Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 19

The first thing I saw beyond the door was as familiar in a way as anything could be; when Mel Fury and I went into the next room I found myself facing two filthy, straggle-haired stick figures.

One of them was me.

The whole opposite wall was metal, shiny and flat enough to be a good mirror. My reflection’s face was a mask of mud interrupted by red scratches and welts, and my arms and legs showed through rents in my pants and jacket. I was in worse shape than Mel.

He did not stop to stare but gestured to the right, where the wall held a matched set of doors.

“It’s a real pain,” he said, “but we have to do it before we’ll be fed dinner. Better get it over with. Take the one next to me.”

He went through a door and closed it behind him. After a moment’s hesitation I went through a neighboring one. I found myself in a little cubicle without windows or furnishings. There was an exit door at the opposite end, and a hatch by my right hand with two handles set above it.

What was I supposed to do next? The door in front of me resisted my push, so after a few moments I turned one of the handles. Before I could move, jets of hot water were hitting me from all sides. I yelped in surprise and turned the handle the other way. The water jets cut off at once.

A shower; except for the controls it was not much different from the low-gravity units on the Cuchulain. The hatches below the controls ought to dispense clean clothes and take away dirty ones.

I emptied my pockets. Walter Hamilton’s book was damp, but it was designed to work in all weathers. And if Paddy Enderton’s computer had been able to survive a night of snow and slush in the bottom of the boat by Lake Sheelin, a brief wetting was unlikely to hurt it. I put them both on a shelf high above the level of the water jets, and stripped to the skin.

Three minutes later, laved in streams of hot water and then dried in the jets of warm air that followed, I felt ready to lie down on the floor of the cubicle and go to sleep. I also felt ready to cry, something I had not done since I was nine years old. It had been a terrible day. Only the conviction that cocky Mel Fury would mock me if I wept kept me dry-eyed.

I finally opened the hatch and placed my wet and filthy clothes inside it. They dropped out of sight, and I had a worrying minute until new ones rolled out of a slit in the hatch’s rear. The clothes were clean, the same light-grey that Mel Fury had been wearing, and by some mystery they were exactly the same size and style as the ones that I had removed, even to being a little bit short in the legs. But there was no sign of shoes. My old, soaked ones had gone, and for the moment I would have to go barefoot.

I retrieved the book and computer from the shelf and looked unsuccessfully for some way to comb my wet hair. At last I gave up and pushed it back off my forehead with my fingers. While I was doing that, the door in front of me opened by itself.

When I went through and saw what was in the room beyond, I had one of those strange moments in life when about eighteen thoughts at once hit you so fast and chaotic you don’t know which came first.

I saw Mel Fury waiting for me, clean and dry and newly dressed—and barefoot—in the middle of a big low-ceilinged room with bright yellow walls and half a dozen doors. Without the coating of mud and grime, his face was pale, as though he had never been out in the sun. I realized that he really hadn’t, compared with me, because Paddy’s Fortune was so far away from Maveen. Around Mel stood a dozen other people. They were all about the same age, all dressed the same, and every one as skinny and pale as Mel. At first glance they looked identical, though I later realized they were all very different. Every one of them was staring expectantly in my direction.

I said people. But then I realized it was not just people. They were females. And not just females. Girls. More girls than I had ever seen in one place in my whole life.

And—at last—I caught on. Mel Fury, now that she was cleaned up, had to be a girl, too, though her hair was close-cropped where the others wore theirs long. I had been fooled by that, but even more by the fact that when I met Mel she was dirty and wild and energetic, running uncontrolled through the jungle growth of Paddy’s Fortune. Girls didn’t do that! Girls were delicate and protected and pampered. Girls were never exposed to any risk of being injured.

