Элизабет Бир - Machine

There was a thing that might be a pressure gauge. The crystal over it was cracked, and if you squinted past the cracks the needle inside lay flat against one peg. If I was reading the archaic numerals right the needle rested on the depressurized side. That was a good sign for avoiding explosive decompression, if it was accurate: nothing inside to decompress.

It might be a bad sign for anybody inside the generation ship, though.

Sensible airlock design provided for a safety interlock such that one could not open both hatches at the same time. You probably wouldn’t be surprised by how often people—even modern rightminded people, even nonhuman people—fail to do what’s sensible. I wasn’t prepared to assume that unrightminded folks from the distant past—desperate enough to light out for stars even their great-grandchildren would never see, while flying the spacefaring equivalent of a very large, leaky rowboat—would be notably cautious individuals.

I checked Tsosie’s work on the bubble, which was as meticulous as ever. I was having a bad pain dia, so I tuned a little to control it. Not too much, though. Being dopey feels gross, and depressing your reflexes is a terrible idea when you’re entering a rescue zone.

Okay, maybe the ayatanas weren’t the only reason I was looking a little gray.

While I was adjusting, Tsosie finished opening the hatch. No air puffed out. It looked like the gauge was working after all. Or was maybe accidentally correct. There was a ladder inside the aperture. He climbed down and I followed, closing the hatch behind me.

“We’re in,” I told Sally. “Looks like an airlock should.”

The second hatch was off to my right as I stepped off the ladder. The space was large enough for six space-suited humans—or two humans and a large piece of equipment—and utterly barren. The bulkheads were a dingy beige, the paint scuffed with bumps and rubs. The ship had stayed functional and in use for some time after launch, then. But either the ship, the management, or the crew had not been functional enough for meticulous maintenance to be the norm.

I wondered how many generations had managed to live and die here. I wondered again if there were still people on board. I wondered if they had triggered the distress beacon, and if so, when.

What leads you to put a beacon on a ship that never plans on encountering another of its kind?

I knew less time had elapsed on this ship than for those of us who stayed home and joined the Synarche. Big Rock Candy Mountain was moving so fast after centians of acceleration that she had attained relativistic speeds. Every standard second we spent here was one point three standard seconds out in the rest of the universe.

Not a big difference, if you only stayed a week. It would mean roughly two extra diar going by in the outside galaxy. But over the course of half a millennian, the time dilation added up.

The pressure gauge in the inside hatch was more legible. It read .83, and since it maxed out at 1, I guessed that meant Terran atmospheres.

Tsosie and I took turns spraying each other’s hardsuits with decontam. We were the same species as the people who built this creaking, ancient vessel, but—in the thrilling eventuality that any were still alive—we and they were six hundred ans separated. Our microbes would eat their immune systems for lunch, and vice versa. It would be an enormous tragedy to reconnect with a lost branch of humanity only to start a pandemic and kill everybody on both sides.

So we wouldn’t do that.

“What we could learn from this place,” Tsosie breathed.

He let the pressure equalize, and suddenly I could hear the creaks and groans of the ancient ship around me. Strained metal and some distant thumps that sounded like the ring of machinery. No voices, and nothing that sounded like voices.

I thought I had been keeping my hopes down, but my spirits still fell. I wasn’t feeling particularly good about our chances of finding survivors. We had not been subtle about our approach—it doesn’t do to sneak up on people—and if anyone was still driving this thing, surely they would have answered our hails. Radio was radio. Or they would have come to meet us at the airlock, or at least sent a bot.

Artificial intelligences dated back to before the Eschaton, and Sally’s data library suggested that most of the generation ships had shipminds of a sort. Wheelminds? I didn’t even know what nomenclature you’d use for a ship this big.

Nobody spoke to us, even when I said the ship’s name out loud, amplifying it through my hardsuit speaker, and requested permission to enter.

Well, maybe somebody was on the other side of the hatch.

Tsosie tipped his head and dipped his shoulder, the broadly expressive gestures of somebody used to communicating through a hardsuit. “Here goes nothing.”

“Give it your best,” I said, and watched him lean on the hatch wheel.

Tsosie swung the hatch wide, and—nothing happened.

Nothing besides a brief puff of equalizing air, that is. I hadn’t really expected a welcome party, but it would have been a nice surprise.

“Huh,” he said, peering around the hatch. “Well, that’s interesting.”

That’s not a reassuring thing to hear when you’ve just broken into a space ship older than your species’s membership in civilization. I leaned sideways to peer over his shoulder.

The entire corridor was filled with what seemed at first to be a strange sort of honeycomb or spiderweb. The illumination was working—not something I would have counted on, after all this time. Let’s hear it for good old-fashioned fusion reactors.

Because the ship spun like a station to simulate gravity, we were standing on the bulkhead that faced the outside of the wheel. Big Rock Candy Mountain was enormous, and I could see quite far down the corridor before the curve of the ship bent out of sight in the distance. The whole space seemed filled with… building toys?

Something very similar, anyway, to the sort of peg-and-keeper sets that children of many species with manual dexterity are normally given as they begin to develop curiosity and the ability to use their fingers independently. If they happen to have fingers. These seemed to be printed or extruded in polymer and plated in what I took to be a conductive material of a shimmering, holographic metal. The whole structure created a mesh of interlocking hexagons that entirely filled the passageway.

“Structural reinforcement?” I asked, making sure we still had a connection back to our ship.

“It might be,” Sally agreed. I could feel her relaying Tsosie’s feed—and my feed—to the other four members of the crew. Loese, our new pilot; Hhayazh, a flight nurse; Rhym, the flight surgeon; and Camphvis, the other flight nurse.

It seemed like we were all equally mystified. We’d sent two out of the three Terrans in the crew (Loese was the other one) on this trip out of caution. We couldn’t expect any survivors aboard Big Rock Candy Mountain to have ever encountered a nonhuman sentience. And Hhayazh, in particular, is the sort of twiggy, bristle-covered, black-carapaced insectoid sentience that gives groundlubbers the shrieking jimjams.

Nobody was going to have the shrieking jimjams on my watch if I could possibly help it.

These structures didn’t seem sinister. They refracted light in bright, human colors. Not all primary—purple and orange and green made appearances—but all true and saturated. Kid colors, accentuating their resemblance to toys.

“There’s too many colors for it to be a DNA model,” Tsosie said. “Unless the same amino acids are wearing different dresses.”

I reached past him, and poked the nearest peg with my finger, causing him to gasp and grab my wrist an instant too late to stop me.