Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Maybe the Ship’s still taking good care of you,” Chao commented.

  Twenty-four

  No one came down the corridor toward his room to meet him, but as soon as Bart had entered the general living area they all jumped out of hiding with cries of “Surprise!” and “Happy birthday!” It wasn’t his birthday yet, but he soon understood that a sort of general birthday had been declared, in which he was being invited to share.

  “It’s been ten years since we’ve had one, Bart,” said Himyar. “A party, I mean. So we just thought it was time.”

  “We could make you an honorary fifteen,” Fay put in. “Or how about an honorary twenty-four?”

  “Have a glass of wine, Bart,” said someone else.

  “Wine?”

  “Told you our garden was going to be a success.”

  “—oh, give him only a small one! He’s too young—”

  “—one glass won’t hurt ‘im—”

  He realized after a while that some of the people were passing around another kind of drug, something they sniffed up into their nostrils. But he stayed with his one glass of wine, which made him feel just dizzy and high enough to be wary of asking for any more.

  The party went on practically all day, with games and jokes and songs. Bart no longer minded when people paired off and vanished for a while, their arms about each other. This behavior was grownups’ doings now, not something in which he might possibly become involved. He went along with all the partying and had a good time. Still, now and then he caught himself wishing they would get down to business. Though he didn’t know just what their business was.

  Twenty-five

  This year his wish seemed to have been granted, for he got the impression of a lot of serious business going on. People were punching at computers and crouched over teaching machines, and in some rooms devices Bart couldn’t identify had been set up.

  He noticed that Olen’s hairline was receding sharply. He wondered if the man had some kind of scalp disease, but he didn’t ask.

  In a large room away from the usual living area, Bart found Himyar working to form a towering metal sculpture, using a torch that showered and streamed electric flames. With this homemade device Himyar brushed the glowing metal into the shapes he wanted. Parts of the sculpture reminded Bart of flowers in the garden, or, again, of the curves of splashed water that lived momentarily when someone dived into the pool.

  They talked for a time, and Himyar showed Bart some paintings Vivian had done. Himyar and Vivian spent most of their time working here or scrounging materials from every part of the Ship that they could reach; they had become known as the Artists.

  “And Armin’s an artist, too, I suppose,” said Himyar. “He’s made himself a camera and goes around using it. Well, the Ship made some of the component systems for him, and the film.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  Twenty-six

  Nobody was working quite so hard today. Bart found an elaborate game in progress, a contest involving both physical and mental effort, with complicated rules. It had to do with dividing up the regularly occupied territory of the Ship between two contending factions or teams who struggled to gain more territory from each other. People sometimes were allowed or compelled to switch sides in the game. The dividing line between the territories was marked with bright tapes stuck on the decks and bulkheads, and moved back and forth as people won or lost at events like Indian wrestling—men were matched against men, girls against girls for the physical struggles—or asking each other difficult questions.

  “Bart, be referee. Wasn’t his foot off the deck just then?”

  “Yep.”

  Powerful Kichiro, still limping on his trick knee, smiled and moved the tape into his opponents’ territory by a distance of two wall panels.

  “Hey, Bart!” It was Armin, approaching with something in his hand. “You never had a chance to see this. Here’s a picture I took of you at the last birthday party. We’ll have to have another one of those sometime.”

  Bart looked. “You hadn’t even started with the camera when we had the party. It must have been yesterday when you took this. I mean last year, for you guys.”

  “Hm. I guess you’re right.”

  Twenty-seven

  He found some of the marker tapes still stuck up in place, but the game wasn’t being played today and everyone seemed to have forgotten it. He met Fuad and Trac and was a little surprised to see how fat they both looked, with rolls of flesh above their shorts.

  He thought of going down the passageway that led to the stars again, but there was no breathing equipment in the locker where Basil had kept it earlier.

  Baruch and Solon came along and asked what he was doing. They soon explained that the breathing equipment was being used in what they called engineering studies, to find out how the more distant parts of the Ship could best be reached.

  Bart wanted to know more. They told him of the solid walls and sealed doors that cut off access to those regions, and how the Ship refused to discuss letting anyone go there. It had not tried to stop their engineering studies, though. Whether it would interfere when they began to break through a wall remained to be seen.

  Using explosives aboard a spaceship was intrinsically dangerous; something important and irreplaceable might be damaged, or all of a compartment’s air might be drained out into vacuum.

  “That’s how Ora and Tang were killed. And then I was getting some acid ready to eat through a wall, and it disappeared. I suspect some machine found it and took it away.” Baruch shrugged, fatalistic but still determined. But we’ll see, we’ll see.” He did not sound or look at all discouraged.

  Twenty-eight

  This year Bart got more attention from his shipmates than they had given him in some days. Edris and Helsa looked at his teeth, and wondered out loud if the Ship shouldn’t be straightening some of them for him.

  “Oh, they’re not terribly crooked. But it did as much for some of us when we were kids.”

