34: Tikka

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I rushed out into the hall and almost ran right into the historians.

“Taya!” Plia threw her arms around me protectively, glancing around for trouble. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“Structural issue?” Hali asked, rushing over to my door and checking that it was sealed.

“I’ll call Fari,” Tima said. “What’s the problem?”

“There’s someone in the vents,” I said.

The historians all looked at me in a way that told e that that did sound as stupid as I thought it did.

“In the air system?” Hali asked, frowning.

“Yes!”

He looked up at the nearest air vent. “They’re pretty small.”

“Some people can be small! Not everyone uses only Courageous genesets; maybe they make small people here!”

“I don’t think it’s possible for people to be that small anywhere,” he said.

“How do you know? Are you a doctor? Do you know the whole range of sizes that people can be?”

“I think that’d be more a geneticist’s job than a doct – ”

“Why were they in there?” Tima asked. “Were they trying to get into your room?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I guess they must have been, but I saw them in the docking bay, too.”

“I didn’t see anyone in the docking bay except Fari,” Plia said. “What did they look like?”

“I didn’t get a good look; they were in the vents there, too. They have big creepy eyes, and… and teeth…”

The historians all exchanged a look of sudden understanding. “You saw big creepy eyes in two different ventilation ducts?” Plia asked.

“They were eyes, I wasn’t mistaken! I thought it was just a piece of machinery or something at first, but then I saw the teeth and the fingers!”

“And you haven’t seen them anywhere else?”

“No!”

Plia held me at arm’s length and looked into my eyes. “Taya. This is very important. Think about your medical files. Do you have any uncommon reactions to any common coolants or air purifiers?”

“Huh? I don’t think so.”

“Your doctor would’ve told you if you did. Try to remember.”

“She wouldn’t know,” Tima said, “because if it’s something the doctors know about then it would’ve been flagged when she applied to board this ship. If she’s having a reaction to anything in the air system, it’s not predictable from her genes or previous checkups. We’ll have to take her to a doctor and get her tested for whatever they’re using here that they don’t on the Courageous.”

“What is it with these experimental ships and doing weird shit with filtering systems?” Hali asked. “Standard systems are fine! Stop changing stuff, it just makes it more complicated for people moving between ships!”

A reaction to something in the air system? “You guys think I’m hallucinating?”

“Either that,” Plia said, “or someone tiny with big creepy eyes is stalking you through the ventilation system.” And okay, yeah, when she put it like that, hallucinations made sense. “Have you hallucinated before?”

“Uh, I don’t think so?”

“Then w should get you to the doctor right away. If you’re not prone to hallucinations, suddenly getting them on a new ship could be a really bad sign.”

“Treegrave!” Tima called, but the treegrave mustn’t have been paying attention to us, because it didn’t answer. She frowned and checked the walls for an alert button.

“There’s probably a button in the cafeteria,” Hali suggested.

“So people have to walk all the way to the cafeteria just to get the treegrave’s attention? Ridiculous!”

“We’ll probably have to go that way anyway to find a doctor,” he shrugged. “And it’s not like the Arborea had anywhere for alert buttons in its residential rings.”

“Yeah, but everyone knows that the Arboreans are weirdos.”

Fari strode into the hall. “Hey there! Sorry, I realised I’d forgotten to explain the message and booking systems; let me just show you… hang on. He listened to nothing for a few seconds, then rolled his eyes and looked at the nearest air vent. “Okay, who’s there?”

Nothing.

“I know for a fact that these vents were cleaned yesterday,” he said. “There’s no work to be done in this part of the ship right now. Do I need to talk to management?”

A strange chittery sound came from the vent.

“No,” Fari said, “I’m not falling for that again.” He bundled his hand into a fist and held it out towards the vent. “Come on.”

Long, thin fingers called around the vent grate, but this time they didn’t shake it roughly like they were trying to pull it loose. Instead their owner unhooked something inside the grate and it swung open easily. They crawled out onto his fist, down his arm, and onto his shoulder.

“I should’ve known it was you,” Fari said. “Guys, this is Tikka. She’s a bit of a brat.”

We all stared.

Tikka was absolutely tiny. From shoulder to hip, she was smaller than Fari’s forearm. Her head looked too large for her body and her eyes looked too large for her head. They looked even creepier in her face than they had in the vents, dark balls in a face that was all smooshed flat and covered in hair. Most of her was covered in hair, actually; pretty much everything except her hands. She as naked, and had no ears, but her spine kept going past her hips in a “tail”, which I’d never seen on anyone before. I knew that some people had tails, but if I hadn’t done all that learning about mammals a while back I never would have recognised what it was so fast.

“She’s… small,” Hali said.

“That’s because she’s a child,” Fari said. “Adults are too big for vent maintenance.”

We stared.

“And because she’s a capuchin, of course,” he said.

We stared some more.

“Capuchins,” he said after some confused silence, “are a humanlike animal from Earth. They’re very clever, very nimble. Make good engineers. They make up a pretty big chunk of our population.”

“She’s a nonhuman Earth animal?” Tima asked.

“Sure, in the way that you’re a human Earth animal,” Fari shrugged. “Tikka is as removed from her Earth ancestors as we are from ours.”

“We are pretty much the same as Earth humans, though!” I protested. “At least, we are on the Courageous. Obviously a few changes have to be made for living in space over the years, but we’re mostly genestock from Earth itself.”

Fari did that little half-laugh that adults sometimes do when they think you’re wrong about something, but in a cute way. “Sure you are. Anyway, Tikka here is absolutely different from her Earth ancestors. She survived pressure and inertial changes better, just like we do, and her hair distributions are different, and she can eat a wider array of foods, same as us. Most importantly, our capuchins are almost as smart as Courageous humans, and also live nearly as long as you, take a couple of decades. Although I have doubts about the intelligence of this one, or her lifespan if she doesn’t make smarter decisions,” he added jokingly.

