Going Interstellar (collection)

THE BIG SHIP AND THE WISE OLD OWL Sarah A. Hoyt

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been twenty and faced with the oldest problem a girl could have. I was being courted by two men and I didn’t know which I preferred.

Except that courted might be too strong a word, since there was very little about it that was romantic. We’d grown up together, were of similar status and background, and each of us was licensed to enter into a marriage producing two children. Still, I had two men who wished to marry me.

And I didn’t know which one to pick. They’d both been my friends forever and whichever way you looked at it, none of us was going to set the ship on fire, as the saying went. Which was a good thing, since rumor had it that this was what Ciar’s parents had planned to do before they were captured and executed. Not that I knew for sure or that Ciar knew anything about his parents. He’d been born from a surrogate years after they’d died and he’d been brought up in a creche for children who’d been created from stored ova and sperm—to continue the lines of people who’d been executed or died before having children. But there was a rumor about his parents, that they’d been dangerous subversives. I’d always thought it had been used to explain Ciar’s tendency to get into all sorts of trouble.

Ennio, my other suitor, and I had grown up with our parents. Ciar didn’t seem to envy us. And his parents didn’t come up beyond the occasional joke among the three of us.

At twenty Ciar was a linguist and Ennio was a teacher’s assistant second class, with a nice space in the bachelor quarters, and a cozy if unexciting job maintaining and programming the educational computers. Which he was doing right now—the maintaining part—halfway under one of the brightly colored terminals in classroom 3A, for the beginners’ class.

His voice emerged muffled from beneath the terminal—a bulky, padded unit, designed to withstand the clumsy movements of toddlers. “What I want to know,” he said, as his upper body moved, indicating that he’d somehow twisted one arm up inside the machine, “is how much they feed these kids that they can afford to shove half their nutritional allowance—” he paused and grunted—“inside these machines, around the sensi-screens.”

Ciar laughed. He was lying across two of the terminals, staring at the ceiling, his straight black hair falling back from his face with its aquiline nose and sharp blue eyes. His status was about the same as Ennio’s. He worked as a third class linguist. Most of his days were spent deep in the archives of the language department which was translating all the documents we’d brought from Earth into the language we spoke now. Though no one ever said how many generations had passed, it stood to reason there had to be many, since my grandfather’s grandfather had been born aboard. They’d brought aboard, originally, people from many countries. Even though they’d made English the official language, many words and some structure had ported over from the languages of the other people on the ship.

So, the administrators wanted to make sure all our records, all our history and all our scientific knowledge stayed understandable, for when we landed.

Ennio emerged from under the terminal, a sticky lump of some unidentified substance in his hand. “It should work now,” he muttered, as he walked across to drop the lump in the disposal chute before washing his hands in the little sink in the corner, which, being set for toddlers, he had to bend almost double to use.

“I could help you,” I said. I hadn’t qualified for intellectual work, as the men had. Not that my IQ tests were inferior to theirs, but I had failed what Ciar called the restlessness test. He said that forced to endure the jobs he and Ennio performed, mostly confined to a single room or a suite of rooms day after day, I would have gone quietly insane. Which I supposed was why I’d been apprenticed to the maintenance crew, where every day brought something new. One day I might be repairing agricultural machines and the next working to remove the socks some toddler had flushed down the toilet on division D before they made all toilets on division F fountain to the ceiling. “I repair machines all the time.”

Ennio wrinkled his nose at me, his mop of reddish-brown hair standing up from being cut so short. There was a fad onboard for longish hair, so of course Ennio wore his almost too short. “This is hardly repair,” he said. “Just clean up.”

The terminal powered up when he tried it and he said, “Right. Now to reprogram it with all the nursery rhymes again.”

Ciar sat up, curious. “Nursery rhymes? You teach them those?”

“At this age it’s the best way to get them to read. I just need to make sure they come up and match the sound,” he said, picking things on the screen, till the screen displayed a series of lines, which were sounded out, aloud, in a babyish voice.

The big ship sails on the vacuum oh, the vacuum oh, the vacuum oh,Oh the big ship sails on the vacuum oh,It will not sail on forever.The captain said it will reach Alpha Centauri ohWhen ten generations are over.The big ship will reach Alpha CentauriWhere our new home will be.It will reach Alpha Centauri when ten generations are over.We will all live in Alpha CentauriIn the world most like Earth.We will all live in Alpha CentauriAfter the eleventh generation’s birth.

He pushed a few buttons and went on to another screen, where a comical owl hooted, flew away, and then the rhyme flashed:

A wise old owl lived down on area C.The more he saw the less he spoke,The less he spoke the more he heard.Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?Find him and ask politely,He’ll tell you the way to Alpha Centauri.When we’ve all forgotten,He will still beKeeping the time and path to Alpha Centauri.

Ennio pushed the screen again, but Ciar was sitting up and staring at it. He spoke over the next rhyme, “Those aren’t right.”

I looked at him. “Of course they are. Don’t you remember?” We’d all learned the rhymes at our mothers’ knees—well, except Ciar, who presumably had learned them at the creche-teacher’s knees. And then we’d learned to read them in school.

“I remember,” he said, frowning quickly at me. He pulled at the collar of his grey tunic. “Look, I know those are the rhymes we learned, but they aren’t the right rhymes.”

Ennio turned around. “What do you mean?”

As often happened, Ciar was struggling to form words. It was funny that the one of us who specialized in linguistics was the one who would often find himself struggling for explanations when talking to us. Perhaps because he was the only one of us with a truly intellectual profession?

“I was looking at nursery rhymes today. One of the books was stored on board from early on. It’s part of the historical collection and I don’t think many people looked at it since it came in.” He frowned. “They had those rhymes, but they’re completely different. Nothing about Alpha Centauri or generations or …division C.”

“Maybe they adapted the rhymes for life on board,” Ennio said.

But Ciar was still frowning.

“They might have, Ciar,” I said. “To make it relevant.”

