Going Interstellar

by Les Johnson

  Making another sound that betrayed his annoyance, Ennio pushed at the door. It swung inward.

  Come into my home, said the spider to the fly flitted through my mind and that, too, I thought, was a fragment of some long-forgotten story. But I went in, as Ennio held the door open for me.

  The archives was where they kept all the data for everything in the ship, and for everything before the ship. Somewhere beneath us computers sat that were separate from the computers used for navigating and powering the ship, but could look into those if needed. Into this computer had been poured all of the knowledge of humanity since we’d first walked on two legs in that Earth which I’d only observed in illustrations and only read about in books, but never actually seen.

  It was possible that they’d skipped a file teaching us how to chip flint, but everything else was in it, from animal husbandry and taming to the shaping of clay and the smelting of metal. Everything needed to start human civilization as far up as possible on our ladder of learning, in the new world.

  And because, by the time we’d left, humanity had worked out that knowledge wasn’t often as simple and clear cut as it seemed, this repository involved other skills that would seem less important to interplanetary civilization, including linguistics and literature, law, history and other disciplines where people argued a lot and used math very little.

  Ciar and his fellow linguists worked here translating and transcribing: a work that would be needed until all records were converted, which is to say probably forever.

  The space looked like what it was. There were terminals, so close together that for someone to get out of his he had to ask the permission of his fellow on the next one. They were grey, smooth and rounded on top, with a sort of privacy hood you ducked under, presumably so that your work wouldn’t disturb that of the workers next to you. In the dark, with a soft light glowing from each of them, they looked as if they were sleeping undisturbed, like children who let their heads droop while napping.

  “Oh, we shouldn’t be here,” Ennio said.

  This, of course, was not news, and of course we shouldn’t have been there. But we were, and the best thing to do was deal with Ciar so that we could get out of there as soon as possible and with as little trouble as possible.

  “Ciar?” I whispered.

  He popped up from behind one of the terminals like a jack in the box, his face flushed, his eyes shining and looking feverish. “You came,” he said, and before either of us could comment, “Good. You’ll never believe this.”

  From Ennio’s snort, I could tell he was already working on not believing it, before Ciar showed us whatever it was.

  ***

  At first I had no idea what Ciar was getting at. He took us to his terminal and showed us the screen. It said, Access denied, you do not have permission to ask this question. Under it there were codes, presumably explaining why we didn’t have the right to look at it.

  “Very exciting,” Ennio said. “I’m all agog. Perhaps you linguists are different, pal, but in my job I get one of these every other day. People don’t think I have a need to know the nutritional mix in classroom lunches, or the stories selected for next year’s primer.”

  Ciar shook his head. He touched the screen, quickly, clearing the error message and bringing up a query screen. In it he typed Big ship and nursery rhyme. For the next few minutes he showed us the old and the new rhymes. The old woman who lived in a compartment—only in the Earth rhyme this was inexplicably a shoe. There were half a dozen others. All of them were very different between the old and the new version. I mean, one of them was clearly created on Earth, for children who had never even thought of flying in space, but the others were full of ship analogies and cryptic references to a wise old owl who didn’t talk and which apparently waited for people to come to it when it was needed.

  “So, the rhymes were altered,” Ennio said. “Perhaps people weren’t sure shipboard children would care about Earth-like things.”

  Ciar shook his head. “It’s more than that. Look at it realistically. If you look at what they’re saying, over and over they’re telling us something special should be happening when we’ve been in the ship ten generations. Over and over. . . .” He looked up and quirked an eyebrow at us.

  “So?” I said.

  “So,” he said. “How many generations have we been in the ship?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m fairly sure I’ve never had a need to know.”

  “Ah!” He raised his finger sagely, like someone making an important point.

  He brought us back to the query screen and asked again how many generations we’d been in the ship. Then he asked for the date of departure from Earth, and the time of arrival at their destination. And, probably in an effort to calculate the generations himself , genealogical tables.

  Each question brought up the same screen telling us we were forbidden from accessing that information.

  “See?” he said.

  “I see,” I said. But truth be told, I was far from impressed. “Since when is it news that they classify as secret everything they can in this ship? My father says that if they could make sex top secret, they would.”

  “They probably have,” Ennio said. “And are shocked when each new generation figures it out.”

  “Generations,” Ciar said. “That’s the thing. How many generations? How long have we been sailing in the big, big ship with the wise old owl? And what is the wise old owl?” He typed that query too, with fast, nervous fingers. It too informed us we had no need to know. “And why won’t it let us look at genealogy?”

  “That should be obvious.” Ennio sounded tired. “You know very well that in the long time the ship— ”

  “However long,” Ciar said, meaningly.

  “However long,” Ennio shrugged. “There have been any number of people executed for destructive behavior or crimes against the community or . . . or others.”

  We nodded. Executions weren’t that common, but they happened once every ten years or so. It couldn’t be helped. We’d learned in school, early on, that in this confined space, discipline had to be far tighter than it was on Earth, because Earth could isolate its anti-social elements. But we had to live and work together, and we had to make sure there were no disruptive elements in the well-oiled social machinery.

