Godspeed

by Charles Sheffield

  He ran his fingers over the bullet holes in the cloth, stuck the pistol back in his pocket, and bent to take Sean Wilgus's gun from the crewman's dead hand. As he straightened up he slowly turned, through a full circle. I had a moment of complete terror when I was sure he knew we were there and was going to come across to us. Then he gave the odd, fluting whistle that I had first heard from him on the Muldoon Port ferry site. I heard a far-off answering whistle. Shaker gave the call again, bowed his head toward Sean Wilgus, and pushed his way into the ferns.

  All during the confrontation in the clearing I had taken no notice of Mel Fury, nor he I think of me. We had lain side by side, silent and frozen as statues. As Danny Shaker vanished I turned my head. Fury's face beneath its layer of dirt was an awful pale-green color, and he seemed ready to throw up. I doubt if I looked any better. In all my life I had seen only three dead men, and two of those had been murdered in my presence within the past twenty-four hours.

  Mel Fury stood up, nodded vaguely at me, and stepped carefully into the clearing. He circled its boundary, keeping well away from the body of Sean Wilgus. So did I. If Wilgus had another weapon on him, as Danny Shaker had suggested, I did not have the nerve to search him for it.

  Fury headed south again through the ferns. I stayed close behind. I had lost all desire to talk. There would be a time for questions—when we were somewhere safe. My appetite had vanished, too, although I felt totally hollow inside.

  We were close to the equator of Paddy's Fortune when Fury hopped across a little ditch, no more than two feet wide. "Here we are," he said softly. "Stand still while we're sensed and we'll go inside. Whatever you do, don't move once you're on it."

  I followed him, stared around, and saw that the ditch was in the form of a complete circle with the two of us standing within its boundary. The plants beneath my feet were a dwarf version of the familiar blue-flowered fern, and the earth beneath was soft and spongy.

  Nothing new—except that while the thought was in my head I realized that we were sinking. Not into the surface, which was my immediate worry, but with the surface. A circle of ground within the ditch was descending, and us with it.

  I crouched, ready for an instinctive jump to get clear, but Fury grabbed my arm. We rode together, down and down, until the ground was level with my eyes, and then far above me. It was suddenly darker. I was peering into shadowy gloom as Fury pulled me forward, off the soft ground and onto some rigid surface. The circle we had been standing on changed its direction of travel, rising until it blocked the light from above and left me standing in frightening darkness. I thought of flesh-crawling horror stories of my childhood, with their trolls and goblins and trogs, the creatures that lived underground among the roots of trees and drank human blood.

  And then lights came on all around us, and I found myself standing in a big room whose walls, floor and furnishings looked like nothing more than the internal partitions and fixtures of the Cuchulain.

  We were "inside." Mel Fury, filthier than ever—I saw new streaks of mud on his backpack and clothes and skinny white arms and legs—was heading for the door of the chamber. I had no choice but to follow. But as the door slid open at our approach, I couldn't help wondering: Was I going to be any better off here than wandering the surface of Paddy's Fortune, pursued by Danny Shaker and his cutthroat helpers?

  CHAPTER 19

  The first thing I saw beyond the door was as familiar in a way as anything could be; when Mel Fury and I went into the next room I found myself facing two filthy, straggle-haired stick figures.

  One of them was me.

  The whole opposite wall was metal, shiny and flat enough to be a good mirror. My reflection's face was a mask of mud interrupted by red scratches and welts, and my arms and legs showed through rents in my pants and jacket. I was in worse shape than Mel.

  He did not stop to stare but gestured to the right, where the wall held a matched set of doors.

  "It's a real pain," he said, "but we have to do it before we'll be fed dinner. Better get it over with. Take the one next to me."

  He went through a door and closed it behind him. After a moment's hesitation I went through a neighboring one. I found myself in a little cubicle without windows or furnishings. There was an exit door at the opposite end, and a hatch by my right hand with two handles set above it.

