Gift From The Stars (18 page)

“You mean you’ve discussed this?” Adrian said huskily. “You and the other women?” He realized that he sounded incredulous, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Of course not,” Jessica said. “But we know. And I wanted you to know that I’ve always admired you, as a leader and as a man. Not only that, I like you.” She leaned forward and kissed him.

For a moment, surprised, he responded. Her lips felt soft and sensual. Then he drew away, shocked at the way his body had responded.

Jessica stood up. Suddenly he was aware of the fact that underneath the one-piece garment she was wearing, only a foot from his face, was the body of a woman, and it was the body of a desirable woman, and if he understood what was going on it was his if he wanted it.

“I’m glad that’s settled,” she said, leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, and went through the doorway and down the hall.

“Settled?” he said, too late to be heard. “Settled?” He had one saving thought: at least all this would be forgotten like everything else.

He thought he heard laughter somewhere down the hall, but it came from voices he had never heard before.

Adrian wasn’t good at talking to groups, but Frances had said it was necessary and he knew that was true. He would have been as traumatized as the crew if he had experienced over the past few hours the time reversals and the gravity wrenchings of the wormhole transition, even though they had been forgotten, and was depending on someone else to solve the problems. Adrian was as puzzled about what was going on as the crew, but he was in charge. That meant whatever was done would be done by him, and, moreover, he couldn’t appear to the crew the way he really felt—helpless.

He had gathered the crew twice before, the first time before the test flight, when he had offered the opportunity to depart, unobserved, to anyone who wanted to sit out the test flight. The second meeting had discussed the computer program that was guiding the ship out of the Solar System, and the reasons for allowing the course to continue toward what they assumed to be an alien-selected destination.

After that the crew divided itself into groups—work groups and social groups, which were not always the same. The crew had been assembled from volunteers to build a ship; once that was done it had to discover new skills and new interests. At first that shakedown was enough to fill the hours. Later squabbles arose about social arrangements and romantic pairings that had to be settled by counseling from Frances or, failing that, a ship’s court, and if that was not acceptable an appeal to the Captain’s final review. Now, however, he had to face them all and explain the inexplicable.

They were gathered in the couples’ dormitory, which had been the single men’s dormitory before the inevitable pairings had led to the switch. As in the two times before, men and women were seated on bunks or stools, or stood wherever they could see Adrian. Frances stood behind Adrian and to his left, providing the support of her solid presence. Jessica, on the other hand, stood by the door as if guarding the avenue of their escape. The climate in the room had been transformed from the intense boredom of space flight broken periodically by personal successes, disappointments, and disputes to a communal unease broken by moments of panic.

“We knew we would encounter some strange phenomena out here,” Adrian said. “But we didn’t know it would be this strange!” The crew responded with nervous chuckles.

“We have been through an experience that defies explanation,” Adrian continued. “It is connected to our entering a wormhole. We know that much. We must have felt some gravity fluctuations.”

“Why do you say ‘must have’?” a man’s voice asked from several bunks back.

“That’s what we would expect from a wormhole, George,” Adrian said, “but we’re still here, so we survived them. If you’re like us, however, you don’t remember.”

“I don’t remember anything that happened after we entered whatever it was,” another man said. “And that scares me!”

“It’s enough to scare anybody, Kevin,” Adrian said.

“There’s something else,” a woman said. “I’m remembering things that never happened, like an argument Bill and I had—are going to have.”

“And I remember the way we are going to make up,” a man answered. He laughed as if he were pleased with himself.

“We’ve got a theory about that,” Adrian said. “You’re remembering things that haven’t happened yet, because time is mixed up in here. But we can’t let the unusual get to us if we’re going to figure out what’s going on, and get out of this place.”

“When’s that going to be?” a woman asked.

“We don’t know a lot, yet, Sally,” Adrian said, “but we know this much: ‘when’ is a word that doesn’t mean much where we are. A wormhole is an out-of-this-world means of getting from one place in the universe to another, like folding space so that distant points touch, and crossing there. The wormhole exists in some kind of hyperspace where space and time get mixed up. We think—”

“Why do you keeping saying, ‘we think’?” a woman asked nervously.

“This is all new and different for us as well as you, Joan,” Adrian said. “Give us a chance to figure this out, how this new kind of time operates and how we can function within it, and, I assure you, we’ll get out of here and on our way.”

Frances spoke up. “You might think about
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
. Alice was in a place where nothing made sense, but she stayed calm and eventually she got back to her safe, sane home.”

“This ain’t a children’s book!” a man said. “And this ain’t fiction.”

“Sam, I hope we can be as capable of handling the unknown as a Vic
torian child,” Frances said. “Maybe even get some answers.”

“We ain’t never going to get back, are we?” a woman said.

“We can’t be sure of that yet, Lui,” Adrian said.

Jessica spoke up for the first time. “But we’ve got to behave as if that’s true, or we’ve got no chance at all.”

“What I want to know,” a woman said, “is where ‘on our way’ is going to take us.”

