In the early days of our enforced holiday in the tube we talked a lot and ate perhaps too much. Or at least I did, despite Gideon’s admonishments that I should be careful, and make sure our rations lasted the distance. I tried to explain that I was worried about the tube disappearing with us in it; he said even if it did, we’d never know about it. We’d only find out when we eventually got out and found ourselves somewhere else, perhaps in a very different part of the galaxy, far beyond the lights of human space. Space travel was always risky, but these days, with the tubes disappearing, it was almost foolhardy. Nobody knew for sure why they were vanishing of course, but the leading theory was that the Silent were behind it.
I turned to Gideon. “You think the Silent might be behind all this?”
Gideon shrugged. “Who’s to say? The Occupation’s been around for almost two decades. God only knows what the bastards are up to now.”
I nodded, remembering the whole business only too well. Nineteen years ago an exploration vessel with the Home System Community, the HMS Eclipse, had discovered the first alien civilization. But what should have been an historic moment turned into genocide when the Eclipse obliterated the aliens’ homeworld, launching a devastating weapon into their ocean-dwelling proto-civilization. Humanity, at the time, was desperate for new territory, and no race of primitive alien beings was going to stand in the way of the Home System Community.
News of the atrocity had spread quickly and in the resulting confusion one of the many factions of humanity decided to use the event as a pretext to war — but just as the first great battle began, the Silent appeared. In a matter of seconds every warship in human space vanished without a trace, and one of the enigmatic Silent vessels appeared orbiting around the primary star of every human-occupied system.. Like it or not, humanity would remain at peace.
None of which, sadly, explained why the Silent would take away our tubes.
“What would be the point of it?” I wondered out loud.
“Who’s to say we could even grasp the point?” said Gideon. “If it is the Silent pinching the tubes, they’d have completely baffling and mysterious reasons for doing so, wouldn’t they?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, and felt a little embarrassed.
He went on, “The salient point is that they’re aliens. They’re more than just foreign. They don’t think like we think. Assuming they have minds in any sort of analogous sense to ours, they would have an entirely different way of thinking. Even if they explained what they were doing in a language we could follow, I doubt we could ever really understand them.”
“Hmm. I’d not thought about it that way.”
“You surprise me, McGee. You spent your professional career trying to fathom motivations from uncooperative offenders.”
“True,” I said, “that’s very true. But with even the more esoteric post-human offenders you’ve still got a certain area of common ground.”
“That’s the point about the Silent, McGee,” he said.
I nodded. “No common ground.”
“None at all. They do things we think we recognize, like taking away the tubes—”
“We don’t know for sure that it is the Silent doing that.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Whoever it is, it looks like they’re stealing the tubes, and we think we can understand why, that it’s got something to do with keeping us confined, the way the Silent taking our warships kept us from interstellar wars. We think we understand, but we almost certainly don’t. We’re just projecting motivations we understand onto unfathomable entities.”
You can see Gideon at this point, around Day Five, was keen to show off his very big brain and endless wisdom. At this point I was happy to indulge him. He liked talking like this, explaining things. He often suggested the best thing I could do, since I was so restless in my retirement, was go back to school and study all the things I’d always wanted to know about. “It’s the secret to staying young,” he said, and he might have had a point. To the best of my knowledge he’d never had anti-aging treatments even once in his one-hundred thirty-plus years, and still looked fit and well, despite having eyebrows on which you could practice your topiary skills, and similar problems, if truth be told, with his ear hair.
All of which was fine, as far as it went. We chatted back and forth, we exercised, we napped, we ate — and we “processed wastes”, as they say aboard spacecraft. Such clinical terminology. In practice, even though you know you’ve got a suit designed to absorb anything you can produce, there are still moments of unalloyed disgust and the worst smells in the universe while you wait for the fancy nano-lining of your suit to take care of business. Even if you were careful about what you ate and drank, nothing much helped. Towards the end of each suit’s five days of life, too, the lining’s matter processing efficiency started to slide in a way you’d rather it didn’t. The process of changing suits was no better. We had to erect this big plastic bubble tent, fill it with air from a fab, which took time, and use it like a portable airlock. The old suit, once you peeled it off your clammy skin, smelled and looked awful. There was a ripe odor of stale sweat, old farts, and sinus-piercing chemicals. This miserable business was one of the things that contributed to things going bad between us.
