Going Interstellar

by Les Johnson

  “But they’ll have farms and . . . and stuff.”

  “Right. Only they can’t be assured they’ll be the best farmers. Remember what I said about what most people care about?”

  “Children and luxury points, I think you said.”

  “Yeah, that and how much other people admire and respect you.”

  “But we’ll all have all the children we can want, and unlimited food, and. . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. But they don’t know they’ll be the best farmers, will they?”

  For a moment I didn’t understand, then I got it. When I was apprenticed as a repair person, I’d made use of a natural talent to become the best of the apprentices in very short order. But then, when we’d become craftspeople, with our licenses in order, I’d found I was only the best of the most inept group—that is the just-graduated ones. I would always remember the sting of that reduction in status. I hadn’t liked even that little step. How much less would people who were at the top of their social and professional ladder enjoy having the ladder pulled away from them and falling . . . into an entirely different category?

  “But . . . to the point of hiding the files? To the point of lying to us about where we are in space? Or at least not telling us when we approach and . . . risking our going right past? To the point of having Ciar executed?”

  Ennio bit his lip. “It seems so. I don’t like to think about it anymore than you do, but it seems so. They’re killing him just for trying to find this information.”

  “And you want us to look at the nursery rhymes?” I said, baffled. If this was true, it seemed more productive to call a public meeting; to shout it from the roof tops; to sound the alarm; to try the administrative board for treason. Which is where I came up against an obstacle. The administrative board and the captain had absolute power aboard. Who would try them?

  “No, not just look at nursery rhymes,” Ennio said. “You weren’t listening. I have compiled all the instructions on how to find the wise old owl.” He looked at me, his gaze so determined that you’d swear he was the one condemned to death and seeing only one means of escape.

  “What good would that be? Even if it’s another computer.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But we got into this by looking at the rhymes. And they all told us to find the Wise Old Owl. If you don’t come with me, I’ll look myself.”

  I took the reader from his hands, looked at his notes. If he’d culled the hints properly, then the wise old owl, whatever it was, was located in one of the external maintenance tunnels, in section 25. That section was little inhabited and I couldn’t remember ever going into that tunnel. How something like a computer would stay undetected all that time, I couldn’t imagine, but neither could I tell him categorically that it hadn’t happened.

  “Tonight,” I said. “After my parents go to bed. I’ll meet you in the alley where you were today.”

  “You’ll help me look?” he asked, and, for the first time that day, I heard a smile in his voice.

  “Of course.” The last thing I needed was an educational machine programmer lost in the maintenance tunnels. With my luck, he would trip over some wiring and destroy one of the air pumps or the light banks.

  ***

  That was the longest dinner of my life. Nighttime is artificial on the ship. It always falls at precisely 20:00, when they close the system of mirrors that brings sunlight into the ship. My mom had said that her parents said sunlight used to be a lot stronger, when we were closer to Sol. Now it had to be supplemented with specialized lamps. I knew because I had to fix them, rearrange them and, occasionally, install them.

  Plants and animals—and humans—need a certain cycle of daylight and darkness and since we didn’t have it naturally, it had to be simulated.

  My family ate an hour before nightfall, but that night we were—of course—delayed. And then mom wished to talk about the shocking news of Ciar’s arrest. I don’t know what answers I made, other than indicating how surprised I was, myself, with my father joining our dismay.

  I know it was well past their normal bed time of 22:00 when they retired. I waited another hour to make sure they were asleep, because the last thing I needed—the absolute last thing—was for them to intercept me at the door and ask where I was going or why.

  This felt like insanity, but it had that curious glimmer of a suspicion that there might be something in it. Just a sliver of hope, the barest of chances that there was something more in this than Ennio’s gallant and silly attempt to save his friend and rival.

  By the time I made it to the meeting place, I halfway expected Ennio to be gone to his bed in the bachelors’ quarters, but he was waiting, clutching his reader.

  “Right,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Come.”

  ***

  “This way.”

  Even on the most external of tunnels there were several layers of material between ourselves and space so there was no dangerous radiation. But we were on the outermost area accessible to humans. Beyond that was an area where only specialized crews in spacesuits were allowed to make repairs.

  The space was a tunnel so narrow we had to shuffle side by side along it. To compensate for the narrowness, it was very high, seeming to climb all the way up the side of the ship, to . . . the top of the ship?

  Of course, I had no business being here after hours, looking around for a chimera born of Ciar’s overexcited imagination, of Ennio’s gallant impulses and desire to save our errant friend.

  At least, I thought, I was less likely to be caught than Ciar. I’d never been here, I saw nothing here to maintain, and so I doubted that anyone could come to do anything in here and bump into us. And of course, I wasn’t leaving clear codes behind, as Ciar had.

  The problem was that there was nothing here to maintain. Just walls—not very smooth, I’ll grant you. They rarely are in the less frequently used maintenance tunnels. Occasionally there might be a protruding pipe. But that was about it.

  We seemed as likely to find a computer here as to find . . . well, a wise old owl.

