Yamin stood in his office, hands behind his back, staring dramatically out into space. Which was fair. If I had a private office with that kind of view, I’d spend a lot of time staring out into space, too.
“Our diplomats have reported back,” he announced without turning around to look at me. “They’re still off doing the diplomacy part of their jobs, and some have more actual work to do on that front than others, but they’ve reached essentially the same conclusions that you did about Hexacorallia.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you said that this sort of thing happens at some colonies, right? So why are we having a big dramatic private meeting about it?”
Yamin didn’t turn around and grin. The mood didn’t lighten. Instead, he sighed deeply, and stared out into space silently for a while.
Just when I was about to awkwardly break the silence, he spoke up. “Tell me, Taya. Do you know what the purpose of a treegrave is? Do you know what a treegrave can do that humans can’t?”
I thought about that for a bit. “Um,” I said. “Those are two very different questions.”
“Are they?”
The fact that he was asking probably meant I was wrong, but I pushed on. “Well, yeah. Treegraves can’t really do anything that individual humans can’t. Plenty of peripheral vessels get along just fine without them, and I think colonies do, too. We were in working spaceships for a long time before treegraves; we launched away from Earth’s star and settled a planet without one. But treegraves can do a lot of things safer, and better, and faster, and more consistently than humans. They mean that we can make big ships with lots going on, and still manage them. You can put a hundred and fifty security personnel behind cameras, or you can put a couple in an office and have the treegrave point out anything dangerous. You can have a complicated messaging network in the hands of a specialised AI and a huge library of information where people have to look up everything they want to know themselves, or you can make both way simpler by having a treegrave help. They don’t do what we can’t, but they make things easier and more reliable.”
Yamin nodded without looking away from the window. “That’s a logical answer that many people would give.”
“But it’s wrong?” I guessed. I knew these games by now.
“It is. Treegraves can do things that humans cannot, because they have one massive advantage over humanity, one capability that we will never, ever acquire.”
“Which is?”
“Immortality.” Finally, Yamin turned away from the window, but he seemed to be staring above my head rather than looking at me. “Treegraves exist on timeframes that humans cannot. Our lives, our cultures, our societies are victims of the restraints of time and distance, and while lifespans can be extended, they can’t be extended enough to matter on the scale of the Mission. But treegraves… minds in them might die and get replaced, but once a treegrave is established, individual minds matter little. They adapt to the system far more than the system adapts to them, and the code, the programming, barely changes without good reason. The treegrave of today is the Aspen Courageous in the same way that today’s Taya is still two-year-old Taya. And in the early years, of course, there is a lot of change, a lot of learning and growth and adaptation; but eventually people, and treegraves, are set. You might be different from your two-year-old self, but that slows down over time. The Courageous treegrave of five or six colonies ago is the Courageous treegrave of today in the same way that fifty year old Taya will be the same as sixty year old Taya. You undertand? It tkes a great deal to change the essence, the personality, of an experienced and established treegrave. People die and are born, and with it, society changes extremely quickly. But the treegrave carried the soul of what a ship is, from its very birth.
“Treegraves… are culture. It is because of their long memories that we can remain the same people as our ancestors. It’s because of them that our societies can remain stable, can weather disasters and coups and all kind of changes and troubles, and then return back to baseline within a generation or two. Treegraves are absolutely critical to interstellar travel, not necessarily because they do any work that we can’t do with security monitoring or controlling robots or communications or anything, but because they grant us a stability that is simply not natural to short-lived beings like us. One cannot safely, reliable, stably travel from start to star and do what we do if every single journey takes multiple generations of people with no baseline to tie themselves to. Something would break, something would rot, something would collapse. The treegrave keeps us alive in the same way that a tether keeps an external hull worker alive.”
“Okay,” I said warily. “And this is important, because…?”
His eyes flicked down to meet mine. “Our diplomats and sociological analysts,” he said, “have determined that Hexacorallia’s treegrave is completely incapable of doing its job. Their culture has a lot of flexibility, which is useful in certain circumstances, particularly in building a new colony. But they have no stability whatsoever, which is death to long-term space travel.
“Under normal circumstances, a treegrave having a cultural autoimmune disease isn’t our problem. Ships can look after themselves and if they want help, they’ll ask for it. The problem is if their disease is contagious, which Hexacorallia’s very well may be.”
“How?” I asked. “People who want to live like Hexacorallians can just move to Hexacorallia. Why would it affect other ships?”
