69: Mutually Assured Survival

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This was a test.

The capuchins being in charge was big news, but that wasn’t as urgent as the way that all three of them were watching me. Like a plant in the lab with a changed gene, that might grow better or worse vines because of it. The information didn’t matter as much as the fact that they were telling it to me. Why? They didn’t tell us when we got here. It wasn’t in any of the stuff I’d read about the Stalwart. They took me away from the historians, alone, into this little room, to tell only me.

And now they were waiting to see how I’d react.

I glanced at Fari and remembered a conversation I’d had forever ago in a cafe with Yamin. Where he’d explained the treegrave to me and watched me to see what questions I would ask, what I would think and feel.

“Thank you, for having me aboard,” I said to Captain Red. “You run a lovely ship.”

I couldn’t read the captain’s body language as well as I wanted, but Fari and Ella relaxed a tiny bit. Whatever rules they were using to judge me, I had gained points.

“A long time ago,” Fari said, “there was a revolution on this ship. Are you familiar with it?”

“I know you had one, but I don’t know anything about it.”

Captain Red asked Fari something, and Fari shook his head. “No, not really. Most of the older ships have a few revolutions in their history; there’s no reason she would’ve thought it important enough to look up.”

“And it’s not like the important stuff is advertised to outsiders anyway,” Ella added. To me, she said, “A long time ago, humans built this ship to be as efficient as possible. They used a double orb design instead of the wildly inefficient ancient ring designs, outfitted it with the best engines and recycling systems of the age, and filled it with driven, forward-thinking people who wanted to come together and make the best ship that they could make. And they optimised their education, and they optimised their time and their productivity, and they optimised their physical systems, too, improving manufacturing and recycling in ways that would be picked up by other, newer ships.”

“And they worked to optimise their own genetics, too,” Fari said. “As I’m sure you are aware, our ship is not largely restricted to pre-fleet genestock like yours; the children born here mature faster, with better health, focus and memory, than the average person on your ship.”

“But,” Ella said, “there are limitations on what it is practical for humans to do. You can engineer humans to be small, or strong, or agile, or whatever you like, but there are limits. At some point you’re just fighting against the template. Sometimes it’s better to start with a template closer to what you want to end up with. So, when it came to delicate work in confined areas, the capuchins were an obvious choice. Their Earth predecessors were arboreal, and they’re naturally comfortable with climbing and moving about in three dimensions. They require less food, air and water than humans to do the same tasks. And trained capuchins move around in zero pull far better than trained humans. There are of course many things that humans do much better than capuchins, but there are other things that capuchins are more efficient for than humans. So, our ancestors started breeding them, and experimenting with raising their intelligence so that they could do maintenance and engineering and soforth.”

It wasn’t hard to guess what happened next. My worst fears about how the capuchins were treated were true… many, many generations ago. “But they weren’t citizens on the ship,” I said. “Most of the humans probably didn’t think of them as people or think they had much capacity for feeling real misery or oppression, did they? They just figured, oh, they’ve got food and they’ve got jobs to do, let’s make sure they do those as efficiently as possible and not think too hard about it.”

The three exchanged glances. Fari nodded. “Most people who didn’t work directly with the capuchins didn’t know how smart they were, we think,” he said. “And their trainers and handlers… were a mixed group. We have records of good caretakers who did their best for them, and records of bad ones who… most definitely didn’t. I won’t disturb you with all the details, but at some point, a breaking point was reached, and those cute little fuzzy beasts who live in their cages down the back of the ship where most people don’t have to think about them… well.”

“There was no contest, really,” Ella said. “The capuchins had no power and no understanding of ship politics and no say in resource distribution, but it was their hands that built and maintained the air and water control systems. They couldn’t unlock their own cages, but they could wait until a enough rebels were at work in human-inaccessible areas to start locking rooms and use hostages to demand that their keepers unlock the rest. According to the records, it took them less than one day to have the whole ship under their control, all external communication systems offline, and humans corralled weaponless into the cargo bays.”