Another thing was simple lack of space. It was surprising how, once you lose gravity, you gain so much extra space. Where before you were confined to the floor with all your furniture and stuff, now — with sufficient practice and skill, of course — you could anchor yourself almost anywhere. Sleeping while anchored to what had been a side bulkhead was strange at first, but I got used to it over time. However, this “increase” in space was of only limited help. We had the main cabin — or “passenger lounge” as Gideon called it — which was designed to look like the inside of the legendary Orient-Express train, complete with mahogany paneling, authentic upholstered seating and those clever “windows” I’d seen previously which displayed simulations of passing European countryside Gideon had told me were cribbed from antique films. We also still had the powerplant compartment. Gideon sometimes lurked back there, out of my hair, watching the helium-three gauge slowly rising. I didn’t dare ask him to cut through another door, perhaps to give us access to the galley, in the forward part of the ship. As it was he muttered glumly sometimes about the expense of getting a replacement door and fitting it. In time he spent more and more time back there, saying he was having trouble with the machinery and had to baby-sit it. “It’s very old, you know, very old,” he’d say. Sometimes the emergency fab systems back there broke down and he had to fix them. He knew more or less how to do it, or had headware patches that knew for him, but the strain wore on him.
All the same, even knowing he was having a tough time of it for reasons that were perhaps more to do with his age and temperament and the unpleasant sanitary conditions, I knew, deep in my nanofactured heart, that the real problem was me. Of course it was. How could it not be me? At first he could get by on the same sort of easy patter he used all the time back at Serendipity, telling stories, explaining arcane things, tinkering with hardware, and being generally charming. After a week or ten days, however, we talked less and less. He was always tired or feeling not that well or had a headache his headware couldn’t fix. We ate and slept at different times, on different schedules. He slept only briefly, but often. I slept a long time, several hours, at something like the usual schedule. He ate only small amounts; I ate a lot, but had a hard time keeping it down. Gideon muttered about wasted food, even though it all went into the recycling system for the fabs. Nothing was ever wasted, but the thought of eating new food made, in part, from vomit did wonders for the appetite.
I came to believe, by about the end of the second week, that Gideon was avoiding me because he was having difficulty with the thought of what I “really” was. In my mind all the time was the stinging memory of that day in Gideon’s apartment as he s
tared at me, trying to see that the Zette he had known for years, who was his great friend and dinner companion, was not what he thought she was. He had looked at me like a man struggling with the idea that he might have been betrayed, but unable quite to decide, and feeling helpless at his inability to make up his mind. His senses told him I was good old McGee; the facts told him I was a simulacrum, a thing, a tool with too much personality.
He had told me, though, that the important thing to him was that I was in trouble and needed help, and he was only too happy to provide it. He had just not anticipated that the forces ranged against us would go so far as to cripple his ship. Yet the more I thought about the whole situation, the more it looked that way. He had to be floating back there in the powerplant brooding about that. If I hadn’t gone along with McGee, none of this would have happened. If she wasn’t a bloody machine, everything would be fine. No mysterious phone calls, no mysterious bomb blasts, no mysterious nothing at all!
Gideon never said any of this to me, of course. He was too much of a gentleman at heart. Even if not to spare my own feelings, he had a certain standard of behavior he expected of himself, and that would keep him from insulting a lady, no matter how artificial she might be.
I spent my many, many hours of Gideon-free time reading period novels that Gideon had brought aboard reflecting the golden age of the Orient-Express, listening to similarly antique period music, exercising, experimenting with eating different things to see what I could and could not keep down, and thinking about the Kell Fallow situation. I worried that we were losing valuable time, that whatever evidence there might have been for us to find on Narwhal Island was now gone, or contaminated. It seemed likely. Anybody who was prepared to go to all this trouble surely would have taken very thorough care of sanitizing the entire island. By the time we got there we’d be lucky to find evidence that Kell Fallow and his wife Airlie had existed at all.
Time wore on, grinding us down. My mood deepened ever further. Gideon, aided by his psychostats, held up better; his problem was fatigue. When we passed the three-quarter mark, Day 21, we had a little celebration, drinking fabbed water (the champagne on board was trapped in the galley) from self-warming bulbs with valved sipping tubes that slipped through and became part of the visors of our suits until it was time to pull them out.
Gideon looked old. His wrinkled skin was loose around his bones like clothes a size too large. His blue eyes, no longer full of slightly pompous mischief, had sunk deep in his sockets; his manicured silver moustache was looking a bit scruffy. Gideon had never looked scruffy in the whole time I’d known him, until now.
“Keeping all right, McGee?” he said, forcing an air of chumminess into his voice. His voice had gone hoarse from lack of recent use. He coughed and cleared his throat a lot.
“More or less. More or less.”
“Helium-three’s nearly there. Another six or seven days.”
“Good. That’s good.” Good God, that long?
“Are you feeling the cold?”
Outside our suits, we knew it was lethally cold. The ship’s air was gone, too. If our suits failed, it would be a race to see if we froze to death before we suffocated. “Some. Not too much.”
He nodded, looking at his bulb of water. “Tastes like shit.”
I smiled. “I thought so.”
“Still,” he said, surprising me with a return smile, “at least it’s ours.”
