Ruul the geneticist unfolded his tall frame from his chair. “We believe it’s possible. We have the Qax technology.” Without drama, he held up a yellow pill.
There was a long silence.
Andres smiled coldly. “We can’t afford to die. We must remember, while everybody else forgets.
“And we must manage. We must achieve total social control – total over every significant aspect of our crew’s lives – and we must govern their children’s lives just as tightly, as far as we can see ahead. Society has to be as rigid as the bulkheads which contain it. Oh, we can give the crew freedom within limits! But we need to enforce social arrangements in which conflict is reduced to negligible, appropriate skill levels kept up – and, most importantly, a duty of maintenance of the Ship is hammered home into every individual at birth.”
Rusel said, “And what about the rights of those you call the transients? We Pharaohs would be taking away all meaningful choice from them – and their children, and their children’s children.”
“Rights? Rights?” She loomed over him. “Rusel, a transient’s only purpose is to live, reproduce, and die in an orderly fashion, thus preserving her genes to the far future. There is no room on this Ship for democracy, no space for love! A transient is just a conduit for her genes. She has no rights, any more than a bit of pipe that carries water from source to sink. Surely you thought this through. When we get to Canis Major, when we find a world to live on, when again we have an environment of surplus – then we can talk about rights. But in the meantime we will control.” Her expression was complex. “But you must see that we will control through love.”
Diluc gaped. “Love?”
“The Qax technology was based on a genetic manipulation, you know. We Pharaohs were promised that our gift would be passed on to our children. And we had those children! But we Pharaohs never bred true. I once had a child myself. She did not survive.” She hesitated, just for a second. Then she went on, “But by now there are genes for immortality, or at least longevity, scattered through the human population – even among you. Do you see now why we had to build these arks – why we couldn’t flee and abandon you, or just take frozen zygotes or eggs?” She spread her hands wide. “Because you are my children, and I love you.”
Nobody moved. Rusel thought he could see tears in her stony eyes. She is grotesque, he thought.
Diluc said carefully, “Pharaoh, would I be able to bring Tila with me? And our children, if we have them?”
“I’m sorry,” she said gently. “Tila doesn’t qualify. Besides, the social structure simply wouldn’t be sustainable if – ”
“Then count me out.” Diluc stood up.
She nodded. “I’m sure you won’t be the only one. Believe me, this is no privilege I’m offering you.”
Diluc turned to Rusel. “Brother, are you coming with me?”
Rusel closed his eyes. The thought of his eventual death had actually been a comfort to him – a healing of his inner wounds, a lifting of the guilt he knew he would carry throughout his life. Now even the prospect of death was being taken away, to be replaced by nothing but an indefinite extension of duty.
But he had to take it on, he saw. As Lora herself had told him, he had to live on, like a machine, and fulfil his function. That was why he was here; only that way could he atone.
He looked up at Diluc. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Complex emotions crossed his brother’s face: anger, despair, perhaps a kind of thwarted love. He turned and left the room.
Andres behaved as if Diluc had never existed.
“We will always have to combat cultural drift,” she said. “It is the blight of the generation starship. Already we have some pregnancies; soon we will have the first children, who will live and die knowing nothing but this Ship. And in a few generations – well, you can guess the rest. First you forget where you’re going. Then you forget you’re going anywhere. Then you forget you’re on a damn ship, and start to think the vessel is the whole universe. And so forth! Soon nothing is left but a rotten apple full of worms, falling through the void. Even the great engineer Michael Poole suffered this; a fifteen-hundred-year generation starship he designed – the first Great Northern – barely limped home. Oh, every so often you might have a glorious moment as some cannibalistic savage climbs the decks and peers out in awe at the stars, but that’s no consolation for the loss of the mission.
“Well, not this time. You engineers will know we’re almost at the end of our GUTdrive cruise phase; the propellant ice is almost exhausted. And that means the Ship’s hull is exposed.” She clapped her hands – and, to more gasps from the crew, the amphitheater’s floor suddenly turned transparent.
