The people of the Arborea Celestia are all farmers, but they don’t think of themselves as farmers. They work three hours a day at some other job and farm in their “free” time. Once I talked about looking after the forests as working in Farming, and the Arborean I was talking to gave me a really strange look. I guess that saying an Arborean who tends the vines is working in Farming is like saying that when I clean my room I’m working in Janitorial.
I made a goal to learn to swim at least a little bit before we moved on to the next ship, and went out with Strawberry as often as I could. I was soon able to walk around the cluster’s territory by myself but I didn’t want to go swimming alone. I was too scared of drowning. I swam and explored and learned how to build in the trees and walk on the roots, and I wasn’t nearly as good at any of those things as the Arboreans but I became way better at them than the historians, because the historians spent most of their time in the middle ring doing history. Whenever I asked them how it was going, I got vague, not very happy answers. So probably not great.
The Dawn Festival was three days before it was time to leave. A lot of the cluster, not just Juniper, had spent the whole day before cooking lots of food for a big feast. Even I had helped, but I’d only cut and carried things; I didn’t want to get too close to the fire.
On the day of the festival, we bundled all the food up and carried it away from the little rooms that made up the cluster’s home. “Where are we going?” I asked Plia (because if the answer was obvious, I didn’t want to embarrass myself my asking one of the Arboreans).
“To the node tree,” she explained. “The start of the festival will happen there.”
Which was obvious, so I was glad I hadn’t asked an Arborean. The node tree was a big tree in the middle of the Dasta node. Each node had one. It looked the same as all the other trees, except that there was a big stone bench in front of it and a lot of space around it where no other tree trunks grew. When different clusters wanted to meet together for talk or trade or celebrations, they met at the node tree. So of course the Dawn Festival would be there.
The crowd at the node tree was the biggest crowd I had ever seen. Arboreans were everywhere, talking, laughing, sharing food with each other. Some of them sang or played drums or pipes and people danced around them, and walking around felt like walking the narrow paths between the trees, except even worse because at least the trees didn’t move. I knew all the names of the Harwood cluster, but different cluster members kept dragging me about to introduce me to their friends from other clusters, and I gave up trying to remember all the new people’s names right away.
There were over five hundred people at the festival. The spaceship has twelve nodes, so it was probably one twelfth of the ship’s population. Which is a really tiny population for such a big ship, but still way too many people to be in one place. I kept thinking that our weight all in one part of the floating forest was going to push through the tree roots and put a hole in it.
“Why do you do it?” I asked Strawberry as we found a quiet-ish spot to sit down and eat bean cakes together.
“Have parties?” she asked.
“Have the forests. It’s so inefficient.”
“What do you mean? It’s super efficient! We grow most of our food right here in the trees! It all grows itself, unlike algae food.”
“It doesn’t, though. You guys are pruning branches and weaving roots and diving under the water to make sure everything’s working properly all the time. One tree takes less work than one algae tank, sure, but it also makes way less food, and in a way less complicated way – you’re doing way more work for the same amount of nutrients and calories. It takes so much space to make hardly any food and air! So your population is tiny, for a massive ship; you’re spending so much fuel to send this thing between stars even though hardly anyone’s aboard. It’s just a really inefficient way to do things.”
Strawberry blinked at me like she didn’t understand what I was saying. “It’s really efficient,” she said. “The water feeds the plants and the fish and the fish and the plants feed the birds and the birds die and feed the water and all of it feeds us. Algae tanks don’t do that, you have to seed and grow them and then clean them out and start again.”
“Yes, but that’s very easy and you get a lot out of it; it’s so much less work than – never mind.” I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to make her understand. The adults would understand, but I didn’t feel like talking about it with them. I might insult their ship or something by mistake by not knowing the right manners.
The feasting and dancing lasted for hours. Some people were going to other clusters, not to catch up randomly with friends, but to have long, serious discussions with all the adults in the cluster. I realised what this meant when the Harwood cluster met with a young man called Citrus – people were arranging to join new clusters. It was kind of like the Arborean version of marrying into a harem, and Terragon explained to me that lots of people chose to wait until the Dawn Festival to do it because the festival was a good time for new beginnings.
Halfway through the day, the feasting and dancing slowed down, then stopped. Then a small group of people started applauding at nothing that I could see, and then another. Soon everyone in the crowd was clapping.
