3.10
31 October
I.R.V. Intercession
Extra-Kuiper Space
3,336 A.U. from Earth
It was not Ptolemy who woke Michael. Unfortunately, it was Sandy.
“You need to come,” she said, shaking his arm.
“What’s wrong?” he said, roused by the urgency of her tone.
“Unruly passenger,” she said. “In the Bubble.”
Uh-oh. If it was bad enough that she was waking people up to help deal with it, then it must be bad indeed.
“Coming,” he said, undoing his sleeping straps. “Who is it?”
“I think his name is Bill.”
Michael tried to think who that might be. Age? Origin? Occupation? He came up blank.
Launching himself down the ladder, he sailed through the service deck, caught a rung four meters into the cargo deck, and twisted through a ninety-degree turn. Another good kick and he was sailing through the hatchway and out into the Encounter Bubble, where he grabbed a cable to stop himself.
He saw the problem at once: a bald, bearded Caucasian male, approximately eighty kilograms of mostly muscle, was using the cross-cables like a set of uneven parallel bars: he swung around one of them once, twice, three times, and then flung himself toward another, on which he arrested himself so forcefully that the whole Bubble thumped with the impact. His face was purple with rage.
“I said stop!” Igbal was shouting. “I’m not going to tell you again!”
Harv and Dong were there as well, looking ready to intervene physically, but not really seeing an opening. Thenbecca wisely hung back, a white towel in her hand.
Sighing, Michael braced himself and did what had to be done. At the moment, he didn’t care one whit who this gentleman was, or what exactly his problem might be, and he didn’t have the time or patience to organize a coordinated group assault. So he pushed off a cable and threw himself, all fists and knees and elbows, directly into the man’s path.
His skull immediately collided with something bony and pointed—possibly an elbow—but other parts of him connected as well. “Bill” grunted in angry pain, and Michael (sighing inwardly again) wrapped his arms and (with more difficulty, given the robe) his legs around Bill’s body as forcefully as he could. It wasn’t like fighting on Earth; momentum was absolute and inarguable. Bill had no way to keep Michael from grabbing him.
Bill of course began flailing and punching, but Michael had, mostly by luck, timed his jump and his grapple such that he was now on Bill’s back. His head rang; his chest ached. Nerve bundles throughout his body began reporting in with bad news. But Bill was no longer in control of his own momentum; together they spun, bounced off a cable, and spun the other way.
And then Dong was there, grabbing Bill’s leg with one hand and a cable with the other, and Harv—God bless him—was doing the same with one of Bill’s arms. Which earned him an immediate punch from the other arm, but then Igbal grabbed that one, too, and old Bill was regally effed.
As melees went, this was rather a silly affair; Michael had kickboxed a little in college, very badly, and it didn’t look like Harv had ever been in a fight at all. Dong was tougher, but small. Igbal was perhaps a little bit stronger than either of them, which wasn’t saying much. But they knew zero gravity, and Bill did not, and so between the four of them they got him decisively restrained.
“I told her to give them back,” Bill was saying. “Get off me. Get off me!”
“What’s his problem?” Igbal asked no one in particular.
“Doesn’t matter,” Michael said. And then, because he had made such a point of preparing the crew for any contingency, he procured, from a hidden pocket in his robe, a contingency item of his own, that he’d gotten from Rachael: a hypodermic syringe.
He needed his hands at the moment, so he wrapped both of his legs around Bill’s left—his only free appendage—and uncapped the needle with his teeth.
“Hold him,” he said, unnecessarily, then braced one hand against Bill’s back and jammed the needle in with the other.
“What are you doing?” Bill demanded as Michael pushed down the plunger. “Ow! Hey! What are you doing?”
“To help you relax,” Michael said, as soothingly as he could manage with the cap still in his teeth. “Stop fighting. Just relax.”
“She took my slippers,” Bill said.
“Who did?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know her.”
“Well, that’s fine,” Michael told him, taking the cap out and gently placing it back over the needle. “We’ll get it all sorted out. Right now I just need you to calm down and gather your thoughts.”
