Strider's Galaxy (6 page)
Authors: John Grant
Small clouds hovered beside the
Santa Maria
's huge daylight-simulator.
It was an imposing sight.
The colors, for example. Colors on Mars were always fairly muted—even the orange-red of the plains was restful in the glimmer of the sunlight. Inside the
Santa Maria
, with its Earth-standard daylight-simulator, greens and yellows were violent, vibrant colors.
She supposed she'd get used to it.
Lan Yi had finished his rather embarrassing reunion with the bot, and was introducing it to her.
"This is Pinocchio. He plays a very good game of chess."
"Yeah. How do you do, Pinocchio?" said Strauss-Giolitto. It seemed odd to be introduced to a goddam machine. (She must stop blaspheming, even in her thoughts.) "Pleased to meet you."
She shook hands formally with the bot.
"And I am pleased to meet you too, Ms"—again there was that disconcerting buzzing noise—"Strauss-Giolitto. We have not met before, but I recognize you from the data which the Main Computer has supplied me concerning your facial features."
"You're too kind," said Strauss-Giolitto sarcastically.
"Thank you," said Pinocchio, with no apparent irony. "Now may I guide you to your cabins? There is a further pair of personnel due to arrive in"—his head hummed—"four hours and forty-four minutes."
Two-thirds of the Great Beast,
thought Strauss-Giolitto, following Lan Yi and the bot.
They went along a path that could have been in Mongolia, where Strauss-Giolitto had spent her childhood, although her mother and grandmother had always fiercely reminded her that her roots lay in Greater Yugoslavia. Through the hedges Strauss-Giolitto could hear the thrum of insects. Every now and then a gap in the bushery offered her a view of endless ears of grain; the only difference from Mongolia was that the heads weren't moving. Above her some kind of raptor soared close to the clouds. The inside of the
Santa Maria
was Earth's ecosystem, done in miniature.
An animal that she didn't recognize scuttled across the path in front of them. It seemed to be covered in stiff, bony needles. Its hindlegs were amusingly long as it scampered nervously out of their way.
"You are a teacher?" said Pinocchio, with studied courtesy.
"Unless your programming's wrong, bot, you know that already." It was probably quite cool in here, but the brightness of the daylight-simulator was making her feel hot. The SSIA uniform was designed for use on Mars, not in Earth-standard.
"You will have very little to do during the first few years of this mission," said Pinocchio. "It is unlikely that any child will be born before we leave the orbit of Jupiter."
"All teachers are, by definition, highly trained in data retrieval," Lan Yi pointed out. "They have to be, because that is what they spend most of their time teaching to their young charges. Ms Strauss-Giolitto's expertise in that field will also be of considerable use to the mission."
"Do we
have
to respond to this bot?" said Strauss-Giolitto angrily to Lan Yi.
The out-of-Taiwanese looked offended. "I told you, he is a friend of mine. He is making conversation, although sometimes I suspect his conversation is not just idle. Why can't you be courteous to him?"
A yellow butterfly landed on Pinocchio's shoulder, flapped its wings for a moment or two, then fluttered away.
"Be courteous to a
machine
? Why should I be?"
"He's a very clever machine," said Lan Yi.
"And I brew excellent coffee," added Pinocchio.
"I wouldn't be surprised if he were as clever as, for example, you," Lan Yi continued.
"I doubt it," said Pinocchio. "Ms Strauss-Giolitto has an IQ of"—his head buzzed again—"one hundred and eighty-four plus or minus ten. I am a mere valetbot, so that I do not require an IQ higher than several decades less than that."
"You've kept telling me so," said Lan Yi, "but you've taken three games of chess off me."
"You were playing badly at the time."
They'd been walking for quite a while, yet still didn't seem to be much closer to the cabins at the
Santa Maria
's far end.
"Look, can I just get a word in edge—?" began Strauss-Giolitto.
"No. You can shut up," said Lan Yi, rounding on her suddenly, holding up his hand, palm towards her, so that instinctively she stopped walking.
"I really don't think—" Pinocchio said.
"And you can shut up for a moment or two as well, my friend," said Lan Yi. His face had become pale. Strauss-Giolitto had the sudden impression that the scientist had grown taller than herself.
"There are going to be fewer than fifty of us on this ship for the next thirty years or longer, perhaps very much longer," said Lan Yi, "and we are going to have to learn to rub along together somehow. Since we left the shuttle a few minutes ago you have beefed about Captain Strider—whom you have never even met—and now you are being directly insulting to a being who, while he is not organic, is nevertheless a sentient creature and a valued friend of mine. You were insulting to me when I remarked on the fact that you were physically beautiful. I don't know what chip it is that you have on your shoulder, Ms Strauss-Giolitto, but could you get rid of it, please?"
