14: Keys

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The tour didn’t seem like such a good idea on the way home. I’d been nervous enough to stay awake through the whole tour, but on the trolley, I nearly fell asleep lots of times. I almost missed my stop.

But I managed to get off, and stumble home, and sneak back in (nobody saw me, everyone must still be asleep), and go to bed.

I woke up to the waking alarm really tired. My tongue felt thick and slimy and my eyes didn’t want to open. I didn’t usually sleep all the way up to the waking alarm. I got up and, with heavy feet and clumsy arms, made myself get dressed.

“Are you okay, Taya?” Mum frowned at me at breakfast. “Are you sick?”

I could say yes. I could stay home all day and get some sleep. But they would bring a doctor to look at me, just in case it was something bad, and I didn’t want anyone to remember anything strange about the day. There was no reason for anyone to think I’d done anything strange last night, but if they wanted to know more about why I was sick then they might ask the treegrave about what I’d done, and it would probably tell them about the tour. I knew that it didn’t care about what every kid was doing every day and didn’t pay deliberate attention to the stuff I did, but if somebody asked it about me it could check its records.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired. I had a nightmare.”

Mum gave me a long, tight hug. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve already forgotten what it was about.”

She was already dressed for work. Her keycard was clipped to her waist, white with a red stripe. The cards for the elevator had a dark blue stripe, except for the tour guide’s, which had a light blue stripe.

Mum was looking at me oddly. I was staring at her keycard, I noticed.

“Why cards?” I asked.

“What?”

“For the locks. They’re harder to recycle than metal. There’s lots of types of metal keys that can be used.”

“Well, the part that does the unlocking is metal,” she said, holding the card up to the light so that I could see the thin, complicated wire pattern inside the striped end. “The rest of the card is just to protect it from damage and stop it from getting lost. And it’s easily recyclable in a biotank.”

“Not as recyclable as metal. I’ve seen keys that are made totally of metal, just a thin rod thing with notches in it. Why not use those?”

“Thin rods with notches? Do you mean for a pin and tumbler lock?”

I had no idea what that was. “Yeah.”

“Well, the mechanisms of such a lock don’t allow all that many keys to be able to fit the same lock. You just can’t get very many notch combinations on something that big and clumsy. So you’d have everyone having the same key for a door, or maybe one of three or four types of keys. If all three hundred people who can access my security offices had the same key, what happens if one of the keys gets lost? We’d have to replace every single lock, with that kind of lock design. With this,” she waved the keycard, “everyone in the office gets a different coding pattern, and the lock itself is electronic and you can just add or remove coding patterns. It seems more wasteful to not just use metal, but when you account for the messiness of life in general, it turns out to be more efficient. And if this got damaged and needed replacing, the casing would just be dissolved in biology and then reconstituted from the oil made by the bacteria breaking it down and turned into another keycard. It doesn’t need to be a complex or precise cycle, it’s just to protect and support the wire internals. Which, obviously, are metal.”

That was really interesting, and I wished that I was awake enough to remember it well. Instead I blearily ate breakfast and trudged off to my jaunt.

I went to bed as soon as I got home, and the next day I was awake enough to get to work. I wanted to know more about the structure of the treegrave to make sure I wouldn’t get lost, so I talked to Auntie Lia about her work and asked the right questions so that she’d have to explain something complicated about the ship’s hull. Then I could reserve a projector room to learn more about the ship’s hull without it seeming strange, and then I could look at the structure of the whole ship, and then the treegrave. And then some stuff about the engines so that stopping after learning about the treegrave wouldn’t seem suspicious just in case I was being watched. I already knew I probably wasn’t, but it was better to be extra careful.

I didn’t learn very much.

The ship was exactly how I’d always been told it was, exactly how all the pictures and diagrams showed it. Big ring, spokes and elevators and stuff leading to a cylinder in the centre. There was a bunch of other stuff I didn’t know about, extra corridors and emergency engines and another layer of halls or storage or something under the treegrave and another trolley system underneath the bottom level of the ring for moving supplies around without getting in everyone’s way, but nothing I cared about.

What I cared about was that there were 23 sections, called ‘sectors’, in the treegrave. The ship-left elevators landed in sector 9, and the ship-right elevators landed in sector 15. The tour guide had said that the people who made up the mind of the treegrave was ‘further in’, so they would be in the middle of the ship, but I didn’t know how many sectors they took up. It might be one, or it might be all five between the elevators. Once I got up there, I’d have to cross into at least sector 14, and maybe all the way to sector 12.

