She let that one die the death it deserved. After a suitable pause, she said, “Do you mind if I talk to you—somewhere where we don’t have to compete with the music?”
I put my plastic cup down on a shelf, and wiped my hand on the back of my trousers because a little of the fluid had somehow spilled on to my fingers.
“Sure,” I said. “We can slip into sick bay. It’s just down the corridor and it’s always quiet when nobody’s ill.”
There was a half-frown again, as if she didn’t think the sick bay was entirely appropriate, but she nodded. As we went out of the door I inclined my head back in the direction of the frenetic festivity.
“Hasn’t changed much since your time, I guess?”
“No,” she said. “That’s the most alarming thing about these last few days. Everything is so tediously familiar.”
“Wouldn’t have been too different if it were seven hundred years ago,” I observed. “Except that we wouldn’t be on a space station and we’d have funny costumes on. Dancing and drinking are the hardy perennials of human behavior.”
“And sex,” she added dryly.
“Yes,” I answered. “That too.”
“If I’d stepped out of 1744 into the twenty-first century,” she said, “I’d notice plenty of differences. But from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth...I keep on looking, but I’m damned if I can find them.”
I opened the door of the sick bay, and stood aside to let her go through. She looked at the beds draped with plastic curtains, and moved to the main desk. She took the chair from behind it; I borrowed one from beside the nearest bed.
“There are reasons for that,” I said, referring to the lack of perceptible changes in the human condition.
“So I’ve heard,” she replied.
“What can I do for you?”
“You can help me out with a few explanations.”
I raised my eyebrows, signaling: Why me?
“I’ve already tried Harmall,” she said. “I’ve also talked to your boss, Schumann. I keep getting stalled. The secretive voice of authority.”
“What makes you think I’ll tell you anything they won’t? What makes you think I can?”
“I daresay you can’t,” she said. “And that might be the advantage I need. If you don’t know, you have to guess—and guesses aren’t secret, are they?”
“For the very good reason that they might not be right.”
She shrugged. “Why won’t they let me go to Earth?” She fired the question at me like a rifle shot.
“Maybe they need you aboard the Earth Spirit on the trip back to your brand new HSB,” I suggested. “Harmall did sort of promise us a fuller briefing on the situation as viewed from the Ariadne.”
“There are plenty of people aboard the Ariadne who could brief you on arrival,” she said. “You’d want to look over the data yourselves, anyhow. I wasn’t planning to go back; I was planning to carry the news all the way home. And I was planning to do my talking to a lot more people—and a lot more important people—than Jason Harmall. As things stand, I don’t even know if anyone on Earth even knows that the Ariadne reached her target.”
“They’ll know,” I assured her. “They just might not want it to become common knowledge. Information control.”
“That,” she said, “is what needs explaining. You’re telling me that the finding of Naxos isn’t going to be publicized—that the whole affair is going to be handled in secret by a select group of politicians and scientists?”
“That’s right,” I told her. “Does that surprise you?”
“Not really,” she answered, with the ghost of a sigh. “But I was rather hoping that I might be surprised, if you see what I mean.”
I nodded.
“Tediously familiar,” she said. “Every way I turn. There’s still a Soviet bloc, I hear, and they’re still ‘they’ while we’re ‘us.’ I really do find that very hard to swallow, after all this time. It seems as though the whole solar system has been in suspended animation, right along with me.”
I found a paper clip, and began studiously unwinding it. Rumor has it that paper clips go all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire, except that there wasn’t any paper then. Parchment clips, I suppose they’d be. Similar in design, anyhow.
“Not far wrong, I suppose,” I told her. “You’d have set sail on the great starry sea during the early generations of the Crash, I guess. I never was much good at dates. It wasn’t really a crash—more a kind of slow fizzle. The world failed to end, with either a bang or a whimper. It just descended into a kind of torpor. A failure of the agricultural base, spread over six or seven generations. No one cause—just a gradual unwinding of the ecosystem’s balancing mechanism. A couple of wars and their aftermath helped, but they weren’t crucial. Deforestation, soil exhaustion, pollution—they were what did it, by degrees. The fossil fuels never ran out, oddly enough, but getting them out of the ground...that was something else. Mining and industry continued as best they could, but the primary production system went slowly to hell, and took everything else along with it. There was a forced rethinking of priorities. The green machine broke down and the only effort that made any sense was trying to get it working again. They failed. They just had to wait until it repaired itself. A lot of people died...not all at once, as if there were a second deluge or a great plague, but one by one, here and there, a decade or two before their time. Famine spread, until it wasn’t just in Africa and Southeast Asia anymore, but in everybody’s back yard. Everybody—whether he was a Latin American peasant or a citizen of New York, had to start thinking about cultivating his garden—literally.