“We don’t know, Yasmine,” Adrian said. “But we all signed on to have our questions answered, and we’re going to have to follow the yellow brick road wherever it leads us until we get the answers.”

A man said, “What’s ‘the yellow brick road’?”

Adrian smiled. “Frances has me doing it now.”

“That’s another children’s book,” Frances said.

“I’d rather come up with my own answers,” another man said.

“If you come up with any, let me know,” Adrian said. He folded his arms across his chest. “Meanwhile, we’re going to have to live with uncertainty and forgetfulness and not let it make us crazy. But there’s a way out of here. The wormhole was a confirmation that we are headed in the right direction. What we can be sure of is that we weren’t directed here simply to strand us in Wonderland. This is a pathway. We just have to figure out how to move along it.”

“Moving along it reminds me,” Frances said, “of what the chess queen said to Alice in
Through the Looking Glass
: ‘Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.’”

“What’s the good of that?” a man asked gruffly.

“We don’t know, do we, Fred?” Frances said. “But I have a memory that it’s going to matter. Oh, dear! That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Frances, you’re always finding a moral somewhere,” a woman said.

“‘Everything’s got a moral, if you can only find it,’” Frances quoted triumphantly.

Shortly after that the meeting ended, with the crew informed but not relieved. For the moment, at least, they were not rebellious. Adrian had an uneasy feeling, however, that something about the meeting wasn’t right: the room was more crowded than it had ever been before.

But he promptly forgot.

Adrian was alone in the control room when the deputation arrived. Three were men; two were women. All of them were young and all about the same age, late teens, maybe, or early twenties. In their youth
and energy, they all looked a lot alike. One of the men and one of the women was blond; two of the men were dark-haired and one of them was dark-skinned; the second woman had dark hair. Adrian had never seen them before.

The dark-haired woman reminded Adrian of Jessica. One of the men looked familiar, too, but Adrian couldn’t quite decide whom he looked like.

“We’re here to present our demands,” that young man said. His voice sounded familiar, too.

Adrian tried to keep from flinching. “Who are you?” he asked.

“You know who we are,” the blond girl said.

Adrian shook his head. “You’re all strangers. And the strangest part is that we’re in a wormhole inside a ship that nobody can leave or enter.”

“We’re the next generation,” the woman said.

Adrian was seated in the captain’s chair. The five newcomers formed a semi-circle around him, lithe, athletic, and leaning slightly forward as if they were poised to take him apart. “We’ve been here that long?” Adrian asked.

“Duration is a word that has no meaning,” the first young man said.

“It’s hard to break old habits,” Adrian said.

“We don’t have any to break,” the other dark-haired young man said. He sounded bitter.

“We agreed to keep this civil,” the first young man said. He looked back toward Adrian. “We’re here to present our demands.”

“You’ve got to let me get used to the idea that the crew has had children who have grown up while we have been stranded in a wormhole that was supposed to provide instantaneous passage. I don’t feel twenty years older.”

“That’s old-fashioned thinking!” the other blond young man said contemptuously.

“He can’t help it,” said the young man who appeared to be the spokesman for the group, if not, indeed, its leader. “He’s system-bound.”

“He’s got to help it,” the blond young man said. “He’s the captain.”

“How many of you are there?” Adrian asked.

“Many,” the blond young woman said.

“Enumeration is as difficult as duration,” said the spokesman.

“Are you all the same age?” Adrian asked.

“You see?” the young man asked. “He’ll never learn.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” the spokesman said patiently. “None of these questions you’re asking has any meaning unless we get into normal space. And that’s what we’ve come about.”

“To present our demands,” the blond young woman said.

Adrian folded his hands across his lap. “I don’t know what you can ask for that we can provide, but go ahead.”

“We want you to stop trying to get out of the wormhole,” the spokesman said.

“We can’t do that!” Adrian said.

“Why not?” the young man said.

“We’re in never-never land,” Adrian said. “Nowhere. No memory. No continuity. Virtual non-existence. And then, you see, we committed ourselves to finding out why the aliens sent us the plans for this ship and brought us here.” He gestured at the book lying in front of him; it was
Gift from the Stars
. Often he found himself reading it as if he could find therein a way out.

“We didn’t,” the bitter young man said.

“Didn’t what?” Adrian asked.

“Sign up for this trip.”

“But—” Adrian began.

“You’ve got no right,” the spokesman said, “to take us somewhere against our will.”

“And against our right to exist,” the dark-haired young woman said.

“What’s that?” Adrian asked.

“What do you think will happen to us if you get out of this wormhole?” the spokesman asked.

Adrian was silent.

“We won’t exist.”

“What kind of existence is that?” Adrian asked finally. “What is life without memory? What is existence without cause and effect?”

“The only kind we know,” the bitter young man said.

“We are your children,” the spokesman said. “You brought us into this world, crazy as it seems to you. But it’s our world, and you owe us.”

“He also owes the rest of us,” a woman said from the door. It was Frances. “And the species. If you’re more than illusions, you’ll be born at the right time in the right place. But now—be gone. You’re nothing but a pack of possibilities.”