Survey Ship

CHAPTER ONE

Peake and Jimson were together, as always, playing a Schubert Nocturne in the Music Room.

Earlier that day there had been the ceremony — broadcast by satellite all over the world — where the forty-three graduates passed on their torches to the forty-two remaining in the class who would graduate next year. Peake had been the leftover one, the one who had to stand with his class without a torch to hand to anybody, so that he had stood there, holding the torch awkwardly until it was unobtrusively taken and put out by one of the administrative personnel. That was the kind of person Peake was; tall, black and gangling, with rumpled hair and beaky features, his legs just a little too long for his uniform trousers; he was the one you always expected to trip over his own big feet, or spill the soup all over himself. Like a giraffe, he looked all-hung-together-anyhow, and awkward, and he was quiet and diffident as the result of catastrophic clumsiness in adolescence. But, like the giraffe, his loose parts somehow fitted; he never broke even the most delicate bit of laboratory equipment, and his huge, ham-sized, double-jointed fingers, now moving caressingly over the frets of the violin, had the precision of a surgeon — which is what he was.

Jimson, leaning over the keyboard, was very differ-ent; small, blonde, almost chubby — not overweight; the diet and exercise program of the Academy pre-vented that. But he had round features, and would never be tall; at seventeen he hadn’t started shaving yet. His hands, though, looked even more muscular and competent than Peake’s; they could span more than an octave. He had wanted to follow Peake into surgery or medicine, but they’d talked it over, at fifteen, and, knowing that two with the same specialty would never be chosen for the same crew, had decided to go different routes. Specialization was always the gamble; every-body in your own specialty was even more your rival than everyone else in the Academy.

Peake let his last note die, stood unmoving while Jimson played the final cadenza; ornate, cheerful, decorative. A good, unemotional choice for tonight, he thought, nothing that could bring on sentiment. Jimson rose, sighed a little, and watched Peake replace his violin in its case on the numbered rack. There were forty-three of them; everyone in the Academy played some instrument, all beginning together in Suzuki violin classes at five.

They walked together to their adjacent cubicles; and, as always, turned into the nearer one, which was Jim-son’s. The cubicles had already been stripped; tradi-tionally, before the torch ceremony, all mementoes of the twelve years of training were thrown away, given away, or passed down to anyone in the next class who could use them. Ship members would take nothing from this life — except their own musical instruments — aboard the Ship; and gradually it had become customary for all members of a graduating class to part with their possessions as if each was going to the life of a Ship. Everyone would have to rebuild a new life anyway.

Jimson sprawled full-length on the cot; Peake crouched in the single chair, which was, like almost everything else, too small for him. At seven, David Akami had already been taller than anyone else in the class; he had been dubbed “Pike’s Peak” which the years had gradually shortened to Peake.

“You’ve got surgery, deep-space navigation, geology, agronomy,” Jimson repeated, obsessively, “I’m worried about that damned geology. I knew I ought to go into organic chemistry instead! And since all my other specialties are in the biological sciences—”

“They aren’t going to get anybody on the crew who doesn’t have at least one overlap with somebody else,” Peake said gently, smiling at his friend, “It’s a plus, if anything, that you can move outside the field of Life Sciences. You have linguistics and life support, too — I don’t think the overlap matters all that much. Look, Jimmy,” he went on, “We took a calculated risk and we have to be ready to stick by our decision. The two of us are right at the top of the class; nobody except Ching has a higher grade-point average—”

“But they don’t always go by marks, and you know it,” Jimson said, gloomily. “They take in compatibility, and personality, and there’s something else too, that a couple — like us — might have trouble adjusting to living with others… that’s why they want us not to make permanent commitments, on the chance that we’ll be separated if one makes Ship and the other doesn’t—”

“Hey Jimson, what’s all this?” Peake interrupted with a grin. “We went all over that three years ago, and decided we had two choices; break up, or make us into such a great team they’d want both of us! At the worst, we’ll both stay Earthside; at best, when that Survey Ship pulls out, we’ll both be on it, you in Life Support and me in Medic…”

Jimson glared at his friend. “No, that’s not the worst and you know it,” he flung at him, “the worst would be that one goes and the other stays — and I ought to have known it years ago, damn it, why did I let you sell me a deal like that? A good Life-Support man who was a surgeon too — that would have been sure to get on the Ship!”