Rusel was seated over a floor of stars; something inside him cringed.
Andres smiled at their reaction. “Soon we will leave the plane of the Galaxy, and what a sight that will be. In a transparent hull our crew will never be able to forget they are on a Ship. There will be no conceptual breakthroughs on my watch!”
With the ice exhausted, the Ship’s banks of engines were shut down. From now on a dark matter ramjet would provide a comparatively gentle but enduring thrust.
Dark matter constituted most of the universe’s store of mass, with “light matter” – the stuff of bodies and ships and stars – a mere trace. The key advantage of dark matter for the Ship’s mission planners was that it was found in thick quantities far beyond the visible disc of the Galaxy, and would be plentiful throughout the voyage. But dark matter interacted with the light only through gravity. So now invisible wings of gravitational force unfolded ahead of the Ship. Spanning thousands of kilometers, these acted as a scoop to draw dark matter into the hollow center of the torus-shaped Ship. There, concentrated, much of it was annihilated and induced to give up its mass-energy, which in turn drove a residuum out of the Ship as reaction mass.
Thus the Ship ploughed on into the dark.
Once again the Ship was rebuilt. The acceleration provided by the dark matter ramjet was much lower than the ice rockets, and so the Ship was spun about its axis, to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal force. It was an ancient solution and a crude one – but it worked, and ought to require little maintenance in the future.
The spin-up was itself a spectacular milestone, a great swivelling as floors became walls and walls became ceilings. The transparent floor of the acceleration-couch amphitheater became a wall full of stars, whose cool emptiness Rusel rather liked.
Meanwhile the new “Elders,” the ten of them who had accepted Andres’ challenge, began their course of treatment. The procedure was administered by geneticist Ruul and a woman called Selur, the Ship’s senior doctor. The medics took it slowly enough to catch any adverse reactions, or so they hoped.
For Rusel it was painless enough, just injections and tablets, and he tried not to think about the alien nanoprobes embedding themselves in his system, cleaning out ageing toxins, repairing cellular damage, rewiring his very genome.
His work continued to be absorbing, and when he had spare time he immersed himself in studies. All the crew were generalists to some degree, but the ten new Elders were expected to be a repository of memory and wisdom far beyond a human lifespan. So they all studied everything, and they learned from each other.
Rusel began with the disciplines he imagined would be most essential in the future. He studied medicine; anthropology, sociology and ethics; ecosynthesis and all aspects of the Ship’s life support machinery; the workings of the Ship’s propulsion systems; techniques of colonization; and the geography of the Galaxy and its satellites. He also buttonholed Andres herself and soaked up her knowledge of human history. Qax-derived nanosystems were so prevalent throughout the Ship that Rusel’s own expertize was much in demand.
His major goal continued to be to use up as much of his conscious time as possible with work. The studying was infinitely expandable, and very satisfying to his naturally acquisitive mind. He found he was able to immerse himself in esoteric aspects of o
ne discipline or another for days on end, as if he was an abstract intellect, almost forgetting who he was.
His days passed in a dream, as if time itself flowed differently for him now.
The Elders’ placid lives were not without disturbance, however. The Qax biotechnology was far from perfect. In the first year of treatment one man suffered kidney failure; he survived, but had to be taken out of the program.
And it was a great shock to all the Elders when Ruul himself succumbed to a ferocious cancer, as the technological rebuilding of his cells went awry.
The day after Ruul’s death, as the Elders adjusted to the loss of his competence and dry humor, Rusel decided he needed a break. He walked out of the Elders’ Cloister and into the body of the Ship, heading for the area where his brother had set up his own home with Tila.
On all the Ship’s cylindrical decks, the interior geography had been filled by corridors and cabins, clustered in concentric circles around little open plazas – “village squares.” Rusel knew the theory, but he quickly got lost; the layout of walls and floors and false ceilings was changed again and again as the crew sorted out their environment.
