143: CULTURE

Max gets us robes. They show us how to tie the belts. They explain that different belts don’t have any official meaning, but fashions go in and out among different groups of friends, so your belt can incidentally declare who you hang out with or what you aspire to which, fine, that’s how fashion usually works. We ask about the children, and Max tells us that all the children live in the nursery. After some confused talk where we ask about the few kids we have seen about town, we learn that in Hylaran culture, childhood ends at about the age of seven (in Earth years). Notions of childhood differ drastically between cultures (my own has several distinct stages that outsiders lump together as ‘children’ and learning their notions on that is, next to learning about different family structures, one of the most confusing and disorienting experiences any exiled Arborean has to adapt to), but seven is extremely young. As a general rule, the more prosperous a society is, the more extended their childhood tends to be, either officially or unofficially – when young people have to take on more labour and spend less time on things like education and personal development, they’re considered adults younger, and the social perspective may or may not line up with law. Historically, most cultures pin adulthood as sometime around the onset of puberty; cultures where many years of education are considered the norm tend to extend it well into the teen years, or even later. The age of majority on the Capricorn Plateau is twenty five.

Seven is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, well before puberty. Adulthood at seven suggests a society with an incredibly high demand for labour, where people are educated to do their jobs as quickly as possible and considered fully competent as early as is feasible, but Hylara very clearly isn’t like that. Max clams up when we ask to too many details on industry, but they’re very open about the fact that their population far exceeds their labour needs. “We don’t have a huge amount of work to do to maintain the colony,” they admit. “It could be done by perhaps fifty people without too much difficulty. Our population mostly operates as a cushion against disaster – immigration is impossible, so we can’t afford for some accident to kill people and leave us understaffed and have the colony collapse. Keeping a living populationhere has always been the goal, and it hasn’t always been easy.” The ship looming above us, full of colonists, is left unspoken.

The hardest part of me is learning not to ask follow up questions. Why is this done this way, what’s the reason this is valued, when did this start? As a sociologist, the why is the point, but Max is adamant about what they can’t talk about and it doesn’t seem like threatening to walk out on our own is going to achieve any more than it already has. They clam up at apparent random, and I try to figure out the shape of the secrets based on what they will and won’t say, but it’s a wasted effort.

Learn the rules. Talk to other Hylarans. See what we can get with more sources of information. That’s the way forward.

Days pass. Max shows no sign of any infections. My new eye causes no problems, just sits in my head, unresponsive. Captain Klees’ new foot tissues are growing well, we’re told, off wherever the colony grows bioproducts, and should be ready for implantation in a month or so.

And finally, we step out onto Hylara without a space suit.

“This is premature,” the Friend mutters, adjusting its oxygen mask. “Max not suffering any side effects isn’t enough information to make this move. They should expose small groups to us, not risk the whole colony.”

“Speed is of the essence,” Max shrugs.

“Politics are mutable. Politics can be negotiated. You can’t negotiate with a fatal infection.”

“I’m sure there’s no danger. Look at me, I’m completely fine!”

I adjust the weight of the tanks on my back. The oxygen mask reminds me of the last time I wore an oxygen mask and had a third of my face burned off by cleaning gas. I meet Captain Klees’ eyes; he sets his jaw and offers me a grim smile.

The planet feels more real like this. Sand shifts under our bare feet. The air smells a little burned; I think that’s the dust. I can only hope that the Hylarans’ confidence that it isn’t carcinogenic is not misplaced. (Would they even know, being so young?) Real, actual sunlight lights my skin, shining in a sky that seems more vividly coloured when I’m not looking at it through a suit helmet. This is the first uncontrolled climate I’ve stood in in years.

I take a deep breath of neon supplemented with livable levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It’s not really any different to being in the dome, except that the extra oxygen comes through my mask rather thana unit in the corner, and the burnt smell of dust.

“Your ship wants a report from you today,” Max says as we come outside. “The sudden replacement of Hive made them a little nervous, I think.”

“Who’s talking to them now?”

“Elenna. Ke’s fairly apolotical. Won’t cause any trouble, great with radio equipment. We could go now, if…?”

“I want to see the colony again first,” Captain Klees says.

“Of course!” Max flashes that bright smile once more. “I’m so glad that all the roughest parts of this are just about smoothed out. Zamanna, we’re going to build such an amazing future together.”

Hylaran family units, I’ve learned, are called sets. Children are raised in the nursery until age four, in sets of six.Once they reach that age, they’re matched with adult mentors with similar interests and skills and work in the colony part-time while being educated in the nursery. Once they graduate from their nursery education, usually around age seven, they’re granted a living dome and usually take on a couple of older adults, people who have lost their setmates or who have decided to branch out and help form new ones. (Leaving one’s set by joining a new one and helping to expand the colony is the socially acceptable way of breaking up a set. It’s not entirely unheard of for those raised together to find living together intolerable and trade members with other existing sets, but it’s frowned upon. Hylara has a very small population with a very high level of social organisation; they don’t appear to like messiness.) The ideal set size is eight, but deaths and disagreements happen, and there are smaller sets in the colony – especially after the famine. Which, we’ve learned, took place about ten years ago, although Max fell silent when asked for further details.