Peake looked at him in dismay; in twelve years in the Academy, each as the other’s closest friend, they had never exchanged a harsh word. “Jimson, that’s not fair; we decided it together. And anyhow, it would be too late to worry about it now. Are we going to spend our last night together fighting?”

“Yeah, you know it’s going to be the last time, too, don’t you?” Jimson flung at him with enormous bitterness, “You set it up just fine, didn’t you, to eliminate at least one rival?”

Peake stared in consternation. But he had been intensively trained in group living and the avoidance of conflict. He unfolded his long legs, towering over the boy in the cot.

“I’m not going to quarrel with you, kid. I hoped we could spend tonight together — I think we both need it. But if you feel this way it wouldn’t do either of us any good. Look, you’ll feel better tomorrow, Reuben.” The use of the private name, rather than the Academy-imposed nickname, was as much a caress as the dark fingers touching Reuben Jamison’s light hair.

“Take it easy, kid. Save a seat in the auditorium for me if you get there first. Look,” he added, eager to comfort, “whatever happens, the decision’s made — one way or the other, nothing we can do is going to change it. Get some sleep, Reuben. It’s settled, right or wrong, it’s done. Relax.”

Jimson flung after him, in sick misery, “Yeah, the decision’s made, all right! You don’t think they’re going to take a pair of queers on their Survey Ship, do you?”

Peake, heartsick, closed the door.

The chapel was an afterthought in the Academy, built in, and still functioning in the style of, a time of agnosticism or atheism among the Establishment; teachers, and therefore almost all the students, were militant atheists. It had been built to appease a small pressure group who had been very vocal about the need for it, but there was no longer, even on paper, an official UNEPS chaplain. The chapel was used, now and then, for concerts of chamber music, and one of the Recreation Officers numbered, far down on the list of his purely nominal duties, that of chaplain and counselor.

Ravi sat there now, cross-legged, silent, breathing in and out almost imperceptibly. Small, dark-skinned, with sharply handsome features, he had been given his nickname because of a chance resemblance to a legendary musician from his own country of origin. Now, deep in meditation, for a time surface thoughts played back and forth across his mind.

It is done. They have made the choice. It is too late for wish or regret. In his heart Ravi was not sure he wished to be sent away from Earth, although his only memories of his world, outside the clean mathematical world of the Academy, were fragmentary; burning heat, blistering sky or torrential stinking rains, the festering sores of beggars crowding, which sometimes haunted him in uneasy nightmares. So that he wondered, sometimes, with something he was too well-trained to identify properly as guilt; why am I here, clean, fed, pampered, and they dying outside there? Images remained in his mind; his father, cross-legged on the ground before a silk-weaving loom; crowded streets, women still clad in saris and veils; but all of it had gone, except for these scattered, fading dreams.

Ravi had taken up meditation without any real purpose; many cadets tried it, as a method of relaxation, a simple cure for insomnia. To his own surprise, he had found that it fitted some small and formerly inaccessible corner of his own psyche, filled a need, scratched an itch he had never known that he possessed. Ravi had been trained as a scientist, not a mystic; he found himself uncomfortable, even while he did it, with the obsessive study he had taken up, of his own roots, of the culture of his native country — not forbidden, never that, but certainly never encouraged. He knew, intellectually, that he belonged to UNEPS, not to his own country. He knew, too, that if he had revealed any trace of his questionings and his inner search, he would have been laughed out of the Academy. And now he wrestled with a question he had not had enough training to regard as spiritual.

I am expected to regard God as superstition and mathematics as ultimate reality. Yet I feel, I know, God as ultimate reality and mathematics as one of His choicer games and methods of revealing Himself. I want to learn more about that, and how can I ever know the things I need to know, if I am sent into the greater vastnesses of outer space with no one except my crewmates? I have heard there will be only five of them, and they are even more ignorant of these realities than I am.

Am I being exiled from God in being exiled from the planet of man, His creation?

He let his consciousness drift in meditation, until his mind narrowed itself to a single point of awareness; somewhere, detached from himself, he wondered if perhaps outer space was like that, a greatness beyond comprehension… like God?

