29: Arborea Celestia

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Arboreans don’t have harems or nuclear families or orphanages like we do aboard the Courageous. Instead they live in ‘clusters’, where a group of grown ups live together in the trees with their kids. Grown ups can move between clusters however they feel like, and they take their kids with them until the kids are old enough to pick their own clusters. Each kid has one mother (who can be any gender) and moves with them, but all the adults of their cluster are their parents.

The clusters are parts of bigger groups called nodes, and each node lives in one of the twelve big sections on one of the outer rings. Each cluster has a representative (who the cluster can replace whenever they want), and the representatives gather together to decide things for the node. Each node has a representative from that group, and those twelve people are in charge of the ship.

One thing that really surprised me was that the twelve people in charge (three people for each of the four shifts in the day) used their real names and everyone knew who they were. The Courageous captains don’t use their real names because it means they can be tracked down and harassed outside of work hours. They use a fake name sometimes; usually they just use the name of their shift. But everyone knew who the twelve node leaders were and they were often approached off-shift.

Our cluster, the Harwood cluster, was in the Dasta node. Out node representative was named Pine, and was on the red shift. I met Pine on my second day, when I got dressed in the morning and stumbled out of the flimsy wooden room that we’d been given and a stranger was there talking to Terragon and the historians.

“Ah, Taya! This is Pine. Pine, Taya is the last of our visitors.”

Pine was quite tall, and looked like all the other Arboreans. Ke didn’t have any special clothes or jewellery or anything to show that ke was in charge. There was a long scar along kes right arm, pale brown against kes black skin, but that was probably unrelated.

“Taya! A pleasure to meet you. You’re very young, aren’t you? Are you Exiled already?”

I didn’t know what that meant. I looked at Plia.

“Ke means the jaunt to other spaceships,” Plia explained. “Taya’s a lot younger than most jaunters, but we figured since I was going anyway, why not?”

“It seems like that’s the philosophy of the day,” Pine said. “It’s getting close to the star that’s doing it, I think. Everyone is frivolous about power and fuel and utterly miserly about the time of children. Panicking about the big job ahead of them, I suppose, wanting to make sure they have as many skills as possible before we hit orbit.” Ke didn’t sound happy about it, but ke smiled at me. “I hope you have a wonderful time on our ship, Taya. And I hope the rest of you find what you’re looking for. I’ll have those files found and ready for you by the end of the shift.”

“We can’t thank you enough,” Tima said.

“It is important to preserve our shared history.”

Then we settled down to breakfast. Arboreans eat two meals a day, a breakfast and a dinner, and their food is… weird. Very, very weird. Instead of picking up protein bars and nutrient cakes from a warehouse, Arboreans cooked their food right before they ate it, at mealtime. On a fire. A real actual little fire, burning on a little platform on the tree roots. What a waste of heat and wood and clean air.

The cook was a woman named Juniper who was just barely old enough to have joined the cluster as a grown-up, and I couldn’t stop watching what she was doing. She put a big pot of water on top of the fire to heat up, then took fist-sized, uneven lumps of something hard and white with a pale pink outside layer, cut off the outside layer, and chopped the lumps into little pieces and threw them in the water. She caught me watching and asked if I wanted her to show me how to do it; I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to get that close to a fire yet.

“What if it burns down the trees?” I asked.

She laughed. “It can’t. We keep it far away from the branches, and very small. And even if it could reach them, the trees are far too wet.”

I stared at the flames while Juniper put more foods in the pot. I wasn’t stupid; I knew what she was doing. These foods weren’t from microbial tanks, but from plants, and they weren’t grown in plant farms like the oats and things that we sometimes got as special treats on the Courageous; they grew from the plants all around us. Arboreans don’t have separate food and residential areas, they actually live on their farms.

Well, they also have real farms, to make enough food to feed everyone. But they try to grow as much of it in the two residential rings as they can.

Normally eating so much plant food would be strange and maybe a little bit gross, but I was too distracted by the fire to think about it. It glowed like the Dragonseye, but instead of being a safe still ball it squirmed around and lashed out at the pot and at Juniper’s hands. I was so worried that she would burn herself, but she didn’t.

The actual food had a strange texture, soft lumps of plant in a gooey liquid, but it wasn’t bad. The worst thing about it was that eating something so different to what I was used to reminded me of eating the sheep, even though they didn’t taste or feel the same. But I knew that I would get used to the food, and then that wouldn’t be a problem any more.

The historians spent most of their time in the central ring, tracking down historical files or whatever they were doing in there. Kids aren’t supposed to wander around most of the central ring without supervision, so after a small tour of some parts of it (which was mostly smaller versions of stuff I’d seen on the Courageous on my jaunt already), I spent my time exploring the Dasta node. I was allowed to wander around there as much as I wanted, but the trees were strange and the paths were confusing and climbing or walking around on the roots was a bit scary, so I let a girl named Strawberry lead me around.

