54: Antarctica

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I had to plan my questions carefully. Not because I thought it would be hard to get the information I wanted, since we didn’t have to worry about the treegrave or anybody else listening in. But because I thought it would be hard not to get a bunch of information I didn’t want. If I just went up to the historians and said, “Hey, I’m really interested in your research project,” I’d get lectured for four hours and three and a half of those hours would be the three of them disagreeing with each other and going off on side conversations about other parts of history. I had to avoid that. I had to be smart.

Hali seemed like the least ranty of the three, so I waited until Plia and Tima were out, then approached him in our little home garden. (Even though he had said that not having GRAV-19 wasn’t a problem, he was doing a lot less walking around than the rest of us.) “Hey, Hali?”

“Taya!” He gave me a big smile. “What’s up?” He smiled even wider. “We have an up now! Isn’t that great?”

“It sure is. Why did Plia tell me not to mention your research project while we were on Hexacorallia? Was it dangerous?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. It just wouldn’t have made us very popular, if they knew all the details of what we were up to. If we get the evidence we need before we reach the Dragonseye, it’ll affect Hexacorallia’s colony bid really badly.”

“What? How?”

“Because their society has some very big problems that are just waiting to emerge, and they seem ignorant of just how serious they are, perhaps wilfully so. We tried to bring up the problems with multiple people there and kept getting brushed off. But if we’re right about the untethered heart, then it’s proof positive that those problems have consumed the fleet before and very likely will consume Hexacorallia again, eventually. Which under normal circumstances wouldn’t be anybody’s business, but right now, with the upcoming colony? This is just about the most inconvenient time to be researching this.”

“What are you researching, exactly?”

I expected him to launch into an enthusiastic explanation the second I gave him an opening, but he didn’t. He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Oh boy, there’s a question. Okay, so. As I’m sure you already know, your sister and Tima and I are looking into what the establishment insists on calling early fleet history, though really it should be called pre-fleet history, because one ship is not a fleet. Proper early fleet history would’ve been between the creation of the Arborea Celestia and the establishment of the fleet charter, which happened when the fleet was five ships big, not counting peripherals of course. And that history is pretty sketchy, with a lot of differing accounts of different events and large parts missing records entirely, but it’s absolutely nothing compared to the history before the Arborea. It’s a lot harder to permanently lose information when you have copies of it on multiple ships, but when it was just the Courageous? Deliberate obfuscation, accidents, and just plain neglect in file maintenance could wipe out important data permanently. On top of that, even a lot of the data that people did successfully try to preserve is a mess, because the initial ship’s AI got completely scrambled at some point, possibly multiple points, and they had the camera feeds set up so that they were only accessible by the AI directly for some reason I will never understand, and all the AI’s footage is long lost, so it’s just an absolute mess back there. There’s things that should be very simple and obvious, and would be in the history of any other ship, but because it’s the early days of the Courageous and there’s so much missing, there’s three or four competing and incompatible theories on what happened. So, with that in mind… how much do you know about the very beginning of the fleet?”

I shrugged. “The normal amount, I think?”

“I’m a historian, you’re going to have to remind me what the ‘normal amount’ is.”

“Uh, right. Well, before the fleet, humanity was just on its home planet of Earth, and some other planets and asteroids and stuff in its home solar system. The Aspen Greaves convinced a whole lot of people that it was humanity’s destiny to spread throughout the stars, and gathered everyone together and they built the Courageous, the first ever interstellar ship. They set out with a whole lot of colonists, who were in chronostasis back then because they didn’t know how to build ships that could support so many people yet, so it was just the First Crew who were awake. They were in three shifts; Aspen Greaves’ shift, Joshua Reimann’s shift, and Sienna Kae Jin’s shift.

“But something went wrong with the computers partway through the trip, and the ship couldn’t support all the crew any more, so in order to keep everyone alive, they had to make a hard choice. Two of the shift went into chronostasis, leaving Joshua Reimann’s shift to look after the ship. But more things went wrong, and Reimann died, and then the next two captains elected from his ship died, and eventually they all died and Aspen was woken up to replace him. Asen woke up their crew and stewarded the ship safely to their first planet, then woke up Sienna Kae Jin’s crew, and together they used the resources of the planet to repair the ship and establish the first colony. But they were so worried about another problem happening with the AI, since it had been clearly shown that AIs can’t do a job so complicated for so many years, so Aspen Greaves became Aspen Courageous, binding their mind with the ship and establishing the first ever treegrave.”

