35: Efficiency

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“What’s the deal with the capuchins, do you think?” Tima asked at breakfast.

Plia shrugged. “Just what Fari said, I’d imagine. They seem to be really big on efficiency here. If you can keep your mass and your food and oxygen cycling down when supporting the huge force you’d need to maintain the frankly ludicrous number of projectors and monitors here – ”

“So much for efficiency!” Hali said. “How can they possibly need all these electronics? The power consumption and maintenance alone!”

“Probably made up for by lower lighting and air cycling needs per person, given the smaller spaces and soforth,” Tima said while cutting her white breakfast loaf into tiny cubes.

“They could do that and not have so much extraneous stuff. What’s the point of the savings if you’re going to waste them straight away? Choosing between the two, I’d rather have more space to stretch out in and book out a projector room when I need one.”

“There must be a reason for the extravagance,” Plia said. “It is a strange indulgence for a community that’s so efficiency-focused. Or maybe they aren’t efficiency-focused at all and Fari and the people who write reports about the place are weirdos.”

“I don’t think there has to be a reason,” I said. “Maybe they just don’t see it as inefficient. I mean, on the Courageous, we’re really careful about recycling materials and stuff, to get the most out of everything we can before it becomes unusable and has to be dumped. We use our carbon and iron and oxygen over and over forever, or as close to forever as we can. But when you think about it, Fari’s right about us being really wasteful, because our ship has way, way more mass than it needs for the people on it, and that means it uses way more fuel. And then there’s Arborea, which is way, way worse at it than us, I mean they have so much space and so much mass per person it’s ridiculous. Water is really heavy and they’re just living in giant water tanks all the time. But they think they’re efficient for the same reason we’d say they’re inefficient – they’re trying to get their forests to do as much stuff as they can by themselves, so the smallest number of people can manage the biggest amount of space with the smallest amount of work. The way they see it, a bunch of trees growing their own food is more ‘efficient’ than a much smaller, much higher-output biotank that needs to be carefully looked after every day. So maybe all these extra electronics that need more maintenance and power and are hard to recycle and all that are just part of another different idea of what ‘efficient’ means.”

“That’s probably the long and short of it,” Plia agreed. “You’d think that after so many generations, the fleet would be able to agree on basic terms.”

“If we could agree on basic terms,” Tima said drily, “there wouldn’t be much of a fleet. Have you looked into the history of basically any ship? It’s always ‘the ships our ancestors were on wanted to do things one way, and our ancestors wanted to do something else, so they just split off onto their own ship so nobody could stop them’.”

“It isn’t always like that!” Plia protested. “It’s like that about, I don’t know, eighty per cent of the time.”

“So the fleet would be eighty per cent smaller,” Tima said.

“Not necessarily. If it was smaller then there’d probably be much fewer fleet splits. We can’t ignore the role of distance in splits. So the fleet would be the same size, but would fragment less, and then we’re just getting into questions of how the fragments out there are doing and whether they survived and are still following the mission, and those conversations never go anywhere because nobody has any information.”

“We’re getting off track,” Tima said.

“We were on a track? That’s unusual for us.”

“As I was saying. The capuchins. What’s the deal with them? Not their existence; that’s pretty obvious. I meant, why were they a surprise? It seems weird that we didn’t know what to expect before we got here.”

“That’s a good point,” Hali said. “You think they were hidden? Shadowed?”

“They weren’t a secret,” I pointed out. “Tikka didn’t hide from us, and Fari didn’t try to hide her.”

“Not secret,” Hali said. “Shadowed.”

I frowned. I didn’t know what that meant.

“Secrets can e a problem when they get out,” he explained. “It would be impossible to keep the capuchins a secret. Some visitor would’ve seen them at work or whatever, or an immigrant from the Stalwart would mention them in their new home, or they’d actually come up in a message between friends on different ships. And then there’s be a whole big thing, because keeping a secret like that would be huge news. Tiny nonhuman people making p a huge chunk of a ship’s population? That they’re trying to hide away from everyone? That would be really exciting news! So of course everyone would pay attention to it!

“Sometimes it’s too risky to hide something that isn’t easy to hide, because it’s more attention-grabbing when it’s discovered. So instead, what you do is make it… less interesting. Harder to learn about. Like you’re sort of accidentally placing it in a shadow, where people probably won’t see it, but if they do then it’s less interesting because obviously it was right there the whole time, nobody was hiding it.”

