Survey Ship

CHAPTER SEVEN

As she showered, Ching thought about that.

She had insisted on cleaning up the mess in the gymnasium unaided (it had rained to the floor in a smelly shower when the gravity came on) before going to clean herself. Now she stood under the shower and scrubbed fiercely, letting the hot water wash away disgust and filth, sudsing detergent vigorously through her short straight hair.

Was it all in her mind? Granted, she had not specialized in psychology and, in fact, considered it a sloppy and inexact science. But Teague was right; as a G-N, she should have had perfect inner-ear channels, and this sudden nausea was evidently some kind of failure. She found it both puzzling and frightening. She had had perfect health all her life, except for a broken finger when she was nine, and the occasional 24-hour-virus. Now her body had betrayed her, and done it in the most humiliating way possible. Well, not quite, she told herself with a touch of bleak humor. She could have wet herself, or her bowel sphincters could have failed her like that, in public; that would have been considerably worse!

But she expected herself to be perfect, had taken her perfect body’s co-operation for granted — she had never even had a cavity in a tooth! Feeling the comfort of the hot shower, flooding down, blessedly down on her, she felt a sudden surge of repeated panic, if the gravity suddenly went off in here, I’d drown, and firmly reminded herself not to be foolish. The DeMags were backed up by all sorts of fail-safe systems. She wouldn’t drown before she could get the water turned off. Why was she being such a fool?

She stepped out, air-dried and combed her hair, enjoying the feel of its cleanness, and slipped into a clean tunic and panties, slid her feet into paper slippers. She thought, I had better go and check the computer tie-ins. Though it can’t be in computer… and again she felt the feeling of sudden, wavery panic.

Unknown I’m supposed to have a perfect body, complete with perfect inner-ear labyrinths. If my own body can go back on me like this, can I trust the computer?

Teague had gone to check on the DeMag and Life-Support units, and Fontana, as his second, had gone with him. Ravi, whose shift it was, had gone up to the Bridge to make the routine check of course, chronometer time, and navigation instrument readings. Peake and Moira, having nothing else to do, had remained in the gym, Peake completing his running laps, and Moira working on gymnastic equipment.

Peake completed the hundredth lap — which gave him a day count of a two-mile run — and slid down, folding his long legs, to watch Moira whirling herself over the parallel bars. He thought; if the gravity failed when she’s doing that, she’d break her neck! and felt himself shudder.

She saw him watching her and jumped down.

“You’re practically good enough for the Olympics,” he said, smiling.

She said, with her throaty chuckle, “Quite a lot of us are. We train very hard, after all, and there are a lot of high-mesomorph types in the Academy — short, compact, muscular. It’s one of the physical arrangements that goes with high intelligence. The other kind is like you — long, scrawny, ectomorph. There’s even been some talk of entering a few of us. Only the question is, what country’s team would we join? Australia? The world would complain, if Australia had a gene-pool like ours to dip into. Our own? Nobody’s supposed to know where we come from, and this would bring us back into national politics again. So — no Olympic stars from the Academy.”

“What country would you have competed in, if you had?” Peake asked, “Would you have liked to?”

She shrugged. “I sometimes think it would have been nice. I do like the limelight. Only if I’d had that kind of ambition, I’d hardly have made it in the Academy, would I?” she said, answering the last question first. “I don’t think I ever knew your real name, did I, Peake?”

“David Akami,” he said, “and I’m from South Africa. And you—”

“Ellen Finlayson,” she said, “and I was born in Scotland, or so they tell me — I don’t remember, so it’s hearsay evidence, after all.” She chuckled again. “Do you mind if I turn the DeMags off again? I had some training in free-fall when Teague and I installed the drives, and I’ve always wanted to try free-fall acrobatics — I watched the telecast from the Lunar Dome the last three Earth Days.”

“Fine with me,” Peake replied, and Moira turned off the stud, feeling the gravity slowly, slowly go off; at first they felt faintly light-headed, a brief flash of dis-orientation, then the exhilaration of floating. Moira bounded up into midair, turning a rapid series of somersaults, spinning on her own center like a top; came to rest laughing and flushed, stretching back and turning on her own momentum, arms splayed out.

