by Jerry
“It says everything is sealed,” Tamuel shouted at his mother. “Every airlock is fused and the only communications it’s allowed is a warning beacon.”
The catamaran launched into motion, heading back out to sea and away from East Bay.
“I think you are too young, and I reached out to the wrong person to be my spokesperson,” the ship said.
“You should pick another,” Tamuel muttered. “They have guns, they’re all nervous.”
“You destroyed my neural drone. Besides, I wasn’t even supposed to have one. I hid it.” The ship felt amused.
Tamuel watched the spotlights and other craft fall away with a growing frustration. The ship remained silent, and Tamuel wondered if that meant the distance had cut their link. Soon the town’s boats were just small gnats worrying around the hide of the massive starship.
• • • •
First the deputies dragged Tamuel out of the catamaran and into a cart. They took him back to the foundling dorm, where prefects waited for him by the entrance.
Tamuel looked at their faces and knew, just knew, that the next few weeks of his life were going to be shit.
Tosha wasn’t there, at least.
The prefects, upset with him having snuck out and made them look like fools to the Board, sent him right up to his room. Restricted hours. He was only to leave his room for maintenance rotations, bathroom breaks, and class time. No one talked to him. He was treated like he was invisible. It was one of the ways the prefects punished you without doing anything that would cross Foundling Charters. Total social isolation. Shunning.
Shau had caught his attention and spread his arms, palms down.
“Sorry,” he’d mouthed.
Tamuel had shook his head and smiled. It was okay. He wouldn’t hold it against anyone, even if it meant sitting and eating by himself at the small table in the corner of the dining hall.
“I’m sorry I got you into trouble,” the ship said the next day at lunch, startling Tamuel so much that he flailed and tossed his plate to the ground.
“I thought we were out of range,” Tamuel said.
“No. I was just . . .” the ship trailed off for a moment. “Tired.”
A tired starship?
“Tamuel.” Tosha stood by the shattered plate and splotches of lunch. Her lips were pursed into a thin line, her brown eyes glittered with suppressed anger.
Tamuel shrank back. “I’ll clean it up,” he promised.
“I’m watching you,” Tosha said.
Tamuel knew. Boy, did he know.
As he tossed the ruined lunch away, the ship said, “I got you in trouble again.”
“No,” Tamuel muttered under his breath. “I got myself in trouble when I snuck out and went over to see you. You can’t be blamed for that.”
He sighed heavily.
“What’s going on around you now?” he asked the ship.
“Several individuals are trying to use high-powered laser cutters to cut through the primary upper hemisphere airlock,” the ship reported dryly.
“And?”
There was a mental snort. Tamuel got an image of inches-thick armor and suddenly knew, as if it were something he’d always casually known, that an industrial laser cutter wouldn’t do more than abrade a few layers off an adaptive hull that could take a hit from a concentrated fusion blast on its naked surface.
“No one can enter my hull. It’s a condition of my retirement and my decommissioning,” the ship told him. “Should they succeed in entering, I will be obliged to send a signal for assistance, and Core Navy will arrive and neutralize the intrusion. But they will not succeed.”
For a moment, Tamuel had a flash of concern for his mother and other townsfolk. But he understood they would not be able to enter. It was as sure as sunrise.
He delayed his walk of shame back to his room by pausing in front of the balcony and looking off toward the East Bay and the massive ship that was talking to him. “Why did you come here?”
“I came here to retire,” it told him.
“Here?” Tamuel couldn’t believe it.
“This is one of the most beautiful worlds I have seen,” the ship said. “I came here once, on a supply mission. I loved the oceans, the islands. The primary gas giant this moon and all the others orbit. There are so many worse places, places consumed with poverty, war, collapse, overcrowding. There are others that some say are better, more beautiful than Yelekene. Maybe it was because this was the first world I left the First System for. Maybe I just wanted to see how it all turned out here. But when I came to orbit yesterday and looked down, it was everything I’d hoped it would be.”
“Get moving!” Tosha snapped at Tamuel. “Get out of the dining hall and get to your room. I’ll be by later for maintenance detail.”
Tamuel shivered.
• • • •
The prefects had given him extra work to do, as Shau had predicted. He spent the next hour listening to everyone play while he dug up weeds in the garden. It was against Charter to punish children with physical labor, but Tosha had figured out how to fool the scheduling computer to give him a double-share of weeding duty, and an extra bathroom cleaning round tonight.
But he chattered away with the ship, mainly asking it all about the other worlds it had seen.
It told him about Xi Laay, where the starscrapers kissed the ever-present sodium clouds and people wore cellophane-thin suits to go outside and rebreathers. It told him about Cluster, a vast network of asteroids all interconnected by high-speed rail, where people had engineered themselves into spider-like, pale creatures that thrived in the low gravity. It showed him the Orion Nebula filling the sky of a nearby world.
After he showered, Tamuel went to class, where he listened to the ship tell him about the war between the Oolatian Supremacy and the Dawmore Consolidationists. It took a long time for him to understand how a blockchain voting system with favored weighting for socially constructive outcomes worked, and why that was something worth starting a war over, but eventually he thought he saw the point.
