“None as grand as that,” Xiao said. “My stories are all about poker and stupid things that people did on shore leave which are probably better forgotten, and yet I remember them.”
“What’s the point of doing dumb things on shore leave if people aren’t going to remember them?” Katie asked.
“Pretty much the same as doing dumb things if people are going to remember them,” Fr. Xris said.
“What do you mean?” Freia asked.
“Only that glory is fleeting and a very fickle master. Glory—the stories people tell about you—will always desert you. You can count on it. Even money is a better reason to do things than glory is. Money at least delivers what it promises. Glory... Glory promises the world, and mostly it just gives you the gnawing fear that it’s fading. But pardon me, I’m not trying to judge what you have or haven’t done. I only mean to answer the question.”
Katie waved away the last part.
“That’s not fair,” Katie said. “Money lasts only until you spend it, but you can keep the fun of telling stories to your friends forever.”
“I don’t deny it,” Fr. Xris said. “But I’ve yet to meet anyone who did not, after enough time, grow tired of fun.”
“How do you get tired of fun?” Katie said.
“It might be best for you not to find out until you can no longer avoid it,” Fr. Xris said.
“Do you ever answer questions?” Katie asked.
“Often,” Fr. Xris said. “If you really want to know how to be tired of fun, the trick is to have enough experiences that fun no longer surprises you. Once it no longer surprises you, you’ll start to ask yourself why you bother. Now, there is actually a reason, but the only metaphysics in which it’s a valid reason is Christian metaphysics. And if you don’t believe me, just ask yourself how many seventy year olds want to party with you, and why the answer is none. And if you think that’s something new, just read a little. At least three millennia of recorded writing equates youth with fun, though the term itself is only about 500 years old. (Older terms like ‘pleasure’ had a related, but different, meaning.)”
“You’re certainly no fun to talk to,” Katie said.
“I’m sorry,” Fr. Xris said. “I do make far too much of a habit of literally answering the questions people ask me.”
Katie gave Fr. Xris a dirty look and went back to eating her food in silence.
“You’ll have to pardon Katie,” Freia said, “she’s used to being the smartest person in the room.”
“She may well still be,” Fr. Xris said.
For the rest of the dinner, the conversation stayed on less weighty topics. Freia, Xiao, and Fr. Xris talked about space travel with some energy. Fr. Xris had enough questions about their experiences to keep the conversation flowing until the plates were cleared. Katie kept to herself, most of the time just looking at nothing in particular, which might have meant that she was reading or playing computer games.
A safe, convenient system for interfacing a computer with a person’s optic and auditory nerves was developed in 2319, and it became cheap enough to be widely adopted by 2338 and essentially ubiquitous by 2349. By 2462, society had largely adapted to the consequences of this sort of computer technology, and between lashes and backlashes, it had largely settled on the etiquette that it was acceptable to use one’s computer any time another person in your presence was not trying to talk with you, but that someone physically present took precedence over those only virtually present. Less outgoing people often got good at being discreet, however, and despite all of the advances in technology since man first discovered how to harness fire, there was still no effective way of knowing how accurate your opinion in your own skill at being discreet was except for having the social skills to pick up on how often you annoyed other people, which was a catch-22 for many introverts.
So whether Katie was being rude by ignoring those around her and being lost in her own thoughts, or being rude by showing a preference for her computer entertainment to them, no one could tell.
When dinner broke up, the Captain, Katie, and Biff headed off to bed since they were off watch and needed to sleep. Jack, the first officer, and Freia were on watch, while Kari was at leisure, her turn on watch starting later. Jack invited the passengers to join them in the rec room. One of the advantages of ubiquitous computer technology is that an officer could perform his watch as effectively in any room of the ship as in any other, watch mostly consisting of being on-call in case of alarms. Regular inspections of equipment, cargo, sensors, engines, etc. were left to the robots, who did not suffer from repetition fatigue.
