Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  One standard year, the Ship had said . . . but his hands looked no bigger, nor did the muscles in his thin arms. His face looked no different in the wall mirror, and the fine tawny hair on his head had maintained its crewcut length. There were still no more than a couple of dozen brown pubic hairs curling at the bottom of his belly. He was sure he was no taller.

  When he got to the nursery, though, he could well believe a year had passed. It certainly had, if these were the same kids. A few were in their beds as before, but now lying stretched out, they almost filled the little cribs. The majority were running about, keeping their balance reasonably skillfully for the most part, and busy with a multitude of toys. The kids wore shirts now, and shorts or pants over their diapers.

  This time the babies were aware that Bart was more than just another image. Some of them took fright at first and clung to the machines. But he kept walking around and talking to them, as the Ship instructed him, and soon they started to warm up to him.

  Again he spent the day socializing, and this time shared the little kids’ food, dispensed by the machines. Meaty-tasting, mildly chewy chunks of stuff, and harder, biscuitlike objects that came in both sweet and sour flavors, it tasted good enough to be adult fere. Last year—yesterday—the babies had been drinking from nippled bottles, but today they got water and colored drinks in little cups.

  Though he hadn’t questioned the Ship on it, Bart was still thinking over the announcement that he was to be a parent. He could imagine himself at the head of an enormous dining table, all these kids, grown a little older, sitting around it, but beyond that his imagination was soon lost. He told himself to be patient; the Ship would come up with explanations and instructions as they became necessary.

  The continual racket was wearying. By the time the babies were all bedded for what must be their regular night’s sleep, with the lights dimmed, he was ready to go to sleep himself. At a word from the Ship, he walked back, yawning, to his room.

  Three

  Again he seemed to be experiencing nothing more than an ordinary night of restful slumber, and again when he awoke he hadn’t grown or gotten older. This time he found a pair of shorts and a pullover shirt laid out for him on the chair.

  After dressing and eating some breakfast he walked to the nursery. Before he got there he could hear the year’s change in the children’s voices, forming clear words now as they called to one another.

  When the new glass doors of the nursery opened to let Bart in, he saw that bigger beds had been installed, and the walls moved back to make more space for play. The kids looked different and bigger again, of course. After an initial shyness, not so intense as yesterday’s, they all came crowding around Bart so that he walked through a little sea of waist-high heads. Here and there a bulge of diaper still peeped out of someone’s shorts.

  “What’s your name?” one tiny voice cried out, insistent above the babble of the others.

  “Bartley. Everyone calls me Bart.” Who had called him that? Family? Friends? There were still no particular memories available. “What’s yours?”

  “Armin.” Or maybe Ermin was what the child answered. Bart wasn’t sure if the speaker was a girl or a boy. The group seemed about evenly divided as to sex.

  Again he ate with the children, and played with them through the day. They all accepted his presence unquestioningly before he had been with them an hour, though he didn’t get the feeling that any of them could recall his earlier visits. Today, he noticed, there were fewer projected images of adults about.

  A little girl who said her name was Deirdre brought him a wheeled plastic toy whose axle had come loose from its containing grooves. He forced it back into place, so the wheels could turn again, and Deirdre carried it off, after a machine had made her stand still until she said “thank you, Bart.”

  Counting as well as he could in the continuing melee, Bart decided that there were twelve girls and twelve boys in the group.

  After dinner, when the machines had begun to pack the kids off to their beds, the Ship said to Bart: “You may remain awake for a few more hours if you wish.”

  He felt tired out, but not ready to sleep. “Maybe I’ll read a book.”

  “I will provide some in your room.”

  Stretched out on his bed, he looked at a book for a while without reading, then put it down and asked the air: “How long have I been here? In the Ship?”

  “I have edited your memories of your past life for good reason. Your past contains tragic and violent things. Nothing can be done about the past. We must work for the future and achieve a successful revised mission.”

  “Are there any other people on this Ship? Besides me and the little kids?”

  “None. Much depends on you.”

  He lay there looking at the cover of The Young Detectives Visit Earth. Although his bed was very comfortable and he was tired, he didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep.

  But he really had no choice.

  Four

  His shorts and shirt were washed for him as he slept, or else it was a clean new outfit that he found on the chair. Breakfast as before, and he was on his way. The books had been removed and there was nothing else to do.

  Two boys and two girls, grown bigger since he saw them last, were playing just inside the children’s compound; Bart decided it couldn’t be thought of as a nursery anymore. As he approached, the four caught sight of him and jumped with excitement, calling out to others, their voices coming to Bart faintly through the heavy glass doors.

  As he entered it, Bart saw that their compound had been enlarged again. There were no more adult images in sight. Children came, hesitantly at first, from everywhere, some pedaling vehicles, others emerging from toy houses of multicolored blocks.

  “Hi, I’m Bart,” he said to those who gathered close around. “Anybody remember me?”

