Once Fr. Xris associated himself with the gravsuit, it tightened onto him and went from being a loose, baggy garment to fitting snugly, though not uncomfortably so. He got a notification from it saying, “Entered learning mode.”
“Oh!” she added. “One thing I do recommend is that you make a point of touching a few things at shoulder height and above your head, as if you were bracing yourself while the ship was lurching under tow. Towing is usually pretty smooth, but somehow despite being computer controlled, it never goes completely perfectly.”
They all moved around the locker room very artificially, with exaggerated motions, as if the gravsuits might be blind, or perhaps slow.
Kari laughed.
“Sorry,” she said, “I just love seeing people train a gravsuit for the first time. You guys look like a robot being controlled by a four year old. You really just want to move about doing whatever you normally do. The more natural and unconscious the motion, the better. Anyway, that concludes what you’ll need to know before we undock, so feel free to go back to the lounge, or your quarters, or wherever. Dinner will be served after we’re clear of the station’s low-thrust perimeter and have engaged the main engines. If you get hungry before that, there’s a vending machine and a korn dispenser in the cafeteria.”
* * *
The ship got underway in a little under an hour. It turned out that space stations were much less congested than airports, and the time from when it was announced that they were about to depart to the time the docking clamps let go and the towing ships starting towing the Hopeful was only ten minutes.
Father Xris, Hannah, and Shaka decided to hang out together in the lounge, while Xiao, who was used to space flight, didn’t feel the need for company and so took a nap in his quarters.
“I guess we’re committed,” Hannah said, as the reverberations of the release of the docking clamps died down.
“I wonder when we’re going to stop feeling the station’s gravity,” Father Xris said.
At that moment, everyone received the text: “brace yourselves, docking ejection commencing.”
Five seconds later they heard a warning bell sound three times, and the ship began to accelerate sideways with sufficient force that all three space newbies were nearly throw from their chairs. They would have been, in fact, had their gravsuits not held them in place.
“I see that gravsuits have magnets on the back as well as the bottoms,” Fr. Xris observed, once he had caught his breath.
The acceleration lasted for about fifteen seconds, then everything was quiet. Fr. Xris tested whether he could pull his back away from the chair, and he could. The gravsuit was very specific about when and how it held onto things. If the motion away from the chair matched how Fr. Xris usually tried to do it, the gravsuit let go without resistance.
“I wonder why they shoot us out of the space station,” Hannah said.
“I think it’s because of the station’s artificial gravity,” Father Xris said. “Since it’s so large it doesn’t need to rotate very quickly in order to generate its gravity, in that it makes a full revolution only once every few minutes, but for the same reason, its tangential velocity is extremely fast. Once the ship is disengaged from the station, there’s nothing keeping it constantly turning with the station, so it needs to leave quickly before the station crashes into it.”
“You seem to know a great deal about space ships, Father,” Shaka said.
“He was an engineer before entering the seminary,” Hannah said.
“Were you, Father?” Shaka asked. “I thought that priests went directly into the seminary after high school.”
“Some do,” Fr. Xris said. “It depends on both the man and the diocese.”
“How so?”
“If a man doesn’t know he’s called to be a priest, or if he isn’t called to be a priest young, he will naturally train and find a job in something other than the priesthood when he comes of adult age.”
“And the diocese, Father?”
“It varies from diocese to diocese and country to country what the requirements for entering the priesthood are. In some places, there are no requirements for entering the seminary past having lived a reasonably upright life, and in others, you have to have gone to college. There’s even one diocese which requires a master’s degree in philosophy, though that’s unusual almost to the point of being eccentric.”
“In Kenya, I don’t think one has to go to college before becoming a priest,” Shaka said.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Fr. Xris said. “On the one hand, a college education does help prepare one for the academic side of seminary, but on the other hand it does mean that the diocese might not recognize or accept poor men who are called to the priesthood. In the dioceses where there is the requirement for college, I’ve heard it argued that if it’s God’s will that a man become a priest, a small thing like getting a college education won’t stand in God’s way. And it’s true enough so far as it goes, but there are aspects to going to college which have to do with the habits of how you were raised, and how much you’re willing to deal with apparently pointless things. Anyway, I’m not surprised that Kenyan dioceses don’t require college. I’ve heard that, despite its great wealth, Africa has a specially strong love for the poor.”
“That it does, Father,” Shaka said. “We have many great saints who lived in the most grinding poverty, before the great agricultural revolution.”
“Are you a Christian?” Hannah said to Shaka.
“I am,” he replied.
“I guess you didn’t recognize the fish symbol on his shirt,” Fr. Xris said.
“Fish?” Hannah asked
“It’s an ancient symbol, Miss,” Shaka said, “used by Christians since the time of Christ.”
“The Greek word for fish was ‘ikthus’, which could be taken as an acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior,” Fr. Xris explained. “In Greek, of course, and the word order was a bit different, but Greek was one of those languages where the word order wasn’t very significant, or at least didn’t have to be.”