The first game Jack proposed was a computer-enhanced version of bocce ball, with projected graphics that alternately helped and provided distractions, as well as made the results more exciting with simulated explosions. Perhaps the best analogy would be like being inside of a giant pinball machine, except the players took turns when a ball came to rest.
Xiao was the winner, with Jack coming in a close second. Fr. Xris came respectably in the middle of the pack behind Kari but ahead of Hannah, Freia, and Shaka, who were all but tied for last. There was an element of strategy to the game, as well as a certain amount of manual dexterity required, but mostly this reflected the amount they had played it before.
After another round, with substantially similar results, they switched to playing cards with virtual stakes. Gambling for real stakes was common on cargo ships, but many captains, including the captain of the Hopeful, prohibited it on the grounds that what it did for morale didn’t make up for what it did to discipline. With such a small complement, getting along was more important than having fun.
The card games broke up when Shaka, Hannah, and Xiao all expressed a desire of getting to bed, finding the various changes in time zones and flights exhausting. Jack had some reports to look over and send to the shipping company, so he excused himself and Kari joined him since
she had some questions about the ship and the command qualifying exams she was going to be taking on the return trip.
Since Freia wasn’t tired, and Fr. Xris hadn’t said anything about being tired, she asked him if he wanted a tour of the engines. He agreed, and she led the way to main engineering.
Once they were clear of the rec deck, as it was known, having as it did all of the rooms related to recreational activities such as eating, lounging, playing, and sleeping, Freia said, “You have an interesting effect on Katie.”
“Do I?” Fr. Xris asked.
“She’s normally a lot less serious,” Freia said. “I can’t tell whether she likes you or hates you, but I’m pretty sure she’s hot for you.”
Freia certainly did not call into question the reputation for blunt speaking which Fr. Xris had heard that Nordic peoples had. Despite 1,500 years, whatever spirit made their mythology have the gods facing certain doom in Ragnarok was still alive. Freia was happy to face triumph or disaster with the same good humor and detachment that led her ancestors to cheerfully rape and pillage their neighbors, then party in Valhalla, then fight with Thor against the giants though the giants were certain to win.
He confined his response to, “Indeed?”
“Are you interested?” Freia asked. It was merely a curious question. For her, sex was somewhere between a sport and a game, and she would have asked a question about zap-ball in exactly the same way.
“No,” Fr. Xris said.
“Not your type?” Freia asked. “You can’t say she’s not pretty.”
“She is pretty,” Fr. Xris admitted, “but I made a promise not to marry.”
“A woman back home?” Freia asked.
“No,” Fr. Xris said, “it was a promise I made when I became a priest.”
“Why?” Freia asked, surprised.
“It’s required of all priests in the western rite, but the purpose is to keep one available to serve everyone with equal devotion. To marry and have a family is to devote yourself specially to a few people in a way that can make general devotion difficu
lt, and many are not up to the task.”
“But what does that have to do with boffing her?” Freia asked.
“It’s complicated, but the short answer is: everything. I will not have sex with someone I’m not married to.”
“Huh,” Freia said. She paused and thought for a minute, with furrowed brows, then looked up as if enlightened. “I had heard something about Christians thinking that sex is evil. Why do you believe that?”
“I don’t,” Fr. Xris said, “I think that sex is good. I probably think that sex is much better than you do. That sex is extremely good is actually the reason why I don’t think it proper to use it for... entertainment.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s complicated, and I’m not sure whether I could ever explain it in a way that would make much sense to you, but basically compared to stimulating nerve endings, making a new person is catastrophically amazing. So much so that it eclipses the fact that it’s fun. And if you take that as the real content of the act, rather than thinking of it as a social game, you confine it to marriage for the sake of the people you make. One of the consequences of making them is that they have a right to have you... That’s the big picture, at least.”
Freia gnawed a dubious lip, turning the idea over and looking at it from different sides. At last she said, “That’s an interesting idea. I might have some questions for you about this once I’ve had more time to think about it.”
“Any time,” Fr. Xris said. “Answering questions is a large part of what I do.”
