The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  When the water ran clear, she closed the faucet, dried her container and walked back to her desk. She tried very hard not to think about anything for the rest of the afternoon.

  Katie was home when Lauren returned to her quarters. She was surprised; Katie almost always worked late. “Is everything all right?” Lauren asked, dropping her tablet on the small table by the door.

  “Everything’s fine,” Katie said, “I just thought it would be nice to have a quiet evening. Besides, it’s obvious the plant doesn’t need me like they used to. It occurred to me that I really don’t need to be there ten hours a day. I’ve decided it’s time to start slowing down, enjoying life a little.”

  Lauren frowned. What would she do if she didn’t have the lab to occupy her days? The thought made her shiver. “So, what do you want to do?” she asked, the question fraught with meaning in her mind.

  Katie didn’t seem to see the complexity. “I thought I’d just warm up the leftovers from your birthday dinner. Looks like there’s a bottle of wine we didn’t get through yesterday, too. Sound okay?”

  “Sure,” Lauren said and sank into her chair. She’d sat at this end of the table since they’d first moved into these quarters when Katie’s daughter Emilie was born. Over the years the foam in the seat had conformed to Lauren’s body so entirely that she felt just a little bit uncomfortable in any other chair. As much as she found their small quarters a painful reminder of the past—when she felt as if there were a cornucopia of possibilities before her, a potential for her small life to be something important—when she sat in her chair, she felt as if she were in the one most right place in the universe. It made her sad.

  Katie brought her a plate of food and set it in front of her. She looked at Lauren and smiled, her eyes crinkling in a way that had once made Lauren ache to reach out and touch Katie’s skin. The memory was almost as strong as the real thing, and she fought to keep her hands to herself. “Thanks,” she said as Katie sat down across the table, in her own well-worn seat.

  They ate, Katie chattering about her day and her plans to visit the arboretum, the flower gardens, the reservoir. Lauren remembered visits they’d made together, drinking in the beauty of those cherished mementoes of their ancestors’ lost home.

  Aloud, she said, ”I don’t know. If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all.”

  Katie’s face froze for a second, then she smiled again. “Maybe that’s the point,” she said. “To bring all the forests with us to new Earth.”

  Lauren shrugged. “If you say so.”

  Katie put her fork down and cocked her head at Lauren. “I know what’s wrong,” she said. “You’ve got the day after your birthday blues. A case of let-down after all the festivities are over. All that expectation, all that planning, and now it’s over.”

  Lauren looked at the woman who had been her companion for over two decades. Could she really see so deeply into Lauren’s soul? Did she simply mean what she said or was this her way of telling her she understood? That she knew that every day was like the day after her birthday, that every day she felt like she was just marking time and waiting for death?

  Katie smiled. “Don’t worry. At our age birthdays come around ever other day it seems. You’ll be stuffed full of cake again before you know it.”

  “That must be it,” Lauren said and, for a brief moment, she felt something.

  Chapter 4

  Memory Loss

  Harald Watanabe paused in front of the door, a tiny fluttering in his stomach. He felt very much like he did on the first day of class, a room full of fresh faces in front of him, all their expectation rolling toward him like he imagined an ocean wave crashing to shore would do. He supposed that his nervousness was a sign that he loved these visits, just as it was a sign that he still loved teaching. Sadly, many of his colleagues had lost the excitement he still felt faced with a class full of students.

  “Every year is just like the last,” Tulia would say over glasses of wine after the faculty meetings. She taught mathematics. “The students don’t change, we don’t change, the material doesn’t change. It’s an illusion of progress, that’s all.”

  “Come on,” Harald argued once, “of course things change. New discoveries, new ideas. All we have is change.”

  Tulia had snorted. “You’re a historian, you know better than that. Let’s say that the whole history of human knowledge is contained by a value of x. All these new ideas, this glorious progress we’ve made, in the entire twenty-five generations born on this ship, can be represented by less than one trillionth of x. Statistically speaking, nothing has changed.”

  He hadn’t argued. He knew she was wrong, knew that there was more to their lives than propagation, but he didn’t feel capable of articulating it. It was a sense of faith in their inherent importance that sustained him, rather than any provable measure. He could live with that, but he could never convince anyone else, which saddened him. And drove him down to lower level N again and again to talk to the kahuna.

  “Hello, again, Harald,” she said, the lines in her dark face crinkling with her smile. “How long has it been since I saw you, my boy?”

  “About twenty days,” he answered, simultaneously guilty that he’d left her alone for so long and that he couldn’t seem to stay away.

  As if she could sense his ambivalence, she said, “The time just disappears, doesn’t it? But it is so nice when you visit; I do love our talks together. So tell me, how are your pupils? Eager to drink from the cup of knowledge, I trust.”

  Harald smiled again. “Oh, Iona,” he said. “Were people really so noble in your day? My students barely care where we’re going, let alone where we came from. It’s a chore to get them away from their stories and music long enough to pass the basic exams. Maybe I was just born at the wrong time.”

