“Four days — four days here. But we only talked for a few minutes in S-space. I call that a fast response.” She looked around her, at Peron and the others. “Relax. I was only sent here to talk. What do you think I’m going to do, knock the lot of you down and tie you up? Any one of you could beat me in a fight. You’re the Planetfest winners, remember?”
“We remember,” said Peron. “We just want to be sure that you do. You and the others. Why are you here, and not Rinker?”
“He made the transition very recently, just a couple of hours ago, when the automatic systems were going wrong. Transitions too close together have bad effects. In fact, frequent transitions shorten subjective life expectancy. And he doesn’t trust you, either.”
She licked her lips. “I guess he thinks I’m more expendable. Look, I know you’re in a hurry to talk, but I’d like a drink of water.”
Peron glanced briefly at the others, then led the way back through the winding corridor, taking them once more to the central food processing chamber of the ship.
“He didn’t really want anybody to talk to you,” said Ferranti as they moved along the corridor. “But he agreed that there was no choice. ‘They’ll be like a band of wild apes,’ he said. ‘Fiddling around with my ship! They don’t know how anything works — my God, there’s no way of knowing what they may do to it and to us!’ “
She looked around her at the intent young faces that closely watched her every movement. “I must say that I have to agree with him. I’m sure you’re feeling pretty cocky at the moment, with everything under control. But you could kill this ship by pure accident. It’s frightening — you’re smart, but there are so many things you simply don’t know.”
“So why don’t you tell us some of them?” Sy asked in a surly voice. “You’ll find we’re all quick learners.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you much — and some things I don’t even know myself. And before you get paranoid as to why I’m holding some things back from you, I’ll tell you the reason for that. There’s a sound logic for why you weren’t told everything back on Whirlygig.”
They had reached the food chamber. Olivia Ferranti bent over a water spigot, took a long, leisurely drink, then sighed and shook her head.
“That’s one of the things that I really miss. Water just doesn’t taste right in S-space.” She turned to face the group. “How much do you know about the history of your civilization on Pentecost?”
“We know that the first settlers came off The Ship,” said Peron. “It was called Eleanora, and it started out from a planet called Earth, thousands of years earlier.”
“That’s a beginning.” Olivia Ferranti settled herself cross-legged, floating a handsbreadth above the floor, and gestured to the others to gather round her there. “And if you’re anything like most of the candidates we get from Pentecost for indoctrination, that’s almost all that you’ll know. So make yourselves comfortable. I need to give you a bit of a history lesson. You may not like some of it too well, but bear with me.
“Eleanora was the biggest and most advanced of half a dozen arcologies that were built as colony ships in the Sol System, more than twenty-five thousand Earth-years ago. The arcologies were all constructed in orbits close to Earth. Just as Eleanora was close to complete, and the colonists had arrived on board it, the nations down on Earth did what we’d all been afraid they would do for generations. They went mad. Someone pulled the trigger, and after that there was no stopping it. It was a full-scale nuclear war.
“When that war happened, there were about thirty-five thousand people living away from Earth. They were working on mining and construction, or on applications satellites and stations, or they were inhabitants of the colony ships. We were all helpless, watching the world explode before our eyes. And at first none of us knew what to do next. We were numb with shock and horror.” “You said ‘we.’ You mean you were there — yourself?” asked Elissa.
“I was. Me, myself, in person. I was a physician on one of the orbiting space stations.” Olivia Ferranti shook her head and rubbed gently at her eyes. She seemed to be staring far beyond the circle of her listeners, out across space and time to the death of a planet. “Initially we just wouldn’t believe it. Earth couldn’t destroy itself like that. We knew it must have been terrible on the surface, because we had seen the whole globe change in a few hours from a beautiful blue-green marble to a dusky purple-black grape, and the smoke plumes had risen well into the stratosphere. Even so, emotional acceptance was beyond us. Somehow, beyond logic, we believed that the damage was temporary and the surface nations would recover. We waited for radio signals from survivor groups, messages that would tell us that civilization was still going on beneath those dark clouds of dust and smoke. The signals never came. After a few weeks we sent shuttles down into the atmosphere, shielded against high levels of radioactivity and designed to go down below the clouds and examine the surface. There was so much dust in the northern hemisphere that we could see nothing, not even from low altitude. We tried south of the equator, and after a couple of months we finally knew. It was the end.
“We couldn’t rule out the possibility of isolated survivors, clinging on to existence down there in the darkness. But as time went by even that hope seemed less and less likely.
“Some plants would survive, we knew that; and we felt sure there would be life in the sea — but we had no idea how much. We tried to calculate what would happen to the whole food chain when photosynthesis was reduced to less than a tenth of the usual value, but we had no faith in our answers. Anyway, they didn’t really make any difference. For mankind on Earth, it was the end. And we felt as though it was the end for us, too. We seemed like a handful of mourners, circling the funeral pyre of all our friends and relations.
“We were too shocked to think logically, but we were certainly far more than a handful. As I said, there were thirty-five thousand of us, with slightly more men than women. And we had ample power and materials available. There was no question that we could survive very well if we pooled our resources and all worked together. We knew it might be centuries before Earth could be re-visited and repopulated, but there was no reason why we could not go on indefinitely as a stable, spaceborne society.”
Ferranti smiled bitterly. “God knows, many of us had said we wanted just that for long enough. Then when we had no choice, most of us in our dreams imagined ourselves back on Terra.
“There’s one good thing about humans: we forget. Despair can’t last forever. We pulled ourselves together, little by little, and began to think again. On Salter Station we finally arranged for a radio conference of all the space groups. It was difficult to handle, because one arcology had been out near Mars, and we had long radio lags. But we pulled everyone into the circuits — all the arcologies, the mining groups that had been smelting from the Amor asteroids, and the scientists who had been building the Farside station up on Earth’s moon. Everything in space had always been controlled from Salter Station, so it seemed natural that we would still be the organizers.
“Natural to us, on Salter Station. But others didn’t see it that way. “The arcologies had been set up to be as self-sufficient as possible, with independent power plants and six-nines recycling systems. The other space facilities were different. They were dependent on supplies provided from Earth, or on spaceborne resources provided by the mining and extractive industries. “The first planning session to discuss pooling of resources went smoothly. Everyone participated. But when the time came to act, three of the arcologies backed out. I believe that they each operated independently, without even discussing it among themselves. They were afraid, you see — scared that the total group might not be stably self-sustaining, even though they had no doubt about their own ability to survive. There were other reasons, too. From the very beginning the arcologies had been developing their own social and political preferences and differences. Like called to like — colonists tended to apply to the same place as their friends, and to avoid a colony where their views would be ridiculed or in the minority. The last thing that Helena, Melissa, and Eleanora wanted was a merger with Salter Station and the other arcologies. They didn’t ever admit that they were not going to cooperate; they simply cut off radio contact and moved farther out, away from Earth.
“The rest of us were angry with them, but we didn’t take as much notice as you might think. We had our own hands full without them for the first few years. We had to establish our own system, self-sufficient and as foolproof as we could make it. That took ninety-nine percent of our energies. And the rest went into the work on reduced metabolic survival — what we finally called S-space existence. As a doctor I was naturally interested in that, and after a while I began to work on it exclusively. Within a couple of months of the first experiments with human subjects on Salter Station it was clear that we had something absolutely revolutionary, something that changed all our ideas about perception and human consciousness. But it took several years more before we saw the other implications. With our work, humanity had found the easy way to the stars. “There was no need for multi- generation arcologies, or for faster-than-light drives — “
“ — which seem to be impossible,” murmured Sy softly.
