90: Shanan

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Yamin did have a private captain’s office. It was pretty nice.

Like the big meeting room, it had a view of space. It was about the size of a normal view port, but instead of the benches and little garden in the middle, there was a small work desk in the middle of the room with a computer terminal built into it. A small unlabelled door was in the right side wall. There was a chair in front of the terminal, and a couple of guest chairs; I sat down in one.

“The soundproofing on this ship is amazing,” I said.

Yamin glanced away from the view of space to shoot me a puzzled look. “What?”

“The soundproofing,” I said. “When we were on the Ironstock, I could hear the humming of machines everywhere. It pushed me to the lock. But there’s, what, only four or five doors between us and the trolley station? And I can’t hear a thing.”

“I suppose it is pretty good,” Yamin said. “I’ve never really thought about it. What did you think about the other apprentices?”

“They seem nice,” I shrugged. “They told me everyone thinks that you’re chaotic and unbalanced. They say all blue captains are, and they think I am because you picked me.”

“And what do you think?”

“That they’re wrong. Not about you being chaotic and unbalanced; you might be, for all I know. But I think they’re wrong about thinking that. If everyone thought that about you then you wouldn’t be in charge of a spaceship for six hours every day. But I think that maybe they think that they think that. Do you do it on purpose?”

“… Come across as chaotic and unbalanced?”

“Yes.”

“What would be the point in that?” he asked. “What advantage would a captain have in coming across as unreliable? That would be silly.” But he was grinning when he said it. “There’s somebody that you should meet.” He knocked on the side door, and it opened to reveal a brennan in kes late middle age, wearing a very nice wrap and holding a notepad and pencil. “Taya, this is Shanan. Ke’s my personal assistant.”

Shanan gave me a polite nod. I returned it.

“Kes job is to note, track and organise things to help manage my schedule. Prioritise meetings, remind me of what’s important, all that kind of thing. It’s not required for a captain to have one – it’s perfectly possible to simply ask the treegrave to remember things for you – but ke’s extremely helpful. I want you to spend the next couple of days with kem.” He left us alone.

“You have to promise not to tell Yamin how easy my job is,” Shanan told me with a grin once he shut the door. “If he sees how little work I do, he won’t respect me.”

Ke ushered me in through the side door, into a much smaller but much cosier-looking office than Yamin’s. There were no windows to space inside, just tall cabinets against the far wall that logically probably contained paper. I’d never seen so much paper in one place, except maybe Aunt Shorin’s room whenever she got bored with canvas. No computer terminal, which was interesting. Ke probably just used the one in Yamin’s office; even in the decadence of Administration, where they seemed to hand electronics out like birthday charms, there had to be limits.

The room wasn’t messy, at least not compared to my home, but it did look messy next to the sterile cleanliness of Yamin’s office. A couple of old teacups and snack packets were scattered on the desk; a few small stacks of paper were lying about, not put away. It’d probably be messier if there wee more surfaces to leave things on. A second chair tucked away into a random corner, which Shanan took a small stack of paper off and dragged out for me before taking kes own chair at the desk.

“How long have you worked for Captain Blue?” I asked.

“Oh, not long. About a month and a half?” Shanan grinned at my look of surprise. “Yeah, he’s been handling his own stuff for a while, but I think taking on an apprentice put more on his plate than he’s used to doing alone. Or maybe it’s just because he’s getting old. Some youngins wanted the job, but since he’s likely to retire in a decade or so anyway, it made no sense to train somebody new for such a temporary job when they could just have me do it. Now, I’m given to understand that you’re quite literate, and you can hand write?”

I nodded.

“That’s great! That’s a surprisingly useful skill in this line of work. You’re always wanting to track or remember things with no computer access, and asking the treegrave to remember everything for you is surprisingly inefficient when you get to a certain level of complexity.”

“They pulled you in because you’ve done this before? And you… knew Captain Blue well?”

Ke shrugged. “We’ve never been best friends or anything. But I became an apprentice, uh, I think around the time that he finished his apprenticeship? So we’ve known each other casually for a while.”

I nodded again. That was why Yamin wanted me to learn from Shanan. He knew as well as me – better than me, presumably – that my chances of becoming a captain weren’t great, with the timing of everything. But he wanted me to help him save the Courageous, and I was going to need influence to do that. This sort of work was another method of gaining that influence.

“He said you organise his schedule and prioritise meetings?”

