Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

Ennio nodded. “Oh, yeah. He’s always getting us into crazy adventures. And would it be so bad if we were?”

“If we were what ?” I asked. “Trying to figure out where the meat comes from?” I was counting back the years since the last crazy adventure and figuring out that even Ciar might be allowed a moment of insanity every ten years or so.

“If we were going to bundle,” he said.

“Unauthorized contact before marriage?” I asked. “Do you want your coupons docked and your child allowance lowered?”

He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged, and this time I wondered which of us had lost his mind.

So we didn’t talk about it anymore. Instead, we walked down the corridors, more or less aimlessly, until we were far enough away that we could head back in the direction we were supposed to be going, to meet Ciar.

This circuitous route took us through narrow little tunnels, the ceramic material that curved overhead patched in a hundred places. Then we emerged onto a larger path amid fields, which were planted with some form of wheat that gave off a rich and earthy smell.

And then we curved back toward lodgings and the administrative buildings, and fetched up at the door to the archives. Which was closed, the lights off on either side, of course. For a moment I wondered if Ciar was in there, or if he had decided to skip this anyway, or even if this was some sort of elaborate prank. But Ciar didn’t play pranks, and even Ennio knew that.

Making another sound that betrayed his annoyance, Ennio pushed at the door. It swung inward.

Come into my home, said the spider to the fly flitted through my mind and that, too, I thought, was a fragment of some long-forgotten story. But I went in, as Ennio held the door open for me.

The archives was where they kept all the data for everything in the ship, and for everything before the ship. Somewhere beneath us computers sat that were separate from the computers used for navigating and powering the ship, but could look into those if needed. Into this computer had been poured all of the knowledge of humanity since we’d first walked on two legs in that Earth which I’d only observed in illustrations and only read about in books, but never actually seen.

It was possible that they’d skipped a file teaching us how to chip flint, but everything else was in it, from animal husbandry and taming to the shaping of clay and the smelting of metal. Everything needed to start human civilization as far up as possible on our ladder of learning, in the new world.

And because, by the time we’d left, humanity had worked out that knowledge wasn’t often as simple and clear cut as it seemed, this repository involved other skills that would seem less important to interplanetary civilization, including linguistics and literature, law, history and other disciplines where people argued a lot and used math very little.

Ciar and his fellow linguists worked here translating and transcribing: a work that would be needed until all records were converted, which is to say probably forever.

The space looked like what it was. There were terminals, so close together that for someone to get out of his he had to ask the permission of his fellow on the next one. They were grey, smooth and rounded on top, with a sort of privacy hood you ducked under, presumably so that your work wouldn’t disturb that of the workers next to you. In the dark, with a soft light glowing from each of them, they looked as if they were sleeping undisturbed, like children who let their heads droop while napping.

“Oh, we shouldn’t be here,” Ennio said.

This, of course, was not news, and of course we shouldn’t have been there. But we were, and the best thing to do was deal with Ciar so that we could get out of there as soon as possible and with as little trouble as possible.

“Ciar?” I whispered.

He popped up from behind one of the terminals like a jack in the box, his face flushed, his eyes shining and looking feverish. “You came,” he said, and before either of us could comment, “Good. You’ll never believe this.”

From Ennio’s snort, I could tell he was already working on not believing it, before Ciar showed us whatever it was.

At first I had no idea what Ciar was getting at. He took us to his terminal and showed us the screen. It said, Access denied, you do not have permission to ask this question. Under it there were codes, presumably explaining why we didn’t have the right to look at it.

“Very exciting,” Ennio said. “I’m all agog. Perhaps you linguists are different, pal, but in my job I get one of these every other day. People don’t think I have a need to know the nutritional mix in classroom lunches, or the stories selected for next year’s primer.”

Ciar shook his head. He touched the screen, quickly, clearing the error message and bringing up a query screen. In it he typed Big ship and nursery rhyme. For the next few minutes he showed us the old and the new rhymes. The old woman who lived in a compartment—only in the Earth rhyme this was inexplicably a shoe. There were half a dozen others. All of them were very different between the old and the new version. I mean, one of them was clearly created on Earth, for children who had never even thought of flying in space, but the others were full of ship analogies and cryptic references to a wise old owl who didn’t talk and which apparently waited for people to come to it when it was needed.

“So, the rhymes were altered,” Ennio said. “Perhaps people weren’t sure shipboard children would care about Earth-like things.”

Ciar shook his head. “It’s more than that. Look at it realistically. If you look at what they’re saying, over and over they’re telling us something special should be happening when we’ve been in the ship ten generations. Over and over….” He looked up and quirked an eyebrow at us.

“So?” I said.

“So,” he said. “How many generations have we been in the ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m fairly sure I’ve never had a need to know.”

“Ah!” He raised his finger sagely, like someone making an important point.

He brought us back to the query screen and asked again how many generations we’d been in the ship. Then he asked for the date of departure from Earth, and the time of arrival at their destination. And, probably in an effort to calculate the generations himself , genealogical tables.

Each question brought up the same screen telling us we were forbidden from accessing that information.

“See?” he said.

“I see,” I said. But truth be told, I was far from impressed. “Since when is it news that they classify as secret everything they can in this ship? My father says that if they could make sex top secret, they would.”

“They probably have,” Ennio said. “And are shocked when each new generation figures it out.”

“Generations,” Ciar said. “That’s the thing. How many generations? How long have we been sailing in the big, big ship with the wise old owl? And what is the wise old owl?” He typed that query too, with fast, nervous fingers. It too informed us we had no need to know. “And why won’t it let us look at genealogy?”

“That should be obvious.” Ennio sounded tired. “You know very well that in the long time the ship— ”

“However long,” Ciar said, meaningly.

“However long,” Ennio shrugged. “There have been any number of people executed for destructive behavior or crimes against the community or …or others.”

We nodded. Executions weren’t that common, but they happened once every ten years or so. It couldn’t be helped. We’d learned in school, early on, that in this confined space, discipline had to be far tighter than it was on Earth, because Earth could isolate its anti-social elements. But we had to live and work together, and we had to make sure there were no disruptive elements in the well-oiled social machinery.