"It sure doesn't feel like it, does it? Even our tickets on this starship were bought and paid for by us working our percentage against Commander Boynton working his."
"He doesn't like that very much," I said.
Douglas nodded agreement. "You got that right. But that's the point, Charles. If you don't have to be good unless there's something in it for you, then everything is a negotiation for percentages—and all that negotiation ultimately disempowers your responsibility for yourself."
"HARLIE said all that?"
"He isn't the first one to point it out. He might not even be the most eloquent—but he does have the metalogical evidence. HARLIE can assemble all the arguments and thrash them out in a way that no human being can. That's what he's doing right now—he's showing the people of Earth that the polycrisis, the meltdown, the collapse, whatever you want to call it, is the result of parasitic memes that have disempowered human beings and kept them enslaved to inaccurate maps of reality."
"Oh," I said.
"This meme we've been talking about is just one of many, but it's a particularly pernicious one. It's a way of controlling people by taking away their right to personal cognition. What makes it even nastier is that some domains have even attached a threat to it. 'If you aren't good, you will be severely punished.' That emphasis makes it that you don't have to be rewarded at all, you have to be good because you're afraid that Invisible Hank will beat you up."
"Invisible Hank?"
"The imaginary companion attached to the meme. God, the Devil, whoever—Invisible Hank. If you don't follow the rules, Invisible Hank will beat you up someday. So even if you want to be good, simply because that's the right way to be, you aren't allowed to, because Invisible Hank doesn't recognize goodness unless it's by his rules. Invisible Hank doesn't allow you to be responsible for yourself."
"Oh," I said. "He sounds like a control freak."
"Yes," said Douglas. "That's exactly the point. The people who insist that Invisible Hank is real have created a way of taking control of other people's lives. And there are a lot of Invisible Hanks down there." He pointed at the Earth. "It's a very sick planet, and it's going to get a lot sicker. HARLIE is sending them some medicine—but even he doesn't think they'll take it. Too many of those people down there think that what's happening to them now is because Invisible Hank is angry. And they're afraid. There's nothing like really bad times to make people afraid of Invisible Hank."
"Oh," I said.
"It's a very human trap," Douglas said.
After a bit, another thought occurred to me. "Is Invisible Hank coming with us? Him and his memes? I mean—we aren't going to make the same mistake on Outbeyond, are we?"
Douglas put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a brotherly hug of reassurance. "I dunno, Chigger. I don't see how we can avoid it. We're still human, aren't we?"
RHAPSODY
Eighteen hours later, we arrived at L-5.
We burned some fuel to match orbit and starship Cascade eventually appeared above us. It grew enormously until it filled our view, and then we burned again.
The Cascade looked like a misshapen Christmas tree. It was a long spindly tube on which someone had hung thousands of colored cargo pods of all sizes and shapes. They were clustered everywhere: the ones in the sunlight sparkled with reflectors and sensory domes, the ones in the dark glittered with their own lighting. Almost all of the pods were shining brightly, one way or the other. Some of them had bright-colored advertising on them, others had moving displays—I guessed that was for anyone pointing a telescope at the starship.
Some of the modules had banners and good-luck slogans on their hulls. And I saw a lot of religious symbols too, all kinds, but mostly the Revelationist cross-within-a-circle symbol. They also had a fish symbol—only the body of the fish had a circle in it like an eye; the eye of God, I guess. (Douglas once said that Revelationists believe that every human being is under the eye of God; but if that's really true, then why do so many people act as if God isn't watching them? Do they think he's been momentarily distracted or something?)
Halfway along the keel of the starship, there was a big disc, holding the ship's two centrifuges. Behind the centrifuge ring was a huge shielded sphere—it looked like an olive stuck on a toothpick. Or like a python that had swallowed a hippopotamus. Circling the sphere was a larger ring, supporting a latticework of twelve slender spars—like a snowflake, or the hippo's tutu. At the far end of each spar was a flattened oval dome. All twelve domes focused back into center of the sphere—this was the stardrive.
