A couple of small riding carts had been built, powered by electric motors, and Bart had some fan riding them about. His elders got angry and yelled at him when he drove too wildly.
The most popular physical game consisted mainly of sliding discs over a pattern of numbered squares on the floor.
Sixty
When he woke up in his room a machine was standing beside him, waiting to give him his monthly physical. His gains in weight and height were both larger than during the previous month. He counted a few more pubic hairs. This morning the creamy drink was dropped from his solitary breakfast.
The birthday party had more and fancier decorations than before, but little else was different, except that most of the people were content to just sit around and eat, drink, and talk. Fuad didn’t eat or drink much—he’d lost a lot of weight. But Chao, as the others said, was having a good day, and joined in merrily.
All in all, the old people had a good time. They fussed over Bart quite a bit, but he felt pretty much out of it. Not sad, really, but detached. School had been recessed for the day, though he would have liked to learn more about the Ship.
Sixty-one
Ranjan had suffered a stroke, and was lying paralyzed in the hospital, unable to move anything on his right side. Everyone seemed angry at the Ship, for what they described as cutting back more on its medical programs just as their needs were rising. Part of the space it had formerly used to give them such niggardly medical treatments as it provided had now been walled off. Something else was going on in there, they said, and nodded angrily, though they didn’t know what.
They questioned Bart, something like envy now mixed on their faces with the tenderness they usually accorded him these days. But he had not a scrap of information to provide.
At the moment the office of president was empty, and the question of reorganizing the government was being somewhat crankily debated.
Sixty-two
Vivian, who had been getting fat, was wasting and suffering internal pains. Ranjan was still unable to help himself at all. Bart was told these ills and a catalogue of lesser ones as if he should be just bursting with eagerness to hear them.
He was more interested by ping-pong, which was now a favorite game.
The burning social question was whether there should be an attempt at tinkering with the basic food machines to try to get a more easily chewable output from them.
Kichiro, Solon, and Armin, the only really healthy men, were undertaking an ambitious program to get themselves in shape. Edris, Galina, Sharon, Helsa, and Lotis were laughing a lot at the men and pondering a reducing program for themselves. Trac was thin already, maybe because she had trouble eating.
Sixty-three
He learned that Vivian was dead, to nobody’s surprise.
His school today was conducted by Lotis, who about six weeks ago had started to seduce him in the swimming pool. Meeting the eyes of the old gray-haired woman now, Bart thought she didn’t remember that at all. And he was right. That hadn’t been her in the pool at all, only someone with whom she shared a name. Today she taught him gardening.
The garden was being expanded again. A lot of the rejuvenation plants were still there, taking up space, and not so much living room was needed for people any more, Bart supposed. There were fourteen of them alive now instead of twenty-four, and the survivors didn’t move around as much as they used to. “Remember when I took this picture of you, Bart?” “Yes, I do, but you don’t.” And he went rudely on his way, leaving Armin standing still behind him. It wasn’t really Armin that bothered Bart, it was the whole situation. The future wasn’t coming for these old people, but it was sure enough coming for him.
Sixty-four
Fuad had just died, of another heart attack, and Bart was solemnly conducted to see the still body in a refrigeration room, before they said words over it and gave it back to the ship through a disposal chute.
“Death is a part of life, Bart,” Basil explained. They hadn’t given him that reasonable an explanation a couple of months ago when they murdered Fritz before his eyes. Never mind, he told himself.
The more energetic people were playing squash today, and Bart joined in for a little while. He was fussed over as usual, and after school people pressed cake and cookies on him.
Sixty-five
He had noticed for some time that his sessions in the school room (not far from the hospital, from which came now and then a querulous groaning) tended to fall into two types. In the first type a teacher tried very earnestly to cram knowledge into his head; in a lesson of the second type (sometimes conducted by the same man or woman) there were long pauses, and an air of futility hung over the proceedings.
Today’s session, starting right after lunch, was of the second type. After about an hour Sharon, his instructor, left him alone with a teaching machine, from which he abstracted information on the layout of the Ship, until that got boring. He played with the machine trivially then until they came to get him for dinner.
Sixty-six
He asked to be allowed to study on his own again, and when the request was granted he daydreamed and played with the machine for a while. The vision of young Lotis in the pool came to him, and he got up and went to see if the pool was still there.
Gray-haired Lotis, his teacher again today, discovered his unexplained desertion and came after him angrily. They quarreled, and she tried to take him by the hair and drag him back to school.
She was still a sturdy old girl, but in getting free he pushed her hard enough to knock her down. Alarmed by the way she yelled, he ran away.
Soon Kichiro came limping after him. Bart might have run some more and evaded capture, or sought the safety of his room, but he thrust out his lip and stood his ground. Kichiro slapped him and made him come back to school, with the hardest grip that Bart could remember clamped on his arm.
Sixty-seven
He heard that Ranjan had died, to everyone’s relief, after six years of paralysis.
