A few days later, after a lesson up in the treegrave with all of the apprentices about the rights and protections of foreign diplomats aboard the Courageous, Huspi made sure to leave with me. We found ourselves alone in the elevator down.
“I wanted to apologise,” ke said, “about the other day.”
“Huh?”
“You know, in the cafeteria. I tend to get chatty when I’m heavily distracted.”
“It’s fine,” I said. I’d never seen anybody react to pain like that, but pointing that out didn’t seem helpful. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about it.”
“Don’t pay attention to anything I – ”
“What did you mean, about doom approaching? And not being sure if there’s a way out?”
Ke met my serious gaze. Hesitated. Glanced around, as if expecting somebody else to appear in the elevator to overhear us. And then, quietly, said, “Do you think it’s possible for a spaceship to die of old age? I mean, we’re the oldest spaceship. We’d be among the first to find out.”
I stared. “What?”
“Never mind.”
“No, what do you mean? Is there something wrong with the ship’s hull, or engines, or something? Or the treegrave? Something the hummers can hear that – ”
“No, no! Nothing like that. I don’t mean a physical problem, I just mean…” ke waved kes hands around vaguely. “Sometimes it feels like this place is rotting from the inside out. Socially and logistically. Like someone who’s organs are slowly failing, but their body is still moving along and they won’t notice until it no longer can. The procedures and traditions in place here aren’t practical; they’re full of gaps, they…” ke inspected my expression and shook kes head. “Never mind, I just get worked up easily.”
I frowned. I knew the tone ke’d said ‘never mind’ in. I used that tone a lot. Ke didn’t mean ‘it doesn’t matter’, ke meant ‘there’s no point in me trying to explain because you wouldn’t understand anyway’.
Huspi thought I didn’t understand, huh? Ke thought I was an idiot and hadn’t noticed? It wasn’t a lack of understanding on my face, it was disappointment. I’d thought that maybe Huspi had seen the same problem as me, but like everyone else, ke was just distracted by trivial nonsense.
“I’ve got a friend on the Stalwart,” I said. “She’s doing an apprenticeship; everyone does apprenticeships there. She’s learning to build robot arms for spaceships. When she writes to me, she can tell me exactly what she’s learning to do and exactly what sorts of jobs it’ll be useful for. When I write to her… well, she has a lot of trouble understanding my apprenticeship. I haven’t told her that the ship captains are involved, but I shouldn’t have to, right? The apprenticeship should make sense if I describe it, right?”
“Yes, exactly!” Huspi said. “Some of our lessons are very useful, but a lot of what we do just feels like filling time. And why have our stupid meetings? I mean, it’s great to keep in contact with the other apprentices, certainly, but if there are better ways to do that. Give us important projects to work together on, or more lessons involving all of us. And why only the current apprentices? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have former apprentices be our teachers as often as possible and maintain ties that way?”
“Not to mention, how do the captains even find time to supervise the meetings? And why? There are easier ways to evaluate us, if that’s the plan. Sometimes I wonder how much they’re just killing time.”
“Sometimes I wonder how much of their jobs is even necessary,” Huspi confessed. “I mean, sure, you want humans in the process so that the treegrave isn’t making all the ship decisions for us, but about eighty per cent of what I’ve seen Captain Green do is just solving petty arguments between other departments. He’s always making decisions on random unimportant things not because it matters what he picks, but because a decision needs to be made for anything to happen. And half the time I don’t think the departments even care either, they’re just bored and need to look like they’re talking to each other. I think that if you cut out all the stuff a captain doesn’t even need to be there for, we could cut the job down to having one captain who doesn’t mind getting woken up sometimes to make time sensitive decisions.”
