89: Aevor

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The best cafeteria on the ship turned out to be very average. I figured that it was some kind of inside joke that I’d learn to understand later. It did have my favourite nutrient loaf, so I grabbed a piece of that and sat down at a little corner table with Aevor.

“So,” he said. “How’s your apprenticeship been so far?”

“Fine,” I said. Why were we here? Did he want something from me? Did he want to know something about me, or to tell me something? Or was he just being friendly? “Do those meetings happen a lot?”

“About once every couple of weeks,” he shrugged. “And they’re usually about that productive. Sometimes something really interesting happens and we can spend an hour talking it out, but usually they have to scramble up some random piece of news to talk about.”

“Why?” Obviously, the captains didn’t expect us to come up with anything useful.

“Well, they say we need to know how to discuss novel problems and problem solve in a group, but we meet up way too often for that. I think they just want to make us talk to each other. That way, whenever an apprentice finishes up and moves out into the wide world of work, there’s some others there that they already know and spent years meeting up with and talking to, right? When Sema leaves us, and I know he can’t wait to, he’ll have his old apprentice peers around and they’ll remember him and might help him out. Then when we move on, we’ll have people like Sema there.” He sipped his nutrient shake. “That’s my theory, anyway.”

He liked answering the question. He didn’t seem to be pushing for anything or anticipating anything. Maybe he was just being friendly.

“I don’t think Mana will want to help me out,” I said. “She didn’t seem to like me.”

“Oh, she’ll get over it. And if she doesn’t, the rest of us will be there.” He gave me a reassuring smile.

Hmm. A very specific type of friendly. I knew this kind of manner very well. He didn’t want to be my friend – like half of the older people in my life, he wanted to be my mentor. He wanted to feel powerful and generous and kind by helping the poor naive new girl with all the knowledge and experience that he had and she didn’t.

Well, I wanted that knowledge. I could play along.

“Why doesn’t she like me?” I asked.

“I’m sure it isn’t that she doesn’t like you.” Lie. “She’s always been the critical one in the group.” True. “But she’s probably having a bad day, she’ll probably be nicer next time.” Lie.

“Being critical seems like an important skill in Administration,” I said, and he laughed a bit.

“How old did you say you were?”

That again. But he wasn’t being aggressive like Mana had been, and if I didn’t tell people, they were probably just going to keep asking. Or ask someone else, or the treegrave; it wasn’t like my age was a secret. “Eleven.”

A flash of surprise in his expression. “You’re very mature for eleven.”

I widened my eyes in mock surprise. “You’re very condescending for a teenager.”

“That’s a job skill. Have you seen how condescending half of Administration is? Gotta get my practice in early.”

“Is that why Mana is like that?”

“She’s fine, she’s just grumpy. I think it’s because she’s on the drudge shift.”

“The drudge shift?”

“Yeah. You know. Right, I forgot; you’re new. So, when it comes to the ship captains, it’s very common for them to be succeeded by one of their own former apprentices, or their former mentor’s apprentices if the ages work out that way, when they retire. It’s not guaranteed; sometimes there aren’t any good candidates in that group, or sometimes there’s another candidate that’s just so perfect that they’re chosen anyway. But people usually try to… well, I don’t think they try to make sure a captain is succeeded by their own apprentices, exactly, but they try to make sure that the whole ship isn’t dominated by the apprentices of one captain. Because a given captain is of course going to pick apprentices with traits that they value, and train them to use skills and methods that they value, and you don’t want all of your captains thinking and believing and acting the same as each other. Variety is key, and all that. Personally I don’t think it matters all that much because most major decisions are made by way bigger groups, but emergency judgements and immediate decisions fall to the captain, so I guess they think it matters that there’s some variety. Anyway. Blue, Green and Violat tend to work like that, but Red captains always seem to be some random department head from outside Administration entirely, or at least some Administrator who didn’t go through an apprenticeship. Obviously most of us won’t become captains, and Mana has the same chance at other high ranking jobs that the rest of us do, but I think she kind of resents the fact that the rest of us at least have a chance at the captaincy if we want to go for it, and she has no chance. Because red apprentices never become captains. The shift is like cursed or something.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said.