“Well,” Freia said, “I hope for Katie’s sake that she doesn’t like you. This way she won’t be very disappointed when she doesn’t get you.”
“I don’t want her to be disappointed either,” Fr. Xris said, “though it is possible that hating me isn’t the only way for that to happen. While I acknowledge you know her better, I didn’t detect any interest from her.”
Freia shrugged, then smiled. “I may know women better than you do,” she said.
“It’s possible,” Fr. Xris said. “Your being one is both an advantage and a disadvantage on that score.
“How is it a disadvantage?”
“It’s easy to assume that everyone is like you when they’re not.”
“Granted, but I’ve known a lot of women,” Freia said. “Women open up to other women.”
“True enough,” Fr. Xris said, “But you might be surprised at the things that women tell priests.”
“Oh?” Freia said.
“At least in my experience, most people are surprised at the things everyone—male or female—tell priests. Most people need to confide in someone, and priests are safe. Plus, we hear confessions. That’s not the same thing as girl-talk, or whatever you want to call it, but if a person can feel guilty for it, justifiably or not, I’ve heard it.”
Freia looked impressed, at what it was not evident, and felt no need to reply further.
They reached the main engineering deck a few moments later. It was the last of the standard decks, with several generator-related decks with catwalks and tubes rather than floors occupying the higher decks and the generators themselves occupying most of the center of the living (i.e. rotating) section. It was inconvenient having to transfer the energy from the generators on the rotating section to the reaction engines on the stationary part of the ship through a rotating coupling, but this arrangement meant that the engines shared the shielding from cosmic rays that was necessary for the living compartment, and it also meant that the engineers could service the engines without needing to do it in zero gravity. While the coupling was complicated, the discovery ninety years earlier of a superconducting fluid meant that it did not incur a loss in efficiency.
With evident pleasure in the ship, Freia said, “Here we are!”
“This looks quite modern,” Fr. Xris said. “This is a fusion drive, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Freia said. “It has two primary banks, each with 36 Daedalus chambers capable of a peak continuous output of 20 gigawatts each, and one secondary bank of 8 Daedalus chambers capable of 12 gigawatts peak continuous output.”
“What’s the conversion efficiency?
“99.86% effective,” Freia said proudly.
Fr. Xris whistled.
“We never could get above 98.91% on Kennedy,” Fr. Xris said.
“The final energy conversion stage is a Feynman ratchet,” Freia said.
“You use a propulsion-scale Feynman ratchet? That must cost a fortune.”
“It’s cheaper than all the cargo space that would be lost to the cooling fins we’d need without it,” Freia said.
“Oh, because your cooling fins have to be behind the ablative shield?”
“Exactly. In a space station, you can just hang them off the top. You’re barely moving. At .1c, if it’s not behind the main shield, it’s not getting to your destination in one piece. At .2c, which we cruise at in the slipstreams, if it’s not behind the main shield, you won’t even find pieces of it at the other end.”
“So do you shut the main banks down when cruising?”
“We do, and fire up the cruising bank.”
“Why is it so large?” Fr. Xris said. “96 gigawatts would be propulsion-class power on a smaller ship. Do the ship’s systems really consume that much power while cruising?”
“Not the ship’s systems,” Freia said, “All together they’re less than a megawatt or so. We actually have a 980 kilowatt pebble bed thorium reactor for running the ship’s systems while the engines are shut off, like when we’re docked. The cruising bank is for propulsion while cruising. The slipstreams’ gas density is much closer to stellar than inter-stellar space, and at cruising speed it actually imposes a fair amount of drag, between the actual collision momentum transfer and reaction mass from the ablations.”
* * *
They had spent a pleasant hour talking about the ship’s engines and systems by the time Fr. Xris started yawning and excusing himself to his bed. Freia bid him a cheerful goodbye and went off to the rec area in search of amusement.
