30: The Dreamspeaker

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“You’re super young to be exiled,” Strawberry said one morning as we ate some big round fruits for breakfast (not all Arborean food needed to be cooked; these were raw). She sounded impressed.

“I’m just accompanying my sister,” I told her. “We thought that if I came now, it would save time later, since I won’t need to be exiled.”

“Everyone gets exiled,” Strawberry said. “It’s how you become a grown-up. Will you be a grown-up when you get back?”

“No, I still have a lot more jaunting to do. Our exile is… it’s complicated. We do a lot of stuff at home, too, as part of it.”

“It’s not an exile if you’re still at home, though, is it?”

“That’s why we don’t call it that, we call it the jaunt. It’s just how we do things.”

Strawberry nodded, and I recognised the nod. It was the same sort of nod that I’d given to kids jaunting over to the Courageous when they said something about their own ships that didn’t make any sense. But I never argued with them, and neither did she argue with me. She’d get it if she got exiled to the Courageous. Or spoke to enough jaunters from the Courageous.

“I haven’t seen any other kids here on their jaunts,” I said. “Are they all just spread out in other nodes?”

“No, we don’t get them this time of year,” Strawberry said. “There’s this whole three months where it’s usually just us. And maybe some grown-up visitors like your sister and her friends. Are they a cluster or just working together?”

I didn’t know enough about the historians or about Arborean clusters to answer that. I just shrugged. “Why don’t any jaunters come this time of year?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably just how the ship schedules work out or something. It’s a pity because it means they never get to see the – oh! You’ll be here for the Dawn Festival! It’ll be so great, we never have foreigners for the Dawn Festival! Except adults, and they’re boring.”

Foreigner. I’d never been called a foreigner before. But I was here, wasn’t I? It was very strange. I still felt like me, it was the ship that was foreign.

“What’s the Dawn Festival? I asked.

“You’ll see, it’s super fun. It’s hard to explain though. It’s like, dawn, right? Like, if you’re on a rotating station orbiting a star, like a planet or something, then you only get sunlight sometimes, and dawn, that’s the start of a day, when your part of the world first gets light because it’s turned to face the sun, right?”

I nodded. I knew how orbits worked.

“So we use ‘dawn’ as a sort of metaphor for a beginning, and the Dawn Festival is like, the end of a year and the beginning of a new one. It’s gonna be so fun. It’s all about what we’ve accomplished so far and about new project, new beginnings, new perspectives.”

New perspectives. “Hey, Strawberry?”

“Mmm?”

“What do you think about the colonies that the fleet has made so far?”

“I bet they’re super interesting. Just think of all the different ways they’re living! Do you think any of them remember us? I mean, I’m sure the more recent ones do, but I bet the oldest ones have totally forgotten the mission, it was so long ago. Hali was talking last night about how societies can forget stuff and make new histories.”

“Do you think they’re safe?”

Strawberry blinked at me. “Safe?”

“Yeah. Like, they’re out there all alone…”

“So are we, though, right? I bet they’re safer than us. They all have their own stars and their own stones and stuff, they don’t have to travel around like we do, which is super dangerous.” She leaned close to me. “Is there something that makes them unsafe?”

She said it in a really excited way, like I was going to tell her a cool story or something. But I wasn’t sure how to explain. “I don’t know. I just have these… really weird dreams.”

“Oh, dreams? You should talk to my mum! He’s a dreamspeaker.”

“A what?”

“He interprets the meanings of dreams.”

“Wait, people can do that?” If people could do that, why was I running around trying to puzzle things out by myself? This was like sneaking into the treegrave to see Grandma all over again. Why did I never just ask for help?

“It’s really hard, but he can. You should talk to him after dinner, he’s always free after dinner.”

Strawberry’s mother was, of course, part of the Harwood cluster (or else Strawberry wouldn’t be). He was small, like her, with very kind eyes. His name was Yew.

“What is a dreamspeaker?” I asked him, when I could get him alone after dinner.

“When people have things on their mind, they dream, and I help them interpret those dreams.”

“Like Hummers.”

He laughed. “No, I don’t know anything about dream prophecy. In my experience, people’s dreams are influenced by things that they’re thinking or feeling or experiencing. I help them find those things and sort them out.”