  Her raucous laugh startled him and he saw her wipe an invisible tear from one eye. “Oh, Harald, people have always been that way, especially young people. My goodness, at that age it’s amazing they can keep their hands to themselves and their clothes on long enough to go to class. You were probably the same, you just don’t remember it. I was certainly like that.” Her eyes twinkled and Harald’s face flushed. “It will pass, the ideas will get into their brains. I believe in you, my boy. Tens of thousands of years of human history aren’t going to disappear from our consciousness on your watch, I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Iona,” he said. “I just wish that I could tell if I were making a difference somehow.”

  “Are you losing faith, my boy?”

  “No,” he said, unable to meet her eyes.

  “There’s no shame in it if you are.” Her voice was so soothing, he was almost willing to admit anything.

  “No,” he repeated. “It’s not that. I do believe, but I don’t know why.”

  “And that bothers you?” she asked. “Not being able to explain it?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I am an academic, a teacher. I may not be a scientist, but I understand science. I hold its discoveries and methods to be above reproach. So, then, how do I reconcile those values with this…” He opened his hands as if the empty space contained the very beliefs he was describing. “This lack of evidence to show that what we do matters? How do I share this hopefulness, this wonder and excitement about our lives with my colleagues, my students when I can point to absolutely nothing to show that it is real?”

  Iona let him finish, her thin lips pursed in concentration. He knew she had heard this all before, knew she’d heard some variant of it from him more than once. Yet she thought about it carefully, as if no one had ever brought this up to her before. He wondered if this capacity for patience was her most supernatural power.

  “There are no easy answers to these questions, my boy,” she said. “It wouldn’t be an article of faith if it were something we could point at with a stick, put in a box and say, ‘there it is.’ But I know that doesn’t help you now. So let me see if I can think of something that mi
ght.”

  Harald shifted in his seat, and for the first time since he’d arrived, looked around the room. It was small, but there was enough space for several visits to occur simultaneously. Some kind of technology he didn’t understand was employed to keep the conversations private, but on other visits he’d seen people gesturing wildly, in argument or deep discussion. It amused him to wonder what they were talking about, and made him wonder what he looked like when he talked with Iona. Today, though, he was the only one visiting a relative, and he was thankful for the privacy.

  “Sometimes I think this family is cursed by optimism,” she said, “damned to be both inquisitive and empirical, but equally sure in our beliefs. It is a surprisingly uneasy alliance, my boy.” She took a breath and Harald recognized the characteristic settling-in that she always did before telling a story. All his life he’d loved her stories; they were as much his reason for these visits as her advice.

  “My great-aunt Ella was just like you, you know. She wasn’t a teacher, but she was a scientist. An engineer, to be specific. Oh, she loved her work. Building things, making systems better, it was all she ever wanted to do. But, you know how it is on this ship—it is a finite space. There is only so much innovation we can sustain, only so much progress we can achieve. It made her a little crazy, I think. She started to think that if there were only some way to tap into the cycle of time, that each of us could do so much more if we weren’t constrained by a single life or the linearity of time. It was a wild theory, of course. At first, she kept it to herself, working on her ideas on her own. But soon, her odd questions and strange research became impossible to ignore. When she finally told her colleagues what she was planning, they called the medics. She was determined to be anti-social, unresponsive to medication. She never left the medical facility again.”

  Harald thought he had heard all of Iona’s stories by now, including the one about her ancestor and her brilliant invention but this story had never ended with medics before. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Her invention worked…”

  “Yes, it did,” Iona said, her eyes filled with equal measures of pride and sadness. “But she never saw it. Years later, other engineers found her notes and quietly finished the project. When the first instance was installed, the Academy called an emergency meeting of the Engineering and History Faculties to determine what to do. They, of course, still believed that it was an impossible idea.”

  “But, the machine worked,” Harald said.

  “It did. Of course, it was too late for my great-aunt to see her years of work come to life, which is such a shame.” She looked at Harald, now, a steely glint to her eye. “But, my terrible confession is that isn’t what makes me sad. What makes me sad is that she spent her life believing in something she couldn’t prove, she let herself be locked away and ridiculed rather than give up what she believed in. What makes me sad is that I don’t think I will ever have that kind of faith.”

  Harald could think of nothing to say. That Ella Mikkels was vilified for her work was shocking enough. That people would imprison someone, ruin their life, just to control an unusual idea—he wasn’t sure how to take that. But to have learned that Iona, his kahuna, his totem ancestor, thought her own faith was insignificant was nearly impossible to comprehend.

  The door swished open, bringing his attention back to the present. “You have given me a lot to think about, Iona,” he said.

  “That is all I can hope to do, my boy,” she answered, the serene smile back on her face. “The rest, as always, is up to you.

