53: Starlight

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Four days before we left for Starlight, it was my birthday. I forgot all about it, until the historians woke me up with a birthday egg.

“It’s not perfect,” Tima said apologetically while I tried not to cry. “I don’t think we got the shell right?”

“They don’t do birthday eggs here,” Plia added. “We got the recipe sent over from the Courageous, but it doesn’t seem to have hardened properly…”

“It’s great,” I said quickly, turning my head so they wouldn’t see my tears as I bit into the egg. (It was a little bit softer than I was used to, but it still tasted the same.) “Thank you.”

“Nine years old, huh?” Hali grinned. “Practically a grown up! Nobody will be able to tell you what to do any more!”

“I already wasn’t listening to people who tell me what to do,” I told him.

“Ha, that’s genius!”

The charm in the egg was a silver leaf. A year of growth. “Is this why you had me draw that card a few days ago?” I asked.

Hali shrugged. “It was the closest we could get to doing it properly. It had to be random, but they don’t do the eggs here, so…”

“So we did it on cards, then bribed a couple of people to let us use a metal printer and a kitchen,” Plia finished.

“Oh,” I said. That was very thoughtful.

When I finished the egg, Plia pulled something out of her luggage. “We wanted to get you gifts, but we were worried about the mass allowances, if you wanted to get souvenirs or whatever,” she told me. “So we just got you one.”

The gift was something small and made of fabric. “Thank you,” I said again, taking it and unravelling it. It was a black belt with pictures woven into it in silver thread. Spaceships. The Courageous, with its big ring and littler treegrave in the middle. The Arborea Celestia, with its three smaller rings. The two spheres of the Stalwart, connected by long cables, and a whole bunch of little bubbles stuck together to make Hexacorallia. The last two were a long tube and what looked like a silver bowl; they must be Starlight and the Dish. It was a record of our trip together. And some of the stitches, I noticed, were just a little bit uneven.

“You hand stitched this,” I said.

“There’s these little workshops on the Stalwart where you can make and repair stuff,” Hali said. “Whenever we had free time there, we worked on the belt.”

I rubbed at my eyes with my palm, but it wasn’t helping much. Crying in zero pull is the worst. It’s so messy.

“Thanks,” I said again.

“Happy birthday, sis,” Plia said quietly.

I wore the belt every day until it was time to leave for Starlight. And I made sure it was securely tied around my waist as we all settled into Miya’s HEX-107 to leave Hexacorallia forever.

“I cannot wait to be back under inertial pull,” Hali groaned as we strapped in. “I can finally stop wearing these stupid wrap garters.”

“You could’ve just worn a jumpsuit if you don’t like the garters,” Plia pointed out.

“Sure, because the best way to deal with not wanting fabric around my legs is to wear even more fabric around my legs.”

“I can’t wait to brain my hair normally again,” Tima said. “These to-the-skull braids feel weird. Hair was meant to be free.”

“Nobody celebrate too much yet, Plia said. “We’re going to be in zero pull again on the Dish.”

The other two historians groaned.

“You could just cut your hair off,” I suggested to Tima. “Nobody out here knows what Courageous fashion looks like. If you told them that all the cool girls had shaved heads, they’d believe it.”

“Tempting, ut my hair grows really slow and I don’t want to have it short when we get back. The last thing I need is more people mistaking me for a brennan all the time.”

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” Hali shrugged. “Your personality is – ”

“Is what, exactly?” Tima snapped. “What about me is so brennan-like, hmm?”

Hali shut up at her glare.

“He just means because you’re so intelligent,” Plia jumped in. “Academic stereotypes and all that.”

“That rusting well better be what he meant,” Tima grumbled.

“Pushing off in thirty seconds,” Miya announced from the pilot’s rig. “Everyone secure?”

“Secure,” we all chorused back, and waited for the little push forward as HEX-107 leapt away from its siblings and out into the void, towards Starlight.

It was a long journey. It was a fourteen hour long journey. I ended up sleeping for a lot of it, which was good, because it meant that when HEX-107 finally took hold of the long metal tube that was Starlight and pressed against it, locking airlock to airlock, I wasn’t tired.

Starlight isn’t a tube in the same way that the Courageous’ treegrave is a tube. There are two main differences. The first difference is that Starlight is much, MUCH bigger than the middle of the Courageous. It’s not easy to tell, but I think Starlight might be nearly as big inside as the Courageous, so the tube was like if you cut our ring and stretched it out into a line.

The second main difference is that it spins wrong. Starlight doesn’t spin so that the walls of the tube are ‘down’. It spins end over end, so that both ends of the tube are ‘down’. The middle of the tube is under zero pull, and each end is under about twice a standard inertial pull. As we grabbed onto the tube, I felt inertial pull me down into my seat, and it felt… strange. Like we must be moving around, because for the past month that was the only tine I’d felt inertia. (I mean, I guess we were moving around, because that’s what spinning is. But you know what I mean.)

We unbuckled and stood up – stood up! On the floor! There was a floor now! – and grabbed our bags and walked (ha, walked!) out through the airlock. It still felt… wrong. I thought that maybe I just needed to get used to being heavy again, but no – no, I was pretty sure I should be heavier. As soon as I had space (the docking port was huge, and mostly empty), I jumped up and down a bit, and yeah, I was jumping way higher than I should, and landing slower than I should.

“We’re only under half a standard pull right now,” Plia explained to me. “Hali doesn’t have the GRAV-19 geneset, so we’re being careful. We’ll spend a week at half pull before moving down to standard.”

“What’s GRAV-19?” I asked.

