I didn’t, of course, tell anyone where I had been. But the day after seeing Grandma, I asked Dad about citrus trees and about the treegrave. I just told him that it was something that had been mentioned on my jaunt and he believed me.
“The history about the aspen trees forming the first forest of the first treegrave is true,” he said. “And many ships still use aspen trees, taken from cuttings of that first treegrave. Arborea Celestia keep their treegrave forest at residential level, and do it with aspens descended from Aspen Greaves’ original aspen. But when our ancestors expanded the Courageous with its own residential ring and dramatically reduced the inertial pull in the old part of the ship, they had to make a lot of changes.”
“Then why were we told that it’s an aspen forest?” I asked grumpily.
“Did someone tell you that?” he asked. “Or did you hear the history, and just assume one day that it must still be an aspen forest?”
That was stupid. They should still be aspens.
But I forgot about it pretty quickly, because a week later, it was Hitan’s birthday.
Well, it was Hitan’s party. His birthday had been a day ago, and he had had a birthday party then too, but orphanage birthday parties aren’t the same. There’s so many kids there that there’s always birthday parties happening, so much that the orphanage has to have a special room just for parties, so it never feel special. They don’t even do birthday eggs right.
The whole point of birthday eggs is that the birthday haver is supposed to pick an egg and the charm inside tells them about the next year. But that only works if there’s a lot of eggs for them to choose from. So there’s usually enough eggs for everyone to have one, so the others don’t get wasted after they pick, but with orphanages there are so many parties that the kids can all attend that getting an egg that isn’t on your birthday doesn’t feel special at all so the kids just don’t take one unless it’s their own birthday egg, and that’s fine because the other eggs can be used for the next birthday instead of given to the guests. If you take an egg when it’s not your birthday then the other orphanage kids think you’re silly and being a baby. So their parties just aren’t very fun.
So Hitan likes to have his birthday party that the orphanage does for him, and then the next day have a special party with his best friends. We get together in a cafeteria that’s near the playground, and we don’t do birthday eggs there either because Hitan’s already gotten his birthday egg from the orphanage, but that’s okay.
He met Arai and me at the cafeteria, wearing his birthday charm around his neck – a silver heart for a happy year. A lot of the little tables around us were occupied by people meeting friends or just grabbing some food on their way somewhere without going all the way home, but there were a lot of empty tables too. Cafeterias were almost never crowded. The front of the cafeteria was open to the middle of the ring, and along the right wall was a stage where some musicians played some mostly okay music without any lyrics. The left and back walls (apart from a couple of doors in the back wall marked for storage and cleaning and staff areas) were lined with tables of food.
I didn’t like eating in cafeterias as much as home most of the time, but it was fun to do sometimes for special occasions like this. The food wasn’t usually as good. When Auntie Shorin and Auntie Moli picked up food for the family from storage, or when Dad took it straight home from his job, they could get everyone’s favourite foods, but the cafeterias were too small to have every single food on the ship so there was always a chance it wouldn’t have your favourites. They usually just had the most popular foods and a few less popular ones that the staff liked the most, and they never had my favourite kind of protein cakes.
I got some sweet white rolls with gooey centres that I thought tasted okay, and a chloro smoothie, which I always like because they’re thick and green and look like you’re drinking the algae right out of the biotank even if you aren’t.
As Hitan put on our presents (a deep brown bandana from me that went well with his strangely pale hair, and a metal pendant from Arai with his name etched in it), Arai asked, “Have you guys thought about what other ships you want to go to?”
“Arai, that’s so far away!” Hitan groaned. “Nobody goes to other ships until they’re at least twelve, minimum. Some people don’t go until they’re fifteen.”
“Yeah, but there’s no harm thinking about it now. I hope I qualify for Arborea Celestia.”
“You will,” I said. “My tyber Laisor just came back from there. If ke could make it, you definitely will.”
“Plus, there’s your guv,” Hitan said.
“What about kem?”
“Ke’s a bigshot engineer, right? Ke can get you in. Like Taya’s aunt must have for Laisor. Talked to her Administration friends or whatever.”
I stared. “I don’t think any of my aunts have Administration friends.”
“She’s an engineer, isn’t she?”
