Richard Russo

by Ship of Fools

  I laughed to myself, hearing that, for I couldn’t help thinking about what had happened on our last landfall, when the bishop tried to do something similar—convert a city, an entire colony, to the Church—although in his case he attempted to do it by force, not by words. A disaster, as I have already mentioned. He should have read the Bible more carefully.

  The bishop paused, and I nearly nodded off. Protocol required me to attend holy day services, but protocol couldn’t always keep me awake, especially when the bishop preached. I tipped my head back and stared up into the shadowed reaches of the vaulting high above me, thinking about this vast and solemn place and thinking, as the bishop wanted, about the uncertain mission of the Argonos.

  The bishop claimed the ship’s mission was to spread the word of God throughout the galaxy, even throughout the entire universe, to man and alien alike (there was no recorded contact with intelligent alien life that anyone was aware of, but the bishop continued to hope). The bishop pointed to his unshakable faith and his exalted position in the ship’s hierarchy as evidence for the religious nature of the ship’s mission, which I found unconvincing. What was convincing, however, was the existence of the cathedral.

  There could be little doubt that the cathedral had been incorporated into the original design of the ship. The occasional suggestion that the cathedral had been built into the ship at some far later date, after the Church had forced its way into a stronger position within the ship’s social structure, was absurd. Structural engineers pointed to the cathedral’s size and its central location, as well as the way the ship’s infrastructure so perfectly accommodated it. The main section of the cathedral was over 450 meters in length and 125 meters in height, with a set of enormous stained-glass windows behind the apse actually comprising a section of the ship’s outer hull. Physical deflectors and an array of energy shields protected the stained-glass from the forces and debris of interstellar travel. There were also extensions from the cathedral and other connected aisles and chapels that ran throughout that level of the Argonos, culminating in the galilee, a small, private, and secured chapel which had its own much smaller stained-glass windows lit from an interior light source.

  I looked back at the bishop, trying to remain alert, hoping to get some idea of what he planned for Antioch, and for Nikos.

  “Bring people the word of God: that is one of the most important things we can do. The exploration and colonization of worlds presents us with one of our greatest opportunities to do just that. Human and alien alike, we all need God, we all need to know His word and His works. It is one of our missions to bring the word of God to those who are ignorant of Him, and to establish outposts on those places where others may come in the future.”

  I started losing interest again because he was moving on to one of his regular sermons. The bishop’s dream was to set up an intergalactic network of missions committed to converting all intelligent beings, “human and alien alike,” and bringing them into the Church.

  He had visions of grandeur, and he was arrogant. But he had a great deal of power, which was growing day by day as Nikos’s power waned. I sat through the rest of his sermon, no longer listening, but watching him, and I grew more and more afraid that I was seeing my future.

  5

  THEArgonos was still seventeen days out from Antioch when I returned to the chamber to check on the bishop’s progress with his new machine. I wanted to know what it was; I needed to be prepared.

  After stepping inside the chamber and closing the door quietly behind me, I stood motionless in the darkness and listened. I couldn’t hear anything except a distant ticking sound that could have been metal cooling, or water dripping, or perhaps something else altogether. No light or glow of any color. The air was cooler, with a hint of moisture.

  I switched on my hand torch and made my way through the chamber, choosing a path by guesswork; there were no lights or sounds to guide me this time, although I knew the general direction. Twice I thought I heard something, footsteps perhaps, but both times when I stopped to listen I heard only the faint ticking and other ambient sounds.

  I finally reached familiar territory—the two large cylinders and the corroded metal structure I had crawled through the last time I had been here. Once again I was perched above the open bay. This time, however, there was only a silent, lifeless structure below me; no bishop, no other men.

  There was no easy way down, so I worked my way around the upper edge of the bay to the far end and the ramp leading down into it from a large, open corridor. I walked down the ramp, my footsteps echoing dully, and approached the massive structure. It seemed dead and somehow incomplete. Perhaps the bishop had abandoned it and moved on to other projects.

  A metallic scraping noise startled me, followed by a cry of pain. I swung around, sweeping the torch beam across the jungle of broken machinery surrounding the bay. The light caught a pair of eyes that tried to pull back. I steadied the beam and held it on the face of a boy staring down at me from above a mound of twisted wire and metal. The boy tried to shift to the side, then back again, but his foot and leg were caught in the wire, and it seemed that the more he struggled against it, the deeper his leg went.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said to him. “It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  But the boy kept struggling, and there was panic in his eyes. I wondered whether he didn’t understand me, or didn’t believe me.

  I moved the light away from his face and walked back up the ramp, then worked my way toward him. I stopped when I was still several meters away, and aimed the light at the tangle of metal and wire that trapped his leg. I tried talking to him again.

