58: The Dish

Starlight did eventually get boring. Nothing really happened on Starlight; or at least, nothing that we guests got to see. The staff could be doing all sorts of interesting things where we couldn’t see them, but that didn’t matter to us – we were just waiting around, making sure our bodies had recovered from zero pull so we could go right back into it, and the longer we were there, the harder it was to distract ourselves from that with fun activities. I wanted to get going again! I wanted to finally see the Dish!

And I wasn’t the only one.

“Rusting finally!” Plia exclaimed on our last day, as we packed up our stuff (a lot more stuff than we’d come with; you pick up a lot of souvenirs when you’ve got nothing better to do).

“Speak for yourself,” Hali said. “I’m going to miss this place. Have you guys thought about how easy it would be to do most of our work from here? I know Plia wants to root around in the Dish’s actual computers, but for the majority of the stuff we do, we know what information we want and could just get it messaged over. We could work almost as efficiently here as back on the Courageous.”

“Yeah, and what would you offer Starlight in return?” Tima asked, raising an eyebrow. “We’ve used up a lot of their time and resources, and they’ll need these rooms for guests who are doing important jobs in this part of the fleet. We’re too far away from home to be relying on goodwill much more than we already have, and it’s obvious from the structure of this place that they don’t accept many permanent immigrants, if any. If you want to stick around here, you’ll have to find a new bit of history to get invested in to pay your way, because I really don’t think these guys would be interested enough in the untethered heart to make it worth the space we take up.”

“I wasn’t saying we should,” Hali said. “I was just saying, it would be cool. Fun to think about.”

“I don’t know about that,” Plia said quietly, after glancing around to make sure Terrence wasn’t in and the foyer door was closed. “This place creeps me out, to be honest. It’s pretty similar to the Courageous in terms of facilities and stuff but the culture and the social structure is like, the total opposite. The staff here are creepy.”

“They’re not creepy!” I said. “all the ones I’ve gotten to know are nice!”

“They can be creepy and nice,” Plia said. “It’s weirder than the capuchins.”

“What have you got against the capuchins?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Plia said, rubbing my head and messing up my hair.

“Don’t forget, everyone,” Tima said before I could respond, “we’re going back into zero pull. So no jewellery, get on your garters, everyone do something with their hair. The usual.”

Ugh. I hate zero pull.

We didn’t need to organise for a smaller ship to take us across, because Starlight had its own mini fleet of peripheral transport vessels. Which made sense, given what Starlight was used for. And because they existed to be transport vessels, and weren’t just ships that did other stuff and had room for a few passengers, they were much more comfortable to travel on. We clipped ourselves into nice, big, soft seats behind a huge viewport so we could watch ourselves leave Starlight and gently turn to face the Dish.

“It’s a thirty six hour journey,” Tima told us tiredly as we headed off. “So I hope everyone has something to do.”

“Really?” I squinted at the Dish. “It looks pretty close.”

“It’s not close. It’s just isolated, and enormous. It only looks close because you expect it to be smaller and expect those other ships to be closer than it is.”

Oh. Well, that made sense.

As we got closer and closer, I could see that she was right. The Dish was the biggest thing I had ever seen. (Well, okay, yes, I’ve seen stars, but they don’t count. They’re too far away to really count as big, even the Dragonseye.) The Dish was shaped like, well, a dish; or more like a bowl, I guess. And you could fit the Courageous and Hexacorallia inside that bowl and have space left over. There were no other ships close to it, and there were no ships at all behind the ‘top’ of the bowl, which was pointed sort of behind the fleet but not exactly.

It was an impossible amount of metal. A huge bowl made of enough metal to make ten Courageouses. How much fuel did it take to move that kind of mass between colonies? How many engines did the ship have?

But then we got even closer, and I realised that I was wrong. I had assumed that the Dish was as thick as a spaceship hull, or maybe even thicker, but as we got closer I realised that I could… see through it? It’s not always easy to tell in space, relying on the light of the Dragonseye and with nothing behind the Dish to see, but… yeah, it wasn’t solid. And it was… shimmering? Sparkling? The surface might be uneven, but that shouldn’t matter; we weren’t moving fast enough for the light of the Dragonseye to make it sparkle for that reason.

