Ship of Fools (3 page)

T
HE
Argonos
was still seventeen days out from Antioch when I returned to the chamber to check on the bishop’s progress with his new machine. I wanted to know what it was; I needed to be prepared.

After stepping inside the chamber and closing the door quietly behind me, I stood motionless in the darkness and listened. I couldn’t hear anything except a distant
ticking
sound that could have been metal cooling, or water dripping, or perhaps something else altogether. No light or glow of any color. The air was cooler, with a hint of moisture.

I switched on my hand torch and made my way through the chamber, choosing a path by guesswork; there were no lights or sounds to guide me this time, although I knew the general direction. Twice I thought I heard something, footsteps perhaps, but both times when I stopped to listen I heard only the faint
ticking
and other ambient sounds.

I finally reached familiar territory—the two large cylinders and the corroded metal structure I had crawled through the last time I had been here. Once again I was perched above the open bay. This time, however, there was only a silent, lifeless structure below me; no bishop, no other men.

There was no easy way down, so I worked my way
around the upper edge of the bay to the far end and the ramp leading down into it from a large, open corridor. I walked down the ramp, my footsteps echoing dully, and approached the massive structure. It seemed dead and somehow incomplete. Perhaps the bishop had abandoned it and moved on to other projects.

A metallic scraping noise startled me, followed by a cry of pain. I swung around, sweeping the torch beam across the jungle of broken machinery surrounding the bay. The light caught a pair of eyes that tried to pull back. I steadied the beam and held it on the face of a boy staring down at me from above a mound of twisted wire and metal. The boy tried to shift to the side, then back again, but his foot and leg were caught in the wire, and it seemed that the more he struggled against it, the deeper his leg went.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said to him. “It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.”

But the boy kept struggling, and there was panic in his eyes. I wondered whether he didn’t understand me, or didn’t believe me.

I moved the light away from his face and walked back up the ramp, then worked my way toward him. I stopped when I was still several meters away, and aimed the light at the tangle of metal and wire that trapped his leg. I tried talking to him again.

“I won’t hurt you. I just want to help you get your leg free. Do you understand me?”

I moved the light up just enough so that its halo faintly illuminated his face. The panic had changed to defiance, but I was certain the fear was still there, camouflaged. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old.

“My name’s Bartolomeo,” I said. “What’s yours?”

The boy finally spoke. “Let me see your face,” he demanded.

I swung the torch around and lit up my face from below.

“You look weird,” he said. “What’s that metal behind your neck?”

“Part of my exoskeleton.”

“What’s that?”

“A special support for my body, for my back and neck. My spine is . . . defective.” I tried again. “What’s your name?”

He hesitated, grimaced, then said, “Francis.”

“A saint’s name.” An automatic response, which I immediately regretted. The boy’s grimace twisted even more.

“Yeah, that’s what my mom told me. But I’m no saint, and I never will be.”

I turned the light back onto his trapped leg and started slowly forward. “Let me help you with that. You don’t want to get stuck in this place. No one would ever find you in here, and you’d starve to death.”

“
You
found me,” Francis said. “And that big bald guy would come around pretty soon. I wouldn’t starve.”

“The big bald guy? You mean the bishop?”

“I don’t know.” I was right next to the boy now and I could see him shrug. “He comes here and other places, and he builds machines.”

Yes . . . he builds machines. I knelt beside the boy and aimed the light down into the chaotic webwork of metal and wire. His leg was buried in it to midthigh.

“Any idea what that machine does?” I asked the boy.

“Not really. Makes a weird sound and it gets real hot. But it doesn’t go anywhere. He likes these old machines, he likes to make them work.”

“You don’t know who the bishop is?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to the cathedral?” I began carefully pulling and pushing at the wire around his thigh, creating a gap around his trouser leg.

“Is that the big church?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never been there.” He paused, and I could almost sense him staring down at me. “Your arms aren’t real.”

“They’re real,” I replied. “They’re just not flesh and muscle and bone.”

“They’re not real,” he insisted.

I nodded, smiling to myself. “I guess you have a point.”

“And there’s something wrong with your foot.”

“Yes, club foot. I was born that way.”

“Your body’s pretty messed up.”

“Yes. But I get by just fine. No, don’t move your leg yet; hold still until I tell you to pull.” A twisted metal rod had become wedged against his knee. I couldn’t get a good grip on it, but I pulled at it anyway. My fingers slipped; I grabbed the rod again, grip better this time, and managed to pry it a few centimeters away from his leg.

“All right, try pulling your foot out now, slowly.”

The leg came up a bit, but his foot was caught almost immediately. It was stuck underneath a bundle of corroded wire.

“Can you straighten your ankle and twist your foot around to the right a little?”

There was some slight movement, but he stopped. “It hurts,” he said.

“All right, let me work on it some more.” I lay down on my stomach and stretched my arm far down, grabbed the bundled wire, and pulled. There is a lot of strength in my prosthetic fingers and arms; suddenly the wires broke apart and the boy’s foot came free. He pulled his leg and foot all the way out and stumbled backwards. He sat down on a metal bench that was attached to a dark blue apparatus littered with broken rubber belts.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Francis nodded. “Foot still hurts is all.”