“I wonder why Ching got sick? There doesn’t seem to be anything sickening about it,” she said, “I actually like the sensation of weightlessness.”

“Her inner-ear channels may not be as stable as yours.”

“Oh, come,” Moira scoffed, “she’s a G-N.”

“In that case,” Peake said, “it’s only a matter of acclimatization; she’ll get used to it very quickly. Don’t make fun of her, Moira.”

“I wasn’t making fun of her, Peake,” Moira said soberly, “I felt sorry for her. She’s always been so perfect and self-controlled. Maybe that’s it — it scares her to be out of control, because that’s just one of the givens of her life. Being perfect. Like a computer. Any G-N takes it for granted — being perfect, I mean. You, and I, and all the rest of us, have to live with the fact that we’re just conglomerations of random genes; if we made it into the Academy, that means that we’re the end product of natural selection. You, more than me, because in your country the weaker ones die out in famines and so forth. So we know, if we get this far, it’s because we, or our ancestors, had some superior stuff inside us, body and brain. Ching doesn’t have that to lean on — whatever there is that’s superior about her, she knows it’s just that some scientist tinkered around with her parents’ germ plasm. No roots.”

All this was true, Peake thought; but he was surprised that it should be the tough-minded Moira who said it. He had not thought her sensitive enough to be aware of that. He discovered that he was looking at Moira in a new way; she too could be sympathetic, where, always before, she had intimidated him a little.

She pulled him up beside her; he felt himself bounce a little on the cushiony air. “As I remember, you’re a fair acrobat yourself,” she said. “Come on, let’s try double-spins around a common center—”

Seizing her hands, spinning, Peake felt the curious sensation that the world, not himself, was spinning while he remained wholly stationary at the center of the module which was dancing, somersaulting around them; that the absolute center of the universe was located somewhere in the small, lessening space between Moira’s curled body and his own as the module whirled round them as the whirling stars moved… at the end of a long spin they slowly came to rest, almost in each other’s arms. Slowly, holding each other, they drifted down.

Moira had felt it too, as if the universe centered to the location in the narrowing space between their bodies; she was reluctant to break the contact.

Peake said, laughing, “You’re good at that for a woman!”

“That’s nonsense,” she laughed, without rancor, “That’s like saying, you play the violin pretty well for a man! Do you really think skill at acrobatics is gender-linked?”

He shook his head. “Women have a higher percentage of body fat to muscle; their center of gravity is lower,” he said, “and so, in general, men are somewhat better athletes. Or at least, so I understood, as a medical man — I’m not claiming to be an expert on athletics. If women are men’s equals in that field, I apologize — I spoke out of ignorance, Moira, not male chauvinism.”

“Apology accepted,” she said, giving him a little hug. Then, as he spontaneously returned it, she came to rest, perfectly still, her eyes meeting his, straightforward and clear.

“Do you want to go to bed with me? If you do, it’s all right.”

Shock flooded through Peake; he felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his universe, the centering closeness suddenly replaced by empty cold. That had never occurred to him, it had been the last thing on his mind. The split second of panic was followed by a split second of cynicism, Maybe I ought to try it, find out what it’s like… but panic, emptiness, and shock were all drowned in a sudden, uncontrollable wave of hostility.

“What’s the matter? Isn’t Ravi enough for you? Or can’t you live with the notion that there’s one man in the universe who doesn’t want you? At that, I suppose I’m the only male in the Academy you haven’t slept with, and you want to round out the collection to completeness?”

Moira’s face whitened at his fury, but she did not withdraw or drop her eyes. She said, shaking her head a little, her curly hair flying out on the soft currents of air in the room, “No, Peake. I’m not ashamed of liking sex, but that wasn’t the idea. I just thought — I thought it might make you feel a little less alone, that’s all.”

And suddenly Peake was ashamed of himself. He had felt alone, most desperately alone, isolated and friendless, and then when one of his new family made an offer of ultimate sharing with him, he reacted like this! He liked Moira, he had been astonished at her sensitivity— in his experience, most women were tough realists, incapable of the kind of gentle sentiment men could display. But still… something inside him refused to take this kind of comfort quite as lightly as that, meaning no more to Moira than the hug she had given him, a purely physical kind of comfort. He wondered if that was all that sex meant to women.