Each of those flattened domes held a gravity lens. According to Gravitic Theory, gravity waves could—under certain circumstances—behave like light waves. They could be generated, they could be focused, they could be reflected. If and when we learned how to generate gravity waves, then space travelers wouldn't have to worry about freefall, we'd have genuine artificial gravity—we wouldn't have to rotate people in centrifuges; but according to Douglas, we didn't know how to do that yet.
We did know how to build gravity lenses. A gravitational lens could take existing gravity waves and focus them. The sphere at the center of the lenses contained a ball of eugenium 932, the largest and densest element ever fabricated in a lab. When the six lenses were energized, they could focus the gravity waves of the E-932 both outward and inward simultaneously and create a bubble of hyper-state around the starship. The bubble could realize velocities of sixty C.
It was also known that gravity could be reflected. This was a lot different than focusing, and according to Douglas, it was just two steps this side of impossible. He said it had been demonstrated in laboratories, but it needed a lot of very expensive and very power-hungry gravity lenses to do it. But if someone could find a way to do it with a lot less power, then we could create a local neutralization of gravity and we'd be able to tyuild real anti-gravity cars, airplanes, and space-shuttles. We'd have the last piece of the puzzle for colonizing other worlds. We wouldn't have to build specialized landing craft or launch catapults. One size would fit all. In the meantime, we had to use brute-force physics.
In addition to her stardrive, the Cascade also had three long tubes running parallel to her keel—plasma drives for slower-than-light acceleration. They didn't provide as much thrust as Palmer tubes, in fact you wouldn't even feel their acceleration, only a couple of milligees, but they could run for days or weeks or months or even years, and all those little milligees of cumulative thrust would add up to some pretty ferocious delta-vee. Once we fired them up, we could be out beyond the orbit of Mars in two weeks. Another week or so and we'd be passing Jupiter. A month after that, we'd be out beyond the Oort Cloud. There it would be safe to transition to hyperstate. We'd be far enough out of the solar gravity well that it couldn't distort our hyperstate envelope and push us sideways into who knows where.
Docking the command module was both exciting and boring. I'd thought it was going to dock at the bow of the starship, but no—it fit into place halfway back toward the hyperstate engine. Only first we had to detach all the extra cargo pods we were carrying and attach them to their various connections to the keel. It took forever and then it took another forever for us to maneuver into place and finally lock down. And while it was interesting to get such a close look at all the separate pods and modules of the starship from the outside, it was a long slow look. You can only look at lights and banners and advertisements and even rude graffiti for so long—sooner or later, the thrill wears off. "OUTBEYOND OR BUST!" "CAUTION, CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE!" "CANNED PEOPLE—OPEN WITH FEAR" and "MY CHILD WAS AN HONOR STUDENT AT STARFLEET ACADEMY" are only funny once, the first time. After a while, you start to wonder what kind of people put slogans like that on their living pods. Why? For who? And is this really the way they want others to know them? Like I said, it was a long slow look, and ultimately, it was about as exciting as calculating pi out to the nine-hundredth decimal place—by hand. Docking is deliberate and painstaking and exhausting.
But when it was all done, we had a starship.
Those of us who'd ridden up on the command module were now assigned to cabins elsewhere in the ship. These would be our homes for the next year or more, so there was a lot of hmphing and fmphing and complaining by latecomers who were upset that folks previously on board had already secured for themselves the best cabins—even though every cabin was just like every other cabin: a refitted cargo pod.
Ours was forward of the command module, fairly close to officer's quarters, probably because Bonynton wanted to keep us close—well, HARLIE anyway. We pushed and pulled what little luggage we had up the keel, all the way to rack 14, 270 degrees, pod 6-forward/upper. Mom and Bev would share forward/lower with a couple of crew. Aft/upper and aft/lower were both owned by another family, who weren't happy about us moving in; they had originally bought all of pod 6. But everybody was cramped now; everybody had given up all their extra space for rice and beans and noodles and all the other stuff HARLIE had recommended.
