85: Handwriting

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“Was the list of ships useful?” Yamin asked me the next morning when we met in a small cafeteria.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. I frowned at my notes, scrawled on a piece of Aunt Shorin’s scrap paper. Over ninety per cent of inter-ship jaunts were to one of six ships, and I’d thought there would be some kind of pattern, something interesting about then that would tell me something about the Courageous. The way that Seiba had acted, I’d been sure that there was something.

There wasn’t, so far as I could tell. I must’ve misread their expression. Or they were uncomfortable about something completely different. Or there was something here, and I was just missing it.

Six ships. The Arborea Celestia, the Needle, the Scout, the Bravery, the Endeavour, and the Ironstock. I’d been on the first and last, and they were very different from each other. The Bravery was like a much smaller version of the Courageous, a little ring with a little treegrave of its own in the middle. Not much to say about it. The Needle and the Scout were tiny ships, barely larger than transport ships. The Needle technically was a transport ship, though it didn’t move around much, it just had a whole lot of tiny peripheral vessels and acted like a storage hub and coordination centre for them. The Scout seemed to be some sort of communication hub and archive, a bit like a less important Dish that handled gathering and collating local information. The Endeavour was a biological research ship. I didn’t know enough about biology to understand its projects, but it seemed to be involved with the Arborea and the Stalwart in the plant thing.

A bunch of different ships. Almost like they were giving kids different options to choose from about what sorts of things they wanted to experience. Almost like it made sense for a big ship like the Courageous to have strong ongoing deals with a small number of ships that had different cultures and lifestyles to send kids to to show them that life could be different in other places. Almost like they’d been chosen to be convenient, and varied, but still pretty similar to the Courageous so that the kids wouldn’t be too disoriented in their visits.

Almost like everything was very logical and above board and there was nothing weird to find here.

Yamin was looking at my notes. “They’ve taught you tally already? We didn’t cover that until I was fourteen. I guess they really are pushing for early literacy.”

“I didn’t learn this in Education,” I said. “Aunt Shorin taught me.”

He leaned further over our little table to peer closer. “That’s not a tally table,” he said. “Did you write that? By hand?”

He seemed to want to read it, so I handed it over, nodding.

“Your aunt taught you this,” he said. “The engineer?”

I shook my head. “That’s Lia. Shorin is a painter. An artist, I mean, not like an industrial painter. She paints pretty pictures and stuff.”

“What use could an artist possibly have for hand writing?”

“What use would an engineer have for it?” I asked.

“Sketching and noting system damage and flaws,” Yamin said while he skimmed my notes. “On-the-fly adjustments to diagrams. High level engineers and personal assistants are the only people I know who learn hand writing; for most of us, we have access to a keyboard when we need to write things. They say it takes a lot of memory and very precise hand control.” He handed the noted back, looking at me with respect.

I shrugged. “It doesn’t take a good memory. I mean, you just need to know the letters a little bit better than you do for reading and keyboard writing. But like with reading, once you know them, you know them. And Shorin already needs really precise hand control for painting, so maybe it’s easier for her?”

“And for you?”

I shrugged again. “I practised a lot.” I tried not to look pleased with myself. ‘Below average literacy’, ha! Take that, Education placement tests! “It’s actually very useful,” I said, gesturing to the notes. “Much more useful than having to book a projector room every time I want to write something.” (I didn’t mention that I hardly ever needed to write anything except for my letters to Aunt Shorin.)

“Well,” he said, toasting me with a little nutrient shake. “May it continue to be useful.”

And then we went to tour some Administration departments.

The whole first week was spent touring Administration departments. We went to Communications, where I learned about how, to cut down on necessary radio bandwidth, domestic and low-priority government inter-ship messages weren’t sent directly to other ships. Instead they were bundled together and sent at a prescheduled time to the local radio node ship (which for us was the Splinter), who distributed them at another prescheduled time to the recipient ship (if they were also the radio node for that ship) or onto another node ship (if they weren’t). Depending on how the transmission schedule worked out, this meant that while sending messages to other people on your own ship was pretty much instant, sending them to other ships could take up to a whole day, or even two days if the ship was far enough away and there were any weird problems.

We went to Employment, where I learned about duty scaling. Apparently the amount of work that each role on the ship entailed depended a lot on how many people there were to do that role. If, despite Education’s best efforts, we ended up with too many people wanting to be, for example, security guards, and not enough people wanting to be secretaries and administrative assistants, then assigning security clearances and issuing cards and licenses became a Security duty; if the balance was in the other direction, it fell back to Administration. This seemed like a lot of work, and I said so, but the woman who was giving us the tour just shook her head. “Rule number one for this kind of work is to not micromanage,” she said. “People always want to micromanage, because it feels good to ‘fix’ stuff, but it makes a lot of extra work and creates a whole lot of problems. We’re doing our job best when nobody even notices that we exist. If it’s just a matter of security guards having twenty per cent more downtime and administrative assistants needing to work an extra half hour on average in the day, then we don’t touch it – that’s the situation we’re in right now, in fact. Those things either self-correct or stay as they are and it’s fine. We only get involved if there’s something truly egregious that needs correcting. Going on correcting every little perceived imbalance is a great way for people who think they understand a system a lot better than they do – because nobody except the treegrave truly understands this system – to make some stupid change and just rust out the inside of the entire thing. If we’re ever too busy, it means that things are either smashed up beyond belief already and other departments should be brought in, or we’re micromanaging and need to step back and trust the public to take care of themselves.”