He said, fumbling, “I’m sorry, Moira. I shouldn’t have said that. I — I know you meant it kindly, and I — I really do appreciate it. Honestly. But I guess I’m just not — not ready for that. Not yet.”

Another sleep period had come and gone, and Teague sat in the music room, music paper and a stylus before him, scribbling rapidly. Ching came and looked over his shoulder.

“What’s that you’re doing?” Her eyes on the line of music, she sang it slowly and correctly, in a sweet clear mezzo voice. “That’s a lovely melody, Teague, but I don’t recognize it. Is it something that isn’t in the computer? Something by Delius, perhaps? It has that feel.”

“I’m flattered,” Teague said wryly.

“You wrote that?” She looked down at him in surprise and admiration. “But Teague, it’s beautiful, I didn’t know you composed music!”

“I don’t, very often,” he said, “only when an inspiration comes to me, I guess.”

“A sonata?”

“String quartet, eventually,” Teague confessed, “and don’t tell everybody about it, Ching. They’d probably think it was foolish. Nobody composes music now, with the computer doing everything better—”

“No,” Ching said, “that’s foolish. There’s no substitute for human knowledge.”

“I’m surprised you would say that, Ching. Aren’t you the one who thinks the computer is God? Why, your very existence — it was computer technology which created the modifications in human germ plasm making the G-Ns possible, wasn’t it? One could say a computer was your real father, couldn’t we?”

Ching giggled. She said, “That brings up the funniest picture in my mind…” and for the first time it occurred to Teague that Ching’s completely plain, ordinary face, without a single feature one could notice or remember, seemed somehow pretty and individual when she was laughing like that. Not a single good feature or a bad one; but somehow her giggle was completely unlike any other one he had ever heard.

Then she sobered, and her voice, always a little tense and didactic, virtually wiped out the memory of that charming laugh. She said, “No, Teague, I don’t idolize the computer. Less than any of you, maybe, because I know more about them and what they can and can’t do. We have to rely on them, though, because the — universe is just too big. Remember what Ravi said about the mudfish and the Great Barrier Reef? The computer can only do what we order it to do, and only if we ask it in just exactly the right way. It’s like that kid game we all used to play in kindergarten — Simon says take three giant steps — and you had all the rigamarole of saying May I — Yes — and if you missed a single Simon Says, or May I, you had to go back to the beginning and wipe everything out. A computer is like that kid’s game. Anything, if you ask it exactly right, and nothing if you don’t. And speaking of computers, Teague, I did check every single tie-in for the DeMags, and I couldn’t find anything wrong. All I can think of is that somebody bumped against the stud, while we were all exercising, and turned it off, and I’d suggest a safety housing for it.”

Teague frowned, leaning back and raising his eyes and his attention from the music paper in his lap. He said, “I can’t imagine how it could have happened. If the control of the DeMag in there had been a pressure stud, yes, I could see it. But it’s a dial that has to be twisted clockwise to go on, and counter-clockwise to go off, and it’s not all that easy to turn; it could hardly have been turned off by accident. Nor can I imagine any one of us doing it without warning the others; Peake could very easily have been killed, and if he weren’t such a fine natural athlete he would have been killed. None of us is stupid enough, to say nothing of malicious enough, to do such a thing as a practical joke. So, eliminating accidental turning-off, or deliberate-without-telling-anyone — which would mean that one of us is a psychopath who didn’t care if he or she killed someone — it winds down to defect in the DeMag, or fault in the computer tie-in. Now Fontana and I checked out that DeMag unit and the control, right down to the core, and it was in perfect condition.”

Ching frowned, thinking hard. She could feel again, in her belly, the sudden nausea and fear as the gravity left her disoriented, hanging upside-down from a ballet barre which, moments before, had been stable and solid. She said, “Could there have been a short in the electrical wiring of the control dial, Teague? That would explain why it went off suddenly, and then came back again when you turned it off and then on again.”