And then my other seventeen thoughts came roaring in. Paddy’s Fortune. I never had been able to swallow Doctor Eileen’s idea that Paddy Enderton would have a scrap of interest in Godspeed Base or a Godspeed Drive. But women—or girls who would soon be women—that would be interesting indeed, and worth a fortune, too, if Enderton could play it right. Up on the surface of the world at this very moment were crewmen who shared completely Paddy’s point of view. I had heard them talking aboard the Cuchulain. Except maybe for Danny Shaker, whose thoughts remained a mystery to me, there was no doubt what each one of them was after: Women. And the crewmen above our heads were searching and scouring the planetoid for anything out of the ordinary. One of them, sooner or later, was sure to find himself standing on the access point. When that happened…

“That circle we stood on,” I burst out. “Up on the the surface. Could anybody stand on it, and be carried down here?”

All the girls were staring at me. I had never received so much concentrated attention in my whole life. But Mel Fury answered quickly enough.

“Only humans,” she replied. “Not animals. The sensors won’t respond for them. And you have to stand still for at least half a minute before anything happens.”

“Can it be locked in position? So it won’t work.”

Mel caught on to the reason for my question even if no one else did. She turned questioningly to the tallest girl in the group, who said “I can ask the controller.” But she went on staring at me, and didn’t move until Mel added, “It could be urgent, Sammy. There are other people outside Home. Dangerous people—I saw someone killed. We have to try to close the access points.”

That started a general buzz of excitement. As the tall girl hurried out through one door I was surrounded by everyone else and swept away through another. They all started to talk at once, asking me questions as we went to another room with tables and chairs all around the walls. I had a thousand questions of my own. But everyone had to wait, because Mel Fury pushed me toward a chair, sat down next to me, and said fiercely, “Let him breathe, will you. And eat. He hasn’t had any food for days.”

And then, as hot food appeared from serving hatches in the wall, she sat down next to me—and promptly began to ask questions of her own. The others stayed to eat, listen, and make comments to each other. Apparently I was accepted for the moment as Mel’s prize.

The food looked fine, but it tasted subtly different from anything on Erin or the Cuchulain. I was too starved to be choosy, and in any case the girls seemed to find nothing odd about it. So I ate and ate, and talked and talked. There was plenty to explain: about Erin and the Forty Worlds, about why we had come here, about Danny Shaker and the cutthroat crew of the Cuchulain, about the Godspeed Drive and the search for Godspeed Base.

That last bit stopped them cold. It was clear that they had never even heard of a Godspeed Drive. The chance that this worldlet was Godspeed Base, with a starship somewhere inside it, dropped suddenly to zero. They didn’t even seem interested in the idea of a star drive.

But when I told of Paddy Enderton’s discovery of the scoutship with two dead women on board, the room went completely silent.

“Our people,” Mel Fury said at last. “They left Home to try to find another world with people on it. The controller didn’t want them to go—there had been others, you see, and no one had ever come back. They were the last big ones. But they were determined. And they couldn’t be stopped by us, because they were the oldest. Well, now we are.”

That made no sense at all, but every minute less and less did. I wasn’t just tired at this point, I was exhausted, and with lots of food inside me and the adrenalin level ebbing, no amount of excitement would keep my eyes open much longer.

“You are the oldest?” I made a final effort. “What about your parents?”

But I didn’t get an answer, because at that moment Sammy came hurrying into the room.

“There’s no way of closing the access points permanently,” she said.

“So someone could get in any time?” Mel Fury asked.

“Normally they could.” Sammy gave me a self-satisfied grin. “But the access points remain closed automatically when it’s raining outside. So I asked for the longest surface rain the controller can give us. We’ll have it for six full revolutions of Home.”

I closed my eyes and tried to translate that to a time I was familiar with. My brain would not cooperate—and when I tried to open my eyes, they too refused to obey. I was ready to collapse. And suddenly hands were lifting and carrying me out of the room. I was finally placed face-up on a soft surface, my new clothes were loosened, and my pockets emptied. A dozen hands touched all over my body, and I heard whispers and giggling.

I went on with my hopeless mental struggle to convert six revolutions of Paddy’s Fortune to something I understood. The best I could manage was to decide that it sounded like a long time.

