Going Interstellar (39 page)

Solar and laser-driven sails can give us the stars. But, as with virtually every other propulsion system that might enable the greatest voyages in human history, their sizes will be immense and pose engineering challenges we cannot yet imagine. But what could be more fitting for the future explorers than journeying to the stars using the only other thing in the universe that already makes such trips with regularity—light! Just remember when you are next out stargazing that the light you see from the distant starts has been traveling for years, decades, or even millennia before it touched you—yes, before it gently pushed you—into thinking about taking such a journey yourself.

THE BIG SHIP AND
THE WISE OLD OWL

Sarah A. Hoyt

Everybody loves a good mystery. In this one, Sarah Hoyt sets us up with a secret hidden within the nursery rhymes preserved for kids on a multigenerational starship. Why, one goes on to wonder, would anyone need to hide information on a starship anyhow?

***

Sometimes I wonder
what would have happened if I hadn’t been twenty and faced with the oldest problem a girl could have. I was being courted by two men and I didn’t know which I preferred.

Except that courted might be too strong a word, since there was very little about it that was romantic. We’d grown up together, were of similar status and background, and each of us was licensed to enter into a marriage producing two children. Still, I had two men who wished to marry me.

And I didn’t know which one to pick. They’d both been my friends forever and whichever way you looked at it, none of us was going to set the ship on fire, as the saying went. Which was a good thing, since rumor had it that this was what Ciar’s parents had planned to do before they were captured and executed. Not that I knew for sure or that Ciar knew anything about his parents. He’d been born from a surrogate years after they’d died and he’d been brought up in a creche for children who’d been created from stored ova and sperm—to continue the lines of people who’d been executed or died before having children. But there was a rumor about his parents, that they’d been dangerous subversives. I’d always thought it had been used to explain Ciar’s tendency to get into all sorts of trouble.

Ennio, my other suitor, and I had grown up with our parents. Ciar didn’t seem to envy us. And his parents didn’t come up beyond the occasional joke among the three of us.

At twenty Ciar was a linguist and Ennio was a teacher’s assistant second class, with a nice space in the bachelor quarters, and a cozy if unexciting job maintaining and programming the educational computers. Which he was doing right now—the maintaining part—halfway under one of the brightly colored terminals in classroom 3A, for the beginners’ class.

His voice emerged muffled from beneath the terminal—a bulky, padded unit, designed to withstand the clumsy movements of toddlers. “What I want to know,” he said, as his upper body moved, indicating that he’d somehow twisted one arm up inside the machine, “is how much they feed these kids that they can afford to shove half their nutritional allowance—” he paused and grunted—“inside these machines, around the sensi-screens.”

Ciar laughed. He was lying across two of the terminals, staring at the ceiling, his straight black hair falling back from his face with its aquiline nose and sharp blue eyes. His status was about the same as Ennio’s. He worked as a third class linguist. Most of his days were spent deep in the archives of the language department which was translating all the documents we’d brought from Earth into the language we spoke now. Though no one ever said how many generations had passed, it stood to reason there had to be many, since my grandfather’s grandfather had been born aboard. They’d brought aboard, originally, people from many countries. Even though they’d made English the official language, many words and some structure had ported over from the languages of the other people on the ship.

So, the administrators wanted to make sure all our records, all our history and all our scientific knowledge stayed understandable, for when we landed.

Ennio emerged from under the terminal, a sticky lump of some unidentified substance in his hand. “It should work now,” he muttered, as he walked across to drop the lump in the disposal chute before washing his hands in the little sink in the corner, which, being set for toddlers, he had to bend almost double to use.

“I could help you,” I said. I hadn’t qualified for intellectual work, as the men had. Not that my IQ tests were inferior to theirs, but I had failed what Ciar called the
restlessness test.
He said that forced to endure the jobs he and Ennio performed, mostly confined to a single room or a suite of rooms day after day, I would have gone quietly insane. Which I supposed was why I’d been apprenticed to the maintenance crew, where every day brought something new. One day I might be repairing agricultural machines and the next working to remove the socks some toddler had flushed down the toilet on division D before they made all toilets on division F fountain to the ceiling. “I repair machines all the time.”

Ennio wrinkled his nose at me, his mop of reddish-brown hair standing up from being cut so short. There was a fad onboard for longish hair, so of course Ennio wore his almost too short. “This is hardly repair,” he said. “Just clean up.”

The terminal powered up when he tried it and he said, “Right. Now to reprogram it with all the nursery rhymes again.”

Ciar sat up, curious. “Nursery rhymes? You teach them those?”

“At this age it’s the best way to get them to read. I just need to make sure they come up and match the sound,” he said, picking things on the screen, till the screen displayed a series of lines, which were sounded out, aloud, in a babyish voice.

The big ship sails on the vacuum oh,

the vacuum oh, the vacuum oh,

Oh the big ship sails on the vacuum oh,

It will not sail on forever.

The captain said it will reach Alpha Centauri oh

When ten generations are over.

The big ship will reach Alpha Centauri

Where our new home will be.

It will reach Alpha Centauri when

ten generations are over.

We will all live in Alpha Centauri

In the world most like Earth.

We will all live in Alpha Centauri

After the eleventh generation’s birth.

He pushed a few buttons and went on to another screen, where a comical owl hooted, flew away, and then the rhyme flashed:

A wise old owl lived down on area C.

The more he saw the less he spoke,

The less he spoke the more he heard.

Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?

Find him and ask politely,

He’ll tell you the way to Alpha Centauri.

