71: Evolution

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“And they just won’t grow solid!” Ella exclaimed over lunch. “But it’s better to find out now, I suppose. The problem with plants is that, like all other biological matter I could be working with, the stock didn’t evolve in space. Not so far, anyway.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, as usual. She hadn’t mentioned our meeting about the capuchins a few days ago at all, so I supposed that we just weren’t supposed tot alk about that, but it would’ve been more interesting than her plants. There was that one word, though, that kept coming up.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Evolve in space?”

“Well, you know,” she said, “since the stock we use is fairly close to what came from Earth, so far as we know, and most of the difference took place inside pressurised spaceships. We’re raising some of them under vacuum now, but in terms of natural selection…” she frowned at my blank expression. “Do you know about natural selection?”

I shook my head.

“Uh, right. Sorry, sometimes I forget how young you are.” (This sounded like a polite lie to me; I bet whatever natural selection was, Stalwart nine year olds learned about it, because everyone was such a smug rusting genius here. But whatever.) “Okay, so uh… hmm. How much do you know about plants or animals?”

“I’ve touched a sheep before,” I said proudly.

“A what?”

“You know, the animal that wool comes from?”

“Uh. Okay. Well, uh… hmm. I’ve never had to explain evolution before.” She frowned. “I’ts like… okay, uh. Imagine you have a bunch of animals. Like sheep. And they live somewhere that’s cold. And through sheer chance, some of the animals born here will have a genetic mutation that – do you know what genes are?”

“Yes!”

“Great. So let’s say an animal is born with a mutation that makes their fur thicker. And another one is born with a mutation that makes their fur thinner. Now, thick fur is good in the cold, right? So on average – this won’t happen every time, luck is a big factor, but on average – the animal, with the thick fur gene will be healthier and live longer and have more healthy kids than the one with the thin fur gene. So now, over lots of generations, more and more of the animals have the thick fur gene, and the thin fur gene dies out. But, fur takes energy to grow, which is a disadvantage, so if the weather wasn’t cold, then – ”

“Oh!” I said. “It’s like a tank collapse!”

“A what?”

“You know, in a biotank? My dad’s a farmer, they had one when I was five. It was an oil farm. They have these big tanks of cells, algae I think, and they make lots and lots of oil, and we filter it out and use it. But sometimes when the algae breed, there’s a mistake where they don’t copy over a gene correctly, and normally it doesn’t matter because it either does nothing or it makes the algae weak and it dies off, so who cares. But sometimes it doesn’t. When I was five, one of the really big tanks got a cell that could eat the oil they made. And this was a really, really big deal, because it meant it had this huge fuel source and could breed so much faster and better than all the other algae, and soon the tank was full of oil-eating algae and we weren’t getting any oil out of it. And there wasn’t any way to just kill off the algae we didn’t want, so they had to flush out the whole system and sterilise everything and re-inoculate it with fresh algae that didn’t have that mistake.”

“Yes! Exactly! The algae evolved to eat the oil, which you call a mistake, but for the algae was obviously an advantage.” She frowned. “From your description, I think it’s a lot more likely that the algae’s distant ancestors both made and ate the oil, and that the farmers simply deactivated some of the oil digestion genes and the algae reactivated them by chance, but things are built from scratch in the same way, it’s just a lot messier and takes a lot of time. Way back before the fleet, there were no genetic databases and incubators to just make living things with whatever genes we wanted. People had sex and built babies inside themselves; plants only grew where seeds landed or roots burrowed. So the genesets that arose depended on what genes worked best in their environment; the better a gene was at helping itself survive, in its own body and in other bodies, the more likely it was that it would keep being part of the gene pool. So all the genes that my plants have are ones that are great at helping them live on Earth, and a bit later, on spaceships. We’re having to invent the ‘live in the vacuum of space’ part from scratch.”

“Can’t you put them in space and let them evolve?”

“We are putting them in space, but no. They have to be able to reproduce out there for that to work, and we’re not even in the asteroid field yet. Also, evolution takes a ridiculous amount of time. The fur example and your dad’s biotank are very small and simple changes to existing infrastructure; radical change involves thousands or millions of collective small changes, and the majority of them need to be positive on their own or they have a much lower chance of spreading through the population to be useful later. I mean, technically speaking most changes are neutral, but the ones that contribute to positive structural – it doesn’t matter. No tiny change in a couple of genes is going to solve the problems we’re currently facing with vine growth, because if they did, we would’ve made those alterations by now.

