While putting together a message for Tikka, I figured it out. I figured out why capuchins couldn’t leave the Stalwart. It was pretty obvious, if you stopped thinking about the ship and started thinking about the fleet.
I was telling Tikka about the staff on Starlight, and thinking about the Hearth (though I didn’t mention the Hearth in the message). The quarantine kept people on contaminated ships stuck on contaminated ships; was that on purpose, or just a side effect of a quarantine that had to happen anyway? I supposed it didn’t matter. The results were the same. Every person in the fleet had the right to leave any ship, so ships had to look after their citizens or lose them, but that only worked if nicer ships would take them. A labourer on the Ironstock might be stuck if some teenager on their jaunt didn’t fall in love with them. A test subject on the Hearth might have nowhere to go except for other ships that wanted test subjects. And a capuchin…
Well, it was different for a capuchin, wasn’t it? Because if you looked at the actual wording of the fleet charter, every person didn’t have the right to leave their ship.
Every human did.
Because ‘person’ and ‘human’ were the same thing when the charter was written, and until getting on the Stalwart, I’d thought they still were. So that seemed like an answer, right? The Stalwart didn’t have to let the capuchins leave, and if they did get to another ship, they wouldn’t have the right to leave other ships either. Better to stay on the ship that cares about you and looks after you than to risk trapping yourself on one that might not. And so long as they were all told how dangerous other ships were, and as long as they didn’t talk much to people on other ships, and as long as the Stalwart didn’t make a big deal about their existence and nobody knew that they were there, then the fleet charter wouldn’t be changed to accept them. That was how the Stalwart held onto its capuchins. A neat answer, right?
Of course not. That was obviously wrong, or at least, it wasn’t the whole story. There was no reason to force the capuchins to stay, because they seemed perfectly happy where they were. Why not let some leave and just breed more? It was an awful lot of work to keep people around who didn’t want to be there. Besides, every human I’d met on the Stalwart had been very protective of the capuchins. Hali had been friendly with Tikka, and Ella had been very clear that I had to be nice to them. Maybe I had only run into friendlier people just by chance, but I didn’t think so. Whenever I’d seen humans and capuchins interacting, they had seemed friendly. That wasn’t the reason. It wasn’t a question of holding onto the capuchins by keeping them half-secret and keeping them out of the fleet charter. That was looking at the whole thing backwards.
You had to stop thinking about the ship and start thinking about the fleet. Never mind what the capuchins meant to the Stalwart. What did the capuchins mean to the fleet?
Some ships are more self-sustaining than others, but no ship in the fleet survives alone. We all need to work together and be friendly with other ships. This is more important for some ships than others – if Starlight made a lot of enemies, it would be in serious trouble, whereas the Courageous could probably get away with a lot more and still have other ships do the processing and transport that it couldn’t do – but it’s somewhat important for everyone. And the Stalwart, with how deep they are in the Hexacorallia colony bid, must really, really want to be best friends with everyone right now.
And what would happen if the capuchins did push to be included in the charter?
A whole big mess, is what would happen. The fleet would have to come up with a whole new meaning of ‘person’. How would you even do it? Intelligence? Then little kids and people with certain genesets or certain types of brain damage wouldn’t be ‘people’ any more, unless you set the level so low that it was meaningless. All mammals get to be people? How would to even be able to tell if a sheep wanted to emigrate? It probably wouldn’t come up with sheep specifically, but there were a lot of mammals. There would be a grey area somewhere. Just humans and capuchins? That wouldn’t work. The fleet was big and the fleet was old, and if capuchins could be people, then somewhere out there, some other ship had done the same thing to some other animal. And they were probably keeping it quiet for the same reason. It would be a whole big mess that nobody wanted to deal with at any time, and especially not when we were preparing to make a colony. It would make everyone very annoyed at the Stalwart and probably be part of their reputation forever, and that might turn out to be a good reputation in a few generations but it definitely wouldn’t right away. Also, if there were other types of people on other ships, they might demand rights at the same time and make everything way messier.
And of course, there was the risk that the fleet wouldn’t grant those rights. That the defencelessness of the capuchins would become part of fleet law. I didn’t think that would happen – back when we’d started this trip, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me that that might happen. But I’d definitely learned that fleet law wasn’t perfect at doing the best for everyone all the time.
