Outnumbering the Dead

14

Fewer than thirty-six hours have passed since Hakluyt's launch, but all that time its stem thrusters were hard at their decades- long work of pushing the ship across interstellar space. By now it is already some fifteen million kilometres from its near-Martian orbit and, with every second that passes, Alegretta's lukewarm- fusion jets are thrusting it several hundred kilometres farther away. The reactors are performing perfectly. Still, Alegretta can hardly bear to let the controls and instruments that tell her so out of her sight. After the pre-launch frenzy, Hakluyt's five thousand pioneers are beginning to catch up on their sleep. So is Alegretta.

Rafiel tried to make no noise as he pulled on his robe and started toward the sanitary, but he could see Alegretta beginning to stir in her sleep. Safely outside their room he was more relaxed - at least, acted relaxed, nodding brightly to the people he passed in the hall. It was only when he was looking in the mirror that the acting stopped and he let the fatigue and discomfort show in his face. There was more of it every day now. The body that had served him for ninety-odd years was wearing out. But, as there was absolutely nothing to be done about that fact, he put it out of his mind, showered quickly, dressed in the pink shorts and flowered tunic that was the closest he had to Hakluyt- style clothing and returned to their room. By then Alegretta was sitting dazedly on the edge of the bed, watching Nicolette, at the foot of the bed, dutifully licking her kitten.

'You should have slept a little longer,' he said fondly.

She blinked up at him. 'I can't. Anyway' - she paused for a yawn - 'there's a staff meeting coming up. I ought to decide what I want to put in for.'

Rafiel gently pushed the cats out of the way and sat down companionably next to her. They had talked about her future plans before. He knew that Alegretta would have to be reassigned to some other task for the long trip. Unless something went seriously wrong with the reactors there would be little for her to do there. (And if, most improbably, anything did go seriously wrong with them in the space between the stars, the ship would be in more trouble than its passengers could hope to survive.) 'What kind of job are you looking for?'

'I'm not sure. I've been thinking of food control, maybe,' she said, frowning. 'Or else waste recycling. Which do you think?'

He pretended to take the question seriously. He was aware that both jobs were full-time, hands-on assignments, like air and water control. If any of those vital services failed, the ship would be doomed in a different way. Therefore human crews would be assigned to them all the time the ship was in transit - and for longer still if they found no welcoming planet circling Tau Ceti. But he knew that there was nothing in his background to help Alegretta make a choice, so he said at random: 'Food control sounds like more fun.'

'Do you think so?' She thought that over. 'Maybe it is, sort of, but I'd need a lot of retraining for aeroponics and trace-element management. The waste thing is easier. It's mostly plumbing, and I've got a good head start on that.'

He kissed her. 'Sleep on it,' he advised, getting up.

She looked worriedly up at him, remembering to be a doctor. 'You're the one who should be sleeping more.'

'I've had plenty, and anyway I can't. Manfred will be waiting for me with the babies.'

'Must you? I mean, should you? The boy can handle them by himself, and you look so tired....'

'I'm fine,' he said, trying to reassure the person who knew better than he.

She scolded, 'You're not fine! You should be resting.'

He shook his head. 'No, dearest, I really am fine. It's only my body that's sick.'

He hadn't lied to her. He was perfectly capable of helping with the babies, fine in every way - except for the body.

That kept producing its small aches and pains, which would steadily become larger. That didn't matter, though, because they had not reached the point of interfering with tending the children. The work was easier than ever now, with the hectic last-minute labours all completed. The ten-year-old, Manfred Okasa-Pennyweight, had been allowed to return to the job, which meant that now there were two of them on the shift to share the diapering and feeding and playing.

Although Rafiel had been demoted to his assistant, Manfred deferred to him whenever possible. Especially because Manfred had decided that he might like to be a dancer himself - well, only for a hobby, he told Rafiel, almost apologizing. He was pretty sure his main work would be in construction, once they had found a planet to construct things on. And he was bursting with eagerness to see Rafiel perform. 'We're all going to watch the Oedipus,' he told Rafiel seriously, looking up from the baby he was giving a bottle. 'Everybody is. You're pretty famous here.'

'That's nice,' Rafiel said, touched and pleased, and when there was a momentary break he showed the boy how to do a cramp roll, left and right. The babies watched, interested, though Rafiel did not think it was one of his best performances. 'It's hard to keep your feet down when you're tapping in a quarter-gee environment,' he panted.