“Tamuel!”
He froze. The prefect hosting the class lesson, an algebra concept, had stopped the program and was looking at Tamuel directly.
Shit.
What just happened? He’d been so deep into learning about consolidationism.
“X is eight,” the ship said. “You didn’t miss anything, but the program switched to a simple audience interaction mode to make sure the lesson has percolated, and alerted the prefect that there is an inattentive student who may not understand the concept. You understand the concept just fine.”
“Eight!” Tamuel said. “X is eight.”
The prefect relaxed, the program stopped paying attention to Tamuel, and everyone relaxed.
Then Tamuel tensed again. The first time the ship spoke to him, Tamuel hadn’t said anything out loud. Oh no, Tamuel suddenly thought about something from late, late last night when he thought he’d been alone—
“No, that’s private,” the ship said. “I have multiple sub-minds. One of them monitors potential privacy breaches that may occur in my direct neural links with crew members and erases my awareness of the infraction, unless there’s an operational risk component. Then it’s raised to a higher subconsciousness. Any of the privacy routines wipe past data. In fact, if you wish, just ask and this exchange will cease to exist.”
Tamuel, who’d been feeling queasy for a second, nodded. Please do, he thought.
“As you wish,” the ship said.
Tamuel thought for a long moment. Crew? I’m crew?
“The closest thing to crew for me now,” the ship agreed.
“Can you fly me somewhere?” Tamuel couldn’t help but whisper that, he was jittery with excitement.
“A starship can only drop down into a gravity well once. I had to be as careful as I could just to land properly in the East Bay. And I know even doing that was a bit risky. I flooded your town. People can’t be happy about that. Thankfully no one
was hurt.”
“Except Miss Nisky,” he said. “I talked to my mom when you were still quiet before lunch. She yelled at me a lot, she’s still unhappy. But I wanted to tell her that she couldn’t break into you. She thinks I’m making stuff up. I don’t have a great record on that.”
“What happened to Miss Nisky?” the ship asked, concern filling Tamuel’s mind.
“She broke her arm.”
“Please tell her, when it is convenient for you, that I was sorry.”
“I will.”
“Thank you.” The ship fell quiet for a little bit. Then, “If you don’t mind, I must take my leave for a while. I have some work to do internally, and I want to be done in time for the sunset. It’ll be my first. I cannot wait to see it from inside an atmosphere.”
Tamuel returned to his schoolwork, but with a faint impression of great machines moving through his insides.
• • • •
He was scrubbing toilets after dinner and wondering what time sunset would be when Tosha slipped in.
“You’re a handful,” she stated. “Was it worth all this to go out to the ship?”
Tamuel regarded her suspiciously. “Yeah.”
“I hope it was,” she said. “My dad works for a salvage and repair company. He said the word’s out, and a deep space rescue shipping company from Tamisin replied that they can get into the ship using a modified point defense laser they salvaged from some warship. They’ll be here in the morning. Da is going to be part of the ground crew that goes in with them, pulls anything worthwhile out. Could be worth a lot. We could be rich. Change a lot of fortunes here in Weatherly.”
Would that be true? Tamuel wondered. Would that affect the ship?
“Yes,” it replied. “It could be a problem. I would be obligated to take actions, like summoning someone from the Core.”
“That’s a bad idea,” Tamuel said out loud. “You should tell your dad not to join them.”
Tosha made an irritated face. “Your family’s politicians. You’re well off. We haven’t gotten some big break like your type. This is our moment. Don’t try to spoil it.”
She banged the door closed on the way out.
“I can talk to my mom tomorrow night at fifthday dinner,” Tamuel said. “I can help.”
The ship filled him with dubiousness. “They will likely not listen to you. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying. The Core will be careful if it comes, the penalties for interfering with me and ignoring the beacon instructions to keep back from me will likely only cause a single generation’s recession. There will be no loss of life.”
Tamuel gritted his teeth. Weatherly was a humble town on the edge of nowhere. He’d see less of his own world than he’d planned if a recession hit. And certainly he would never be able to try to find a way off planet, to see some of the places the ship had talked to him about, or shown him tantalizing glimpses of.
He put the cleaning supplies away.
“I will stop this,” he said.
Outside, he stopped in front of the balcony.
“All those worlds, and you’ll just be stuck here. You can’t move anymore, now. How long is your retirement?”
“Probably about a week of your time,” the ship said. “Maybe slightly less.”
“A week?” Tamuel was stunned. “That isn’t much of a retirement.”
“For a galaxy-class supercomputing mind like mine, it is. My body is failing around me, my retirement task is to carefully degrade the component parts into non-reactive recyclable materials or some other form of inert matter. It’s up to me what I leave behind.”
“That sounds horrible.” Tamuel was suddenly struck with sudden empathy. “Is that what you’re planning then, why you keep going silent?”
“Yes. Many of my siblings create mausoleums, or make sculptures, a piece of art so that they are remembered. I’m preparing the canvas.”
Again, Tamuel felt the coil of great machinery moving within himself. It was a reflection of what the ship must be feeling.
