Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

She said softly, “You know, everyone here commits suicide sooner or later. The whole place is a futile attempt to keep us from killing ourselves. But everyone manages it. They can’t help us. This isn’t a hospital, it’s a hospice.”

Quietly he said, “How do you stand it?”

She spread her hand over the handheld in her lap. “I’m looking at this as a chance to catch up on my reading.”

“Lieutenant? It’s time to leave.” Baz stood at his shoulder. Mitchell hadn’t been aware of his approach. Meekly, he let the orderly guide him away.

Back in his room, he listened to the piece of music Sonia had named, the Chopin. A sad piano melody wafted gently from his terminal, like a ghost. He wondered what it meant to her.

Dora was wrong: This was not a place where navigators killed themselves. Keesey was wrong: he was not ill. He kept trying to remember what happened on the Drake . The thing Scott didn’t want him to remember, that the doctors didn’t want him to think about.

He’d signed in, said good morning to the captain, went to his station. We have an hour until we need to jump, Lieutenant . The first step to initiating a jump was identifying the arrival matrix and locking in coordinates. The next step: convert the holography of local space from manifold to loop representation, another computerized operation that nonetheless required monitoring.

Ultimately the navigator, the human element, confirmed the optimum departure matrix generated by the navigation system, or chose an alternate. Then the M-drive would push the ship through it to emerge across interstellar space at the desired arrival matrix. At some level, even if only intuitively, he had to understand the mathematics that connected the two ends of the ship’s journey.

By remembering routine, he forced himself through his breakdown, moment by moment.

He confirmed the departure matrix—and it was wrong. The colors swirled around it like light bursting to its death, and the space through which the ship should have been traveling was a mouth waiting to devour them. It wasn’t a departure matrix but a black hole. The colors were wrong, the math was wrong, the computer was broken—

“Mitchell! Look at me.”

Keesey leaned over him. Her cool hand touched his cheek. His skin was clammy, and his heart was racing. He couldn’t control his breathing; air rasped roughly through his throat. He was on the floor of his quarters; some alarm must have summoned the doctor.

“What is it, Mitchell? What happened?” Her concern was professional, unemotional.

“I-I think I remembered something.”

“Can you describe it?”

He had to speak very carefully. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He had to say the thing that would explain all this away. “I saw colors. They were wrong.”

He winced and turned his head, or tried to, but Keesey held him in place. Baz stood behind her. A vent fan hummed somewhere.

“Make your mind a blank, Mitchell. Let the images fall away until you see nothing.” He obeyed her psychiatrist’s calm, and the colors faded. Baz came closer with a bottle and urged him to drink. Mitchell was obedient. The rehydrating fluid somehow made him feel weaker. He shouldn’t need all this attention, this treatment. He wasn’t sick.

“There was something wrong with the computer,” he tried to tell them. That would explain everything.

Keesey wrote on a handheld as she spoke. “Your cortical map shows a faulty connection within your visual cortex. You can’t trust your eyes, Mitchell. I know this is going to be hard, but I’d like you to limit your visual stimulation over the next couple of days. I can give you a blindfold if you’d like.”

Blindfold? Like taking away Sonia’s music.

“What are you writing down?” he asked. Maybe he shouldn’t be looking. Is this what she meant by visual stimulation?

“Some exercises we’ll try at your next session. We need to stabilize the dysfunctional area of the visual cortex. Please, rest your eyes if you can.”

If they could reduce his world to a tiny, thoughtless box, then nothing at all could damage him. They could blindfold him. But he was still going to try and remember.

“I overheard Dalton and Keesey talking about you,” Dora told him. He was sitting in his usual chair with his eyes closed. It didn’t help. If he could just figure out what was wrong with the computer…

She continued, “You’ve got the piss scared out of Dalton. He seems to think you should be locked up and tied down full time. You must have done something spectacular. On the other hand, Keesey thinks you’re the key to the holy grail that’s going to save us all.”

Dora was wrong—this wasn’t a hospice, this was a laboratory. A hundred years of interstellar travel and they hadn’t figured out how to prevent or treat Mand Dementia. That was why they were here; they were data points.

“I don’t know why either of them should think that.”

“Let me ask you a question. What is Mand navigation? Is it the math, or is it the mind of the navigator? See, the math alone isn’t enough. Otherwise the computers could do it all. But no—they need us to process it. Not just anyone can be a navigator. A navigator has to understand what the computer is doing when it crunches those numbers. All those aptitude tests—they’re measuring us, making sure we have the right kind of brain. We’re the key. So why does the Trade Guild have this place?”

She leaned over the arm of her chair and lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “The Guild doesn’t put us here because we’re crazy. They put us here because they’re afraid of us. It’s not that we’re sick. It’s that they can’t control us. We’re too powerful, and this hospital, this so-called disease, all the sedatives, it’s the only way they can keep us under control.”

Powerful? He was a navigator. Part of a crew. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. “We’re not that special—”

“Mitchell, what do we do?”

“We review the M-drive navigation system, confirming departure and arrival matrices—”

“Do we confirm them? Or do we create them?”

He stared at her. He had to squint against the light, and the colors seemed wrong.

Her eyes grew even wider. “What if some of us have learned to manipulate the process without M-drives, without starships? What would that make us?”

His voice was small. “Powerful.”

“It drives some of us crazy.” She nodded at Jaspar and Sonia at their same places at the table, absorbed in their same tasks. “But some of us are the next step in evolution. It’s not God that makes the Universe, it’s math. Know the math, and you are God.”

Mitchell found Baz and asked to be escorted back to his room. He flinched, though, when Sonia walked smoothly to intercept him before he reached the door.

She touched Mitchell’s arm. “Prokofiev. Prokofiev.”

He could only stare and wish to understand. Bowing her head, she stepped aside and let them pass.

“What did that mean?” Mitchell asked Baz.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

They passed far enough along the curve of the station that the common room door was out of sight when a buzzer sounded, and Baz brought his wrist comm to his face. “Yeah?”

A desperate voice—Mitchell thought it belonged to the other orderly—replied. “Morgan knocked out Dalton and sealed himself in the decompression chamber.”

Baz ran, shouting, “Damn! Damn, damn—”

Running after him, Mitchell’s slippers skidded a little on the floor. This was what rebellion looked like in the Mand Dementia ward; he wanted to see it. Baz rounded a corner, flashed his wristband to open the door, and Mitchell followed him into the infirmary.