  After lunch there began a general discussion of his future, carried on at times as if he were not there. Ranjan said: “I still think the Ship plans to provide him with a bride one of these days—one of these years. Maybe it’s already tried to hatch other people from the artificial wombs and something’s gone wrong, so it’s got poor Bart just marking time.”

  Another adult asked: “You still think there’s a good supply of human genetic material on board?”

  “Bound to be. Else the Ship wouldn’t have sterilized us, right?”

  There was general agreement on that point, but on little else. One body of opinion held that the Ship really wanted the people to take over, now that its own computers had grown crotchety and unreliable with breakdowns and damage. But some kind of glitch prevented it from simply saying what it wanted. Schizophrenic, it fought off with one hand their attempts to gain control, while feeding and caring for them with the other.

  The discussion soon got over Bart’s head, but he listened intently, trying to weigh everything they said. He listened for what might give him confidence, but heard it not.

  Twenty-nine

  “I know you’ve seen our biology lab before,” Galina told him. “But I think you ought to take a real interest. All our futures may lie in this room.”

  He ceased scratching his back against the doorframe. “How’s that?”

  “Sit down, Bart.” When they were seated, she looked at him with concern. “Bart, if the machines never provide you with any people about your own age—with a fertile female, specifically—then it’s going to be up to us to find some way to eventually produce more people, so that the human race can go on. I’m not sure that there are any people left alive on Earth.”

  “I see.” He nodded very seriously.

  Galina spoke slowly and kept studying him for his reactions. “We know that when the Ship was launched there were many human sperms and ova stored on board, all coded as to genetic type, so that people could be conceived and raised
by machines when the end of the voyage drew near.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sighed. “I myself suspect that most, perhaps nearly all of this genetic material was lost in some kind of accident, one that evidently disrupted the voyage in other ways as well. The Ship speaks always of a revised schedule for the mission, a revised plan.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s further evidence.” She paused. “I said all the human seeds and eggs were coded as to type and potential? There’s some indication in the available records that all of us now alive, except you—we don’t know where you came from—were conceived from materials not considered of the highest quality. Not that we have any grave genetic defects, of course; no seriously defective material would have been placed aboard. But—not the best. This suggests to me that all the best material was somehow destroyed, and also that there may not be much material left.”

  Bart nodded, not knowing what else to say or do.

  “Except you, Bart, as I said. There may have been a human crew aboard before the accident—whatever the accident was. You may be its only survivor. But I suppose your origins make little difference. Here you are and here we are, and there’s the future to be faced. A future to be created, perhaps for the whole human race, out of whatever we have on hand. Would you like to learn something about biology?”

  “I guess I’d better,” said Bart.

  They had a pretty good first lesson, distinguishing plants and animals, marking the first great branches of the tree of life.

  “What are those marks on your face?” Bart asked on impulse a few hours later, as they were leaving the lab to go to dinner. He felt he knew Galina pretty well now and wasn’t shy about getting a little more personal.

  “What marks?” She raised tentative fingers to her cheek.

  “Just like little lines in the skin, going out from the corners of your eyes.”

  Thirty

  Today marked a standard month since the Ship had roused Bart from his first period of suspended animation. When he awoke, a machine equipped with measuring devices was waiting at his bedside. It quickly got busy to check his height and weight, looked into his eyes and mouth, listened at his chest.

  “How much taller am I than a month ago, Ship?”

  “Approximately seventy millimeters,” said the expressionless voice.

  “And how much heavier?”

  “Approximately ninety-five grams.”

  “Is that good?”

  It wouldn’t say. But it did adjust his diet, adding a delicious, creamy drink to that very breakfast, served in his room.

  When he joined the other people he found Olen half bald, and learned that Basil had gone back to communing with the stars.

  Galina gave him another biology lesson, more technical and duller than the first.

  Thirty-one

  Today Bart heard that Deirdre was in her bed, too sick to get up.

  “She always liked you, Bart,” said Chao sadly. “Go in and talk to her a little.”

  He went into Deirdre’s room, and found her looking much sicker than any human being he had ever seen before. She also seemed too dazed to talk very much.

  “Galina’s been giving her drugs,” Chao explained when he came out. “Otherwise, the pain gets too bad.”

  “Pain? From what?”

  “They think it’s cancer.” Chao and the others explained it to Bart as best they could.

  Only later did they get around to telling him that Baruch had been killed in some kind of an explosion, trying to force a passage to the forbidden areas of the Ship.

  “Remember this photograph, Bart?” said Armin, cheering him up. “I took it of you at our last birthday party. We’re going to have another one soon.”

  “You took it the year after the birthday party, Armin.”

  “Oh? Maybe you’re right.”

  Galina was busy with her other work today and never got around to teaching him biology.

  Thirty-two

  Deirdre had died, which came as no surprise to Bart, but still left him with a hollow feeling. Thinking over matters of life and death, he stood at the edge of the garden, a high-domed region full of bright lights, vastly enlarged from the first little plot of synthetic soil. Some people were jogging for exercise around the walk that circled the perimeter of the garden, while others were working casually inside.