  “The Ship told us you were coming to see us today.” A bold little girl pushed forward. “Look, look, see the picture I drew?” It was a row of a dozen or so little circle-faces, each the same size, with lines for hair and nose and eyes, and one large face above. “That’s you.” In a corner the artist’s name stood in big shaky letters: SHARON.

  As the day went on Bart heard the names of all the other kids, though he remembered only a few. He spent his time in play with one group and another, and then read them all stories from a book about old Earth as they sat around him on the floor. When the Ship directed, he saw them off to bed.

  “Am I being a good enough parent, Ship?”

  “The revised mission plan is proceeding satisfactorily.”

  Five

  All twenty-four of them were waiting for him excitedly just inside the heavy glass doors. And they remembered him.

  “We’re five now, Bart!”

  “Ship says we can have a birthday party if we want—”

  “—like Billy and Lynn—”

  It took him a while to figure out that Billy and Lynn were characters in some children’s story that the Ship showed them from time to time. Lynn and Billy were twins, back on Earth somewhere, and in one episode they had evidently enjoyed an elaborate birthday celebration, complete with cake, candy, and ice cream.

  “How old are you, Bart?”

  “Will you have a birthday with us?”

  “Sure. If the Ship will give us cake and things. Maybe we can have some real candles.”

  “Yayy!”

  So they had the party, the Ship providing real candles and entrusting Bart with a lighter for them. The machines even brought forth small paper-wrapped toys as presents for all the five-year-olds.

  “Din’choo get a present, Bart?”

  “No, it’s not my birthday.”

  “When is?”

  “In about a couple of months.” The precise date was something else still sitting undisturbed in his memory, with blank holes knocked all around it. “This was fun. Listen, maybe we can have another birthday party when I come back tomorrow. You’ll all be six, if the Ship kee
ps me on the same schedule.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Well—next year. See, you and I are running on different time schedules now, because I’m only awake one day every year. I expect the Ship’ll put us on the same time schedule soon.”

  “Next year?”

  Bart sighed, seeing that for them the difference between tomorrow and next year was not too clear. Especially the way he was talking.

  Six

  This year the difference in time schedules was much easier for them to grasp. So were a lot of other things.

  Again the compound in which the children lived had been transformed. Part of it had become what Bart recognized as a school, and everybody was busy at teaching-machine consoles when he arrived.

  The Ship’s voice then declared a holiday for them all.

  “Let’s have our birthday party!” a boy cried out.

  And after Bart had talked with them all, and read them a new story as the Ship directed, and had been shown through the school by his small friends, machines wheeled out a big cake. This time there were balloons as well as little gifts of toys and candy.

  “Isn’t it your birthday too, Bart?”

  “Well, no. Mine’s coming in about a couple of months . . . in two months and two days.”

  “How old will you be?”

  “Fourteen.”

  After the cake and ice cream was finished they had a good time playing games. The kids were awed by Bart’s strength and speed and dexterity. He taught them some of the skills he knew for games with balls and ropes and sticks. Now and then someone who got bumped hard in a game took time out to cry. Bart thought he could tell quicker and better than the machines just how serious the damage was.

  Seven

  Before the seventh-birthday party got started, Bart went through a period of rather intense questioning by a few of the kids. Fuad and Ranjan and Ora wanted to know what he was doing all the time they didn’t see him—where and how he spent the year between birthdays.

  “I’m sleeping. The Ship can fix it so a person just sleeps all the time.”

  “Huh,” said Ranjan, doubtfully.

  “Why does it want you to sleep all the time?” asked Ora. Today she had a loose front tooth she kept wiggling with her tongue.

  “I don’t know,” Bart admitted, feeling foolish.

  “Don’t you get hungry?” Fuad wanted to know.

  “No. I guess it’s not like regular sleep.” Some vague knowledge of the process was available in his impersonal memory. “It’s something like being frozen, only you never feel cold.”

  This year the games were rougher. When two or three of the boys grabbed Bart by the legs at once, they could tip him over.

  Back in his room alone after dinner, he asked: “Ship, am I really helping much, being a parent, if I just come out once a year? How long will I be on this schedule?”

  “You will not be on this schedule for any substantial portion of your lifetime. A definite time limit cannot be set now, but all computation on the matter is proceeding properly.”

  He tried again a little later, before going to sleep, but got essentially the same answer.

  Eight

  When Bart walked into the schoolroom something like boy-girl war was going on, the place in disarray, the weaker or more timid children in tears. The more aggressive ones were screaming insults at one another and hurling toys and writing materials back and forth as missiles, over bookshelves and teaching machines turned into parapets. Adult images had been brought out by the Ship and were calling sternly and uselessly for order, and outnumbered machines were shaking some of the worst offenders by the arm and lecturing.

  “Ship, can I help?” Bart cried.

  “Yes. Two boys have gotten to a lower deck and should be brought back up.” Ship’s voice was calm and methodical as always, though somewhat louder than usual to be heard plainly above the screaming. “My machines are busy. It would be helpful if you went after the boys and got them to come up again. Go down the stairs at the end of the corridor to your right.”