God exists; I must simply trust in what is necessary for me. If God created the Universe, then surely he is everywhere in it, in the space between the stars… as much as here in my mind.

Fontana, small and dark and delicately made, with sleek dark hair and thick freckles, was in bed with Huff. They had been exploring each other’s bodies with curiosity and good-natured affection for more than a year now, in their leisure moments; but both were conscious of the admonition against pairings or permanent commitments, and both had been seen, often enough, with others.

Now, lying at ease in the afterglow, she smiled at him, a pixie smile, and said, “I’m going to miss you, Huff. I’m going to miss this—” and she touched him, playfully. He chuckled.

“Sure of yourself, aren’t you, girl? Well, I don’t blame you; you’re at the top of the class, you’re sure to be on the crew.”

Fontana smiled and shook her head. “Not sure at all. Only whatever happens, we’re going to be separated. It’s scary, Huff, they blend us together so well, teach us to care about each other, up to a point, and then, after graduation, no two of us are ever likely to work together again. Maybe ten of us — six this year, I heard somewhere — will stay together on the Ship. The rest of us — well, scattered all over the universe. But you’re just as likely to make Ship as I am. You’re a good navigator—”

“Not half as good as Ravi.”

“And you’re skilled in linguistics—”

“Jimson and Janet and Mei Mei and Smitty are all better than I am.”

Fontana shook her head. “No way they’re going to take Jimson. Peake is sure to be chosen, and they won’t take any couple. No more than they’d take Dolly and Smitty — didn’t you hear Dolly almost got thrown out because she had been careless and they thought she was pregnant? I’m pretty sure about Peake and Ravi. And Ching.”

“Ching,” Huff said with a groan. “Damn human computer! I thought they made the choices for compatibility too — how are they going to square it to take along Ching? Nobody likes her!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Fontana said, with scrupulous fairness. “Huff, are you still prejudiced, just because she’s a G-N?”

“That’s an insult,” Huff said, frowning. “Do you really think I’d keep that kind of superstitious prejudice? Maybe outside UNEPS, they think the G-Ns aren’t human, but, damn it, I know Ching’s human. I’ve seen her bleed, I’ve seen her cry when she was hurt. Logically, I know the only difference between Ching and the rest of us is that somebody tinkered with her mother’s ovaries about ten months before she was born, and as a result, she has perfect genes for high IQ, musical talent, superior muscular tone, slow heartbeat, efficient hemoglobin use, perfect inner ear channels, and so forth.”

“And yet—” Fontana said.

“And yet. I’m human. I resent the G-Ns. Who wouldn’t? The G-Ns are phasing out the human students in the Academy. In the class below us, there are already twenty G-Ns; humans can’t compete with them. G-N cadets will make us all obsolete some day.”

“Don’t be silly,” Fontana said with some heat. “The G-Ns are just as human as we are. They’re the best of humanity, that’s all. Would you prefer to deny humanity the best, just to preserve some of the worst? Is there any moral Tightness to a person being born tone deaf or with hemophilia or sickle-cell anemia? By that reasoning, you’d think women had some god-given right to have a Mongoloid child, or one with something horrible like Tay-Sachs disease!”

“But they all act so superior! The ones in next year’s class aren’t so bad. But Ching was the first, and she knows it, and I can’t stand that damn superiority of hers!”

Fontana said, “That’s not fair. Put yourself in her place, Huff. She knows she’s different; she is superior. Yet she hasn’t made herself hated. All of us here have IQs somewhere between 150 and 185. Ching’s is so far over 200 that they can’t even measure it, because there’s no one who could make up a test. She’s — careful. Not that anyone here would hate her — anyone who’s capable of real hate gets weeded out of the Academy a lot younger than this. Ching’s not arrogant; she’s diffident, that’s all. She doesn’t want to — to swing her weight. Understand?”

“No,” Huff confessed, “but I don’t expect to. When you decided to specialize in Psychology, you lost me. And,” he added, hugging her suddenly, “I’m going to miss you, Fontana. Listen—” he said shyly, “do you know I don’t even know your name?”

“You never asked,” Fontana said, touching his cheek. “I know yours, because I worked one year with the Rosters. You’re Jurgen Hoffmeister, and I think Huff is a lot better as a name. The names people out there give to their kids!”