The clapping went on for ages. After a while it started to get louder and quieter, then louder and quieter again, until the quiet parts were silent and everyone was slowly clapping out a beat together. (Which wasn’t how I would have started a beat. I’d have gotten one person clapping how I wanted and then had other people join them, not have everyone find it together through random clapping. Way too messy.) Once the rhythm was steady, some people stood up and started walking towards the node tree, taking steps in time with the beat. I recognised Terragon and Pine, and realised that these must be all the cluster representatives.
Pine was carrying some sort of metal cone. It looked like something electronic, which was interesting, because Arboreans didn’t tend to take many electronic things into the forest, probably because of all the water everywhere.
When all the representatives were at the node tree, the clapping stopped all at once. Pine came to the front of the group and faces the crowd, raising the cone to kes lips, and I realised that it was a loudspeaker.
“Medicine production,” ke announced into the silence, “nineteen per cent!”
There was a bit of cheering and applause.
“Food production, sixty eight per cent!”
The applause was more enthusiastic this time.
“Organic materials production, seventy three per cent!”
Everyone seemed very happy about that.
“Oxygen production, ninety six per cent!”
People were chanting now. “Ninety six! Ninety six!”
“Water cycling!” Pine waited for everyone to be quiet again before finishing. “One hundred per cent!”
People were screaming with joy. I saw people grab their children in tight hugs, weeping. One woman grabbed a tree branch and bit down on it, just sinking her teeth into the bark, tears running down her face. “Water cycling!” people were screaming randomly. “One hundred! One hundred!”
I stood a little closer to the historians, who were all bunching up together, looking as bewildered as I felt. Strawberry clutched my wrist so hard that she was leaving bruises. “One hundred!” she whispered to me like it was a precious secret, then ran off to hug her mother.
“We are the forest!” all the cluster representatives called out together. There was something wrong with their faces, all stiff with shiny eyes, big smiles showing way too many teeth.
“We are the forest!” the crowd repeated.
“We are the coming life!” they called.
“We are the coming life!”
“As our ancestors filled the sterile ocean of Earth, so we fill the sterile ocean of space!”
“So we fill space!”
“We are the coming vitality! We are the germ that conquers the body!”
“One to many! The power of vitality!”
“So the universe becomes alive!”
“So the universe becomes alive!”
“The perfect cycle approaches!”
“The perfect cycle approaches!”
Another round of applause and cheering. The representatives all went back to their clusters.
And then everyone started saying their goodbyes and packing up to go home like nothing had happened.
The historians were struggling to look unbothered, and I did my best to do the same. Terragon smiled at me as she helped me pack up leftover food, and I couldn’t help remembering her face just a couple of minutes before, all manic and stiff with eyes staring out at nothing like she’d been drugged. But I was pretty sure that she hadn’t been. No drug works or wears off that fast, that I know of.
“So, what did you think of your first Dawn Festival?” she asked me.
“I got to meet a lot of new people,” I said vaguely.
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s great for that. A node is a community, but sometimes we get so caught up in our own little cluster territories that we can go months without seeing some of our more distant neighbours. Some people don’t see anyone outside their cluster except at work, unless we have these get-togethers.”
That night, I had the dream again. I was standing in the viewport, and I could hear the cluster representatives shouting, but I couldn’t see them.
“We are the coming vitality! We are the germ that conquers the body!”
Was that it? Was that the danger?
I knew about infection. When you got cut, you had to clean it so that it didn’t get infected. If the cut was too deep or too dirty, you had to go to the hospital, and they cleaned and bandaged it for you and gave you special medicine so that it wouldn’t get infected. I looked out behind us and imagined us out there as an infection. Humanity, life, spread across the body of the universe like billions of germs, sickening it. Killing it.
When a body gets infected, it fights back. Was that what I was worried about? Did the universe have an immune system?
Yes, yes! A little voice whispered in my mind. The universe is the problem!
But not like that. Not like a hostile thing fighting off an infection. Bodies killed germs because the one thing that bodies wanted to do was keep being bodies. Alive wanted to stay alive. Stones and stars and space dust couldn’t do that. It was dangerous, but it didn’t attack people on purpose. If the universe acted like that, then we’d already know about it. And if it acted like that and nobody had figured it out then there was no way that I had, in my dreams.
The problem had to be something simpler, something I sort of knew about but wasn’t seeing properly. That wasn’t the problem.
Still, something about it felt right. Not the immune system part, not space itself trying to kill us to stop us from spreading. But space… the problem was space.
That’s what I had to figure out. What was wrong with space?
Derin Edala 