84: Education

“So, what do you think so far?” Yamin asked me as we descended in the elevator together.

“Those guards are pretty mad,” I said.

“Ha, yes. They’ve had perfectly acceptable performance records for years now, so it’s reasonable that they weren’t all that impressed with my little joke. That’s your first important lesson, Taya; be a better person than me. You can build up resentment very fast if you indulge in games like that.”

I nodded, pretending to understand what he was talking about. “Why did you do it, then?”

“Because it was worth it to make a point to somebody else. It’s all very complicated. There’s a lot of politics involved in this kind of work, unfortunately. Any other thoughts?”

“There aren’t nearly as many Administrators on the ship as I thought.”

“What makes you say that?”

“There were hardly any Administration offices. Plenty of labs, some medical stuff, some…”

“All sorts of things that are better done in low-pull, or services that have a reason to be near our central docks or near the treegrave?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“And what advantage would there be in putting the bulk of Administration up there?”

Hmm. Everyone knew that Administration was in the middle, though. That was the brains of the ship, up with the treegrave. That was where important stuff happened. “Diplomats and stuff are met up there,” I said. “All the big important decisions are made and announced up there. I’ve seen it on the projectors.”

“Indeed. The treegrave is the cultural hub of the ship; it’s where anything ceremonial takes place. But what would be the point in moving all those people up and down every single day? The main offices are elsewhere.”

“The trolley level.”

“Exactly. We don’t have time to tour all the Administration departments today, but are there any that you want to see first?”

How was I supposed to know that? I didn’t know the departments! I just got here! I said the first thing that came to mind that was less stupid than ‘Can you introduce me to the captains?’

“Uh, who handles jaunts for the kids?”

Yamin nodded and tapped the big red button on the elevator wall. “Treegrave.”

“Listening.”

“Contact Education and Development immediately and see if they can spare somebody to speak to myself and Taya. It’s not critical; we can postpone if it would disrupt work.”

“Understood. Sending a message now.”

We got a reply before the elevator reached the ring. “Seiba is waiting at Reception Two to meet with the two of you.”

“Understood.” To me, he said, “That’s only one trolley station over. We might get you home early today, depending on how chatty Seiba is. Which is hard to predict; it depends to much on kes mood.”

“You know a lot of people.”

He shrugged. “Lots of names and faces, and a proper acquaintance with at least two per department. It comes with the job.”

We didn’t talk on the trolley. I felt awkward asking him questions about the job in front of other people. We got off on the next station and went through an unobtrusive door into Reception Two, which looked a lot like the reception room I’d followed Yamin into after my interview. An excitable-looking brennan with a round face, a wide grin and two missing fingers leapt out of a seat to greet us as we arrived.

“Seiba,” Yamin said with a nod. “Always a pleasure.”

“Same, same. And this must be Taya.” Ke’s grin morphed into one of those smiles that grown ups use for children. “Are you having a good day, Taya?”

I was tempted to say ‘well that’s really up to you, isn’t it?’, but that was probably a bad move. I just shrugged. “It’s fine. Yours?”

“Great! I got to restructure spreadsheets today!”

Seiba said this as if it was the most exciting thing in the world. I looked at Yamin. He shrugged.

“Taya’s interested in learning about how jaunts are organised,” he said.

“Oh, that’s simple enough!” Seiba strolled through a door and into a hall, gesturing for us to follow. “It doesn’t take much work on our part, really. We’re a very small department; most things handle themselves, though it’s getting busier as we approach orbit, of course. It’s important that this generation be ready for the work ahead.” Ke lead us into a small, dark room with five little alcoves in it, each containing a couple of chairs and a projector screen. Only one of them was in use, with a young man, maybe about mid-20s, slouching in a chair and using a small laptop keyboard to flip through a display of spreadsheets.

“This place is terrible for the eyes,” Seiba told us. “The little wearable computers won’t work in here because we often need multiple people looking at the same thing. I keep petitioning for proper display screens in here, but we all know how stingy the higher-ups are with those sorts of things.”

