61: Cousins

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One day, I found myself in a view port, looking at the stars. The Dish, being a zero pull ship, didn’t have seating in their tiny viewports, but they did have safety handles to hold onto so you could stay in place without thinking about it; I had my arm looped around one of those as I stared out at nothing.

I imagines specks of gold and silver out there, like the rings on the map. Points of colour to show the colonies still speaking to us, still having their voices heard, still being a part of the future of humanity. I pretended I could see them clearly against the stars, which was wrong for a number of reasons. Firstly, of course, the colonies weren’t actually visible, and even if there were little gold and silver lights out there, they’d be hard to distinguish from the stars. (In fact they’d be so close to the stars that all I’d see was starlight, no matter what colour they were.) But more importantly, I was pretty sure I was looking in the wrong direction. I hadn’t even tried to memorise the star map (why would I?), and even if I had, matching the stars on a two-dimensional disk to the view around me would be impossible without a whole lot of math that I didn’t know how to do. But since I was looking in a total different direction than the big radio dish that gave the spaceship its name, I was pretty sure that the stars I was looking at were uncolonised – after all, the dish would be pointing towards the colonies.

I imagined them anyway, little points of life in the vast nothing. I imagined them winking out, sometimes one by one, sometimes in groups.

“Doing some stargazing?” Gara asked, coming in behind me.

“The stars look different from here,” I told him.

Gara was silent, and I could tell it was a baffled silence without looking, because I’d just said something completely ridiculous. I explained.

“The way that the Courageous is built, you can only get two views of the stars. Either you’re looking ship-right or ship-left; wither you’re looking right at the Dragonseye or right away from it. There’s a whole lot of view ports but that doesn’t matter; they can only face in those two directions. The view will flip upside down as the ship spins, but you can’t see other stars unless the ship turns around, and it’s turning so very, very slowly as we get closer to Dragonseye that the stars have looked the same for as long back as I can remember. All that middle bit there,” I say, pointing to a bunch of stars in the middle of my view, “is invisible on the Courageous. The ship itself is in the way. I’ve seen a lot of stuff on new ships, but I didn’t even think about seeing new stars.”

“Huh,” Gara said, drifting in beside me and taking a handhold. He righted himself with respect to me, adjusting his up-and-down to match mine, which was something that zero pull people did to be friendly and polite.”Do you have a favourite?”

“No.”

“I don’t spend much time looking at the actual stars. Maybe I should do it more often.”

“People have told me that I do it more than normal. I think the historians think I’m a bit weird for it.”

“Well, the historians are weirdos themselves.”

“Like everyone on this ship isn’t?”

Gara laughed. “So we know it when we see it! Say, do you think there’s any chance we could convince your sister to stay on? She’s got a real intuition when it comes to searching for lost files in junk, and you wouldn’t believe the kind of junk an archive like this gets sent.”

“I doubt it. Do you have a drum circle here?”

“A what?”

“Yeah, I don’t think she’d stay without her drum circle.”

“Still don’t know what that is, but that’s a pity.”

“How many of these stars will we colonise, do you think?”

“Well, my job is the past, not the future. But between you and me, I’d guess… most of them.”

“Most of them?!”

“It’d make my job a lot easier, that kind of density. Or the jobs of the people after me, I guess, since I’ll be dead. But think about it – as our technology gets better, so do our colonisation options. Our first few colonies were really far apart from each other, because they relied on finding planets with really specific temperature ranges and gravities and soforth; then we got better at metal refining and radioactive decontamination and rocket building, and we could colonise more types of planets, and places that weren’t planets at all. Do you think that the Courageous and the Arborea Celestia would’ve stopped off at a place like Dragonseye in the early days? Of course not! There’s nothing there for them! But to us, that much ice and metal is a perfect colony location, and even the boiling and frozen planets might have potential for the colony’s descendants. Fleet splits used to be a big deal, but did you know that for the past twelve colonies, we’ve had a split every third colony? We might have another one here, given how much metal there is, and that’s even more recent, only two colonies since the last one. Assuming there’s more than one good candidate for the next star of course; those decisions won’t be made until we’re in orbit and can do proper, thorough, long-term Kleiner scans.