I sat beside him. “Do you think you can walk?”

He snorted. “I can walk.”

“What were you doing in here?”

The boy shrugged. “Looking around.”

“Do you come here often?”

“Sometimes. And other places like this. I like them.”

“How about school?”

Francis barked out a laugh. “What’s the point of
that
?”

“Do your parents know you come here?”

“I don’t have any.”

I hesitated, feeling a sharp pain of recognition in my chest. “No parents at all?”

Francis didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his feet and rubbed his left ankle.

“No father,” he finally said. “My mother’s sick. They say she’s dying and they won’t let me see her. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“Who are you living with, then?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“I can take care of myself.”

Yes, I thought, he probably could. But that wasn’t excuse enough for a thirteen-year-old boy to be living alone. “Don’t you have some other family? Sisters or brothers or aunts and uncles? Grandparents?”

“Yeah, but they don’t really want me.” He shrugged again. “I don’t want them, either, so it kind of works out.”

I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t say anything. Then I noticed he had no light.

“Don’t you have a hand torch, or some kind of light?” I asked.

“I dropped it back there, when I got stuck.”

I climbed across the mound of wire and searched for it with my own light. Far inside I saw what might be another hand torch; I lay down and tried to dig for it. But it was well beyond my reach; I realized there was no way I could ever get to it.

“I can’t reach it,” I said. “We’ll go out together.”

The boy didn’t respond. When I turned around to ask him where I should take him, he was gone. I swung the light around, among the hulks of old machines, between hanging cables and rusting metal rods, but saw no sign of him. He couldn’t have gone far.

“Francis.”

I listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything.

“Francis.” Louder this time. Again no response, no sound of movement.

I knew he was nearby, motionless and silent, cloaked in shadows. I was also fairly certain that if I searched long enough I would find him. But he didn’t want to be found,
and I felt I should honor his wishes. There was something about the boy that reminded me of myself.

I stood watching and listening, still reluctant to leave him, but his wishes were clear.

“Goodbye, Francis,” I finally said. “I hope I’ll see you again.”

There was still no response, so I headed out on my own.

I
have no parents. Certainly there was a woman who gave birth to me (the bishop and the Church forbade all use of artificial wombs), and certainly there was a man who fathered me, in either the “natural” way or as a donor—probably the former, although the use of artificial insemination would have been far easier to conceal than the use of an artificial womb. So I almost certainly had parents of some kind, but I have never known who or what they were.

I was born an orphan, presumably because of my deformities, and was raised communally by a small circle of families high within the social and command structures of the ship, which leads me to suspect that my parents were among that circle, or at least had some influence.

I am almost sure that my deformities were known well before my birth, but for some reason I was not aborted (the Church’s strictures against abortion did not seem to stop most convenience terminations). I imagine there are a number of people who later regretted that decision, whatever the reasons for it at the time. This always gave me some degree of satisfaction.

The people who were my parents may still be alive. I doubt that it would have been difficult to discover who they are, or were, but I never tried. They decided to abandon me at birth, so I have returned the favor throughout my life. As far as I am concerned, they no longer exist, and never did.

P
ÄR
was talking mutiny.

There was no other word for it. The thought filled me with both excitement and fear.

We met again, this time in the Snow Gardens, which were currently out of season. There was no snow on the ground, and the trees were completely bare, without even a dusting of frost or ice. But the air was cold, burning the nose and biting at the lungs. We walked through a forest of skeletal trees, the dead dry leaves and branches cracking and snapping under our boots.

“There are a lot of people who want to leave the ship,” Pär said when we were deep into the woods.

“Where are they going to go?” I asked disingenuously. “Out the air lock?”

Pär scowled up at me. “When we reach Antioch. You know that’s what I mean.”

“Temporarily, or permanently?”

“Permanently.”

“It may not be habitable.”

“It probably is, though, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But even if it
is
habitable, we don’t know what we’ll find.”

“It doesn’t matter. These people will want to leave the ship under any and all circumstances. Join those already living there, in the extremely unlikely event we find anybody, or start their own settlement if the place is deserted. They won’t care about hardships. Anything to get off this damned ship. Permanently.”

“Downsiders,” I said.

Pär nodded.

We walked on in silence for a while, our breaths like disintegrating smoke. The Snow Gardens appeared to go on for kilometers when they were in season and there was snow everywhere, the ground blanketed and the densely leaved trees heavy with snow and ice. But now the boundaries were visible—the gray walls enclosing the gardens, which were in need of basic maintenance; the dark ceiling high above us, pitted and cracked, appearing nothing at all like the vast and open sky it was in season with chaotic cloud images moving across its surface.

We neared a wall and changed direction. Directly ahead of us was a half-burned tree, branches and trunk charred and broken.

“There would need to be a vote,” I finally said to him.