  What was I supposed to do next? The door in front of me resisted my push, so after a few moments I turned one of the handles. Before I could move, jets of hot water were hitting me from all sides. I yelped in surprise and turned the handle the other way. The water jets cut off at once.

  A shower; except for the controls it was not much different from the low-gravity units on the Cuchulain. The hatches below the controls ought to dispense clean clothes and take away dirty ones.

  I emptied my pockets. Walter Hamilton's book was damp, but it was designed to work in all weathers. And if Paddy Enderton's computer had been able to survive a night of snow and slush in the bottom of the boat by Lake Sheelin, a brief wetting was unlikely to hurt it. I put them both on a shelf high above the level of the water jets, and stripped to the skin.

  Three minutes later, laved in streams of hot water and then dried in the jets of warm air that followed, I felt ready to lie down on the floor of the cubicle and go to sleep. I also felt ready to cry, something I had not done since I was nine years old. It had been a terrible day. Only the conviction that cocky Mel Fury would mock me if I wept kept me dry-eyed.

  I finally opened the hatch and placed my wet and filthy clothes inside it. They dropped out of sight, and I had a worrying minute until new ones rolled out of a slit in the hatch's rear. The clothes were clean, the same light-grey that Mel Fury had been wearing, and by some mystery they were exactly the same size and style as the ones that I had removed, even to being a little bit short in the legs. But there was no sign of shoes. My old, soaked ones had gone, and for the moment I would have to go barefoot.

  I retrieved the book and computer from the shelf and looked unsuccessfully for some way to comb my wet hair. At last I gave up and pushed it back off my forehead with my fingers. While I was doing that, the door in front of me opened by itself.

  When I went through and saw what was in the room beyond, I had one of those strange moments in life when about eighteen thoughts at once hit you so fast and chaotic you don't know which came first.

  I saw Mel Fury waiting for me, clean and dry and newly dressed—and barefoot—in the middle of a big low-ceilinged room with bright yellow walls and half a dozen doors. Without the coating of mud and grime, his face was pale, as though he had never been out in the sun. I realized that he really hadn't, compared with me, because Paddy's Fortune was so far away from Maveen. Around Mel stood a dozen other people. They were all about the same age, all dressed the same, and every one as skinny and pale as Mel. At first glance they looked identical, though I later realized they were all very different. Every one of them was staring expectantly in my direction.

  I said people. But then I realized it was not just people. They were females. And not just females. Girls. More girls than I had ever seen in one place in my whole life.

  And—at last—I caught on. Mel Fury, now that she was cleaned up, had to be a girl, too, though her hair was close-cropped where the others wore theirs long. I had been fooled by that, but even more by the fact that when I met Mel she was dirty and wild and energetic, running uncontrolled through the jungle growth of Paddy's Fortune. Girls didn't do that! Girls were delicate and protected and pampered. Girls were never exposed to any risk of being injured.

  And then my other seventeen thoughts came roaring in. Paddy's Fortune. I never had been able to swallow Doctor Eileen's idea that Paddy Enderton would have a scrap of interest in Godspeed Base or a Godspeed Drive. But women—or girls who would soon be women—that would be interesting indeed, and worth a fortune, too, if Enderton could play it right. Up on the surface of the world at this very moment were crewmen who shared completely Paddy's point o
f view. I had heard them talking aboard the Cuchulain. Except maybe for Danny Shaker, whose thoughts remained a mystery to me, there was no doubt what each one of them was after: Women. And the crewmen above our heads were searching and scouring the planetoid for anything out of the ordinary. One of them, sooner or later, was sure to find himself standing on the access point. When that happened . . .

  "That circle we stood on," I burst out. "Up on the the surface. Could anybody stand on it, and be carried down here?"

  All the girls were staring at me. I had never received so much concentrated attention in my whole life. But Mel Fury answered quickly enough.