Strawberry was one of the kids of the Harwood cluster, and she was eight years old like me. She was actually a little bit older than me, but I had trouble believing that; she was a lot smaller, and acted a lot younger. Which was odd, because usually when I was with younger kids it was me looking after them, not them looking after me.

“Look!” she said as we walked along a thin trail between the trees (me very carefully, her without even looking at her feet), “the berries are ripening early this year! I hope the birds don’t get them all.”

That seemed like a silly thing to worry about to me. The birds were beautiful and precious and should be able to eat as much as they wanted and make lots and lots of baby birds. The humans didn’t need the berries; they had algae farms, and they could build more if they ran out of food. I thought it would be better if the birds got all the little red globes hanging over our heads.

But I didn’t say that. Different perspectives.

“Ooh, Taya, we should go swimming. Have you ever gone swimming?”

“Swimming?”

“You know.” She moved her arms around strangely, probably miming something. “In the water.”

“… In the water?”

“Yeah! You go to one of the ponds, or to the edge of the forest or whatever, and you jump in and mover around in the water! It’s super fun!”

That sounded terrifying. Arboreans could breathe water? They didn’t look like they had unusual genesets, but you couldn’t always tell by looking.

“I can’t breathe water,” I told her as she half-pulled me between the trees towards the edge of the forest.

She laughed. “Nobody can breathe water, silly! You hold your breath if you want to put your head under!”

I was too nervous to say anything else on the trip (and also out of breath, since Strawberry was pulling me along and was used to moving through the trees much faster than me), so we reached the edge of the forest in silence except for my gasping. I grabbed a branch of the last tree and stared out at its roots spread out ahead of me, only forming a metre or so of solid ground before they became all loose and tangled through the water like vines through the trees, and then further out, they disappeared completely, leaving just dirty water.

Strawberry flung off her wrap and ran out until the roots couldn’t hold her up any more, then jumped into the water, laughing. She looked back at me, still clinging to the tree branch.

“It’s okay!” she called. “I won’t let you drown!”

I’d seen fish and dolphins swim before on videos in the projector room. Strawberry wasn’t swimming like a fish or a dolphin. She was just there, bottom half of her body in water, top half in air. I took my wrap off and hung it up on the tree branch out of the water, then carefully walked toward her over the roots until they became thin and my feet started to slip and I got scared. Then I sat down, feet between the roots, dangling in the water.

I laughed. Strawberry laughed back. “Yes, come on!” She was swimming towards me. With her help, I slid down into the water, still holding onto tree roots, and let myself sink all the way down to my shoulders.

Then some water got into my mouth, and I spit it out in surprise. “It’s salty!”

“Of course it’s salty! We’re in the salt ring! If you want an ocean that isn’t salty, you have to go to the other ring.”

“But I’ve drank water from here before. In the little pond near the cluster home. It’s all the same water, right?”

“The water inside the forest won’t be salty, because it’s gone through all the tree roots,” Strawberry said in a patient voice like she was explaining something to a baby. “That’s what the forest is for. It takes all the salts and nutrients in the sea and turns them into wood and food and medicines.” She looked around like she was about to tell a secret, then leaned close. “You know, they say, and we can’t be sure but they say, that Earth was all covered in salt water. Like more than half of it. And that’s why the ancestors of Aspen and Dandelion Courageous, and also of Note but that was a bit different, set out to live on the waters, and design new types of plants and animals that could build homes out there. They took it upon themselves to spread life across the Earth like how we spread it across the galaxy.”

“Wasn’t stuff already living in the water, though?” I asked. “Lots of stuff lives in water. Fish and things.”

Strawberry shrugged. “It mustn’t have been, back then. Because why would they build Arborea Atlantica and Arborea Antarctica to spread life somewhere that already had life? They probably invented the fish.”

“You think the original Arboreans invented fish?”

“Well, salt water ones. Maybe there were fish in fresh water and they changed them to fill the ocean. That’s why our ring’s the best one, by the way; better than the freshwater ring. But the ship has both to ‘cover all contingencies’.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

Strawberry showed me how to swim and dive, but I was too scared to try it, especially when she warned me very firmly not to get tangled in tree roots when diving or to lose my sense of direction underwater or I would die. I was able to paddle around on the top of the water without holding onto any roots, though, and even ducked my head under a few times, which was fun because I could glimpse some thing moving dow there that might have been fish. Being in water was very strange – it wasn’t like being in zero pull, not really, but the way it made you feel lighter and float felt sort of similar in some ways. It helped to find my way around in the water if I thought of it like being in zero pull. A zero pull where it’s hard to move and you can’t breathe.

I hate zero pull, so I was really surprised to find that I didn’t hate swimming.

Maybe this trip could be more than useful. Maybe it could be fun, too.

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