“Oh, you’re a therapist! A… dream therapist? I don’t think we have those at home.”

“You don’t,” he sighed. “I did my exile on the Courageous, and I trained as a therapist in a red house there. But I couldn’t specialise in dreams until I got back home, where we have dreamspeakers.”

I didn’t need therapy, but I did need help with my dream. “I have this nightmare. Strawberry thought you might know something about it.”

“Maybe. What’s it about?”

“I’m on the Courageous, in one of the viewports. You remember the viewports we have there?”

“I remember.”

“Well, I’m in one, except all of the walls and the ceiling are glass, and there’s nothing in the way to stop me from looking out at the Dragonseye or up at the treegrave or out behind us. I can see the other ships and stuff all around us, in front of the stars. But when I look behind us… there’s something there. Something dangerous, that’s chasing us, and if it catches us then it’ll kill us.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that it’s the scariest thing ever.”

“Hmm.” Yew tapped his lip with one finger. “And does this make you worry about anything? Getting caught and killed, I suppose.”

“Yeah. But not just us. It had to go through the colonies we left behind to get to us, right? And we’re slowing down, we’re going to go into orbit around the Dragonseye for who knows how long, to build a colony. And when we do, it might catch up. And even if it doesn’t, when we leave, we’ll be leaving all those people to get eaten. What’s the point of building a colony that’s just going to die?”

“Ah,” he said, like he’d figured something out.

“What is it? Do you know what’s chasing us?”

“I wouldn’t want to give a hard and fast answer on something I know so little about, in the mind of swomebody whom I don’t know very well. But I do have a theory. Taya, do people often tell you that you’re quite bright for your age?”

I nodded.

“There we go.”

“There we go? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, one thing I’ve noticed a lot of in your generation is anxiety about the upcoming colonisation. We’ve been in space for generations and everyone’s very excited to see the birth of a new colony. Everything’s become a bit disorganised and everything’s new and everyone’s all eager to get started, and it’ll be kids your age, of course, who’ll be young enough to get real work done and old enough to have the experience and expertise to do it when we hit orbit. So everyone’s going around telling kids how they have to study hard and work hard because it’ll be them carrying the hopes and dreams of the mission, them shouldering the whole purpose of the fleet, and the new colony’s lives will depend on them doing a good job. And it’s the brightest or wisest or strongest kids that are getting this the most.

“Adults aren’t trying to push kids, I don’t think. They’re just excited, and they want to share that excitement, and to contribute by training you all up. They’re trying to help. But a lot of children I see have been negatively affected by that sort of pressure, they get told they can be whatever they want to be but they still feel trapped by their destiny, even though it’s something that we all want to do. And you, Taya, an extremely clever little girl who’s taking the inter-spaceship part of her jaunt way too young… are dreaming about some nameless threat to the colony, and about setting it up being pointless and dangerous.” He leaned forward. “Are you perhaps anxious about your future job? Your dreams might be inventing some reason to be afraid of the job to explain your anxiety about your future.”

“Can that happen?” I asked.

“Oh, all the time. All the time. Most of my job is trying to find out what people are actually worried about under their nightmares.”

I had thought that my dreams were trying to tell me something about what I didn’t know I knew. I hadn’t considered that they were trying to tell me something about what I didn’t know I felt.

Was he right? No. Couldn’t be. I wasn’t scared of hard work. I wasn’t scared of challenge. I definitely wasn’t scared of being smart; being the smart kid in the family was who I had always been. Why would I imagine a monster for something like that?

But what else could it be? There couldn’t actually be a monster following us; if I knew about it, even subconsciously, then the adults definitely would. And Yew was a professional who just said he saw this kind of thing a lot.

Now I didn’t know what to think. Was I chasing nothing? Why was I even out here?

Well. If I was right about the monster, then I had to keep looking, to save the Dragonseye colony and to save the whole fleet. And if I was wrong, then I had to keep learning anyway, to be as ready for the job that Yew thought I was scared of as I could be. So I would keep watching and listening and learning about the other ships in the fleet, and trying to figure out what was going on. And if I still didn’t find out anything about the monster of my dreams by the time I got back home to the Courageous… well, then. Then maybe I would agree with Yew and stop looking.

Maybe.

“Thank you,” I told him. “You’ve been a really big help.”

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