The Ghosts of Heaven (26 page)

The answer to whether to allow artists to be selected was, in the end, to choose people with multiple skills: the dentist who paints, the architectural technician who writes stories, the component manufacturer who makes short films in his spare time. In some of the drawers, therefore, there may be unusual things, but of genuine treasure, there will be none. No money. The entire system of work, payment and government will have no meaning where they are going. They will start again, according to laws drawn up by the Global-Government Special Committee created just for that purpose, a compact to which all 510 people on the ship have agreed, in writing.

Bowman's hand rests on the button to open the personal effects drawer of pod 89, but only on a whim. It will not open for him anyway as each responds only to its occupant's bio-print.

Instead, his hand slips down to the drawer underneath, again an almost featureless white surface into which are recessed two buttons, upon which he places the first two fingertips of his right hand.

The maintenance drawer beeps twice, and starts to slide open slowly. As it does, Bowman realizes he is staring at the fingerprints on his right hand, to which the maintenance drawer just responded. In the bright light of Deck One, it's easy to see the spiral patterns on the pads of his fingers, and then a question so stupid enters his head that he is shocked.

Who put those there?

Unhappy with himself, he turns back to the work in hand, and starts to inspect the readouts.

Inside the pod was a living being. Breathing had ceased and been replaced by a system of oxygenated fluid that fills the lungs. Brain function was reduced to a state little more active than a coma. But, it was still a person inside, and now, according to the pod, even those minute vital signs have gone, and that person is dead.

Either side of him, Deck One runs away out of sight to become Deck Two in the direction of spin, and Deck Five in the other.

The pods sit, apparently lifeless. One after another, after another.

The only sound is his breathing as he tries to make the pod tell him what went wrong.

The ship spins on through space.

Then, in the corner of his eye, he sees something move far away, at the horizon caused by the curve of the deck.

His head jerks toward the movement, and startled, he falls back, catching his heels on the floor of the deck, banging the back of his head, just under the skull, against the lip of the open maintenance drawer.

He feels nausea swim up into him instantly and knows he is fainting, but, as he does, he still has endless milliseconds in which to realize that he cannot have seen what he thought he saw, because what he thought he saw, crouching over a Longsleep pod, was a human figure.

 

3

When he comes to, he has no idea how long has passed.

He is immediately terrified, by two thoughts. The first is the idea that someone else is awake with him, on the ship. That cannot happen, the ship would not cause it to happen.

The second, which is now more pressing, is the fact that unless he returns to his sentinel pod before it enters the sleep cycle again, he will almost certainly die.

He checks the clock on his suit. With a shock he sees that he has been out for hours; his waking cycle is due to finish in forty-five minutes.

He forces himself to be calm, and work out what to do, in what order, and how to do it all in the most time-efficient way he can.

The back of his head is bleeding a little, or has been while he slept. He feels angry with himself for wasting even a second of his waking cycle on sleep, never mind many hours, but he pushes those thoughts down into the depths of his mind, and runs more checks on the pod, according to which, the occupant is truly dead.

If that's the case, he thinks, no harm can come of an actual, visual check on the occupant. In Longsleep, it's almost impossible to tell the difference between life and death states anyway, but there is one sure-fire method: pupil dilation. Even in the Longsleep state, pupils will constrict when exposed to bright light if the sleeper is still alive.

He begins to quickly tap away at the controls of the maintenance drawer, entering a series of codes known only to the sentinels to permit the lid of the pod to be opened in emergency situations.

It takes five and a half minutes to complete the protocols required, and as he finishes, the pod begins to give a series of low warning beeps.

The faint seal around its perimeter glows white and then the lid lifts, revealing the occupant inside.

It is a woman.

Bowman guesses she is around twenty-eight years old. She is beautiful, one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen, and he wonders whether all the occupants were chosen for their looks, as well as their intellect, skills, and personality traits. Have they chosen a perfect five hundred people from which to make a new world? Of the millions of people who applied for the mission, the numbers must have rapidly fallen away as the selection process weeded out any who didn't come up to the mark. Even this beautiful woman, who must have a CBC of at least 256, who no doubt has skills vital to the new colony and who probably plays a variety of musical instruments, even she might not have been selected, but for the fact that her age gives her at least forty years of childbearing ahead of her, for what is a new colony without babies?

His hand hovers over her, his fingers hesitating to touch her, as if she might be ill, or carry some contagion, though he knows there are no pathogens on board the ship.

His spiral-tipped fingers move to her right eyelid, to open it, but as he touches her skin, her entire body, now exposed to the air of the open deck, crumbles before his eyes, collapsing in on itself in a pile of dust and the strange fluids that had kept her half alive for so long.

His heart begins to pound.

He thinks he hears a sound behind him, and spins round, eyes wide.

Nothing.

*   *   *

He checks his suit clock. Thirty-five minutes.

He runs, downhill, back to Terminal Base Four, where he is unable to speak for a few minutes, since the run has left him short of breath. Sentinel Sleep might keep his body alive and not wasting away, but it does no more than that. He is badly out of shape.

Unable to speak his log, he begins to type a report for Sentinel Seven to read, and hurriedly performs three of the thirty-seven systems checks that he would really like to make.

He checks his watch.

He now has five minutes to reach his pod before it will close without him and leave him stranded, awake for ten years unless he can find a way to override the system, and it is not one of the systems that he himself developed.

He wonders how he lost track of time so badly—another half hour just to type a report?

He hurries as fast as he can back toward his pod, which is already making warning noises when he reaches it, and as he climbs into it, he can no longer suppress the fears that are calling out from inside him.

Did he really see someone else awake on the ship?

