Someone keyed the room lights to full brightness again. Bedlam erupted as others vehemently countered the physicist’s assertion. The loudest voice belonged to Lt. Tony Shrib. “All it proves is He was well-read. Susan here is an engineer, for star’s sake, and she knows about these Remans.”
“Romans,” Susan corrected under her breath. She ignored the continuing, well-worn arguments. What was new lay before her. Her eyes moved hungrily over the scene on the table, feasting on its complexity; she admired the stonework of the bridge, the odd moisture on a plant whose name she would have to look up in a text. All were images strange and exotic to the shipborn. Of those party to the secret of this art, only Master Electrician Huong Trang could claim to have set foot on the planet glorified by the Artist and Huong stubbornly refused to discuss what he remembered, as if the memories were sweeter for the hoarding.
Typically, it was Huong who interrupted her pleasure. “My friends,” he said in his gentle, clear voice—the voice that had reproached them so many times before. “My colleagues. Is it not time?”
The good-natured bickering faltered and stopped. The others, all officers or senior scientists, found good reasons to look anywhere but at Huong’s stern face. He recaptured their attention by placing one blunt-fingered hand firmly on the surface of the art.
Dr. Natalie Emil, a trim woman in her late forties whose love for the art was matched only by her love for her patients in the ship’s hospital—and truth be told, for her mother’s legacy of Earth chocolate—cried out, “Careful!”
The sacrilegious hand stayed where it was. “Is it not time?” Huong insisted, looking from one to the other in turn. “Has He not suffered long enough?”
The ship’s senior psychologist, Dr. Wayne Simmons, shook his mane of heavy gray hair, his eyes troubled behind their thick lenses. “We don’t dare release Him from the sim program. You know that, Huong. We can’t predict what the effect on His mind would be. We don’t have the facilities on this ship to ensure His recovery.”
Huong lifted his hand, prompting at least one sigh of relief, then waved it eloquently over the artwork imprisoned on the table. “And we don’t want this to stop, do we.”
Susan felt the blood draining from her face. She didn’t need to glance at her colleagues to know they too would be showing signs of shock. How dare Huong accuse them of—of what?
“We cherish the Artist’s work,” she said involuntarily. “How is that wrong? Despite His weakness, He’s valued by all of us.” Susan looked pleadingly at her peers, was strengthened by Natalie’s nod of support, by Tony’s smile. “You’ve seen for yourself how our shipmates flock to the Gallery to see His images of our heritage. We’ve arranged school tours. We let anyone order a reproduction for their quarters. We—”
“We imprison Him in His dream of Earth. We ensure He continues to produce what we crave,” Huong said heavily. “And we wait for Him to die and release us from our conscience.”
“No! How dare you—” Wayne’s hand touched hers briefly. Susan calmed herself but refused to back down. “You’ve never been comfortable with our decision, Huong. I understand your feelings about it—”
“I don’t think you do. I don’t think any of you really do.” The Master Electrician walked to the side of the room they usually avoided. He activated the sole control on its surface, turning the blank surface into a one-way view of a room, larger than most of the quarters on the colony ship
Just as the Artist had done each and every day since they had discovered His existence. Almost ten years ago, yet Susan remembered it as if it had been yesterday. They’d searched for the release catches, frantic to rescue the imprisoned stranger, only to be stopped by Wayne and Natalie, their medical experts. It was obviously a sim chamber, like enough to the hundreds on the
The shipborn entered the chambers as part of their schooling, a refresher course built from open skies, scented winds, and uneven ground. It was a matter of pride to avoid them as adults, to prefer acclimation to the Ship, though all recognized the coming generations would need the sims and more to prepare for their new home.
But no one lingered in the sims more than a day at a time. Only those who could accept leaving Earth had boarded the Ship; to admit otherwise was to unsettle one’s own sanity and disturb those around you. And there was work to be done, the carefully planned busyness designed to occupy minds tempted to hold on to the past. Survival for all meant looking to the future, not dwelling on what was now forever beyond their reach.
The sim chamber hosting the Artist was quite different from those offering education or a harmless moment of blue-skyed nostalgia. It was capable of full life support even if the Ship failed, of remote functions better suited to quarantine facilities. That had been one of their early fears: that He had been a carrier of some disease perilous to the Ship. They’d used the remotes to run tests as He lay unconscious, until they were sure He was nothing more dangerous than a puzzle.
There were recording devices, notes left behind in this secret place. Those had been studied too, though all they offered was a seemingly endless lists of bodily functions, chilling evidence the Artist had indeed been in this chamber every minute since launch.
As vividly, Susan remembered the morning when they’d met, here, to listen with horror as Wayne presented their conclusion: they must do nothing to disturb the Artist within His sim chamber with its automated, if bizarre, treatment. He and Natalie had been utterly convinced and so convincing: Releasing the Artist from his dreams of Earth, replacing them with the here-and-now of the Ship after all this time, would only shatter whatever reality His mind still recognized.
And, unsaid but understood, it would very likely stop His Art.
So they resigned themselves to being His keepers, to hiding the dark secret within the bowels of the Ship, and to sharing the Art with as many as possible. Huong wasn’t the only one to have nightmares since. How dare he set himself as their conscience!
Huong’s small eyes glittered at Susan, as though he heard her thoughts, or as though he were close to tears. His emotions were becoming embarrassingly public as he aged, perhaps a consequence of outliving most who had walked onto the Ship with him. “I’ve found out where He came from,” he said calmly enough. “I know the truth.”
“What?” Tony, the ship’s senior stellar cartographer, ran one hand over his close-cropped hair, then down over his face as if to smooth away an expression he’d rather not share. “How? Where?” Susan understood his dismay. Tony had taken the greatest risk of them all, using his clearance and knowledge to search the Ship’s records for any clue as to the origin of the Artist on the Ship. He’d found nothing: nothing to explain how the ship’s senior psychologist, Dr. Randall Clarke, had been able to requisition then hide the construction of this chamber at the edge of livable gravity inside the immense core of
Nothing to challenge their assumption that the Artist suffered from some delusional state, some flaw Dr. Clarke had been treating him for in this private, hidden place, some condition too severe to allow exposure to the Ship’s environment or company.
“Our past is recorded in places other than the Ship’s systems, Mr. Bridge Officer,” Huong said with deliberate irony.
“Tell us what you’ve learned,” Wayne ordered impatiently.
Huong spoke slowly, methodically, as if to impress each word on them all. “Did Randall mention his wife to any of you?”
They didn’t look at Susan, but she felt their focus on her. Everyone knew she and Randall had been lovers until his death. “Is this relevant?” she asked coldly.
“Very.”
“Then, no. I didn’t know he had ever married.”
“Oh yes. In fact, Randall was supposed to board with his wife. Yet Tony’s checked the manifest; Ship’s records clearly show Randall arriving alone.”
“Where did you find this information?” Tom demanded. He’d found the datacube giving directions to this place in Randall’s cabin safe—otherwise they might never have discovered it. Sometimes the thought made Susan weak. The beauty and richness of the Artist’s work, languishing as dust-covered rolls on the floor where the automatics dumped them. No classes of school children seeing His work, awed by their own past made manifest. They’d have reached orbit around New Earth 17, moved to the surface and started their new lives all unaware, while the great
