by Larry Niven
“And nobody wanted to go up,” Carlos said.
“Cadmann would have—”
“We didn’t have Cadmann,” Carlos said. “And we weren’t sure of what we were facing. If Cassandra had been down here in the Grendel Wars—”
“Yeah, yeah, we would have lost her. And working without her would have been damn tough. But we’d have pulled through,” Marvin Stolzi said. He had joined Cadzie and Joanie in the first row, but sat at the end, no one next to him, as he always did when he could. “We’d have made it.”
“You weren’t there. Your father thought we should wait to be sure there weren’t any more threats. Existential threats. Like intelligent grendels, or those damned bees, or—well, anything like that,” Zack said, his voice rising a bit. “We depended on Cassandra. We still do. But it would be safe to bring her down, but instead you went up and put more stuff into Cassandra! And now after you kids wrecked her we can’t know—”
“Oh, that’s not true,” Joanie said. She sat next to Cadzie, again in the front row, so it was more like a round table than leaders and audience, Earthborn on one side of the table, everyone else on the other. “We didn’t ruin Cassandra.”
“She isn’t working,” Carlos said quietly. “You still can’t get her to tell us much about that ship, or talk to it for us, and neither can I.”
“It’s the new Preferences Matrix Board we—all right, I—put in,” Jennifer said from somewhere behind Cadzie. “I didn’t like that at the time, but mother—and you!” She stood and pointed dramatically at Mason Stolzi, “agreed that we weren’t doing her any harm! You were in charge!”
That finally roused Mason Stolzi. The elderly astronaut didn’t stand, and his voice was low and tired. Cadzie would have called it weak if it hadn’t been someone he respected. “You were sure it wouldn’t do any harm, and I believed. I always believed you.”
“And it didn’t do any harm,” Jennifer insisted. “We just thought it made keeping secrets about the cthulhu a lot easier. And it did, and there was no problem, not for all these years. And we saved the cthulhu! You’d have killed as many as you could! You know you would have.”
Carlos started to say something and caught himself.
“And who gave you the right to mess with Cassandra?” Zack demanded.
Cadzie cleared his throat. None of this was getting them anywhere. Uncle Carlos was acting strange, Zack sounded like he had ice on his mind. He stood. “Look, it’s all agreed that it’s time to bring Cassandra down here. We’ll also pack up and bring down all the spare parts we can find. Let the experts,” he said, his voice dripping derision now, “argue about backups and Primary Preference Tables and all the rest of it. We haven’t been up there for seven years, we weren’t there long then, and we won’t be doing it often now. Will we, Toad?”
Marvin Stolzi was hesitant. Usually he avoided big meetings. Little meetings, too, unless he wanted something. He looked to his father, up at the table with the Earthborn, then said “I went up with Dad on the last mission. Fixed a few things. Couldn’t stay long. No, Cadzie, we won’t be going back often.”
“But you’ll take us up. Joanie and me.”
“Better if it’s only two. Better safety factor with a smaller payload. Not sure of the thrust we can get—”
“But it’ll do it.”
“Two nine’s, anyway you look at it,” Toad said carefully. “Another nine if only two go.”
“Three nines? Really?”
“How the hell do I know? No data, and you know it, Cadzie. Dad, what do you make it?”
Toad’s father sat at one end of the table of Earthborn.
He had the title of Chief Astronaut, but he looked older than Carlos. Cadzie knew he really wasn’t. It was hard to tell about Earthborn ages anyway. It depended on how old they’d been before they went to sleep, and on how long they’d been awake, and for that matter, how many times they had been awakened and put back to sleep. And nobody wanted to talk about it. But however old Mason Stolzi looked when he went up eight years ago, he sure didn’t look up to going now. He looked tired, and he didn’t talk much.
Mason stood with some effort.
Maybe he has been awake longer than Carlos, Cadzie thought. He was younger than Carlos when they left Earth. It had taken a lot of patience to find out that much.
