And then I hit the Mulch.
The conclave room was deep inside the Palestine; sealed from the rest of the ship by massive bulkhead doors which had been decorated in ornate metal scrollwork, festooning like alloy vines. Inside was a massive rectangular table surrounded by twenty high-backed seats, less than a dozen of which were occupied. The matter of the messages from home was one of utmost security, and it was considered normal that the other vessels had sent only two or three delegates apiece. They sat around the table now, their stiffly suited figures reflected in the table’s polished mahogany surface, so dark and mirrorlike that it resembled a slab of perfectly still moonlit water. Rising from the centre of the table was a projection apparatus which was cycling through the technical schematics contained in the first message, skeletal graphics of dazzling complexity flashing into existence.
Sky sat next to Balcazar, listening to the faint labours of the old man’s medical tabard.
“… and this modification would appear to give us more elaborate control of the confinement bottle topology than we yet have,” said the Palestine’s senior propulsion theorist, freezing one of the schematics. “Coupled with the other things we’ve seen, it should give us a steeper deceleration profile… not to mention the ability to throttle back the flow without experiencing magnetic blow-back. That would let us turn off an anti-matter engine while there’s still fuel in the reservoir—and restart it later—something we can’t do with the current design.”
“Could we make those mods, even if we trusted them?” asked Omdurman, the Baghdad’s commanding officer. He wore a glossily black tunic flashed with grey and white sigils of rank. Coupled with the paleness of his skin and the deep black of his hair and beard, he was a study in monochrome.
“In principle, yes.” Beneath a sheen of perspiration, the propulsion tech’s face was impassive. “But I’ll be honest with you. We’d be making large-scale alterations within centimetres of the confinement bottle, which has to keep functioning perfectly the whole time we’re working. We can’t shunt the anti-matter somewhere else until we’re done. One wrong move and you won’t need so many seats at the next conclave.”
“Damn the next conclave,” murmured Balcazar.
Sky sighed and dug a finger between the damp edge of his collar and the skin of his neck. It was unpleasantly warm in the conclave room, almost soporifically so. Nothing felt right on this ship. There was an aura of strangeness aboard the Palestine that Sky had not been expecting; one that was heightened all the more by the things that were not strange at all. The ship’s layout and design had been instantly familiar, so that as soon as the Captain and he were escorted from their shuttle, he felt he knew exactly where he was. Though they were diplomatic visitors rather than prisoners, they were under constant armed guard, but had that supervision been lax enough for him to vanish into the ship, he was certain he would have been able to find his way to any part of it unaided and perhaps even unseen, exploiting his own knowledge of the Santiago’s blind spots and shortcuts, all of which were probably replicated on the Palestine. But in nearly every respect other than basic topology, the ship was subtly different, as if he had awakened into a world almost but not quite correct in the most mundane of details. The decor was different, signs and markings in unfamiliar script and language, with slogans and murals painted where the Santiago had blank walling. The crew wore different uniforms, flashed with sigils of rank he could not quite interpret, and when they spoke amongst themselves he understood almost nothing they said. They had different equipment and they saluted each other aggressively at every opportunity. Their body language was like a tune being played slightly offkey. The internal temperature felt warmer than on his own ship, and more humid—and there was a constant smell, as of cooking, wherever they went. It was not actually unpleasant, but it served to reinforce the feelings of foreignness he felt. It might have been his imagination, too, but even the gravity felt heavier, his footsteps hammering hard against the flooring. Perhaps they had upped their spin rate slightly so that when they arrived at Journey’s End they would have an advantage over the other colonists. Perhaps they had done it just to make everyone uncomfortable during the conclave, and turned up the heating while they were at it. Or perhaps he was imagining it.
The conclave itself had been tense, but not quite tense enough that he feared—if that was the word—for the Captain’s health. Balcazar had become more alert by then, almost fully lucid, for the relaxant that Rengo had administered had been designed to wear off by the time of their arrival. Some of the other senior crew members, Sky observed, were almost as infirm as his own Captain; supported by their own biomedical rigs and fussed over by their own aides. It was quite an idiosyncratic collection of wheezing ironmongery; almost as if the machines had decided to meet and had dragged their fleshly hosts along for the ride.
They had talked mainly about the messages from home, of course. Everyone agreed that the two messages had been genuine in origin, if not necessarily guaranteed to be truthful, and that they were probably not a complex hoax perpetrated by one of the ships against the rest of the Flotilla. Each frequency component in either radio message had been subjected to a specific delay relative to its neighbour, due to the clouds of interstellar electrons lying between Sol and the Flotilla. That smearing would have been very difficult to fake convincingly, even if a transmitter could have been dropped sufficiently far behind the ships to send the message. There was never any mention of the sixth ship, and the Captain never alluded to anything connected to it. Perhaps it was truly the case that the existence of the sixth ship was only known about on the Santiago. A secret worth keeping, in other words.
“Of course,” said the propulsion theorist, “it could all be a trick.”
