73: Competence

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Weaving is hard.

Spinning is harder, but I gave up on that straight away. I found a workshop that had a little machine that could spin fibre into yarn, and the locks of hair I fed it spun up just fine. But I wanted to do the weaving myself, or there was no point. Fortunately, the ribbon I wanted to make was small, so I didn’t have to weave very much. Unfortunately, even weaving something small was hard.

I had no idea how Tikka had managed to turn her hair into something so smooth and silky for the haircharm. I wove mine together on a little loom and it came out rough and uneven, and I had to pull it apart and start again.

Also, weaving a charm out of your own hair takes way more hair than you would think. I didn’t want to cut my hair short, so I’d had a hairdresser cut locks of hair from near my neck, where hair on top would hide it, and I was worried that I’d cut too much and it looked weird. But oh well. Hair grows back.

“Your hair is a different texture than capuchin hair,” one of the many people who stopped by in the workshop to give me advice told me. “It probably won’t weave the same.” But I was sure I could do it. With practice.

It took me almost two weeks to get a nice, even ribbon, and even then it wasn’t nearly as nice as Tikka’s. What was it about being on other ships that made me so bad at stuff? I’d always been able to figure things out well and learn new skills fast on the Courageous. I was always one of the fastest in any group of my jaunts when it came to remembering stuff, or figuring out how to organise or sort things, or even learning how to cook food. Aunt Lia had taught me how to set the pins in a recycled microchip when I was five and she was really surprised when I’d figured out how to do it in less than a day. But out here, it was like I couldn’t learn anything! I didn’t understand anything that Ella said about plants, and I’d had ages to figure out the capuchin thing and I’d still gotten it wrong. And now I couldn’t learn to weave anywhere near as well as Tikka could, even though we were the same age! It wasn’t like weaving was hard; it wasn’t like I had to memorise a bunch of stuff. So why couldn’t I be good at anything any more?

But I had a ribbon, and it was good enough, and we were leaving for the Ironstock soon so I didn’t have time to make a new one anyway. It was time to stitch a design into it.

Embroidery is hard.

It took me a days of practicing on scraps of fabric before I was ready to try stitching the pattern onto the charm I’d made, and when I was done, it looked clumsy and stupid next to the one that Tikka had made me. I should’ve made something more complicated and fancy, something special, but I just wasn’t good enough. Maybe I could make one at home and send it to her? No, I had to give her something before we left. Ugh. It would have to do.

I stashed it in my room and went to have dinner with the historians. They were both already in the cafeteria, and smiled excitedly when they saw me. Plia waved me over and handed me my favourite nutrient shake.

“Taya! We can answer your hair question!”

“My what?” They could make my embroidery better? I hadn’t even told them I was doing it! If they knew, then Tikka might, and that would be a problem since I wanted it to be a surprise.

“You know, when you asked about the Stalwart people shaving their hair?”

Oh, right. That. “I thought you’d forget about that in a few minutes.”

“Tima made me promise not to look at our project results until we get home,” Plia scowled. “I had to do something, and getting information about the Stalwart is weirdly challenging. Not dangerously challenging, just. Annoying on purpose.”

“And yet you found it,” Tima said.

“Of course I did, I’m a genius. Anyway, the humans here used to have a normal variety of hairstyles. They started shaving their heads after an internal revolution they had awhile back.” She leaned close to me and lowered her voice, which was silly because nobody was listening in anyway and if she wanted to hide the conversation from the treegrave then we shouldn’t be having it in the cafeteria at all. “They’ve only had one, since it’s a young ship, and get this – it was against the capuchins.”

Oh, great. Of course the historians had figured out about the capuchins as soon as they even bothered to look into the Stalwart, when I hadn’t been able to figure anything out for ages.

“Yeah. Turns out, the capuchins tried to take over the ship! And here’s the thing about the capuchins, right; hair is really important to them. They’re always touching each others’ hair – ”

“I know that,” I said. “I noticed.”