“Probably,” I agreed. The elevator stopped, the door opened. We stepped out into the ring. “You know what’s interesting about the Stalwart? They do a lot of monitoring and stuff, but they’re very open about it. You can just look up a whole bunch of statistics that the ship collects on you at any time. And I don’t know exactly how their management works, but I really get the impression that they make strong decisions based on those statistics, and they know how to use those statistics. Now, we have whole departments who look at statistics all day, but have you noticed that they don’t seem to do much with them? You go and visit some department and they’re like ‘oh, four point five per cent less people are interested in electronics than we’d expect at this distance from a new star,’ and you say ‘is that a problem?’ and they say ‘maybe’ and you say ‘is there a way to fix it?’ and they say ‘it will probably self correct and if it doesn’t it might not matter, micromanagement is a bigger problem than leaving things alone’. And you wonder, okay, so why spend a day tracking in the first place? Micromanagement is bad but micromonitoring isn’t?
“But the micromonitoring makes sense on the Stalwart. And when I was there, I was really creeped out by it. Everything is so heavily moderated and optimised and it’s all very competitive, and when I brought this up to someone, she got really surprised. Not because she didn’t understand what I’d meant – she’d worked with Arboreans, they were probably way more creeped out than I was. But because, according to her, they’d copied that system from us when the ship was built.”
“Ah,” Huspi said. “And how long ago did they build their ship?”
“Two colonies.”
“So this system very likely worked, two colonies ago. We’ve only been decaying since then. We’ve lost a lot in a short time.”
I shook my head. “Not decaying. Changing. And we haven’t lost anything, because if we wanted to be like the Stalwart, we could just copy the Stalwart. Or check our own history; I’m sure we still have detailed records from back then somewhere. You know what I think? I think that at some point, priorities changed on the ship, and we stopped doing some things and started doing others, and there just wasn’t a reason to cut out everything that’s now pointless. I mean, if we cut out all the pointless nonsense busywork, we’d probably just have a bunch of people with nothing to do. And people like to be useful, they like to contribute to stuff, so we’d probably have more people just spending their time doing art or raising kids or inventing new gadgets or whatever, but most of them would probably go to other ships where they could do exciting and useful things, and then we’d have a massively lower population.”
“And that would be bad?” Huspi asked. “You think that this ship is a mess because we need to maintain a high population for some reason? Why?”
I shrugged. “That’s just the first possibility I thought of. Maybe it’s for some other reason. My point is that if we needed to be more efficient in our work and our time and our education, we would be. It’s not like everyone on the ship is stupid, and it’s not like the treegrave is stupid. I don’t think it’s a sign of – how did you put it, organ failure? I think that maybe the things we do are being done because there’s no pressing reason to fix them. And if they ever cause enough problems, then they’ll change. Either on purpose and carefully if people are thinking far enough ahead, or by revolution.”
“You think we’re at risk of a revolution?”
“Not yet,” I lied. “A star is the best place to have one, but I think that most of the people on the Courageous are content and safe right now. Anyone who wanted to make some big change and was desperate enough to try to do it via a revolution right now would have a really, really big job, because things are just too good for too many people; they’d have to agitate everyone a lot first, maybe cause some problems to make people desperate – actually, I don’t know much about how revolutions even work. So I don’t know how you’d go about causing one. But the treegrave would probably notice, right? If you tried to organise anything when everything was this peaceful? And I’m sure we have some kind of department for monitoring any dangerous revolutionaries or whatever, right?”
“The Harmony Division,” Huspi said, nodding.
“Harmony division. Good to know. I don’t even know how you’d go about causing a revolution, then. I think people have to be a lot more desperate and angry than this, right? I don’t think ‘wow, a lot of our work seems kind of pointless’ is revolution fuel on its own.”
“You’re probably right,” Huspi said, though I could tell ke didn’t believe me.
“Unless you’re aware of some underfloor discontent that someone could be using to set up a secret surprise power grab that the Harmony Division won’t see until it’s too late and is stable enough that the treegrave won’t try to stop it,” I grinned.
Huspi laughed. “No, I don’t know of anything like that.”
