by Gene Wolfe
“You probably haven’t,” Daw said. The list Gladiator was flashing on his in-helmet display showed one man still out, and he was not sure the girl was aware of it—or that she was not.
“I’ve been wondering what they all do. I mean, the ship can almost run itself, can’t it?”
“Yes, Gladiator could pretty well take care of herself for a long time, if nothing had to be changed.”
“If nothing had to be changed?”
“We have to worry about damage control too, on a warship; but adaptability is the chief justification for a big crew. We can beat our swords into plowshares if we have to, and then our plowshares back into swords; in other words we can rewire and re-rig as much as we need to—if necessary fit out Gladiator to transport a half million refugees or turn her into a medical lab or a factory. And when something like this comes up we’ve got the people. This ship is too big to have every part visited by a specialist in every discipline, but the men I’ve just sent through her included experts in almost any field you could think of.”
She was too far off for him to see the beauty of her smile, but he could feel it. “I think you’re proud of your command, Captain.”
“I am,” Daw said simply. “This was what I wanted to do, and I’ve done it.”
“Captain, who is Wad?”
For an instant the question hung in the nothingness between them; then Daw asked, “How did you meet Wad?”
“I asked the ship something—a few hours ago when we went back—and she referred me to him. He looks like you, only …”
“Only much younger.”
“And he’s wearing some sort of officer’s insignia—but I’m certain I’ve never seen him before, not at mess or anywhere else.”
“I didn’t think Gladiator would do that,” Daw said slowly. “Usually Wad only talks to me—at least that’s what I thought.”
“But who is he?”
“First I’d like to know what question you had that made the ship turn you over to him—and how he answered it.”
“I don’t think it was anything important.”
“What was it?”
“I think she just felt—you know—that it needed the human touch.”
“Which Wad has in plenty.”
“Yes.” Helen Youngmeadow sounded serious. “He’s a very sympathetic, very sensitive young man. Not like an empathist of course, but with some training he could become one. Is he your second in command?”
Daw shook his head, though perhaps she could not see it. “No,” he said, “Moke’s my second—you’ve met him.” He thought of the times he and Moke had shared a table with Helen Youngmeadow and her husband—Youngmeadow slender and handsome, a bit proud of his blond good looks, intelligent, forceful and eloquent in conversation; Moke’s honest, homely face struggling throughout the tasteless and untasted meal to hide the desire Youngmeadow’s wife waked in every man, and the shame Moke felt at desiring the wife of so likable a shipmate as Youngmeadow.
“Then who is Wad?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me what it was you asked him?”
The girl’s shoulders moved, for Daw could see the bulky metal shoulders of her suit move with them. “I suppose so—Gladiator would tell you if you asked.”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t be the same thing as your telling me, Mrs. Youngmeadow. You see, Wad is me. I suppose you could say, too, that I am Wad, grown up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you know how ship captains are trained?”
“I know an officer’s training is very hard—”
“Not officers—captains.” Unexpectedly Daw launched himself toward her, his arms outstretched like a bird’s wings, dodging the wide-spaced guy wires until, almost beside her, he caught one and swung to a stop.
“That was good,” she said. “You’re very graceful.”
“I like this. I’ve spent a lot of time in space, and you won’t find any of that sucking furniture in my cabin. You can laugh if you like, but I think this is what God intended.”
“For us?” He could see the arch of her eyebrows now, through the dark transparency of her faceplate.
“For us. Leaping between the worlds.”
“You know, understanding people is supposed to be my profession—but I don’t think I really understand you at all, Captain. How are captains trained, anyway? Not like other officers?”
“No,” Daw said. “We’re not just officers who’ve been promoted, although I know that’s what most people think.”
“It’s what I thought.”
“That was the old way. I suppose the British carried it to the ultimate. Around eighteen hundred. Have you ever read about it?”
The girl did not answer.
“They put their future skippers on board warships when they were boys of eight or nine—they were called midshipmen. They were just children, and if they misbehaved they were bent over a gun and whipped, but at the same time they were gentlemen and treated as such. The captain, if he was a good captain, treated them like sons and they got responsibility shoved at them just as fast as they could take it.”
“It sounds like a brutal system,” Helen Youngmeadow said.
“Not as brutal as losing ship and crew. And it produced some outstanding leaders. Lord Nelson entered the navy at twelve and was posted captain when he was twenty; John Paul Jones started at the same age and was first mate on a slaver when he was nineteen and a captain at twenty-three.”
“I’m sorry … .” The girl’s voice was so faint in Daw’s earphones that he wondered for a moment if her suit mike was failing. “I’ve never heard of either of those men. But I’ll look them up when we get back to Gladiator.”
“Anyway,” Daw continued, “it was a good system—for as long as people were willing to send promising boys off to sea almost as soon as we’d send them off to school; but after a while you couldn’t count on that anymore. Then they took boys who were almost grown and sent them to special universities first. By the time they were experienced officers they were elderly—and the ships, even though these weren’t starships yet, had become so large that their captains hadn’t had much real contact with them until they were nearly ready to take command of a ship themselves. After a hundred years or so of that—about the time the emphasis shifted from sea to space—people discovered that this system really didn’t work very well. A man who’d spent half his life as a subordinate had been well trained in being a subordinate, but that was all.”
