Survey Ship (12 page)

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I'm supposed to have a perfect body, complete with perfect inner-ear labyrinths. If my own body can go back on me like this, can I trust the computer?

Teague had gone to check on the DeMag and Life-Support units, and Fontana, as his second, had gone with him. Ravi, whose shift it was, had gone up to the Bridge to make the routine check of course, chronometer time, and navigation instrument readings. Peake and Moira, having nothing else to do, had remained in the gym, Peake completing his running laps, and Moira working on gymnastic equipment.

Peake completed the hundredth lap — which gave him a day count of a two-mile run — and slid down, folding his long legs, to watch Moira whirling herself over the parallel bars. He thought; if the gravity failed when she's doing that, she'd break her neck! and felt himself shudder.

She saw him watching her and jumped down.

“You're practically good enough for the Olympics,” he said, smiling.

She said, with her throaty chuckle, “Quite a lot of
us are. We train very hard, after all, and there are a lot of high-mesomorph types in the Academy — short, compact, muscular. It's one of the physical arrangements that goes with high intelligence. The other kind is like you — long, scrawny, ectomorph. There's even been some talk of entering a few of us. Only the question is, what country's team would we join? Australia? The world would complain, if Australia had a gene-pool like ours to dip into. Our own? Nobody's supposed to know where we come from, and this would bring us back into national politics again. So — no Olympic stars from the Academy.”

“What country would you have competed in, if you had?” Peake asked, “Would you have liked to?”

She shrugged. “I sometimes think it would have been nice. I do like the limelight. Only if I'd had that kind of ambition, I'd hardly have made it in the Academy, would I?” she said, answering the last question first. “I don't think I ever knew your real name, did I, Peake?”

“David Akami,” he said, “and I'm from South Africa. And you —”

“Ellen Finlayson,” she said, “and I was born in Scotland, or so they tell me — I don't remember, so it's hearsay evidence, after all.” She chuckled again. “Do you mind if I turn the DeMags off again? I had some training in free-fall when Teague and I installed the drives, and I've always wanted to try free-fall acrobatics — I watched the telecast from the Lunar Dome the last three Earth Days.”

“Fine with me,” Peake replied, and Moira turned off the stud, feeling the gravity slowly, slowly go off; at first they felt faintly light-headed, a brief flash of dis-orientation, then the exhilaration of floating. Moira bounded up into midair, turning a rapid series of somersaults, spinning on her own center like a top; came
to rest laughing and flushed, stretching back and turning on her own momentum, arms splayed out.

“I wonder why Ching got sick? There doesn't seem to be anything sickening about it,” she said, “I actually like the sensation of weightlessness.”

“Her inner-ear channels may not be as stable as yours.”

“Oh, come,” Moira scoffed, “she's a G-N.”

“In that case,” Peake said, “it's only a matter of acclimatization; she'll get used to it very quickly. Don't make fun of her, Moira.”

“I wasn't making fun of her, Peake,” Moira said soberly, “I felt sorry for her. She's always been so perfect and self-controlled. Maybe that's it — it scares her to be out of control, because that's just one of the givens of her life. Being perfect. Like a computer. Any G-N takes it for granted — being perfect, I mean. You, and I, and all the rest of us, have to live with the fact that we're just conglomerations of random genes; if we made it into the Academy, that means that we're the end product of natural selection. You, more than me, because in your country the weaker ones die out in famines and so forth. So we know, if we get this far, it's because we, or our ancestors, had some superior stuff inside us, body and brain. Ching doesn't have that to lean on — whatever there is that's superior about her, she knows it's just that some scientist tinkered around with her parents' germ plasm. No roots.”

All this was true, Peake thought; but he was surprised that it should be the tough-minded Moira who said it. He had not thought her sensitive enough to be aware of that. He discovered that he was looking at Moira in a new way; she too could be sympathetic, where, always before, she had intimidated him a little.

