Reave the Just and Other Tales (39 page)

A
ster’s Hope
stood more than a hundred meters tall—a perfect sphere bristling with vanes, antennae, and scanners, punctuated with laser ports, viewscreens, and receptors. She left her orbit around her home-world like a steel ball out of a slingshot, her sides bright in the pure sunlight of the solar system. Accelerating toward her traveling speed of .85c, she moved past the outer planets—first Philomel with its gigantic streaks of raw, cold hydrogen, then lonely Periwinkle glimmering at the edge of the spectrum—on her way into the black and luminous beyond. She was the best her people had ever made, the best they knew how to make. She had to be: she wasn’t coming back for centuries.

There were exactly three hundred ninety-two people aboard.

They, too, were the best Aster had to offer. Diplomats and meditechs, linguists, theoretical biologists, physicists, scholars, even librarians for the vast banks of knowledge
Aster’s Hope
carried: all of them had been trained to the teeth especially for this mission. And they included the absolute cream of Aster’s young Service, the so-called “puters” and “nicians” who knew how to make
Aster’s Hope
sail the fine-grained winds of the galaxy. Three hundred ninety-two people in all, culled and tested and prepared from the whole population of the planet to share in the culmination of Aster’s history.

Three hundred ninety of them were asleep.

The other two were supposed to be taking care of the ship. But they weren’t. They were running naked down a mid-shell corridor between the clean, impersonal chambers where the cryogenic capsules hugged their occupants. Temple was giggling because she knew Gracias was never going to catch her unless she let him. He still had some of the ice cream she’d spilled on him trickling through the hair on his chest, but if she didn’t slow down he wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it. Maybe she wasn’t smarter or stronger than he was, better-trained or higher-ranking—but she was certainly faster.

This was their duty shift, the week they would spend out of their capsules every half-year until they died.
Aster’s Hope
carried twenty-five shifts from the Service, and they were the suicide personnel of this mission: aging at the rate of one week twice every year, none of them were expected to live long enough to see the ship’s return home. Everyone else could be spared until
Aster’s Hope
reached its destination; frozen for the whole trip, they would arrive only a bit more mature than they were when they left. But the Service had to maintain the ship. And so the planners of the mission had been forced to a difficult decision: either fill
Aster’s Hope
entirely with puters and nicians, and pray that they would be able to do the work of diplomats, theoretical physicists, and linguists; or sacrifice a certain number of Service personnel to make room for people who could be explicitly trained for the mission. The planners decided that the ability to take
Aster’s Hope
apart chip by chip and seal after seal and then put her all back together again was enough expertise to ask of any individual man or woman. Therefore the mission itself would have to be entrusted to other experts.

And therefore
Aster’s Hope
would be unable to carry enough puters and nicians to bring the mission home again.

Faced with this dilemma, the Service personnel were naturally expected to spend a significant period of each duty shift trying to reproduce. If they had children, they could pass on their knowledge and skill. And if the children were born soon enough, they would be old enough to take
Aster’s Hope
home when she needed them.

Temple and Gracias weren’t particularly interested in having children. But they took every other aspect of reproduction very seriously.

She slowed down for a few seconds, just to tantalize him. Then she put on a burst of speed. He tended to be just a bit dull in his love-making—and even in his conversation—unless she made a special effort to get his heart pounding. On some days, a slow, comfortable, and just-a-bit-dull lover was exactly what she wanted. But not today. Today she was full of energy from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair, and she wanted Gracias at his best.

But when she tossed a laughing look back over her shoulder to see how he was doing, he wasn’t behind her anymore.

Where—? Well, good. He was trying to take control of the race. Win by tricking her because he couldn’t do it with speed. Temple laughed out loud while she paused to catch her breath and think. Obviously, he had ducked into one of the rooms or passages off this corridor, looking for a way to shortcut ahead of her—or maybe to lure her into ambush. And she hadn’t heard the automatic door open and close because she’d been running and breathing too hard. Very good! This was the Gracias she wanted.

