Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

Their suit lamps cast a halo of soft, subtly tinted light about them. It created an eerie effect in the dark interior: broken and twisted walls and decks, cables and conduits, gaping chasms in which shadows seemed to move. Once, Méarana thought she saw another suit weirdly following them: perhaps an ancient crewman, wrapped in foil like a bonbon, drifting through the empty spaces of the Vessel until he should find his way accidentally to the void and freedom. But when she shone her spotlight on the apparition, she could not find it, and perhaps it had not been there at all.

Another time, they found a floating machine, tangled in cables like a skin-diver caught in seaweed. It had wheels and extensors that resembled arms and two lenses that gave the appearance of eyes; but the carapace was blackened and the unit dead.

Their lamps found an inscription on one of the bulkheads. It was in the Tantamiž, and Donovan puzzled over it some before declaring that, if he guessed the sound-shifts correctly, it meant something like “Amphitheater” and the number five. Five decks from here? Amphitheater 5? Five paces this way? But the rest of the meaning had gone with the rest of the bulkhead.

Blankets and Beads tracked them and kept them informed of their position relative to the large pressurized sector. “When we find it,” Donovan wondered, “how will we enter without losing the pressure?”

“Why worry?” said Billy. “You can’t imagine there are people inside! Not after thousands of years.”

Méarana entertained the sudden image of survivors of this ancient catastrophe; huddled in a redoubt, a civilization in a box. Would such a people commit mass suicide one day when the futility of it all came home to them, when they finally realized that they would never leave their box, that there was nowhere else they could possibly go? Or would they forget that they were even in a box and forget that universes might not have walls?

Méarana told herself it was absurd; but the notion of a spaceship the size of a small moon was just as absurd. So who could say where the line of fantasy ought to be drawn?

As they worked deeper into the Vessel, they found intact rooms and corridors, machines dead but undamaged. There was no air or power or gravity, but whatever had wrecked the Vessel’s outer hull and torn up ordinary quarters and corridors had failed to penetrate this far into the ark.

Finally, they came to a door beside which small lights glimmered green and yellow and blue. What the colors meant was not clear. The Tantamiž consisted of cryptic abbreviations. But that there were lights at all meant everything.

There was a button labeled and another labeled . Beside them the symbol glowed green. Donovan studied all closely.

Billy coughed impatiently. “This means ‘close’ and that means ‘open.’ The symbols are universal.”

“That does seem obvious,” Donovan admitted. “I’m trying to decide if means ‘pi.’ Pirāņam means air, life, vitality, strength, power, so it might be the abbreviation for ‘air.’”

Sofari said, “So the green light might mean there is air on the other side, or it may mean that the power for the door is on.”

“Or there is life within,” said Méarana with thumping heart.

Donovan shrugged. “Or all the above. They had words that cut crosswise through ours.”

“One way to find out,” suggested Sofwari.

“Maybe the rest of us should get out of the way,” said Méarana. “In case pressing the button means something more serious than ‘open.’”

“Umm.”

“What, Debly? What!”

“If there is air under pressure in there, and the door opens, everyone standing in front of it gets blown away.”

“It must be an airlock. What’s the point of airtight doors with no way through them?”

“Aah,” said Paulie, “enough O’ this shit!” And he reached past everyone’s shoulder and pressed the button.

Everyone flinched. The door split down its center—there had been no sign of a crack before—and they found themselves staring down a broad, brightly-lit corridor.

Donovan had a moment to register the sight. Then he braced himself.

But there was no hurricane of outpouring air.

“Magicians,” he muttered. He stepped through the doorway and felt as if passing through a thick layer of gelatin. Then he was inside, and suit sensors activated. There was air around him. His helmet display read off temperature, pressure, and composition—well within the range of human atmospheres.

It occurred to him that, however long recycled, this was the atmosphere of Old Earth herself, that these very molecules had once blown in soft breezes on a free Earth.

His fingers fumbled at his helmet seals. By the time he had pulled the hood off, the others were around him and wondering at the tears that ran down his cheeks.

The ark was named A. K. Prabhakaran . It was the name of a person of such fabulous importance as to cause this enormous vessel to be named in his honor; but it was a name lost in an incalculable past. Warrior, politician, science-wallah, explorer…Even male or female. Whatever he had been, he was only the name of a ship now.

They learned the name from one of the crew.

Shortly after they had entered the pressurized sector, a multiwheeled cart with a raised front rolled down the aisle and stopped before them. The holostage flickered and the head and shoulders of a young woman appeared on the raised platform. The ymago did not have the ghost-like appearance of a normal projection, but seemed a solid body, so that the whole gave the impression of a mechanical centaur: half woman, half cart.

It spoke to them in the Tantamiž, but with many words of the Murkans and the Zhõgwó and the Yurpans mixed in. Donovan learned that he could follow it, though he had to ask the thing to repeat itself several times.

“Why are ye awake at this time?” Donovan understood the thing to say. “Our planet is not yet ready.”

“Who art thou, o machine, that thou mayest ask this of us?”

The ymago smiled. “I am Flight Attendant 8y493 pi-cha-ro, sri colonist; and such are my assigned duties.”

“I will call you ‘Peacharoo.’”

“As thou willst. This is not an alloted wake time. Hath there been a failure of thy pod?”

“And why should I not be awake?” He turned aside to tell his companions. “It says we’re up past our bedtimes. I’m trying to stay outside its box.”

“Be not foolish, sri colonist,” the machine countered. “The planet will not be a world for another nine lakhs of hours. Thou willt be an old man before the landings begin.”

“Nine lakh? Nine hundred thousand hours…Are those metric hours or dodeka hours?”

“Thy query signifieth naught. An hour is an hour. Which are your pods, and I will escort you to them. Do not waste your life-hours, for time spent is never to be regained.”

“A Terran hour, then. Nine lakh would be, ah, about a hundred years.”

Sofwari whistled. “Far less than a Gladiola ark requires to prep a planet.”

“Well,” Donovan told him, “a Gladiola ark is far smaller than this behemoth.” He turned back to Peacharoo. “The planet Enjrun is already terraformed. We have come from there. It is time to wake the colonists and bring them down.”