Gregory Benford: Across the Sea of Suns

“Right. In other words, they’ve always seen my appointment to a real, working exo job as a political fish thrown to a 3-D-elevated seal.”

“Harsh words, Nigel. And of course completely untrue.”

Nigel smiled and laced his hands behind his neck, leaning back with elbows high, easing the quiet chorus of strain in his lower back muscles. “Not so far from the mark as you might think,” he said almost dreamily. “Not so far …” His mind flitted over old pictures: the alien incursion into the solar system, the pearly sphere of the Snark, an exploratory vessel he had met for only moments, beyond the Moon; the Mare Marginis wreck, a crushed eggshell that had fallen from the stars a million years ago; the webbed logic of the Marginis alien computer that had taught them how to build Lancer. He had been there, he had seen it, but now the pictures were faded.

Ted said solemnly, “I had hoped to impress you with the weight of opinion behind this vote. We’ll be in Isis space within months. The surface teams must begin practicing in earnest. I cannot in all good—”

“I’ll go on fallback status,” Nigel said casually.

“What?”

“Put me in the reserve exploration unit. There’ll be dead times when we’re on the surface, surely. Times when most of the crew is asleep or working on something else. You won’t want those servo’d modules standing idle on the surface, will you? I’ll simply hold down the position, keep watch until the real working crew comes back on control.”

“Ummmm. Well, it’s not exactly what I had—”

“I don’t give a ruddy toss for your plans, if you must know the truth. I’m offering a compromise.”

“Backup isn’t a full-time position.”

“I’ll do scutwork, then.”

“Well …”

“Hydro jobs. Agri, perhaps. Yes, I’d like that.”

He watched Ted savor this new possibility. The man treated the idea like a small quick animal, probably no threat but unpredictable, as likely to sink fangs into his thumb as it was to suddenly dart off in unexpected directions. Nigel was neither snake nor sturgeon, though, and Ted disliked things without labels. Behind Lancer’s cosmetic groupgov policy lurked these traditional top-down managers, with instincts as old as Tyre.

Ted’s smile suddenly reappeared. “Good. Good. Nigel, I’m happy you were able to see it our way.”

“Indeed.”

“Nigel.”

A weighty silence. “There’s something more, Ted.”

“Yes, there is. I think you ought to realize that you are kind of … distant … from your fellow crew members. That might have influenced this vote.”

“Different generation.”

Ted looked around at the flat, mute surfaces of the room. Most interiors in Lancer covered every wall with a crisp image of forest or ocean or mountains. Here there were severe angles and no ersatz exteriors. Ted seemed to find it unsettling. Nigel watched him shift his sitting again and tried to read what the man was thinking. It was becoming harder for Nigel to understand people like Ted without committing himself to the draining process of letting himself go into them completely. Then, too, Ted was an American. Nigel had lived in the United States a great portion of his life but he retained his English habits of mind. Many of the senior positions on Lancer were held by the affable American managerial types like Ted, and more than age differences separated Nigel from them.

“Look,” Ted began again, his voice resolute and factual, “we all know you’re … well, your neural activity was somehow maximized by the Marginis computer. So your sensory input, your processing, your data correlation—it can all occur on a lot of levels. Simultaneously. With clarity.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re going to seem a little odd, sure.” He smiled winningly. “But do you have to be so standoffish? I mean, if you even gave some sign of trying to get through to us about what it’s like , even, I think—”

“Tanaka and Xiaoping and Klein and Mauscher …” Nigel gave the names a drum-roll cadence. Those men had come after him and experimented with the alien Marginis computer net. They had all been altered, all thought differently, all reported seeing the world with an oblique intensity.

“Yes, I know their work,” Ted broke in. “Still—”

“You’ve read their descriptions. Seen the tapes.”

“Sure, but—”

“If it’s any help. I can’t make much out of that stuff, myself.”

“Really? I’d guess that you would all have a lot in common.”

“We do. For example, none of us talks very well about it.”

“Why not?”

“What’s the point? That’s scarcely the way to go.”

“The 3-D that Xiaoping made, that means a lot to us. If you—”

“But it doesn’t to me . And that fact itself is more important than anything else I can tell you.”

“If you’d just—”

“Very well. Look, there are four states of consciousness. There’s Aha! and Yum-yum and Oy vey! But most of the time there’s Ho-hum. ” Nigel grinned madly.

“Okay, okay. I should know better.” Ted smiled wanly. He sipped the dregs of his tea. Nigel shifted position, taking less of his weight on the knobby end of his spine. This apartment was farther out from Lancer ’s spin axis, so the local centrifugal tug was stronger than at his old digs in the dome. As he moved his skin crinkled and folded like a bag used too long. He was still sinewy, but he knew better than anyone how his muscles were tightening, growing stringy and uncertain. He looked at the blotchy red freckles on his hands and allowed himself a sigh. Ted would misinterpret the sound, but what the hell.

Ted chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that. Hu-hum, yes. Hey, look,” he said brightly, preparing to leave, “your response on this job thing was first-class. Glad it worked out. Glad we stopped the problem before it got, well, harder.”

Nigel smiled, knowing they hadn’t stopped anything at all.

“What do you think Ted really means?” Nikka said.

They strolled along a path that wrapped all the way around the inside of the dome. The best part was a hundred-meter patch of forest, dense with pines and oaks and leafy bushes. It may have been his imagination, but the air seemed better there, less stale.

“Probably no more than he says. For now.”

“Do you think they’ll do the same to me?”

A fine mist drifted over the treetops, obscuring the fields which hung directly over their heads. In the distance, along the axis, Nigel could make out the other side of the dome. Cottonball clouds accumulated along the zero-g axis of the dome, and through them he could see a distant green carpet, so far away only the Euclidean scratches of the planting rows were apparent: a garden zone.

“He said nothing about it.” Nigel turned to her, spreading his hands. “And at any rate, whatever for?”

“Next to you, I’m the oldest crew member.”

“But, blast it!—you’re not old.”

“Nigel, we’re two decades ahead of anybody else in the crew.”

He shrugged. “My work requires motor skills. And they’re dead right, I’m getting stiff and awkward. But you’re a general handy type. There’s no—”

“Your years in the Slowslots retarded all that.”

“Some. Not a lot.”

Nikka walked faster, her vexed energy coming out in a particular irked way she had of swinging her hips into her stride. She was still in marvelous condition, he thought. Her straight black hair was drawn back in a Spartan sheath above her lidded, open face. It joined a natural cascade at the crown, to become a jaunty black torrent down half her back. Nigel forced himself to look at her as though she were a stranger, trying for Ted’s perspective. With age her skin had stretched tight over her high cheekbones. She didn’t have her full strength any longer, granted, or the gloss of early middle age she’d once had. But she was a fine, slim edifice that showed no signs of sinking squat and Earthward.