He stared up at her, his dark eyes very hard.
She could probably have clubbed him to the ground with a single swing of her arm, but of course she didn't.
"I am amazed you got through the screening procedures," said Lan Yi. "You seem like an atavism. I will make a point of observing you during the next three years and if necessary recommending to Strider that she send you back to Mars before we leave Jovian orbit."
Strauss-Giolitto felt the blood drain from her lips. "You'd get me thrown off the mission?" she said.
"Too damnably right," said Lan Yi. "I might have children during this voyage. You are a teacher. I do not want them to be taught your ghastly little prejudices."
"What makes you think Strider would listen to you?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
"Oh, you really
do
have a lot to learn, Ms Strauss-Giolitto," said Lan Yi. "Come on, Pinocchio. Let us get to the cabins. Let this stupid individual come along behind, unless she would prefer to find herself lost out here rather than follow a mere bot and a wrinkled old man."
#
As soon as Lan Yi was alone in his cabin he threw himself down on the forcefield futon and stretched out on his back, his arms outreached behind his head with his thumbs locked together, his feet tensed so that his toes pointed towards the opposite wall. His body was over a hundred years old and felt as good as it ever had.
On his secondary retinal screen he could see that Pinocchio was returning to the main ingress aperture, ready to wait for the next brace of incoming personnel.
The cabins had small windows so that enough light came in from the daylight-simulator for most things. There were blinds that would mute the light and automated curtains to shut it out entirely. Lan Yi had been in worse quarters. Much worse. His Taiwanese ancestors had luckily been out of the country when the nuke war had annihilated Taiwan alongside mainland China. People elsewhere on Earth often couldn't make the distinction between the descendants of Communist Taiwan and those of the larger, anarchist nation that had once been to its north. On either side of his family tree, Lan Yi had ancestors who had been lynched. He himself had three times during his century-long lifetime—or was it four?—been locked up by the cops for a few nights on the grounds of "suspicion." Maybe that had been, along with their poverty, a part of what had driven his wife Geena to take her life. Once he had come to Mars that type of harassment had stopped; the Martians, blind to physical differences like the epicanthic fold, regarded
anyone
from Earth as a bit of a lost cause until they had proved themselves otherwise.
Lan Yi was concerned that this blasted teacher might think differently. He blinked at his secondary retinal screen and the scene of the outdoors changed instantaneously, giving him a view through the window into her cabin.
She was kneeling forward on her forcefield futon, with her face in her hands. Her long, mousily blonde hair covered her arms down to her elbows, so that it took a moment or two for him to realize that she was weeping.
He felt like a voyeur, and immediately blinked at his secondary retinal screen once more. The pastoral splendors of the
Santa Maria
's interior blandly returned again.
The woman regarded bots as by definition second-class citizens. He wondered if, by extension, there were subdivisions of the human species whom she regarded as inherently inferior to herself. He hoped this were not the case—otherwise he would indeed fulfil his threat to have Strider pitch Strauss-Giolitto off the mission at the first possible opportunity. But he didn't feel very good about himself for having invaded her privacy.
Wearily, he realized that he probably ought to take her under his wing. If she carried on behaving this way, no one else would.
He cued his musibot to play some Bach. Pure Bach, not a melding with another composer, was what he desired right now. The fifth Brandenburg Concerto was exactly what was needed to soothe him.
#
"We have it!" yelled Strider ten days later. The amalgamate fibre linking the eighth of the eight tugs to the
Santa Maria
had attained full tension. "Yahey!"
"Are you reporting that we have achieved A-73 status, Captain Strider?" said Dulac in her temporary commlink. He sounded amused.
"Aw, come on, Alphonse, you know what I'm talking about."
"I was joking, Leonie," he said. Over the past year the two hadn't become friends, but, as with O'Sondheim, their working relationship was more or less OK. "Congratulations on a successful manoeuvre."
It would be another couple of hours before the tugs started pulling the
Santa Maria
clear of Phobos. First it was essential that the amalgamate fibers be fully tested; later on, during the slow trip to Jupiter, it wouldn't matter too much if one of them broke, but there could be a disaster if one did so in the first few minutes.
