46: Fleet Status

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We all stared at him.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s the treegrave! It’s not a ship without a treegrave!”

“It’s not a fleet ship without a treegrave,” Miya corrected me gently. “Peripheral vessels don’t have treegraves and they do just fine.”

“Because they have a fleet ship to look after them, which does have a treegrave!”

“They only need to be peripheral to a fleet ship because other fleet ships won’t deal with them directly. It’s the fleet ship qualification law, saying that a ship needs a treegrave to count as a fleet ship, that keeps other ships subservient to ships with treegraves. There’s nothing inherently better or more efficient about ships with treegraves. They’re only ‘better’ because of their political status, not anything practical; treegraves can make certain things more efficient, but they don’t do anything that people and computers can’t also do. If we win the Dragonseye bid, we plan to settle all of Hexacorallia around the Dragonseye. After the fleet leaves, what use would we have for a treegrave?”

“So you’re going to kill it?!” I asked.

“No! No, we’ll just stop adding minds to it. The people already in there will live out the rest of their lives in there as normal. They’ll be fine.”

“And they’re okay with this plan?” Plia asked, sounding doubtful.

“The first people to join our treegrave came up with it. It was their idea. Everyone who’s joined since knew the plan well before they joined.”

“I don’t think they will live their lives as a normal treegrave, in the end,” I said. “Treegraves aren’t the same as a committee of people. The minds are interrelated. I think that once you lose enough brains in there, the rest won’t have the right functions to keep everything going. It’ll collapse.”

“We’re prepared for that scenario,” Miya said. “It is true that near the end, we might need to retire the treegrave with a few minds still in it, if things are bad enough in there. But I don’t think that’ll happen. Brain damaged people live fulfilling lives on any ship, so I think the last minds in there will be perfectly fine. Anyway, human minds are adaptable! There’s nothing physically wrong with most minds in the average treegrave, except for age. They could probably relearn lost functions. Aspen Courageous themself was a one-mind treegrave at first, and did fine!”

Aspen had been the first mind to join the first treegrave. That was very different to being a mind in a bigger treegrave and having the others ripped away from you. I didn’t think Aspen’s experiences told us anything at all about how Hexacorallia’s treegrave would do near the end, if it was allowed to die off.

“You know, there’s a reason that ships need a treegrave to have fleet status,” Tima said in the cautious sort of voice that people use when they’re trying to be diplomatic about something. “It proves that a ship has the resources, management and drive to, well, be an independent ship. The whole reason the fleet charter was written, treegrave requirement and all, was because the early days of the fleet were legal chaos, with the little peripheral ships demanding equal rights to the larger proper ships. People on the Courageous or the Arborea would captain some little transport vessel and decide that they could do their own thing now and should be taken as seriously as the real ships and be entitled to their resources while under their own laws and beholden to no one. What’s to stop that from happening at Dragonseye? If nobody has to prove their competence and drive by maintaining a treegrave, how will you stop a couple of random fourteen year olds from piloting a HEX off to plunder an asteroid by themselves and start their own operations under their own rules?”

“Why would we want to stop them?” Miya asked. “If they have the skills to survive out there alone, good for them. If they want to make their own rules, even rules other people disagree with, that’s an internal issue for their HEX, though it might affect what committees people will let them join.” That’s the beauty of an asteroid belt; people can spread out however they want and do whatever they want.”

Behind his back, Hali tapped his heart and raised an eyebrow. The other historians nodded.

“Even in an asteroid belt, you’re going to have resource conflicts,” Plia pointed out.

“Everyone everywhere has resource conflicts. There’s resource conflicts in the fleet all the time, and the ships manage to work it out with each other. We’ll do the same.” Miya turned to face us and flash us a big smile. “If there’s one thing that people have proven again and again to be really fantastic at, it’s overcoming our problems and working together. Even when there’s major conflicts, they get resolved eventually, and the fleet moves on with its mission. It’s beautiful, when you think about it.”

It was beautiful. But the problem with that logic was that a colony wasn’t on the fleet mission. They were stationary. I had no idea how that common goal sort of thinking translated to a colony, and I didn’t think that Miya knew, either.

