I tried another angle.
“Humanity will go extinct,” I said.”On the Ironstock, there are people with special genesets adapted for high radiation. There are people adapted for external work. There’s no reason why changes have to be small; we ourselves are a reminder of what a standard human is, but the other fragments lack that. The fleet usually fragments if something strange and radical enough to be a problem starts to appear; they’re going to drift further from the norm than our fleet, acquire more changes than our fleet. Changes that make them better at living in space and traveling between stars than we are. We have to keep focused, keep striving to stay ahead, keep researching new technology to compensate, to keep up, or we’ll be surrounded by people too far removed from us to be called the same species any more. And because they’re better than us at what we do, humanity will eventually die out behind them no matter how widespread we are right now.”
“That’s simply evolution,” Huspi said. “We expect our descendants to be better than us. The models are very different when you’re reproducing from a stored gene bank rather than the germline evolution that the Arboreans are obsessed with in their forest life, but it’s – ”
“Evolution is extinction!” I snapped. “They’re the same thing! When we were learning about it, people were like ‘an without gene storage, things either evolve or go extinct’, but that dichotomy doesn’t exist. Either they leave descendants or they don’t. But when those descendants are entirely different to their ancestors, then the ancestor species has still gone extinct. It didn’t survive. It created something new and then it died. And ships that make people different enough from us to no longer call human have no reason to preserve our stock human genetics; even if they did, it wouldn’t make a difference if they never made anybody with them, and why would they?
“They don’t even have to be our biological descendants. Capuchins could probably do it, given enough time. Not even on purpose; it’s not like a species has to go, ‘oh, well, time to out-compete everyone else’. It would happen entirely innocently, over too many generations to control or conceive. It would happen over such vast distances that it would be impossible to even be sure it was happening, rather than just being a temporary local phenomenon. And much like new human genesets, we have to assume that there are far, far more nonhuman people out there than just capuchins. There might even be more in this fleet fragment, that nobody’s bothered to properly catalogue and tell the whole fleet about, because why would they? There are definitely more in other fragments, fragments that split away from us because they were straying too far from normal practice to be safe to keep in the fleet. There are probably already entire fleet fragments out there without a human in them, just some other species engineered to be smart that’s more biologically suited to star-to-star travel. There might even be some out there who don’t know what a human is, for all I know. Is that what you want? To be replaced by something else? Because I have no idea what our chances of survival are, but I o know that we owe it to our descendants to do absolutely everything we can to keep those chances as high as possible.”
“I thought you liked capuchins. Aren’t you good friends with one? Aren’t you about to assist the first capuchin ever to come aboard our ship?”
I waved a hand dismissively. “I have nothing against individual capuchins. Tikka is great. I think they should have the same rights an safety and freedom as everyone else. I’m just also saying that on a species level, if you asked me to choose between all capuchins and all of humanity, obviously I’d pick humanity. This isn’t about individuals; I think every individual should have a great life. This is about things happening on a scale too long to really matter for individuals. I mustn’t be explaining this well. You don’t seem to understan how serious this is.”
“It’s not that I don’t understand,” Huspi said. “It’s that I don’t agree. Even if I thought that anything you said was a problem, which I don’t because I think wildly different humans and the descendants of humans who are too different to be called the same thing as us and the people we create who have no human ancestry at all are as much inheritors of the stars and of our Mission as we are, it simply doesn’t make sense to become fixated on any specific disaster scenario on that scale. There’s too many things that can go wrong, or go right; too many other things that might wipe us out, too many potential technologies that might change everything, too much time for something completely unpredictable to happen, and too long a time frame for a consequence like even the death of our ship to be meaningful to anyone.”
How disappointing. I’d thought that Huspi, with all of kes hummer talk about the importance of viewing reality properly, would have a better sense of perspective.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said neutrally. “I guess it doesn’t matter either way right now; the problem in front of us is the colony.”
“And you’re going to be working with diplomats from one of the main ships involved in one of the prospective bids! Nervous?”
“Yeah. Kinda.” I couldn’t see any possible way that I could screw this up, but that probably just meant I hadn’t thought hard enough about it.
“You’re smart. You’ll do fine.”
“Captain Blue once told me that the people who kept telling me I’m smart did me a grave disservice in life.”
“Your captain is really, really weird.”
“Yeah. I know.”
I headed off to move into my new temporary accommodation, which didn’t take much. I was only bringing a couple of bags, mostly of clothes. If I was quick, I could sneak in and out without any of the adults seeing me and catching me in a long conversation.