He would try to get it sorted out, if only to make sure there wasn’t a second troublemaker onboard.
“You fuckers had better let go,” Bill said, with a noticeable slur.
The tension went out of his muscles then, and within about fifteen seconds he was off to la-la land.
“Jesus,” Harv said.
Michael decided to let that name-in-vain go unremarked. Everyone relaxed, and Bill drifted free.
“Take him back to the hibernation bay,” Michael said. “I don’t care what set him off; this one is going right back in the freezer. He’ll wake up on Earth.”
Bill had clearly selected the emptiest portion of the Encounter Bubble for his gymnastics show, but during the scuffle Michael had become aware of red sleeping sacks and blue-clad passengers on the periphery, six meters to either side. The fight had had an audience, and a rather sizable one at that.
Michael watched as Igbal and Harv and Dong directed Bill’s limp body back inside the hull of the ship. Thenbecca remained behind, holding her towel. Doing her best, Michael thought, to be a calming presence.
In a loud and pointed voice, he addressed the crowd: “Did none of you think to intervene?”
Thinking it over for a moment, he said, “Perhaps the chain of command is unclear. You are guests here, after all, with instructions to stay out of the way. That’s my fault.”
From the twenty or so visible people, he picked out the beefiest person: another Caucasian male with fiery copper hair pulled back in a net. He pointed, and said, “You, sir. What’s your name?”
“Lars Onsanger,” the man said at once. Michael had not yet met him; he was one of the ones awakened during the night. Probably still shaking off the chill, and gathering up his wits like scattered sticks. There would be others who knew more and understood more and were better accustomed to weightlessness. But Lars was the biggest person here—probably about as big as the hibernation pods could accommodate—and right now that would do.
Memorizing his features, Michael said, “Lars, I’m appointing you Chief Passenger. You’re in charge of all passenger disputes, and the enforcement of safety and basic decency. If you encounter a problem that requires assistance from the crew, you are to come to me with it. Is that acceptable?”
Lars looked confused. “Um, who are you, again? You’re apparently some kind of monk?”
“I am indeed,” Michael said. “The ship’s concierge can fill you in on my biography, but for the moment I only need to know whether you understand your assignment, and feel yourself capable of performing it. Yes? No?”
“That’s fine,” Lars said, still looking confused.
“Good,” Michael said. Then, softening: “Appoint lieutenants and sergeants as you see fit. Such organization, even if haphazard, provides a structure for the mind and a balm for the soul. None of us have ever done this before, and so there are no traditions to fall back on. We’re absurdly far from home; we have, literally, only each other.”
No one said anything.
Someone coughed.
“I have businesses elsewhere,” he said then, because he really needed to pee, “but sometime later today, I will assist with a group meditation, for anyone who feels the need. It’s Halloween, by the way, if anyone cares.”
He then gestured at the empty space around him. “The population void in this part of the Bubble is going to be filled today. This time tomorrow, we’ll have woken everyone up, and our real work can begin. Try to think about that.”
And then, with a dozen questions in the air, he fled to empty his bladder.
Michael wolfed down a quick MRE breakfast and got back to work. Hobie was out of commission now, rolled up tight in his bunk, and Dr. Rachael was again in charge of the awakenings. By now the procedure was quite routine, which (as Michael knew from long experience) actually increased the chances of error. So he watched her closely, and twice reminded her of a step she was skipping. But mostly it all went very smoothly, and soon enough the next batch of passengers was ready for the Bubble.
Fortunately, there was now a formal structure into which they could be introduced, so he simply brought them out to the Bubble and let the passengers themselves handle all the rest.
This was partly a source of worry, because it was nearly certain they would farble up some aspect or another. But mostly it was a relief.
For a while, he shuttled back and forth between the Encounter Bubble and the hibernation bay, until he found the time to make good on his group meditation promise.
Twenty-six passengers accepted the invitation, and so they briefly took over a ninety-degree wedge of the Bubble.
“Just float,” he advised them. “It’s okay if you gently bump into things, or each other. It’s okay if your attention wanders. The truth is, everyone is bad at meditation. Does anyone here have experience with it?”
Fifteen hands went up.
