Survey Ship

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “There it goes,” Fontana said suddenly. “We might as well take a last look.”

  Earth had come into their viewfield, a dim blue wraith, the size of a small dinner plate, diminishing, distant… a raindrop. Moira blinked, shook the tears from her eyes, concentrating on the drive tell-tale. Now, when they were clear of the last fragments of gravitational pull from the Moon and from the Space Station… now, slowly, gently… she pressed another sequence of buttons in a memorized order, feeling the faint drag from the DeMag units; possibly it would be easier when they could turn off the DeMags for a while, but at this moment none of them were emotionally or physiologically prepared for less than half gravity. The ship rotated, modules turning for favorable light exposure. She watched what she was doing on her video tell-tales as the light-sail panels, enormous, thin sheets of mylar film, were slowly extruded. She could see a corner of one of them coming, slowly, into sight across the dome, a smear of translucence blotting out a few of the stars across the lower edge of the lenticular observation window. Trim it just a little toward the sun, Moira thought, pressing buttons gently, watching the sail veer ever so slightly, rotate a little, streaming gently. Her tell-tales told her of other sails, great sheets of film sensitive to solar pressure… light as a tangible force, making the sails just shiver… the film was so delicate it would tear at a touch, but in space, friction-less, airless, there was nothing to tear it. Yet Moira’s fingers moved as delicately on the studs as if her fingers could rip through the sails themselves, and she watched the movement, the imperceptible shiver of the streaming mylar, with a lump in her throat. That’s right, just a fraction more to the left… now you, back there by the Life-Support module… come on, darling, easy now ,, . just a little further… she was whispering to the sails as they moved, slowly and with a silken elegance, into position. She felt like a spider, spinning out her silken web into every direction, surrounded by the feathery streaming of filmy sails, responding to the light… feeding the endless energies of light into the drives. The awareness shimmered inside her nerves with the violence of orgasm, and she closed her eyes in momentary ecstasy.

  Teague watched Moira’s face quivering as she moved her hands on the controls, and remembered how she had looked, once, when he kissed her… he himself felt as useless as a vermiform appendix. Life-Support was fail-safe and idiot-proof; barring some unimaginable catastrophe, he would have nothing important to do for years, except for synthesizing food. When, or if, they found a habitable planet — when, not if, he reminded himself sternly — it would be quite different; as the biologist, he would be responsible for every fragment of their physical safety in an alien environment. Aboard ship, he had a sinecure; he was a piece of dispensable software, whose work was being done by machinery and computer.

  Well, they were all like that, really. The ship could have been sent out, unmanned, as a probe — but an unmanned probe could not have surveyed the planets at the hypothetical other end of the voyage. Only Peake, as their doctor, and Fontana, as their psychologist, would have much to do on the voyage of nine light-years. Once they were out of the Solar System, only Moira would have much of anything to do inside the ship, and that was mostly trimming the sails by calculating light-pressures. The ship would navigate on a course which Peake and Ching had already set; to change it now would mean decelerating down to zero and re-computing from the beginning. Every second they remained in flight, they were reaching velocities which were more and more unthinkable. More than nine meters per second per second — maybe Ravi could have figured out how fast they were actually travelling by now. He couldn’t.

  So the most interesting thing he’d be doing for the next several years was synthesizing catgut for violin strings!

  Perhaps he would have time to learn to play the oboe — there were spare instruments aboard. Or he would have time to compose the string quartet which had been in his mind ever since he learned, at fourteen, that he did not have the manual dexterity to be more than a mediocre violinist, and taken up the flute. Melodies moved constantly in his mind; now he would have time to write them down.

  He’d never tried before; most music was computer-written. He remembered a story from the early days of the Academy, when the computer, programmed to write a chorale, had exactly duplicated, missing only four notes in the tenor part, Bach’s setting for O Sacred Head. Well, given the information about how to compose music, that was the perfect chorale, the logical and perfect way to write and harmonize the music, the inevitability of perfection. The people who programmed the computer had been overwhelmed by Bach, after all; and after that episode the Melody Mark VII had been nicknamed JOHANN.

  How could anyone write music greater than that, or worth naming in the same breath? Well, the twentieth-century classic composer Alan Hovhaness had done it; critics had said that he had taken music in the direction it might have gone if Bach had never written his Well-Tempered Clavier. Perhaps there were still other directions, though he was sure Peake didn’t think so, and Peake was a real musician.

  Now the Earth could barely be distinguished; it had lost its blue color and was a point of light against black, against other points of light. Ravi glanced at his chronometer and said, “My shift, Peake.” Peake drew his attention from the window and said, “Right.” Formally, they exchanged places. Teague said, “Are we going to keep on Greenwich Time for the whole voyage? Hours, days… weeks, months, years — they don’t make much sense out here. Anyhow, as we approach light-speed, there’ll be changes… it’s not as if we could keep the clock set for what time it is back in dear old Greenwich of whatever!”

  Peake said, turning his back on the vista of stars — that was Ravi’s responsibility for the next twelve hours — “We have to keep a 24 hour ship’s day, or something near it. For circadian rhythms. God alone knows what light-speeds and zero gravity will do to our body rhythms. But we have to try and keep them as stable as we can, and for the next few months it won’t matter much.”

