I stopped with a foot in midair. Because when somebody else says something is broken you can’t be totally sure until you try it yourself, I idiotically echoed, “Sally?”
The silence was immediately twice as loud.
I put my foot down very gently and groped for our uplink. There was nothing on the other end. Not even the quiet feeling of connection that usually radiates down the senso from a linked AI when you tune into it. For a second, the bottom dropped out of me, and I flailed in the panicked certainty that Sally was gone and we were trapped here on this weird ghost ship, and that all our friends were dead.
I admit it: I am not the galaxy’s best at not immediately producing the worst-case scenario. Fortunately, I’m also aware of this tendency, after years of rightminding and some time in a nice, secure environment, and so I bumped my GABA and serotonin levels up and my cortisol level down and took six deep breaths until the sensation of my heart squeezing tight around a shard of glass eased up somewhat.
The brain is—mostly—an electrochemical meat machine. The fact that you can tune it is why humanity still exists, centians after the Eschaton and the crazy desperate nonsense of those who could afford to escape an Earth we’d declared doomed attempting to save themselves at any cost.
Crazy desperate nonsense like this big old ship I was standing on.
I looked over at Tsosie, and saw his face pinched and his brow dewed with beads of sweat behind the faceplate. He’d stopped moving, too, and when we halted the clicking of the tinkertoy microbots silenced. They were frozen mid-peel, as if somebody had hit pause on the animation.
“What are the odds we’re blocked from coms, and they’re fine up there?” I asked him, trying to sound reasonable. “And they’ll get in touch with us momentarily?”
“If it can be done, Sally and our crew can do it.” He sounded like he believed it, too. Some people just have solid neurochemistry. Or more robust rightminding.
Or less trauma, I supposed.
Maybe I was a little freaked out by the entirely empty ship. Entirely empty, except for one dead person and a weird tinkertoy machine. Entirely empty of the thousands of crew members it was large enough to contain.
“What are the odds that something terrible went wrong and they’re all dead?”
“Have a little faith,” said Tsosie. “Come on. Keep walking. Let’s do our job and trust them to do theirs, what do you say?”
* * *
“I don’t know much about faith,” I said to Tsosie, ten steps later.
“What?” he answered, distractedly. He was scanning the lattice construct of microbots warily, and I expected he was as busy pinging Sally as I was.
My brain was building architectures of attack, sabotage, or accident, and I needed to distract it. “What you said about having faith. I never knew how that felt. I guess it’s some kind of neurological defect. I was born without it. Or it got knocked out of me so early I never remember having those feelings. I don’t believe in things. But I believe in Core General. I believe in our mission. I believe that we are here to help people.”
I was, as you have probably diagnosed, babbling. I was also grateful to Tsosie, for providing me with a distraction from the panic that wanted to overwhelm me. The least I could do was talk about trivialities in return.
If they really were trivialities.
He hummed a sound that made me wonder if he’d even heard the second half of what I’d said. “You mean religion, when you say faith? Because I meant, our crew and ship know what they’re doing, and we know that.”
“Nah.” I shook my head inside the hardsuit. And checked my battery levels. The suit had extra backups; it and my exo were still fine.
Tsosie pointed to a hatch in the side wall.
I nodded, and followed him. “Like trust. Like believing in people. Like believing that things will turn out okay. Like… what you said.”
The hatch was an access point. Beyond it was a tunnel that would need us to crawl.
“Let’s save those for after,” I said.
He nodded. “And after we get back in touch with Sally. And her sensor arrays.”
There it was again: that faith that we would get back in touch with Sally. I was having a hard time remembering that she even existed, that we weren’t stranded out here alone with no support.
“I want to put eyes on her,” I said.
“Next hatch. Let’s see if we can find a viewport.”
There had been windows. We’d seen them from the outside. Mirrored to reflect the potentially unforgiving light of space. There weren’t any here, because this was a corridor.
Or were there?
I started inspecting the control panels we passed more carefully.
“This is a personal question,” Tsosie said formally.
I glanced over at him and nodded. The hardsuits fit close enough that you can pick up even a little gesture like that.
“I consent,” I said, so it would be on Sally’s record. If Sally was still out there. If we ever got our link back.
Quit psyching yourself out, Dr. Jens. If you tell yourself something firmly enough, it’s almost as good as hearing it from a trusted authority. Especially if you can back it up by fiddling with your brain chemistry.
“Do you remember a time before the chronic pain?”
I could claim that wasn’t a perceptive question, but then I’d have to explain why I stood there silently for a good thirty seconds before I found an answer. “No,” I admitted. “There’s always been the pain.”
“So how would you, as a kid, have learned that things were going to be okay, or that adults could solve your problems? Why would you ever have cause to think things would turn out all right?”
“Huh,” I said, eloquently. While the tinkertoys went click click click.
I chewed on my lower lip inside the faceplate. It was a terrible habit; I was going to give myself a chapped lip in the dryness of the suit environment, and if it started to bleed in zero g or while I was under acceleration, that was going to be a bloody mess. Quite literally.
