We had nothing to do the whole next day except travel closer and closer to Arborea Celestia. The historians spent a lot of their time arguing with each other, which seemed to be their favourite hobby.
“All I’m saying,” Tima was saying, “is that the Smallest Possible Loop doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Plia said. “I know, you don’t think the existence of the universe necessitates an outside creator that – ”
“No, it isn’t that. I mean, yes, also that, but the life part doesn’t make any sense. The logic is that stars and soforth were of limited complexity and life delighted the creator by virtue of being more complex and therefore more interesting, right? But that’s simply not the case. A living thing is not more complex than a star. A star is many, many orders of magnitude more complex than a person, obviously, simply by virtue of having so much more matter, but even of you took a me-massed portion of the Dragonseye, it would, in unbiased terms, be as complex as I am. You calculate the movement and interactions of those atoms and they’re the same complexity.”
“Not in any way that matters,” Plia said. “The chemical interactions within you are complex in meaningful ways because they’re what determines a human. If they’re not right, you don’t have a human, you have a corpse. Whereas the interactions inside the Dragonseye could behave in any number of ways and it would still be a functionally identical star. So they’re not – ”
“To human eyes, yes! Because we decide what a star is! ‘Star’ or ‘human’ or ‘corpse’ are labels that we give groups of atoms that are interacting in certain ways to exhibit certain mass behaviours, but we draw the lines on those definitions based on what specific behaviours we, as humans, find useful or meaningful. We say, ‘oh, the types of chemical interactions in a person are more complex than those in a star’, but chemical models are an absolutely miniscule part of an entity. The specific position, energy and velocity of the atoms within an entity are all part of its complexity – the difference between Dragonseye and the star our ancestors left behind is much, much greater, mathematically speaking, than the difference between me and a teacup. But to a human, we just ay they’re both yellow dwarves and basically the same thing, because we only care about things clearly visible and related to us, like the energy output and mass and lifespan an all that; does it matter to us what the specific velocity of the atoms being born inside are? No, so we pretend that doesn’t count as part of it. We pretend that the parts that fit into our model of what things count as ‘yellow dwarf’ are the sum of it’s complexity, when mere things like total mass and chemical reactions are such a small part of the information involved that they’re negligible.
“But they’re the parts we care about for our models, so we’re like, a model of a human is more complex than a model of a star, therefore humans are more complex than stars. Which is perfectly fine for humans talking to humans about the things that humans, who live inside this universe and have very little control over it, find useful or interesting. But there is absolutely no reason for some other force outside our universe to draw the lines in the same place; such a being might see stars as being radically different from each other and as being very specific entities, and humans as functionally identical to stones. See, this is the problem with the language of physics; it bleeds anthrocentrism into the discipline which is then misunderstood and extrapolated to other disciplines. It’s like, I don’t know. Entropy. Like, what we know from observation, as well as just from, y’know, basic probability, is that material changes are not perfectly reversible. That’s it, that’s entropy, right? But people dress it up in terms of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ and ‘information loss’, because that’s how we’ve just named the parts of the models to try to make them understandable to new people, right? And that’s perfectly fine, for the definitions of those words used specifically in the model. But then you explain it with those terms and people go around thinking that a sound wave has more ‘information’ than heat does in the casual sense of the word, which is obviously nonsense, it’s an artefact of how we model and view the world, and that the non-reversibility of sound to heat means that the universe itself has somehow ‘lost information’, like that’s a thing that a universe can have, and then they extrapolate that specific physical meaning of information into their own little philosophies assuming it means the same thing as the casual term ‘information’ and think they can philosophise something with it. And the Smallest Possible Loop is the same. There’s no inherent complexity present in a person that isn’t present in a star, or a stone, or a hydrogen cloud; obviously a human has complexities that are more meaningful to us and more important in our scientific models, but that’s it. ‘Humans are more complex than stars’ just means ‘our definition of ‘human’ is much much narrower than our definition of ‘star’’. And that’s all fine and very useful, from a human perspective. I just think it’s incredibly narrow to assume that a creator from outside the universe would draw the same lines that we do.”
