickly. They just had to think I was an unusually small older kid, and be too worried about causing problems with the important person I was clearly on a jaunt with to do anything until I found my grandma.
It didn’t even have to be her, really. Finding any actual living person hooked up to the treegrave would be good enough.
I practised walking like them, with my thumbs tucked into my sash. I practised sitting and standing like them, leaning against stuff. I got myself some wraps like them and wove a bracelet in the same colours that a lot of them wore, though I didn’t wear any of that stuff yet. I didn’t want to look odd in my normal life.
And I went on another tour of the treegrave.
I wanted to know where everything was, so that I wouldn’t be lost or confused when I did my investigation. That would waste time. Tours didn’t happen all the time, and the next one from the elevator near the playground wasn’t going to be for another month, but I found one that was happening from another elevator a quarter of the way around the ring and took a trolley there. It was when I was supposed to be sleeping. That was good, because it meant I wouldn’t have to miss my jaunt and my parents wouldn’t wonder where I was, but it was also bad if they found me missing. That was really, really unlikely, though, and if it happened, well, I would deal with it then.
The moving ramp leading up to the trolley level doesn’t move very fast. It just moves so that people in wheelchairs or with lots of luggage or things like that can stay still if they want and still get to the trolley. Most people just walk on it to move faster, like I did. There were a lot of people around; just because it was sleep time for my family didn’t mean it was sleep time for everyone.
The Courageous has four six hour work shifts (half of twelve, I remembered from my lesson about number bases). But a lot of people actually work six and a quarter or even six and a half hours, because they have to hand off to the next shift and get handed off to by the previous shift, depending on their jobs. Most families orient everyone on the same shift, so they can have the same eating and sleeping periods; everyone in my family is on the green shift. So for the six green hours my family all go to work (and I go to my jaunt for two of those hours) and everyone sleeps through the red shift, and also a little bit of blue and violet. But the people on other shifts sleep at other times, so they were all out and about still.
It did feel strange to be in the bright lights and noise when I should be asleep. If we had lights on during sleeptime, they were usually a lot dimmer, and everyone stayed quiet so that people could sleep. Being out and about on the ship that looked and sounded the same as it did when I was off on my jaunt or at the playground made me feel more awake. Some people gave me strange looks, since it was weird for someone as young as me to be going somewhere on the trolley by myself, but I made my body confident and they looked away.
There wasn’t very much up on the trolley level. There were toilets and drinking fountains and snacks, but it was mostly a place to sit down on the benches and wait for the trolleys. Ship-right of the benches was the entrance ramp and a lot of big storerooms and stuff (since doing the Janitorial part of my jaunt I could tell which of the storerooms had brooms and bins and where the little cleaning robots would come out when it was time to clean the floors), and ship-left was the trolley tracks. I couldn’t see it, but I knew that on the other side of the tracks would be another waiting area that you had to use the ship-left ramps to get to.
I couldn’t actually see the tracks from the benches; they were behind a thick wall, and automatic doors that would only open when there was a trolley on the other side. This was for safety, so that nobody could fall onto the tracks and get hit by a trolley, but it was mostly for noise. The sound of the trolleys rattling around and around the ring would be very, very loud if there was nothing to muffle it, and since there was no way to put doors at the top or bottom of the entrance ramp without slowing everyone down a lot, they had to wall off the tracks or else everyone on the floors below would hear the trolleys all the time. Even though the walls were really thick, if I pressed my ear to one, I could hear the rumble of the trolley.
There was a big clock above the doors, next to the big sign telling us what trolley stop we were at (stop 4). I still had a few minutes before the trolley would come. I looked upship and downship, over the benches and water fountains and people, and wondered if I could get to the elevator I needed to get to just by walking in a straight line. On the level below, the level I lived on, I would be able to – just keep on walking along the road down the middle of the ring. You’d go past lots of residences and little cafes and playgrounds and projector rooms, and through a lot of doors (to break up the space because of noise), and eventually get to the elevator I needed to go to (a long time after the tour was already over) and then you could keep going and get back home. That would be a really, really long walk, though, and it would probably take many of days; I didn’t know if anyone had ever done it.
The level below that, where Farming and Textiles and all that kind of stuff was, you couldn’t walk all the way around, because you’d have to go through restricted areas. But the trolley level, I didn’t know. I could see doors at each end of the waiting area, but I didn’t know what was on the other side of them. There couldn’t just be more waiting rooms for the next stops; they were too close. Storage? Places for the trolley operators? I didn’t know.
The trolley arrived was loud enough to hear even through the doors as it got close to the station. It stopped, and after about twenty seconds, the big doors opened, and we started to board.
I’ve been on trolleys before, but usually with family. Getting on is a little bit scary. There’s the big door, then about two metres of walkway over empty space, then the trolley door. The trolley operators have to put the walkway out every time the trolley stops and then pull it back in before it leaves, so even though it’s very safe to walk on, it always feels like it should be dangerous. They put special guard rails up so that nobody will fall off the sides, which is really important, because if you duck under the rails and jump off, you die. It feels kind of like how I think external ship work would feel; safe, but you know that death is very, very close. Just outside your space suit, or under the rail.
My parents always make me hold their hand very tight whenever we go on a trolley. I clenched my hands together, and pretended I was holding someone’s hand, as I walked on.
The trolley itself was like a really narrow hallway with rows of seats on either side. It was so thin between the seats that a wheelchair can only barely get through, so there were special areas near the doors without seats for wheelchairs and carts and things. I found somewhere to sit and calm down after the scary boarding.
There were clocks on some of the walls that show the time and also what stop is next. I sat back and wait for my stop, stop 12, but it wasn’t long before an old lady sat down next to me. She looked me up and down.
“All by yourself?”
I made my body confident. “I’m going on a tour of the treegrave.”
She nodded. “Good. It’s good to take an interest in our history and our duty. Many kids these days don’t, you know.”
I nodded politely and didn’t say anything.
“A lot of kids don’t understand what we’re for, or they don’t care. They’d rather mess around making noise and using all our electricity in their free time rather than learn something. When I was a kid we didn’t have nearly as much electricity, you know; less entertainment, less power for growing food. Kids these days act like power is free, they don’t know how rare it is to be this close to a star.” She eyed me. “You’ll be sure to always count your blessings, won’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. A lot of kids don’t, you know. They don’t understand. You have very important work and you should be focused on it, on learning the skills you need, on remembering and honouring our history and our mission. For my generation it didn’t matter so much, we just had to keep the ship alive, but I’ll be dead by the time we reach orbit and it’ll be your job to build the Dragonseye colony. Your generation will get a rude shock then, when it comes due to actually do some work for once.”
I nodded again.
“Of course, if everybody sensible is dead by then then they might not manage it at all. Discipline and work ethic are going to the vacuum in this place. Nobody listens any more, nobody respects their elders any more, so they won’t know what they’re missing until it’s too late. My generation would be able to handle Dragonseye no problem, but we were born too early.”
I nodded once more. It seemed to be what she wanted.
Luckily, the woman was only taking the trolley for a couple of stops, and soon things were quiet again. I made it to stop 12 without any problems and walked into a waiting area that looked a lot like the one at stop 4, except of course for the sign saying what stop it was.
Time to visit the treegrave.
Derin Edala 