62: Hamelin

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“And then you catch the arm on the twirl – yep, you got it!” Other Haken said as I took her arm and halted my spin. “That’s pretty good for someone who doesn’t live in zero pull.”

“I played a lot of markball on Hexacorallia,” I said.

“The sport of champions,” Haken said placidly from over by the wall. We had one week left on the Dish and the two of them were teaching me a zero pull dance in the mess. It was a lot more exciting than dancing in normal pull; you had to keep an eye on the momentum of yourself and your partners in three dimensional space, with no floor friction to save you. Professionals could do really intricate dances involving dozens of people, making brilliant, shifting shapes. I was doing my best not to throw myself or Other Haken into any walls.

“How did you come to live on a ship like this, anyway?” I asked Other Haken. “Did you grow up in zero pull?”

“How do you know I wasn’t born here?”

“Because Haken’s an immigrant, and you’re Other Haken. If you already lived here when ke arrived, ke would be Other Haken.”

“How do you know I didn’t arrive before she was born?” Haken asked me from over by the wall. And I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Did you?”

“No. We both came over from Starlight about four years ago. I was a doctor and they needed one for their treegrave, and this brat is a mostly adequate apprentice.”

Other Haken stuck her tongue out at kem. “Before that, I grew up on a zero-pull industrial ship a bit further out. The Pillar. Boring place, but they did have some very cool dances.”

“And your parents sent you here with Haken to become a doctor?”

“Who cares what my parents want me to do? I met Haken when we were on a stopover for one of my dad’s stupid political things.”

“Politicians love doing their inter-ship meetings on Starlight,” Haken sighed. “And they’re all such snobs about it.”

“It’s more interesting than any of their home ships, trust me,” Other Haken said. “If you’ve got to have a neutral territory, why not make it the most luxurious ship in the area? Certainly beats being trapped on the rusting Pillar.”

I stopped even trying to dance and looked between the two of them, a suspicion forming. But… no. No, I was being stupid.

I asked anyway. “Haken, did you Hamelin her?”

The expressions on both of their faces told me I was right. I froze in shock. I was drifting towards a wall but I didn’t care. “You did!”

“It’s not like that!” Haken protested, at the same time that Other Haken said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” But I knew enough. I was looking at an actual, real life child thief.

I don’t know if the orphanage kids get warned, but Courageous kids who grow up in families hear a lot of spooky stories about Hamelin cases. Sometimes from grown-ups – “Don’t listen to a nice stranger who promises you everything, they’re trying to steal you away to another ship” – but mostly from each other. The thing about the fleet charter is that the rights of people (well, humans) in the fleet are absolute and inviolable. A ship can make its own rules but it can’t stop its people from leaving if they choose. There’s no legal groupings that they can use to get around it, no way to say that they have the right to force this group to stay or to restrict their communications because they’re a criminal, or because they’re a lower class, or because they’re too important to the ship, or because they work too high in government and know too many secrets.

Or because they are a child.

On the Courageous, there’s a lot of rules about how to raise kids, and about the facilities and family support you need to be allowed to do it. So a random person can’t just see a cute kid and decide they want to raise them and snatch them away. But what they can do is move to a ship with different guardianship rules, and convince the child to move with them, and if the child wants to go then nobody has the legal authority to stop them (except, of course, the ship they’re moving to, who can deny immigration to whoever they want). I got told a lot of scary stories about this when I was younger, and used to have nightmares about some bad person luring away one of my younger siblings who didn’t know any better.

Mum had had to sit me down and explain to me that these stories weren’t real. Almost nobody stole kids like this. Anyone who might want to would have to find a ship who would take them and the child, and that would legally allow them to raise the child, and also had to make sure that the child never simply chose to go home, and that simply didn’t happen because no ship was going to want to face the massive diplomatic consequences of being the child-stealing ship. It would be much easier for someone to just go to a ship with the guardianship laws they wanted have a child of their own there, or adopt one that already lived there.

On the very, very rare cases where Hamelin cases did happen, Mum had explained, it wasn’t some nasty lying stranger. It was usually a very close friend or family member. For example, somebody might leave their partners, which under Courageous law surrendered their rights to the children of the marriage, and they might be so angry and upset with their former partners that they couldn’t agree on being able to visit the children they loved. So they might convince the child to move away to another ship with them where they could be together. “If I or one of your aunts decided to leave your father,” she’d asked me, “do you think we’d do that to your siblings?”

No. Of course I hadn’t. So I’d calmed down. There weren’t any child thieves snatching random kids away to other ships; there was nothing to worry about. Hamelin cases were just scary stories.

Or so I’d thought, until staring at a child thief and kes victim right here on the Dish.

“I wasn’t some toddler,” Other Haken scowled. “I was ten years old. I could make my own decisions.”

And I couldn’t really argue with that, because I knew I was old enough to know what kind of ship I wanted to live on and who I wanted to live with, and I was only nine. “Why didn’t you just ask your parents?”

“Because my dad and guv are evil and my mum’s a coward,” she said.

“And nobody else was doing anything,” Haken added. “Family of snobby politicians show up on our ship with a little girl with scared eyes and way too many bruises, and everyone says how sad it is and that it’s a pity we have to ignore it. Because we’re a neutral ship, a guest ship, and we can’t go judging other people’s cultures; all we can do is give her a lot of good memories on a nice holiday and then send her back. I tried to make a fuss and was told to lodge a complaint with the Pillar and let them handle their own affairs.”

“And nobody there wanted to get in dad’s way,” Other Haken added Disdainfully. “A whole ship of cowards.”

