Homegoing

Chapter 4

Although on the ship’s plans the seven-twelfths of its cubage given over to the propulsion systems is described as “fuel storage,” that isn’t quite right. The three drive motors take up no more than a twelfth of a twelfth of that space, and the real fuel takes even less. The fuel for the Hakh’hli drive comes in three lumps. Each one, now, is about the size of a Hakh’hli’s head. They are small, but they are heavy. Each one masses something like four by ten to the fourteenth grams. Although they are matter, they are not normal, baryonic matter, which is composed at root of nothing but up and down quarks. The fuel of the Hakh’hli ship is what Earth physicists called “strange” matter, because it is made up in equal parts of up, down, and strange quarks combined. It is the most violently energetic substance known. What takes up most of the space in the “fuel compartment” is simple hydrogen gas, there for no other purpose than to be fired out of the ship’s nozzles at near light speed when driven by the energies of the strange matter. What takes up the rest of the space is the containment for the fuel itself. Those basketball-sized fuel elements need bracing to keep them in place, because they are heavy. They weigh as much as all the rest of the ship combined, and, since they are what they are, they could not be kept in a galvanized-iron tank. Strange matter has to be held by electromagnetic fields, which themselves have to be braced against the fabric of the ship. Fortunately for the ship’s designers, the fuel core weighs nothing at all when the ship is at rest—because nothing does—and when the drive is in operation the back-pressure against the core is exactly equal to the drive thrust that moves the ship. Newton’s laws of equal and opposite motion hold good here, too. When the core is activated the strange quarks boil off to heat the hydrogen working fluid and shove the ship along as it accelerates, and the masses are in balance. There is enough strange-matter fuel to last for a long, long time. It has been powering the ship for 3000 years, and it is good for 10,000 more before it is used up. In fact, it never will be used up. One of the strangest things about strange matter is that the more you use it, the more you have left; and that is a problem that has been worrying the Hakh’hli on the ship for some centuries.

Sandy had never seen the drive engines. No one on the ship did except for the specially bred drive engineers, who managed to live (though not very long) in the residual radiation that would have killed anyone else, human or Hakh’hli, in hours. Sandy had never desired to be one of them. What he did desire was to be allowed to pilot the great interstellar ship itself. Naturally there was no chance of that. Sandy wasn’t supposed to pilot the landing ship, either, when the time came for him and all his cohort at last to brave the garbage barrier that surrounded the Earth and drop down onto its surface. Piloting the lander was Polly’s job, though any of the others could take over. But the flight simulator that all the members of his cohort trained on—ah, that was another matter.

What made it possible for Sandy to sneak in a few lessons was that flight-simulation took place right after the midday meal and its consequent stun time. Since Sandy was physiologically exempt from stun time he could get there before any of the others. It helped, too, that the instructor in charge was not the smartest Hakh’hli on the ship. The reason he was there was that he had actually been in the crew that was preparing to land somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system. They never did land, because there wasn’t anything big enough to land on, but he was the closest the Hakh'hli had to an experienced lander pilot. Although he had never been authorized to let Sandy try his hand at pilotage, he had never been ordered not to, either. With a little wheedling, Sandy got past him and again took his place in the simulator capsule.

Sandy had brought cushions with him and used them to wedge himself into the kneeling-seat that had never been designed to accommodate a mere human anatomy. For a quarter of a twelfth-day—no, he corrected himself; for about twenty minutes, in the Earth reckoning of his new wrist watch—he was able to go through the whole sequence, from the magnetic-repulsion “launch” of the capsule from its recess in the side of the great interstellar ship, through the course-correction that brought it over the Earth’s pole in a descending slant, through the dodging of space debris and the buffeting of atmospheric entry, and to a good, or at least not catastrophic, landing on a level, snow-covered plain between high mountains. The simulator made it all real. When the “lander” lurched away from the mother ship—pistons gave it a realistic jolt as it happened—the screens showed the black of space, and the green planet underneath, and the great ship shrinking rapidly away. When he “turned” the lander, the same pistons gave his capsule enough of a twist to match physical sensations with the slipping images on the screens, and they filled in again to suggest the terrible jolting of atmosphere entry.

A session in the lander simulator was as good as any Earthly video game for a young adult, or actually a lot better. It wasn’t good enough, though. When Sandy had to get out to make way for the first real space cadet from his cohort he was sulking. “I don’t see why I can’t fly it down,” he complained to Polly—unwisely, because she gave him a pinch.