“The fleet spends generations just drifting through space without much to do except survive and innovate. Strange new breakthroughs happen all the time, and are unpredictable. Ten colonies ago, we didn’t have the ferrocarbon tech used to make this very ship’s signal reception array, and that same tech was used to create dynamic radiation shielding at the last colony, which would’ve been uninhabitable without it. Four colonies ago, the Lancer created a new heat dispersal system that let them bring their incredibly hot new metal factories online, and that same dispersal system is being looked at as tech to let us build on planets with atmospheres way closer to stars than we usually do. It hasn’t been used for that yet, but if the scan at the Dragonseye shows any promising but way-too-hot planets…

“We’re constantly learning to colonise more and more stars, in better, safer and more stable ways. And those stars you’re looking at out there? They’re very, very far away. I think that by the time most of them come into range, they’ll be viable colony targets, and that means that the distances between colonies will be much shorter, which means that not only will communications be better but also that the journeys for the fleet will be shorter and safer and require less resources, and we’ll be able to split more often to cover more stars. Or maybe the fleet will just decide to stay together and zig-zag between the stars, taking its time.”

“We shouldn’t do that,” I said automatically. “We should keep heading away from the galactic centre, as fast as possible.”

“Huh? Why?”

I didn’t know. I changed the subject. “Why are the rings different colours?”

“The what?”

“On the map. Most of them are gold, but some of them are in other metals.”

“Oh! They’re the children off different fleets. The gold rings are our own colonies; the others are clusters that we receive from that were seeded by split-off fleets.”

I turned away from the stars to gape at him. “We’re in contact with the colonies of other fragments of the fleet?!”

“Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t we be? The connections are less stable for various boring reasons of physics and protocol, but a transmission is a transmission. If they happen to make contact with one of our colonies or vice versa – which, again for boring physical reasons, is a lot rarer than you’d think but does sometimes happen by chance – then the two networks are now one network. We’re currently, or at least we were at the last colony, in contact with two small groups of colonies settled by other fleets, and they are, well, they are something.”

“They’re ‘something’?”

“The fleet tends to split along seams. If there’s some ideological or political or even physical issue dividing it in two, it self-sorts. For example, if we do split at Dragonseye, I suspect it’ll be because of this virus thing – ships that want to avoid contamination will go one way, and ships that are either already contaminated or happy to risk it in the name of progress will go the other. And of course, our fragment, the fleet of the Courageous and the Arborea Celestia, is always the traditional one. Those two ships won’t rush off with a fragment doing something new and dangerous and dramatic. So when the other fragments go and make their colonies, they can be… very different from ours. Let me show you Talos sometime. Well, technically they’re Isosceles Two, but they call themselves Talos. Weird, weird place. Impeccable transmission protocols.”

“That thing you said about our colony creation tech getting better. They said the opposite on the Stalwart.”

“You jump around in conversations a lot, did you know that?”

I ignored that. “Ella said that it’s hard to make new tech for colonies because the conditions of colonies and of the fleet are so different.”

“Ah. Let me guess. This Ella works with those new hull plants, right?”

“Is she wrong?”

“She’s right for some types of tech and wrong for others. A lot of the tech that improves colony building also improves the fleet; new ways to make metals and ceramics, new engines or heat shielding systems, advancements in food production. A lot of this stuff is employed on ships between colonies just fins and we know how it operates over time. Things like the plants are a more specific sort of case; the vaunted colonisation paradox is absolutely a limitation in some fields of development, but not a wall to all, or even most, development.”

“Do you think the plants are a bad idea?”

“Oh, they’re a fantastic idea! They’re key to our support of the Hexacorallia bid, you know.”

“The Dish is supporting a colony bid?”

“Of course we are! Why wouldn’t we? I know our crew’s a bit small to mean much, but Hexacorallia has our full and unanimous support.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the Stalwart’s plants,” he told me.

“Why would the Dish care about the plants?”

“Why indeed?” He gave me a little wink. For some reason. I’d been thinking that Gara was the most normal person on this ship, but now I was thinking that maybe Old Teeth was easier to understand.

Or maybe nobody on this ship made sense. That was also a possibility.

That night, I finally had the dream I’d been expecting for a while. I stood in a view port on the Courageous, but as I looked out at the stars, I saw the view from the Dish. And out there, little colonies shone bright gold and silver, points of communication somehow visible against the stars. Most of them were gold; our colonies. A couple of groups of silver clustered at either side. (They were the wrong stars for it, but I knew in the dream that that didn’t actually matter. These were the stars I most recently remembered seeing, so they were the ones my mind used. I’d seen the galactic centre so rarely that I wasn’t sure I could remember those ones well enough to dream of them.)

And behind them, a darkness. The darkness of silence, of isolation and, I somehow knew for certain in the dream, of inevitable, invisible death. A cloud of it ever-expanding to devour the network, colony by colony.

I stared at it, afraid. A nameless, instinctive fear, nestled deep in my bones. And on top of that, confusion.

Because I was afraid of the darkness behind us, yes.

But for some reason, I was even more afraid of the clusters of foreign colonies shining silver in the stars.

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