17: Aspen Trees

First — Prev— Archive — Next

“What are you on about now?” Saro asked.

“I went on a tour and the tour guide said that the treegrave people are further in,” I said, “towards the middle of the treegrave. But you’ve taken me to one of the outer sectors. This is the opposite direction. Where are you taking me?”

“Well right now, to look up your grandmother’s location,” Saro said, “but I still need your citizen number to do that, if you don’t have hers. But this is the way the to compheads. The middle sectors are full of trees and water and shit, you think we’d put medical patients in there? With all their monitoring equipment and brain hookups? That’d be stupid.”

I wasn’t stupid. I narrowed my eyes. “So why did the tour guide lie to me?”

“She didn’t,” Turin said. “She said they were further in, right? Think of the shape of the whole spaceship. Which way is ‘further in’?”

From the corridor, I looked up, to the ceiling of the sector.

I dropped back down into the building, the wall becoming the floor. The building was tall, or long, or whatever; I stood at one end of a very long hallway, and that was strange, because there wasn’t much room for it to be long in. It should hit the ceiling of the sector and stop. But it kept going, a long shaft right through the middle of the sector, starting at the floor on one side and going straight through to the floor on the other side.

The hallway going through the building was wide, wide enough that there was room for what looked like computer banks and some type of keyboards lined up along the walls. Some of them even had their own little display screens; flat screens that lit up, not projected light onto a wall, even though modern projectors were easier to build and recycle than larger flat screens. I supposed that maybe this place had to be kept too light for projectors to work well, or maybe the screens needed to show too much detail.

Saro used my grandma’s name and my citizen number to look her up while I looked around. There were a few other people in the hall, but not very many. People would drop or climb in, use a computer for a few seconds, and leave. None of them paid us any attention.

The strangest thing in the hall was the pole. About halfway down the hall, where I supposed the centre of the ship was, a long, thick pole rose up from the ground. It looked uneven, and with strange spikes jutting off it, like the bristles of an enormous cleaning brush. Most of the other stuff around was in plain colours, all whites and greys and blacks without much else on them except for labels, but the pole was painted in strange patterns. It was an uneven pale grey and, between the spikes, was covered in painted black eyes.

I couldn’t stop staring at it. It looked like some kind of horrible space monster breaking into the ship, like in a scary story.

“Okay,” Saro said. “Got her.” He walked down the hallway, towards the pole. Watching it carefully to make sure it wasn’t moving, I followed, with Turin behind me.

As we got closer, I relaxed, able to see for sure that it was definitely just fake and painted. In the middle of the hallway was a huge pit, reaching really far down and really far up above us, probably through the centre of the whole ship. This was the space above the ceilings of the sectors. I’d always been told that pipes of coolant and air and fuel and stuff went through there, not a big spiky stick, but maybe the pipes were between the walls of the pit and the ceilings of the sectors.

Around the outside of the pit, spiralling around the long bar through the middle, was a helical staircase. The inner wall was open, so you could see the long bar, and along the outer wall were strange racks.

They weren’t solid racks, bolted in place to the wall. They hung down a little from their mountings, like hammocks, so that however the ship moved they’d always hang upright. They looked like big hanging filing cabinets, each with twelve drawers. There looked to be thousands and thousands of them, all lined up through the middle of the ship, and sometimes there were gaps between them for doors. I could read some of the door signs; they were for medical offices and medical supplies and stuff, mostly.

We didn’t go down the staircase. The inertial pull was very light here, just the slight pull from the ship decelerating, and Saro leapt out onto one of the bars jutting out from the long central pole and jumped down to lower bars, moving much quicker than using the stairs. Turin took my hand and helped me to follow him.

“What is this?” I asked.

“An aspen tree,” Turin said. “Well, a model of one. You couldn’t keep a real aspen tree alive in here.”

“It doesn’t look anything like the ones in the sectors.”

“There are no aspen trees out there,” Saro said from just below us. “You couldn’t get an aspen tree to grow with so little inertial pull. All trees have trouble without it, but aspen trees are especially weak.”

“No, there are aspens in the treegrave,” I argued. “The first one was planted in honour of Aspen Greaves when they became Aspen Courageous and started the Courageous cluster and the very first treegrave, and now they’ve spread into a forest that memorialises our important mission.”

Saro shrugged. “Maybe there were aspens in there before the ring was built, but you can’t grow trees like that without a high inertial pull. This model’s the best we can do. And it’s upside down right now, anyway, because it was built for when the ship’s accelerating.”

“Well, what are all the trees in there, then?”

“I dunno. Citrus, I think? Something poisonous, anyway. It handles the lower inertial pull a lot better, if you don’t mind it growing in bundles of scraggly spidery shit.”

“Citrus trees also spread out like aspens to make a forest that is all one tree and many at the same time,” Turin said soothingly. “Look, you’ve seen a lot today. Are you sure you don’t want to just go home?”

