99: Cultural Exchange

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Tikka was delighted by the video of me with Heron. She sent one back where she showed me her parents. I gave Heron the important grown-up responsibility of explaining Tikka to the three other kids (then I corrected the misconceptions when they asked me questions), and we sent a video with all of them. (The kids, apparently, were bragging about their cool older sister who went to so many other ships when she was barely older than they were now, and her cool capuchin friend who looked different and lived a different, interesting life).

Tikka and I didn’t bother any more with clumsy audio translations; though she sent video, she sent written messages to accompany it. I’d read these out to the kids and have them help me write replies. I wasn’t sure how much they cared about other ships and how much they just liked being able to hang out with me when I wasn’t off on my mysterious Administration job, but that wasn’t all that important. The important thing was that they liked Tikka, and they liked Tikka’s friends, and with hardly any prompting from me, they started bringing some of their friends to see Tikka, too. And some of those friends were from orphanages.

And orphanage kids spent most of their time around other orphanage kids. So that was perfect.

Years ago, I’d talked to Tikka about whether she had any friends who’d like to message my friends on the Courageous. I’d been planning something very different back then, but it worked out well; soon, Tivon and Ivy both had capuchin friends of their own to make videos and messages for, as did some orphanage kids who I didn’t even know. I spoke to Seiba and Dava about the potential for communication with the capuchins to encourage literacy, since reading their writing was so much better than listening to the translations of their words, and while the kids could simply have the treegrave or a bot read the letters to them, it was at least a good way to give them fresh, interesting things to encourage them to practice. Seiba and Dava didn’t seem keen to do anything with that information, but they seemed interested enough to have it. They’d probably just watch literacy numbers go very slightly up and do nothing with that, as always, but if I did need to convince them to help with something, I had an angle.

It was all going a lot better than I expected. There was no way that this had been left entirely in my hands. Yamin must have other people helping, for things to be going this smoothly.

The first capuchin doll that I saw took me by surprise. Some kids liked to play with dolls, and sometimes you saw one or two of them at the playground or a cafeteria or whatever in the hands of children. The little girl I ran into clutching a capuchin doll on the trolley wasn’t even somebody I knew, just a random kid who was probably a friend of a friend of a friend of one of my siblings. And somebody, somewhere had made her a doll shaped like her friend, or maybe he didn’t have a specific capuchin friend but thought they were cute. And there it was.

I hadn’t organised that. I wished I had, because it was a good idea. Somebody else had done it. And keeping an eye out, travelling around the ship, I saw more of them – not nearly as many as there were human-shaped dolls, but here and there, kids were carrying toy capuchins.

The dolls all looked very similar; they’d been mass produced. Some parent who liked sewing hadn’t made a toy for their kid. Somebody had started making them in a factory. Either the kids wanted them enough that the orphanage carers had started something, or one of Yamin’s people had gotten them made to make the kids more interested, or at least make them look more interested.

I spoke to the people monitoring Communications, as well as continuing to check in with Seiba and Dava at Education and Development. I wasn’t able to read people’s private messages, obviously, but the Communications people gave me general statistics on what demographics were messaging what sorts of people on what ships. When there was a notable uptick in communication between working adults on the Courageous and the people on the Stalwart sending personal, individual mail to each other, I knew we were succeeding.

I decided to celebrate by getting myself something nice at the best cafeteria on the entire ship a couple of hours before an apprentice meeting. I grabbed myself a little sweetloaf, then paused when I noticed Mana and Huspi.

They were tucked away at a little table in one corner, situated as far as possible from the few other people in the cafeteria. Huspi stared drowsily at a smoothie in front of kem and seemed to mumble whenever ke spoke, which wasn’t often. Mana didn’t have any food or drink, and would lean in close to reply. She radiated tension, glancing up whenever anyone came close to them and watching until they left. Whatever they were doing was secret, and they weren’t even trying to hide that.

On the other hand, it couldn’t be that secret, because they were meeting in public. Even though Mana was really, really tense about it. So it was probably some personal issue, rather than anything involving work, or me. Me getting involved wouldn’t bring anything but problems, so I bit back my curiosity and headed for hall outside, eyes fixed on my sweetloaf so I could pretend not to see them.

