The problem with Mission: Become Best Friends with Mana And Get Involved With The Red Apprentices (And maybe Try To Become Close To The Other Apprentices Too) was that I still didn’t really know anything about making friends. I’d become friends with Arai and Hitan when we were all far too young and naive to have standards, and with Tikka, let’s be honest, that had been a lot more down to her personality and initiative than mine.
I knew that I was good at reading people. I’m not stupid; it’s not like I hadn’t noticed that other people missed or misinterpreted each others’ thoughts and moods way more than I did. But was that going to be enough? I was pretty sure you were supposed to care about your friends more than other people, and I had no idea how to care about someone openly picky and hostile who was practically a stranger to me.
Well, the ‘practically a stranger to me’ part would fix itself over time, if they kept making us have meetings with each other. I supposed that I just had top make the intervening time pleasant for both of us instead of unpleasant. I needed a Mana-specific strategy. And for that, I needed information.
I waited until I was absolutely certain that all of my family were asleep (being on a different shift made it so much easier to get private time at home), headed for our garden, and pushed the little red button. “Treegrave?”
“Yes, Taya?”
“How much information can you give me about the other apprentices?”
“A fair amount. What would you like to know?”
So I started gathering facts.
Sema, twenty two years old, about three months from finishing his apprenticeship. Only child of a 3-parent nuclear family. Planning to go into Resources; specifically, into administration of the division of stores and, when we made orbit, into the acquisition and storage of resources from the Dragonseye in preparation for the next leg of our journey. Sema had seemed distant at the meeting; learning all this about him, I had the sense that he was impatient to finish up his apprenticeship and get to work. He probably wouldn’t be interested in making friends with the new kid. He was one of Captain Violet’s apprentices.
Huspi, eighteen years old. Orphanage child. A Hummer, which surprised me. I’d only ever seen Hummers wandering about the ship in small groups, swathed in their large black veils, or with bared faces and gauzy fabric tied over their eyes. They spoke very little, and as quietly as possible. Huspi had looked pretty normal in our meeting, but I supposed that Hummers must have normal lives, too. Maybe ke didn’t take kes religion to work. (Had we ever had a Hummer captain? I hadn’t heard of one. But then, I hadn’t exactly gone looking, either.) Huspi was a Green apprentice.
Dimun, seventeen years old. The other Green apprentice – that was interesting. They were very close in age. Had they and Huspi been picked up by Captain Green at the same time? Dimun was a harem kid, like me, so the pair wouldn’t have grown up together. But maybe they’d been friends, and gotten noticed at the same time? I actually had no idea how other captains picked their apprentices. Presumably they didn’t all wait until a kid tried to sneak into the treegrave and critique her infiltration technique.
Aevor was the other violet apprentice. I already knew him. Orphanage kid, played the harmonica apparently, I had the treegrave explain a harmonica to me. It seemed awful.
And Mana, the red apprentice. Fourteen years old. Orphanage kid. The treegrave wouldn’t tell me much about her personal life, like whether she had a lot of friends (“Why don’t you ask her?”), but it did tell me that she liked to run. I’d seem people run for fun before, at the playground; running in huge circles, sometimes timing themselves. It seemed like a lonely hobby.
Or maybe they were all getting together and having big parties where they compared their running times. I didn’t know. Sometimes, people ran together.
There was something interesting about all that information, though. The next day, I didn’t see Yamin (it was my second day with Shanan), but I mentioned to Shanan that I had some questions about childrearing and ke arranged for me to meet with Seiba and Dava from Education and Development again. My questions were really more about families, and probably not something I needed to consult a professional about, but it was a break from learning shorthand notation strategies and schedule organisation tips, so I didn’t stop kem.
Seiba and Dava were the same boistrous, smiling brennan and thin, sharp man that I remembered. I wasn’t sure why they, or Shanan, thought I’d need both of them, but maybe they were also looking to take a break from work.
“Taya!” Seiba grinned widely, spotting me in the little reception area where I’d las met kem. “Welcome back!”
Dava fluttered a few fingers in greeting.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you guys up to today?”
“Not a whole lot, honestly,” Dava said before Seiba could answer. “We’ve sorted out most of the education type and scheduling changes as we approach orbit and nobody’s trying to disrupt our whole society in any unusual or serious way, so we’re just coasting on inertia for a while.”
“… Are they trying to disrupt society in a usual, unserious way?”
“Somebody is always trying to disrupt society in a usual, unserious way,” Dava groaned. “Always. Especially as we get near a star. There’s no such thing as a perfect system that everyone is happy with, and there’s always some group of people both unhappy and bored enough to want to break everything about it, and it’s usually a bunch of kids and young adults which makes it at least partly our problem.”