At last he came to the right doorway on the right corridor. He was about to knock when a boy, aged about five with a shock of thick black hair, rocketed out of the open door and ran between Rusel’s legs. The kid wore a bland Ship’s-issue coverall, long overdue for recycling judging by its grime.
This must be Tomi, Rusel thought, Diluc’s eldest. Child and Elder silently appraised each other. Then the kid stuck out his tongue and ran back into the cabin.
In a moment Diluc came bustling out of the door, wiping his hands on a towel. “Look, what in Lethe’s going on – Rusel! It’s you. Welcome, welcome!”
Rusel embraced his brother. Diluc smelt of baby sick, cooking, and sweat, and Rusel was shocked to see a streak of grey in his brother’s hair. Perhaps he had been locked away longer than he had realized.
Diluc led Rusel into his home. It was a complex of five small interconnected cabins, including a kitchen and bathroom. Somebody had been weaving tapestries; gaudy, space-filling abstract patterns filled one wall.
Rusel sat on a sofa adapted from an acceleration couch, and accepted a slug of some kind of liquor. He said, “I’m sorry I frightened Tomi. I suppose I’ve let myself become a stranger.”
Diluc raised an eyebrow. “Two things about that. Not so much stranger as strange.” He brushed his hand over his scalp.
Rusel involuntarily copied the gesture, and felt bare skin. He had long forgotten that the first side effect of the Pharaoh treatment had been the loss of his hair; his head was as bald as Andres’s. Surrounded all day by the other Elders, Rusel had got used to it, he supposed. He said dryly, “Next time I’ll wear a wig. What’s the second thing I got wrong?”
“That isn’t Tomi. Tomi was our first. He’s eight now. That was little Rus, as we call him. He’s five.”
“Five?” But Rusel had attended the baby Rusel’s naming ceremony. It seemed like yesterday.
“And now we’re due for another naming. We’ve missed you, Rus.”
Rusel felt as if his life was slipping away. “I’m sorry.”
Tila came bustling in, with an awestruck little Rus in tow, and an infant in her arms. She too seemed suddenly to have aged; she had put on weight, and her face was lined by fine wrinkles. She said that Tomi was preparing a meal – of course uncle Rusel would stay to eat, wouldn’t he? – and she sat down with the men and accepted a drink.
They talked of inconsequentials, and of their lives.
Diluc, having stormed out of Andres’s informal council, had become something of a leader in his own new community. Andres had ordered that the two-hundred-strong crew should be dispersed to live in close-knit “tribes” of twenty or so, each lodged in a “village” of corridors and cabins. There were to be looser links between the tribes, used for such purposes as finding partners. Thus the Ship was united in a single “clan.” Andres said this social structure was the most common form encountered among humans “in the wild,” as she put it, all the way back to pretechnological days on Earth. Whether or not that was true, things had stayed stable so far.
Andres had also specified the kind of government each tribe should aspire to. In such a small world each individual should be cherished for her unique skills, and for the value of the education invested in her. People were interdependent, said Andres, and the way they governed themselves should reflect that. Even democracy wouldn’t do, as in a society of valued individuals the subjection of a minority to the will of a majority must be a bad thing. So Diluc’s tribe ran by consensus.
“We talk and talk,” Diluc said with a rueful grin, “until we all agree. Takes hours, sometimes. Once, the whole of the night watch – ”
Tila snorted. “Don’t tell me you don’t like it that way. You always did like the sound of your own voice!”
The most important and difficult decisions the tribe had to make concerned reproduction. Most adults settled down into more-or-less monogamous marriages. But there had to be a separation between marriages for companionship and liaisons for reproduction; the gene pool was too small to allow matings for such trivial reasons as love.