We got closer and closer, until the metal of the Dish filled the whole view port, and I realised it wasn’t sparkling – it was quivering. The Dish was made of rods or cables or something, it was hard to tell, that moved like a thick metal fabric, twitching into the shapes of smaller bowls inside the big one, making it bumpy. They changed shape very slightly, changing how the light bounced off the bumps and making the whole thing sparkle.

And then we got even closer, and changed direction to circle around the bowl, and I realised that I was wrong again. What I’d been looking at wasn’t the Dish.

I mean, it was part of the Dish, I supposed, but it wasn’t the spaceship. The spaceship was a small sphere, probably a bit bigger than the Vanguard, with the huge shimmering metal-fabric bowl dragging behind it.

On that little sphere was a little dock. And that’s where we went.

The docking bay was dimly lit by very low power lighting and very cramped, probably the smallest we’d seen so far. It was a little hallway – room, really, not long enough to be a hallway – barely wider than the airlock. A man was waiting in there, looking about fifty or sixty years old, assuming normal genetics. He had a very short, wiry beard, and a smattering of grey hair behind his ears and around the back of his head, and like most of the people we’d seen who lived in zero pull, he wore a jumpsuit. It was grey, worn in a few places, and had a couple of patches and old, faded stains on it. “Hey, it’s our long-distance travellers!” he called with a grin and a little wave as we floated in. “I’m Gara, We don’t get many visitors here, especially not from so far away.” He sounded tired, but in the way that some people are always tired. He looked tired, too.

Tima drifted forward, shook his hand, and introduced us all. “I would’ve thought you’d get a lot of people coming through,” she said. “Given how valuable your information is.”

“Oh, we get a lot of requests for information,” Gara said dismissively. “All digital, though. Nobody cares to see how the work is done, and few want to trawl through the archives themselves. That’s what you’re here for, though, right? Trying to track down something tricky and misplaced?”

“If it exists at all, yeah,” Plia said.

“Well, best of luck, then! Anything useful you dig out is something I won’t have to do myself in a decade’s time. Though I must say, I think we’ve pulled almost everything useful from the really old files. Whatever hasn’t been pulled from Amy after all this time is too garbled to be recoverable, I promise you. Every few years we get some genius in here certain they can get some sort of video or audio or something but once code is gone it’s just gone, and there are limits to the damage it can take and still be recoverable.”

“We’re not interested in Amy,” Plia said. “We’re looking for files created by the First Crew that we believe were being intentionally hidden and possibly manually encrypted at the time of their creation.”

“Oh, well now, there’s a puzzle and a half! Still very likely gone, of course, and if they’re not then the means to find them are.”

“What’s Amy?” I asked Hali, who was the only one still close enough to me to whisper to.

“You don’t want to know,” he whispered back. “That’s a whole mess and a half, that thing. You can make a career in history just arguing with people about Amy.”

It seemed like you could make a career in history arguing with people about anything, but okay.

We headed out of the room into a… hall?… lit in the same way as the docking bay, with barely glowing light strips that made it easy to make out the shape of things but not much else. It was clearly supposed to do the job of a hall, a passage where you could move from one room to different rooms, but I wasn’t sure if it counted, because there was no floor or ceiling. It was like the inside of the ship was a sphere, and then the outer hull with one layer of rooms attached, and between them was just empty space. Not completely empty, of course – there were support struts everywhere, holding the ship together – but there was a wall of doors on my left and one on my right and I could move forward, back, up, down, wherever I wanted in what looked like it was probably an empty gap that went around the whole ship.

Well, I supposed that words like ‘up’ and ‘down’ didn’t mean anything. Ugh, zero pull.

The Dish wasn’t accelerating at the moment (I figured that they probably did what Hexacorallia did, and accelerated a lot in short bursts instead of a little bit constantly like most ships), but it looked like it would be impossible to move around when it was. There were bits on the walls that looked like ladders and handholds and stuff so that people could climb around under inertial pull, but just the idea of climbing them or walking across the support struts with a big, big drop beneath you no matter which direction the ship was accelerating made me freeze up. When the ship was accelerating, people probably stayed put. They would have to.

The ‘hallway’ was pretty narrow, and looking at how close together all the doors were, it looked like the rooms were pretty small. Gara showed us to our bedrooms – private bedrooms, but with a shared bathroom several doors down, each room pretty small but nowhere near as cramped as the ones on the Stalwart – and then we headed out again.