“But mostly not our problem,” Seiba cut in quickly, “and I’m sure that Taya didn’t come here to discuss that sort of thing. Life isn’t a spy story.”
“Pity,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of spy stories.”
“I’m given to understand that the threat of potential unrest is so low at the moment that the harmony division is downright bored,” Seiba assured me, and I made a mental note to try to learn more about this ‘harmony division’ when I got a chance. “What do you want to know?”
“Um,” I said, my questions feeling like a waste of everyone else’s time now that I was here. I probably could’ve asked the treegrave for this information. I just hadn’t wanted to. “I wanted to know what proportion of kids were raised in orphanages on the Courageous?”
“About eight ninths,” Seiba said, without even having to check. “Give or take.”
“Should be higher,” Dava muttered.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
Seiba smiled. “Dava doesn’t like families.”
“Most of us don’t like families,” Dava pointed out. “Don’t pretend that you do.”
“I was raised in a family!” I protested. “I’m from a harem!”
“That’s great,” Dava said. “Nothing against the kids from them. I just don’t think we need them.”
“We don’t need them?”
“They’re a statistical and organisational nightmare. It’s like, the majority of the kids on the ship are pretty easy to raise, from an organisational standpoint. Easy to monitor, easy to regulate educational and life standards. Easy to predict how they’ll turn out, on a statistical level though not an individual one. Kids in orphanages all have pretty similar childhoods except for an occasional exceptional case, and if there are problems they’re very easily picked up and can be addressed. But families make things way harder. Parents, who very rarely have half the training of carers and definitely have less guidance and gain less experience over their lifetimes, haphazardly raise kids however they want and then throw them out into the world with all the normal kids. It’s harder to find problems, it’s harder to find subtle types of abuse, and it’s harder to control for large societal factors. I’m sure your childhood was fine as an individual, but on a mass scale it’s just a wildly inefficient, unpredictable and unnecessary way of raising kids when we already have a perfectly good orphanage system right there.”
“But family kids come out better, right? I mean, in the advanced classes I’ve been in, there have been a much higher proportion of family kids – ”
“A common misconception,” Dava said. “Family kids don’t come out smarter, or more emotionally regulated, or more competent. Their average is the same as the average for orphanage kids. What family kids have is a higher standard deviation. There are more successful family kids, and more unsuccessful family kids. And we don’t have any particular need for a small handful of hypercompetent geniuses, so this is just another drawback. It’s much easier to plan and organise a society there people are more similar to each other than one with bigger differences. Besides, if some family does come up with an amazing strategy to make smarter, happier, more self-assured children in a reliable and repeated matter, you know what we do? We find out why it’s happening and then we alter the orphanage care strategies accordingly. Nd then you end up with the families falling behind, because parents are stubborn and refuse to let people tell them what to do. It’s a mess, and the only reason it sticks around is because this ship is deathly allergic to ever letting go of a tradition.”
“That is kind of our identity,” I said.
Dava sighed. “Don’t I know it.”
“Well, the family system is clearly good for something,” I said, “because even though we’re a tiny part of the population, half of the current apprentices of captains are from families. I mean, maybe that’s coincidence because there aren’t very many of us, but…”
“No,” Seiba said. “That’s pretty normal, actually. No idea why, but captains do seem to favour family kids.”
“Maybe a lot of them just apprentice their own kids, or something?”
“Nope,” Dava said. “That’s illegal. Anyone who’s a captain, no member of their family – that includes ancestors and descendents as well as siblings and spouses – and no member of any family that includes one of those people – so if their brother gets married, his kids and spouses – are allowed to become a captain, become apprenticed to a captain, or take on a handful of other important ship roles. This is supposedly to prevent dynasties.”
“Dynasties?”
“When a family stays in charge of something for multiple generations,” Seiba explained. “It can cause all kinds of problems. Mainly conflicts of interest, where people might put their family before the ship, issues with giving jobs to bad candidates because of their families instead of good ones, diplomatic problems… stuff like that.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I can see how banning family members would stop that.”
Dava snorted. “Does it?”
“Well, ke just said – ”
“That it’s supposed to. But we somehow still ended up with captains picking out their favourite kids to train them into the kind of people they want and hand the ship over to them, generation after generation. The preferences have grown so strong that people who are close enough to the decisions to know what’s going on assign personalities to the shifts, did you know that? Everyone pretends it’s not a dynasty because they don’t rock your cradle, but I’m not convinced we’ve solved anything.”
Seiba frowned. “You’re very pessimistic, you know that?”
“You mean realistic,” Dava and I said at the same time, and I finally saw Dava smile.
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