“The plan was to simply kill all the humans,” Fari said, “but there, they hit somewhat of a snag. Because no matter how much the diehard rebel leaders wanted to destroy every human on the Stalwart and build a society where their oppressors could never be a threat again, most of the others were somewhat less happy about unilateral genocide. All of them had at least a couple of human friends, and several of them pointed out that there were a lot of ship systems that they didn’t know how to operate and it could be very dangerous to learn by trial and error.”

“The infighting gave the humans time to rally around a spokesperson,” Ella continued, “who the capuchins deigned to hear out. She pointed out that killing the humans would doom all of the capuchins permanently, because the capuchins didn’t have something critical to survival in this fleet.”

“Charter status,” I said. “No other ship would trade with a ship full of human-killing capuchins. In fact, they’d probably kill all the capuchins and salvage the Stalwart for parts, or restaff it with new humans.”

“Er, yes. Exactly that. Killing all the humans would mark the whole capuchin species for death, since they were all on this ship and had no status; forcibly exiling them would very likely lead to a slower death if the rest of the fleet had no particular reason to trade with them. Even if they did somehow manage to form trade relations with human ships, which was very unlikely because they had no diplomatic history with any other ships and throwing all the humans off the ship is not a good first impression and they didn’t have a hope of getting anyone to change the fleet charter to force anyone else to recognise them, they’d be on a time limit set by the minds in the treegrave. Capuchins can’t safely carry the geneset that lets human minds safely join the treegrave, and any attempt to find an equivalent would be uncertain in its results, take a great many years, and probably kill a lot of capuchins; besides which, the official charter definitions of a treegrave specify human minds just as much as the other laws specify humans, so there’s no guarantee that a capuchin treegrave would be recognised by the fleet as giving them fleet ship status anyway.”

“So humans were critically required for diplomacy,” I said.

Captain Red chittered something.

“And carrying heavy stuff,” Fari translated with a little smile. “We’re good at that, apparently.”

“The point,” Ella said, “is that the capuchins who wanted to kill all humans, and the humans who wanted to kill all capuchins, were both in the minority, so it was a relief to everyone involved to be in a situation where either genocide was wildly impractical. Killing or exiling all humans put the ship at risk from the rest of the fleet; if the humans were allowed to live and conspired to kill the capuchins, then they’d have to redesign multiple core ship systems to be more human-accessible and rebuild half of the ship. But there was a lot of anger and a handful of extremists on both sides, and a new balance would need to be found that increased our dependence on each other and made serious conflict with the other side unthinkable.”

“So that’s what happened,” Fari said. “Capuchins were given command of the ship as a whole, and direct control of the treegrave. Humans handle many industrial systems, and diplomacy with other ships. Our ancestors set up a situation so that there could be no good outcomes to a war, and created cultural incentives so that serious resentments would die off with the generations involved in the conflict, and their descendants would know only peace and comradeship with each other. It’s been working pretty well so far.”

I glanced between the two humans, who were watching me carefully. I lanced at Captain Red, who, except for one little joke, hadn’t said anything through their whole explanation. The explanation had definitely been rehearsed, and the three of them had barely looked away from me the entire time. Watching, Judging.

Don’t get distracted by the explanation, I reminded myself. This is a test.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“You seemed really interested in the capuchins,” Ella shrugged, trying to sound way more casual than the situation suggested. A lie, obviously. Of course I was curious about the capuchins, but if that was all it was then I would’ve been able to look this information up. I probably would’ve learned it before ever coming aboard the Stalwart. This stuff was probably well-known on the Stalwart, but it was obviously supposed to be kept secret from outsiders. And the idea that a ship captain would be here just because I was curious was ridiculous.

So why single me out? Obvious reason: my friendship with Tikka. My plans for the capuchins. Let’s assume that I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was, and that the Stalwart knew what I was planning. Maybe they were telling me this so that I wouldn’t get all the Courageous kids interested in giving the capuchins help that they apparently didn’t need, since they clearly didn’t want the rest of the fleet to know that this ship wasn’t human-controlled. Maybe that’s what I was being tested for. To see if I could be trusted to drop those plans, to keep quiet about the capuchins. And if I couldn’t, then they might try… something else?

