I quickly learned that while the apprentices often talked together after meetings, most of them weren’t friends outside of work. It seemed like Mana and Huspi were close, but everyone else had their own, separate lives.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing for me. I wanted Mana to trust me enough to pull me into whatever the red apprentices were doing about getting one of them made captain, so that I could make my own plans. It would be nice if Sema wanted to be close to me, because he was about to finish his apprenticeship and that would be a great way to get to know other former apprentices, but there was no chance of that. Sema was obviously looking forward to leaving his apprenticeship, and definitely didn’t care about getting close to an eleven year old newbie.
My age was a problem all round, I quickly noticed. Mana and Aevor were only a few years older than me, but it seemed like a few years counted for a lot. People were mostly nice to me at work, but nobody wanted to spend their own free time with an eleven year old they barely knew yet. It was becoming more obvious every day that Yamin had come to me way too young – if I was eight, this apprenticeship would be pointless.
Most of the apprentices had started at around thirteen, I learned. Sometimes an apprentice would start at fourteen, or even fifteen. Eleven was young enough to surprise people, but not young enough for them to be too weird about it. Mana had started at twelve, but now she seemed to think that eleven was too young, but whatever.
Maybe I didn’t need to be friends with these people outside of work. Maybe getting along at work would be enough. I supposed that I’d find out.
I started spending about half of my jaunt time with Yamin, following him to various departments to hear about various issues and projects, and half of it with his assistant Shanan. I wasn’t sure how much of this was designed for me to learn from Shanan, and how much was Yamin wanting to get work done that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, drag a new apprentice around for. I found that it was pretty easy to get either of them to let me go wherever I wanted so long at it looked like I might learn something there, and spent a lot of time hanging out in the departments that had fun, friendly people willing to talk to me or show me something cool. Sometimes Yamin or Shanan went with me. Usually they sent me off alone.
I spent enough time with Seiba and Dava from the Education and Development Administration branch that people were clearly suspecting that that was where I wanted to work. Both Shanan and Seiba kept subtly giving me information about the job and the skills I’d need to pursue it. I wasn’t interested in joining them. I was just fascinated by their work.
Saving humanity was a goal far beyond the scope of any one person. I didn’t know what to do when we ran out of galaxies, when we ran out of universe. That problem was going to be for other people to solve. I didn’t even know how to escape our galaxy. My job was to solve the problem in front of me, to give us a chance – my job was to help us free ourselves from the weights holding us back and slowing us down. If we could shift away from an obsession with limping from star to star wasting pointless time seeding colonies, if we could shift our mindset and focus on outrunning the competition… that was the big step, the first step. Everything else I’d have to leave in the hands of our descendants.
And honestly, most of that would be left in the hands of our descendants, too. I was very lucky, to be born at the right time to see one colony. I wouldn’t live long enough to see another. I’d die of old age long before I could ever know whether I’d succeeded at helping at all.
But I had to do what I could. My current best-case-scenario goal was to somehow convince the fleet not to make a colony at the next star. When we launched away from the Dragonseye, we shouldn’t pick the next start based on how well it could support a colony; we should pick it for the resources, the air and iron and fuel, that spaceships need. It would be our first ever ‘refuelling star’. We could mark that as a part of our history – sometimes we stop to refuel at stars without building a colony. And that’s okay.
If I was very, very lucky, then generations of people living their lives on the way to a refuelling star would change the whole mindset. Maybe not having building a colony be the goal for all those people would stop people from being so obsessed with colonies. Maybe they’d change the identity of the fleet on their own, and think of us as humanity’s habitat, not just a transport to one.
Or maybe not. Maybe they’d go on to colonise another star. That was okay, too, because there would be future refuelling stops once one of them had gone down in history. And I was sure that over time, colonies would become less and less prevalent, and refuellings more and more prevalent. If I did it right.
I wouldn’t live long enough to ever know if I’d done it right. But I had to do my best.
And if I had to change the culture of a ship, then Education and Development was a great place to start. These people spent all day poring over jaunt schedules to figure out the best age to send kids on janitorial jaunts so they’d understand why picking up after themselves was important, and how much to push a literacy education so that we’d have the skills best suited to colony building. If I wanted to declare a multi-generational war on the Mission, I couldn’t just focus on the adults in charge. I would have to focus on the children.
“Any problems?” Yamin asked as we walked into their little projector office one day.
“Growth and Medical are idiots,” Dava said, not looking away from his spreadsheets.
Yamin didn’t quite manage to hide his small, amused smile. “Are they now.”
“They’re increasing the Y chromosome probability draw in new babies by three per cent for the indefinite future,” Seiba explained, in the fed up tone of someone who’d clearly heard kes coworker rant about this extensively.
“Ah,”Yamin said, like that explained everything. “Emigration.”
“”It’s pointless!” Dava fumed. “I mean, it’s not a big deal in the scheme of things, but it’s the principle of it!”
