And when the system finally came back up, Sim use never did reach its previous level again, let alone exceed it.
Indeed, toward the end of the year I developed a funny suspicion about how well it had all turned out, and queried the Sheffield as to whether any previous starships might ever have suffered Sim failure, and discovered an overall benefit. I was absolutely certain it was physically and emotionally impossible for an untrue word to pass the lips of Dr. Amy, but for all I knew any or all of her three colleagues could have conspired to hoodwink us all for our own good. But if that was the case the ship’s AI was in on the gag: it told me only nine previous ships had even carried 5S Sim gear, and none had ever experienced more than momentary failures, save for the one that had blown up.
Clever con or sheer luck—either way it was damned good luck. The colony was emotionally healthier than it had ever been as it entered its fifth year of star travel, gaining confidence in its own ability to cope. That proved useful when disaster struck.
What goes on in the Power Room of a relativistic starship like the Sheffield?
Maybe God knows, if She exists. The Relativists themselves aren’t at all sure.
I remember I was sitting at a table at the Horn once with Herb and all five off-duty Relativists, everyone but Kindred—I can’t recall what led them all to be awake at once—and Herb asked what it was like.
I’d never have had the hairs to ask, myself, and there was a silence that lasted nearly ten seconds. Then Dugald Beader shifted his pipe in his mouth and said, “It’s like staring at a random-visuals screensaver until you can predict what it’s going to do in the next second.”
George R said, “It’s like playing jai alai with fifty different opponents at once, in zero gravity, blindfolded.”
London, her head on his shoulder, said, “It’s like being inside a spherical mirror, in free fall, and remembering at all times where the door is.”
Sol grinned. “It’s like running full tilt across a tightrope in spike heels with your eyes closed while cooking an omelette with a blowtorch,” he said, and turned to his husband. “Your turn, Spice. ‘It’s like…’”
“…not being…” Hideo said.
“Aw, come on,” Sol said. “I declare that answer void.”
Hideo blinked at him, and then nodded. “Very well. It is for me like an archery exercise, in which you must first hit the bull’s-eye, then hit that arrow, then hit that arrow, and the next, continuing until you can retrieve all your arrows with a single tug, without taking a step forward.” He turned to the rest of us. “The secret,” he confided, eyes twinkling, “is to aim.”
Sol hooted with laughter and hugged him. “Much better.”
Dugald took another crack at it. “Sometimes I think of it as looking for a hayseed in a giant needle stack.”
“Oh, Duggie, that’s good,” George R said, wincing as he mimed rummaging through needles.
His wife said, “To me it’s always seemed very much like hearing a very complex unfamiliar four-part harmony in the distance, and trying to instantly, intuitively improvise fifth, sixth, and seventh harmonies.”
That one boggled my own mind. Most people have trouble intuiting the third harmony.
Nobody else came up with anything better that night. But I later learned someone had asked Peter Kindred, and he’d offered two of his own, “It’s like looking at a Rorschach blot until it means everything,” and, “It’s like repairing nothingness.”
None of which tells me anything.
Despite years of friendship with five Relativists, and close friendship with Sol, George R, and London, I don’t know what it looks like inside the Power Room, or even the antechamber; nobody does who hasn’t been inside one. The convention that has become established in film and other forms of fiction is to portray Relativists sitting before banks of instruments with lots of blinking lights, intently studying gauges and readouts, constantly making fine adjustments with levers, dials, wheels, or mice that invariably cause beeping sounds. But no such layout has ever been certified authentic, and as far as I or anyone really knows, it is equally likely that what they do in there is simply sit in meditation in a bare white cubic… a meter off the floor, held aloft by sheer spiritual purity. I have no idea what takes place in a Power Room, and I particularly have never been able to conceptualize what it is like in there at the moment of transition, when one’s shift ends and another’s begins—how that hand-off is accomplished.
I am not one of those fools who believe Relativists guard their guild secrets to protect their monopoly. None of the ones I knew had an avaricious bone in their bodies. Avarice would appear incompatible with the mindset that produces a Relativist, or that a Relativist produces—a rare case of fortune bringing immense wealth to people fundamentally indifferent to it. But I have no idea why it is that they do discourage specific questions about their daily activities. I simply know it is their right if they choose, and they do. It is purely my own intuition that they do so to protect the rest of us from the knowledge, for some reason.
It may equally well be that they simply literally can’t explain what they do—that you and I have no referents for the information, nothing in our experience that any words we know could evoke. Maybe I’m like a cat trying to understand exactly how the fish get into those little cans, or a man trying to understand women: unequipped.
For all I know, something happened in that room, every day, all day, that was simply beyond ordinary human understanding. That’s the way I lean, anyway.
The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that my last chance to ask any of the Relativists I know about such matters is gone for good. I waited too long.
Anybody who was aboard can tell you where they were and what they were doing when it happened.
Any society has such events, benchmarks in its shared history. Usually they involve great tragedy. It may be the untimely death of some universally beloved public figure, or a natural disaster of uncommon magnitude; in the old days it was most often a war, and sometimes a plague.