“I wonder what they’re doing now,” Hannah said.
“Probably getting ready to tow us,” Fr. Xris said. “It’s easier for small ships to tow us into position to travel to the slipstream than for us to point ourselves.”
“This doesn’t make you nervous?” Hannah asked.
“There’s no point in being nervous,” Fr. Xris replied. “I’m not piloting the ship, so there are no plans I can make that will do any good. If I knew that I’m going to die unavoidably in five minutes, then thinking about it only means I’ve stopped living five minutes early. Besides, I’m going to die at some point, and whenever it is, God will certainly not let it happen at the wrong time.”
“But what if it is five minutes from now?” Hannah said.
“So what if it is?”
“Well, I mean, don’t you feel like you’ll miss out on a lot?”
“No.”
“This was enough?”
“If I were to die now, then clearly it was. If I don’t, then clearly it wasn’t. The thing is, I don’t know before it happens. God does, and I trust him.”
“That’s a lot of trust,” Hannah said. “You’re not worried that God will make a mistake?”
“No,” Fr. Xris said. “It’s not in his nature to make mistakes.”
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Hannah said.
At this point they felt the shocks from the towing ships as they magnetically latched on to the hull. Shaka laughed.
“I thought that in space there is no sound,” he said.
“I saw a movie about that!” Hannah said. “Well, that was the tagline for the movie, at least. It was this ancient movie about people who went to a planet where there were these eggs and they would hatch and jump onto your face and then stick a little alien into your stomach, and then it would turn into a big alien and kill everyone. I know that description doesn’t make a lot of sense, but neither did the movie. B
ut it was pretty cool. And you should have seen the graphics! They were absolutely ridiculous!”
“You like old movies?” Fr. Xris asked.
“I do,” Hannah said. “They’re just so interesting. I think it’s the artist in me. Sculpture is such an ancient art form. Really it’s just you and the rock. I mean, we use modern tools for the bigger cuts. But for the detail work, nothing beats a hammer and chisel, and people have been sculpting like that for thousands of years. That got me thinking about what people were like in olden times, and that got me into watching old movies. Did you know that in the first movies, they didn’t even have sound? I don’t mean as some fancy artistic thing. I mean they couldn’t even record sound.”
“I did know that, actually,” Fr. Xris said. “It was just chance, but one time I saw a performance of an old silent film by someone who was playing the piano live with the movie. I think I read that they used to do that of necessity, and not by choice.”
“They did,” Hannah said. “And it wasn’t just music. The performer would often do sound effects by banging on pipes, dropping things, stuff like that.”
“In my experience,” Fr. Xris said, “people who know a lot about movies often want to make them. Is that true for you?”
Hannah smiled sheepishly.
“It kind of is,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think that I ever will. I mean, it’s hard to make a movie. And you have to work with a lot of people, which means you either need a lot of money or to be really good at talking people into doing things, which I’m not.”
The ship started moving about its center point, and with the center point being only slightly behind the living quarters the motion was small in comparison with the un-docking procedure, though still noticeable. The three passengers suspended their conversation while it was happening. There’s something in the human psyche which makes you pay attention to significant things, even if there’s nothing you can do about them.
Once the motion stopped, there was a few second pause, and then the hollow metallic sound of the towing ships disengaging their magnetic locks.
A broadcast text came out, “We’re now traveling under our own power. Please position yourself on a rear wall.”
“It will be nice when we get gravity back,” Fr. Xris said.
Chapter 3
The new direction of gravity proved to be less strange than Fr. Xris had expected it to be. The spartan design of the living areas meant that there was very little furniture on what was, for the time being, the walls. That helped. The ship was also designed with the knowledge that for parts of its voyages gravity would come from the wrong direction, and so some of the furniture would actually shift over to the temporary floor.
It was not mandatory to attend dinner, but Fr. Xris made a point of it since he was curious to meet the crew, and in fact all four passengers were present. The dining hall was designed to be run buffet style, but since the crew was traveling with a minimal complement and there were only four passengers, dinner was cooked to order from a menu, if a small one.
The robot cooking the meal was named Madeline, and people had been sent a copy of the menu before dinner time so that Madeline could arrange to have everything ready when they arrived. Since Madeline was still busy cooking at dinner time, Stan, being a general purpose robot, carried the food out to the tables.
With the restoration of gravity the passengers and crew had removed their gravsuits and were wearing regular clothes. Fr. Xris was back in his cassock and the other passengers were only wearing what they had before, but it was the first opportunity to see how the crew dressed. The answer, it turned out, was: just like everyone else. Fr. Xris wasn’t sure why he was surprised at this. After all, it’s not like there was special weather inside of a spaceship, and it wasn’t a military vessel where uniforms were part of discipline, nor a cruise ship where uniforms were part of the ambiance.
