Survey Ship

CHAPTER FOUR

Ching felt, still, that there ought to be more to it than this — some formal report to the Space Station that Survey Ship #103 was on its way, some acknowledgement, some formal leave-taking. But they had had all that when they were chosen as a crew… it was foolish to wish for more. She kept her eyes down on the steady familiar console of the Bridge computer, the numbers and letters which appeared as she touched buttons. She had done this on a similar console many times during her training, and since they had decided to take their course toward the most, recent of the colonies, even the course was one she had plotted before. It seemed almost too simple.

Since there was no other formality possible, she made her voice formal.

“Colonies one and two are in the system of Barnard’s Star, at six light-years distance. Colony Three is at Cygni 61; eleven light-years distance. Colony Four is in the Sirius double-star system, eight point eight light-years, and Colony Six is established in the T-5 cluster, nine point three light-years distance.”

“And,” said Teague, “it’s very probable that when we get to the T-5 cluster, if that’s where we are going, we will find Colonies Seven through Eleven — maybe through twenty or twenty-four — established there, with no planets left for us.”

Peake shrugged. “Then we start hunting from there, I suppose.”

Moira said, “If we leave the Solar System in that direction, that means we’ll be off the plane of the ecliptic and we’ll miss the asteroids. No way we’re maneuverable enough to get through the asteroid belt without being crashed by a minor asteroid. We could program the ship to avoid the bigger, better-known ones, the more predictable ones, but there are hundreds of thousands of them — maybe millions.”

“I have the precise number of known bodies in the computer,” Ching said, “but does anyone really care?”

“I do,” said Teague, “but it’s irrelevant right now.”

Peake looked at the readout from Ching’s computer on the panel before him. He frowned, flicking buttons on the pocket calculator at his belt, then started to lay in a course in the general direction of the T-5 cluster. It was still day-shift; Ravi sat behind him, with nothing, at the moment, to do except watch Peake’s huge, clumsy-looking hands on the buttons and switches. The fingers were so long, and so large, that they obscured the switches at times.

It was almost frightening to contemplate this kind of freedom, this kind of distance. He did not mind the vista of stars outside the transparent glass dome… although he noticed that Moira kept her eyes carefully turned away from it.

Navigating on the surface of the Earth, there were three-hundred-and-sixty directions in which you could go, and some of that was limited by features of the terrain — mountains, water, heavy undergrowth, preexisting roads. In the air you had the full three hundred sixty degrees; he’d grown used to that, flying a light plane.

But out here there were all those directions, multiplied into three dimensions… 360 to the three-sixtieth power, maybe? Up, down, and all the permutations and combinations of angles in between.

The universe is too big… thank God we have the computer… all the crowding multiplicity of stars, vastness beyond imagining… we talk glibly of light-years. But the light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth. Think of something so distant that the light takes a year, a whole year, to reach it… that’s a light-year… the simple explanation he had been given in kindergarten, their whole education aimed at making these monstrous things close and simple and familiar and comfortable….

Ravi shut his eyes, to shut out the thousand blinking lights of the bridge, and the millions of blinking stars behind it. There was just too much of it. These distances were not made by man at all, man could not envision them. The mudfish in the water hole in the outback had mapped the Great Barrier Reef… but was this arrogance, was it meant that mankind should do this?

Behind his closed eyes pictures formed, faces in a crowded Bombay slum, starving faces, packed filthy faces; but he had grown up clean and well-fed, educated almost beyond human possibility, to do a deed at the very limits of the possible. Why me, why was I chosen with these others? Why millions to starve and die and bumble along from day to’day, and the six of us to live in luxury and attain the limits of human possibility? Dare I think that the Great Architect of the Universe has chosen me? Is it any better to think that it was the work of random Chaos and chance?

He knew he could go mad this way, and opened his eyes, fastening them on the navigation console. His eyes slid past Peake to Moira, and, trying to wrench his mind away from vastnesses too great to contemplate, he forced himself to think of the mundane and familiar. Moira. He had, briefly, been one of her lovers. Somehow he had begun to think, seeing Peake and Jimson, separated, that they had chosen a crew with no sexual ties to one another. He thought, trying to control an unseemly laugh, that it would have been hard to find any man in her year who had not been, at least briefly, Moira’s lover. No, he didn’t think was promiscuous, though one or two of the women were, but she had experimented widely, and she was a friendly girl with no special sexual inhibitions; he thought that Teague, for instance, had also been chosen, a year or so ago, to share Moira’s favors.

