23: Plia

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I tried to find Yamin again for a really long time. The Courageous wouldn’t tell me where he was very often. It would sometimes say he was ‘at work’, but wouldn’t tell me where he worked. (Working in admin and wearing a jumpsuit to work probably meant he worked up in the middle of the ship anyway, and I wasn’t going to sneak up there again.) Usually it wouldn’t tell me anything at all. Sometimes, it would tell me that he was at a specific cafeteria, or exercise area, or something, but he was always gone when I got there. It would never tell me where he was going to be before he went there.

He was avoiding me, and the treegrave was helping. Even when I told it how badly I needed to talk to him. Even when I told it that I thought we were being chased.

That did make sense. Yamin probably knew. If I could figure it out, then all of the grown-ups probably knew. This might be like the sheep, like the people in the treegrave, like the jobs that weren’t part of the jaunt but that you had to volunteer for yourself when you were older – something that lots of grown ups probably knew about but didn’t tell kids until they thought they were old enough to handle it.

I went to the view ports a lot. I looked at Dragonseye sometimes, and out the other side most of the time, away from it. But no matter how hard I stared, I couldn’t see anything out there. Just stars. It looked the same as any other direction, unless you were looking straight at Dragonseye which was very big and bright. Just looking, there was no way of telling which way we were even going. There was void behind and void ahead and void to the sides, all covered in far away stars and close ships and no big monsters.

I learned more about the ship, looking at more advanced maps in the projector rooms. I learned more about history, learning about other colonies that the ship had left behind and wondering if they were eaten yet or not. I kept trying to find Yamin, who could answer my questions and not treat me like a scared little baby like my parents did.

I didn’t find him. But trying to track him down at a cafeteria, I did see my oldest sister, Plia, talking to a man I didn’t know.

Plia would be about 20, maybe a bit older, by now, and the man looked about her age. They were eating some sort of pink cake and laughing together. She looked happier than she usually did, at least when I saw her at family things. Red and brown greasy paint was smeared over her face and braids, and even a little on her wrap; it looked like she’d gotten really messy and cleaned up a bit but not all the way. The man had grease paint on him, too.

They finished the cake and he stood up to leave. She put a hand on his shoulder and he twirled one of her braids around his finger and whispered something that made her laugh again and let him go.

After he’d gone, I went up to her.

“Hello, Plia.”

“Shit! Oh, it’s you. Hi there, Taya. Shiproute and stars, you’re getting big. How old are you now? Nine?”

“Eight.” I had turned eight a few months ago.

“Wow. Time flows on, huh?”

“Why’s there paint on you?”

“Drum circle. We were worshipping the spirit of the ship.”

Plia had talked about spirits before. I never really understood it. “You mean the treegrave?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“The First Crew? Aspen?” Spirits sometimes meant dead people.

Plia laughed. “Definitely not. How’s the family? How’s everything? Is your jaunt going okay?”

“Yeah. Everything’s fine. I think Laisor might go on a third jaunt to another ship but ke might just be doing it to annoy me.”

“Why would it annoy you? Jaunting on other ships is a great idea. I did as many ships as I could when I was kes age. It’s what made me decide to be a historian. The different ships, their different perspectives on the past, how everyone’s idea of ‘the past’ fits into what they want their present and future to be…”

“Who was that man?”

“Turik. Another worshipper at the drum circle. He’s really fun, you’d like him. I’ll have to introduce you sometime.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

Plia laughed so hard and so suddenly that she nearly fell out of her chair. “Stars, no! Oh, wow, could you imagine me raising kids? Me in another family? I love you, Taya, but being the oldest kid in a harem was enough for a lifetime. No, you won’t catch me marrying anyone. We just live together for fun.”

That made sense. A lot of grown ups lived together for fun. Sometimes they did it for a little while and sometimes they did it their whole lives. “I get that. I was on babysitting duty for two whole months a while back. I’m never having kids.”

“Two whole months! What did you do, try to blow up the ship?”

“No! Nothing even very bad! Dad was being so unfair about it.”

She rubbed my head, probably getting some paint on me. “Well, once you’re through the first and second pass of your jaunt, you can move out and be free forever.”

Plia had moved out as soon as she was old enough. I didn’t think I would do that. Most people didn’t. Most people stay with their families or in the orphanages until they have a job, or at least are in advanced job training, but Plia had left as soon as she could.

“Hey,” I said, “you know about computer records and stuff, right?”

“Taya, I’m a historian. Half of my life is sifting through old computer records in the hopes of finding some unknown piece of important history that was mislabelled as plant growth data or something.”

“Could you help me find someone?”

“What, like a historical figure?”

“No, someone alive. On the Courageous.”

“Did you try asking the treegrave?”

“It’s being helpfully unhelpful.”

“Helpfully unhelpful?”

“Giving me information that seems helpful but turns out to be useless. It’s happened a lot and I think it’s doing it on purpose.”

“Well, have you tried contacting this person? Maybe they can find you.”

“He knows I want to talk to him, I think. I think he’s avoiding me.”

Plia raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to help you stalk some guy who’s not only avoiding you, but the situation’s gotten bad enough that he’s enlisted the treegrave’s help in avoiding you?”