“It’s a question of rate and volume. Ships in transit are expected to handle their own issues, and sometimes those issues are bad enough that an internal revolution or reorganising takes place, which is normal and natural and not a big deal in the long run, so long as the treegrave is empowered and respected enough to handle itself. Small problems can be solved by moving problematic citizens to ships that they’re better suited to, but a highly independent model like Hexacorallia’s is powerfully seductive to anyone desperate, discontented or simply very bored. A ship can only afford to lose so many people before emigration becomes an instability factor all of its own, and traditionally, ships can only afford to gain so many people and maintain both their own culture and their own material safety; ships only have so much space and so many resources. Hexacorallia’s model removes a lot of those limits. I have no doubt that they’re one of the least safe ships in the fleet and their premature death rate is probably enormous, but that would just let them bleed more population from other ships. Their modular nature means that by trading resources with other ships, they can even build and expand in transit; their power to expand in an asteroid belt will be far greater. And as they grow, they’ll likely take away the trade and duties of a lot of the smaller transport ships – not all of it, but enough of the smaller transfers and the passenger transfers to put the less secure transport ships in trouble. And there’s not a whole lot that other ships can do except embargo them, because the ship itself is liable to lse control over its own parts due to their government structure and attitudes to authority, meaning that if they do become a problem, most of our normal methods of quickly and subtly dealing with the problem will be ineffective. If we take them with us when leaving the Dragonseye, they run the risk of becoming a cancer to the fleet.”
“That’s what fleet splits are for, right?” I asked.
“Yes. Generally, if something that endangers the stability of the fleet becomes prominent, we simply cut the fleet in half and send the dangerous part away to take their own chances. If it works out really effectively, good for them; we get another competent fragment spreading humanity throughout the galaxy. If it doesn’t, they can die off without endangering our fleet and our Mission. But since there’s already talk of a fleet split at the Dragonseye to excise an entirely different problem, the best way to deal with Hexacorallia would be to simply leave them behind. If we can promote their views as a colony idea and convince people that being inclined to that kind of independence is what makes excellent colonists, then we can uproot the entire thing as once without making a big controversy that’ll stick in people’s minds and have people building a new Hexacorallia within a generation or two.”
“Does that happen much?”
“We’ve not seen this idea take root to this extent before. They caught us off guard by building in transit, I think, rather than trying to start something at a star. But dangerous ideas are evergreen. We’re looking into splitting over post-birth gene editing technology, which seems to be the cause of every third split or so; it’s an idea that just will not die and is a huge threat to the stability of most individual ships, let alone the fleet. Somebody’s always rediscovering ways to engineer longer lifespans or better muscles or whatever, which makes it so much more complicated for a ship to control its own genestock.” He scowled. “Anyway, we’ve got one urgent fleet split on our hands, so all of this is to say that the best and simplest way to protect the fleet is to make sure that Hexacorallia gets to build the colony, and make certain that we leave every last bit of Hexacorallia behind with the colony. And that’s your job.”
“Wait, what? My job?”
“We have about five years before the official vote takes place. See what you can do to sway public opinion so that the Courageous votes for Hexacorallia, and do it without drawing attention to the things that make them dangerous – the last thing we want is to spread the very ideas we’re trying to get rid of even further. It’ll be a good first project for you, a good learning opportunity. Let me know if you need the help of any specific Administration departments so that I can back you up.”
“Change public opinion? Without drawing attention to – how can I – ?”
But he was already striding past me and out the door.
Okay then. Okay. Don’t panic.
This was a learning experience; he’d said as much. Obviously, Yamin wouldn’t put anything that the fleet truly depended on in my hands. Either he’d been playing up how important this was, or there’d be lots of people working on it. And people would be watching me, too, to make sure I didn’t screw it up.
He probably wanted to give me some practice with a real project, and also see how well I could do. I couldn’t actually, properly break anything. I just had to do what I could. So.
I strode across the room and stared out at the stars, thinking.
Get support for Hexacorallia without drawing too much attention to Hexacorallia? How could I do that?
Easy. The Stalwart.
Hexacorallia wanted the asteroid field, Hexacorallia were the danger, but the pitch had been based around the plants. The plants created by the Arborea Celestia, which the Courageous already had a good relationship with, and the Stalwart. The plants that the Dish was interested in, because monitoring them long-term would mean more attention and support for their long-distance communication duties. From that angle, Hexacorallia were a labour force and population source. So I could focus on that. The Arborea’s involvement already did a lot – people in the apprentice meeting had talked about backing up the Arborea as a reason to vote for Hexacorallia’s bid – so if I could also encourage a positive opinion of the Stalwart…
And did I have a way to do that? Yes. Yes I did. I could repurpose some plans that I’d started working on years ago, and never needed.
It was time to get everybody really interested in capuchins.
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