Yu was not familiar with this level of care for humans. Tria had never done anything like it. Injuries in the settlements were lessons, left to mend or to kill. Humans bled, or drowned, or birthed themselves into graves. It was part of what she called natural selection. Yu had seen that indifference far more often than he had seen care. Instead of intervening, Tria observed. She evaluated how her humans dealt with their injured, and marked which of endured and which were discarded.
Yu did not seek them, these memories of Tria. He did not recall them deliberately, but still they answered. They surfaced on their own, rising to meet the sight through the slit. He knew there were a hundred other things he ought to be thinking of, but all slipped past him, and none offered hold. His drowning mind reached for fragments from beyond the Albweiss. They belonged to the old self. They helped anchor him.
When Tria first took control of the habitat, the second most common cause of death was drowning, simply because of the many streams running through the territory. The first was childbirth, with high tolls for both infants and females. Despite that, Tria did not restrict the humans’ access to water. In fact, she did the opposite. She forced their lives into it and made fishing the centre of their survival. Unlike what you would expect, drowning actually became less frequent. Surprisingly, the humans learned to swim, all on their own. At first they waded while working their nets in the shallows. As they started to move into deeper waters, they found ways to keep their head above the surface even when the ground dropped away. Then they discovered how to float for long stretches of time, and eventually, they could drift and move with their limbs in steady rhythm. In the end, they swam while handling their gear. Some even dove.
They grew so bold that Tria had to reinforce the fencing and send patrols along the habitat streams. By the time Yu came to the estate, swimming had become not only a necessary discipline for survival and industry, but also a significant part of their – for the lack of better word – culture: children were taught to swim almost as early as they could walk or knot nets. They had a recognisable hierarchy, where older children supervised the younger ones by the rivers. There were crude rituals and challenges to fetch stones or trinkets from deeper waters, all primitive and rather stupid, of course, but still, recognisable as ambition.
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