  "Only humans," she replied. "Not animals. The sensors won't respond for them. And you have to stand still for at least half a minute before anything happens."

  "Can it be locked in position? So it won't work."

  Mel caught on to the reason for my question even if no one else did. She turned questioningly to the tallest girl in the group, who said "I can ask the controller." But she went on staring at me, and didn't move until Mel added, "It could be urgent, Sammy. There are other people outside Home. Dangerous people—I saw someone killed. We have to try to close the access points."

  That started a general buzz of excitement. As the tall girl hurried out through one door I was surrounded by everyone else and swept away through another. They all started to talk at once, asking me questions as we went to another room with tables and chairs all around the walls. I had a thousand questions of my own. But everyone had to wait, because Mel Fury pushed me toward a chair, sat down next to me, and said fiercely, "Let him breathe, will you. And eat. He hasn't had any food for days."

  And then, as hot food appeared from serving hatches in the wall, she sat down next to me—and promptly began to ask questions of her own. The others stayed to eat, listen, and make comments to each other. Apparently I was accepted for the moment as Mel's prize.

  The food looked fine, but it tasted subtly different from anything on Erin or the Cuchulain. I was too starved to be choosy, and in any case the girls seemed to find nothing odd about it. So I ate and ate, and talked and talked. There was plenty to explain: about Erin and the Forty Worlds, about why we had come here, about Danny Shaker and the cutthroat crew of the Cuchulain, about the Godspeed Drive and the search for Godspeed Base.

  That last bit stopped them cold. It was clear that they had never even heard of a Godspeed Drive. The chance that this worldlet was Godspeed Base, with a starship somewhere inside it, dropped suddenly to zero. They didn't even seem interested in the idea of a star drive.

  But when I told of Paddy Enderton's discovery of the scoutship with two dead women on board, the room went completely silent.

  "Our people," Mel Fury said at last. "They left Home to try to find another world with people on it. The controller didn't want them to go—there had been others, you see, and no one had ever come back. They were the last big ones. But they were determined. And they couldn't be stopped by us, because they were the oldest. Well, now we are."

  That made no sense at all, but every minute less and less did. I wasn't just tired at this point, I was exhausted, and with lots of food inside me and the adrenalin level ebbing, no amount of excitement would keep my eyes open much longer.

  "You are the oldest?" I made a final effort. "What about your parents?"

  But I didn't get an answer, because at that moment Sammy came hurrying into the room.

  "There's no way of closing the access points permanently," she said.

  "So someone could get in any time?" Mel Fury asked.

  "Normally they could." Sammy gave me a self-satisfied grin. "But the access points remain closed automatically when it's raining outside. So I asked for the longest surface rain the controller can give us. We'll have it for six full revolutions of Home."

  I closed my eyes and tried to translate that to a time I was familiar with. My brain would not cooperate—and when I tried to open my eyes, they too refused to obey. I was ready to collapse. And suddenly hands were lifting and carrying me out of the room. I was finally placed face-up on a soft surface, my new clothes were loosened, and my pockets emptied. A dozen hands touched all over my body, and I heard whispers and giggling.

  I went on with my hopeless mental struggle to convert six revolutions of Paddy's Fortune to something I understood. The best I could manage was to decide that it sounded like a long time.

  My last thought was an odd sort of satisfaction. I might not be safe, not really. But if the murderous crew of the Cuchulain were still searching for me, out on the surface, they were being soaked by steady rain. I knew how much they would like that.

  Serve them right.

  * * *

  Doctor Eileen told me to describe anything I saw that was unfamiliar. Well, here is a fact I learned since I left Erin: When you are at home and things are quiet and something new comes along, you can describe it pretty well; but when everything around you is new, you won't take it all in no matter how much you want to.

  So I'll just have to do the best I can.

  I opened my eyes with only the vaguest idea of where I was, or how much time had gone by since I passed out. Then I lay for a few minutes idly rubbing and scratching myself. Only after a satisfying scratch did two thoughts come drifting into my head.

