All over the ship, people were stopping what they were doing, looking up, listening, waiting …
And then the last few seconds ticked off and a yellow light turned green and the plasma torches ignited … and we felt absolutely nothing. At three milligees, we wouldn't. But they would burn for hours, days, even weeks, and by the time we passed the orbit of Pluto, we'd be traveling fast enough to get from Earth to Mars in fourteen hours.
Boynton nodded to me and I ducked down to the lounge and powered up the keyboard. In my earpiece, I could hear him announcing to the entire ship, "Congratulations, colonists."
That was my cue, and I began playing very softly. So softly that if you didn't know what to listen for, you would have missed the first note. And then the next one. Like rain drops falling off a leaf and plinking into a tiny brook. First one, then the next, then a pair of notes, then another pair, then a few more … and by then, it was clear where the music was going. The brook was babbling happily into a stream, the stream was tumbling joyously into a river, and the river was rushing triumphantly all the way down to the ocean. We sailed away On The Beautiful Blue Danube. The perfect music for flying off into the darkness of space.
We were on our way.
And then, after that …
—life went back to normal. It would be nearly six weeks before we reached our transition point. So the kids went back to school, the crew returned to their maintenance, the cooks went back to their galleys, the colonists went back to their classes and their jobs, and we all fell into the routine of a well-disciplined machine.
We did have a launch party though—two shifts later, after everything had been triple-checked again. One thing about life on the Cascade—nobody ever missed an excuse for a party. We celebrated everything. Partly to break the monotony of the routine, and partly because it was always good for morale.
I was asked to play again, of course. Mom agreed to join me, and I found three other people who had instruments—and even though we hadn't had much time for rehearsal, we didn't do too badly.
We started off with a crashing chord—which opened up into "A Hard Day's Night," which surprised everybody for about two seconds—and then they cheered and applauded. It was the perfect ice-breaker. Then we segued into "Yellow Submarine," and everybody joined in on the chorus, and I knew we had chosen correctly. Mom had been nervous about appearing in front of an audience again, especially when she started her solo number—"With A Little Help From My Friends"—she quavered nervously for the first few bars, but then she took a breath, found her strength, and came back very quickly. If you didn't know better, you'd think it was planned.
Then Mom did a beautiful solo of ''Imagine." We gave her the barest minimum of accompaniment, letting her carry the song by sheer willpower alone. Mom hadn't wanted to do it this way, but it was the right decision. They loved her—and when the waves of applause rolled over her, she flushed with embarrassment and joy and had to dab at her eyes. She had forgotten how much she loved her music too.
She concluded with "The Long And Winding Road" and then she segued smoothly into "Across The Universe." If we'd had gravity, the audience would have come out of their seats. Even without gravity, their reaction was astonishing. Dad used to say that music could touch people in a way that nothing else could. He said it was the best way to make love to hundreds and thousands of people all at once. I'd never played for an audience like this before—and they applauded so hard it was scary. But Mom loved it. She was flushed with embarrassment and joy, and she looked happier than I'd ever seen her.
For an encore, Mom sang "Hey Jude" and everybody joined in and sang it with her and we kept it going for twenty minutes, with all kinds of variations and even a couple solos. And then for a last encore, I played On The Beautiful Blue Danube again, because it had become our unofficial ship's anthem. And then all of us in the band all held hands and took a bow—which isn't really possible in free fall, but we made it work anyway.
And then J'mee came swimming up and gave me a great big kiss and that made everything perfect. I just floated there in bliss and smiled from here to forever. Doug and Mickey came drifting down to us, both grinning in delight. Douglas grabbed some webbing and pulled himself close, so he could whisper in my ear. "Dad would have been so proud of you, Charles."
That was all he needed to say. The tears came flooding to my eyes and I started crying again, because I missed him so much. And because this should have been his night, not mine. And then Bev nudged Mom and she swung around and pulled herself over to me and for a while, we all just cluster-hugged and wept, until finally something funny occurred to me and I started to giggle.
"What—?" demanded Douglas.
I pulled away from the group hug. "This whole thing—this started out as Dad's idea, remember? None of us wanted to go. We all thought it was crazy. And now, here we are anyway—we get to live Dad's dream. He didn't get to come, but we did." I smiled as I said it. "We should have seen it coming—Dad's ideas always worked out backwards."
Douglas laughed softly. "I miss him too—but he gave us a great gift, didn't he?"
"Yeah, he did. And Mom too. I'm glad you came, Mom."
"So am I," she said.
There was a lot more we could have said, but the party swirled around us suddenly, and we were all pulled in separate directions by well-wishers and new friends and fans. And then I was in the center of a crowd of people: some I knew, most I didn't, but all of them wanted to congratulate us, and some of them wanted to join the band. Even Trent swam up to ask if Mom and I would teach him how to play an instrument, and he wasn't the only one. Gary and Kisa were there, telling me to say yes. And then suddenly a lot of people were asking about music classes, and the next thing I knew, I was a teacher.