As we buckled in for docking, Plia, while pretending to check my buckles, leaned in very close to whisper directly into my ear. “Don’t mention the Untethered Heart until we’re well and truly off Hexacorallia, okay?”

I nodded, even though I had no idea why. What could be so dangerous about mentioning it here? I still didn’t even know what it was.

Docking was bumpier than undocking, but not as much as I expected it to me. There was a little jolt when Miya reached out HEX-107’s arms to grab handholds on the back of one of the HEXes that made up the mass of the ship, but ‘crawling’ up the branch towards the middle of the mass was smooth.

From a distance, I had thought that the moving HEXes were walking over each other like I might walk down a corridor, and that we’d feel every loping step. I’d forgotten that movement in zero pull doesn’t work like that. Miya gently pushed us in the right direction and then let go, skimming a little way above the surface of the mass. He only took a ‘step’ every minute or so, grabbing on with a couple of arms to make a tiny change to speed or direction.

About two thirds of the way down the branch, we came across a really long, tubular HEX covered in docking ports. Most of them were free. Miya had a short radio conversation with someone, too quiet for me to make out from the other side of the ship, then spoke up to us. “This bit might be a bit disorienting,” he said. “Hold on.”

And then he spun HEX-107 in a half-circle to line up the airlock behind us with a docking port.

It wasn’t that bad, actually. “Down” was towards the airlock for a few seconds, and then we were floating again. I wasn’t sure what he was so worried about. Maybe inertial pull from rotation was weird for zero-pull people, but we’d grown up with it.

The docking clamps closed with a loud hum. (HEX-107 was not well protected against sound; if the sound of machinery travelled like this through the Courageous then everyone inside would be deaf. I supposed that if you spent most of your time in open space with no neighbouring rooms to have loud machines in them, that didn’t matter to you so much.) “Okay, we’re clear to disembark,” Miya said, and everyone started unbuckling themselves.

“Technically,” Miya said as he lead us into the next HEX, “HEXes designed like this are called docking hubs, but everyone just calls them spines. So. Welcome to the spine.”

The “spine” was HEX-31, according to the massive letters painted along the walls in several places. Like HEX-107, there was no floor, with airlocks and little cargo bays on every surface. I did feel safer as soon as I stepped inside, though; I couldn’t hear the machinery of the docked HEXes, the walls just felt safer and more sturdy, and just by looking I could see lots of features to account for emergency conditions – regular blast doors and small pressure shelters in case of a breach, six flat strips running from end to end spaced evenly around the tube that had no airlocks breaching them, each with guard rails, that could become a walkable ‘floor’ if the spine was put under inertial pull, and ladders next to them running end-to-end in case one of the ends became the ‘floor’ during inertial pull. That all made sense, I supposed, given how the ship worked; if the spine could be at any angle and the ship had to sometimes move around, you wanted people to still be able to move through it when it was moving.

It also, after so long on the Stalwart, felt massive. HEX-31 was designed so that mig crowds, and probably big cargo, could move through it. If the historians and I all stood on each others’ shoulders in a big chain, we’d probably be about the diameter of the cylinder, and it was really long, with space for thirty six HEXes to dock at once.

I’d missed big spaces, and I could tell from the historians’ expressions that they had, too.

“HEX-46 is just over here,” Miya said, leading us across the hall and just a few airlocks down. And we walked inside, and I felt, for the first time in ages, like I was home.

It wasn’t exactly like home, of course. It was laid out like a zero pull ship. But we walked straight into a gathering area where some kids played some floating game in one netted-off corner while an older kid watched them, and next to one wall a young woman was taking tools off a magnetic rack to fix something complicated with a look on her face that was exactly like Auntie Lia working on a complicated chip, and there were doors on one side of the room that I just knew lead to bedrooms, and even an open door down the back through which I could glimpse green vines woven around wall trellises, which I suppose is the neatest way to make a zero gravity personal garden. (Theirs probably didn’t have any water features. That would be messy.)

Someone (a woman, if I could trust Courageous gender fashions and Hexacorallia gender fashions to be sort of similar) moved into the doorway of the garden, a huge smile on her face. She was dressed in a bright red wrap with her hair in long braid woven with matching red ribbons and beads of… stone? Like real decorative stones? Tiger’s eye and onyx and stuff? They had to be fake.

