Yamin started laughing.
“You promised you wouldn’t make fun of me!”
“Incorrect! I promised I wouldn’t make fun of you if you were wrong. Besides, I’m not making fun of you; I’m surprised. I didn’t think you’d figure it out this quickly.” He sipped his shake. “Everyone’s going to be so relieved. I could feel them cringe every time they called me by a name instead of by my title.”
Oh, great, so now I looked like a naive idiot in front of everyone. “Why was it even a secret? You could’ve just told me who you were from the start! You don’t think I had a right to know that I was accepting an apprenticeship from one of the ship’s captains?”
“Would that have made a difference?”
“Of course it would! My family could hardly have objected so much if – ”
“And would that have been a good outcome, me pulling rank to strongarm your family? Having a random family on this ship go on with the perspective that one of its captains had stolen their child? Besides; they were right; you were far too young. I was overenthusiastic and it was inappropriate to ask you when you were six. You needed to grow up a bit and have more of a perspective, and you used the intervening time wonderfully. I’m sure you learned a lot more on your ship tour than you would have taking these tours five years earlier.”
I frowned. “It was you, wasn’t it? You approved the historians’ journey out to the Dish. Because they were taking me.”
“Of course. I’m not usually directly involved in those sorts of decisions, but I was keeping an eye on you, so the proposal was brought to my attention after your name was added to it. I had it fast-tracked.”
Huh, the historians had been right. I had been their lucky charm.
“Well, you could’ve told me who you were after I accepted the apprenticeship.”
“I didn’t want you distracted. It was important that you see the job, see how things actually happen, without getting misled by grand ranks and titles.”
“Well, you failed there,” I said, “because now I know about your rank and I’ve seen you do hardly any work.”
Yamin grinned. “Yes, you complicated matters by figuring it out so quickly.”
“You complicated matters by making it too easy to figure out.”
“That’s fair,” he said, his grin widening. “These failures are usually the teacher’s, and that’s certainly true in this case.”
“So what happens now?” I asked. “Can I tell my family?”
“If you like. Do you think that that’s a good idea?”
I hesitated. I had, until he’d spoken. “Is it a bad idea?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know as much about your family as you do. But telling people important information is an irreversible decision. So you should figure out whether it’s a good one or a bad one before you make it.”
I didn’t see why it would be a problem. But then, captains tended to go by their shifts instead of using their real names for a reason, didn’t they? And it wasn’t like my younger siblings were all the best at keeping secrets. What was I supposed to do, tell my parents and make them promise not to tell the kids? That didn’t seem very fair on them.
I’d have to think about it. Yamin was right; telling them was irreversible. Not telling them wasn’t.
“Are you training me to be a captain, then?”
“No amount of training could prepare anybody to be a captain of a ship like this. You’d likely have a decent shot at the job if you want it, though, assuming you do well on this apprenticeship. Technically, most willing adult citizens are eligible for consideration for the job when a captain retires, or is… encouraged to retire, but captain’s apprentices have a very large advantage. They have familiarity and often proven competency with the work, and tend to personally know a lot of the people involved in making the decision. People are supposed to scout for candidates a fair bit wider, since there’s quite a lot of danger in filling up your leadership with people from any specific demographic; a ship lead for generations only by people with the sorts of nature and opportunities to get them a captain’s apprenticeship would create some potentially catastrophic blind spots so far as the needs and opinions of general workers go. But it’s difficult to ignore that people trained by captains in the sorts of work that captains have to do are, logically, likely to be good candidates for captaincy.”
“How big is the advantage?” I asked. “How many of the captains are former apprentices?”
“A very specific sort of question. Are you going to try for it?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t know enough about the job to know if it’s for me yet.” (It would be so, so much easier to get started on saving the Courageous if I were a captain.)
“Historically, about three quarters of the captains have been former apprentices.”
Three quarters. When there were four captains at any given time. Hmm. “Am I right in guessing that one current captain wasn’t an apprentice?”
“Yes.”
“And that there’s pretty much always exactly one captain that wasn’t an apprentice?”
“That does seem to be the pattern.”
“Almost like everyone’s usually just lazy about it and promotes the most promising apprentice, until the non-apprentice captain retires and they all go ‘oh, wait, we probably shouldn’t have just apprentices’ and they actually find a proper candidate, and then forget about the issue until that non-apprentice captain retires?”
Yamin was trying not to grin. “You know, that’s a distinct possibility.”
“Who’s the non-apprentice captain?”
“Captain Red. She’s quite fun, you’ll like her.”
“Is she close to retiring?”
“No, she’s very young. Mid-twenties, I think. Everyone else is at least forty.”
Good. The next three retirings, I’d have a shot at becoming captain. So long as they held off until I’d done this apprenticeship. If they all retired next year, I was out of luck.