Tikka chittered at him and bared her teeth.

“Oh, plug you,” he said. To us he added, “Tikka’s very friendly, she just likes her jokes.”

Tikka jumped off his shoulders straight at me, and before I could dodge, landed on my head. Then she started gently moving my braids about, like she was looking for something on my scalp.

“Oh, she likes you!” Fari beamed, while I froze in fright and the historians tried to shoo her off. “Okay, go home. Shoo. You can play later.”

She jumped back onto his arm, then up into the vent, and clattered noisily away.

“Close the vent!” Fari called.

She clattered noisily back, lifted the grate back into place, and noisily away once more.

“Forgive her,” Fari said to us. “Most of our visitors are from Arborea or one of the smaller project ships. I can’t remember when we last had a courageous visitor. You’re a real curiosity.”

“Uh-huh,” Hali said, staring up at the vent. “We’re definitely the ones here that provoke the most curiosity.”

“Do all capuchins look like her?” Tima asked.

“Broadly speaking, yes. I mean, as much as your companions look like you or me.”

“Hmm. I just… assumed from preliminary research that a capuchin was a type of engineer.”

“They are! They maintain a great many of the critical and general systems on the ship. Their size and dexterity makes them very good at it, as well as their general range and modes of movement. Seeing a capuchin move in zero pull… it’s physical poetry. And their size greatly reduces their food and oxygen requirements, of course, compared to a human; it simple makes no sense to have routine system maintenance in the hands of engineers who need to lug around and maintain as much extra bulk as we do, unless it’s a job that requires carrying heavy equipment. And of course their lighter gear such as smaller space suits are another saving in mass. They make up a full third of our population, which cuts almost a quarter off our mass-per-person. The biggest mystery in the fleet is why other ships aren’t full of them. Oh, I know you have your historic traditions and so forth, but the smaller courier ships at least could get great value out of replacing all their workforce except for baggage haulers with capuchins. They’ll be the chief couriers for the fleet within a couple more colonies, mark my words.” He clapped his hands together. “Now! Let me show you the communication and booking systems.”

He lead us into a bedroom at the very end of the hall, which was bigger than ours and dint’ have a bathroom attached. I soon figured out why – it wasn’t for sleeping, but for teaching. It had to be big enough to let us crowd around the bed while he showed us the switches next to it and how to work the projector.

Most of it was stuff that I had already worked out or didn’t care about. He did also show us how to book things like doctors (which would’ve been really useful if Tikka had turned out to be a hallucination), and the gym, and how to request special items. He showed us how to send and receive messages, which I’d already figured out, and took time to show us how to find both him and the treegrave in the system, which was actually useful.

“Oh,” he said, “and I’ll show you Ella, too. She’s my apprentice, so you’ll probably see her a lot. I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”

The most useful thing he showed us was right after he saw me having trouble reading the screen. He showed me how to switch it to ‘visitor mode’ (though the tone of voice he used made me think that wasn’t its real name, and it was probably called ‘child mode’ or ‘low literacy mode’ or something), which let me use symbols and spoken words instead of writing.

After he left, the historians headed back to their rooms to look up old technology or languages or whatever they were trying to do. I headed for the cafeteria. I wanted to understand the ship I was on, and I didn’t think the computers were going to help me. We hadn’t been prepared for the capuchins; how much other stuff were we going to get wrong by just reading reports and not going out to look?

I was here to get new perspectives. So. I would need to look at things.

I didn’t see any buttons to alert the treegrave in the cafeteria. Maybe they just looked different here, and I wasn’t recognising them? Or maybe they didn’t need them. If people could message the treegrave from their rooms, maybe that’s how they talked to it, and there wasn’t any need for buttons t get its attention.

The food in the cafeteria was a lot like Courageous food, thankfully. A lot of loaves and bricks and drinks that were probably made from things grown in microbial vats, none of the weird cut-up fruits and stuff that I’d had to stomach on the Arborea. There weren’t as many types of food as I was used to, though; just four types of loaf and two types of drink. They did have my favourite type of cloro smoothie, so I grabbed one and sat at a small table by myself to people watch.

There were a lot of people eating alone or in small groups, and most of them looked at me curiously for a few seconds before looking away. I probably looked Arborean to them, if they were getting lot of Arborean scientists, and they were probably just wondering why I was so young. I should start dressing like them as quickly as I could; I didn’t want to be ‘a curiosity’, as Fari had put it.

Everyone I’d seen on the Stalwart was bald and beardless. I looked closely, and saw that a lot of them had fuzzy heads; they weren’t naturally bald, they jut kept their heads shaved. I could do that. They also didn’t wear very much jewellery. I saw a couple of bracelets and a brooch, but most people had nothing, except that about a quarter of the teenagers had plain steel rings in their ears.

None of the adults, I noticed, wore wraps; they mostly wore jumpsuits, or strange outfits where the top half looked like a jumpsuit and the bottom half looked like a really long loose wrap, just a big circle of fabric that covered their legs. Most of them tended to hang out with other adults that wore the same types and colours of clothes as them, but not everyone did. I couldn’t tell whether they were uniforms, or showed different genders or social groups, or were just different fashions. I supposed I’d find out.

The little kids wore wraps. Most of the kids my age wore wraps, but about a quarter of them dressed like adults.

There weren’t many capuchins in the crowded cafeteria. I saw a couple come in, talk to some humans, and leave, but none of them were eating. Maybe capuchins ate different food.

Even though we were under normal pull, and the food was familiar and the corridors and rooms normal (if very small), this ship somehow felt more different than home than anywhere I’d been so far.

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