“The plants probably will improve a lot once they’re out in the belt; that’s very normal for agriculture, as the colonists propagate the most useful ones on new asteroids. But that takes generations, and we’ll be far away before the colony ever sees results from that. We need a viable, working product to get them started, and the basic mechanics we’re working with all developed in a very specific pull range with a very specific range of temperature and light, in a specific type of atmosphere or hydrosphere. Just like human bodies. Because everything we have to work with had the audacity to do most of its early building on some random rusting planet, and anything we change has to be hitched to an unbelievably complex series of mechanisms built to work on that planet. Life is awful like that.”

“Do you think we’ll ever find life that evolved somewhere else to work with?”

“No. And if we did, it would probably be something that evolved on some other random planet with its own atmosphere and it’d be useless to us. ‘Cause everything we’re doing here is trying to create habitats for humans to live in, and that means that we have to bring everything back to the conditions of our stupid origin planet. And sure, we can play with making people more resilient to pressure changes or heat or inertial pull or whatever, but it all comes back to basic internal chemistry that works under specific conditions and that we simply can’t change. So life that evolved somewhere else would just give us two problems – making it work in space, and making it work with our life. At least with the plants I’m working with, we only need to worry about the space part; it can work with the internal atmosphere needed for humans just fine, ‘cause it’s the same atmosphere that it needs. But no, I don’t think that there is any other life out there. We would’ve found it by now.”

I should’ve asked that question on the Dish. Captain Gara would never have said something like that. “The universe is huge,” I pointed out. “And we’ve only seen a little tiny bit of it. And, maybe some other fragment of the fleet has found other life, or even some colony, and we’ve lost contact ages ago and so we’ll never know.”

Ella blinked at me. “The Dish make a big song and dance about how hard it is to get detailed information, but I’m sure that if somebody discovered extraterrestrial life then it would get around. The communication network can’t be in that bad shape.”

“There are whole colonised areas that are completely cut off from us.”

“Yeah, I know, not everyone is in direct contact with the fleet because lots of them are too far away or whatever, but everyone is in contact with someone. We can get information on more distant colonies from closer colonies; if new life were discovered, word would absolutely get around.”

“Ella, have you ever actually looked at the colony communication map?”

“Me? No, I do biology. If we want information on previous colonies, we call the Dish.”

Hmm. I could see why the Dish was so eager to make long-term communication with the Dragonseye colony scientifically important. “Four fifths of the colonies are out of contact, and the ship has almost no staff to clean up and archive what they are getting.”

“Huh. That’s a lot. But I’m sure whatever relay dish went down to cut us off will be repaired within a few years. Whatever colony’s responsible for that dish would have to know how massively important they are to the network, and a small delay is nothing given how long it takes for their transmissions to get here. We don’t have enough staff to run our lab either; it’s amazing how busy the fleet gets when we’re approaching a star, isn’t it? But I’ve never had any problem getting the information I need from the Dish. I’m sure there’s no need to panic.”

I blink at her. “After we’re in orbit and your plants are all set up with the colony and you have some time to yourself,” I said, “you should visit the dish. Like, in person. Put your body inside their ship.”

“Sure,” she said, in the tone of someone who had no intention of doing that, and would probably forget we’d even spoken about the Dish as soon as the conversation was over.

The more I spoke to people, the less strange it seemed that nobody outside of the Stalwart seemed to know or care much about the capuchins. At least the Stalwart had been actively avoiding spreading information. I had to assume that the Dish were telling everyone they could about their staffing problems every chance they got, and the colony network wasn’t exactly private information. If I messaged Captain Gara and asked for a digital version of the colony map, he’d probably send it back within a minute or two. Their treegrave would probably send it without even bothering to go through him. There was a maybe-dangerous infection out there being studied in case it was helpful, spread across a huge chunk of the fleet, and nobody outside those ships seemed to know or care much about it except to ensure that they didn’t trade people or air with those ships. There were ships staffed by people bred as medical test subjects, and nobody off those ships cared. Starlight was staffed by clones of those very test subjects, and they didn’t seem to care. How much stuff was happening in the fleet that nobody knew about because it just wasn’t something that anybody on other ships thought of as their business?

Someone had to know about it, though, right? The captains of the different ships probably got together and discussed all the important and interesting things that were going on, and tracked what was dangerous and who was in trouble and what important fleet resources and services needed more help. It just wouldn’t make sense for us to be living in a fleet where one day our archives or our materials transport or our decontamination ships could just suddenly fail and put the whole fleet at risk, because the other ships were just refusing to pay attention to their problems.

Well, it wasn’t my problem, and I didn’t think that I was going to explain the Dish to Ella. “Good luck with your plants.”