The taut cable beneath Daw’s suit-glove shook with a nearly undetectable tremor, and he turned to look toward the hatch, aware as he did that the girl, who must have felt the same minute vibration, had turned instead to the mouths of the connecting tubes that led deeper into the ship.
The man coming through the hatch was Polk, the cyberneticist, identifiable not by his face but by the name and number stenciled on his helmet. He saluated, and Daw waved him over.
“Got something for me, Captain?”
“I think so, the big cabinet in the center of this module. It’s their computer mainframe, or at least an important part of it.”
“Ah,” said Polk.
“Wait a minute—” There was an edge of shrillness to Helen Youngmeadow’s voice, though it was so slight Daw might easily have missed it. “How can you know that?”
“By looking at the wiring running to it. There are hundreds of thousands of wires—braided together into cables, of course, and very fine; but still separate wires, separate channels for information. Anything that can receive that much and do anything with it is a computer by definition—a data-processing device.”
Polk nodded as though to support his captain and began examining the great floating octahedron Daw had pointed out. After a minute had passed the girl said in a flat voice, “Do you think theirs might be better than ours? That would be important, I suppose.”
Daw nodded. “Extremely important, but I don’t know if it’s true. From what I’ve been able to tell from looki
ng into that thing they’re a little behind us, I think. Of course there might be some surprises.”
Polk muttered, “What am I looking for, Captain, just their general system?”
“To begin with,” Daw said slowly, “I’d like to know what the last numbers in the main registers were.”
Polk whistled, tinny-sounding over the headphones.
“What good would that be?” Helen Youngmeadow asked. “Anyway, wouldn’t they just print it—” She remembered how much of Gladiator’s output came over CRTs and audio, and broke off in midsentence.
Polk said, “Nobody prints much in space, Mrs. Youngmeadow. Printing—well, it eats up a lot of paper, and paper’s heavy. It looks to me like they use a system a lot like ours. See this?” He passed a spacegloved hand across the center of one facet of the cabinet, but the girl could see no difference between the area he indicated and the surrounding smooth grey metal. To look more closely she dove across the emptiness much as Daw had a moment before.
“This was one of their terminals,” Polk continued. “There are probably thousands scattered all through the ship. And they seem to have been used about the same way ours are, with turnoff after a set period to conserve the phosphors; they go bad if you excite them for too long.”
“I’ve noticed that on Gladiator,” the girl said. “If something’s written on the screen—when I’m reading, for example—and I don’t instruct it to bring up the next page, it fades out after a while. Is that what you mean? It seems remarkable that people as different as these should handle the problem the same way.”
Daw said, “Not any more remarkable than that both of us use wires—or handles like the one that opened the hatch outside. Look inside that box, though, at the back of that panel and you’ll find something that is remarkable. Show her, Polk.”
They cyberneticist unlatched the section he had indicated. It swung out smoothly, and the girl saw the display tubes behind it, tubes so flat that each was hardly more than a sheet of glass with a socket at the base. “Vacuum tubes?” she said. “Like a television? Even I know what those are.”
Daw grunted. “Vacuum tubes in a vacuum.”
“That’s right. They shouldn’t need anything around them out here, should they?”
“They don’t, out here. This ship, or at least parts of it, goes into atmospheres at times. Even though the crew doesn’t seem to care whether there’s one in here or not.”
“Captain,” Helen Youngmeadow said suddenly, “where is my husband?”
Hours later Moke’s voice (unexpectedly loud and near because Moke had the kind of voice that transmitted well through the phones’ medium-range frequencies) asked a similar question: “You find Youngmeadow. yet, Skipper?”
“We don’t know that he’s lost.”
“You didn’t find him, huh?”
“No, not yet.”
“You really think he’s alive and just not answering?”
“It could be,” Daw said. He did not have to remind Moke, as he had Helen Youngmeadow, that there was no danger of running out of oxygen in a modern space suit—each suit being a system as self-sufficient as a planet and its sun; energy from the suit’s tiny pile scavenging every molecule of water and whisper of carbon dioxide and making new, fresh food, fresh water, clean air that could be used again, so that once in the suit the occupant might live in plenty until time itself destroyed him. (He had not mentioned that even death would not end the life encysted in that steady protection, since the needs of the bacteria striking in at the now defenseless corpse from the skin, out from the intestines, would be sensed, still, by the faithful, empty suit; and served.)
Daw thought of Youngmeadow dead somewhere in this strange vessel, still secure in his suit, his corpse bloating and stinking while the suit hummed on; and found, startled, that the thought was pleasant—which was absurd, he hardly knew Youngmeadow, and certainly had nothing against the man.
“His wife still out looking for him?” Moke asked.
