Peace and War - Omnibus (44 page)

I felt loss, but also a strange relief. And I wasn't completely surprised; at some level I guess I'd known something was going on.

Maybe Marygay had, too. She stared at the note and then slipped it under the other sheets on her clipboard, cleared her throat, and spoke to the new arrivals with only a slight quaver in her voice. 'These are your initial housing assignments. We'll be trading around. But put your stuff in there now, and come back to the assembly area. Is anybody feeling space-sick?'

One big man obviously was; his skin had a greenish cast. He raised his hand. 'I'll take you to the doctor,' I said. 'She has something stronger than that pill.' He actually made it to the clinic before he barfed.

There were ten communication channels, and Marygay allowed everyone ten minutes for goodbyes. Not many people took that long. After a little more than an hour, everybody was in the assembly area, watching a large flatscreen display of Marygay in the captain's chair. All 148 of us had maneuvered so as to be 'lying' on the 'floor' in front of the screen.

Marygay peered out of the screen, her thumb poised over a red button on the console. 'Is everybody ready?' The crowd shouted yes and, with less than military precision, our journey began. (I wondered how many people were aware of the fact, or suspected, that the red button wasn't attached to anything. It was just an engineer's joke. The ship launched itself, and knew its time of departure to within a millionth of a second.)

The onset of acceleration was slow. I was floating about a foot off the floor, and I drifted down gently, and then gained weight over the course of ten or twelve seconds. There was a slight hum, which would be the background of all our lives for ten years: the tiny residue of the unimaginable sustained violence that was flinging us out of the galaxy.

I stood up and fell down. So did a lot of people, after days or weeks of zero gee. Sara took my arm and we helped each other up, laughing, forming a wobbly triangle with the floor, that closed up into two roughly parallel people. I cautiously lowered myself into a squat and stood up again, muscles and joints protesting.

About a hundred people were stepping around carefully, looking at their feet. The rest were sitting or lying down, some showing signs of anxiety or even panic.

They'd been told what to expect, that even breathing would seem to be an effort, at first. Those of us who'd been in and out of orbit the past months were used to it. But having it described to you and feeling it were two different things.

Marygay switched us over to a view of the planet. At first it just turned beneath us, a few wispy clouds over the mottled white snowscape. People were chatting and groaning in commiseration.

After a few minutes, things quieted down, as our motion became apparent. People sat and stared at the screen in silent meditation, perhaps a kind of hypnosis.

One curved horizon appeared, and then, on the opposite side of the screen, another. They inched toward one another until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the planet was a huge ball, visibly shrinking.

Marygay had tottered down the stairs and was sitting next to me. 'Goodbye, goodbye,' she whispered, and I echoed her. But I think she was mostly saying goodbye to our son. I was saying goodbye to the planet and the time.

As it shrank away I felt an odd epiphany, born of science and mathematics. I knew that it would be a month – 34.7 days – before we reached a tenth of the speed of light, and officially I entered the realm of relativity. And it would be months later before the effect of it would be visible, looking out at the stars.

But we were actually there already. The huge force that made the ship's deck feel like a floor was already bending space and time. Our minds and bodies were not subtle enough to directly sense it yet. But that acceleration was slowly pulling us away from the mundane illusion we called reality.

Most of the matter and energy in the universe live in the land of relativity, because of extreme mass or speed. We would be joining them soon.

Fourteen

We kept the image of Middle Finger centered on the screen for a couple of days, as it shrank to a dot, and then a bright star, and then was lost in the hot glow of Mizar. By the end of the first day, we didn't even have to filter Mizar's glare; it was just the brightest star in the sky.

People started going about their business. They knew that much of what they did was make-work; the ship, by necessity, could run itself. Even the agriculture, being integral to the life-support system, was closely monitored by the ship.

Sometimes it bothered me to know that the ship was intelligent and self-aware. It could greatly simplify its existence by turning off life support.