“Why would they?” he said. “They haven’t removed ‘owl’ from there, and the only things we know of owls are in books from Earth. I presume there are owl embryos frozen somewhere in the ship, but …”

“But the decision of whether to ever grow them depends on the level of life development we find in the destiny world,” I said. We’d all learned, from very young, that the world we were headed towards was, so far as they could tell from old Earth, the twin of the home world. It was supposed to have water, and atmosphere and probably be much like Earth. But the question was, did it have the same level of biodevelopment? We’d brought a sample of every bird and animal and plant, or at least all the ones anyone could think of. If we found a very primitive world, or one where life hadn’t yet taken hold beyond single cell organisms, then we would set about reconstructing the ecology of Earth. But if we found that it had the same chain of life, and that we were compatible with it and could use it for sustenance, then we would not bring back the animals of Earth, except perhaps as curiosities in well-guarded zoos.

“Yeah, but we still learn about them,” Ciar said. “And cows that go moo. You know, until I caught a reference in an ancient manuscript, I thought cows were about the size of a chicken.”

Chickens and fish being the only animal life aboard, I’d thought so too until this moment. “You mean they’re not?”

He shook his head, and his hands sketched improbable dimensions. Now Ennio was frowning. “So …The rhymes were altered. I wonder why?”

“I think …” Ciar was frowning. “Well …I’ve read a lot of things from when the ship was first launched. Part of the reason they established the captain with absolute power and the administrators reporting only to him is that they were very afraid there would be a mutiny and we would either destroy our knowledge base, or that we would overrun the resources of the ship.”

I shrugged. I’d got up and was looking over Ennio’s shoulder at the screen changing in multicolored patterns of lights as syllables appeared. There was, for instance, the bells song. “Find me if you can, toll the bells of C and N….” I remembered singing it with my class in my first year in school. “So, we didn’t mutiny and we didn’t overrun the resources of the ship,” I said.

“Yes, but I think they changed the nursery rhymes, so that we would have something to remind us if we forgot.”

“To remind us of what?” Ennio asked. “That the wise old owl keeps his mouth shut? Or that we’re going to Alpha Centauri? Honestly, Ciar.” He turned to me, “There’s a dance tonight at the bachelor’s dorm, and I was wondering if you—”

“You don’t understand,” Ciar said, his voice in the slow pedantic tone he used when he thought he was schooling us. “The thing is that nursery rhymes are the most linguistically conservative bit of language. Not just in terms of how exactly they get passed on, but they retain fossilized references and pronunciations for centuries after they’ve died out of any normal use. They would be a …they are a superb medium for encoding instructions. But instructions for what?”

“For people who’ve forgotten that we’re on our way to Alpha Centauri and who, probably, think that this is the only world that exists.” He shook his head. “Now, Nia,” he said, looking at me. “Will you go with me to the dance?”

I said yes, mostly, I think, to try to get Ciar to let go of the crazy subject of nursery rhymes. When he got an idea in his head, he tended to hold onto it like a well-placed rivet. And this one was truly one of the strangest ones he’d come up with.

But when I looked up to see if he was upset or interested, I met with a frown, and his eyes half-closed, but he was staring into something we couldn’t see. “Oh, the dance,” he said, slowly. “Yes. I’ll see you two there.”

He walked out through the terminals, towards the door and Ennio and I met each other’s eyes and laughed. “Now, do you suppose he thinks I invited him to the dance?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems to think both of us did.”

Ennio shook his head. “Ciar has a bug in his processor again!”

I confess I completely forgot about Ciar and the nursery rhymes. Unlike the men, I still lived with my parents. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting enough ration coupons to live alone, but I disliked the single women dormitory. Too much cackle and giggling, too much scent and makeup. My mom shook her head when I complained and said women had always been like that, and always would be, but frankly, I owned a mirror and could see my face as well as the next person. My face was not as soft and round as I’d have liked. I had a broad forehead, and dark blond hair. The best that could be said about me was that I didn’t cause men to run screaming into the night, and that I had two guys who wished to court me—even if they were not exactly potential heartthrobs. But makeup didn’t improve my looks and frankly I didn’t think either of my two very odd suitors would notice, unless I put blue circles on my cheeks and dyed my hair purple. They seemed to enjoy my company and talking to me, more than actually looking at me.

Besides, I was mom and dad’s only daughter. Mom had got into some trouble when she was young. I’d never found out exactly what it had been, but whatever it was meant she was only licensed for one child, so here I was. And it didn’t seem fair to move out before I absolutely needed to.

Mom insisted on fussing over my going to the dance with Ennio, and finding me one of the dresses she’d worn when she was young and which she hadn’t traded in for material credits. It looked very odd on me, because though our bodies are about the same size, mom is a beautiful woman, delicate and blond. I’m …not. But she said I looked beautiful in the pink, ruffled top and skirt, and she found me the shoes that went with them. Though she told me I could do better than Ennio, she approved of my playing the field.

But she didn’t mention Ciar and I didn’t think of him, until I got to the dance. Both Ennio and Ciar were standing at the entrance, looking out with anxious expressions.

The way their faces cleared when they saw me approaching did my heart good, but I soon saw that they were relieved for completely different reasons, as Ennio looked towards Ciar and said, “See, I told you she was fine. You and your paranoia.”

“I’m not paranoid,” Ciar said, in an urgent whisper. “And don’t talk about it here. And I have to show you something.”

Ennio lowered his eyebrows, as his features shaped into a frown. “You are insane. This is a dance. Nia came here to dance.”

I could see, past his shoulders, the dimmed lights, and couples gyrating to the convoluted strains of something that—from my classical music history—I knew should be a waltz, but wasn’t. Not quite. They called it the Cuddle Bug, but really, like the waltz in its time it was an excuse for young people to hold each other and spend time together in a form the population planners might otherwise find inappropriate in unmarried couples.

Ennio put his hand on my forearm to guide me inside, but Ciar was shaking his head, making his hair flop in front of his eyes. “Come. Forget the dance. This is more important.” His voice got louder, as he got more agitated, and I could see Ennio thought that if he were to refuse to listen to whatever Ciar had to say, Ciar was quite likely to cause a scene and then we’d all be investigated for—at the very least—antisocial activities.

