Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 13

Twenty-four hours after the Cuchulain started our outward journey, the inside of my head began to sort itself out. So much had happened to me, in so short a time, that it had produced what Doctor Eileen called an “experience overload.” I didn’t have a name for it. All I knew was that I had seen masses of stuff and I’d had it all explained to me—but often I only understood when I met the same thing for a second or third time. Even then I had problems.

For instance, before we left the Upside hangar Danny Shaker had shown me over the interior of the ship. We had visited the engine room, and the drive unit at the far end—off limits during powered flight to everyone except suicides—and we had been all through the labyrinth of the expandable cargo hold, corkscrewed down now into its tightest form. Shaker had pointed out the electrical supply system, and the air duct system, and the various vacuum escape systems, and he even explained the waste disposal apparatus in the living area. But it was only late the next day, wandering around with Doctor Eileen, that I began to get any feeling for what was where.

And then it became really embarrassing. Doctor Eileen knew I had been through the ship before, and naturally she asked me questions. Half the time, I had no idea of the answer.

“Look at the mess there,” she said, when we were in the living quarters and walking along a tight little corridor. “Why is that room different from everywhere else?”

The corridor was clean. But one room that led right off it was filthy, coated in what looked like years or decades of dust.

I shook my head. Shaker had shown me that same room, and said something about it. But as to what he had said…

I went inside, bent down, and pulled the air duct grille away from the wall. It was a mistake. Dust clouded around me, in my hair and up my nose. The duct tunnel itself was clear, and I could hear air sighing along it. I remembered Danny Shaker telling me that the air duct passages were usually a couple of feet wide. They formed an alternative programmed pathway for the cleaning machines, and they could also be used in an emergency by humans as an escape route from one part of the ship to another. But none of that explained why the cleaning robots had chosen to ignore this particular room completely, while diligently collecting the dust and trash everywhere else.

I came out of the room sneezing and feeling like a moron. I had been told, and I knew I had been told. But I had been told a thousand and one other things, too, at a time when I was sick and nauseated from a first exposure to free-fall, and giddy with the novelty of everything. I simply didn’t remember.

We didn’t get an explanation until that evening when Danny Shaker came by to report on his progress in producing a trajectory for us.

That’s another thing that I ought to have mentioned earlier, right when it happened. But I didn’t, so rather than fiddle with the record back there, I’m going to stick it in here.

It had happened on the previous day, before we had been heading out from Upside for an hour. Danny Shaker came to see Doctor Eileen as we were preparing for our first night of sleep in low gravity.

“I want to remind you of your promise, Doctor,” he said. “You indicated that you would tell me our destination as soon as we were on the way.”

“You certainly haven’t wasted much time in asking.” Doctor Eileen sounded more amused than annoyed.

“That’s because I don’t want to waste your money or your time. As soon as I know where we are going, I can calculate an optimal trajectory. At the moment, though, for all I know we have the Cuchulain heading in exactly the wrong direction.”

I knew from what Doctor Eileen had told me that this was a crucial moment. Once she informed Danny Shaker where we were going, there was no way to keep the information secret. A message from our ship to another one, closer to the destination, might allow someone to reach Paddy’s Fortune ahead of us. On the other hand, there was no way to hold the information to ourselves indefinitely.

The doctor knew all that. She merely nodded, and held out a folded slip to Shaker. “Here are the coordinates. The position in orbit is given for midnight today, Erin Standard Time.”

Shaker unfolded the slip and stared at it in silence for a few moments. Then he placed the paper in his pocket and sat down, uninvited, opposite Doctor Eileen. “That is an orbit in the Maze.” His face was as calm as ever. “Do you know what that means?”

“I thought I did. From the way you ask the question, I suspect that I do not. Do you have trouble taking us there?”

“No more trouble than to anywhere else in the Maze. And no less, either.”

“So you can take us?”

“Certainly. What I can’t do is take you there quickly. How much do you know about the Maze, Doctor?”

“That it’s hundreds of different bodies, of all sizes. That their orbits aren’t accurately known, for any but the biggest ones.”

“Change hundreds to millions, Doctor Xavier, and you have a better picture. The Maze is a great jumble of rocks, everything from midsized planetoids to pebbles. Constantly perturbed by the gravitational fields of Antrim and Tyrone, and mostly uncharted. A ship can certainly go there. But unless you want to risk running into a thousand-ton boulder at a relative velocity of a few miles a second, and shattering your ship and yourself to bits, you don’t fly through the Maze. You creep through it. That’s why I say I can get you there—eventually.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.” Shaker stood up and patted his pocket. “I have to feed these coordinates into the navigation computer, and see what we come up with as the best approach trajectory. The Maze is complicated. It may take us a while. I am a coward, you see, by both experience and natural inclination.”

Then he winked at me, as though he was joking and I knew it, and left without another word. And now, twenty-four hours after that first discussion of where we were going, he was back.

