At the end of that long conversation through the appliance, Ricci agreed to put her old work under lockdown so she could concentrate on the here-and-now. Which meant all her attention was focused on us.
Ricci got into my notes. I don’t keep them locked down; anyone can access them. Free and open distribution of data is a primary force behind the success of the human species, after all. Don’t we all learn that in the crèche?
Making data available doesn’t guarantee anyone will look at it, and if they do, chances are they won’t understand it. Ricci tried. She didn’t just skim through, she really studied. Shift after shift, she played with the numbers and gamed my simulation models. Maybe she slept. Maybe not.
I figured Ricci would come looking for me if she got stumped, so I de-hermited, banged around in the rumpus room, put myself to work on random little maintenance tasks.
When Ricci found me, I was in the caudal stump dealing with the accumulated waste pellets. Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like: half-kilogram plugs of dry solid waste covered in wax and transferred from the lavs by the hygiene bots. Liquid waste is easy. We vaporize it, shunt it into the gas exchange bladder, and flush it through gill-like permeable membranes. Solid waste, well, just like anyone we’d rather forget about it as long as possible. We rack the pellets until there’s about two hundred, then we jettison them.
Ricci pushed up her goggles and scrubbed knuckles over her red-rimmed eyes.
“Why don’t you automate this process like you do for liquids?” Ricci asked as she helped me position the rack over the valve.
“No room for non-essential equipment in the mass budget,” I said.
I dilated the interior shutter and the first pellet clicked through. A faint pink blush formed around the valve’s perimeter, only visible because I’d dialed up the contrast on my goggles to watch for signs of stress. A little hormone ointment took care of it—not too much or we’d get a band of inflexible scar tissue, and then I’d have to cut out the valve and move it to another location. That’s a long, tricky process and it’s not fun.
“There’s only two bands of tissue strong enough to support a valve.” I bent down and stroked the creamy striated tissue at my feet. “This is number two, and really, it barely holds. We have to treat it gently.”
“Why risk it, then? Take it out and just use the main valve.”
A sarcastic comment bubbled up—have you never heard of a safety exit?— but I gazed into her big brown eyes and it faded into the clouds.
“We need two valves in case of emergencies,” I mumbled.
Ricci and I watched the pellets plunge through the sky. When they hit the ice slush, the concussive wave kicked up a trail of vapor blooms, concentric rings lit with pinpoints of electricity, so far below each flash just a spark in a violet sea.
A flock of jellies fled from the concussion, flat shells strobing with reflected light, trains of ribbon-like tentacles flapping behind.
Ricci looked worried. “Did we hit any of them?”
I shook my head. “No, they can move fast.”
After we’d finished dumping waste, Ricci said, “Say, Doc, why don’t you show me the main valve again?”
I puffed up a little at that. I’m proud of the valves. Always tinkering, always innovating, always making them a little better. Without the valves, we wouldn’t be here.
Far forward, just before the peduncle isthmus, a wide band of filaments connects the petals to the bladder superstructure. The isthmus skin is thick with connective tissue, and provides enough structural integrity to support a valve big enough to accommodate a cargo pod.
“We pulled you in here.” I patted the collar of the shutter housing. “Whoever prepared the pod had put you in a pink body bag. Don’t know why it was such a ridiculous color. When Vula saw it, she said, ‘It’s a girl!’.”
I laughed. Ricci winced.
“That joke makes sense, old style,” I explained.
“No, I get it. Birth metaphor. I’m not a crechie, Doc.”
“I know. We wouldn’t have picked you if you were.”
“Why did you pick me?”
I grumbled something. Truth is, when I ask our recruiter to find us a new hab-mate, the percentage of viable applications approaches zero. We look for a specific psychological profile. The two most important success factors are low self-censoring and high focus. People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long-fermented resentments, and obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.
Ricci tapped her fingernail on a shutter blade.
“Your notes aren’t complete, Doc.” She stared up at me, unblinking. No hint of a dimple. “Why are you hoarding information?”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. There’s nothing about reproduction.”
“That’s because I don’t know very much about it.”
“The other whale crews do. And they’re worried about it. You must know something, but you’re not sharing. Why?”
I glared at her. “I’m an amateur independent researcher. My methods aren’t rigorous. It would be wrong to share shaky theories.”
“The whale crews had a collective research agreement once. You wrote it.”
She fired the document at me with a flick of her finger. I slapped it down and flushed it from my buffer.
“That agreement expired. We didn’t renew.”
“That’s a lie. You dissolved it and left to find your own whale.”
I aimed my finger at the bridge of her goggles and jabbed the air. “Yes, I ran away. So did you.”
She smiled. “I left a network of