We went to Reproduction, where I got to see all the artificial wombs with babies inside them. They weren’t very interesting, just being small black tanks, but the person showing us around showed me some scans of the developing fetuses and pointed out what little nodules were becoming what limbs. They had a brief, quiet talk with Yamin about genetic ratios, and said something about a minor imbalance in some random very rare geneset that was apparently fashionable right now amongst parents (who get to choose 50% of their child’s genome) and going to throw off the population balance. Yamin promised to talk it over with Medical as a whole, but didn’t seem all that worried about it.

All in all, the tours didn’t really feel like proper tours. We’d just go to a department, and he’d introduce me to someone, and they’d show me a couple of things and answer any random questions I had, which was sometimes a lot and sometimes none. It didn’t have nearly as much structure as my earlier jaunts, and felt more like a way to meet a lot of random people than to actually learn anything.

But that was fine. I’d have years to learn about them properly. What was much more interesting than what wasn’t happening, was what was happening.

Yamin did indeed seem to know at least a couple of people per department, and know a lot more by sight. Everywhere we went, we’d be greeted b somebody that he clearly knew to show me around and answer questions. Some of these people were openly friendly with him; others disliked him, but were politely trying to hide that fact, at least in front of me. Most of them were fairly neutral; they had a job to do, and they did it.

All of them treated us in ways that made me suspect that Yamin had massively downplayed the importance of an interdepartmental administration job.

Yamin was mostly quiet on our tours, content to let the tour guides take charge and let me ask questions, only speaking up if he wanted to clarify or draw my attention to something. But it was clear from the way that people kept glancing to him for confirmation when they thought I wasn’t looking, from the way they’d hesitate to answer some questions until he answered them and then they’d immediately relax, from the way they looked to him any time I said or did something surprising, that he was in charge. At first this seemed logical to me; I was his apprentice, he was in charge of my education, obviously they were checking with him to make sure that things were being explained to me in the right way. But the more I thought about it, the less sense that made. If the order I learned things was that important, then I wouldn’t be being lead around to random departments and allowed to just ask for whatever I was curious about; the tours would be more structured, or I’d be learning from educational videos in a projector room. I got the sense that their looks were more general than that, and more serious. Not ‘does she have enough background knowledge to understand this explanation?’ (they usually just asked me directly if that might be an issue), but ‘is she authorised to know this?’

And there was one other thing. He was really subtle about it, but sometimes I felt like Yamin was preparing me with knowledge in advance before we toured somewhere. I only noticed because he usually didn’t; he rarely bothered to direct our conversations any more than he bothered to direct my questions on the tours. But sometimes, we’d go somewhere and I’d meet someone who was unusually critical, subtly assessing me rather than just being friendly, and being politely wary with Yamin. And while I asked about whatever they were in charge of, Yamin would at some point casually interject something that steered the conversation somewhere where the tour guide would ask be if I knew about some niche topic, and I’d be able to explain it to them because it just so happened to be something that I’d talked through with Yamin that morning. Once, when an engineer was asking me some frankly unfairly tricky questions about machines, Yamin (who had suggested a couple of days ago that I carry around a pencil and paper in case I wanted to take notes on anything) gently suggested that I note down what he was asking so I wouldn’t forget the details, and the engineer’s eyes widened at the sight of an eleven year old neatly hand writing out a complicated engineering problem.

I couldn’t answer the question, obviously. I’m not an engineer. But he stopped testing me with tricky questions once he saw that I could hand write.

It was then that I was sure. These tours weren’t about me learning anything. I mean, that probably helped too; I was sure that when I did start learning about all these places, these little tours would probably help me get started. But that wasn’t the main point. The point wasn’t to introduce all these departments to me; it was to introduce me to these departments. ‘Finally, the famous Taya’, as Kami had said.

Why would Yamin’s apprentice matter so much?

At the end of my first week, after carefully watching all sorts of people interacting with Yamin, I met him for breakfast in one of the little general Administration offices (as had become our habit; I couldn’t have breakfast with my own family any more because they were still on the green shift), and asked him a question.

“I’m supposed to be learning, right? So I need to think for myself. Come up with theories. That kind of thing.”

“Yes. You have one?”

“Maybe. Some of them are going to be stupid, because I’m still learning.” I took a deep breath. “You need to promise not to make fun of me if I’m wrong about this.”

“This’ll be good. Okay, I so promise. What’s your theory?”

“Yamin.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you Captain Blue?”

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