The historians stayed in a pretty good mood for the rest of our time on the Dish, and I couldn’t blame them. But a few days before leaving, as the historians and I ate in the mess, Hali stared wistfully at the walls, barely picking at his food.
“We could keep going, you know,” he said out of nowhere.
“You mean onto another ship?” Tima asked.
He nodded.
“Which one? Against all odds, we’ve got a partial blueprint. I don’t think any ships further out are going to give us anything about the untethered heart that e can’t just get from – ”
“Dent the untethered heart!” Hali’s eyes looked almost feverish. “We’re never going to be this far away from home again, do you understand? And this time period is never going to happen again, either. Things change when the fleet makes a colony, and change again when it takes off again. Just think about the handful of ships we’ve seen, and all the different ways they live and the cool things they’re doing, and imagine how many more things the rest of the fleet must be doing, how much stuff that we’d never even think of could be happening out on the fringes! This is our only chance to see it, and we don’t have to be on the Courageous for Plia’s search algorithms to do their thing on the Dish. We don’t have to turn around and go home and miss out on it all.”
He said it like it was something he’d thought a lot about, something he’d rehearsed. The other historians noticed, too; I saw them exchange a look.
“Well, I have to go home,” Plia said. “I’ve got to get Taya back, and I’ve got a boy waiting on me that I’m not just going to ditch. Besides, the drum circle must be really boring without me.”
“And all the people who owe me favours are on the Courageous,” Tima added with a grin. “What am I supposed to do, just let them off the hook? Like a decent person?” More seriously, she said, “I won’t try to force you to come home if you don’t want, but you understand what you’re proposing, right? This trip was easy because we had the Courageous’ backing. Ship-hopping on your own with no home ship to support you is a lot more complicated. We’re moving out of the area where it’s easy to get back home; it’s very easy to wear out your welcome on a ship out there and not be able to find another ship to take you in, and being unwanted puts a ship-hopper in a very, very tricky spot. Unless you can find someone who really needs an ancient linguist, you don’t have a whole lot of tradeable skills.”
“I have a home ship I can retreat back to if needed,” Hali said. “This one. The Dish is massively understaffed, they’d give their primary engines to hold onto workers with our skill set. Wherever I go in this area, so long as I steer clear of virus ships, I can come back here. And before I move out of easy travel distance, I’ll find another ship on the edge of that distance that also has use for my skills, and if I can’t find one then I won’t travel in that direction. I’ll be fine.
The other historians exchanged another glance.
“Well, if your mind’s made up,” Tima said, “I’ll inform Miya that he has one less passenger to take back to the Stalwart.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, good. You two can come – ”
“No.”
“No chance.”
“Fair enough.” He left the mess. Without asking me if I wanted to come on his trip throughout the fleet, which I was a bit miffed about. I would’ve also said no, but still.
Once he was gone, Plia looked to Tima. “What are the chances he’s going to go public with our research behind our backs?”
Tima shrugged. “I think about half? I don’t think he’s planning on doing that right now, he does seem to just want to explore more. But he could change his mind at any time. We should be ready to wake up on any given morning and find ourselves with a lot of attention out of nowhere.”
“Worst of both worlds,” Plia groaned. “Discovery sniping is already pretty underhanded, but failing to discovery snipe is just lame. If he waits long enough o be awkward but not long enough for us to build the tether ourselves, we’re going to fail to be the first people to build the tether and also look like arseholes.”
Tima shrugged again. “I think he’ll either disclose pretty soon, close enough where it doesn’t look like we’re discovery sniping, or he’ll get distracted by some strange new thing on one of the other ships and focus on that instead. I don’t think an awkward amount of time is likely to be a factor. Of course, if we want to minimise risk, then discovering the full blueprints as soon as possible…”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll just tell the automated discovery algorithms to search through the inconceivably massive pool of disorganised data soup faster,” Plia said.
And four days later, it was time to leave. I couldn’t help but feel a bit glum, and it wasn’t just because we were saying goodbye, or that the trip to all these new spaceships was almost over.
We said our goodbyes. I wished Hali well on his journey and he wished me luck on the rest of my jaunt. Old Teeth hugged me tight enough to hurt my ribs, and Flitch gave me a little wave without meeting my eyes. The Hakens told me to come back soon, which we all knew wasn’t going to happen, and Gaya headed to a conveniently angled view port with Plia and me to watch Miya’s HEX approach the Dish.
We wouldn’t be able to watch him dock, since we needed to be ready to board by then, and it turned out we started watching way too early. It was impossible to make out the tiny little HEX, still hours away, against the background of other ships partly lit by the harsh light of the Dragonseye. It was hard to make out anything completely, but if I shaded out the glare of dragonseye with one hand then I could see the other stars.
“What are you thinking about?” Plia asked me after several minutes of silence.
“Dad,” I said.
“Ah. Homesick?”
“No. You know how he always likes to go on and on about the biotanks?”
“Yep. He sure does love his job.”
“He goes on a lot less less than you do about your job.”
“Hey!”