But where had he turned off? Not the auxiliary compcom: that room didn’t have any other exit. How about the nearest capsule chamber? From there, he’d have to shaft down to inner-shell and come back up. That would be dicey: he’d have to guess how far and fast, and in what direction, she was moving. Which gave her a chance to turn the tables on him.

With a grin, she went for the door to the next capsule chamber. Sensing her approach, it opened with a nearly silent
whoosh,
then closed behind her. Familiar with the look of the cryogenic capsules huddled in the grasp of their triple-redundant support machinery, each one independently supplied and run so that no systemwide failure could wipe out the mission, she hardly glanced around her as she headed toward the shaft.

Its indicators showed that it wasn’t in use. So Gracias wasn’t on his way up here. Perfect. She’d take the shaft up to outer-shell and elude him there, just to whet his appetite. Turn his own gambit against him. Pleased with herself, she approached the door of the shaft.

But when she impinged on the shaft’s sensor, it didn’t react to her. None of the lights came on: the elevator stayed where it was. Surprised, she put her whole body in front of the sensor. Nothing. She jumped up and down, waved her arms. Still nothing.

That was strange. When Gracias had run his diagnostics this morning, the only malfunction anywhere was in an obscure circuit of food-sup’s beer synthesizer. And she’d already helped him fix it. Why wasn’t the shaft operating?

Thinking she ought to go to the next room and try another shaft, find out how serious the problem was, Temple trotted back to the capsule-chamber door.

This time, it didn’t open for her.

That was so unexpected that she ran into the door—which startled more than hurt her. In her nearly thirty years, she had never seen an automatic door fail. All doors opened except locked doors; and locked doors had an exterior status light no one could miss. Yet the indicators for this door showed open and normal.

She tried again.

The door didn’t open.

That wasn’t just strange. It was serious. A severe malfunction. Which didn’t show up on diagnostics? Or had it just now happened? Either way, it was time to stop playing.
Aster’s Hope
needed help. Frowning, Temple looked for the nearest speaker so she could call Gracias and tell him what was going on.

It was opposite her, on the wall beside the shaft. She started toward it.

Before she got there, the door to the chamber slid open.

A nonchalant look on his dark face, a tuneless whistle puckering his mouth, Gracias came into the room. He was carrying a light sleeping pallet over one shoulder. The door closed behind him normally.

“Going somewhere?” he asked in a tone of casual curiosity.

Temple knew that look, that tone. In spite of herself, she gave him a wide grin. “Damn you all to pieces,” she remarked. “How did you do that?”

He shrugged, trying to hide the sparkle in his eyes. “Nothing to it. Auxcompcom’s right over there.” He nodded in the direction of the comp-command room she had passed. “Ship motion sensors knew where you were. Saw you come in here. Did a temporary repro. Told the comp not to react to any body mass smaller than mine. You’re stuck in here for another hour.”

“You ought to be ashamed.” She couldn’t stop grinning. His ploy delighted her. “That’s the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard. If the other puters spend their time doing repros, the comp won’t be good for alphabet soup by the time we get where we’re going.”

He didn’t quite meet her happy gaze. “Too late now.” Still pretending he was nonchalant—in spite of some obvious evidence to the contrary—he put the pallet on the floor in front of him. “Stuck here for another hour.” Then he did look at her, his black eyes smoldering. “Don’t want to waste it.”

She made an effort to sound exasperated. “Idiot.” But she practically jumped into his arms when he gave her the chance.

They were still doing their duty when the ship’s brapper sounded and the comp snapped
Aster’s Hope
onto emergency alert.

_______

Temple and Gracias were, respectively, the nician and puter of their duty shift. The Service had trained them for their jobs almost from birth. They had access, both by education and through the comp, to the best knowledge Aster had evolved, the best resources her planners and builders had been able to cram into
Aster’s Hope.
In some ways, they were the pinnacle of Aster’s long climb toward the future: they represented, more surely than any of the diplomats or librarians, what the Asterins had been striving toward for two thousand years.

