The Secret Sharer

4.

On the fifth virtual day of the voyage I suddenly felt a tic, a nibble, a subtle indication that something had gone wrong. It was a very trifling thing, barely perceptible, like the scatter of eroded pebbles that tells you that the palaces and towers of a great ruined city lie buried beneath the mound on which you climb. Unless you are looking for such signals you will not see them. But I was primed for discovery that day. I was eager for it. A strange kind of joy came over me when I picked up that fleeting signal of wrongness.

I keyed the intelligence on duty and said, “What was that tremor on Passenger Deck?”

The intelligence arrived instantly in my mind, a sharp gray-green presence with a halo of tingling music.

“I am aware of no tremor, sir.”

“There was a distinct tremor. There was a data-spurt just now.”

“Indeed, sir? A data-spurt, sir?” The intelligence sounded aghast, but in a condescending way. It was humoring me. “What action shall I take, sir?”

I was being invited to retreat.

The intelligence on duty was a 49 Henry Henry. The Henry series affects a sort of slippery innocence that I find disingenuous. Still, they are very capable intelligences. I wondered if I had misread the signal. Perhaps I was too eager for an event, any event, that would confirm my relationship with the ship.

There is never a sense of motion or activity aboard a starship: we float in silence on a tide of darkness, cloaked in our own dazzling light. Nothing moves, nothing seems to live in all the universe. Since we had left Kansas Four I had felt that great silence judging me. Was I really captain of this vessel? Good: then let me feel the weight of duty upon my shoulders.

We were past Ultima Thule by this time, and there could be no turning back. Borne on our cloak of light, we would roar through heaven for week after virtual week until we came to worldward at the first of our destinations, which was Cul-de-Sac in the Vainglory Archipelago, out by the Spook Clusters. Here in free space I must begin to master the ship, or it would master me.

“Sir?” the intelligence said.

“Run a data uptake,” I ordered. “All Passenger Deck input for the past half hour. There was movement. There was a spurt.”

I knew I might be wrong. Still, to err on the side of caution may be naive, but it isn’t a sin. And I knew that at this stage in the voyage nothing I could say or do would make me seem other than naive to the crew of the Sword of Orion. What did I have to lose by ordering a recheck, then? I was hungry for surprises. Any irregularity that 49 Henry Henry turned up would be to my advantage; the absence of one would make nothing worse for me.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” 49 Henry Henry reported after a moment, “but there was no tremor, sir.”

“Maybe I overstated it, then. Calling it a tremor. Maybe it was just an anomaly. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?” I wondered if I was humiliating myself, negotiating like this with an intelligence. “There was something. I’m sure of that. An unmistakable irregular burst in the data-flow. An anomaly, yes. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes what?”

“The record does show an irregularity, sir. Your observation was quite acute, sir.”

“Go on.”

“No cause for alarm, sir. A minor metabolic movement, nothing more. Like turning over in your sleep.” You bastard, what do you know about sleep? “Extremely unusual, sir, that you should be able to observe anything so small. I commend you, sir. The passengers are all well, sir.”

“Very good,” I said. “Enter this exchange in the log, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Already entered, sir,” the intelligence said. “Permission to decouple, sir?”

“Yes, you can decouple,” I told it.

The shimmer of music that signaled its presence grew tinny and was gone. I could imagine it smirking as it went about its ghostly flitting rounds deep in the neural conduits of the ship. Scornful software, glowing with contempt for its putative master. The poor captain, it was thinking. The poor hopeless silly boy of a captain. A passenger sneezes and he’s ready to seal all bulkheads.

Well, let it smirk, I thought. I have acted appropriately and the record will show it.

I knew that all this was part of my testing.

You may think that to be captain of such a ship as the Sword of Orion in your first voyage to heaven is an awesome responsibility and an inconceivable burden. So it is, but not for the reason you think.

In truth the captain’s duties are the least significant of anyone’s aboard the ship. The others have well-defined tasks that are essential to the smooth running of the voyage, although the ship could, if the need arose, generate virtual replacements for any and every crew member and function adequately on its own. The captain’s task, though, is fundamentally abstract. His role is to witness the voyage, to embody it in his own consciousness, to give it coherence, continuity, by reducing it to a pattern of decisions and responses. In that sense the captain is simply so much software: he is the coding through which the voyage is expressed as a series of linear functions. If he fails to perform that duty adequately, others will quietly see to it that the voyage proceeds as it should. What is destroyed, in the course of a voyage that is inadequately captained, is the captain himself, not the voyage. My pre-flight training made that absolutely clear. The voyage can survive the most feeble of captains. As I have said, four starships have been lost since the Service began, and no one knows why. But there is no reason to think that any of those catastrophes were caused by failings of the captain. How could they have been? The captain is only the vehicle through which others act. It is not the captain who makes the voyage, but the voyage which makes the captain.