Living Hell (3 page)

‘I’ll have to go, Sadira, Cheney just walked in,’ my mother declared, upon catching sight of me. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow. After I’ve read that report. Linkdown.’ She signed off. ‘How was the party?’

‘Good,’ I said. The three-dimensional diagram displayed on the family-room Interface Array was labelled ‘Proopiomelanocortin chain.’ Mum had obviously brought some work home with her. ‘We finished early. Firminus had to run some charts,’ I continued, and seated myself at the table. ‘Do you know why?’

‘Some kind of anomaly, your father says.’ Mum went to the food dispenser, and keyed in directives. ‘He won’t be eating with us. He has to stay on the Bridge, for now.’

‘Really?’ I was surprised. ‘Is it an emergency?’

‘Of course not. We’d be on red alert if it was.’

‘Is that curry?’

‘I think so.’ Mum lifted the cover on the first tray, and sniffed. ‘Yes. That’s curry.’

We ate our supper. Mum asked about the party, and I asked about Yestin, who hadn’t been able to attend. According to Mum, Yestin’s artificial osteocytes weren’t behaving quite like the real thing. ‘But we’re sorting it out,’ she assured me.

Yestin’s health was of great concern to my mother.

She was fifty-one, then (seventy-five in real time), but she didn’t look it. Her hair was still brown, straight and fine and cut in short wedges. Her voice was still strong, and her movements brisk and full of purpose. Though small, she had a dominating presence – perhaps because of her large, pale, penetrating eyes. She always wore red. Not that she had much choice, mind you. Our clothes only came in four colours: red, navy, black and beige. But given even this small selection, my mother always, always wore red.

‘My turn to clear up,’ she announced when she had finished, and leapt to her feet. She was one of those people who are always darting around like electrons. You didn’t often see her sitting still, unless she was studying a cardiograph or something. (My father called her Comet.) ‘Weren’t you going to play chess with your dad tonight?’

‘I think so.’

‘You’ll have to find someone else to play with, then.’

‘I think I’ll visit Sloan. We missed our Hobnob, because of the party.’

‘Are you sure he’s not at work? Sadira was complaining how she never sees him any more. He’s always got his nose stuck in some Petri dish . . .’

‘I’ll visit him at work, then.’

Sloan and I met three times a week, for an hour in the late afternoon. These sessions were called Hobnobs. They were part of our Brotherhood program. I always looked forward to my Hobnobs with Sloan.

My Hobnobs with Dygall, on the other hand, weren’t so much fun.

‘See if Sloan’s found out anything from Firminus,’ my mother urged, as I headed for the door. ‘About this anomaly, I mean. Your father was very vague.’

‘All right.’

‘Back by twenty-three hundred, Cheney.’

‘Yup. I know.’

‘And tell Sloan to give his mother a call, will you? I’m sick of having Sadira moan on about how she never sees him.’

Sadira was Sloan’s mother: a Medic, like my own mum. Firminus was Sloan’s father. I don’t know why Sadira and Firminus partnered up, because they were very different, but it was an inspired genetic splice. Sloan was the result, and he combined all the best features of each parent. Though tall and slim and well-organised, like his dad, he wasn’t as stiff or as finicky. Though he had his mother’s heavy, lustrous hair and rich colouring, he never complained about anything. (Life wasn’t ever
quite
good enough for Sadira.) Sloan had his father’s high cheekbones, but his mother’s large eyes; his father’s incisive brain, but his mother’s smooth voice. It made you wonder if someone had broken the genetic manipulation laws. How could someone so perfectly conceived have been produced by sheer chance? That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.

As far as I was concerned, Sloan’s only fault lay in the fact that he didn’t think much of Caromy. Though I never heard him say a bad word about anyone, his tone, when he spoke of Caromy, was slightly dismissive. I got the feeling that he considered her a little less bright than most people on board.

Had it been anyone but Sloan, I might have wondered if jealousy played a part in this attitude. After all, Caromy was First Born, while Sloan had come in second. But resentment like that would have been illogical, and Sloan was always logical. Always.

It was what I admired about him.

‘Where are you, Sloan?’ I inquired, as I headed for the port tube. (I had called him up to pinpoint his location.)

‘Are you working?’

‘
I’m always working, Cheney. You know that
.’

‘In BioLab?’

‘
In my cabin
.’

‘We missed our Hobnob today. Because of the party.’

