“I call the ship Gruvmaja because I love her.
“And she loves me back.
“You could say, how can a soulless thing, an unalive mechanical husk with no heart, no mind, love? But she has a soul. In fact she has a lot of souls.
“She was built in a small factory. It’s a company of people who all came together to conceive the design. They ran simulations and modified the design, they ran more simulations and modified the modifications. Then they built a prototype and modified some more. They built software, and modified that.
They built the ship. They built this ship.”
Gina was almost singing now. In a whirlwind tour of the shipyards where the tough little single-crewed, long-duration mining utility – the longstay single – had been constructed, she had fallen into a kind of love with not just the ship, but the entire process of how it had come to be, forged from a mountain of purified lunar aluminum, basaltic fiber-reinforced composites and sweat. And out of that kind of love had slowly grown the real thing.
“They’ve built a few ships. They’re similar to each other. They’re not a big company so they can’t afford to branch out much. But they’re smart and passionate. The hulls are more or less modular so there are some identical dimensions here and there. But none of the ships are exactly like this one. As soon as they start building a ship, it begins to deviate from the initial specification. Right from the very first casting.
“I call her Gruvmaja, the Mine Mother. She watches over the mine and the miners. Take care of her and she’ll take care of you.
“Her soul is a smorgasbord of all the other souls that came together to build her, welded into the seams and grown into the viewport crystal. Everyone who’s ever touched her with even a moment’s respect has left their share.
“You don’t love things. Don’t love things that can’t love you back. But love isn’t as simple as that. I don’t have to have the people in front of me to love them, to respect them. I don’t love the photograph of my mother, but I love my mother and it’s a picture of her. I love my friends, not their messages – but I treasure their messages because the messages are from them. I go back through the messages and remember how I felt, laugh again at the jokes, cry at the struggles. I love the messages for my friends’ sake, I love the picture for my mother’s sake. They’re my relationships with them, and totems of the relationships that remind me how I’m part of them. We belong to each other. It’s a belongingness that reflects back and forth.
“So I love the Mine Mother, I respect and care for her because she’s mine. She protects and cares for me because I’m here for her.”
The chant had gone around and around her mind before, a lucid dream that tried to square the relationships of purpose and practice. If the ship existed for the purpose of mining, had mining come to be a practice so that the ship could exist? Did humanity evolve into a spacefaring race so that the asteroids could become more than clods of accreted dust wandering around one insignificant star?
Admittedly, some of these thoughts could feel a little overwrought and whenever she allowed herself to realize that, they would come to an abrupt halt and the dream’s end, silly though it might be when examined, left her feeling a little sad. It felt nice – spiritually fulfilling - believing at some level, however briefly, that she was part of something great.
“It’s not that I love the ship specifically, do you see? Except I do, too.
“All these hearts and minds have touched it. Have touched her. They thought carefully, they worked hard. They touched every portion of this ship. Some of them may have said prayers over it. Some were fiercely competitive. Some were watching out for my safety. By extension they all touch me. And I have poured a lot of myself into this ship too. No other ship in space is like this one. I’ve put time and energy into making her what she is, all that work doesn’t go away. All that energy doesn’t disappear. It’s all still here, and here, and here. It’s all me, it’s all those people, it’s all Gruvmaja. And I love her.”
She patted the hull gently, pat pat pat. By Newton’s Third Law, the hull patted her back exactly as gently.
“All those people…all those souls left an echo on this ship, like a baby changing her mother even as she grows inside. All those people left a bit of themselves here to become this, to shape Gruvmaja. I love what they have done. I love what they have put in my care, and I promise every minute to take care of that care and not waste it.
“To not love their work, to not love them, to not love her…would break my heart.
“And I love myself too much to let that happen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment