I didn’t get onto Project: Capuchin immediately. There was something else that was really bothering me about the conversation with Yamin.
M ultimate goal was to keep us from getting hedged in to die by other fleet fragments and their colonies. I didn’t have enough information to know how much of a danger that was, how soon the threat would hit, or even if it was already too late – the speed of light made it impossible to learn that. All I could do was do my best to save our fleet, our Courageous, humanity’s true seed, and trust our descendants to keep working towards that same goal, lest we go extinct. I needed to preserve our power within the fleet so that we could affect our own destiny, and I needed to change people’s minds on what that destiny was; get the fleet to stop picking stars based solely on colony potential and start mapping a path to stay ahead, get the fleet to stop wasting precious time building doomed colonies instead of refuelling and pushing forward. If I could change the mindset a little bit for leaving the Dragonseye, and rely on generations of people reorienting themselves to that new goal, to the idea fo refuelling and moving on instead of building a colony… make that a part of something that the fleet could do, then over time…
I hadn’t counted on the treegrave.
I mean, it factored into my plans, obviously; mostly as an observer that I’d have to be careful not to alarm if I needed to do anything dangerous or illegal. It had never occurred to me that the treegrave might have its own agenda. If Yamin’s explanation was right, then it didn’t matter what I did. It didn’t matter how many people I convinced, how inappropriate for a colony the next stop was. A miracle could happen tomorrow that imbued me with the ability to convince the entire ship to abandon the mission entirely, and the treegrave could simply wait for all of us to die, and then, by being careful with what information was readily available and how it spoke to people and how competently it helped different groups, pull public opinion back to baseline before we even reached the next star.
I didn’t need to convince the people. I needed to convince the treegrave. Human allies would be valuable, but the treegrave was critical.
I had absolutely no idea of how to convince a treegrave of anything.
The way Yamin had talked, he seemed to think that treegraves were unchangeable, but I didn’t think that that was true. Every living being had to adapt to their circumstances. He’d said that the Courageous’ treegrave of today was the same as the Courageous’ treegrave of a several colonies ago in the same way that a sixty year old is the same person that they were at fifty. But while it might be rare for a fifty or sixty year old to change their personality very much, they could change their minds. If I could convince our treegrave of the danger…
But that was silly. The treegrave was so much older and wiser and more experienced than me. It must have seen the danger a long time before I was ever born. What could I tell it that it didn’t know?
But in that case, why were we still making colonies? The treegrave had to have better judgement, a better perspective, than I did, at least when it game to big things like this. And it didn’t seem to be trying to make us go faster. The doomed future ahead of us would happen long after I was dead; it didn’t actually affect me. But it would affect the immortal treegrave. If I was right, the treegrave was doomed to suffocate in the void if we fell behind.
So why weren’t we doing anything?
Were my calculations wrong? Maybe. I couldn’t see how, though. Physics was inescapable.
Did the treegrave have a plan, and we just didn’t know it? Possibly. But I couldn’t conceive of what it might be. The things we were doing now couldn’t help us in the future, they could only slow us down. So why were we wasting time still building colonies? Were our people just so committed to the Mission that not even the treegrave could wean us off it without risking fatal internal instability?
Or maybe its longevity was the problem. Maybe the treegrave knew the problem, and knew that no solution would work. Maybe it had accepted eventual death in the same way that humans do; maybe it had decided that staying ahead of the wave of colonies was a temporary solution, and that failure was, eventually, inevitable, whether in this galaxy or the next. Maybe it understood physics better than us and knew that no miracle of technology was coming to permanently save it in a million years or so. Maybe it was prepared to die, and was doing the same thing that the rest of us mortals did – wasting its time with pointless, temporary things that made it happy. The thing that it had been made to do – make colonies.
If so, then changing its mind was going to be very, very difficult. I had a hard enough time making most adults take me seriously – how was I supposed to get the treegrave to take me seriously? How was I supposed to convince a vast, immortal being of the intrinsic value of hope?
(There was the brute force method, obviously, but that wasn’t even worth considering. Yamin had said that minds added to the treegrave adapted to the treegrave, but we only added one mind at a time after careful screening. I’d bet that you could change a treegrave’s personality by adding a whole bunch of minds with very specific ideas at once, probably, but not only would that be pretty much impossible to actually pull off, it would also be unimaginably cruel. It might be possible in theory, but in practice it wasn’t worth trying.)
And convincing the treegrave directly wasn’t the only problem. The more I spoke to people about colony building, the more it was becoming clear how important it was to the life cycle of fleet culture. If Yamin was right about humans not being naturally equipped to live for generations in cultural stasis inside spaceships, then the systems we’d built to deal with that – the separate ships with different cultures and a small amount of immigration, the jobs where people went to work for four hours to do something that the treegrave could do in four minutes so that they could feel useful and constructive, the flash of remixing and burst of creativity at every star as everyone got together to build something amazing and shear off the dangerous parts of the fleet before moving on – needed colonies. Stopping at stars to refuel wasn’t the same. People needed to feel like their tame lives in transit were building towards something important. People needed their dreams to go somewhere, while they spent generations working on designs for the perfect bid at the next star. We couldn’t cut out colony building without another outlet for that creativity, another way to make people feel like they were making meaningful decisions and living important lives.
This was all going to be so much more complicated than I’d thought.
But my short term goals hadn’t changed, at least. Get everyone backing the Stalwart. Try to get close enough to Mana to get in with the ex-red apprentices and figure out what the plan was for the next blue captain. Don’t upset any of the other apprentices badly enough that they’d become enemies and make future plans difficult.