But in those times, war and plague were expected dangers, and survivable ones. I doubt there have been many humans in history who’ve known anything like the instant ice-cold horror that comes to every passenger aboard a relativistic starship when they suddenly find themselves in free fall.
Where I was that day was on Bravo Ag Deck, goofing off behind the goatshed, chewing the fat with Sol Short, while the two colonists I’d drawn as my unskilled labor that shift, John Barnstead and Adewale Akbage, listened and tried not to look awed. We were passing around a flask of wine Zog had made from the Brasilian flower Muira Puama (Ptychopetalum Olacoides), which was making a very happy adjustment to Brasil Novo conditions.
I can even remember what we were talking about. At the gentle urging of Dr. Amy, and with Sol as intermediary, I had long since buried the hatchet with transportees Richie and Jules, going so far as to comp them for a night at the Horn so they could hear me play. It made a difference; Richie came backstage after to stare at the floor and say he “apollenized,” and Jules put one arm around me and hugged me, and from then on whenever we encountered each other in the corridors, they were both loudly friendly.
So I had begun a small but precious collection of Richieisms, and loved to compare specimens with Sol, who appreciated them as much as I did. That day, I recall, I had shared with him, “Don’t kill the goose that laid the deviled egg,” and, “You can’t sell a fuckin’ book by looking undercover.” John threw one in, then: he’d heard someone ask the pair why they were constantly together, and Richie had said, “Two heads are better than none.”
And Sol had just gifted us all with the gem “Atojiso,” as in, “I knew that would happen. I hate to say atojiso, Jules, but I fuckin’ atojiso,” and we were roaring with appreciation, when all at once the ceiling came down to join us, and the floor fell away.
Sudden unexpected Weightlessness can only mean drive failure, and this is never good news.
But if
you’re on a starship, it probably means you’re dead. You and everyone in your world.
It is just barely possible to restart a quantum ramjet at velocities higher than 0.5c. But time is critical—and luck even more so.
It had been done. Twice before in history, in each case by a Relativist said to be particularly adept. Successfully, I mean. There had been two spectacular failures—by colleagues generally agreed to have been equally good. That was why the Sheffield needed a minimum of four Relativists—six hours was the longest one could reliably sustain the necessary concentration—and why it carried six. We’d have carried more, if Kang/da Costa had been able to hire more.
If the quantum ramjet was not restarted, and damn quickly, the Sheffield would literally never get anywhere. There would be plenty of power for life support—and nowhere near enough to slow all those megatons of mass appreciably. We would drift for all time through the void at more than nine-tenths of the speed of light, forever unable to decelerate to any more reasonable speed, incapable of making any port.
John and Adewale and I were none of us spacemen. We panicked. The blood did not drain from our heads because there was no gravity; but we didn’t become as ruddy as we should have. We’d all been in free fall long enough to learn some basics, but none of us had free-fall instincts or reflexes. All we had was enough intelligence to understand how much trouble we were in.
The goats didn’t even have that—they knew only two gradations of terror: none and total. They simply happened to be right for once. The goat shed exploded, and jagged pieces of its walls became lethal Frisbees, followed by a second wave of hay, hooves, and horns.
Miraculously, none of us was hurt by any of these. It was Solomon Short who broke my collarbone, using it to launch himself toward the stairwell, and who dislocated Adewale’s shoulder using him to leapfrog, and busted John’s nose when he couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. I figure I’m responsible for my concussion; I could probably have ducked that goat, if I hadn’t been watching Sol dwindle in the distance. But how can you look away from somebody crying like that?
To be honest, I don’t think I’d have been much help to him even if I hadn’t gotten my skull kicked. I was already thinking in terms of coping with my own responsibilities: my livestock, my farm—both my farms! Everywhere, things would be going to hell, delicate hydraulic systems pumping dry, containers spilling over, lattices coming apart, koi trying to swim in damp air—
So it was John, not even particularly a friend of Sol’s, who thought of it first, and did it in time, and so ended up accomplishing far more good than I would that day. The instant he had drifted within reach of something substantial enough to change his vector—a light fixture in the ceiling, still on, still hot—he used it to launch himself after Sol. He stayed close to the ceiling, and used every surface feature he passed to add speed, so he had soon built up nearly as good a head of steam as Sol had.
At about that point I heard the right rear quadrant of my skull make the sound “KLOP!” and decided to take a little nap, so I missed John’s triumph.
Sol had sensibly ignored the lift, beelined for the emergency stair-shaft/drop-chute, and flung himself down it like a hungry ferret going down a hole. It was the mental picture of him in that ship-length tunnel, reaching ever higher velocity with the help of the handholds that were usually rungs under gravity, that had galvanized John. He was far less free-fall savvy than Sol, but massed more, so he arrived at about the same speed. He knew there was no way he’d make the turn. But he never even attempted to decelerate, just sailed into the chute, slammed against its far wall, and accepted the damage. “FLIP! FLIP!” he was screaming as he came through the doorway, and after he crashed and got his breath back, he resumed screaming it at the top of his lungs down that long Freudian shaft. “FLIP, SOL! FOR CHRISSAKE, FLIP!”
