Survey Ship (13 page)

“Oh, damn.'” He grabbed at handfuls of papers. Ching struggled to control sickness again, clutching at the doorframe and closing her eyes as the room reeled around her. Moira grabbed the cello, manhandled it into its case and snapped it safely inside, then purposefully forced herself down toward the DeMag unit.

“Now, damn it, this is not funny,” she said wrath-

fully, and Teague stared at her.

“Do you seriously believe anyone would do this to be funny, Moira? Besides, nobody was near the dial —”

“No, I don't,” she said. “Peake is too serious about working in full gravity, and Ravi knows perfectly well how serious it would be; and the rest of us were all here watching each other. But I couldn't even find a short in the way it's wired in. It's got to be the computer, Ching.”

“I don't know why you all blame the computer,” she said crossly, her eyes still squeezed shut against compelling nausea. She would not lose her breakfast, she would NOT! “I checked every tie-in to the DeMags and the programming appears to be perfect! Most of it I did myself, and I don't make that kind of mistakes!”

“Well, try what you did before, Teague,” Moira said, twisting the dial firmly to OFF and then to ON again. The cello case thumped over on its side; if the cello had not been in the case it would have been crushed. Ching came down with a bump and a small, smothered cry.

“It's evidently something in the control dials, then,” Moira said, touching it gingerly as if probing a wound “I'll take one of the dials apart and see how it's put together and why it keeps doing that. First in the gym, then in here, and God knows where it will happen next! And it could have been really dangerous, too.” She glanced at Ching and said, “You look shaky; do you want coffee, tea, a drink — something stronger?”

Fontana said, “Brandy. Call it medicinal,” and went to the console, dialing herself a drink and a slightly stronger one for Ching. “No, drink it, Ching. I'm not a qualified doctor in the sense Peake is, but I have had medical training, and right now this is what you need.”

Slowly, Ching sipped the sharp liquid, making a face of distaste.

“Ugh, I hate that stuff!”

But even so, Fontana noticed the color coming slowly back into her face as she sipped.

Peake and Ravi came into the main cabin, and, seeing Fontana and Ching drinking, went to get themselves hot drinks. Teague said, “Cocktail hour, huh?” and got himself one, too. He scrabbled the music paper together, carefully separating his own from the printout of the madrigals Fontana had brought, and slid them into the flute case again. Then he began to pass out the parts.

“Fontana, soprano. Ching, alto. Peake, tenor. Ravi, baritone. And I'll sing bass,” he said. “Moira, are you going to play for us? Or shall we go to the gym first and work out?”

“No!” said Moira, sharply, automatically and without thinking. Then, hearing what she had said, she began to rationalize it.

“I think we ought to — to stay out of the gym until we know what's happened with the DeMags. It's the easiest place to get hurt or killed, and if one of them went off suddenly, again, it might be more dangerous this time . . .”

Her voice trailed off again.

Ravi protested, “Look, one of the first priorities aboard ship is to keep our physical fitness. With the gym closed —”

Peake said sharply, “Moira's psychic; have you forgotten how we found out she was psychic? We stay out of the gym until we find out what went wrong with the DeMags, and that's an order!”

Teague raised his head and glared. “Who appointed you Captain of this ship, Peake?”

“As the medical officer in charge of physical fitness and safety —” Peake began, but Fontana swiftly interposed. She said, “We'll check out the DeMags as soon as we can. Meanwhile, we're all here, and it's time for music and then for dinner, in that order. Let's talk about it later. Arguing on an empty stomach never gets anyone anywhere.” She turned to Moira. “Give us an A, will you?”

Moira stroked a soft string on the cello. She frowned, wondering why the thought of going to the gym had evoked such immediate, unprompted panic. Was it really another of those sickening psychic flashes, coming from nowhere and infuriatingly vague? Or was it her awareness of some flaw in the DeMags, subliminal, so that she knew, subconsciously, what was wrong and wanted to keep people away from it until it came into her conscious mind and she could fix it? She scowled, damning her Wild Talent, wishing it more accessible and more easily tamed, or else non-existent. She listened as Fontana sang the opening phrase of the Ave Verum in her clear, beautifully trained soprano; heard Ching and Peake join in, Ravi and Teague joining with the bass line.