When we’ve all forgotten,

He will still be

Keeping the time and path to Alpha Centauri.

Ennio pushed the screen again, but Ciar was sitting up and staring at it. He spoke over the next rhyme, “Those aren’t right.”

I looked at him. “Of course they are. Don’t you remember?” We’d all learned the rhymes at our mothers’ knees—well, except Ciar, who presumably had learned them at the creche-teacher’s knees. And then we’d learned to read them in school.

“I remember,” he said, frowning quickly at me. He pulled at the collar of his grey tunic. “Look, I know those are the rhymes we learned, but they aren’t the
right
rhymes.”

Ennio turned around. “What do you mean?”

As often happened, Ciar was struggling to form words. It was funny that the one of us who specialized in linguistics was the one who would often find himself struggling for explanations when talking to us. Perhaps because he was the only one of us with a truly intellectual profession?

“I was looking at nursery rhymes today. One of the books was stored on board from early on. It’s part of the historical collection and I don’t think many people looked at it since it came in.” He frowned. “They had those rhymes, but they’re completely different. Nothing about Alpha Centauri or generations or . . . division C.”

“Maybe they adapted the rhymes for life on board,” Ennio said.

But Ciar was still frowning.

“They might have, Ciar,” I said. “To make it relevant.”

“Why would they?” he said. “They haven’t removed ‘owl’ from there, and the only things we know of owls are in books from Earth. I presume there are owl embryos frozen somewhere in the ship, but . . .”

“But the decision of whether to ever grow them depends on the level of life development we find in the destiny world,” I said. We’d all learned, from very young, that the world we were headed towards was, so far as they could tell from old Earth, the twin of the home world. It was supposed to have water, and atmosphere and probably be much like Earth. But the question was, did it have the same level of biodevelopment? We’d brought a sample of every bird and animal and plant, or at least all the ones anyone could think of. If we found a very primitive world, or one where life hadn’t yet taken hold beyond single cell organisms, then we would set about reconstructing the ecology of Earth. But if we found that it had the same chain of life, and that we were compatible with it and could use it for sustenance, then we would not bring back the animals of Earth, except perhaps as curiosities in well-guarded zoos.

“Yeah, but we still learn about them,” Ciar said. “And cows that go moo. You know, until I caught a reference in an ancient manuscript, I thought cows were about the size of a chicken.”

Chickens and fish being the only animal life aboard, I’d thought so too until this moment. “You mean they’re not?”

He shook his head, and his hands sketched improbable dimensions. Now Ennio was frowning. “So . . . The rhymes were altered. I wonder why?”

“I think . . .” Ciar was frowning. “Well . . . I’ve read a lot of things from when the ship was first launched. Part of the reason they established the captain with absolute power and the administrators reporting only to him is that they were very afraid there would be a mutiny and we would either destroy our knowledge base, or that we would overrun the resources of the ship.”

I shrugged. I’d got up and was looking over Ennio’s shoulder at the screen changing in multicolored patterns of lights as syllables appeared. There was, for instance, the bells song. “Find me if you can, toll the bells of C and N. . . .” I remembered singing it with my class in my first year in school. “So, we didn’t mutiny and we didn’t overrun the resources of the ship,” I said.

“Yes, but I think they changed the nursery rhymes, so that we would have something to remind us if we forgot.”

“To remind us of what?” Ennio asked. “That the wise old owl keeps his mouth shut? Or that we’re going to Alpha Centauri? Honestly, Ciar.” He turned to me, “There’s a dance tonight at the bachelor’s dorm, and I was wondering if you—”

“You don’t understand,” Ciar said, his voice in the slow pedantic tone he used when he thought he was schooling us. “The thing is that nursery rhymes are the most linguistically conservative bit of language. Not just in terms of how exactly they get passed on, but they retain fossilized references and pronunciations for centuries after they’ve died out of any normal use. They would be a . . . they are a superb medium for encoding instructions. But instructions for what?”

“For people who’ve forgotten that we’re on our way to Alpha Centauri and who, probably, think that this is the only world that exists.” He shook his head. “Now, Nia,” he said, looking at me. “Will you go with me to the dance?”

I said yes, mostly, I think, to try to get Ciar to let go of the crazy subject of nursery rhymes. When he got an idea in his head, he tended to hold onto it like a well-placed rivet. And this one was truly one of the strangest ones he’d come up with.

But when I looked up to see if he was upset or interested, I met with a frown, and his eyes half-closed, but he was staring into something we couldn’t see. “Oh, the dance,” he said, slowly. “Yes. I’ll see you two there.”

He walked out through the terminals, towards the door and Ennio and I met each other’s eyes and laughed. “Now, do you suppose he thinks I invited him to the dance?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems to think both of us did.”

Ennio shook his head. “Ciar has a bug in his processor again!”

I confess I completely forgot about Ciar and the nursery rhymes. Unlike the men, I still lived with my parents. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting enough ration coupons to live alone, but I disliked the single women dormitory. Too much cackle and giggling, too much scent and makeup. My mom shook her head when I complained and said women had always been like that, and always would be, but frankly, I owned a mirror and could see my face as well as the next person. My face was not as soft and round as I’d have liked. I had a broad forehead, and dark blond hair. The best that could be said about me was that I didn’t cause men to run screaming into the night, and that I had two guys who wished to court me—even if they were not exactly potential heartthrobs. But makeup didn’t improve my looks and frankly I didn’t think either of my two very odd suitors would notice, unless I put blue circles on my cheeks and dyed my hair purple. They seemed to enjoy my company and talking to me, more than actually looking at me.