The Void Behind 1: What Every Girl Wants

Right from the first day of my jaunt, I knew that every girl on the Courageous must want more than anything to work in Rubbish & Recycling.

Arai didn’t agree. She said that working in Records was going to be the best, once we got to that part of the jaunt. But that was just because she likes to sound smart and really likes reading, and she probably thought Records was going to be way more fun than it actually would be. And Hitan thought that Engineering would be the most fun, and that does sound fun, but I said ‘every girl’, not ‘every boy’, so I’m still right.

As soon as we finished work on that first day, I went home and asked Auntie Lia about it.

“Well, different people like different things,” she told me over her needlework. “The ship would be chaos if everyone wanted the same jobs, wouldn’t it? People would be sad that they had to do all the important jobs that they didn’t want to do, and fighting over the few jobs that everyone wanted.”

I’d been warned before not to distract Auntie while she was doing needlework (spacing and setting the tiny needles on the computer chips had to be done carefully, and took a lot of focus), but her argument didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I told her so. “Rubbish & Recycling is the most important job on the whole ship, though,” I pointed out. “If we didn’t sort and recycle everything, everyone would die before we got to the next asteroid belt. Sure, you need some people to do other stuff, like steer the ship and grow food and stuff, there’s a lot of important jobs, but the most important job is Rubbish & Recycling, so it makes sense that everyone would want to do it.”

“What about chip repair?” she asked, indicating her work.

“That’s recycling! You’re just doing Rubbish & Recycling!”

She chuckled at that, which is something that Auntie Lia does when I’m right, and then I was distracted by Mum, who came into the common area and lay down on a couch. She said hello to me and closed her eyes.

“Need anything, Seri?” Lia asked.

“No.”

Mum was tired and had a headache. Being pregnant always made her tired and with a headache. Her ankles were all swollen up and her face was flushed. I didn’t understand why she kept doing it. It’s not like anybody had to be pregnant – we had artificial wombs for that kind of thing, and most babies on the ship were born that way. Most people preferred not to get pregnant, even if they decided to join a harem or a nuclear or an orphanage and raise kids. But Administration encouraged people who could and who wanted to, giving them special time off work and extra support, because it was important for us as a society to know how to be pregnant. If everyone decided not to be pregnant for a few generations and then the artificial wombs all broke, then that would be really dangerous, because the mothers and the doctors and society would all have to learn about being pregnant all over again, on a time limit.

So some people whose bodies are really good at being pregnant, and who have hard jobs, choose to be pregnant because it’s easier. And then some people just choose to be pregnant anyway, like my mum. Which is confusing, because my mum’s body is really bad at being pregnant. It makes her tired and grumpy and gives her migraines and a sore back and it stops her blood from moving around properly. And her job involves sitting down and looking at security cameras a lot, so being pregnant is way, way harder for her than just working.

But she keeps doing it.

I found myself frowning angrily at her big belly, and Auntie Lia raised her eyebrows at me, reminding me of the talk we’d had last time Mum was pregnant.She’d said that I shouldn’t hate or be jealous of the babies inside Mum, because then I might hate or be jealous of my little siblings when they’re born, and they’d be little babies who couldn’t understand or do anything about that, and it would cause problems for the family and not be fair for them. But she was wrong, this time, because the baby inside Mum wasn’t a sibling this time. The family had enough children already, so this baby was for the orphanage, and after it was born I wouldn’t have to see it or live with it. So it was safe for me to hate it for taking Mum away from the rest of us while it was in there.

But I didn’t say that to Lia, because Mum didn’t know about our talk.

“And how was the first day of the jaunt?” another voice, my favourite voice, asked from the doorway. I gave a squeal and jumped up to throw my arms around her.

“Gamma-ma!”

“Why hello there, baby butterfly.” My grandma hugged me gently, and I was careful to be gentle with her too, and her old bones. I love Grandma. I love a lot of people, my mum and my dad and my aunties and my friends and my siblings (even if I don’t like most of my siblings, but liking and loving your family are different things), but I love my grandma most of all. I’m very lucky to have a grandma. Most people don’t have one. You need to have parents, which most people don’t have. And one of those parents has to also have parents. My dad has parents, which is why I have a Grandma and a Grandad and a Grandguv, but Grandma is the only one of them who’s still alive.

“A baby butterfly is just a caterpillar,” I pointed out, which was my normal answer. And then I said, “And I’m not a baby, anyway! I’m nearly seven!”

“Of course, my big grown-up butterfly.” She rubbed my head with one hand. “Do grown-up butterflies usually have hair like felting wool?”

“It was braids this morning,” I said. “It was just a long day.”

“Braids? Don’t little boys usually wear braids?”

“That was my generation, Tera,” my Mum said without sitting up or opening her eyes. “Braids are for girls now. The boys are cutting their hair shoulder length and letting it hang loose, because a boy’s favourite hobby is being a safety hazard.”

“And the brennans?”

“Shaved heads, or cutting it short and shaving designs into it.”

“Still? That was coming into fashion before I had Jarna!”

“Believe me, I know. That’s what Laisor said when ke tried to convince me to let kem get kes head depilated. Ke was all, ‘I won’t regret it, Mum, look at the orphanage workers, they’ve all been bald since they were my age. The fashion hasn’t changed.”

“Laisor did what?” Lia asked. “I swear, if that kid – ”

“It’s fine.” Mum waved a hand. “I reminded kem that only about a quarter of the caretakers are bald, and most of them just cut their hair short and shave designs into it. And that if ke got depilated, ke would never be able to shave patterns even if ke wanted to later on. So now Laisor’s determined to grow kes hair long enough to shave ‘super cool designs’ into it.”