Bart went sullenly into school, under Kichiro’s watchful eye.
The regular lesson hadn’t gone far before Kichiro interrupted it to make a small impulsive speech. “Bart, you’re about all that we old people have to live for. You and the hope that you represent—that one day there will be more people on the Ship, people who will get out from under the yoke of the machines, something we’ve never been able to manage. ‘We have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we should have done.’ ”
Bart didn’t know what to say.
“But all our lives make too much of a burden to be put on you, don’t they?” Kichiro added with a sigh. He seemed to be pleading.
“No, it’s all right with me if you feel that way.” And his teacher was happy and gave him a manly hug. But Kichiro had missed the point. Bart no longer cared how any of them felt about anything.
Sixty-eight
The first person he met was Armin, who told him that Chao and Basil had both died, separately and rather suddenly, in the past year.
Bart went to school and found that they had a test programmed into the teaching machine, ready for him to take. Left alone to work, he answered a couple of the questions, and then, feeling that he had something more important to do on this day, he got up and left the school. He looked back once and then walked on. Kichiro looked older and less vigorous than he had two years before, and Bart didn’t think any of the others would try to get rough with him. Not any more.
He went to the commissary and punched orders for a small birthday cake into the machine, as he had done for some of those early parties, so long ago. It seemed long to him, now.
Soon he had his cake, the fourteen small candles he had ordered, and a lighter, too. He carried the cake to a refectory table and sat down alone to eat some of it himself. He made a little ceremony of lighting the candles, but would have felt too silly singing himself any songs.
He had ordered the sweet fizzy drink he usually had at parties, but soo
n got up and went to where the wine was always kept and poured himself a cup of that.
Kichiro came in and stared at him a few moments before speaking. “You’re supposed to be in school.” The old man’s voice was half startled and half angry. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s my fourteenth birthday today. I’m having my cake.”
Kichiro stared a little longer through his puffy, old man’s eyes. “Well—I’m sorry if we forgot about your birthday, but that doesn’t excuse your running out in the middle of a test.” He had left a door open somewhere behind him and all the time he was talking, fretful moaning complaints kept drifting over from the direction of the hospital.
Armin and Helsa came into the room. “What’s the matter?”
Kichiro told them, and they started arguing—Helsa for taking a different approach with the boy, as she put it, and Armin in favor of declaring another holiday. This last suggestion angered Kichiro. They were still arguing with one another when Bart finished the little piece of cake on his plate, got up, and left, practically unnoticed. This time he located the pool but found it had long been dry and empty.
Sixty-nine
Bart woke up and left his room as usual, and was surprised when the first set of heavy doors that interrupted his private corridor remained closed when he approached. Then he saw that a new doorway, leading to a new, or newly revealed, passageway had been made in the wall at right angles to the doors.
After a moment, Bart took the new way.
“The prime directives under which I operate are very clear,” the Ship said in his ear. “At least one human parent is necessary for children to mature to their full potential.
“We will arrive in less than twenty standard years within a system of planets probably suitable for colonization. From now on you will be awakened increasingly often. You will serve the first generation of colonists as parent. Like them, you have first-rate genetic potential, and perhaps you will remain in some position of leadership when they mature. Today begins your apprenticeship in this role; your elementary preparation for it—a course in the basics of human psychology—was completed yesterday.”
With gradual comprehension Bart walked on, guided toward the new nursery by the polyphonic squalling from its full cribs.
TO MARK THE YEAR ON AZLAROC
Fred Saberhagen has worked as an encyclopedia editor and in electronics, but for the past 14 years he has spent as much of his time as possible writing science fiction, and now he has no time for encyclopedias or electronics. He is best known for his famous “Berserker” series of science-fiction stories, which has been widely enjoyed and even more widely imitated.
They had been quarreling in the ship, and were still at it when they disembarked and left its sprawling metal complexities behind them. Ailanna snapped at Hagen: “So what if I misplaced your camera! What does it matter if you have one more picture of the stars? You can take a dozen when we depart.” And when it turned out that they had missed the ground transport machine that was taking the other passengers across the smooth undulations of the golden plain toward the city, Hagen was almost expecting her to physically attack him.
“Son of a nobody!” Ailanna hissed. “Where are we to stay if you have made no reservations?” A kilometer away was the only real city on the star, and Hagen realized that to one coming to Azlaroc for the first time, the city must look quite small. On the surface there appeared only a few fairyland towers, and little evidence of the many chambers and passageways dug out beneath the plain.
“I haven’t made up my mind where to stay.” He turned away from her and began to walk after the transport machine.
She followed. “You can never make up your mind about anything.” It was an old intermittent quarrel. If the reservations had been in perfect order, there would have been something else to quarrel about.
She nagged him for a hundred meters across the plain, and then the scenery began to come through to her. The enormous golden-yellow land was humped here and there by paraboloid hills and studded with balanced spheres of matter. The surface looked more like something man-made than like soil, and it stretched in places up to the low, yellowish, sunless sky, in asymptotic spires that broke off in radiant glory at an altitude of a few hundred meters, at the upper edge of the region of gravity inversion.