My last thought was an odd sort of satisfaction. I might not be safe, not really. But if the murderous crew of the Cuchulain were still searching for me, out on the surface, they were being soaked by steady rain. I knew how much they would like that.

Serve them right.

Doctor Eileen told me to describe anything I saw that was unfamiliar. Well, here is a fact I learned since I left Erin: When you are at home and things are quiet and something new comes along, you can describe it pretty well; but when everything around you is new, you won’t take it all in no matter how much you want to.

So I’ll just have to do the best I can.

I opened my eyes with only the vaguest idea of where I was, or how much time had gone by since I passed out. Then I lay for a few minutes idly rubbing and scratching myself. Only after a satisfying scratch did two thoughts come drifting into my head.

First, the crew of the Cuchulain, no matter what, must never be allowed to suspect that I had vanished beneath the surface of the planetoid. I was beginning to realize exactly what they would do if they found Mel and the other girls.

Second, I had to meet the controller. The girls inside Home seemed to accept his—or more likely, her—word as law.

The room I was in contained its own bathroom. I used that and came out casually fixing my pants—then finished in a big hurry when I saw Mel Fury sitting on the bed I had just left.

“How did you know I was awake?”

“Monitors.” She pointed up to the ceiling.

I recalled my very personal scratching, and wondered how much she had seen. And were there monitors in the bathroom, too? But that gave me an idea. “Is there any way to see what’s happening outside, up on the surface?”

“Not directly. The controller must have sensors, but I don’t know how to use them.”

The controller again. That was where I had to start. I wanted all my questions about Paddy’s Fortune answered, but it was not the most urgent thing in the world. Top priority was to make sure that the crewmen didn’t find a way in. A close second was to send a message to Doctor Eileen, telling her all that had happened and warning her.

“Can you take me to meet the controller? Right now?”

“Well… if you really have to.”

“I do.”

She stared at me a little oddly, as though a meeting with the controller was to be more shunned than sought. But she led the way out of the room—and into mystery.

Paddy’s Fortune was the worldlet that the Cuchulain had found its way to, and I continued to think of it that way. But Home was really the inside of that worldlet, a series of concentric habitation shells that honeycombed the interior. As Mel led me toward the middle of Home, I lost my grip on reality. I smelled peculiar odors like burning feathers and molten metal, heard horrible (to my ears) music coming out of nowhere, saw a thousand gadgets so unfamiliar I could not even guess their use, and at every turn I watched little blond heads poke around corners, stare at me, and then vanish. They were the other residents in Home. But on the plus side Mel had the time to answer enough questions to satisfy some of my personal curiosity.

For example, Mel and Sammy and the other big girls all turned out to be exactly the same age: fifteen years and two months. No one on Home now was older than that, not since the scoutship left with its pair of nineteen-year-olds. But there were plenty of younger children: ten-year-olds, and six years, and one year. Exactly fifteen of each. It seemed to me that I had seen every one in the past half hour.

“But parents,” I said. “And who looks after the babies?”

Mel Fury didn’t answer in words. She changed her path down the long corridors and moving ramps that spiraled toward the center of Home, to take us past the wombs, creches, nurseries and schoolrooms.

I stared in through viewing windows, to where little mechanical figures like cleaning robots hustled back and forth, feeding and changing and teaching. Not a human in sight, except for the babies themselves. At Mel’s insistence, I inspected an array of fertilized eggs, each with its etched label and in its low-temperature bath.

“They’re all girls!” I said.

She nodded, but she seemed embarrassed. “Well, they are, but they don’t have to be. There’s frozen sperm, loads of it. It doesn’t occupy more than a few cubic millimeters of storage, so you won’t see it.”

And who decided when an egg would be fertilized and a new child added to Home’s population?

Mel told me, but I should have guessed for myself. The same agent who did everything else on Home. Fertilization decisions, along with air content and surface rain and the food supply and each child’s individual education program, were the job of the controller. Mel told me that her own presence out on the surface of Paddy’s Fortune had been an education elective, something that few other girls wanted. She enjoyed the privacy and the wild feeling of the jungle.

