Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (30 page)

“You’d want to be stuck with needles for a headache? The problem is that you’re homesick, Irish girl.”

“It’s not homesickness. It’s just that everything is so . . . so . . . planned. Even our genetics. When we get to Zeta Riticula, the computer will control our breeding, screen our genes, manipulate them to fit the environment, twitch and tweak us to keep us healthy. It has mission control. God knows what all it’s up to. We’re letting the computer make autonomous decisions. I just think that being human means accepting a bit more chance in our lives and staying open to wonder.”

Sierra said, “Chance and wonder gave us the mutagen and drove us off Earth. Besides, I like what the computer is doing. Did you have some of the new tomatoes for lunch? The botanist said that not only are they more resistant to disease, but it takes half the water to grow. That’s what happens when you give a computer some decision making capabilities and a lot of time to work with. Those old people invented gods because they needed to explain how their worlds worked. We engineered ours. How much farther? This is tearing up my hands and knees.”

“I think we’re there.” Anise checked the monitor again. The numbers confirmed they were on the site, but to her eye the surface appeared uniform and undamaged. She dragged her pack to where she could reach it, then pulled out a hull diagnostic device, a sophisticated tester for metal integrity. She
was
homesick. When they’d started the flight a year earlier (by their time—the Caretaker crew was awake only two weeks of every hundred years, while the ship had been traveling for 2,600 years), homesickness was an easily disregarded triviality. Anise thought now about the hills south of Letterkenny in Donegal where she’d grown up. No more wind off Trawbreaga Bay and Lough Swilly carrying a hint of salt and far away, North Atlantic storms. No more heather-covered hills.

Sierra said, “The maintenance bots have been all over this section, and they didn’t report anything.”

“I know, but I’ve got to see for myself.” Anise connected the two thumb-sized transmitters a yard apart on the hull, then pressed the diagnostic device’s trigger, sending a low-level radiation pulse through the hull, which tested whole for three feet before reaching a complicated series of cracks that lead all the way to the outer surface and the vacuum of space. Beyond that the device didn’t measure, but Anise could imagine the light years of emptiness. Light years from Earth and Ireland. Light years from Zeta Riticula. She tried to remember what the morning mist felt like on her last hike to the ancient circular fortress, Grianan of Aileach, where she stood atop the thousands of years old wall waiting for the weather to break. On a clear day she could see the Swilly estuary, the Inishowen peninsula and much of Derry, but the fog never broke. The cool, damp stones were slick under her fingers. She’d heard a noise behind her, a quick, light laugh. No one stood in the fortress’s circular sward. The tops of the wall in both directions were empty. It didn’t take much to believe that there was more to the world than appeared when she was by herself in a land filled with so many stories.

“Nothing close here.” She moved six feet and replanted the sensors.

“Which is just what the computer reported. Why can’t you admit that the hull performed the way it was designed? In the event of a collision, force is
supposed
to be transmitted laterally. That way a speck can’t poke all the way through.”

“When we’re going at a quarter of the speed of light, a ‘speck’ packs one hell of a lot of kinetic energy, and this was much more than a dust mote. The numbers say it was about the size of a marble. The ship should have shattered like a porcelain egg.” She read the results again. The cracks radiated to within a foot of the inner surface.

“I don’t get why you’re looking for a break in the hull when there clearly isn’t one. We’d be freeze-dried and vacuum-packed if there was. Do you hear a breeze? I don’t hear a breeze. The hull held. The outside squads will resurface the ship, and we’ll be back in the sleep pods before you know it.”

Anise scooted farther forward. “Well, if the numbers tell me that we should be busted, and we’re not, I’d like to know why.”

“For once the ship exceeded the design specs.”

Anise saw the crack before her monitor reported it to her. The inside surface of the hull had a grain to it, representing the millions of interwoven carbon-metal threads that gave the ship its unprecedented durability, but it needed that strength if it was going to survive the 4,000 year-long trip to Zeta Riticula intact, and deliver its crew of mostly slumbering Caretakers and frozen embryos and colonization gear to the distant planet. Her head lamp showed the break, a long, crooked line across the rough texture. The monitor confirmed it: the series of fissures emanating from the collision led all the way to here, hundreds of yards from the impact spot on the hull’s exterior.

