47: Kichi

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“What’s a creche?” I whispered to the historians quietly while the two Hexacorallians talked.

“It’s sort of a half-orphanage,” Hali whispered back. “It’s like, for kids that have families but they can’t find anyone to watch the kids during the day. They go to the creche to be kept an eye on while their parents are busy.”

I frowned. On the Courageous, having a family was a really big commitment. People didn’t raise kids unless they were able to raise kids; you had a family member at home to watch them, or if you couldn’t then you arranged for a friend to do it. My family was able to have so many kids mostly because Auntie Shorin didn’t work. If you had kids and you couldn’t look after them, then they’d have to be sent to an orphanage, which did happen sometimes (if the family’s situation changed or they broke up or someone got hurtor killed or something and couldn’t look after kids any more) but nobody wanted it to, so starting a family was a very serious matter.

The idea that there were enough parents out there who couldn’t be parents that they needed a whole separate place to watch all the kids was…

Well. All the ships I’d been on raised kids differently. Maybe it was a good idea for how Hexacorallia worked. Maybe there was a reason that they couldn’t have enough orphanages, but needed lots of kids, so creches were a good halfway point. Or something.

The door behind us opened and a little girl appeared in the doorway, maybe about four years old. The grinned brightly. “Oh, Miya’s back!”

“Hello, Tana.”

Then her eyes settled on us. She stared.

“Tana,” Jamon said, “these are our guests. Remember?”

She suddenly smiled very brightly. “From the far-away ship! The Brave!”

“The Courageous.”

“Yeah! Hello! I’m Tana!”

“Hello, Tana,” Tima said, putting on that annoying talking-to-kids voice she used when she first met me. “I’m Tima.”

Tana didn’t seem to mind the voice. “That sounds a bit like Tana! Is your ship called that because you’re all very brave? You’re going to stay in my room! Nimi and I are staying in Parla’s room so that you have lots and lots of space. But I left one of my dolls in there in case you get lonely and want to play with her! You don’t have to, though. She doesn’t mind. Her name is Alisha.”

Alisha. Foreign name. Or a weird one, anyway. Everyone we’d met on Hexacorallia so far had standard fleet style names, like on the Courageous, bit Alisha wasn’t one.

“Thank you,” Tima said. “I’m sure Alisha will have fun with us.”

Tana nodded energetically, the stubby ends of her short braids bouncing up and down against her neck. She looked to Jamon. “Is there any more algae bread?”

“Lilin is looking right now,” Jamon said. “Why don’t you go and help?”

“Okay!” Tana set her feet against the wall and pushed herself across the room towards the door tot he creche like it was a natural thing to do, and I supposed that for her, it was. When she got to the other side, she grabbed a handle on the wall to stop herself while the creche door opened. (The airlock there wasn’t being used as an airlock right now, so going through was faster than going through an active airlock, but it was still a big heavy door.)

“She seems like a nice kid,” Hali said once she was gone.

“Most of my charges are,” Jamon said, “though a couple are recovering from less than ideal circumstances. The children are very used to foreign visitors, but we don’t get many visitors from your particular area of the fleet, so I hope you’re ready to be asked hundreds of questions by children.”

“That’s okay,” I said, speaking up as our little group’s Representative for Children. “I’m also going to ask hundreds of questions.”

And I did. We shared algae bread with Jamon, Miya, Lilin, and a whole bunch of kids in the creche, which turned out to be a lot bigger than the front part of HEX-46. (Well, it was probably the same size, actually, but unlike the front part it was mostly one big room with a couple of doors on the side that probably led to tiny bathrooms or storage or something.) I learned that there were seven children living in the orphanage and five who came to the creche, and that there would be more in the creche when it was all set up and Jamon and Lilin had found more adults to help. I learned that most of the toys and things in the creche, and the subHEX itself, were gifts or donations from people in other HEXes, which was interesting because I figured that she’d got them from Supplies and Logistics, but I supposed that things didn’t work like that here. (Though when I asked if they had something like that, a general supply to help all the citizens, they said yes, which just confused me more.) I learned that Jamon was very political and spent a lot of time on different committees that decided things for Hexacorallia.

“This whole creche thing has been huge for her there,” Miya whispered to me loudly when that came up. “It’s giving her a lot of leverage over workers with kids, everyone wants to increase capacity as quickly as possible.”

Jamon shot him a Look and he shut up.

“Will you be coming to the committee meeting tonight, Miya?” she asked him in that fake-sweet tone that aunties sometimes use when you don’t clean your room.

“I’m disconnecting tomorrow,” he replied a little apologetically. “So I’m a bit busy tonight. But I can link up for the next one, maybe. Digitally, you know.”

“And yet you never attend digitally,” she said in the same sweet tone, “no matter how much I remind you. These decisions are important.”

“Some of them are,’ Jamon said, “and I know you’ll make great ones. But mama, I just don’t think it’s a good use of anybody’s time to spend four hours arguing about what bright colours it’s okay to use on public property and how many flyers you should be allowed to tape to someone else’s door before it counts as excessive advertising.”

“Well when you go back to your HEX tonight and find the door covered in seventeen flyers about Mr Johnson’s flute lessons then maybe you’ll think it’s a bit more of an important issue.”

“Then I’ll have seventeen sheets of free paper. It’s not a four hour issue, mama.”