  “I won’t hurt you. I just want to help you get your leg free. Do you understand me?”

  I moved the light up just enough so that its halo faintly illuminated his face. The panic had changed to defiance, but I was certain the fear was still there, camouflaged. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old.

  “My name’s Bartolomeo,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  The boy finally spoke. “Let me see your face,” he demanded.

  I swung the torch around and lit up my face from below.

  “You look weird,” he said. “What’s that metal behind your neck?”

  “Part of my exoskeleton.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A special support for my body, for my back and neck. My spine is . . . defective.” I tried again. “What’s your name?”

  He hesitated, grimaced, then said, “Francis.”

  “A saint’s name.” An automatic response, which I immediately regretted. The boy’s grimace twisted even more.

  “Yeah, that’s what my mom told me. But I’m no saint, and I never will be.”

  I turned the light back onto his trapped leg and started slowly forward. “Let me help you with that. You don’t want to get stuck in this place. No one would ever find you in here, and you’d starve to death.”

  “You found me,” Francis said. “And that big bald guy would come around pretty soon. I wouldn’t starve.”

  “The big bald guy? You mean the bishop?”

  “I don’t know.” I was right next to the boy now and I could see him shrug. “He comes here and other places, and he builds machines.”

  Yes . . . he builds machines. I knelt beside the boy and aimed the light down into the chaotic webwork of metal and wire. His leg was buried in it to midthigh.

  “Any idea what that machine does?” I asked the boy.

  “Not really. Makes a weird sound and it gets real hot. But it doesn’t go anywhere. He likes these old machines, he likes to make them work.”

  “You don’t know who the bishop is?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been to the cathedral?” I began carefully pulling and pushing at the wire around his thigh, creating a gap around his trouser leg.

  “Is that the big church?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never been
there.” He paused, and I could almost sense him staring down at me. “Your arms aren’t real.”

  “They’re real,” I replied. “They’re just not flesh and muscle and bone.”

  “They’re not real,” he insisted.

  I nodded, smiling to myself. “I guess you have a point.”

  “And there’s something wrong with your foot.”

  “Yes, club foot. I was born that way.”

  “Your body’s pretty messed up.”

  “Yes. But I get by just fine. No, don’t move your leg yet; hold still until I tell you to pull.” A twisted metal rod had become wedged against his knee. I couldn’t get a good grip on it, but I pulled at it anyway. My fingers slipped; I grabbed the rod again, grip better this time, and managed to pry it a few centimeters away from his leg.

  “All right, try pulling your foot out now, slowly.”

  The leg came up a bit, but his foot was caught almost immediately. It was stuck underneath a bundle of corroded wire.

  “Can you straighten your ankle and twist your foot around to the right a little?”

  There was some slight movement, but he stopped. “It hurts,” he said.

  “All right, let me work on it some more.” I lay down on my stomach and stretched my arm far down, grabbed the bundled wire, and pulled. There is a lot of strength in my prosthetic fingers and arms; suddenly the wires broke apart and the boy’s foot came free. He pulled his leg and foot all the way out and stumbled backwards. He sat down on a metal bench that was attached to a dark blue apparatus littered with broken rubber belts.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  Francis nodded. “Foot still hurts is all.”

  I sat beside him. “Do you think you can walk?”

  He snorted. “I can walk.”

  “What were you doing in here?”

  The boy shrugged. “Looking around.”

  “Do you come here often?”

  “Sometimes. And other places like this. I like them.”

  “How about school?”

  Francis barked out a laugh. “What’s the point of that?”

  “Do your parents know you come here?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  I hesitated, feeling a sharp pain of recognition in my chest. “No parents at all?”

  Francis didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his feet and rubbed his left ankle.

  “No father,” he finally said. “My mother’s sick. They say she’s dying and they won’t let me see her. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “Who are you living with, then?”

  “No one.”

  “No one?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  Yes, I thought, he probably could. But that wasn’t excuse enough for a thirteen-year-old boy to be living alone. “Don’t you have some other family? Sisters or brothers or aunts and uncles? Grandparents?”

  “Yeah, but they don’t really want me.” He shrugged again. “I don’t want them, either, so it kind of works out.”

  I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t say anything. Then I noticed he had no light.

  “Don’t you have a hand torch, or some kind of light?” I asked.

  “I dropped it back there, when I got stuck.”

  I climbed across the mound of wire and searched for it with my own light. Far inside I saw what might be another hand torch; I lay down and tried to dig for it. But it was well beyond my reach; I realized there was no way I could ever get to it.

  “I can’t reach it,” I said. “We’ll go out together.”

  The boy didn’t respond. When I turned around to ask him where I should take him, he was gone. I swung the light around, among the hulks of old machines, between hanging cables and rusting metal rods, but saw no sign of him. He couldn’t have gone far.