“Perhaps, but it is a human religion, from a human perspective; we can’t view things from the creator’s point of view, either. Maybe this is just the most useful way for us to view things in order to be the people we are and do the duty of the fleet.”
“And I’m not arguing against the usefulness of the religion, I’m arguing against its accuracy. There’s absolutely no reason to assume a creator or, even if we do assume one, that any such favour would be given to living things or to humans in particular. There are thousands of wildly inaccurate beliefs that persist because they are culturally useful; usefulness is a separate conversation.”
“Maybe usefulness is the important one,” Plia said, with a little smile that told me she was just joking around. “Maybe I have decided to believe what’s useful instead of what’s true.”
“No, you haven’t. You only believe what you think is true, same as me.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Of course I can. If any of us weren’t committed to truth, we wouldn’t be seeking the untethered heart, would we?”
Plia laughed. “That’s fair.”
“Yes, excellent point,” Hali said. “Got comeback to that one, Plia?”
“You’re supposed to be on my side! It’s your religion, too!”
“Not any more. Tima’s ironclad logic was so convincing that I’m now a believer in the fundamental meaninglessness of the universe. All live and die without purpose, hail ennui.”
“I regret bringing you,” Tima said.
“I also regret you bringing him,” Plia said. Then she glanced at me and seemed to remember that I was in the bedroom. “How are you doing today, Taya? Going to go exploring again?”
I shrugged. “What’s a Jessie?”
The historians exchanged a glance.
“Was somebody being mean to you?” Plia asked.
So ‘Jessie’ was a mean word, then. I shook my head. Decker had said that if Rodge’s prank got back to the Courageous, it could cause problems for the Vanguard. I didn’t want to cause problems for the Vanguard.
“Jessie,” Hali explained, “Is short for Courageous.”
“So a Jessie is someone from the Courageous?”
“Someone from any of the big, influential ships,” Tima said. “Don’t worry about people who use words like that.”
“What’s a wordie?”
“An academic.”
“Or an artist,” Plia said. “Or computer tech or negotiator. Someone who doesn’t do a lot of heavy physical work.”
“Like a historian.”
“Like a historian, yes.”
There was an awkward beat of silence.
“Taya,” Plia said, “one fun thing about different ships is that they all have different views and values. Things that are very important on one ship might not be as important on another ship, so people have different opinions about them. In some places, people work by themselves or in small groups and being independent and having your own opinions and standing up for yourself is respected; in others, people all have to work together a lot and live very close together, and keeping your opinions to yourself and following the rules is respected instead. The Courageous is a big ship with lots of people and a very long, very important history, and certain things are encouraged and respected there, things that are important for the culture. On little ships like this, different things are respected.”
“And they don’t respect people who don’t do lots of physical work.”
“The Vanguard has a very small population, and because it has to move around a lot, very small mass. More mass needs more fuel to move it, so they try not to haul around lots of spare stuff. Here, a small thing that is hard to recycle is more valuable than a big thing that is easy to recycle; the opposite of the Courageous. And because they have to worry about mass so much, everyone doing lots of labour is really important. They have less specialised machines and make more things by hand; it’s less mass that way, since the people are here anyway. That means that people have less free time, that’s part of how they contribute to the ship. Somebody who chooses work where they don’t spend a lot of time using their body is therefore seen as less useful, even as being selfish and harmful to the ship for taking up air and water and costing them more fuel. They’re nice to us because we absolutely do pay our way; the Courageous gives them more to take us on this trip than the trip costs them. So us being here still helps them out, and they try to take as many people as they can as often as they can, but as individuals, we don’t fit their values.
“You’re going to see a lot of this on different ships; different things are considered good manners and good behaviour in different places.”
Different values. Different perspectives. Good – I’d come along to learn different perspectives.