“But why would anyone want to send us harmful information?” asked Zamudio, the commander of the host ship. “Whatever happens to us won’t make any difference to anyone back home, so why try and hurt us?”
“The same argument applies to any beneficial data,” said Omdurman. “There’s no reason for them to send that either. Except common human decency.”
“Damn human decency… damn it to hell,” Balcazar said.
Sky spoke up at that point, raising his voice above that of the Captain. “I can think of arguments either way, actually.” They looked at him patiently, as one might humour a child attempting to tell a joke. Hardly anyone in the room must have known who he was, beyond the fact that he was supposedly Titus Haussmann’s son. It suited him perfectly well: being underestimated was a highly satisfactory state of affairs.
He continued, “The organisation that launched the Flotilla might still exist in some shape and form back home, perhaps clandestinely. They’d still have an interest in helping us on our way, if only to ensure that their earlier efforts weren’t wasted. We might still be the only interstellar expedition under way; don’t forget that. We might still be the only hope anyone has of reaching another star.”
Omdurman stroked his bearded chin. “I suppose that’s possible. We’re like a great mosque being built: a project that will take hundreds of years and which no one will see in its entirety…”
“Damn them… damn them all.”
Omdurman faltered, but pretended not to have heard. “… yet those who know they’ll die before the end is reached can still feel some satisfaction at having contributed something to the whole, even if it’s only the tiniest chip in the least significant pattern. The trouble is we know precious little about what’s really happened back home.”
Zamudio smiled. “And even if they did send more thorough news updates, we still wouldn’t know how much to trust them.”
“Back to square one, in other words,” said Armesto, from the Brazilia. He was the youngest of the Captains; not much older than Sky. Sky studied him carefully, taking the outline of a possible enemy; one that might not assume definition until years or decades hence.
“Equally, I can think of reasons they might want to kill us,” Sky said. He tur
ned to Balcazar. “With your permission, of course?”
The Captain’s head jolted up, as if he had been on the point of sleep.
“Go head, Titus, dear boy.”
“Suppose we’re not the only game in town.” Sky leaned forward, his elbows hard against the mahogany. “It’s a century since we left home. There may be faster ships on the drawing board now; maybe even on their way. Maybe there are factions that want to stop us reaching Swan so they can claim it for themselves. Granted, they could always fight us for it, but we’re four large ships and we do have nuclear armaments.” The devices he was talking about had been put aboard for landscape engineering when they reached Journey’s End—blasting mountain passes, or scooping out natural harbours—but they were perfectly capable of being used as weapons. “We wouldn’t be a pushover. From their point of view, it would be a lot simpler to persuade us to destroy ourselves.”
“So what you’re saying is, there are equally strong reasons for trusting the message as not trusting it?”
“Yes. And the same argument applies to the second one; the one warning us from adopting the modifications.”
The propulsion theorist coughed. “He’s right. All we can do is assess the technical content of the message for ourselves.”
“That won’t be easy.”
“Then we take a massive risk.”
So it had gone on; arguments for and against trusting the messages bounced around fruitlessly. There had been suggestions that one or other party was withholding valuable knowledge—true enough, Sky thought—but no fingers had been pointed directly and the conclave had ended in a mood of unease rather than outright hostility. All the ships had agreed to continue sharing their interpretation of the messages, together with the establishment of a special pan-Flotilla expert group to examine the technical feasibility of the suggested modifications. It was agreed that no ship would act unilaterally, and there would be no attempt to implement the modifications without the express agreement of all other parties. It was even suggested that any ship that wanted to go it alone was welcome to do so, but they would have to pull away from the main body of the Flotilla, increasing their separation to four times the current distance.
“That’s an insane proposal,” said Zamudio. He was a tall, handsome man, much older than he seemed, who had been blinded by the flash from the Islamabad. A camera was strapped to one of his shoulders like a seadog’s parrot, tracking this way and that, seemingly of its own volition. “When we launched this expedition we did it in a spirit of camaraderie, not as a race to be the first to claim the prize.”
Armesto squared his jaw. “Then why are you so unwilling to share those supplies you’ve hoarded with the rest of us?”
“We aren’t hoarding supplies,” Omdurman said with little discernible conviction. “Any more than you’ve been withholding spare parts for our sleeper berths, as a matter of fact.”
Zamudio’s camera snapped onto him. “Why, that’s a ridiculous…” He trailed off before speaking again. “No one’s denying that there are differences in the qualities of life on the ships. Far from it. It was always part of the plan that it should be like that. From the outset it was always intended that the ships should organise their own affairs independently of one another, if for no other reason than to ensure that not everyone made the same unforeseeable mistakes. Does that mean we all end up with the same basic standard of living aboard each ship? No; of course not. Something would be very wrong if it did. It’s inevitable that there should be subtly differing mortality rates amongst the crew; a simple reflection of the differing emphasis placed upon medical science by the ship regimes.” He had their attention now, so he lowered his voice, gazing into the middle distance while his camera eye snapped from face to face. “Yes, sleeper berth fatalities will vary from ship to ship. Sabotage? I don’t think so, comforting as that thought might be.”