“You mean Auntie Lia? Yeah, she repairs computer chips. It’s factory work. She’s not up there fixing pipes in the treegrave and making friends with the captains.”
“She might be. But either way, I bet Arai’s guv knows important people in Administration, so it’ll be no problem for Arai. Us orphanage kids don’t have to make so many choices, unless we get on the good side of a grown up friend or something. The caretakers almost never have fancy jobs or connections so it doesn’t matter how much they like you. Well, except for Sasan, who has a sister who works in Administration, but Sasan doesn’t like me, so.” Hitan shrugged.
“I don’t think it works like that,” Arai said. “I’m sure you can get to Arborea Celestia if you want to. You just have to work hard. Look, I’ll teach you to read better so that you can move up in Education.”
“That’s a great idea!” I said encouragingly, even though I didn’t want Hitan to move up in Education and leave me behind as the least educated one. But I could just work very hard myself so that I’d move up, too. “Then we can all go to Arborea Celestia together! Or wherever else we want to go. It doesn’t matter where.”
“You don’t want Arborea?” Arai asked.
I shrugged. “Laisor says it’s boring. Ke says it’s just like the Courageous with more water and plants.”
“That’s so so wrong,” Arai said. “Even I know that’s wrong. Laisor mustn’t have been paying any attention.”
“Ke usually doesn’t.”
“Arborea is the best ship in the fleet.”
“Except for the Courageous,” I protested, but Arai ignored me.
“Arborea was the first true fleet ship, built far away from Earth without Earth’s help. Arborea proved that the fleet could replicate itself and that humanity could survive out in space and that our mission could be completed even if something happened to the Courageous, because we could build more ships. Arborea carries the actual culture of some of the First Crew, including your favourite crew member, Taya.”
“The Courageous carries the culture of other members of the First Crew,” I protested. “including Hitan’s favourite. We’re pretty sure that Tal was from a nuclear family.”
“No ke wasn’t,” Arai said. “Ke said ke had three dads.”
“That’s a mistranslation,” I said. “Nobody has three dads, that doesn’t make any sense. Ke must have meant three parents. Which is a nuclear family.”
“Who cares about family types?” Hitan asked. “Obviously, the Courageous is more important than the Arborea because of its technological roots.”
“Yeah!” I said.
“I mean, the Arborea never had the Vault. It was built after that technology was lost. But the Courageous must have had one, back in the beginning.”
“No!” I said.
“Hitan, are you four?” Arai sighed. “The Vault isn’t real.”
“Yes it is! The records say – ”
“That the Courageous had a teleporter that they put on the first planet they settled so it could teleport stuff to and from Earth, and then just took off into space and never made another one? That doesn’t make any sense. If they could build Vaults, why doesn’t the ship have one? Why doesn’t every ship in the fleet have one? Why not leave one with every colony? Imagine how much easier and safer it would be to spread life throughout the galaxy if teleportation was real.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” Hitan protested. “Maybe they’re really hard to build, and you need something that’s on Earth. So they only had the one.”
“Then why would they leave it on a planet?” I asked. “No single colony is more important than the fleet, and back then the whole fleet was just the Courageous. It would make way more sense to keep it on the ship and give the Courageous a better chance of survival.”
“Well, maybe they couldn’t, for some reason. Maybe it only works on planets.”
“How could it possibly only work on planets?” Arai asked.
“I don’t know! Do you know how teleportation works?”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “The Vault isn’t real. It’s a made up story.”
Hitan looked sad, and I remembered that this was his birthday. We shouldn’t be making him sad. “But we have lost a lot of ship records,” I said. “My sister Plia is a historian and she says that they’re always finding weird stuff in the records that’s been mislabelled, or that we thought we lost but there turned out to be a copy in the computers of another ship. Maybe somewhere there is information on the Vault and Arai and me will be surprised.”
I doubted it, though.
An hour later, I walked home feeling great. It had been a fun party, and all three of us were now seven. My grandma was okay, even though she was taking a long time to get into the mind of the treegrave. I had even pulled off my little plan to sneak in and see her without any problems.
Then I got home, and saw a strange man at the table with my parents, and I knew I was in trouble.
Derin Edala 