Going Interstellar (40 page)

Besides, I was mom and dad’s only daughter. Mom had got into some trouble when she was young. I’d never found out exactly what it had been, but whatever it was meant she was only licensed for one child, so here I was. And it didn’t seem fair to move out before I absolutely needed to.

Mom insisted on fussing over my going to the dance with Ennio, and finding me one of the dresses she’d worn when she was young and which she hadn’t traded in for material credits. It looked very odd on me, because though our bodies are about the same size, mom is a beautiful woman, delicate and blond. I’m . . . not. But she said I looked beautiful in the pink, ruffled top and skirt, and she found me the shoes that went with them. Though she told me I could do better than Ennio, she approved of my playing the field.

But she didn’t mention Ciar and I didn’t think of him, until I got to the dance. Both Ennio and Ciar were standing at the entrance, looking out with anxious expressions.

The way their faces cleared when they saw me approaching did my heart good, but I soon saw that they were relieved for completely different reasons, as Ennio looked towards Ciar and said, “See, I told you she was fine. You and your paranoia.”

“I’m not paranoid,” Ciar said, in an urgent whisper. “And don’t talk about it here. And I have to show you something.”

Ennio lowered his eyebrows, as his features shaped into a frown. “You are insane. This is a dance. Nia came here to dance.”

I could see, past his shoulders, the dimmed lights, and couples gyrating to the convoluted strains of something that—from my classical music history—I knew should be a waltz, but wasn’t. Not quite. They called it the Cuddle Bug, but really, like the waltz in its time it was an excuse for young people to hold each other and spend time together in a form the population planners might otherwise find inappropriate in unmarried couples.

Ennio put his hand on my forearm to guide me inside, but Ciar was shaking his head, making his hair flop in front of his eyes. “Come. Forget the dance. This is more important.” His voice got louder, as he got more agitated, and I could see Ennio thought that if he were to refuse to listen to whatever Ciar had to say, Ciar was quite likely to cause a scene and then we’d all be investigated for—at the very least—antisocial activities.

“You just want to undercut my one chance to dance with Nia,” Ennio said, in the tone of someone trying desperately to turn the whole thing into a joke.

“No,” Ciar said. “No, this is important.”

And it was clear that to him it was. Not just a joke, not just a side pursuit, not just a way to take the shine off his rival. At any rate, I told myself, it was impossible that either of them was that serious about their rivalry. First, they were as good friends as two young men of their solitary temperaments could be. And second, suppose one of them won my hand. The other one could find a woman just as good looking and with as good prospects on any given evening, at the single women’s dormitory. Frankly, I thought the only reason they both courted me was because it allowed all three of us to spend time together, as we had since we’d started instruction.

I could see Ennio weigh all this too, and judge the anxiety in Ciar’s eyes, and the way he kept looking around wildly, as though sure he was being followed. And then a hint of resignation appeared in his eyes, as it had in our childhood, when we finally gave in to one of Ciar’s crazy schemes and investigated his mad suspicions—like the time Ciar had decided that the food in the cafeteria was made from the bodies of people who died and the entire thing with the recycler and converter was a cover up. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Let’s dispose of your insanity, shall we? What did you discover this time? Are they using school children for propulsion?”

But Ciar didn’t laugh or argue, he just shook his head, and his voice changed to a whisper. “I’ll go ahead. You don’t want to be seen with me. Or at least, we shouldn’t leave together,” he said. “I’ll go ahead, and then in ten minutes or so, meet me at the archive.”

“At the—” Ennio said.

“Where I work. You know very well where it is. I’ll leave it open for you.”

His being in his place of work after hours seemed strange enough. If he didn’t have a work order from his supervisor, he could get into serious trouble over it. His letting us in after hours was even more dangerous.

“He’s riding for a fall,” Ennio said, as he watched Ciar leave. “I wonder what’s got into him?”

“Isn’t it strange,” I said, “how we use expressions for things long vanished, things neither we nor anyone on board the ship could know about personally?”