“The Minerva reliability with that light a payload has got to be better than point nine nine,” he said. “No reason to try for better. I wouldn’t try. But you’re missing the point. It’s Marv who has to decide. He’ll be the mission commander, for God’s sake. Who the hell is fit to argue with him?”
“Not arguing, Mason,” Carlos said. He’d got control of himself, and his voice was strong again, now that he had something to argue for. “But it has to be three. Too much work for just two. Have to pack up Cassandra—carefully!—after taking her apart—carefully. Good bit of work. And whoever is in charge of disassembly needs to know something about computers and engineering. Not programming. Not science. Engineering. And be up to going now. We don’t have time for much training, so we need young people who will get the job done. I don’t know anyone better than Joanie for the job, but we can’t send her up on that mission to do it alone.”
There was silence after that. Twenty people, and not a word. Cadzie looked at Joanie. She looked more like a little girl, like she had back at Weyland Compound as a child than like the dam’s chief engineer. This couldn’t have been easy for her. He stood again. “And I’ll go with her to help,” he said firmly. “So the only question is when.”
Mason Stolzi had been Geographic’s pilot, off and on, for most of Geographic’s voyage to Tau Ceti. It could be said that he’d brought them to Avalon. It was also true that Stolzi had been wakened from cold sleep too often, but it didn’t show, not for a long time. He’d become the Chief Astronaut, and after a while damn near the only one. And that last mission to Geographic had been too much. Mason’s near collapse had cut the mission short, and he’d finished that mission as a passenger. Now he lived quietly. Nobody said “ice on his mind.” But a lot of people thought it. His son, Marvin Stolzi—Toad—had never really known him when he wasn’t nervous, almost fearful, but he handled it well. And he knew more about actually going to space than anyone else in the colony.
And now it was his son’s turn. There hadn’t been a lot of space missions after the Grendel Wars. There was always a better use for fuel right now. The preparations crew, and the missions, kept being put off. There was no real hurry. The frozen embryos had been flown to ground, human and animal alike. Many of the animals had been awakened before anyone knew grendels were a threat. Those that hadn’t been had thawed and died after the grendel attacks became fierce. So did a lot of the human embryos when the grendels destroyed much of the colony.
His mother had raised him to be a pilot, and he’d gone along with that. He was skilled with machines. Age: 38. Height five feet six, and his father was a little shorter. Brown hair. White skin that took a red tan. He didn’t like the sea much; he wasn’t part of the Surf’s Up crowd. His bicycle was old, made for his father, just before a grendel destroyed the third and last 3D printer.
He loved Geographic. Loved and cared for the Minervas too. It struck him now, as he danced through the checklist, that he’d done this too often as rote. The list ran well, telling him everything he already knew about the aging spacecraft’s flaws.
He asked, “Strapped in?”
Cadzie said, “Sure.” Joan grunted.
Stolzi said, “I always ask.” He ran the red cursor up to High. Joan and Cadzie jerked in astonishment as the Minerva blasted along the waterway. A tiny shudder in the roar killed Stolzi’s grin, but the Minerva lifted and rose into the darkening sky.
The Minerva had required just thirty-eight minutes to travel from launch to matching orbit and velocity with Geographic.
Cadzie’s stomach was just settling down from liftoff when he felt the gentle bump of the docking rings. By the time things had clicked in
to place and all pressures had been normalized, he was ready. Cadzie and Joan prepared to enter Geographic, while Toad remained behind on the Minerva checking systems, a tiny furrow between his eyes betraying his concern. The air was cool and stale, smelled of disinfectant and ancient sweat and even more ancient air conditioner filters.
“I still can’t get used to this,” Joan said. “They spent almost a century in here.”
“And out of that century, no single person was awake more than two years, total,” Cadzie said. “Usually two crew at a time.”
“That,” Joan said, “that had to be very strange.”
“And dangerous,” Cadzie said. He ran his fingers along one of the sepulchral ivory and stainless steel cold sleep pods built into the walls in a section marked D-4. “Look,” he said. “This was my granddad’s pod.”