“Maybe, but we didn’t find any trace of it,” Teague said. “Fontana thought about that, of course; it was the first thing that occurred to her. Electrical circuits do short out, of course, but all the electrical circuits aboard this ship are computer-controlled anyhow, and they’d hardly short out without some record — I mean, not the way a regular wired switch would do.”

“No question of that,” Moira said behind them, “Fontana and I checked every circuit and everything in the DeMag machinery before we went to bed, and it’s purring along as sweetly as any old pussycat. Speaking of which, I wish we could have shipped a cat or two. I like live things.”

“There are plants enough in the conservatory,” Teague said, “but there were all kinds of arguments against any pets. Starting with contamination of alien worlds, and ending with the psychological problems of becoming attached to them and suffering when they die, or inbreeding causing monsters after several generations of kittens. Not to mention that cats react very badly to free-fall; worse than any other animal. Their inner-ear channels are even more sensitive than the human ones. More so, because they can’t react to visual cues the way humans can.”

“Oh, plants — that’s not what I mean by live things,” Moira said, going to the rack where the musical instruments were kept and getting out her cello, and a little later, Fontana came in, carrying a printout of the Mass in Five Voices.

“Ching, you can have the soprano part if you’d rather, you’ve got the range — you can sing a top A, can’t you?”

“I’d really rather do the contralto part, Fontana. I like harmony. You and Peake can share the honors for the melody.”

“The mass is a little complicated. I thought we could start with something shorter. You know this, don’t you?” She hummed the opening phrases of the Ave Verum. Teague took up the bass part, surreptitiously sliding the music paper on which he had been writing into his flute case. Suddenly Moira’s cello began to drift upwards; Teague grabbed for a shower of floating papers.

“Oh, damn.’” He grabbed at handfuls of papers. Ching struggled to control sickness again, clutching at the doorframe and closing her eyes as the room reeled around her. Moira grabbed the cello, manhandled it into its case and snapped it safely inside, then purposefully forced herself down toward the DeMag unit.

“Now, damn it, this is not funny,” she said wrathfully, and Teague stared at her.

“Do you seriously believe anyone would do this to be funny, Moira? Besides, nobody was near the dial—”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “Peake is too serious about working in full gravity, and Ravi knows perfectly well how serious it would be; and the rest of us were all here watching each other. But I couldn’t even find a short in the way it’s wired in. It’s got to be the computer, Ching.”

“I don’t know why you all blame the computer,” she said crossly, her eyes still squeezed shut against compelling nausea. She would not lose her breakfast, she would NOT! “I checked every tie-in to the DeMags and the programming appears to be perfect! Most of it I did myself, and I don’t make that kind of mistakes!”

“Well, try what you did before, Teague,” Moira said, twisting the dial firmly to OFF and then to ON again. The cello case thumped over on its side; if the cello had not been in the case it would have been crushed. Ching came down with a bump and a small, smothered cry.

“It’s evidently something in the control dials, then,” Moira said, touching it gingerly as if probing a wound “I’ll take one of the dials apart and see how it’s put together and why it keeps doing that. First in the gym, then in here, and God knows where it will happen next! And it could have been really dangerous, too.” She glanced at Ching and said, “You look shaky; do you want coffee, tea, a drink — something stronger?”

Fontana said, “Brandy. Call it medicinal,” and went to the console, dialing herself a drink and a slightly stronger one for Ching. “No, drink it, Ching. I’m not a qualified doctor in the sense Peake is, but I have had medical training, and right now this is what you need.”

Slowly, Ching sipped the sharp liquid, making a face of distaste.

“Ugh, I hate that stuff!”

But even so, Fontana noticed the color coming slowly back into her face as she sipped.

Peake and Ravi came into the main cabin, and, seeing Fontana and Ching drinking, went to get themselves hot drinks. Teague said, “Cocktail hour, huh?” and got himself one, too. He scrabbled the music paper together, carefully separating his own from the printout of the madrigals Fontana had brought, and slid them into the flute case again. Then he began to pass out the parts.