I ducked under one of those weird, trailing strands of tinkertoys. This one hadn’t peeled apart with the others to let us through. If they were as fragile as they looked, they should have been collapsed all over the decking, even under such light acceleration as this. “So you think I never learned trust because, as a child, I had nothing to believe in?”
“You trust, though. You trust Sally with your life—”
“That’s not what I mean.” I sighed. “Yes, I can decide to take a risk on Sally, or on you. But I know it’s a risk. Whereas I’ve heard people talk about the belief that somebody would never hurt them. Or the sense that everything will turn out all right in the end. I’ve never had those.”
“So why do you take risks?”
“Well,” I said. “Because if you don’t, you never gain anything. And, as I said, I believe in Core General. I believe in what we are doing there. I believe it’s a good thing. Worth risking myself for. So I trust… I guess I trust the mission.”
The tinkertoys were denser here, and less responsive to our presence. I gave up on crouching and ducking under them. I got down and crawled. By the way, the inside of a hardsuit isn’t any good for the outside of your knees.
Tsosie had come up beside me. He gave me a funny sidelong look and got down on his hands and knees as well, but he didn’t say anything for a minute. When he did, it was a change of subject—or a segue.
“So you trusted the mission when you were with the Judiciary?”
His kneeplates scraped irritatingly on the decking.
I knew he was talking so we wouldn’t think too hard about where Sally was, or Loese, or Hhayazh, or Camphvis, or Rhym. That was fine. There wasn’t anything we could do for them from here, right now. He was right—we had to trust them to take care of their part of the mission, even without communication.
They would be trusting us to do the same.
I shrugged. “Well. Not in the sa
me way. I decided it was a good mission and that I could serve it. And it helped me get closer to the Core, where I could get better care. And it got me a military-grade exoskeleton, which is absolutely the bomb for mobility issues.”
One thing about the Synarche. It’s so big, and data and people move so slowly through it, that it takes a while for tech to disseminate. Medical tech along with all the other kinds. And backwater settlements on marginal planets are definitely at the bottom of the list, most of the time. There aren’t enough people there to make them a priority.
I shouldn’t say people move slowly. They move very quickly. Just… over ridiculous distances.
“Anyway,” Tsosie said. “Before I interrupted me, I was pointing out that once you got to Core General, you finally got to a place where people could take care of you. They took care of your pain.”
“Judiciary took care of my pain,” I corrected. “If they hadn’t, I would not have been much use to them.” I was managing my own pain now, which was a task I usually outsourced to Sally so I didn’t have to concentrate on it, but this didn’t seem the time to mention that.
“How effectively?”
I wobbled my head to emphasize my eyeroll of defeat, since the faceplate hid the eyeroll part. “All right, you got me.”
“And you probably weren’t taken seriously by medical people before then.”
“Well… It wasn’t that bad. I learned the lingo in the military, which never hurts. And people don’t dismiss you when you can prove your rightminding is effective.”
“People don’t love being presented with unsolvable problems, though.”
I chuckled. “Core General does.”
“I rest my case.”
“Are you suggesting, as my commanding officer, that I have some untreated medical post-traumatic response?”
“Mmm.” Noncommittal.
I turned my shoulder to him, concentrating on the medical panel on my forearm, looking up occasionally to make sure I wasn’t about to crawl into anything—or past one of the control panels without inspecting it.
“What’s wrong with me isn’t that complicated,” I said. “I grew up on the kind of planet where resources were limited, because the settlement was at the very edge of things. We got supplies, but sometimes we went a long time between drops. And medical relief was intermittent at best.”
“The last scarcity economy in the galaxy.” I could hear the smile.
“I mean, it was the Synarche. It wasn’t like I grew up in a Freeport, or totally outside civilization.”
“Civilization is not evenly distributed. Did you join the Judiciary to get away from your backwater homeworld?”
I was starting to get irritated with his obtuseness, but at least it distracted me from the hardsuit pinching and banging in uncomfortable ways. “I said it got me better medical care—”
The tinkertoys seemed to be getting more responsive again. I wondered if the patch we’d just wormed through were reinforcing a structurally weak spot. Or if they were so old they didn’t work very well.
I risked standing up, and the cloud of microbots got out of my way. I rubbed elbows I’d bruised on the inside of my hardsuit while Tsosie levered himself to his feet also.
“Crap,” he said. “This is like caving.”
“Better light,” I joked. “I joined the Judiciary because it got me this exo. And it seemed interesting. A chance to travel and see things. And then they offered me medical training, and I found being a doctor was even more interesting than being a cop, so I transferred to Core General once I got good enough.”
Tsosie waited to see what I would say next. His boots scraped along beside me. We’d both turned off the electromagnets and were moving more or less normally, given the low simulated gravity. It wasn’t quite push-off-and-bound, but one definitely had to be aware of the ceilings.
Core was installing a new artificial gravity tech salvaged from a Koregoi archaeological site. Sally would probably get it next, unless one of the other ambulance ships was the guinea pig. Most ships in transit aren’t designed to spin up gravity, but it’s hard to operate on somebody when you’re floating, and their bodily fluids tend to form large rippling balls under surface tension. So we had fake—centripetal—gravity now, and soon we would have better fake gravity still.