Manfred took alarm. 'Don't do any more now, please. You shouldn't push yourself so hard,' he said. Rafiel was glad enough to desist. He showed Manfred some of the less strenuous things, the foot positions that were basic to all ballet...though he wondered if ballet would be very interesting in this same environment. The grandest of leaps would fail of being impressive when the very toddlers in the nursery could jump almost as high.

When their shift was over, Manfred had a little time to himself before going to his schooling. Bashfully he asked if Rafiel would like to be shown anything on the ship, and Rafiel seized the chance. 'I'd like to see where they do the waste recycling,' he said promptly.

'You really want to go to the stink room? Well, of course, if you mean it.' And on the way Manfred added chattily, 'It probably doesn't smell too bad right now, because most of the recycled organics now are just chopped-up trees and things - they had to cut them all down before we launched, because they were growing the wrong way, you see?'

Rafiel saw. He smelled the processing stench, too; there was a definite odour in the waste-recycling chambers that wasn't just the piney smell of lumber, though the noise was even worse than the smell. Hammering and welding was going on noisily in the next compartment, where another batch of aeroponics trays were being resited for the new rearward orientation. 'Plants want to grow upward, you see,' Manfred explained. 'That's why we had to chop down all those old trees.'

'But you'll plant new ones, I suppose?'

'Oh, I don't think so. I mean, not pines and maples like these. They'll be planting some small ones - they help with the air recycling - and probably some fruit trees, I guess, but not any of these big old species. They wouldn't be fully grown until we got to Tau Ceti, and then they'd just have to come down again.'

Rafiel peered into the digesting room, where the waste was broken down. 'And everything goes into these tanks?'

'Everything organic that we don't want any more,' Manfred said proudly. 'All the waste, and everything that dies.'

'Even people?' Rafiel asked, and was immediately sorry he had. Because of course they had probably never had a human corpse to recycle, so far.

'I've seen enough,' he said, giving the boy a professional smile. He did not want to stay in this place where he would soon enough wind up. He would never make it to Tau Ceti, would never see his son born... but his body would at some fairly near time go into those reprocessing vats, along with the kitchen waste and the sewage and the bodies of whatever pets died en route, ultimately to be turned into food that would circulate in that closed ecosystem for ever. One way or another, Rafiel would never leave them.

While Alegretta was once again fussing over her diagnostic readouts Rafiel scrolled the latest batch of his messages from Earth.

The first few had been shocked, incredulous, reproachful; but now everyone he knew seemed at least resigned to their star's wild decision, and Mosay's letters were all but ecstatic. The paps were going crazy with the story of their dying Oedipus going off on his last great adventure. Even Docilia was delighted with the fuss the paps were making, though a little put out that the stories were all him, and Alegretta was pleased when the news said that another habitat had been stirred to vote for conversion to a ship; maybe Rafiel's example was going to get still others to follow them.

But she was less pleased with the vital signs readings on her screen. 'You really should go into the sickbay,' she said fretfully.

'So they could do what for me?' he asked, and of course she had no answer to that. There was no longer much that could be done. To change the subject Rafiel picked up the kitten. 'Do you know what's funny here?' he asked. 'These cats. And I've seen dogs and birds - all kinds of pets.'

'Why not? We like pets.' She was only half attentive, most of her concentration on the screen. 'Actually, I may have started the fashion myself.'

'Really? But on Earth most people don't have them. You hardly ever see a pet animal in the arcologies. Aren't you afraid that they'll die on you?'

She turned to look at him, suddenly angry. 'Like you, you mean?' she snapped, her eyes flashing. 'Do you see what the screen is saying about your tests? There's blood in your urine sample, Rafiel!'

For once, he had known that before she did, because he had seen the colour of what had gone into the little flask. He shrugged. 'What do you expect? I guess my rognons are just wearing out. But, listen, what did you mean when you said you started the fashion-'

She cut him off. 'Say kidneys when you mean kidneys,' she said harshly, looking helpless and therefore angry because she was helpless. He recognized the look. It was almost the way she had looked when she first gave him the bad news about his mortality, so long and long ago, and it chased his vagrant question out of his mind.

'But I'm still feeling perfectly well,' he said persuasively - and made the mistake of trying to prove it to her by walking a six-tap riff - a slow one, because of the light gravity.

He stopped, short of breath, after a dozen steps.

He looked at her. 'That didn't feel so good,' he panted. 'Maybe I'd better go in after all.'