13: The Treegrave

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The elevator was smaller than I remembered. Last time I’d done this tour had been in one of my earliest sessions of Education, and the twelve of us had gone up in two groups of six plus the guide. This time there were only five of us plus the tour guide, so we went up in one group, and even though there was one less person in the elevator than last time, everyone was a lot bigger.

There was a tired-looking brennan with three teenagers, an old man, and me. I didn’t know if the brennan was a parent or a carer from the orphanage or someone else; I figured probably from the orphanage. The old man looked solemn and sure of himself; he might be one of the people who does these tours once or twice a year.

The tour guide was a young woman. Her age might mean that she was new at this, which would be good for me; she might not keep a very close eye on us.

Everyone says that the elevators are safe, but I still felt scared as the motors started and we slowly, noisily, started to rise. I kept thinking about how close we were to open space. And about how if anything went wrong, we would be really, really far from the nice safe ring.

Also, being lifted up felt weird. When I went up a moving ramp or when a grown-up picked me up or when I climbed the Big Spiderweb, I could see the world around me not going up. The elevator was different.

As we rose, with two of the teenagers arguing and their carer telling them to settle down and the tour guide looking about nervously, we got lighter and lighter, which felt even weirder. I’d gotten garters to hold the bottom of my wrap down like you were supposed to when you went somewhere without much inertial pull, but one of the teenagers had forgotten his, and the others got noisier teasing him about it.

When we got so light that we had to hold onto the guide rails to stop floating around the elevator when we moved too much, the elevator stopped. The doors opened.

And there it was. The treegrave.

It’s a really weird place. It’s not like anywhere in the ring. The air is wet and, even weirder, it moves around like you’re sitting right in front of a fan. It gets pushed around by the ventilation system to make streams of moving air that Auntie Lia calls “wind”, because gases don’t rise and sink right when there isn’t enough inertial pull, and the air has to be moved around so the trees can breathe and grow properly.

The trees are everywhere.

They’re not as weird as most trees. I’ve seen trees that grow under normal inertial pull; Dad took me to see the tree farms once, where they grow the wood that the ship uses. Those trees were so weird that learning about them upset me almost as much as the sheep. Huge, thick rods of wood sticking up out of the ground like metal support beams, except round and knobbly and bent in little ways that made them wrong, ways that would make an actual support beam dangerous. With normal bush branches, but huge, just stuck all over it. Like someone had taken a normal plant and stretched and bloated the stem to force the poor plant to grown into a big cylinder and just sort of try to keep living around its horrible thick middle.

Some types of tree were even worse, because they didn’t have just one long rod in the middle; they had what started as one really thick rod that then got split in half and the two halves all bent out sideways, then those were split in half too, over and over until they became hundreds of little sticks. Like someone had taken the horrible bloated tree and just started mutilating it. (“Mutilating” is a word that Hitan taught me, but I don’t think he uses it right.)

The trees in the treegrave looked a lot more normal. They mostly looked like bushes except bigger. They didn’t look totally normal, because they didn’t grow upright properly, they just grew branches in all directions, especially if there was light over there. And their roots were mostly in the ground, but there were some random patches of roots on the branches in parts where blobs of water stick to them. Like air, water doesn’t move right in low inertial pull. It’s hard to keep it in the ground, which is why the air is wet. It’s hard to even keep the ground in the ground; most of it is held down by grasses and things, but in any spots where plants don’t grow, it’s easy to kick up dust and mud that can fly about and stick to branches and, if it stays there for a really long time, make roots grow there.

I stepped out of the elevator, and straight away I felt lost.

I wasn’t actually lost. I could see the elevator, and the rest of the tour around me. I knew how to get home. But directions are weird, up in the treegrave. Even up and down is more confusing than normal with barely any inertial pull; if you step forward too quickly then you can take a long time to touch the ground again, and everything is at an angle because of the ship slowing down. In the main rings, the pull to the floor is so strong that the sideways inertial pull from the ship’s slowing can hardly be noticed, and the floors down there are all angled so that the total force is straight down anyway so you can only really tell by checking the walls. Up in the treegrave, it was much easier to notice, making ‘up’ and ‘down’ confusing.

And the other directions were even more confusing. I’d come up a ship-right elevator, so the wall that the elevator behind me was in should be the ship-right wall. But it wasn’t; there were doors in it, leading to more ship. The treegrave is a lot longer than the ring, so you have to go way farther to get to the sides. And of course you can’t go ship-forward nearly so far. The floor of the treegrave was so close to the middle of the ship that it was almost confusing to look ship-forward or ship-back because of how much the floor curved. If I started walking (well, hop-floating) ship-forward, I’d loop around and end up back where I started in no time, but if I went to the sides, it would take ages to reach the far walls.