“That’s more or less accurate, so far as we know,” Hali said, “but it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Have you been taught about Antarctica yet?”

Antarctica? I shook my head.

“Well,” Hali said, “the simplified history that you’ve learned so far is a bit more charitable to Reimann than he really deserves. You know how in stories, there’s sometimes a bad guy who wants to take over a ship using trickery and lies?”

“Reimann was a spy?” I gasped.

“That’s the current consensus, yes. Antarctica were a group that infiltrated the Courageous from the start. Nobody’s really sure what they were trying to do, but we think that they’re the ones who damaged the computer so that the other two shifts would have to go into chronostasis. It’s also thought that not only was Reimann a member of Antarctica… but so were several of the crew serving under Aspen.”

“No!” I gasped.

“Oh, yes. Tinera Li Null kept a diary for about a year after being revived to serve under Aspen, and it’s all very vague and confusing, but does seem to corroborate the accepted story.”

‘Current consensus’. ‘Accepted story’. ‘Seems to corroborate.’ “You don’t believe in this Antarctica, do you?”

Hali sighed. “I honestly don’t have much of an opinion on Antarctica. It’s likely they existed and possible that Reimann was among them. But we do think that Aspen’s crew very likely weren’t. The real problem is that Tinera was not a perticularly poetic person, but Lunari is an excessively poetic language. We just don’t have enough context to properly interpret a lot of what she wrote, so you have to make assumptions about not only the actual meanings of lost words, but the contextual meanings within the diary. The poetic nature of the language has made some people make assumptions about the poetic nature of the diary, because there are areas in it where drawing a literal conclusion seems contradictory or ridiculous. But we think that parts of it are a lot more literal than people give it credit for.”

“Like the untethered heart.”

Hali nodded. “There’s a section early in the diary where Tinera talks about the crew’s loyalty to an organisation that she never names, but that is almost certainly Antarctica. It’s made very clear that her and Aspen’s other crew members have their ‘hearts tethered’ by this cause, as she puts it, but that Aspen does not, and furthermore that the crew are working together at this cause and actively keeping it a secret from Aspen. But Aspen was very clever, and at one point corners the crew one by one, and brings them outside the ship onto the hull one at a time to observe the majesty of the stars and the importance of their mission, converting them to Aspen’s cause – untethering their hearts, as she put it. Very likely there were some threats involved as well, according to common wisdom – you don’t drag someone to the outside of a ship alone unless you’re planning to terrify them, and at least one crew member nearly died in the process. But the point is, it worked, and the crew were loyal to Aspen and the ship’s original mission from then on.”

“But you think that something else happened.”

“We do.”

“What?”

“It’s complicated.”

I knew when someone was shutting down the conversation when I heard it. I narrowed my eyes. “Isn’t history always complicated?”

“True enough. But some of it makes more sense to discuss after you find proof of it.”

“Does it? In Education, we learned that scientists share their information and theories so that everyone can talk about how likely they are and decide what’s probably right. Isn’t it unscientific to be doing all this secretly?”

Hali shrugged. “It’d be better to be having open discussions with other historians, sure. But sometimes politics get in the way of science.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’re less than two decades out from orbit, and that Hexacorallia aren’t the only ones who’ll be really upset if we turn out to be right. Let’s just say that if we’d been fully open about just how far our research has gotten and just how thorough we intend to be in finding evidence, there’s no way that the Courageous would ever have supported this trip. The thing about history is that most people don’t care about what is actually true half as much as what they want to be true, and they don’t care about what they want to be true half as much as what would be useful to be true.”

“That’s true of you, too, right?” I said. “You guys really want to be right, and it’d be useful to your careers to be right about something so big.”

He laughed. “True enough. The idea in science is that different people should have different biases, and so it all evens out and the evidence wins. But in history, that’s a lot harder, because most of the evidence doesn’t exist any more. But believe me, not many people will want this to be true. Personally I’m not sure exactly how big of a problem it’s likely to be, I think most people probably won’t care, but Tima’s very clear about how much of a problem the higher-ups can make if they want to and she’s usually right in these sorts of things. So we’re being quiet just in case.”

“I think most of the higher ups would be pretty happy to find out that Aspen’s crew wasn’t full of sneaky spies,” I pointed out. I did NOT like the sound of this ‘Antarctica’. The First Crew were heroes!

“Under normal circumstances, you’re probably right,” Hali said. “But if we’re right about the untethered heart, then the truth is so, so much worse.”

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