Survey Ship (8 page)

“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.”

Watching her hands move on the consoles, as surely as they had moved upon the computer, Peake envied her self-sufficiency.

She doesn't need anybody. She has never had this sense of being only half a person, only half alive, the rest of the self moving away at nine point eight meters per second per second ... it overwhelmed him to think how far apart he was already from Jimson, separated already by time as well as distance.

Ching slid open a panel; a savory smell emerged from the inside. She said, “I hope you like your steak well done.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, chagrined, “I like it rare, but I'll eat it any way it comes, Ching.”

“I like it well done,” Teague said, somersaulting down from the spincter lock. "Ouch! Someday I'll have to get used to where the gravity is in the different mod-

ules! Can I have that one, Ching, and you fix a rare one for Peake? Don't tell me your friend the computer mixed up the orders? I thought computers were infallible!"

Ching shook her head, handing him the plate of well-charred “steak.”

“A computer,” she said, glad to have something else to think about, “is an idiot savant. It does just exactly what it is told, and absolutely nothing it is not told to do. It's only as intelligent as the person who programs it — and the person who uses it. It could have all the knowledge of the universe inside — ” she waved at the console of the food processor, “and it wouldn't be a bit of good unless somebody knew exactly the right instructions to give it, put into the computer in exactly the right way. I must have put in the wrong input — I thought I had it marked for rare, because I tend to digest proteins better when they're somewhat under-coagulated — but it came out well done. But the computer isn't at fault, only the instructions I gave it. A computer is exactly like an idiot savant. Remember the little boy they had on one of the training films we saw? He was blind, autistic, and couldn't be toilet-trained, but at the age of nine he could add a column of ninety figures in his head. He didn't know how he did it — in fact, he couldn't be asked how he did it, because he seemed to understand numbers, but not verbal speech concepts. But you put in numbers and he would come up with the right answer.” As Ravi came in, still interlaced with Moira, handing her carefully down into the change of gravity in the DeMag units, she asked, "Is that how you do your lightning-calculation, Ravi? I can understand an autistic idiot doing that — he has nothing else to occupy his mind — but you're highly intelligent and verbal too. Yet you compute automati-

cally, in the same way as that autistic idiot-savant."

“I wish I knew, Ching,” Ravi said. “All I can say is that old cliche” from psychology — a normal person uses five per cent of his brain cells, the greatest geniuses maybe five per cent more than that. The other ninety per cent — well, who knows what's inside it? Wild talents like Moira's ESP, or mine, or the idiot-savant's. Maybe anything, maybe nothing. Who knows? Who cares? Thank you, Ching,“ he added, taking a plate with a sizzling chunk of rare meat on it, ”this is perfect."

“I'll have one just like it for you in five seconds, Peake,” Ching promised. “Is yours done well enough, Teague? How would you like yours cooked, Fontana?” She felt a surge of pleasure; they might not like her, but at this moment she was catering to their enjoyment, she was useful to them.

Ravi and Moira, still entwined loosely, ate, feeding each other choice bites from their plates. Teague and Fontana chatted, smiling.

“You're a harpsichordist, a pianist, Fontana. And of course the weight problem, lifting a piano or harpsichord from Earth, would be impossible. But you have an electronic keyboard, don't you?”

She nodded. “They warned me about that when I decided to specialize in keyboard music,” she said, “that any career off-planet would mean abandoning almost everything I'd done in music.”

“It should be possible to build a harpsichord,” Teague mused. “We've certainly got time enough, and we can machine any parts we want to very precise tolerances. Building here on shipboard, we can synthesize the materials ...”

She shrugged. “I can play recorder and flute some, and an electronic keyboard will do for accompaniment,” she said, “and I never had any serious ambitions
as a solo instrumentalist. It isn't as if I'd had a talent like Zora's. That kind of talent sweeps away everything else. Nobody with that much musical talent would have cared whether they made Ship or not, and of course they wouldn't —”

“I don't think it's a question of talent,” Moira said, “Mei Mei had a voice as good as Zora's. What she didn't have was the drive, the ambition if you like. It isn't talent that makes a performer. It's desire — what a person wants more than anything in the world. I think all six of us wanted to make the Ship more than anything else, and we had more drive and ambition than the ones who turned up second to us.”

“I'm not so sure,” Fontana demurred, “at least half the class never wanted anything else but to be on the Ship, and at least thirty of them got cut out. I think there's a certain amount of luck involved — ”

“Luck!” Ching scoffed, “luck has nothing to do with it! We're here because, basically, we worked harder than the others at what it takes ...”

“Compatibility, too,” Teague said, “I think they tried mixing different combinations and we just came up as the ones who were most likely to be able to adjust...”

“I suspect,” said Peake, “that we'll be debating that point for the next nine years or so! Why it was us, and not some other members of our class. But does it matter?” He yawned. “I'm tired. Excuse me — I want to explore the sleep cubicles. It's your on-shift in navigation, Ravi, if anything should come up — ”