82: Courageously Moving forward

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He understood!

The relief that swept through me made me feel dizzy for a second. Somebody else understood. Somebody clever, and somebody powerful and important, understood the danger that humanity was in, and was working to solve it.

And needed the help of an eleven year old girl to do that, apparently. So things still weren’t going great.

“What do you mean?” I asked, but my expression must have given me away, because Yamin just smiled.

“What do you think I mean?”

I leaned forward. “Dragonseye doesn’t matter,” I said. “None of the colonies matter. They’re a waste of precious resources and even more precious time.”

Whoops, I was wrong. He didn’t understand. He looked shocked, and not in a good way, and I didn’t have time to feel disappointed; I had to turn back into somebody he agreed with right away. It didn’t matter if Arai thought I needed a psychological evaluation, but I needed this man to trust my judgement.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that no individual colony matters. We have a duty to the Dragonseye, but we also have a duty to every colony made after the Dragonseye. We owe them the best that we can do for them, but the fleet is more important than any single colony, because the fleet carries the future of all colonies. It’s important to do a good job at Dragonseye, but if people get too caught up in the colony at the expense of the fleet…”

Yamin nodded. He’d been relaxing while I’d been talking. “Exactly. Priorities are very important. And while it’s always a bit awkward to admit this, some parts of the fleet are more important than others. Transmission and archive ships are important; manufacturing ships are important… above all, cultural ships are important. And the most important ship in the fleet is…”

“The Courageous,” I said. Easy answer. An answer that everyone knows, and one that was actually true; I didn’t have to pretend to care about the Courageous like I did the Dragonseye colony.

“And what makes us so important?”

“We are the heart and history of the fleet,” I answered immediately. “We are the original ship, the ship of Aspen and the First Crew. The fleet’s mission is our mission, specifically, and other ships were created to assist us in it. We are the beacon of human culture and human history, sent from humanity’s first planet.”

Yamin tilted his head. “Are we?”

I had a brief moment of panic, remembering that time, years ago, when I’d found out that the aspens in the treegrave were actually citrus plants these days, and nobody had seemed to think that this change was something that everyone should know about or even important enough to properly keep a secret. It was just something I’d assumed to still be true, and had been wrong about.

“If you’re going to tell me,” I said, “that we’re not the actual Courageous and some copy was made at some point and everyone is just pretending – ”

“Oh, no! No, nothing like that. I can assure you that the centre of this ship is absolutely the ship that left Earth’s orbit and carried humanity out into the stars.” He frowned. “As far as I know, anyway. History is very long, I suppose it’s not completely impossible that there was some vast conspiracy to make copies in the past and all records were lost. But I very much doubt it. The question isn’t what this ship is. The question is, is that what makes us important to the fleet?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Taya, you’ve spent a lot of time on other ships. You’ve told me what the Courageous thinks is important about the Courageous. What do the other ships you went to think is important about the Courageous?”

The… the same thing, right? I mean, I couldn’t recall anyone ever saying so, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that would come up in conversation, right?

What had other ships said about the Courageous? It had been such a long time ago. I would’ve taken notes if I’d thought there would be a test.

The Arborea Celestia. They seemed to agree with us, right? About the importance of our history? But they didn’t really count, because their claim to importance was the same as ours. We were the Earth ship, the beacon of human culture; they were the first real ship actually built on the journey, the proof that the mission was possible. And they, like us, went out of their way to carry Earth culture into space; we tried to map ourselves onto Earth culture in general as much as we could, and they mapped themselves onto Aspen’s culture as best they could. Of course they thought our history was important; it was what was important about them, too.

What about the other ships, though?

The Vanguard… well, I hadn’t spoken to people much on the Vanguard. But they hadn’t seemed all that interested in fleet history, from what I did see. They had strong opinions about the Courageous, and wanted us to have a good time on their ship and have a good opinion of them, but it wasn’t because they valued our culture and history; it was because of our political power, and the resources we could trade with them and ask them to carry. The Ironstock was the same, but cared less about us liking them because they were in a better bargaining position. I remembered lunches with my workmates on the Ironstock; apart from sneering a bit about “Jessies” not doing real work and telling me that they were glad I did know how to work, they didn’t have much to say about the Courageous at all.

They had been factory workers, though. Maybe the higher-ups on the Ironstock were more impressed by our history? Not judging by Yamin’s smug little smile.

Stalwart, Hexacorallia, Starlight, Dish. The Stalwart cared a lot about what the Courageous thought, but again, that was about our political power and how we could sway their chances for winning the bid. Ella had talked about our history a bit, but only because she liked that we could run long experiments; even then, she’d been much more interested in Arborea Celestia and their forests than in us, since we weren’t running anything like that. She was interested in our history only as something that let us be less efficient and do long-term experiments; our traditions were useful tools for longevity, our history something that protected us because it was something irreplaceable, so the fleet had to put extra work into preserving us. Outside of that… yeah, the Stalwart mostly cared about our political power.