“To a degree. He’s used to being self-sufficient, but yes; a captain’s time can be very limited, especially when they’ve got an apprentice for half of their shift, and there are constantly people wanting their advice or clearance on things. Half of my job is filtering out the nonsense that Captain Blue doesn’t actually need to be there for. A lot of the things he’s asked to authorise can actually be authorised by other Administrators or heads of certain departments or sometimes even the treegrave. Some of it I can do myself. It means he has to attend a lot less meetings, and if he’s still overburdened, I sometimes have to make a call on what’s low-urgency enough to reschedule to prioritise more immediate concerns. Or whether meetings need to be shorter. Things like that.”

Oh. Yamin had always seemed very relaxed and casual when I was around. It made sense that all his important meetings about classified things were happening when I wasn’t there, though, so I supposed that the part of his shift that he spent with me was much more low-stakes and relaxed.

I’d feel bad about taking up his time like that, but well, he was the one who proposed this apprenticeship. And was so insistent about it. And judging by how many other apprentices there were for other captains, I supposed that he’d really been slacking until now.

It made sense that he didn’t get a personal assistant until he was overwhelmed. (I half suspected that he still didn’t need kem, and had gotten kem purely to teach me, but that seemed like a lot of work for something like that.) The person who gets to decide what the captain sees and what they can make decisions on might be more influential than the captain themself. Shanan didn’t seem to be playing any complicated political games (but then, how would I know? I didn’t have enough information to guess at something like that), but it would be really, really easy to play them with a job like that.

For hours, Shanan took me through the various duties of personal administration. Ke had clearly meant to give me a brief overview of each one, but I wanted to learn, so I kept asking questions. How much authority do you have to change and organise things? How do you decide to prioritise different sorts of things? Do you interact directly with the other captains’ assistants, or with the captains themselves? How much control do you have over your client’s schedule?

It was complicated, but straightforward. Personal assistants didn’t seem to have any real power of their own, but they were supposed to handle their client’s affairs and their decisions were backed by their client. If Shanan couldn’t really go against Yamin’s decisions (at least, not if he noticed), but so long as he trusted kes judgement and was happy with kes work, ke had as much power as ke wanted to make things happen properly. “If you want to talk about power to actually get things done,” Shanan explained, “most of what I can do has nothing to do with being Captain Blue’s PA. I mean, some of it does; there are clearances and influence that I had specifically because everyone knows I’m working on his behalf. But on the whole there’s not all that much that I can do that a whole lot of other people can’t – it’s just that my job ensures that I know specifically what I can do, and they don’t. You have to know a lot about our laws and procedures to do this kind of work effectively. And of course, I have access to most of the general information that people are sending to Captain Blue, so I have enough information to get things done. But on the whole, it’s not a position that really comes with any power. Captain Blue makes all the decisions.”

Everything else ke’d said sure sounded like making a lot of decisions, but I let it go.

“If you’re truly interested in this work,” Shanan said, “you should know that it’s a very brennan-dominated field.”

Yes, of course it was. Anyone could have guessed that. “Is that important?”

Shanan shrugged. “I’ve never thought so, but men and women assistants seem to think that it does. Life is easier when you make the sorts of life choices that people expect of you.”

That was definitely true. “So do you have access to all of Captain Blue’s messages and stuff?” I asked.

“Most of them. Some people are more private than others, and more restrictive with what they want personal assistants to do, but the captain is very relaxed. I don’t see personal correspondence, or anything above a certain level of security clearance. I get everything moderate-security or below addressed to “Captain Blue” or “Yamin”, but nothing highly classified or under his real name.”

Yamin was a fake name? Hmm. That made sense, I supposed – he’d used it to introduce himself to my family, and they hadn’t responded well. If they’d responded even worse, and had somehow found out he was a captain (which might have been possible if they’d decided to investigate; Mum did work in security), and had had his real name and decided to make things personal… I mean, they wouldn’t do that; no reasonable person would. But he probably couldn’t be sure that everyone would be reasonable. Besides, all the people whose departments we’d been touring before I figured out that he was a captain had used the name.

Still, it didn’t seem fair that he knew my name and I didn’t know his. Didn’t he trust me? His apprentice? I wasn’t keeping big secrets from him!

Well, except for my goal of having the fleet abandon the Mission in favour of heading to the galactic edge as quickly as possible and leaving this galaxy to its eventual overconsumption and decay at the hands of our sibling fragments and doomed colony children. But no big secrets apart from that.

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