  “Francis.”

  I listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything.

  “Francis.” Louder this time. Again no response, no sound of movement.

  I knew he was nearby, motionless and silent, cloaked in shadows. I was also fairly certain that if I searched long enough I would find him. But he didn’t want to be found, and I felt I should honor his wishes. There was something about the boy that reminded me of myself.

  I stood watching and listening, still reluctant to leave him, but his wishes were clear.

  “Goodbye, Francis,” I finally said. “I hope I’ll see you again.”

  There was still no response, so I headed out on my own.

  I have no parents. Certainly there was a woman who gave birth to me (the bishop and the Church forbade all use of artificial wombs), and certainly there was a man who fathered me, in either the “natural” way or as a donor—probably the former, although the use of artificial insemination would have been far easier to conceal than the use of an artificial womb. So I almost certainly had parents of some kind, but I have never known who or what they were.

  I was born an orphan, presumably because of my deformities, and was raised communally by a small circle of families high within the social and command structures of the ship, which leads me to suspect that my parents were among that circle, or at least had some influence.

  I am almost sure that my deformities were known well before my birth, but for some reason I was not aborted (the Church’s strictures against abortion did not seem to stop most convenience terminations). I imagine there are a number of people who later regretted that decision, whatever the reasons for it at the time. This always gave me some degree of satisfaction.

  The people who were my parents may still be alive. I doubt that it would have been difficult to discover who they are, or were, but I never tried. They decided to abandon me at birth, so I have returned the favor throughout my life. As far as I am concerned, they no longer exist, and never did.

  6

  PÄR was talking mutiny.

  There was no other word for it. The thought filled me with both excitement and fear.

  We met again, this time in the Snow Gardens, which were currently out of season. There was no snow on the ground, and the trees were completely bare, without even a dusting of frost or ice. But the air was cold, burning the nose and biting at the lungs. We walked through a forest of skeletal trees, the dead dry leaves and branches cracking and snapping under our boots.

  “There are a lot of people who want to leave the ship,” Pär said when we were deep into the woods.

  “Where are they going to go?” I asked disingenuously. “Out the air lock?”

  Pär scowled up at me. “When we reach Antioch. You know that’s what I mean.”

  “Temporarily, or permanently?”

  “Permanently.”

  “It may not be habitable.”

  “It probably is, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “But even if it is habitable, we don’t know what we’ll find.”

  “It doesn’t matter. These people will want to leave the ship under any and all circumstances. Join those already living there, in the extremely unlikely event we find anybody, or start their own settlement if the place is deserted. They won’t care about hardships. Anything to get off this damned ship. Permanently.”

  “Downsiders,” I said.

  Pär nodded.

  We walked on in silence for a while, our breaths like disintegrating smoke. The Snow Gardens appeared to go on for kilometers when they were in season and there was snow everywhere, the ground blanketed and the densely leaved trees heavy with snow and ice. But now the boundaries were visible—the gray walls enclosing the gardens, which were in need of basic maintenance; the dark ceiling high above us, pitted and cracked, appearing nothing at all like the vast and open sky it was in season with chaotic cloud images moving across its surface.

  We neared a wall and changed direction. Directly ahead of us was a half-burned tree, branches and trunk charred and broken.

  “There would need to be a vote,” I finally said to him.

  Pär snorted. “Yeah, but what kind
? None of the downsiders would be voting.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “On the other hand, the vote would be taken not by the Executive Council, but by the full Planning Committee.”

  “Either one, we know how that vote would go.”

  “It depends on the circumstances.”

  “Crap,” Pär said with disgust. “They’d never agree to let people leave. Especially not downsiders. They need them to do the scut work—cleaning and maintenance, all the manual labor this ship needs, and needing more all the time. Not to mention providing the servants for you all.”

  He was right, of course. Over the years, the issue had come up several times in Executive Council sessions as well as in other informal discussions. With few exceptions, no one wanted to allow the downsiders to leave, unless the upper-level residents were to also leave the ship, which was as unlikely as finding anyone alive in this solar system. Those in the upper levels were afraid to leave the Argonos after all these centuries; they were afraid they would lose the power and control they had over the downsiders. They were right to be afraid.

  “We can help each other,” Pär eventually said.

  “You said that once before.”

  “And I mean it now as much as I did then.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was after, or what he could offer in return, so I finally asked him.

  “You have shipwide access,” he said, “full authority over all systems.”

  “Not all,” I corrected. “I cannot launch weapons on my own. I cannot shut down life support. I cannot change or set course—”

  Pär shook his head in dismissal. “You have access to everything we need.”

  He said we. So he was with them, which I had already suspected. But I wondered if his we was meant to include me as well.