It was easy enough to find his way to his quarters even without the computer-assisted mapping. He said his evening prayers from the electronic copy of his prayer book, as he didn’t feel like unpacking the three volume set yet. There wasn’t a bookshelf in the room, he noted. After all, why would a cargo ship make provision for such an anachronism?
So far, things had gone quite well. Fr. Xris didn’t really know what to expect when he bought the ticket. The low price had made him expect... what? The only real reference he had for cheap long-distance travel was documentaries about old steam ships crossing the Atlantic in the 1800s. With the advent of efficient short-runway two-stage supersonic airplanes in the 2100s, no place on earth was more than about 10 hours away. And there were a lot of reasons why the cheap steam travel of the 1800s was as bad as it was that didn’t apply to the present case. A lack of germ theory, for example, as well as no such thing as air sterilizers. Food poorly preserved and without a real understanding of its nutritional characteristics. A lack of robots to do all of the menial tasks. No ability to look up how previous passengers had rated it. None of that had applied for centuries.
Fr. Xris would have been willing to put up even with the steam ships of the 1800s, but he was glad that he didn’t have to. The people he had met so far had been pleasant enough. Freia made him laugh. Intelligent, though with a very narrowly focused intelligence, she seemed to almost personify the stereotype of the Norse pagan. The Norse pagan in home life, rather than in war. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, but said in a cheerful manner, not like the Israelites in the book of Isaiah, which is where the phrase originally came from, and where there was no “and be merry” in it. His smile took on a tinge of sadness. Poor Freia, she was among the best of youthful paganism, but paganism cannot stay young forever. Somehow you always get to blood sacrifices and thugs and glorious battles to rape and pillage your neighbors, and end with suicide when you’re old and life i
sn’t fun any more.
He shook off the mood. Where there is life, there is hope, he reminded himself.
Shaka was interesting, and he guessed that he was going to see more of the reserved African Christian, possibly in his clerical capacity.
Xiao was a curious puzzle. He had depth that he clearly didn’t want others to know about. What was he hiding?
Unlike Hannah, who hid nothing. She had a sense of restraint, but no secrets. Fr. Xris liked her. She was clearly a pagan, but from a very different mold than Freia. Whereas Freia came out of the spring of paganism, Hannah came from the summer of paganism. She hasn’t discovered the cruelty in the universe yet, but she doesn’t have the hope that there is in the spring. It’s not that she has no hope—Fr. Xris liked the definition of paganism, “the belief that something worthwhile is true”—but what hope she had was much smaller in scope. Freia expected to find happiness in the world. Hannah knew that you can’t, but still wondered whether it might be possible outside of it. Might there be anyone on the ship in the winter of paganism, who are certain that their only hope is outside of the world and can only be brought into it through blood and destruction?
Fr. Xris shook off the thought. It wasn’t that he was scared, he was just reminding himself that there was no point in borrowing the troubles of tomorrow when today has enough troubles of its own.
Which brought his thoughts to Katie. He didn’t think much of Freia’s interpretation of Katie’s feelings towards him. Perhaps she had picked up on some minor under-current, but he recognized Katie’s behavior toward him as something that he had seen many times before, from both men and women. She was angry at him. Not him specifically, of course, since she didn’t actually know him yet. But she was angry at what he stood for. His presence gave her something concrete to express her anger at. Why she disliked Christians and Christianity he couldn’t even guess, but that sort of combativeness was unmistakable.
He didn’t mind. Often it comes to nothing, but several people who had talked to him only to quarrel with Christianity ended up becoming Christians themselves. It’s not that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, because they’re not. It’s because angry people know that the world isn’t right, and they want an explanation. Whether their anger is likely to lead to conversion depends on whether they care more about the answer or the anger. Anger can become a substitute for an answer, if the angry person is unlucky enough to discover a scapegoat. A man can cling to this unpleasant sort of idol all the way to hell. When you worship monsters, it doesn’t matter whether you love them or hate them, you’re still worshiping them. As a pithy song once said: you can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.
A Stitch In Space Page 4