Those things first. Save humanity later.
Tikka and I had messaged each other a few times since I’d come home, but that had quickly petered out. Like my letters to Aunt Shorin, we just quickly ran out of stuff to say to each other. That had been before I’d started my apprenticeship, though – I definitely had a lot of news now.
Would she still want to hear from me? Would she be upset that I hadn’t reached out in so long? Or bored with me, now that she was older?
Nope! Tikka was delighted to hear from me. We wrote to each other now, which was much better than sending audio recordings and relying on very clumsy treegrave translation of Tikka’s words. I didn’t know it the capuchins had their own written language as well, but either way, she was very fluent in writing in fleet common, as was I, so I could communicate with her about as well as with a human. I told her all about my apprenticeship (without explicitly mentioning that Yamin was a captain, something I was still wary of bandying around outside Administration), and Tikka told me about her engineering apprenticeship. She was learning to build and maintain the external robotic arms used on HEXes, which would keep her very busy at Dragonseye whether or not Hexacorallia won the bid. (Even if they didn’t get the colony, they’d probably still be heavily involved in building it for whoever did – they were too well suited to an asteroid field not to be.)
Tikka seemed really confused about my apprenticeship. She couldn’t understand exactly what I was learning or why. And that wasn’t her fault; there just wasn’t much to tell her. I described the apprenticeship as best I could, and even looking at my own letter, it looked… vague. She could tell me what field she was training for and how useful it would be; I tried t o describe mine in the most specific ways I could, leaving out nothing except for the part about ship captains being involved, and it looked like I was hiding something.
Despie that, we had a lot to share. Tikka was interested in building hardware for the HEXes but still had no intention of moving away from the Stalwart. She told me about her master and her friends, both the one I’d met and new engineering friend. I told her about the other apprentices I worked with and funny things that happened in our meetings.
After a few messages, I sent her a video message. She sent me one back. Perfect.
I also asked her, a couple of messages in, to say hi to Fari and Ella for me and ask how they were doing. The higher-ups on the Stalwart probably already knew I was talking with Tikka again – it wouldn’t be hard to ask their treegrave to notify them if I ever again sent messages to the Stalwart – but it was best to tip them off just in case. It would become obvious what I was ding pretty quickly, and if your goals are perfectly aligned with someone else’s, it’s best that they know what you’re doing in case they decide to help.
Then I found out how my younger siblings were doing in their jaunts. Heron was seven now; had he done his initial Farming jaunt?
He had. Fantastic. I so everyone in the family had seen a sheep. I made some time to hang out with him.
“Do you want to show me your favourite things at the playground?” I asked him one day after he finished breakfast. “I used to be a fan of the Big Spiderweb, myself.”
He gave me a delighted grin. I never spent time with my siblings any more, it seemed. It was easy not to, when we were on different shifts.
“I like the running machines,” he said.
“They’re sized for grown ups. Aren’t they a bit big for you?”
“I run really fast!”
We went to the playground, and he showed me how fast he could run. Once he was tired out, we sat down on a bench together.
“You did your Farming jaunt a couple of months ago, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How was it?”
“Boring! Why does Dad even do farming? It’s just big tanks of goo!”
“Did you see the sheep?”
Hern went quiet and looked away. An obvious ‘yes’.
“What did you think about it?”
“It was weird,” he mumbled. “Why does it look like that?”
“Lots of animals look like that,” I said. “When I was on the Arborea, I saw different kinds of weird birds. Have you ever seen a bird?”
He shook his head.
“We should look at them in a projector room,” I declared. “Come on. They’re very interesting.”
I’d already booked a projector room, so we headed over there. We looked at all kinds of birds – wading birds, plains birds, birds that live on high cliffs on planets. Lots of bird that even I didn’t know about. Then I started showing more animals ‘like the sheep’ – mice, cats, cows. Different kinds of mammals.
“Did you see all of these on the other ships?” Heron asked, fascinated.
“No, no. Most of these animals don’t live on ships. We carry their DNA to make them on planets, or on really large stations with large organic areas. I did see a snake once, though – have you seen a snake?”
I showed him a snake. He stared.
“Ooh,” I said, as if it had just occurred to me. “I got a message from one of my friends on a ship the other day. You’ll like this.” And I pulled up Tikka’s video. Heron stared at her, too, then flushed and looked away.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You can look at her.”
“You’re not supposed to stare at people with weird genesets,” he mumbled.
Oh, right. Heron was young and sheltered enough that seeing somebody with a long tail or covered in fur walking the halls was a strange novelty, and obviously it was rude to stare. (Technically, it was still a novelty for me, too; it’s not like there’d been much visual evidence of the different genesets on the ships I’d visited, except for the Ironstock. But it was harder for little kids.)
“Tikka doesn’t have ‘weird genesets’,” I said. “She’s very normal for a capuchin, as far as I’m aware. One third of the people on the Stalwart look like her.”
“People on different ships always have weird genesets,” Heron said with a nod. Which, fair enough.
“That’s not what I meant. Tikka isn’t a human with fur. She’s like the sheep, or the cat we looked at earlier. Or the snake. She’s an animal. But she’s also a person.”
Tivon looked confused.
“Humans are animals and people,” I said. “Some other types of animals can also be people. She’s like if the sheep you saw was also a person.”
“It looked like a person,” Heron mumbled. Then he glanced at the screen. “Not as much as she does, though.”
“I think that Tikka would like to see some of my family,” I said. “Will you make a video with me for her?”
A nod. Great.
A good first step.
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