83: Chronostasis

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On my first day of the apprenticeship, I was so nervous that I almost forgot to read Aunt Shorin’s morning note. (She’d kept it simple and short that morning, probably because I had other things to worry about.) I put on my almost-new jumpsuit and clipped my brand new keycard to my pocket, and headed for an elevator.

I sort of felt like people would stare at me in the halls, but of course they didn’t. It was shift change; there were all sorts of people walking back and forth, and almost everyone didn’t know me, especially since I was on the blue shift now. Sometimes kids did jaunts up in the treegrave, though they were usually a bit older than me. Still, little me with my nice new keycard wasn’t all that remarkable, to a stranger.

I tried to stop my hands from shaking as I swiped the card in the elevator, and started to ascend. I didn’t want to look nervous. I also didn’t want to look clumsy; did I remember how to move in low pull? The trips to low and zero pull ships had been so long ago.

I should’ve been taking tours of the treegrave, to get used to moving around up there. I should’ve gotten in practice. I was an idiot, who was going to look like an idiot. Rust!

Yamin was waiting for me right outside the elevator. The treegrave had probably told him exactly when I was coming up. I tried to look as coordinated and dignified as possible as I leapt out into the low-pull citrus forest and grabbed a tree branch to stop myself from slowly drifting towards the Dragonseye-facing wall.

He gave me a grin. “Are you excited to get started?”

I nodded. “Is there anything we’ll be doing that I can’t tell my family about?”

“No, not today. It’ll be a long time before you’ll see anything classified. But over the next few weeks, we will need to openly discuss a lot of things that most people find it polite not to discuss, so you might want to exercise judgement on what you tell them.”

I nodded again. That was fine. I was mostly worried about writing something I shouldn’t to Aunt Shorin.

“Today,” Yamin continued, “I’ll give you a tour of some of the facilities and people that you’ll be working with. We generally won’t need them, but just to avoid any complications on your very first day, I’ve organised a security escort. Ah, here they are.” He waved at somebody over my shoulder.

The two security guards were in treegrave-security orange armbands and headbands over worn jumpsuits. A gangly brennan, and a large, surly-looking man. Both of them looked very awkward about being there; neither would meet my eyes, and the man might have been blushing.

“Turin, Saro,” Yamin said, “this is Taya. You’ll be keeping the both of us out of trouble today.” There was something a bit smug in the way he said it.

“Yes, chi,” the brennan half-spoke, half-mumbled. The man didn’t say anything.

The way they acted made me think, for a moment, that maybe I was being embarrassing; maybe I’d done something inappropriate, and everyone was too awkward to say anything. But I glanced at Yamin’s face and understood. I’d seen adults in my family look like that too many times, when a particularly annoying kid did something wrong and had to deal with the consequences. This had nothing to do with me; these guards had done something wrong, and escort duty was their punishment.

It seemed like a stupid punishment, to me. Escort duty seemed like the least boring job a security guard could have. At least they didn’t have Mum’s job.

“Shall we begin?” Yamin asked.

So we began.

He took me through the entire treegrave area, room by room. Sometimes, there were rooms that we couldn’t go into, for security or safety reasons; he’d just explain what they were and move on. I read as many signs as I could, and was delighted to find that I knew a lot of the room names and could make pretty good guesses about most of the rest.

There were medical facilities. There were research facilities. There were treegrave maintenance facilities and the treegrave itself, whole rooms of computer hardware and rows and rows of little chambers with humans in them. We spoke to a few workers here and there, and one of them was a computer tech who spent a good half an hour explaining the things they had to do to keep the treegrave alive (it was as much computer program as it was human brain, if not more), even though nobody asked them to explain it. (I kept sneaking looks at our reluctant guards to see how bored they were. They were pretty bored.)

There were a few administrative offices; not as many as I would’ve thought they’d need to run a ship. There was the massive forest chamber full of citrus trees which, now that I’d seen the Arborea Celestia, looked kind of sad. (Was there any ecosystem in mind at all when building this place?) There was a lot of storage. Way more storage than I’d thought there would be. Most of the Courageous’ storage was on the lowest level of the ring, but I guess we had backup storage in the middle, too.