Yamin wouldn’t retire for a while, though. He’d just taken on an apprentice. So all I needed to do was be better than the other apprentices, and take his job.
“How many apprentices are there?”
“Are you asking how many peers you currently have, or how many current captaincy candidates have been through the program?”
“Uh, both?”
“Currently, there are five other apprentices, all various teen ages. Blue and violet each have two; Red has one. There are also… I would estimate seven ex-apprentices who could be serious captaincy candidates, as well as a handful of others that aren’t.”
“Aren’t?”
“Too old, or a persistent lack of interest in the job. Serious unresolvable personality conflicts with captains or other people they’d have to work with. That kind of thing.”
So twelve potential rivals for a captaincy position. That was pretty good, for such an important job; I’d expect much more competition than that. Of course, all of them were by definition better candidates than me right now, so I’d have to work hard and make sure I was the best before any captains started retiring. “How many of the ex-apprentices are yours?”
“None.”
I stared. Yamin gave an embarrassed little smile. “You’re my first apprentice.”
“How long have you been a captain?”
“Forty one years.”
I stared some more.
“It’s not compulsory to take apprentices,” he explained, “though it’s strongly encouraged. Everybody just sort of assumed I wouldn’t, I think. So that’s why people are paying attention to you.”
Oh, great. The guy who’d been comfortably not taking apprentices for his whole career latched onto a kid who snuck up to the treegrave and waited for her for five years. I had the weird, obsessive captain. I bet he had a reputation as the odd one out and the other captains talked behind his back.
Well, a captain was a captain. I’d just have to get to know the others, and Yamin wouldn’t be a problem. Besides, this was good news, in some ways. He was probably way more invested in me than the others were in their apprentices. That would definitely come in handy.
“When can I meet the other apprentices?” I asked.
“After this little trial period. They know a lot of classified information, and of course some of them are protective of their own identities as people so close to the captains, for obvious personal reasons. You won’t be able to access any particularly secret information until you’ve decided to make a commitment to this apprenticeship.”
“You and I both know that I’m going to keep going with the apprenticeship.”
“Yes, but there’s such a thing as doing things properly. For now, how would you like to start shadowing me in meetings?”
So I started shadowing him in meetings. Not important ones with secrets, obviously. Just everyday maintenance stuff. (I assumed he was doing his important work in his remaining shift hours after my jaunt hours. He was probably working a lot of overtime.) It wasn’t that much different to the tours, except that this time I mostly shut up and Yamin did the talking. Also, a lot more of it happened in offices; Yamin and I would occasionally still go to various Administration departments, but more often they’d come to him in one of the little general use offices, or not meet at all, instead messaging each other across the ship.
Everyone seemed a lot more relaxed to be calling him Captain Blue again. I just kept calling him Yamin, because he never told me I couldn’t.
I came home one day to see most of the family industriously cleaning and decorating our home. I started helping automatically, trying to figure out why we were cleaning. It wasn’t until Mum told me that they’d pushed the party forward until after my shift so that I’d be able to attend that I remembered. It was Klei’s birthday the next day. My big brother was turning fifteen.
So I had one day to get him a gift. What did Klei even like these days? I never seemed to have time to hang out with my siblings any more. The fact that they spent so much of my free time asleep didn’t help.
Well, that was unfair. I hadn’t hung out with them much before the apprenticeship, either. I used to be a lot closer to Klei, when I was little, but that might just be because he had to babysit me a lot. And I was closer to my younger siblings, because I had to babysit them. What did fifteen year old boys like? I could ask Hitan; he was eleven, which was close enough.
I hadn’t hung out with Hitan much recently, either. What had I been doing with my time, aside from writing letters to my aunt and trying to save all of humanity from suffocating in its own success?
Bead earrings seemed to be in fashion for teenaged boys (I’d heard my aunts joking about beads being a ‘boy thing’ now instead of just something for women’s hair), and Klei had gotten his ears pierced, so I got him a random pair. I wasn’t sure if the red glass was a colour he liked or anything, but it turned out not to matter. Birthdays meant getting a lot of random trinkets from a lot of people and he probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had put more thought into them anyway.
When I became captain (I didn’t dare think ‘if’; becoming captain was too good a chance to help humanity to even consider failing at), I’d probably be able to have somebody else help with these kinds of things. There was probably some statistic somewhere, being calculated by the treegrave, about what the level of interest in earrings was, and why they’d come into fashion in the first place, and what types of boys liked what colours. Maybe somebody in Education, or some other field probably, it probably didn’t have anything to do with education but someone, was sitting in a dim room staring at a projection of a spreadsheet and wondering if earrings were hampering boys’ ability to learn to be good at stuff that the Dragonseye colony would need. Maybe they’d know the perfect gift for my brother.
I didn’t even notice what charm he got as I munched my way through a birthday egg. I had more important things to worry about.
Derin Edala 
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