Was she thinking about that? he wondered. Two ex-lovers on the Ship? It was simpler to lose himself into a frankly erotic reverie than to contemplate that painful vastness outside the ship, or to try and wrestle some meaning for it all from the unyielding cosmos.

Moira was not thinking about anyone, or anything, human, at all. The faint apprehension she felt, she forced down into calm; she told herself that the view from outside the dome made her dizzy, with all the stars, the Space Station moving sedately past their window every few seconds, disturbing her visual orientation. When she closed her eyes she felt quite comfortable, her stomach in place, the DeMag gravitation strong enough so that she did not lose her up-down orientation with the control board.

Peake said, “Well, it’s like one of those old Navy novels — should I yell out ‘Engineer, set all sails’…”

“You’re mixing your metaphors,” Fontana said. “In the days when they set sails, in the Navy, they didn’t have engineers.” She too was in one of the supernumerary seats; they had all chosen to be present for that moment when Survey Ship 103 moved away from the Space Station, From being as nearly at rest as any body in the universe could be — moving in free-fall orbit around the Space Station — they would begin their long, slow, but steady acceleration which, within a year, would bring them to 99.3 per cent of light-speed; the highest practical speed for space travel. And so rapid would this acceleration be that, from just outside the orbit of the Moon, they would leave Pluto’s orbit behind within thirteen days.

Moira wet her lips, checked the panel before her, then, deliberately, touching the buttons with gentle fingers, she pressed a certain sequence which would activate the drives. Although the drive was in another module, and the intervening total vacuum of space would not convey even a fragment of sound, she fancied that she could feel a faint vibration, somewhere, the drives setting up their vibration… not a sound. Not a vibration. Had it to do with her extra-sensory perception, so that she felt it somewhere inside herself, that the drives were running, like a heartbeat?

She checked the green light on the console which telemetered information, looked at a small visual panel which gave video information from the drive module. There were, of course, no moving parts, but energy was being transmitted, and outside the dome window, the Space Station began to recede, grow smaller against the background of stars. It was no longer passing their window every few seconds. It was moving away… no. They were moving away, Survey Ship 103 was accelerating away from the Space Station at nine point eight meters per second per second…. at an ever-increasing velocity. Moira was not the natural mathematician Ravi was, and could not keep track of the continuing velocity without flicking a glance at the tell-tales giving velocity, and the percentage of Tau — light-speed.

“There it goes,” Fontana said suddenly. “We might as well take a last look.”

Earth had come into their viewfield, a dim blue wraith, the size of a small dinner plate, diminishing, distant… a raindrop. Moira blinked, shook the tears from her eyes, concentrating on the drive tell-tale. Now, when they were clear of the last fragments of gravitational pull from the Moon and from the Space Station… now, slowly, gently… she pressed another sequence of buttons in a memorized order, feeling the faint drag from the DeMag units; possibly it would be easier when they could turn off the DeMags for a while, but at this moment none of them were emotionally or physiologically prepared for less than half gravity. The ship rotated, modules turning for favorable light exposure. She watched what she was doing on her video tell-tales as the light-sail panels, enormous, thin sheets of mylar film, were slowly extruded. She could see a corner of one of them coming, slowly, into sight across the dome, a smear of translucence blotting out a few of the stars across the lower edge of the lenticular observation window. Trim it just a little toward the sun, Moira thought, pressing buttons gently, watching the sail veer ever so slightly, rotate a little, streaming gently. Her tell-tales told her of other sails, great sheets of film sensitive to solar pressure… light as a tangible force, making the sails just shiver… the film was so delicate it would tear at a touch, but in space, friction-less, airless, there was nothing to tear it. Yet Moira’s fingers moved as delicately on the studs as if her fingers could rip through the sails themselves, and she watched the movement, the imperceptible shiver of the streaming mylar, with a lump in her throat. That’s right, just a fraction more to the left… now you, back there by the Life-Support module… come on, darling, easy now ,, . just a little further… she was whispering to the sails as they moved, slowly and with a silken elegance, into position. She felt like a spider, spinning out her silken web into every direction, surrounded by the feathery streaming of filmy sails, responding to the light… feeding the endless energies of light into the drives. The awareness shimmered inside her nerves with the violence of orgasm, and she closed her eyes in momentary ecstasy.

