42: Holding Pattern

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After that, I was pretty bored for a while. Ella did get more busy in the lab and couldn’t hang out with me much, and the historians were also busy, spending all of their time looking through the Stalwart’s databanks even though they admitted that they didn’t expect to find anything useful until we actually got to the Dish. I said that they should just check the Dish’s databanks from here; there was lots of messaging back and forth between the two ships and they might get lucky and get what they needed early. They waved this off, saying that they’d be better able to find useful stuff if we were actually there, but I didn’t understand why that mattered; if they didn’t expect to find anything in the Stalwart’s database anyway, and Hexacorallia wasn’t ready to take us for another couple of weeks, then wasn’t searching the Dish from a distance better than searching the Stalwart in person?

I didn’t push though, because I didn’t want them to find what they wanted early. They might decide not to go to the Dish if they did, and I really wanted to go to the Dish. It wasn’t until later that night that I figured out that that’s why they’d waved me off, too; they didn’t want to find their information too early and miss a chance to see the Dish. It had been hard enough to plan this trip; they might never get another chance to go there.

I wondered how much of this trip was actually about their research and how much was just an excuse to visit a bunch of ships. I hadn’t known Plia very well before all this (I’d been pretty young when she had left home), but from the way my parents talked about her, I knew she wasn’t the most responsible person; they talked about how she always did the smallest amount of babysitting she could get away with and never wanted to share with the rest of us kids and had moved out of home as soon as she could. Maybe the other historians were the same.

I really wanted to talk to Tikka again, but I couldn’t figure out how. I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t come back; maybe she’d gotten bored with me, or maybe she was too busy at her work, or maybe the grown up capuchins had found out she’d been talking to me and made her stop. (I didn’t think she was supposed to talk to me, because if she was then she would’ve just come up to me normally instead of sneaking through the vents.)

I tried to find her through the ship’s computer system, which should be pretty easy. Everyone was in it. I could send messages to anyone on the ship, and while it was set up expecting people to know how to read and write lots of words, the picture-and-audio versions of things that Fari had showed me was really well made.

I wondered why the Courageous didn’t have something like this. I mean, it was obvious why we didn’t have a computer system like this; if we could do everything really fast on computers from anywhere then nobody would go out and spend their days doing things in different places, which the Stalwart seemed to had set up on purpose for efficiency but seemed like it would be really sad on the Courageous. Also, it meant having lots and lots of computers everywhere, and I knew our Rubbish & Recycling systems well enough to know how hard that would make things. But we did use computers for a lot, and I’d never seen any way to talk to the computers in the projector rooms, or the ones I’d been shown on my Medical jaunt, or anything like that. You had to know how to write out the information you wanted in a projector room, or you had to ask the treegrave to put it in for you. Would it really be that hard to put in something to let you just talk to the projector room computers?

Anyway, with the Stalwart’s system, I could find people and message them and learn about them pretty easily. There were lots of people sharing the same names and I didn’t know anyone’s ID numbers, but most of the Stalwart citizens were listed with two names to help tell them apart.

I knew how second names worked from history. The First Crew and the people they’d brought from Earth had all had at least two names, and so had a lot of people in the first generations that we knew of. At least one of the names was a name that somehow indicated their family on Earth, like hoe Aspen Greaves was from the Greaves cluster and became Aspen Courageous when they founded the treegrave and created the Courageous cluster. So it was easy to figure out that Ella Farin and Fari Pella we ‘my’ Ella and Fari.

I couldn’t find Tikka like this. The capuchins were there, and also had family names, but I didn’t know anything about Tikka’s family and I quickly learned that I didn’t even know her name. Was I looking for Tikkakataku or Tikkakiriri? If it was the first one, did I want Tikkakataku Kut or Tikkakataku Pik or Tikkakataku Har? I had no idea.

I knew I’d found the right Ella and Fari because I could see a lot of information about them. It showed their ages, where they worked, what shift they were on, and even a lot of information about their physical abilities, intelligence scores, duty suitability tests and the types of training they had had. With the capuchins, I could learn their names and the shifts they were on and not much else. And I didn’t even know what shift my Tikka was on.