“Ugh,” Lia said, “I’ve seen that kid’s idea of what a cool design is. Ke’s going to look awful.”

“Better a series of truly bad haircuts than depilation. Shaved hair grows back. Besides, what is adolescence, if not a time to make the most horrible fashion choices of all time and give any parent with a camera an endless stream of future blackmail in the form of embarrassing photos?”

“Arai wants to shave her head,” I said. “She says that the best way to make everything fair between boys and girls and brennans is to make it so they’re the same and that we should ‘challenge gender ideas’.”

“The almost-seven-year-olds are political now,” Mum told Auntie Lia. “I swear they get younger every year.”

“Will you come and look at the stars with me, caterpillar?” Grandma asked.

“Okay!” I went to get Grandma’s wheelchair, because the walk to the view ports is too long for her old legs. She can get it herself, but she likes it when people help her. She settled down in it and I gave her some water and got ready to push her. (She can do that too, but she likes it when I push her.)

Leaving the residence always feels like going onto a whole new spaceship, to me. Inside, there’s Auntie Shorin’s paintings on the walls and my siblings’ toys everywhere and Mum’s favourite music and the smell of Dad’s favourite tea all spilling out into the harem common area from everyone’s rooms, or left out there on purpose, and the little garden and the noise and people around. Then you step outside, and there’s just the smooth, silent corridor and the hum of machines. There were guide lines painted on the walls to show where things were but I didn’t need them. I knew where the ports were.

“Left or right?” I asked my Grandma.

“Right,” she said. “I’m tired of the dragon’s gaze for now.”

I wheeled her down the corridor to the rightside view ports. I don’t fully understand why we have so many; people don’t spend a lot of time looking at the stars. They’re supposed to remind us of the ship’s mission to spread life among the stars, I think, but everyone already knows that mission just by being on the ship.

The Courageous has changed a lot since it was invented a long long time ago. It used to be tiny and now it’s a lot bigger. It used to be fast and now it’s slow. But one of the first new things that was built onto the Courageous after Aspen Greaves started the first treegrave and secured humanity’s future forever was the view ports, so that the crew could see where they had come from and where they were going. And now, every time the ship grows or changes, it gets view ports. It’s just tradition, I guess.

They all look the same. Little rooms built into the side of the ship with a wall on one side that you can see through, out into space. They all have benches to sit on and plants to remind us of the Earth of our ancestors, which is silly because there’s lots of plants all over the ship and the others don’t remind us of the earth of our ancestors, so why would these ones? I wheeled Grandma into the room and sat down and dutifully look out at the stars.

They looked like they always do; little points in the dark. A dangerous, deadly universe outside our small, safe ship. None of them were bright enough to drown out the others; the Dragonseye, the star that the ship is heading towards, was very close (we should reach the asteroid belt around it in about twenty years), but it was on the left side of the ship. I could see the Vanguard next to us, a smaller ship that wasn’t spinning so everyone inside would be floating around. The Vanguard had a really small population anyway, mostly just crew and their treegrave. Maybe they liked floating.

There were other ships, but they were too far away or at difficult angles to really make out in the dark between the stars. But if I pressed my face against the clear plastic wall and looked straight up, I’d be able to just make out the edge of the Courageous’ treegrave, the long metal cylinder in the middle of the big spinning ring that was most of the ship. The cylinder that had once been the whole ship, a long time ago, and was barely bigger than the Vanguard.

Grandma looked out at the stars, and the Vanguard, and sighed. “I swear that every time I see that ship, it’s closer to us. Doesn’t the crew of the Vanguard know what personal space is? They’re going to crash into us one of these days.”

I laughed. “They’re always that far away, Gamma-ma!”

“If you say so, baby butterfly.” She sighed again. “It is beautiful, isn’t it? The universe.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure why she thought that. It was just big empty space with some lights in it. I knew it was vast and important and everything but it had never seemed beautiful to me; everything beautiful I’d ever seen was inside the ship. Still, if my Grandma thought it was beautiful, then it must be.

“Taya,” she said, and that’s how I knew she had something very serious to say, because she used my name, “I heard back from Administration. About the treegrave.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ve been approved. I’ll be merging in one month.”

“One month?!” A fleet month is thirty days.

“Taya, love, you knew this was coming – ”

“Yes, in the future! The treegrave is for old people and sick people and – ”

“And I’m both old and sick, baby butterfly. I haven’t been useful to the Courageous for years; I want to be useful again – ”

“You’re useful to us!”

“I know that, sweetheart, I do, but I want to have a real job again. I want to be able to see more than these failing eyes will let me, I want to be free of the pain of these old bones. And I’ll still be there got you; you know I will. You’re just at the age where you’re starting to spin your cocoon and grow into a new person and I can’t wait to see the beautiful butterfly that my perfect baby butterfly will turn into. And you can talk to me whenever you want, and I’ll be able to see you the whole time, and – ”

“But that’s different,” I said. “You won’t really be there. You’ll be in a big computer with a whole lot of other brains.”

“Which can see and hear the whole ship. I’m always going to be there for you, baby butterfly. But I can’t do it physically any more. I love you.”

“I love you,” I mumbled. I took my grandmother’s hand, being gentle with her old bones. I could only hold her hand like that for thirty more days.

Grandma was the most special person in the whole world, and in thirty days, I was going to lose her.