41: The Colonisation Paradox

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“That can’t be right,” I said. “We definitely don’t do things the way you do.”

“Well, the Stalwart was built two colonies ago. Maybe your society’s changed since then.”

“Maybe yours has.”

“Ha! You might be right.” She suddenly stopped smiling and looked thoughtful. “Actually, you probably are. We’ve had some pretty radical changes. I guess I never really thought about how much stuff I just assumed we brought with us.”

“People are always assuming stuff about history, that’s one thing I’ve noticed.”

“You would notice that, I guess, hanging out with historians.”

“Not just from them. Never just assume it’s always been aspen. Sometimes, it’s citrus.”

“I have no idea what that means, but fair enough. So you’re more like the Arborea than like us, huh?”

“Maybe? I mean, the inside of the ship is more like yours. We have metal corridors and rooms and stuff and don’t just all live in big forests. But socially, we’re more like… huh. Actually, coming back to assuming stuff, I don’t know much about your society. Do you guys have families?”

“Of course. I’ve got Fari.”

“Is he your dad?”

“What’s a dad?”

That was probably a ‘no’, then, unless they just called them something else. I opened my mouth to explain, then remembered that Ella had talked to lots of Arboreans, and Arboreans had mothers. “A dad is kind of like a mother.”

“Oh! Then yes. Now, I mean.”

“What do you mean now?”

“He’s my supervisor. My guardian was a woman named Sharu.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A guardian looks after you when you’re young. When you get old enough to pick a career path, you become the responsibility of a supervisor instead. I was Sharu’s ward until I turned twelve, then I became Fari’s apprentice.”

“Apprentice.”

“Yeah.”

I knew that word. My heart jumped. Did the Courageous do things the same way? When Yamin had offered me an apprenticeship, was he planning on taking me away from my family? That would explain why Mum had been so mad.

No, that couldn’t be right. My parents would have said so. There was no way that it wouldn’t be the first thing my dad told me when we were talking about it after.

Ella had been taken away from her mum when she turned twelve.

“Do you ever see Sharu?”

“Yes, of course. We have dinner every couple of weeks. Well, every couple of months these days, since I’m so busy with the plants. She’s really nice, she likes to talk about her new ward.”

“Your sibling?”

“My what?”

I didn’t bother explaining. “I think our societies are pretty different. Does everyone have a family like yours?”

“Well, people move into their apprenticeships at different ages, especially if their career proficiency tests are ambiguous and they need more time to develop and clarify their skills. But pretty much, yeah. You guys are like the Arboreans, then? Where guardians have multiple wards, just, forever?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Most kids on our ship are raised communally by professional carers in orphanages. It works out okay. But some of us have families – adults with their own jobs who decide to group together to raise their own kids.”

“Like smaller orphanages.”

“Well, it’s… yeah, I guess so? I’m from a family like that.” I grinned. “You’re going to say it sounds inefficient, right?”

Ella laughed. “Maybe so. But you work with plants long enough and you have to accept that diversity has its own value. Except when it’s diversity in stem strength and growth, then it’s just a hull weakness. But that’s different. The Arborea is an inefficient mess and yet they have probably the most important asset to colonisation in the whole fleet outside fo the Dish because of it. Nobody building for efficiency in our modern times could ever, in the span of the universe, come up with something capable of running a biological sustainability experiment for literally countless generations. I can sneer at their awful engineering, but the simple truth of the matter is that they did what nobody else can – they beat the colonisation paradox.”

“The… what?”

“You know. The colonisation paradox. How we’re out here spreading life from star to star but basically condemned to never get any better at the job. We could be fucking up something basic with an obvious solution, and it’ll take us a dozen colonies to solve what should be a one-colony issue. As a scientist, I have to say. It’s all very frustrating.”

I quickly sat forward. Ella flinched back, a bit startled.

“Is there something wrong with the colonies?” I asked. “Something that puts them in danger?”

“Uh, no, nothing specific that I know of,” she said. “I meant just in general.”

I sat back, disappointed. “We are getting better at building colonies,” I said. “We’re making new stuff all the time. I mean, you’re doing it! With the plants! I bet there’s a whole bunch of colonies we’ve made in the past that would’ve loved to have these plants! And now, they’ll help at the Dragonseye, if you win the bid, and even if they don’t, we’ll have them for future colonies, to solve future problems! We’re doing better things with metals, better medicine, better power generation, all the time. Even social stuff! Different social systems work better for different environments, don’t they? And we’re making new ships that can try new things at almost every colony!”

“Uh-huh. And how well do those new things work out, long term? Do you know? Because I don’t. That’s the issue, right there. The problem is that no matter how you build it, no matter where it is, a stationary colony in orbit around a star is just different to a fleet of ships moving through space. High mass is an advantage for them, they have no fleet around them to rely on, they have to be able to last indefinitely on the materials in their immediate vicinity without expecting resupplies at new stars, and critically, they usually have constant access to some kind of power source, most often solar power. All of that is simply not true for the fleet most of the time, when we’re out between stars. Which means that we have really brief times at stars to really experience and track colony development, and then we’re off again. Like these plants I’m working on – they could change everything, maybe. And you know what’s going to happen with them? I’ll tell you right now. Either we’ll get to use them at the Dragonseye colony or we won’t.