“It’s funny,” Huff said softly, “I keep forgetting, but sometimes, when I’m half asleep, I hear my mother saying my name. Jurgen. I called her Mutti or Mutterl. I’m never speak anything but English, here. But when I’m asleep I remember.”

“I know,” Fontana whispered, “I don’t remember my mother. I don’t think I had one. But I remember I had a sister. She was bigger than I was. Her name was Consuelo. I wonder if she’s still alive? I wish sometimes they’d let us know. But she would think of me as Maria, and wonder who Fontana was. She’ll — if I’m chosen or the Ship — she’ll see me and never know that I’m her sister.”

“I think that’s why they give us nicknames,” Huff murmured, “so that every mother, or father, can look at us and wonder, is that my son, or daughter, is that my Jurgen, my Maria? And never be sure, but always think it could be.”

Fontana rolled over and buried her head in his shoulder. She said roughly, “Hey, you’re not so bad a psychologist yourself, at that. Cut it out before I start to cry.”

“Sure,” he agreed, and began fondling her again. But she was crying, and so was he.

Before nightfall, Teague had requested permission to leave the Academy grounds, and had driven his flitter up to the Observatory. The official who gave it had stared at the chunky, freckled lad in sloppy fatigue uniform, but he had signed the permission slip; there was no reason not to. Except for class hours, the students had unrestricted freedom. Teague had explained that his final examinations, and the ceremony earlier that day, had interfered with some photographic studies he had made of a transit of Venus last week, and he wanted to examine them carefully before leaving.

In the Observatory darkroom he worked away happily for many hours, unnoticed, until one of the night watchmen — all of whom knew him, for he spent a substantial part of his time there — asked, “Isn’t it your class that’s graduating tomorrow?”

And then James MacTeague had blinked, grinned, and thought to himself; so that’s why they looked at me so funny when I signed out. Our last night, and all that. It is tomorrow, isn’t it?

But then the buzz on the developer sounded, and he went back to his slides. He didn’t have much time to finish up.

Moira was in the Jacuzzi, neck-deep in hot water, the bubbling jets streaming against her naked body, her red hair streaming on the surface. There were eight or ten other cadets in the Jacuzzi with her, crowded so close that the water spilled out on the fiberglas deck; most of them male, and each convinced that he was the one Moira wanted there.

Not that Moira was a tease; it was only high spirits and good nature. She had done the usual amount of sexual experimentation, but never to the point where it interfered with her standing in her classes — right at the top, just below Ravi, Peake and Ching, who were the intellectual standouts in her year, and had been so since they were nine years old — and she had left no broken hearts in the wake of her good-natured sexiness.

She moved sensuously in the tub, revelling in the feel of the bubbling hot water against her long limbs. Next to her, Scotty said, “Has your ESP told you anything about which of us is going to be on the crew, Moira?”

She chuckled. “No luck there, Scotty. Too bad. I don’t have even a clue; it only kicks in when there’s a real emergency, which is why they could never manage to test it in laboratory conditions. They can’t fake an emergency, because I know — and as long as there’s no real danger, the ESP just sits there, and isn’t the least good to me! It doesn’t even warn me ahead of time if I’m going to break a cello string in the middle of a quartet,“ she added, with a rueful headshake. ”It’s only for real disasters.”

“I’d think a Wild Talent like that would make you a top choice for crew,” Mei Mei, the only other woman in the tub, said, and Moira shook her head.

“Too unreliable. And they think it’s phasing out as I get older, anyhow. More likely they’ll try cloning me, and see if it’s genetic or reproducible.” Moira frowned, remembering the time she had absolutely refused, for no reason she could identify, to go on a piece of play-ground equipment. She had been given a severe lecture on obedience and antisocial behavior by the playground director, who had been killed, five minutes later, when the equipment collapsed under five children, under Moira’s horrified eyes.