  “The ship’s already on Universal Solar,” Ravi said, looking at a small tell-tale at the very center of the ceiling of the Bridge; the seats swivelled through a full circular rotation — so they could be turned to any angle, though they would lock at whatever angle the sitter chose. The tell-tale displayed, in smooth-flowing liquid crystal digital numbers the time by what was called Universal Solar, or sometimes only true time; a kind of reckoning in seconds from the pulses of energy, elapsed time from the original Big Bang; true time, so-called, measured the exact age of the known Universe.

  “But Universal Solar is clumsy,” said Peake, looking at the long stream of numbers which measured time, in seconds, from the beginning of the universe,

  “Clumsy!” Moira said, disbelieving, and Ching said, “How can anything as precise as that be clumsy?”

  “Because,” Peake said, good-naturedly, “by the time you read all that off, in seconds, it’s some other time already. I suggest we keep Greenwich Time just to figure out when our shifts begin and end, and when we’re going to meet for those daily music sessions Fontana, or was it Moira, thought were so important.”

  Looking at the long, ever-changing stream of numbers on the tell-tale, they all, one by one, agreed to that. Greenwich Time would become a kind of biological time-clock for them; Ching’s flying fingers programmed, into the computer, a sequence of “elapsed time, in hours and days, from leaving the space station,” basing it on 24-hour days, of which this — they all agreed — was Day One. Years calculated in Earth reckoning, Anno Domini, a religio-political reckoning, they all agreed, had no meaning for them. Day One became the day they had been skylifted, first to the Space Station, then to the Ship; and by that reckoning, when Ravi took his first shift, it became noon of Day One. Peake would go on-shift again at Midnight, which they would call the first moment of Day Two.

  “And we have been aboard for four hours,” Ching said, “and my biological rhythms are beginning to tell me that it’s dinner-time. Is there any reason we have to stay in the Bridge,
or must one of us be here to tend the machines at all times? And what will that do to our theory that we all ought to meet once a day?”

  Moira made a final finicky adjustment to a sail, a great triangular translucency blotting out a third of the stars, From the lenticular window she could see that the ship was rotating on its own axis as it moved against the stars. They seemed to be standing still, now, without the reference points of Space Station and Earth, and when she shut her eyes, the DeMag units told her that “down” was the floor of the Bridge, and the lenticular window was straight before her; but when she looked out to the small slow spin of the ship around them, the other shaped modules that came into view and were obscured again, themselves obscuring nearby stars, she felt a trace of vertigo, her inner ear channels rebelled, and she wondered how she could manage to swallow against this queasiness. She shut her eyes and the Bridge settled into homey normal up-and-down. Stability again.

  “Nobody has to be here,” she said, looking with tender farewell at the exquisite delicacy of the sail shivering across the stars, “the sails are programmed to trim themselves; strictly speaking, we could leave the Bridge now and spend the next four years or so playing string quartets and making love in our cabins. Each of us ought to check in here on our instruments once every shift or so, but mostly that’s busy-work. Once our course is set, that’s it.” And she wondered why a faint, sick shiver went through her at the words; and she remembered her younger self, crying and refusing to step on a piece of playground equipment which, a few minutes later, cast several of her playmates, and one of her counselors, to the ground in screaming heaps….

  Angrily, she dismissed the thought. I’m tired and sick and I think I have a touch of gravity sickness and I’m making up nightmares and calling it ESP! Because there had been times when her erratic wild talent had played her false, giving her a warning of trouble which never happened, especially when there was something she particularly wanted not to do.

  Ching, accustomed from early childhood to rely on computer-set certainties, nodded at Moira’s words. She said, “Actually, we’re just along for the ride. The computers run the ship.”

  “Actually, I was thinking that myself,” Teague said. “It seems that you and Moira are doing all the real work of the ship, and it might make more sense to put the four of us others into suspended animation. When we reached a planet, you could wake us up, we’d still be young and stronger than we would otherwise, and we could do the survey work on that planet…”

  “I don’t know about you,” Moira said, “but I don’t think I’d care to make a voyage of nine point something years to the T-5 cluster without more company than Ching. No offense intended, Ching, but it’s a known psychological fact — Fontana, I’m right, aren’t I? — that any two people alone together will drive each other crazy and murder each other.”

  Fontana chuckled. She said, “It has been known to happen. It’s true; that’s why the minimal crew for a Survey Ship has to be at least four people, and six is better. That gives everybody some privacy, and somebody new to talk to now and then. Even as it is, we’re likely to get bored with each other’s company.”

  Although Ching knew that Moira’s words were not personally intended, she still felt somehow wounded. But at least, she thought, they know that I — and the computer — have set the major work of the Ship. Peake plotted the co-ordinates and the course, but it was the computer which gave it to him. The computer and I. Very precisely, intending to wound a little, she said, “I don’t know about you, Moira, I can well understand that you might need a certain amount of diversion on a long voyage, but I think it would be interesting to experiment with a Survey Ship staffed by one human and one computer. I would gladly have volunteered for such a voyage. I’m not afraid of my own company, and I don’t need to hide from it. With this computer — “ and only Moira saw, and understood, the affectionate touch of her fingers on the console, “—I don’t really think I would need anyone else on the voyage. After all, I went through the Academy as a loner, and I’m used to it.”