Wild, when the location of every crevice—maybe the size of every plant, and the timing of every drop of rain—was decided by the controller?

My growing bewilderment finally ended. “Here we are,” Mel said. “This is the controller’s main room.” She sounded uneasy as she led me to a circular chamber about a quarter of the size of every other one. There was a tall vertical cylinder in the middle, surrounded by a narrow round table and half a dozen angular chairs. Other than that the place was empty.

I turned to Mel, but before I could speak I heard a pleasant female voice. “Sit down,” it said to me, “in the white chair. Make yourself comfortable. As for you, Mel Fury, you will be punished later. You have been warned, many times, about unauthorized trips to the outside. Yet you continue to make them.”

So there was the reason for Mel’s discomfort. And so much for her “education elective.” She had been running wild when she found me, just the way I suspected. The difference that I had sensed between her and the other girls was apparently a real one.

But at the moment I had bigger worries. I sat down in the white middle chair, and at once thin wires as fine as spider silk crept out from its arms to swathe themselves around my body. They tickled my arms and neck, and touched my ears and scalp. “Relax,” the voice said again, “you will not be harmed. This is for inspection only.”

I didn’t relax, but I did kind of collapse and sag down in my seat. Of course I should have realized, long before, that the controller had to be a machine. No human could do the thousand and one jobs that the controller performed. We had control computers on Erin, even if they were not this capable.

Well, why didn’t I realize it? Because so much was different here, it was easy to make the mistake of assuming that nothing learned on Erin was likely to apply.

Anyway, the Home controlling computer really was different. It was kind of creepy, to sit and chat with a machine just as though it was a human being. For one thing, you didn’t know where to look. I stared at the vertical cylinder, for lack of anything better, but I had no reason to believe the controller’s computer “brain,” if it had a brain, sat in there. More likely, the controller was spread all over the interior. For another thing, no computer on Erin was a hundredth as advanced as this. If it hadn’t been for Mel, sitting there and talking to that machine as though it was the most natural thing in the world, I don’t know if I could have handled it. But anything she could do, I decided I could match.

So I talked with the controller. I didn’t think it was God, though, the way that Mel and the other girls seemed to. She had bossed me around since we met, any chance she got, but now even feisty Mel sat meek as a mouse. No wonder. I learned that the controller set their whole lives for them—or tried to: everything but the time they would die, and maybe that, too, eventually, although they had no experience of it, because no one had been developed in the wombs and born inside Home until twenty years ago, when the controller had initiated a female birth program.

“Why no boys?” I asked, when it told me that everyone was a girl. It seemed like an obvious question, but Mel stared at me in amazement. To her, I guess it seemed natural that people should be female.

“My analysis of Home and its resources suggested that male children might actually be physically preferred here,” the controller said softly. “Examination of you confirms this. However, for psychological reasons the female choice was made, at least until such time as external contact had been reestablished; which has now occurred.”

That statement about male children being physically preferred turned out to be important, but I missed its significance at the time because I thought that the “external contact” the controller was talking about was Danny Shaker and his crew. I was struck dumb with horror, until I realized the controller was actually referring to me. But recalling yesterday, which today’s weird events had made like some awful dream, started me worrying again about Doctor Eileen and the rest of our party. I had to warn them that Danny Shaker and his men were killers, and now the presence of two dead bodies on Paddy’s Fortune provided evidence that could not be talked away.

I decided it would take days to explain everything to the controller—I had been explaining for Mel since we met, and I still hadn’t finished. So this time I didn’t even want to try.

Instead I said, “I need to return to the outside, as soon as possible, and leave this world.”

It was a reasonable request, and I saw no reason why the controller would object. After all, I wasn’t one of its precious charges, raised from some frozen fertilized egg.

But instead of answering at once, which it had done in every other case, the controller remained silent. To my relief, the web of wires that had enmeshed my body retreated back into the arms of the chair. I was free to wriggle nervously in my seat—and I did.