The door I’d seen between sectors 15 and 14 didn’t seem to have a lock. Which might mean that I’d be super lucky and just be able to go through there to find the people, but probably actually meant that 14 was just more trees. There’d have to be a lock or a security guard or something between the elevators and the people.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to get past that.

One thing I had noticed on the tour was that while the tour guide did use her keycard to get us up the elevator, she didn’t need it to get us back down. So if I got up there and found something I couldn’t get past, I could probably just go back down before anybody was suspicious and try again later. But I was going to have to bluff my way up, somehow, and that might make people suspicious. I might not get a second chance. So it was still better to get it right the first try, if I could.

I got home from my research only to see the whole family in the common area. Rose and Ivy, the sort-of twins, were playing with my three-year-old brothers, Tivon and Heron, the actual twins. My big brother Klei, who I hardly ever see because he always keeps to himself, was having a very quiet conversation with Mum and looking at the floor. When I came in, Mum looked up at me, and for a second I panicked, thinking she’d found out about me sneaking out and had gathered everyone to watch her yell at me.

Then I realised that that was stupid, because why would she do that. Why would there need to be an audience for me to get into trouble. And then she looked away and I realised that she hadn’t been waiting for me at all.

Right. Laisor was coming home from Arborea Celestia today. They were all waiting for kem.

I tried not to feel jealous, because it was a stupid thing to be jealous about. Everyone went on other spaceships for their jaunt, unless there was some health reason that stopped them. I would get to go to other spaceships when I was older, maybe even including Arborea, and I might do even better there than Laisor did. Maybe Laisor did really badly there and had a horrible time, even; we didn’t know yet. I might go to even better spaceships than Laisor.

Well, that last one was impossible, because the Courageous was the best spaceship in the fleet and Arborea Celestia was the second best. The Courageous was of course the oldest, the most important, the only ship in the fleet to have actually left Earth itself under the stewardship of the First Crew, tasked with the important mission of spreading life throughout the universe, and the rest of the fleet had been built around it to support it in its mission. We were the link to Earth, the living history, the guiding light and moral centre of the fleet; I bet that on all the other ships, kids worked really hard to try to be chosen to come to the Courageous on their jaunt so they could brag about it to all their friends. Which meant that I couldn’t really visit the most important ship because I was already there, and Arborea was the second most important ship, so.

We don’t know very much about Earth, but we do still know some things about the First Crew. The three main types of family on the Courageous (nuclear, harem, and orphanage) are the most common and most stable family types from old Earth. We know that because of the old records and stories that we still have. People will make up all sorts of fun things for stories but the stuff that they just assume is normal tells you a lot about what normal life is like for them, my Auntie Shorin always says, and so by looking at the characters in the old stories we still have, we can guess what families were like on Earth. We know that most children all through Earth’s history were orphans, because most heroes in the stories we still have are orphans. (Being an orphan worked differently back then, of course, because for most of Earth history, people had to get pregnant to make babies. So the orphanages were full of kids like Mum’s latest baby, who were made in people’s bodies and then given away, instead of how most of ours are made in artificial wombs. In the stories, the orphans talk about their “parents” being “dead”, a sort of symbolic death to say that the orphans are not part of the family that gave birth to them. It sounds a lot more culturally messy than just growing most kids in artificial wombs like we do.)

The Courageous modelled itself on the most stable, most natural human families, but most of the First Crew came from different sorts of places. They grew up in all kinds of places, and the most important one (well, the one who I thought was the most important, even if other people had different opinions) was Aspen, who grew up in a place called an arborea. Some people thought that the societies that actually started our mission and that were our cultural ancestors made more sense for space than whatever stuff older dead societies on Earth had done, so Arborea Celestia was built to be as much like an Earth arborea as its builders could make it. Being the first fleet ship to be built away from Earth also made it pretty special; much as the Courageous proved that we could thrive and escape the fate of a single star, Arborea Celestia proved that we could escape the fate of a single ship.

So it was hard not to be jealous of Laisor, for going somewhere so special. But I told myself that I wouldn’t be childish. I’d get to go to Arborea myself when I was older, and for now I could be happy for Laisor, or if I couldn’t manage to be happy for kem then I could at least try to look like I was. It was silly to be jealous.

I was supposed to be worrying about more important things, anyway. Like Grandma.

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