“You just want to undercut my one chance to dance with Nia,” Ennio said, in the tone of someone trying desperately to turn the whole thing into a joke.

“No,” Ciar said. “No, this is important.”

And it was clear that to him it was. Not just a joke, not just a side pursuit, not just a way to take the shine off his rival. At any rate, I told myself, it was impossible that either of them was that serious about their rivalry. First, they were as good friends as two young men of their solitary temperaments could be. And second, suppose one of them won my hand. The other one could find a woman just as good looking and with as good prospects on any given evening, at the single women’s dormitory. Frankly, I thought the only reason they both courted me was because it allowed all three of us to spend time together, as we had since we’d started instruction.

I could see Ennio weigh all this too, and judge the anxiety in Ciar’s eyes, and the way he kept looking around wildly, as though sure he was being followed. And then a hint of resignation appeared in his eyes, as it had in our childhood, when we finally gave in to one of Ciar’s crazy schemes and investigated his mad suspicions—like the time Ciar had decided that the food in the cafeteria was made from the bodies of people who died and the entire thing with the recycler and converter was a cover up. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Let’s dispose of your insanity, shall we? What did you discover this time? Are they using school children for propulsion?”

But Ciar didn’t laugh or argue, he just shook his head, and his voice changed to a whisper. “I’ll go ahead. You don’t want to be seen with me. Or at least, we shouldn’t leave together,” he said. “I’ll go ahead, and then in ten minutes or so, meet me at the archive.”

“At the—” Ennio said.

“Where I work. You know very well where it is. I’ll leave it open for you.”

His being in his place of work after hours seemed strange enough. If he didn’t have a work order from his supervisor, he could get into serious trouble over it. His letting us in after hours was even more dangerous.

“He’s riding for a fall,” Ennio said, as he watched Ciar leave. “I wonder what’s got into him?”

“Isn’t it strange,” I said, “how we use expressions for things long vanished, things neither we nor anyone on board the ship could know about personally?”

Ennio gave me an odd look. “What are you talking about now?” he asked.

“Riding for a fall. None of us has ever ridden anything.”

He rolled his eyes. “We’ve ridden the ship our whole lives,” he said. “But that’s not the point. Don’t you go talking of old language now, or I’ll think both of you have gone completely insane. I wonder what he’s chasing?”

“Something related to those nursery rhymes, I think.”

Ennio made a sound that, without being a profanity, consigned the nursery rhymes and everyone who wrought them to the hells of the ancients. “You’re not going to marry him, are you, Nia?” he asked me, with a pleading look. “The man is my best friend, but sometimes I think he’s a half-wit. He does more thought transgression in ten minutes than other people do in their entire lives.”

I shrugged. “I’m not going to marry anyone,” I said. “At least not just yet. I have enough to support myself, and I enjoy living at my parents’ lodging. Why bother merging, when I can fly solo just as well?”

He gave me a wolfish smile that told me he wasn’t buying my answer, not for a second, then tugged on my arm again, gently this time. “But you do dance, don’t you, Nia? Come and dance with me.”

We did dance, in the dark, confined warmth of the great room of the bachelor’s quarters. I knew from visiting Ennio there—usually under close supervision—that this room was normally used for terminals for learning or gaming or any other leisure activities, but someone had cleared them all away, and dimmed the lights to the lowest setting and the large, well-lit room looked like a cavern, confined and close. The semi-darkness made the whole space more intimate, more …isolating, so that while you spun with your partner to the winding strains of the Cuddle Bug the two of you might well have been in the middle of nowhere, gloriously alone.

And the music was sensuous, I’ll give you that. The warm firmness of Ennio’s chest against mine was reassuring, his arms around my body were comforting. But as one set ended and another began, I pulled away, regretfully, and whispered to him, “Come on, we’d better meet him.”

“Nia,” Ennio whispered back, looking betrayed.

“Do you want to risk what he might do if we don’t meet him?”

“No …no. I guess not. I …oh, but he’s a pain.”

I smiled up at his annoyed expression. Perhaps he was courting me in earnest after all. Oh, sure, he could find a better bride around any corner and down any section corridor, but maybe he didn’t know that.

I’m a woman of machines and solid objects. I understand malfunctions based on some defective component, and I understand the logic of mechanics. I also understand humans aren’t always logical, which is why they are such bewildering creatures. And why I normally do my best not to get that involved with them. But sometimes I still have trouble with the idea that humans aren’t logical in their choice of a mate.

I’ve read the classic romances just as well as everyone else has, but the one thing no one ever explained to me was exactly why people did any of these things. And perhaps that was where I failed to understand Ennio. Maybe he was in the grip of one of those illogical convictions that only one woman would do for him, and that I had to be that woman. I don’t pretend to understand, but I was gratified by it anyway.

I gave him my arm, and we walked, in an ambling sort of way, as if we had nothing much to do, out of the room, out of the center, down a corridor, then down another, on a seemingly random path.

“People will think we are bundling,” I told Ennio. “But I get a feeling it’s better than their thinking that we’re meeting Ciar. I don’t think this time if we’re caught we’ll escape with just a severe reprimand, like the time we got into the kitchens to find out where meat came from.”

Ennio nodded. “Oh, yeah. He’s always getting us into crazy adventures. And would it be so bad if we were?”

“If we were what?” I asked. “Trying to figure out where the meat comes from?” I was counting back the years since the last crazy adventure and figuring out that even Ciar might be allowed a moment of insanity every ten years or so.

“If we were going to bundle,” he said.

“Unauthorized contact before marriage?” I asked. “Do you want your coupons docked and your child allowance lowered?”

He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged, and this time I wondered which of us had lost his mind.

So we didn’t talk about it anymore. Instead, we walked down the corridors, more or less aimlessly, until we were far enough away that we could head back in the direction we were supposed to be going, to meet Ciar.

This circuitous route took us through narrow little tunnels, the ceramic material that curved overhead patched in a hundred places. Then we emerged onto a larger path amid fields, which were planted with some form of wheat that gave off a rich and earthy smell.