The system wouldn’t tell me much at all about the capuchins, actually. I had no idea whether that was worrying or not. Maybe I was only allowed ot have certain information because I wasn’t a citizen on the ship. Maybe capuchins were just naturally more private than humans and the system was set up to be polite. Maybe they had their own separate part of the system that was set up how they liked to use it, and nobody had bothered to put all the capuchin files in the human system and all the human files in the capuchin system.

On the Courageous, none of this would be weird because on the Courageous I wouldn’t expect to be able to just look up anyone’s physical reaction time test statistics. That seemed like a weird thing to record in a public system. But the humans on the Stalwart seemed to really like that sort of thing (I could even ask the system to list the whole ship’s reaction times in order of fastest to slowest), and I had no idea if it mattered that the capuchins seemed no to. Or not to tell humans. Or did want it but the system didn’t track their statistics for some reason. Or whatever.

It was a bit annoying, because I’d kind of been hoping to learn what they needed on the Stalwart that they couldn’t get on other ships. It didn’t really matter why going to other ships would kill them, but I like to know how things work. Oh well.

The system also kept telling me that my profile wasn’t complete and asking me if I wanted to take an intelligence test, or use the gymnasium to start logging my physical fitness statistics, or book a medical checkup. I didn’t.

I spent a lot of time just wandering around and looking at the different things on the Stalwart. There wasn’t very much to see. Cafeterias, gyms, relaxation rooms, a big room with a soft floor where people gathered for an instructor to lead them through a bunch of fancy stretching exercises… everything they had was also on the Courageous, except our versions were bigger and more varied and people didn’t seem so rushed when using them. The only thing I found that they had that we didn’t (at least not that I’d seen, there was probably lots of stuff on the Courageous that I didn’t know about) was a small ocean called a “swimming pool”, which was apparently new; they’d flooded a room so that all the visiting Arborean scientists would have a place to swim. It didn’t have plants and stuff in it though. Just a big room of clean water.

The most interesting place I found was an “open factory”, which was just a big room full of tools and workbenches and things. Anyone was allowed to book a bench to make or repair things. You could make or repair stuff for yourself, or you could take one of the broken things stored in the room and repair it for the ship.

I ended up spending a lot of time in there, repairing ship stuff. Most of the repairs were very easy; putting new rubber gaskets in things, gluing back together broken casings, unscrewing broken parts and screwing in new ones. It seemed a lot less efficient than just having professionals like Auntie Lia do it all, but when I asked one of the factory supervisors about it (they had supervisors to show volunteers how to repair things), ke said that it was an efficient and low-cost method to promote psychological fulfilment, whatever that meant. Ke said a log of long and complicated things about “tangible and tactile productivity” and “the psychological drive for community contribution” but what I got from it was that the open factory was more like the relaxation rooms or gymnasiums than a place to actually get work done.

Which made sense, because I kept going there, didn’t I? I wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t fulfilling.

At one point, I decided to go and see what the other sphere of the Stalwart was like. The most interesting part was the trip over; I had to get in a trolley, but instead of moving on tracks like the ones on the Courageous, it walked on big robot legs along one of the long cables connecting the two parts of the ship. It had windows, so I could see us walking towards the middle of the cable as the inertial pull got lower and lower, and past the small chambers on the cables for low- and zero-pull work, and then towards the other big metal sphere on the other end as the inertial pull got stronger again.

And then I got out in the other sphere, and found… it was pretty much the same as the one I’d left.

So that was fun.

I probably should have found some people my own age to hang out with, and made some new friends. But I’ve never been very good at that. I tried to talk to the Arborean scientists, but they weren’t very interesting; I could tell that they didn’t like kids very much and kept talking like I was stupid and doing that annoying ‘oh how cute!’ face if I said anything smart.

There was nothing here that was helping me understand the danger to the fleet, unless I thought that making people take too many competency tests was secretly dangerous. The whole thing was starting to get really frustrating. Had the Arborean dreamspeaker been right? Was I just imagining the whole problem because I was nervous about setting up the new colony?

That couldn’t be right. It looked like people like Ella were in control of everything. There were lots of ships full of lots of people to help with the Dragonseye colony. The kids of the Courageous weren’t going to have to do it on our own. Besides, I knew what I’d felt in my dreams. And the best thing that I could do for the fleet was figure it out.

Somehow.

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