Hsing broke the pledge, broke the silence.
“Reduced to a virtual skeleton,” Luis said absently, evidently thinking of something other than the v-cadaver which had been teaching him Anatomy. The cadaver had been programmed by its ghoulish author to guide and chastise the apprentice dissector. “The medulla, idiot!” it would whisper cavernously from moveless lips and lungless rib-cavity, or “Surely you don’t take that for the caecum?” Hsing liked to hear what the cadaver had been saying. If you made no mistakes it occasionally rewarded you with bursts of poetry. “Soul clap hands and sing, and louder sing!” it had cried, even as Luis removed the larynx. But he had no cadaver-tales for her today, and went on sitting at the snackery table, brooding.
She said, “Luis, Lena—”
Luis held up his hand so quickly, so silently, that she fell silent, having said nothing but the name.
“No,” he said.
There was a very long pause.
“Listen. Luis. You’re free.”
His hand was up again, warding off speech, defending silence.
She insisted: “I want you to know that you are—”
“You can’t free me,” he said. His voice was deepened by anger or some other emotion. “Yes. I’m free. We both are.”
“I only—”
“Don’t, Hsing! Don’t!” He looked straight into her eyes for an instant. He stood up. “Let it be,” he said. “I have to go.” He strode off among the tables. People said “Hi, Luis” and he did not answer. People saw a quarrel. Hsing and Luis had a fight in the snackery today. Hey, what’s up with Hsing and Luis?
Yin Yang
A YOUNG WOMAN MAY FIND it difficult to withstand the urgent sexual advances of an older man in a position of power or authority. Her resistance is further compromised if she finds him attractive. She is likely to deny both the difficulty and the attraction, wishing to maintain her freedom of choice and that of other women. If her desire for independence is strong and clear, she will resist the pressure of his desire, she will resist her own longing to match the strength of her yielding to the strength of his aggression, to take him into herself while crying “Take me!”
Or she may come to see her freedom precisely in that yielding. Yin is her principle, after all. Yin is called the negative principle, but it is Yin that says “Yes.”
They met again in the snackery a while after commencement. Both were in intense training in their chosen specialties, Luis interning at the Central Hospital, Hsing as an apprentice in the Bridge Crew. Their work consumed them. They had not seen each other alone for two or three tendays.
She said, “Luis, I’m living with Canaval.”
“Somebody said you were.” He still spoke with that vagueness, absentness, a kind of soft cover over something hard and set.
“I just decided to last week. I wanted to tell you.”
“If it’s a good thing for you . . .”
“Yes. It is. He wants us to marry.”
“That’s good.”
“Hiroshi is—he’s like the fusion core. It’s exciting to be with him.” She spoke earnestly, trying to explain, wanting him to understand. It was important that he understand. He looked up suddenly, smiling. Her face turned dusky red. “Intellectually, emotionally,” she said.
“Hey, flatface, if it’s good it’s good,” he said. He leaned over and lightly kissed her nose.
“You and Lena—” she said, eager.
He smiled a different smile and replied quietly, mildly, absolutely, “No.”
Integrity
IT WASN’T THAT THERE WERE pieces missing from Hiroshi. He was complete. He was all one piece. Maybe that’s what was missing—bits of the other Hiroshis who might have read novels, or played solitaire, or stayed in bed late mornings, or done anything but what he did, been anyone other than what he was.
Hiroshi did what he did and doing it was what he was.
Hsing had thought, as a young woman might think, that her being in his life would enlarge it, change it. She understood very soon after she came to live with him that the arrangement had changed her life greatly and his not at all. She had become part of what Hiroshi did. An essential part, certainly: because he did only what was essential. Only she had never truly understood what he did.
That understanding made a greater change in her thinking and her life’s course than having sex and living with him did. Not that the pleasures, tensions, and discoveries of sex didn’t engage and delight and often surprise her; but she found sex, like eating, a splendid physical satisfaction which did not take up a great deal of her mind or even her emotions. Those were occupied by her work.
And the discovery, the revelation Hiroshi brought her, had nothing to do, or seemed to have nothing to do, with their partnership. It concerned the work he did, they did. Their whole life. The life of everybody in the worldship.
“You got me to live with you so you could co-opt me,” she said to him, half a year or so later.
He replied with his usual honesty—for though everything he did served to conceal and perpetuate a deception, he made scrupulous efforts never to lie to a friend—“No, no. I trusted you. But it simplified everything. Doesn’t it?”
She laughed. “For you. Not for me! For me everything used to be simple. Now everything’s double . . .”
He looked at her without speaking for a while; then he took her hand and gently put his lips against her palm. He was a formally courteous sexual partner, whose ultimate surrender to passion always moved her to tenderness, so that their lovemaking was a reliable and sometimes amazing joy. All the same she knew that to him she was ultimately only fuel to the fusion core—an element in his overriding, single purpose. She told herself that she did not feel used, or tricked, because she knew now that everything was fuel to Hiroshi, including himself.
Errors
THEY HAD BEEN MARRIED FOR three days when he told her what the purpose of his work was—what he did.