Teague watched Moira’s face quivering as she moved her hands on the controls, and remembered how she had looked, once, when he kissed her… he himself felt as useless as a vermiform appendix. Life-Support was fail-safe and idiot-proof; barring some unimaginable catastrophe, he would have nothing important to do for years, except for synthesizing food. When, or if, they found a habitable planet — when, not if, he reminded himself sternly — it would be quite different; as the biologist, he would be responsible for every fragment of their physical safety in an alien environment. Aboard ship, he had a sinecure; he was a piece of dispensable software, whose work was being done by machinery and computer.

Well, they were all like that, really. The ship could have been sent out, unmanned, as a probe — but an unmanned probe could not have surveyed the planets at the hypothetical other end of the voyage. Only Peake, as their doctor, and Fontana, as their psychologist, would have much to do on the voyage of nine light-years. Once they were out of the Solar System, only Moira would have much of anything to do inside the ship, and that was mostly trimming the sails by calculating light-pressures. The ship would navigate on a course which Peake and Ching had already set; to change it now would mean decelerating down to zero and re-computing from the beginning. Every second they remained in flight, they were reaching velocities which were more and more unthinkable. More than nine meters per second per second — maybe Ravi could have figured out how fast they were actually travelling by now. He couldn’t.

So the most interesting thing he’d be doing for the next several years was synthesizing catgut for violin strings!

Perhaps he would have time to learn to play the oboe — there were spare instruments aboard. Or he would have time to compose the string quartet which had been in his mind ever since he learned, at fourteen, that he did not have the manual dexterity to be more than a mediocre violinist, and taken up the flute. Melodies moved constantly in his mind; now he would have time to write them down.

He’d never tried before; most music was computer-written. He remembered a story from the early days of the Academy, when the computer, programmed to write a chorale, had exactly duplicated, missing only four notes in the tenor part, Bach’s setting for O Sacred Head. Well, given the information about how to compose music, that was the perfect chorale, the logical and perfect way to write and harmonize the music, the inevitability of perfection. The people who programmed the computer had been overwhelmed by Bach, after all; and after that episode the Melody Mark VII had been nicknamed JOHANN.

How could anyone write music greater than that, or worth naming in the same breath? Well, the twentieth-century classic composer Alan Hovhaness had done it; critics had said that he had taken music in the direction it might have gone if Bach had never written his Well-Tempered Clavier. Perhaps there were still other directions, though he was sure Peake didn’t think so, and Peake was a real musician.

Now the Earth could barely be distinguished; it had lost its blue color and was a point of light against black, against other points of light. Ravi glanced at his chronometer and said, “My shift, Peake.” Peake drew his attention from the window and said, “Right.” Formally, they exchanged places. Teague said, “Are we going to keep on Greenwich Time for the whole voyage? Hours, days… weeks, months, years — they don’t make much sense out here. Anyhow, as we approach light-speed, there’ll be changes… it’s not as if we could keep the clock set for what time it is back in dear old Greenwich of whatever!”

Peake said, turning his back on the vista of stars — that was Ravi’s responsibility for the next twelve hours — “We have to keep a 24 hour ship’s day, or something near it. For circadian rhythms. God alone knows what light-speeds and zero gravity will do to our body rhythms. But we have to try and keep them as stable as we can, and for the next few months it won’t matter much.”

“The ship’s already on Universal Solar,” Ravi said, looking at a small tell-tale at the very center of the ceiling of the Bridge; the seats swivelled through a full circular rotation — so they could be turned to any angle, though they would lock at whatever angle the sitter chose. The tell-tale displayed, in smooth-flowing liquid crystal digital numbers the time by what was called Universal Solar, or sometimes only true time; a kind of reckoning in seconds from the pulses of energy, elapsed time from the original Big Bang; true time, so-called, measured the exact age of the known Universe.

“But Universal Solar is clumsy,” said Peake, looking at the long stream of numbers which measured time, in seconds, from the beginning of the universe,

“Clumsy!” Moira said, disbelieving, and Ching said, “How can anything as precise as that be clumsy?”

“Because,” Peake said, good-naturedly, “by the time you read all that off, in seconds, it’s some other time already. I suggest we keep Greenwich Time just to figure out when our shifts begin and end, and when we’re going to meet for those daily music sessions Fontana, or was it Moira, thought were so important.”

