The Ghosts of Heaven (29 page)

He was so busy with the priority alert about the ETI signal that he has not seen the status alert about the Longsleepers.

Another screen is flashing a pale green alert at him; with a series of red lights glowing on the schematic of the ring of the
Song
.

Eight more pods have gone offline. Eight more people are dead.

He is dumbfounded. Adrift, he feels a powerful sense of terror rising inside him, not terror of the murderer who is aboard the ship with him, but the terror of not knowing what to do. It is something he has rarely experienced, and when he has, it has come close to paralyzing him with fear.

Trying to think of something to do, to kid himself that he is in control of the situation, he decides to read the reports of Sentinels Seven, Eight, and Nine, who have all been on duty since he last woke.

Again, they have left only written reports, and something about their tone troubles him. They sound concerned, they have performed what duties and investigations they can, but when he goes to check on the computer what those investigations were, he finds that nothing has been done that
the ship itself
could not have done.

Uneasy, he finds some of the words in the reports are bothering him. It's so hard to be sure, because he finds remembering anything at the moment is very hard, but he seems to find them very familiar. He hunts back to the previous reports from Sentinels Seven, Eight and Nine, and then he knows what it is that worries him. They use the same phrases. They repeat themselves. They use different combinations of key phrases, but the phrases are there nonetheless. Of course, people repeat themselves, but they do so in a loose way, not a perfect one.

He forgets everything else. For the time being, he wants to know something, because an awful idea has just crept into his head and he cannot focus on anything else until he has that idea disproven. At least, he very much hopes it will be disproven.

He knows that the entire mission files are on the ship. Most of them are open access to a sentinel. Some are classified, such as the personnel files that he hacked before. And then there are a series of files that are only to be actioned upon arrival at New Earth. These are files that contain information about landing procedures, sequences, settlement plans, security measures, and so on. He knows these are important because he has glimpsed them, hidden behind firewalls that it would take him years to crack, unless he happened to have the right access codes.

He digs down into the network until he's faced with the screen demanding the sixteen-digit access code to the mission files.

He stares at the screen and, as he does so, he remembers something else about the number phi—the number being broadcast through space. Phi also underpins something else, one of the most beautiful of shapes: a special kind of spiral known as the Golden or Fibonacci Spiral, one found again, and again and again in nature; in the shells of sea creatures, in the heads of sunflowers, in the branching of plants.

Bowman leans forward and, holding his breath, he types, without even thinking why he knows he has the correct code.

1 6 1 8 0 3 3 9 8 8 7 4 9 8 9 4

The screen turns green for an instant, and a whole new user interface that he has never seen before opens up before him.

And that's when it all unravels. The whole thing: the mission, the sentinels, and his place among them.

 

89

Bowman is wrong about one thing.

He had feared that he was the only sentinel. That what appeared to be the other sentinels was in fact just the ship, generated by the computer, to mimic the actions of his colleagues. He knows that Sentinel Sleep was unbelievably costly to introduce into the mission; maybe they only had the cash for one per ship. Maybe he is the only sentinel aboard the
Song
, that's what he's thinking.

But he's wrong. There are indeed nine other living sentinels on the ship. It's just that he's the only one who's been woken so far. In all of this last forty years, he is the only one, and now he knows why.

They lied about the distance to New Earth. It is not in the constellation of Lyca at all, but much farther away—around ten times farther, to put a number to it.

They have lied about the aging process too. Bowman is aging much faster than he was led to believe. If he had looked more closely at his face during any of his waking cycles, he would have seen lines appearing around his eyes, more gray hairs than his actual years ought to have given him.

As he reads on, Bowman learns the bald truth of his situation.

He will never make it to New Earth. In fact, once he has worked his shift of a hundred years or so, he will die. Only then will Sentinel Seven be activated. Bowman was designated number Six so as not to arouse any notions of being the first in a chain, as the name One might have suggested to him. When he dies, Sentinel Seven will take over for a thousand years of duties, and then Eight, and so on.

They lied about other things, too.

He, like everyone else, had been told there were five Toroid Class IV ships leaving for New Earth, but that too was a lie, told in order to make the members of the
Song
feel less isolated, less alone, because it is well known that such thoughts can seriously undermine confidence and performance in the long run.

The
Song of Destiny
is alone—here will be no other voyages. It is simply too expensive.

They lied when they said New Earth was 98.7 percent like home. He reads now that there is a 65 percent chance it is as close to Earth as they hoped. The chances are high that the planet is something less than perfect for man to colonize. Even on which to survive.

Bowman sits at the console, staring into the nothingness with which he has just been crucified. They lied to him; they lied to everyone. He has a bitter picture in his head of the riots that took place around the launch base on Venture Day. People fighting to be allowed on board, even though they had never come close in the selection procedure. People died in that riot, and all over a lie. If only they'd known the truth, would anyone have signed up at all?

All his life Bowman has wanted to head forward, never looking back, searching for something that always eludes him. Now he knows what it is; he has lied to himself. His whole life, he has lied. Because he
does
want to look back. He wants to be a boy again. He wants his father to be alive, and his mother, but they are dead forever. He wants to fall from the apple tree and land in the wet grass at the end of the sloping lawn outside the house where he grew up, and have his father come and pick him up, as they both laugh about how silly life is.

He won't find that. He will never get back there, back to his childhood, or anything like it. He will die, in space, aboard a ship full of the victims of a terrible lie, approximately 16 thousand trillion kilometers from home.

He cries.

*   *   *

The hours tick away.

His tears have ended.

