The trip to the Stalwart was uneventful. We had to put the braces back on and everything for the docking procedure, since we hit the Stalwart and nearly the same velocity that we left the Dish with, and after Miya gave us a quick inspection we tottered out onto a much safer ship that wasn’t piloted by people who didn’t seem to care whether they lived or died.
Fari was there to meet us, which I expected. Both Ella and Tikka were with him, which I hadn’t. As we strode in with our bags, Tikka chittered happily and leapt from Fari’s shoulder to mine, tugging at my braids and seeming a bit puzzled that she couldn’t lift them away from my head (I had, of course, left them braided in the zero pull Hexacorallia style for the trip).
“Welcome back,” Fari said warmly, shaking Tima’s hand and giving me and Plia polite nods.
“Thank you for having us,” Tima said.
“No problem at all! We look forward to hearing more of your insights; working with other cultures is always so educational.” He said it to Tima and Plia, but was that a glance at me and Tikka? It was very fast. Maybe I imagined it.
Tikka chattered excitedly at me even though she knew perfectly well that I couldn’t understand her. “i’m happy to see you, too,” I told her, which may or may not have been related to what she was saying. She seemed happy and relaxed, anyway. We could talk properly later, either in pantomime or with the treegrave’s translation help. Maybe I could get the treegrave to actually open up and be more chatty.
Ella stepped forward to shake my hand. “It’s great to see you again! How was your trip?”
“Educational,” I said.
“I bet. What was Hexacorallia like?”
“Fine. The Dish are really into your plants, by the way.”
“The Dish? That’s great! Why?”
“No idea. The captain wouldn’t explain it to me.”
“Huh. Well, so long as they’re supporting the bid.”
Nobody on Hexacorallia had seemed to care about the plants much. But then, it wasn’t like we’d been staying with scientists. The Stalwart’s plants could be the most important part of the whole colony plan and nobody in the creche would mention it. They had been testing out those old shields to use with them, so they probably were important.
“I reserved you the same rooms as last time, to avoid any confusion,” Fari was telling the historians.
“Thank you,” Tima said. “Then we’ll go drop our bags off. Let us know when you want us to get started on that file cleanup.”
Plia’s polite but flat smile probably meant nothing to Fari, but I knew that it would be Plia doing whatever file cleanup she’d been drafted into, not Tima; Plia was the computer expert of the group. This was probably how we were paying for our stay on the way back. The Courageous had organised our trip out and handled any exchanges, but Tima was organising our trip back, and we would probably be expected to do at least some work for it.
Well, Tima and Plia would. I was just a helpless little nine year old. So sorry, ships; I’m too young and uneducated to help. I might as well go and have fun while the grown ups do all the work.
Tikka followed me into my room, and the two of us sat on my bed and pulled up the computer system. She knew the system better than me, and pretty quickly got it set up to translate her words for me.
“After you leave, I won’t ever see you again, will I?” she said.
“Uh, probably not,” I admitted. “Unless you come to visit me on the Courageous. I don’t think I’ll come back out here. We can still message each other, though.”
“Maybe our ships will be really close to each other at the Dragonseye.”
I shook my head. “The Courageous is too big and clumsy to safely go into the asteroid field. I mean, it probably could, asteroids are pretty far apart, but nobody wants to risk it. I assume the Stalwart is going in to help set up the colony?”
“We will if we win the bid, yes.”
“And work with the other ships there? I spoke to someone on Hexacorallia who said that it’d be really cool to have some capuchins living there.”
“We can’t. It isn’t safe.”
“What if it did become safe, though? A lot of things are going to change, politically, when we start building the colony. Capuchins will be really useful, and I bet people would – ”
“It isn’t safe.”
“Why not, though? Has anyone ever explained that to you? What’s so unsafe about it?”
Tikka didn’t answer that, and I wasn’t sure if she didn’t know or if someone had just told her not to talk about it. Which was a pity, because I really, really wanted to know if I was right about the whole fleet charter thing being the problem. If it turned out that it really was something environmental then I was just wasting my time.
I didn’t want to push her on the very first day though, so I let her change the subject.
“I made a present for you,” she told me, then darted into the vent in the wall. She came back about half a minute later, holding a ribbon.
It was about as wide as my finger and as long as my hand, and woven in deep black and vivid red silky threads. It showed a pattern of interlocking red triangles on a black background, and when I turned it over, they were black triangles on a red background.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s a haircharm,” she explained. “Do you make them on the Courageous?”
“No.”
“Oh. I thought you might, because you have hair. Our humans shave theirs off. It’s a good luck charm. You hang it in your room, and it brings luck to the things you do or plan there.”
“Thank you,” I said again. “You said you made this?”
“I wove it out of my own hair, so when you go back to your ship, part of me will come with you.”
“This is your hair?” I glanced between the smooth, silky ribbon and Tikka’s shaggy coat. “But how?”