And for a minute there, I had the strangest feeling of how far we'd already come. We were only a half million klicks from Earth, but it felt as if we'd already come a million light years. Only three months ago, we'd been in El Paso and I'd been wondering why adults acted so stupid. Now, I was taking on adult responsibilities—and adults didn't seem so stupid at all.
Three months ago, we weren't a family—just some people who lived in the same tube-house and yelled at each other a lot. All I wanted to do was get away from Mom so badly that I'd even go to the moon with Dad. And now we were half a million klicks beyond the moon, living in a tube again; Dad was gone and I loved my Mom. Everything was inside-down and upside-out. And that was just fine with me.
And then, just to make everything even better, J'mee grabbed me by the hand and dragged me off to the downside lounge, where hardly anybody ever went, and we practiced our smiling.
REVELATIONS
Back on Earth, the only Revelationists I'd ever seen were the ones on television. And television only shows the weirdest people, because nobody wants to watch ordinary boring folks. So just about everything I knew about Revelationists was wrong.
The Revelationists aboard the Cascade didn't mix with the Outbeyond colonists unless they had to. Douglas said that was because they believed we were all evil sinners and godless heathens, but Mickey shook his head and said that was just prejudice. Most of the Revelationists were pretty nice people—but that the underlying meme of the Revelationist mind-set was so fragile that the only way it could survive was by the construction of a memetic membrane to isolate the Revelationist meme from other and possibly stronger memes, and thereby prevent assimilation or deconstruction. The effect, of course, was to isolate the individuals carrying the meme and minimize the possibilities of memetic hybridization—
I turned to Douglas. "You're contagious, aren't you?!" To Mickey, I said, more politely, "Listen—if you're going to live among humans, you have to speak our language."
Mickey and Douglas exchanged a look.
"Why did you let him live this long?" Mickey asked.
"Couldn't think of a good way to dispose of the body—"
"You could shove me out an airlock," I suggested.
"Yeah,
that'll work," Mickey said.
"Hey—!"
But getting back to the Revelationists … they weren't bad people. They were just different. We would drop them off at New Revelation and then continue on to Outbeyond. No problem. There were only three hundred of them. They were shipping themselves and sixty cargo pods to their colony. That didn't seem like enough to me. Douglas and Mickey agreed; but that was all they could afford to ship. Their colony was badly underfunded. Mickey said that they had hoped once they were up and running, they would attract a lot more families than they did; but they didn't, so the colony was surviving from ship to ship. With no more ships coming after the Cascade, things were probably going to get pretty scary for those folks. Everybody knew it, nobody was talking about it—the Revelationists were touchy enough already. They mostly smiled and said, "The Good Lord will take care of his own," as if that was an answer.
I asked Douglas about that and he just rolled his eyes and muttered something about Invisible Hank and the Pernicious meme. But when I told him about Dr. Pettyjohn and his questions about HARLIE, both he and Mickey reacted sharply. "Stay away from him, Chigger."
"Why?"
Mickey swam over to me. "What do you think he wanted?"
"He wanted me to agree that souls only came from God."
"And what did you say?"
"I didn't say anything. I don't think about things like that. How can anyone know?"
"He asked you if HARLIE had a soul, didn't he?"
"Yeah—?"
"And the next question … ? Where do you think HARLIE's consciousness comes from? If not from God, then from where?"
I waited for him to tell me. Mickey waited for me to answer.
I shrugged.
It didn't work. "Go ahead. Work it out, Chigger."
"The only thing I can think is … well, maybe souls don't come from Invisible Hank. Maybe souls are just born? Maybe your soul grows as you do?"
Mickey nodded. "Yes, that's what scares these folks. The existence of a soul that doesn't come from God suggests that there might not be a God—at least, not a God like they imagine. The existence of HARLIE threatens their sense of identity. So they have to have another explanation for HARLIE's existence. If God didn't create HARLIE's consciousness, who did—?"
"The devil?" I guessed.
"Right. And if you accept that idea, then HARLIE is a demonic being—and if Revelationists have sworn to destroy the tools of Satan, then what is your obligation … ?"
He let me work it out for myself. "Oh!"
"That's right."
"But that's stupid—if they destroy HARLIE, how will they get to New Revelation?"
Mickey shrugged. "The Lord will provide a way. That's what IRMA units are for."
"But isn't an IRMA unit sentient too?"
"Not like a HARLIE. It's okay to enslave the devil's tools and put them to work serving God; but a HARLIE unit is too smart—so smart that it can't be enslaved to God's purposes, so that means it's the devil's tool and it has to be destroyed."
I looked to Douglas. "He's putting me on, isn't he?"
"Nope."
"They really believe that?"
"Mickey should know."
"That is so crazy!"
"You don't know the half of it, Chigger. Just stay away from them."
Mickey added, "Mostly they stay in their part of the ship, and mostly we stay in ours. And that's the way everybody wants it."
"Then why are they on the Cascade!"
"Because they paid fourteen percent of its construction costs. On every voyage to Outbeyond, the Cascade is contracted to deliver pilgrims and supplies to New Revelation."
"Oh," I said,
"And … they arranged the new IRMA unit for Commander Boynton."
"Well, he should be grateful for that, shouldn't he?"