“Because you’re too little, and too clumsy, and too dumb!” she told him. “Now get out of the way so I can check out!”

He glowered after her as she climbed in. Obie touched the small of Sandy’s back in sympathy. “I’d let you fly if I could,” he said. Sandy shrugged morosely; they both knew that Obie’s time for influencing anyone else in the cohort had passed with his brief sexual phase. “Well,” Obie said helpfully, “do you want to do something else? I’m last on the list; we’ve got at least a twelfth and a half before my turn.”

“Do what?” Sandy asked.

“We could watch an Earth film,” Obie proposed. “There’s a ‘Star Trek’ I’d like to see again. I like those funny spaceships.”

“No way,” Sandy said positively, because Earthly ideas of nonexistent spaceships weren’t what interested him; if he were going to watch films on his free time he wanted something with prettier girls in scantier clothing. Or alternatively—

He looked around thoughtfully. The four other waiting members of his cohort had started a Questions Game—name all fifty-three states of the U.S.A. in order, left to right, from Guam to Puerto Rico—and were conspicuously shunning both Sandy and Obie. The communications screen was being ignored. “Well,” he said slowly, “there is a film I’d like to see again. Only it isn’t from Earth. It’s Hakh’hli.”

It took Obie a lot of juggling to find the old records Lysander wanted, but when they appeared on the screen even the other members of the cohort gave up their game to cluster around. That wasn’t particularly welcome to Sandy. What he was seeing was a personal matter; most of the times he watched it he did so in private, because he didn’t want anyone else intruding on the yearning he always felt.

It was the record of the discovery of the lost Earth spaceship, half a century before. It showed the detection of the artifact, in orbit around the planet Mars, and the growing images of it as the interstellar ship drew close to investigate.

There wasn’t any need to launch a lander for it; the Hakh’hli had simply sent out an unmanned probe. The cameras on the probe showed the ship growing large, filling the screen. As the probe cautiously circled, the shape of the thing was clear: a torpedo with a great chemical-fuel nozzle at one end, a transparent cone at the other. And behind the transparency of the cone—

Behind the transparency were two figures in spacesuits. They did not move. Their half-silvered visors showed nothing inside.

“Which one is your mother?” Obie asked sympathetically.

“Now, how the hell do I know?” Sandy snarled. But actually he thought he did. The one on the right was smaller than the other, and its spacesuit had a golden sunburst emblazoned on the breast. Earth females, Sandy knew, were more inclined toward personal adornment than the men.

On the screen a sudden red streak of fire lanced out from the probe to the Earthly spaceship. A tiny explosion of white and gold erupted from the ship’s surface.

Sandy winced, even though he knew that it wasn’t an attack but only the routine precaution of lasering a little crater on the hull so that the watching Hakh’hli could analyze its composition before they brought it closer to the big ship itself. The glow darkened and died almost as soon as it flared. It left only a tiny pit in the metal.

Then the probe began its cautious circling of the ship again, stem to stern and roundabout. As it shifted views there were, from time to time, quick glimpses of stars, of part of the rusty disk of Mars far below, even a glint of sunlight reflected from the Hakh’hli interstellar ship itself, hovering many miles away. Sandy saw the probe launch its magnetic grapple, the cable snaking behind as it attached itself to the hull of the Earth derelict.

Then the screen went dark.

“That’s all?” Tanya sniffed. “We don’t see the inside of the Earthie ship?”

“Not in this file,” Obie said. “There’s another file, though. I can get it for you if you like, Sandy.”

Sandy shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. It wasn’t the bother that he minded, it was having people staring over his shoulder as he watched the recording of the ship being carefully examined and disassembled by suited Hakh’hli. The tape showed the spacesuited figures that were his parents being handled like time-fused bombs. He did not enjoy that. True, it showed nothing of the people inside the spacesuits; it showed them being carefully transported to the Genetics laboratories, where they would be kept quarantined while investigations were made, but once those doors closed the file ended. He did not care to have an audience as he watched that, and anyway the simulator had stopped moving and the door was opening. “Polly’s through,” he announced. “Who’s next?”

But when Polly came out she was in no good mood, and the instructor didn’t help it any. “When you launched from that magnetic grapple you were slow and not at all fast,” he told her. “This is waste of energy, so you must do better and not worse.”