  It was a passageway he hadn’t been in before, evidently one recently opened up by the ongoing enlargement of the living quarters. He found the two truants, Tang and Mal, without much trouble. There wasn’t much of the lower level open to their exploration—only a loop of corridor sealed off by heavy glass doors at all points, except the stair where other passages intersected. The stair also was sealed where it went on down to still lower regions of the Ship.

  The boys were glad to see Bart and willing to go back with him; they had been looking long enough at the interesting sights down here. Through the various sets of glass doors you could see other corridors stretching away for hundreds of meters, at least. Many other doors were visible, some of which stood open to reveal static glimpses of rooms furnished for human life but all unused and empty of movement. The lights were dim in that large world outside the glass, and there was not a footstep on the dustless, polished-looking floors.

  “I wonder if anybody lives there,” Mal asked, nose against the glass.

  “Nobody does,” said Tang. “Let’s go back up.” “Maybe we will someday,” Mal said in a small, thoughtful voice.

  Nine

  The war between the sexes was not raging today, but it still smoldered, as Bart could tell readily enough from the grimacing and hair-pulling and name-calling that flared sporadically during the day. The cake and ice cream lunch was a success, as usual, and the games were fun, though now he had to exert himself somewhat to outdo some of the other players.

  A girl and a boy had a brief argument about what mathematical formula should be used to calculate the volume of the basketball they were playing with, and with a start Bart realized that now some of these kids knew things, maybe important things, that he had never learned. And he was supposed to be their parent! Or was it possible he had misunderstood what the Ship was saying?

  These things still bothered him when the day was over and he had undressed and climbed back into his isolated bed. “Ship.”

  “Yes.”

  “. . . nothing.” He decided to let well enough alone. Ship rarely gave him a helpful answer anyway. And he wasn’t really all that anxious to be a father, at least not until he was older.

  Ten

  Eating his usual breakfast, Bart felt for the first time a little anxious about meeting the people he was going to find waiting for him in the compound. If they were all another year older, they wouldn’t be so much like small kids any more, but people, with whom he would have to interact almost as an equal. He shook off his misgivings and walked out.

  The kids weren’t enormously bigger today, but it was certainly time to celebrate their collective tenth birthday, and they reminded Bart of this right after their first whoops of welcome. They had a big calendar drawn on the wall now, and had been crossing off days. There was no doubt that another year had passed.

  Today, when several of the boys ganged up on Bart in a rough game, they easily pushed him around. Not that there had been any plan on their part to gang up on him, or because they were not still impressed by his strength.

  And this year there were certain moments, talking to the girls, when Bart felt oddly almost bashful.

  Eleven

  Suddenly some of the boys, Baruch and Olen in particular, were almost as tall as Bart himself. And Deirdre and Sigrid were starting to round out into the shapes of women; only just starting, but you could tell the process had begun.

  Right in the middle of the cake-eating, the birthday party turned solemn, and there was a long sober discussion of early memories and hopes for the future.

  All of them naturally shared as their lifetime memories the things that Bart had seen during the last eleven days—the old nursery, the parental images and the guardian machines, the toys and teaching devices. Of course Bart had missed the greater part of their history, but he had a sampling of it.

  They sat there soberly sipping their sweet party drinks and talking. When it came Bart�
�s turn to recount his early memories, he explained that the Ship must have scrambled them for him in some way, erasing large sections. “I don’t even know if I was raised out of the machines like you, or if my biological parents were on board, or if I was born on Earth.”

  No one could give him any help with those questions. The talk went on for a long moody time before they got around to playing games.

  Twelve

  Bart found himself looking up at Baruch, and level-eyed at a number of the other kids. The Ship was allowing them more freedom now, and everyone except Trac, who had a stomach ache, had come to meet Bart right outside his room, the doors of which could only be opened by the Ship. Even Tang was there, though hobbling on a broken leg he said he had gotten by falling two decks down a stairwell. Ships medical machines had neatly fixed the bones and told him he was healing.

  Today the kids’ collective attitude was at first so grown-up and businesslike that Bart was almost intimidated. They explained to him that they had just formed themselves into a society, modeled on old societies of Earth that they had studied through the teaching machines. Baruch had been elected president, and others chosen to fill at least half a dozen additional offices.

  Even the birthday party began in an atmosphere of formality. But things soon loosened up. Bart was still stronger than Baruch, and could outwrestle him with an effort. But stocky Kichiro was now slightly stronger than he.

  Thirteen

  Chao, this month’s president, announced early in the morning that this year’s party was going to be a thirteenth birthday celebration for Bart as well as all the others. All the others chorused agreement, so Bart went along without protest, though he knew full well he had passed his real thirteenth birthday many months ago. He had not the slightest idea whether there had been any party to mark the event, so he enjoyed this one as his due.