39: Foreigner

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The Stalwart doesn’t have viewports. I’m not sure why; I didn’t want to ask anyone in case it set off a rant about inefficient weak spots in the hull or something. After the historians left, I changed the projector view to a view of space, and stood in the middle of the little room.

It was more like my dream than the real thing, because I could see the stars in every direction. Only it wasn’t quite like my dream, because the stars were accurate – they were much, much thicker on one side, like a glowing bruise in the sky. The middle of the galaxy was that way, I knew. We’re heading away from it over time, but sort of zig-zagging between stars to do that, and the way we’re coming towards the Dragonseye means that most of it it hard to see out of a real Courageous view port because the ship is in the way. You can kind of see the edge of it if you press your face to the glass and look hard in the right direction, but not much.

On one wall, the Dragonseye burned, and unlike the real thing I could see distant stars around it because the projector light didn’t burn a bright as a real star. Looking away from it, the view was just the same as looking out of one of the Courageous’ rightside view ports, all those familiar stars in just the places I remembered, except… there was something different about it. What was it?

Oh, yeah. The ships. There fleet wasn’t in the projection, just empty space. I imagined myself as the Courageous, or maybe as the whole fleet, carefully carrying humanity to the safety of a new star and a new asteroid belt full of important ices and metals and rocks. I stared out behind me, looking back the way we’d come – over there was Hayrin, the star of the last colony, and a little bit above it was Stonehearth, the star of colony before it. The Stalwart was two colonies old, so it must have been made at Stonehearth.

And further behind that somewhere, though I didn’t know which star it was orbiting, was a colony where people had looked up and seen a ribbon of stars that they thought looked kind of like a long snake, with a cloud of extra-bright stars spewing out of its mouth. A place where they’d pointed at a brighter-than-average star on the snake’s head, and named it Dragonseye.

I wondered how Hayrin and Stonehearth were doing. I wondered if they knew that they were in danger yet. If they saw the danger, or even if they’d already been killed by it. I stared into the darkness, looking for it, but of course there was nothing there. I already knew that whatever I was afraid of wasn’t something I could see from the fleet. And even if it was, this was just a projection; if the people who’d made it didn’t know anything was out there, then they wouldn’t be able to program it in.

Still, I walked across the room, like I just needed to get closer to get a better look. Like that would help. Until my foot hit something sharp and I fell, banging my knees on the hard floor and grabbing my ankle.

Oh, right. The random uneven bits of the wall. They helped make forests and caves and things look more realistic, but in space, there was nothing that the projectors could turn them into.

I held onto my ankle with one hand and rubbed my knees with the other and quietly said a lot of words that would make dad lecture me about socially acceptable language if he heard them. Then I took some deep calming breaths that didn’t calm me down at all and carefully felt my way back to the door to turn the normal lights on.

The ankle was just bruised. It was pretty sore, but the skin wasn’t broken. That was good; there were probably rules about needing to alert people if I bled all over a relaxation room and I didn’t know who I’d need to report it to.

It had only just started bruising, but it looked like it would be pretty deep. It would probably hurt to walk on for the rest of the day. I should find somewhere to sit down.

I went back to my room, lay on my bed, and opened the computer system. Maybe I could find something to do there; maybe play some of the games, or talk to some new people. Oh, maybe I could look up the Courageous! It would be fun to see if the Stalwart’s information on us was as bad as our information on them! Maybe I could ask some scientists some questions; if the ship was so focused on getting the Dragonseye, they probably had people learning everything they could about old colonies, and maybe one of them had noticed some danger that might help me on my mission.

There was a sound in the vents.

I sat up in bed, a bit angry. “Tikka?”

The sound stopped.

“Well don’t just skulk in there. Come out.”

The grate swung aside, and the little capuchin crawled out. Now that I was paying attention, I could see that she barely fit, so I supposed that the grown-ups really wouldn’t be able to fit in the vents. She stared at me with eyes that, hen I wasn’t busy being scared, looked curious.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Taya.”

She pointed at herself and chittered something, probably telling me her name in her language. Tikka could clearly understand fleet language (she understood Fari, after all), but I guess her mouth couldn’t make the right sounds, so I couldn’t understand her. I glanced at the system control panel; the computer probably knew her language and could translate. But I didn’t open it. Fari had said that capuchins were almost as smart as Courageous humans, and I was smarter than most people my age on the Courageous, so if Tikka didn’t need the computer’s help, then neither did I. I could figure it out.

“Why are you following me around?” I asked.

She chattered and pointed at me, which wasn’t a useful answer. I stared at her. She leapt for me and, before I could get away, landed on my shoulder to pull at some of my braids for a few seconds, then dashed back to the vent.

My… hair? “You’re following me around because I have braids?”

She bit down on the air hard, her teeth clacking loudly. She was nowhere near me and didn’t seem to be trying to threaten me, but I flinched back. That bite had to mean ‘no’.

I touched my hair. Remembered the Arboreans in the corridor glancing at it and asking if I was with the newcomers, remembered the baldness of everyone on the Stalwart. Remembered Fari calling us “a curiosity”, since not many people came from the Courageous.

“Because I’m a foreigner,” I said.

A wobbly nod. Yes.

“There’s lots of foreigners,” I said. “Don’t you guys get Arboreans all the time? And I’m here with three historians, why not bother them?”

She pointed at me and herself, then held her hands pretty close together, one above the other. Gestured out the door, and held her hands further apart. It took me a bit to figure out what that was supposed to mean; she did it again while I was thinking about it.