‘
Yes, of course. You must tell me about the party. In great
detail
.’

‘Now, you mean?’

‘
Whenever you like
.’

So I went to visit Sloan in his cabin. Here I found him poring over some kind of slowly unfolding calculation on the Interface Array, surrounded by various oddly shaped, transparent vessels full of soupy jellies. I peered at these vessels, one by one.

‘How are the little guys?’ I queried.

‘Oh, thriving. No complaints.’

‘This one’s new.’ I pointed.

‘Not really. It’s garden-variety
sulfolobus acidocaldarius
, from the purification tanks.’

‘No mutations, or anything?’

‘Not of any interest.’

‘You ought to teach them a few tricks.’

Sloan smiled.

‘Oh, they can put on quite a show, when the opportunity presents itself,’ he said placidly.

I knew what he was talking about. Plexus was practically run by micro-organisms. Rotifers in the filtration ducts consumed other microbes that were harmful or toxic. Bacteria helped to repair the hull by excreting certain metals. Algae and azotobacter fixed nitrogen for the photosynthesis machines. Almost the entire Plexus cleaning system was based on microscopic organisms that quietly ate up grime and mould and bits of skin, scrubbed the air clean, processed sewage, and helped to purify water.

Sloan was one of the people who took care of all these microbes. After two years of Rotation Assignments, he had found his niche in Sustainable Services among other ‘Sussers’ who monitored the health of our microscopic populations.

He called the populations his ‘little guys’.

‘Some of our
halobacterium salinarum
are getting a bit frisky,’ Sloan said. ‘That’s been interesting, because they’re tough little guys. It’s got to the point where adjusting pH levels just doesn’t make an impression. We might have to do some genetic tweaking.’ His eyes narrowed, and another slow smile crept across his face. ‘It seems a pity to interfere, in a way, because I’ve always had a soft spot for the post-Darwinist position. Survival of the fittest, and all that.’ Seeing my doubtful expression, he gave my arm a reassuring pat. ‘Don’t worry, though. We have to guard against mutation in this environment.’

Sloan could talk for hours about prokaryotic cells and
mycoplasma genitalium
, but only if given the chance. He was well aware that most people didn’t share his enthusiasm for microbiology. ‘So tell me about the party,’ he said, abruptly changing course. ‘Was everyone there?’

‘Pretty much everyone. Except Yestin. He was at MedLab.’

‘Ill?’

‘Tests. Did you hear that Firminus threw the switch on us?’ I asked, and Sloan blinked. We were sitting at his modest extension table, which was attached to the bulkhead. ‘He said he had to run some charts. Something’s going on. My dad didn’t make it home for supper.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Sloan.

‘You haven’t heard anything?’

Sloan shook his head. ‘Not a word.’

‘Dad was talking about “anomalies”.’

‘Anomalies in what?’

‘He didn’t say.’

Sloan rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if it’s anything important, we’ll find out soon enough. So what else can you tell me? What did Dygall do?’

Sloan always liked to hear about Dygall. He would lean back and absorb the news with an air of detached enjoyment. I had seen the same expression in his eyes whenever he and Dygall got together. You could have sworn that Sloan was observing the behaviour of a particularly aggressive microbe.

I don’t think Dygall liked him much.

‘Dygall said we ought to expose ourselves to mimexic monsters,’ I reported. ‘Otherwise our first alien encounter is going to scare us all to death.’

Sloan raised an eyebrow.

‘He also wants to run a Battle of Waterloo program for his next birthday,’ I added.

‘Complete with mimexic monsters?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. Caromy was there.’ I cleared my throat. Though I wanted to talk and talk about Caromy, I was also afraid of saying something stupid. ‘She was playing with the little kids,’ I added lamely.

‘Oh?’

‘She’s very good with little kids.’

‘Yes.’ I got the impression, from Sloan’s half-smile, that he regarded such a talent as something to be expected in a person of only average intelligence. ‘So was there any dancing?’ he asked.

‘A bit.’

He nodded, and I decided to change the subject. I didn’t feel like telling Sloan about my failure to dance with Caromy. It was getting too late. ‘Some of the music was pretty bad,’ I added, and we both smiled. ‘Plexus Mix, you know. Maybe Firminus could hear it on the Bridge. Maybe he threw the switch because he couldn’t stand the noise.’

