Trying to find out why Tikka thought that other ships were deadly was hard. I couldn’t understand most of what she tried to tell me, and it seemed like she didn’t know, either. Like maybe it was just something that the grown ups had warned her about. She had to leave pretty soon, so we didn’t get very long to talk about it, and I ended up with no answers.
I brought it up with the historians at breakfast the next morning. (My ankle wasn’t as badly bruised as I’d thought, and didn’t hurt very much so long as I was careful not to bump it on anything, so I didn’t bother trying to rest it.) “Hey, why do you guys think the capuchins don’t go to other ships?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Plia said, “and honestly, I think they probably don’t want to. I mean, they were made from some Earth animal, right? So they might not have the creative spark that humans have, the drive to keep expanding the Loop.”
Tima sniffed.
“Oh, you have a better explanation?”
“I don’t know anything about neurology or genetics,” Tima said. “It’s possible that their brains do work differently, and they’re not naturally inclined to explore, but – ”
“Oh, so you admit the theory is valid?”
“I admit that it’s possible for such a thing to be true without needing to invoke some kind of spiritual element. Maybe they’re not inclined to travel, but even if that is the case, there’s no reason the Loop has anything to do with it. But also, I don’t think that’s true, because we know they’re smart, and we know they’re engineers. Engineers have to be creative and curious.”
“No they don’t,” Plia said. “A lot of engineering is rote factory work. My Aunt Lia just repairs chips day after day, all the same; that’s probably like ninety per cent of what these capuchins do. Even Fari admitted that they’re not as smart as humans.”
“He said they’re almost as smart as Courageous humans,” Hali said. “Which means that there’s probably a lot of humans stupider than them, and I know plenty of stupid people who burn with the creator’s spark. Also, some ships have humans that are engineered to be way smarter than us, like the ship we’re on right now. Are you suggesting that people on the Stalwart have more of the spark than people on the Courageous, just because they’re smarter on average?”
“Of course not,” Plia said. “I’m suggesting that there’s a floor. Just because these capuchins can repair a chip doesn’t mean – ”
“Maybe,” I cut in, because the friendly debate was starting to sound less friendly and I didn’t want a big argument in the cafeteria, “it would make more sense to find out before arguing about it? I’m sure we could just ask if the capuchins are inventing stuff and doing creative things. There’s a lot of science on this ship, we could just find out if there are any capuchin scientists.”
“Science also has a lot of rote work,” Plia said, but she said it quietly. I think she’d realised that they were about to have an argument over something stupid that nobody wanted, too.”
“Anyway,” I said, “they are curious. One of them made friends with me because she was curious about other ships and stuff. And I asked about going to other ships, and it had nothing to do with a creator’s spark or whatever. She said that the capuchins can’t go to other ships because they would die.”
“They would die?” Hali asked.
“Or maybe that they might die? It was a bit confusing, I don’t know how sure the death is. But there’s definitely death. They don’t go to other ships because it’s way too dangerous for them.”
“Oh,” Tima said. “That… makes a lot of sense, actually. Yeah, that explains it.”
Everyone relaxed. Which just confused me.
“It does?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Tima said. “It’s like how people who grow up on zero pull ships can’t go to high or normal pull ships without lots of therapy, and they get all kinds of health problems there. The capuchins aren’t even human, right? So they probably have some kind of weird physiological need that only the Stalwart caters for. They don’t go to other ships because there’s something about the way this ship is built that lets them live here, and other ships don’t have it. I have no idea what it could be, maybe something to do with the air pressure or radiation, or there’s a food they need that’s made here but that it would be really complicated to farm on other ships for some reason, something that it’s just too difficult or expensive or time consuming to install on another ship. So they’re stuck on the one that supports them.”
Well. That made sense. And was a lot less dramatic than what I’d been worried about. I’d half thought that Tikka had been trying to tell me that people would kill them on other ships or something. But Tima’s words made way more sense than that, because if that’s what Tikka had been worried abut, then she’d be scared of foreigners on the Stalwart too, right? But she’d made sure I understood that the ships themselves were dangerous.
Well. That problem solved, I supposed.
I asked Ella about capuchin scientists the next day when she invited me out to lunch. She said that there were capuchin engineers who invented and optimised new things, and also some capuchin scientists. She’d worked with a couple of them on projects and they weren’t as good at remembering or analysing things as most of the humans she worked with, but they were just as creative and their work was perfectly fine. “I’d work with them again if it came up,” she said, “but they mostly prefer to keep themselves to themselves. At the last colony, when people were rearranging a lot of stuff on the ship, there was talk of having a human sphere and a capuchin sphere, but they decided against it because dividing us up might cause big problems in the future. They kept thins so we’d have to mix up and work with each other instead.”
I glanced around the cafeteria. There were a couple of capuchins at one table, talking with some humans, but that was it. “I haven’t seen much of that.”
“Ha, yeah, so you can imagine how much worse it would be if we each had a separate sphere, right? Most of them like to eat in their own cafeterias, which are set up for them and have food that they like.”