When they finished, Ravi said, “Does everyone know the Mozart setting of the Ave Verum?”

Ching replied by singing the opening line. The voices answered one another. . .

O dulcis. . . .

O pie ....

O Jesu, Fili Mariae. . .

Ravi, singing softly with his ear tuned to the other voices, particularly Peake's clear tenor, thought how strange it was that five agnostics or atheists, and one secret mystic, without any noticeable religion, were singing this music dedicated to militant Christianity;

that the greatest of Western music had been poured out into this religion which had tried so hard to conquer the world. Maybe their only triumph had been their music, their masses and hymns, the work of Bach especially, the great flood of praise poured out in song; music that actually survived the faith for which it had been written. “Miserere mei,” Ravi sang, softly, “Miserere mei, Domine . . .” and as the five voices melted into the great cadenced Amen, he had a curious sense of merging with all of them, more intense than the merging in any act of love.

This isn't religious music any more, no one cares what the words mean . . . true body of our Lord, what rubbish. . . . but the music itself creates a form of reverence for everything. ... is it a psychological trick, or is music, by its very nature, a part of God? He had studied the writings of his namesake, the great Indian musician, who had written once that he did not invent the ragas that he played; that he simply listened for them, in the meditative mode, and they were poured through his instrument. Was this what was meant by the old phrase, The music of the Spheres?

They began the Mass for Five Voices; Ravi, unfamiliar with the music and sight-singing his part, for a time had to pay strict attention to what he was doing; but through it, he had the curious sense that in this shared music, they were pledging a common faith and merging with one another in a way more important than any act of love. Faith to what? To one another? To their common roots, to the Academy? To the Ship? To the cause they served without knowing why, which was, when you came right down to it, rather like religion; none of them had ever questioned why space must be colonized, the Survey Ships sent out year after year. So that they were priests of a strange religion of space. . . .

Priests? Or were they simply blind worshippers?

They finished the Mass; somebody suggested more music, but Peake shook his head.

“My throat's dry; I need something to eat and drink.” He went to the food unit. Moira put away her cello again, knowing that she, too, should find something to eat. My throat's dry and I haven't even been singing! What's wrong with me?

She had been trained to strict rationality; bit by bit she checked out the possible causes of her unease. Was she worried about the DeMags? That was troublesome, yes, but after all, it was only machinery, and she could understand that; if there was someting wrong in the mechanism, surely it was only a matter of time before she, or Teague, or Fontana, could locate and correct it, and meanwhile they would stay out of the gym and observe every precaution, secure everything for free-fall — she noticed that Fontana had stored the music carefully in closed bins.

Had she eaten something that did not agree with her? No, her breakfast had consisted of vitamin-C syrup and flat cakes of rice meal, with hot bouillon. Nothing that could upset the digestion of a sickly infant, and she had always been almost boringly healthy. Was her menstrual period due? No, not that either, and she had never had trouble with it, anyhow. Why, then, did she stare with sickened disinterest at the sizzling chunk of meat on Fontana's plate, at Ching's heaped salad?

Ravi came and settled into a seat beside her. “Not eating, Moira? Can't I bring you something? A little clear tea?”

“That would be nice,” she agreed, “but you don't have to wait on me, Ravi, I can get it for myself—”

“Here, I have it,” Peake said, turning from the console with a cup in each hand, “I was getting some for myself
anyway. Moira, what's wrong? It's my business if anyone's sick.”

“I'm not sick,” Moira said irritably, “I simply don't feel like eating!”

“Fontana was feeding Ching brandy; you look as if you could use a good stiff drink,” Peake said, but he didn't pursue the matter. Whatever it was, it wasn't serious enough to justify rank-pulling, assuming he had it to pull. None of them did. Maybe Ching had been right all along, that one of them should have had authority to make decisions.