Looking at the long, ever-changing stream of numbers on the tell-tale, they all, one by one, agreed to that. Greenwich Time would become a kind of biological time-clock for them; Ching’s flying fingers programmed, into the computer, a sequence of “elapsed time, in hours and days, from leaving the space station,” basing it on 24-hour days, of which this — they all agreed — was Day One. Years calculated in Earth reckoning, Anno Domini, a religio-political reckoning, they all agreed, had no meaning for them. Day One became the day they had been skylifted, first to the Space Station, then to the Ship; and by that reckoning, when Ravi took his first shift, it became noon of Day One. Peake would go on-shift again at Midnight, which they would call the first moment of Day Two.

“And we have been aboard for four hours,” Ching said, “and my biological rhythms are beginning to tell me that it’s dinner-time. Is there any reason we have to stay in the Bridge, or must one of us be here to tend the machines at all times? And what will that do to our theory that we all ought to meet once a day?”

Moira made a final finicky adjustment to a sail, a great triangular translucency blotting out a third of the stars, From the lenticular window she could see that the ship was rotating on its own axis as it moved against the stars. They seemed to be standing still, now, without the reference points of Space Station and Earth, and when she shut her eyes, the DeMag units told her that “down” was the floor of the Bridge, and the lenticular window was straight before her; but when she looked out to the small slow spin of the ship around them, the other shaped modules that came into view and were obscured again, themselves obscuring nearby stars, she felt a trace of vertigo, her inner ear channels rebelled, and she wondered how she could manage to swallow against this queasiness. She shut her eyes and the Bridge settled into homey normal up-and-down. Stability again.

“Nobody has to be here,” she said, looking with tender farewell at the exquisite delicacy of the sail shivering across the stars, “the sails are programmed to trim themselves; strictly speaking, we could leave the Bridge now and spend the next four years or so playing string quartets and making love in our cabins. Each of us ought to check in here on our instruments once every shift or so, but mostly that’s busy-work. Once our course is set, that’s it.” And she wondered why a faint, sick shiver went through her at the words; and she remembered her younger self, crying and refusing to step on a piece of playground equipment which, a few minutes later, cast several of her playmates, and one of her counselors, to the ground in screaming heaps….

Angrily, she dismissed the thought. I’m tired and sick and I think I have a touch of gravity sickness and I’m making up nightmares and calling it ESP! Because there had been times when her erratic wild talent had played her false, giving her a warning of trouble which never happened, especially when there was something she particularly wanted not to do.

Ching, accustomed from early childhood to rely on computer-set certainties, nodded at Moira’s words. She said, “Actually, we’re just along for the ride. The computers run the ship.”

“Actually, I was thinking that myself,” Teague said. “It seems that you and Moira are doing all the real work of the ship, and it might make more sense to put the four of us others into suspended animation. When we reached a planet, you could wake us up, we’d still be young and stronger than we would otherwise, and we could do the survey work on that planet…”

“I don’t know about you,” Moira said, “but I don’t think I’d care to make a voyage of nine point something years to the T-5 cluster without more company than Ching. No offense intended, Ching, but it’s a known psychological fact — Fontana, I’m right, aren’t I? — that any two people alone together will drive each other crazy and murder each other.”

Fontana chuckled. She said, “It has been known to happen. It’s true; that’s why the minimal crew for a Survey Ship has to be at least four people, and six is better. That gives everybody some privacy, and somebody new to talk to now and then. Even as it is, we’re likely to get bored with each other’s company.”

Although Ching knew that Moira’s words were not personally intended, she still felt somehow wounded. But at least, she thought, they know that I — and the computer — have set the major work of the Ship. Peake plotted the co-ordinates and the course, but it was the computer which gave it to him. The computer and I. Very precisely, intending to wound a little, she said, “I don’t know about you, Moira, I can well understand that you might need a certain amount of diversion on a long voyage, but I think it would be interesting to experiment with a Survey Ship staffed by one human and one computer. I would gladly have volunteered for such a voyage. I’m not afraid of my own company, and I don’t need to hide from it. With this computer — “ and only Moira saw, and understood, the affectionate touch of her fingers on the console, “—I don’t really think I would need anyone else on the voyage. After all, I went through the Academy as a loner, and I’m used to it.”

