Gateways (53 page)

Next went personal correspondence. The crew was given one shift to
download all personal mail onto primitive cold cubes before that compartment of ship storage went, too. There was a lot of protest. The crew went in a body to confront the captain in the mess room.

“With respect, sir,” Callan said, “we don’t need
all
this crap. I’ve checked the files. We have hundreds of identical scans of the system! Plenty of them are redundant copies.”

“We can do without a lot of stuff, Lieutenant,” the captain said imperturbably. “I don’t want to ditch my letters from home, either, but it’s a sacrifice for the job. Should I write home and tell them we’re coming back early because you want to keep your photo collection? Put what you can on datacubes, and I promise you when we get within sending distance of home I’ll notify NASA to instruct the server to resend all of it. We’ll triage the raw information later, people. For now, we can’t be discriminatory. We need all the space there is!”

Callan, Ardway, and the others went along with the program, however reluctantly. Ardway felt he could cope without letters from home, or even his precious videos. Then, nine days before they were to depart the system, the evil day came.

Ardway, coming out a self-induced fog at the beginning of his shift, realized that Boojum wasn’t at his knee begging for an imaginary scrap from his breakfast. No little paw touched his knee; no back rubbed against his calf. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Long ago, he’d stopped thinking of the cat as a programming construct, and felt as though other people could see him. Ardway unhooked himself from the grapples holding him to the table, and felt around the floor area, wondering if the cat was lying on his side, waiting to trap his hand when he reached for him.

“Boojum,” he called softly. “Where are you, baby?”

“What’s the matter, Benny?” asked Cora Handley, the medic.

“My cat is gone,” he said, now beginning to panic. He got down on hands and knees and felt out farther. “Maybe my power pack is out of whack. Will you check it?” He undid the zipper on his coverall and pulled it down to show her the middle of his back. She swam over through the air.

“Nope,” she said, unhooking the flat box to show him. “It’s on green. How many bytes did the program take?”

“What program?” Ardway asked.

“Your cat,” said Handley. “Everything nonessential has been yanked out of the system. I guess they finally had to reach for everybody’s personal files. I’m really sorry about that. We’d all given up a little of our per areas for you. In a way, seeing you so happy lifted everybody’s morale.”

Ardway was touched by the crew’s generosity, even as he felt dismay rising in him. “He’s gone?”

“Until we hit sending distance of home again, it looks that way,” Handley said, with real sympathy in her blue eyes. “Don’t worry. I’m sure Johnson put it on a disk somewhere. He wasn’t about to lose all the complicated programming the two of you have done on Boojum. He even thinks he’d like to market it when he gets home. You couldn’t be an isolated case, though I’m thankful you’re the only one on this mission. No offense, honey.” She tilted her head toward her office. “Come and see me if you need to talk. I promise I’ll listen.”

Ardway felt like mourning, even though Boojum wasn’t really dead. He had come to enjoy it, to believe in it as if it was real. The loss twisted his heart until he could hardly breathe. Cats helped provide him with a sense of identity, and he had almost nothing left. He had given up the vids he’d taken of his cats to store navigational data. Oh, the videos were just copies, but the originals, like the cats, were trillions of miles away. Home. On Earth. Boojum had made the separation bearable, and now he was backed up on disk somewhere, just as if he wasn’t real.

Of course he wasn’t real, Ardway scolded himself. But it’d felt that way. The complex programming Johnson had given him had taken on a personality so he was virtually a real cat.

“I can handle this,” Ardway said, firmly. He went about his shifts, ate his meals, and did his job, but all the time half hoping that the loss of the cat was a glitch, and that he would be back soon. He started to get edgy and snappish again. The techs on caffeine or alcohol rations or nicotine patches were starting to give him dirty looks. He was an addict of a different kind, and his fix had been withdrawn from him. He missed Boojum. He went to appeal to Captain Thurston.

“No, you can’t have your cat back. The damned thing isn’t real!” the captain roared.

“He’s real to me, sir,” Ardway said humbly. “Please. I’ll sacrifice any of my personal files you want.”

“They’re all gone anyhow, Lieutenant,” the captain said impatiently. “So are all of mine.”

It was true, but Ardway was desperate. “There must be something, sir. I’m begging you!”

Thurston snapped, and stood up, glaring. Rumor had it he was wearing a sedative patch, too. “There’s nothing, dammit. This project must be accomplished. Go back to your station. Now, spaceman!”

Glumly, Ardway went back to his station. His hands kept doing the work, but neither his mind nor his heart were in it.

Without his program he started to withdraw into himself again. It wasn’t the sight of cats he missed. He had permanent 3D images of Parky and Blivit. Those couldn’t be rerecorded, so they’d been spared in the data crunch. It was the physical contact, the constant checking in that cats did, the “Hi, how are you?” touches that he missed. Captain Thurston avoided him, and rumor had it that he would cheerfully have spaced him if he could have found an excuse. Ardway didn’t care about his own well-being anymore. He took to shutting himself in the cubicles again.

But he was not alone in isolating himself. Other members of the crew were now suffering from detachment as much as he was. Without entertainment media to keep their minds busy, they were becoming touchy and sniping at one another. He hadn’t realized it had gone so far until the day he saw the unflappable Cora Handley haul herself into the carrel next to his and slam the door.