Would I have understood what he was saying, if I’d heard it? Interesting and pointless question. Adewale said later he did hear it, and didn’t get it—as far as he could see, everyone around there had flipped.
Halfway down that stair-shaft—any and all gods be thanked, once they’ve been cleared of any involvement in the original catastrophe—Solomon Short heard John Barnstead’s scream. He was then in a kind of frenzy, or fugue state, as fixated as a heat-seeking warhead. But John had selected a word from the tactical menu used by warheads. It was a legal command, and as Sol received it he instantly saw the sense of it and obeyed. By a process that has never been properly described because everyone who’s spent time in free fall knows it, and nobody who hasn’t can ever understand it, Sol tumble-flipped his body end over end, and continued his plunge feet first.
John’s mental process had gone more or less like so: If Sol is the first Relativist to reach the Power Room, we’re all screwed. By the time he can get there from this far away, the ramjet will probably have been off too long to restart safely. So we must pray that another of his colleagues beats him there.
But if so, what of Sol, in the stair-shaft?
Sure enough, the Sheffield was later able to tell me that it was less than a second after Sol stablilized in his new position that weight suddenly returned—followed a split second later by the siren blast that was supposed to give ten seconds’ warning before any vector change. At once he began slapping at passing rungs to kill velocity, and looking below for his landing site. In the end, he landed with nothing worse than a sprained ankle, which became severely sprained after he ran on it.
By the time he landed, that was important. Crucial, even. Because by then George R was dead, and London was… was permanently out of action.
The Sheffield was down two Relativists, now… and that left us exactly enough to keep the quantum ramjet running twenty-four hours a day. There was going to be no acceptable excuse to miss a shift… for the next fifteen years.
What happened in the Power Room that day?
There’s a lengthy report on file, which I am assured is accurate and complete; you’re welcome to look it up. It’s full of what look like words, arranged in sequences that seem to be sentences, and the one I come closest to understanding seems to say that the Zero Point became briefly numerable, and George R was unable to deny it. Maybe that conveys something to you; it’s noise to me.
Months later, at various times, I heard Dugald Beader say that George R had “stopped surrendering,” and heard a massively drunken Kindred assert that his colleague had “lost his focus.” How those two things could describe the same event, I cannot imagine.
Here’s what little I do understand.
First of all, George R was not supposed to be on duty that shift. Hideo was. That was why Sol lost it. But at the last minute, one of Hideo’s Zen students had come to him with a spiritual crisis, and he’d asked to be replaced.
This was no big deal. By that point in the voyage, all of the Relativists had missed a shift or two; it was part of what spares were for. Hideo had probably missed fewer than anyone else but Kindred—and had extracurricular responsibilities the others lacked. If anyone was entitled to blow off a shift, it was him.
The person he was supposed to succeed was George R. When his request showed up on George R’s board, George R should have messaged backup, confirmed availability, then let Hideo know he was off the hook—a total of three keystrokes. He did only the third.
Who can say what was in his mind? Of the Relativists aboard, Sol was the loudest, and Peter Kindred the most egotistical, but George R was far and away the most sheerly confident. There was no leader, but he was senior among equals. The backup he should have called was London. She was asleep just then, in their quarters. Perhaps he just wanted to do something nice for his wife. Maybe it was a gesture of apology to get him out of some marital doghouse. It may simply have been easier for a man as confident as him to push one key than three.
He certainly was not the first Relativist ever to work a double shift. But I think it’s safe to say he was the last.
Fatigue? Monotony? Bad judgment? Bad luck
? None of them ever said, and none of us ever had the balls to ask.
Something Horrible happened in there, that’s all.
Whatever it was took something like thirty seconds to finish burning his brains out, and matters should have ended there. It is certain that he did not at any time trigger an alarm or send out a message of any kind. The ramjet should have failed, and then whoever won the race to the Power Room should have yanked his smoking body out of the way and, hopeably, restarted it.
I do not know how London got there before he finished dying. She knew exactly how dangerous it was to try and go in there, just then, and never hesitated. Whether she believed she could save him or simply didn’t care to outlive him is not for me or anyone to say. If it was a mistake in judgment she paid dearly enough for it—with her eyesight, most of her hearing, and about eighty-five IQ points.
A rain of shit can take time to stop. It was doubtless lucky for all of us that Hideo was the next to reach the Power Room. Of all of them he most had the kind of iron discipline and diamond calm it must take to toss the smoldering bodies of two friends out in the corridor for others to deal with, forget them, and try to restart a quantum ramjet. I honestly think any of them could have done it, but I’m glad it was Hideo who got the job.
But when he emerged, and had been thanked in turn by Captain Bean, Governor Roberts, Governor-General Cott, and Coordinator Grossman, Sol and Dr. Amy had to take him aside and tell him that the student he’d blown off his original shift to counsel had pieced events together, and committed suicide from guilt.
A poor reward for heroism.
16
During this period, Tesla spoke out vehemently against the new theories of Albert Einstein, insisting that energy is not contained in matter, but in the space between the particles of an atom.
—Tesla, Master of Lightning PBS-TV documentary, Dec. 12, 2000
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