‘That wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘Not that it was anywhere
near
as bad as the stuff I used to come up with,’ I had to concede.

‘No.’ Sloan tapped his chin. ‘I seem to recall that yours had a somewhat cachinnating effect.’

‘A
what
effect?’

‘Look it up,’ said Sloan, with a glint in his eye. (I never left one of Sloan’s Hobnobs without something to look up.

He was relentless like that.) ‘So
Firminus
wanted to run those charts?’

‘Yes.’

‘To check our course?’

‘I suppose so.’

He grunted, and seemed to think. I watched him run the tip of his finger back and forth across his chin.

‘Maybe I’ll give my father a call,’ he said at last.

But when he tried, he couldn’t get through. Firminus’s comm-link wasn’t cleared to receive.

The Bridge was busy.

CHAPTER
THREE

When the noise woke me up, I thought that Dad must have returned from the Bridge, at long last. But I was wrong.

It was Mum, preparing to leave our cabin.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded groggily. I had climbed out of bed, and crossed to the door of my room in about four shuffling steps. (It wasn’t a very big room.) ‘Where are you going?’

‘Oh dear.’ Mum was pulling on her shoes in the half-light. ‘I was trying to be quiet . . .’

‘Is somebody sick?’

‘No, my love, it’s nothing like that.’

‘What, then?’

Mum hesitated, and that unnerved me. She wasn’t normally the sort of person to pussyfoot around.

‘It’s not Dad, is it?’ I asked in alarm.

‘No, no! Tuddor’s fine.’

‘Where is he? Isn’t he back yet? What time is it?’

‘About zero-three.’ Mum rose from her seat. She hadn’t combed her hair, I noticed. ‘Cheney, there’s a Senate meeting on. I have to go. Your father, too.’

I caught my breath. ‘A
Senate
meeting?
Now?

’ ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘But – but -’ A Senate meeting at three o’clock in the morning could only be an emergency Senate meeting. And the only emergency Senate meeting ever before held on Plexus had occurred during the first shift, some forty-three years previously.

On that occasion, the ship had narrowly avoided a large meteor.

‘Is it a meteor?’ I gasped.

‘No. It’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Please, Cheney, I’ll tell you later. I have to go now. I’m sorry, my love, I wish I hadn’t woken you.’ She crossed the room, and kissed me on the forehead. ‘See if you can get back to sleep.’

I couldn’t, of course. How could I? An emergency Senate meeting had to mean that something bad was about to occur. So I sat in front of my Interface Array and logged on to our Core Artificial Intelligence Program, hoping that I might be able to dig up some information.

In those days, CAIP was pretty accessible. The personnel files were heavily protected, but almost everything else was wide open – provided that you knew your way around. I did. I had to. My Rotation Assignment at the time was with Planning and Projection, the department that took care of CAIP and the Central Processing Unit or CPU. All of us ‘Capers’ were required to have a thorough grasp of the programs that ran the ship. After two months at Planning and Projection, I had a good working knowledge of most of CAIP’s functions, thanks to my supervisor, Arkwright. Arkwright knew CAIP more intimately than anyone else ever had.

Oddly enough, he wasn’t a big fan. Although he agreed that CAIP was extraordinarily complex, he didn’t regard it as a very ‘creative’ program. It was, he said, too stable to be really interesting. Its designers had sacrificed flexibility for stability; CAIP, he maintained, was about as exciting as a condenser coil.

I suppose, after years of exposure to CAIP, he couldn’t be blamed for getting a little bored. I disagreed with him, though. I was still coming to terms with the sheer extent and depth of that program. As for the CPU, it was a marvel. It had a self-assembly system based on hybridised DNA, and a matrix like a neuron map. In other words, it wasn’t the least bit boring to me. Neither was CAIP. Just because a program is accessible and user-friendly doesn’t mean it’s a great big yawn.

As accessible as CAIP was, however, I didn’t have much luck with the Navigation data that night. My problem was that I still hadn’t spent any time in Navigation. (My first Rotation Assignment had been with Sustainable Services.) So a lot of the stuff that I riffled through didn’t make much sense to me. Besides, I was tired. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.

What I finally established was this: we were on a collision course with some kind of mysterious band of radiation. It was heading straight for us – a long, drawn-out wave of energy, hurtling through space at the speed of light. No one had worked out the exact composition of the wave, or where it might have come from. No one had worked out whether we could dodge it.