75: The Factory

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There was something sort of dreary about the Ironstock. I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. It wasn’t the dirtiest ship we’d been on (that was the Arborea Celestia, obviously, probably followed by the Dish, since they had a lot of space for five people to keep clean and critical servers and soforth took priority), nor the least well-maintained (that would be Hexacorallia). It wasn’t the most cramped (the Stalwart) or the most impoverished (the Vanguard). But there was something stressful about it being just a little bit subpar in so many areas that grated on the nerves.

Hexacorallia had a lot of unmaintained or half-finished things scattered about the place because they were always rebuilding and reconfiguring, pushing forward and prioritising. The Stalwart was tiny on purpose, designed very carefully with psychology in mind to make the lack of space as unobtrusive as possible. But there was something about the Ironstock’s slightly-narrower-than-expected corridors and constantly moving machinery that couldn’t help but be a little bit dirty and a little bit worn down at all times that just felt stifling. They had so much machinery everywhere that proper soundproofing was impossible, so there was always a low, barely-audible hum of something moving, and you could get an idea of where you were based on the pitch. There was no decoration. Oh, people had decoration – they stitched designs on their clothes and put pictures next to their beds and baubles on their desks – but there was no public art at all, the only things breaking up the plain walls and chairs and tables being warning and navigational signs painted straight onto the bare metal or ceramic.

There was a blue stripe along all the corridors that I was allowed in. I’d been warned not to enter any red or orange airlocks, because they lead into decontamination rooms, and beyond those rooms were floors with different colours – areas where hazardous materials that I wasn’t genetically qualified to be exposed to might be. Further stripes on the walls, in different colours, showed which way to go to get to the nearest cafeteria, or resource depot, or medical facility, along with a bunch of other locations.

The ship somehow seemed to lack both public and private places. I didn’t see any private rooms while I was there – all offices had multiple desks, bedrooms had multiple beds, toilets had multiple stalls. These all felt more cramped than they were – technically, I had far more space in our twenty four person dormitory than in my tiny room on the Stalwart, but somehow it didn’t feel like it. Cafeterias and gathering places and recreational facilities weren’t big spaces in central areas (or even small spaces in central areas, like on the Stalwart), but just sort of crammed in wherever they fit, in a begrudging acknowledgement that the people moving about do need somewhere to eat or read or exercise in order to keep being people.

The people themselves were interesting. All the ships we’d been on were full of people that were close enough to base genetic stock that they looked pretty much like people on the Courageous. (Except of course the capuchins, and probably a lot of the Hexacorallia population that I didn’t meet, but the ones we’d stayed with all looked pretty standard.) But there were four different types of people on the Ironstock, and they were definitely not standard.

The most familiar form to me (they called their four types ‘forms’) were the lenti. It was obvious that gamma-ma must have been a lenti. They looked a lot like most people on the Courageous, except for a single sharp plate growing out of each gum instead of teeth (gamma-ma had always worn false teeth), unusually large ears, and thing, almost-translucent fingernails. They were also taller than most people I knew, but only by a little bit. They seemed to do a lot of bookkeeping, engineering and cleaning, that kind of thing. The historians and I were treated like lenti, which was probably a good thing. Definitely better than being a halti.

The halti were almost half of the ship’s population. They were big. Very big. Tall, huge shoulders, wide jaws, large hands. They were very resistant to radiation and all kinds of toxins, and did most of the heavy, dangerous work, especially with dangerous materials. I didn’t see as many as you would expect (I think most of them were in the hazardous areas that it wasn’t safe for me to go in), but the ones I did see seemed to be very calm sort of people, never getting mad or snappy when other people bossed them around, which happened a lot.

A form who were not calm were the kelti. There weren’t very many of them, probably because they were engineered for external work and you don’t need quite so many people to do that. They were small, radiation-resistant, and apparently could handle low pressure and very little oxygen if they had to. Someone proudly told me that so far as publicly-available inter-ship records went, the four records for ‘longest to survive in total vacuum’ were all from the Ironstock and all Kelti. Personally I thought that said about as much about ship safety as it did about superior genetics for external work (“we have no idea how long our people can survive in a vacuum because that never happens” seemed like a much more impressive claim to me), but I didn’t say so.

The handful of kelti I saw were jumpy and snappy. I had no idea whether they were naturally anxious or whether that was just the constant noise and smells and stuffiness from being inside the ship – maybe being in a space suit out in the open was more comfortable for them. I didn’t ask. They were apparently as radiation-resistant as the halti, but small and light, with long, thin limbs, and not strong enough to do heavy halti work. They were also respected a lot more; I didn’t see anybody try to boss a kelti around except for other kelti.

The last form, the santi, were about as similar to Courageous people as the lenti were, but in different ways. They were a little smaller, with shockingly pale hair – brown instead of black, even more pale brown than Hitan’s, and with hardly any curl in it at all. I wasn’t sure what they did, specifically, but I always saw them rushing all over the place with messages or with parcels in their hands. They had large eyes, and about half of them had blue or green irises, which I’d seen before but not very often. Eyes like that were very rare on the Courageous.

