48: Unregulated Growth

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“Children!” Jamon said firmly, standing up – well, straightening her posture, at least. (People don’t really ‘stand up’ or ‘sit down’ in zero pull, but they do have more relaxed and more attentive stances.) “We have guests, and Kichi needs his rest!”

“Sorry,” various kids mumbled. Nimi raised his hand again and whistled, and Kichi leapt back through the air to wrap around his arm. Lilin, blushing, apologised while Jamon told her it wasn’t her fault, and us poor foreign guests all backed into the front room as politely as we could manage.

Jamon and Miya followed us, leaving Lilin with the kids.

“So sorry about that,” Jamon said again. “They know better, and they’re usually much better around guests from other ships. I don’t know why they brought him out like that with no warning.

I did. “Do you have many guests from other ships who are kids?”

She blinked at me in surprise. “That’s… a good point, actually. Nevertheless, it will not happen again.”

“What was that thing?”Hali asked. “That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, and I saw a real live fish once.”

“You did not!” Plia said.

“I did! On the Arborea Celestia!”

“Okay, did you properly see a fish, or did you see things moving in the water and the Arboreans told you what they might be? Because we all saw things moving in the water that might have been fish and that doesn’t count.”

“That was a snake,” Jamon explained. “A pet. A… a companion animal.”

“They’re for long-range HEXes,” Miya explained. “Sometimes, people are far away from the ship for weeks at a time, all alone, and while of course we have radio it can be a bit wearing to not have anyone else around. Pets give people something alive to interact with, something to keep them social and to keep them on a routine, caring for it. It’s a new thing we’re trying out, though I’m not sure why the kids have one.”

“Because one of the creche kids’ guardians is a long-range HEX pilot and as soon as ke told us all about it the kids just have to have one,” Jamon sighed. “And somehow someone ended up with a snake that they didn’t want so we have it now. The whole thing is a mess really, but it makes the kids happy. None of this is actually necessary, of course; there’s no need for HEXes to travel that far from Hexacorallia in the first place. We only need to be able to get to the ships immediately around us. What’s a full week away that we can’t get via other transport ships?”

“The point is the practice, Mama Jamon,” Miya said, in a tone that said they’d had this conversation before, probably a lot. “When we’re in the asteroid belt, we will need to spread out really far. We want to make sure we know exactly what we’re doing and work out all the kinks before we get there. Like this pet thing! Now we can see how helpful it is, and when we actually get to the Dragonseye, the colonists won’t have to discover it themselves!”

“If we get the bid,” Jamon said.

“Of course we’ll get the bid. It’s an awesome bid. Our plan is absolutely perfect for asteroid belt colonisation and we’ve done half the work already so it’ll be a really easy colonisation and the fleet can move on quickly. It might be so fast that we’ll live to watch them leave!”

“And then you’ll be stuck here with us, and no other big ships to fly off to.”

“No other ships, just countless asteroids!”

Jamon rolled her eyes and turned to us, making a point of ignoring Miya. “Anyway, I hear you guys might be interested in some of the old tech we’ve revived for this bid?”

“Absolutely,” Tima said immediately. “We’re particularly trying to learn about old shielding technology, the kind that was used for shielding the Courageous in its early days.”

“And you don’t have that information on the Courageous?”

“Oh, the blueprints, certainly. But we don’t have any need for electrostatic shielding over there. We could get an engineer to build us a model, possibly, but since we’re here anyway we’d rather see it in use as it was originally used, if possible.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m not a tech person but I know that some of the people with those new plants are using electrostatic shields with them. I’m sure someone is out there using the original shield designs. People are always building strange things on this ship.”

“Yeah, like creches,” Miya said.

Jamon twisted a little to get him further behind her and make the pint that he was still being ignored. “I’ll ask around and see if there’s someone with a shield that you can look at.”

“Thank you very much,” Tima said.

I was a bit worried, because this had to have something to do with the Untethered Heart and for some reason the historians didn’t want anyone to know about that, but Jamon didn’t ask any more questions about it.

The grown ups talked about more and more boring things, and nothing else very interesting happened for the rest of the day. Well, lots of stuff happened that might be interesting – we checked out some different types of HEXes, and met lots of people, and the historians learned more about the ship command structure but I didn’t understand any of it – but after the snake it was kind of hard to be surprised by anything else.

That night, I went into the bedroom that had been emptied for us, carefully made sure that Tana’s doll was secured safely out of the way (what kind of a name was ‘Alisha?’), and “laid down” on the “bed” to sleep.

And had a very strange dream.

I stood in a view port on the Courageous, looking out at out baby colony. All of the walls were see through once again, so I had to hold one hand up to block the glare of Dragonseye in order to properly see the glittering field of asteroids in front of me. It was a ring around Dragonseye, obviously, but I couldn’t see most of it because the star itself was in the way, so I looked at what I could see.

