Plia and Tima were waiting for us in the cafeteria. They saw us approach through the window and strode impatiently out into the hall to meet us.
“So what’s this oh-so-great discovery of yours?” Plia asked.
Hali grinned. “Oh, you’ll see.” He lead us down a series of hallways, doing his best to walk dramatically the whole way (which must have been tiring), then stopped at a large door labelled “Relaxation.”
At Hali’s gesture, Tima pushed open the door. Inside was… another long hallway.
“Aha,” she said, without any tone in her voice. “Such a wonderful find.”
The hallway was lined with doors, and there were no windows to show what was behind them. The doors were labelled, but not in any helpful way; they were numbered, like the bedrooms, and most of them marked “small”, some others “medium”, and a few “large”.
The doors all had a single light on them, most of them glowing red, some of them green. A couple of the medium rooms had blue lights, and one of the large ones, right at the end of the hall, a violet light.
“Green lights mean the room is free,” Hali explained, leading us down the hall, “and red is occupied. Blue lights mean that the room is occupied but that the people inside don’t mind company and you can join them if you want. Purple means that the room is out of order; that it’s being cleaned or maintained, usually.” He paused outside a medium room with a green light and dramatically pushed the door open.
“Wow,” Tima said. “How very exciting.”
It was a small room, though with how small most rooms were on the Stalwart, it probably did count as medium. It was smooth ceramic, with unevenly sized walls and rounded corners, and with soft seats of different shapes and heights scattered around. Five seats; probably meant for groups of five or less. Though a couple of them were long, but I couldn’t tell if that was to squeeze more people on them or so the sitter could lie down.
There were a couple of ceramic ledges jutting out of the walls. It would be a stretch to call them tables; more like just areas where the uneven walls made a flat surface that you could put something on if you wanted. Thy weren’t placed between the seats, and the seats weren’t placed to face each other; everything looked very random.
“Okay,” Plia said. “You win. I cannot possibly guess the purpose of this room.”
“Take a seat, and I will show you.”
We all picked seats. Hali shut the door, revealing a panel covered in buttons on the back, and pushed a few of the buttons.
The lights went out, and we were in total darkness.
Then the lights came on again. And with them, sound. And we were somewhere else.
There was the sound of sloshing, of a child laughing far away, of leaves rustling in the air that blew gently across my face. The walls were gone, replaced by the trees of Arborea Celestia stretching out into the distance. The ones nearby were perfectly shaped so that the lumps an ledges in the walls became part of their trunks and branches.
The picture wasn’t perfect. The cushion of my chair still felt like a cushion no matter how much light the projectors projected on it, and my own hands cast shadows on the projections n the seat. But if I looked out into the distance, I could almost believe that we were in Arborea.
“Shiproute and stars,” Tima breathed.
“It’s better with the glasses,” Hali said, handing a pair to each of us. They were small and light, just thing metal holding a couple of screens where they could sit over someone’s eyes. I put mine on.
The glasses filled in the shadows of the projections, and made the walls and seats behind them invisible. With them, it really did look like Arborea. Right away, I got to work trying to rick them, waving my hand really fast in front of my face to see if there was any lag in the image that would cover my hand and make it look wrong.
“Okay, fine,” Plia said. “This is the coolest place on the ship.”
“I assume it does more than just the Arborea?” Tima asked.
“You can do all sorts of places,” Hali said. “You can be on different ships, stand in outer space surrounded by stars… there’s illusions of different colonies, but the system explains that they’re guessing a bit there because we can’t be certain how most of the colonies developed. They can accurately show them very early on, or guess at what they’re like developed using information from the Dish. They also have locations from Earth, but those are almost completely guesswork.
“Nobody look at the earth ones,” Tima said hurriedly. “We already argue about too much stupid bullshit. If we see their version of an Earth desert or something then we’ll start endlessly arguing about what we think they got right or wrong.”
“And that would distract from our other very important bullshit arguments,” Hali agreed.
“Taya should be allowed to look at Earth if she wants, but only if she doesn’t tell any of us anything about it so we can’t argue,” Plia said.
“Yes,” Tima said, “That’s fair. Taya, you can look.”
“Uh, thanks?” I said. I reached out and touched a nearby tree. It was, of course, just smooth ceramic. “Hey, you know what I just noticed about this ship?”
“No plants?” Plia asked. “Outside the research labs, I mean. Yeah, that’s weird.”
I nodded. “Not even pot plants in the cafeteria or anything.”
“They’d probably say it takes up too much space in the halls and it’s inefficient to have to have someone going around to water them or something,” Tima said.
“They’d have an automated watering system if they had them here,” Plia said, “and the capuchins would maintain all the pipes or whatever. They’d probably say it was a waste of time they could spend maintaining these ten billion projectors they seem to have. Have you guys checked out the gymnasium? It’s tiny. No sports fields or big climbing frames or anything. All machines to run or climb or lift heavy things in one spot so they don’t waste any extra space. I’m surprised they even put walls between the rooms and waste all that valuable mass.”
“No Big Spiderweb?” I asked, disappointed.
“Oh yeah, I remember the Big Spiderweb!” Hali punched the air. “Best think in the playground. I was the third best in the whole orphanage at climbing that thing.”
“The playground near my house didn’t have one of those,” Tima said. “We just had this really, really, really big slide… it was really slick, actually pretty dangerous to go down in slippery clothing. We all used to compete to see who could climb the highest up the slide part before slipping down.”
“That doesn’t sound as fun as Big Spiderweb,” Hali said. “Big Spiderweb for Blue Captain!”
“Yeah, that sounds like something that a blue shift kid would say,” Tima said, rolling her eyes.