"Not the way they did it," Mickey said. "The Captain didn't have a choice. They refused to let the ship boost with HARLIE running the hyperstate transitions."
"But why?"
"HARLIE scares them."
"Huh? What did he do to them?"
"What did he do to Luna? He doesn't seem to have a lot of regard for either the laws of man or the laws of God. Doesn't that scare you?"
"Invisible Luna had it coming. If they had left us alone, he would have left them alone."
Mickey said, "That's not the way they see it, Chigger. Look at it from their point of view. If HARLIE is a tool of the devil, he won't want them serving God, so he can't allow them to arrive at New Revelation. They're afraid that HARLIE will take the ship right into the nearest wormhole—and straight to Hell to deliver all of us to Satan himself."
"That's silly!" I stared at him in disbelief. "They should know better than that—"
"But they don't know better. And they think that you and I and Douglas are all brainwashed tools of HARLIE. Especially you."
"Now I know you're making this up."
"I wish I were, Charles. But these are the kind of people who make satirists commit suicide—because they can't keep up. As crazy as you or I might think these people are, that doesn't even approach what they think about us. They believe that anyone who hasn't had The Big Revelation is still under the influence of the devil. So that means everybody else is the enemy. That's why the rest of us have to be on our best behavior around these people until we get them off the ship. Do you understand?"
"Why didn't you tell me this sooner?"
"We didn't want to scare you."
"Well, I'm scared now."
"But now we're underway," said Douglas.
"That's even more scary. Now, we're stuck. We've got three more weeks to transit point and then ten weeks to New Revelation."
Douglas swam over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. "Charles," he said. "This isn't the Cascade's first voyage. The crew has done this before, they know how to keep the two groups of colonists separated. As long as everyone follows the rules, we shouldn't have any trouble."
I looked him straight in the eye. "Douglas—ever since that first moment when Dad said, 'I've got an idea. Let's go to the moon,' that's all we've had. Trouble. Nothing but trouble. And each time, it's worse than before. Why do you think that's going to stop now?"
He didn't have an answer for that. I wish he had. I hate being right about stuff like that.
INTROSPECTIONS
We kept a tight beam connection with Earth as long as we could. After that, we relayed through the outer planet stations. The news from the homeworld wasn't good, and it wasn't going to get any better. Everything was still collapsing.
It takes a long time for a civilization to collapse. It falls apart by pieces—a little piece here, a little piece there. Then a big piece here, and a lot more pieces everywhere—but it still takes time for all the pieces to come down. It's like an avalanche. First one pebble, then another—each one knocks another stone loose—and in those first few moments, you think maybe nothing bad is going to happen; but pretty soon a whole bunch of stones are rolling, and then it's too late, because the whole mountainside is sliding. And sliding. And sliding.
And on Earth, all the mountains were coming down.
We'd been watching it for six weeks now, a little bit more every day. And every day that things fell apart with no one stopping them, with no one trying to stop them, that was another day of chaos that would have to be repaired. Douglas said that every day without law, without order, convinces people that there isn't going to be any more law and order. That's when things start to get ugly. There's nothing like a plague or six to turn neighbor against neighbor.
Lunar Authority estimated that over two billion people had already died, and that it was likely to get a lot worse. One commentator said that the breakdown point is twenty percent. When a society loses twenty percent of its population, it starts to unravel. And some parts of Earth had already lost thirty or forty percent.
I couldn't imagine it. I couldn't imagine what it must be like to be on Earth, terrified that everything was
out of control and there was no way to get anything back to anyplace resembling normal. I couldn't imagine what it must be like to be on Luna or Mars and not be able to do anything. I would be glad when we entered hyperstate and I could start to pretend that there was no such place as Earth, except as a bad memory.
But what I couldn't understand most was how people could be so stupid. Why did people have to fight with each other? If everybody cooperated, everybody would have a better chance of survival, wouldn't they?
That line of thinking only brought me right back to the Cascade. The same question could be asked here. Why couldn't the Revelationists cooperate with the rest of us?
—of course, they were asking the same question from their side. Why didn't the rest of us cooperate with them?
The problem was the word cooperate.
What most people mean when they say "let's cooperate" is really "let's do it my way." Which is why other people don't cooperate.
I guess I'd been naïve. I'd thought/hoped/believed/imagined that once we were away from Earth, the Line, and Luna, once we were aboard the starship, we'd finally get away from all the crap of people fighting with each other. That was why I wanted to go—to get away from all the fighting. But no, we were just taking it with us. More of the same old same old that had pulled the Earth apart. So it didn't really matter where we went, did it? We'd just keep doing it to each other, one planet after another. Earth, Luna, Mars, New Revelation, Outbeyond, and whatever came after that.
If this is what it meant to be a human being, I didn't like it. I was really sorry I'd ever started puberty.
There was this thing back on Earth where you could delay puberty for as much as seven years, depending on your metabolism. Doug had delayed for two years, and Mom had gotten a tax benefit. I had delayed a little bit—at least until Dad said, "Let's go to the moon." Now I was wishing I'd brought a lifetime supply of the damn pills.
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