Survey Ship (7 page)

But out here there were all those directions, multiplied into three dimensions . . . 360 to the three-sixtieth power, maybe? Up, down, and all the permutations and combinations of angles in between.

The universe is too big . . . thank God we have the computer ... all the crowding multiplicity of stars, vastness beyond imagining ... we talk glibly of light-years. But the light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth. Think of something so distant that the light takes a year, a whole year, to reach it... that's a light-year . . . the simple explanation he had been given in kindergarten, their whole education aimed at making these monstrous things close and simple and familiar and comfortable. . . .

Ravi shut his eyes, to shut out the thousand blinking lights of the bridge, and the millions of blinking stars behind it. There was just too much of it. These distances were not made by man at all, man could not envision them. The mudfish in the water hole in the outback had mapped the Great Barrier Reef. . . but was this arrogance, was it meant that mankind should do this?

Behind his closed eyes pictures formed, faces in a crowded Bombay slum, starving faces, packed filthy faces; but he had grown up clean and well-fed, educated almost beyond human possibility, to do a deed at the very limits of the possible. Why me, why was I chosen with these others? Why millions to starve and die and bumble along from day to'day, and the six of us to live in luxury and attain the limits of human possibility? Dare I think that the Great Architect of the Universe has chosen me? Is it any better to think that it was the work of random Chaos and chance?

He knew he could go mad this way, and opened his eyes, fastening them on the navigation console. His eyes slid past Peake to Moira, and, trying to wrench his
mind away from vastnesses too great to contemplate, he forced himself to think of the mundane and familiar. Moira. He had, briefly, been one of her lovers. Somehow he had begun to think, seeing Peake and Jimson, separated, that they had chosen a crew with no sexual ties to one another. He thought, trying to control an unseemly laugh, that it would have been hard to find any man in her year who had not been, at least briefly, Moira's lover. No, he didn't think was promiscuous, though one or two of the women were, but she had experimented widely, and she was a friendly girl with no special sexual inhibitions; he thought that Teague, for instance, had also been chosen, a year or so ago, to share Moira's favors.

Was she thinking about that? he wondered. Two ex-lovers on the Ship? It was simpler to lose himself into a frankly erotic reverie than to contemplate that painful vastness outside the ship, or to try and wrestle some meaning for it all from the unyielding cosmos.

Moira was not thinking about anyone, or anything, human, at all. The faint apprehension she felt, she forced down into calm; she told herself that the view from outside the dome made her dizzy, with all the stars, the Space Station moving sedately past their window every few seconds, disturbing her visual orientation. When she closed her eyes she felt quite comfortable, her stomach in place, the DeMag gravitation strong enough so that she did not lose her up-down orientation with the control board.

Peake said, “Well, it's like one of those old Navy novels — should I yell out 'Engineer, set all sails' ...”

“You're mixing your metaphors,” Fontana said. “In the days when they set sails, in the Navy, they didn't have engineers.” She too was in one of the supernu-

merary seats; they had all chosen to be present for that moment when Survey Ship 103 moved away from the Space Station, From being as nearly at rest as any body in the universe could be — moving in free-fall orbit around the Space Station — they would begin their long, slow, but steady acceleration which, within a year, would bring them to 99.3 per cent of light-speed; the highest practical speed for space travel. And so rapid would this acceleration be that, from just outside the orbit of the Moon, they would leave Pluto's orbit behind within thirteen days.

Moira wet her lips, checked the panel before her, then, deliberately, touching the buttons with gentle fingers, she pressed a certain sequence which would activate the drives. Although the drive was in another module, and the intervening total vacuum of space would not convey even a fragment of sound, she fancied that she could feel a faint vibration, somewhere, the drives setting up their vibration . . . not a sound. Not a vibration. Had it to do with her extra-sensory perception, so that she felt it somewhere inside herself, that the drives were running, like a heartbeat?

She checked the green light on the console which telemetered information, looked at a small visual panel which gave video information from the drive module. There were, of course, no moving parts, but energy was being transmitted, and outside the dome window, the Space Station began to recede, grow smaller against the background of stars. It was no longer passing their window every few seconds. It was moving away . . . no. They were moving away, Survey Ship 103 was accelerating away from the Space Station at nine point eight meters per second per second. ... at an ever-increasing velocity. Moira was not the natural mathematician Ravi was, and could not keep track of the continuing veloc-

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ity without flicking a glance at the tell-tales giving velocity, and the percentage of Tau — light-speed.

“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 cal-

culating 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.