We were sitting around the table, me between Doctor Eileen and Walter Hamilton, with Jim Swift and Duncan West opposite us, and an empty seat between them.

“You won’t like this any too well,” Shaker began, direct as usual. “We’ve done the trajectory calculation, Pat O’Rourke and I, and the safest route to where you want to go has to skirt out wide of the Maze. It will take us nearly four weeks.”

I don’t know if he could read the doctor’s wince, but I could. In making her plans she had hoped to be out and home again to Xavier House in less time than that. But all she did was nod, and say, “Keep it safe, Captain, that’s the first priority.” And then, in what seemed like an odd change of subject, “Tell me, is the Cuchulain a safe ship?”

Shaker must have been as puzzled as I was by the question, but he didn’t let his feelings show any more than she had. “I certainly believe it is,” he said, “or I would not fly in it. As I told you, in space cowardice is a virtue. But why do you ask?”

“Jay and I did a quick tour earlier today. I noticed that some areas of the ship are neglected and dirty. It made me wonder how well your central control computer is working.”

Shaker sighed, and sat down between Uncle Duncan and Jim Swift. “Doctor Xavier, I believe that the Cuchulain is perfectly spaceworthy, at least for the moment. But I don’t pretend that the ship is as good as new. It has been in use, more or less continuously, for hundreds of years. There is natural wear, in everything from main drive to maintenance, and when certain things go wrong we do not have enough knowledge of the original design to fix them. I’m well aware that some parts of the ship are being neglected by the cleaning robots, and I assume that the problem lies in the controlling software in the ship’s main computer. But I have no one able to understand that software, and safely change it.”

His answer, oddly enough, seemed to please Doctor Eileen. She was nodding.

“Captain Shaker,” she said, “you have been very patient with me. You have never asked me the natural question: Why are we going to the Maze? But I think that now you deserve an answer.”

Doctor Eileen really liked Danny Shaker, I could tell she did. There was a lighter tone in her voice when she talked to him, and a different little smile on her face. It did not surprise me. I felt the same way myself. He was different from any man I had ever met in and around Toltoona.

“Let me start by asking a question,” she went on. “You and I both know that the Isolation is real, and that before it happened there was travel between the stars. Materials and people came to Erin from far away, from planets around other stars. Why do you and your crew think they stopped coming?”

“Me and my crew? To be honest, Doctor, I doubt if anyone else on this ship spends two minutes a year worrying that question. But I do. I think there must have been some great emergency, far from Maveen. All the Godspeed ships were called there to help. And every one was destroyed. Perhaps in a great battle, but much more likely in some natural disaster. Maybe the whole fleet was turned to vapor in one flash of a supernova. Maybe they were all trapped around a chasm singularity, and they are still there. But we don’t know. And I have to agree with my crew: Without real information, guesswork like this is no better than a game.”

“I totally concur. But what do you think happened to the other worlds, all the other destinations served by the Godspeed ships?”

That made Danny Shaker’s smooth forehead wrinkle, and he crossed his arms to massage his biceps through the sleeves of his blue jacket. “I don’t like to think too much about that. I’ve been to libraries in Skibbereen and Middletown. There’s not much left in the general data banks, but you get the feeling that our survival on Erin after the Isolation was not easy.”

“That’s a prize understatement, if ever I heard one.” Walter Hamilton had been sitting aloof, still not fully over his spacesickness but much improved in the tenth-gravity field of our living quarters. Now he was showing signs of life.

“The first generation after Isolation survived by an eyelash,” he went on. “Without the space launch system, and the local space fleet, and the access to minerals and light metals from the Forty Worlds…”

He hiccuped, put his hands on his stomach, and lapsed back to silence.

“So we came through—just.” Danny Shaker turned again to Doctor Eileen. “But you know that we’re not really in the clear. The records show that every human on Erin, and many of our most useful plants and animals, came here from somewhere else. We’re not native to the planet. It’s not right for us. We keep struggling along, but we do it by hauling in what we need from the Forty Worlds. And we do it with a fleet of ships that can’t be replaced, and gets older and more worn every year. I know that from personal experience—every year, something else goes wrong with the Cuchulain.

“But the old records make another fact even clearer. Of all the planets settled and colonized by humans, Erin is the most like Earth, the most like the original home world. So I think—and as I said, I don’t like to think about this too much—I think that we have been very lucky. We have survived. Maybe a handful of other planets have, too.” He glanced my way, and this time there was no wink or smile. “But for most of them, and for the future generations on Erin—”

“I agree with every word you say.” Doctor Eileen cut him off before he could finish the sentence, I think because I was present. “And now I’ll tell you why I’m asking you to fly us into the middle of the Maze. I believe we will find evidence, on the body whose coordinates I gave you, of something new about the Godspeed Drive.”

“Something new?” Shaker’s face was impassive again. “What?”

“I can’t tell you—because I don’t know. It could be as little as an old base, empty and deserted. Or it could be as much as a whole ship, with a Drive intact. But as I’m sure you’ll agree, anything about the Godspeed Drive has to be investigated. Erin’s future may depend on it.”

