“We have a complication,” Tima said one morning at breakfast.
Plia stopped chewing. “A serious one?”
“Not really. The trip to the Dish is all secure. It’s the ride back to the Courageous that’s going to take some finagling. The Velocity – ”
“Terrible ship name, very confusing to use in a sentence.”
“Yes, I know – the Velocity was going to take us all the way back to the Courageous, but they’ve gotten tied up with something with the Starlight and can’t do it. So I’m looking for anyone who can. It’s starting to look like we might have to ship-hop our way back too, do some transfers between some of the ships we’re already visiting on the way up, so nobody do anything to make any of the ships we’re visiting hate us.”
“They just cancelled their plans with us?” I asked. ‘That’s rude.”
“It happens,” Tima shrugged. “The Vanguard has a very strong relationship with the Courageous, so we can make ourselves a priority for them, but we’re moving out of the range of ships that trade directly with the Courageous all that often. The Velocity does a lot of work with Starlight, and everyone and everything is being moved on and off Starlight recently. It makes sense that something more urgent and lucrative has taken priority over ferrying a handful of random strangers back to the very edge of their transport range.”
“It still sounds rude,” I grumbled.
“Yeah, but trying to strongarm them would be a lot ruder, and also wouldn’t work. We’re running ninety per cent on goodwill out here and almost all of that goodwill is directed at our ship, not us specifically. Don’t worry, Taya; making our way back will be easy, it just might be tedious if we’re unlucky.” She grinned mischievously. “If worst comes to worst, Hali can pay our way home by working on transport ships.”
“Why me?” Hali asked.
“Because you’re the biggest and strongest of us, clearly.”
“They have some good gyms here. If you wanted to get stronger, you could – ”
“No, I won’t be doing that.” Tima drank the last of her smoothie. “There’s still the chance for a single trip home; I’m in negotiations with the Ironstock, which is a low-pull ship with an engine capacity that might – what?” she stopped, noticing Plia and my faces. “Is there a problem with the Ironstock?”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Plia said. “A low pull ship is a good idea. A zero pull ship like the Velocity would’ve been worse for such a long journey anyway, coming out of a zero pull ship like the Dish. I’d rather preserve as much bone density as possible.”
Tima looked at me. I shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll be great,” I said. “I’m kind of curious to see what all the fuss is about.”
“The fuss?” Tima asked.
Plia and I looked at each other.
“Our grandmother came from the Ironstock,” Plia said. “She didn’t have much nice to say about it.”
“Wait, you share a mother?” Hali asked. “I thought you only shared a father?”
“Not mother, grandmother. As in, our father’s mother.”
“You have two generations of family?” Hali grinned and gave each of us a mock salute. “I had no idea I was in the presence of such important people!”
“You do know that anyone can make a family, right?” Plia asked. “You could do it yourself, if you could trick anyone into marrying you.”
“To raise children, certainly, but to have parents, who also have parents? Such power! Such notoriety!”
“The most prestigious job anyone has in our family is computer chip repair,” Plia said, rolling her eyes. “None of us are making important contacts through our relatives, trust me.”
“The most prestigious job in your family is history,” Tima corrected. “When this project pans out – ”
“If this project pans out,” Plia corrected. “You know that if we want to convince a stodgy establishment of anything this big without our lifetimes, the evidence has to be perfect. We’re going to need an accurate tether, and we don’t know if that information even still exists anywhere. It might be impossible. If it’s all gone – ”
“Then it’ll take a lot longer for anyone to consider the evidence that we already do have,” Tima shrugged, “and sometime after we’re all dead there’ll be a paradigm shift and you’ll posthumously be prestigious.”
“Call me optimistic, but I don’t think it’ll take that long,” Hali chimed in. “I think that if w don’t get more than we have now, we’ll be vindicated when we’re old. Big shifts are common at new colonies; there’s every chance that people will be more receptive when we’re leaving the Dragonseye.”
“They’re receptive to things that are useful,” Tima said. “I don’t think that anyone could claim that our research is at all useful.”
“What is this thing you’re trying to find in the diary?” I asked. “What is this untethered heart?”
“It’s actually a really complicated and boring explanation,” Plia shrugged. “Unless you’re super into Lunari history and ancient medicine, it’s not important.”
And I might’ve believed her, except that something being boring and unimportant had never stopped the historians from ranting about it as much as they could before. And also they had shared a very, very tiny uneasy glance right before answering.
And as she spoke, Tima glanced around the cafeteria, and Hali glanced up at a corner of the ceiling. I didn’t know if anything was up there, but if we were on the Courageous, it’s exactly where you’d expect one of the treegrave’s cameras to be.
Interesting. I wasn’t the one they were trying to keep their research secret from.
It also couldn’t be that big of a secret either way, because they never shut up about the untethered heart. Unless they were actually doing something else and the history project was an excuse? No, that couldn’t be right. I couldn’t think of anything good that they’d be going to the Dish to secretly do, and Plia definitely wasn’t a bad person.
Besides, nobody who was just pretending to be obsessed with a history project would go on and on about it as much as they did, even in private.
Later on, I was talking about the change to Ella in her lab (mostly to make conversation, I didn’t actually care about the schedule very much).
The Velocity can take us from Starlight to the Dish, but taking us back home is too far apparently,” I said. “So we either have to find another one to make a long trip or ship-hop back.”