Hexacorallia… again, political power. They were making a colony bid and we were a powerful voice. But we were a powerful voice because of that history, right? Because people respected us?

Or was that just a cultural excuse? I’d always assumed that we had the history, so we had the respect, so we had the power. But it seemed like we had the power, so we had the respect, so we had the power again.

Starlight hadn’t cared about us at all one way or another, that I could tell. But the Dish… they were archivists and communicators. History and the Mission were their two big things. They had to care about us as a cultural beacon, right? We were the past, they were the present! They carried the cultural beacon!

And they were five people living in a giant computer. It wasn’t like swarms of people were going on pilgrimages to the Dish to lay eyes on the star map or anything. Everyone just assumed that they were getting on with things and messaged them when they needed something.

If nobody cared about the Dish, why would they care about us?

“We carry… inertia,” I said slowly. “People care what we think because we’re powerful, and we’re powerful because they care what we think. We do carry irreplaceable history, which makes us a very high priority, but…”

“But kids are high priority for their carers, and that doesn’t make them powerful,” Yamin said, nodding. “A strong history alone would make us a trophy, not a leader.”

“But that history remembers our leadership. It’s all a sort of social inertia.”

He shook his head. “Do you think that there’s so little friction in fleet politics that inertia could carry us for that many centuries? No; I assure you, Taya, that if we weren’t out there actively doing everything we could for the good of the fleet, we’d be a near-voiceless trophy in fleet politics by now. It’s people like me, and people like you, who hold our position. Every ship has its own history, and we might be part of every ship’s history if you go back far enough, but they find the history they built on their own decks more important than the one they built on ours. They all consider ourselves as much a part of the mission as we consider ourselves. What we offer them is current, and practical, and valuable.”

“What do we offer them, then?”

“What do you think?”

I glared at him. “You like riddles, don’t you?”

He grinned. “I do! I’ll give you a hint for this one. It actually does come down to the age of the ship. But it’s not as fragile as being a living museum.”

I glared harder at his smug face. He didn’t give me anything more, so I got to thinking.

“We’re pretty big, for our population,” I thought out loud. “So I guess we have a lot more air in circulation per person than most ships? Which is… a useful redundancy? But I don’t see how that’s more useful than just having redundant air recyclers.” Spare air was much safer in storage than circulation, anyway. I glanced at Yamin’s expression; it wasn’t about the air. “Older ships are a lot bigger, because we used to be the whole fleet and have to carry everything ourselves. But smaller ships are better at – ”

He tried to hide the flicker, but I caught it. That was it. Something to do with the size, but not the air?

We were huge, relative to our population. That was probably culturally important, but Yamin had already said it wasn’t about culture. We gave the fleet something practical. “Is out mass practical, somehow? Too much mass is usually a bad thing.”

“Why is it a bad thing?” he asked, in that patient teacher voice that adults use when they’re trying to lead you to a conclusion.

“It’s expensive,” I said. “It makes the ship harder to move around, and takes way more fuel to speed up or slow down.” That was the answer; I could see it on Yamin’s face. Something to do with movement being more expensive; that was a good thing, somehow. But I had no idea how.

He must have noticed my confusion, even though I was trying to look on top of things. “You said we have a lot of space,” he said. “But it’s worth noting that we’re approaching a star. How much space do you think we’ll have leaving it?”

We’d take a lot of supplies leaving, obviously. We needed enough to get us to the next star, generations away. All the cargo holds and soforth would be filled up, and we’d be even less efficient at moving with the added mass, and…

And we had a lot of mass already, and really powerful engines to move it. How much extra matter would the Vanguard be able to carry away from the star? Or the Stalwart?

“We’re the fleet’s cargo hauler?!” I cried, indignant.

Yamin laughed. “What, not dignified enough for you? It’s a very important job. Half the offices, cafeterias, gymnasiums and even homes that we’re oh so used to spreading out into will be filled with tanks of water and metal ingots. The larger, more spread out farms where people grow unnecessary wheat or raise unnecessary sheep will carry tanks of nitrogen and helium and argon. We fancy ourselves the heart of the fleet, but we also fulfil the much more critical role of being the fat of the fleet. They don’t make ships like ours any more; why would they? A new ship needs to be able to move inexpensively; it cannot afford to be so wasteful. Nobody uses rockets as powerful as ours any more; they take too much propellant. Nobody makes huge, clumsy rings to pump needlessly large volumes of air through, shaped in a way that takes even more mass in hull construction. But since we need to be preserved for the history, why not take advantage of what we have? There is no competition. The only ship that comes close is the Arborea Celestia, and they use up so much mass on their floating forests.”

“The fleet has other cargo ships,” I said.

“Of course it does. All tiny, in comparison to us. It’s a dangerous proposition, to try to build something our size from scratch, in the modern fleet. People hardly ever even try it.”