“It was fast enough,” she grumbled. “But if you think I am bad and not sufficiently good, let’s try someone else. Obie! You take next turn and show him what one bad pilot is really like!”

Unfortunately for Obie, he performed almost as badly as Polly said. When he got out of the flight simulator his tail was dragging. “Very bad and not at all good,” the instructor pronounced. “You crashed this ship. You do not at all bring credit to your cohort.” And while Bottom, the next in turn, was getting into the still-warm kneeling seat and buckling himself in, Obie had to stand silently through a lengthy criticism of the way he had failed to deploy his trash deflectors, missed his angle of approach over Earth’s pole, and decelerated too rapidly on landing.

As soon as it was over he growled to Sandy, “Let’s get out of here.”

Sandy had no objection. “Where?”

“Anywhere,” Obie said sulkily. “Listen. We’re outside our quarters, aren’t we?”

“Well, of course we are.”

“So why don’t we do something about it? As long as we’re out we can look around.”

“Look around where?” Sandy asked eagerly, already convinced.

“Anywhere we haven’t been lately,” Obie said, meaning anywhere they weren’t authorized to be going.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that,” Sandy said thoughtfully. It wasn’t an objection, just a matter of putting all the evidence on the table, and Obie regarded it as such. He didn’t answer. He just led the way out of the simulator chamber, and they stood for a moment in the corridor, looking around.

Sandy proposed, “We could go see some of the things they’re making us to take to Earth.”

“No, wait a minute!” Obie cried. “Listen, we can do that later, but maybe they’ve got some funny new freaks in Genetics! Let’s go see!”

It wasn’t what Sandy had had in mind. Genetics was a place of stews and stinks, and he didn’t usually like to go there for personal reasons. But when he tried to explain that to Obie they were already on the way there, and anyway Obie was puzzled. “Tell me again what you don’t like, Sandy?”

“I told you. They’ve got my mother there.”

“Oh, Sandy,” Obie said sorrowfully, twitching his thumbs in disagreement. “It isn’t really your mother, you know.” And actually Sandy did know. What the Hakh’hli had taken from his mother’s body after her death was no more than a few microorganisms and cell samples. If they kept them alive as cultures, that was just science.

But Sandy couldn’t see it that way. To him they weren’t cultures, they were his mother—not alive, but not exactly dead, either. “Really, Sandy. The samples they’ve got in there aren’t her. They’re just cultures. All the rest of her fed the titch’hik long ago.”

Sandy flinched. He disliked the thought of his mother’s body being eaten even more than the thought of parts of it being preserved. It wasn’t that Hakh’hli burial customs bothered him particularly. All his life he had been aware that the ultimate fate of every living being on the ship was to be tossed into the tank of the things, more like a limbless starfish than anything else on Earth, called titch’hik; the titch’hik swiftly consumed all the flesh from the bones; then the titch’hik were harvested and fed to the food animals, the hoo’hik, as a valuable protein source; the bones themselves, ground up, went into the nutrients for the plants and to the hoo’hik as a calcium supplement—nothing was wasted. But when it was your own mother you were talking about it was different. Especially when you knew quite well that somewhere in Genetics there were flasks of cultures from her very own maternal body, kept on hand for experiments in gene-splicing.

Obie stopped halfway up the spiral ramp to the Genetics level. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes. I’m serious.”

“But it’s silly! They’ve got a lot of my own ancestors in there, too, you know.”

“They can’t have, or you wouldn’t be here,” Sandy pointed out sullenly.

“Well, I mean, at least from the same batch of eggs in the freezers. And I’ve certainly got children there, you know. Not even counting the ones with the Fourth Major Senior,” he finished with a touch of offhanded pride.

“It’s not the same.”

“It is the same,” said Obie, getting irritated. “Are you coming or not?”

Sandy shrugged and followed, still reluctant. But as it turned out he was spared. They were met at the Genetics doorway by a Senior who told them severely, first, that certainly there were no new organisms created by Genetics at that time—didn’t they know that all of Genetics was preparing for the influx of new creatures from Earth to study and add to their gene pools? So how could they manage to breed funnier-looking or more efficient plants and hoo’hik and titch’hik at such a time? And, second, he pointed out, they had no business there in any case, did they?

They retreated hastily. “Ah, well,” Obie sighed. “You didn’t really want to anyway. I know! Let’s go see what they’re making for us!”