“Indeed it may.” Danny Shaker stood up. “I appreciate your sharing this information with me.”

“You’ve earned it. And of course, you are free to pass what I have said on to your crew.”

Danny Shaker’s mouth quirked, and there was again a gleam of humor in his eyes and mouth. “I will certainly do that, Doctor. But I ought to be honest with you, and say that I do not expect them to show much interest—unless we find a ship that’s designed for in-System use, and might replace the Cuchulain with something newer. They’re a pretty practical bunch of people, my crewmen—and I’m glad of it. Give me a crew that keeps the waste disposal system working, and I’ll take them any time over a group that spends their energy on future worries.”

He was turning to go, but Duncan West, who had been sitting blank-faced through all the conversation, suddenly spoke. “I’ll bet it’s not that,” he said.

Doctor Eileen stared at him as if he were a statue that had just come to life. “Not what?”

I understood her reaction. Uncle Duncan never contributed to such general discussions of the past and future.

“Not the computer software,” he said. “I bet it’s not that that’s causing the problem with the cleaning robots. I’m no computer specialist, but I’ve never heard of a glitch that could just drop individual rooms off, here and there, and leave the rest serviced.”

“What else could it be?” Danny Shaker was staring at Duncan, too, as though he had never seen him before.

“I don’t know. But I’d be more than willing to take a look.”

“A look? No touching the computer, you realize—hardware or software.”

“Of course not. I told you, I don’t know computers. Well?”

Danny Shaker shook his head at first in refusal, but then he gave a what-do-I-have-to-lose shrug of his shoulders. He turned to Doctor Eileen. “Can you show him the place you were talking about?”

“I think so. But Jay could do it better.”

Danny Shaker raised an eyebrow at me. “Jay?”

“I’m sure I can.”

“Then let’s go.”

I led the two men away, suddenly unsure of myself. I had been there twice, but I’d seen proof that spacesickness made me forget things. There was a lot of relief in me when I opened a door, and revealed the dusty and neglected room beyond it.

Uncle Duncan went in and stared around for half a minute, a vacant look on his face. “How would they enter and leave?—I mean the cleaning robots.”

Danny Shaker did not speak. He just pointed to a little panel, low on the far wall. Uncle Duncan walked forward without another word, leaving tracks in the deep dust, and knelt in front of the panel. He slid it carefully to one side. “It doesn’t stick.”

“I’m sure we checked that. I feel sure it’s the computer, hardware or software.”

But Duncan was shaking his head, and lying flat to stick his head past the open panel. “The cleaners come right through here.” His voice was muffled. “Everything up to the back of the panel is vacuumed and polished. Which means…”

He wriggled back a foot or two, and began to feel carefully around the rear side of the panel’s perimeter. After a few moments he grunted, rolled over onto his back, and inched his way forward until his head had again vanished behind the panel. His hands went up.

“Here we are.”

“Did you find something?” I couldn’t see what he was doing in there.

“Inhibitor circuit.” He had his forearms close together, and he seemed to be pushing hard on something. “Met this sort of thing—before.” His voice was uneven, grunting with effort. “Seen it back home. Break—in strip. See, Jay,”—he finally brought his arms down, and wiggled his way back out—“you see, Jay, there’s times when people don’t want cleaning robots in a room. Maybe they’re using it themselves for something that needs privacy, or maybe they have something in there that they’re worried about because it’s super-fragile or valuable. So some rooms have an inhibitor circuit strip that you can turn on. It sits just where a cleaning robot enters the room, and it inhibits the robot, tells it not to go in. The normal condition has the inhibitor turned off, so the room gets cleaned. But if a circuit cross-connect goes bad, like it did here, then you can get the inhibitor permanently on…”

He stood up and dusted himself off. The hair on the back of his head was thick with grime. “Well, that’s it. We won’t know for sure, of course, until the cleaners come through again.”

The whole thing, from our entry into the room until I was helping Duncan to dust himself off, had taken no more than three minutes.

Danny Shaker’s face was a picture. “Do you do this sort of thing often?”

“I make my living at it—I don’t mean cleaning machines, I mean with all sorts of mechanical fixes.”

“Then would you like to earn some money while we’re on the way to the Maze? If you would, I’ll have Tom Toole add you to the ship’s pay roster. We have a hundred little things that need fixing, all over the Cuchulain.”

“Sounds good to me. No promises, though. And no computer work—I’m just a tinkerer.”

Duncan was as laid back as ever. I don’t really think he cared much about the money, but he sure did like to fiddle with things.

Anyway, from that moment on he began to work with the crew of the Cuchulain, just as though he had been one of them for years. And every day he had a meeting with Danny Shaker, to discuss problems and progress.

It was typical Uncle Duncan. No matter where he was, or what was going on, he always managed to make his easygoing way right to the center of things. I envied him, and I wondered how he did it.