24: Growing Up Fast

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Medical was a pretty interesting jaunt.

Kids can’t do real Medical on their jaunt, of course. There’s not too many Medical jobs that the hospitals want to trust us with. And it’s okay for kids to mess around sorting scraps or cooking food but running around a hospital getting underfoot is dangerous for the patients.

Instead, they took us to a new classroom, a special one that doesn’t have a projector but instead has a lot of little computers that each had their own little screens, one for each kid. (We were all good enough at reading and writing to use the computer keyboards; I was especially good at them, because I spent so much time in projector rooms learning things, and you have to be able to tell the computer in there what you want to see). They showed us, on the computers, how to look up our own medical files.

The files themselves were pretty boring. It was just stuff known about our bodies from all our hospital visits and genetic legacies and stuff. They started by getting us to look at our genetic code, and that was the most boring part of all, because anyone who’s got any really interesting genesets already knows about them. (The only interesting things in my genes were a really high alcohol tolerance and a chance that when I was older I might become allergic to chocolate.)

Kids who are born through the artificial wombs or through IVF have their genesets semi-randomly chosen from the core human database on the ship, the one originally from Earth without the modern variations that some of the other ships have to use because their air pressure or radiation or whatever is different. There’s lots of genes in there that we don’t use, because they cause really bad diseases and stuff, but most of them we do, and each geneset is supposed to be in a certain proportion of the ship; if a geneset is below its target in the population, it has a higher chance of being picked for a new kid. But they like to keep things a little bit random. I don’t know why, but when I asked the jaunt guide why they don’t just decide for sure who every kid is going to be and go down a list, he got all awkward about it and said that people shouldn’t do it like that.

They can’t control the proportions exactly anyway, because when kids are going to families, their parents have the right to pick half of their genes. Most parents do what mine did, which was make a quarter of my genes my mum’s and a quarter my dad’s, but some like to mix in everyone in the harem, or even genesets that they don’t have but they want their kids to have, to make them extra smart or beautiful or whatever. And sometimes kids are born by accident, without IVF, like Rose, and just get half from their mum and half from their dad automatically.

With how many kids my mum and dad had, I wondered if our family had changed the ship proportions enough that we’d made it so that my parents’ genesets were less likely to show up in other kids.

All of that was boring, and stuff that I knew. And my health stuff was also boring and stuff that I knew. But I couldn’t stop looking at the little picture of me on the screen, with my blood vessels and my skeleton, and thinking of the sheep.

When I’d learned about the sheep in the projector room, I had seen sheep bodies compared to human bodies. I had looked at other mammals being compared to humans, too. But this was different; this wasn’t some picture of just a human on the screen. This was me. And I’d known that my bones were like its bones, that my heart was like its heart, I’d felt my arm bones and my ribs through my skin and imagined where they were on the sheep, but it was different to see the whole thing there on the screen, me, my body, inside and out, just like the sheep body and the moose body and the dolphin body, with it’s strangely squished and stretched bones, and the mouse body, with its tiny hammering heart. I stared at the screen so long that the jaunt guide thought I was confused and tried to help me use the program.

This was a few months after talking to Plia, and I walked home in a daze still thinking about it, thinking about how my nerves sent signals to my muscles and my muscles (fed by my blood) bent my knees with every step, and I was so distracted that I was really surprised to see both of my parents and all of my aunts seated in the common area, frowning at me as I walked in.

At first I thought I was in trouble. Then I realised, no, that was silly; they were having an adult meeting about something that upset them all, and I’d interrupted them when I came home, and they were just looking up to see who had come in.

And then they kept frowning at me and I realised that I’d been right the first time. I was definitely in trouble.

“Ta-ya,” my mother said in that strange way that she says when I’m in more trouble than normal but less trouble than when I snuck into the treegrave, saying each of the two glyphs in my name separately to make it sound like she was spelling out the virtue instead of saying a name. ‘Ta’ for waiting and resting and patience, ‘ya’ for comprehension and understanding. (I hate it when she does that because it’s like she’s reminding me that whatever I did doesn’t fit my name at all.)

“Yes?” I asked.

“Why did we receive a message today that your trip to several other ships in the fleet had been approved?”

“It what? Already?”

“Taya,” Dad said, saying my name more normally, “did you ask Plia to take you, an eight year old girl, off on a tour of a bunch of other ships for many many months and not tell us?”

“I meant to tell you,” I said, “I just sort of forgot. I mean, it wasn’t supposed to work! Plia said it wouldn’t work. She also said that these trips can sometimes take years to plan so I thought that maybe if it came through when I was eleven or twelve then I might get to go, but I only asked her a couple of months ago! Why are they sending me now? I’m only eight!”