Even the tugs represented something of an achievement for human technology. Their on-board puters would have to make thousands of tiny alterations of trajectory over the next two years as they hauled the spinning
Santa Maria
to the big gas planet. If one of the puters crashed the other seven would have to compensate immediately; if a second one went down there were going to be difficulties. Those puters were probably a lot more sophisticated than Pinocchio.
"We have some spare time," said Danny O'Sondheim, by her side.
"You can stand down now if you wish to, First Officer," said Strider, her eyes flicking between the viewscreen directly in front of her, on which the tugs and the filaments showed up clearly, and the broad vista of the view-window above it, where they didn't. What the window did show was an amazing panoply of stars. More than anything—more, even, than her final shuttle-trip up from Mars to Phobos—this view persuaded Strider that she really was on her way to Tau Ceti
II
. Some of the stars she recognized—Aldebaran was winking in its angry orange way off to one side, and Sirius was a bright white flame almost directly ahead—but they were in the minority. On a clear night on Earth you could see several thousand stars, and the classical constellations were reasonably easily distinguishable. On a clear night on Mars you could see tens of thousands of other stars, and it was twice as difficult to pick out the constellations. On Phobos, the heaven was a blaze of stars, most of them faint but together adding up to form curtains of light in which the bright stars of the constellations were almost lost.
"We could both stand down," said O'Sondheim, getting up. "There's nothing for us to do for a while. The Main Computer will monitor the situation as well as we can. Better."
"Don't you think this is exciting?" said Strider, unable to take her gaze away from screen and window and screen and window and screen and . . .
"Yes, of course it is," said O'Sondheim. "But we'll need all our wits about us when the tugs start the
Santa Maria
moving. Much better if we had a few hours of rest and recreation until we're required here again."
Now Strider did look up at him.
"Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?" she said.
"It depends on what you think I'm suggesting," said O'Sondheim.
"Oh, right," said Strider, returning her attention to the starfields. "You want to fetch me a sandwich. Yes, please."
3
Jupiter:
AD
2531
Three years had passed, and most of the personnel aboard the
Santa Maria
had sorted themselves out somehow. Communication with Earth had been minimal after the first few months.
The three years had not been without their strains. There is only so long that one can tolerate checking and rechecking systems in the knowledge that none of the commands you are issuing are being executed but are merely being correlated with the actions of other responsive instrumentation. There is only so long that you can sit watching holos during your recreation time, or seeing the same familiar faces. Some, like Lan Yi, lost themselves in music or books, or stared at the starscape outside the windows for hours on end. Some indulged in the mating dance, sleeping around with a diminishing supply of partners: semi-permanent pairings removed some people from the pool of good-timers, but more people gave up because they noticed that folk like Lan Yi were looking a lot less bored than they themselves were. The Main Computer's libraries became in progressively heavier demand. Ball games like tennis were fiendishly difficult aboard the rotating craft, but some stalwarts persevered; there were brief vogues for ping-pong, volleyball and flick-me. All in all, things were boding reasonably well for the potentially hundred-and-ten-year voyage even though the corollary of intelligence and curiosity—the capacity to become bored—might at some stage pose a threat.
Six months out Strider dictated that rotas of her personnel should assist the agribots in the planting of the remaining fields in the
Santa Maria
's great central hold. Everyone realized that what she was doing was dictating occupational therapy for all—herself included. No one objected except Danny O'Sondheim, who had felt that it was beneath his dignity as First Officer. Even his objections didn't last long.
"You've got a splodge of mud on your cheek," said Strider one time they met on the command deck for yet another round of systems checks.
"Yes, I know," said O'Sondheim. "I thought I'd leave it there."
She grinned at him. For once, he grinned back.
There was a tension between Strider and her First Officer that she didn't know how to defuse. He made it obvious time and again that he was sexually interested in her, but at the same time his body language told her that in some obscure way he also despised her—perhaps because she had chosen not to encumber herself with all the technological enhancements which his own body sported. She, on the other hand, found herself profoundly uninterested in him except in a professional sense: it was her duty to ensure that the two of them worked together well as a team—which they had always done—but she couldn't envisage herself ever becoming friends with the man, and the thought of making love with him, with his secondary retinal screens and his thighputer and who knew how much additional augmentational junk clanking around (or so she imagined it) on the bed with them, repelled her entirely. It was odd that, on the very few occasions these days when she felt remotely interested in sex, it was still Pinocchio whom she invited to her cabin: the fake man was more attractive than the augmented one.
"I'm glad to hear it," she said.
His smile vanished. "Yeah," he said noncommittally.
