"Well, euthanizing her would solve the problem" is a hard sell for a group of frazzled human foster care workers who've been trying all week to make sure they don't accidentally kill this random baby alien.
Transcript
Mel: Do you think she's a trafficking victim?
The comic panel background dips away, showing a black void behind Mel's head. A gulper eel swims by.
Doug: Hard to say.
Otília: There wasn't a note, right?
Doug: Nothing. Our youth care facility was not equipped to deal with a non-human infant. The first couple weeks were a scramble for food, medical care…
Mel: So…
They rub their thumb along the top of their mug awkwardly. The panel background of the brightly lit break room dips away again. An abyssal plain can be faintly seen, a lone squid drifting slowly over it.
Mel: …Why wasn’t she returned to the centaur homeplanet?
Doug: We tried.
Otília's brow furrows.
Otília: Centaurs don’t really do foster care, do they?
Doug: The embassy told us that most clans choose to cull unclaimed infants.
48 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 215”
thegriffin88
It seems like Centaur culture doesn’t really value individuality.
Then again it makes sense if you have 6 babies at a time. Funny how that hasn’t changed in the settlers since normally with some degree of lowering the infant mortality rate you end up with an organism that focuses more rearing a smaller number of children.
goblout
With Doug thinking Talita might be listening in the last page, and the water backgrounds… I wonder if it’s meant to be more of a symbolic thing, or perhaps if Talita is sitting in another room trying to listen to deep sea sounds as white noise to calm herself, but still hearing everything…
forthebit
I assume it’s a dream or a memory. Not necessarily Talita’s, it could be Mel’s. There’s certainly some symbolism and imagery in the chapter title being “heavy water”.
Vinemaple
WAIT, READ THE TRANSCRIPT, THEN SCROLL BACK UP AND LOOK AGAIN. Jay is… doing something, on this page.
Arcstone
Huh. I didn’t even notice those critters.
malmo
First thing I did when I saw the gulper eel, before even reading the rest of the panels, was scroll down to see if it was mentioned in the captions
ploapgusset
Dracaena trifasciata spotted!
Alicia Smith
We really are getting into deep water.
Fallingfeather
Ah, I had all these weird theories, but I hadn’t even considered good ol’ (well, “good ol’ “) human (well, “human”) trafficking.
goose
gulper eel in the corner??? stop eavesdropping dude not your convo
petra
centaur embassy: well.. did you try killing it
humans: D:!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
tyrone
They did not teach to handle that one in Diplomacy 101 , I think.
EnchantressEmily
I wonder if Doug is choosing his words carefully as the only one who knows Talita is listening in from her room.
Lilac
Ah, the infinite nuances of morality…
gigithebear
gulper eel??? hello???
The Defenestrator
That’s the other cross-species foster case. Their name is Bryan.
Gnome_Artificer
My favorite character in the lore makes their official appearance! Buckle in, cause Bryan the eel is the GOAT.
A Box Of Fox
He was fostered by the squid in the bottom right. The squid’s name is Jaqueline. Every squid should have an elegant name.
JoB
Just in case they make headlines in the Friday Squid Blog? 😉
eden
if talita really did get sophont trafficked than all things considered her entire life is an absolute lottery. I can only imagine the hell she would’ve lived otherwise if she even survived at all.
FelixScout
Though if they were never traffiked they may have grown up in some normal sense, for a centaur nomad.
ugagradlady
It happened to a real orangutan, named Pony. She was rescued at five years old (a teenager by orangutan standards) and was so traumatized she can’t be returned to the wild. Pony is now 21 and lives in an enclosure at Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Center in Borneo, with seven other orangutans deemed unreleasable; they’re her family now.
Anoyint
Jesus christ, I never even considered space trafficking… I guess the bleakest parts of the modern day only get bleaker, more advanced, in a future that holds the same values.
Joysweeper
A mismatch of values between centaurs and humans. Humans tend to really value preserving (appealing forms of) life even if there’s a lot of difficulty involved, see the general response to videos about rescuing turtles with broken shells, or making prosthetic limbs for injured animals, or well any hospital. Even if it means quality of life is poor. And of course we’re wired to find babies appealing; those who don’t really gotta keep it quiet around those who do, social mores require you to at least smile if your coworker shows you pics of their newborn. It takes a lot of investment and risk to make a human baby.
Homeworld centaurs don’t have that kind of response. Reproductive investment is so different for them and they’ve had to develop population control systems. I’m sure centaurs are invested in the children of their clans’ matriarch but outside of that… Centaurs on the softhearted side who get why Doug and his team would even try probably see them trying to raise Talita in a way similar to how (modern) veterinarians may see attempting to heal a racehorse with a shattered leg, a very difficult process that’s likely to fail and cause a lot of suffering along the way. Except at the best-case-scenario end of it you have a person with no clan, which is a terrible position to them.
(I imagine a GMH horse taur with a badly broken leg would have a rockier, more expensive road to recovery than a typ but even aside from future-y medical advances, it would be doable since they can actually understand the need for rest and probably aren’t wired to kick out and flee.)