Big. Small.

“Only scientists and engineers and stuff come here,” I concluded. “You’ve never seen a foreigner who’s your age before.”

Excited chittering. Enthusiastic nodding.

Huh. There was a new kid around who knew interesting things, and Tikka wanted to be friends.

I wasn’t used to people wanting to be friends with me. I mean, I had friends; I had Arai and Hitan. But we had been friends since we were little. And I had my siblings, and I liked Strawberry and maybe Ella, but Strawberry and Ella had been told to hang out with me, it was their job to show me things on their ships. It was good that they seemed to like me, probably, but that wasn’t the same as someone deciding to hang out with you on their own.

Of course, Tikka didn’t know me either; she probably just wanted to know cool stuff about the Courageous, which was obviously a way cooler ship than the one she had to grow up on. But it was still nice.

Besides, it wasn’t like I could be mad about her wanting to know more about my world when I wanted to know more about hers. “So you like, clean vents and stuff? That’s your job? And fix the monitoring systems and things in them?”

She nodded, then pointed at me, tipping her shoulders in a weird way. Ugh, this was so difficult. If I was talking to a human who couldn’t use a language I knew, that would be easy, because I could read their body language. I did that half the time with Auntie Shorin anyway when she was too busy painting or sculpting to sign properly. But Tikka’s body language was weird and different. No human would bite the air to mean ‘no’.

I could figure it out, though. She’d answered the question about her job and then pointed at me. The shoulder tip might be a curious or questioning pose, maybe. I’d have to keep watching to find out.

“I’m on my jaunt,” I said.

A more exaggerated shoulder tilt. No answer. Did she not know what a jaunt was? Didn’t they have them here? Then how did people know what they wanted to do?

“I’m trying out all sorts of jobs to see what I want to do when I’m grown up.”

She pointed at my hair again, and gestured to the door.

“Do I… want to go out there?” I tried.

Air-bite. Point at my hair, ‘big’ sign, gesture to the door, three fingers held up.

“Oh! The historians! Am I learning to be a historian?”

Nod.

“No, not really. I’m just visiting different ships. We visit different ships in our jaunt to see if we want to move to them. I’m not moving here,” I added, since that was the obvious next question. “You don’t go to different ships, do you?”

A soft air bite.

“Why not? You could see all kinds of new stuff.”

She gestured at the vent behind her.

“I’m sure someone else could clean the vents. If you have time to be following me around all day, you can’t be working very long hours.”

She held up two fingers.

“Two hours a day?”

A nod.

I nodded back. “That’s the same as me. At home, I mean. On the jaunt, we do two hours a day practising a job, or learning about it. Adults do six hours a day, though for a lot of jobs it’s more like six and a half since they have to hand off between shifts. It depends on the job though.”

Tikka held up two fingers again, pointing to the vent, then the same two fingers before miming ‘big’ and moving her hands like she was Auntie Lia aligning the pins in a chip.

“You do two hours of stuff in places like the vents, and the adults who are too big to fit do two hours of building and fixing other stuff,” I concluded.

Air-bite. She mimed the sequence again, this time adding a bit at the end where a small capuchin watched the big capuchin doing the pin alignment. Then she paused briefly, mimed ‘big’ again, held up four fingers, and did the pin alignment miming.

This one took a few tries, but I eventually figured it out. “You do two hours of kid’s work and two hours learning from the adults. The adults do four hours of adult work.”

A very happy nod. Yes! I’d figured it out.

“So you can’t go to other ships because… you’d get behind in learning from the adults?”

A head tilt. Silence. I had no idea what that meant, but it wasn’t a nod or a bite, so I supposed it meant that I was wrong, but wrong in a way where just a ‘no’ would be confusing.

Ugh, this was hard. It was giving me a headache.

I hadn’t had this much fun in a conversation in months.

Tikka pointed at herself, then at my hair. Then she chomped the air hard, the click of her teeth really loud, and dashed back into the vent. After a couple of seconds, she came out. When I just stared, confused, she did it again.

No foreigners? The dash to hide – avoid foreigners. “Foreigners are bad?”

Normal air-bite – no. She did it again, but this time hid in the vent for much longer. When I peeked inside, she dashed away from me, like she was afraid, before coming back out.

“Foreigners are scary.”

She thought to herself for a few seconds before nodding. So I was right, but not completely right. I was missing something.

She pointed at me, then out into the corridor and held up three fingers; the historians. She bunched one hand into a fist. Us as a group. Then she pointed out into the corridor again and held up two fingers, and this one was hard for me to understand until she actually led me out into the corridor and pointed to two specific rooms. The Arboreans. She bunched her other hand into a fist to represent them.

Back on the bed, she held both of her fists in front of her, then bit at them and ran to hide.

Okay, but that was the same thing, right? Foreigners are scary. Or maybe people from our ships in particular, just those two ships, were scary? Why would – ?

No, because then she could just group is all together, right? What did the fists mean. Courageous and Arborea people, grouped separately – ships!

“Foreign ships are scary!” I exclaimed.

She nodded so enthusiastically that her whole body shook.

“You won’t leave the Stalwart because the other ships are scary.”

More nodding.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s so scary about them?”

Tikka pointed at herself, then stiffened her whole body and fell onto her back, not moving.

I didn’t know capuchin body language very well, but it was pretty hard to misunderstand somebody playing dead.

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