44: Messages

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A couple of days before we left for Hexacorallia, I got a message from my family. It wasn’t anything urgent. They just said they were missing me, told me how everyone was doing, asked how I was doing. (They didn’t seem worried about me, so I guessed that Plia was already keeping them up to date on where we were and telling them that I was fine.) I sent them one back, telling them that I was learning a lot and having fun, that I missed them, and congratulated my siblings on the various achievements they’d told me about. Apparently Mum had spoken to the doctors and decided not to get pregnant any more, and I wasn’t sure how they wanted me to respond to that news so I just tried to sound happy and supportive in general.

The message from the Courageous gave me an idea. Tikka hadn’t come back to see me again, and I wasn’t sure what to think about that. She probably hadn’t come back because she just hadn’t wanted to – she’d met the kid from another ship, and I hadn’t been as interesting as she’d thought, and she’d decided not to come back. But maybe she hadn’t come back because she wasn’t allowed to. She’d snuck through the vents to see me the first time, so she probably wasn’t allowed to talk to foreigners. What if she’d been told not to talk to me any more? What if she’d gotten in trouble?

If she had, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. When Fari had found her in the vents, he hadn’t panicked or gotten angry; he’d smiled and introduced us. And she’d found me later, so it wasn’t like he’d told her family and they’d made her stay out of the vents after that or anything. And when she’d come to see me, we’d gone out into the hall for a bit where the treegrave must surely have cameras, so it wasn’t like she’d been hiding our meeting. Meaning that if she wasn’t supposed to talk to me, it mustn’t have been a very important rule. So I wasn’t worried for her or anything.

But I did want to know more about the capuchins, because the humans on the Stalwart were so weird about them. And talking to Tikka was the best way to learn more. I wished I hadn’t been stubborn about not using the computer system last time; I could’ve learned so much more if I’d used it to translate her language.

Anyway. Even if Tikka didn’t want to come and talk to me on her own, she’d probably respond to messages I sent from other ships, at least until she got bored. And if she did want to talk to me and the grown ups didn’t want her to, they’d probably be fine with messages, which were less risky than talking to someone alone where they couldn’t hear. If there was some reason they were keeping us apart, they might check the messages, but that was fine. The humans on the Stalwart didn’t seem to like to make a big deal about the capuchins, and if I, off on other ships, kept sending messages to her and didn’t get a response, then they might expect me to wonder why and to make a big deal out of it. So messages should work, no matter the reason that she hadn’t come back.

Of course, I was still left with the whole reason why I couldn’t message her on the Stalwart – I didn’t know her full name. But! I had a genius plan for getting it!

I asked Hali if he had something that could record sound, and after making me promise not to do anything creepy with it, he loaned me a small recorder. As me, the historians and Fari gathered in the docking bay and waited for our transport to Hexacorallia to dock, I turned to Fari.

“Hey,” I said, “you know that capuchin who was watching us through the vents when we got here?”

“Tikka? What about her?”

“What’s her actual name?”

Yeah, that was my genius plan. Asking.

“Why do you want to know?”

“She seemed fun. I’ve been wanting to message her, but I checked the ship’s system and all the capuchins have these long complicated names and I didn’t know which one was her. But I figure I can still message her from other ships.”

“Yeah, a lot of the capuchins don’t do message humans much.”

“It’s still worth a try, though,” I said. “Ella said that they’re pretty private, but surely her name isn’t private, right? I don’t want to go around messaging every capuchin with ‘Tikka’ in their name looking for her.”

There was a flash of panic in his eyes at that suggestion, but I only noticed because I was looking for it. He covered it with an easy chuckle. “Yeah, that’d be a chore. Her name’s Kitaritikka Ku. Oh, the docking’s started; everyone make sure you’ve secured all loose items…”

He’d said the name pretty fast, already turning away from me to fuss over Hali’s necklace (stop wearing it onto zero pull transports!), but I’d been recording the conversation. I had the name.

Good thing, too, because I hadn’t even thought of names that didn’t start with ‘Tikka’.

The transport that was docking for us wasn’t a fleet ship in its own right like the Vanguard was, but one of Hexacorallia’s peripheral vessels, called HEX-107, which would take us to the peripheral vessel we would be living on, HEX-46. Yes, they were numbered, starting with 1, which yes, did mean that Hexacorallia had more than 107 peripheral vessels. Why would any ship need so many peripheral vessels? And how could ti support so many, especially a ship as young as Hexacorallia?

Easy! The entire ship was made of peripheral vessels!

I mean, they did have a treegrave, obviously. They were a fleet ship. If they didn’t have a treegrave then they couldn’t qualify for fleet ship status and the whole thing would be the peripheral vessels of someone else. And some of their ships were pretty big, not like the tiny one we were boarding; some were about half the size of the Vanguard and had things like medical facilities and chemical processing facilities and stuff. But looking from the outside, you couldn’t tell which ship was the fleet ship and which ones were just peripherals that were the same size; you’d have to actually check and find out which one had the treegrave on it. And there were so many smaller ships that the size of the bigger ones hardly seemed to matter anyway, just by looking.

HEX-107 was tiny. Even the airlock felt tiny as we boarded, and I was glad that the air in the HEX and the Stalwart was the same so that we didn’t have to shut ourselves in there and wait for it to cycle. The entire interior of the ship was just one big room, not counting a bathroom and a storage room walled off to one side. It was a sphere about 8metres in diameter. Yes, the entire interior of the ship. 8 metres in diameter.