“Two ships of cowards,” Haken said. “Even the rest of my run, no matter how much sorrow and sympathy they expressed, insisted that the only thing that was in our power to do was to be nice to her for as long as she happened to be on board. That’s one things I envy in you non-runners; you’ll never know the despair of being so abjectly disappointed by your own genome. It would’ve been so simple for Starlight to let her stay aboard when her family left, but oh no, we couldn’t have trouble with the Pillar, we couldn’t risk political problems, we couldn’t tarnish our precious reputation. After all, we don’t want people to think we’re stealing a child, so clearly letting a child get hurt is our only option. Though in fairness, they wouldn’t have accepted her even with her parents’ blessing; Starlight is almost impossible to immigrate to. If you’re not born there in a run-zero, you’re a guest unless you have some extremely specialist skills that no ship could ever pass up on. A ten year old brat with no useful skills wouldn’t have had a chance under any circumstances.”

“I have skills!” Other Haken protested.

“You are developing some rudimentary skills as a result of my excellent tutelage,” Haken said, inspecting kes nails. “You’re welcome.”

Other Haken rolled her eyes. “Anyway, we started looking for ships that would take two immigrants on very short notice, and there wasn’t a whole lot.”

“Everyone was very cautious about taking in a ten year old who wasn’t travelling with her legal guardians,” Haken said, “and I didn’t push too hard, because we couldn’t risk anyone contacting her parents about it. This little metal ball with three people in it was the only nearby ship with the courage to help, which, frankly, just puts everyone else in a much worse light. It’s truly disgusting, the perspectives and priorities of some ships out here.”

“If we hadn’t found the Dish and I’d had to go home, I was going to try to sneak onto a virus ship somehow,” Other Haken said. “I wouldn’t be able to be sent back to the Pillar once I was contaminated. But Haken pointed out how dangerous that was, because being trapped on a ship that doesn’t want me would just make it easy to be taken advantage of by different bad people. It probably would’ve taken years to sneak off to one, anyway.”

“Fortunately, it turned out not to be necessary,” Haken said. “Because I am luckily very clever and amazing.”

I didn’t get a chance to respond to any of this, because my sister squealed fro the doorway. “Taya!” She launched herself across the room to wrap me in a hug, which sent both of us sailing for the opposite wall and struggling to twist enough to land on our feet instead of slamming into the wall with our shoulders. Once we’d caught ourselves and scrambled for handrails, she continued. “Taya! Taya! We found it!”

“You found Denish’s notes?”

“Yes! Well, partially.”

“It’s a lot less than we hoped but a lot more than we could reasonably expect,” Tima said, entering the mess with Hali in a much more sensible way. “It’s truly amazing that they still existed at all. It’s only a partial blueprint, but it confirms a lot of our suspicions.”

“Also, not coded, beyond the normal mid-security file encryption of the time,” Hali said, “which we can decrypt just fine. I was worried that he’d use some personal code or something since he was working secretly, but I suppose he figured that simply hiding the file location was sufficient, because he just wrote in plain Texan.”

“Writing in Texan is a personal code,” Tima said, “because Aspen didn’t speak Texan at the time, remember?” To me she added, “We don’t have the whole blueprint, which means that either some of the file is missing or he never finished analysing the tether, but – ”

“But,” Plia said excitedly, “this is very good evidence that the tether was indeed a physical device that existed, and with a partial blueprint it’s a very simply matter to search the whole database of engineering manuals for a match! It’s not a fast process by any means, but it can be mostly automated. This is it! We did it! I can’t believe that we somehow actually did it!”

“We haven’t done it until we have the full blueprint and can build a working model,” Tima said, “but yes, this was absolutely both the hardest part and the least likely to pan out.”

“I’d say this counts as having done it,” Hali said. “I mean, yes, building a working model of the tether is absolutely the next step, but we have more than enough evidence to suggest that it exists as a physical device and we can make some very good assertions as to it purpose. With Tinera’s diary, Denish’s notes on dissecting the thing, our experiments with the electrostatic shield confirming the effect of going outside…”

“We still have to be careful,” Tima said. “This information, being released at this time…”

“It’s an historical curiosity!” Hali protested. “Sure, nobody’s going to like what it suggests about our history and culture, but I’m starting to think that the secrecy you insist on is more paranoia than a legitimate…” He frowned at her. “You’re sniping, aren’t you?”

“What? I am not sniping!”

“Yes you are! You’re sniping! You know as well as I do that this is big news and we have enough to make people take it very seriously. There’s no need to sneak around and keep the research to ourselves. Except that there are other researchers who are better at engineering or know better engineers than us, and if we go public now, they might build the model before they can. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You want our names on as many advances here as possible, and that can only keep happening if nobody else knows how much we’ve found and starts to take this seriously.”

“Huh,” Plia said. “I think you’re right. She’s trying to discovery-snipe.”

“So you two are going to insist on going public with what we have, then?”

“Nope,” Plia said. “I think sniping is a good idea. We put in all the hard work, we took the untethered heart seriously. I spent three weeks trawling through the most boring databases in the fleet on this ship, fuelled by pure intuition and a heavy dose of lateral thinking. Now it’s a matter of tracking down an old blueprint that we already have a quarter of the data for and finding an engineer to build us a small, primitive gadget. Why should we give away the easy, glorious part?”

“Hali?” Tima asked.

He bit his lip. “This isn’t how history is supposed to work.” He frowned. “But how history is supposed to work didn’t find the untethered heart, so…”

“Good,” Tima said. “Plia, how long will it take you to set up the automated search?”

“The search itself could take years. Setting it up? Maybe six minutes.”

“Fantastic. You guys know what that means?”

“Yeah.” Plia grinned. “Six more minutes of work, and we’ve done all we can. The rest of this trip is a holiday.”

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