The Voyage of the White Cloud Page 10

  “No,” his mother said, agreeing, but she sounded unsure. She always sounded unsure, now.

  “I love you, mom,” Kieran said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “I— I’m going to see if we can get you out of here.”

  “That would be nice, sweetie,” she said, her heavy-lidded eyes closing. “I think I’d like that…” She seemed to be drifting back into some half-asleep fugue, and Kieran used the opportunity to escape.

  It took him longer than it ought to have before he finally called Marta. He had never contacted her socially and it felt strange, like he was doing something naughty or transgressive. He liked the feeling.

  “Good to hear from you,” Marta said, and Kieran wondered if she was this friendly with all her apprentices. “What’s new in the world of pipes?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not really,” Marta said and Kieran saw her face take on a cloudy look. “They’ve got me on admin duty these days.” She lifted a hand up to the camera and Kieran could see her once steady-as-a-rock fingers trembling. She dropped her hand and shrugged. “The price of getting older,” she said. “Beats the alternative. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  At first Kieran didn’t know what to say. All he could think of were her quivering hands. He couldn’t imagine what he would do if he couldn’t weld—and he was nowhere near the artisan Marta was. He had to force himself back to the moment.

  “Remember when I saw you in Scutters last? Must have been, what—a half year, something like that?” Marta nodded. “Well, you were talking about those weird rooms on November deck? With the dead people?”

  “Sure,” Marta said. “What about them?”

  Kieran paused. What did he want? What did he think he could learn from a bunch of simulated people? “Did you ever try it out?” he asked finally. “Did you talk to any of them?”

  He saw Marta smile. “Yeah,” she said. “They told me not to fool with any of the doodads in there, but how could I not? I mean, wouldn’t you want to talk to someone from the past if you could?”

  “Yes,” Kieran said, nodding solemnly. He hadn’t even realized it himself, not consciously. “Yes, I would very much like to talk to one of them.”

  Marta grinned. “Well, then, my boy. It looks like we have a bit of a secret mission to embark on, eh?”

  They met outside the door to the lift on November deck. Kieran was shocked at how old Marta looked—the comms had blurred the wrinkles around her eyes and she somehow seemed smaller than he remembered her. When she clapped a hand on his shoulder, though, he could still feel the strength in her grip. “I checked the master job board,” she said, her voice low. “There’s no work scheduled down here for a few days and there’s no reason for anyone to be in this section at all.” She grinned at him. “It’s supposed to be off-limits.”

  Kieran felt his heart beating and wondered for the first time how much trouble they could get in if they were caught. As if she could read his thoughts, Marta said, “I don’t think anyone really cares. Besides, no one is supposed to be down here, so who’s going to know? C’mon, let’s go.” She took off down the corridor and Kieran had to hurry to keep up. Maybe she wasn’t so feeble after all.

  It looked more like the door to an access hatch than the entrance to an electronic mausoleum. “You sure this is it?” he asked.

  “Definitely,” Marta said and looked up and down the corridor as if expecting some authority to catch them in the act. She grinned again and Kieran wondered how long it had been since she’d done anything fun. He also wondered why anyone would find this fun—he was having fifth thoughts by now. Marta opened up the access panel and punched in a maintenance override code. A shockingly loud beep sounded then the door popped open.

  “All right,” she said and shouldered open the door. “Let’s go have a chat.”

  The room was as Marta had described—like a cinema, but with a dozen small screens. It had a funny smell that Kieran associated with barely-used access ducts. “How long has it been since anyone was in here?” he asked and Marta shrugged.

  “Far as I know, I’m the only one who’s been in here for years,” she said. “C’mon, pick one.” She grinned and elbowed Kieran in the ribs. He looked around but the stations all looked the same.

  “Are they different people?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” Marta said. “I only tried one and it gave me a list to pick from. Beats me why they needed so many screens.” She walked around the room slowly, eyeing the devices. “Maybe when they built this it was so popular they needed to serve a bunch of people at once. Who knows why they built anything the way they did around here.” She shook her head and Kieran smiled at her familiar complaint. “Let’s try this one,” she said, slipping into the seat in front of the screen furthest from the door. Kieran walked up behind her and watched as she powered on the device.

  “They’ll know we turned it on,” he said and Marta laughed.

  “Sure,” she said, “if anyone’s monitoring this place, which I doubt. I don’t even think anyone remembers it’s here.” She poked at the screen and Kieran saw a list of names and faces appear. “Besides, I already did this once and nothing happened. We’ll be fine.” She turned to Kieran and the wrinkles around her eyes deepened as she grinned at him. “Squeeze in here and let’s take a walk down memory lane.”

  Kieran felt an almost electrical surge through his body as he sat next to Marta, their thighs touching on the narrow bench. He kept his eyes focussed on the dim screen. There were a long list of names and faces, all women, all looking older than Marta was now. Kieran shrugged. “I dunno,” he said. “How about her?” He pointed at a woman called Audra Tamehana. She had kind eyes.

  Marta poked at the screen and it went blank. For a moment, Kieran wondered if they’d broken something, then the woman’s face filled the screen. She blinked twice, then seemed to look first at Marta then at Kieran. “Well, hello,” she said, the voice coming from a speaker on the side of the screen. “How nice to have visitors.”