And then we curved back toward lodgings and the administrative buildings, and fetched up at the door to the archives. Which was closed, the lights off on either side, of course. For a moment I wondered if Ciar was in there, or if he had decided to skip this anyway, or even if this was some sort of elaborate prank. But Ciar didn’t play pranks, and even Ennio knew that.

Making another sound that betrayed his annoyance, Ennio pushed at the door. It swung inward.

Come into my home, said the spider to the fly flitted through my mind and that, too, I thought, was a fragment of some long-forgotten story. But I went in, as Ennio held the door open for me.

The archives was where they kept all the data for everything in the ship, and for everything before the ship. Somewhere beneath us computers sat that were separate from the computers used for navigating and powering the ship, but could look into those if needed. Into this computer had been poured all of the knowledge of humanity since we’d first walked on two legs in that Earth which I’d only observed in illustrations and only read about in books, but never actually seen.

It was possible that they’d skipped a file teaching us how to chip flint, but everything else was in it, from animal husbandry and taming to the shaping of clay and the smelting of metal. Everything needed to start human civilization as far up as possible on our ladder of learning, in the new world.

And because, by the time we’d left, humanity had worked out that knowledge wasn’t often as simple and clear cut as it seemed, this repository involved other skills that would seem less important to interplanetary civilization, including linguistics and literature, law, history and other disciplines where people argued a lot and used math very little.

Ciar and his fellow linguists worked here translating and transcribing: a work that would be needed until all records were converted, which is to say probably forever.

The space looked like what it was. There were terminals, so close together that for someone to get out of his he had to ask the permission of his fellow on the next one. They were grey, smooth and rounded on top, with a sort of privacy hood you ducked under, presumably so that your work wouldn’t disturb that of the workers next to you. In the dark, with a soft light glowing from each of them, they looked as if they were sleeping undisturbed, like children who let their heads droop while napping.

“Oh, we shouldn’t be here,” Ennio said.

This, of course, was not news, and of course we shouldn’t have been there. But we were, and the best thing to do was deal with Ciar so that we could get out of there as soon as possible and with as little trouble as possible.

“Ciar?” I whispered.

He popped up from behind one of the terminals like a jack in the box, his face flushed, his eyes shining and looking feverish. “You came,” he said, and before either of us could comment, “Good. You’ll never believe this.”

From Ennio’s snort, I could tell he was already working on not believing it, before Ciar showed us whatever it was.

At first I had no idea what Ciar was getting at. He took us to his terminal and showed us the screen. It said, Access denied, you do not have permission to ask this question. Under it there were codes, presumably explaining why we didn’t have the right to look at it.

“Very exciting,” Ennio said. “I’m all agog. Perhaps you linguists are different, pal, but in my job I get one of these every other day. People don’t think I have a need to know the nutritional mix in classroom lunches, or the stories selected for next year’s primer.”

Ciar shook his head. He touched the screen, quickly, clearing the error message and bringing up a query screen. In it he typed Big ship and nursery rhyme. For the next few minutes he showed us the old and the new rhymes. The old woman who lived in a compartment—only in the Earth rhyme this was inexplicably a shoe. There were half a dozen others. All of them were very different between the old and the new version. I mean, one of them was clearly created on Earth, for children who had never even thought of flying in space, but the others were full of ship analogies and cryptic references to a wise old owl who didn’t talk and which apparently waited for people to come to it when it was needed.

“So, the rhymes were altered,” Ennio said. “Perhaps people weren’t sure shipboard children would care about Earth-like things.”

Ciar shook his head. “It’s more than that. Look at it realistically. If you look at what they’re saying, over and over they’re telling us something special should be happening when we’ve been in the ship ten generations. Over and over….” He looked up and quirked an eyebrow at us.

“So?” I said.

“So,” he said. “How many generations have we been in the ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m fairly sure I’ve never had a need to know.”

“Ah!” He raised his finger sagely, like someone making an important point.

He brought us back to the query screen and asked again how many generations we’d been in the ship. Then he asked for the date of departure from Earth, and the time of arrival at their destination. And, probably in an effort to calculate the generations himself , genealogical tables.

Each question brought up the same screen telling us we were forbidden from accessing that information.

“See?” he said.

“I see,” I said. But truth be told, I was far from impressed. “Since when is it news that they classify as secret everything they can in this ship? My father says that if they could make sex top secret, they would.”

“They probably have,” Ennio said. “And are shocked when each new generation figures it out.”

“Generations,” Ciar said. “That’s the thing. How many generations? How long have we been sailing in the big, big ship with the wise old owl? And what is the wise old owl?” He typed that query too, with fast, nervous fingers. It too informed us we had no need to know. “And why won’t it let us look at genealogy?”

“That should be obvious.” Ennio sounded tired. “You know very well that in the long time the ship— ”

“However long,” Ciar said, meaningly.

“However long,” Ennio shrugged. “There have been any number of people executed for destructive behavior or crimes against the community or …or others.”

We nodded. Executions weren’t that common, but they happened once every ten years or so. It couldn’t be helped. We’d learned in school, early on, that in this confined space, discipline had to be far tighter than it was on Earth, because Earth could isolate its anti-social elements. But we had to live and work together, and we had to make sure there were no disruptive elements in the well-oiled social machinery.

“So,” Ennio said. “The genealogical tables are hidden, so feuds can’t be carried on from generation to generation. As they might very well be, in a group as limited as we are.”

Ciar frowned as though this had never occurred to him. “Maybe,” he said. His voice sounded less self-assured than it had at first. “Maybe I’ll give you that this is a possible reason, but it still strikes me as odd. All these references to generations, and then we can’t find out how many generations have been in the ship.”

“I’m sure the captain and the administrators know, never you worry,” I said. But I was worried. Something at the back of my mind refused to quiet down. I knew my grandparents’ grandparents had been in the ship. That made it at least six generations. Were they the first ones?

“Is this all you wished to show us?” Ennio said. “I think you’re inflating it wildly. It’s like when you decided that they were serving us dead bodies.”

Ciar stuck his lip out. “I was only ten. You have to admit it seemed logical. Humans are made of meat, they serve us meat …”

“From vats. And this seems logical to you too, but only because you have that kind of mind. You know what, Ciar, if you’d been born on Earth you’d probably be one of those people who make up stories to amuse others. That’s the sort of mind you have. You make it all sound very interesting, but come on, you know it’s not true.”