Moira sipped her tea, feeling the hot liquid loosen her dry throat, but the unease still lay within her, a cold lump. She could see Ravi's eyes fixed on her, solicitous and troubled. Damn all men, anyhow, you gave them access to your body, because you wanted it as much as they did, and they kept on thinking it made some difference, that they somehow had the right to possess your mind and soul too! Machines made more sense. They were what they were, no matter how you treated them, as long as you gave them the kind of care their physical and mechanical nature demanded. Why couldn't men be content with that? Ravi was nice, and fun, and charming, and a skilled and ardent lover, but she felt hemmed in by the closeness he demanded. Was that why she had offered herself to Peake, to demonstrate to Ravi that he had no first mortgage on her body and soul?

Even Ravi's Wild Talent was a simple one; a purely mechanical one, utilizing the latent calculating skill of the brain. Some educator once had surmised — and seemed to prove it, by teaching children believed to be mentally retarded — that reading was not a learned skill, but a brain function. Arithmetic was probably the same kind of thing. But precognition?

Fontana came and joined them. She said, “I heard you humming along with Ravi on the Ave Verum, Moira. Listen, there's nothing wrong with your voice, and no reason you shouldn't sing tenor if you want to; you have perfect pitch, and all you'd need to do would be work on your breathing. I have a feeling, though, that if you worked just a little to develop your range, you'd be a very fine contralto. Ching's not a contralto, she's a soprano without a high range.”

“I can sing a high B-flat,” Ching said defensively.

Fontana retorted, “When I was studying voice, I was told that almost all mezzo-sopranos are just timid sopranos!”

“And I was told,” Ching said waspishly, “that sopranos are lazy people who think it's easier to sing the melody than to learn how to read music and sing the harmony!”

Moira chuckled. “Cut it out, you two. I was told that singers are temperamental people, which is why I stuck to the cello!”

“Just the same,” Fontana said, coming back to her original thesis, “I could teach you to sing as well as either of us — any of us — if you'd be willing to work a little. Not right away, but keep it in mind.”

But Moira was not listening. Her face had suddenly gone blank, staring into nowhere, her features so relaxed, so mask-like that Fontana recoiled; she hardly looked human. Peake made a startled movement in her direction; he had seen an epileptic, once, in the hospital where he trained, look like that a fraction of a second before a seizure.

Then Moira screamed, a shrill, almost soprano scream. And in the next moment, like an echo of that shriek, all six of them felt it, a sharp, shivering shock, and then every siren and alarm bell in the ship went off.

It was a clamoring, deafening cacophony; and twelve years of reflex training and safety drills took over, without need for conscious thought. Peake found himself struggling into a pressure suit, his helmet latched shut, even before Teague managed to move toward the dial that would cut off the sound. Moira, even as she clamped her helmet, looked reflexively toward the bin where her cello was stored. In the moment before the helmet cut off sound, and before she got the sound in the suit hooked on, Fontana heard Teague slam the control that closed bulkheads all over the ship, confining airloss to the module which had actually suffered injury.

But only after Teague had closed off the deafening clamor, and all helmets were latched shut, the sound system opening their voices once again to each other, did anyone speak to put into words what had happened.

“A meteor,” Moira said, in shock. “We're struck, we're holed! But how could that be? We were so carefully programmed to be outside the asteroid belt — ”

“We are,” Ravi said, “but we wouldn't have to be anywhere near the asteroid belt. There are stray bits of flotsam everywhere in the universe; and a piece no
larger than a grain of sand, hitting at our velocity — which, I now venture to remind you, is more thousands of kilometers per second than I like to think about — could do very substantial damage to any module it hit.“ Only then did he think to ask, ”Is everybody alive and all right?”

One by one, with wavering voices, they confirmed presence and well-being. Moira was thinking, in shock, So that's what I was scared about, that's why I screamed be/ore it hit us. She let herself slide down toward the floor. “I'm all right,” she said sharply, to Peake's concerned question, “just a — a little shaky.”

“Whatever it was — ” Teague heard his own voice wobbling as if it belonged to someone else and he had no connection with it, “it's not in here; the air is all right and the module's integrity isn't breached.” He heard the technical language with dismay; he'd intended to say, this particular cabin is still in one piece. Strange, how reflexes superseded thought. He checked the tell-tales again and confirmed. “Air level in here, normal. Helmets can be unlatched for the moment. DeMags, as far as I can tell, intact, gravity normal.”