Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  The vid of the work, condensed to five minutes on that night’s broadcast, was quite beautiful, Sandy thought. For one shot, using a digital sun filter on his longest lens, shooting from the far side of the ship, he had shown the shade eclipsing several minor sunspots as it was maneuvered into place. He’d locked on Fiorella’s egg, holding it in a constant predetermined set of pixels, which did not have the digital filter, so her egg hung like a bright white star across the pumpkin-colored face of the sun.

  Fiorella had narrated.

  The ratings were down.

  The earth was moving on, as the two ships were moving out.

  26.

  Time passed—for most of the people on the ship, it was business as usual. Although there was a growing time lag for radio-wave contact between the ship and the earth, it wasn’t noticeable except in direct conversations. Professors who lectured continued to lecture; they might then have to wait for some minutes for blocks of questions from the audiences, and the audiences would have to wait a similar number of minutes for a block of answers, but they adapted to the delay.

  As Clover said, “I can finish a lecture, walk down the hall, take a leak, and get back in time to answer the questions. Can’t do that when you’re there in person.”

  Sandy spent a lot of time in the shop, designing and printing a five-string bass guitar for Crow. There’d been carbon-composite guitars for most of a century, and though wood-bigots still ruled, most objective measures suggested that properly designed and printed carbon instruments now exceeded their wooden counterparts in the various parameters of tonality.

  “Properly designed” being the stumbling point: nobody knew what that meant, just as nobody knew what “art” meant.

  And Martinez and Sandy did not see precisely eye to eye on the matter: although the same pitches were involved, Martinez favored more of a country whack sound, while Sandy favored more of a RhythmTech boom.

  Either sound could be simulated with software, of course, but sound-bigots still insisted that amplified native-wood resonance was clearly distinguishable from electronic sound. Both Martinez and Sandy subscribed to that view, although numerous blind tests had proven that even professional musicians couldn’t tell the difference. But, carbon composites would have to do.

  “Hey.”

  Sandy turned and found Becca standing behind him, dressed in her usual jeans and T-shirt. “Haven’t started printing it yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Still tweaking the sound, making some adjustments in shape.”

  “You know, with a perfect sound system, you guys probably couldn’t tell the difference between the native resonance . . .”

  “Yes, we could.”

  “. . . and constructed sound, and after you finish running it through the leads and stompboxes and then through the preamp and power amp and out through a couple of speakers and then bounce it around the Commons . . . you’re lucky you can even tell it’s a guitar.”

  “Shut up.”

  After a moment of silence, she said, “So, not to abruptly change the subject, will you be sleeping with Fiorella tonight?”

  That stopped him: “Jesus, where did that come from?”

  She leaned against the printer bench and grinned at him. “From rumor central. And it’s all over the ship.”

  Rumor central was a guy named Larry Wirt, who, in addition to being an excellent cook, knew more about who was doing what to whom than anyone else on the ship. And he talked about it. Incessantly.

  “Ah, he saw Cassie and me talking down by Cassie’s cabin . . . he’s just making up bullshit.”

  “Don’t wanna see my boy get hurt. That woman is a snake.”

  “Becca, I’m just thinking about guitars. That’s it. Fiorella is a good-looking woman who doesn’t do a lot for me.” Sandy paused to think. Actually, Fiorella did do a lot for him, but then . . . This had to be handled carefully. “We started out hating each other and have improved that to active dislike.”

  “Ah, well. Say, don’t basses have four strings?” She waved at the screen on Sandy’s slate. “Yours seems to have five.”

  “Becca . . . Look, basses have as many as seven strings. . . .”

  The following lecture on bass guitars was a cover, designed to conceal a temptation to giggle. Sandy hadn’t actually giggled since Harvard, but now . . .

  Earlier that day, John Clover had collected Wirt, supposedly to talk about a menu change for their joint cooking class, and had skillfully guided him past Sandy and Fiorella, who’d been waiting for them.