“There’s a kind of irony, I suppose, that everyone had thought of the ecosystem as something wonderful and eternal, and of the political system as something transient and arbitrary. You might think that during the century of the greenhouse effect, when the climate temporarily went crazy, the first thing to go would be the governments of the day, their bureaucracies and their ideologies. Not a bit of it—they endured, with astonishing tenacity. There were revolutions, and invasions, and all the usual routine things like that, but at the end of the day the map looked pretty much as it had done at the beginning. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere escalated, and it got hotter for a while, but it was surprisingly short lived—we can say this with equanimity now, I guess, though people down there in those days spent their entire lifetimes being surprised. The ecosystem did regenerate, without our doing anything conspicuous to help it except try to stop hurting it. I suppose that on Earth, they’re just about back to where they were in the early twenty-first century, which is not bad considering. But we have had three hundred and fifty years, or thereabouts, when we had to put the very possibility of progress on the shelf, insofar as it depended on Earthly events. Not much went on in the way of research, practical or theoretical, as you’ll probably understand. There is a school of thought, mind you, which says that the Crash didn’t make much difference anyway—that we were already close to the end of progress, at least in theory, simply because we’d already induced just about all that we can induce, given the limits of the human sensorium.
“Having said all that, though, there’s one other point that needs to be mentioned, and that is that one tiny segment of the human race has stood rather to one side of all the troubles. Out here in space, things always looked different. Not that the various habitats in space were ever genuinely independent of Earth—but no matter how short the peasants went, the spacemen always got theirs. They didn’t need so very much, as things turned out, and they could provide a good deal in return—mostly beamed-down power, but even apart from that, the people on Earth were always prepared to give the spacers priority. I think you must know more than I do about the mentality behind that.”
“And progress went on the shelf out in space, too?” she queried.
“That depends what kind of progress you mean,” I said. “Mostly, I’d say yes. There was nothing like Sule a hundred years ago
, or even fifty. A research establishment in space was something really strange even when I was at school. The progress they made out here through those long centuries of hardship was simply physical progress. They built things. They gradually extended the human domain. New stations, new ships. All the time, of course, they never stopped looking for new worlds, but we’d grown just a little cynical about that particular dream in recent years.”
She was silent for a few minutes, thinking it over. I let her think. I’d gone on long enough. I was wishing now that I’d brought my drink with me from the party. My throat felt dry.
“So there’s still a Soviet bloc,” she said. “And there’s still a free world.”
“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” I said.
“It always was.”
“There’s not much real antagonism between them,” I said. “For all that they have different laws concerning ownership, and for all that they still attack one another’s philosophies in the interests of maintaining their own social solidarity, they get along all right. At least, the Soviets-in-space get along well enough with our-side-in-space. There’s another dimension of ‘us’ and ‘them’ now. There’s us—and there’s the ones down the bottom of the big well.”
“Well?”
“Gravity well. Earth is the big well. Mars is the little one.”
“Yes,” she said, “of course. And who exactly is it that is so concerned with maintaining secrecy? Is it us—or is it us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or care?”
“There’s no payoff in caring. I try to live with it. There’s a school of thought which holds that post-Crash civilization is wiser than pre-Crash because no one expects things to be perfect. We’ve all accepted, so it’s said, that we live in an imperfect world, and always will. Idealism and hedonism, it’s said, have both declined markedly since their heyday.”
“You keep saying: ‘So it’s said.’ Don’t you believe it?”
“How do I know what it was like in the olden days? You tell me.”
“I would,” she assured me, “if only I could look long enough to find out.”
“You don’t really need me to tell you all this,” I said. “There are all kinds of history tapes in the data-store. You could get a blow-by-blow account of the whole thing.”
“I could,” she said. “But tapes don’t necessarily select things in accordance with what the inquiring mind wants or needs to know. And tapes don’t make guesses.”
“Neither do I,” I told her.
“Do you trust Jason Harmall?” she fired at me.
“No one’s asked me to,” I countered.
“Would you trust him?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Except my mother. And maybe Zeno. But he looks like a bit of a bastard to me, if that’s what you’re angling for. Why?”
“Dr. Caretta,” she said softly, “I’ve been on a journey of three hundred and fifty years, across the big desert of empty space. I’ve aged over ten years, lived in short stretches of ten and fifteen weeks. I did all that because I believed, passionately, in what the Ariadne was for. I sometimes get the impression that no one here really cares what the Ariadne was for, and that I’m being prevented from getting through to people who might. I want the Ariadne’s mission to be completed. Jason Harmall isn’t going to stop me. I’m looking to you for help...you have to help me make Naxos safe for colonization.”
“Harmall doesn’t want to stop you,” I told her weakly.
“I don’t know what Harmall wants,” she said. “But I’m not taking anything for granted.”
I hesitated before asking, but in the end I just had to. “What do you think it was that killed your ground crew?”
“If I knew,” she said, “we wouldn’t need you, would we?”
“And just suppose,” I went on carefully, “that whatever it was, it can’t be beaten. Suppose it makes Naxos forever uninhabitable by men?”
“If that really were the case,” she said levelly, “then the Ariadne wouldn’t have completed her mission. We’ve taken three and a half centuries already. Another two or three would be comfortably within our compass.”
She bid me good night, then, but I had a feeling she’d be asking more questions in time to come. She was a brave lady, I decided, but just a trifle odd. Maybe she was entitled to be.
When a woman gets to be four hundred years old, she’s entitled to worry about her age.