Pär snorted. “Yeah, but what kind? None of the downsiders would be voting.”

“That’s true,” I said. “On the other hand, the vote would be taken not by the Executive Council, but by the full Planning Committee.”

“Either one, we know how that vote would go.”

“It depends on the circumstances.”

“Crap,” Pär said with disgust. “They’d never agree to let people leave. Especially not downsiders. They need them to do the scut work—cleaning and maintenance, all the manual labor this ship needs, and needing more all the time. Not to mention providing the servants for you all.”

He was right, of course. Over the years, the issue had come up several times in Executive Council sessions as well as in other informal discussions. With few exceptions, no one wanted to allow the downsiders to leave, unless the upper-level residents were to also leave the ship, which was
as unlikely as finding anyone alive in this solar system. Those in the upper levels were afraid to leave the
Argonos
after all these centuries; they were afraid they would lose the power and control they had over the downsiders. They were right to be afraid.

“We can help each other,” Pär eventually said.

“You said that once before.”

“And I mean it now as much as I did then.”

I wasn’t sure what he was after, or what he could offer in return, so I finally asked him.

“You have shipwide access,” he said, “full authority over all systems.”

“Not all,” I corrected. “I cannot launch weapons on my own. I cannot shut down life support. I cannot change or set course—”

Pär shook his head in dismissal. “You have access to everything we need.”

He said
we.
So he was with them, which I had already suspected. But I wondered if his
we
was meant to include me as well.

“Landing ships, supplies, all of that,” he went on. “We have people who can run the loaders and navigate the shuttles. But we’ll need access codes for the shuttles, ship’s stores, fuel allocation, launch coordinates . . .” He shook his head. “Too much we can’t do on our own.” He stopped and leaned against the charred tree trunk; a pair of violet-and-indigo butterflies rose from a scarred branch and fluttered away. Pär looked up at me. “We can’t do it without you.”

“Why should I?”

Pär stared at me. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” he finally said. “We all have rights, every person on this ship. Or we
should
. Downsiders have
no
rights. We should have the right to make this decision ourselves, to leave the ship or stay, as we
choose
. But we don’t.”

“Why should I risk helping you?” I asked.

He snorted then. “You mean, how would it be to your advantage?”

“Something like that.” I didn’t like it put so crudely, but I couldn’t argue his point.

Pär nodded; not in agreement, it seemed to me, but rather as if he’d expected as much.

“Your captain is in trouble. If he goes down, you go down with him. And he is almost certainly going down, no matter what we find. This is your way out.”

“How?”

“You go with us.”

“And if I don’t want to leave?”

“Will you really want to stay when the captain has been deposed? The way everyone on the Planning Committee and Executive Council, in fact nearly everyone in the upper levels, despises you?”

“Despises? Isn’t that a little harsh?”

“Harsh?” And here Pär smiled. “Yes. But it’s accurate. You must know that. You’ll have no power, no influence, and my guess is that all access will be cut off, all authority canceled. You’ll be nothing.” He pushed off from the tree and walked away. “Think about it,” he said without turning back.

I watched him walk deeper into the skeletal woods, watched my own breath form and dissipate over and over. Yes, I would think about his proposal. I had no choice.

T
HE
downsiders did all the scut work on the ship, just as Pär said. Although most of the ship’s systems were automated, and most of the machinery was self-maintaining and self-repairing, nothing was completely trouble-free, and much manual labor was needed to keep everything running. Cleaning, servicing, other kinds of maintenance. Also to run the manufacturing and fabrication equipment, the ag rooms, and countless other jobs. And more needed to be done each year as systems gradually faltered and broke down.

Costino and his staff were in charge of production and schedules, coordinating all the downsider work crews. I’d never been interested in the details, but I knew that much of the labor was exhausting, and some of it dangerous. People were occasionally killed. But someone had to do it. I did not make judgments one way or the other.

According to the ship’s history, as recorded by Toller and his predecessors, there had been periodic attempts by downsiders to change the way things were done. I had even heard vague stories of a massive revolt, called the Repudiation, associated with some kind of plague three or four centuries earlier. Such efforts had never been successful. I had been through one attempted insurrection myself, six years earlier. It did not last long.

At that time, the downsiders began negotiations reasonably enough—they asked that all the work be shared equally by those on all levels. This request was of course refused. So the downsiders threatened to cease all work. In response, we (and I’m afraid I must include myself, whether or not I agreed with the actions taken; I
was
a part of the upper-level society, no matter how much of an outsider I was to most of them) simply cut off all the food and water conduits to the lower levels, secured the ag rooms so they could not get at
our
food, and shut down their recycling systems.

They held out for six days. Arne Gronvold tried to restore all the lifelines for them, and when he was unsuccessful he tried to cut off all of ours. That, too, failed. When the insurrection was over, Arne was banished for life to the lower levels.

So I understood why the downsiders would want to leave, and I understood why the upper levels would never agree. And Pär was asking me to risk sharing Arne Gronvold’s fate.

He was asking too much.