We, in turn, could override the ship. Marygay's captaincy, now largely symbolic, would suddenly become a real and huge burden. The
Time Warp
could be run without its brain, but it would be a daunting enterprise.

The fifteen children aboard did need parents and teachers, which gave some of us real work. I taught physical science and still had 'father' in my job description, though most of my job there was keeping out of Sara's way.

Everybody who didn't have children had some other ongoing project. A lot of them, of course, were engaged in creating and dissecting scenarios about what we were going to do forty thousand years from now. I couldn't get up much enthusiasm for that, myself. It seemed to me the only model worth planning about was the
tabula rasa
one, where we came back to find nothing left of humanity. Otherwise, we were Neanderthals speculating about starflight.

(The sheriff was in favor of a scenario where not much would change over forty thousand years, except increasing mastery over the physical universe. Why would Man want to change? I was more in favor of the one where Man, refusing to allow change, declines into gibbering savagery, in obedience to the Law of Increasing Entropy.)

There were several people writing histories of our voyage, whom I could visualize waiting hungrily for something bad to happen. No news is bad news for historians. Others were studying the social dynamics of our little group, which did seem worthwhile. Sociology with a uniquely reduced set of variables.

Others were writing compositions or novels, or otherwise engaged in the arts. Casi was already whittling away at his log, and on the second day out, Alysa Bertram announced she was holding auditions for a play that was in progress; the actors to collaborate on the script. Sara was one of the first to show up, and she was chosen. She wanted me to try out, but the idea of memorizing pages of dialogue always had sounded like mind-numbing torture to me.

Of course I did have my position on the council to keep me out of trouble. But we had a lot less to do, now that the voyage had begun.

With 'gravity,' the ship was a totally different place. In orbit, the floors were just nuisances, obstacles you had to swim around, and you thought of the ship in a sort of horizontal way, bow to stern, like a water ship. But now forward was up and aft was down. Less than an hour into the flight, Diana had to treat her first broken bone, when Ami – who had lived for months in zero-gee – instinctively tried to float down a staircase.

When that happened, I realized we didn't have anyone who was a safety inspector. So I gave myself the job, but wanted an assistant trained in civil engineering. One of the three people qualified was Cat. I guess I chose her so as not to appear to be avoiding her.

I didn't dislike Cat, though I'd never felt completely comfortable around her. Of course, she'd been born, if you can call it that, nine hundred years after me, into a world where heterosexuality was an affliction so rare most people never even encountered it. But the same was true of Charlie and Diana, our best friends.

Some were more hetero than others, though; Charlie'd had at least one fling with a guy. I wondered about Cat, who had left her husband behind. (Though at the time I'd been relieved; he was kind of worthless except for chess and go.)

Cat accepted the offer with enthusiasm. Most of her work was not really going to start for another ten years, when and if we had to roll up our sleeves and start building a new world.

We decided to work from top to bottom. There wasn't much to be concerned about on the top floor, just cargo and control. Nobody would be going there regularly except for Marygay and her assistants, Jerrod Weston and Puül Ten. The five escape ships weren't locked, and I supposed people might sneak into them for privacy, so we checked them with that in mind.

There was not much inside them but acceleration couches and the suspended-animation pods. The couches looked safe enough, all padding, and I didn't think anyone would venture into the pods, unless they wanted to have sex in a dark coffin full of machinery. Cat said I lacked imagination.

The fourth floor was where most of the aquaculture was, so there was theoretical danger of drowning. All the tanks were shallow enough for adults to stand in with their heads above water, but most of the children were small enough for it to be a potential hazard. All the families with children lived on the first floor, but of course the kids would be roaming everywhere. The
DON'T FEED THE FISH
sign gave me an idea. I found Waldo Everest, who confirmed that the fish were fed a measured amount each day, and he agreed to go along with my plan: make the children responsible for actually scattering the feed. So the aquaculture pools would be their workplace, rather than a forbidden 'attractive nuisance.'