“Display screens are much harder to recycle than projectors,” I told kem.

“I see that nothing is likely to change, then,” ke muttered half under kes breath, before saying more loudly, “Dava, we’ve got visitors.”

“Hi,” the slouching man called, without looking away from the screen.

“Anyway, Taya, I wan show you – ” ke frowned at Dava’s display. “Is that the literacy rates?”

“Yep. Compared to the last three colonies at this distance.”

I looked at the screen. It was just a spreadsheet full of numbers to me. “What’s wrong with the literacy rates?” I asked, glancing at Seiba’s frown.

“Nothing,” Dava said. “Fluctuations are normal. All kinds of factors can make ‘em. Cultural changes, fashion changes, a few more grumpy old carers than normal. Our academic literacy for children is at the same level as it was for the previous colonies this far out, but the practical literacy is noticeably lower.”

“What’s the difference between academic and practical literacy?” I asked.

“Academic literacy is the test scores and Education results,” Seiba explained to me. “Practical literacy is how much reading and writing the children actually do. Our kids can read and write as well as previous generations at this point, but they’re choosing to do it a lot less.”

“And that’s… not a problem?” I asked.

“Nope. They can do it, so if they need to do it at the Dragonseye, they’ll pick up the habit. I was mostly just curious about why it was lower, but it doesn’t particularly matter.” He flipped to another spreadsheet. “For kids, most voluntary reading and writing is usually in the form of using the projectors. Projector bookings are at the same level… kids are asking for the treegrave to read things for them instead of reading them themselves at the same level… oh, they’re using keyboards less.”

“What do you mean they’re using keyboards less?” Seiba asked.

“To look stuff up. They’re asking the treegrave to input their requests more.”

“I thought we axed that function nearly two decades ago.”

“We what?” I asked. “Hang on, other ships let people request stuff from the treegrave verbally in projector rooms all the time. I always thought it was weird that we didn’t. Are you saying that that’s on purpose?”

“Literacy isn’t a particularly important skill for a good eighty per cent of the ship’s population most of the time,” Yamin explained to me. “The exception is at a colony. Written communication between ships and the ability to actually read records instead of needing them read out makes things much more efficient when organising and designing novel things. It doesn’t matter that most of my generation and above can’t read well, but it does matter that yours can. So we start to reduce alternative methods of doing things as we get closer to the Dragonseye to encourage children to practice their reading and writing instead.”

“We shut off the specific functions,” Dava said, “but the treegrave can still be cajoled into helping with pretty much anything. That’s its job. We can ask it to be more difficult about them if it warrants correction, but…”

“Do you think it warrants correction?” Seiba asked.

“Nope. They’ll start writing more if they need to write more. I’m going to look into why they’re not, though, just in case it indicates something else that is important.”

“But you could encourage kids to read and write more, if you wanted to?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, easily,” Dava said. “Talk to the carers, ask the treegrave to be more difficult about helping, try to instigate a fashion trend that involved reading and writing somehow, though trying to control kids’ fashion is always tricky. Alter the search prioritisation of stuff in the projector room so that when people look things up, they get more results that require reading. But it’s not our job to micromanage every aspect of ship culture, it’s our job to flag problems. And this isn’t a problem, so we don’t need to care about it, which means I can go home.” He shut off the projector, plunging us into near-darkness, and managed to leave without bumping into anything.

“He’s always like that,” Seiba said apologetically, turning the projector back on. “Now, you wanted to see how we organise jaunts, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. If they could, theoretically, control the literacy rate like that, what couldn’t they control? Attitudes towards the Mission, towards the fleet? If I worked for this department, could I simply make sure that the next generation were taught about the dangers of being outrun, and taught to take them seriously?

“The younger years of jaunt work are all fairly standardised,” Seiba was explaining to me. “We put the kids through things that affect their daily life on the ship first – janitorial, recycling, things like that. This makes the ship much easier to look after.”

“How?” I asked.