“Exactly!” Mum snapped. “That’s far too young to send anyone jaunting around other ships! What is Administration thinking?”

“How did Plia get such a complicated travel plan approved in just a few months?” Dad asked nobody. “This isn’t some time critical immigration; she’s not even after anything very important. It’s so low-priority and complicated…”

“Who knows what’s going on with travel organisation these days?” Lia shrugged. “It makes less and less sense the closer we get to orbit. It’s like now that we’re approaching a colony location, everyone’s just doing whatever.”

“What I want to know is how we didn’t hear about this,” Mum said. “Our young child is going on the journey! They should have asked our permission before allowing that! This is nonsense!”

“They probably figured that since Plia’s her sister, Plia got our permission,” Dad said.

“And they didn’t check? Absolutely ridiculous! I swear I’m trusting Administration less and less every year. Who’s running that clown show?”

“Technically,” Aunt Moli said, “if they’re already approving and organising everything for Plia, forbidding Taya just because she didn’t have our permission would be against at least the spirit of the Charter – ”

“Whose side are you on?”

Now they were mad at the Administration instead of me. I hadn’t meant to do that, but I made sure to remember it anyway; when someone is mad at you, sometimes you can fix things by agreeing with them right away and using that to make them mad at someone else instead.

That was going to be a very useful little trick, I was sure of it.

“If we refused to let her go,” Dad said, “then the Administration would of course respect that, and might learn a little something about plan – ”

“Of course she has to go,” Mum said. “I think we can all agree that obviously Taya should go. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, much better than the ship jaunts that the ship itself organises for kids.”

“If I were organising the perfect ship jaunt for a kid, these aren’t exactly the ships I’d pick,” Lia said, nodding, “but it’s a lot better than the ones that do get organised, of only because of how many ships she’ll visit. And look at the lineup; Plia’s carefully arranged the route so that they keep coming back to ships with our inertial pull, so there’s no need to come back to the Courageous between ships. Very efficient. And Plia will of course look after her and she’s liable to learn a lot more than she would in a group.”

“And if she decides she doesn’t like it,” Moli said, “she can just come home early from whatever ship she’s on. There’s no reason not to go.”

“Exactly,” Mum said. “It’s a really good opportunity. And it shouldn’t have been organised behind our backs like this. Taya should’ve told us, and Plia definitely should’ve told us, and the Administration absolutely should have told us. Utterly ridiculous.” She frowned at me. “You need to get ready, and start saying your goodbyes.”

“When does the trip start?” I asked.

“Two weeks.”

“Two weeks?! That’s no time at all!”

“If you don’t like it, take it up with Administration,” Mum said sourly. I sure have a few things I’d like to take up with them.”

Later that night, sneaking out of bed and pressing my ear against Mum’s bedroom door, I heard her and Dad talking.

“Are we bad parents?” Mum asked. “All of us, I mean.”

“No, love, of course not! Why do you think that?”

“Because all our children ever want to do is leave us! Plia got out as soon as she could, Laisor’s chafing more at every restriction every week, and now dear little Taya is off on a multi-ship adventure at eight years old! The only kid in this family older than seven who doesn’t want to leave us is Klei, and he’s barely at home. What are we doing that makes them all hate being here?”

“No, they don’t… they’re growing up fast and they’re excited to lead their own lives. We’re raising strong, confident citizens, which is our job, remember? They’re just independent.”

“That’s fine for teenagers, but eight years old is way too young to be independent.”

“You know she’s no normal eight year old.”

“Yeah,” Mum sighed. “I know. I really screwed up today, Jarna.”

“What? How?”

“When I told her how soon the planned trip was. She said that was too soon, and I was all angry at the Administration and everything and sarcastically told her to take it up with them. It wasn’t until after that I realised, it sounded like I was making her go. I can’t help but think that when she said it was too soon, maybe she meant she didn’t really want to go, and now she’ll think I want her to go anyway I should’ve supported her and said she doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want to.”

“I’m sure she knows that already.”

“After all the stuff we said about how good an idea it was and how good it’ll be as part of her jaunt? We shouldn’t have said that stuff in front of her. What if she thinks she has to go now?”

“She’s the one who asked Plia to take her.”

“She thought she’d be older, or it wouldn’t work! What if – ”

“Seri,” Dad said. “Love. You can always remind her that she doesn’t have to go tomorrow. It’s okay.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Is it just me, or are they getting like this younger and younger with each kid? Tivon and Heron will be trying to leave us before they even start their jaunts at this rate.”

I crept back to bed, feeling a bit sorry for Mum. She didn’t know that I actually did have to go, whether I wanted to or not. She didn’t know that even if I didn’t feel ready, getting to go early was a good thing.

If learning these new perspectives had any chance of helping be figure out what was chasing us, I had to take that chance.

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