The laboratory rooms were hot, and not just because they had been in the part of the ship that had been allowed to heat up in the solar passage. Things were being made here, and there were furnaces and ovens to make them in.

Sandy was entranced. In the first chamber two old Hakh’hli were tending a plastics blender, out of which fabrics were being extruded in a dozen colors and textures. “For you,” the boss said proudly. “These will be socks, these will be underwear, this is a ‘necktie.’ But if you want to see something really interesting, go next door.”

Next door was really interesting, as promised, and even hotter than the fabric room. Part of the heat came from a furnace. An elderly Senior was standing over a couple of technicians who were carefully maneuvering a crucible. They tipped the crucible, and tiny, shiny, orange-glowing droplets fell into a tall vat. Sandy couldn’t see inside it, but he heard a sudden violent sputtering from within.

Then the senior reached inside—Sandy blinked, but evidently the water inside was still cool in spite of the molten droplets it had quenched—and pulled out a couple of fingernail-sized, irregular lumps of yellow metal. He tossed them back and forth, hissing in amused discomfort, then handed one to Sandy. “Gold,” he said proudly, using the English words. “Ith for you. Ith to give tho can buy thingth.”

“Yes, to buy things,” Sandy nodded eagerly. How many lessons they had had in “buying” and “shopping” and “paying”! The little golden nugget almost burned Sandy’s palm, but he held it with reverence because it was an Earth kind of thing.

“I think buying things is silly,” Obie put in, curiously fondling one of the little chunks of metal. He glanced up, and his eyes sprang a quick tear of surprise. “Theseus!” he cried. “I didn’t expect to see you here!”

It was obvious that the other young Hakh’hli hadn’t expected to see them either. Theseus was one of the three or four twelves of young Hakh’hli who had trained with them through all their childhood and growth, then suddenly been taken away from them when the final half-twelve had been selected for the Earth mission.

The other thing that was obvious was that the goldsmith hadn’t expected them to meet and didn’t like the fact that they had. He excused himself and huddled over a communications screen as Theseus said suspiciously, “You two aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s orders not, that’s why!”

“That’s not a reason,” Obie said stubbornly, sticking to their story. “We were ordered to stay in our quarters, that’s all. Then we were ordered to go—somewhere—and nobody said we couldn’t look around. What are you doing here?”

“I’m picking some things up,” said the reject. “You’ll be swallowing your own spit if they catch you here.”

“Why? What’s the big secret?”

“We’re not supposed to discuss it,” Theseus said firmly, and he and Obie inched nose to nose, glaring at each other.

It was never a good idea for Lysander to get between any two Hakh’hli who were about to get physical, but these two were his friends—well, Obie was definitely his friend, no doubt of that, and Theseus had at least been a comrade, before the group had been split up. He opened his mouth to try reason.

It wasn’t necessary. A voice from the communicator squawked at them. “John William Washington! HoCeth’ik ti’Koli-kak!” It was MyThara’s voice, and the fact that she called them by their formal names told them how much trouble they were in. Sandy darted a furious glance at the goldsmith for turning them in, but there was no time to argue. “I did not believe the Thenior when he called, but it’th true,” MyThara went on. “You are both where you have no buthiness being! Meet me at onthe in your quarterth, Lythander! And you, Oberon, get back to the thimulator chamber where you belong!”

When MyThara got to the cohort’s quarters, slower than Lysander because she was limping more than ever, she found him at his carrel, gazing at the picture of his mother. It wasn’t entirely guile on his part. When he was in trouble he had always found solace in gazing at the only memento he had of the woman who had given him birth. But it wasn’t entirely without guile, either, because he had learned early on that MyThara’s wrath at any transgression could often be muted if he played on her sympathy.

“That ith no uthe, Lythander,” she said sternly. “You have been very wicked today!”

“I know I have, MyThara,” he said in penitence. But he added, anyway, “MyThara? Why is this the only picture I have of her?”

She hissed reprovingly at him, but he could see that she was taking the bait. “It ith not a Hakh’hli cuthtom to keep picturth of dead people,” she reminded him.

“But I’m not a Hakh’hli!”

“Indeed not,” she agreed, with sympathy creeping into her voice. “Well, thith ith the betht we could do. We found it in your father’th ‘wallet.’ It ith a good likeneth, though.”

“You know what she looked like?” he asked eagerly. “Of courthe,” said MyThara, and added considerately, “She wath very beautiful. For an Earth perthon, I mean. You look like her, I think.”