“Comforting?” someone said, as if they had misheard him.
“Yes, exactly that. There’s nothing more comforting than paranoid conspiracy-mongering, especially where it hides a deeper problem. Forget talk of saboteurs; think instead of poor operational procedures; inadequate technical understanding… I could go on.”
“Enough damned prattling,” Balcazar said, in a flash of lucidity. “This isn’t what we came to discuss. If anyone wants to act on the damned message, let them. I’ll be more than interested in observing the results.”
But it seemed unlikely that anyone would be the first to make that move. As the Captain had implied, the natural impulse would surely be to let someone else make the first mistake. Another conclave would take place in three months, after the messages had been reviewed in greater detail. The general shipwide populace would be informed of the existence of the messages sometime after that. The accusations that had been thrown around in the conclave room were quietly forgotten. Cautiously, there was talk that the whole issue, far from heightening inter-ship tensions, might lead to a modest thawing in relations.
Now Sky sat with Balcazar in the homegoing shuttle.
“Not long until we get back to the Santiago, sir. Why don’t you try and get some rest?”
“Damn you, Titus… if I wanted rest I’d…” But Balcazar had fallen asleep before he managed to complete the end of the sentence.
The home ship was an outlined speck on the taxi’s head-up display. Sometimes it seemed to Sky that the ships of the Flotilla were like the tiny islands of a small archipelago, spaced by stretches of water which nearly ensured that each island was over the horizon from its nearest neighbour. It was always night in the archipelago, too, and the fires of the islands were practically too faint to be seen except when one was close anyway. It took a leap of faith to steer away from one of those islands into the darkness, relying on the navigational systems of the taxi not to take them into oceanic waters. Mulling modes of assassination, as was his wont, Sky thought of sabotaging a taxi’s autopilot. It would have to be done just before someone he wanted to kill embarked on what they thought would be a journey to one of the other ships. It would be a simple enough matter to confuse the taxi to the point where it headed in the wrong direction entirely, sliding into blackness. Combine that with a fuel loss or life-support failure, and the possibilities were enticing indeed.
But not for him. He always accompanied Balcazar, so that particular mode was of limited value.
His mind returned to the conclave. The other Flotilla Captains had done their best not to show that they noticed Balcazar’s lapses of concentration and—at times—outright sanity, but Sky had seen the way they exchanged concerned glances across the polished mahogany gulf of the conference table, just when they imagined Sky to be looking elsewhere. It obviously troubled them immensely that one amongst their number was palpably losing his mind. Who was to say that Balcazar’s strain of madness did not lie in wait for all of them, once they reached his age? Sky, of course, did not once acknowledge that there was anything of concern in his Captain’s state of health.
That would have been the gravest of disloyalties. No; what Sky had done was to maintain a poker-faced semblance of obedient solemnity in the presence of his Captain, nodding dutifully at every deranged utterance from his master, never once letting slip that he considered Balcazar as thoroughly mad as any of the other Captains feared was the case.
A loyal servant, in other words.
A reminding ping from the taxi’s console. The Santiago was looming large now, though it was still hard to see with the cabin’s interior lights on. Balcazar was snoring and drooling at the same time, a silvery stream of saliva adorning one of his epaulettes like a subtle new indication of rank.
“Kill him,” Clown said. “Go on; kill him. There’s still time.”
Clown was not really present in the taxi—Sky knew that—but he was here in some sense, his high, quavery voice seeming to come not from within Sky’s skull, but from some distance behind it.
“I don’t want to kill him,” Sky said, adding a silent “yet” for his
own benefit.
“You know you do really. He’s in the way. He’s always been in the way. He’s a sick old man. You would really be doing him a favour by killing him now.” Clown’s voice softened. “Look at him. He’s sleeping like a little baby. I expect he’s having a happy dream about his boyhood.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’m Clown. Clown knows everything.”
A soft metallic voice on the console warned Sky that they were about to enter the prohibited sphere around his own ship. The taxi would shortly be seized by the automated traffic vectoring system and guided to its berth.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Sky said.
“But you’ve often thought of it, haven’t you?”
There was no point arguing with that. Sky fantasised about killing people all the time. He thought of ways to do it to his enemies—people who had slighted him, or whom he suspected of speaking about him behind his back. Some people, it seemed to him, should be killed for no other reason than that they were weak or trustful. Aboard a ship like the Santiago, there was every opportunity to commit murder, but very little chance of doing it in a way which would avoid detection. Nonetheless Sky’s fertile imagination had brooded on this problem long enough to have thought up a dozen plausible strategies for reducing the numbers of his enemies.
But until Clown had spoken to him now, it had been enough to entertain the fantasies. Playing those gruesome little deaths over and over in his mind, slowly embroidering them, had been sufficient reward for him. Clown was right though: what was the point of drafting elaborate blueprints in painstaking detail if one at some point did not begin the business of building?
He looked at Balcazar again. So peaceful, as Clown had said.
So peaceful.
And so vulnerable.
TWENTY-THREE
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