32: Moon Mysteries

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The next day, being so put off by the Dawn Festival felt silly. All the stuff they’d been chanting was just the fleet mission, sort of. They didn’t think about it like we did on the Courageous, and we’d definitely never describe ourselves or our mission like that, but wasn’t that why I was here? To learn different perspectives?

And the chanters hadn’t been acting like they were drugged, they’d been acting like little children. I’d seen Rose and Ivy scream like that at their birthdays. It had confused me because no Courageous adult would ever act like that, but I supposed that the festival must have made them really, really excited, so excited that they forgot they weren’t four years old. And I was pretty sure, after a good night’s sleep, that I’d figured out a really important difference between the Courageous and the Arborea Celestia.

“Last night,” I asked Strawberry, “those percentages that Pine read out. What did they mean?”

“They were how much of our needs are covered by the forest,” Strawberry said. “The dream of the ship is to eventually be able to get everything we need to live from the forest. I mean, obviously doing that all the way is impossible, because we need power from the ship for heat and light and stuff, and we need all sorts of metal things that we can’t grow, and I don’t think we’ll ever get a hundred per cent on medicine, but it’d be nice to be able to make a forest that can give us all our food and air without anything from the outside except for the lighting.”

“And that’s why everyone was so happy about the water being at one hundred per cent.”

“Yeah! Perfect water filtering from just the forest, no outside filtering or distilling needed at all! It’s the least important one because we can always distil water if we need it, but it’s great to reach a hundred per cent in something. And oxygen is really close, too! It’s because of these new algae we’re using. I bet we’ll get to one hundred per cent oxygen in my lifetime.”

“Good luck,” I said.

A couple of days later, we said goodbye to everyone and got back onto the Vanguard. Like last time, the people on the Vanguard were a lot less friendly than the people on the Arborea. I saw a couple of new kids but didn’t talk to them, in case they wanted to play tricks on me like Rodge.

“So, what did you think of the Arborea?” Plia asked me as we settled down in our room and I remembered how much I hated zero pull.

“It’s very different,” I said. “Laisor said it was basically like the Courageous, but I think ke didn’t get it. They’re not the same.”

“That kind of family structure would never work on the Courageous,” Plia agreed.

“And so much space!” Hali said. “I’m glad the Courageous isn’t built like that, I’d be scared just to walk around every day of my life!”

I shook my head. “Not that. All that stuff isn’t important. I mean, I don’t think they do the fleet mission like we do. You can tell, from the forests, and the Dawn Festival, and… everything.”

“That festival was nuts,” Plia said. “Weird as void. I’ve never seen adults act like that.”

“I have,” Tima said, “when you invited me to a drum circle. Those guys were acting exactly like you do.”

“Drum circles don’t count!”

“They’re trying to spread life throughout the galaxy,” I said.

“Uh, yeah,” Hali said. “That is the fleet mission.”

I shook my head again. “We say it is,” I said, “but what the fleet’s really doing is spreading people throughout the galaxy. We’re building homes for people, not just any life. If we came across a planet that would be really, really hard to keep humans alive on, but that bacteria could live on, the fleet would keep going – we do, often. The Courageous would think it was a dangerous waste of time and resources to stop and fill it with bacteria. But the Arborea, even though they’d be outvoted, I think they’d want to stop. To them, a planet with no life, and a planet with life but no people, are different. We’d see that as pointless, but I don’t think they would.

“I asked Strawberry why they put so much work into their forests and stuff instead of just using normal ways of growing food and purifying things, and she said that the forest was more efficient. I pointed out that that was obviously not true, and she didn’t understand what I was talking about. Like, they think the forest would have its own value even if there were no people around to be a part of it, which isn’t the mission at all. They’re more like you guys with your loop thing.”

“Nothing we saw there was anything like Loopies,” Plia said. “That was just fleet mission stuff.”

“No, it wasn’t the mission, it was definitely more like the Loop stuff,” I said. “They see humans as a way to spread life, not the goal of it. Like you guys. That’s very different from the fleet mission.”

“It’s the same thing with a looser definition of the ‘life’ than the Courageous uses,” Plia shrugged. “It’s way different to the Loop, because the Loop isn’t proscriptive. The Loop doesn’t tell us to do anything. It doesn’t say that spreading life is good and not doing it is bad, it just explains why we’re the sort of creatures who do want to spread life. If the fleet decided to never leave the Dragonseye, the Loop wouldn’t say we were doing anything wrong, because it doesn’t say anything about right or wrong. But the fleet mission, both how the Courageous does it and how the Arborea does it, would say that that’s wrong.”

