Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

The stunned crowd didn’t make a sound as Asher stood, plucked a cigarillo from Gideon’s shirt pocket, and bounced a match off the table. The match lit when it struck the wood surface and popped right up into Asher’s hand. The new king of El Perdido puffed his cigarillo to life.

Gideon yanked his six-gun from its holster and aimed the barrel at his temple. Asher slammed his fist on the table, bouncing the opposite side up and knocking the gun from Gideon’s hand.

“Fate ain’t gonna let you off that easy,” Asher said. “All you woulda done is hurt yourself bad enough to spend the rest of your life regretting the attempt. But thank your lucky cards I’m gonna be a damn sight kinder to you than you ever was to me.”

Jane stood, painfully, one hand over her ribs. She limped toward the door.

“Why’d you do that?” Asher called after her.

“Got my reasons,” she said without looking back.

Jane stepped out into the night. The first dim hints of dawn lightened the horizon. Asher followed, as did most of the crowd. He hustled to get in front of her.

“I owe you a debt, now,” Asher said. “A mighty big one. What is it you’re doing here? What is it you want?”

Jane struggled to hold back tears as she met his eyes.

“My people came through here a few months back, with my little girl. All I want is to find them.” She nodded toward the soldier. “I think that fella may know something about where they went.”

Asher turned his gaze to the soldier, who startled back.

“We gonna do this the hard way, or you gonna tell this lady everything you know?” Asher asked.

“They asked the way to Las Cruces, that’s all I know,” the soldier said in a rush. From the fear pulling his eyes wide, there was little doubt he was telling the truth.

Jane dropped her gaucho hat in the dirt and let the borrowed duster fall to the ground. She stood naked in the middle of the road, staring over the hilltops to the west, where bright stars sparkled against the indigo sky.

I’m so sorry, my beautiful girl.

It’s okay, Momma.

Can you hang on just a little longer?

Yes, Momma, I think I can.

Scales sprouted from Jane’s skin. Toenails grew into talons. The ground receded in her view, the crowd gasping and backing away as she gained her full height.

Jane leapt into the air and beat her wings, picking up speed until the ground below became a blur.

I will find you soon. I promise.

Navigation Deck

Generation Ship Calvin’s Hope

March 552 Post Diaspora

“It’s confirmed,” the leaden voice said in Vincent Anderson’s headphones. “No way. The damage at ground level is even worse than we expected. We’d need three times the resources we’ve got to establish even a temporary foothold down here. And it’s still getting worse.”

“Understood,” Anderson said. He drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Come on back up. Looks like we’re going to have to come up with something brilliant.”

“Lots of luck with that,” the voice said harshly. Then there was a pause, and Anderson visualized the owner of that voice drawing her own deep breath. “I’m calling in the survey parties now. We should be back aboard in a few hours.”

“Good.” Anderson’s voice was soft. “I need you, Trish.”

“I know, Babe. See you soon.”

Anderson killed the circuit and pushed off against the captain’s chair to send himself across the nav deck to the main visual display. The command section, like the engineering core, was outside the spin section, and he’d always loved the microgravity. It made him feel lighter than air, with a buoyancy that went beyond the merely physical as he floated here, watching the endless stars recede into infinity.

But not today , he thought. Not today .

It was late in Calvin’s Hope ’s day, and he’d decided to take the watch by himself. It wasn’t as if the nav deck needed manning, and the truly critical parts of the huge ship’s infrastructure had always been managed from Engineering and Environmental. But there’d been someone here—usually only a single someone, admittedly, but someone —every day for the last three and a half centuries.

Well, he amended, hooking a toe through a safety loop, for the last four centuries, as the rest of the universe had told time. The time dilation affect at fifty percent of light-speed was significant, and Vincent Anderson had spent his entire forty-three years—subjective—tearing through the cosmos at that velocity. His parents had spent their entire lives doing precisely the same thing, and so had their parents. In fact, his great-great- grand parents had been only in their thirties when the shuttles delivered them to their new home in space. He was the eighth captain Calvin’s Hope had known since it departed the Sol System, 135 years after the Beowulf Expedition, on its own long, lonely voyage, and they were farther from Earth than any humans had ever traveled.

Angelique Calvin hadn’t lived to see the ship that bore her name depart. She’d driven the expedition with every gram of her steely will, though. She’d personally rammed it through the Earth Union’s committees and bureaus and petty tyrants, despite their bitter opposition to interstellar exploration. She’d personally designed the generation ship’s drive, but she’d known she wouldn’t be making the voyage aboard the project to which she’d devoted her entire adult life. There was no room for octogenarians aboard a starship. But on the day the transmission confirming the Beowulf Expedition’s safe landing in their destination star system, her son Angus had begun the countdown for Calvin’s Hope ’s launch.

Now, four hundred and two years later, the great-great-grandchildren of that ship’s crew had reached their destination.

Vincent Anderson looked at the image of the world they’d come so far to reach and tried not to vomit.

Officers’ Lounge

Generation Ship Calvin’s Hope

March 552 Post Diaspora

“—and that’s it,” Shirley McKellen, Calvin’s Hope ’s chief environmental engineer, said in a flat voice. “Our reserve will carry us another seventy-five years—maybe ninety, if we stretch it hard and start winding our population down pretty damned quickly—and that’s about it.” She smiled without any humor at all. “I’m sure three quarters of a century seemed like an ample safety margin to the mission planners.”

“And it should’ve been,” Seong Cho Mee, the ship’s logistics manager pointed out. She shook her head. “No one could have predicted this , Shirley!”

“I didn’t say they could have,” McKellen replied. “And, trust me, no one’s blaming you, Cho Mee.”

“Of course we aren’t,” Anderson said. “It does establish our parameters, though.”

“Would that give us enough time to convert the ship into a long-term orbital habitat?” Patricia Anderson asked.

“No,” Joe Vogel, the ship’s chief engineer, was a blunt-spoken man at the best of times. Today his voice was hard, almost harsh. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. “Like Shirley says, the mission planners provided what they thought would be plenty of margin, but they expected us to move dirtside. In theory, we’d have enough enviro margin to give us the time for something like that, Trish, but the ship’s too banged up and at least thirty percent of her systems—including the fusion plants—are within twenty, thirty years of their design lives. We don’t have the right tech base—or one that’s deep enough—to build new ones, either. We can probably baby the ones we have along, keep them up and running for quite a while, but when they’re gone, they’re gone.”