“It’s impossible with this one,” Jamon said to the historians. “Will you be attending?”

The historians looked at each other in surprise. “Are we allowed?” Hali asked.

“To watch? Yes. You won’t be allowed to vote and probably won’t have many options to speak, but you can watch. Many people do.”

“We’d love to come,” Tima said.

“At least somebody shows an interest in local politics,” Jamon said, turning her eyes back on Miya.

“They definitionally aren’t,” Miya said. “It’s not local to them.”

I stopped paying attention to the boring grown up conversation and went back to talking to the other kids. Tana was staring at the bandana I wore on zero pull. “Are you a girl or a brennan?” she asled.

“I’m a girl,” I said. (The two brennan kids at the table wore some kind of head wrap, I noticed, like Lilin. The boys all had very short hair. There wasn’t a lot you could safely do with hair in zero pull and it looked like Hexacorallia had pretty strong gender fashions for hair. That was good; that’d make things a lot easier for me.)

“Then why are you wearing a head thing?”

“It’s not even a real head thing,” said Parla, in a kind of mean voice. She was my age, and she frowned at me.

“It’s a bandanna,” I said, taking it off. “It’s to keep my braids down, because I’m from a standard pull ship and don’t know how to tie them against my head like you guys.”

“Ooh, we’ll help!” Tana said. “We’ll teach you!”

Parla nodded, suddenly looking a lot more friendly and less mean. “Yeah! Wow, your hair is so long!”

It wasn’t very long, but my braids did hang a little way past my shoulders, not stopping halfway down my neck like the other girls’.

“Yeah, that’s going to be a problem,” Tana frowned.

“No, it won’t,” Parla said. “it’ll just mean we can do them fancier.” She reached out, paused to see if I’d pull away, and when I didn’t, took a couple of my braids between her fingers to feel them. “Ooh, I have some ribbons that’ll go great with this. It looks easy to braid, too.”

“It’s fine,” I said. My hair wasn’t as kinky as Hitan’s and wasn’t as smooth as Arai’s. I’d never really thought much about how hard it was to braid, which I guess meant it was probably easy.

“Never mind hair,” said Nimi, who was six years old and kind of grumpy. “Tell us about your ship! You’re from really far away, right?”

“Not that far away,” I said. “I only had to be on two other ships on the way here.” Well, three if you counted the Vanguard, but travel ships didn’t count.

“That’s still pretty far,” Nimi said. He ate a big chunk of bread, chewed it, and swallowed. I picked at my own algal ‘bread’. It was weird; soft and spongy, but it didn’t break up easily like the bread I was used to. It was like a big sponge. Probably so you didn’t get a bunch of crumbs floating around in zero pull. “You’re three whole ships away from home. Nobody ever lets us go out that far. They won’t let any of us more than a few hours away from the coral, they say we’re too young.”

“I’m going to go further,” I said, deciding that ‘the coral’ was probably the main mass of Hexacorallia that we were on. “After this, we’re going to Starlight, and then the Dish.”

“Wow!” Tana gasped.

“What’ll you do then?” Parla asked.

“Go back home,” I said. I missed home.

“Oh, hey!” Nimi said. “I know what we can do! Do you want to meet someone really fun, Taya?”

“Sure!” I said.

“Nimi, don’t – ” Parla began, but he was already zooming across the room to one of the little closed doors. The grown-ups didn’t notice, but all the other kids got very excited, and I started to wonder just how bad an idea whatever he was doing was, and whether I was going to get blamed for it.

He appeared in the doorway again a few seconds later, and wrapped around his arm was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

And I’d seen a lot of weird stuff. I’d touched and eaten sheep. I’d walked in a floating forest. I’d met capuchins.

I’d never seen a thick, green, living rope before.

It was definitely alive, wriggling and moving around his arm. I thought at first that it was something robotic, but something deep inside me told me that it wasn’t. One end of the rope lifted away from his arm and swayed around, and a tiny mouth opened, something (a tongue? It had to be) flicking in and out as two tiny black eyes stared at us.

The other kids cheered, which got the attention of the grown-ups.

“Reimann’s shift!” Plia exclaimed as all three of them and me used our very limited zero pull experience to get to the airlock door as fast as possible. “What is that?!”

Jamon looked over and sighed wearily. “Kids,” she said gently, “not around the guests, remember?”

“He’s harmless!” Nimi said.

“I know he’s harmless, but he is very scary,” she said. She looked at us apologetically and we all tried to pretend that we weren’t preparing to flee the subHEX and leave the kids to the mercy of the living rope at a moment’s notice. “Sorry about them. They’re very excited to show off new things.”

“He’s not scary!” Tana said. “He’s cute!” She lifted up an arm. “Come here, Kichi!”

The living rope, Kichi I supposed, uncoiled itself from Nimi’s arm and flung itself across the room, straight at Tana. Plia put herself between me and Tana right away, so I barely saw Kichi grab her arm and wrap around it. She laughed and rubbed his tiny head.

“Kichi is a snake,” Nimi explained, holding him out to us in case we wanted to get a closer look. We didn’t.

“He seems nice,” Tima quickly squeaked out before any of the rest of us could say anything less diplomatic.

“He is!” Nimi said proudly.

Well, we’d done it. We’d found the weirdest thing in the fleet. Nothing on Starlight or the Dish could beat this.

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