Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  All through the day the girls paid him a great deal of attention, to which he reacted confusedly, enjoying it all one moment and feeling tongue-tied and awkward the next. He could tell some of the boys were getting jealous.

  Every night recently he had been saying goodnight with the feeling of saying farewell, knowing that never again would he meet the same people he was leaving. Tonight he tried to stay with them, but one of the machines took him gently by the arm and led him from the group toward his room. He looked around at the other children’s faces, saw sympathy but no help, and knew he had to go.

  Fourteen

  Every morning now he went to greet some strangers, boys and girls he had heard about indirectly but had never seen before. They resembled other kids he had met yesterday, and had their names, but that was all. Their bodies were melting and altering almost while Bart watched, flesh inflating and stretching over elongating bones, boys’ faces sprouting elementary whiskers while their voices deepened, girls growing breasts, their legs curving and rounding to spell out disturbing secret messages in visual code.

  And today they could literally talk over his head. Bart was small for his age. That’s what—who was it?—always used to say.

  During the party, right in the middle of the ice cream and cake, a fistfight broke out between Fritz and Kichiro. They slugged away at each other so hard that Bart saw he wouldn’t be able to stand up to either of them for ten seconds.

  The machines just stood around like dummies and made no move to halt the fight. Fay, the current president, had to yell repeatedly to get other kids to step in and break it up.

  As soon as things had settled down a little, some of the kids began drifting out of the room in pairs, a boy and a girl together, kissing and maybe pawing at each other as they left. Bart felt strange and almost frightened. The kids that remained in the dining hall talked and giggled and talked, talked, talked. The conversation was about nothing important, but still it seemed important that it be going on.

  Edris came to sit near Bart and talk with him. A red ribbon tied up her brown hair, but some fell loose down as far as the halter that covered her breasts. Solon got jealous and started an argument. Soon he and Bart were trying to think up insults to call each other.

  Bart shoved Solon, who was not too big for him to think of fighting, and Solon punched Bart on the cheek, so his mouth started to bleed inside. Bart hit back, then they grabbed each other and wrestled in deadly earnest to see who could get the other down. With furniture in the way, they couldn’t come to any clean conclusion. Bart saw that a couple of machines were hovering near, and Edris was watching with enjoyment. Pretty soon some of the big kids grabbed the combatants and broke up the fight.

  The social atmosphere was a little strained for the rest of the day, and Bart went back to his room earlier than usual, before the machines came to urge him along.

  He sat on his room’s one chair, arms folded. “Ship, I’m not being a parent. What am I really supposed to be doing?”

  “Further instructions will be given you as required.”

  “Are you still going to wake me up only once a year?”

  “The mission is proceeding according to its revised schedule.”

  He got up and tried to walk out of the room again, but found the door immovable.

  He wondered if something vital could be wrong with the Ship. Might its planning computers break down like so many common machines, and issue hideously wrong decisions? Though his bland, smoothed-out memory suggested this was impossible, Bart went worriedly to bed. Sleep was still mechanically fast in coming.

  Fifteen

  Solon had grown alarmingly big, and it was with relief that Bart saw him smile in a friendly if distracted way. The inside of Bart’s mouth was still sore from yesterday, but Solon said hello as if he didn’t recall their fight at all.

  Bart’s former opponent had other matters on his mind, and returned quickly to a conversation he was conducting in fierce whispers with Fritz and Himyar and one or two other boys. It was shortly concluded, and the bunch of them took off running, grimly and purposefully, down a corridor. Bart looked around and realized there was no one left in the common room with him but half a dozen girls. Most of these girls looked worried.

  Galina and Vivian came over to Bart and started trying to explain. It seemed that the boys were now divided into two gangs, of six members each, and between the gangs existed something like open war.

  “They’ve been fighting this way off and on for months now,” Galina told him. “Always getting black eyes and bloody noses. Today looks like it might be one of the worst. It started today over whether we should have another birthday party or not.” Galina, rather plain, was solemn most of the time, usually giving the impression she favored sobriety and order. “And me trouble is, half the girls have gotten involved, too.”

  Helsa and Lotis also came over, and the girls debated whether there was anything they could do to stop impending hostilities. All around them the Ship was quiet—ominously so, Bart felt. He stood by, feeling dangerously out of it all. He didn’t even know the layout of the passages the girls talked about as they tried to guess where their male friends might be planning fights or ambushes.

  While the other girls kept on talking to one another, Lotis came to Bart and with a gesture got him to follow her off into the Ship.

  “Where’re we going?” he asked, supposing some plan for peacekeeping or hiding out was being put into effect.

  “Something I want to show you.” She was just barely taller than he, with straight black hair and Chinese eyes. Shortly they came out in a wide open space, a meeting of corridors, where Bart saw that the kids had improvised a swimming pool. Decking had been taken up, and a room in the lower level flooded. Lotis pointed out how waterproof patching had been stuck in where necessary, and a water pipe tapped to fill the pool. The water looked deeper than a man’s head.

  Bart was impressed, but somehow disturbed, too, that they had done this much on their own. “Didn’t the machines do anything to stop you?”

