Forever Free (14 page)

She liked studying the controls, a complex maze of readouts, buttons, dials, and so forth, arrayed along a four meter panel with two two-meter wings. She knew what everything was and did through her ALSC training, the way I knew how to fly a shuttle, but it was good to reinforce that crammed-in expertise with experience and observation in real time.

(One evening I asked her how many bells and whistles she thought there were on those eight meters of control board. She closed her eyes for about five minutes and then said, "One thousand two hundred thirty-eight.")

She chose to be on from 0400 to 1200, so we always met for lunch when she got off. We'd usually throw something together at our place, rather than go down to the "zoo," the cafeteria. Sometimes we'd have company. Back on MF we always had lunch with Charlie and Diana on Tuesdays, and saw no reason to change that ritual.

The second week out, I made potato and leek soup, for the first but not the last time—we'd be limited, for several months, to the vegetables Teresa and her crew had been able to grow in zerogee. So no tomatoes or lettuce for a few months.

Charlie showed up first, and we sat down to our ongoing chess game. One move apiece, and Marygay and Diana came in together.

Marygay looked at the board. "You ought to dust that every now and then."

I gave Diana a kiss. "How's the doctor business?"

"God, you don't want to know. I spent most of the morning exploring the rectum of one of your favorite people."

"Eloy?" I knew he had a problem.

She wagged a finger. "Confidentiality. I noticed a lot of vowels in his name, though."

Eloy Macabee was a strange abrasive man who called me almost every afternoon with some complaint or suggestion. He was the keeper of the chickens, though, so you had to give him some leeway. (Fish and chickens were the only animals we'd had aboard in zerogee. Fish can't tell the difference and chickens are too dumb to care.)

"Actually, you should know. Both of you," she said to Marygay as they both sat down at the table. "We have a small epidemic on our hands."

I turned up the heat on the soup and stirred it. "A virus?"

"I wish. A virus would be easy." Marygay poured coffee. "Thanks. It's depression. I've treated twenty-some people the last three days."

"That is an epidemic," Charlie said.

"Well, people do catch it from each other. And it can be deadly; suicide."

"But we expected it. Allowed for it," Marygay said. "Not so soon, though, nor so many." She shrugged. "I'm not worried about it yet. Just puzzled."

I ladled the soup into bowls. "Do the victims have anything in common?"

"Unsurprisingly, it's mostly people who don't have real jobs, who aren't involved in the day-to-day running of things." She took a notebook out of her pocket and tapped a few numbers. "Just occurred to me … none of them are veterans, either."

"Not too surprising either," Charlie said. "At least we know what it's like, being cooped up together for years at a time."

"Yeah," I said, "but not in years. You'll be seeing some of us before long."

"Good soup," Marygay said. "I don't know. I'm feeling more and more comfortable, now that I'm used to … "

"Bill," I said.

"Yes. Shipboard wasn't the worst part of the war. This is like 'old home week,' as we used to say. But without Taurans to worry about."

"One," Diana said. "But it's really no problem, not yet."

"Keeps to itself." I hadn't seen it five times.

"It must be lonely," Marygay said. "Separated from its group mind."

"Who knows what goes through their heads. "

"Throats," Diana said.

I knew that. "Just an expression." I made the kissing sound for the ship. "Continue Mozart." Soft strains of a lute being chased by woodwinds.

"He was German?" Diana said.

I nodded. "Maybe Prussian."

"He was still being played in our time. It sounds strange to my ear, though."

I called the ship again. "How much of your music comes from before the twentieth century?"

"In playing time, about seven percent. In titles, about five percent."

"Good grief. Only one out of twenty I can listen to."

"You ought to sample the others," Charlie said. "Classicism and romanticism return in cycles."

I nodded, but kept my opinion to myself. I had sampled a few centuries. "Maybe we should switch jobs around. Give the depressed people something significant to do."

"Could help. We wouldn't want to be too obvious about it."

