Acts of Conscience (11 page)

He said, “Central bulge is all pressurized habitable space, control rooms, staterooms, whatnot.” A gesture overhead. “Since our modified gravity polarizer and the new hyperdrive components had to be toroidal, we built the life support system into the doughnut hole, then hung the rest of the flight hardware, avionics and whatnot, around the rim. This is the main gangway, of course, and there’s an airlock door on the bottom, between the landing legs, an escape trunk hatch on top, mounted in the upper bulkhead of the control room...”

Listening, of course, listening to his blather, as I put my hand on the gangway railing, put my feet on the risers, which some idiot had engineered for one-gee... Even on Earth, I’d’ve taken them two-at-a-time, I think. As it was...

“Watch your head,” said Lassiter.

Me, powering up the stairs, toes barely touching, mainly just hauling myself up the handrail, excitement a tight nervousness in my chest, touched by a matching flutter of joy from the spacesuit.

o0o

Then school days. Taking me back, I suppose, to my mother’s useless architectural school on Luna, much more to Syrtis Major, which I chose for myself and loved after a fashion. Strange way to look at it. Loved? I suppose so. If it’s true that I actually...

These new friends were a mixed bag, the first class made up for the in-house apprentice school of B-VEI, expected to be much like the apprentice schools at other industrial concerns, teaching those special things that companies need their technical personnel to know. I’d had to spend a few weeks at the ERSIE apprentice school—
just so you’ll know the ropes
—but those years at Syrtis Major, my years of prior experience...

Different here.

Classes taught by our predecessors on the line—
this is the way we do things here
—startling to find Roald Berens himself teaching theory, Ntanë Vataro showing us the guts of the machines, showing us how things
really
worked.

Do I remember things like that from before? No. The president of the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise is a red-faced politician. Saw him on the netvid only days ago...

So how
does
the Berens-Vataro faster-than-light overdrive really work, Dr. Berens? Small, nordic sort of man with pale blue eyes, what they call mulberry eyes, and thin, flat, mouse-brown hair. Small man with a secretive smile and a rather hapless shrug.

You’ll have to ask Dr. Vataro about that. Me, I only figured out a way it
could
work. That little smile and shrug again. Most of you came out of the ERSIE apprentice school—a gesture at me—Mr. du Cheyne, I believe, went to good, old Syrtis Major...

Anyway, you were taught how Kerechenko and her team worked out the basic principles of the field well converter, using Mace Electrodynamics money; how they then separated themselves from the company and got government loans to extend this technology to the field of gravity control, among other things...

At Syrtis Major the history-of-technology course spent some time on the way ERSIE, Mace and the government of the Mitteleuropa went round and round over who owned the patents on antigravity. Gravity control is one of those magical technologies that simply changes everything. Like agriculture, like writing, like steam, nuclear energy... hyperdrive too, I suppose.

Dr. Berens: “For my scholar magestral dialogue at Pantech, I did an exhaustive numerical run on the mathematics of Kerechenko Analysis. You know, it’s funny. I would’ve thought Madame Kerechenko would’ve done that herself, right at the outset, but...”

Some woman in the back of the room, a pretty dark-haired girl with a long nose and oddly-colored tan skin, sort of a funny sallow-brick hue, said, “Didn’t have the computing power in those days.”

Berens squinted at her and shrugged. “Right. Ms... Strachan is it? They didn’t do it because they couldn’t, and in the ensuing centuries, as Kerechenko’s discoveries turned into money, money and more money... Anyway, it looked like a good project to me, so I ran the arrays through TPI’s Skylark analogue-numerical sieve, then started doing a statistical analysis. All sorts of interesting bullshit came popping out, graduate school research topics for a thousand years to come.” He laughed. “I considered taking out a loan right then and there, so I could go into business as a professional thesis adviser. That would’ve been fun...”

Long silence, while we watched him reminisce about his own good, old days. Then, in a pale, faraway voice: “So you put a field well converter inside the system event horizon of a gravity polarizer, link to a power load, charge up the well, run the polarizer to full throttle and head out. That was the theory behind the starships we’ve been using for so many years.” Another silence, then: “What do you suppose happens if you open the loaded well’s event horizon just then?”