“You asked me a year ago about discrepancies in the acceleration records,” he said. They were eating alone together in their homespace. Honeymooning, it was called, a word that didn’t have many reverberations in this world without honey or bees to make it, without months or a moon to make them. But a nice custom.
She nodded. “You showed me I’d left out some factor. I don’t remember what it was.”
“Falsehood,” he said.
“No, that isn’t what you said. The constant of—”
He interrupted her. “What I said was a falsehood,” he said. “A deliberate deception. To lead you astray. Make you think you’d made an error. Your computations were perfectly correct, you omitted nothing. There are discrepancies. Much greater discrepancies than the one you found.”
“In the acceleration records?” she said stupidly.
Hiroshi nodded once. He had stopped eating. She knew that when he spoke so quietly he was very tense.
She was hungry, and pushed in one good supply of noodles before she put her chopsticks down and said, through noodles, “All right, what are you telling me?”
His face was strained. His eyes lifted to hers for a moment with an expression of desperation? pleading?—so uncharacteristic that it shocked her, moved her as his vulnerability in lovemaking did. “What’s wrong, Hiroshi?” she whispered.
“The ship has been decelerating for over four years,” he said.
Her mind moved with terrific rapidity, running through implications, explanations, scenarios.
“What went wrong?” she asked at last, quite steadily.
“Nothing. The deceleration is controlled. Deliberate.”
He was looking down at his bowl. When he glanced up at her and at once looked down again, she realised that he feared her judgment. That he feared her. Though, she thought, his fear would not influence his actions or his words to her.
“Deliberate?”
“A decision made four years ago,” he said.
“By?”
“Four people on the Bridge
. Later, two in Administration. Four people in Engineering and Maintenance also know about it now.”
“Why?”
The question seemed to relieve him, perhaps because it was asked quietly, without protest or challenge. He answered in a tone more like his usual one, even with a touch of the lecturer’s assurance and acerbity. “You asked what’s wrong. Nothing is. Nothing went wrong. We have always been on course, with almost no deviance. But an error did occur. An extraordinary, massive error. Which allowed us to take advantage of it. Error is opportunity. Chierek and I spotted it. A fundamental, ongoing error in the trajectory approximations, dating from our passage through the CG440 sink, five years ago, in Year 154. What happened during that passage?”
“We lost speed,” she answered automatically.
“We gained it,” he said. He glanced up to meet her incredulity. “Our acceleration increase was so great and so abrupt that the computers assumed a factor-ten error and compensated for it.” He paused to make sure that she was following him.
“Factor ten?”
“By the time Chierek came to me with the figures and I realised that it could only be explained as a computer compensation error, we’d accelerated to .82 and were forty years ahead of schedule.”
She was indignant at his joking, trying to fool her, saying these enormities. “Point eight two is not possible,” she said, cold, dismissive.
“Oh yes,” Hiroshi said with a grin that was equally cold, “it’s possible. It’s actual. We did it. We traveled at .82 for ninety-one days. Everything you know about acceleration, Gegaard’s calculations, the massgain limit—it was all wrong. That’s where the errors were! In the basic assumptions! Error is opportunity. It’s all clear enough, once you have the records and can do the computations. We can tell the physicists back on Dichew all about it when we get to Shindychew. Tell them where they went wrong. Tell them how to use a sink to whiplash an object up to eight tenths lightspeed. This is the voyage of the Discovery, all right. We could have made it in eighty years.” His face was hard with triumph, the conqueror’s face. “We’re going to arrive at the target system five years from now,” he said. “In the first half of Year 164.”
She felt nothing but anger.
“If this is true,” she said at last, slowly and without expression, “why are you telling me now? Why are you telling me at all? You’ve kept this from everybody else. Why?”
It was not only the enormous shock of what he was telling her, it was his victorious look, his triumphant tone, that brought up the surge of rage in her—the opposition he had feared at the beginning, the question How dare you? But her anger now didn’t affect him; he was unshaken, borne up by his conviction of rightness.
“It’s the only power we have,” he said.
“‘We?’ Who?”
“We who aren’t angels.”
To Count the Number of Angels
WHEN LUIS WAS TOLD THAT the Educational Agenda for the Sixth Generation was not accessible because it was being revised, he said, “But that’s what I was told when I asked to see it eight years ago.”
The woman on the Education Center info screen, a motherly sort, shook her head sympathetically. “Oh, it’s always under revision or under consideration, angel,” she said. “They have to keep updating it.”
“I see,” said Luis, “thank you,” and switched out.
Old Tan had died two years ago, but his grandson was a promising replacement. “Listen, Bingdi,” Luis said across their sharespace, “does the bodycount register angels?”
“How should I know?”
“Librarians are the masters of useful trivia.”
“You mean, are angels listed as such? No. Why would they be? The old religious affiliations weren’t ever listed. Listing would be divisive.” Bingdi did not speak quite as slowly as his grandfather, but in a similar rhythm, each sentence followed by a small, thoughtful silence, a quarternote rest. “I suppose Bliss is a religious affiliation. I don’t know how else it could be defined. Though I’m not sure how religion is defined.”
“So there’s no way to know accurately how many angels there are. Or put it another way: There’s no way to know who is an angel and who isn’t.”
