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3.5

28 April

I.R.V. Intercession

Extra-Kuiper Space

833 A.U. from Earth


Turnaround Day finally came, with remarkably little fanfare. Hobie and Sandy were both up in the cockpit, and everyone else was secured in their sleeping berths, though with the doors open. Michael could stare across the room at Thenbecca and Rachael, and through the ladder at Harv. He didn’t know if he should feel nervous or excited or what, so he simply sat and listened to the voice traffic. “I’m starting the engine shutdown sequence,” Sandy said over the public channel. “Shockwave generators half power. Zero power. Matter flux at fifty percent. Zero percent. Engines stopped.”

The ship’s acceleration, never more than a gentle kiss, stuttered and faded, and they were all weightless and coasting again. Coasting at tremendous velocity—0.05c!

Then Hobie said, “Let’s see if the attitude control on this tub even works, eh? Captain’s choice: you want me to pitch or yaw?”

“You’re asking me?” Igbal said, sounding annoyed. His voice came from the loudspeaker in Michael’s cabin, but he could also hear it through the air and through the wall. Igbal was strapped into the berth next door.

“Yaw it is, then.”

At which point, Michael thought he could hear, or perhaps feel, the buzzing of a steering thruster: once, twice, then a pause. And then a different thruster? Once, twice?

“We’re turning,” Hobie said, and on the display screens above the sleeping berths, fake windows showed the stars wheeling slowly by outside. “Ten degrees. Thirty degrees, ninety degrees.”

Then another jet fired, and Hobie’s count—already slow—slowed further. “One-twenty. One-sixty. One-seventy-five.”

Another jet.

“One-eighty.”

Jet.

To Michael, the sequence seemed to go both surprisingly slowly and surprisingly fast.

“Okay,” Hobie said, “That’s got it. Sandy?”

“Commencing start sequence.”

She didn’t call out the details this time, but the ship’s acceleration gradually resumed. Except that now it was deceleration.

“Congratulations, people,” Igbal said. “We’re halfway there.”

Everyone groaned at that, which was about what you’d expect. But what Michael didn’t expect was that right now at this ostensibly momentous moment, Harv would try to restart the spirited group debate about the Beings that had ended only a few minutes before the Turnaround maneuver.

He said, “I don’t see how they could process sound, in anything like the sense you mean it.”

To which Hobie replied, “They sang to me, man. They did.”

And Sandy chimed in, “Not sounds. Vibrations, independent of medium, interpreted by your brain.”

And then they were all off to the races again.

People didn’t even need to be in the same room anymore; they chatted over headsets and intercoms, stopping sometimes for an hour or two and then picking up right where they left off. There was only so much to say on the subject, and so past a certain point Michael felt there was something vaguely masturbatory about it, an endless fidgeting contortion of a knot that could not be untied. Disconnected from the world right in front of their faces.

It reminded him of the way theology students simply could not shut up about Jesus, even on a walk through the mountains or beside a crackling fire. And never asking the centrally binding question: what if it’s all a fever dream? That thought must surely have crossed the minds of everyone here. Was it healthy, to leave it always unvoiced? This made him worry not only that he’d created a monster—that he’d simply persuaded them to scatter their energies in this way—but also, paradoxically, that they were racing too far ahead of the rest of the class. When the ninety-two sleepers awoke, they’d know nothing of these conversations. They would be thrust, unprepared, into humanity’s first alien encounter, without the comfort of having talked it through with other would-be experts. Would he, Michael, have any chance to do anything about that? There would only be one first time, and he wanted it to count.


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