random Chaos and chance?
He knew he could go mad this way, and opened his eyes, fastening them on the navigation console. His eyes slid past Peake to Moira, and, trying to wrench his mind away from vastnesses too great to contemplate, he forced himself to think of the mundane and familiar. Moira. He had, briefly, been one of her lovers. Somehow he had begun to think, seeing Peake and Jimson, separated, that they had chosen a crew with no sexual ties to one another. He thought, trying to control an unseemly laugh, that it would have been hard to find any man in her year who had not been, at least briefly, Moira’s lover. No, he didn’t think was promiscuous, though one or two of the women were, but she had experimented widely, and she was a friendly girl with no special sexual inhibitions; he thought that Teague, for instance, had also been chosen, a year or so ago, to share Moira’s favors.
Was she thinking about that? he wondered. Two ex-lovers on the Ship? It was simpler to lose himself into a frankly erotic reverie than to contemplate that painful vastness outside the ship, or to try and wrestle some meaning for it all from the unyielding cosmos.
Moira was not thinking about anyone, or anything, human, at all. The faint apprehension she felt, she forced down into calm; she told herself that the view from outside the dome made her dizzy, with all the stars, the Space Station moving sedately past their window every few seconds, disturbing her visual orientation. When she closed her eyes she felt quite comfortable, her stomach in place, the DeMag gravitation strong enough so that she did not lose her up-down orientation with the control board.
Peake said, “Well, it’s like one of those old Navy novels — should I yell out ‘Engineer, set all sails’…”
“You’re mixing your metaphors,” Fontana said. “In the days when they set sails, in the Navy, they didn’t have engineers.” She too was in one of the supernumerary seats; they had all chosen to be present for that moment when Survey Ship 103 moved away from the Space Station, From being as nearly at rest as any body in the universe could be — moving in free-fall orbit around the Space Station — they would begin their long, slow, but steady acceleration which, within a year, would bring them to 99.3 per cent of light-speed; the highest practical speed for space travel. And so rapid would this acceleration be that, from just outside the orbit of the Moon, they would leave Pluto’s orbit behind within thirteen days.
Moira wet her lips, checked the panel before her, then, deliberately, touching the buttons with gentle fingers, she pressed a certain sequence which would activate the drives. Although the drive was in another module, and the intervening total vacuum of space would not convey even a fragment of sound, she fancied that she could feel a faint vibration, somewhere, the drives setting up their vibration… not a sound. Not a vibration. Had it to do with her extra-sensory perception, so that she felt it somewhere inside herself, that the drives were running, like a heartbeat?
She checked the green light on the console which telemetered information, looked at a small visual panel which gave video information from the drive module. There were, of course, no moving parts, but energy was being transmitted, and outside the dome window, the Space Station began to recede, grow smaller against the background of stars. It was no longer passing their window every few seconds. It was moving away… no. They were moving away, Survey Ship 103 was accelerating away from the Space Station at nine point eight meters per second per second…. at an ever-increasing velocity. Moira was not the natural mathematician Ravi was, and could not keep track of the continuing velocity without flicking a glance at the tell-tales giving velocity, and the percentage of Tau — light-speed.
“There it goes,” Fontana said suddenly. “We might as well take a last look.”