“Y chromosome?” I frowned. I didn’t know much about genetics, but I knew that there were genes on the Y chromosome that were a big determinant in lots of physical characteristics. It was also the main genetic cause of men, so far as we could tell. More than three quarters of people with Y chromosomes turned out to be men, and less than one twentieth of people without a Y chromosome did. “They want more men in the population? Why?”
“Because they’re trying to hit standard,” Dava said. “They want to keep the ‘proper’ ratios of different characteristics in the population. Which is their job, of course, but their new head is weirdly obsessive about it, to the level of five per cent more women than men is a big problem, apparently, when those ratios ‘should be’ closer to equal. Plenty of ships have far more skewed gender ratios than ours and it’s not any kind of problem, but this is just what we get for turning our ship into a living museum, I guess. It’s the we-gotta-keep-families thing all over again.”
“Families have benefits outside of just tradition,” Seiba said.
“Agree to disagree,” Dava said.
“Don’t we already make half the population with a Y chromosome?” I asked. “Shouldn’t they be more or less balanced? Do people with Y chromosomes die faster or something?”
“Yes, actually,” Seiba said, “but not in numbers that make much of a difference until we get to the elderly. Some ships have large difference in survival based on the Y chromosome, but it’s mostly an extrapolation of survival differences between genders based on social factors; we have comparatively few gender differences here and the actual genetic difference in survivability exists, but isn’t huge. The main factor is emigration. Women and brennans leave the Courageous at about the same rate, on average, but men leave at twice the rate of everyone else.”
“Why?” I asked.
Before ke could answer, Yamin cut in. “Why do you think, Taya?”
He liked doing this; giving me impromptu little quizzes to make me think. I hid my annoyance and thought.
I didn’t know anything about the topic, but I knew what Seiba had just told me when thinking about the topic. It wasn’t genetic, or ke wouldn’t have phrased kes explanation like that. Not many social differences between the genders… I wasn’t sure about that, we seemed about the same as the other ships I’d been to; more, in some cases. But I hadn’t been to all that many ships, and if Seiba included that in the explanation… what differences did we have? Probably nothing to do with fashion, so…
“Employment,” I said.
“What about employment?”
“Well, you can’t really condense anyone down to just their gender, but we do know that on average, men, women and brennans think differently and have different skills. On average, they’re drawn to different kinds of work and recreation. Women are patient and focused; they’re good at repetitive tasks, like factory or janitorial work. Women are most likely to become masters at the things they do because they have the patience and drive to practice the same skills until they’re perfect at it. Brennans are observant, caring, and have good memories. They tend to be good organisers, and like to help people. So they’re good at academic jobs, organising jobs, and medicine and childcare, stuff like that. I mean, you just have to look around and see how saturated Administration is with brennans; they’re like three twentieths of the population, but nearly half of the people up here.
“Women and brennans have a lot of work they can do up here, and that’s great; everyone wants to contribute and help the ship and be useful. But men have more trouble with that, on average. Men tend to like fast, dangerous work, where things change a lot and they have to adapt. Men are good at keeping calm in a crisis and thinking on their feet, and coming up with creative new solutions to unexpected problems. And on a ship like this, there’s just not that much of that kind of thing to do. We only need so many pilots and diplomats and external hull workers. Plenty of men are good at other jobs – my dad does a woman’s job and he’s great at it – but I think, on average, men are less likely to find fulfilling work on the Courageous, and will want to head to more dangerous ships.”
“That’s a great answer,” Yamin said, sounding a bit surprised. “I wouldn’t have even considered that. It’s completely wrong, but it’s a fantastic guess.”
I crossed my arms. “What do you mean, it’s wrong?”
“Even if we accept your premise of truth in stereotype, which a lot of people don’t, by the way, there’s plenty of work on the Courageous that requires creative thinking, risk, and doing different things day to day. If there was a sudden influx of men into factory work, we’d stop talking about factory work as being repetitive and start talking about how dangerous factories can be and how responding to problems in them takes fast thinking. If men started flooding into medicine, we’d stop talking about it as a job for caring, organised academics and start talking about the risks of surgery and the problem solving skills needed to pin down and treat so many different kinds of health problems in so many different kinds of bodies. Similarly, if women started flooding into medicine, we’d talk about the repetition of standard medical screenings and how important it is to be patient and adhere to standards and procedures, and well as praise the hard-earned mastery of good surgeons. Don’t get me wrong; shutting entire demographics out of certain fields of work isn’t impossible; in fact, it happens a lot as a symptom of some broader level of control. But the stereotypes are often an excuse, but not the cause – people are shut out due to other factors, and then back-rationalisations made about why it’s for the best, or only natural, because their absence proces they’re not suited to the work anyway. It can be a huge deal; some ships have had actual coups based on things like that. But a lack of access to good, fulfilling work isn’t why twice as many men are leaving the Courageous.”
“Why are they, then?” I asked, annoyed.
Yamin smiled. “Children. More men leave because of the children.”
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