“What’s that?” Her voice was no longer angry. She was looking toward the top of a golden sphere which loomed over the distanceless horizon, at right angles to the way they were walking. The sphere reminded Hagen of a large planet rising, as seen from some close-in satellite, but this sphere was entirely beneath the low, peculiar sky.
“Only part of the topography.” He remained calm, as usual, taking her bickering in stride.
When they had gotten under-surface in the city, and arranged for lodgings, and were on their way to them through one of the smaller side passageways, Hagen saw some man or woman of a long-past year approaching through the passage from the other direction. Had there been three or four people of the present year or of recent years in the same part of the corridor just then, the passage of such an old one would have been almost un-noticeable. The old one did not appear as a plain solid human figure. Only a disturbance in the air and along the wall, a mound of shadows and moire patterns that throbbed with the beat of the pulsar somewhere beneath their feet. The disturbance occupied hardly any space in this year’s corridor, and Ailanna at first was not aware of it at all.
Hagen reached out a hand and took her by the upper arm and forced her, strong woman that she was, into three almost-dancing steps that left her facing in the proper way to see. “Look. One of the early settlers.”
With a small intake of breath Ailanna fixed her eyes on the figure. She watched it out of sight around a corner, then turned her elfin face to Hagen. Her eyes had been enlarged, and her naturally small chin further diminished, in accordance with the fashion dictates of the time, even as Hagen’s dark eyebrows had been grown into a ring of hair that crossed above his nose and went down by its sides to meld with his mustache. She said: “Perhaps one of the very first? An explorer?”
“No.” He looked about at the ordinary overhead lights, the smooth walls of the yellowish rock-like substance of the star. “I remember that this corridor was not cut by the explorers, not perhaps until ‘120 or ‘130. So no settler in it can be older than that, of course.”
“I don’t understand, Hagen. Why didn’t you tell me more about this place before you brought me here?”
“This way it will all come as a wonderful surprise.” Exactly how much irony was in his answer was hard to tell.
They met others in the corridor as they proceeded. Here came a couple of evidently ten or fifteen local years ago, walking in the nudity that had been acceptable as fashion then, draped with ten or fifteen of the sealing veils of Azlaroc so that their bodies shimmered slightly as they moved, giving off small diamond-sparkles of light. The veils of only ten or fifteen years were not enough to warp a settler out of phase with this year’s visitors, so the four people meeting in the passage had to give way a little on both sides, as if they were in a full sense contemporaries, and like contemporaries they excused themselves with vacant little social smiles.
Numbers, glowing softly from the corridor walls, guided Hagen and Ailanna to their rooms. “Hagen, what is this other sign that one sees on the walls?” It was a red hollow circle with a small pie-cut wedge of its interior filled with red also.
“The amount of red inside shows the estimated fraction of a year remaining until the next veil falls.”
“Then there is not much of the year left, for sightseeing. Here, this must be our door. I would say we have come at a poor time.”
Opening the door, he did not reply. Their baggage had already been deposited inside.
“I wouldn’t want to be trapped here, Hagen. Well, the apartment’s not bad . . . now what’s the matter? What have I said?” She had learned to know at once when something really bothered him, which he
r inconsequential bickering rarely seemed to do.
“Nothing. Ample warning is always given so the tourists can get away, you needn’t worry.
She was in the bedroom unpacking when something came in through the illusory window that seemed to give upon the golden plain. Where a sawtooth range of diminishing pyramids marched in from the horizon there came a shimmer and a sliding distortion that was in the room with her before she knew it, that passed on harmless through her own flesh, and went its way. She gave a yelp of fear.
Hagen was in the doorway, smiling faintly. “Didn’t I mention that we might be sharing our apartment here?”
“Sharing—of course not. Oh. You mean with settlers, folk of other years. That’s what it was, then. But—through the wall?”
“That wall was evidently an open passage in their time. Ignore them, as they will us. Looking up through their veils they can see us—differently, too. While diving I have asked them to describe how we look to them, but their answers are hard to understand.”
“Tell me about diving,” she said, when they had finished settling in and were coming out of doors again.
“Better than that, I’ll show you. But I’ll tell you first, of course.” As they walked out onto the plain, Hagen could hear the pulsar component of the triple system beating as sound, the sound coming now from overhead, thick and soft and at one third the speed of a calm human heart. It came through all the strangeness of space that lay between him and the invisible pulsar that locked its orbit intricately with those of a small black hole and of the world called Azlaroc.
He said: “What is called diving, on Azlaroc, is a means of approaching the people and things that lie under the veils of the years. Nothing can pierce the veils, of course. But diving stretches them, lets one get near enough to the people of the past to see them more clearly and make photographs.” And more than that, more than that, oh Gods of Space, thought Hagen but he said no more.
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