The trip out from Mars to the orbit of Ganymede had taken the ferried
Santa Maria
the best part of two years. Once they'd arrived there, some of the commands that Strider and O'Sondheim entered into the Main Computer had begun to seem of purpose. The nuclear-pulse drive that would thrust the
Santa Maria
out of the Solar System depended on the detonation of about 250 small spheres of deuterium and helium-3 every second at the center of the electromagnetic field housed by the hemispherical chamber at the rear of the vessel. Both deuterium—"heavy hydrogen"—and helium-3—"lightweight helium"—are richly present in the atmosphere of Jupiter. For the past few decades bot "miner" drones had been plunging down into the atmosphere of the giant planet and bringing back the elements to store in installations on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. There was enough there now to fuel several
Santa Marias
out beyond Neptune's orbit, but even the
Santa Maria
alone required over one hundred kilotons of the stuff, for both acceleration out of the Sun's system and deceleration into Tau Ceti's. A constant relay of drones was bringing it up from Ganymede's surface to load the fusion drive.
In theory, the bot drones could have carried out the year-long task entirely on their own, with the aid of the Main Computer. In practice, there had to be constant supervision from the command deck by either Strider and O'Sondheim or their deputies, Maloron Leander and Umbel Nelson, in case of emergencies.
So far there hadn't been any serious emergencies, just an occasional malfunction that had been easily overridden, but . . .
"Oh, shit!" said O'Sondheim.
Strider looked up at him. Ninety per cent of the fuel was loaded. Her mind had been wandering. The slow rolling of the heavens as the
Santa Maria
rotated on its longitudinal axis tended to be hypnotic. Her right foot had, without her noticing, eased itself out of the loop beneath her chair. Annoyed with herself, she jammed it back in again. Once they were in deep space the command deck would reconfigure itself. At the moment, though, there was always the risk of floating upwards.
"What?"
"One of the drones has gone berserk."
"Click into the Computer and redirect it."
"I've just tried that. The drone's puter refuses to respond." O'Sondheim's voice was beginning to rise.
Still Strider didn't take it seriously until she looked at the screen in front of her.
"
WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!!
" the Main Computer was flashing urgently at her. "
WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!!
"
She instinctively pressed four keys to give her voice-interaction with the Computer.
"Quick!" she snapped. "Tell!"
"Drone seven eight three B's guidance puter has crashed completely," said the Main Computer calmly. "The vessel is heading towards the
Santa Maria
's midships at a rate of seven thousand three hundred and thirty-one kilometers per hour, and will impact within three point six minutes."
Strider slapped her hand down on the large red button beside her keyboard. Instantly a klaxon began sounding in the main body of the ship. Her personnel would start donning their suits as soon as they heard it—assuming they weren't too far from their suits. She bit her lower lip. Three children had been born during the trip out from the Solar System—the personnel had proved more fecund than expected. She hoped someone would be on hand to suit them up.
But there was no time to worry about casualties. This was a case of damage limitation.
"Can't you override?" she said.
"I've just told you—" began O'Sondheim.
"No," said the Computer.
"Can't you move the
Santa Maria
?"
"No. Not in time."
"Then what
can
you do?"
There was a silence from the screen.
Strider thought fast.
Things hitting her ship . . .
"Meteor defenses," she yelled at the screen. "How quickly can you get them up and running?"
She knew the answer. They'd tested out the meteor shields often enough. The chances of being hit by anything serious were minimal here within the Solar System. The chances of being hit by anything
outside
the Solar System were incalculable—no one had any real idea what might be floating between the stars—but when you were travelling at a substantial fraction of the velocity of light yourself it was wise to take precautions.
"Four point one seven minutes," confirmed the computer.
"Switch them on anyway," said Strider.
She glanced at O'Sondheim. What she could see of his face was paler than she'd ever known a human being's face to be.
"Unzip one of our shuttles," she said, trying to keep her voice clear of alarm.
"But—"
"Just fucking do it!"
She turned back to her screen.
"Have you got an accurate location for the berserker?" she said to the Computer. She could have asked the question of the air, but the instinct to face someone while you're speaking to them is almost impossible to break.
"To within three hundred meters."
"No better than that?" she demanded. The drones were little over three hundred meters across themselves.
"I could get it down to one hundred meters, but it would take me one point eight minutes to do so. Estimated time of impact is two point five minutes."
"Shuttled unzipped," reported O'Sondheim shakily beside her.
I must not think about those infants.