  “I do not wish to seem rude,” Audra said, after they’d awkwardly introduced themselves, “but you appear to be a young man.”

  Kieran blushed, though he didn’t really understand why. “I am twenty-four,” he said. “Is that… a problem?”

  Audra and Marta laughed, and seemed to share some kind of look between them that Kieran didn’t understand. “Not at all, my dear,” Audra said. “Though it wasn’t your age which surprised me.”

  Kieran frowned and looked at Marta. She just angled her head back to the screen as if he should ask Audra. As he turned back to the screen Audra said, “In my time there were very few boys. And no young men at all. It is, in fact, quite wonderful to see that things have obviously changed. I’m guessing it must have been some time since I last had a visitor. Tell me, what generation are you?”

  “We don’t count that way anymore,” Marta said to Kieran’s utter confusion. “But we’re a bit more than halfway to new Earth. There was a big celebration to mark it when I was young.”

  “Ah,” Audra said, a wide smile lighting her face. “How wonderful.” She appeared to look at the two of them, and Kieran felt uncomfortable being scrutinized by a machine. “Well, I doubt you fired me up just to give me an update on our journey. Tell me, what is it you’d like to know? Why did you wake me?”

  Marta turned to Kieran when he didn’t say anything and asked, “Well, kid? Why are we here?”

  “I guess I just want to know what it was like,” Kieran said, finally, after humming and hawing and making Audra and Marta laugh. “Back at the beginning. When the ship set out.” He watched Audra’s face carefully, looking for some indication that she knew that it was all a ruse. But her face held the same expression of equal parts amusement and edification.

  “I was part of generation eight,” she said. “That’s the eighth group of children to be born after the ship launched. By the time I was born, none of the initial crew were alive, but my great-great-grandmother w
ould tell me stories that she’d heard from her great-great-gran. How there were whole decks of the ship that were closed off, because there were so few people. It was a time of great change, of experimentation, even when I was a girl. No one had really known what would happen after years and years on a ship alone in space. How we would live, how we would make a community here.”

  She closed her eyes as if remembering those moments so long ago. “Sometimes I felt like I was a slave to the knowledge of our greatness, a greatness which had more to do with an accident of birth than anything innate within ourselves. We were just the ones who came after, just the ones entrusted to keep our mission alive. The ones who were truly great, who left old Earth behind to find a new home for us all, they were gone. And yet every day I knew that I was a part of something amazing, a journey into the future that would dwarf every other human endeavour.”

  She opened her eyes again and Kieran felt an intensity in her gaze that crossed the gulf of centuries, the reality of her long-ago death. “It is a heroic life you lead, young man,” she said and Kieran felt the words crash into him. “All of us who have been privileged to live on this ship. If you learn anything from history, learn that.”

  Kieran nodded dumbly, his voice lost. Marta thanked Audra and shut down the machine. “You find what you were looking for?” she asked as they left the room. Kieran nodded again, still unable to speak. He wondered if he could find a way to bring his mother here, to let her listen to this voice from the past.

  Kieran knew there was nothing the personality construct had said that even came close to proof that the stories were true. Nothing that couldn’t just be part of a grand lie to keep people like him, like Marta, like Rachel and his mother quiet and compliant. But he knew that if his mother could hear Audra’s story that everything would change. Because Audra would make her want to believe. As Kieran did.

  Chapter 10

  Windows

  Beatriz walked down the darkened corridor, one hand along the bulkhead as a guide. She cursed under her breath. This was the fifth outage is as many days – clearly someone had lost the plot down in power management. But of course she was the one who was woken and asked to crawl around in the dark to fit a new fuse. Typical. It was going to be a long night.

  There was one advantage to this recurring problem, though. She knew her way to the Green Sector power relay in her sleep. She strode purposefully down the hall, knowing that she’d reach the access panel in a few seconds. She felt the outline of the hatch and stopped, finding the release catch and popping open the recessed door. She carefully set the cover next to the now-exposed hatch and peered into the opening. She couldn’t see a thing.

  She knelt down and crawled into the service tube. This was the worst part. She could feel the walls of the small space closing in on her, even though she knew they were solid. She fought with herself not to turn on her headlamp, knowing there was only enough power in the cell to keep the light ablaze for fifteen minutes. She also knew that it could take that much time to switch out the fuse, so she had to conserve.

  Not for the first time, she cursed the poor planning that left her with such an underpowered light. “You can tap into the ship’s power from anywhere,” they said. “There’s no need for portable lights,” they said. She let her annoyance smother her fear as she crawled as quickly as she could to the fuse box.

  She palmed open the box and felt around in her pocket for the new fuse. Only when it was in her hand did she finally switch on her headlamp. She squinted at the sudden brightness, then began the task of determining which fuse had blown and replacing it.

  When she was done, a low hum filled the space and the lights blinked back on. She took a breath and began backing out of the tube. She felt something brush her leg and she let out an involuntary squeal. She rolled on to her back and sat up, her heart racing. She saw a flash of movement and turned toward it, her hands clenched into fists. She was just about to lash out when she recognized the source of the movement.