“Tell me why you came here,” the controller said at last.

So much for my idea of a quick and easy escape to the surface. I had to start all over again, with the whole messy explanation that I had given Mel.

This time it went a lot faster, though, because unlike Mel the controller didn’t interrupt me with a stupid question every two seconds. It knew all about the Forty Worlds, in far more detail than I did. It also apparently contained detailed data on every worldlet in the Maze. I decided it was a lot smarter than Mel and the other girls—particularly when I got to the Godspeed Drive and our journey to search for it.

The controller took that idea in its stride. “This world was established as a biological reserve against future need, which has now arrived, never as a reservoir of space hardware. There is no Godspeed Drive on Home.”

That news was going to devastate Doctor Eileen—if ever I had the chance to tell her. And if I had been Mel Fury, I would not have been pleased by my role as part of a sort of as-required supply house for humans. But the controller was continuing: “There may be no Godspeed Drive anywhere in the Maveen system. If there is, that information is not available here.”

And then, just when I was ready to sink into the gloom of a wasted months-long journey, it added: “There is, however, a logical place to look. There are several related references in data storage that possess space hardware associations.”

I could hardly breathe. “References—to places? In the Forty Worlds system?”

“It is not clear that all are places. They are names: the Net, the Needle, the Eye… The Net lies within the Forty Worlds system, and even within the Maze itself. It carries a designation as a ‘hardware reservoir.’ ”

“Do you know how to get there?”

“Coordinates are available for the Net. However, the information is not easily conveyed orally. You must use a navigation aid. This one is appropriate.”

A little machine no bigger than my hand came scuttling out of nowhere and extruded long, spindly legs that brought it up to the level of the table. Just when I was thinking that this was the most peculiar-looking navigation aid I could imagine, it reached out a thin arm and placed in front of me a flat black oblong and a little silver box.

I was speechless as I fumbled in my pocket and brought out an identical copy of the plastic object sitting before me: Paddy Enderton’s mystery “calculator/display unit.”

Naturally, I then had to explain how I came by that, and again reveal the news of the death of the two women on the scoutship. This time I was wide awake instead of totally exhausted, so I could observe the distress on Mel’s face. The controller’s voice showed no sign of emotion, and I assume it could feel none—or perhaps it just had no way to show it.

“Take the new one,” it said, when I was done. “This navaid has been loaded with information about the Net itself, also with all that is known, conjectured, or rumored about the Godspeed Drive. Connect the aid to your navigator and it will define an optimum trajectory to the Net. Take the silver box also. The capsules that it contains are diet supplements. Swallow one each morning after you leave here, until none is left.”

After you leave. I was going to be allowed to leave Paddy’s Fortune! And the sooner the better. I absolutely had to get all this new information back to Doctor Eileen and Jim Swift.

But there were problems. I picked up the little plastic wafer and fingered the familiar indents on its surface. “We don’t have a navigator on our ship. I mean, we do—but it’s a person, not a machine. I don’t have anywhere to connect this.”

“Then you must employ it in manual mode. You know how to interact with it directly?”

“Not really. I tried for days and days.”

“I know how!” Mel Fury exclaimed. “I’ve trained on those for years. I can do it.”

Maybe she had, and maybe she could, but the last thing I wanted was Mel Fury up on the surface with me, or worse yet on the Cuchulain. She was a female. One sniff of a woman—or even a young girl—and the crew of the Cuchulain would be wild beasts. Mel had no idea of the risk she proposed to run.

Fortunately, the controller was on my side. “You appear to be suggesting that you might accompany Jay Hara away from Home,” it said to Mel. “That is forbidden. The biological reserve must not be further depleted.” And then to me, “She cannot go, but you are expendable. Therefore you must learn to use the navaid yourself. It should not be difficult, even for someone of your limited capacities.”

I realize it makes no sense to dislike a machine, but there are limits. After those last couple of cracks, I would never feel the same about the controller of Paddy’s Fortune.