“If we don’t, then everyone will be sad and we’ll all say to ourselves, well, that’s fair; it’s very new technology. There’ll be other colonies in the future that could use biological refineries that can live in a vacuum and contain their own atmosphere, and we owe it to them to have them ready by the time we get to the next star. And me and all my colleagues will spend the rest of our lives developing that tech. And then we’ll age and die, and our descendants who have never seen a colony and know they never will might continue the research for a little bit, but not for very long, because they’ll have fleet problems, spacefaring problems. They’ll start to ask themselves whether they should be spending all this time and space and effort on making these completely useless plants instead of improving our fuel cell designs or optimising air recycling or researching our own genetics. And the plant research will be retired after less than one generation of work, and be nothing more than information in the computer systems somewhere, maybe pulled out for future colonies if it’s useful, but not improved. Absolute best case scenario is that the people in our position at the next colony revive it again for the next bid, making really, really slow progress, and never getting a plant of any decent age, but it’s just as likely that they’ll research some shiny new thing instead, especially if this research already lost one bid.

“The other option is that we do get these things planted at the Dragonseye colony. And that’s better, because it means we’ll be putting a lot of effort into this research as the colony’s being set up and make more progress, and of course the research will continue at the Dragonseye. They might be able to make something amazing with it, cover their asteroid field in a forest of centuries-old space plants and see how they develop and change over time, and refine them and how to care for them. But, crucially, that won’t matter for the fleet. Because the fleet’s not going to stick around for a hundred years to see that happen; we’ll build the colony and in somewhere between five and fifty years, depending, we’ll be heading for the next star. Sticking around any longer is a dangerous waste of resources. So for the research we have, that can be used to benefit future colonies? It’s not much different to if we lose the bid. The projects that can’t drag their own weight during space travel will be retired, and we won’t have any long-lived plants to watch and to learn from, and when we make future colonies we’ll have just the barely-started research that we have right now. It might crawl forward a little with each colony, if the Stalwart chooses to revive it. It might not. But if it does improve over time, it won’t be nearly as fast as it should, and our future colonies won’t have as many options or as good options as they should.”

“We would have access to information about older plants, though,” I said. “Via the Dish.”

“The Dish is fantastic,” Ella said. “It’ll tell us whether the Dragonseye colony is still alive, and probably give us some idea of how much use they’re making of the plants, but getting scientifically useful information out of their data is pretty much impossible. There’s a lot of weird limitations to radio that just can’t be helped.”

“Limitations?”

She waved a hand. “I’m not a communications expert. The people on the Dish will be able to explain it a lot better than I can. But the point is, when it comes to the old ships? A lot of these limitations don’t apply nearly as much. If we wanted to settle a big wet planet with appropriate gravity and air pressure, we’d know how to do that, because the Arborea Celestia is a long-running example of exactly how. They’ve stripped so many problems out of the process and they’d be able to provide a detailed plan on how to oxygenate the atmosphere, how long it will probably take, what species to use to start building their floating mangroves and how to go about it. We’d know what would and wouldn’t work long-term, because we’re carrying a living example through space with us. That’s something that ships like the Stalwart just can’t do. Even if we tried to set up such small-scale experiments, they’d probably be abandoned within a few generations. We don’t have the space, and we don’t have the cultural momentum for it. And it’s a double-bind, yes, because that cultural momentum also means that Arborea utterly refuses to modernise; they could be running all kinds of experiments with modern plants in there, they could cover their ship in my plants and get away with it, but they won’t. If they were changeable like that, then they wouldn’t have their long-running experiment, and outdated as their methods are, their experiment has been of immense value in developing my plants.”

“We could make more,” I said. It’s not like we forgot how to make big ships. A second Arborea, with more modern plants, to – ”

“Impossible,” Ella said, shaking her head. “You can’t make the Arborea or the Courageous today. It simply can’t be done.”

“Um, yes it can?” I said. “We have the technology.”

“We don’t have the resources. Any attempt to build a clunky old counterweight like one of those ships today would be rejected immediately. They’re too big, they house too few people, and they use way, way too much fuel to move between stars. Even if you got the project going, it’d be retired a colony later; it just wouldn’t be able to garner enough fuel to keep going. There’s only one reason that the old ships can get away with it.”

“History,” I said. “We’re the core of the fleet. The original ship that left Earth and the original one built on the journey, proving we can do it. The ancestors of every other ship and the living history of humanity.”

“Weird phrasing, but yeah. Nobody’s going to abandon the two oldest spaceships ever, you’re inherently too precious to lose, so you’re worth all the extra fuel and soforth. But a new ship in that design? Not a chance. We could convert the Courageous to a more Arborean system, but – ”

“That wouldn’t work,” I said. “We’re the cultural history of the fleet, too.”

“Which leaves us stuck where we are,” Ella said. “Strangled by the inconvenience of long-distance space travel.”

“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” I said. “Who cares if the science is slower than it could be? It’s not like we’re going to run out of stars any time soon.”

“That is true,” Ella said. “There’s always another star.”

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