It was wrong, of course. In the real world, these asteroids would be many kilometers apart from each other, but in the dream they were barely a few HEX-lengths apart. I watched HEXes jump between them, burrowing into some to plant the Stalwart’s seeds, digging into others with robot mouthparts, like giant bugs on the leaves of a bush. That’s what this looked like. I had never seen a real asteroid field, and I’d never seen HEXes at work mining one. But I had seen the models they show, with the huge asteroids that are all too close together so that kids can understand what they’re looking at. And I’d seen plenty of bugs.

They jumped about in their work and brought metals and ices back to Hexacorallia, which looked in the dream how it did in real life – a huge metal shrub made of HEXes themselves, all clinging to each other. A lot of the HEXes never left Hexacorallia; they formed its skeleton, or climbed over it to clean and repair it, or spread out their massive solar panels to collect solar energy for the whole structure. After listening to Dad talk about biotanks for years and then Ella talk about her plants for a month, I could see how beautiful it was. It was so, so beautiful.

And there was a problem inside it, a weakness. I had the sense of Ella telling me about differences in vine growth causing weaknesses in the ‘hulls’ of her plants; something like that was happening inside Hexacorallia, and I panicked, thinking it was going to collapse, that the colony was going to die. But it didn’t, of course. It broke in two. Two smaller Hexocorallias, which sent out their HEXes to farm the asteroid fields and bring back metals to build more HEXes, until they both grew even bigger and stronger than their parent. And then one of them broke again.

I was watching for years, in the dream, then decades, then centuries, as the little settlements grew. Sometimes, two of the metal bushes would merge into one. Much more often, they would break apart. They stretched out, filling the asterid belt, making hundreds of different shapes out of their hundreds of tyes of HEXes, growing and experimenting and being homes for generations and generations of colonists, always having more space, more materials… until they didn’t.

Asteroid fields are massive. But they do have a limit in size. And the HEXes, the Hexacorallias, when they ran out of food…

They started to eat each other.

I watched in horror as the different groups of HEXes started attacking each other, pulling each other apart to take the pieces home to their own Hexacorallia. A lot of them didn’t have a Hexacorallia at all and just drifted about on their own, docking wherever they were allowed and trying to hold on when they couldn’t; most of them either learned to band together with someone for protection or got torn apart. The metal itself wasn’t the biggest problem, as metal loss does happen but is pretty minimal compared to things like air and water, which are much easier to lose in space. I just knew that that was what the people inside those HEXes were truly running low on as they grouped together into different shapes, better to attack and defend from each other, as small Hexacorallia gathered together into big ones, and big ones collapsed and violently tore themselves apart. I don’t know how many centuries it took, but eventually, it was done.

The colony wasn’t dead. Not entirely. There were a few small Hexacorallia left, protected from each other mostly by the vast distance between them. It was too far for the little HEXes to move between them as they pleased any more, and they couldn’t split or expand, because no matter how much scrap metal floated around them, the ice was gone. They’d used up too much air and water in the struggle; they didnt’ have enough to grow.

And more would be lost, very slowly. And they’d shrink. And someday, they would die.

I forced myself to wake up. I was suffocating! No, no… I was just panicking. What? Nightmare. Right.

Nightmare. Okay.

The historians were all asleep. I took some long, deep breaths and forced myself to calm down.

Okay. What I had seen in my dream was stupid. Because it was impossible.

Obviously, nothing like that would happen to Hexacorallia. In my dream, the HEXes had looked like bugs on plants, gathering food, but people weren’t bugs. People were smart, and the colony would be born of our fleet, and everyone in the fleet knew how important resource conservation was. It wasn’t like they’d forget the skills used by generation after generation travelling through empty space he second we hit an asteroid field.

The colonists would know, right from the beginning, how much of what resources were in the asteroid field. They would know what was on the nearby planets, and the conditions on those planets, in case they eventually chose to settle those too (and we assumed that they would). If they split off into little groups, there would be charters, agreements; they’d know the resource risks in advance, and they’d work with them, and anybody who started acting like the mindless HEX bugs in my dream would be kept in like by everyone else. If it did look like wars might break out, everyone involved would know the costs in advance. They wouldn’t destroy their own colony like that. They weren’t bugs.

After all, the fleet never went to war with itself, and it wasn’t because all of the ships were very best friends all the time. A revolution happened inside a ship, or included a few ships at most, and nothing was wasted. If there was really, truly no way to fix a rift and it was too dangerous to keep travelling together, the issue was delayed until the next colony so the fleet could split. Actual wars like the ones in my dream were from stories, not real life. When they happened in history, they happened on planets, and were small enough to fit on a planet. Or they happened in very young colonies, when things could still be recovered and the fleet was there to supervise.

The colony wouldn’t do that.

But I was still scared, for some reason. I was still tense, for some reason.

Because something in the back of my mind told me that this dream hadn’t been about the Dragonseye colony at all.

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