Maybe a homeworld centaur could have at least been pen pals or video response partners with Talita, but would have seen it as contributing to dragging the process out, or didn’t want to get attached to an infant they thought would soon die, or let a child falsely believe there was a chance of being in a clan that didn’t want them. Maybe the foster care workers would have been more motivated to find one who was willing anyway if they hadn’t been given a response that read to them as totally heartless.
Maybe Bip can be really good for Talita in that they do know centaur culture and can convey things from a closer perspective than she’s gotten, but are distant enough that the implications of her being clanless without a homeworld centaur’s preconceptions about such a thing.
IncompleteMachine
I think Talita is functionally inculturated as a human now. I think she’ll touch on points of her home species culture but she’s expressed (in AMA’s) that she dooesnt want all that much of a connection.
She’s an outsider to two worlds, and thats kind of the point.
Jay Eaton
Also worth noting that historically humans have practiced plenty of infanticide. This isn’t a population control method unique to centaurs. In the modern day we are spoiled with myriad options for preventing and terminating pregnancies, as well as surrender sites and foster systems, saving us from having to consider killing freshly born offspring we can’t care for. …But you’ll never guess what removing widespread public access to birth control and overtaxed foster systems results in more of…
blythe
i still cant believe they didnt at least have security footage in a major city, but again its not rly important to the story
John
Yeah it’s kind of a plot hole
LizardWizard
anonymous infant drop boxes are a thing for a reason, besides it sounds like “find out who dropped this baby centaur off” took a significant backseat to “OH fuck I gotta feed an alien baby!” followed by scrambling off to beg, borrow or steal anything edible for her. it’s not that no one cared it’s that there’s only so many hours in a day and by the time you’ve secured her meals for the next little while all the security cameras are probably lapsed
Paul
It’s been a while. Like, right now there is a massive surge in surveillance pretty much everywhere. All backed up by the latest AI face recognition and shared to… well, a whole bunch of people. You can imagine that some people are not keen on this.
So, it’s not implausible that sometime between now and the time of the comic there is a big backlash and privacy in public places becomes something that the cops and governments care about and enforce.
LizardWizard
I could totally see a war changing peoples views such things. I’m not even sure you can get “asbestose” for construction nowadays, I reckon people realized “no the torment nexus watching our every move does not infact keep us safer” and did away with it the same way we did away with asbestos.
IncompleteMachine
I feel like this is the direction we’re going to go in the real world so I’ll take it as canon here XD
Teod
I think it’s a cultural thing. Privacy on a space station is a rare commodity. So as the stations grew there was probably a push to have more of it, which ended up creating a city with nearly no surveillance.
HAL9000
i suppose its also a community thing- you cant leave or enter a space station without people knowing who you are, so i guess loads of surveillance is considered a bit superfluous when there’s literally no way in or out without official sanction (well… in an ideal world)
Joysweeper
I’m sure they had cameras around, like, life support areas. Maybe plenty of other places. But in the modern day we have designated safe havens, where someone who can’t or won’t be a parent to a newborn can leave it in confidence that it will be cared for, and they won’t be blamed or punished for it. That seems to have continued into RTTS times.
furubatsu
Is the background why this chapter’s called Heavy Water?
Also GOOD LORD I would love to be a fly on the wall during the phone call to the Centaur Homeplanet when that was their response
pathfinder42
I bet it has a double meaning with heavy water being the common name for Deuterium oxide, and the runaway runs off of Dueterium (I assume pure Dueterium), but the idea is there.
Time to turn and burn as it were, both socially, and physically with the gang’s new runaway “buddy”. Love double meanings like that.
Pathfinder42
My spelling is atrocious I apologize, it’s deuterium.
0xabad1dea
the most depressingly realistic scenario I can envision is some human assumed she was the centaur version of a domestic cat and stole her to keep as a pet before realizing what they’d actually done was commit a slavery against a sentient creature that was gonna grow a hundred times bigger. I can totally envision most humans assuming baby centaurs are as big as baby giraffes.
Paul
My minimum expectation for humankind is pretty low, ever since I saw that clip where someone was basically, “Swim free, little turtle!” before throwing a tortoise into the canal.
The pet carrier certainly seems to be a human thing, though. A slightly more optimistic version would be that someone came across her recently orphaned, knew what was going to happen to her if she left it to the centaurs, and cared enough to save her life but not enough to actually take responsibility for it.
Enai
Oh no 🙁 Some tortoises like to bathe, but not like that…
HAL9000
whats up with the gulper eel behind mel in panel one?? scary…
Adrienne
Wait. Wait yeah. What IS that doing here. Scary
hurgaburga
the whole background behind the pannels is the deep sea, left of the last pannel you can see some brittle stars and on the other side a squid.
wierd
JoB
I may be going out on a limb here, but I suspect the “deep waters” imagery being symbolic of Mel having their own bad childhood experiences welling up unbidden right now …
forthebit
I’m going to laugh if it turns out the whole foster home is just situated in a deep-sea habitat (unlikely, but hey, maybe Jay was also a fan of Crisis on Conshelf 10 as a kid)
JoB
Talita grew up in (or is that still “on” … ?) Nexus Jovia, which should be at quite some distance from the nearest massive body of water …
Enai
A most excellent pun, methinks. They thought they’d foster a mildly unusual adolescent and got a possible trafficking victim. I would’ve also suddenly felt lost and in deep waters. Maybe even gulped…