  “Here,” Ennio said. “We’re supposed to stand here.” He turned into a passage so narrow we had to squeeze between the walls. The floor was solid but grimy underfoot, and the ceiling was lost somewhere in the darkness above.

  “Now what?” I asked. “The wizard comes and rescues us?”

  “What?” he said. Then he looked at his reader, bringing it up almost to touch his visor. “No. Look. It says we should climb up the wall, like the itsy bitsy spider.”

  I looked dubiously at the wall. Okay, it wasn’t smooth. But it wasn’t really rougher than any other section of wall. Those protrusions might perhaps be enough for us to hold feet and hands as we climbed. But were they designed that way? “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Mentally he retraced our steps, as his lips moved—his face visible, pale and concentrated through the visor. “Yeah, I’m sure. I counted the steps right.”

  “Okay.” I could see there was no way to get Ennio to budge from here until we climbed the wall. It was climbing down, I thought, that was going to be very hard indeed.

  But climbing up was easier than I expected. The protuberances on the wall really seemed to have been placed on purpose to make our life easier.

  And when we got up so far that the floor seemed imprecise and indistinguishable, too far from the lights cast by our suit, there were . . . rungs, like a ladder, embedded on the wall.

  Finding them made the task even simpler. It also seemed to validate the idea we were on the right trail. But were we? Or was this some forgotten maintenance path?

  ***

  “There’s a door,” Ennio said. He’d been alongside me, on another set of embedded rungs—there seemed to be five at least—and now he reached over and knocked on something that sounded hollow. “I think that’s it.”

  Maybe. Or maybe some sort of fancy maintenance closet. I figured I was the trained maintenance worker, and
should go in first. Mostly because if Ennio came across some machinery he was likely to fall on it and break it. Both the men were much better than I with words and meanings, but neither of them would know a shoe polisher from an oxygen recycler.

  I clambered across and felt for some sort of handle. There was one, of course, which I turned. I shoved the door inward.

  Light came on, inside.

  “See?” Ennio said.

  I felt Ennio close the door.

  A voice, polite and cool, sounding like a well-brought up young woman, said, “What are you seeking?”

  There were many answers to that, including asking who the woman was. But before I could speak, I heard Ennio say, “The Wise Old Owl.”

  There was a click and I thought he’d done it now, and the medtechs would come get us for a serious mind adjustment, but instead a door opened in what looked like a completely smooth wall. Ennio stepped through it, so I had to go after. I was only slightly startled when it closed. And, somehow, the chamber began to move. Like a mobile capsule.

  After awhile, it stopped. And opened.

  We looked into yet another completely blank room. Ennio led the way in, and the door closed automatically behind us.

  “What do you wish to ask theWise Old Owl?”

  The voice came from nowhere. Ennio and I spoke at the same time, “How many generations we’ve been in the ship,” he said.

  “How far are we from our destination?” I asked.

  Another click, and we looked into a large, carpeted room, with chairs, and the appearance of one of the upper-rank staterooms. It felt like one, too. It was smooth and polished.

  Almost the minute we came in and the door closed behind us, an entire wall came to life. In it an owl with enormous eyes sat on the branch of a tree, against a blue sky. “I am the wise old owl,” the pleasant young woman’s voice said.

  Of course it wasn’t an owl, or a young woman, but a computer designed for extrapolative reasoning, which explained how it had managed to understand our disparate answers and still make sure we were on the right quest. I wondered if many other people—or any other people— throughout the history of the ship had been in that first room and been sent away because they lacked the exact answer.

  I won’t relate our interaction with the computer, or at least not in detail. It had been programmed to ask us a series of questions to find what, if any, knowledge had been lost in the time since it had been buried in what appeared to be dead—or perhaps—solid space around the ship. Hidden away.

  It had also been designed to be programmed and worked with in what seemed to be plain everyday language. It answered questions by inductive logic when we asked them. Sometimes it stopped and asked us to rephrase, but it seemed to understand everything. Speaking to it was almost like speaking to a foreign-language speaker, someone who didn’t fully understand what we said, but understood most of it and could carry on a conversation. Turned out that its story was exactly what we thought—it had been hidden so that should what it called unforeseen social difficulties come to pass, there would be one computer aboard that the administration could neither reprogram nor tamper with.

  “How long have we been in the ship?” I asked, then rephrased, “How long ago did the ship leave Earth?”

  “The ship was constructed in Earth orbit.”

  I’d asked the wrong question. “How long since the ship left the sol system, then?” Ennio asked.

  “Four hundred and twenty five years,” the voice answered.

  I felt my heart clench. That had to be ten generations. Perhaps more. “How . . . how near are we to Alpha Centauri?” I asked.

  “We should prepare to slingshot around the sun in . . . twenty four hours,” the computer answered.

  Needless to say Ennio and I panicked. Twenty four hours. We couldn’t possibly learn to pilot the ship in that time.