Ciar sat, frowning at the terminal, then at us, then at the terminal again.

“Come back to the dance with us,” I said. “You can probably find girls to dance with. I’ll even take a turn with you.”

He hesitated visibly, then shrugged. “Nah. There’s a few more things I want to look up.”

So Ennio and I went back, and despite the suspicious looks of our fellow dancers, managed to convey the impression we’d just been for a nice, long, peaceful walk.

That night, when I got home, mom was awake, waiting for me, while doing her best to look as if she were balancing ration coupon accounts.

After the normal pleasantries, as I was heading for bed, I turned around and asked her, “Mom, I know my grandfather’s grandfather was in the ship. I remember your dad talking about his grandad. Was his grandad the first generation aboard the ship?”

Mom looked surprised. “Why? No, couldn’t be, because I remember my grandmother talking about her grandmother being a little girl in the ship. Why?”

“Just curious,” I said. I removed the shoes which had started to pinch and continued down the narrow hallway to my room. That made seven generations, didn’t it? What had the rhyme said? When ten generations have passed….

During the night several systems broke down. I probably would have heard first thing in the morning, if I’d seen mom. Only I didn’t. She’d already left for her job in the planning center when I woke up, consumed my morning calories without too much attention to their form, which seemed to be cardboard with syrup, though the container said pancakes. Then I headed into the maintenance center, where I got my sheet of work for the day.

It was nothing like the blackout three years ago that left a whole wing of the ship with minimal air recycling. This was more a matter of clothes washers not working, freezers becoming suddenly warm and heating systems having gone south over an entire section.

Since we were requested to hurry and since we were being offered extra luxury rations on completion, I worked straight through lunch, and didn’t talk to anyone until I headed home.

Which was when Ennio intercepted me. This wasn’t so rare, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Or at least, I was disquieted. He didn’t look as he normally did.

To begin with, he wasn’t waiting at my home or within sight of my home, as he usually did. Instead, he seemed to have been patrolling all my possible paths of approach to home—which, of course, varied, since I came from different locations, depending on the last job I’d been busy with—to meet me out of possible sight of my parents and neighbors. And then, instead of falling into step beside me, as he usually did, and easing into a conversation, he came just close enough to motion me to follow him.

This was strange enough behavior that I almost had to obey. I confess if Ennio had been a different type of person I might have thought that he had ulterior motives. He took increasingly smaller and narrower corridors, each one less populated, until I half expected him to pull me into a repair tunnel. Instead, he pulled me into a maintenance closet.

Maintenance closets are spaced along corridors, both large and small. Most of them have access to the wiring for that portion of the ship. Some of them just contain tools, others have the specialized machines that clean the corridor floors. This one had a machine, so that to pull me in, Ennio had to squeeze himself behind it, then make room for me.

“Close the door,” he whispered urgently.

I did, because at that point I was going with the assumption he’d gone stark raving mad, and everyone knows the best thing with lunatics is to humor them until you can get them to a medtech.

Closing the door left us in complete darkness, surrounded by a smell of mustiness and detergent. “All right,” I said. “Now what?”

But nothing prepared me for the tone of his voice much less what he said, as he spoke out of the dark, “They arrested Ciar this morning.” He sounded as if he was about to cry.

The sound was so odd, that I was sure I had misunderstood him. “What?”

“They arrested Ciar this morning. I had to talk to you where no one could hear us. I brought a lantern here earlier. I don’t think there are any listening devices.”

“I don’t think there are listening devices anywhere in the ship,” I said. “Oh, maybe in the supply areas, to make sure things are not stolen, but I don’t think so. Why should there be?”

“Why should they arrest Ciar?”

“He went to his place of employment after hours and probably without permission.”

“That’s an administrative sanction,” he said. “It’s just an administrative sanction. It’s not a capital crime.”

“A …capital crime? They are going to kill him? How do you know this? Why do you think this?”

“It’s what the news says,” he said. “They say he was arrested for activities against the community, and that he’ll be executed.”

“You have to have misunderstood.”

“I didn’t.” And the woebegone tone of his voice made me begin to believe him. Ennio couldn’t possibly be confused about something that important.

“But …” I said

“I figured it was his search. He was using his ID on the terminal. Someone correlated all his searches. Someone doesn’t want that stuff looked at.”

“What? Nursery rhymes?”

A desperate sniffle from the darkness, that might have been an attempt to sound ironical, but sounded only sad. “I hope that’s not it, since I just downloaded all I could find.”

“Ennio!”

“I have to know. We have to find out. We have to do something to save Ciar.”

This was truly delusional. Fine, so there hadn’t been an execution in the last ten years, meaning there hadn’t been one in the time I’d been conscious of them, or an adult, able to interpret the news. But even I knew enough, from hearing my parents talk, to know that when someone was arrested for a capital crime and it was announced as such, everything was decided and there was no reprieve. Like Ennio I couldn’t imagine what Ciar had done to deserve capital punishment. Other than his silly search into the nursery rhymes and how many generations there had been in the ship, I didn’t think he’d so much as talked back to his supervisor this last year. Ennio and I would have known if he had. We talked over almost everything. So this left…. “When are they executing him?”

“Next week,” Ennio said.

“Why that long?”

Even without being able to see Ennio, I knew he had shrugged. And I realized I was a total idiot. There were many things to do before an execution, most of them procedural and technical. While the administration alone decided on death or life, they had to be really sure that nothing could be done to reclaim a trained linguist, like Ciar.

“Where are they holding him?” It seemed impossible we were talking about this, in connection with Ciar. Like Ennio, I kept thinking there had been some horrible mistake and we should, somehow, be able to clear him. I’d read stories of Earth where someone was broken out of jail and he and his rescuers vanished into the sunset, but aboard the ship there was no possible way to do that. Unless we escaped into the no-grav areas, and even there, repair people and maintenance people would find us eventually—let alone the fact that staying in no gravity too long would make us ill in very short order.