It was the opposite of how the distances were supposed to go.

The part of the treegrave that we were in didn’t do anything practical for the ship. The minds weren’t here, and the wood here wasn’t useful for much except making wood chips or powder. That wasn’t what it was for. It was for history.

While the tour guide explained the history of the treegrave, how Aspen Greaves saw that humankind’s destiny was in the stars and inspired humanity to build the Courageous and headed out with a loyal crew to seed other planets with life, I looked around. I knew all this, about how Aspen had lived and worked among their crew to intimately know the ship and discover the best procedures for space travel, and then after seeding their first planet had given their mind to the computer core as the very first mind in the very first treegrave, becoming Aspen Courageous and forming the Courageous cluster with the remaining members of the First Crew. I knew about how the crew had planted an aspen tree in Aspen’s honour and how that tree had sent out shoots to make dozens of other trees and eventually a tiny forest all through the old ship that was now the treegrave, all separate trees but also all the same tree connected by the same roots, like humanity spreading throughout the stars. I knew that, and it wasn’t important right now.

What was important was where the people who made up the mind of the treegrave was. Where my grandma was.

The whole middle axle of the ship is called ‘the treegrave’, but the actual people who are part of the treegrave computer probably don’t take up much space. There’s a lot of stuff up there. It’s a long cylinder that’s cut up into 23 smaller cylinders by big walls. My dad once said that way back when the ship was new and the treegrave was the whole thing, the cylinders used to be able to come apart so that if there was an unfixable problem that endangered the ship in one of them then it could be removed and abandoned in space. Which is a very wasteful design. I have no idea how the original crew planned to go from planet to planet forever colonising the universe if they were willing to just throw away good materials between the stars like that.

Nowadays, of course, they’re all solidly stuck together, with lots of doorways cut between them so that people can move around without getting in each others’ way. Standing outside the elevator, I could see through an open door into the next section, which was also full of trees. Above me, I saw the roof of the ring, which was really a wall separating us from a bunch of pipes and stuff that ran through the middle of the ship. It was strange to think that if those pipes weren’t there, I’d be able to see the ground on the other side of the ring. I’d look up and be looking down on the other side, without the void of space between us. I tried not to think about that, because it made me feel cramped.

I looked down instead, and noticed something strange among the tree roots. Something flat and smooth was stuck down there. I couldn’t see all of it, but it looked like a really low bench, or the top of a really wide box.

The tour guide had finished her little speech about the treegrave, and smiled at me. “Ah, you have a sharp eye. That’s a chronostasis pod.”

“A what?”

“You know chronostasis? Time-slowing technology?”

I nodded, even though I didn’t. The other people on the tour seemed to know what she was talking about, so it was probably something I’d learn about later on the jaunt.

“Well, when the Courageous went out to colonise its first planet, it was, as you know, only the size of the treegrave, and had no fleet. That’s far too small to support enough people to form a colony! So they put most of the colonists to sleep, and they slept in those boxes, in chronostasis so that they could sleep away decades in less than a year.”

Now that I was looking for it, I could make out enough of the box’s edges to see that it would be wide and tall enough for a grown up to sleep in. “Why is it here in the roots and things, instead of looked after somewhere where people can learn about it?” I asked.

“We do have many that have been preserved as historical curiosities, but most of them were left where they were because they’re melded into the floor. It was never really worth cutting them all out. They’re extremely durable, of course, but time will wither anything; most of them have been cracked open by tree roots and slowly destroyed over the generations. Very few of the ones left in the floor are still as intact as that one.”

So if it was part of the floor, then I could guess how deep it probably was to hold a grown up, and guess how far away the floor was (and therefore how thick the matrix of tree roots was). Which probably wasn’t useful for anything. But was still fun.

“An interesting fact about the chronostasis pods,” the tour guide continued, “is that some of them were repurposed to house the first people to merge with the treegrave. Those ones were preserved, of course. Most of them, though, weren’t used after their colonists woke up; by the time there were enough people to join the treegrave to need them, we had better technology for it and didn’t need the pods any more.”

“Where are the treegrave people kept now?” one of the teenagers asked, which was good because it meant I didn’t have to ask.

“Oh, a bit further in. Now, the ventilation – ”

“Can we see them?”

“No; they’re very busy. They can’t be distracted by random tours. The ventilation system up here – ”

Further in. My grandma was further in.

I’d taken an elevator on the right side of the ship, meaning that further in’ was to my left. I peered through the trees and could just see parts of the wall over the other side of the section, including a door, which was closed. But I couldn’t see any kind of lock on it.

That was where I needed to go.

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