  It was strange to see gray in the hair of some of them, but Bart guessed that was just one more thing that happened naturally with age. His own hair, crewcut when his shipmates were babies, was starting to fall over his forehead now.

  He went to look up Basil, and asked to go out and see the stars again. Basil was willing. When they got to the observation port, he pointed out to Bart the prow of the Ship, and the aft, or the stern, as they sometimes called it, where the engines and their controls were supposed to be.

  “And when some people finally get back there,” Bart asked, “they’ll really be able to take over the whole thing?”

  Basil shrugged. He was looking mainly outward at the stars.

  Thirty-three

  Trac was the first person to meet Bart as he came down the corridor from his room, and as soon as she smiled in greeting he noticed that several teeth were missing from her lower jaw.

  “Had a jaw cyst, Bart. At least that’s what Galina and Solon say. They took it out. Spoils my famous beauty, but they think eventually they’ll be able to do something about giving me artificial teeth.”

  “Couldn’t the Ship—?”

  “It wouldn’t help, whether it could or not. It’s giving us less and less help these days. But never mind about that. Come along, we’ve got something to show you.”

  He followed along. And then they were all jumping out at him, yelling, “Surprise! Birthday party!” The common dining room was decorated with streamers and balloons, and the table set for a feast.

  “We were going to have ‘one next year, Bart. You know, ten years from the last. But then we decided, why not have it now?”

  “You can be whatever age you like, Bart. Be an honorary thirty-three with us, if you like.”

  “That’s a third of a century, Mal,” a woman cried. “Who wants to be that old?”

  They were all good to him, as they usually were these days, petting and hugging him and fussing around, making it his party although it was supposed to be their birthday. He never said what honorary age he wanted. Actually he didn’t want any; his own real age was good enough.

  Later he found unnoticed in a corner something that he supposed had been dragged out of storage accidently with the decorations. It was a wheeled plastic toy that he remembered fixing for Deirdre a month ago.

  Thirty-four

  The marking tapes were up on the bulkheads again, and a few people were playing at the question-and-wrestle game. Meanwhile, some had evidently been spending a lot of time working in the garden. It was now huge, and looked like the earthly gardens pictured in the Ship’s records, which none of them had ever seen in actuality.

  “And now, Bart, we’re going to have some prayers. Come along.”

  “Some what?”

  “You’ll see. It’s another old idea that Basil’s been putting into practice lately.”

  They had wanted to hold the prayer meetings out by the observation port, Bart learned, but there wasn’t room enough for everyone, and all had wanted to attend the first meetings at least, to see what they were going to be like. That was a month or two ago and by now, attendance was dropping slightly.

  Bart didn’t understand the theory of prayer too well, but at the meeting Basil and the others who got up to talk seemed to be speaking not only to the Ship but to the world outside it, and to some force or power that had made them both.

  Thirty-five

  When Bart emerged from his room most of his shipmates were there in the hall waiting for him, something that hadn’t happened since they were sixteen, a day he could remember well. Today they were going to bring him to a meeting, they
said. At first Bart expected more prayers, but this meeting turned out to be more businesslike than that.

  It was a governmental council, held all day or most of the day around the big table where lunch came as an interruption. Lunch included fruits and vegetables brought fresh from the garden, as well as the usual rations issued by the Ship.

  The proceedings got rather boring for Bart, though his friends made an effort to bring him into it all. They showed him their new system of recording all the discoveries of their research for easy access by Bart and future generations.

  He looked the question at them.

  “It’s true, Bart,” said Fay. A deep, gentle happiness glowed through her eyes at the thought. “The Ship has recently promised us, there will be future generations.”

  “Provided the mission is completed,” someone put in.

  “Yes. Well.” That was enough for Fay, and for the people as a group.

  Bart himself thought it sounded fine, but he would still like to know more. He asked the Ship for details later, but got nowhere, as usual.

  Thirty-six

  There had been important changes made around him. He knew this the moment he started to come out of sleep. Opening his eyes & groggy second or two later, he realized that he was in a new bedroom, much like his old one, but different in detail and bigger.

  “Ship . . . Ship, where am I? What’s happened?”

  “You have been moved during your sleep into a new accommodation, Bart. There is no cause for alarm.”

  He got up, dressed, ate, and eliminated as usual. The walls of this room were metal, and its door was thicker, as he saw when it opened for him to go out.

  “Why did you move me, Ship?”

  “Some of the people were attempting to reach you, to rouse you from sleep at the wrong time. They meant you well but it was necessary to prevent their interference.”

  His door opened into a corridor he had never seen before, leading off in one direction only. It bent sharply several times and was interrupted by two sets of heavy doors that opened as Bart drew near and closed immediately after he had passed.

  He found himself coming back into the peopled area of the Ship from a new direction, near the biology lab. The first folk to see him dropped what they were doing and ran to give him a glad welcome.