  “So,” Ennio said. “The genealogical tables are hidden, so feuds can’t be carried on from generation to generation. As they might very well be, in a group as limited as we are.”

  Ciar frowned as though this had never occurred to him. “Maybe,” he said. His voice sounded less self-assured than it had at first. “Maybe I’ll give you that this is a possible reason, but it still strikes me as odd. All these references to generations, and then we can’t find out how many generations have been in the ship.”

  “I’m sure the captain and the administrators know, never you worry,” I said. But I was worried. Something at the back of my mind refused to quiet down. I knew my grandparents’ grandparents had been in the ship. That made it at least six generations. Were they the first ones?

  “Is this all you wished to show us?” Ennio said. “I think you’re inflating it wildly. It’s like when you decided that they were serving us dead bodies.”

  Ciar stuck his lip out. “I was only ten. You have to admit it seemed logical. Humans are made of meat, they serve us meat . . .”

  “From vats. And this seems logical to you too, but only because you have that kind of mind. You know what, Ciar, if you’d been born on Earth you’d probably be one of those people who make up stories to amuse others. That’s the sort of mind you have. You make it all sound very interesting, but come on, you know it’s not true.”

  Ciar sat, frowning at the terminal, then at us, then at the terminal again.

  “Come back to the dance with us,” I said. “You can probably find girls to dance with. I’ll even take a turn with you.”

  He hesitated visibly, then shrugged. “Nah. There’s a few more th
ings I want to look up.”

  So Ennio and I went back, and despite the suspicious looks of our fellow dancers, managed to convey the impression we’d just been for a nice, long, peaceful walk.

  That night, when I got home, mom was awake, waiting for me, while doing her best to look as if she were balancing ration coupon accounts.

  After the normal pleasantries, as I was heading for bed, I turned around and asked her, “Mom, I know my grandfather’s grandfather was in the ship. I remember your dad talking about his grandad. Was his grandad the first generation aboard the ship?”

  Mom looked surprised. “Why? No, couldn’t be, because I remember my grandmother talking about her grandmother being a little girl in the ship. Why?”

  “Just curious,” I said. I removed the shoes which had started to pinch and continued down the narrow hallway to my room. That made seven generations, didn’t it? What had the rhyme said? When ten generations have passed. . . .

  ***

  During the night several systems broke down. I probably would have heard first thing in the morning, if I’d seen mom. Only I didn’t. She’d already left for her job in the planning center when I woke up, consumed my morning calories without too much attention to their form, which seemed to be cardboard with syrup, though the container said pancakes. Then I headed into the maintenance center, where I got my sheet of work for the day.

  It was nothing like the blackout three years ago that left a whole wing of the ship with minimal air recycling. This was more a matter of clothes washers not working, freezers becoming suddenly warm and heating systems having gone south over an entire section.

  Since we were requested to hurry and since we were being offered extra luxury rations on completion, I worked straight through lunch, and didn’t talk to anyone until I headed home.

  Which was when Ennio intercepted me. This wasn’t so rare, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Or at least, I was disquieted. He didn’t look as he normally did.

  To begin with, he wasn’t waiting at my home or within sight of my home, as he usually did. Instead, he seemed to have been patrolling all my possible paths of approach to home—which, of course, varied, since I came from different locations, depending on the last job I’d been busy with—to meet me out of possible sight of my parents and neighbors. And then, instead of falling into step beside me, as he usually did, and easing into a conversation, he came just close enough to motion me to follow him.

  This was strange enough behavior that I almost had to obey. I confess if Ennio had been a different type of person I might have thought that he had ulterior motives. He took increasingly smaller and narrower corridors, each one less populated, until I half expected him to pull me into a repair tunnel. Instead, he pulled me into a maintenance closet.

  Maintenance closets are spaced along corridors, both large and small. Most of them have access to the wiring for that portion of the ship. Some of them just contain tools, others have the specialized machines that clean the corridor floors. This one had a machine, so that to pull me in, Ennio had to squeeze himself behind it, then make room for me.

  “Close the door,” he whispered urgently.

  I did, because at that point I was going with the assumption he’d gone stark raving mad, and everyone knows the best thing with lunatics is to humor them until you can get them to a medtech.

  Closing the door left us in complete darkness, surrounded by a smell of mustiness and detergent. “All right,” I said. “Now what?”

  But nothing prepared me for the tone of his voice much less what he said, as he spoke out of the dark, “They arrested Ciar this morning.” He sounded as if he was about to cry.

  The sound was so odd, that I was sure I had misunderstood him. “What?”

  “They arrested Ciar this morning. I had to talk to you where no one could hear us. I brought a lantern here earlier. I don’t think there are any listening devices.”

  “I don’t think there are listening devices anywhere in the ship,” I said. “Oh, maybe in the supply areas, to make sure things are not stolen, but I don’t think so. Why should there be?”