Leah Strachan said, “
Bang
.”

“You’re a pilot, aren’t you Ms. Strachan? Always a good idea for a pilot to know how her machinery works, isn’t it?”

She said, “You never know what might happen.”

“I suppose not. That’s why I went into mathematics, Ms. Strachan. I wanted to
know
what would happen.”

Then: “You know what? After I linked up with Ntanë, we had a hell of a time getting permission to test our experimental apparatus. It was so damned little, we figured we could fire it off in one of the desert wastelands on the farside of Crater. Hell, it’s just like the Moon was in the early days, when there were hardly any colonists...”

Only sort of like the Moon of course. Maybe halfway between the Moon and Mars? But colder than both.

He said, “We figured it’d just be a
little
bang, you know? Fifty, maybe sixty kilotons... Guy in charge of authorizing potentially-destructive experiments made me read up on something called
Castle Bravo
, the first test of a lithium-deuteride-fueled thermonuclear bomb, back in the 1950s. Seems the scientists who put that one together didn’t know about the lithium-6 reaction. Maybe they knew about it and just failed to take it into account. Scientists are always forgetting crucial numbers. That’s why they call them
experiments
... Anyway, they were surprised as hell when their nice little five-megaton bomb made a fifteen-megaton bang.”

He said, “They made us do a space test, which of course led us to build a much bigger test apparatus. Our engineering test models suggested we develop a prototype toroidal gravity polarizer, one that could fly the ship as well as test my suspicions about event horizon canceling in a massively accelerated inertial reference frame. People thought we were nuts.

“You know, those paranoid bastards not only made us test the ship in the outer system, they made us go to a point in space that placed 61 Cygni A in the line of sight between our test site and Earth. I guess they were afraid if we made a big enough bang, somebody might notice and come asking questions.

“Made us wait ‘til Crater itself was behind 61 Cygni C relative to our position as well. Paranoid. Silly...we went to our appointed position, ran it up to full throttle, accelerating directly toward 61 Cygni A...”

Strachan said, “What the hell for?”

“Funny you should ask that. I wanted to accelerate away from the system’s barycenter. Just in case, you know?” He shrugged. “Ntanë insisted we aim for something that could catch our debris cone, if worse came to worst...

“So we fired the test apparatus and discovered ourselves on the opposite node of our orbit around 61 Cygni, at the center of an expanding energy shell that appeared to have originated in the experimental device, basically a soft gamma ray burst in the few hundred megaton range. As if the ship had exploded or something.”

As if. Or something. His calm amusement wasn’t the way I was imagining the scene.

“You know, if we’d done it my way, pointed the damned thing straight up, the apparatus would have carried us to a point... oh, I think we calculated it was something like 219,000 parsecs from here in the direction of the classical constellation of Cygnus, as seen from Earth.”

Empty space, but...

“As it happens, zero time passes for the passengers on a Berens-Vataro starship, even a primitive one like our test apparatus, so we’d’ve popped out, instantaneously to us, somewhere in intergalactic space. Think how surprised we’d’ve been when we figured out where. And, of course, when. It turned out the test apparatus moved us at something like fifteen cee...”

The calculator in my head chattered softly. 14,600 years? I said, “It would’ve been interesting if you’d gotten home some time around the year 30,000...” Imagine that. Will things be different then? Or, trapped in our own corner of space with no Berens-Vataro drive...

That same smile and hapless shrug. “Well, no Mr. du Cheyne. In order to run a reverse geodesic, conditions at our emergence point would have had to mirror those at our departure point. They wouldn’t be, of course...”

No, of course not. Stupid.

He said, “No, we would’ve wandered around the universe, hopping here, hopping there, completely at random, until the end of time. Or until our supplies ran out. Whichever came first.”

Silence.

Then someone in the back of the room murmured, “Well,
shit
.”

Berens said, “We were damned lucky. As it was, TPI confiscated our research notes and non-dirigible faster-than-light starship, placed us under house arrest...”