Ravi looked at the immensity beyond the window and said, “We are all alone, fundamentally, with the universe—” but he said it so softly that no one else heard.

Moira stood up and went to Ching. She said, very gently, “But you weren’t alone, and I think if you were really alone, with the computer, you’d go crazy. I know I would.”

“I know you would, too,” Ching said, stiff against the friendly arm Moira slid around her waist, and Moira sighed and let her go. It was, after all, impossible to be friendly with Ching. She had tried it before, and been rebuffed in the same way, and here she was, stuck with her for the indefinite future.

Ching, her face tightly barriered, was thinking, Oh, yes, Moira, being nice to the class freak, the way she’d be so nice to a cripple or a blind person. Well, I’m damned if I want her pitying me! She said, “Well, the question’s academic anyhow. It makes more sense to figure out who’s going to cook dinner. Teague, didn’t you say there was fresh food storage for a period of months? Why don’t we celebrate our takeoff with a steak dinner, or the nearest equivalent we can find in the food machines? I’ll volunteer to cook tonight, but after this we take turns.”

Once again, the dizzying shifts in direction as they moved from the strongly oriented gravity of the “bridge” to the Life-Support central area — which was fairly circular — and once again Peake stumbled as the direction of “down” abruptly reversed itself.

Moira, flipping herself over in the low gravity, catching Ravi and spinning with him on a common center in the almost-gravity-free corridor between two modules, thought, I guess the gravity-sickness was psychological. When I don’t have to look out that damned window at the whole universe, I seem to have my space-orientation just fine! Holding tight to Ravi’s hand, they cartwheeled the length of the zero-gravity corridor. Ching was clinging tightly to the crawl-bar, inching like a fly along the wall. Peake pushed his legs against one end and took off, shooting along the corridor and colliding with Ravi and Moira; the three of them ended in a laughing tangle of arms and legs. Teague and Fontana, clinging to each other and making “swimming” motions, joined in the laughter.

“I should remind you all,” Peake said, “that the exercise area — that’s the conical module we didn’t get to, next to the sleeping quarters — is arranged with DeMag units that can be cut down to zero or up to full gravity. We have to work out at full gravity to keep our muscles in good shape—” Teague groaned, but Peake ignored him and went on, “but we can experiment with free-fall acrobatics if we want to, too.”

“Look at Ching,” Moira squeaked. “Let go, Ching, you can’t get hurt, there’s nowhere to fall to!”

Ching was clinging dizzily to the crawl-bar still. She said, “I think I’ll wait to get my orientation. If it’s quite all right with you, Moira?” she added meticulously.

Fontana’s voice was sharp. “Let her alone, Moira, we all have to adjust at our own rate, and you’ve been in free-fall before; she hasn’t.”

Moira, holding to Ravi, felt his body against hers, looked with pleasure at the contrast of his coffee-colored hands against her own pallid ones. She twisted a little and their lips met; she felt his kiss with a shock of recognition, a familiar thing among all the new strangenesses. They floated together, their lips just touching, entangled, her hair floating around him, streaming, intermingled with his own dark curls. She fancied Ching’s look down at them both was one of disapproval, and defiantly prolonged the kiss.

Peake pushed through the sphincter into the next module, which was the main cabin they had first entered. He went to the food machine, Ching joining him there a moment later.

Ching said, “They didn’t lose any time, did they — Moira and Ravi?”

Peake shrugged. He said, “Does it matter that much?” The sight of the two, intertwined and kissing, lost in each other, roused painful memories. Every scrap of his being longed for Jimson; even during the excitement of pulling away from the Space Station, he had had to keep remembering, I can’t share it with him, is he watching me go, I’ll never be able to share it with him again. Was Jimson suffering like this, too, at the other end of that lengthening string which separated them? Part of him wanted Jimson to share even this suffering, part of him quailed at the thought of Jimson, tender, sweet, vulnerable, undergoing this monstrous pain that seemed to eat him up inside.

Alone, and I will be alone all the rest of my life. There is no one here for me. Both Ravi and Teague are obviously heterosexual, and as for the women…. I don’t want them, they don’t want me… alone. Always alone, a lifetime alone….

Ching, standing beside him at the console, thought that he looked lost; it was so strange to see Peake without the fair-haired Jimson trailing him.