Ennio gave
me
an odd look. “What are you talking about now?” he asked.

“Riding for a fall. None of us has ever
ridden
anything.”

He rolled his eyes. “We’ve ridden the ship our whole lives,” he said. “But that’s not the point. Don’t you go talking of old language now, or I’ll think both of you have gone completely insane. I wonder what he’s chasing?”

“Something related to those nursery rhymes, I think.”

Ennio made a sound that, without being a profanity, consigned the nursery rhymes and everyone who wrought them to the hells of the ancients. “You’re not going to marry him, are you, Nia?” he asked me, with a pleading look. “The man is my best friend, but sometimes I think he’s a half-wit. He does more thought transgression in ten minutes than other people do in their entire lives.”

I shrugged. “I’m not going to marry anyone,” I said. “At least not just yet. I have enough to support myself, and I enjoy living at my parents’ lodging. Why bother merging, when I can fly solo just as well?”

He gave me a wolfish smile that told me he wasn’t buying my answer, not for a second, then tugged on my arm again, gently this time. “But you do dance, don’t you, Nia? Come and dance with me.”

We did dance, in the dark, confined warmth of the great room of the bachelor’s quarters. I knew from visiting Ennio there—usually under close supervision—that this room was normally used for terminals for learning or gaming or any other leisure activities, but someone had cleared them all away, and dimmed the lights to the lowest setting and the large, well-lit room looked like a cavern, confined and close. The semi-darkness made the whole space more intimate, more . . . isolating, so that while you spun with your partner to the winding strains of the Cuddle Bug the two of you might well have been in the middle of nowhere, gloriously alone.

And the music was sensuous, I’ll give you that. The warm firmness of Ennio’s chest against mine was reassuring, his arms around my body were comforting. But as one set ended and another began, I pulled away, regretfully, and whispered to him, “Come on, we’d better meet him.”

“Nia,” Ennio whispered back, looking betrayed.

“Do you want to risk what he might do if we don’t meet him?”

“No . . . no. I guess not. I . . . oh, but he’s a pain.”

I smiled up at his annoyed expression. Perhaps he was courting me in earnest after all. Oh, sure, he could find a better bride around any corner and down any section corridor, but maybe he didn’t know that.

I’m a woman of machines and solid objects. I understand malfunctions based on some defective component, and I understand the logic of mechanics. I also understand humans aren’t always logical, which is why they are such bewildering creatures. And why I normally do my best not to get that involved with them. But sometimes I still have trouble with the idea that humans aren’t logical in their choice of a mate.

I’ve read the classic romances just as well as everyone else has, but the one thing no one ever explained to me was exactly why people did any of these things. And perhaps that was where I failed to understand Ennio. Maybe he was in the grip of one of those illogical convictions that only one woman would do for him, and that I had to be that woman. I don’t pretend to understand, but I was gratified by it anyway.

I gave him my arm, and we walked, in an ambling sort of way, as if we had nothing much to do, out of the room, out of the center, down a corridor, then down another, on a seemingly random path.

“People will think we are bundling,” I told Ennio. “But I get a feeling it’s better than their thinking that we’re meeting Ciar. I don’t think this time if we’re caught we’ll escape with just a severe reprimand, like the time we got into the kitchens to find out where meat came from.”

Ennio nodded. “Oh, yeah. He’s always getting us into crazy adventures. And would it be so bad if we were?”

“If we were
what
?” I asked. “Trying to figure out where the meat comes from?” I was counting back the years since the last crazy adventure and figuring out that even Ciar might be allowed a moment of insanity every ten years or so.

“If we were going to bundle,” he said.

“Unauthorized contact before marriage?” I asked. “Do you want your coupons docked and your child allowance lowered?”

He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged, and this time I wondered which of us had lost his mind.

So we didn’t talk about it anymore. Instead, we walked down the corridors, more or less aimlessly, until we were far enough away that we could head back in the direction we were supposed to be going, to meet Ciar.