“Fontana, soprano. Ching, alto. Peake, tenor. Ravi, baritone. And I’ll sing bass,” he said. “Moira, are you going to play for us? Or shall we go to the gym first and work out?”

“No!” said Moira, sharply, automatically and without thinking. Then, hearing what she had said, she began to rationalize it.

“I think we ought to — to stay out of the gym until we know what’s happened with the DeMags. It’s the easiest place to get hurt or killed, and if one of them went off suddenly, again, it might be more dangerous this time…”

Her voice trailed off again.

Ravi protested, “Look, one of the first priorities aboard ship is to keep our physical fitness. With the gym closed—”

Peake said sharply, “Moira’s psychic; have you forgotten how we found out she was psychic? We stay out of the gym until we find out what went wrong with the DeMags, and that’s an order!”

Teague raised his head and glared. “Who appointed you Captain of this ship, Peake?”

“As the medical officer in charge of physical fitness and safety—” Peake began, but Fontana swiftly interposed. She said, “We’ll check out the DeMags as soon as we can. Meanwhile, we’re all here, and it’s time for music and then for dinner, in that order. Let’s talk about it later. Arguing on an empty stomach never gets anyone anywhere.” She turned to Moira. “Give us an A, will you?”

Moira stroked a soft string on the cello. She frowned, wondering why the thought of going to the gym had evoked such immediate, unprompted panic. Was it really another of those sickening psychic flashes, coming from nowhere and infuriatingly vague? Or was it her awareness of some flaw in the DeMags, subliminal, so that she knew, subconsciously, what was wrong and wanted to keep people away from it until it came into her conscious mind and she could fix it? She scowled, damning her Wild Talent, wishing it more accessible and more easily tamed, or else non-existent. She listened as Fontana sang the opening phrase of the Ave Verum in her clear, beautifully trained soprano; heard Ching and Peake join in, Ravi and Teague joining with the bass line.

When they finished, Ravi said, “Does everyone know the Mozart setting of the Ave Verum?”

Ching replied by singing the opening line. The voices answered one another…

O dulcis….

O pie….

O Jesu, Fili Mariae…

Ravi, singing softly with his ear tuned to the other voices, particularly Peake’s clear tenor, thought how strange it was that five agnostics or atheists, and one secret mystic, without any noticeable religion, were singing this music dedicated to militant Christianity;

that the greatest of Western music had been poured out into this religion which had tried so hard to conquer the world. Maybe their only triumph had been their music, their masses and hymns, the work of Bach especially, the great flood of praise poured out in song; music that actually survived the faith for which it had been written. “Miserere mei,” Ravi sang, softly, “Miserere mei, Domine…” and as the five voices melted into the great cadenced Amen, he had a curious sense of merging with all of them, more intense than the merging in any act of love.

This isn’t religious music any more, no one cares what the words mean… true body of our Lord, what rubbish…. but the music itself creates a form of reverence for everything…. is it a psychological trick, or is music, by its very nature, a part of God? He had studied the writings of his namesake, the great Indian musician, who had written once that he did not invent the ragas that he played; that he simply listened for them, in the meditative mode, and they were poured through his instrument. Was this what was meant by the old phrase, The music of the Spheres?

They began the Mass for Five Voices; Ravi, unfamiliar with the music and sight-singing his part, for a time had to pay strict attention to what he was doing; but through it, he had the curious sense that in this shared music, they were pledging a common faith and merging with one another in a way more important than any act of love. Faith to what? To one another? To their common roots, to the Academy? To the Ship? To the cause they served without knowing why, which was, when you came right down to it, rather like religion; none of them had ever questioned why space must be colonized, the Survey Ships sent out year after year. So that they were priests of a strange religion of space….

Priests? Or were they simply blind worshippers?

They finished the Mass; somebody suggested more music, but Peake shook his head.

“My throat’s dry; I need something to eat and drink.” He went to the food unit. Moira put away her cello again, knowing that she, too, should find something to eat. My throat’s dry and I haven’t even been singing! What’s wrong with me?