  When Clover and Wirt appeared, Fiorella had her back to the corridor wall, while Sandy’s hand was planted on the wall next to her head, their faces barely half a meter apart. Or, as Wirt put it later, in the cafeteria line, “He was practically drooling on her perky little breasts. Wait, did I say little? Anyway, she liked it.”

  That posture, that image, went viral. According to Clover, who talked to them later, eighteen thousand dollars had gone into what had become known as the Hump Pool: “We’re at a hundred and forty-eight thousand and counting,” Clover said, gloating.

  “Gloating is unbecoming in a man of your stature,” Fiorella said.

  “If you’ll excuse the language, my asshole is unbecoming of a man of my stature, but I got one anyway,” Clover said. “Honest to God, one more day like this and we’ll be at two hundred thousand. A month, if we manage it just right, we’ll be at half a mil, and from there on out . . . snowball heaven.”

  After finishing the short lecture on bass guitars, Sandy asked, “You play an instrument?”

  “I started playing a violin when I was five,” Becca said. “My parents made me do it, for the discipline. I quit when I was ten. I hated it. I still hate it. I can’t even stand to listen to violin music—and I mean classical, bluegrass, whatever.”

  “Ah, too bad,” Sandy said. “But if you already know the theory, you could pick up something else, pretty quick.”

  “Nah. The fact is, I don’t have music in my head,” Becca said. “If you don’t have music in your head, you can’t really play—all you can do is reproduce what’s on the page. No fun in that.”

  “Mmmm. So what do you have in your head?”

  “Structures, mostly,” Becca said. “Shapes. Next life, maybe I’ll be an architect. I’ve got a whole town in there, that I put together building by building, and block by block. I can lie in bed and close my eyes, and walk through it. Move stores around, change apartment layouts, streets, you know . . . shuffle the whole deck.”

  “How big is the town?”

  “About five thousand right now, but it’s growing. I think I might get it to thirty thousand, someday, but that’d about be my intellectual limit. . . . Why are you pushing that edge out?” She was looking over his shoulder at the schematic on the screen.

  “Because Crow’s thin,” Sandy said. “A heavy guy, I’d cut some off the basic pattern—you need the guitar to snuggle up to you, when you’re standing up.” She nodded, and Sandy pushed the edge out a bit more.

  “Where are the frets?”

  “No frets. He started by playing the upright bass,” Sandy said.

  “Huh. Who woulda thunk.”

  “What are you doing down here, anyway?” Sandy asked.

  She shrugged. “Looking for something to do, I guess. I’m about burned out on pushing bytes . . . and I thought I might borrow one of the smaller printers and poop out a Go board and some stones.”

  “Yeah? I tried playing that, back in school,” Sandy said. “The chess guys were such jerks about it that I gave up on chess and tried Go. It’s like playing chess in a heavy fog . . . sort of.”

  “If you help me poop out my board, I’ll teach you how to play,” Becca said. “In a couple of months, you could fake being an intellectual.”

  “Yeah . . .” He laughed. “I can do that now. Set up the Go board a
nd stare at it. Chuckle every once in a while. What more do you need?”

  “Well, you need the board . . .”

  “All right. You give me secret Go lessons, we’ll print up a board and the stones. Then when I look like I might know what I’m doing, we’ll go play in the Commons where we can impress people.”

  “Deal.”

  They chatted for a couple of minutes, then Becca wandered away and Sandy went back to his schematic. After a moment, he smiled, just for himself.

  27.

  Six days after parasol deployment and thirty-two days into their mission, the Nixon passed perihelion. This was the most uncertain part of the mission plan, next to visiting the alien whatsit.

  There were a number of ways the ship could get into trouble. Parasol failure was only the most obvious and predictable one. That wouldn’t kill the crew.

  “Well, probably not,” Fang-Castro told Clover. They were drinking tea in Fang-Castro’s apartment. “The ship could take the heat, at least for a couple of weeks. We don’t know if the heat pumps could shunt the thermal load from the living modules to the radiator system, but we think they could. Probably.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking about the heat,” Clover said. “We got the heat handled. But I was talking to Alfie, and he said we’re near the solar maximum . . .”