“We spin and dye it,” she said, and the treegrave’s translation didn’t translate tone very well but I just knew that she had to be speaking to me like a toddler because the question, when I thought about it, was stupid. I’d done my Textiles jaunt. I shouldn’t ask such stupid questions. Come to think of it…
“You wove this yourself?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all so smooth and even! Like it came out of a machine!” (After my Textiles jaunt, Aunt Moli had tried to help me learn to weave by hand. We both gave up after a couple of days. It was very slow and the ribbons we were making were coming out very bad.)
Tikka gave a little rumbling chitter that was probably capuchin laughter. “It’s not that good, there’s still a few mistakes in it. Grown ups can usually weave better than machine work, and my clan-king can make charms so good that you’d swear they weren’t even real. We get a lot of practice because charms are very important. Everyone here can weave.”
“Even the humans?”
“No, not the humans. Humans don’t understand anything.” She gave a little eyeroll, reminding me of myself when I complained that grown-ups didn’t understand anything.
“Does it have to go in a certain part of the room?” I asked.
“No, just somewhere you can see it, in a space that is yours. A bedroom or a personal office or whatever. Kapu and I hang ours in our little clubhouse, which is really cool, but I can’t show you because you’re too big to fit.”
“Kapu?”
“She’s my best friend! You’ll get to meet her in a few days; she’s so cool.”
Huh. I didn’t know anything about Tikka’s friends. I’d never asked. What a stupid oversight. I hung the charm over my bed for now. “I have the perfect place for it in my room at home. It’s going to look so cool. Thank you, Tikka.”
“You’ve said that three times,” she said, and climbed up onto my shoulder to hug my neck. I silently decided to figure out the perfect present for her and make it before we left.
Later, Ella was excited to show me new improvements to her plants, and pulled me around her lab explaining how an increased expression of some kind of protein or other (whatever that meant) might have improved the consistency of the the vines’ stem thickness, unless it didn’t, she needs more samples to be certain. I, to be honest, did not care even a little bit. I didn’t understand most of it, and when I asked her what “increased expression” meant and she explained it, I understood even less. But she was working on something that might have made her plants better in an important way, so that was great.
I might not care about plant stem thickness, but now that I’d been on Hexacorallia, there was one thing about the plants that interested me a lot. And that was that they didn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
“So how long,” I cut Ella’s explanation of some kind of statistics to ask, “do the plants take to be useful? I mean, once you plant it in an asteroid or whatever, how long does it need to grow before it’s made mining and refining the asteroid easier?”
“Five or six years before you can start tapping it for minerals, if you want to, but that risks killing the plant and slows growth a lot,” Ella replied. “We recommend leaving them alone for ten to fifteen years to reach full maturity and create stable internal atmospheres.”
“That’s a long time to start mining,” I said.
“It is, but the critical point is that it’s a long time that is almost labour-free. It takes some labour to plant the plants and baby them for their first few months, and occasional trimming, but they don’t require a whole lot of looking after. This makes the time it takes for them to grow irrelevant, except for the initial ten to fifteen year lag, which we don’t need to worry about because if we start planting immediately then Hexacorallia will be harvesting by the time we leave. If you plant once plant a month, you harvest one mature plant in that same month; the time it took to get to maturity is irrelevant, because you’re planting and harvesting at the same rate. So there’s always a mature plant waiting as long as you stick to that rate. It does mean that there’s a lag in expansion, but we don’t see that being a serious issue; if resources are critically needed and there isn’t enough plants then they can still be mined and refined the old fashioned way.”
“That all makes perfect sense from an engineering standpoint,” I said.
“Exactly! But it only works if they’re not prone to hull failure. High numbers of plants failing at random before harvest screws up the whole pipeline. Which is why this protein…”
I tuned out the rest of her explanation.
“Farin!” A voice snapped from the door of the lab. It was the woman who’d snapped at Ella that one time last time I was on the Stalwart. What was her name? Sammo. “Do you have those protein measurements yet?”
“I just finished the analysis this morning, chi,” Ella said tiredly. “I’ll go get them now.” She left, and Sammo turned to me, and for half a second I wondered if she was just here to find some way to talk to me alone (the first time we’d met, she’d offered tot ake over my tour from Ella, after all,) but she just gave me a polite, not-very-interested smile.
“It’s nice to see you again,” she said, eyes already turning to the rows of vines in the room. “Are you enjoying your trip?”
“It’s been very interesting,” I said. “So you work with Fari and Ella?”
“Sometimes. That girl grows longer in the hair every day, I swear – oh, no, it’s just an expression!” she added hurriedly when I reached up to touch my own hair. “Your hair is lovely, dear.”
She was clearly more interested in her experiments than in me, and if I stuck around there was a good chance I’d get caught in a complaining session about Ella, so I left. I went to go learn some new words that I would need to explain things, and then to find the historians.
Because I didn’t want to insult the people of the Stalwart, but I needed someone to talk to about the plants. I just couldn’t see how they made any sense.
Derin Edala 