She had been trained to strict rationality; bit by bit she checked out the possible causes of her unease. Was she worried about the DeMags? That was troublesome, yes, but after all, it was only machinery, and she could understand that; if there was someting wrong in the mechanism, surely it was only a matter of time before she, or Teague, or Fontana, could locate and correct it, and meanwhile they would stay out of the gym and observe every precaution, secure everything for free-fall — she noticed that Fontana had stored the music carefully in closed bins.

Had she eaten something that did not agree with her? No, her breakfast had consisted of vitamin-C syrup and flat cakes of rice meal, with hot bouillon. Nothing that could upset the digestion of a sickly infant, and she had always been almost boringly healthy. Was her menstrual period due? No, not that either, and she had never had trouble with it, anyhow. Why, then, did she stare with sickened disinterest at the sizzling chunk of meat on Fontana’s plate, at Ching’s heaped salad?

Ravi came and settled into a seat beside her. “Not eating, Moira? Can’t I bring you something? A little clear tea?”

“That would be nice,” she agreed, “but you don’t have to wait on me, Ravi, I can get it for myself—”

“Here, I have it,” Peake said, turning from the console with a cup in each hand, “I was getting some for myself anyway. Moira, what’s wrong? It’s my business if anyone’s sick.”

“I’m not sick,” Moira said irritably, “I simply don’t feel like eating!”

“Fontana was feeding Ching brandy; you look as if you could use a good stiff drink,” Peake said, but he didn’t pursue the matter. Whatever it was, it wasn’t serious enough to justify rank-pulling, assuming he had it to pull. None of them did. Maybe Ching had been right all along, that one of them should have had authority to make decisions.

Moira sipped her tea, feeling the hot liquid loosen her dry throat, but the unease still lay within her, a cold lump. She could see Ravi’s eyes fixed on her, solicitous and troubled. Damn all men, anyhow, you gave them access to your body, because you wanted it as much as they did, and they kept on thinking it made some difference, that they somehow had the right to possess your mind and soul too! Machines made more sense. They were what they were, no matter how you treated them, as long as you gave them the kind of care their physical and mechanical nature demanded. Why couldn’t men be content with that? Ravi was nice, and fun, and charming, and a skilled and ardent lover, but she felt hemmed in by the closeness he demanded. Was that why she had offered herself to Peake, to demonstrate to Ravi that he had no first mortgage on her body and soul?

Even Ravi’s Wild Talent was a simple one; a purely mechanical one, utilizing the latent calculating skill of the brain. Some educator once had surmised — and seemed to prove it, by teaching children believed to be mentally retarded — that reading was not a learned skill, but a brain function. Arithmetic was probably the same kind of thing. But precognition?

Fontana came and joined them. She said, “I heard you humming along with Ravi on the Ave Verum, Moira. Listen, there’s nothing wrong with your voice, and no reason you shouldn’t sing tenor if you want to; you have perfect pitch, and all you’d need to do would be work on your breathing. I have a feeling, though, that if you worked just a little to develop your range, you’d be a very fine contralto. Ching’s not a contralto, she’s a soprano without a high range.”

“I can sing a high B-flat,” Ching said defensively.

Fontana retorted, “When I was studying voice, I was told that almost all mezzo-sopranos are just timid sopranos!”

“And I was told,” Ching said waspishly, “that sopranos are lazy people who think it’s easier to sing the melody than to learn how to read music and sing the harmony!”

Moira chuckled. “Cut it out, you two. I was told that singers are temperamental people, which is why I stuck to the cello!”

“Just the same,” Fontana said, coming back to her original thesis, “I could teach you to sing as well as either of us — any of us — if you’d be willing to work a little. Not right away, but keep it in mind.”

But Moira was not listening. Her face had suddenly gone blank, staring into nowhere, her features so relaxed, so mask-like that Fontana recoiled; she hardly looked human. Peake made a startled movement in her direction; he had seen an epileptic, once, in the hospital where he trained, look like that a fraction of a second before a seizure.

Then Moira screamed, a shrill, almost soprano scream. And in the next moment, like an echo of that shriek, all six of them felt it, a sharp, shivering shock, and then every siren and alarm bell in the ship went off.