“Well, then this will be more of a practice than a learning experience. I find zero gravity helps quite a bit. Just let your bodies relax into a loose fetal position. Good, yes, and close your eyes. We’re going to breathe, in and out.”
It was actually rather loud in here; the thirty passengers who were not meditating were mostly awake and talking, and the sound carried around in both directions, effectively doubling the chatter, so the Bubble sounded more like a crowded cafeteria than a spaceship in the deep void. But the weightlessness was indeed relaxing, and anyway these people needed something on which to focus their attention. So he led them through some breathing and a body scan, and promised another round at bedtime.
Meditation was a kind of prayer, and he would have actually prayed with anyone who asked, albeit discreetly, so as not to discomfit the irreligious. But no one did ask—the previous query was not repeated—and that was fine. The role of the Church in outer space was not so much to convert nonbelievers as to be a visible part of the useful infrastructure, and let the rest take care of itself.
He did field two requests to send messages back home, which he regretfully declined.
“We have bandwidth enough for only the most critical communications, alas, and we’ve security concerns on top of that. However, the good news is that from your own subjective points of view, you’ll be back home in just a few days’ time. Another year for your sweetheart, yes, I know. But if she loves you as much as your eyes convey, then her patience will not exhaust over so brief a span.”
Also, via Lars Onsanger, a consensus request from the passengers, that the temperature in the Bubble be raised by one degree.
“That I can do,” Michael said, for such an expenditure of energy was absurdly trivial against the forces required to propel a starship. A hundred nanograms of antimatter, perhaps, among all the five tons of it yet to be consumed?
And then it was time to start dealing, again, with groggy, cranky, wakers-up. The same questions, over and over, met by the same answers. But a monk like Michael was nothing if not patient, and it pleased him to be useful.
Michael was keenly aware that the crew of Intercession was now greatly outnumbered by passengers who weren’t particularly happy. It reminded him of the worst days of air travel, when airlines would pack as many people onto a plane as would physically fit, hand them a can of sugar water, refuse to answer the call light, and exhort those who dared flex their clotting limbs or queue up outside the washroom.
And Michael, like a flight attendant of old, was first in line to receive their ire, despite having nothing to do with the corporate planning that gave rise to it.
But God and the Pope and Igbal Renz had placed him in this position, with his own enthusiastic consent, and so he did his best to radiate a calm enthusiasm into the crowd. And maybe that worked, or maybe it was Thenbecca’s relentless cheerfulness, or Harv’s professorial curiosity, or the enigmatic presence of Igbal, moving through the maze of webbing and sleep sacks like a politician. Or maybe everyone just started to really think about why they were here.
In any event, regardless of the trigger, something shifted in the crowd at a certain point during the late evening. Michael felt it almost as a breath of fresh, unfiltered air. Gone, suddenly, were the moping, the griping, the jostling for space. A kind of electricity was building, even among the newly awakened. Or maybe the Beings themselves had something to do with it, for the possibility of failure suddenly seemed quite remote. The humans were out here by invitation, and every present soul would participate in this communion, where two branches of the universal family could at last come together.
“Speech!” someone in the crowd called out to Igbal.
“Speech!” seconded another voice.
And then the whole crowd—even the people on the far side of the Bubble, obscured by the hull of the starship—was chanting it.
Laughing, Igbal fished a headset out of one of his pockets, placed it over his head, aligned the mic beside the corner of his mouth, pressed a couple of buttons on the earpiece, and said, “Testing.”
The word issued forth from every loudspeaker on the ship, and rang throughout the Encounter Bubble. The crowd cheered.
“We don’t even have everyone awake yet!” Igbal protested.
“Speech!” someone in the crowd insisted.
“Michael,” Igbal said, “how many people do we have still in the hibernation pods?”
“Twelve!” Michael called back, for he was separated from Igbal by fifteen meters of jabbering humanity. “Eighty passengers awake.”
“Well, then,” Igbal said, “we should have a speech in eight hours.”
“Actually, five and a half.” Michael called back. The next batch of Popsicles was already thawed to room temperature and would soon be starting to regain their faculties.
