Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

“Too soon!” the robot called. Its voice modulated down an octave; it spoke in electronic tones: “Sleep, Justinian…”

And Justinian remembered folding his arms beneath his head as he tumbled into sleep.

“Ship! What is going on?” he called out, voice dying in the odd stillness. It was as if something outside was listening so intently that it swallowed up all sound.

The baby wouldn’t stop crying. His son was hungry, he realized. The baby needed feeding. How long had he slept?

“Ship!” Justinian called with renewed urgency. “Ship! Speak to me!” His tenderness towards his child was in inverse proportion to his disgust at those who had marooned him here on Gateway. How would he get out if there was no intelligence to open the door for him? How long would it be before he starved to death?

“Ship!”

There was a message written on the carpet.

It had been there all along, nagging at his subconscious. The orange and black checks of the carpet pattern had moved themselves around to spell out a message. Justinian went to the beginning of it, just by the door into the flight deck, and began to walk backwards down the length of the ship reading the letters that were spelled out in eight-by-eight patterns of squares.

Justinian. This is the ship.

I’ve had to shut down all my senses. Leslie has had to do the same. He’s still fully conscious in there, but he has no contact with the outside world, or at least I hope he doesn’t. If he becomes aware of anything outside the flier, he will have to switch himself off. Look at him.

Justinian was keeping pace with the message, retreating down the cabin as he read. The words now brought him level with the robot. He looked again at the silver-grey blur. There was no sign of life, no indication if what lay inside the fractal region was conscious or not.

He resumed his walking and reading.

We flew too close, Justinian. The Turing machine that maps my mind may be nowhere near as powerful as the polynetworks to be found in an AI pod, but it is shutting itself down nonetheless as this subroutine rearranges the carpet structure. It will take you two months to walk to safety from here, but I can’t send a distress signal. I can’t bring another ship here to die like me. I’m sorry.

“The shuttle!” Justinian whispered. “You could have called for David Schummel and the shuttle. Why didn’t you think of that?”

If you stay on the flier you will die of starvation. I don’t know what to suggest. Do what you think is best. The manual release for the door is just here.

The writing stopped just by a flap that had popped open in the rear wall, just by the hatch. Justinian frowned. Manual release-what did that mean?

Inside the flap there was a handle, a jar of baby food, and a spoon. The baby reached out for the food, crying desperately. Justinian sat down on the floor and balanced his son on his knee. He opened the jar and began to feed the child, wishing he had something to wipe the streams of yellow snot that ran from his nose. The baby ate hungrily.

“There, there, baby boy. Come on. Eat nicely.”

When his son had calmed down a little, he reached out and gave the handle inside the flap a couple of exploratory turns, then glanced back towards the exit hatch. It hadn’t moved. He turned the handle some more and his arm quickly began to ache from the exertion.

This time he wasn’t sure whether the hatch had moved fractionally. Was there now a little shadow where there had not been one before, right at the top of the doorway? He didn’t know. He fed the baby a few more mouthfuls and then continued turning the handle.

After five minutes of exhausting winding, a gap of approximately three centimeters had opened up to the outside world. He could see nothing through that gap but greyness, but even as he looked away, virtual colors seemed to dance and play at the edge of the opening. He looked back to see the greyness, and then away. Again, the memory of colors danced before his eyes. Just what was waiting out there? For a moment he wondered about winding the door shut again, blocking out whatever danger lay beyond, then hiding in the ship, waiting for possible rescue. After all, something that could cause a ship’s TM to commit suicide and a robot to retreat right inside its fractal skin should be more than capable of disposing of a man and his baby.

The baby had finished his food. He pushed the spoon away with one hand, chuckled, then stood up unsteadily.

“What do you want?” Justinian asked.

The baby looked up to his father and laughed again, this time a deep belly laugh. He reached out and took hold of the handle, wanting to join in the game. Bright blue eyes smiled up at him as the baby babbled something and pointed to the gap. Colors dodged from view around the edge of the door. The baby was telling him something. Justinian wished that Leslie was here to translate.

“Berber berber ber!” The baby was gazing earnestly at Justinian, who shivered as his son pointed back to the door. Surely whatever was out there could not be speaking to a fifteen-month-old child? And then he half glanced again at the apparent flickering of the colors around the door frame. There was a pattern to the flickering, he realized. It didn’t seem to be quite random. Maybe he should just close the door and sit and hope for rescue.

He knew there would be none. He resumed his winding.

It took Justinian over an hour of exhausting work to open the door fully. The kaleidoscope effect faded to nothing as the gap between the hatch and the flier widened. Nonetheless, the baby kept grabbing Justinian’s arm and pointing out at the bleak rocky landscape that lay outside. He would regularly look up at Justinian and burble something.

“What is it?” Justinian asked, but the baby just kept tugging and pointing.

Justinian shivered as he looked out at the greyness that led away from the edge of the ramp. It was bitterly cold outside; his breath emerged in misty clouds as he stood at the top of the hatch, feeling the last of the flier’s warmth leaking into the miserable day beyond.

The flier was resting at the bottom of a narrow rocky ravine. High jagged walls rose on either side, dry mounds of scree slipping from their bases. Smaller ravines led off in all directions, sloping up and down to form a crazy maze of stone. The scene was so desolate it froze the heart. The baby tugged at Justinian’s leg and pointed again.

“What is it?” Justinian asked. “Hey, you must be freezing. Come here.”

He picked up the baby and walked back into the flier, looking for a passive suit for his son. Most of them lay beyond the locked door of the forward section, but one lay draped over a chair, left there from last night. He picked it up and dropped his son in, folding the little mittens over his cold little hands. As he pulled the hood over the child’s head, the baby pawed at it for a moment with his little mittens, and then gave up. Justinian gave his son a hug, then, with a heavy heart, carried him back to the door. The baby pointed again. He clearly wanted to go outside. Justinian spoke in a hushed voice: “I know. I can feel it, too.”

He set off down the sloping ramp, the temperature dropping as he did so, and stepped onto the grey stone floor of the ravine. It was hopeless: even if he knew in which direction home lay, there would be no guarantee of finding a path that led there. They would wander around in this waterless maze until they both died of thirst.

His ears were cold, so he placed the baby down on the ramp, and working the hood of his own passive suit out from its collar, he pulled it over his head. The baby meanwhile pulled himself upright using his father’s legs for support and set off on his own, tottering on the uneven ground as he worked his way around to the front of the flier. There he pointed ahead to a crack in the wall of rock that stood facing the ship. The ghosts of colors hung in Justinian’s vision as he withdrew his gaze from the crack. Something was calling to them from inside there. He could now hear the voices at the edge of his consciousness.