“Thanks. It’ll be a lot easier in a month or so when Sammo’s new apprentice starts working with us.”

A new apprentice, huh? “Are they good at science?”

“Probably not, they’re eleven years old. But Sammo will chill out. She never really forgave me for picking Fari over her and it’s made things very awkward.” She lowered her voice. “It’s kind of embarrassing to go too long without having a child or an apprentice, at least at Sammo’s level. Everyone has at least one, you’re not really an adult until you do, and a lot of the less driven people stop there, but when someone on Sammo or Fari’s level goes too long without one it’s like, why doesn’t any apprentice want you if you’re so good at your job? Some people just raise a kid instead, since you can’t do that and apprentice someone at the same time, but in a lab like ours there’s not really time for stuff like that; kids take so much time and energy to raise. So Sammo’s just been sort of awkwardly apprenticeless for a while and kind of blames me for it. Which is fair, honestly, but hopefully the new kid will get us past all that.”

“Do the capuchins do the same thing? With kids and apprentices?”

“Oh, no; they apprentice in groups. It’s a whole different system.”

“How different?”

“Well, one capuchin raises one kid at a time, like normal, but when they pick a career they work in small groups under two or three supervisors. And they don’t pick one until they’re much older than us; there’s a whole stretch of time where they’re old enough to work but where they do a lot of low-skill work of different types. I think it’s because they’re small enough to do stuff that full adults are too big to do, like clean vents.”

“And then when they’re too big to do that, they apprentice like you do?”

“No, no. Like I said, it’s like five or six apprentices with a couple of shared supervisors. Totally different.”

It sounded pretty similar to me, but I let it go. “I still have no idea what I should give Tikka.”

“Like Fari said. Something from your culture.”

That was the first reference she’d made to our meeting the other day. Did that mean that we were talking about it? Maybe not; she hadn’t actually said what we’d discussed. I changed the subject. It didn’t sound like she was going to be much help with Tikka, anyway.

I met up with Tikka and her friend Kapu later that day. I wasn’t really sure if I should bring up my meeting with the captain around her, either. Would it be awkward? I wasn’t sure. Besides, I didn’t know Kapu that well – she was still very shy, and I got the impression that she was probably only with us because Tikka had asked her to be.

We hung out in my room again, mostly so that we could use the computer system in there to translate the capuchins’ words, and they showed me their favourite games on the system. They liked the reflex games, and I played along even though I was more of a fan of puzzle games.

“What are you going to apprentice in?” I asked the capuchins while we pretended to pilot little spaceships through an asteroid field where the asteroids were way too close together.

“I don’t know, that’s forever away!” Tikka said.

“You should be thinking about these things, Tikka,” Kapu chided her. “I’m going to be a fuel technician.”

“Fuel is boring.”

“You think all work is boring!”

“What are you going to do?” Tikka asked me.

“I’m going to work in Rubbish and Recycling,” I said. My pretend spaceship crashed into a pretend asteroid that definitely wouldn’t have been moving like that in a real asteroid belt. “Or maybe Administration. I haven’t decided yet.”

Both of the capuchins seemed surprised for a moment, then got over it. I figured that they were probably remembering that yes, on other spaceships, humans could be Administrators.

“Those are really different jobs,” Kapu said.

“Yeah. I’m hoping for Rubbish and Recycling.” But if I figured out what was threatening the fleet, it might be up to me to stop it. And then, I might need power. I might need to be in Administration. I might have to take up Yamin’s apprenticeship.

My pretend spaceship crashed again and blew up. I threw myself back onto my bed in frustration. Tikka abandoned the game and leapt over to play with my hair.

Capuchins were always playing with hair, I had noticed. Tikka and Kapu combed each others’ hair with their fingers all the time. When I saw other capuchins together, they usually greeted each other by touching each others’ hair, too. Maybe that was why the humans shaved their hair here – they were all sick of capuchins combing their hair.

“Why aren’t the humans here depilated?” I asked.

“What?”

“Everyone’s bald. But they shave their hair. They’re so obsessed with efficiency here, so why not just depilate everyone so they don’t grow it? Do they use the hair for something?”

“I don’t know,” Tikka said. “Human question. Ask a human.”

“Humans are mostly bald anyway,” Kapu pointed out with an unusual lack of shyness. “Bald arms and legs and face and everything. Maybe our humans like to shave it off to look more even, and not growing it would be cheating.”

“Why would it be cheating?” I asked.

“Who knows? Humans are weird.” She dashed into the air vent. A moment later, after tugging on my braids a few more times, Tikka followed her.

Uh-huh. We were the ones who were weird.

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