“It’s not stalking! I just need to talk to him.”

“Uh-huh. Is this some guy you like? Some other kid you met on your jaunt maybe?”

“He’s not a kid, he’s older than Mum and Dad.”

Both of Plia’s eyebrows went up this time. “Taya, crushes are fine, but to pursue somebody that much older than – ”

“No! I don’t think about him like that.”

“Okay. You’re too young for those kinds of interests, anyway. Aren’t you? What age does it… ugh, you’d think that with my past I’d know a lot more about kids. Either way, I’m not helping you track him down.”

“It’s important.”

“Why? What’s the problem?”

I opened my mouth to explain, then realised how silly my space monster theory would sound to Plia, and closed it again. “Never mind.”

“Well, if you need my help on something that’s not a terrible idea, let me know. I’m going away for awhile once my latest proposal gets approved.”

“To which ship?”

“Arborea first. Then Stalwart. I’ve got a whole list. It’s going to be a long trip, if I can get the drifting thing organised.” There was guilt in her eyes, and it took me a moment to figure out why. One thing I learned about Plia by watching her at family gatherings was that she didn’t like to be there. She doesn’t like hanging out with her parents and aunts, and she doesn’t like kids, but she feels guilty about not liking it. She always comes because she thinks it’s her duty, since she’s lucky enough to have a family unlike most people, to appreciate them. Telling her little sister that she was going away for a long time would be something that would make her feel guilty.

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“As soon as approval comes through. Which will probably take years for a trip this complicated. But I’m looking for important information. I’ve been tracking the history of some data loss relative to the seeding of new fleet ships and there’s some ships that might still have copies of the data I need, that we’ve lost.”

“Can’t they just send you their data? Why do you have to go there?”

“They could, if they knew what they had and where to find it. But the way different people, and different cultures, store and label data isn’t perfectly consistent, no matter how many protocols you put in place to try to make it consistent. What they think is important isn’t enough, and what I currently think is important isn’t enough. I need my information and their cultural perspectives, and the best way to get that is to actually go and look at their cultures for myself. A new perspective is a great way to get new information out of old data.”

A new perspective, huh?

I knew that we were in danger. I had enough information to have dreams about it. But for some reason, I couldn’t understand what I was dreaming about. Maybe it wasn’t more information that I needed. Maybe there wasn’t anything that the projector rooms or the treegrave or Yamin could actually tell me to help.

Maybe what I needed was the right perspective.

“Can I come?” I asked.

Plia stared at me in surprise. “To the other ships?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

The truth wouldn’t help. It would sound silly to her. I tried to come up with a reason that Plia would like. What could I use?

Right. Guilt.

“I have to go to other ships on my jaunt eventually anyway. And what you’re doing is way more ships and a way better experience than just going through a normal jaunt. If I do this then I won’t have to jaunt to them later, and it’ll help me get perspective and find my place a lot faster.” I paused for a second and made my voice softer. “Anyway, going on a jaunt with a bunch of other kids and without my parents sound less useful and also a bit scary. I’d rather go with my big sister.”

It worked. I could see the uncertainty on her face. “You’re eight. There’s no way that the Courageous Administration would approve you leaving like this.”

I fought the urge to correct her. I was old enough now to know that sometimes when you corrected people, it still made them do or think or feel things that didn’t help you. Sometimes you could get more help by letting them be wrong.

It didn’t matter, technically, what the Courageous Administration did or didn’t approve. Everyone knew the Fleet Charter. The Fleet Charter said that nobody could be held on any ship against their will. If you want to go to another fleet ship, whoever you are, then so long as the other ship is willing to accept you, you can go. Ships can choose who to let in but they can’t force anybody to stay in. Someone could kill all four captains on a ship and poison their food supply and if another ship was willing to accept them then, by the Charter, the ship they’d betrayed couldn’t stop them from leaving. (Of course, that would never happen, because nobody would accept an immigrant who’d murdered their four previous captains. And even if they did, for some reason, the ship with the murdered captains would probably “accidentally” kill them before they left. But they’d be breaking the Charter when they did that.)

So Plia was wrong about the Courageous not ‘letting’ me go. But she was also kind of right, which was another reason I didn’t correct her. Because to leave, another ship does have to accept you, and most ships probably weren’t going to accept random eight year old kids for no good reason. Even the kids twelve and older, on their jaunts, only got accepted because the Courageous and the other ships that did jaunts had a system and talked to each other and did deals with each other. If the Courageous hadn’t organised their jaunt, Laisor’s class probably wouldn’t have gotten Arborea’s permission to go there. So even though the Courageous couldn’t actually say ‘no’, it was still really important for them to say ‘yes’.

Plia was right; the Courageous wouldn’t send me off on a trip like that. But I didn’t want to back down. I shrugged. “No harm in asking,” I said.

She laughed. “Why the hell not? Honestly, with how long these things take to organise and approve, you might be twelve before we get to go anyway. I’ll include you in the proposal; don’t say I never do anything for you. But!” She pointed at me for emphasis. “There’s no way they’ll approve you, so don’t be disappointed.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Thanks.”

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