Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

A wise old owl lived down on area C.The more he saw the less he spoke,The less he spoke the more he heard.Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?Find him and ask politely,He’ll tell you the way to Alpha Centauri.When we’ve all forgotten,He will still beKeeping the time and path to Alpha Centauri.

Ennio pushed the screen again, but Ciar was sitting up and staring at it. He spoke over the next rhyme, “Those aren’t right.”

I looked at him. “Of course they are. Don’t you remember?” We’d all learned the rhymes at our mothers’ knees—well, except Ciar, who presumably had learned them at the creche-teacher’s knees. And then we’d learned to read them in school.

“I remember,” he said, frowning quickly at me. He pulled at the collar of his grey tunic. “Look, I know those are the rhymes we learned, but they aren’t the right rhymes.”

Ennio turned around. “What do you mean?”

As often happened, Ciar was struggling to form words. It was funny that the one of us who specialized in linguistics was the one who would often find himself struggling for explanations when talking to us. Perhaps because he was the only one of us with a truly intellectual profession?

“I was looking at nursery rhymes today. One of the books was stored on board from early on. It’s part of the historical collection and I don’t think many people looked at it since it came in.” He frowned. “They had those rhymes, but they’re completely different. Nothing about Alpha Centauri or generations or …division C.”

“Maybe they adapted the rhymes for life on board,” Ennio said.

But Ciar was still frowning.

“They might have, Ciar,” I said. “To make it relevant.”

“Why would they?” he said. “They haven’t removed ‘owl’ from there, and the only things we know of owls are in books from Earth. I presume there are owl embryos frozen somewhere in the ship, but …”

“But the decision of whether to ever grow them depends on the level of life development we find in the destiny world,” I said. We’d all learned, from very young, that the world we were headed towards was, so far as they could tell from old Earth, the twin of the home world. It was supposed to have water, and atmosphere and probably be much like Earth. But the question was, did it have the same level of biodevelopment? We’d brought a sample of every bird and animal and plant, or at least all the ones anyone could think of. If we found a very primitive world, or one where life hadn’t yet taken hold beyond single cell organisms, then we would set about reconstructing the ecology of Earth. But if we found that it had the same chain of life, and that we were compatible with it and could use it for sustenance, then we would not bring back the animals of Earth, except perhaps as curiosities in well-guarded zoos.

“Yeah, but we still learn about them,” Ciar said. “And cows that go moo. You know, until I caught a reference in an ancient manuscript, I thought cows were about the size of a chicken.”

Chickens and fish being the only animal life aboard, I’d thought so too until this moment. “You mean they’re not?”

He shook his head, and his hands sketched improbable dimensions. Now Ennio was frowning. “So …The rhymes were altered. I wonder why?”

“I think …” Ciar was frowning. “Well …I’ve read a lot of things from when the ship was first launched. Part of the reason they established the captain with absolute power and the administrators reporting only to him is that they were very afraid there would be a mutiny and we would either destroy our knowledge base, or that we would overrun the resources of the ship.”

I shrugged. I’d got up and was looking over Ennio’s shoulder at the screen changing in multicolored patterns of lights as syllables appeared. There was, for instance, the bells song. “Find me if you can, toll the bells of C and N….” I remembered singing it with my class in my first year in school. “So, we didn’t mutiny and we didn’t overrun the resources of the ship,” I said.

“Yes, but I think they changed the nursery rhymes, so that we would have something to remind us if we forgot.”

“To remind us of what?” Ennio asked. “That the wise old owl keeps his mouth shut? Or that we’re going to Alpha Centauri? Honestly, Ciar.” He turned to me, “There’s a dance tonight at the bachelor’s dorm, and I was wondering if you—”

“You don’t understand,” Ciar said, his voice in the slow pedantic tone he used when he thought he was schooling us. “The thing is that nursery rhymes are the most linguistically conservative bit of language. Not just in terms of how exactly they get passed on, but they retain fossilized references and pronunciations for centuries after they’ve died out of any normal use. They would be a …they are a superb medium for encoding instructions. But instructions for what?”

“For people who’ve forgotten that we’re on our way to Alpha Centauri and who, probably, think that this is the only world that exists.” He shook his head. “Now, Nia,” he said, looking at me. “Will you go with me to the dance?”

I said yes, mostly, I think, to try to get Ciar to let go of the crazy subject of nursery rhymes. When he got an idea in his head, he tended to hold onto it like a well-placed rivet. And this one was truly one of the strangest ones he’d come up with.

But when I looked up to see if he was upset or interested, I met with a frown, and his eyes half-closed, but he was staring into something we couldn’t see. “Oh, the dance,” he said, slowly. “Yes. I’ll see you two there.”

He walked out through the terminals, towards the door and Ennio and I met each other’s eyes and laughed. “Now, do you suppose he thinks I invited him to the dance?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems to think both of us did.”

Ennio shook his head. “Ciar has a bug in his processor again!”

I confess I completely forgot about Ciar and the nursery rhymes. Unlike the men, I still lived with my parents. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting enough ration coupons to live alone, but I disliked the single women dormitory. Too much cackle and giggling, too much scent and makeup. My mom shook her head when I complained and said women had always been like that, and always would be, but frankly, I owned a mirror and could see my face as well as the next person. My face was not as soft and round as I’d have liked. I had a broad forehead, and dark blond hair. The best that could be said about me was that I didn’t cause men to run screaming into the night, and that I had two guys who wished to court me—even if they were not exactly potential heartthrobs. But makeup didn’t improve my looks and frankly I didn’t think either of my two very odd suitors would notice, unless I put blue circles on my cheeks and dyed my hair purple. They seemed to enjoy my company and talking to me, more than actually looking at me.

Besides, I was mom and dad’s only daughter. Mom had got into some trouble when she was young. I’d never found out exactly what it had been, but whatever it was meant she was only licensed for one child, so here I was. And it didn’t seem fair to move out before I absolutely needed to.

Mom insisted on fussing over my going to the dance with Ennio, and finding me one of the dresses she’d worn when she was young and which she hadn’t traded in for material credits. It looked very odd on me, because though our bodies are about the same size, mom is a beautiful woman, delicate and blond. I’m …not. But she said I looked beautiful in the pink, ruffled top and skirt, and she found me the shoes that went with them. Though she told me I could do better than Ennio, she approved of my playing the field.