  Harald watched his students file out of the small classroom, two dozen young men and women, more interested in just about anything than the 21st century Asian politics his lecture had been on. Iona was right; they were simply young. He just hoped that something was sinking in—he didn’t even really care if it were the details of old Earth arguments. History wasn’t about memorizing dates, it was about people—our goals, fears, desires. He hoped that something from those old stories would resonate with them, make them see that all of life is a journey, that when one goal is reached another just arises to take its place.

  His hand absently fell to his tablet, the touch awakening his place in the text he’d been reading. Jail-Birds: A History of Incarceration. Like many features from old Earth’s history, Harald would have said that there wasn’t an analogue for prisons on the ship. Nationalism, long-distance communication, hunting—there was so much of human life on Earth that just didn’t apply now. It was, other than his students’ inherent disinterest, the biggest barrier to understanding he felt as a history teacher. It was just so hard to see the connections between the planetary life of the human species and the existence they shared on the ship.

  But Iona’s reference to Ella Mikkels’ confinement in a de facto prison worried him. He didn’t want to believe that something like that could really happen, but he was insulated from many parts of ship society. He’d never known anyone who’d had a mental breakdown, who’d acted out in an anti-social manner. He knew intellectually that the medclinics dealt with that sort of problem, but he’d never thought through the implications. Who decides what’s pathological and what’s merely eccentric?

  He checked, but there was nothing in the ship’s log. Harald had always been unimpressed with it as a historical reference. He’d given a talk at the annual academic convention a few years back proposing a proper history of the journey, but no one else seemed interested. He’d spent several fevered months after the convention beginning one on his own, but like most of his grand schemes, his enthusiasm had waned long before the project was even outlined.

  This was different, though. If the medclinics really were just glorified prisons, even if those days were over, that was major. Harald knew that everyone aboard the ship would want to know the truth. But how to begin?

  “So, what seems to be the problem?” Dr. Suli smiled warmly at Harald, who felt like an idiot as his feet dangled like a child’s while he sat on the examination bed.

  “Uh,” he said, “I feel like I’m not concentrating as well as I used to.” He shrugged. “Probably just age, but I thought it’s worth getting it checked out, right? I mean, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” He swallowed, his mouth dry from the lie. The doctor seemed to believe him, though, and nodded.

  “It’s not an uncommon problem,” she said, “happens to us all.” She reached over for a small pad on a wire. “Let’s see if there’s anything electrical first, shall we?” She stuck the pad to Harald’s temple, and he had the irrational fear that he was about to undergo shock treatment or something equally barbaric. “Don’t worry,” the doctor said, and Harald wondered what he’d done to make her realize that he was afraid, “you won’t feel a thing.”

  She was right. Harald was still waiting for the procedure to begin when Dr. Suli pulled the patch off his skin and shrugged. “Normal. Can you be a bit more specific about these lapses of concentration?”

  Harald spent the next ten minutes making up stories that he hoped sounded plausible about daydreaming during class and forgetting to restock the pantry. In the end, he left with the advice to get more sleep and to come back if it got worse, which was fine advice but it wasn’t what he’d come for. He hadn’t seen any indication that Dr. Suli or any of her colleagues were acting as either guards or police.

  As he walked back to his quarters, he wondered if Iona had just been wrong about what happened to her great-aunt. And if she was wrong about that, what else had she been wrong about?

  “I’m sorry, but that’s really just absurd.” Elias Barthes was one of the most even-tempered people Harald knew, and as the head of the Engineering school said the words, Harald saw the other’s man’s face flush with embarrassment. “I don’t mean to be rude…”

  “It’s fine, Elias,” Harald said. “It’s fine. The more I looked into it, the more this story seemed—far-fetched. But I had to be sure. Iona…” He looked away, and felt the other man’s hand on his arm.

  “I unders
tand,” he said. “The idea that she could be wrong about something from the past it’s… well, it’s almost as disturbing as the story she told you.”

  “I know,” Harald said. “You’re certain?”

  Elias nodded sadly. “I checked the technical records, just to be sure. Ella Mikkels is the name on the design drawings, all of them. Mark I, Mark II and the final revision that became the system we still use today. It’s her signature on the plans. There’s just no way she could have been cooped up in some medical facility like a madwoman in the attic.”

  “Which means there’s something wrong with Iona.”

  Elias nodded again. “And that means there’s probably something wrong with all of the ancestor constructs.”

  Harald stood at the door, his forehead resting against its cool solidity. For the first time in his life, he was afraid to enter the Chamber of the Ancestors. Even as a child, when his mother had brought him to talk with Iona, he’d found the experience comforting. He knew some of his friends were afraid of the kahuna, afraid to talk to the ghostly remains of their long-dead ancestors. But for Harald it was always a cherished gift. That these lucky few people had somehow transcended death, transcended time itself, and through the miraculous technology of Ella Mikkels, were able to share their knowledge with those who came after.