Daw nodded, though Moke could not see him. “Yes,” he said. “So are the other parties. I’ve got a couple of men with Mrs. Youngmeadow to make sure she comes back all right.”
“I was just talking to her,” Moke said. “I think she’s been talking to Polk too.”
“What about?”
“She said she’d heard you found some maps, Captain. I guess Gladiator told her.”
“No reason why she shouldn’t, but I found those while she was here—she must have seen them. While we were waiting for the first survey parties to come in.”
“You didn’t hide them from her, or anything like that?”
“No, of course not. She just didn’t show much interest in them.” Actually, Daw remembered, he had taken the charts—technically they were star charts rather than maps—to show Helen and had been rather disappointed by her reaction; as an empathist, she had explained, she was much more concerned with things that had not been vital to the ship’s operations than with the things that had. “Everyone takes what is necessary, Captain,” she had said. “By definition they have to. It’s what is taken that could be left behind that reveals the heart.”
“She wanted to know if any of them showed the inside of the ship,” Moke said.
Daw felt tired. “I’ll talk to her,” he said, and cut Moke off.
He started to adjust his communicator for the girl’s band, then thought better of it. His investigation of the command module—if in fact this was the command module—was nearly complete, and it served no purpose for him to stand by and watch Polk tinkering with his instruments. After having Gladiator scan the charts so that duplicates could be made on board for study, he had replaced the originals. Now he gathered them again.
It was the first time he had been more than two units away from the corner module he and Helen had first investigated, and though he had heard the chambers of the interior modules described by the men he had sent through them, and had seen the pictures they had taken, it was a new and a strange experience to plunge through tube after tube and emerge in chamber after chamber, each so huge it seemed a sky around him, each seeming without end.
The tubes, like those of his own ship, were circular in section; but they were dim (as Gladiator’s were not) and lined with shimmering, luminous pastels he felt certain were codes but could not decipher. His years in space had taught him the trick of creating the things called up and down in his mind, changing them when it suited him, destroying them with the truth of gravitationless reality when he wished. In the tubes he amused himself with them, sometimes diving down a pulsing pink well, sometimes rocketing up a black gun barrel, until at last he found that he was no longer master of these false perceptions, which came and went without his volition.
Entering each module was like being flung from a ventilation duct into the rotunda of some incredible building. The walls of most were lined with enigmatic machines, the centers cobwebbed with cables spanning distances that dwarfed the great mechanisms they held. Light in the modules—at least in most—was like that in the first Daw had examined—bright, shadowless, and all-surrounding; but some were dim, and some dark. In these his utility light showed shapes and cables not greatly different from those he had seen in other modules, but in the dancing shadows it cast to the remote walls, it sometimes seemed to Daw that he saw living shapes.
At last, when he had become almost certain he had lost his way and was cursing himself (for his religious beliefs permitted any degree of self-condemnation, though they caviled at the application of the same terms to any soul except his own) for a fool and a damned fool, he saw the flicker of other lights in one of the half-lit modules and was able, a moment later, to pick out Helen Youngmeadow’s suit with his own beam and, a half-second afterward, the suits of the sailors he had sent with her. At almost the same instant he heard her voice in his phones: “Captain, is that you?”
“Yes,” he said. Now that he had found her, he discovered that he was unwilling to admit that he had come looking for her. Eve
ryone, notoriously, fell in love with empathists—the reason they were invariably assigned as married couples. In retrospect he realized how foolish it had been for him to allow her to accompany him at all, despite the rationalizations with which he had defended the decision to himself; and he found that he was anxious that neither she nor the men with her should think that he had come here for her sake. “I understand you were asking my second about charts, Mrs. Youngmeadow,” he said, deliberately bringing his voice to the pitch he used in delivering minor reprimands. “I want to make it clear to you that if you have found any such documents they should be submitted to me for scanning as soon as possible.”
“We haven’t found any maps,” the girl said, “and if we did, of course I’d turn them over to you, though I don’t suppose you could read them either.”
The fatigue in her voice made Daw despise himself. Softening the question as much as he could, he asked, “Then why were you questioning Mr. Moke?”
“I knew you had found some. I was hoping they showed this ship and could tell us where my husband might be.”
“They’re star charts, Mrs. Youngmeadow. You saw them when I found them.”
“I wasn’t paying much attention then. Do you think they’re important?”
“Very important,” Daw said. “They could easily be the key to understanding—well, the entire system of thought of the people who built this ship Naturally Gladiator can’t stay here—”
“Can’t stay here until my husband’s found?”
“We aren’t going to abandon your husband, Mrs. Youngmeadow.”
“I don’t suppose I could stop you if you wanted to.”
“We don’t.”
“But if you do, Captain, you’ll have to abandon me too. I’m not going back to our ship until we find out what happened to him, and if he’s still alive; you say that a person can live indefinitely in one of these suits—all right, I’m going to do that. Even if your ship leaves they’ll still send out another one from Earth to investigate this, with cultural anthropologists and so forth on board; and when they get here they’ll find me.”