I didn’t see Rodge again on that trip. I think Decker told him to stay away from us. It wasn’t a long trip, anyway; the next day, we docked with Arborea Celestia.
Arborea is a lot like the Courageous, but also different. I had learned as much about it as I could before coming so that I’d know what to expect. Where the Courageous is one big ring with the treegrave in the middle, Arborea has a much longer middle spoke and three smaller rings lined up next to each other. It spins faster, so the inertial pull is the same even though the ring diameter is smaller, and there’s about the same amount of living space in the two ships. The three rings are connected to each other with long corridors.
The middle ring has all the industrial stuff, the computers and recycling and textile machines and all that. Like the Courageous, there’s three levels for walking around, and a trolley level above and below to move around the ring faster. But much more interesting are the other two rings.
They don’t have levels. They don’t have rooms, not proper rooms, though people build little wooden buildings inside them. They’re just big, open rings, each one cut into six sections separated by huge emergency pressure doors that are usually open but that will slam shut if there’s a hull breach.
And they’re full of trees.
Not just trees. Also bushes and vines and grasses. They don’t grow in soil, but float on the water in twelve big floating forests, six in each ring, separated by the open blast doors (the door part of the doors is all above water level; under the water, the sections are separated by thick walls). As soon as we docked, we went to the ship-left ring to meet Terragon, who was an old friend of Auntie Moli’s and would be hosting us. I knew wat to expect, stepping into the ring; I knew that looking down and seeing water below my feet would be weird. I knew that the trees, all tall and stretched out, would be creepy.
I didn’t realise that it would be scary.
Normally, it’s hard to really understand how big a ring is from inside it, because there are walls; all you can see is the corridor or room you’re in, and maybe into a couple of other rooms if the doors are open. But not the outer rings of the Arborea. The treegrave of the Courageous, the big empty storage rooms of the Vanguard, they were nothing like this. When we stepped into the ring and onto the little bridge that lead to the forest, there was a wall behind us, and trees not too far ahead, but to the sides, things just went on forever. And the ceiling was so, so far above.
It felt like being in open space, with nothing to protect us from death. I grabbed Plia’s hand and held tight. Hali looked sick and took a step backwards like he was going to leave the ring. Plia and Tima, who had both been here before, lead us forward into the trees.
Being in the trees was better, even though they looked weird, because we couldn’t see very far and could pretend we were in a smaller space. I walked carefully on the twisted roots of the floating forest, the wood feeling strange under my feet (but it was nice to finally have something under my feet, now that we were under proper inertial pull again), and got distracted by a small white animal. It wasn’t scared of me; it didn’t move away as I got close. It was about as high as my knee, and white, and covered in feathers, and had a long hard nose – no, a beak, I knew the word; a beak – that it was poking in between the roots.
A bird. A real bird. I stood and stared for so long that Plia had to pull me along and get me moving again.
Our walk was slow because we were trying not to trip on the tree roots. Most of them weren’t wet since we were floating high on the water, but they were uneven. After a while there were less trees (but still just as many roots), and we came across a small group of ‘rooms’ built out of sticks tied between the branches. (That was even weirder than the trees – wood was precious and rare, who would waste it on walls? But I guess it wasn’t rare on the Arborea. They probably had too much of it.) In the middle was a group of five grown ups and seven children, all talking.
A stocky woman (though it was hard to be sure, all the Arboreans locked their hair and wore their wraps the same when they bothered to wear clothes, so it wasn’t always obvious who was what gender) stood up as we came near, smiling. She waved us over. “Look, it’s the children of Moli’s cluster and their friends!” she said. “Welcome; welcome to the Harwood cluster. I am Terragon. It’s wonderful to meet you.”
We got close, and I found myself being hugged and kissed by a whole lot of strangers. They lead us into their little circle where, it turned out, they were all sitting around eating together. It was very strange, but I couldn’t help but feel safe.
Which was good, because for the next three weeks, the Harwood cluster would be my home.
Derin Edala 