“It’d be a sure sign somebody was here,” I murmured.
I hastily powered down and we hurried back to the main level, cracked the hatch to see if anybody was coming, then slipped through and headed for the nearest waste chute.
Back in my compartment, we sat in thoughtful silence on the hammock until finally Crow said, “Who wrote them, Sparrow?”
“The dispatches in Section Two?”
“No, the ones our own Communications division posted.”
“Probably the Captain. Who else?”
When they got that last dispatch, had that ancient crew tried to mutiny? I wondered. That would have been a crisis point for them, one as significant as the death of Judah and going into the Dark were for us.
“What did it mean?” Crow asked. “That last dispatch?”
“I don’t know—but taken together they mean the Captain has no real authority. The governments that sent us have vanished, there’s nobody depending on us, there’s no one awaiting our return.” It suddenly struck me as both tragic and funny. “There is no Kingdom of Spain, Crow.”
He didn’t understand the reference. Then he glanced at my hands and frowned. “What’s the matter, Sparrow?”
I was flexing my fingers, balling them into a fist, straightening them out one by one, then curling them into a fist again.
Ophelia had done the same thing when she tried to convince me of the uniqueness of life. Then she had claimed the only life in the universe was on the Astron and in “that thin green layer of scum” covering our home planet.
Now I wondered what had happened to life on Earth. Putting the dispatches from Section Two in chronological order showed that disaster had followed disaster, the population had declined to some small farmers, the government to some sort of priesthood. Had wars and plagues reduced them to that? Had there been irreversible changes in the ecosphere? Had life itself survived?
“We have to return,” I said.
But I wasn’t sure there was anything to return to.
Perhaps that thin green layer of scum covering Earth had vanished completely and now the only life in the entire universe was that on board the Astron.
Part Three
Mark keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality Given our reality, the truth doesn’t it.
—Werner Erhard
Chapter 27
Anybody in the cell could call a meeting. Crow and I called the next one. Once again we met in the cave compartment. Ophelia was the first to arrive, followed by Loon and Snipe. They looked at me, curious, but I kept my face carefully blank.
I made no move to turn on the shadow screen after they entered and they guessed something was wrong. Loon looked apprehensive, glanced at Crow for explanations, received none, and turned back to me, frowning. Ophelia started to complain, took another look at my face, and shut up. Snipe made a show of studying her fingernails. She didn’t like surprises and she wasn’t prepared to like this one.
A moment later, Grebe floated in, followed by little Quince and then Malachi from Engineering, a frail, elderly man with a sharp mind who had many friends among the old crew. I didn’t have the “sense” that Snipe and Ophelia had, but I could observe and investigate and I knew with certainty that all three were members of other cells. If any of the others knew, they pretended not to.
Once they had made themselves comfortable, I drifted over to the hatch and sealed it. This was the first time we had ever met in a sealed compartment.
Ophelia was quicker than the others.
“You’ve discovered an informer,” she said with dawning awareness.
I nodded. “Corin. He’s one of the Captain’s men.”
There was a shocked silence.
“The Captain knows about us?” Loon was terrified.
I shrugged. “He’s probably always known about some of you.” I devoutly hoped that I wasn’t included. “But he’s tolerated the mutiny because it’s had no real leader since Noah.” I turned to Ophelia. “You said you could sense a traitor.”
She paled. “Corin’s old crew, we couldn’t… sense him. He’d been a friend of Noah’s.”
So much for their overconfidence. Corin had spent years ingratiating himself with Noah. For what? I wondered. A pat on the head from the Captain? Assurance that he would be among the next selection of would-be fathers? Maybe. If there had been fewer birth mothers, the competition would have been much tighter this time.
But I had more to talk about than a computerman turned informer.
“All Corin knows is what his cell members tell him. That can work to our advantage. But Corin’s not that important.”
Snipe took offense. “Sparrow, don’t play games with us.”
I nodded in apology, then told them about the Communications compartment in Section Two and the last dispatches received from Earth. When I was through, nobody said anything. I felt irritated. I had done my share; now it was up to somebody else. Or maybe they didn’t realize the significance of what I had just said.
“What it means is that the Captain has no authority,” I said with as much emphasis as I could. “He can’t continue the voyage in the name of the governments existing at the time of Launch. We’ve heard nothing in five hundred ship years. For all we know, there’s nobody left on Earth. At the very least, there’s no technological civilization with the ability to send messages.”
I knew what they were thinking. Michael Kusaka had always been… The Captain. He had been The Captain all their lives and all of their mothers’ lives and their grandmothers’ lives going back for as long as they could remember their begats. He had been the highest authority on board and a father figure as well. It was difficult to accept him as anything else, and because of that—despite the trials, despite the course change into the Dark—there had been an air of unreality about the mutiny. It had always been serious but it had also involved a certain amount of playacting.