“Wow. Sort of a mausoleum, huh? So . . did he have ice on his mind?”
He winced. Hated the term “ice.” It was so . . cold. “I have no memory of him, Joan. Maybe a big smiling face, but they say you don’t remember anything before the age of two, so that could be a mirage. But I can tell you what everyone else said: no. He was as sane as a man ever is. All circuits firing.”
She laid down in one of the pods, closed her green eyes. Then shivered, opened them and climbed back out rather more quickly than she had entered. “Would you have wanted to get in one of these?”
“At the time?” he asked. “Sure. All the tests looked good.”
“Then . . what went wrong?”
Cadzie considered. “No one had tested what happens when you wake up, go down, wake up . . over and over for a century. There were limits to cellular plasticity. Things that didn’t show up in animal experiments over shorter time frames. It was . . tragic.”
Joan’s face softened. “Your grandmother?”
“Yeah,” he said. “My bio-grandmer. Her I remember. And she loved me, but always needed help dealing with me. And I remember when the day came she could no longer help me with my math.”
“How old were you?”
A dark cloud flitted across his face. “Ten.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” he said, and shook himself like a dog waking up from a nightmare. “Let’s get on with it.”
They floated through the ship, past endless rows of clear Plexiglas cubbyholes and humming equipment bays. Rat-sized black maintenance bots awakened and shadowed them, like pets eager to serve long-absent masters. Past doors to shops and labs, sliding through crowds of ghosts, their fathers and grandmothers, men and women possessing a kind of courage that might . . just might be unknown to them. There was no hurry, but neither did they dawdle making their way to the central computer room. If Cassandra lived anywhere in Geographic, she lived here.
“All right, Trevanian? We’re here.”
The lanky communications officer answered the comm link instantly. “All right. Congratulations. So the first thing is to make an inspection of the logic banks while the test is running.”
“In process,” Cadzie replied.
A series of lights and sounds indicated diagnostic checks. Beep beep boop.
“Everything seems all right,” Trev said.
“We’ve got a little fuzz,” Joanie said.
“I’m not surprised. Chip degradation. But we expected that. What we need to know is if Cassandra made any physical alterations to obey the new instructions.”
“Protocols prevent her from altering the physical structure. But there are some limited changes she can make to the programming or memory partitions. Let’s see . . .” Cadzie read the schematics. “Ah . . according to this, yes. She created some kind of firewall. Pretty subtle. Wow. I didn’t know she could redesign herself.” He looked more closely. “And . . yeah, it looks like someone made a physical alteration and tried to hide it from the diagnostics.”
“Tried to?”
“Pretty much did. So she found a way around those instructions. Perhaps repurposed repair bots to modify her logic boards. Create a section that was invisible to the ordinary scans. That wasn’t expected.”
“So . . what do we do?”
“Figure out what was done and how they did it. That will give us some clues. People?”
He could envision the comm hut, knew that Nnedi and Scott and Epifanio Clay were standing by to provide advice.
He hoped they were squirming.
“It wasn’t all remote.” Nnedi’s voice. “We got on one of the repair runs, and managed to make some modifications.”
“Swapped out a module for one we created here,” Scott Martinez’s voice. That conversation, between Scott and Carlos, must have been scathing. “From spare Minerva parts.”
“Created a separate computer inside Cassandra? A virtual Cassandra?”
“Pretty much.” Nnedi sounded as if she was about to undergo dental surgery with a chisel and hammer.
“Well . . .” Cadzie admitted, “it actually is pretty solid work, Carlos. You could look right at it and not know.”
“All right,” Carlos said. “Tap in and run an integrative diagnostic.” He did as asked. “And . . running now.”
“What do we do now?” Joan asked.
Cadzie leaned back in his chair and laced his hands behind his head. “We wait.”
Joanie shivered. “This is really creepy.”
He knew exactly what she meant, but took a childish pleasure in pretending he didn’t. “Oh? How so?”