I know what it is to be alone. I went through twelve years of it. But he at least has known what it is like to be loved and wanted, she thought disconsolately. I never will.

She said, “Do you suppose we could manage a steak dinner out of the console, Peake?”

“Can’t hurt to try,” he said, “it may not actually be steak, but it will probably be too good an imitation for me to tell the difference.”

“We might have a little more trouble with the fried potatoes and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “And I suspect fresh salads are always going to be beyond our reach. Oh, well, Vitamin C is Vitamin C, I suppose.”

Watching her hands move on the consoles, as surely as they had moved upon the computer, Peake envied her self-sufficiency.

She doesn’t need anybody. She has never had this sense of being only half a person, only half alive, the rest of the self moving away at nine point eight meters per second per second… it overwhelmed him to think how far apart he was already from Jimson, separated already by time as well as distance.

Ching slid open a panel; a savory smell emerged from the inside. She said, “I hope you like your steak well done.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, chagrined, “I like it rare, but I’ll eat it any way it comes, Ching.”

“I like it well done,” Teague said, somersaulting down from the spincter lock. “Ouch! Someday I’ll have to get used to where the gravity is in the different modules! Can I have that one, Ching, and you fix a rare one for Peake? Don’t tell me your friend the computer mixed up the orders? I thought computers were infallible!”

Ching shook her head, handing him the plate of well-charred “steak.”

“A computer,” she said, glad to have something else to think about, “is an idiot savant. It does just exactly what it is told, and absolutely nothing it is not told to do. It’s only as intelligent as the person who programs it — and the person who uses it. It could have all the knowledge of the universe inside—” she waved at the console of the food processor, “and it wouldn’t be a bit of good unless somebody knew exactly the right instructions to give it, put into the computer in exactly the right way. I must have put in the wrong input — I thought I had it marked for rare, because I tend to digest proteins better when they’re somewhat under-coagulated — but it came out well done. But the computer isn’t at fault, only the instructions I gave it. A computer is exactly like an idiot savant. Remember the little boy they had on one of the training films we saw? He was blind, autistic, and couldn’t be toilet-trained, but at the age of nine he could add a column of ninety figures in his head. He didn’t know how he did it — in fact, he couldn’t be asked how he did it, because he seemed to understand numbers, but not verbal speech concepts. But you put in numbers and he would come up with the right answer.” As Ravi came in, still interlaced with Moira, handing her carefully down into the change of gravity in the DeMag units, she asked, “Is that how you do your lightning-calculation, Ravi? I can understand an autistic idiot doing that — he has nothing else to occupy his mind — but you’re highly intelligent and verbal too. Yet you compute automatically, in the same way as that autistic idiot-savant.”

“I wish I knew, Ching,” Ravi said. “All I can say is that old cliché from psychology — a normal person uses five per cent of his brain cells, the greatest geniuses maybe five per cent more than that. The other ninety per cent — well, who knows what’s inside it? Wild talents like Moira’s ESP, or mine, or the idiot-savant’s. Maybe anything, maybe nothing. Who knows? Who cares? Thank you, Ching,“ he added, taking a plate with a sizzling chunk of rare meat on it, “this is perfect.”

“I’ll have one just like it for you in five seconds, Peake,” Ching promised. “Is yours done well enough, Teague? How would you like yours cooked, Fontana?” She felt a surge of pleasure; they might not like her, but at this moment she was catering to their enjoyment, she was useful to them.

Ravi and Moira, still entwined loosely, ate, feeding each other choice bites from their plates. Teague and Fontana chatted, smiling.

“You’re a harpsichordist, a pianist, Fontana. And of course the weight problem, lifting a piano or harpsichord from Earth, would be impossible. But you have an electronic keyboard, don’t you?”

She nodded. “They warned me about that when I decided to specialize in keyboard music,” she said, “that any career off-planet would mean abandoning almost everything I’d done in music.”

“It should be possible to build a harpsichord,” Teague mused. “We’ve certainly got time enough, and we can machine any parts we want to very precise tolerances. Building here on shipboard, we can synthesize the materials…”

She shrugged. “I can play recorder and flute some, and an electronic keyboard will do for accompaniment,” she said, “and I never had any serious ambitions as a solo instrumentalist. It isn’t as if I’d had a talent like Zora’s. That kind of talent sweeps away everything else. Nobody with that much musical talent would have cared whether they made Ship or not, and of course they wouldn’t—”

“I don’t think it’s a question of talent,” Moira said, “Mei Mei had a voice as good as Zora’s. What she didn’t have was the drive, the ambition if you like. It isn’t talent that makes a performer. It’s desire — what a person wants more than anything in the world. I think all six of us wanted to make the Ship more than anything else, and we had more drive and ambition than the ones who turned up second to us.”