Why didn't they come to him? Why didn't they make themselves known to him unless they meant some harm?

He pulls his clothes off, sitting up in the pod, and throws them on the floor, just as the lid starts to close on him for another ten years, and as he sinks away into the breathless dreaming of Sentinel Sleep, his last conscious thoughts are these:

Is there someone on board, tampering with the systems?

Is there a killer on the ship with me?

And will I ever wake again?

 

5

He dreams for ten years.

During which he is not murdered, not for real, though in his dreams he dies a thousand times and then a thousand times more. The endless ways in which his unconscious mind seems to be able to horrify him means that no two of these deaths are the same. Not all his dreams are so horrific, however, but still, there are no words for some of the things he sees. What do dreams mean? And why are they there? What happens to the mind when they can go on, and on, and on, almost forever it seems?

He's tumbling down a spiral staircase, head over heels, infinitely, as the
Song
spirals through space, weaving 504 helical dream-threads through the galaxy as the ship heads for Lyca, still so very, very far away.

If there was a being, a being with no physical body, but one which grew and sustained itself purely on the traces of emotion, it would be able to drift through the stars after the
Song
, drinking in this trail of floating dreams.

*   *   *

Bowman is not killed, and as he wakes, he's dreaming about something he has not seen in a very long time—wet grass.

It fills his nose and covers his palms, but as the lid to his pod slips open for the fourth time, the grass vanishes like smoke. He was about to make the connection to the rest of the dream: a distant memory. He grew up in a rural part of the country, something more distant than a suburb, closer to the city than a backwater. His parents were successful people, but his father was rarely home. He remembers the house and garden better than his parents. There was the house itself, a fine and elegant old building with a hundred rooms to hide in, if only he'd had someone to play hide-and-seek with. He liked the summer best, because that was when he could live outside from dawn till dusk, pushing open the gate to the measureless gardens when he was young, sitting in an ancient apple tree in one corner, desperate to be old enough to be allowed beyond these confines, to see the world. As soon as he could, he didn't wait, and was gone into the woods and valleys below the hamlet, but those early days remain the strongest in his mind, and wet grass means one thing to him, which is the sensation of falling from a low branch of the tree, and putting his palms out to meet the ground. And then … But no, it's gone.

He sits up.

“Yes,” he says, and then catches himself, and laughs. It is a nervous laugh, because though it has been ten years, to his conscious mind it seems only a moment since he climbed into the pod, wondering if someone malevolent was on board with him.

His first thought is that he should complete one circuit of the deck, from Base Four back to Base Four again, to see if anyone is there. Perhaps he imagined the whole thing, after all. Some trick of the light? And he did hit his head on the maintenance drawer … Maybe that made him hallucinate something.

Wait
, he thinks,
that's wrong. I fell
after
I saw the figure. That was why I fell. That can't be what made me see something.

Still, he is alive, and his first responsibility is to the voyage of the
Song of Destiny
.

He climbs from the pod again, pulls on his gray suit, and sets off for Base Four.

If there were someone on board
 … he thinks
. Well, there is nowhere to hide on the decks.
But each of the bases has many rooms, halls, hangars, and labs. It would take him hours to search just one of them, there's no way he can manage all five in this waking. But how could someone be on board anyway? They would have to have somehow accessed the food stores in one of the PTP ships, as well as overridden the oxygen lowering that occurs in the ten years when a sentinel is not active. That alone would have placed a huge drain on the output of the chlorophyll tanks. The
Song
is designed to carry sleeping, barely-respiring passengers, not fully breathing ones.

None of it makes sense.

*   *   *

He makes some quick mental calculations as he walks.

The radiation pressure engine is a slow but steady beast. It collects solar radiation channeled through the spiraling ring of the
Song
and uses the reaction it makes against a virtual sail to cause an impulse to the ship. The impulse is tiny, but it is constant, allowing the ship to accelerate at one meter per second.

When the
Song
left Earth's orbit, it was towed away from the effect of Earth's gravity by five tug ships. Left to its own devices, the ship has been accelerating only at one meter per second it's true, but for thirty-six years. The beauty of the radiation pressure engine is that the speed just keeps on building, until, after seven years, it reached its maximum velocity at around 260,000 kilometers a second. And so the distance to Lyca will be gobbled up in a mere one hundred years or so.

Bowman estimates that he is now 589 trillion kilometers from home.

He reaches Terminal Base Four.

Another Longsleep pod is dead.

 

8

Bowman closes the door from Deck Three to Terminal Base Four, then he locks it so it can be opened only from inside. He also locks the door that leads through the Base to the operational centers, and the one that leads to Deck Four, with Base Five beyond it.

He returns to the console and slumps into the chair in front of the bank of screens.

He needs to think, but it's so hard to think clearly when you've just woken from Sentinel Sleep. He tries to remember how he felt when he woke last time, but he can't seem to get that straight in his head, either.

More than ever before, he needs to think logically, and use his time well, but he's finding it hard to get rid of the dreams of the last ten years, snatches of which keep flashing into his mind even as he tries to concentrate on the status of the ship. The things he sees are broken and distorted, but it doesn't take him long to see that the theme of spirals runs through them all. He starts to apply his mind to the question of why he is dreaming about spirals, he tries to understand what that might mean, and then, suddenly, he lifts his head, checks the clock, and sees he has wasted a whole hour in this waking dream.

He looks at the medical pack fixed to the wall of Terminal Base Four and wonders if he should give himself a shot of something to help him concentrate, but decides against it. He wants to know that his thoughts are his own and not chemically altered ones. With a great effort of will, he turns his eyes back to the console, and his mind to the problem.