“If we were going to go onto a ship that had, for example, a very muscular workforce bred with special genesets for high strength,” Tima said, “we’d find out about that pretty quickly. The stuff we learned before boarding would have information on their genetic caste system, and how long they’ve been breeding such workers and how many and probably even specify what genesets are used. But the information on the capuchins we got was so vague that we thought they were just normal human engineers. The information we got was true, nobody was lying, but there’s no way that people just accidentally didn’t mention what they were. They were definitely shadowed – they didn’t want people all over the fleet who are just casually reading about other ships to know what they have here. But at the same time, they didn’t want to hide it from people who would find out, and make it look like enticing information by making it a secret.”

“And Fari himself raised a good point,” Hali said. “Why aren’t capuchins all over the smaller ships? They’d be pretty useful on the Vanguard. If they can maintain all these electronics then they can definitely pilot a ship. Fari said they’re almost as smart as humans.”

“Almost as smart as Courageous humans,” Plia corrected him. “They geneselect for intelligence here.”

“It’s an interesting question,” Tima said. “And even more interesting is that the way Fari brought it up suggests that he doesn’t know the answer, or even expect that it’s something that shouldn’t be asked. So whatever shadowing is taking place here, it doesn’t involve people like him.”

“More importantly,” Hali said, “is there any reason for us to care? Do we think there’s a research angle here?”

“For the untethered heart? Oh, I really, really doubt it. I don’t think this has anything to do with us. I just thought it was interesting.”

I also thought it was interesting, and if they were right, then it sounded like Fari might be a safe person to ask about it.

An even safer person, I learned after breakfast, was his apprentice.

While the other historians explored the ship, Fari took Plia and me to a laboratory. I’d never been in one before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I definitely didn’t expect the rows and rows of plants.

They were vines, thick and green and growing all tangled around each other to make little walls. Their leaves were thick and fuzzy. I didn’t see an flowers or fruits on them, so I wasn’t sure what they were for. Fibres for weaving, maybe? Maybe they had plant walls instead of a wool wall?

“This,” Fari said, “is Ella.”

Ella looked up from the vine she was inspecting with a tiny torch, for some reason. She was a girl (I had to keep reminding myself of that, she was a girl even though she had brennan hair like everyone else on the ship) who looked about fifteen. Her skin was darker than Fari’s, black instead of deep brown, and she was very thin instead of chubby like him, but she dressed the same as he did, in a pale green jumpsuit. She had no jewellery, not even a steel earring.

“Ella,” Fari said, “these are some of our guests from the Courageous.”

She gave us a friendly smile and offered Plia her hand. “That’s a long journey! I hope you’re settling in okay?”

“It’s certainly been interesting,” Plia said, shaking her hand. “I’m Plia.”

“Pleased to meet you.” She held her hand out to me. “You must be Lia, then.”

“Um,” I said, shaking her hand, “my name’s Taya.”

“Oh!” She looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.” She looked at Fari, confused. He shrugged.

“Our guests are interested in the technology we’re working on for Hexacorallia. Can you give them a bit of a tour? Just a casual look-around to get their grip on, we can get the technical details to the whole group later.”

“Of course! Any excuse to take a break from leaf analysis.”

“The glorious and exciting life of a scientist. Everyone’s open, so take as long or as short as you need. See you at dinner?”

“Will you be on time tonight?”

“I’m late in the lab one time…” he rolled his eyes and left.

Ella gave us a big grin and clapped her hands together. “Do you guys like plants?”

Plia and I looked at each other.

“We just came over from Arborea,” Plia said.

“Our dad’s a farmer,” I added.

“Great! Then you’ll love what we’re working on.” She headed for the nearest wall of vines. We followed. “These beauties,” she said, “are going to change absolutely everything. Look at this.”

She waved a hand at each side of the vine wall and stepped back. We looked.

Oe side, the side we could see from the door, was a tight weave of pale vines covered in bright green leaves. When I looked closely, I saw that the vines were a little bit see-through. Not totally see-through, because there was fluid and fibres and all the normal plant stuff in there, but it was like looking through the water on Arborea.

The leaves were not see-through. They were green, and very large, and very hairy. And the hair looked odd. I had seen hair leaves before, in some of the plants in the viewports on the Courageous, but these ones looked weirdly thick.

From the other side of the wall, it was a lot easier to see that there were no gaps between the vines. They grew so tightly together that I wasn’t sure how the sap or whatever (do vines have sap?) could even move through them. This was easy to see, because no leaves at all grew on that side.

Ella patted the vine wall proudly. “This,” she said, “is the future of orbital colonisation.”

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