“It does?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s the same as the other captains being succeeded by their own apprentices, right? They like to have at least one captain who wasn’t an apprentice, to keep variety and make sure there’s an outside voice so they’re not missing anything important. But it’s way easier to promote people you know, who have been through the training, right? So they tend not to bother having more than one outsider captain, meaning that whenever the outsider captain retired, that’s when they get a new one. Of course they’re all going to be on the same shift. If something weird happened and we were put in a situation where it made sense to promote a drudge captain to the violet shift, then a red apprentice would probably succeed Captain Red and the violet shift would become the drudge shift.”

“Ooooh,” Aevor said. “Yeah, I get why she hates you now.”

“I knew it! I knew she hated me! Wait, why does she hate me?”

“I’m sure she’ll get over it,” he shrugged.

“Why, though?”

“Well, you’re Captain Blue’s apprentice.”

“So?”

“So. He didn’t have one until now. We all thought that he was gonna retire with zero apprentices. And he’s been captain for ages, so all of his blue apprentice peers, as it were, are pretty old for the job. I’d bet anything that the red apprentices got together and were all planning to push for one of their own or for a drudge to take over his shift. Probably the latter; a red apprentice in blue shift wouldn’t mean anything to Mana, she’s way too young for it to be her. But if they put a drudge in that slot, then when Captain Red retires…”

“And now she’s worried that I’ll take his job instead?”

“I guess so. You won’t, though, because he’s almost definitely going to retire right after your apprenticeship is finished. You won’t have the work or life experience to be considered. But she’s probably annoyed that you might be a threat somehow anyway. Maybe you or him will do something unpredictable that makes you a good candidate. It’s an extra complication, anyway.”

Hmm. I had practically no chance of directly succeeding Yamin – I already knew that, I’d made the same assumptions about him retiring that Aevor had made – which meant that none of this new information was good. If the other captains were likely to give the job to their own apprentices, then me becoming captain was going to be even harder than I thought.

I could give up on the idea of the captaincy and put myself in another influential role – that was the backup plan anyway, no reason to give up on the main plan for it. I could try to be good enough to be considered over another captain’s apprentices – that might work, if the problem was maintaining variety, but if it were that easy then previous generations of red apprentices would’ve just done that. Or… I could do what I could to get a red apprentice to succeed Yamin instead of an outsider. Putting a red in after Yamin would disqualify the rest of them from succeeding Captain Red, which meant that I’d be up against drudges for that position. That wasn’t any easier than the position they’d been in, but if I could leverage my support of a red captain against their support later on… and maybe employ some rhetoric about drudge captains being good in general but a bad idea around the high stakes situation of building the colony… I didn’t know enough about the situation to know what my chances of success were, yet, but it was a start. If the reds were working together, I needed to get to know them, figure out more of what was going on.

I was going to have to become Mana’s best friend.

“So if the red shift is the drudge shift, do the other shifts have reputations?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Green Shift is the Brains Shift. Their captains always seem to be clever, focused, stressed out of their minds. Micromanage a bit too much, I think. Violet shift is the chill shift. Violet captains and their apprentices tend to be more hands-off. You don’t want to hold something too tightly or it breaks, right? You go around fixing what isn’t broken, you end up breaking it. We tend to be more hands-off and doing our actual jobs, which is to facilitate communication between others and to step in for judgement calls in emergencies, not try to do everyone else’s jobs for them.”

“And my shift?”

Aevor grinned. “Your shift is the chaos shift. I don’t think anyone currently alive remembers a blue captain who was predictable, or, to be honest, who was getting nearly as much therapy as they probably need. Which is probably why Mana’s wary of you. Captain Blue picked you, and that alone is gonna say something about your character to some people.”

“What does it say to you.”

“Nothing. I’m reserving judgement. Chill shift, remember? I will think nothing until the moment until we’re all called into an emergency meeting because of some random shit you pulled.”

“You said ‘when’, not ‘if’. That’s not reserving judgement.”

“I haven’t finished my apprenticeship yet. I’m still learning the chill part.”

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