“I’m not so sure,” Fontana demurred, “at least half the class never wanted anything else but to be on the Ship, and at least thirty of them got cut out. I think there’s a certain amount of luck involved—”

“Luck!” Ching scoffed, “luck has nothing to do with it! We’re here because, basically, we worked harder than the others at what it takes…”

“Compatibility, too,” Teague said, “I think they tried mixing different combinations and we just came up as the ones who were most likely to be able to adjust…”

“I suspect,” said Peake, “that we’ll be debating that point for the next nine years or so! Why it was us, and not some other members of our class. But does it matter?” He yawned. “I’m tired. Excuse me — I want to explore the sleep cubicles. It’s your on-shift in navigation, Ravi, if anything should come up—”

“It won’t,” Ravi said, “as far as I can imagine, we could probably get along without any of us going to the Bridge for the next nine years or so.” His arm was still around Moira’s waist. He made a small, interrogative sound, tightening his arm around her. For a moment she was abashed; there was a momentary silence in the cabin, and she felt as if everyone was looking at them where they sat. Then, defiantly, she tossed her head. In this crowded ship everybody was going to know what everybody else was doing, and she had no reason to be ashamed of it. She might as well start the way she intended to go on, doing what she chose.

I’m not like Ching, I can’t be as self-sufficient as she is. I need people, I’m frightened…. The very thought of the vast window on the stars made her feel dizzy and weak, the steak curdling her stomach; she clutched at Ravi, hungry for reassurance.

Fontana said, “I think we all need a break. Suppose we all meet in four hours, here, for the first of those music sessions? Peake, you know Schubert’s Nocturne for piano and violin, don’t you?”

She knew he knew it, she knew it perfectly well, Peake thought angrily. She was rubbing it in. He and Jimson had played it at the last of the Academy concerts, they had been playing it that ghastly final night…. Queers, he heard again the taunt Jimson had flung at him. But Fontana was testing him, perhaps, seeing how well he could stick to the agreement not to cling to the past or torment one another with memories of those who were not with them. He said, “Sure, I know it, can you handle the piano part? I don’t know how it will sound on an electronic keyboard, though.”

“We’ll try it, anyhow,” Fontana said.

Teague said, a little diffidently, “Would anyone like to try the Mozart clarinet quintet?”

“I’ll take the second violin for that,” Ravi said, and they agreed to meet.

The six sleeping cubicles were arranged in a semicircular pattern around the spherical module; each cubicle, Ching had expected, would be the shape of a section of tangerine, but instead the cubicle was vaguely roomlike, the ends chopped off; she supposed that was to make them feel familiar, safe, womblike. At one side was a bunk with a restraining net; on the other, a small cubbyhole with shower and washing equipment, this part heavily DeMagged to full gravity for proper water-flow. She brushed her perfect teeth, feeling some comfort in the familiar ritual, and realized she had forgotten to get herself a disposable nightgown, or fresh clothing for the next shift, from the machine in the hallway. Darting out for it, she saw Moira and Ravi coming out of Moira’s cubicle, turning into Ravi’s, and heard their husky laughter. She felt a sadness too deep for mere envy. What does she know that I don’t know?

She punched the proper co-ordinates for fresh disposable clothing, stuffed everything she was wearing, except her panties, into the recycling chute. She had no particular modesty taboos, but somehow she could not force herself to strip to the skin before Moira and Ravi, who were behind her, also stripping, stuffing clothing into the recycler, stark naked. She turned her eyes shyly away from Ravi, who was strongly erect, and hurried into her cubicle, sliding the door shut. She fastened the restraining net over her bunk, turning the DeMags to half gravity, and forced her thoughts to try and float free. Fortunately the cubicles were completely soundproof.

Why should I wear a nightgown? There is no one here, nor likely to be anyone here! She pitched it fiercely out of her bunk and watched it drifting in lazy circles, trailing one sleeve, until finally, in the low gravity, it settled to the floor. Then she slept.