Fake or real, the stones were tied a lot tighter into her hair than a Courageous woman would do it, and as she moved her head I noticed that all the braids were tied together. Her hair was short enough that, tied down like that, there was only a few centimetres of it free from her head, floating around her neck.

Smart. If I lived in zero pull I wouldn’t want a bunch of floating ropes full of rocks swinging around my face all the time, either.

Her skin was on the light side, almost as pale as the soil in the Courageous’ tree farms or the darker woods in the Arborea’s forest, making her hair and perfectly polished but very short-clipped black fingernails stand out. She was very fat, all soft rolls under red fabric that looked like a warm, comfortable pillow, her eyes were sharp, and her smile was radiant.

“Miya!” she cried, opening her arms and wisely bracing her legs on either side of the doorway to hold herself in place as Miya kicked off the wall, launching himself directly into her and wrapping his arms around her middle in a tight hug. She patted his head. “I’m so glad the trip went well.”

“It was only a pickup, Mama Jamon,” came Miya’s muffled voice. “I do them all the time, they’re not dangerous.”

“Yes, but you know how I worry.” Jamon seemed to be the sort of person who spoke at top volume whenever there wasn’t a reason not to. She turned that smile on us, lingering awkwardly just inside the airlock. “And our guests! Welcome, welcome. I’m so excited to have you all here.”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Tima said.

“It’s certainly a novelty to be hosting historians,” she smiled. “Our ship has many wonderful aspects, but a long history is not one of them. Nevertheless, I hope you have a nice time here on your way to your destination.”

“A ship’s history begins when it is built,” Tima said politely. “I’m sure there are already many fascinating things in the history of a ship as varied at yours.”

Jamon laughed. “‘Varied’ is certainly the word for it. I always say that if you’re ever bored on Hexacorallia, just move a few HEXes down. Are you hungry? Lilin!”

An airlock door I hadn’t noticed down the back of the HEX opened, revealing more HEX than I thought there was. Someone appeared in the doorway, head and body wrapped in a complicated system of wraps that made it look like they were wearing a makeshift jumpsuit. Alert eyes peered out of a tired face. “Yes, chi?” The eyes flicked to us. “Our guests. Welcome.”

“My name is Jamon, not chi,” Jamon said gently. “Do we have any of that algal bread from last night, for our guests?”

“I’ll check.” The door closed again.

“That’s Lilin,” Jamon told us in a significantly quieter voice than normal. “Please be kind to kem, ke’s a bit shy.”

A brennan, then. I hadn’t been sure, the fashion was so strange. Lilin had looked to be in kes 20s, so at least there was a brennan involved in this orphanage. (Was that a bad thing to think? Jamon seemed nice. I had no reason to think she wasn’t good at running an orphanage except that she was a woman, which I already knew was silly ‘cause of my dad, so was being relieved about Lilin bad?)

The name was strange, too. Lilin – a repeat glyph and a derivative suffix. Not weird, I mean there was no reason you couldn’t have a name like that, but it was a great way to make the most boring name it was possible to have. I knew the glyph, too; it was one of the first ten that any kid learns. It was a placeholder glyph; the meaning was close to ‘this thing’. A good glyph with others – ‘Lia’ meant ‘bright one’ or ‘beautiful one’, for instance, and Moli meant ‘insightful one’ – but on its own? Horrible name. Most names with ‘li’ in them weren’t popular because they sounded arrogant; naming a kid with a glyph that referred to them directly was kind of crass. ‘Beauty’ or ‘insight’ were much better than ‘beautiful one’ or ‘insightful one’, and it gave you a whole extra free glyph to name a second virtue. But ‘Lilin’ had the exact opposite problem as a name.

“Whoa,” Miya said, “is that a whole new subHEX back there? When did you get that done?”

“Last week,” Jamon said. “It’s for the creche. Lilin’s for the creche, too – ke’s my assistant.”

“You’ve got that finished already?”

“Well, the subHEX is second hand, it’s not like I had to have much built. Really it was just a matter of organising.”

“It’s always something new with you, isn’t it?”

I was already getting the impression that ‘it’s always something new with you’ was going to be common on this ship.

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