“The thing about the tanks, right, is the bacteria. Some of them can detect light, but most of the tanks he works with have bacteria that can’t.”
“Yeah, I know. They use chemical gradients or something, right?”
I nodded. “They can tell how much food and how much poison is right around them, they feel it when it touches them. And if they’re heading towards food and away from poison, then they keep going; if they’re heading away from food or towards poison, then they go in some other direction. It’s really simple, they don’t need any kind of brain to do it, but it works pretty well at finding what they need and keeping them alive.”
“Uh-huh. Biology is amazing.”
“That’s what we do.”
“What?”
I gestured out the window, at the fleet, at Dragonseye, at the stars. “We’re blind,” I said. “We think we can see really far, see all those distant pricks of light out there, but that’s nothing. That’s just the chemicals touching our skin. We can barely see behind us, let alone ahead, and people behind us are trying to talk. The universe is far too big for the tiny little bubble that we can see to mean anything, and honestly, we can’t even see that, because we’re just looking at all those stars from decades or centuries ago and having to guess where they are now and what conditions anything around them is currently in. If a bacterium in a biotank was magically super duper smart, it would probably think it was getting all the information available in its environment; it wouldn’t be able to imagine light. And that’s fine, for living in the tank – until something goes wrong. If that bacterium hits the wall of the tank, it wouldn’t be able to detect it. It could be a genius of chemistry and all it would know is that the chemical concentrations get weird there as they can’t diffuse beyond a certain point, and that it also can’t go beyond that point. You could give it the genius of a treegrave and it would not be able to conceive of the spaceship outside the tank. And if the tank became contaminated and started to die around it, it would be utterly helpless.”
I turned to look at Plia. She was frowning at me, concerned. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked me. “When we’re aboard the Stalwart, we should find somewhere private and talk.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been in a really, really grim mood several times now on this journey. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought you so far away from – ”
“I’m fine!”
“She’s fine,” Gara cut in, unexpectedly. “She’s just understanding the truth of the universe. Very, very common for communications people who come here. You might have a gift for the work, Taya.”
“You might have a perspective clouded by wanting anyone with half a brain to work here,” I told him.
Gara chuckled. “Fair point. But you’re right, of course; we’re sailing blind out here. And unlike the bacterium, it’s not simply a matter of lacking senses. We can give people new senses, we can build tools to have senses that we don’t have; our problem is much more serious than that, and it’s one that genius won’t ever solve unless the laws of physics turn out to be unexpectedly permeable or local. We are up against the very concepts of time and space. Light has a maximum speed, stars have gravities and cosmic interferences that impede any signal and cannot be removed, and all the math in the world will only tell you so much about a distant object when the amount of actual light that can physically reach your measuring instruments is so limited. We are blind, we’re only guessing what’s out there, and while our ability to guess gets better and better over time based on local observations and consistently accurate models, the idea that we’re doing anything else is sheer arrogance.”
“That’s a very grim view,” Plia protested. “We’re not bacteria in a tank. We do build tools to detect what we can’t; our models that you call “guessing” can and consistently have predicted where stars and planets will be in the future, and our technology is always improv – ”
“Our technology, no matter how good it gets, cannot speed up light,” Gara pointed out. “Unless you historians find out that the Vault was actually real, that’s a barrier that’s not going away any time soon.”
Rather than get more confrontational, Plia just threw up her hands and laughed. “Oh, that would be the real scoop, wouldn’t it? It’d push the untethered heart right out of orbit. The Vault somehow turning out to be a real thing.”
“Weirder things have happened,” I grinned. “And we have lost a lot.”
“I think that if the Vault was real, somebody would have rediscovered it by now,” Gara said.
I shook my head, then grabbed for a handhold because shaking your head in zero pull is unexpectedly disorienting. “Obviously the Vault is made up, because there’s no reason why the Courageous wouldn’t take one into space with it when it left the first colony and there’s no way that they’d let the science behind it and the information on how to build more disappear, it’s too valuable,” I said, “but I don’t think that us not rediscovering it means anything. Colonisation paradox. The initial Vault was discovered on Earth, right? Maybe you need specific conditions to make them. Gravity – real gravity, not inertial pull. The right kind of magnetic field. Specific radiation from a specific kind of sun. If we have no idea what’s needed and nobody seriously believes in Vaults anyway, we’re not likely to just stumble on stuff like that, are we? Maybe there’s a few colonies out there that have the right conditions, but why would they be looking into it? What’s the chances that they’d find it before we lost contact with them? If the technology was real, maybe a bunch of early colonies discovered it long after they were stable and had lost contact with us, and we’d never know. Maybe they sent Vaults to each other.”
“And we’d never know or have any way of finding out,” Gara said with a nod. “Like blind bacteria in a tank.”
“How can you guys turn such an amazing hypothetical into something so gloomy?” Plia complained.
“Years of experience, in my case,” Gara said.
“Just natural talent for me,” I said. “People tell me I’m very advanced for my age.”
Derin Edala 
Taya unlocked existentialism.
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