  “Thomas?” she asked, her face screwed into a frown. “What are you doing here?”

  The young boy shrugged and Beatriz shook her head. Thomas was her sister’s boy, and he had always been a bit odd. Quiet, not the rough and tumble handful her other nieces and nephews were. At first, Beatriz had found the boy’s calmer nature to be a relief, but as he’d grown older it had become a little off-putting. And now he was following her around.

  Great.

  “Does your mother know where you are?” Beatriz asked as they scooted toward the glow of the hatch’s opening into the corridor.

  “How can I know what she knows?” Thomas asked, methodically moving along the ground in front of Beatriz. It was as if he’d been here before. She felt a shiver go up her spine. Kids. They were creepy at the best of times. These were not the best of times.

  “We should probably be getting you home,” she said. “Your mom will be worried.” Thomas didn’t answer, and Beatriz wondered if he could tell that she was trying to get rid of him. She wanted to go back to her quarters, pour a drink and relax. She hadn’t had a decent sleep since the first outage and it was starting to take its toll. She hoped she’d be able to keep her temper with Thomas.

  They reached the hatch and Thomas scooted into the corridor. He made no move to leave, just stood across the hall waiting for Beatriz. She pulled herself out of the hatch, grunting with effort, and stood. She patted her pockets to check that she’d remembered all her tools, then lifted the hatch cover back into position. It clicked into place and locked with a hiss of compressed air. Beatriz turned to her nephew and a chill passed through her body. He was staring at her with an intensity that she did not enjoy.

  “Come on, buddy,” she said, turning down the corridor. “Let’s get you home.”

  They walked toward the habitation sector, alone in the corridor. It was late and few people had cause to be in this part of the ship. Beatriz often marvelled at how much empty space there was on the enormous starship. A few generations down the line some of these areas would become habitation sectors, but now there were whole sections that were almost as empty as the vacuum on the other side of the hull.

  They turned a corner and Beatriz realized that Thomas had been staring at her the entire time. She didn’t know what to say to a six-year-old, but the silence was worse than an inane conversation.

  “You’re pretty quiet. There must be a lot going on up there,” she said, tapping her own temple.

  Thomas made no response. It was as if he hadn’t heard her at all. She stopped walking, and he stopped as well, his attention never leaving her face. She knelt in front of him. His wide-open blue eyes never wavered from her gaze. “You okay, buddy?” she asked. “Staring at me is kind of weird, you know?”

  “I just want to see if there’s anything there,” he said.

  “Okay,” Beatriz said, forcing a laugh. “You know what they say? ‘The eyes are the windows to the soul.’ That it?”

  Thomas frowned. “What’s windows?”

  Beatriz laughed, legitimately this time. She stood and waved Thomas over to the side of the corridor. “Like the ports in the observation deck. They let you see what’s on the other side. Like this.” At the wall-mounted terminal, she hit a few keystrokes. A live feed from one of the exterior cameras filled the screen. She lifted Thomas up so he was facing the image.

  He scrutinized the picture for a moment, then repeated, “Windows to the soul.” He wriggled around in Beatriz’s arms and stared at her again. His eyes were so clear, so blue, like the images of Earth’s sky she’d seen once. He looked at her intently for what felt like forever. Finally, he blinked once and said, “There’s nothing there.”

  Beatriz put him down. He was no longer looking at her, but rather up at the screen, its display still showing the darkness of space. “There’s nothing there,” he repeated, then walked down the corridor toward his quarters.

  Beatriz didn’t follow him and he didn’t look back at her. Why would he?

&nb
sp; Back in her quarters, Beatriz poured a large drink. She sat, sipping, thinking about Thomas. He was just a child. He didn’t know anything, was probably just going through some phase. She didn’t envy her sister, that was certain. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.

  What if he were right? What if there was nothing there, nothing for them to aim for, no planet for them to one day call home? What if they were out in the void, literally going nowhere?

  And, worse, what if there was nothing inside either? Nothing special about humanity that made them worth saving?

  Beatriz downed her drink and poured another. It was going to be a long night, indeed.

  Chapter 11

  Golden Cage

  The birds hid in the trees. They had no predators, no need to fear anyone or anything, but their ancient instincts still told them to conceal themselves among the leaves, their presence only indicated by their tentative calls to one another. Neils walked quietly among the branches, careful not to snap a twig or rustle the leaves. According to his supervisor, within a few generations the birds would learn to be unafraid. It was a shame.

  Neils stopped at the foot of a healthy rimu and stood very still. There were a half dozen birds on its branches and he knew that if he moved too suddenly they would fly off. He’d done this hundreds of times before, but catching birds was one of the harder parts of his job. It was also among the most fun.

  After waiting several minutes, he sprung his trap. He managed to get three birds in the wire cage, the area filled with the sound of their terrified flapping and squawking. “Shhh,” he said softly, “quiet, now. I’m not going to hurt you.” The birds continued their caterwauling and, although the sound was piercing, Neils smiled. It was good that they had a sense of self-preservation, good that they maintained some independence from the human population which ensured their continued survival. He picked up the cage and carried it out of the woods.