“Oh, hey! Taya!”

Well. That didn’t work.

Huspi had looked up from kes drink, and was grinning and waving me over. Mana looked exasperated – not panicked, that was good – but after a moment’s hesitation, she waved me over, too. Great; not I couldn’t just ignore them. The least socially complicated thing to do was go over, so I did.

Huspi waved me into a seat, and reluctantly, I sat down. “How’re you doing?” ke asked. “Looking forward to the meeting?”

Weirdly sociable and relaxed, for Huspi. “Is it ever worth looking forward to these meetings?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“Ignore kem,” Mana said. “Ke always gets like this.”

“I don’t always get like this.”

“You always get like this!” she hissed as quietly as she could. “The tiniest bit of stress and you have zero filter. You should be prepared for this kind of thing by now!”

“Sure thing, Captain Red,” Huspi said, rolling kes eyes. Mana narrowed hers, but didn’t respond.

“Um,” I said. “Is ke on hummer drugs or something?”

“I wish I still was,” Huspi mumbled.

Now Man a rolled her eyes. “This idiot,” she said, “has a body that doesn’t metabolise hummer meditation drugs very well. And leaves kem in a lot of pain the next day. And knows this, and still takes the rusting things, even though there’s absolutely not any kind of requirement to do so. You can just not take them!”

“A bit of pain is a small price for the secrets of the universe. Especially when painkillers – ”

“Painkillers only work when you actually take them! And surely you don’t have to go to meditations the day before you have meetings?”

“I’ve taken the painkillers now, and they’ll kick in well before the meeting. Calm down.”

“I don’t need to calm dow. You need to calm down less.” Huspi raised a brow at me and made a ‘look at this fusspot’ sort of gesture towards Mana. “The ship knows best,” ke assured her. “If you’d quiet down and listen for once, it’ll tell you what’s important.”

“Great, we’ve hit the mad prophet stage,” Mana muttered.

“Are we sure ke’s not still drugged up?” I asked.

“No, ke’s just like this. Looks all put together and sensible in meetings, right? But the slightest amount of stress or pain or distraction and ke’s verbal filter is completely obliterated.” She frowned at Huspi. “and then you freak everybody out with your weird mad prophet stuff. It’s weird. You’re weird.”

“I’m normal.”

“If pain makes you like this then that means the sheer amount of focus you must be using every day to seem normal is astounding. Proving you’re not normal.”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s not normal. Maybe everybody sees things and keeps them to themself, except you.”

Mana rolled her eyes again. “Nobody sees – ”

“She does,” Huspi said, suddenly fixing kes eyes on me.

“Huh?” I asked.

“The ship speaks to you, doesn’t it? You told me so. And you’ve seen the doom approaching. I can see it in your eyes; they’re always fixed on what’s before us.”

I stared back, unable to think of anything to say.

“I don’t know if there’s a way out,” Huspi said quietly, and with conviction. “Every day I worry more that there might not be.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it again.

“Reimann’s shift, Huspi, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about!” Mana said. “Look, you’ve freaked out the kid. Get a hold of yourself.” To me, she said, “Just ignore everything ke says. Ke’ll be sensible again once the painkillers kick in.”

I nodded. Was there a way to question Huspi about this ‘doom approaching’ without upsetting Mana? Probably not. A way to get Mana to leave? Definitely not. “Right,” I said. “Um. I hope you feel better soon.”

“Once the magic of drugs kicks in, I will.”

“The magic of drugs is what got you needing these drugs in the first place,” Mana growled. To me, she said, “maybe don’t mention this to the captains, yeah? They don’t need to know about Huspi’s terrible, terrible sense of timing.”

“Hey,” I said, getting up, “it’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Right. Good.”

I left, trying to put Huspi’s words out of my mind for now. I didn’t need to be all unnerved and gloomy for the meeting. I was trying to enjoy a victory here.

I did see the doom approaching. And there was a way out.

We just had to move fast enough.

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