Right past the airlock was a sort of very short cylindrical corridor with rows of seats along both sides, facing forward. There were only three seats to a side, given how short it was. Tima sat down and started buckling on safety restraints without being told, and the rest of us followed suit. Beyond the corridor I could see the rest of the ship; the bathroom and storage area, the hammock on one wall, currently stowed away (probably for sleeping when the ship was under inertial pull), the magnetic surfaces at random spots around the walls and floor and ceiling (which I guess were also walls) that had snacks and tools and personal belongings attached to them. The whole place was very tidy, because you can’t have unsecure objects floating around a zero pull ship, but I got the sense that if the person who lived here had been able to be kind of a slob, they would’ve been.

This residential area was in the back half of the ship, and a wall about 2m high ran all around the middle, leaving a big gap through which we could see the front half. I figured that it was probably a privacy wall so that nobody outside could see the occupant going about their life, because the whole front half of the ship was one big window. Just a big 8m-wide observation dome. And right in the middle of it, strapped to a support that was half chair and half bed, was the occupant of HEX-107. Our pilot for today.

I couldn’t see much of him except for his shaggy hair, about ten centimetres long and obviously tangled. His back was to us, and his hands and feet were locked into control instruments of some kind. There was a small screen in front of him, but most of what he could see would be space, through the window.

“Hey there!” he said cheerfully, in a voice that sounded a lot younger than I’d expected. “Welcome aboard! I’m Miya, welcome to Ole Seven. If you’ll all strap yourselves in securely – yes, good, I see you know what you’re doing – then we can get this leap started. There’s going to be a bit of a jolt as we push off the Stalwart. It’ll be a gentle one at this angle, but nevertheless, make sure you have your heads in the headrests, okay? We don’t want whiplash. Give the all clear when everyone’s secured and I can initiate the leap.”

Plia, who had paused to make sure I’d done up my restraints properly, was the last to finish with hers. “All secured,” she said.

“Fantastic! Initiating leap.”

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened for a bit longer.

“It’ll take another fifteen seconds or so for us to hit the right point in the Stalwart’s rotation,” Miya explained. “The direction’s very important. Ten seconds.”

We waited ten more seconds. There was a very brief, sharp jerk forward that pushed me back into my chair. And then, we were out of inertial pull.

“And we’re clear! You can get out of your chairs now.”

“We can?” Hali asked, sounding doubtful. He looked a bit nervous about being in the little ship. I think we all were.

“Yep! It’s a long coast to the rest of Hexacorallia, just over three hours. We’ll buckle back in fifteen minutes before latching.” Miya unbuckled himself and pushed away from the controls. “There’s basically nothing to do until then.” He drifted into the back half towards us, and I got my first proper look at him.

He wasn’t naked, but he wasn’t wearing a whole lot of clothing; just a very light vest and tight shorts. Apart from his hair, which floated around wildly, nothing about his outfit flapped or drifted. He was very chubby by Courageous standards, but that wasn’t surprising; people who lived in zero pull tended to have a lot more fat on them unless they were cargo haulers like on the Vanguard.

He was a lot younger than I thought he would be. It’s not always easy to tell how old someone is without knowing their lifestyle and living conditions and genesets and everything, but if he’d been on the Courageous I’d say he looked like he was in his early twenties, and I had no reason to think things were different on Hexacorallia. (I supposed that I’d find out if they were.) He grinned at us, and held out a hand to shake Tima’s, and something about his grin reminded me really, really strongly of Laisor.

“You must be Tima! The one who ran the org ragged with coordinating this little venture. It’s a pleasure to put a face to the messages.”

“It’s important to be specific about travel arrangements,” Tima said. “Misunderstandings can be costly or even dangerous.”

“Don’t I know it! You had those layabouts doing more work in four days than I normally see out fo them in a month. Let me know if you ever consider immigrating, we could use a firelighter like you in more than one org around here.” He looked to Plia instead and flashed her his grin. “And you must be Plia! The techie, right?”

“A description that makes my work sound more complicated than it is,” Plia said, shaking his hand. “I mostly look through old databases.”

“Well, I’m afraid we don’t have any of those, being one of the youngest ships in the fleet. We’ve got copies of other people’s old databases, if that helps? But they’re all from the Dish, so you’re probably better off just getting them there.”

“I’m sure I’ll find something appropriately monotonous to do,” Plia said.

“Oh, we have plenty of monotony for you.” His eyes skipped to Hali. “Hali, right?”

“That’s me.” Hali shook his hand.

“A linguist? You’ll have plenty to do here, I can never understand half of what anyone else in this kinked ship is saying.”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I specialise in ancient languages, so unless anyone here speaks Lunari or Texan…”

“Honestly, with some of their jabber, I wouldn’t be surprised.” He smiled at me. “And you must be Taya!”

“That’s me,” I said.

He offered me his hand, and shook mine much more gently than the others. “Are you having a fun trip?”

“It’s very informative,” I said.

He gave that little smile that grown ups sometimes do the first time they hear me use a big word. “Well, that’s handy. It’s important to learn if you want to grow up to be a historian!”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m going to work in Rubbish & Recycling.”

Miya didn’t seem to know what to do with that information. After a few confused seconds, he said, “That’s even more important! Especially with setting up a new colony. Rubbish & Recycling is a really important part of getting Hexacorallia working efficiently, and I bet that’ll be even truer when we’re turning it into a colony.”

It’s a big part of getting any ship working efficiently, but I didn’t say that. I also didn’t say that he was making a pretty big assumption about Hexacorallia winning the colony bid. I just nodded and gave him a friendly smile so he could leave the conversation without it getting too awkward. I didn’t want to spend the next three hours making conversation with the pilot. I wanted to see where we were going.

Without asking (I figured he’d stop me if it wasn’t allowed), I drifted into the front half of the ship and looked out into space, out at Hexacorallia.

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