Was I in danger?

No, no; this was too high risk for that. If they already thought I might cause trouble, they wouldn’t be giving me a bunch more dangerous secrets. If they wanted to stop me from changing anything then they –

Was that what they wanted?

Was the point the opposite? Did they want the attention of the Courageous, but not the diplomatic risks of asking for it? Maybe that was what this was about; maybe they wanted me to have the right information so I could call attention to the right things. To some other problem that they couldn’t tell me about, oh no, but that I, a random Courageous kid who hadn’t been directly put up to anything by the Stalwart, had figured out and decided to do on my own. Maybe they weren’t testing me as a threat. Maybe they were testing my usefulness.

Was I being recruited like a secret agent in a spy story?

“Why are you all so secretive about this?” I asked. “I mean, outsiders might look down on the Stalwart humans if they knew, but not enough to cause any real problems. You have a treegrave, you have human citizens and diplomats, and your humans are protected by the charter so if they don’t like being here they can leave. A couple of months ago, I was on a ship run by clone servants who were copies of people bred to be test subjects for an ancient type of genetic engineering. Other ships being asked to see capuchins as equals or include them in the fleet charter would probably cause problems, but since your diplomacy is already being done by humans, I just don’t see why the rest of the fleet would care about this. Why hide your command structure from outsiders? Why try to hide the existence of capuchins at all?” I spoke to Captain Red. “Why tell your kids they’ll die on other ships, and discourage them from messaging other ships? Why write your ship information from outsiders in a way that will make them assume you’re human? Why keep secrets like this?”

“We won’t be able to for much longer,” Fari admitted. “Previously, we’ve had very little immigration in either direction, and not many visitors except from a couple of key ships. But with the upcoming colony bid and the plants and everything, we’ve had consulting scientists all over the place.”

“You’re the fifth person he’s had this conversation with,” Ella said, which imploded my ‘being recruited as a secret agent’ theory unless they were recruiting people on lots of ships. “But you’re from the furthest away, and the youngest by a long shot.”

“To be honest,” Fari said, “I expected to be having this conversation with your companions. I thought that a group of young historians would be really interested in our culture and figure most of this out on their own pretty quickly, and we’d have to tidy everything up. I didn’t expect to be doing it with you.”

“Don’t tell them I said this,” I said, “but I don’t think the historians are very good at their jobs.”

Everyone laughed at that, and the last of the tension bled out of the room. Fari sounded more relaxed when he said, “The capuchins keep to themselves as part of the ancestral bargain. It’s similar to how we’re not allowed access to the treegrave; they’re not allowed access to our diplomatic channels. The agreements are based on both species needing each other to survive.”

“And do you think that that’s even necessary?” I asked. “I mean, back when the revolutionaries were alive and everyone remembered either being abused in cages or nearly getting killed in a cargo hold, sure. But if you guys didn’t need each other, would anything bad happen?”

“No,” Fari said. “It’s mostly tradition at this point.”

Captain Red chittered something, and Fari translated, “A tradition that some of the upstart kids don’t take seriously, but what can you do.”

Ella was still watching me with complete focus while he spoke. I was still being tested. But… ah. I’d misunderstood. The captain was a commanding officer, but Ella and Fari were scientists.

It was the other kind of test. I wasn’t on trial. I was an experiment.

“You’re getting a lot more visitors,” I said, “who have friends on other ships, so the capuchins are getting talked about more. And the younger capuchins are seeing a lot more foreigners than previous generations, and asking questions about other ships and getting restless. Everyone’s getting restless as we approach Dragonseye, and if Hexacorallia wins the bid, the capuchins and your command situation are going to become common knowledge. Many ships will probably still never hear of any of this, but it’ll be as much common knowledge as the work with virus is. It’ll be more attention than you’ve ever had, and you’re a bit worried about how outsiders will react.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” Fari asked.

“I suppose so,” I said. “As an outsider, I don’t think it’ll be all that big a deal. I think there’s only really one thing that might cause problems.”

“Which is?”

I met Captain Red’s eyes. “Do Hexacorallia know that you’re planning to steal their colony?”

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