No surprise there.

He said, “Campus police didn’t have a good mechanism for holding onto us and Crater doesn’t
have
a government, so we got away, hopped a freighter, came here, and you know the rest, I guess...” A final shrug, and he said, “First thing we did after we got
Torus X-1
flying was lift a team of lawyers to Crater. Turns out the administration diverted most of TPI’s resources to developing control systems for the test apparatus, but no one could figure out my math. Now, of course...”

Some time later, walking back toward my dorm room, it occurred to me to wonder what my life would’ve been like had FTL ships been introduced 20 years ago, not long after I’d finished up at Syrtis Major College of Industrial Arts.

o0o

Now I lay sprawled through the guts of
Torus X-3
’s hyperdrive machinery, angular lumps and bumps on my back, spine twisted at an odd angle, one arm reaching, the other compressed against my side, rainbow sparkles from the worksuit’s live integument reflected in my face from the flat, graygreen surface of the nearest drive-horizon interface discharge array. Knowing.

Comfortable. Familiar. Warm happiness. Belonging.

Even these new machines, these unknown machines, are my friends, entities I
will
know, friends who’ll never betray my trust, even if I grow careless to the point where they kill me.

I can hear them whisper, when I’m among them:
Do thus, and we’ll do such
.
Always
.
Forever
.
You can trust us
.

Dark shadow moving toward me, throwing sparkles against the inner curve of the hull, a few meters away. Sleek woman shape in a glittering worksuit, slithering through the hardware, this way and that, muscular hips oozing through a hole just a touch too small, hardware giving birth to even, bright blue eyes, eyes looking at me through the eyeholes of the helmet. Leah Strachan. Leah the Pilot.

Expressionless? Or is it true that eyes are just spheres of transparent tissue, white parts and colored, little red veins, colored iris muscle, dark hole of pupil, casting light down into the dark soul beyond...

Christ. Turning into a fucking mooncalf here...

She said, “I thought you’d be in here, du Cheyne.” Lying beside me then, twisting until she was lying on her back across the access coverplate of a big heat exchanger pump, looking up at the discharge array. “This is really something, isn’t it?”

Really something.

I reached out and grabbed the array’s sensor-control throughput waveguide, tugged it from its socket, pulled the woven metal/glass snake across my chest and looked into the plug socket. Collared male connector, forty-seven little golden prongs of some exotic composite whose name I’d remember if I thought about it for a while.

Pitting in there, down where the connectors were seated into their mounts. Something going on that some engineer hadn’t thought about beforehand. Maybe not a problem now, but when this ship had been flying for thirty years or so. What was I imagining? Some catastrophic failure? Some horrific crash, all fire and flames and bits of bodies? No. Imagining myself, some day, stuck in the space between the stars. Hyperdrive dead. Gravity polarizer dead. Calling for help on some old fashioned maser device, hoping someone was listening at my target star. Hoping they’d come get me, some day, somehow.

“Hmh.” Futile. Stupid. Leah’s head was pressed close to mine, our helmets more or less touching, looking down into the plug. She said, “I bet that’s what they call exotunneling.”

Particles, apparently, have the power to decide they don’t
really
exist, switch from orbiting a real chaotic attractor to orbiting an imaginary one. “I bet you’re right.”

Blue eyes on my face then. No. Not my face. Blue eyes on my eyes, all that’s visible through the eyeholes of my helmet. See anything in there? She said, “What the hell are you going to do with this thing?”

My ship? I shrugged. “Travel, I guess.”

Remote whisper from my suit, engaged in conversation with hers, a rapid, incomprehensible exchange of data. If I asked nicely, would it get her suit to read her mind and then tell me what she was thinking? Brief electronic silence in my head, as if the two suits were considering the question, then the faraway whispers resumed.

She said, “Right. And here I thought you were going to start an amusement park ride for all the kiddies of Mercury.”

Feeble sarcasm. As if she weren’t used to being one of the gang. Another shrug from me. “I’ll see what there is to see. What little there is to see, I guess. Not that many colony worlds.”