“Because children who have picked up rubbish and cleaned floors for a month have a better understanding of why you shouldn’t just throw rubbish on the floor, and do it a lot less. They sort their recycling better and take better care of their clothes and waste less food and soforth when they’ve seen these systems in action and have had a practical taste of how their negligence makes more work for others. Unless there’s a serious problem, we don’t need to do anything at all with regard to organisation up until children start organising second jaunt passes, except for making some small adjustments with regard to approaching a new colony, like increasing Education in math and literacy. For the second pass and beyond, it’s mostly a matter of interfacing with the Employment department to predict the proportion of people needed in each job in the future, and with that we can weight our encouragement into different fields and, should that fail, the approval rating for second and third passes. It’s best to move children into fields in such a way that when they reach adulthood and make their choices, we have to outright reject the smallest number possible…”

The explanation wasn’t all that interesting, but the fact that it was needed at all was. I’d always thought of jaunts as something that kids chose, maybe with help from the parents or carers, based on the things that they wanted to do, and then they chose their favourite job and it all worked out somehow. It had never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a full half of a generation decided they wanted to be janitors, or that there were systems in place to stop that from happening. I said as much to Seiba.

“Good,” ke said. “If people notice that we’re working, then we’re doing our jobs badly. That’s a big part of why we don’t get involved in things unless there’s a need to. And when we do get involved, it has to be as little and as early as possible. It’s better to arrange jaunts in such a way that only a small amount of them will find janitorial work interesting, than to encourage them all in it and then have to tell a whole lot of young adults that they don’t get to do the job they’ve set their heart on.”

That made sense. Otherwise everyone would be interested in stuff like Rubbish & Recycling, and the resentment when –

Hey. Hang on a minute.

But this wasn’t the time to go on a deep personal journey wondering how much of my fascination with recycling was based on the way it was deliberately taught. “What about jaunts to other ships?” I asked.

“They do take a lot more arranging,” Seiba said. “The diplomatic considerations, the trade…”

“How are they picked?”

“Well, the children choose where they want to go, and we look at how many kids we have and what ships we have deals with, and we do our best to fulfil the requests as best we can.”

“And the ships have to be close by,” I said.

“Yes, of course. We can’t expect children to sit on a transport for hours and hours to go to a new ship.”

“I’ve done it,” I said. “It’s not that hard.”

Seiba looked confused.

“Taya has been on several ships,” Yamin explained, “out as far as the Dish.”

“Oh, wow!” Seiba said. “That’s really far!”

“It’s actually not, though?” I said. “Not really. And the thing is, when we get into orbit, a lot of my generation – at least, the ones who actually get involved in colony building instead of waiting on the Courageous – are going to have to travel a lot, right? So shouldn’t we be getting used to that, just like we’re getting used to reading? And most kids going on jaunts to other ships are a lot older than I was, so they can probably handle it.”

“Yes, but there are diplomatic and fuel costs involved,” Seiba reiterated. It was hard to be sure, with a stranger, and in the near darkness, but… Seiba seemed really uncomfortable talking about this. And ke seemed to be not looking at Yamin. As in, ke was glancing at Yamin a lot less than one would in a normal conversation.

I glanced at Yamin. He looked mildly interested in the conversation, but not worried or uncomfortable.

The ship thing had been an idle question; I hadn’t really cared or thought it was important. But now I did.

“I want to see what ships we send kids to, and how often,” I said.

Now Seiba looked at Yamin. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I’m here to learn.”

“I’ll make sure you have that information,” Yamin said, and Seiba relaxed. Which was even weirder. What was happening between these two? Whatever it was, it seemed really one-sided.

“But for now,” Yamin said, “it’s time to get you home. I daresay your parents will have my ear if I keep you late on your very first day.”

“Oh, you have parents?” Seiba asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Is that important?”

“No, that’s great,” Seiba said. “A pleasure to meet you, Taya.”

As we left, I heard kem muttering under kes breath, “It sure explains a lot.”