structure rooted to the spine by umbilical attachments. Ninety-six disks in total, and each of those disks, Sky knew, contained ten triangular compartments, each of which held a single momio sleeper and the bulky machines necessary for their care. Nine hundred and sixty frozen passengers, then. Nearly a thousand people in total, all submerged in an icy sleep which would last the entire duration of the voyage to Swan. The sleepers, needless to say, were the most precious commodity that the ship carried; its sole reason for existence. The one hundred and fifty-strong living crew were there only to ensure the wellbeing of the frozen and to keep the ship on course. Again Sky measured his current familarity with the ship against that which he could reasonably hope to attain by the time he was an adult. At the moment he knew fewer than a dozen people, but that was only because his upbringing had been deliberately sheltered. Soon he would know many of the others. His father said that there were one hundred and fifty warm humans on the ship because that was some kind of magic number in sociological terms; the population size towards which village communities tended to converge and which carried with it the best prospects for internal harmony and general wellbeing amongst its members. It was large enough to allow individuals to move in slightly different circles if they wished, but not so large that there were likely to be dangerous internal schisms. In that sense, Old Man Balcazar was the tribal leader and Titus Haussmann, with his deep knowledge of secret lore and his abiding concern for the safety of the population, chief medicine man, or top hunter, perhaps. Either way, Sky was the son of someone in a position of authority, what the adults sometimes called a caudillo, meaning big man, and that augured well for his own future. It was open talk amongst his parents and the other adults that Captain Balcazar was an ‘old man’ now. Old Man Balcazar and his father were professionally close: Titus always had the Captain’s ear and Balcazar routinely consulted Sky’s father for advice. This trip outside would have required Balcazar’s authorisation, since use of any of the Santiago’s spacecraft was to be kept to a minimum, the ships themselves irreplaceable.
He felt the taxi decelerate, false gravity easing off again.
‘Take a good look,’ Titus said.
They were passing the engines: a huge and bewildering tangle of tanks and pipes and flared orifices, like the gaping mouths of trumpets.
‘Antimatter,’ Titus said, mouthing the word like a quiet oath. ‘It’s the devil’s own stuff, you know. We carry a small amount even in this shuttle, just to initiate fusion reactions, but even that makes me shiver. But when I think about the amount aboard the Santiago, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.’
Titus pointed to the two magnetic storage bottles at the rear of the ship: huge reservoirs for penning macroscopic quantities of pure antilithium. The larger of the two reservoirs was empty now, the fuel it had contained completely consumed during the initial boost phase up to interstellar cruising speed. Though there was no external indication that this was the case, the second bottle still contained its complete load of antimatter, delicately balanced in a vacuum fractionally more perfect than the one through which the great ship flew. There was less antimatter in the smaller bottle, since the ship’s mass would be less during deceleration than acceleration, but there was still enough to give anyone nightmares.
No one, at least in Sky’s experience, ever joked about antimatter.
‘All right,’ his father said. ‘Now get back in your seat and do your belt up.’
When he was secure Titus gunned the taxi, increasing the thrust to its maximum. The Santiago diminished until it was just a thin grey sliver, and then became difficult to see unless one searched the starfields carefully. It was hard to believe, seeing it against apparently fixed stars, that the ship was moving at all. It was, but eight hundredths of lightspeed, though faster than any crewed ship had ever moved before, was still almost zero when set against the vast distances between the stars.
That was why the passengers were frozen, so that they could sleep out the whole thing while three generations of crew lived almost their entire lives tending them. Cocooned in their cryogenic sleeper berths, the passengers were nicknamed mummies by the crew, momios in the Castellano which was still used for casual conversation within the ship.
Sky Haussmann was crew. So was everyone he knew.
‘Can you see the other ships yet?’ asked his father.
Sky searched the forward view for long moments before finding one of the other vessels. It was hard to see, but his eyes must have adapted to the darkness since leaving home. Had he imagined it, even so?
No — there it was again, a tiny, toylike constellation in its own right.
‘I see one.’ Sky pointed.
His father nodded. ‘That’s the Brazilia, I think. The Palestine and the Baghdad are out there too, but they’re much further away.’
‘Can you see it?’
‘Not without a little assistance.’ Titus’s hands moved in the dark across the taxi’s control board, painting an overlay of coloured lines over the window, bright against space like chalk on a blackboard. The lines boxed the Brazilia and the two more distant ships, but it was only when the Brazilia loomed large that he thought he could make out the slivers of the other two vessels. By then the Brazilia had revealed itself to be identical to his home ship, down to the disks studding its spine.
He looked around the taxi’s window, searching for an intersection of coloured lines that would demark the fourth ship, and found nothing.
‘Is the Islamabad behind us?’ he asked his father.
‘No,’ his father said, softly. ‘It isn’t behind us.’
There was a tone in his father’s voice which troubled Sky. But in the gloom of the taxi’s interior his father’s expression was hard to read. Perhaps that was deliberate.
‘Where is it, then?’
‘It isn’t there now.’ His father spoke slowly. ‘It hasn’t been there for some time, Sky. There are only four ships left now. Seven years ago something happened to the Islamabad.’
There was a silence in the taxi which stretched endlessly before Sky found the will to reply.
‘What?’
‘An explosion. An explosion like nothing you can imagine.’ His father paused before speaking again. ‘Like a million suns shining for the tiniest of instants. Blink, Sky — and think of a thousand people turning to ashes in that blink.’
Sky thought back to the flash he had seen in his nursery when he was three. The flash would have troubled him more if it had not been eclipsed by the way Clown broke down that day. Though he had never quite forgotten it, when he thought back to that incident, it was never the flash that was the more important thing but his companion’s betrayal; the stark realisation that Clown had only ever been a mirage of flickering wall pixels. How could the brief, bright flash ever have signified something more upsetting than that?
‘Someone made it happen?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Not intentionally, anyway. They might have been experimenting, though.’
‘With their engines?’
‘Sometimes I think that was what it probably was.’ His father’s voice grew hushed; almost conspiratorial. ‘Our ships are very old, Sky. I was born aboard our ship, just as you were. My father was a young man, hardly even an adult, when he left Mercury orbit with the first generation of crew. That was a hundred years ago.’
‘But the ship isn’t wearing out,’ Sky said.
‘No,’ Titus said, nodding emphatically. ‘Our ships are nearly as good as the day they were built. The problem is that they aren’t getting any better. Back on Earth, there were still people that supported us; wanted to help us on our way. Over the years they had thought long and hard about the designs of our ships, trying to find small ways in which our lives might be improved. They transmitted suggestions to us: improvements in our life-support systems; refinements in our sleeper berths. We lost dozens of sleepers in the first few decades of the voyage, Sky — but with the refinements we were slowly able to stabilise things.’
That was news to him, too: the idea that any of the sleepers had died was not at first easy to accept. After all, being frozen was a kind of death itself. But his father explained that there were all sorts of things that could happen to the frozen which would still prevent them being thawed out properly.
‘Recently though… in your lifetime, at least — things have become much better. There have only been two die-offs in the last ten years.’ Sky would later ask himself what became of those dead; whether they were still being carried along by the ship. The adults cared deeply about the momios, like a religious sect entrusted with the care of fabulously rare and delicate icons. ‘But there was another kind of refinement,’ his father continued.