At first it was just a hairline; then, it widened to as much as a fingernail in thickness, four feet long. Anise scrinched forward, directing her light onto the hull.

Sierra inhaled sharply. “God! You were right, but it can’t be continuous. Not to the surface.”

Anise didn’t answer. The monitor told her the story. The line was a part of a ten foot thick system of fractures. She pressed her finger against the crack, then looked at the raised mark it left on her skin. “We should be dead.”

Sierra offered, “The bots . . .”

“Were knocked out. Two hours without power while the ship rerouted energy and woke us up. Besides, they weld hull breaks. No weld here.” She unsnapped a knife from her tool belt, then poked the end into the crack. It was hard to see, since the gap was so narrow, but it didn’t appear to be more than a half inch deep. The knife stopped. She jabbed it in again. There was a little give, not like metal against metal. More like digging into wood. Carefully, she rocked the knife point back and forth. When she brought it out, a white residue coated the end.

“What is it?” asked Sierra.

“We need to get back to the lab.” Anise scraped the residue into an envelope and sealed it.

At the end of her work shift, Crew Chief Yatmaso paused at Anise’s station. His hair was uncombed, and tiredness bruised the skin beneath his eyes. “Sierra says you found a crack in the hull, a real crack?”

“It’s sealed, but that’s not what’s—”

“Thank goodness for that. The repair squads are working in gangs to refurbish the exterior. With some effort, we should be sleeping again in a few days, but it’s thrown off everyone’s schedule. There’s a committee deciding if the next crew should be awakened early, or if we should keep them on cycle. It’s an extra seventeen years before the next maintenance that way, but then we’d be back to normal. Plus, we’ve got to worry if there’s another stone like the last one in front of us. We shouldn’t have hit anything.”

Anise pushed a notebook at him. “Can you look at my numbers?”

He took the notebook in one hand and rubbed his eyebrows with the other. “Couldn’t you show me these on your computer? Your handwriting is terrible.”

She crossed her arms. “I get different numbers on the computer.”

The crew chief handed her the notebook. “Then you made a mistake.”

“The crack in the interior wasn’t welded.”

“It wasn’t leaking either. It just means the maintenance-bots missed it. The system was under a lot of stress those first hours after the collision.”

Before she could even give him a disgusted look, he left. She leaned back in her chair, the notebook in her lap. Above her monitor was a digital display from home: a long, green hill, sun-streaked and cloud-shadowed. In the foreground stood a whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof. During the summer she used to explore the hills, heather and clover and dew-damp moss in the air, sometimes taking an entire afternoon to climb one, her thighs burning. Folks called Ireland the Emerald Isle, and they were right. The more she thought about it, the greener it became. The month before the flight she’d spent seaside at Bundoran in south Donegal, where cliffs bracketed the beach on either side. Waves had carved the stone into fantastic lavender-blue formations, but behind them the hills rose, green on green.

It takes a long time to say goodbye to a country, and she didn’t realize she was,
really
realize she was until it was too late.

She flicked her monitor to the analysis of the white residue she’d found in the crack. She’d asked the computer to identify it and run a match. It was plastic, the same kind that formed almost everything on the ship that wasn’t metal. How did plastic end up blocking a crack that could have been disastrous to their mission? What saved the ship during the two hours when the maintenance bots were down?

After a few key clicks, the time line for the collision came up. At zero hundred hours, a marble-sized rock hit
The Redeemer
. Power supplies to the bots and most of the ship’s key systems, including the computer, were interrupted. Automatic routines independent of the computer kicked in, warming a Caretaker crew and searching for alternate paths around the system breaks. An hour and fifty minutes later, the computer regained ship control. The bots started moving, and ten minutes after that, the crew began to awaken to klaxons and emergency lights.

Anise tapped her finger against the monitor. The bots scurried everywhere in the record. They had to have found the crack she’d found. They couldn’t miss it. But by then it was already sealed.