"OK, Computer. What I want you to do over the next fifteen seconds max is progressively download your best figures for the location and trajectory of the berserker into that shuttle. Then I want you to launch it on an intersecting course."
"You are not permitted wilfully to destroy expensive items of SSIA property—"
"The
Santa Maria
's a fuck of a sight more expensive than a shuttle."
Human lives are more expensive than either.
"You're overridden."
"Very well. The chances of success are under twenty per cent."
"Do it."
"The situation is complicated by the fact that the meteor shields are beginning to deflect the berserker from its original trajectory."
"Adjust the shuttle's course accordingly."
"This problem is difficult."
"You've got about three seconds to solve it."
A small tremor ran through the
Santa Maria
as the shuttle blasted off.
"I hope this is going to bloody work," muttered Strider dourly, repeatedly thumping the surface in front of her with her fist.
"Meteor shields are now up to fifty per cent strength," said the Computer.
"That's not very relevant at the moment. How's the shuttle doing?"
"It appears to be locked on target."
"Good. Keep it that way."
For the first time Strider noticed the rate at which her heart was pounding. It was lucky some nearby medbot hadn't come rushing on to the command deck, insisting that she take it easy.
She looked at O'Sondheim. He was still ashen.
"Fingers crossed," she said, with assumed optimism.
"Shouldn't we suit up?" he said.
"There's no time. Besides, a captain goes down with her ship." It suddenly hit her. She was as terrified as he was, but she'd been too busy to notice it.
"Progress?" she snapped at the Main Computer.
"If impact is to be achieved, it will be between fourteen point nine and fifteen point eight seconds from now. The range of values is as wide as this because I am uncertain about the probability of impact indeed being achieved. The meteor deflectors are now at seventy-five per cent strength and rising."
Fifteen seconds or so. Not a long time to think about being dead. Even the personnel who'd managed to get themselves suited up wouldn't have a great chance. A mass of several thousand tons moving at upwards of seven thousand kilometers per hour would probably break the
Santa Maria
in two. Depending on where it hit, one or other of the craft might explode. Short-circuiting through the electrics would do untold damage. There were likely to be flash-fires in the few seconds before the
Santa Maria
's oxygen dissipated: suits were designed to withstand vacuum, not flames. Some of her people might be able to cling on to installations around them long enough for the people on Ganymede to be able to get here in time to save them, but most would be spilled out into space: you don't go hunting for a person floating in space, because space is too big and a person is too small. Anyway, the force of the impact would probably be so great that no one aboard her ship—
her
ship, dammit—would have a bone in their body left unbroken.
"Don't blame yourself," said Pinocchio, who had suddenly appeared behind her.
"Between six point four and six point seven seconds," said the Main Computer. "My accuracy is improving because—"
"Just tell me to the nearest second!" she screamed at the screen.
"Four." That was the number of people she was really fond of aboard the
Santa Maria
: Pinocchio, Lan Yi, Maloron Leander and Umbel Nelson. OK, since she was being honest with herself in what could prove the final few moments of her life: five. Leonie Strider could be added to the list.
"Three." Which was the number of infants who had been born since the vessel had left Phobos. She had an insane urge to start singing her thoughts out loud, as if they were some kind of nursery rhyme.
"Two." She didn't have a thought for the number two, so she was glad she hadn't started singing.
"One." The one thing she had wanted for over twenty years to do was to go starside.
There was an impossibly long delay. Her crudely improvised guided missile had failed to find its target.
Then . . .
A flash of brightness to her left, like the first rising of the Sun in a tropical dawn, appeared in the view-window in front of her. It grew with implausible speed, seemingly becoming even brighter. She shut her eyes tightly, but the light still stabbed through the lids. She put up her hands, but even they didn't seem to give her retinae enough protection.
"Impact achieved," she heard the Computer say.
She'd been holding her breath for too long. Now it came rasping painfully out of her.
"Status of meteor-deflection shields," she croaked, her hands still over her eyes.
"Ninety point two per cent," the Main Computer replied promptly. "There is a four point one per cent chance that any of the debris from the impact will hit the
Santa Maria
with sufficient momentum to cause major damage."
"Keep the shields rising," she said, slowly lowering her hands. It took an extra dose of courage to open her eyes. She discovered that the base of the thumb of her right hand was bleeding, and realized that at some point she must have been pressing her fingernails into it. The brightness in front of her had ebbed almost entirely, but she was still having difficulty seeing things directly: green and purple afterimages were confusing her vision.