So the social structure of the Ironstock should be easy to understand, right? With different types of people all set up for different types of jobs, and with some types obviously more respected than other types, with the kelti being the most respected and the halti being the least respected. All very clear.

No. Because, like the historians had warned me, the people of the Ironstock had mantles. And nobody explained what this meant. Everyone on the ship, of all forms, seemed to be randomly sorted into five groups, and I couldn’t tell them apart; they didn’t wear different clothes or jewellery or anything. They had subtle signals and body language to tell each other apart that I just couldn’t understand. Which wouldn’t be a problem, normally, except that nobody seemed to be able to understand that I didn’t have one, which meant that when I was watching for people’s reactions to me, they would suddenly change at apparent random when I did something that made whoever was watching decide that okay, sure, technically I was mantleless, but clearly I was really in whatever group did the thing I did. I’d hold a cup with my whole hand instead of my thumb and two fingers and suddenly it was rude for me to ask too many questions or smile too directly at a seemingly random one fifth of the population. Except that somebody else who didn’t see me pick up the cup would hear my laugh and think that questions and smiles are fine, but touching the arm or shoulder of a different fifth of the population was aggressive if I did it. It was impossible to follow, and I gave up trying right away. Let them decide I was super rude. Whatever.

I didn’t even bother memorising what the mantles were called. Petty, but I don’t care.

On my first work shift, a santi lead me to a narrow room, barely more than a hallway, with a long bench down the middle of it. Unlabelled lockers lined both walls. Along one side of the bench were labelled storage bins, and along the other, a row of stools, most of them already occupied. The workers were mostly lenti of all ages, from kids about five years old up to old people, but there were a few people of other forms here and there. All the kelti present were old, and the only halti there were young children; I didn’t know if that meant anything.

My guide showed me to a seat. “You take a box out of the locker,” they said, indicating a locker in the wall behind me, “pull apart the chips, put the pieces in the right buckets. It’s easy. Javi will show you how.” They waved to the wrinkled, greying lenti next to me, who gave me a cheery smile.

“You’re the new kid, right? The visitor.”

“Taya,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you! I’m Javi. There’s a tool box in your locker; grab that, and let’s get to work.”

Javi showed me how to unscrew and lever apart all the different bits of the chips – how to peel off the rubber without leaving glue behind, how to lift ceramics from the metal, how to take out the tiny, tricky plating screws – and stick them in the right buckets for recycling. The work wasn’t all that hard, but I did have to focus, because some of the chips were dented or broken in ways that made cleanly separating the materials difficult. It was obvious just from how we did the work that these chips weren’t being refurbished; they were being broken down to their basic materials to be turned into something else. Which was puzzling, because a lot of them still looked perfectly useful with just a little bit of tidying up, and maybe replacing a part or two.

I asked Javi about it. “That’s way more work,” they explained.

“How is it more work to refurbish something than make it from scratch?” I asked.

“Because then you have a whole extra layer of sorting. You’d need people who can tell good chips from bad, and that means more training and inspecting, and they’d be wrong sometimes and that would make a big mess. And more space for refurbishing the chips, because that’s more complicated than building them from scratch since each one is different, and you’d have to train people special for that step, too. It seems counterintuitive, but it saves a lot more time and space to train everyone to treat all the chips the same way rather than having to sort out all that mess. Worker time is a precious resource.”

Huh. I’d never thought of worker time as a resource before. On the Courageous, there was always plenty of time, and things took as long as they took. If Auntie Lia had to spend twenty minutes carefully aligning and replacing bent pins then that’s what she did; it was surely more efficient than junking the chip and building a new one, right?

Behind me, the lockers hummed faintly with the sound of factory machines a few rooms away. I supposed that that depended on that you had available, and the people on the Ironstock always seemed to be short of work time.

So I spent the shift carefully destroying perfectly good chips, some of which I was pretty sure should still work, and some of which were broken but in ways that even I could fix if I had the time and spare parts. (That was assuming that the actual microchips in the centre worked, of course; I had no idea how to fix microchips. You probably needed fancy machines for it.) It really did feel like a waste, no matter what Javi said, but it wasn’t my job to overhaul their recycling system. It was my job to pull chips apart.

There was a rhythm to the work. Some people on the line chatted while they worked; others sometimes had mini races with each other. (Javi told me that races weren’t actually allowed, because they resulted in more mistakes that someone else would have to fix later.) About five or six people to my left, three people told a story in the round, where they each made up a scene or two before giving the next person a turn. I was too focused on my chips to follow the story (something about someone travelling between ships in search of kes lost brother), but I could tell that a lot of the more experienced workers who didn’t need to pay so much attention tot heir chips were listening to it.

By the end of the shift, all the muscles in my hands and arms hurt, and I had a few nicks in my fingers where I’d caught them on sharp screws or edges. But it wasn’t bad work, all things considered.

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