“Right! So. They wrestled the ship back from the capuchins, and that was when humans all started shaving their hair. So I think that it’s a sort of declaration of superiority and separation, like an ongoing declaration to the capuchins, denying them permission to get close to them and really be part of the ship.”

“That might’ve been the origin, but there’s no way that it’s still used like that,” Tima said. “The humans are perfectly friendly to the capuchins not. It makes no sense for a single fashion choice to be held onto universally for generation after generation when that revolution is obviously ancient history. Fashions like that usually change within a generation; at most, when the last people involved start to die off.+ Unless holding down the capuchins was still an active and prominent part of their culture – ”

“It is, though!” Plia pointed out. “They’re kept here on this ship, and we have reason to suspect they aren’t usually allowed to even communicate off-ship!” And people are friendly and protective of them, yes, but have you seen how few of them are out and about and involved in public life? They – ”

“You’ve got it backwards,” I told them, not bothering to try to keep my voice down or anything. The people in charge would analyse the recording of this conversation anyway. The historians hadn’t figured it out, but still, they’d gotten closer than I had, by accident. They were probably better at weaving than me, too. “It’s not a social declaration of superiority. It’s a declaration of submission.”

The historians stared at me. I let myself feel happy about that. Time for me to blow their minds.

“You’re probably right about the grooming thing,” I told them. “Tikka loves my hair, and finds it weird and stupid that the local humans don’t have any. But if they started cutting it off to separate themselves from the capuchins, it wasn’t to say that they’re better than them. It was the opposite. The capuchins won that revolution, and the reason you don’t see as many capuchins running around here as you’d expect since they’re a third of the population isn’t because they’re discouraged from being here. It’s because humans can’t go to the important parts of the ship, where the capuchins are. The capuchins aren’t being restrained and policed by the humans, though I’m sure humans are heavily involved in holding everything together. They’re policing themselves to avoid complications with the fleet as a whole and to put on a political face that the rest of the fleet can respect and accept; a human face. But it’s the capuchins who are in charge here, and who have been ever since that revolution. This is a capuchin-controlled ship.”

The historians stared some more.

“Are you sure?” Plia asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” I said. “Look into it yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“That… does make a lot of sense, actually,” Tima said. “I can’t believe I never even considered that. Could you imagine how much it could affect the ship’s social standing in the fleet if it was openly known as not being run by humans? Was the coup violent?”

“Almost nobody died,” Plia said.

“They nearly did,” I said. “The humans could’ve been wiped out entirely. They had to broker a peace with each other.”

“We should keep this information to ourselves,” Tima said. “This could be quite dangerous, if it got out. Especially if Hexacorallia wins the colony bid…”

Yeah, that’s what I’d expect someone who was so obsessively secretive about the untethered heart to say. “If Hexacorallia wins the bid then this ship will have way more visiting scientists than it has now,” I pointed out. “It won’t matter what we say. It’ll all be up to how people view the capuchins, and whether anyone wants to make trouble for the Stalwart or not. And let’s give the Stalwart leadership a little credit – if they weren’t ready to deal with the scrutiny of the fleet, they wouldn’t have gotten so publicly and centrally involved in the Hexacorallia bid in the first place. The ship’s young, but they’ve held it together for a good couple of colonies. They know what they’re doing.”

“A couple of colonies isn’t a very long time,” Tima said. “It’s a baby ship, we have no idea whether they can handle the problems that might occur if they’re not smart about this.”

“Sounds like their business, to be honest,” Plia shrugged.

“Yes, of course it’s their business. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t go about announcing their business when we get home.”

“I… wasn’t planning to?” Plia said.

Tima looked at me.

“I wasn’t planning to either!” I said.

“Good.”

I wasn’t surprised when Fari ran into us in the corridor on the way back to our rooms and called Plia and Tima away to ‘meet some friends’. I didn’t make things difficult by trying to come along. Their meeting with the captain would probably be way longer than mine, since they were bound to ask a bunch of history questions. I went back to my room to play some games on the computer system.

I needed to practice that stupid ship piloting game that Tikka liked. There had to be something on this ship that I could be good, or at least not terrible, at.

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