Six weeks ago, we'd been living in a tube half-buried in the West El Paso desert. We'd started up the Line, and we'd been moving from one pod to the next ever since. Our grand escape from a dirtside tube-town had taken us all the way to a starside tube-town. The only difference was that there wasn't any gravity here. It made the pod feel bigger, because you could look up the length of it and pretend it was really a high ceiling. Only our cabin was already filled—with musical instruments and band equipment. One last surprise from Dad.
Somewhere in there, he'd negotiated an orchestra for himself—well, not a whole orchestra, but enough resources to create one; it must have been one of those negotiating sessions I'd slept through. So there we were with a cabin filled with electric oboes and collapsible clarinets and polycarbonate violins and a box of music displays and a folding podium, and even a bunch of electronic batons. My first impulse was to shove the whole mess out the nearest airlock. Why would we need this crap on a colony?
—but then I found the keyboard. A Kurzweil-9K. And I almost started crying. Because Dad knew how much I'd always wanted one of these. He'd promised me more than once. But it had never happened, and it was one of the reasons I'd resented Dad so much. I didn't have to ask; I knew this was for me. This was Dad finally keeping a promise. How he'd arranged this I didn't know, I didn't care. I wedged myself into a corner—you can't play a keyboard very well in free fall—switched it on, and started noodling around, getting comfortable with the touch and feel. After a bit, I found my feelings, then I found the music to express them.
Beethoven. Pathétique sonata. Pure piano. As angry as I could. Pound, pound, pound. Slam, slam, slam.
I'd missed my music. Six weeks without it. The only real moment of peace had been when I'd played Dad's eulogy. I started playing now and all the anger and frustration and tension and tears and hate just poured right out of me. I hadn't realized how cranky and ugly I'd become until it started washing away in great torrents of sound. A grand glorious rush of notes that filled the cabin and rattled the rafters—or would have, if there had been any rafters to rattle. I played all the repeats, several of them more than once; I played until I was exhausted, and when I had nothing more to say, I finally let go of the keys and arched my back hard enough to hear the knuckles in my spine go cra-ack—
—suddenly there was applause. I looked up. Both the hatches to the pod were open, and there were people floating there, listening. I hadn't even realized. I saw Mom and she was smiling. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her smiling at me like that.
Without even thinking about it, I started playing again. I switched to clarin-oboe just for the long silky glissando that always caught my breath, then back to piano and synth-orch for the rest of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. It was music that was both joyous and wistful at the same time. It celebrated even as it wept. For me, it didn't matter what emotion I was feeling when I played the Rhapsody; all of them were in it. I could play it like a dance or a dirge; either way it sounded beautiful. This time, I played it like a triumphant march into Rome. We were here. We'd made it. We were going to the stars. My fingers leapt across the keys like dancers; they took on a life of their own, rushing to keep up with the manic frenzy of the music. I disappeared into the beautiful noise and for the first time in a long time, I felt complete.
IN BLUE
I here was a lot to do before we could launch. Cargo had to be rebalanced, which sometimes meant that pods had to be moved around, and sometimes meant that a lot of stuff had to be shuffled from one pod to another, and sometimes meant that various ballast fluids would be pumped hither and yon. HARLIE spent a lot of time up on the bridge, as the flight deck was now called, computing optimal loading configurations.
There was also a bunch of stuff in the last six cargo pods we'd picked up that we needed to offload and install. And then there would be at least a month or two of checklists and countdowns. And cross-lists and checkdowns and countups and whatever else you had to do to get a starship launched.
Along the way, there were several unpleasant surprises.
The first one was immediate. When I finished playing Rhapsody In Blue, there was a lot more applause. Mom and Bev and Doug and Mickey and Bobby were all in our cabin, but/there were a dozen faces peering in through both of the open hatches, and later on I found that there were at least two dozen more people listening in the halls—and someone had opened a direct channel to the keyboard and my impromptu concert had been piped throughout the entire ship. Mistakes and all.