Earth had come into their viewfield, a dim blue wraith, the size of a small dinner plate, diminishing, distant… a raindrop. Moira blinked, shook the tears from her eyes, concentrating on the drive tell-tale. Now, when they were clear of the last fragments of gravitational pull from the Moon and from the Space Station… now, slowly, gently… she pressed another sequence of buttons in a memorized order, feeling the faint drag from the DeMag units; possibly it would be easier when they could turn off the DeMags for a while, but at this moment none of them were emotionally or physiologically prepared for less than half gravity. The ship rotated, modules turning for favorable light exposure. She watched what she was doing on her video tell-tales as the light-sail panels, enormous, thin sheets of mylar film, were slowly extruded. She could see a corner of one of them coming, slowly, into sight across the dome, a smear of translucence blotting out a few of the stars across the lower edge of the lenticular observation window. Trim it just a little toward the sun, Moira thought, pressing buttons gently, watching the sail veer ever so slightly, rotate a little, streaming gently. Her tell-tales told her of other sails, great sheets of film sensitive to solar pressure… light as a tangible force, making the sails just shiver… the film was so delicate it would tear at a touch, but in space, friction-less, airless, there was nothing to tear it. Yet Moira’s fingers moved as delicately on the studs as if her fingers could rip through the sails themselves, and she watched the movement, the imperceptible shiver of the streaming mylar, with a lump in her throat. That’s right, just a fraction more to the left… now you, back there by the Life-Support module… come on, darling, easy now ,, . just a little further… she was whispering to the sails as they moved, slowly and with a silken elegance, into position. She felt like a spider, spinning out her silken web into every direction, surrounded by the feathery streaming of filmy sails, responding to the light… feeding the endless energies of light into the drives. The awareness shimmered inside her nerves with the violence of orgasm, and she closed her eyes in momentary ecstasy.
Teague watched Moira’s face quivering as she moved her hands on the controls, and remembered how she had looked, once, when he kissed her… he himself felt as useless as a vermiform appendix. Life-Support was fail- safe and idiot-proof; barring some unimaginable catastrophe, he would have nothing important to do for years, except for synthesizing food. When, or if, they found a habitable planet — when, not if, he reminded himself sternly — it would be quite different; as the biologist, he would be responsible for every fragment of their physical safety in an alien environment. Aboard ship, he had a sinecure; he was a piece of dispensable software, whose work was being done by machinery and computer.
Well, they were all like that, really. The ship could have been sent out, unmanned, as a probe — but an unmanned probe could not have surveyed the planets at the hypothetical other end of the voyage. Only Peake, as their doctor, and Fontana, as their psychologist, would have much to do on the voyage of nine light-years. Once they were out of the Solar System, only Moira would have much of anything to do inside the ship, and that was mostly trimming the sails by calculating light-pressures. The ship would navigate on a course which Peake and Ching had already set; to change it now would mean decelerating down to zero and re-computing from the beginning. Every second they remained in flight, they were reaching velocities which were more and more unthinkable. More than nine meters per second per second — maybe Ravi could have figured out how fast they were actually travelling by now. He couldn’t.
So the most interesting thing he’d be doing for the next several years was synthesizing catgut for violin strings!
Perhaps he would have time to learn to play the oboe — there were spare instruments aboard. Or he would have time to compose the string quartet which had been in his mind ever since he learned, at fourteen, that he did not have the manual dexterity to be more than a mediocre violinist, and taken up the flute. Melodies moved constantly in his mind; now he would have time to write them down.
He’d never tried before; most music was computer-written. He remembered a story from the early days of the Academy, when the computer, programmed to write a chorale, had exactly duplicated, missing only four notes in the tenor part, Bach’s setting for O Sacred Head. Well, given the information about how to compose music, that was the perfect chorale, the logical and perfect way to write and harmonize the music, the inevitability of perfection. The people who programmed the computer had been overwhelmed by Bach, after all; and after that episode the Melody Mark VII had been nicknamed JOHANN.
How could anyone write music greater than that, or worth naming in the same breath? Well, the twentieth- century classic composer Alan Hovhaness had done it; critics had said that he had taken music in the direction it might have gone if Bach had never written his Well-Tempered Clavier. Perhaps there were still other directions, though he was sure Peake didn’t think so, and Peake was a real musician.
Now the Earth could barely be distinguished; it had lost its blue color and was a point of light against black, against other points of light. Ravi glanced at his chronometer and said, “My shift, Peake.” Peake drew his attention from the window and said, “Right.” Formally, they exchanged places. Teague said, “Are we going to keep on Greenwich Time for the whole voyage? Hours, days… weeks, months, years — they don’t make much sense out here. Anyhow, as we approach light-speed, there’ll be changes… it’s not as if we could keep the clock set for what time it is back in dear old Greenwich of whatever!”
Peake said, turning his back on the vista of stars — that was Ravi’s responsibility for the next twelve