Ennio made a sound of dismissal, and then turned on something. It had a small screen that glowed feebly, but in the total darkness it looked like a spotlight. After my eyes adjusted, I realized it was just a little data port, which could function independently of the main computer. It was what most of us used to read for amusement.

“I correlated all the things the nursery rhymes say about the wise old owl,” he said. “While I was waiting for you. I think …I think it’s a hidden computer somewhere in the ship.”

“Right,” I said. “Because it makes perfect sense to spend twice the needed amount of money, to give a ship like this two completely separate computer systems.”

He shook his head. “It does, if you think about it. For one, there could be a space disaster or something, that wiped out the other one. And besides, there’s …other reasons. Like for instance, people not wanting us to know things, like how many generations there have been in the ship.”

“Why would they want to do that?” I asked. “I mean, you’re assuming someone is deliberately hiding the number of generations from us. What you said earlier is much more likely. That they don’t want feuds and such to propagate and perpetuate.”

But he shook his head. “No, I think it’s more than that. I think the administration doesn’t want us to arrive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at them. They have all this power, over the ship and over us. Why would they want us to arrive?”

“Because the whole point of this trip is to arrive?”

“Is it? It was when we launched, but is it still? Most people aboard care about what? Who they’ll marry, how many children they’re allowed to have, and how many luxury points they have that they can spend this week. And when we arrive, what is supposed to happen?”

“We …we’ll settle,” I said. “Depending on what the world is like. I mean, they know it has water and is the right temperature and …” I dredged up from my mind the memory of childhood lectures. “I think they somehow established that it either had life or could support life. Depending on which one it is, we either settle right in, or we warm up the plants and animals and give them some time to establish. And then we move down to the surface, and we have farms and …and stuff down there, just like we have here. The whole point was to expand human civilization and knowledge.” The idea of living somewhere without the upper limits of the tunnels overhead, of the floor beneath, made my heart pound. Just looking at movies of Earth made me a little dizzy, unless I thought of the sky as a tunnel top. But I knew the name for that was acrophobia and that there were hypnotic treatments for it. We’d been provided with those, since everyone knew after …ten generations? In the ship that was bound to happen.

“Right,” Ennio said. “But there won’t be any restrictions on how many children you can have, anymore. And after a while there won’t be any restrictions on how much you can eat, and where you can go.” He looked at me with the look of someone who’d just won an argument, and exhaled, forcefully. “Think, Nia. The administrators will lose all their power over us.”

“But they’ll have farms and …and stuff.”

“Right. Only they can’t be assured they’ll be the best farmers. Remember what I said about what most people care about?”

“Children and luxury points, I think you said.”

“Yeah, that and how much other people admire and respect you.”

“But we’ll all have all the children we can want, and unlimited food, and….”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. But they don’t know they’ll be the best farmers, will they?”

For a moment I didn’t understand, then I got it. When I was apprenticed as a repair person, I’d made use of a natural talent to become the best of the apprentices in very short order. But then, when we’d become craftspeople, with our licenses in order, I’d found I was only the best of the most inept group—that is the just-graduated ones. I would always remember the sting of that reduction in status. I hadn’t liked even that little step. How much less would people who were at the top of their social and professional ladder enjoy having the ladder pulled away from them and falling …into an entirely different category?

“But …to the point of hiding the files? To the point of lying to us about where we are in space? Or at least not telling us when we approach and …risking our going right past? To the point of having Ciar executed?”

Ennio bit his lip. “It seems so. I don’t like to think about it anymore than you do, but it seems so. They’re killing him just for trying to find this information.”

“And you want us to look at the nursery rhymes?” I said, baffled. If this was true, it seemed more productive to call a public meeting; to shout it from the roof tops; to sound the alarm; to try the administrative board for treason. Which is where I came up against an obstacle. The administrative board and the captain had absolute power aboard. Who would try them?

“No, not just look at nursery rhymes,” Ennio said. “You weren’t listening. I have compiled all the instructions on how to find the wise old owl.” He looked at me, his gaze so determined that you’d swear he was the one condemned to death and seeing only one means of escape.

“What good would that be? Even if it’s another computer.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we got into this by looking at the rhymes. And they all told us to find the Wise Old Owl. If you don’t come with me, I’ll look myself.”

I took the reader from his hands, looked at his notes. If he’d culled the hints properly, then the wise old owl, whatever it was, was located in one of the external maintenance tunnels, in section 25. That section was little inhabited and I couldn’t remember ever going into that tunnel. How something like a computer would stay undetected all that time, I couldn’t imagine, but neither could I tell him categorically that it hadn’t happened.

“Tonight,” I said. “After my parents go to bed. I’ll meet you in the alley where you were today.”

“You’ll help me look?” he asked, and, for the first time that day, I heard a smile in his voice.

“Of course.” The last thing I needed was an educational machine programmer lost in the maintenance tunnels. With my luck, he would trip over some wiring and destroy one of the air pumps or the light banks.

That was the longest dinner of my life. Nighttime is artificial on the ship. It always falls at precisely 20:00, when they close the system of mirrors that brings sunlight into the ship. My mom had said that her parents said sunlight used to be a lot stronger, when we were closer to Sol. Now it had to be supplemented with specialized lamps. I knew because I had to fix them, rearrange them and, occasionally, install them.

Plants and animals—and humans—need a certain cycle of daylight and darkness and since we didn’t have it naturally, it had to be simulated.

My family ate an hour before nightfall, but that night we were—of course—delayed. And then mom wished to talk about the shocking news of Ciar’s arrest. I don’t know what answers I made, other than indicating how surprised I was, myself, with my father joining our dismay.

I know it was well past their normal bed time of 22:00 when they retired. I waited another hour to make sure they were asleep, because the last thing I needed—the absolute last thing—was for them to intercept me at the door and ask where I was going or why.

This felt like insanity, but it had that curious glimmer of a suspicion that there might be something in it. Just a sliver of hope, the barest of chances that there was something more in this than Ennio’s gallant and silly attempt to save his friend and rival.

By the time I made it to the meeting place, I halfway expected Ennio to be gone to his bed in the bachelors’ quarters, but he was waiting, clutching his reader.