Yamin was strangely happy the whole time. He dragged me from area to area like a little brother showing me all his favourite playground spots. We were walking (floating? Climbing?) through one hallway of random laboratories when he suddenly stopped, and I almost ran into him. “Oooh, Kami should be in at the moment,” he said. “Wait a moment, I’ll see if she’s free.” And he ducked into a lab, leaving me and the two guards in the hallway.

There was silence. We looked at each other. There was more silence.

“So,” I said. “Are you guys having a good day?”

“It’s fine, chi,” said the brennan tiredly.

Without Yamin in the hall, the man met my eyes and sneered. “Just rustin’ perfect,” he said sarcastically.

Wow, okay. Not getting involved in whatever was going on here.

I looked away. More awkward silence.

“Congratulations, by the way,” the brennan said to me.

“Uh. Thanks.” For the apprenticeship? Probably?

The man just snorted. The brennan sighed impatiently. “Saro.”

“What?” the man said. “What? I didn’t say anything. I’m just doing guard duty. I’m just getting dragged out here by that rustin’ – ”

“Saro!”

“I can’t wait to retire,” Saro growled.

“Everyone else can’t wait for you to retire, either,” the brennan, who through process of elimination must be Turin, said acidly.

Yamin came back out into the hall, leading a scientist who looked as old as my grandmother. She gave all of us a slightly distracted smile.

“Taya, Kami,” Yamin said. “Kami, Taya.” He gave the guards a blank smile, and both of them did their best to look like they hadn’t been fighting.

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

“And you!” her smile widened. “Finally, the famous Taya. Yamin was so excited to take you on.”

Yamin frowned at this, but didn’t say anything.

“What do you research?” I asked.

She grinned. “I’m a time wizard!”

“Kami works in chronostasis development,” Yamin explained when I looked confused.

“Chronostasis?” I asked. “Do we even, uh… what do we use that for?”

“Not a whole lot, true enough,” Kami admitted. “Being able to slow down time is fascinating technology, but given the limitations, it’s usually simpler to just refrigerate whatever you want to slow. It mostly gets used in other research, especially in materials development; sometimes you want to slow down certain reactions relative to each other without affecting the temperature, things like that.”

“Don’t things have to be in a special liquid for chronostasis, though? Wouldn’t that be a problem with building things?”

Kami laughed. “Oh, we aren’t stuck with the ancient technology of the First Crew any more! It is usually simplest to conduct the field through chronostasis fluid, but if need be, we can propagate a chronostasis field a short distance through a vacuum. We’re working on the range and granularity of the field, though the real breakthrough will be if we can figure out how to propagate it through a breathable atmosphere.”

“Granularity?” I asked.

“There’s limitations to the field strengths that can be propagated. We can slow time by about half, by about eighteen times, and by about thirty times. Technically, fields at other strengths can be generated, but they’re impossible to propagate any useful distance; there’s something about the resonance of those specific strengths that gives them enough range to be useful. The chemists want more granularity, so that’s been on our plate for a while, though we’re mostly focused on increasing the vacuum range of the fields we can already generate. If we can get that tackled, we can look into air.”

“The Splinter?” Yamin asked.

Kami nodded. “The whole lot of them need a psych eval if you ask me, but if they’re going to keep supplying our research, I’m not complaining. The chemists are pretty annoyed about the refocus, but I keep telling them, better we learn to make larger fields for less power than we can’t research the fields at all, right?”

“Who’s the Splinter?” I asked.

“A spaceship,” Yamin said. “Well, a design for one. They’re hoping to build it at Dragonseye – ”

“No hope,” Kami said. “Not a chance we can get what they need before we leave orbit. They’re better off preparing for their descendants to make the thing at the next star.”

“Their design depends on technology that doesn’t exist yet,” Yamin said.

“Chronostasis technology?”

“Yes.”

“Like the First Crew?”

“Somewhat.”