“It’s a force adaptation geneset,” Hali said, “whose main job, so far as I can tell, is to make people treat you like glass if you don’t have it. I was only under zero pull for a month, I’d be fine.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Tima said. “Besides, a gentle adaptation is probably best for all of us.”

Hali grimaced. “Frankly, I don’t see why GRAV-19 saturation is only seventy five per cent on the Courageous in the first place. It’s such a useful geneset, why limit people’s options like that?”

“Monoculture problem,” Plia said right away, which was an answer so obvious that even I knew it. “Diversity is inherently valuable against unknown threats.”

“Name one time where an objectively worse geneset has protected against a weird threat.”

“DIVR-32,” Plia said right away. “Citrus allergy, treegrave integration.”

“Name two times where an objectively – ”

“DEEP-44,” Tima said. “Hero lag crisis, calcium deficiency.”

Hali shut up.

Tima and Plia were standing next to each other, with Hali still coming out of the HEX, so Tima was able to whisper too quietly for him to hear, “DIVR-32 doesn’t really count; there were several well known advantages to that geneset already.” Plia just winked and put a finger to her lips.

I stuck with the plan that had been working for me sofar, which was to ignore historian nonsense and take a look at the room. It was definitely the nicest port I’d been in so far, with soft-looking benches, and gentle music playing. There were dispensers for food and water, and a big public bathroom to one side. And Miya said his goodbyes to us, made sure we had all our luggage, and started disengaging HEX-107, a brennan strode into the spaceport and towards us.

Ke looked like ke was probably in kes forties, though with the weird genesets people nave on some ships it’s not always easy to tell, and was bald. Not shaved, depilated. It was impossible to tell without getting way too close and nosy to be polite, but I thought that ke might be completely depilated – ke had eyelashes, but no eyebrows. Ke wore black shoes (I didn’t see very many people wear shoes, it was strange) and a completely black jumpsuit with something white printed across the chest. It looked like writing, the way the simple shapes were printed out in a row, but I didn’t recognise any of the glyphs or how they were put together. Huh. I knew other languages existed, of course (the historians never shut up about them), but apart from the capuchins I’d never seen anybody actually use something that wasn’t fleet standard. Or maybe I was wrong and it wasn’t writing at all, just something decorative.

Ke stopped in front of us and bowed. Yes, actually bowed, like somebody in a play or a story, but for real. It was deep enough that I could see that the writing on kes chest was also printed on kes back.

“Welcome,” ke said, “to Starlight. We are honoured to have you stay with us. I am Terrence zero-five, and I will be your liaison while you are here. Please inform me if there is anything at all that I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, and I will do my best to accomplish it.”

“Ter-rence,” Tima sounded out. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“And you, chi. You may call me Terin, if it is easier.”

“That is very kind, but unnecessary, Terence zero-five,” Tima said. “I’m Tima, and my companions are Plia, Hali, and Taya.”

Terrence bowed again. “If you wish, I can show you to your rooms and help you get settled. Would you like me to carry your bags?”

We all politely declined and carried our own bags as we followed Terrence out of the port. Ke was definitely the weirdest person I’d met on the trip so far. But it was hard to focus on how weird Terrence was when we were faced right away with how weird Starlight was.

Starlight didn’t have small individual rooms like Hexacorallia or narrow corridors like the Stalwart. It reminded me more of the Courageous, with a big wide corridor with stuff on either side of it, some of it in rooms but a lot of it just out in the open because there was no reason to have walls up. But it wasn’t a ring shape, so there wasn’t just one long middle path going from ship-forward to ship-back; instead, the paths were in circles that got smaller and smaller towards the middle of the floor.

Oh, and also, the wide paths had windows in them. I could look down and see the floor below me, and through the window in that floor to the floor below that, and so on and so on until all the window layers together were too much to see through. I could look up, and see the same thing.

Everything that we would see from the path around the spaceport looked fun. There were cafeterias that all seemed to serve different kinds of food, which confused me until I realised it was because Starlight had so very many different kinds of food available that it wouldn’t all be stored in one cafeteria.. There were gymnasiums, much bigger and less crowded than the Stalwart’s but not as big as the open playgrounds on the Courageous. There was something called a massage parlour, which Plia explained to me was one of the services that the Courageous offered at a red house, one of the handful that I was allowed to use as a kid. There were also places with signs on them that suggested they offered red house services that I wasn’t allowed to use. There was a really big projector room that it seemed that people didn’t have to book; it had a whole lot of seats and seemed to just play stuff that someone else had already selected and people could go in and watch whatever was on. (Terrence informed us that if we wished to hire private projector rooms, that was also a simple matter.)

Ke lead us to our room, which was really a house. It was as nice as my home on the Courageous, except completely clean, with a perfectly maintained garden, and with fancy things in it like a ‘relaxation sauna’ (which was just a hot wet room, so far as I could tell) and a ‘hot tub’ (which was a much wetter hot room, what was it with these people and water? Did a lot of Arboreans come here?) and a ‘sensory room’ (which was a pleasantly warm room that was, at least, not wet, though you could make it smell of different things and play different sounds and lighting effects). Also, unlike home, we had the whole thing all to ourselves.

As we stepped inside, Tima asked one of the most suspicious questions I’ve ever heard in my life.

“Does the treegrave have access to these rooms?”

Terrence bowed again (why did ke keep doing that?) and said, “Due to differing standards of privacy among our various guests, the treegrave is completely locked out of all residences except the foyer area.” (Ke indicated the small entryway.) “If you wish to speak with it while inside your residence, you will either have to do so in here, or leave the inner door open so that it can hear you inside.”

“The inner door is soundproofed?”

“Yes, chi.”

The historians exchanged one of their little glances, and I made up my mind. This was getting silly.

It was time to learn abut the untethered heart.

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