“You could ask.”
“Certainly. I will.”
“You’ll go from corridor to corridor throughout the world,” Bingdi said, “inquiring of each person you pass, Are you an angel?”
“‘Are we not all angels?’” said Luis.
“Sometimes it seems that way.”
“It does indeed.”
“What are you getting at?”
“It’s what I can’t get at that worries me. The education program for the Sixes, for instance.”
Bingdi looked mildly startled. “Are you planning on procreating a baby Six?”
“No. I want to find out something about Shindychew. The Sixes are going to land on Shindychew. It seems reasonable to assume they’ll be educated to do so. Informed of what to expect. How to cope with living outside. Trained in doing long-term eva on a planet surface. That’s going to be their job, after all. The Zeroes must have included information on it in the education program. Your grandfather said they did. Where is it? And who is going to train them?”
“Well, there aren’t any Sixes even wearing clothes yet,” Bingdi said. “A bit soon to terrify the poor little noodles with tales of an unknown world, isn’t it?”
“Better too soon than never,” said Luis. “Destination Date is forty-four years from now. We might want to go do eva on Shindychew. Dodder forth, as Hsing put it.”
“May I think about it after a couple of decades?” Bingdi said. “Just now I need to finish this bit of useful trivia.”
He turned to his screen, but in a minute he looked round again at Luis. “What’s the connection of that with the number of angels?” he said, in the voice of one who glimpses the answer as he asks the question.
Enemies of Bliss
SHE DID NOT KNOW 5-CHIN Ramon well, though he was one of Hiroshi’s circle. He had been on the Managerial Counsel for a couple of years now. She had not voted for him. He identified as Chinese Ancestry and lived in Pine Mountain Compound, which was mostly Chins and Lees. A lot of the Chins had become angels early on. Ramon had risen, as they said, high in Bliss. He seemed a colorless, conventional man; like many male angels he treated women in a defensive, distancing, facetious manner Hsing found despicable. She had been displeased as well as very surprised to find he was one of the ten—now eleven—people who knew that the ship was decelerating towards an early arrival at the Destination.
“So you made this tape without telling the people you were taping them?” she asked him, not trying to keep contempt and distrust out of her voice.
“Yes,” Ramon said, without expression.
Ramon had had a crisis of conscience: so Hiroshi said. 5-Chatterji Uma explained it to Hsing. Hsing liked and admired Uma, a bright, elegant little woman, elected to chair the Managerial Counsel four years running; she had to listen to her. Ramon, Uma explained, had been admitted to Patel Inbliss’s inner circle, the archangels; and what he heard and learned there had so disturbed him that he had broken his vow of secrecy, made notes of things said among the archangels, and given them to Uma. She had taken his report to Canaval and the others. They had requested Ramon to prove his allegations. So he had surreptitiously taped a session of the archangels.
“How can you trust a person who would do such a thing?” Hsing had demanded.
“It was the only way he could provide us evidence.” Uma had looked with sympathy at Hsing. “Paranoid suspicions—rumors of plots to take over navigation, tamper with our genes, put untested drugs in the water supply—how many have we all heard! This was the only way Ramon could convince us that he wasn’t paranoid, or simply malicious.”
“Tapes are easy to fake.”
“Fakes are easy to spot,” said 4-Garcia Teo with a smile; he was a big, craggy, kindly engineer whom Hsing could not help trusting, hard
as she was working to distrust everybody in this room. “It’s real.”
“Listen to it, Hsing,” Canaval said, and she nodded, though with a sullen heart. She hated it, this secrecy, lying, hiding, plotting. She did not want to be part of it, did not want to be with these people, to be one of them, to share the power they had seized—seized because they had to, they kept saying; but nobody had to lie. Nobody had the right to do what they were doing, to control everybody’s life without telling them.
The voices on the tape meant nothing to her. Men’s voices, talking about some business she did not understand, none of her business in any case. Let the angels have their secrets, let Canaval and Uma have theirs, just leave me out of it, she thought.
But she was caught by the sound of Patel Inbliss’s voice, a soft, old voice, iron-soft, familiar to her all her life. Through her resistance, her disgust at being forced to eavesdrop, her incredulity, she heard that voice say, “Canaval must be discredited before we can count on the Bridge. And Chatterji.”
“And Tranh,” said another voice, at which 5-Tranh Golo, also a member of the Counsel, nodded his head in a wry pantomime of thanks-very-much.
“What strategy have you formed?”
“Chatterji is easy,” said the other, deeper voice, “she’s indiscreet and arrogant. Whispers will cripple her influence. With Canaval it is going to have to be a matter of his health.”
Hsing felt a curious chill. She glanced at Hiroshi. He sat as impassive as if in his morning meditation.
“Canaval is an enemy of bliss,” said the old voice, Patel’s.
“In a position of unique authority,” said one of the others, to which the deep voice replied, “He must be replaced. On the Bridge, and in the College. We must have a good man in both those positions.” The tone of the deep voice was mild, full of reasoned certainty.
The discussion went on; much of it was incomprehensible to Hsing, but she listened intently now, trying to understand. All at once the tape ended midword.
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