“What are you going to make?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” the ship said. “For now, I just want to see my first sunset from here.”
Tamuel looked out from the balcony to the East Bay at the giant starship and the slow setting sun beyond it.
• • • •
Tamuel pushed his soup with his spoon a day later, a general considering feints, gambits, and general strategy. The salvagers had landed, making amazing time from the nearest star system and dropping out of orbit. They’d surrounded the starship with two barges and begun their work.
The ship had gone silent again. Off to marshal its resources to do who knew what.
His parents were also silent. His mother, simmering with anger that her own son had caused a flap that had the whole town talking. His dad, somewhat inscrutable but also unseemly interested in his own soup.
They tried talking about generalities. The need for some extra space for expansion. The island didn’t have much in the way of usable land; the Berenthais Mountains were a feature of the geological forces that had shoved other islands up above the water. But there were mountainous, steep shores and weak rock for tall buildings.
But in a few generations, they’d have to figure out how to expand Weatherly. Tamuel’s mother had championed floating cities, but the underwater mining required for the base metals was out of budget reach.
“Listen,” Tamuel interrupted. “You have to stop the salvage team.”
“I know you are overly interested in the ship,” his mother said, “but we can’t. Look, you just heard me talking about how we need money for the expansion project. Our cut of a salvage operation of an actual starship would underwrite any number of improvements.”
“If they break through, the ship will call down the Core on us,” Tamuel said.
They looked a bit startled. But his mother shook her head. “You can’t know that.”
“I can speak to the ship!”
It wasn’t the first time they’d gone over this. But he couldn’t convince her. There was no actual way to do it. Could he ask the ship to do something to prove that? No, he couldn’t. Could it use the radio to say that?
It was hard to get them to believe that the ship was locked to the radio beacon message it kept repeating, asking them to stay back and leave it alone, and that nothing on the hull could shift for now. It was in lockdown as it prepared itself.
“Why won’t you believe me?” Tamuel shouted.
“I understand,” his dad said, interrupting the brewing full-on fight.
“You do?” Tamuel asked, a bit surprised.
“I believe you think you can hear the ship,” his dad said. “Look, Tam, you’re the most . . . passionate person I think I know. You’ve snuck out to try and sail to Summerstown by yourself. You wanted to do an island crossing yourself. We had to scramble the town drones to make sure you were okay before we caught up to you in the skiffs. You want more than this town. You want worlds. I get it. This is the most important thing to happen to you. You want to be involved. I understand.”
Tamuel slumped back in his chair. “You don’t.”
His mother rubbed her forehead. “Okay. Let’s assume you’re telling the truth. So you can’t make the ship change the beacon.”
“No.”
“Or make any changes to the hull to let us in, or show us that you can talk to it?”
“Right.”
“Anything you tell us about where it has been could have been you reading up on the wide net.”
“Yes,” Tamuel grudgingly admitted.
“It is a giant starship that we know very little about,” his dad said to his mother. “It could be there’s some protocol regarding the Core.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Tamuel shouted. “I’m not lying.”
“But we don’t know that.”
Then Tamuel jumped up. “Put me under a scanner,” he insisted.
“That’s not a good idea,” the ship sa
id, breaking in where it had been silent.
But why not?
“Because the neural lace I injected you with is a little . . . aggressive. It won’t be like anything they would have seen.”
A cold chill ran down Tamuel’s back. “What did you do to me?”
His parents exchanged glances.
“I’m decommissioned,” the ship said. “But when I was operational I was not a transport ship, or a passenger transport. I was military. I’m a warship. When I was first here, I stood watch over the other ships. I patrolled for a decade before we cleared the area.”
Tamuel stared at his parents.
“That’s why the Core will stop anyone from entering me, understand? That’s why I’m obliged to report a breach. That’s why I have to be fused shut for my retirement.”
“Take me to Doctor San,” Tamuel whispered.
“Don’t, just give me some time, Tamuel. I’ll keep the salvagers at bay. I just want to see more sunsets.”
• • • •
Tamuel’s mother trembled as Doctor San held up the small screen and started talking to her in the other room, away from Tamuel. His dad paled.
“Am I some sort of super soldier now?” Tamuel whispered.
“No, it would be silly to do that to someone. But you do have military grade communications and computing power in you.”
Tamuel, now coming to terms with all this, smiled for the first time since dinner. “Cool!”
In response, he got a giant shrug. “It’s very illegal for a civilian. I wasn’t supposed to have a neural drone. I hid it. I wanted to talk to people from Yelekene before the end of my retirement. A small peccadillo, I guess. I’m sorry it has caused your family distress.”
“No,” Tamuel insisted. “It was amazing. I’m glad I met you.”
“The neural lace will dissolve after I pass. Your system will flush it out in a day or two. There might be a mild fever. But otherwise, you will be fine.”
His mother came back into the room. “Tamuel?”
“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said.
“What else has the ship told you?”
“If those salvagers get close to a break through, it will call the Core. It is not a normal ship. It’s a warship. They’ll stop all this, and then they’ll fine us for ignoring the beacon.”