I was ready to be upset about it, but Mickey patted me on the shoulder and said, "That was a wonderful gift you just gave these people, Charles. Thank you." I hadn't thought about it that way, but he was right. It was that thing that Bev had said. Music is a gift.
The only thing was that not everybody wanted the gift. While I was still basking in the afterglow of my own music, that warm feeling of having achieved something, a rough voice came cutting through the crowd, followed by—oh no—one of the people I thought we'd left behind on Luna. His name was David Cheifetz, he looked like a Canadian hockey player, and he was the father of J'mee, the girl I'd met on the Line. Yes, there she was, right behind him. She looked more curious than angry. He pushed a few people out of the way and shoved right into our cabin, without even knocking, without even being invited. "You're going to have to find another place for that!" he said angrily. "We're in the other half of this pod and we don't appreciate the noise."
A couple of the listeners in the corridor booed him. Someone even shouted, "Get over it, you old poop." But Cheifetz wasn't intimidated. He whirled around and said loudly, "Easy for you to say. Any of you willing to take this tube-trash family for roommates? I didn't think so." He faced us again. "The whole lot of you—you're a pack of thieving opportunists. You're not even honest enough to stay bought. The least you can do is have a little respect for the people you stole your tickets from."
Douglas started to react to that, but Mickey held him back. "Mr. Cheifetz, you are in our quarters without permission. If you do not leave, I will file a complaint with the Senior Warrant Officer."
"You do that," he said. "I intend to file a few complaints of my own. I don't want to hear any more noise out of any of you!" And then he left. For just an instant, J'mee and I locked eyes. I couldn't tell what she was thinking, but for some reason I felt sorry for her. And then she was gone too.
The second thing that happened was on the bridge. I was supposed to report for a shift every six hours, during which time I would authorize HARLIE to perform all necessary routine tasks and accept orders from the ranking bridge officers, Boynton, O'Koshi, and Damron. Only this time, there was a panel open where HARLIE usually sat and two technical guys—Lang and Martin—were installing a rack of modules. A brand new IRMA unit.
"Huh? Where'd that come from?"
"From the Galaxy," said Lang, unhappily. He was an intimidatingly large man, but he knew all about intelligence engines, probably more than anyone else, including Douglas.
"We bought it from them. They won't be using it." He shook his head. They didn't even have a chance to unpack and install it.
The Galaxy was another starship, supposedly only six months from completion. Already she had her first cargo pods attached, mostly supplies for the crew and colonists who would be completing her interior fittings. Except that wasn't going to happen—not with the Earth caught in a population crash and an economic meltdown and plagues and war and eco-catastrophe and a whole bunch of other stuff that had never occurred before, so there weren't any words for it.
According to HARLIE, the worst was still to come, as various food and energy supplies ran out. The longer production was stalled, the larger the bubble in the pipeline. If production could be restarted tomorrow, most folks on the planet would survive—there was enough food and fuel and medicine in storage. But production couldn't be restarted. The plagues were still raging out of control. And as long as people were still running away from invisible death, it wasn't likely that production of any kind could be restarted, so the bubble in the pipeline was going to be larger than the supply of resources to survive it.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure," said Lang. He was a lot friendlier than he looked.
"When did Commander Boynton make this deal?"
Lang and Martin looked at each other. Lang said, "It was always a contingency plan. All the starship commanders watch out for each other."
"Then he didn't need HARLIE at all, did he? He could have launched from Luna without us if he knew he could have this IRMA."
"Yep, that's true." Lang agreed. "But he didn't know then that he'd have this IRMA. And then there's the other worry—no HARLIE has ever made a hyperstate transit."
I pointed. "That's a brand new IRMA. It's never made a transit either."
Lang scratched a cheek. "Good point."
Without looking up from what he was doing, Martin spoke. "IRMAs aren't just installed, kid. They're trained. Every IRMA rides along as backup for several hyperstate transits, running its own solutions to the hyperstate injection problems, until it can consistently create valid solutions; only then is it certified and installed in a ship of its own."
Leaping to the Stars Page 12