This was the most significant conversation we had had for days. Many times, for the sake of conversation, I attempted to engage Gideon by asking him about his younger days. For example, it had occurred to me that he would have been a “young” man in his seventies at the time of the Kestrel Event. This was a baffling incident from almost sixty years ago in which a remote mining planet nobody much cared about was supposed to have been destroyed in a huge collision with another planet-like thing made of very dense exotic matter. The thing of it was, however, that shortly before the moment of impact, which was carried on every media service in human space, the exotic matter planet disappeared, sucked away into what scientists since have concluded was, improbably, another dimension. Why this should happen, or rather not happen, to such an unimportant world has never been explained.
Naturally, since the advent of the Silent Occupation, with their penchant for stealing warships and so forth, theories abounded arguing that the Silent saved Kestrel from destruction, and that it was all a warning to us, to show us what they could do. I didn’t buy that explanation, but like many people the story has always fascinated me.
Gideon was one of the few people I knew old enough to have seen the whole thing unfold. As it happened, he didn’t want to talk about it. He said this one day when our exercise schedules happened to coincide, and he apologized, saying, “I was a foreign service diplomat at the time. Signed the Official Secrets thing.”
“Weren’t you a trade diplomat?”
“Forty-five years worth.”
“You worked on trade negotiations and you still had to sign Official Secrets?”
“Potentially tens of billions of creds were at stake,” he explained, sounding annoyed that I didn’t understand such things without being told. “Few matters were more sensitive.”
“So you can’t even tell me where you were when you heard about Kestrel?”
“I was at Barnard’s Star.”
“Right. And you were there on business.”
“Family funeral. My mother.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. My old mother.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” He nodded his head minutely.
We said nothing for a while. My water bulb ran out. The sucking, gurgling noise in my straw was deafening. Gideon stared at the blanked out windows. He looked far away.
“But what does the Official Secrets provision have to do with Kestrel?”
He snapped his head around to face me, while at the same time grabbing a handhold on the bulkhead to stop the counter-rotation. “It just does, all right?” He pushed away, working his way back to the powerplant compartment.
“That went well…” I muttered, feeling cold and dreadful.
The final days dragged. Gideon barely spoke to me, and when he did it was to report the latest helium-three gauge figures. Production was slowing. Even I could see that. Gideon was projecting that it might take more than eight days before we had the minimum required quantity for the powerplant.
“Eight days?”
I was currently on day six with my second-last suit. I’d been trying to make them last a little bit longer, just in case. The odor inside the suit was sickening. I hardly ate a thing, knowing I’d not be able to keep it down. My whole diet was bland bread and sterile water. Each successive suit was getting easier to put on as I shed bulk. They no longer felt quite like sausage skins. I didn’t know if I could go another day with my current suit, but that would mean at least seven or even eight days with the final suit. It was a horrible prospect.
“Try not to breathe deeply,” Gideon muttered, no doubt equally horrified.
“We can’t use the emergency fabs here to make new suits or recharge patches?”
“Need proprietary feed materials, which…” He sighed.
“… We don’t have, right.”
“Right,” he agreed.
Later, since he hadn’t yet gone back to watch the powerplant, I said, feeling embarrassingly nervous, “Look. Smith. I’m so sorry.”
“What now?” he said, in a tone I didn’t like.
“I didn’t mean to pry, about the Barnard’s Star thing.”
“Thank you. Think nothing of it.”
It was the kind of “thank you” which you know is just there for form’s sake.
He added, “Anything else?”
“No. Nothing I can think of. Just fel
t bad.”
He nodded and pushed off again, heading aft.
I’m not sure exactly what happened that drove me to do this. All I can say is that there was something about the way he simply dismissed me and left, as he had done several times now, that pissed me off. It was one thing for me to feel embarrassed and guilty for not informing him about my artificial status sooner, but it seemed to me that we should at least keep things civil while in this miserable situation. Whatever it was, I went after him.
CHAPTER 11
It was my first visit to the powerplant compartment. The first thing I noticed was the huge brass-plated spherical reactor dominating the room from which two conduits led out of the compartment, back to the twin drive cores. The way Gideon had it fitted out, it looked very Golden Age of Steam, with valves, struts, rivets, brass work, rich and gleaming wood paneling, spinning steam governor things, and a variety of other touches that I suspected were simply fun mechanical gadgets for Gideon to play with.
I found Gideon anchored to a brass console featuring mechanical dial displays, including one, labeled in embossed serif type, “3He”, whose thin needle turned so slowly I couldn’t see it move. The needle was still a short distance from the green area on the dial. “Smith!”
He looked shocked, and went to back away, before his tether stopped him and rotated him about clumsily. “McGee! —God, what are you—”
I pulled myself over to him. “We have to talk.”
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