  “True . . .”

  “. . . and so we get these flares and coronal ejections and whatnot, and there’s no really good way to model them. They can’t really see forward for more than a few days or a week. After that, it’s guesswork.”

  “Guesswork and statistics. Statistics say we’d have to be really unlucky to get hit.”

  “But if we did, it’d be all bad,” Clover said.

  “Yes, it would be.” She smiled at him. “Since there’s not much we can do about it, except have fire drills, it’s best not to think about it.”

  A major flare would unleash a burst of X-rays, and at the Nixon’s distance, the hard radiation would hit them in a few minutes—most of the crew wouldn’t get enough warning to reach the safety of aft Engineering, where they would be shielded by the huge water tanks that provided reaction mass for the VASIMR engines.

  There were hidey-holes in each module of the ship, which, in a pinch, could accommodate the crew in a radiation-safe environment for the hour or so they might need protection—but it would be crowded and uncomfortable. Crowded and uncomfortable was better than dead.

  Fang-Castro had insisted on drill after drill until every crew member showed they could make it to safety in less than ninety seconds, three times in a row. In the month leading up to perihelion, every crew member had come to hate the sound of the flare alarm.

  After the X-rays, there’d be a proton storm. The flood of charged particles was immensely damaging, biologically, but it would also wreak havoc with electronics, inducing massive eddy currents in anything metallic.

  The hidey-holes and the water tanks were enough to protect the crew but there was no way to electrically shield the entire ship. Shunts and circuit breakers would provide some protection, and the ship builders believed the craft would make it through without fatal damage. Nobody was quite sure, and there was no way to test for it.

  The worst possibility was that they’d be hit by a coronal mass ejection. If that happened, they were toast. The massive plasma stream would overwhelm any imaginable safeguards on the ship’s critical systems.

  There really wasn’t much to be done except prepare for what they reasonably could. Space weather could give them some advance warning, but the Nixon was not a maneuverable ship. The math was simple and irrefutable: the ship was barreling along at one hundred and fifteen kilometers per second deep in the sun’s gravitational well. At best, its engines could alter its velocity by two kilometers per second in a day’s time. Major course changes were out of the question. If the Nixon found itself on a collision course with a coronal mass ejection, then a collision was what was going to happen.

  The anxiety was compounded by the boredom. There just wasn’t much to do on the ship: eat, work, sleep, exercise, watch vids beaming in from Earth. Ten days on, it looked like they were going to luck out, as far as solar storms were concerned. No news was the best news. Still, it was no news.

  Boring.

  Well, not all the time.

  28.

  Francois Peneski, a biochemist known for research into the possibilities of non-carbon-based life-forms, finished dinner in the cafeteria/commons. He took his tray and empty dishes to the dirty-dishes corral, dumped the dishes, then carried the tray back to where Don Larson, a mathematician, was chatting with friends, and used the hard-plastic tray to smash Larson in the face, breaking several blood vessels in Larson’s nose and knocking him off his chair.

  Larson knew precisely why this had occurred, and though the nose pain was nearly blinding, and blood was running down his chin, he got up off the floor and swung wildly at Peneski, connecting, more by luck than anything else, with the other man’s left eye.

  Then it was on: flailing fists and feet, several bites, screaming crew members. A woman named Rosalind Aster, a mechanical engineer, ripped at Peneski’s face with her fingernails. Peneski elbowed her in the mouth, and she fell backwards, hard, taking a table full of dishes down with her.

  (After the fight, several of the numbers people and one of the physicists tried to work out the optimum tactics for a low-gravity fistfight. The problem proved to be surprisingly difficult, given the number of variables involved; the actual fight, however, was carried out with some efficiency.)

  Francisco, the ship’s executive officer, was in the cafeteria at the time, as was Ang, the wrestling, violin-playing shrink, and between the two of them, they managed to pry the fighters apart. There were three empty reinforced cabins designed to be used either as hospital rooms or as cells, as need be. The exec ordered the three fighters confined to the cells, and to be attended by a ship’s doctor, while he talked with Fang-Castro about the next step.