Would that special talent be a handicap or a benefit on a Survey Ship? Moira didn’t know. Tuning her ears to the sound of the Jacuzzi, amusing herself by locating from that soft sound the hidden flaw in the machinery which would, if not fixed, put the pump out of commission within four or five days, she reminded herself to tell the maintenance man before she left the pool area. That was the talent that would win her a place on the Ship, if she did win a place, she told herself. The knowledge, so deep-rooted that it was almost instinctive, of how machines worked, and what could interfere with the working. Nobody had noticed the flaw in the sound of the pump, which increasingly grated on her ears like a false note in a Haydn quartet. The pump was like an apparently healthy man with a small, asthmatic rasp which ought to warn a doctor of ncipient emphysema, but seldom did. Scotty was murmuring to her, caressing her freckled breast under the hot water, but she pushed him impatiently away.

“Later, Scotty. Something’s wrong with the pump, I’ve got to go and tell the janitor.” “It sounds fine to me,” Mei Mei said. “Are you having psychic flashes again, Moira?”

“No, no,” Moira said, impatiently. “Can’t you hear it?” Machines, she thought, climbing wet and dripping out of the Jacuzzi and draping a huge towel about her body, had to be perfect. They were so much more reliable than human talents. She listened, frowning, to the almost-imperceptible sound, tilting her head, grit-ting her teeth. Poor old fellow, she whispered to the laboring machinery, just take it easy, we’ll have you fixed up and comfortable pretty soon, I’ll make sure they take good care of you.

And in her solitary cubicle in the dormitory where the other students, alone or together, tried to forget tomorrow and the impending finality of the choices, the small, slight, dark-haired girl who had been dubbed “Ching” in her first week in the Academy, stood brushing her teeth before the mirror. The teeth were perfect — any predisposition toward dental or gum disease had been eliminated from her altered genetic makeup. Academy nutrition and conscientious brushing kept them that way.

She had the Oriental eye-fold; the insemination do-nor who had “fathered” her, she had been told, was a Japanese architect. But her face was too much a racial blend to have any other distinguishing characteristics. Even a touch of ugliness, she thought, would have made her more interesting. But, like all G-Ns — Genetically ENgineered Superiors — her face was boringly average and ordinary. She wondered if the scientists who had created the G-Ns had done it that way so that there would not be one more thing for the ordinary, genetically mixed humans to envy; great beauty would have set them even further apart from everyone else.

Tonight she had kept to the exact routine she had known all her life; she had put on a tape of one of her favorite violin sonatas, later practiced a half hour on the viola as she had every night since her fifth year, and now, her teeth brushed and tingling with cleanliness, she showered and went peacefully to bed, wondering how showers and other hygienic maneuvers would be managed in the low gravity of a Ship. Alone among her classmates, she knew she would be chosen. The experiment which had created the G-Ns was an unqualified success; in the class below Ching, there were twenty of them; two classes below her, there were forty, and not one had dropped out due to illness or physical or mental incompetence. The other G-N in Ching’s class, the one that would graduate tomorrow, had left them on her fifteenth birthday; some unsuspected randomness in the engineered musical talent had given her such a soprano voice as was heard only once or twice in a generation, and she had left, with the blessing of the Academy, to pursue a concert career. Ching thought, a little wistfully, of Zora —who had been given back her own name, Suzanne Hayley, and her own nationality, which was Canadian. She, Ching, would never be anything but Ching, of the UNEPS Academy. No name, no country, only a Ship, and fame she would not be able to enjoy. Zora had been allowed to follow her own choice and her own destiny.

But the G-Ns were certainly the wave of the future; some day, no doubt, the G-Ns would be the staff of all the Survey Ships. Ching had no doubt that next year’s class would be the full Ship complement often, instead of leaving it to competitiveness. And she, Ching, had been chosen to be the first to test the sufficiency of G-Ns, and that ought to be enough.

She was an experiment; she had been lonely, having no real peers. And no real friends, either, she thought with a touch of cynicism. They tolerated her, because there was no room in the Academy for anyone who could not get along with all kinds, and any dislike or unfairness shown to Ching would have damaged that person’s career more than Ching’s. But she sometimes envied Moira’s hordes of admirers and her easy sexuality, even admired the close tenderness of Peake and Jimson while she recognized its unwisdom. There was no one she had ever cared for that much, and no one who had cared so much for her; she supposed, a little wryly, that she was the only virgin in her class.

It was worse, she supposed, than being a member of a racial minority in the old days. But she was different, and there was no point in resenting it. Ching turned on her side, and within minutes was peacefully asleep.