Ching wasn’t so sure. She said in a low voice, “I think they chose people who had demonstrated that they could conform if they had to.”
“But whatever they decided,” Moira said, “we are here. It’s like those arranged marriages they used to have, hundreds of years ago, it’s done and can’t be undone. What God, or the Academy, has joined together, let no man put asunder. The six of us are here, and there are no others, and we’d better work out a way to care about each other; because there’s nobody else for any of us, and we are not going to get any second chances!”
That, Peake thought, was laying it right out on the line, putting into words what they all knew and which he, at least, had never really faced. He set his jaw tight and said, “All right. Agreed.”
“Agreed,” Ching said promptly, adding, “I was out of line.”
Peake said, “I’ll play anything you want me to. But we’d better pick an hour which will work for the day people and the night people both, unless somehow our internal rhythms adjust. Which they might, at this distance — I don’t think anyone really has tested circadian rhythms over long periods of time in zero-gee or alternating gravities. There might be some studies in the computer library, done on the Moon or space station. Meanwhile, I tend to be a day person myself, but I’m not extreme about it one way or the other.”
But, while the others were discussing the optimum time of an arbitrary day for the shared music session, Peake sat silent, watching the space station go and return in its orbit across their window — they were still in orbit around it.
It had been a flea-brained idea anyhow, the commitment he had made with Jimson. Dimly, he knew they had both been too young for the kind of lifetime commitment they had wanted to make. He had scorned people like Fly and Moira and Chris, whose wholesale sexual experimentation had been close to the promiscuous, but he knew he had gone to an equally dangerous other extreme; he had been so wrapped up in Jimson that he had made too few other friends.
I’m not the only one. There’s Ching, I don’t think she did any experimenting at all, she must be as lonely as I am… or worse. But she’s used to it… it was her choice, and I…. Then he recognized that as self-pity and cut it off.
“You play the viola, don’t you, Ching?”
“Violin, too,” she said, nodding, “but I thought it would be interesting to specialize in an instrument no one else plays very often.”
“There isn’t much solo literature for it.”
“True,” Ching said, “but then, I’m not interested in being a solo performer, and it got me a place in a lot of string quartets. Because I’m a good violist, not a second-rate violinist trying to play the viola.”
Humility, Peake wondered, or a very shrewd assessment of the kind of team-oriented thinking they’d want on the Ship? Had Ching gambled, cleverly, for a place in the most exclusive string quartet of all?
Fontana watched them talking agreeably about Mozart and Beethoven quartets, improvisational jazz sessions, and wondered if this was the final test, one called survival; how they sorted themselves out, no guidelines, no rules. She might be the Ship’s psychologist, but Moira had forestalled the first suggestion she might have made in that capacity — making it a firm rule that the past should not be used as a defense against the present. Peake might have agreed not to talk about Jim-son; but could anyone stop him from brooding? Would he be able to put it aside, would he need help, would she be able to give it if he did?
And it was Peake who broke into a discussion of the technique for synthesizing violin strings by saying, “But now that we’ve settled the important things, like the make-up of our string quartet, can we try discussing a couple of very minor things, like where we are going, and when do we leave? What’s the procedure?”
“I think,” Moira said, “we’ve had all the orders we’re going to get. When we’re ready to go, we just go, and that’s that.”
“Go where?” Ching asked. “Do we plot a course at random?”
“That’s up to you,” Ravi said, “you have the computer library. You know where planets have been found and colonized, you should make the decision about whether we try for a planet in an area where habitable planets have already been found, or whether we head in a new direction, where we’d have a chance at finding new, wholly untouched stars.”
“I can only get that information on the Bridge,” Ching said. “Has everyone had enough to eat?”
As they went back, one by one, through the dizzying shifts in gravity orientation — this time they were prepared for it and no one lost balance — Fontana reflected that already they had exercised the human habit of naming things; the room with consoles and computation equipment had become the Bridge, by analogy with a ship at sea, in spite of the fact that none of them had ever been on a naval ship. Still, she was glad that the vast observation window, with its lenticular view of half the visible universe, was opaqued against the endless stars; there was only a pale reflection of the colored winking lights on the control panels. Ching slid into a seat before the computer; Peake glanced at his chronometer and said to Ravi, “Toss you for day shift.”
Ravi raised his eyebrows. “Why? You clearly prefer day shift; I unquestionably prefer night. Why risk committing each of us to our least favorite time? If we had the same preference, it would make some sense…”
Peake shrugged. “We’ll run on Greenwich Time for ship operations; Mean Solar Time for navigation. It’s 1409 hours; day shift from 0800 to 2000 okay with you?”
“Fine,” said Ravi, and Peake slipped into the seat before the navigation controls. Moira was already in the drive seat. Fontana noticed there were ten seats built into the control-room which they had called the Bridge. She took one of them. Ravi sat where he could see what Peake was doing. Teague was bending over Moira, studying the control drives with interest.
Moira said, “The drives are ready to go; the only question is, where. We have to leave the Solar System in the direction we’re intending to end up — I don’t have to tell you that. Where are we going, Ching?”
Ching stared at the printout on the greenish console before her, navigation co-ordinates of the known colonies; and blindly up at the opaqued star-screen. The whole universe lay before them — and they expected her to make that decision? She said in a low voice, “You’re asking me to play God,” and something in her voice communicated her sense of awe, of immensity, to Ravi. She had always been so aloof, so much in command of herself, that Ravi, too, was shaken.
Did she feel it, too, that wonderment? he asked himself, and because Ching had always repelled any too- personal approach, Ravi knew he could not ask.
He glanced at the opaqued star-glass, thinking of the crowding immensity of the stars beyond. Unexplored territory. A universe at their feet. Fragments; a scant half dozen colonies out there, millions of billions of stars, and the six of them in their frail little ship, to find a habitable planet in all that wilderness….
He said, and he heard his voice shaking, “I read somewhere, once, that for man to map and explore space was as if a colony of mudfish in a waterhole in the outback of Australia should map the coastline of Australia and every rock in the Greater Barrier Reef.”
Only with the help of God, he thought; mankind aJone could never have done it. And he knew that if he had said it aloud they would all have mocked him; so he was silent.
Teague looked at Ravi, sympathetically. He had gone through this during his first year in the study of astronomy. Facing the indifference of enormous galaxies, the smallness of his own kind against the universe. He said, good-naturedly, “Well, this colony of mudfish has done it. And Ching has the results in the computer. Which way, Ching?”
They were all looking at her now. She said, trying to make her voice matter-of-fact, “I don’t think it’s fair to ask me to make a decision of that size. Not when it affects all of you. I honestly think this is the place for Moira’s consensus decision.”
“You’re the one with the information,” Teague said, “and you were the one who seemed, a while ago, to be in favor of command decisions. What does it matter which way we go? As long as we stay out of black holes, we’re just as likely — speaking from statistic analysis — to find a habitable planet in one direction as in the next.”
Moira exploded. “How can you say that, Teague? Are you saying we can stick a pin in a star-map — or whatever the equivalent would be in the computer — and pick a direction at random?”
“Not at all,” Teague said, “I’m simply pointing out that whatever way we go, we are equally likely, or unlikely, to find a good planet, or not to find one.”
Peake said, “It would seem sensible to go in the direction where we know colonies have already been