“Well . . our grandparents. Your dad, Joe Sikes. They climbed into those pods, and they had every reason to think that that was the best thing to do.”
Now he felt a little creeped out himself. “Yeah.”
“And it broke them.”
“Not all of them,” he protested. “Not most of them. Have you ever met anyone with ice on his mind?”
“Sure,” she shrugged. “A couple. When I was a kid. They didn’t last very long, did they?”
“No. Incidence of stroke went way up. Those that survived the grendels. Most of them knew, you know. Knew they weren’t what they had been. Some volunteered to hold positions so others would escape. Waited for the grendels.” A sigh. He took no pleasure in speaking about this.
“How is the diagnostic?” she asked.
“I’m having to make a new map to incorporate the bypass circuits. This is sophisticated stuff. Who did this?”
“Well . . .” Joan hawed. “I was a part of it.”
“Well done.” He clapped three times, feeling an odd combination of anger and admiration. “I mean . . it shouldn’t have been done, but if you were going to do it, this was the way.”
She glared at him. “Was that a convoluted way to say you’re impressed?”
He smiled. “Yes. Well, sort of. Carlos?”
“Here.” It seemed that every meter of the ship was covered by speakers and cameras. They were never alone.
“The kids did modify Cassandra, and I’m seeing some areas where conflicting directions could cause failures, but they seem fairly minor. The real problem is simply that our girl is old, and we’re running out of replacement parts.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Carlos said, fifteen thousand kilometers below them. “What about our visitor?”
“I’m looking at the scanners. Considering that the object isn’t broadcasting, isn’t it a good sign that Cassandra picked it up?”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “If it’s really there.”
“I’m checking the telescope and our polar satellite. We’re verifying Cassandra’s information. The log suggests that these are original feeds, unaltered by any of the corruption.”
“And you still see the object?”
“Yes,” he said. “We can’t be certain of the mass or composition, but the approach vectors and speed are clear, and . . it’s slowing down.”
“If I had to guess,” Carlos said, “I’d think it was twice as fast as Geographic, which means that if it’s coming from Earth . . .”
“It is more advanced,�
�� Carlos said. “We estimate fifty to seventy years more advanced.”
“Agreed,” Cadzie said. “Too many factors to be sure.”
“And no indication of radio contact?”
“None. Silence.”
Carlos looked as if he’d bitten into an onion. Cadzie suspected that a bit of that was pure theatrical flair. Uncle Carlos enjoyed his drama. “That . . is disturbing. It could be a dead object. Everyone on board killed by their cold sleep capsules, or disease . . .”
“We just don’t know. They might sail right past us, keep going until they reach the galactic core a million years from now.”
“Jesus,” Joan said. “Next subject?”
Another hour getting a sense of what they were dealing with, and then it was time to think. Cadzie and Joan had changed into pale orange utility jumpsuits. They sat in the cool of the communications pod, and Cadzie had brewed coffee from a hidden stash of real beans. “Plenty of this stuff left at least,” Cadzie said. “Earth blend. We planted our own before we ran out.”
“Not speed-y,” Joan said, relishing her first sip. “I like it.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Cadzie closed his eyes and enjoyed, then opened them and sat up straight as the alarm dinged. “Ah!” Foot-tall facial holograms of Carlos and Trevanian floated beside their table. It was always a little eerie. “How long is it going to take to disassemble Cassandra?”
“We estimate two weeks.”
“Well before our visitors arrive,” Carlos said. “We’ve decided that Stolzi will stay onboard, to prevent any claim of salvage on Geographic.”
“How do we get back down?”
“Autopilot should work fine. We’ve run simulations.”
Cadzie considered. “If they’re from Earth, and they’re coming here . . .”
“Right. They will have means of reaching the surface, and Stolzi can ride down with them.”
“Or, they will have the ability to fix our equipment.”
“A chip fabricator,” Joanie said. “And—” The thought of one of the legendary three dimensional printers made her mouth water.