  Ravi looked at the immensity beyond the window and said, “We are all alone, fundamentally, with the universe—” but he said it so softly that no one else heard.

  Moira stood up and went to Ching. She said, very gently, “But you weren’t alone, and I think if you were really alone, with the computer, you’d go crazy. I know I would.”

  “I know you would, too,” Ching said, stiff against the friendly arm Moira slid around her waist, and Moira sighed and let her go. It was, after all, impossible to be friendly with Ching. She had tried it before, and been rebuffed in the same way, and here she was, stuck with her for the indefinite future.

  Ching, her face tightly barriered, was thinking, Oh, yes, Moira, being nice to the class freak, the way she’d be so nice to a cripple or a blind person. Well, I’m damned if I want her pitying me! She said, “Well, the question’s academic anyhow. It makes more sense to figure out who’s going to cook dinner. Teague, didn’t you say there was fresh food storage for a period of months? Why don’t we celebrate our takeoff with a steak dinner, or the nearest equivalent we can find in the food machines? I’ll volunteer to cook tonight, but after this we take turns.”

  Once again, the dizzying shifts in direction as they moved from the strongly oriented gravity of the “bridge” to the Life-Support central area — which was fairly circular — and once again Peake stumbled as the direction of “down” abruptly reversed itself.

  Moira, flipping herself over in the low gravity, catching Ravi and spinning with him on a common center in the almost-gravity-free corridor between two modules, thought, I guess the gravity-sickness was psychological. When I don’t have to look out that damned window at the whole universe, I seem to have my space-orientation just fine! Holding tight to Ravi’s hand, they cartwheeled the length of the zero-gravity corridor. Ching was clinging tightly to the crawl-bar, inching like a fly along the wall. Peake pushed his legs against one end and took off, shooting along the corridor and colliding with Ravi and Moira; the three of them ended in a laughing tangle of arms and legs. Teague and Fontana, clinging to each other and making “swimming” motions, joined in the laughter.

  “I should remind you all,” Peake said, “that the exercise area — that’s the conical module we didn’t get to, next to the sleeping quarters — is arranged with DeMag units that can be cut down to zero or up to full gravity. We have to work out at full gravity to keep our muscles in good shape—” Teague groaned, but Peake ignored him and went on, “but we can experiment with free-fall acrobatics if we want to, too.”

  “Look at Ching,” Moira squeaked. “Let go, Ching, you can’t get hurt, there’s nowhere to fall to!”

  Ching was clinging dizzily to the crawl-bar still. She said, “I think I’ll wait to get my orientation. If it’s quite all right with you, Moira?” she added meticulously.

  Fontana’s voice was sharp. “Let her alone, Moira, we all have to adjust at our own rate, and you’ve been in free-fall before; she hasn’t.”

  Moira, holding to Ravi, felt his body against hers, looked with pleasure at the contrast of his coffee-colored hands against her own pallid ones. She twisted a little and their lips met; she felt his kiss with a shock of recognition, a familiar thing among all the new strangenesses. They floated together, their lips just touching, entangled, her hair floating around him, streaming, intermingled with his own dark curls. She fancied Ching’s look down at them both was one of disapproval, and defiantly prolonged the kiss.

  Peake pushed through the sphincter into the next module, which was the main cabin they had first entered. He went to the food machine, Ching joining him there a moment later.

  Ching said, “They didn’t lose any time, did they — Moira and Ravi?”

  Peake shrugged. He said, “Does it matter that much?” The sight of the two, intertwined and kissing, lost in each other, roused painful memories. Every scrap of his being longed for Jimson; even during the excitement of pulling away from
the Space Station, he had had to keep remembering, I can’t share it with him, is he watching me go, I’ll never be able to share it with him again. Was Jimson suffering like this, too, at the other end of that lengthening string which separated them? Part of him wanted Jimson to share even this suffering, part of him quailed at the thought of Jimson, tender, sweet, vulnerable, undergoing this monstrous pain that seemed to eat him up inside.

  Alone, and I will be alone all the rest of my life. There is no one here for me. Both Ravi and Teague are obviously heterosexual, and as for the women…. I don’t want them, they don’t want me… alone. Always alone, a lifetime alone….

  Ching, standing beside him at the console, thought that he looked lost; it was so strange to see Peake without the fair-haired Jimson trailing him.

  I know what it is to be alone. I went through twelve years of it. But he at least has known what it is like to be loved and wanted, she thought disconsolately. I never will.

  She said, “Do you suppose we could manage a steak dinner out of the console, Peake?”

  “Can’t hurt to try,” he said, “it may not actually be steak, but it will probably be too good an imitation for me to tell the difference.”

  “We might have a little more trouble with the fried potatoes and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “And I suspect fresh salads are always going to be beyond our reach. Oh, well, Vitamin C is Vitamin C, I suppose.”