Diluc showed Rusel a draft of a “social contract” he was preparing to capture all this. “First, on reaching adulthood you submit yourself to the needs of the group as a whole. For instance, your choice of career depends on what we need as much as what you want to do. Second, you agree to have kids only as the need allows. If we’re short of the optimum, you might have three or four or five, whether you want them or not, to bring up the numbers; if we’re over, you might have none at all and die childless. Third, you agree to postpone parenthood as long as possible, and to keep working as long as possible. That way you maximize the investment the tribe has made in educating you. Fourth, you can select your own breeding-spouse, who may be the same as your companionship-spouse – ”
“We were lucky,” Tila said fervently.
“But she can’t be closer than a second cousin. And you have to submit to having your choice approved by the Elders. That’s you,” he grinned at Rusel. “Your match will be screened for genetic desirability, to maximize the freshness of the gene pool – all of that. And finally, if despite everything you’re unlucky enough to have been born with some inheritable defect that might, if propagated, damage the Ship’s chances of completing its mission, you agree not to breed at all. Your genetic line stops with you.”
Rusel frowned. “That’s eugenics.”
Diluc shrugged. “What else can we do?”
Diluc hadn’t studied Earth history, and without that perspective, Rusel realized, that word carried none of the horrific connotations it had once borne. As Diluc had implied, they had little choice anyhow given the situation they were in. And anyhow, eugenics was lower-tech than genetic engineering: more future-proofing.
Rusel studied the draft. “And what happens if I break the rules?”
Diluc was uncomfortable; suddenly Rusel was aware that he was an Elder, as well as this man’s brother. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Diluc said. “Look, Rus, we don’t have police here, and we haven’t room for jails. Besides, everybody really is essential to the community as a whole. We can’t coerce. We work by persuasion; we hope that such situations will be easily resolved.”
Diluc talked of personal things too: of the progress of his boys at school, how Tomi had always hated the hour’s wall-cleaning he had to put in each day, while little Rus loved it for the friends he was making.
“They are good kids,” Rusel said.
“Yes. And you need to see more of them,” Diluc said pointedly. “But, you know, Rus, they’re not like us. They are the first Shipborn generation. They are different. To them, all our stories of Port Sol and Canis Major are so many legends of places they will never see. This Ship is their world, not ours: we, born elsewhere, are aliens here. You know, I keep thinking we’ve bitten off more
than we can chew, for all Andres’s planning. Already things are drifting. No wonder generation starships always fail!”
Rusel tried to respond to their openness by giving them something of himself. But he found he had little to say. His mind was full of studying, but there was very little human incident in his life. It was if he hadn’t been alive at all, he thought with dismay.
Diluc was appalled to hear of Ruul’s death. “That pompous geneticist – I suppose in a way it’s fitting he should be the first to go. But don’t let it take you, brother.” Impulsively he crossed to Rusel and rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You know, all this is enough for me: Tila, the kids, the home we’re building together. It’s good to know that our lives serve a higher goal, but this is all I need to make me happy. Maybe I don’t have much imagination, you think?”
Or maybe you’re more human than I am, Rusel thought. “We must all make our choices,” he said.
Diluc said carefully, “But you can still make a different choice.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned forward. “Why don’t you give it up, Rus? This crappy old Qax nano-medicine, this dreadful anti-ageing – you’re still young; you could come out of there, flush the shit out of your system, grow your hair back, find some nice woman to make you happy again . . .”
Rusel tried to keep his face expressionless, but he failed.
Diluc backed off. “Sorry. You still remember Lora.”
“I always will. I can’t help it.”
“We’ve all been through an extraordinary experience,” Tila said. “I suppose we all react differently.”
“Yes.” Tila, he remembered, had left behind a child.
Diluc looked into his eyes. “You never will come out of that Cloister, will you? Because you’ll never be able to cast off that big sack of guilt on your back.”
Rusel smiled. “Is it that obvious?”
Tila was a gracious hostess. She perceived his discomfort, and they began to talk of old times, of the days on Port Sol. But Rusel was relieved when Tomi, unreasonably tall, came in to announce that the meal was ready, relieved to hurry through the food and get away, relieved to shut himself away once more in the bloodless monastic calm of the Cloister.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18 Page 75