But the terms themselves,
nician
and
puter,
were atavisms, pieces of words left over from before the Crash—sounds which had become at once magic and nonsense during the period of inevitable barbarism that had followed the Crash. Surviving legends spoke of the puters and nicians who had piloted the great colonization ship
Aster
across the galactic void from Earth, light-years measured in hundreds or thousands from the homeworld of the human race. In
Aster,
as in all the great ships which Earth had sent out to preserve humankind from some now-forgotten crisis, most of the people had rested frozen through the centuries of space-normal travel while the nicians and puters had spent their lives and died, generation after generation, to keep the ship safe and alive as the comp and its scanners hunted the heavens for some world where
Aster’s
sleepers could live.

It was a long and heroic task, that measureless vigil of the men and women who ran the ship. In one sense, they succeeded; for when
Aster
came to her last resting place it was on the surface of a planet rich in compatible atmosphere and vegetation but almost devoid of competitive fauna. The planet’s sun was only a few degrees hotter than Sol; its gravity, only a fraction heavier. The people who found their way out of cryogenic sleep onto the soil and hope of the new world had reason to count themselves fortunate.

But in another sense the nicians and puters failed. While most of her occupants slept,
Aster
had been working for hundreds or thousands of years—and entropy was immutable. Parts of the ship broke down. The puters and nicians made repairs. Other parts broke down and were fixed. And then
Aster
began to run low on supplies and equipment. The parts that broke down were fixed at the expense of other parts. The nicians and puters kept their ship alive by nothing more in the end than sheer ingenuity and courage. But they couldn’t keep her from crashing.

The Crash upset everything the people of Earth had planned for the people of
Aster.
The comp was wrecked, its memory banks irretrievable, useless. Fires destroyed what physical books the ship carried. The pieces of equipment which survived tended to be ones which couldn’t be kept running without access to an ion generator and couldn’t be repaired without the ability to manufacture microchips.
Aster’s
engines had flared out under the strain of bringing her bulk down through the atmosphere and were cold forever.

Nearly nine hundred men and women survived the Crash, but they had nothing to keep themselves alive with except the knowledge and determination they carried in their own heads.

That the descendants of those pioneers survived to name their planet Aster—to make it yield up first a life and then a future—to dream of the stars and spaceflight and Earth—was a tribute more to their determination than to their knowledge. A significant portion of what they knew was of no conceivable value. The descendants of the original puters and nicians knew how to run
Aster;
but the theoretical questions involved in how she had run were scantly understood. And none of those personnel had been trained to live in what was essentially a jungle. As for the sleepers: according to legend, a full ten percent of them had been politicians. And another twenty percent had been people the politicians deemed essential—secretaries, press officers, security guards, even cosmeticians. That left barely six hundred individuals who were accustomed to living in some sort of contact with reality.

And yet they found a way to endure.

First they survived. By experimentation (some of it fatal), they learned to distinguish edible from inedible vegetation; they remembered enough about the importance of fire to procure some from
Aster
’
s
remains before the wreckage burned itself out; they organized themselves enough to assign responsibilities.

Later they persisted. They found rocks and chipped them sharp in order to work with the vegetation; they made clothing out of leaves and the skins of smaller animals; they taught themselves how to weave shelter; they kept their population going.

Next they struggled. After all, what good did it do them to have a world if they couldn’t fight over it?

And eventually they began to reinvent the knowledge they had lost.

The inhabitants of Aster considered all this a slow process. From their point of view, it seemed to take an exceptionally long time. But judged by the way planetary civilizations usually evolved, Asterin history moved with considerable celerity. Five hundred years after the Crash, Aster’s people had remembered the wheel. (Some theorists argued that the wheel had never actually been forgotten. But to be useful it needed someplace to roll—and Aster was a jungle. For several centuries, no wheel could compare in value with a good ax. Old memories of the wheel failed to take hold until after the Asterins had cleared enough ground to make its value apparent.) A thousand years after the wheel, the printing press came back into existence. (One of the major problems the Asterins had throughout their history to this point was what to do with all the dead lumber they created by making enough open space for their towns, fields, and roads. The reappearance of paper offered only a trivial solution until the printing press came along.) And five hundred years after the printing press,
Aster’s Hope
was ready for her mission. Although they didn’t know it, the people of Aster had beaten Earth’s time for the same development by several thousand years.