Anise’s mattress felt stiff beneath her. Not that that was surprising. It was 2,600 years old, as were the sheets and blankets and the clothes she wore. Everything on the ship had a brittle look to it. The engineers and manufacturers put
The Redeemer
together out of theory and hope. Could humans survive repeated cold sleep to make the 4,000 year long trip? Could the ship keep itself repaired? Could the crew remake and recalibrate the hundreds of times it would take to arrive at the distant star? Yes, in theory.

As she tried to sleep, she thought about the computer, a redundantly designed, decentralized intelligence interlaced throughout the ship, capable of independent action, controlling all the systems, directing the toaster-sized, multi-tooled bots that scurried through the maintenance tunnels like industrious mice. What did the computer do while they were asleep? Why didn’t her collision calculations done by hand match the numbers the computer spit out? And, most nagging, how did the plastic that undoubtably saved their lives end up in the crack the bots hadn’t found?

Finally, after what seemed like hours of trying to find a comfortable position, she drifted on the self-aware edge of consciousness, half hearing the ship, half hearing the mountain rush of her own blood- stream. Lazily she thought of an old lover, long dead now on Earth. She had picked him because he looked like William Butler Yeats, a long face behind black, wire-rimmed glasses. Anise asked him to read her poetry, and as she settled deeper into sleep, she heard his voice until he became a part of a dream, and in the dream he became William Butler Yeats sitting on a rock along the trail to the flat-topped mountain, Benbulbin. Not the old Yeats who wrote “The Second Coming,” with its prophetic, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” —the rough beast indeed of the mutagen that had driven them to build the ark-ships and sent them skyward, trusting that not everything human need end—but a young man in his mid-twenties, the one who collected Irish folktales and wrote, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: nine bean rows will I have here, a hive for the honey bee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

Yeats held a walking stick in one hand, and a book lay open on his lap. “What are you looking for, lass, so early on a morning as fine as this?”

But before she could answer his question, a wind came up, and the figure of Yeats dissolved into a wisp and the rock was empty. Behind her, something laughed. She turned, and the long trail down the mountain was empty, though there were many limestone boulders a being could hide behind. She thought, there must be leprechauns or Sidhe, the fairy folk.

Yeats’s voice came out of the wisp. “One wonders if the creatures who live followed us from the ruins of our old towns, or did they come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had shone for a moment?”

Even in the dream, she was puzzled, and when she sat on the rock where Yeats had been, she found it wasn’t rock at all, but white plastic. She scraped at it and white remnants stuck under her fingernails. The wind blew again, moaning through the rocks. She could see it, eddying through the fog below her where the trail disappeared, twisting the gray cloud into fantastic shapes. For a second she saw faces. Scowling faces, and she couldn’t breathe.

They were taking the air, the faces in the fog, stealing the air from around her. The hull is breached, Anise thought. She tried to scream, but when her mouth opened all the breath rushed out. No air! She flopped off the rock, hand at her throat, while the sky darkened so quickly that within a few eye blinks stars shone through.

The hull is breached!

*

Deep in the warehouse module, Anise found what she’d been searching for, the raw polychloride supplies that served as a base for any of dozens of kinds of plastics the ship might need. Six huge vats standing on stubby legs held the chemicals. Sierra wandered toward the back of the room. “I don’t see what the point in coming down here. It’s been hundreds of years since this area’s been used.”

The low ceilinged room absorbed the sounds of their footsteps. Recessed wall lights illuminated the area poorly. Anise imagined steely-eyed little people watching them from the deep shadows. She shook her head, then popped the latch on the first vat and pushed the lid. It resisted for an instant, then the hinges gave way reluctantly. According to the records, this vat hadn’t been opened in eight-hundred years. Grainy, white flakes filled it to the top. She dipped her hand in thoughtfully. Plastic, exactly like what she’d found choking the crack in the hull fell from her grip like sand. Under the atmospheric pressure from within the ship, the plastic had solidified into an airtight seal. If the crack had been any more than a complex set of fissures, the plastic would have flown into space with their air, but the break had been so narrow and filled with twists and turns that the plastic piled up, expanded and corked the leak.