“I hope you ship-hop back,” she was as she took some kind of measurement of leaves with a small tool. “Then we can see each other again. But you’re going to Starlight?”
“Yeah.”
“Residence one or two?”
“Two.” Did it matter? Starlight called itself a ‘guest-focused residential vessel’, which so far as I could tell meant that they had a pretty small citizen population and lots and lots of visitors all the time. People would stay there to rest, recover and adapt to new inertial pulls and air pressures between ships. They were very busy right now because building up Hexacorallia for the Dragonseye bid meant that a lot of people were moving around in this part of the fleet. The ship had two halves with two guest residences, called residence 1 and 2, but I hadn’t seen anything that made them seem very different. (Also, I hadn’t looked very hard. Starlight was easily the most boring ship on our trip, it was literally just a place that people went to wait.)
“Good,” she said. “Residence 1 could give you trouble getting back. Some ships don’t let people on if they’ve been to residence 1 or another contaminated ship in the past couple of years.”
“I’m sorry, a contaminated ship?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard? I guess it’s too far away to be much news where you’re from. The Treasure have been playing with ancient genetic engineering tech and a big part of the fleet have closed off access to anyone who’s been near it in case it’s dangerous. Apparently they’re using something that used to kill lots and lots of people back on Earth, but they say it’s safe and that’s just a stupid rumour.”
“Is it?”
Ella shrugged. “No idea. It’s not my area of expertise and I’m not a historian. You companions might be able to figure it out, it’s a big fight. Frankly, I think it’s all stupid because what they’re studying is pointless anyway. They’re trying to engineer people after they’re born.”
“We can do that?”
“Oh, yes. Very, very easily. We just don’t because, well, why? It’s a whole lot easier to give them the genes you want before they’re born. You want specific organs to have different genes for some reason? Grow it separately and transplant it in. There’s not really any reason to do what they’re doing, in my opinion, and everyone’s really mad about it, because they’re saying how dangerous the tech is.”
“Might it be a threat to the fleet? If it’s old, older colonies might have it; is it a threat to them?”
“Oh, I really, really doubt it. It hasn’t killed or even hurt a single person and they’ve been using it for years. Even if it did hurt people, it could easily be contained to infected ships and everyone else would be fine. It’s a whole lot of nothing, in my opinion.”
Fair enough, but I should probably still look into it. “What is it?”
“It’s called ‘virus’. Apparently you can inject it into people and it grows inside their bodies – ”
“Like a parasite?”
“Sort of, except it’s not actually alive. I don’t get it either but apparently it was all over Earth, no idea why they invented it there. It spreads through the body and gets into cells and changes their DNA, so that’s what they’re using it for. And then they give you something else to tell the body to destroy it.”
“And it’s not alive? It’s some kind of poison?”
“Honestly I’m not sure. It’s all very complicated. But if you’re in residence 2, you won’t need to worry about it; Starlight is very careful about keeping anyone and anything potentially contaminated to residence 1 so that it doesn’t mess up what ships people who go through residence 2 are allowed on.”
“What are they trying to achieve with virus?” I asked. “Like, is there something that we need people to do that we can’t just engineer them for from the start?”
“So far as I’m aware? No. It’s not my area, it’s not anyone on this ship’s area, and I don’t know what the actual details of their experiments are – I’ve never looked into it, to be honest. But I asked the same thing as you, I think everyone does, and the only answer I got was something about people’s right to determine who they want to be and to be able to choose to change their DNA when they’re old enough to decide for themselves. Which does sound great, to be honest; I’m sure everyone has a few genesets they wish that they did or didn’t have. But like. Is it worth resurrecting ancient probably-deadly technology to do? Absolutely nothing in any of our records suggests that Earth humans could even do that, as far as I know. Does it? You’d know better than me.”
“Um,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that, no. But I’ll ask the historians.”
“Right. I’m sure if the First Crew and their colonists could just medically swap out their genesets however they wanted, we’d know, right? We’d probably have preserved that technology, we’d still be doing it. So unless something very strange happened to erase our records of something like that, then those guys are resurrecting an ancient technology to try to make it do something that it couldn’t do. Which, in fairness, is technically what we’re all doing, I mean plants came from Earth and I’m engineering those, but it seems weirdly confident to have such a broad goal for something when you have no real reason to believe it can do all that much. Seems like you’d start with trying to do something small and very specific and expand into broad ideologies once you know what you’re working with.”
“Maybe they are,” I said. “Maybe they just don’t want it widely known what they’re doing.”
“Yeah, that’s what worries me. Of course, it’s equally possible that they have been doing all sorts of amazing things with virus and their confidence is fully justified, and I just don’t know about it because it’s got nothing to do with me or my ship. Most of the fleet probably doesn’t know about our space plants either, and they’re not a secret.”
What about the capuchins? I almost asked, but stopped myself.
Then I thought more and started myself again. “What about the capuchins? As a secret, I mean.”
Ella laughed a little. “Yeah, they do like their privacy. They don’t tell us much either, never mind other ships; it’s just how they are. So you’re not sure about your journey home?”
The conversation moved on, and that all seemed normal. Except that when she was talking about the capuchins, she looked up from her instruments for the first time in the whole conversation, for one very, very small moment. But she didn’t look at me.
She glanced into a corner of the room. The sort of place that I’d expect the treegrave to have a camera.
Interesting.
Derin Edala 