alive for centuries. Mizar and Alcor are three light-years apart, so with the ship's original back-and-forth mission, the most time they would spend zipped up in the tanks was thirty years. Which would pass like nothing, supposedly.
I clicked for the ship's attention. "What's our upper limit, given the flight plan I filed? What's our point of no return?"
"It's not possible to be definite," it said. "Each suspended-animation tank will function until a vital component fails. They're superconducting, and require no power input, at least not for tens of thousands of years. I doubt that the systems would last more than a thousand years, though; a hundred light-years' distance. That will be a little more than three years into our voyage."
It was amusing that a machine would use a romantic word like "voyage." It was well programmed to keep company with a bunch of middle-aged runaways.
At the bow of the cylinder was a neat stack of modules left over from the wara kind of build-a-planet kit, the ultimate lifeboat. We knew that earthlike worlds were common. If the ship couldn't make collapsar insertion and go home, those modules gave the people a chance of building a new home. We didn't know whether it had ever happened. There had been forty-three cruisers unaccounted for at the end of the war, some of them so far away that we would never hear from them. My own last assignment had been in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 150,000 light-years away.
Most of the rest of the hold was given over to redundancy, materials and tools to rebuild almost anything in the living cylinder, but the area closest to where we were floating was all tools, some as basic as picks and shovels and forklifts, some unrecognizably esoteric. If something went wrong with the drive or the life-support system, there would be no other job for anyone until it was fixedor we were fried or frozen.
(Those of us with engineering and scientific backgrounds would be speed-training with the ALSC-Accelerated Life Situation Computerwhich was not quite as good as learning in real time, hands on, but it did give you a lot of data, fast. It was sobering to realize that if something did go wrong with the drivewhich restrained more energy than had been released in any Earth warthen the person in charge of repairing it would be essentially a walking, talking manual, who had really vivid memories of procedures that had actually been done by some actor centuries dead.)
On the way back up the corridor, Man showed off her zerogee expertise by exuberant spinning and cartwheeling. It was good to sometimes see them acting human.
We were free to wander around and poke at things for a couple of hours before going back to Centrus. Marygay and I retraced the patterns of her life here, but it seemed less like revisiting old memories than like exploring a ghost town.
We went into the last apartment she'd occupied, waiting for me, and she said she wouldn't have recognized it. The last occupant had painted the walls in bright jagged graphics. When Marygay had lived there, the walls were light cobalt blue, and covered with her paintings and drawings. She didn't do it much anymore, but in the years while she was waiting here, she'd become an accomplished artist.
She'd looked forward to getting back to it, once the kids were out of the house. They might be light-years out of the house, soon.
"It's sad for you," I said.
"Yes and no. They weren't unhappy years. This was the stable part of my world. You'd make close friends and then they'd get off the ship, and every time you stopped at Middle Finger, they'd be six or twelve or eighteen years older, and then dead." She gestured at the dead dry fields and still waters. "This was permanence. That it's a shambles now does bother me a little."
"We'll have it rebuilt soon."
"Sure." She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the place. "We'll make it better."
Chapter eight
Of course, it wasn't going to be just a matter of rolling up our
I clicked for the ship's attention. "What's our upper limit, given the flight plan I filed? What's our point of no return?"
"It's not possible to be definite," it said. "Each suspended-animation tank will function until a vital component fails. They're superconducting, and require no power input, at least not for tens of thousands of years. I doubt that the systems would last more than a thousand years, though; a hundred light-years' distance. That will be a little more than three years into our voyage."
It was amusing that a machine would use a romantic word like "voyage." It was well programmed to keep company with a bunch of middle-aged runaways.
At the bow of the cylinder was a neat stack of modules left over from the wara kind of build-a-planet kit, the ultimate lifeboat. We knew that earthlike worlds were common. If the ship couldn't make collapsar insertion and go home, those modules gave the people a chance of building a new home. We didn't know whether it had ever happened. There had been forty-three cruisers unaccounted for at the end of the war, some of them so far away that we would never hear from them. My own last assignment had been in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 150,000 light-years away.
Most of the rest of the hold was given over to redundancy, materials and tools to rebuild almost anything in the living cylinder, but the area closest to where we were floating was all tools, some as basic as picks and shovels and forklifts, some unrecognizably esoteric. If something went wrong with the drive or the life-support system, there would be no other job for anyone until it was fixedor we were fried or frozen.
(Those of us with engineering and scientific backgrounds would be speed-training with the ALSC-Accelerated Life Situation Computerwhich was not quite as good as learning in real time, hands on, but it did give you a lot of data, fast. It was sobering to realize that if something did go wrong with the drivewhich restrained more energy than had been released in any Earth warthen the person in charge of repairing it would be essentially a walking, talking manual, who had really vivid memories of procedures that had actually been done by some actor centuries dead.)
On the way back up the corridor, Man showed off her zerogee expertise by exuberant spinning and cartwheeling. It was good to sometimes see them acting human.
We were free to wander around and poke at things for a couple of hours before going back to Centrus. Marygay and I retraced the patterns of her life here, but it seemed less like revisiting old memories than like exploring a ghost town.
We went into the last apartment she'd occupied, waiting for me, and she said she wouldn't have recognized it. The last occupant had painted the walls in bright jagged graphics. When Marygay had lived there, the walls were light cobalt blue, and covered with her paintings and drawings. She didn't do it much anymore, but in the years while she was waiting here, she'd become an accomplished artist.
She'd looked forward to getting back to it, once the kids were out of the house. They might be light-years out of the house, soon.
"It's sad for you," I said.
"Yes and no. They weren't unhappy years. This was the stable part of my world. You'd make close friends and then they'd get off the ship, and every time you stopped at Middle Finger, they'd be six or twelve or eighteen years older, and then dead." She gestured at the dead dry fields and still waters. "This was permanence. That it's a shambles now does bother me a little."
"We'll have it rebuilt soon."
"Sure." She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the place. "We'll make it better."
Chapter eight
Of course, it wasn't going to be just a matter of rolling up our
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