Now the Captain had lost the backing of any higher authority and the mutiny was going to be played out in earnest. The stakes were very real and so were the penalties. Noah and Tybalt hadn’t been condemned in any sort of legal process—they had been murdered. The difference was enormous and for the first time, everybody in the compartment realized that if we lost, they would pay the same price.
Still, nobody volunteered to comment. They were waiting for me, as if somehow I knew all the answers. I realized I had challenged the one natural leader there, Ophelia. She wouldn’t offer advice now unless I asked her.
“What should we do about it?” I looked at her when I spoke, forcing her out of her silence.
She glanced at Loon. “What are the numbers?”
He stumbled over his words, his voice still choked with fear. “The Captain has perhaps thirty who will… follow him. Maybe a few less.”
“Cato’s loyal,” Malachi warned. “And all of Cato’s friends.”
“Why?”
Malachi was as frightened as the rest but he was older and did a better job of hiding his fears.
“Cato would follow the Captain to hell if he had to. I’d try to talk to him but I know he wouldn’t listen. It would be dangerous.”
The others were probably much like Cato—unquestioningly loyal and devoted, if only because that relieved them of making their own decisions. Huldah’s breeding program had left behind some dross. Then I reminded myself that I, too, had once been loyal and devoted.
There was another silence and again I thought Ophelia would lead the discussion. But she said nothing and next time I didn’t wait as long before offering my opinion.
“The Captain still runs the ship,” Grebe objected.
I shook my head. “He runs the computer and the computer points the ship in the direction the Captain wants it to go. But he doesn’t run Life Support, he doesn’t run Maintenance, he doesn’t run Engineering. He sets course but he doesn’t run the ship.”
“You want us to threaten him?” Grebe looked at me as if I had just suggested it. “Sabotage the wat
er supply for a few time periods, convince him he can’t do without us?”
“That’s foolish,” Ophelia said acidly. “You’d find yourself going to Reduction very early.”
Loon came up with the most telling argument. “The pellet guns—the Captain controls the armory.”
There was another long silence and again they waited for me to offer suggestions, to say what they were thinking before they thought it. I glanced at Ophelia once more, wondering why she wasn’t doing that. She stared back, silent, a faint smile on her face.
“The Captain’s men are all old crew?” I asked Malachi.
“So far as I know.”
It was a simple equation. New crew wouldn’t use violence. Old crew could be talked into it. Huldah’s gamble had been the kind you won completely or you didn’t win at all.
“We can’t do things piecemeal,” I said at last. “We can’t threaten the Captain with shutting off the water supply; we can’t turn off the odor scrubbers in the ventilation system and wait for him to come to terms. We’d suffer as much as he. Whatever we do has to affect him primarily and it has to be something dramatic.”
Crow had almost as much trouble talking as Loon had. “The Captain would see through any bluffs.”
“I’m not talking about a bluff,” I said.
“How far will the Captain go?” Quince asked. There was a hint of aggression in his voice and I smiled to myself. A little man who wasn’t afraid of the odds.
I remembered the handball game and the Captain continuing to play with a broken finger.
“The Captain will do whatever he thinks is necessary.”
All the time I was talking, I was sitting in judgment on myself. I knew I sounded rational and pragmatic, confident. But I also felt uneasy about it. I was doing what I considered Ophelia’s job.
Snipe summed it up and we were suddenly back to the beginning.
“You haven’t told us how we can run the ship without the Captain.”
This time I didn’t wait for Ophelia to answer, nor did I look to her for tacit permission to speak.
“The real question is, Can the Captain run the ship without us? And the answer is, He can’t.”
“And you have some ideas as to how we can?”
It was Ophelia, challenging me this time, but I had no more answers. They had known each other longer than I had, they knew the ship better than I did. “That’s what you’re going to figure out—you and Snipe and Malachi. How can we force the Captain to do what we want? If it’s a threat, it has to be decisive.” I hesitated. “We have to be prepared to carry it out, we can’t bluff him.”
Playing the part of leader was a heady feeling—and deceptive. I was anything but confident; I could think of problems that none of them had even imagined.
“You mentioned the Captain’s store of pellet guns, Loon—try to find any others. Crow will help you.” Then, to Grebe and Malachi: “Both of you have friends among those still loyal to the Captain. Talk to those who can be swayed.”
Grebe looked unhappy. “That’ll be risky.”
“Very risky.” I felt more grim than confident and let some of it show. “At the end, surprise will be all we have, and the Captain will know almost as much about what we’re going to do as we do. Once the mutiny starts, we’ll have to improvise. We won’t be able to stop it and, I hope, neither will the Captain. But he’ll try—and he’ll use force. We have to be prepared for that.”
All of them looked a little frightened, even Ophelia. I understood their feelings because I felt the same way. I was as dubious as they were, as frightened as they were, but I couldn’t afford to show it. Right then they needed encouragement, and encouragement was all I really had to offer.
“When you look at it from space,” I said gently, “the Earth is very blue, covered with shreds of clouds that are blinding white. It has deserts and mountains, plains and lakes, rivers and vast prairies. There’s life under every rock and in every drop of water. It’s home—and it’s time to go back.”