She pulled him up beside her; he felt himself bounce
a little on the cushiony air. “As I remember, you're a fair acrobat yourself,” she said. “Come on, let's try double-spins around a common center —”

Seizing her hands, spinning, Peake felt the curious sensation that the world, not himself, was spinning while he remained wholly stationary at the center of the module which was dancing, somersaulting around them; that the absolute center of the universe was located somewhere in the small, lessening space between Moira's curled body and his own as the module whirled round them as the whirling stars moved ... at the end of a long spin they slowly came to rest, almost in each other's arms. Slowly, holding each other, they drifted down.

Moira had felt it too, as if the universe centered to the location in the narrowing space between their bodies; she was reluctant to break the contact.

Peake said, laughing, “You're good at that for a woman!”

“That's nonsense,” she laughed, without rancor, “That's like saying, you play the violin pretty well for a man! Do you really think skill at acrobatics is gender-linked?”

He shook his head. “Women have a higher percentage of body fat to muscle; their center of gravity is lower,” he said, “and so, in general, men are somewhat better athletes. Or at least, so I understood, as a medical man — I'm not claiming to be an expert on athletics. If women are men's equals in that field, I apologize — I spoke out of ignorance, Moira, not male chauvinism.”

“Apology accepted,” she said, giving him a little hug. Then, as he spontaneously returned it, she came to rest, perfectly still, her eyes meeting his, straightforward and clear.

“Do you want to go to bed with me? If you do, it's all right.”

Shock flooded through Peake; he felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his universe, the centering closeness suddenly replaced by empty cold. That had never occurred to him, it had been the last thing on his mind. The split second of panic was followed by a split second of cynicism, Maybe I ought to try it, find out what it's like . . . but panic, emptiness, and shock were all drowned in a sudden, uncontrollable wave of hostility.

“What's the matter? Isn't Ravi enough for you? Or can't you live with the notion that there's one man in the universe who doesn't want you? At that, I suppose I'm the only male in the Academy you haven't slept with, and you want to round out the collection to completeness?”

Moira's face whitened at his fury, but she did not withdraw or drop her eyes. She said, shaking her head a little, her curly hair flying out on the soft currents of air in the room, “No, Peake. I'm not ashamed of liking sex, but that wasn't the idea. I just thought — I thought it might make you feel a little less alone, that's all.”

And suddenly Peake was ashamed of himself. He had felt alone, most desperately alone, isolated and friendless, and then when one of his new family made an offer of ultimate sharing with him, he reacted like this! He liked Moira, he had been astonished at her sensitivity— in his experience, most women were tough realists, incapable of the kind of gentle sentiment men could display. But still. . . something inside him refused to take this kind of comfort quite as lightly as that, meaning no more to Moira than the hug she had given him, a purely physical kind of comfort. He wondered if that was all that sex meant to women.

He said, fumbling, “I'm sorry, Moira. I shouldn't have said that. I — I know you meant it kindly, and I — I really do appreciate it. Honestly. But I guess I'm just not — not ready for that. Not yet.”

Another sleep period had come and gone, and Teague sat in the music room, music paper and a stylus before him, scribbling rapidly. Ching came and looked over his shoulder.

“What's that you're doing?” Her eyes on the line of music, she sang it slowly and correctly, in a sweet clear mezzo voice. “That's a lovely melody, Teague, but I don't recognize it. Is it something that isn't in the computer? Something by Delius, perhaps? It has that feel.”

“I'm flattered,” Teague said wryly.

“You wrote that?” She looked down at him in surprise and admiration. “But Teague, it's beautiful, I didn't know you composed music!”

“I don't, very often,” he said, “only when an inspiration comes to me, I guess.”

“A sonata?”

“String quartet, eventually,” Teague confessed, “and don't tell everybody about it, Ching. They'd probably think it was foolish. Nobody composes music now, with the computer doing everything better —”

“No,” Ching said, “that's foolish. There's no substitute for human knowledge.”

“I'm surprised you would say that, Ching. Aren't you the one who thinks the computer is God? Why, your very existence — it was computer technology which created the modifications in human germ plasm making the G-Ns possible, wasn't it? One could say a computer was your real father, couldn't we?”