“Right,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Come.”

“This way.”

Even on the most external of tunnels there were several layers of material between ourselves and space so there was no dangerous radiation. But we were on the outermost area accessible to humans. Beyond that was an area where only specialized crews in spacesuits were allowed to make repairs.

The space was a tunnel so narrow we had to shuffle side by side along it. To compensate for the narrowness, it was very high, seeming to climb all the way up the side of the ship, to …the top of the ship?

Of course, I had no business being here after hours, looking around for a chimera born of Ciar’s overexcited imagination, of Ennio’s gallant impulses and desire to save our errant friend.

At least, I thought, I was less likely to be caught than Ciar. I’d never been here, I saw nothing here to maintain, and so I doubted that anyone could come to do anything in here and bump into us. And of course, I wasn’t leaving clear codes behind, as Ciar had.

The problem was that there was nothing here to maintain. Just walls—not very smooth, I’ll grant you. They rarely are in the less frequently used maintenance tunnels. Occasionally there might be a protruding pipe. But that was about it.

We seemed as likely to find a computer here as to find …well, a wise old owl.

“Here,” Ennio said. “We’re supposed to stand here.” He turned into a passage so narrow we had to squeeze between the walls. The floor was solid but grimy underfoot, and the ceiling was lost somewhere in the darkness above.

“Now what?” I asked. “The wizard comes and rescues us?”

“What?” he said. Then he looked at his reader, bringing it up almost to touch his visor. “No. Look. It says we should climb up the wall, like the itsy bitsy spider.”

I looked dubiously at the wall. Okay, it wasn’t smooth. But it wasn’t really rougher than any other section of wall. Those protrusions might perhaps be enough for us to hold feet and hands as we climbed. But were they designed that way? “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

“Yeah,” he said. Mentally he retraced our steps, as his lips moved—his face visible, pale and concentrated through the visor. “Yeah, I’m sure. I counted the steps right.”

“Okay.” I could see there was no way to get Ennio to budge from here until we climbed the wall. It was climbing down, I thought, that was going to be very hard indeed.

But climbing up was easier than I expected. The protuberances on the wall really seemed to have been placed on purpose to make our life easier.

And when we got up so far that the floor seemed imprecise and indistinguishable, too far from the lights cast by our suit, there were …rungs, like a ladder, embedded on the wall.

Finding them made the task even simpler. It also seemed to validate the idea we were on the right trail. But were we? Or was this some forgotten maintenance path?

“There’s a door,” Ennio said. He’d been alongside me, on another set of embedded rungs—there seemed to be five at least—and now he reached over and knocked on something that sounded hollow. “I think that’s it.”

Maybe. Or maybe some sort of fancy maintenance closet. I figured I was the trained maintenance worker, and should go in first. Mostly because if Ennio came across some machinery he was likely to fall on it and break it. Both the men were much better than I with words and meanings, but neither of them would know a shoe polisher from an oxygen recycler.

I clambered across and felt for some sort of handle. There was one, of course, which I turned. I shoved the door inward.

Light came on, inside.

“See?” Ennio said.

I felt Ennio close the door.

A voice, polite and cool, sounding like a well-brought up young woman, said, “What are you seeking?”

There were many answers to that, including asking who the woman was. But before I could speak, I heard Ennio say, “The Wise Old Owl.”

There was a click and I thought he’d done it now, and the medtechs would come get us for a serious mind adjustment, but instead a door opened in what looked like a completely smooth wall. Ennio stepped through it, so I had to go after. I was only slightly startled when it closed. And, somehow, the chamber began to move. Like a mobile capsule.

After awhile, it stopped. And opened.

We looked into yet another completely blank room. Ennio led the way in, and the door closed automatically behind us.

“What do you wish to ask theWise Old Owl?”

The voice came from nowhere. Ennio and I spoke at the same time, “How many generations we’ve been in the ship,” he said.

“How far are we from our destination?” I asked.

Another click, and we looked into a large, carpeted room, with chairs, and the appearance of one of the upper-rank staterooms. It felt like one, too. It was smooth and polished.

Almost the minute we came in and the door closed behind us, an entire wall came to life. In it an owl with enormous eyes sat on the branch of a tree, against a blue sky. “I am the wise old owl,” the pleasant young woman’s voice said.

Of course it wasn’t an owl, or a young woman, but a computer designed for extrapolative reasoning, which explained how it had managed to understand our disparate answers and still make sure we were on the right quest. I wondered if many other people—or any other people— throughout the history of the ship had been in that first room and been sent away because they lacked the exact answer.

I won’t relate our interaction with the computer, or at least not in detail. It had been programmed to ask us a series of questions to find what, if any, knowledge had been lost in the time since it had been buried in what appeared to be dead—or perhaps—solid space around the ship. Hidden away.

It had also been designed to be programmed and worked with in what seemed to be plain everyday language. It answered questions by inductive logic when we asked them. Sometimes it stopped and asked us to rephrase, but it seemed to understand everything. Speaking to it was almost like speaking to a foreign-language speaker, someone who didn’t fully understand what we said, but understood most of it and could carry on a conversation. Turned out that its story was exactly what we thought—it had been hidden so that should what it called unforeseen social difficulties come to pass, there would be one computer aboard that the administration could neither reprogram nor tamper with.

“How long have we been in the ship?” I asked, then rephrased, “How long ago did the ship leave Earth?”

“The ship was constructed in Earth orbit.”

I’d asked the wrong question. “How long since the ship left the sol system, then?” Ennio asked.

“Four hundred and twenty five years,” the voice answered.

I felt my heart clench. That had to be ten generations. Perhaps more. “How …how near are we to Alpha Centauri?” I asked.

“We should prepare to slingshot around the sun in …twenty four hours,” the computer answered.

Needless to say Ennio and I panicked. Twenty four hours. We couldn’t possibly learn to pilot the ship in that time.