I'd never heard of that phrase until Cat used it. Describes some people well.

There were three shallow rice paddies which also were home to thousands of crayfish, not quite big enough for the menu yet. About half the floor area was given over to fast-growing grains, fish food. This floor smelled best to me, a whiff of the sea along with green growing things.

Not many safety hazards other than the fish ponds and some of the harvesting machinery. This was the stairwell where Ami fell and broke her arm, but it wasn't uniquely dangerous.

The elevator was right across from the stairs, 120 meters away, but you couldn't just walk across. The narrow path between the various hydroponic fields zigged and zagged. So we just walked around the sidewalk in front of the living quarters, which on this floor made up half a circumference of apartments, identical in size but with slightly different layouts.

The apartment where Marygay and I lived was right next to the elevator, a privilege of rank that was also a necessary convenience: the control room was directly overhead. I invited Cat in for tea. One apartment was as good as any other, to look over for safety hazards.

Compared to military quarters, the apartments were large. The ship was originally configured to hold 205 people, each one having one room four meters square. So our 150 were well spread out. Twenty-eight couples planned on having one or two children during the voyage, but even so, it wouldn't be especially crowded.

It did feel claustrophobic after our big house in Paxton, with the windows looking out on forest on one side and the broad lake behind. I put holo windows of the lake on the wall of our bedroom, but was thinking we ought to reset them. It looked real but felt false.

'Fire hazard,' I said, putting the kettle on for tea. 'Burn hazard, anyhow.' The two burners were induction heaters, so you'd have to be really trying, to injure yourself.

'You have knives and things,' Cat said. By choice, she didn't have a cooking area in her own place. Marygay and I had brought along enough kitchenware to cook and serve a meal for six, and a cabinet of precious spices and herbs. Up to a certain hour, by our tentative rules, you could go to the kitchen and get a meal's worth of raw materials, rather than show up for chow and have what everyone else was having.

'They say the bathroom's the most dangerous room in the house,' she said. 'Not much to worry about there.' We had a toilet and small sink. Each floor had a shower room and a schedule, and there was a shower by the pool on the common floor.

The teapot chimed and I poured us each a cup, and sat next to her on the couch. I looked around the room critically. Not much to worry about anywhere. You think about accidents at home – falls, cuts, burns, exposure to dangerous substances – and most of them involve things we don't have here.'

She nodded. 'Balanced by dangers we
don't
have at home. Like meteorites and life-support failures and the idea of standing on top of tonnes of antimatter.'

'I'll make a note.' We sipped in silence for an awkward minute. 'Did you come along just to … just because of Marygay?'

She stared at me for a moment. 'Partly. Partly because I knew Aldo wouldn't. It was an unembarrassing way to end the marriage.' She set down her cup. 'I also like the idea of running away, finding a new world. We weren't drafted, you know, in my time. I joined up to see new worlds. Middle Finger was getting pretty small.' She made a wry smile. 'Aldo really liked that. He fell in love with the farm.'

'You're farming here, part time.'

'Exercise. And I do know my root vegetables.'

'I'm glad you came.'

'You are.' It was a question. 'Aldo thought I was chasing after Marygay. Did he talk to you about that?'

'Not in so many words.' But a lot of unsubtle innuendo.

'We do … I do love her.' Cat was trying to keep a tremble out of her voice. 'But I've been, we've been, sixteen years this way. Just neighbors, close neighbors. I'm content with that.'

'I understand.'

'I don't think you do. I don't think men
can
.' She picked up her cup with both hands, as if to warm them. 'Maybe that's not fair. I never met a het man until I was on Heaven, my mid-twenties. But the normal men and boys I grew up with always had to
do
each other. It wasn't serious if you weren't doing. Girls and women, it was different. You loved someone or you didn't. Whether you did each other was not a big deal.'

'Yeah, I guess we were different. It's not het versus home. Women were more sexually aggressive in my time, too. But you were born, what, nine hundred years after I was?'