anyway.’
‘We found the only one, though.’
‘Yes.’ In the days after the attack, the other sleeping passengers had all been scanned for buried weaponry — the process had been difficult and dangerous — but nothing had been found. ‘Which shows how confident they must have been.’
‘Sky… did he say anything about why he did it, or why they made him do it?’
Sky raised an eyebrow. This line of questioning, admittedly, was new. His father had concentrated only on specifics before.
‘Well, he did mention something.’
‘Go on.’
‘It didn’t seem to make an awful lot of sense to me.’
‘Perhaps not, but I’d still like to hear it.’
‘He talked about a faction which had discovered something. He wouldn’t say who or what they were, or where they were based.’
His father’s voice was very weak now, but he still managed to ask, ‘And what exactly was it that they had discovered?’
‘Something ridiculous.’
‘Tell me what it was, Sky.’ His father paused. Sensing his thirst, Sky had the room’s robot administer a glass of water to the cracked gash of his lips.
‘He said there had been a breakthrough just before the Flotilla left the solar system — a scientific technique, in fact, which had been perfected towards the end of the war.’
‘And this was?’
‘Human immortality.’ Sky said the words carefully, as if they were imbued with magic potency and ought not be uttered casually. ‘He said that the faction had combined various procedures and lines of research pursued during the century, bringing them together to create a viable therapeutic treatment. They succeeded where others had failed, or had their work suppressed for political reasons. What they came up with was complicated, and it wasn’t simply a pill you took once and then forgot about.’
‘Go on,’ Titus said.
‘It was a whole phalanx of different techniques, some of them genetic, some of them chemical, some of them dependent on invisibly small machines. The whole thing was fantastically delicate and difficult to administer, and the treament needed to be applied regularly — but it was something that was capable of working, if done properly.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘I thought it was absurd, of course. Oh, I don’t deny that something like that might have been possible — but if there’d been that kind of breakthrough, wouldn’t everyone have known about it?’
‘Not necessarily. It was the end of a war, after all. The ordinary lines of communication were broken.’
‘Then you’re saying the faction might really have existed?’
‘Yes, I believe it did.’ His father paused, gathering his energies. ‘In fact, I know it did. I suspect most of what the Chimeric told you was true. The technique wasn’t magic — there were some diseases it couldn’t beat — but it was much better than anything evolution had given us. At best it would extend your lifespan to about one hundred and eighty years; two hundred in extreme cases — those were extrapolations, of course — but that didn’t matter; all that did was that you’d get a chance at staying alive until something better came along.’
He slumped back into his pillow, exhausted.
‘Who knew?’
His father smiled. ‘Who else? The wealthy. Those whom the war had been kind to. Those in the right places, or those who knew the right people.’
The next question was obvious and chilling. The Flotilla had been launched while the war was still in its end stages. Many of those who had obtained sleeper berths, in fact, had been seeking to escape what they saw as a ruined and dangerous system just waiting to slip into another fullscale bloodbath. But competition for those spaces had been immense, and although they had supposedly been allocated on the basis of merit, there must have been means for those with sufficient influence to get aboard. If Sky had ever doubted that, the presence of the saboteur proved it. Someone, somewhere, had pulled strings to get the Chimeric aboard.
‘All right. What about the sleepers? How many of them knew about the immortality breakthrough?’
‘All of them, Sky.’
He looked at his father lying there, wondering how close to death the man really was. He should have recovered from the stab wounds — the damage had not really been that great — but complications had set in: trivial infections which nonetheless lingered and spread. Once, the Flotilla’s medicine could have saved him, could have got him up on his feet in a matter of days with no more than a little discomfort. But now there was essentially nothing that could be done except to assist his own healing processes. And they were slowly losing the battle.
He thought of what Titus Haussmann had just said. ‘How many of them actually had the treatment, then?’
‘The same answer.’
‘All of them?’ He shook his head, almost not believing it. ‘All the sleepers we carry?’
‘Yes. With a few unimportant exceptions — those who chose not to undergo it, on ethical or medical grounds, for instance. But most of them did take the cure, shortly before coming aboard.’ His father paused again. ‘It’s the single biggest secret of my life, Sky. I’ve always known this — ever since my father told me, anyway. I didn’t find it any easier to take, believe me.’
‘How could you keep a secret like that?’
His father managed the faintest of shrugs. ‘It was part of my job.’
‘Don’t say that. It doesn’t excuse you. They betrayed us, didn’t they?’
‘That depends. Admittedly, they didn’t bestow their secret on the crew. But that was a form of kindness, I think.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Imagine if we’d been immortal. We’d have had to endure a century and a half of imprisonment aboard this thing. It would have driven us slowly mad. That was what they feared. Better to let the crew live out a normal lifespan, and then have another generation take over the reins.’
‘You call that kindness?’
‘Why not? Most of us don’t know any better, Sky. Oh, we serve the sleepers, but because we know that not all of them will wake up safely when we reach Journey’s End, it isn’t easy to feel too envious. And we have ourselves to look after, too. We run the ship for the sleepers, but also for ourselves.’
‘Yes. Very equitable. Knowing that they kept the secret of immortality from us does alter the relationship a smidgeon, you have to admit.’
‘Perhaps. That’s why I was always so careful to keep the secret from anyone else.’
‘But you just told me.’
‘You wanted to know if there was any truth to the saboteur’s story, didn’t you? Well, now you know.’ His father’s face grew momentarily serene, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. Sky thought for an instant that his father had slipped away from him, but shortly afterwards his eyes moved and he licked his lips to speak again. It was still an immense effort to talk at all. ‘And there was another reason, too… this is very hard, Sky. I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing by telling you.’
‘Why not let me be the judge of that.’
‘Very well. You may as well hear it now. I almost told you on countless other occasions, but never quite had the courage of my convictions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say.’
‘What little knowledge would that be, exactly?’
‘About your own status.’ He asked for more water before speaking again. Sky thought of the water in that glass; the molecules which were slipping between his father’s lips. Every drop of water on the ship was ultimately recycled, to be drunk again and again. In interstellar space there could be no wastage. At some point, months or years from now, Sky would drink some of the same water that was now bringing relief to his father.
‘My status?’
‘I’m afraid you’re not my son.’ He looked at him hard, as if waiting for Sky to crack under the revelation.