"Sure," Marygay said. "Put dysfunctional people in all the important positions."

"Or put them in suspended animation," Charlie said. "Table the problem for forty thousand years."

"Don't think I haven't considered asking for that."

"We couldn't just tell everybody there's a problem?" I said. "They're intelligent adults."

"In fact, two of the patients are children. But no; I think that would cause even more depression and anxiety. "The problem is that depression, and anxiety for that matter, are both behavioral problems and biochemical ones. But you don't want to treat a short-term problem by altering a person's brain chemistry. We'd wind up with a ship full of addicts. Including the four of us."

"The mad leading the mad," Charlie said.

"Ship of fools," Marygay said.

I kissed for the ship and asked, "If we all went insane, would you be able to carry out the mission?"

"Some of you are already insane, though perhaps my standards are too high. Yes, if the captain so ordered, I could lock the controls and conduct the mission without human mediation."

"And if the captain were insane?" Marygay asked. "And the two co-captains?"

"You know the answer to that, Captain."

"I do," she said quietly, and took a sip of wine. "And you know what? I find it depressing."

The next day, we had something more depressing to worry about than depression.

I was in my office on the common floor, doing the flunky job of tallying people's requests for various movies for afternoon and evening showings. Most of them I'd never heard of. Two people asked for A Night to Remember and Titanic, which would do wonders for morale. Space icebergs. Hadn't worried about them in days.

The Tauran appeared at my door. I croaked a greeting at it, and glanced at my watch. Five minutes later and I would have escaped to lunch.

"I did not know whether to bring this problem to you or the captain or the sheriff."

"The sheriff?"

"You were closest."

"What problem?"

It made an agitated little dance. "A human has tried to kill me."

"Good God!" I stood up. "Who is it?"

"He is the one called Charlton."

Cal, of course. "Okay. I'll get the sheriff and we'll go find him."

"He is in my quarters, dead."

"You killed him?"

"Of course. Wouldn't you?"

I called Marygay and the sheriff and told them to come down immediately. "Were there any witnesses?"

"No. He was alone. He said he wanted to talk to me."

"Well, the ship will have seen it."

It bobbed its head. "To my knowledge, the ship does not monitor my quarters."

I kissed for the ship and asked it. "That's correct. The Tauran's quarters were improvised out of storage. I was not designed to monitor storage."

"Did you see Cal Charlton headed in that direction recently?"

"Charlton got on the lift at 11:32 and it went down to the storage level."

"Was he armed?"

"I could not tell."

"He tried to kill me with an axe," the Tauran said. "I heard glass break, and he came running in. He got the axe from the fire station outside my quarters."

"Ship, can you confirm that?"

"No. If he had pulled the fire alarm, I would have known that." Well, that was an interesting fact.

"So you took the axe away from him?"

"It was simple. I heard the glass break, and correctly interpreted that. I stepped behind the door. He never saw me."

"So you killed him with the axe."

"Not actually. I believe I broke his neck." It demonstrated with a convincing karate-like stroke.

"Well, that's … it could be worse."

"Then, to be sure, I took the axe and severed his head." It made a gesture like a shrug. "That's where the brain is."

You don't want to be disrespectful of the dead, but it was a good thing the Tauran hadn't killed someone anybody liked. Cal was kind of a loose cannon when he was younger, and although he seemed to have calmed down in recent years, he did have outbursts. Married three times, never for very long. In retrospect, it's clear we shouldn't have brought him along; if he hadn't been in on it from the beginning, he probably wouldn't have been chosen, in spite of his many useful talents.

He was one of Diana's depression patients, it turned out, but when we looked over his belongings we found that he had taken one pill and then quit. Two days later, he tried to kill Antres 906.