“Then I don’t think we have anything to worry about except your general grumpiness at not being able to find a cool and useful enough job for your tastes.” With the amount of people who spent their time analysing random statistics and probably wishing for a chance to do something with them, it would probably be a bad idea for a potential revolutionary to even think about revolution too hard unless they had a solid angle of attack and a way to be sure that the treegrave wouldn’t see it as dangerous and act against them. Ke looked unconvinced by my logic, so I tried a different angle. “By the way, which foreign ship did you go to for your jaunt?”
“The Arborea Celestia. They seemed a lot more put together than us. Though I was a kid and didn’t actually see their Administration stuff. Maybe they’re a mess, too; they are the second oldest ship.”
“They seemed well put together to me, too,” I said. “though I was even younger and wasn’t looking for problems, so yeah. But most of the other ships I went to did have weaknesses that were obvious even to me, and get more obvious the more I learn. Hexacorallia’s been built for a star, and that’s good, because there’s no way that they’d survive in the fleet. People keep telling me that they could be a formidable, powerful fleet ship, taking over much of the small transport work and risking the cultural stability of other ships, but if you look at it it’s obvious why they built their ship in transit and it wasn’t a power play about how few resources they needed – it’s because their governmental structure is just so wildly unstable that they’d never survive a full journey between stars. They need the near-unlimited resources, lack of diplomatic competition and freedom to move about and diplomatically separate and reconvene at will that the Dragonseye will offer them or they don’t stand a chance. The Vanguard are holding onto their position by their fingernails; they’re entirely dependent on their trade and service relationships with a handful of larger ships, including the Courageous, and are going to have to fight for their prosperity at the Dragonseye, same as they do at every star. The Stalwart look like they’re doing great, but they’ve actually been holding themselves together via delicate alliances within their own ship for a colony and a half after a massive power struggle nearly destroyed their ship and permanently scarred their culture, and it seems stable, but I spoke to one of their captains and I’m pretty sure that everybody was only holding everything together with plans for this colony. I have absolutely no idea what state the Stalwart will be in when we leave this colony. Frankly, even if they do try to keep to their current pattern, I’m not sure how many post-Dragonseye generations that’ll survive for, and a lot of it depends on the rest of the fleet. The splinter has an economic structure that, unless I missed some other major industry, seems to be based almost completely around visitors from other ships; that’s going to need serious reworking when we make orbit, because their niche relies on being in a spot where there’s enough ship movement to make it worth having a ship based around helping people re-adapt to other ship environments and worth acting as a neutral meeting-place for people from other ships, but there isn’t so much movement to or from any specific ship that the ships just build facilities for that themselves. The Dish is in such a ridiculously sad state that people do not believe me when I try to explain how serious it is; it’s something that you have to see for yourself. The Ironstock seemed to be doing okay when I was there, but also, I barely saw more than the inside of a factory and a dormitory, so it’s difficult to say.”
“And what’s your point, exactly?”
“My point is that the Courageous seems, based on what I know, to be doing much better than most of the ships I went to. The point is that it’s not dying of ‘old age’; the ships I visited were of all different ages. Older ships can be trusted to be safer and ‘healthier’ than younger ones, because we have such a long history of surviving this cycle of travel and colony building. The ship is fine. You’re just struggling with ennui.”
“Maybe,” Huspi said, and kes tone was so neutral that for once I genuinely couldn’t tell whether ke agreed with me or not. “But what are you scared of, then?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re scared of something, right? Something about our future. So if it’s not what bothers me, then what is it?”
I paused in the hallway. We were at the base of a ramp leading up to the trolley level. “I have to get to a meeting right now,” I said. “But I promise I’ll tell you about it another time, okay?”
“Okay.”
I did have a meeting. More importantly, I had to figure out how to explain. I didn’t want things to go like they had with Arai again.
I was going to have to figure out how to convince people of the seriousness of the situation at some point, and Huspi would be a very good ally to have.
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