The Quiet Pools

Caravan to Tau Ceti

For one day short of five weeks, Memphis nursed its wounds, real and feigned, in a polar orbit high enough to shrink the blue-white globe below almost to the size of a memory.

Inside, training continued as time and space allowed, with impromptu classes held at all hours, all over the ship. With the manifest at 218 over the design maximum of 12,000, staff and citizenry both faced relentless settling-in pains, as though the ship were a shoe and a half size too small. But, in an unfolding miracle, each day Memphis seemed to grow larger, as its inhabitants learned where elbows rubbed and how best to use the spaces that they had.

While the techs and mechs tuned the ship’s systems, the counselors tried to tune its community. Nearly two hundred Selection mistakes were quietly corrected before the sailing day arrived, each case reviewed by Sasaki before the offenders were sent down to Takara for holding. A hundred more went out on their own through the door that Sasaki held open for them to the very last.

But at last the ship was ready, and the door irrevocably closed. There was no announcement—Memphis was still officially disabled, departure indefinitely postponed—and yet somehow there were anticipations in the ether. On the day that Memphis sailed, 56,000 massed in London at a Muslim prayer rally aimed at pulling the starship back down from the sky. In the hour Memphis sailed, a judge in Delaware granted an injunction barring the starship from leaving and ordering Allied to show that the son of Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy of Wilmington, missing now for nearly two months, was not aboard.

But neither the power of prayer nor the power of law would be enough to stay the captain’s will or still the starship’s drives. And so, in the minutes before Memphis sailed, two friends spoke one last time across a void wider in space than in spirit.

“I’ve already written my essay for tomorrow’s History Today,” said Thomas Tidwell from his house in Halfwhistle. “Do you want to hear how it begins? ‘The starship Ur left Earth in the sunlight, to children’s cheers and the sound of summer bands. The starship Memphis stole away in the night, in the silence of a pricking conscience.’ Nicely turned, don’t you think?”

“Well enough—but whose conscience?” said Sasaki from her suite on Memphis. “Mine is clear.”

“I use you only as a bullfighter uses the cape, to draw them in, unsuspecting. I go on to make many profound observations, the meaning of which will likely escape nine in ten listeners.”

Sasaki smiled. “I look forward to hearing it all tomorrow, from somewhere in the neighborhood of Jupiter.”

“That will be a good distance to listen from, I expect,” said Tidwell. “Have you told Governor James on Ur?”

“I plan to put up a dispatch when we cross out of the solar system.”

“Good,” said Tidwell. “Perhaps then they won’t feel so alone. Perhaps it will help them take some courage and pride in what they’ve embarked on.”

“Perhaps. But I intend to concern myself only with Memphis,” said Sasaki. “Thomas, Captain Powell is calling me to the bridge.”

“Never let your people forget that they are messengers as well as travelers.”

“I will try. I trust you have no regrets, Thomas.”

Tidwell shook his head. “I no more regret refusing your offer and staying than you regret leaving. And I am curious to see if knowledge of the prophecy of our genes will allow us to defy them.”

“I will wish you the best in that,” Sasaki said. “Thank you for your service, Thomas.”

“Thank me? I should rather thank you. I was privileged to stand in the shadows beside you while you drew to yourself all the forces of a moment in time,” Tidwell said. “Everyone over the age of five in 2083 remembers where they were, what they were doing when Ur sailed. Everyone over the age of five today will remember as vividly where they were when they heard that Memphis had skipped away. And you, Hiroko Sasaki, will go down in history as one of the great criminals of all time.”

“There you are wrong, my friend,” said Sasaki with the smallest hint of a prideful smile. “Starting today, we write the histories.”

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