Kari came up to the passengers as they were standing in the entrance wondering where to go and invited them to come over and sit with her. The crew had arranged themselves so that they could sit mostly facing the passengers, the better for people to get to know each other, with the exception of Kari, who sat in the middle of the passengers.
Fr. Xris ended up sitting at the end of the table, opposite two fairly young women. He guessed that they were both in their late twenties, though it was not easy to tell. In four hundred and fifty years, cosmetics as well as cosmetic hormones, cosmetic gene therapies, and cosmetic surgeries, together with a superior understanding of nutrition meant that there were fewer physical differences between the young and the old than there were before the twenty third century. Everyone was reasonably thin, no one was grey, and while athletes were more muscular than couch potatoes, practically no one had poor muscle tone. Fr. Xris looked to people’s eyes to tell their age. No matter how youthful a person’s body, their eyes generally conveyed how much they’ve experienced. Young people are always energetic and nervous—you can’t fake knowing what’s going on around you, nor does anyone ever repress wanting to know. Older people are always more relaxed and confident, and often a little weary—no one is ever willing to put up with faking the foolishness of youth, and most can’t summon up the energy to deal with the whirlwind of emotions the young go through. It was an imprecise system, to be sure, but Fr. Xris was rarely off by as much as a decade, when people going by general looks were often off by two or even three.
Both women wore their hair in ponytails, but the one had nearly black hair—she might have been a quarter Chinese, by her face—and the other was a Nordic type platinum blonde. They both wore well fitting, almost skin-tight utility jumpsuits in, if this description makes any sense, a sort of khaki grey.
“The name’s Katie,” the black-haired one said. “I’m the chief engineer on the ship.”
“Father Xristoferos Guerin,” he replied. Introductions had to be made without handshakes, as the table was wide enough that trying to shake hands across it would have been comical.
“I’m Freia,” the blond woman said. It was a fitting name, with her deeply Nordic face and hair. “Assistant engineer.”
“Is this your first time in space?” Katie asked.
“It’s my first time in deep space,” Fr. Xris replied. “Or rather, it will be when we get there.”
Katie gave him a quizzical look.
“Are you counting one of those upper atmosphere joy rides?” she asked.
She was referring to what the industry called “weekend space vacations”. They consisted of a luxurious space plane which would enter low earth orbit, make two to four complete orbits of the earth so people could enjoy being weightless for a day, then re-enter. It was very expensive and looked down upon by people who worked, rather than played, in space.
“No,” Fr. Xris said. “I worked for a short time on Kennedy Space Station.”
“Oh?”
“I was an apprentice engineer on the reaction engines.”
Katie raised an eyebrow.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I realized that I was doing the wrong job.”
“Is there something wrong with being an engineer?”
“Not at all. I just realized that it wasn’t my job.”
“Too hard?”
“No. It just wasn’t what I was supposed to do.”
“And what were you supposed to do?”
“Be a priest.”
“You seem awfully confident of that.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
Fr. Xris shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re quite confident that you’re sitting in a chair,” he said. “Why?”
“Huh?”
“You don’t have an explanation for it, because you know it. You have an explanation for the things that you believe; the things that you hold to be true because of some chain of reasoning. You don’t have an explanation for things that you know more directly than that. I don’t mean that you can’t give reasons if you really ha
d to, but that instinct that you have that giving an explanation is both ridiculously easy but at the same time completely inadequate is the mark of knowledge as opposed to belief. Belief is easy to explain, because it’s the result of an explanation, but knowledge is hard to explain, because it comes from the thing itself.”
“That sounds like a lot of fancy hand-waving,” Katie said.
Fr. Xris laughed.
“In a sense it is,” he said, “since it’s an explanation of why I can’t give you an explanation. But it’s legitimate in this case because I’m only explaining—or not explaining—myself. I’m not trying to sell you anything, not even myself. I’m not asking you to be impressed with me, I’m just answering your question as well as I can.”
“Which isn’t very well.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Freia laughed. Katie was merely quiet.
Xiao had been sitting next to Fr. Xris and across from Freia during this conversation, but had remained quiet, merely watching the exchange.
“How long did you work on the reaction engines on Kennedy?” he asked.
“About nine months,” Fr. Xris replied.
“Do you have any good stories?” Xiao asked.
“Not really,” Fr. Xris said. “It was pretty quiet, unless you count as exciting a solar storm frying one of the current shunts to full open and causing a .2g acceleration for eight minutes—until we could shut it off. Fortunately no one was docking at the time, so nothing of any consequence happened.”
“How did you shut it off?” Freia asked.
“We opened the engine throttle to full and spun the generator feeding that circuit up to maximum, which melted the transmission line. Transmission lines are spec’d to have their weakest part in an accessible area, so once the solar flare was over and we replaced the current shunt, it was quick work to fix the transmission line.”
“Not the thriftiest solution in the world,” Katie said.
“No,” Fr. Xris replied, “but it was a very fast solution, which my boss preferred.”
He turned to Xiao and asked, “So, do you have any good stories?”
A Stitch In Space Page 3