  “Why should they arrest Ciar?”

  “He went to his place of employment after hours and probably without permission.”

  “That’s an administrative sanction,” he said. “It’s just an administrative sanction. It’s not a capital crime.”

  “A . . . capital crime? They are going to kill him? How do you know this? Why do you think this?”

  “It’s what the news says,” he said. “They say he was arrested for activities against the community, and that he’ll be executed.”

  “You have to have misunderstood.”

  “I didn’t.” And the woebegone tone of his voice made me begin to believe him. Ennio couldn’t possibly be confused about something that important.

  “But . . .” I said

  “I figured it was his search. He was using his ID on the terminal. Someone correlated all his searches. Someone doesn’t want that stuff looked at.”

  “What? Nursery rhymes?”

  A desperate sniffle from the darkness, that might have been an attempt to sound ironical, but sounded only sad. “I hope that’s not it, since I just downloaded all I could find.”

  “Ennio!”

  “I have to know. We have to find out. We have to do something to save Ciar.”

  This was truly delusional. Fine, so there hadn’t been an execution in the last ten years, meaning there hadn’t been one in the time I’d been conscious of them, or an adult, able to interpret the news. But even I knew enough, from hearing my parents talk, to know that when someone was arrested for a capital crime and it was announced as such, everything was decided and there was no reprieve. Like Ennio I couldn’t imagine what Ciar had done to deserve capital punishment. Other than his silly search into the nursery rhymes and how many generations there had been in the ship, I didn’t think he’d so much as talked back to his supervisor this last year. Ennio and I would have known if he had. We talked over almost everything. So this left. . . . “When are they executing him?”

  “Next week,” Ennio said.

  “Why that long?”

  Even without being able to see Ennio, I knew he had shrugged. And I realized I was a total idiot. There were many things to do before an execution, most of them procedural and technical. While the administration alone decided on death or life, they had to be really sure that nothing could be done to reclaim a trained linguist, like Ciar.

  “Where are they holding him?” It seemed impossible we were talking about this, in connection with Ciar. Like Ennio, I kept thinking there had been some horrible mistake and we should, somehow, be able to clear him. I’d read stories of Earth where someone was broken out of jail and he and his rescuers vanished into the sunset, but aboard the ship there was no possible way to do that. Unless we escaped into the no-grav areas, and even there, repair people and maintenance people would find us eventually—let alone the fact that staying in no gravity too long would make us ill in very short order.

  Ennio made a sound of dismissal, and then turned on something. It had a small screen that glowed feebly, but in the total darkness it looked like a spotlight. After my eyes adjusted, I realized it was just a little data port, which could function independently of the main computer. It was what most of us used to read for amusement.

  “I correlated all the things the nursery rhymes say about the wise old owl,” he said. “While I was waiting for you. I think . . . I think it’s a hidden computer somewhere in the ship.”

  “Right,” I said. “Because it makes perfect sense to spend twice the needed amount of money, to give a ship like this two completely separate computer systems.”

  He shook his head. “It does, if you think about it. For one, there could be a space disaster or something, that wiped out the other one. And besides, there’s . . . other reasons. Like for instance, people not wanting us to know things, like how many generations there have been in the ship
.”

  “Why would they want to do that?” I asked. “I mean, you’re assuming someone is deliberately hiding the number of generations from us. What you said earlier is much more likely. That they don’t want feuds and such to propagate and perpetuate.”

  But he shook his head. “No, I think it’s more than that. I think the administration doesn’t want us to arrive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at them. They have all this power, over the ship and over us. Why would they want us to arrive?”

  “Because the whole point of this trip is to arrive?”

  “Is it? It was when we launched, but is it still? Most people aboard care about what? Who they’ll marry, how many children they’re allowed to have, and how many luxury points they have that they can spend this week. And when we arrive, what is supposed to happen?”

  “We . . . we’ll settle,” I said. “Depending on what the world is like. I mean, they know it has water and is the right temperature and . . .” I dredged up from my mind the memory of childhood lectures. “I think they somehow established that it either had life or could support life. Depending on which one it is, we either settle right in, or we warm up the plants and animals and give them some time to establish. And then we move down to the surface, and we have farms and . . . and stuff down there, just like we have here. The whole point was to expand human civilization and knowledge.” The idea of living somewhere without the upper limits of the tunnels overhead, of the floor beneath, made my heart pound. Just looking at movies of Earth made me a little dizzy, unless I thought of the sky as a tunnel top. But I knew the name for that was acrophobia and that there were hypnotic treatments for it. We’d been provided with those, since everyone knew after . . . ten generations? In the ship that was bound to happen.

  “Right,” Ennio said. “But there won’t be any restrictions on how many children you can have, anymore. And after a while there won’t be any restrictions on how much you can eat, and where you can go.” He looked at me with the look of someone who’d just won an argument, and exhaled, forcefully. “Think, Nia. The administrators will lose all their power over us.”