77: Meet Up

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We docked at one of the ring docks on the Courageous, where industrial cargo could be loaded or unloaded, under normal inertial pull. The three of us stepped out, and I took a deep, deep breath of the air of home. I imagined that it smelled like home, even though I’d never been on this part of the Courageous before and I was pretty sure that the living areas I was used to must smell different. I couldn’t really remember.

Then I was almost knocked off my feet by two people running into either side of me and crushing me in a big hug.

“Taya!” Arai squealed. “Oh, you’re so different!”

“No, you’re not,” Hitan said. “You’re exactly the same.”

I pushed both of them far enough back to get a look at them. Arai was still the shorted of us, but she was a bit chubbier now, with round little cheeks and round little shoulders. Hitan’s hair had grown longer, and his bandanna could barely hold it down; he seemed to be almost my exact height, minus the hair. They both stared at me intensely like they hadn’t seen me for almost a year, which was fair, given the situation.

“What’s this?” Arai asked, running her fingers through my braids down by my neck, where they hung free from my skull.

“I was on a zero pull trip here,” I explained. “If you braid your hair like this, they don’t all fly around and smack you in the face with beads.” I looked at Hitan. “You hair would be a nightmare in zero pull.”

“His hair is a nightmare right now,” Arai pointed out.

“You’re perfect for zero pull,” Hitan told her, rubbing her bald head with one hand, which she quickly slapped away.

Then Arai turned back to me, glaring this time. “You didn’t send us any messages!”

“You guys didn’t send me any messages!”

“You should’ve messaged first!”

“Let’s not fight,” I said. “Let’s all agree that it’s Hitan’s fault.”

Hitan rolled his eyes.

Around us, cargo haulers were moving stuff onto the little vessel to go back to the Ironstock. Ahead of me, a chubby, tired-looking woman was approaching, slowly and calmly. Her hair was braided in a fancy style, and she was wearing her best wrap with her nicest sash to come and meet us.

Mum.

She came over, gave me a warm hug, then stood up and smiled at Plia. “It’s so good to see you two,” she said. “Did you have a good time? Learn a lot?”

I nodded.

“And you behaved yourselves?”

“Taya was wonderfully behaved,” Plia said.

“And you?”

“Are you sure you want to know the answer to that?”

Mum laughed. “You should visit more often.”

“When I have the time.”

“Your mother will want to know how your trip went.”

“You can’t mother-guilt me any more, Auntie Seri.”

“Of course I can. Parental privilege. That strategy never expires.”

“It was good to see you, Auntie. You raised an excellent kid.” She put her hand on my shoulder.

“I raised at least two excellent kids,” she replied, putting a hand on Plia’s shoulder. Then she let her go, and bent to pick me up. I was getting too big to carry, really, but she didn’t put me down until we got back to our home.

I was set down in the garden (yes, right, of course; this was what home smelled like) and surrounded by family. Everyone wanted to know how the trip had been, what I’d seen, what I’d done. The younger kids couldn’t understand what capuchins were no matter how much I tried to explain them. The adults tensed up when I explained working on the Ironstock, and I just knew that Plia was going to get some harsh messages about it.

There were changes at home, too. Laisor had left home to work on the Vanguard (I bet ke and Rodge hated each other), so wasn’t there. That meant that I was the second oldest kid in the household now, after Klei, and Klei was twelve and would probably be taking a jaunt to another ship soon. Tivon and Heron, the youngest, were old enough to start their jaunt; there were no babies left at home. Ivy thought he might be better as a boy rather than a girl, and was trying that out. Aunt Shorin was on a new art kick, painting people now; Dad had been helping out with some of the plants instead of the biotanks in Farming and he and Aunt Moli, who was of course still maintaining our family garden, loved hearing about the Arborea Celestia. (They had both been there on their own jaunts, but that had been a long time ago.) They were also fascinated by Ella’s plants, but didn’t really understand them; I think I wasn’t explaining them correctly.

It was hours before I was able to tell them all I was tired and go to bed. Which was hours early for bed, meaning I woke up while Rose and Ivy were still asleep. I turned on the low navigation lights, bright enough to stop me from walking into anything but dim enough not to wake the twins, and just lay there.

The room felt big. I would’ve expected it to feel small, since I was bigger, but I hadn’t actually grown that much. It felt big because Laisor’s junk wasn’t spread out over a quarter of it. My chain of silver birthday charms glinted in the navigation lights; I dug through my bag and added the ninth charm, the little leaf that the historians had made for me. It was ever-so-slightly larger than the other charms, not that I could see them all together. I supposed that they hadn’t had completely accurate schematics.

I got out of bed and snuck back out to the garden. It was empty and quiet, of course; everybody was asleep. As I sat down on a bench to admire the plants in the dim navigation light, I heard a voice that I had never expected to hear again.