He stares at the information in front of him, wondering what else is untrue. For one thing, they must have programmed all the clocks and time codes aboard the ship to alter themselves, or future sentinels would know that the mission had been running for far longer than it ought to have been. They must have tampered with telemetry and astro-sextancy. They must have falsified so much.

He needs time to read everything, and the first thing he decides is that if he is going to die in space, it might as well be sooner than later.

He can break into one of the PTPs and make use of the food and other provisions there; there is enough on board each landing ship to feed 102 people for two years, and they are now fifteen people lighter than when they left Earth. He can, likewise, override the oxygen controls to allow him to breath those fifteen people's quota of air.

Maybe after ten years awake, he can slide back into the pod, and let it keep him alive, sort of, dreaming, forever. He could hack into it and make it do that. In fact, he could probably make it do anything, like take him to sleep only when he tells it to, not just once every ten years, automatically.

He is God now, not the Selection Committee. He can do anything he wants.

He hangs his head, and he cries again for a short time.

*   *   *

There is still another matter that Bowman has forgotten. It is only when he finally stands, as his sentinel pod starts to send him warning beeps that it is time to return to sleep, that he remembers it.

Let the pod go to hell
, he thinks.
I'm not sleeping anymore. Not now.

He wants, if nothing else, to know what is happening to his passengers, for that is how he has started to think of them since he met Allandra. There is the question of which of the other sentinels has been waking. And waking, he now knows,
far
ahead of their expected schedule. Waking and killing.

He sits back down again, listening vaguely to the sound of his pod emitting a final series of warning beeps through the clock on the sleeve of his suit, before lapsing into silence.

“Maybe now I can get a little work done,” he says, and starts to punch up the video files from the last four years.

If everything has gone according to plan, he should have better quality image files than before.

He checks the numbers of the eight newly failed pods; he is, for some reason, disturbed to learn that one of them is right next to his own sentinel pod.

He plays the files.

He watches a dark gray suit appear in the field of the camera. His back is toward the lens and Bowman cannot make out the face. The sentinel kneels beside pod 269, and dials out the maintenance drawer.

Bowman's hand moves to his mouth as the sentinel sets up the routine to open the lid.

A few minutes pass but Bowman does not fast-forward the video. He is transfixed, waiting to see what happens, and he wants to see every second. Finally the lid slides open, and he watches in horror as the sentinel pulls from his pocket a Lethno probe, used to test the charge of electromagnetic bolts on the PTPs, holds it against the temple of the man inside, and squeezes the switch.

The body shudders once inside the pod, and Bowman knows that all brain function would have terminated immediately.

The sentinel is already closing pod 269, the drawer sliding shut, and then, as the figure stands and makes ready to leave for his next killing, Bowman's heart falls apart at the sight of the most horrifying thing of all.

He can see the killer's face.

It is him.

 

144

I killed them
, he thinks.

He is horrified and scared, in equal measure.

I killed them all. I killed Allandra.

He thought there was a ghost on the ship with him.

Then he dreamed that the ghosts of the universe, the ghosts of Heaven, were outside, waiting to be spoken with, waiting to communicate. But now he knows the truth;
he
was the one who was floating away, he was the one who was disappearing.

He is the ghost.

*   *   *

It doesn't make sense. He knows he is not a killer. He has no memory of these acts whatsoever. But then, as he knows all too well, it has been getting increasingly hard to remember things. Although he's only been awake for a little over a day and a half since he left Earth, he has slept for forty years. No one has ever studied the long-term effects that this could have on the mind—how could they have done? Who knows what he is now? The evidence is incontrovertible; he has seen himself on screen applying the discharge of a Lethno probe to a man's head. His mind must have separated into two parts.

Then, he thinks, two or
more
.

That would account for the time losses he's been experiencing. He thought he had drifted off at the console while studying spirals. What if he had merely left one part of his mind there while another part stalked through the ship doing unspeakable things?

Have I gone mad?
he asks himself.
Am I really a killer?

He could verify that if he dialed up the video of activity aboard Terminal Base Four during his last waking cycles, maybe see himself leave the Base when he believed he'd been sitting at the console for hours.

He cannot bring himself to see. He wants to watch the video again, but he cannot do that, either. He cannot bear to watch himself murdering the sleeping occupants of the
Song of Destiny,
one by one. Except, it was not one by one. It was six first,
then
one. And then eight.

Six. One. Eight.

0.618

Immediately, he makes the connection. Phi is a remarkable number.

Phi, or
ϕ
, is 1.618, to three places.

It's reciprocal, 1/
ϕ
, is 0.618.

Subtract 1 from
ϕ
and you also get 0.618, the reciprocal.

It is a sign; this number; the number of the broadcast; it is a message, or a challenge, and he will only know which if he follows it.

There and then, he makes up his mind. He knows what to do again; he knows how to act, and he doesn't need to ask anyone else.

*   *   *

He begins to call up the protocols that will enable him to divert the mission. He will take the
Song of Destiny
to the source of the spiral, and confront whatever lies waiting for him there—be it nothing, or ghosts, or God.

 

233

He doesn't think twice.

There is no other option. He could fly on through space, continue the mission to New Earth, and slowly allow part of himself to kill the occupants as they sleep. He could fly on and let the other sentinels take over when he dies. He could tell them the truth about the mission, that it is almost certainly pointless.

Maybe he should program his pod to let him sleep forever, to protect the Longsleepers. He could put everything in his report for Sentinel Seven, let him or her decide what to do about the crazy murderer who went mad in Sentinel Sleep.