  A flirt of her head dismissed the powers of the machines. “I’m going in. Do you know anything about swimming? People on Earth used to do it all the time. The records show them in the oceans even.”

  Lotis pulled off her scanty clothing and slid down into the water naked. She turned over and paddled on her back, smiling knowingly up at Bart while he stared down in helpless fascination. Female nudity was not among the things on which his memory could give him reassurance. His mind lurched this way and that in turmoil.

  He heard running feet quite near at hand, and turned to see a figure dash out of a side corridor. Fritz was bigger and stronger even than a year ago, but his eyes were wide and frightened; he scarcely looked at either Bart or Lotis, but came running around the pool as if pursued.

  He was. Kichiro and Basil and Mal came pounding after him, carrying bludgeons made of the unscrewed legs of chairs, their faces transformed in the fury of the hunt. At the sight of them Bart started to run, too. He realized almost at once that this was a mistake, but it was too late. Someone responding to his flight with instinctive pursuit had grabbed him from behind and he was flattened beneath his captor on the deck.

  Kichiro had tackled Bart, while Basil and Mal closed in on Fritz. It sounded like all of them were yelling.

  Fritz broke away and fled for another corridor, but Basil was too fast and blocked his path. Fritz lunged at him in desperation and before Basil could swing his club he was slammed up against the bulkhead in a choking grip. The club dropped from Basil’s hand, and Bart, pinned on the deck under Kichiro’s kneeling weight, could see the whites of his eyes seeming to expand.

  Mal stepped close to the struggling pair and earnestly swung his plastic chair leg. The impact made an ugly sound. Fritz let go of his enemy, staggered back and fell.

  Kichiro had started to get up. Bart squirmed out from beneath him, tore free of a grasping hand, and ran. His one thought was to reach the safety of his own
room. He had to pass between the group of boys and the pool, where Lotis, open-mouthed, clung to the side and watched.

  Mal, turning wild-eyed, saw Bart coming and raised his club for one more swing—

  None of them had seen the machine approach, but now it was on hand as if it had popped right out of the many-paneled wall. It took the swinging club like a feather from Mal’s hand and in the same instant shoved him violently back, so he stumbled over Fritz’s unmoving legs and fell.

  “You hurt me,” Mal croaked stupidly from the floor. His hand was scraped raw, oozing blood, where it had collided with the gripper of the machine.

  The Ship said loudly to them all: “I have authority to sacrifice individuals, as I judge it necessary for the good of the mission.”

  Overawed, they all stayed frozen silent. The machine walked through them to bend over Fritz. As it picked him up, Bart saw that his eyes were half open but unseeing, and his mouth was slack.

  It walked off down a corridor, carrying Fritz in its arms. His limbs hung down, utterly limp. The other boys came to life and followed in a group, their weapons left behind. Bart heard a slosh and trickle behind him, Lotis getting out of the pool, but he did not turn.

  The machine went on for a few score meters, then stopped facing a panel in the wall.

  “Ship,” Kichiro said, “that’s a disposal chute.” But Fritz was already gone.

  Ignored by the others, Bart went straight back to his room. He sat there, shivering a little and staring at the wall. The ship served him his dinner there, without comment. He ate a little, and then soon turned to his bed, where sleep and forgetfulness never failed to come.

  Sixteen

  All twenty-three of the kids were waiting for him in the corridor when he stuck his head out of his room to see what might be going on. But it was all right.

  “No one’s going to try to kill you this time,” was one of the first things said, by a strong young man with thickening patches of dark beard on cheek and chin. With just a minor effort Bart could recognize the speaker as Kichiro, who, as Bart soon found out, was this year’s president. They were having elections only once a year now, he was soon informed.

  Fights were evidently much less frequent also, Bart discovered to his great relief. He overheard part of an argument as to who had tried to kill him last year, and this argument was the closest thing to a fight that happened on this birthday.

  He soon found out also that birthdays, like gang wars, were now considered kid stuff, and today there was no party. There was a good elaborate lunch, with ice cream produced unpretentiously as dessert.

  Talk turned to Bart, and his purpose in the world.

  He repeated to the kids everything that the Ship had ever told him about that purpose, which wasn’t much.

  “I wonder,” Basil said to him, “what the Ship’ll do with you now? I mean, we obviously don’t need you any more as a father or model or whatever to help us grow.”

  “I dunno,” said Bart, taking a little more ice cream. The kids’ eyes were all sympathetic, but still, their silent gaze made him uncomfortable. “Anytime I ever ask Ship about it, it just says the mission is proceeding as per revised schedule, or something like that.”

  Sigrid nodded knowingly. “You’ll find Ship’s that way. If it doesn’t want to answer something for you, it just won’t.”

  Seventeen

  This morning it was a relief to meet a group of stable-looking, sane-looking people, not too much different from their namesakes he had said goodbye to the night before.

  Bart soon noticed that Basil was missing from the group. “Oh, he’s all right,” said Ora reasuringly. “He’ll be along for lunch. He goes studying the stars.”

  “The stars?”