  This was, of course, silly. Whoever had designed the ship couldn’t expect us to. Turned out it didn’t even expect us to tell it to detach the outer portion of the sail, so the outer sail could focus the lasers—similar to the lasers that had given us additional speed on leaving sol orbit—onto the inner sail and slow the ship. The ship was wired hard to this hidden computer in a way that could not be severed. This computer would be executing the maneuver, no matter how much the other computer had been corrupted or its programing overpowered.

  No, it turned out what we were needed for was something much more vital. We had to prepare everyone aboard ship for the hours of weightlessness as the ship stopped spinning while slowing and maneuvering into orbit at the new world. In the long time aboard, the practice of securing everything that could float had long stopped. Weightlessness could destroy the ponds in which we grew fish, it could forever break terminals capable of reading our records. Not to mention what it would do to toilets.

  The computer told us all that would happen, but more importantly, it said, the people aboard would need to find out about the secret lifeboat bays—the ones that couldn’t be opened, so the landers couldn’t be cannibalized for parts, as it appeared the other well-known landers had been. In the situation we were in, the wise old owl said, everyone aboard would have to be told at the same time, so that a few people couldn’t find the boats and destroy them before anyone could take them and land.

  Someone needed to tell the panicking population what was happening. Someone needed to have people expecting it and prepared. Oh, most people probably wouldn’t want to land. Not right away. Perhaps not ever. Once the ship was in orbit around our new home, and the ship’s sails retracted, life could go on as it had aboard the ship for eleven generations. Humans are creatures of habit and most people cared for nothing but their luxury rations. But after coming all this way, people should know there was another option available. An option to finish our mission. And people who wanted to leave should not be constrained to stay. And—most of all—in the confusion of the moments of weightlessness, it was necessary to keep fights from breaking out and disorder from descending on the ship. In just a few hours of riot, damage could be done that would lessen forever the chances of the colonists.

  This seemed almost impossible. Neither Ennio nor I had any particular power in the ship. And who would listen to us? Look what had happened to Ciar, just for trying to see forbidden files.

  And then I had an idea. It required me to work madly the rest of the night, but I could—and did—wire the Wise Old Owl so that it could speak to the whole ship at once. Many people might not believe it. And many people would ignore it, or suspect a prank. But at least there would be some warning. And when the people looked out at the stars around us, they’d see confirmation.

  Then—as soon as we could—we asked the Wise Old Owl what to do about Ciar. It could not—so much the worse—magically open the door to his cell. It was directly wired to the ship’s navigation and landing systems, but not to the rest of the ship. All it could do was access the other computer’s memory and tell us where Ciar was kept.

  That was enough, I assured Ennio. Even with the cell locked, I probably could open it. And when gravity stopped most people—even if alerted—would be disoriented long enough to lose track of keeping watch on a prisoner.

  They didn’t know how to cope with null g, while I did. Null-g maintenance jobs are rare but they do happen aboard ship, and I’d been trained to handle that kind of environment.

  The problem was that we were not on Earth. There was nowhere to run.

  This was when the computer pitched in with the information that the landers were also scouts. As soon as we’d escaped the pull of the star around which we’d slingshot to slow our velocity, the larger of the lifeboats could take us there, and it would have provisions for the month we would need to land and for one more month afterwards.

  We could lock ourselves in the boat and hide if the computer didn’t reveal our location until we’d departed.

  I looked at Ennio, “If there’s no life on the planet, or no life compatible with ours. If we can’t
eat the plants and animals of the world, we’re going to starve long before they come down with seeds and animals.”

  A muscle worked on the side of Ennio’s face. “I know. But if we don’t do it, Ciar will die.”

  What else is there to say? It went as planned. Well, almost as planned. Yes, the guards that had been assigned to Ciar’s cell were floating above us, completely unable to guard anything. Yes, opening his cell—with a cutting tool around the lock—was easy.

  The hard part was keeping Ciar and Ennio moving properly in null-g till we could reach the capsule that took us to the chamber of the Wise Old Owl and, this time, beyond it, to the lifeboats.

  The lifeboat—and why was it called that? It’s not like exiting to space would have saved anyone—was more comfortable than any of our lodgings, and had enough food for four people for two months.

  And the planet turned out to have food of a sort. The bodies of water contained algae. A strange fish that looked like a jelly fish had a high speed collision with a salmon. Apparently they weren’t even really fish at all, but something between a plant and an animal, which has kept our scientists baffled so far, and will probably keep them so for many years to come.

  But they were edible enough to keep us alive. Us and those who came after us.

  We’ve used Earth food plants to colonize the land and start our farms.

  It’s been thirty years since we landed and I’ve almost forgotten the stomach-churning fear of falling upward. I can look up at the deep blue night sky and feel nothing but wonder at how far we’ve come.

  Thirty years later, I realize how lucky we were. We found the computer just in time to stop confusion and rioting and to know we’d arrived. If we’d not found the computer, the administration could have said the loss of gravity was a temporary malfunction. Only astrogators would have known we were orbiting a star, and, depending on how the computer records had been changed, they might have thought it was a different star. They could have been forbidden from asking further questions. We could have been prisoners in the ship for generations.