“It’s impossible for us to do what the First Crew did,” I pointed out. “They could take colonists between planets because they were moving really, really fast. It took decades to reach the next planet, not generations; our ships can’t go that fast. If they want to put colonists in a coma between planets… are they going to split off and make ships that can travel near-lightspeed again?” Oh, that would be bad. That would be very, very bad. We’d get trapped behind a wall of colonies so fast if they did that.

“No,” Yamin said, and I relaxed. “That’s not practical. It’s much safer and better on resources to go slower and just breed up new colonists at each star, rather than to put the same colonists to sleep and jump from star to star as fast as you can. Monitoring a treegrave is hard enough, can you imagine monitoring a ship’s worth of people like that? And they’re all in chronostasis? I have sympathy for the First Crew wanting to see the first interstellar human colony that badly, but there’s no point to doing things like that these days.”

“Besides, they wouldn’t need new tech to do that,” Kami said. “That tech is ancient. The problem is that your spaceship would be way too expensive to build and would be falling apart by the time you got to the next star, like the Courageous was.”

“Then what are they doing?” I asked.

Yamin smiled at me. He was wearing that face that he wore when he expected me to figure something out.

Oh, so this was how this apprenticeship was going to go, huh?

They wanted chronostasis technology. They weren’t doing what the First Crew did. Putting people in comas for that long wasn’t safe, and moving fast enough to make it worth it wasn’t practical. They wanted new chronostasis technology; they wanted to be able to make the fields bigger, outside the fluid; they wanted to move then through air, and planned to build a new ship from scratch that would use –

“They want to put the entire ship in chronostasis?!” I asked.

“You have to admit,” Yamin said, “it would be a massive saving in materials.”

“Yeah, if you don’t take into account the costs of the chronostasis field at all,” Kami said. “All we have to do is come up with a magically economical field that can encompass the whole ship and be powered by the ship for that long and that won’t create any weird friction or heat dissipation issues. Never mind that the rest of the fleet would be moving at thirty times the speed of the Splinter, so that’d make diplomacy fun, as well as any exterior hardware outside the field breaking down thirty times too fast from their perspective. Frankly I hope they do do it because I want to see what the acceleration physics looks like, but there’s no way they’ll succeed. We’ll all be dead and the idea shrugged off and forgotten before the technology is even close to being there; I mean, the power requirements alone. Still, I’m not going to complain about getting chronostasis research projects with almost no trouble for the rest of my life.”

I nodded, but I was thinking. Should we be doing what our ancestors did? Not the chronostasis part; putting a bunch of colonists to sleep in chronostasis fields for decades was a risky waste of time and resources, unless it was for some reason super important that the people who left one star had to be the same people that arrived at the next one. It was the kind of thing that the First Crew would think of. The kind of thing that people who’d lived their whole lives and their whole human history around one star and thought of the space between stars as a dangerous place that you had to cross, not a home to live in, would think of. We knew better now.

But should we be moving faster? Should we be accelerating away from each star until we hit nearly the speed of light? The Courageous had been designed to do that, initially. Of course, the modern Courageous couldn’t do it; the rings would never survive. But the heart of it, that we were talking in, had been built for that. And we had better technology, now. Better ways to build things. Yamin and Kami thought it wasn’t safe because the ship would get damaged so much between the stars and so much would have to be rebuilt, but did that matter? We had to resupply at every star, anyway; if we couldn’t get the iron and air and things that we needed, we died. Did it matter whether some of that had to go to rebuilding engines and shielding or not?

No; it wouldn’t work, of course. The Courageous was too big. The ring would have to go, and that was where the Courageous was, really. You wouldn’t be able to fit enough people in the middle and still have it be the Courageous. And you’d have to do it to the whole fleet, anyway; there was no chance in any galaxy that the people of the Courageous would agree to leave the fleet. Even thinking that made my heart race. You could split the fleet, taking only the ships that would convert to near-lightspeed best, but there weren’t any ships that could do that, or at least not nearly enough. None of them had been built for it. No ship except the Courageous had.

It’d be nice, though, wouldn’t it? To solve our future problems by just… physically going far faster than anybody who didn’t know they were in a race would ever want to go? Maybe we would make those changes someday.

Like the Splinter, though, it was unrealistic to expect it within my lifetime.

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