Sandy gave her a skeptical scowl. “What are you talking about? She’s so skinny, and I’m so fat!”

“You are not fat, Lythander. That ith muthle.”

“But look at the difference between us!”

“Of courthe there ith a differenthe. The differenthe ith becauthe you grew up here on the ship. Earth gravity ith only eight-twelfthth of ship normal. If your mother had come to uth ath a baby she would be a lot thtockier, too.”

“Yes,” Sandy said reasonably, “I see that, but—”

MyThara’s patience had worn out. “Thandy! Don’t think I don’t know what you are doing.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, trying to look innocent.

She wrinkled her nose in sorrow, looking weary as well as disappointed. “Oh, Lythander,” she said, shuddering in sadness. “How could you?”

“That’s Lysander,” he snapped, to hurt her feelings.

“Ekthcuthe—I mean,” she said, angrily forcing out the sibilants, “excuse me. I am quite tired, dear Lysander, but I am also disappointed. May I tell you a tht—a story?”

“I don’t see any way of stopping you,” he said.

She looked at him sadly, but began her story. “Once, long ago, when I was only half-tailed, a hawkbee queen escaped. She flew into the thpatheth between the wallth and laid eggth—” she was lisping badly again, but Sandy didn’t have the heart to tell her—“and there wath a whole hawkbee netht that no one knew about. Then she laid queen eggth. When they hatched, the new queenth flew away, and new nethtth were thtarted, all out of thight. No one knew. Only people kept complaining. Where do all thethe hawkbeeth come from? What can they be living on, there aren’t any bugth here, are there?

“And then—” She paused, looking dire. “And then there came a time when the pilot wanted to make a courthe adjuthtment, and he fed hith inthructionth into the thentral command controller machine—and it didn’t rethpond! The ship didn’t change courthe!”

“Golly,” Lysander said.

His nurse waggled her tongue solemnly. “Golly, indeed,” she said. “Of courthe, the backup thythtemth took over, and the courthe change wath made. But when they checked out the mathter machine, it hada hawkbee netht in it! The netht had short-thircuited itth relayth! And, oh, Thandy, you would not believe how hard it wath, for twelveth of dayth after that, to thcan every thpan of the ductth and ventth and pathageth! Everyone wath working an extra twelfth-day every day until it wath cleaned up and the latht wild hawkbee netht wath wiped out. Do you thee the moral of the thtory?”

“Of course,” Sandy said promptly. “Or, no. Not exactly. What is it?”

She touched the tip of her tongue to his arm before she spoke. “The moral,” she said, “ith that even good thingth can do great harm if they are done in thecret. Now do you thee what I mean?”

“Certainly I do,” said Lysander, certain that she would go on to explain it anyway.

“Thertainly you do,” she agreed. “The moral ith that you mutht never keep thecretth from your thuperiorth.”

Sandy thought that over for a moment. “They keep secrets from me,” he objected. “They didn’t tell us why Theseus and the rest aren’t allowed to see us any more.”

“But that’th very different, ithn’t it? You don’t need to know thothe thingth. At leatht you don’t need it now, and when you do, you’ll be told. But the Theniorth need to know, becauthe they’re the oneth who have to make the dethisionth, after all. You don’t, do you?”

“No,” Lysander said thoughtfully. “I don’t make any decisions.” But he wished, all the same, that at least now and then he did.

“Tho,” she said, “when I am not here any longer, I hope you will remember what I’ve taught you.”

“Sure I will,” he said, and then did a double take. He scowled at her, half in anger, half in sudden alarm, and demanded, “What do you mean, when you’re not here?”

She waggled her jaw, like a shrug. “The freetherth have reported that my latht batch of eggth wath mothtly infertile. Tho I’ve retheived orderth to report for a termination examination,” she said.

Lysander was shocked. “MyThara!” he gasped. “They can’t do that!”

“Of courthe they can, Lythander,” she said firmly. “And I think I will fail it, my dear, and then, of courthe, it’th the titch’hik tankth for me.”

And of course they could, so when Lysander finally huddled with the rest of his cohort for sleep that night his drowsing thoughts were not of his return to Earth, or even of scantily clad human females. They were sad thoughts. MyThara had been a part of his life as long as he had had a life. He did not like to think of her being terminated.

Some of the fun was going out of the adventure.