Tivon and Heron, my two youngest siblings (they were what, eight now?), were in the main room, playing some kin of game involving throwing a ball back and fourth and quizzing each other.
“How many shifts in the First Crew?” Tivon asked.
“That’s easy!” said Heron. “Three!”
Tivon threw the ball.
“Who were the captains of the First Crew?” Heron asked.
“Hey, I’m asking the First Crew questions!”
“That’s not a rule!”
“Fine.” Tivon scowled. “Greaves, Kae Jin, and Reimann.”
“Nuh-uh! It was Greaves, Kae Jin, and Klees.”
“Klees was a replacement! He wasn’t even from Reimann’s shift! I got it right.”
“Klees was the captain when Greaves became Courageous, so – ”
“You didn’t ask me about that! That wasn’t the question! Reimann is the right answer! Reimann died, an then his replacement Kinoshita dies, and then her replacement Sands died, and then they chose a captain from a different shift instead because Reimann’s shift was cursed, an that captain lived! But it was Reimann’s shift! Give me the ball!”
“No; you got it wrong so you have to answer another – ”
“I got it right!” Tivon leapt at Heron, and the pair began fighting for the ball.
“They fight so much more than you ever did,” said Mum, wearily, from behind me.
Shiproute and stars. I should’ve been faster.
“They’re covering early history in Education already?” I asked. “At their age?”
“They’re as old as you were when you went touring other ships.”
“What? No! They’re babies!”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Why’d you let me go? I was a baby!”
“Something that you seemed utterly incapable of accepting at the time,” Mum said drily. “An now, look at you. All grown up.”
“I’m just here to get my stuff,” I said.”
“I know,” she sighed. “Your auntie’s offer to throw you a going-away party is still – ”
“It’s just a temporary job, I don’t need a party.”
“Alright, then.” After a brief moment of silence, she said stiffly, “I love you,” an walked away.
I relaxed. She was letting me leave easily. I grabbed my stuff and darted out before she could change her mind.
The diplomat’s accommodations weren’t all that different to my family home. There was a central foyer and meeting room, though in this case it was clearly set up more as an office for meetings then as a relaxed family gathering space. There was a small private garden, for unclear reasons; we kept a large family garden because Aunt Moli like looking after plants, but nobody lived here to keep up that hobby. A lot of garden care can be automated, but they’ still have to send staff in to do the more flexible work.
After examining the neat, perfect beds of low-maintenance ornamentals and bright, colourful leaves an flowers, complete with living butterflies that were probably brought in from elsewhere on the ship since there were no signs of caterpillars eating or hatching in here and no other bugs around, I decided that the purpose of the private garden was to show off to diplomats from ships that had less plants and space than we did, and comfort diplomats from the rare ship that had more.
Also connected to the main gathering room was a small working office for the diplomats and a general storage closet, both of which I had access to, and a door to their private rooms and another office, which I didn’t. Not did they have access to my private office (with its own small, low-capacity computer terminal bolted to the desk – very fancy), or my private bedroom and bathroom behind it. I also had my own tiny private storage room, though I didn’t think I’d be there long enough to make use of it. I assumed that their private area contained bigger, nicer versions of the same facilities I had, though I couldn’t go in to check.
I umped my bags onto my new bed. I had a bedroom all to myself for an entire month. Had I ever had a bedroom to myself for a whole month? I’d gotten to sleep by myself a couple of times on other ships, but not here, at home. Not in a room so nice. (Well, Starlight had been very nice, but that didn’t count; being nice was that ship’s whole job.)
The area where my new quarters were was also interesting. It was, of course, just another part of the ship’s residential floor, but there were no orphanages or family homes around, and I saw hardly any children. There were no large play or sports areas, though there were some nice areas to sit and relax and a small gym. I checked, and all the large living spaces in the area seemed to be temporary accommodation for diplomats – all the local homes were very small, and clearly built for one person. And most of the people I spoke to either worked in a local service or janitorial job, or worked in something like Administration or Communications, or something diplomatic.
Well, at least Kadda wouldn’t be swarmed by random children.
I had some free time before bed, an then the next day, the diplomats. I spent that free time wandering around the area, getting used to the facilities, and sampling food from the cafeterias. It was the same foo I could get from my local cafeterias so there was no reason to sample it, but it made me feel more comfortable with the area, which I’d need for guiding the diplomats. I was walking through a small public garden, drink in hand, when I spotted Mana sitting on a bench by a small bush. She wasn’t holding or doing anything.
She was just, very intensely, watching me.
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