“I feel safe at Core,” I finally told Tsosie.
“And you never felt safe before.”
“No,” I agreed. “I never felt safe before. So I believe in Core, because it makes me feel safe.”
“Congratulations. Now you understand why people go to church.”
“To feel safe? Is that all faith is?” I pounced on the next control panel. “Aha!”
“Aha?”
It was push buttons and little toggles. Mechanical linkages rather than electronic: the sort of thing you could fix with a tiny screwdriver. Smart, when wandering off into space for generations.
I flipped one of them, and heard a pop as the beige panel beside it unlatched. “Help me slide this gently.”
Tsosie didn’t argue. And after two steps sideways, I saw his body language perk up as he got it.
The beige panel was a cover over a viewing port two meters wide and a meter tall. It sealed, airtight, when the port wasn’t in use, and slid aside so crew could look outside and check the structure. Or take in the view.
Which was breathtaking. A sweep of hull decked with antennae and other protrusions was visible below the window. The port itself was bubbled outward, and if we stuck our heads in, we could see the hub far above us, and the massive arch of the wheel made to seem like a fragile tower by the vastness of its diameter. Far in the distance, against velvet black, the stars revolved.
And there was Sally, right where she should have been, holding her position alongside Big Rock Candy Mountain while the wheel whipped beneath her. Or, from our perspective, she was zipping backward along the great, motionless arch of the ship we were in.
She looked intact, and her navigation was obviously working. Tsosie reached out and tapped his fingers on my shoulderplate, silent acknowledgment of our profound shared relief.
We each let out our tension on a held breath in turn. Hand still trembling a little, I flashed a light out the port.
We’re okay. Continuing.
I repeated the message three times.
Copy, Sally flashed back, after a while. Standing by.
We went on.
* * *
Step by step—and occasionally crawl by crawl—we came quite a way around the ring of the generation ship. One pie slice, maybe, depending on the size of your slicer. We checked in again with Sally when we found a viewport pointed in the right direction. We also checked side passages and chambers, when we passed them, and found—mostly—predictable things, all filled with more lattice. What was this stuff?
“Tsosie.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you…” I got embarrassed and trailed off.
“… do I?”
“May I ask you a personal question?”
He laughed. “I started it. Be churlish to say no.”
“Do you go to church?”
He smiled. It turned into a grimace. “No. I don’t go to church. My people thought the world was their church. So now, I act as though the galaxy is.”
“The galaxy isn’t a safe place, though.”
The grimace went back to a smile, but it wasn’t an easy one. “Neither, it turns out, was the world.”
* * *
I was still wondering about that—about Tsosie having a connection to “his people,” even going back to Terra, a standard hour or so later when he looked up from his wrist and said, “I might have a thermal signature.”
“Might have?”
“It’s a big ship and there’s a lot of stuff in the way.”
The macro-microbots were unzipping before us and zipping back up after us again. Tsosie and I had both opted to reskin our hardsuits, which were normally marked all over their chest and backpl
ates with an inelegant clutter of galactic medical and rescue symbols. Based on the provenance of Big Rock Candy Mountain, we were opting to prioritize the Red Crescent, the Red Cross, and the Rod of Asclepius, and deemphasize the others. (It didn’t escape me, given my conversation with Tsosie, that all of those had started off as religious symbols back on Terra.)
My favorite was the Nazzish symbol, the Blade of Life, because it looked so badass. But walking around with a great big scalpel on my pec plate probably wouldn’t inspire confidence in the descendant of refugees from one of the more barren and brutal periods of Terra’s history.
People who fled the Eschaton in their primitive space arks did so because they believed that anybody who stayed behind would die, along with the rest of humanity.
And if those of our ancestors who hadn’t made it onto an ark hadn’t discovered rightminding, the Alcubierre-White drive, and the Synarche (in roughly that order), those with the resources to become refugees might have been right. As it was, we managed to start making decisions that took the pressure off the Terrestrial environment and ameliorated climate change in time to save both Earth and humanity.
I overstate the peril. Earth would have been fine. The biosphere would have persisted and expanded again, as after other extinction events. Even a mass die-off from a methane burp is recoverable on a geologic scale.
But I and my species are predictably ethnocentric. We would have missed us, even if nobody else would. And thus: primitive space arks.
I was struck again, as we explored, that this particular primitive space ark showed signs of long habitation before its current state of abandonment. It was spotlessly clean—I wondered if there were more bots devoted to scrubbing—but the surfaces were worn, the finish on the walls buffed to a matte shine with layers of polishing scratches.
Tsosie said, “On the bright side, we haven’t found any more cadavers.”
Or even any skeletons. The giant ship we were searching seemed to be not just spotless and not full of dead people, but perfectly functional. Those side doors had led us to endless low-moisture farms full of food plants. The air that we weren’t breathing was heady with oxygen, and the hardsuits were filtering it out of the environment to recharge their own tanks.
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