Hylarans stare openly at our faces as we move toward the central meeting area. I wonder if we look as strange to them as they first did to us. I don’t know when the original settlers died; have any of these people seen a face that looks like hours? They must have pictures, surely; they have computers, meaning they have digital files. (The computer we’d been given hadn’t been networked to anything and hadn’t been preinstalled with much in the way of entertainment media or history materials, nothing I could use to learn very much about the culture at large and what they did or didn’t have. It had come with basic programs for us to do our own work, word processors and sound manipulators and graphing programs and soforth, as well as a wide array of bare-bones computer games that relied more on shapes and mathematics than any cultural knowledge. All I could tell from those were that these people didn’t seem interested in putting skins on their entertainment to contextualise it; no desire to make the targets in a reflex game look like soldiers or hide the math of a strategy game behind a fiction of producing food for a colony or any of the hundreds of other framing devices that I’m used to. Either they didn’t care to create that sort of art, or had deliberately chosen not to give it to us. I guess we’ll find out which, eventually.)

Nobody’s surprised to see us, of course. Everyone was probably told ahead of time that we’d be doing this today. If there’s Politics afoot, it’s not unreasonable to expect someone looking for a fight in the central meeting area – and indeed there is. The Hylaran in the multicoloured belt, Celti, is there. The look he gives us if frostily polite and distant. He’s not alone; there’s a lot of people in the dome, most probably bystanders, but the two lurking behind Celti give us equally distant looks.

“Welcome to Hylara,” Celti says stiffly.

“Thank you,” Captain Klees says, awkwardly. “You have a beautiful colony.”

“We certainly do, for now. How long before you plan to initiate your full invasion?”

The dome around us is deathly silent. Everyone has stopped pretending to do anything except watch the interaction. Captain Klees stays calm, keeps his tone friendly. “We have no wish to destroy what you’ve built. We’re here to fulfil the promise made to your ancestors inherent in their mission; to resupply your colony.”

“With a bunch of ancient Antarcticans following a mission plan from over a century ago, yes, we understand your mission. Times change, Captain. Missions and colony directions change.”

“We’re not Antarctican,” Captain Klees points out, which Celti brushes off with a dismissive wave. I scan the crowd and do some refiguring in my head. The general mood seems to agree with Celti on this – it’s an Antarctican mission, and the patch of land we came from on a planet sixty five light years away seems irrelevant to these people. Which is, honestly, fair. And there’s strong feeling about Antarctica and the mission here. A lot of tension; the colony doesn’t consider themselves an Antarctic outpost, or at least these people don’t. It might be a divisive topic here? I file it away to ask Max about later.

A long pause. Captain Klees glances at us for a moment, then back to Celti. He sighs.

“To be honest,” he says, “we’re not entirely clear on the whole thing with Antarctica. We didn’t expect to find a colony here.”

“You thought we’d all died out and you’d get the whole planet to yourself?”

“No. We didn’t know you were here in the first place. The Javelin Program was an international allied mission in which Antarctica wasn’t involved. We had no idea they were spearheading anything, and we had no idea they’d launched ships ahead of us. We thought we were coming to an empty planet; getting a transmission from your colony took us all completely by surprise.”

Celti crosses his arms. “You sent a transmission to us first, Captain.”

Captain Klees crosses his arms. “It was supposed to be something for the historical record. We didn’t expect a response. And now we have more than two thousand people asleep above us and nowhere to go but down. So unless you want to see a population four or five times the size of your colony die in space, we’re going to have to figure something out. We didn’t come here to invade you; we didn’t know you were here. We didn’t come here to take from you; we brought our own supplies. In fact, we’re supplying you. Those people are going to come down; we’d like to do it here, but if you’re that opposed to immigrants, we can land somewhere else on the planet and – ”

He stops talking as the entire atmosphere of the room changes. Everyone stiffens; Celti’s eyes narrow. There’s genuine fear there, fear inmost of the people in the room, like Captain Klees has just threatened them. He shouldn’t have brought that possibility up, not after how Max had reacted to it. But why? Why is an external settlement so much scarier to these people than an internal one?

Captain Klees unfolds his arms and raises his hands slightly. He says, very calmly, “We’re not here to make trouble. Just to ensure our passengers survive. Our job is to get those supplies and those colonists down here before the ship falls apart completely. If you’re worried we’re going about this wrong? Tell us. What supplies do you want? We’ll send them with the next drop.”

I feel Max tense beside me, and wonder whose toes we’re trampling on, what bridges we’re burning. Until now, Max and Hive have had almost exclusive control over relations with us and the ship, and they seem to be on the same side of this conflict. They got to choose the last drop, and their faction immediately caused problems with the seeds. Hive’s been replaced with someone more neutral, losing them their control over ship communications. And now our captain stands here openly asking the other side what they want and promising to deliver it. They’re losing a lot of control in a very short period of time.

Hopefully nobody does anything stupid.