  The next step was to interview the fighters.

  Fang-Castro appeared at Peneski’s cell, with Francisco, Crow, and Ang in tow. Peneski was sitting on the floor—the room had no furniture—and when the door opened, he stood as Fang-Castro walked in.

  Fang-Castro said, “Mr. Peneski: What in God’s name was that about? My executive officer tells me that you launched an unprovoked attack on Mr. Larson. Mr. Larson has a bloody nose, and Ms. Aster has several loosened teeth, which will require braces. Your face looks like a raw steak. Can you give me a good reason why you shouldn’t remain locked up?”

  “I’m sorry,” Peneski said. “It won’t happen again. And it wasn’t unprovoked.”

  “Then give me an explanation to consider.”

  “Roz and I had developed a . . . relationship,” Peneski said.

  “A sexual relationship,” Fang-Castro said.

  “Yes. She was . . . she was really a good thing for me. I have difficulty with relationships. But then, she joined Larson’s orgy club and she didn’t want to be with me anymore. I couldn’t—”

  Fang-Castro: “The what club?”

  “The orgy club. Larson started an orgy club. There are six members, four men and two women. Roz invited me to get in, but I didn’t want to, I wanted to be exclusive. She started avoiding me and finally I said I’d do it, but then she said it was too late, they’d recruited a fifth guy, and I couldn’t get in until they got another woman, unless I was bi, and maybe not even then, because I was a stick-in-the-mud, and they didn’t want any stick-in-the-muds.”

  The exec said, “Ah, Jesus.”

  By the time Peneski spoke with Fang-Castro, the well-lubricated rumor mill was already in overdrive. Not only was the reason for the fight well known, but the details of the Larson orgies were also revealed. Not only revealed, but extensively embroidered upon.

  Larson was quoted as having said, “Women a
re basically recreational areas, with several separate facilities available at any given time.”

  The quotation was completely fabricated, but people were entirely unamused. And, of course, then the jokes started, often based on Peneski’s occupation: “Is that a silicon-based life-form in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

  “What would you recommend?” Fang-Castro asked Francisco, Crow, and Ang, in the hallway outside the cell where Peneski remained confined.

  Crow said, “There was a violent attack. It’s not something you can ignore, even if there’s no danger of another one. There has to be some kind of punishment. Since you’re the captain, you have to decide on what it should be.”

  Ang said, “Peneski doesn’t seem irrational—he managed to work himself into a momentary rage, watching them sit at their table, laughing. He says it won’t happen again and I tend to believe him. Whatever the punishment is, I don’t think we should shame him. He’s already shamed enough. And Larson was provoked, beyond question. I’d suggest a monetary fine, a couple of weeks’ pay, for both of them. I would also find out who the other members of the orgy club are, and I would peel the skin off them. It’s not so much the group sex that worries me, it’s the exclusionary attitude—Peneski couldn’t qualify for membership.”

  The exec said, “Ah, Jesus.”

  Crow: “Ma’am, I would also recommend that you address the situation directly. Call a crew meeting and broadcast it. Be very clear about the limits of what you’ll tolerate.”

  “I should say it’s okay to have orgies, but you have to invite everybody? I don’t think so,” Fang-Castro said. “The President would be the teensiest bit annoyed.”

  Crow actually smiled at the thought. “That’s not quite what I meant. You outline the damaging effects that this kind of thing has on ship morale, tell them that you won’t put up with it. Tell them to behave like adults on a deadly serious mission, and that while sex is their own affair, morale is your affair. That if they do anything that will impair morale—and indiscreet sexual liaisons might well qualify—you will lock the offenders in the restraint cells with nothing but a TV set and three meals a day, for the duration of the mission. That you will not allow any behavior, even if legal on Earth, that will impair the mission: this ship is not a democracy, and you are the Queen.”