“Hey, hey,” Plia said. “We’re all on the same shift now, and we can all live in peace on green shift.” She paused. “The best shift.”
“I want to boo you, but it’s kind of hard to trash the shift we all decided to be on,” Hali said. “So it’s your match, I guess.”
“Actually,” I said, “we’re not on the Courageous, and I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t checked the Stalwart calendar. Are we even on the green shift here?”
“Yes! Thank you!” Hali threw his hands up. “The opportunity to trash talk Plia’s childhood shit remains! Blue Shift rules!”
“Do you ever wonder if maybe there’s a reason that some of our colleagues don’t take us as seriously as we’d like?” Tima asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Hey, they take us seriously! Against all the odds, we’re here! They even let us drag the kid along, for some reason!”
“Be nice!” Plia chided.
“No, he’s right,” I said. “You’re my sister, but why did you two agree to take me?”
It’s hard to exchange glances with people when everyone’s eyes are hidden behind virtual reality glasses, but Tima and Hali looked at each other.
“Honestly,” Tima said, “we had no reason to object. We were throwing everything at the wall by that point. We’d called in every favour and every contact, drafted the travel proposal a hundred times, and kept getting shuffled to the back of every queue.”
“There are two types of trips that the Courageous is interested in fostering right now,” Hali said. “Trips that are focused on helping the Dragonseye colony setup, and jaunts for kids. We’d already redrawn our route to the Dish to come through Hexacorallia in the hopes of convincing them that we could learn something of value there and jump the organisational queue a bit, but it wasn’t working. So when Plia was like, ‘hey, we can use this to double as my sister’s jaunt’, we all knew that there was no way that that was going to help, I mean how does dragging one single child off far out of the usual jaunt zone make anything easier for the jaunt organisers, but it wasn’t like it was going to hurt. We were throwing absolutely everything in there.”
“We were starting to plan the journey without the Courageous’ help,” Plia said. “We were this close to just negotiating our way to the Arborea and then negotiating ship by ship from there until we eventually reached the ones we wanted. None of us wanted to do that because you can get stuck on a random ship for months that way, but it was looking like the best option. But I guess all our efforts achieved something, because the arrangements did come through a lot faster than we’d been lead to expect.”
“Taya’s our lucky charm!” Hali said. “Or more likely one of Tima’s connections greased the way for us, but that answer is way less fun. Either way, I’m certainly regretting the cutbacks now. Imagine the work we could get done if we’d been able to stick to the original travel plan.”
“The original plan included twelve ships,” Tima said. “There’s absolutely no way that that would’ve gotten through this fast, with any level of luck.”
“You underestimate the efforts of your fancy connections, oh project leader.”
When we got bored of the fake Arborea Celestia, Hali showed us how to use the control panel and we took turns picking places to project. A colony in a gas giant, where we sat on some kind of viewing platform and looked out into a pink haze; one underwater, where the uneven parts of the wall became big pink chunks of something called coral, and the light of a sun shone down through thick ice above us. A dark tunnel through stone (I’d never seen so much stone!) with puffy sacks projected in the floor that Tima said would be for sleeping in (which seemed like it would be uncomfortable). A place full of thick cables with no clear floor or walls, that felt like being really tiny in the Big Spiderweb. Huge metal things crawled along the cables in the distance; big boxes that might be elevators or something, I wasn’t sure how elevators actually worked. (That one didn’t project very well, I guess it’s kind of a hard thing to make an illusion of. When I took the goggles off it just looked like lines being projected onto the flat walls of the room.)
Plia found a projection of the Dragonseye, and we got to see for ourselves what the people of the Stalwart were hoping to make. We sat on an asteroid, uneven parts of the wall becoming spikes of iron and ice, while all around us was a dome of see-through vines twisting around each other and glued to each other by some kind of plant resin. It was hard to see much f the dome, because the light of the Dragonseye filtering through it was faint, and a lot of it was blocked by the huge soft-looking leaves growing all over the inside. I almost wanted to reach out and touch them, but I knew that if I did, feeling the cold ceramic would just ruin the illusion again.
“Huh,” Hali said, after we sat in the quiet for a bit. “It makes me hope they can pull it off.”
“They won’t,” Tima said. “I don’t care how clever you are with wood or how strong a resin you can make it excrete. Plants just don’t grow with the same kind of reliability as we can manufacture metal and ceramic. The domes will leak and break before they could get anywhere close to this size.”
“We don’t know that,” Hali said. “There are a lot of very smart people putting this together, and humankind has done much more amazing things. They might succeed.”
“We’ll never know,” Plia said. “They won’t get the kinks worked out until long after the colony’s stable enough for the fleet to move on. We’ll be out into space again long before they can grow domes this big. The Dish will keep picking up information from them, but if there are early failures, which I think w can expect, then we’ll probably all be dead of old age before they have big, useful domes like this that have been alive long enough to confidently be called stable. I think that a lot of domes will seem promising for a while before something goes wrong, and they probably won’t know everything that can go wrong until after it’s happened, so this either won’t succeed or it’ll succeed really far into the future. Either way, none of us will see anything like this. We’ll likely be heading back off into space before the domes are even big enough to put airlocks in.”
“They’ll probably lose a few just figuring out how to do that without killing the plants or depressurising the dome,” Hali said. “Well at least we can be more confident on the survival of Hexacorallia, even if the plants don’t work out. Their hulls are predictable and their mechanics are known.”
“If they even win the bid,” Tima said. “This might all be for nothing, if the fleet decides to do something else for the Dragonseye colony. There’s a lot of proposals out there.”
We sat back and looked up at the leaves. Nobody said anything else, but I think we were all hoping that Hexacorallia and the Stalwart won the bid. It would be nice if they had a chance to make this place real.
Derin Edala 