CHAPTER SIX
The journey through hyperspace, sad to relate, was boring and uncomfortable. The first day and a half I was sick, partly because of the zero-g but mainly because of the shots they gave me to protect me from the physiological effects of the zero-g. The trip wasn’t supposed to take a long time, but in hyperspace you can never be absolutely certain how long it is going to take, and it would have been a pity to have to go down to the surface of a new world with bones that were even a bit more fragile than usual.
Zero-g fills me with a curiously strong sense of tedium if I have to stay in it too long. I like to float, and the sensation itself doesn’t bother me, but I find it difficult to work in zero-g, and it doesn’t take me long to get restless if I’ve nothing to do with my hands. Staring at screens isn’t really work—not when it’s all that you can do.
The worst thing of all about being on the Earth Spirit, though, was the sleeping accommodation. Only the captain—not Catherine d’Orsay, the Earth Spirit’s captain—had a cabin to himself. The rest of us were wedged in three deep on either side of a gangway so narrow that you had to move along it sideways. For privacy, there was a thin plastic curtain in the color of your choice. Mine was black. I didn’t like sleeping where other people could hear me. Sometimes I talked in my sleep.
The Earth Spirit had a crew of six, not counting its captain, whose name was Alanberg. She wasn’t really built to carry six passengers in addition, and our equipment was also putting pressure on such free space as was available. Everybody knew that we just had to put up with it, but no one thought he or she was expected to pretend to like it.
Alanberg did his best to make the run smooth. He invited us one by one to spend a watch in the cockpit, where he explained the instruments and controls to us. When my turn came, I was faintly surprised by the dullness of the account. The screen which reproduced an image of what was supposedly outside was too obviously a computer playing simulation games. All the information was there: the HSBs scattered over the projection for all the world like red-headed pins stuck in a military map.
“What does it really look like?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t look like anything,” he answered. “Light does propagate in hyperspace, but haphazardly. It’s virtually instantaneous, but it’s subject to all kinds of spatial drift. A beam breaks down and scatters very quickly. Seen from here, the Ariadne HSB—which isn’t, of course, radiating in the visible spectrum at all—looks to the receptors like a sort of misshapen archery target filling half the field. The computer sorts out the photons of the appropriate wavelength and plots the apparent direction of origin, then gradually builds up a scattergram. We simply point at the region of highest destiny and let the warp-field jump us in that direction. Then we replot and jump again. What kind of path we actually follow there’s no way of telling, but the optimum is something like three jumps an hour, ship’s time. If we take longer jumps we drift too far from the target and in the long run it isn’t worth it.”
“Is there some kind of limit beyond which you’d find it impossible to zero in on a beacon, even though you could still pick up its signal?”
“Maybe,” he said. “That’s one reason for having three beacons around Mars, but we just don’t know for sure. Ships that can’t get home can’t tell us why. We only have information on the runs which work out right. That’s what we have to settle for, until someone masters the conceptual geometry in theory well enough to tell us what the hell we’re actually doing. All we know at present is that it works—usually.”
I’m sure they’re working on it,” I murmured. It was hard enough on the imagination, no doubt, when they discovered that ordinary spacetime has four dimensions. The extra ones necessary for figuring in hyperspace may not quite defeat our mathematical capabilities, but they do strange things to our three-dimensional habits of thought.
The cockpit, for good reasons, was the least cramped space on the ship, and it was noticeable, once we’d had our little tours, that the man who got invited back (if that’s the right phrase) more often than anyone else was the Space Agency man. Maybe he and Alanberg shared a secret passion for word games. Or maybe one another. More likely, Harmall simply played VIP.
The rest of the crew worked in what they called “slots,” for very good reasons. Apart from the quartermaster, they were basically machine-watchers and fixers. The quartermaster was a manwatcher (and fixer). It was difficult to talk to them about their work, in the same way that it’s always difficult to talk to highly trained specialists, but they were more approachable in connection with their private obsessions. One was crazy about eighteenth century music; one was writing a novel; one was writing a book about the early social evolution of man and the historical break separating hunter-gatherer societies from agricultural societies; one was using spare time on the ship’s computers to do fundamental research in artificial intelligence; the last (the quartermaster) was using the rest of the spare time for exercises in computer art. I never did find out what the captain did for laughs. The advantage of all these hobbies, of course, was that none of them took up more space than a couple of bookplates and a bagful of playbeads. The trouble with any kind of biology is that you need organic things (preferably live ones) to work with. There are no amateur naturalists on star-ships.
Contrary to popular belief, living so close to other people that you’re virtually in their pockets is no way to get to know them. When the only privacy available is that attendant upon fulfilling the most basic and vulgar of bodily functions, the ability to be by yourself becomes a valuable commodity. Starship life is the best possible introduction to the art of ignoring people—and to the equally valuable but often underestimated art of being ignored. You become so adept at these fascinating skills that—paradoxically—it’s easy to feel threatened by loneliness. All the apparatus of camaraderie which is so easy to maintain when you interact with others only by choice and within delimited periods of time can easily break down, or come to seem utterly hollow and meaningless, when you’re within a few meters of five other people for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. God only knows how rabbits cope.
The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel Page 4