If everyone aboard had liked Cal, we would have had a lynch mob. As it was, the council agreed with the sheriff that it was an unambiguous case of self-defense, and there was no public disagreement with that. So we were spared the knotty problem of a trial between species. No Tauran had ever committed a crime on MF. Antres 906 claimed that the Taurans had no equivalent to the human legal system, and it appeared to me that it didn't really grasp what a trial was. If there are no individuals in your race, what constitutes crime and punishment—or morality or ethics, for that matter?

Anyhow, Antres 906 was in a kind of existential solitary confinement already, by choice. Whatever "choice" means to a Tauran; I suppose they normally have their equivalent of the Whole Tree, and just follow its orders without question.

In solitary, but not alone. One of the council was always with it for several days after the killing, protecting it, armed with the tranquilizer rifle. It was a lot more time than I'd ever spent with a Tauran, and Antres 906 didn't mind talking.

One time, I brought along the five-page document from Earth, sentencing us to stay out of space. I asked it about that mysterious last line: "Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable."

"I don't understand this," I said. "Is it supposed to be a general statement about reality?"

It rubbed its neck in an almost human gesture, which I knew meant I'm thinking. "No. Not at all." It lightly ran its long finger over the Braille twice more.

"Our languages are very different, and the written language is subtle. The translation is incomplete, because … " It rubbed the line again.

"I don't understand human jokes, but I think this is something like a joke. When you say something and mean something different."

"What words would you use?"

"Words? The words are accurate. They are familiar, a saying in what you would call our religion.

"But when we use them, they are not inflected this way, which is what makes me think of your jokes. The word 'unknowable' here, it means, or rhymes with, 'unnamable,' or 'nameless.' Which is sort of like fate, or God, in human terms."

"It's supposed to be funny?"

"Not at all, no, not in this inflection." It handed the paper back to me. "Normally, it is meant to be an expression about the complexity of the universe."

"That's reasonable enough."

"But this inflection is not a generalization. It's directed at you, I suppose the one hundred forty-eight of you. Or maybe even all humans. And it is … an admonition? A warning."

I read the English again. "Warning that we're headed for the unknowable?"

"Either that or the other way around: the unknowable is headed for you. The nameless."

I thought about that. "It could just be talking about relativity, then. It gets pretty mysterious."

It scraped out a syllable of negation. "Not for us."

It was little things at first. No pattern.

A whole bed of oysters stopped growing. The other beds were okay. It only interested me academically, since I had an oyster once and decided once would do it for me. But I helped Xuan and Shaunta run environmental tests, having been a fish farmer in another life, myself, and there wasn't one molecule of difference that we could detect between the affected bed and the others. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the oysters, except that they refused to grow beyond thumbnail size.

We finally decided to sacrifice the bed and harvest them immature, making about ten liters of soup, which I declined to savor. Then we drained and sterilized the pool and reseeded it.

All the movies and cubes that began with the letter C were missing. No Casablanca or Citizen Kane. But an article would preserve them, so we still had The Cat Women from Mars and A Cunt for All Seasons, so some ancient culture was preserved.

Little things.

The temperature regulator on the children's pool refused to work. It would run hot one day and not at all the next. Lucio and Elena took it apart and put it back together, and so did Matthew Anderson, who had an affinity with such things. But it never did work, and Elena took it out of the system altogether after she tested the water one morning and it was scalding. The kids didn't seem to mind the cold water, but it made them a little more noisy.

Something happened to the floor of the handball court. It got tacky; it was like trying to move around on half-dried glue. We stripped it and revarnished it, but of course it was the same varnish, and soon after it dried, it became tacky again.

That wouldn't have seemed important; just an unfortunate choice of materials, but it was the same varnish we used on all of the ship's fiber surfaces, and it only had gotten tacky in that one location. Handball players do sweat. As if weight lifters did not.

Then a small thing happened that had no reasonable explanation at all. It could only have been an elaborate but pointless practical joke: the air was sucked out of a food storage locker.

Rudkowski sent a report to me, annoyed, and I went down to look at the thing. It was a grain storage locker, free-standing, with no possible connection to vacuum.