Ching giggled. She said, “That brings up the funniest picture in my mind. . .” and for the first time it occurred
to Teague that Ching's completely plain, ordinary face, without a single feature one could notice or remember, seemed somehow pretty and individual when she was laughing like that. Not a single good feature or a bad one; but somehow her giggle was completely unlike any other one he had ever heard.

Then she sobered, and her voice, always a little tense and didactic, virtually wiped out the memory of that charming laugh. She said, “No, Teague, I don't idolize the computer. Less than any of you, maybe, because I know more about them and what they can and can't do. We have to rely on them, though, because the — universe is just too big. Remember what Ravi said about the mudfish and the Great Barrier Reef? The computer can only do what we order it to do, and only if we ask it in just exactly the right way. It's like that kid game we all used to play in kindergarten — Simon says take three giant steps — and you had all the rigamarole of saying May I — Yes — and if you missed a single Simon Says, or May I, you had to go back to the beginning and wipe everything out. A computer is like that kid's game. Anything, if you ask it exactly right, and nothing if you don't. And speaking of computers, Teague, I did check every single tie-in for the DeMags, and I couldn't find anything wrong. All I can think of is that somebody bumped against the stud, while we were all exercising, and turned it off, and I'd suggest a safety housing for it.”

Teague frowned, leaning back and raising his eyes and his attention from the music paper in his lap. He said, “I can't imagine how it could have happened. If the control of the DeMag in there had been a pressure stud, yes, I could see it. But it's a dial that has to be twisted clockwise to go on, and counter-clockwise to go off, and it's not all that easy to turn; it could hardly
have been turned off by accident. Nor can I imagine any one of us doing it without warning the others; Peake could very easily have been killed, and if he weren't such a fine natural athlete he would have been killed. None of us is stupid enough, to say nothing of malicious enough, to do such a thing as a practical joke. So, eliminating accidental turning-off, or deliberate-without-telling-anyone — which would mean that one of us is a psychopath who didn't care if he or she killed someone — it winds down to defect in the DeMag, or fault in the computer tie-in. Now Fontana and I checked out that DeMag unit and the control, right down to the core, and it was in perfect condition.”

Ching frowned, thinking hard. She could feel again, in her belly, the sudden nausea and fear as the gravity left her disoriented, hanging upside-down from a ballet barre which, moments before, had been stable and solid. She said, “Could there have been a short in the electrical wiring of the control dial, Teague? That would explain why it went off suddenly, and then came back again when you turned it off and then on again.”

“Maybe, but we didn't find any trace of it,” Teague said. “Fontana thought about that, of course; it was the first thing that occurred to her. Electrical circuits do short out, of course, but all the electrical circuits aboard this ship are computer-controlled anyhow, and they'd hardly short out without some record — I mean, not the way a regular wired switch would do.”

“No question of that,” Moira said behind them, “Fontana and I checked every circuit and everything in the DeMag machinery before we went to bed, and it's purring along as sweetly as any old pussycat. Speaking of which, I wish we could have shipped a cat or two. I like live things.”

“There are plants enough in the conservatory,”

Teague said, “but there were all kinds of arguments against any pets. Starting with contamination of alien worlds, and ending with the psychological problems of becoming attached to them and suffering when they die, or inbreeding causing monsters after several generations of kittens. Not to mention that cats react very badly to free-fall; worse than any other animal. Their inner-ear channels are even more sensitive than the human ones. More so, because they can't react to visual cues the way humans can.”

“Oh, plants — that's not what I mean by live things,” Moira said, going to the rack where the musical instruments were kept and getting out her cello, and a little later, Fontana came in, carrying a printout of the Mass in Five Voices.

“Ching, you can have the soprano part if you'd rather, you've got the range — you can sing a top A, can't you?”

“I'd really rather do the contralto part, Fontana. I like harmony. You and Peake can share the honors for the melody.”

“The mass is a little complicated. I thought we could start with something shorter. You know this, don't you?” She hummed the opening phrases of the Ave Verum. Teague took up the bass part, surreptitiously sliding the music paper on which he had been writing into his flute case. Suddenly Moira's cello began to drift upwards; Teague grabbed for a shower of floating papers.