“I think,” Tima said, “that you’re both weirded out by the Arboreans and want their thing to be like the other person’s thing and not your thing, but you’re both missing the main point: all three are basically the same thing. Your heads are so far into ‘spread life throughout the universe’ that you’re acting like these tiny differences in perspective make the three positions totally separate things, but someone who wasn’t on the fleet mission would see all three as basically the same. You’re quibbling over the tiniest, most meaningless things.”

Outside the fleet mission? I cocked my head. “Don’t you believe in the fleet mission?”

There was an awkward moment of silence in the room.

“Do I believe that we’re spreading life throughout the galaxy? Obviously. We’re quite verifiably doing that.”

“But do you think we shouldn’t be?”

She shrugged. “No reason not to. The universe is a big place and the fleet might as well be going somewhere as staying still.”

“It’s the whole purpose of the fleet! The purpose of our lives! It’s the reason any of use were born!”

“I suppose you could look at it that way,” Tima shrugged. “Personally, I think whatever reason anybody else had for making sure I was born is their own business. I prefer to find my own meaning. And I have nothing against doing that on a fleet that’s spreading life throughout the galaxy, if that’s your question.”

I stared. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about the mission.

I’d never met someone who didn’t care about the mission. I hadn’t thought that someone in the fleet could not care about the mission. It didn’t make any sense.

“It does make you think, though,” Hali said. “I mean, you say that they’re so similar, Tima, but doesn’t that in itself prove that the Smallest Possible Loop is right? If we weren’t gifted with this deep yearning to spread life, then why would all of our strongest and most popular philosophies be based around doing just that?”

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Tima said, rolling her eyes. “Such philosophies aren’t popular because they’re true, they’re popular because the fleet mission is already established so anything that fits that viewpoint is going to be easier for people to accept and spread better. If Aspen Fucking Greaves hadn’t been obsessed with people filling that galaxy and had been obsessed with mechanics or something instead, and we were all out here worshipping machines, then Loopies would barely exist and the Hummers would be a major force in the fleet and you’d be sitting here saying, ‘well, surely the fact that all of our main philosophies are about the wisdom of machines means that the Hummer-priests really can hear the voices of the universe in the engines?’ It’s not a deep secret of the universe, it’s cultural self-reinforcement.”

I’d been around the historians a lot and knew that a term like ‘cultural self-reinforcement’ would get them talking about something really boring, so I changed the subject. “Did you guys find out anything useful on the Arborea?”

Plia shook her head. “They had very well preserved records of everything from the Arboreans in the First Crew, like we’d expected; a lot of stuff that the Courageous has lost over time. But nothing useful for us.”

That made sense. I nodded. “Lots of people have tried to learn about the First Crew and the Earth Arboreae. I’m sure everything they have has been looked at by every historian in the fleet.”

The three historians exchanged a glance. I’m good at glances, but I wasn’t sure what this one meant. Then Hali said, “We’re not looking into that kind of stuff.”

I frowned. “Then why go to the Arborea?”

“Because,” Hali said, “Aspen and Dandelion were both very close to a First Crewmember who we are very interested in, on whom there’s been a lot less research done.”

“We’re trying to learn about the Lunari,” Plia explained. “In particular, a Lunari First Crewmember named Tinera Li Null.”

I knew the name, because I knew all the First Crew names, but I didn’t know much about Tinera. “Wasn’t he one of the First Crew who stayed behind in the first colony?”

“She. And yes, she stayed behind with Captain Adin. But she’s also the only one of the First Crew who kept a diary. She didn’t keep it for very long, just a couple of years, but it tells us a lot of what we know about the First Crew since they, for some absurd reason that I’ve never been able to understand, didn’t put cameras throughout their ship and record their journey.”

“No respect for future historians,” Hali said, with a grin.

“Tinera’s diary is mostly in Lunari, and the fleet doesn’t have a record of the language. We have to assume it originally did, before earlier troubles wiped a lot of the drives, but the diary’s been translated from scratch by people using context clues and whatever other languages we can find that seem closely related, as well as cross-referencing with other records in Lunari.”

“And you were hoping that records of Aspen or Dandelion might mention something about Tinera that could give a better translation?”

They exchanged the glance again.

“Yeah,” Tima said. “Something like that.”

They didn’t want to tell me about it. Interesting.

One thing I had learned about the historians was that they always wanted to talk about their projects and their interests. I thought about pushing more, but another thing I had learned about the historians was that if that worked then they would think I was interested, and if they thought I was interested then they would talk about their project for at least two hours and it would turn out to actually be really boring. So I let them have their secrets.

But there weren’t a whole lot of ships in the fleet that had a long history related to the First Crew. After the Courageous and the Arborea, the fleet started making more practical ships, and I supposed that the other ships had their own histories or whatever and probably took them very seriously, but it wasn’t the same. It wouldn’t help translate an old diary.

So if the Arborea didn’t have what they wanted, what was the rest of the journey for?

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