This circuitous route took us through narrow little tunnels, the ceramic material that curved overhead patched in a hundred places. Then we emerged onto a larger path amid fields, which were planted with some form of wheat that gave off a rich and earthy smell.

And then we curved back toward lodgings and the administrative buildings, and fetched up at the door to the archives. Which was closed, the lights off on either side, of course. For a moment I wondered if Ciar was in there, or if he had decided to skip this anyway, or even if this was some sort of elaborate prank. But Ciar didn’t play pranks, and even Ennio knew that.

Making another sound that betrayed his annoyance, Ennio pushed at the door. It swung inward.

Come into my home, said the spider to the fly
flitted through my mind and that, too, I thought, was a fragment of some long-forgotten story. But I went in, as Ennio held the door open for me.

The archives was where they kept all the data for everything in the ship, and for everything before the ship. Somewhere beneath us computers sat that were separate from the computers used for navigating and powering the ship, but could look into those if needed. Into this computer had been poured all of the knowledge of humanity since we’d first walked on two legs in that Earth which I’d only observed in illustrations and only read about in books, but never actually seen.

It was possible that they’d skipped a file teaching us how to chip flint, but everything else was in it, from animal husbandry and taming to the shaping of clay and the smelting of metal. Everything needed to start human civilization as far up as possible on our ladder of learning, in the new world.

And because, by the time we’d left, humanity had worked out that knowledge wasn’t often as simple and clear cut as it seemed, this repository involved other skills that would seem less important to interplanetary civilization, including linguistics and literature, law, history and other disciplines where people argued a lot and used math very little.

Ciar and his fellow linguists worked here translating and transcribing: a work that would be needed until all records were converted, which is to say probably forever.

The space looked like what it was. There were terminals, so close together that for someone to get out of his he had to ask the permission of his fellow on the next one. They were grey, smooth and rounded on top, with a sort of privacy hood you ducked under, presumably so that your work wouldn’t disturb that of the workers next to you. In the dark, with a soft light glowing from each of them, they looked as if they were sleeping undisturbed, like children who let their heads droop while napping.

“Oh, we shouldn’t be here,” Ennio said.

This, of course, was not news, and of course we shouldn’t have been there. But we were, and the best thing to do was deal with Ciar so that we could get out of there as soon as possible and with as little trouble as possible.

“Ciar?” I whispered.

He popped up from behind one of the terminals like a jack in the box, his face flushed, his eyes shining and looking feverish. “You came,” he said, and before either of us could comment, “Good. You’ll never believe this.”

From Ennio’s snort, I could tell he was already working on not believing it, before Ciar showed us whatever it was.

***

At first I had no idea what Ciar was getting at. He took us to his terminal and showed us the screen. It said,
Access denied, you do not have permission to ask this question.
Under it there were codes, presumably explaining why we didn’t have the right to look at it.

“Very exciting,” Ennio said. “I’m all agog. Perhaps you linguists are different, pal, but in my job I get one of these every other day. People don’t think I have a need to know the nutritional mix in classroom lunches, or the stories selected for next year’s primer.”

Ciar shook his head. He touched the screen, quickly, clearing the error message and bringing up a query screen. In it he typed
Big ship
and
nursery rhyme.
For the next few minutes he showed us the old and the new rhymes. The old woman who lived in a compartment—only in the Earth rhyme this was inexplicably a shoe. There were half a dozen others. All of them were very different between the old and the new version. I mean, one of them was clearly created on Earth, for children who had never even thought of flying in space, but the others were full of ship analogies and cryptic references to a wise old owl who didn’t talk and which apparently waited for people to come to it when it was needed.

“So, the rhymes were altered,” Ennio said. “Perhaps people weren’t sure shipboard children would care about Earth-like things.”

Ciar shook his head. “It’s more than that. Look at it realistically. If you look at what they’re saying, over and over they’re telling us something special should be happening when we’ve been in the ship ten generations. Over and over. . . .” He looked up and quirked an eyebrow at us.