This was, of course, silly. Whoever had designed the ship couldn’t expect us to. Turned out it didn’t even expect us to tell it to detach the outer portion of the sail, so the outer sail could focus the lasers—similar to the lasers that had given us additional speed on leaving sol orbit—onto the inner sail and slow the ship. The ship was wired hard to this hidden computer in a way that could not be severed. This computer would be executing the maneuver, no matter how much the other computer had been corrupted or its programing overpowered.

No, it turned out what we were needed for was something much more vital. We had to prepare everyone aboard ship for the hours of weightlessness as the ship stopped spinning while slowing and maneuvering into orbit at the new world. In the long time aboard, the practice of securing everything that could float had long stopped. Weightlessness could destroy the ponds in which we grew fish, it could forever break terminals capable of reading our records. Not to mention what it would do to toilets.

The computer told us all that would happen, but more importantly, it said, the people aboard would need to find out about the secret lifeboat bays—the ones that couldn’t be opened, so the landers couldn’t be cannibalized for parts, as it appeared the other well-known landers had been. In the situation we were in, the wise old owl said, everyone aboard would have to be told at the same time, so that a few people couldn’t find the boats and destroy them before anyone could take them and land.

Someone needed to tell the panicking population what was happening. Someone needed to have people expecting it and prepared. Oh, most people probably wouldn’t want to land. Not right away. Perhaps not ever. Once the ship was in orbit around our new home, and the ship’s sails retracted, life could go on as it had aboard the ship for eleven generations. Humans are creatures of habit and most people cared for nothing but their luxury rations. But after coming all this way, people should know there was another option available. An option to finish our mission. And people who wanted to leave should not be constrained to stay. And—most of all—in the confusion of the moments of weightlessness, it was necessary to keep fights from breaking out and disorder from descending on the ship. In just a few hours of riot, damage could be done that would lessen forever the chances of the colonists.

This seemed almost impossible. Neither Ennio nor I had any particular power in the ship. And who would listen to us? Look what had happened to Ciar, just for trying to see forbidden files.

And then I had an idea. It required me to work madly the rest of the night, but I could—and did—wire the Wise Old Owl so that it could speak to the whole ship at once. Many people might not believe it. And many people would ignore it, or suspect a prank. But at least there would be some warning. And when the people looked out at the stars around us, they’d see confirmation.

Then—as soon as we could—we asked the Wise Old Owl what to do about Ciar. It could not—so much the worse—magically open the door to his cell. It was directly wired to the ship’s navigation and landing systems, but not to the rest of the ship. All it could do was access the other computer’s memory and tell us where Ciar was kept.

That was enough, I assured Ennio. Even with the cell locked, I probably could open it. And when gravity stopped most people—even if alerted—would be disoriented long enough to lose track of keeping watch on a prisoner.

They didn’t know how to cope with null g, while I did. Null-g maintenance jobs are rare but they do happen aboard ship, and I’d been trained to handle that kind of environment.

The problem was that we were not on Earth. There was nowhere to run.

This was when the computer pitched in with the information that the landers were also scouts. As soon as we’d escaped the pull of the star around which we’d slingshot to slow our velocity, the larger of the lifeboats could take us there, and it would have provisions for the month we would need to land and for one more month afterwards.

We could lock ourselves in the boat and hide if the computer didn’t reveal our location until we’d departed.

I looked at Ennio, “If there’s no life on the planet, or no life compatible with ours. If we can’t eat the plants and animals of the world, we’re going to starve long before they come down with seeds and animals.”

A muscle worked on the side of Ennio’s face. “I know. But if we don’t do it, Ciar will die.”

What else is there to say? It went as planned. Well, almost as planned. Yes, the guards that had been assigned to Ciar’s cell were floating above us, completely unable to guard anything. Yes, opening his cell—with a cutting tool around the lock—was easy.

The hard part was keeping Ciar and Ennio moving properly in null-g till we could reach the capsule that took us to the chamber of the Wise Old Owl and, this time, beyond it, to the lifeboats.

The lifeboat—and why was it called that? It’s not like exiting to space would have saved anyone—was more comfortable than any of our lodgings, and had enough food for four people for two months.

And the planet turned out to have food of a sort. The bodies of water contained algae. A strange fish that looked like a jelly fish had a high speed collision with a salmon. Apparently they weren’t even really fish at all, but something between a plant and an animal, which has kept our scientists baffled so far, and will probably keep them so for many years to come.

But they were edible enough to keep us alive. Us and those who came after us.

We’ve used Earth food plants to colonize the land and start our farms.

It’s been thirty years since we landed and I’ve almost forgotten the stomach-churning fear of falling upward. I can look up at the deep blue night sky and feel nothing but wonder at how far we’ve come.

Thirty years later, I realize how lucky we were. We found the computer just in time to stop confusion and rioting and to know we’d arrived. If we’d not found the computer, the administration could have said the loss of gravity was a temporary malfunction. Only astrogators would have known we were orbiting a star, and, depending on how the computer records had been changed, they might have thought it was a different star. They could have been forbidden from asking further questions. We could have been prisoners in the ship for generations.

Perhaps forever.

Oh, some people still remain in the ship, orbiting the world. But living in the world is so much more rewarding, so much more free, that most everyone has come down, little by little. The young first, and those with some spirit of adventure. Which of course, had been squelched during the generations of living in a closed system, but apparently not entirely bred out.

My children would never know how to live in that close and regimented society. They’ve fanned out over the world, planted the land, grown animals, lived by their labor and answered to no man.

I did marry. Which of them? Can’t you guess?

Last year I had my first grandchild and I sing it to sleep with the songs that will tell them where we came from—so that if everything else is lost they’ll still know we came here from another world and that there will be other humans out there when their world is developed enough to send ships to other stars. I don’t doubt they will. All animals have a biological imperative to expand or die. And humans have been expanding their territory since they came down from the trees in a semi-tropical area of a little world now very far from us. We’ll continue expanding, beyond Alpha Centauri, beyond the Milky Way, on and on forever, until our species is so widespread no single calamity can render us extinct; till the fruits and knowledge of a thousand worlds make every single human freer and happier and wealthier than we can even dream.

So I’ll sing my grandchildren to sleep as I sang my children to sleep: to stories of our once and future voyages.

The big ship sails in the vacuum, oh.