“I talked to one yesterday,” I said. “Tikka.”
“Tikka? I don’t think I know them.”
“Fari does.”
“Fari knows everyone. He has a ridiculously high SC average, you’d almost swear he was cheating.” She smiled fondly.
“SC?” I asked.
“Social compatability,” she explained. “You know, SC ratings? Maybe you call them something else on the Courageous? He’s a real social butterfly, and that’s saying a lot, coming from me. Though I haven’t gotten to socialise much recently, with these latest plant tests.” She ate a forkful of white nutrient loaf. “We’re really pushing to get these things as good as possible so we can get them growing and have nearly two-decade-old stable atmospheric bubbles before we pull in to orbit. The better, older and more stable our living samples are, the stronger our bid for getting them into the colony, and they work best with Hexacorallia’s system, so that’ll really help.”
“Do you need to get back to the lab?” I asked, getting ready to leave.
“No! Showing around someone from the Courageous is a great excuse not to spend hours taking plant readings, not even Sammo can contest that. She can take them herself.”
“I won’t have anything to do with choosing what the Dragonseye colony is going to be like,” I told her. “None of the historians do.”
“Now, you know that, and I know that,” Ella said with a grin, “but can Sammo be so sure?”
“You don’t like her much, huh.”
“No, it’s… she’s a great scientist, very accomplished, very dedicated.” She poked at her loaf. “I’m really lucky to be able to work with her and Fari and everyone. Her lateral ratings are mind boggling and we’d be getting nowhere with the plants if it wasn’t for her. It’s just, well, it’s a whole thing. Don’t worry about it.”
“There’s people I don’t get along with, too, even though there’s nothing wrong with them,” I said. “Hey, how long are your workdays?”
She blinked at me in surprise. “Huh?”
“Sorry, I know that question’s kind of out of nowhere. I’ve just been wondering. Tikka says that the capuchins work four hours, and on my ship, people work six hours, or at least the adults do.” I hadn’t thought to ask on the Arborea, I’d just assumed that everyone worked six. Maybe I could ask the visiting scientists.
“Adults here do eight. For my age group, it’s five. Well, technically.”
“Technically?”
“Nobody who’s serious about their work does five, that’s a great way to tank your ratings.”
“Ratings?”
“Yeah, your DR and your OR. But most importantly, it’s a waste of educational opportunities. What’s the point of not taking the extra three hours to learn to be as good as possible at every lab task you can? Or, or medical task or cleaning task or programming task or, you know, whatever your speciality is. Well, I mean, that’s not entirely fair, because some people need more time outside their jobs to up their other skills; someone who’s really into their physical stats, because maybe they want to qualify for external work at the Dragonseye or whatever, might go home from their cleaning job and put that extra time into weightlifting or whatever, so I guess saying that everyone should stay for eight isn’t fair. Different people have different paths to reach their goals. But most people who are serious about their jobs stay longer than five. If I want to keep doing good work in a successful lab when I grow up, I need to be learning as much as I can right now.”
“That sounds really stressful,” I said.
“No, not at all! High stress is a serious demotivator, avoiding that is paramount. Our shifts are optimised, don’t worry. I’m going to the relaxation rooms after work today. Have you seen them? I know the Arboreans don’t have them, do you?”
“With the projectors? We don’t have them, but I’ve seen yours. They’re interesting, but they don’t seem all that relaxing.”
“Not in isolation, of course. I bet you could work them into your regimen from the Courageous.”
“My regimen?”
“Yeah, your psychological optimisation regimen. I know our facilities aren’t the same as yours, but the basic psychological needs should be the same, so you could probably get a psych profile done and get a regimen set up to optimise your time here.”
I had no idea what any of that meant. “I’m probably just going to look around and relax most of the time,” I said.
Ella shrugged. “Well, if the point of this is to decide if you want to move here and you’ve already decided not to, then I guess there’s nothing else you need to achieve here, so why not?”
That wasn’t really why I’d come, but there was no point in explaining, so I just nodded. “You guys have a lot of ratings and regimens and things,” was all I said.
“Do we?” She shrugged. “The Arboreans always say the same thing. But they do things very differently than we do. You probably just have different names for your ratings and stuff.”
“No, I’m pretty sure we don’t do them,” I said. “I’ve never been given anything that I’d describe as a social compatibility rating. I don’t know what that means. And we don’t have psychology tests to make perfect relaxation regimens and I don’t even know that a DR or an OR is.”
“Well, yeah, like I said, you probably call it something different, but – ”
“No, we don’t test stuff like that. Why did you think we did even though the Arboreans don’t?”
She blinked at me in surprise. “Because you’re from the Courageous, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And the Courageous is the Stalwart’s parent ship, our first people came from there. The generations and generations of data used to create our rating and ranking systems came from your databanks and what worked on your population. All our social efficiency and optimisation systems were copied from you.”
Derin Edala 