“I missed you, baby butterfly.”

I sat up straight. “Gamma-ma! How are you? Are you okay? Do you like the treegrave?”

She laughed. “I’m fine, dear. How about you? Did you enjoy your trip?”

“Yeah. Hey, um. Can I ask you about the Ironstock?”

“Of course,” she said immediately, and that really brought home that I wasn’t talking to just my grandma. She would have agreed, but she would have hesitated first. She never liked talking about her past.

“Did you have friends from other forms? Friends who weren’t lenti?”

There was a bit of a pause this time. “It was a very long time ago,” she said. “I don’t remember everything. But… no, I don’t think so. We mostly stuck to our own kind.”

“I saw people hanging out with different forms all over the place.”

“Adults, maybe. As a kid, we kept to our own; the kelti didn’t like the noise in the places we liked to hang out and the santis were usually too busy. And then as a young adult… well, it was mostly lenti who did lenti work. The kelti who worked with us were all there because they were too old or frail or incompetent to do their own work. I wasn’t hanging out with old people at that age. And then I fell in love with a charming visitor, of course…”

“What about santi or halti friends when you were a grown up?” I asked. “I saw them everywhere, and they didn’t look more busy than anyone else.”

“Well, no, but it was pretty rude to get too close to a santi who wasn’t your personal assistant or something.”

“Why?”

“It’s an imposition on their time. Like, if you work closely together and they carry personal messages for you or run your schedule, that’s one thing. But if you’re just some random person, it’s… it’s like trying to make a cafeteria attendant talk to you when they’re working, and imposing on their time because they have to be nice to you.”

“I didn’t mean while they were working.”

“It’s still the same in your free time. They have to be nice to you. It’s… it’s just how things are done, there.”

“So it’s rude to impose on their time if they’re not your personal assistant or something, but if they are, where presumably they have to be even nicer to you, then it isn’t rude?”

“Well, if they’re your personal assistant then of course you should be friends. It’s much better if you like each other and get along, right? But of course I was just some random kid, so I didn’t have a personal assistant or work closely enough with any santi to make friends with them without being rude.”

That didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t think that asking more questions was going to help with that. “What about the halti?”

A longer pause.

“You have to understand,” Gamma-ma said, “that I left that ship when I was very young. And I grew up in a world where I learned to do what I was told and believe what I was told. And what everyone knew and everyone said was that only criminals and troublemakers hung out with halti.”

“The halti I saw seemed nice!” I hadn’t talked to any, but still.

“They are. I think they’re designed that way; a lot of temperament is biology. Whenever any of them made trouble, they ended up confined to hazard corridors anyway, so they were usually very polite when I saw them.”

“Then we have no idea whether they’re designed that way. Maybe most of them are angry and difficult and you just never saw them. But that’s not important; why do people think they’re criminals?”

“People don’t think they’re criminals; at least, not most of them. But lenti who hang out with them must be criminals, because why else aren’t they hanging out with a better class of people. And halti who hang out with criminal lenti might be criminals themselves, if the criminals talk them into it. It’s all… very complicated, and very unpleasant. It doesn’t make much sense from a Courageous point of view.”

I’d been there, and it didn’t make much sense to me either. Maybe I should have paid more attention.

“What was your, uh… the other thing, the gender thing. You mantle?”

“Lamar,” the treegrave said in a voice that was starting to drift a little bit away from my grandma’s voice. The tone, and the speed of the answer, made me think that it hadn’t come from my grandma’s memories, but looked up in a file somewhere. Maybe her immigration records. Maybe it had started pulling up her records as soon as I started asking about her, so it could answer my questions.

“Do you know about the capuchins?” I asked.

“On the Stalwart?” came the response. Of course the Courageous would have records somewhere about the existence of the capuchins, even if the Stalwart had been coy about their modern role.

I hesitated. I wanted to talk to my gamma-ma about the capuchins. I wanted to talk about the halti. I wanted to discuss whether they were okay, or whether they might be abused and controlled like the capuchins’ ancestors; even though they could immigrate, they could only do so if another ship wanted to take them, and the low computer access on the Ironstock made it harder to even look into other ships to make decisions like that. I wanted to talk about people, and justice, and freedom, and the fleet and what made a person and what people owed their ship and what their ship owed them and how dangerous revolutions could be and figure out if any of this, any tiny bit of it, had anything to do with the sense of doom I’d had for years over the fleet and the mysterious deadly thing chasing us.

I wanted to have that conversation with my grandmother. I didn’t want to have it with the Courageous treegrave.

“I think I’m still tired,” I said. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Sleep well, baby butterfly,” my gamma-ma said, as if I hadn’t just abruptly changed the subject.

So I went back to bed, and pulled the covers over my head where the treegrave couldn’t see me and worry about me, and didn’t sleep.

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