  First, the crew of the Cuchulain, no matter what, must never be allowed to suspect that I had vanished beneath the surface of the planetoid. I was beginning to realize exactly what they would do if they found Mel and the other girls.

  Second, I had to meet the controller. The girls inside Home seemed to accept his—or more likely, her—word as law.

  The room I was in contained its own bathroom. I used that and came out casually fixing my pants—then finished in a big hurry when I saw Mel Fury sitting on the bed I had just left.

  "How did you know I was awake?"

  "Monitors." She pointed up to the ceiling.

  I recalled my very personal scratching, and wondered how much she had seen. And were there monitors in the bathroom, too? But that gave me an idea. "Is there any way to see what's happening outside, up on the surface?"

  "Not directly. The controller must have sensors, but I don't know how to use them."

  The controller again. That was where I had to start. I wanted all my questions about Paddy's Fortune answered, but it was not the most urgent thing in the world. Top priority was to make sure that the crewmen didn't find a way in. A close second was to send a message to Doctor Eileen, telling her all that had happened and warning her.

  "Can you take me to meet the controller? Right now?"

  "Well . . . if you really have to."

  "I do."

  She stared at me a little oddly, as though a meeting with the controller was to be more shunned than sought. But she led the way out of the room—and into mystery.

  Paddy's Fortune was the worldlet that the Cuchulain had found its way to, and I continued to think of it that way. But Home was really the inside of that worldlet, a series of concentric habitation shells that honeycombed the interior. As Mel led me toward the middle of Home, I lost my grip on reality. I smelled peculiar odors like burning feathers and molten metal, heard horrible (to my ears) music coming out of nowhere, saw a thousand gadgets so unfamiliar I could not even guess their use, and at every turn I watched little blond heads poke around corners, stare at me, and then vanish. They were the other residents in Home. But on the plus side Mel had the time to answer enough questions to satisfy some of my personal curiosity.

  For example, Mel and Sammy and the other big girls all turned out to be exactly the same age: fifteen years and two months. No one on Home now was older than that, not since the scoutship left with its pair of nineteen-year-olds. But there were plenty of younger children: ten-year-olds, and six years, and one year. Exactly fifteen of each. It seemed to me that I had seen every one in the past half hour.

  "But parents," I said. "And who looks after the babies?"

  Mel Fury didn't answer in
words. She changed her path down the long corridors and moving ramps that spiraled toward the center of Home, to take us past the wombs, creches, nurseries and schoolrooms.

  I stared in through viewing windows, to where little mechanical figures like cleaning robots hustled back and forth, feeding and changing and teaching. Not a human in sight, except for the babies themselves. At Mel's insistence, I inspected an array of fertilized eggs, each with its etched label and in its low-temperature bath.

  "They're all girls!" I said.

  She nodded, but she seemed embarrassed. "Well, they are, but they don't have to be. There's frozen sperm, loads of it. It doesn't occupy more than a few cubic millimeters of storage, so you won't see it."

  And who decided when an egg would be fertilized and a new child added to Home's population?

  Mel told me, but I should have guessed for myself. The same agent who did everything else on Home. Fertilization decisions, along with air content and surface rain and the food supply and each child's individual education program, were the job of the controller. Mel told me that her own presence out on the surface of Paddy's Fortune had been an education elective, something that few other girls wanted. She enjoyed the privacy and the wild feeling of the jungle.

  Wild, when the location of every crevice—maybe the size of every plant, and the timing of every drop of rain—was decided by the controller?

  My growing bewilderment finally ended. "Here we are," Mel said. "This is the controller's main room." She sounded uneasy as she led me to a circular chamber about a quarter of the size of every other one. There was a tall vertical cylinder in the middle, surrounded by a narrow round table and half a dozen angular chairs. Other than that the place was empty.