“Well,” Igbal said, “we have to sleep sometime. We’ll have a speech in the morning, after breakfast.”
A few voices booed, and soon much of the crowd was joining them.
“Whoa,” Igbal said. “You want to pitch twelve people under the train? Have a speech without them?”
“Yes!” someone said.
“Speech!” someone else said.
And then the crowd was chanting it again.
“All right,” Igbal said. “Okay. Seems like the rabble is already roused. Look, we’re out here for a party.”
An even louder cheer went up.
“Not . . . no, keep your pants on—there’s no booze or cannabis here. It’s a party at the neighbors’ house, whom we’ve never met. I want each of you—I want all of you—to . . . Well, actually, we are taking drugs for this, right?”
Another cheer.
“Look, this is going to be very different from any experience any of us has ever had. We need to keep one eye on what’s happening around us, and one eye on the future. Because the future . . . posterity is going to care very much what we have to say about this. We need to be good guests, good emissaries, good scientists, good interrogators, good witnesses . . . I’m not kidding about this; we have one shot, and then it’s back to the freezers and back home to Earth.”
The crowd had gone silent, and they stayed that way for several seconds, until Igbal continued, “We don’t know very much about the Beings. Well, Michael thinks we do, but Michael also thinks we know how the universe was created, and why. I’ll let him give the speech tomorrow, but please, take everything he says with a teaspoon of salt. Be skeptical of me, too. Be skeptical about everything, no matter who says it, and especially be skeptical of your own preconceptions. Try to come into this with your minds as wide open as you can.
“At the same time, please, try . . . uh, not to lose track of yourself. The drug cocktail we’re taking is serious shit. It’s going to open your mind for you, but it’s also going to mess with your perceptions of time and space. It’s going to let you access a realm outside of our limited, four-dimensional perceptions. That outer realm is objectively real, and the wiring of our brains includes features to access it. The spirit world, whatever you want to call it. It’s where the Beings exist, or at least it’s a layer of the universe where they’re able to meet us halfway, or shout down the chimney at us. But it’s confusing! You’re going to be confused! Put a scuba helmet on an ant and drop her on a coral reef, and she’s not half as confused as you’re going to be. So please, get over it now. When the time comes, if you spend all your mental energy focusing on the reef and the currents and the bubbles, then you’re wasting your place in history, not to mention the twenty billion dollars per body that it cost to haul us all out here.
“I wish . . . God, in retrospect, I wish you’d all had a training program in dealing with psychedelics. Sounds obvious now, right? But here we are. You guys are my guys. You gals are my gals, hand-picked, by me. Every one of you is amazing at something, and now I’m asking you, please, be amazing at this, too. Amaze me. Amaze history.
“There will be a medical doctor standing by. Her name is Rachael Lee. She’s the one who woke most of you up, and I think she put some of you into hibernation in the first place. She will be taking a special formulation of the drug—basically just pure DMT—that wears off after about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. So she’ll be available quickly to treat any genuine medical problems. Freakouts do not count, okay? Please, don’t embarrass me, or yourself, by freaking out. The drugs in our cocktail are well tolerated, so genuine medical problems are pretty unlikely. Maybe a panic attack here or there, but seriously, try to keep your shit together.
“Now, I also want to welcome you here. Probably should have started with that. All of you are risk-takers and early adopters, and I want to thank you for saying yes to this. All of you are paying a high personal cost—some higher than others—and I certainly hope history will remember that as well. Meanwhile, pat yourselves on the back. Hell, pat each other.
“On a different subject, please remember that the wall of the Encounter Bubble is about as thick as five playing cards, and on the other side of it is hard vacuum. We already sent one person back into hibernation for screwing around. Don’t make that happen to you as well.
“You may have a hard time sleeping tonight; I know I will. But try not to keep each other awake. Try not to bother the crew. If you can’t sleep, meditate. If you can’t meditate, float quietly in your bag. Be a hero, not a jerk.”
He trailed off, then, and was silent for several seconds. Finally, he said, “Well, maybe that’s all.”
And then he turned and left without another word.
The crowd cheered him out.