“Everyone else should be in mess by now,” he said. “I’ll get you all introduced, get that out of the way, grab something to eat. Then we can get to work.”

“Everyone else?” Tima asked.

“Yep, he rest of the crew. We’re a small ship; just me, Flitch, Haken, Other Haken, and of course Old Teeth.”

“Old Teeth?” Hali asked.

“Yep. We call her that because she’s old.”

Everything about the Dish seemed packed in – narrow hallways, small rooms. But not small in the same way that the Stalwart was. On the Stalwart, they were very clearly trying to get the most people and the most productivity using the smallest amount of mass, and designed everything to get away with using as little mass as possible while providing the best practical and psychological benefits. I didn’t get the sense that the Dish had been so carefully designed. Everything felt small, but not in the sense of trying to pack people in – actually, come to think of it, I didn’t see a single other person on our journey.

“So it’s a crew of five?” I asked. How many people live on the ship, total?”

“Just us, normally. You guys have almost doubled our occupancy while you’re here.”

“This whole ship only has five people?!” Plia asked.

“Yep.”

There it was. Everything was small because that was all they needed. In fact, this ship must be a nightmare to keep clean as it was; they probably wished it was smaller. To clean, you need either cleaners, or engineers to maintain automated cleaners; preferably both. And in zero pull, cleaning is really important.

Gara lead us into ‘the mess’, which turned out to just be a cafeteria, though I supposed that a zero pull cafeteria probably would get messy. Three people were hanging out there (not sitting, because zero pull), nibbling on loafs of food and drinking from water pouches. They looked up as we entered.

“I brought the visitors!” he announced loudly. “We got Tima, Plia, Hali, Taya. These are the crew. Old Teeth up there; food taste any better today, Teeth?”

The wrinkliest woman I’ve ever seen in my entire life gave is a bright, completely toothless smile. “Oh, I made it taste like feet just for you, youngster.”

“Of course you did. There’s Flitch, ke’s our top engineer, say ‘hi’, Flitch.”

Flitch looked about twenty, and was focusing on fixing something that looked small and fiddly, but gave us a little wave.

“That’s good enough. Then there’s Haken, ke’s one of our treegrave techs, and – where’s Other Haken?”

“Currently being a treegrave tech,” Haken said in an even, semi-formal tone. He picked at kes nutrient loaf with perfectly manicured fingernails in a very precise manner. “The work of a doctor never stops.”

“Well, okay, you guys can meet Other Haken later. Anyway, that’s everyone. Teeth! You got any food for the newbies?”

“Just for them, I’ll find something that doesn’t taste like feet,” she said. “But you’re getting the feet taste, you brat.”

“Of course.”

“What do feet even taste like?” Hali mumbled to Plia. “Like, does the food taste like how feet smell, or…?”

“If we start trying to pull apart the running jokes of strangers we’ll be here all day,” Plia mumbled back.

There was something oddly familiar about Haken. Kes movements, kes tone… everyone here wore old-looking grey jumpsuits (though Haken’s and Flitch’s were in better condition than the others), but I could imagine Haken in black…

I drifted over to kem. “Hey, Haken? Have you ever been to Starlight?”

Kes eyes brightened. “Oh, you’ve been? Awfully dreary place, isn’t it?”

“I thought it was pretty fun,” Hali said.

“It was fun at first,” I agreed, “but you do run out of things to do eventually.”

“I know, it’s awful,” Haken sighed. “I mean, it’s alright for the staff, of course, since we have productive and fulfilling work to do, but I always feel so sorry for the guests. Of course, even for the staff, it gets tiresome eventually, which is why I came out here to do something more productive with my life.”

“You and Other Haken?”

“Yes, exactly. And now we have…” ke gestured with one perfectly manicured hand in a precise, sharp movement to indicate the ship as a whole… “this place to look after. Which is a lot, because those other three fools are not helpful.”

“Hey!” Gara protested. “We’re perfect! Flitch, tell ‘em how perfect we are.”

“Mmm?” Flitch mumbled, not looking up from kes project.

“Ugh, you’re useless. I mean perfect!” Gara added quickly, as Haken triumphantly opened kes mouth.

I shared a glance with the historians. Why did it feel like this very small crew was going to make the place feel more crowded than any other ship we’d been on?