The Great Egg would forgive me my small lies and extravagant hopes. I opened the hatch and they slipped out, a little less frightened and more determined than they had been before my pep talk. Ophelia was the last to go and she left with a look of grim satisfaction on her face.
She had always wanted me to act like Hamlet and at last I had.
****
There had been a certain amount of euphoria in acting the leader. Deep within I still had doubts about our chances and the final outcome, but doubt weakens purpose and I didn’t dare admit my doubts, even to myself. Nor did I dismiss Noah’s conviction that buried someplace in my memories was the secret of returning to Earth without the Captain.
On the other hand, there was always the chance of jogging my memory. What was buried in it might also be buried in the computer’s and I spent the next dozen time periods doing my best to find out what the computer might remember that I had forgotten.
Eagle had now taken my place at the terminal pads and I had taken Corin’s, though Corin still put in more shift time than anybody. And Thrush was often huddled over a pad in the corner, researching nobody knew what, though sometimes I thought he was there as much to watch me as to dance with the computer. Work remained, including logging in the signatures of distant stars, estimating the chances of planetary systems and the limits of their CHZ’s—continuously habitable zones. But urgency had fled.
I knew Corin’s schedule as well as I knew my own, and committed to memory those periods when he bedded down with Gull or Raven and when he might elect to put in extra shift time in Exploration. Eagle was there as little as possible—as Crow and I once had, he had discovered the dubious pleasures of continuous rut. Thrush showed up frequently but never stayed when I was there alone.
Which left those periods when I was by myself. I spent them searching the computer’s memory matrix. It was, as Huldah had warned, unreliable. The personal history of the crew and the generation-by-generation records of the ship itself were inconsistent, not so much in content but in method of recording and presentation. Operating techniques of individual fingermen varied as much as their handwriting and within each generation you could distinguish between the different crewmen who had logged data or modified files. But studying the memory matrix for the first five generations confirmed Noah’s comment that no true records existed. It was like going from a solid-colored blanket to a patchwork quilt.
There were occasional gaps in the early records and, more important, frequent mention of a virus infecting the neural net toward the end of the first generation. Beginning with the sixth, the patchwork-quilt effect disappeared and data logged was once again consistent in presentation.
I followed the memory matrix into various side paths and retrieved information about specific crew members, diets on board, the steady shrinking of the crew itself, information about planets explored, and all the minutiae of shipboard life.
And then I stopped, startled, and took my hands off the pad, watching the viewing globe go blank without even being aware of it. I had expected some raggedness, some “scar tissue” in the ship’s memory, but there were no real indications that the neural net had ever been attacked by a virus.
What I was actually looking at was a selective erasure and rewriting of the ship’s history for the first five generations. Not only could I tell where the excisions had taken place, I could see that the same individual had logged much of the data throughout that first hundred-year period.
It was well done, the work of a master fingerman. And the only one who could have done it was the Captain. He had effectively wiped the slate clean for the first five generations and written his own history of the ship. What had really happened, I would probably never know. But I could guess.
He must have originally intended to plant the stories about the virus, then simply leave the record blank for the next five generations. Apparently he had changed his mind, erased all references to the first mutiny, and altered the information logged by
following generations.
The Captain and I were still the only ones who knew what had happened. There were no records of a mutiny—any mutiny—in the matrix.
The next time I was alone, I did some more personal research and reviewed all mentions in the computer of the various crewmen I had once been. I also checked the access codes to see if anybody else had become fascinated by my life history. The codes were like a library card, listing the names of all the interested parties who had accessed certain files. There was only one such person, but he had been very thorough.
What Thrush had been researching was me.
He had retraced my own steps through the computer’s maze of memories and now knew all the connecting links, all the names of the crewmen whose lives I once had led, all the roles I once had played. What chilled me was not that he had done it but the reasons why. He had known I was a phoenix all of his life. What more had he hoped to find out?
“You’re working late, Sparrow.”
The display in the viewing globe had vanished before Corin floated in. I jiggled my thumb slightly and a sheaf of figures appeared. I yawned and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
“Inventory, Captain’s request.”
The Captain hadn’t requested any, but I doubted that Corin would bring the matter up with him; even if he did, I had flooded the Captain with so many lists and figures lately that he probably wouldn’t recall whether he had requested more or not.
“I can’t imagine he’d be in a hurry,” Corin said easily. His face was more affable than usual, a ready cover for any suspicion beneath.
“Supplies on board versus attrition rates for at least the next two hundred years,” I said. “It will have a big effect on the number of birth mothers for the next few generations. I thought he ought to know.”
Corin’s face became appropriately somber.
“Venturing into the Dark is the worst thing the Captain could have thought of,” he said in a low voice. Since he was a member of a cell, and probably suspected I was as well, I knew he wanted me to dig my own grave a little deeper. His eyes were a little too innocent, and I knew if I left now he would check my personal code to see what I had been doing.
The Dark Beyond the Stars Page 31