“Hardly ever?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes, when conditions are right, at a very prosperous star and with really stubborn builders, people manage to get a massive cargo ship built. But the social and material conditions that make that remotely viable in the modern fleet are the same social and material conditions that encourage the fleet to split, and it doesn’t take all that much encouragement to send the competition off with the other fragment. If you’re splitting your fleet in two, why would you put both massive cargo ships with the same fragment? Besides, without our history and existing power in the fleet, they’d have a really, really hard time trying to compete with us if they stayed in our fleet. So it’s a self-solving problem, mostly.

“But the point is that while culture and history might protect us somewhat, our main value to the fleet is practical, and maintaining our dignity and a say in our future means staying valuable. That’s not generally a problem during the journey between stars, but every colony is a new battle to make sure that we can keep contributing. This is a time when ships move around a lot, coming into close contact with new ships and moving away from old friends as we arrange ourselves to best support the colony, and while allegiances can change at any time, they’re particularly volatile at times like this. This is a time when the tempers and resentments and differences of ideas that ships have done their best to keep the valve closed on for generations are allowed to erupt as everyone gets access to new resources and gets involved in making critical decisions. It’s the time when ships can easily be modified or changed, when the fleet can be fragmented, when new deals and partnerships are struck that we all hope – sometimes with more success than others – will remain stable until the next colony. This is the time when any big changes that have been happening in transit, that everyone’s politely kept as contained as possible and politely ignored because it’s not good manners to be making disruptive changes during transit even though plenty of ships are definitely doing so, are finally openly acknowledged and advertised and clash with other radical changes being made elsewhere in the fleet while everyone jockeys for social capital and the honour of imposing their advancements, their designs, their culture on one of the colonies that we all exist to build. This is the time when a much larger than normal proportion of people can be expected to spend significant time on other ships, working together to build colonies and harvest resources, often on ships that would’ve been physically too far away to visit during transit, so we can expect spikes of immigration in all sorts of unpredictable directions.

“This is the time when we redraw the lines, renew the trade agreements, and remind everybody that the Courageous is the heart of the fleet. This is the time when we must make sure that we aren’t politically left behind. And that becomes harder and harder with every colony. As we get better at making colonies, the distance between them grows shorter, which means less reliance on stored resources. Engine designs get more efficient, so smaller ships can bring more of what they need. The colony creates or retires smaller cargo ships as needed, and while any one smaller ship is insignificant to us, whether there are ten of ninety of them affects us quite a bit, especially if they’re too close to us when we leave the system and providing competition for the attentions of our transport ships. Every colony, the people in your position, the generation of Courageous citizens who have to secure our future for another long transit, have a slightly harder job than last time. And while I can’t prove this, I have a strong suspicion that with every colony, the fleet is more secure in our present and less interested in our past as it existed before the fleet and the Mission. Less interested in the specific part of their history that we carry. Our history should make us more valuable over time, but that only applies if people still care. And it will be you and your peers who have to make sure that they still care.”

“By working in interdepartmental Administration.”

“Anywhere in Administration. As I explained in front of you parents, working with me will let you see how a lot of departments operate. My colleagues have bright, promising apprentices of their own, being trained for the same sort of work. We’re trusting you all to decide where you need to be and to work together to save our ship.

“Will you save the Courageous, Taya?”

“Yes,” I said. “I already told you I would, didn’t I? Framing it with a trial few months was very clever, that’ll make my parents feel a lot better, but I think we both know where this is going.”

Yamin smiled. He shook my hand.

This man was probably very wise, and knew a lot that would help me. It was great that I’d get a chance to learn from him.

He was also pathetically small-minded.

We both cared about the Courageous, but I could practically feel the walls that he put up around his little universe, like nothing mattered outside this fragment of the fleet. I could hear it in the way that he spoke of other cargo ships that might’ve been competition for the Courageous, and how they tended to leave with the other fragment in a fleet split, like that meant that they weren’t a threat any more. He didn’t consider the other fragments to be the biggest threats we would ever face.

He was thinking ship to ship, colony to colony. He was thinking about keeping the Courageous relevant and powerful for one more journey to one more star, and then it was somebody else’s problem. He wasn’t thinking about how in twenty or thirty colonies, our distant descendants might find themselves hemmed in by the colonies of some fleet fragment that was faster and more forward-thinking than us, that they would pay the price for our laziness in solving problems by creating new fragments.

Everyone on this ship was so short sighted.

But of course I would do what he wanted. If the Courageous was going to survive by outrunning other fleets, we needed to stay powerful in our own fleet. We wouldn’t be able to do anything if nobody was listening to us. His oh-so-big-and-important problem was one of the problems that needed solving in order to solve the real problem. (Would he learn to understand the real problem? Would he help? His shock when I’d told him that colonies were a waste of time meant that he probably wouldn’t. But then, we didn’t know each other very well yet. Maybe things would change.)

“I look forward to working with you,” Yamin told me.

“And I look forward to working with you,” I told him. For now.

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