Benny Ardway was grateful for all the kindness his crewmates had shown him over the past months. At that moment he determined to pay it back as much as he could.

He floated over to bang on the cubicle door.

“Hey, Handley!” he shouted. “Did you ever hear the one about the computer programmer and the cow?”

From that decisive moment onward, Ardway became everyone’s court jester. Whenever he had an audience of even a single person in the mess hall or the break room, he sang songs, told every joke he knew, and made up silly games to involve the bored crew. He even oversaw a card tournament.

“The first card party in space,” he insisted. Neither he nor anyone else on board knew how to play bridge, and no books remained to teach them how, so he taught them Crazy Eights. He told stories.

“And not one word about a cat,” Callan marveled at the end of an evening. It was praise, however offhand, and Ardway glowed. In hopes of soothing everyone else’s misery, he had forgotten about his own. Though the mesh suit no longer worked he continued to wear it. He slept in it, showered in it, did his shifts in it. He considered it a kind of amulet. It was his physical contact, as much as anything else, to help keep him sane. With that to bolster him, he gave all he had to planning entertainment for his companions.

Three months passed that felt like three years. Half the crew was overweight from eating out of boredom; the other half was musclebound from
intensive bodybuilding for the same reason. But they were all in better spirits than might have been expected, thanks to Ardway’s evening antics.

Having something else to concentrate on also kept him more alert at his job. As the ship’s navigator he was the first to know the moment they arrived back within hailing distance of Earth. Ardway saw the readings come up on the astrogation console. He looked up at the viewscreen. There was nothing to see, but the computers confirmed the good news. Yes! He bounced up, straining against the straps holding him in his seat during zero-gee. Whirling his arms he spun around to face the center seat, where Thurston sat rotating a couple of ball bearings in his palm. “Captain, we’ve just entered line of sight to Earth!”

“Thank God,” the captain said, showing animation for the first time in weeks. His smile wrapped clear around his handsome, strong-jawed face. “Helm!”

“Sir!” Lawes exclaimed, the force of her salute throwing her to the end of her restraint straps.

“Drop us out of warp. Communications, send a tachyon squirt to Mission Control, my dictation begins now. This is Captain Thurston on the
Calliope
. We’re about halfway home from Gliese. We’ve got data for you beyond your wildest dreams, folks. We’re going to start sending you digital squirts on this beam. In return, we need a few things. Attached to this transmission is a list of personal comm numbers for my crew. Do me a favor: check those out and send whatever’s in the servers. There’s a lot of lonely people here who need a word from home.” Ardway and the others in the control room broke into cheers. The captain raised his voice over the din. “Plus some good music. And a few new vids wouldn’t hurt. We’ve been reduced to watching
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
almost every night after chow.”

After some days had passed, a message came back from Mission Control. The sound of the controller’s voice was punctuated with hoots of hysterical laughter, the response of the ground crew hearing the captain’s plea.

“Roger that,
Calliope
. Entertainment on the way. Can’t wait to see the vacation photos, folks! Welcome back to Sol!” A steady stream of digital data came in the wake of the reply.

A few weeks after the first message, another squirt from Mission Control came through, and there was awe in the communication officer’s voice. “First sixty terabytes of data received! You’ve got a wow coming from the big brass,
Calliope
. We’re proud of you. I don’t frigging
believe
what you’re sending back!”

“It took sacrifices from whole crew,” Captain Thurston said, and he looked straight at Ardway when he said it. “Okay,” he said to the waiting crew. “You saw the receipt. You can dump the redundant scans from the first 60T.” The crew started cheering wildly.

“Mail call,” Polson, the communications officer said, with a grin on his face. “I feel like Santa Claus.” Anyone who was not on duty kicked off for their cabins to hear their messages. Ardway had to wait until shift’s end to download his mail, but he was pleased to see he had received three new uploads, audio and video, from his cat sitter. He thought both Melanie and the cats looked a little older, but they all seemed healthy and happy. A big knot rose in his chest. He missed them so much. And, though he’d never seen it, he missed Boojum. Ardway chose a frame of his cat sitter holding Parky and Blivit on her lap, and left it glowing on the face of his reader beside his bunk when he went to sleep.

Ardway drifted drowsily halfway between sleep and waking, batting at the buzzing alarm in the bed head. The astrogation program was due for a check-over, although it had been ticking along the whole mission without hiccuping once. He glanced over at the picture on his viewer and smiled.

“Be seeing you soon, kids,” he said. Suddenly, something hard stabbed him in the bladder twice, then struck him in the leg as if it was rolling off the end of his bunk heading toward the door. Ardway threw off the covers and looked around. There was nothing there, but he knew what had happened. Boojum was back!

“Hey, kitty!” he cried. “Wait for me.” He started to roll over to unfasten his net, starting to swim toward the door, when he felt the pounding sensations again, knocking him back against the padded wall. Those footsteps were going in the same direction as the previous ones. Ardway shook his head. There must be a hiccup from the program being downloaded and uploaded again. It was repeating actions. He was going to have to help Johnson to fix it as soon as he had a break. But his virtual cat was back. He was delighted. He couldn’t wait to pet Boojum and welcome him home.

Ardway clambered out of his net, and pulled himself down to his clothing locker. Something thumped against his leg, struggling, and sharp pains lacerated his calf and knee.