  “We’ve found a way to reach the outer hull. In one place there’s a glass port through which you can see the outside of the Ship, and the stars to, of course.”

  Bart could call up a plain picture of what stars were; sometime, somehow, he had seen them.

  “What do you think about the stars, Bart?” Tang asked him patronizingly.

  He didn’t have a quick answer. Armin said: “Look, we’ve been working on this problem of the Ship and where it’s going for seventeen years now. And Bart’s put in how much time? About seventeen days.”

  And there was laughter, not unkind.

  Eighteen

  When Bart mentioned that he thought it would be fun to learn to swim, they took him to the newly remodeled and enlarged pool. Everyone was matter-of-fact about undressing, and after clothes had been off for a minute or two, it all seemed practically normal to Bart.

  Resting on the pool’s edge after some strenuous splashing, they took up again last year’s discussion about the Ship and its purposes. Bart got the idea that now they talked a lot on this subject. Today he remarked that maybe soon they would be having children, so eventually, people would fill up the empty rooms still waiting on the other levels.

  Fuad shook his head. “The Ship’s told us we’re all sterile—know what that means?”

  “You can’t make any babies.”

  “That’s right. Girls and men both. We can do all the sex we want, but nothing can ever happen from it.”

  Later, alone, Bart asked the Ship: “Am I sterile, too? I mean, am I going to be, when . . .”

  “No. With maturity you will be fertile.”

  That was a definite answer at last, but he still got only the old answers to his old questions when he repeated them.

  Nineteen

  Bart’s chronic worry that his life was going fundamentally wrong was lightened when he met his shipmates today. They were now so obviously adults that he could produce an inner sigh of relief and decide to leave the worrying to them.

  Most of the teaching machines had been removed. At the few remaining, people were abstractedly at work, printouts and papers stacked around them.

  As soon as the word spread that Bart had joined them for the day, most of the adults abandoned other activities and came towering around him, smiling and calling greetings, squeezing his shoulders and ruffling his hair. A number of people wanted to show him things.

  Basil took him to see the stars. They went drifting, swimming through a part of the Ship where gravity was turned off, and though there was air, Basil made him wear a breathing device, just in case. Through the glass Bart looked along the curves of the hull, unreal in their great size and distances, and at the stars that looked even more unreal, like some vast scattering of bright powdered paint.

  After lunch he asked to go swimming again. Lotis, in the pool with him and others, now had a peculiar slightly mottled look to her thighs that Bart eventually decided must be caused by fat under the skin. And on her left thigh was the threadlike red tracery of an enlarged vein.

  After dinner Baruch and Tang took him aside. “Bart, do you really like this one-day-a-year life?”

  “I dunno. It’s all right, I guess. The Ship must have some reason. It’s taking care of us all, right?” He might have said something else, but Ship heard everything.

  The men exchanged glances over his head. With several of the girls, they walked him back to his room when the Ship called for him to come, and almost tucked him into bed.

  Twenty

  He learned soon after rejoining the others that Tang and Ora had been killed, some months ago, trying to work their way into a part of the Ship from which humans were ordinarily sealed out.

  “Were they trying . . . I mean, did it have anything to do with me? With waking me up more often, or. . .”

  “No.” Fay shook her head definitely. “Oh, no, Bart, don’t worry about that.”

  The thought hadn’t really worried him. Actually, it had generated some hope.

  “They were trying to get to the far end of the Ship,” Ranjan explained. “You know, the aft, as the old records call it. Have you seen any of the old records? The part of the Ship where the drive controls and so many other things seem to be located.”

  They
explained to Bart such elementary knowledge of the Ship as they had been able to piece together, and his understanding of it grew a little. He found out also that they meant to keep on trying to get through to the other parts of the Ship, and eventually to take over its control. That was a strange thought, and Bart wasn’t at all sure how much he liked it.

  Twenty-one

  It had been many days since his shipmates paid him as little attention as they did today. He was greeted cheerfully enough, but no crowd gathered around. A couple of people went with him to swim, in a pool that had again been remodeled—made safer and more pleasant.

  He learned that some of the people were working hard to grow plants, from seeds the Ship had provided for their old school biology program. They showed him the new garden. It held nothing ready to eat yet, but maybe next time he came.

  He saw Kichiro limping by and heard that his knee had been lamed in some contest with another man, but whether it was a fight or a game Bart did not learn.

  Twenty-two

  There were no beds in the old common room any more. Bart found that most of the people had paired up two by two for sleeping, in more or less stable partnerships.

  More noticeably, most of the people he talked to today had runny noses. Sharon told him that an experiment in the new biology lab had gone wrong and some viruses had escaped. Nothing to worry about, they assured him. He wasn’t worried, really—not about viruses, anyway.

  All in all, it was a casual, low-pressure sort of day.

  Twenty-three

  Lotis, working in the garden, wore shorts today, and he noticed that her legs and bottom were getting quite lumpy with fat. The red vein on her thigh had extended itself into a little tracery of defective blood vessels in the skin.

  All the runny noses had dried up. Some medicine the people had made for themselves was ready for Bart in case he had caught the infection, too. But he hadn’t.