“I’m going to see Grandma.”

“Good,” Saro said, “because we’re here.” He jumped over to the spiral staircase and approached one of the hanging racks. “Here she is.”

I watched him fiddle with the seals on one of the drawers. Wait, the people were in the drawers? That couldn’t be right! They were too small! I could probably fit in one if I scrunched my legs up to my chest, but a grown up couldn’t! Grandma couldn’t!

“This is a bad idea,” Turin said.

But Saro opened the drawer. And there was Grandma.

Her hair was missing, but it was her. She had a breathing mask over her face, and some tubes going into her body. She wasn’t lying on the bottom of the drawer; she was stuck to some sort of stretchy webbing a third of the way up, probably to stop her from bumping into the walls and stuff, and the tubes in her were tied to the webbing too and threaded under it and, it looked like, out the back of the drawer. She looked like she was asleep. Peaceful.

And she could fit in the drawer because she didn’t have any arms or legs.

I looked up a the two guards. Turin looked worried. Saro looked kind of mean and happy at the same time. What was the word? Triumphant. They were waiting for me to do something.

“Why doesn’t she have any arms or legs?” I asked.

“it’s okay,” Turin said in a rush. “It’s standard procedure to – ”

“I know it’s standard procedure,” I snapped. Did they think I was stupid? I pointed at some of the other drawers. “All the drawers are the same size. If grown ups fit in there then they must be missing their arms and legs, too. But why?”

“It’s safer,” Turin assured me. “You need your arms and legs to run around and play and work and stuff, right? But people in the treegrave don’t need any of that. Your grandmother is having wonderful adventures in the computer, with her mind.”

“People in the treegrave stop using their own bodies at all after a while, and limbs aren’t all that useful to someone who doesn’t move,” Saro added. “They’re just more sites for something to go wrong. More sites for blood clots, or infections, or cancers, more places that blood needs to be pumped by old hearts. Also more things to distract the compheads. They integrate faster and live a lot longer without them.”

“Like drive unit insulation,” I said.

They both looked at me blankly.

I rolled my eyes. Didn’t they remember anything from their Rubbish & Recycling jaunt?

“Drive units,” I said. “They’ve got all this bulky rubber insulation on them. It makes them overheat faster but it also protects them, so it does more good than bad. But when they start to wear down and their chips are recycled into monitoring systems, they don’t need the insulation any more; all it does it make them overheat faster for no reason. So they peel it away and just use the unit. It looks like the chip has lost something useful, but it works better when you take it away.”

The pair exchanged a glance.

“Uh, yeah,” Turin said. “I suppose it is kind of like that.”

They were looking at me strangely now. They were expecting something from me, and I wasn’t doing it. Saro didn’t look so triumphant any more; he looked a bit sad, and confused. Turin looked even more concerned.

They were waiting for me to do something, and I had no idea what they wanted. Was there something that they were waiting for me to notice?

I looked at my grandma again. She looked peaceful. Asleep. Was there something wrong with her that wasn’t obvious when she was asleep?

“I want to talk to her,” I said.

“You can’t do that,” Turin said. “It’ll interfere with – ”

“She’s integrating really slow anyway,” Saro said. “Still wakes up and talks to the caretakers when they look in on her sometimes. Waking her up won’t do any harm.” He reached over and gently squeezed her shoulder.

Grandma woke up. She didn’t open her eyes; her eyelids, I noticed, were sewn shut.

“Hello, Gamma-ma,” I said.

She turned her face toward me, and smiled.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Is it going okay? With the treegrave?”

A nod.

“I love you,” I said.

She couldn’t talk through the mask. But she smiled wider, and I knew that she loved me too.

“Sorry to interrupt you, ma’am,” Saro said. “Sleep well.” He closed the drawer. “We done here?”

He was looking at me really closely. Still a bit upset and sad. I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me.

“What happened to her eyes?” I asked.

“Sight interferes with integration,” he said. “The brain’s incredibly biased towards processing visual information. We have to remove the eyes to get compheads to learn to see through the treegrave properly instead.” He was looking hard at me. “What do you think about that?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know very much about brains. “Do they do that to everyone?”

“Yeah.”

It was probably okay then. They wouldn’t go to the trouble if it didn’t help. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you. I won’t tell anyone you helped me, don’t worry.”

Saro opened his mouth to respond, but Turin was ushering me back onto the branches of the fake aspen tree. “I’ll see you back out,” ke said, shooting an angry glare at Saro as we left. Turin stayed quiet all the way back to the elevator, but as I got in, ke asked me, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I feel much better now that I know she’s alright. Thanks.”

But that was a lie. I didn’t feel better at all.

Because now I knew that the sacred forest of the treegrave wasn’t even made of aspen trees! What even was ‘citrus’? Everything was a lie!

First — Prev— Archive — Next