The Stalwart wasn’t weird about the capuchins for the capuchins’ sake. They were weird about the capuchins because the capuchins were a huge diplomatic issue just waiting to happen. And the fleet was probably letting that happen on purpose, all the ships that knew and worked with the Stalwart just sort of not bringing them up. Because nobody wanted to deal with it.
And that… that wasn’t fair.
I had thought that if I could figure out what was going on, figure out why Tikka and her kind seemed to be trapped on one ship, I could help to free them. Maybe explain things on the Courageous, and try to get our leaders to put pressure on them. But it looked like thing were more complicated than that.
I know it’s really, really selfish of me, but I was kind of glad that we wouldn’t be going to the Hearth. Not just because of virus, but because there was absolutely no way I could help anyone on that ship and I didn’t want to get caught up in trying. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to learn whether things were actually bad there or not. I was glad I would never have to meet them or be friends with any of them.
I should’ve stayed at home. The Courageous doesn’t have problems like this.
Tima came into the foyer just as I finished composing my message to Tikka. “We’ve got a homeward travel schedule,” she told me. “Miya’s willing to pick us up all the way from the Dish, which seems like a long trip in such a little craft but I’m not complaining, and drop us off back on the Stalwart. We can spend another month there to adapt back up to standard pull before the Ironstock takes us home.”
I nod. “That all sounds sensible.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just messaging Tikka.”
“Oh, you’ll be able to see her again on the way home! Won’t that be nice?”
“Yeah,” I said.
So we were going back to the Stalwart. In about two months, depending on how the travel times worked out.
I had that long to figure out if there was some way I could help. Or if I should even try. I mean, if the capuchins were happy where they were…
The normal pull levels of residence two were about the same as the half pull levels, except heavier. I’d forgotten how heavy I was and how much work it was to move around. Or maybe I’d just gotten weaker in zero pull. Either way, it was annoying. Being heavy again hadn’t bothered me much when adjusting to half pull because it had come with so many good things, like being able to walk on a floor, and drinking from cups normally. But while normal pull was definitely a lot better than half pull, it wasn’t as different as half pull was from zero pull, so there was less to distract me from the annoying things. Like being heavy.
I found a new massage parlour with a new masseuse, Tavia zero-nine, who was just as good at massage as Lerriah but much more fun, because after ten days or so she started to relax and tell jokes and stuff instead of being professional all the time.
“I suppose it’ll be an adjustment for both of us when you leave, chi,” she said one day, digging her fingers into my back. “A real upset to our routine.”
“Mmm,” I mumbled into the padded table. “I see now that this is the ship’s evil plan. To get everyone to move out to this part of the fleet so they can keep coming here for excellent massages.”
“And through the power of massage, we shall become the prime influence in the fleet.”
“That’s fine, it’s totally worth it.” I didn’t know how good massages were on the Courageous, come to think of it. They couldn’t be this good though, or nobody would ever get any work done. “Have you ever thought about moving to a different ship?”
“No, chi. I am very happy here.”
“Do any of the staff here leave?”
“Occasionally. Sometimes, people will want jobs or experiences that are hard to come by on Starlight, but there does tend to be a lot of… inertia. Most of Chiariz left last year, when Two and Four wanted to try being pilots; they planned on leaving years ago, but their Three and Nine wanted to stay and the two groups took a long time trying to convince each other. In the end, they realised they wouldn’t reach consensus, and the rest of the run left Three and Nine behind, which is still pretty sad, but they’re handling it as well as they can.”
“They didn’t want to split up from the rest of their run.”
“Of course they didn’t! It would be a terrifyingly lonely experience.” She paused awkwardly, seeming to remember she wasn’t talking to a zero run, and quickly added, “For us, I mean, chi. I’m sure that your independence is thrilling and fulfilling.”
A lie. A good one, but I knew her way of speaking well enough to tell. She felt sorry for the guests. She thought were were lonely.
“You’re really close to the other Tavias, huh.”
“Yes.”
She acted like that was normal for the Starlight staff, but Terrence had been very dismissive of people on other ships who ‘happened to share his DNA’. “What about the Tavias on the Hearth and in residence one?”
The massage stopped for a few seconds, then resumed. “Well, chi,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t grow up with them.”
Ah. Something emotionally complicated, there. Probably for all the Starlight staff, but I wasn’t going to go around rudely asking other people to find out. This was, pretty clearly, none of my business, and it was a bad idea (not to mention pretty rude) to try to make it my business.
I should focus on other things, like the end of humanity. And more immediately, should I be making the capuchins my business?
Derin Edala 