“I’d like to help,” Rubi said. “Have to be back by the twenty-first, though.”
“Me, too,” Justin said. “When’s the next flight?”
“We can be flexible,” Man said. “A week, ten days.” She made the kissing sound that signaled the ship that she was talking to it. “You have plenty of food for three people?”
“Several years’ worth, if they can survive emergency rations. Or I can activate the galley, and they can use up frozen food. It’s very old, though.”
Teresa smacked. “Do that. Let’s save the emergency rations for emergencies.”
I wouldn’t have minded joining them myself, though I’m not much of a farmer. It was pleasantly exciting. Like putting twigs on the embers of a banked fire, and blowing gently to make the small flame that would start it over again.
But I had classes and fish to take care of. Maybe when classes were over next month, I could come up and help get the aquaculture started.
Marygay pinched my butt. “Don’t even think about it. You’ve got classes.”
“I know, I know.” How long had we been reading each other’s minds?
We took a holo tour of the “engine room,” which was not a room by anybody’s definition. It did have a cylindrical wall of lacy aluminum, for the convenience of workers. Nobody would ever be out there while the engine was running, of course. Gamma-ray leakage would fry them in seconds. A lot of the engine crew would practice working with remote robots, in case repairs had to be made and the engine couldn’t be shut off.
There was a huge water tank–a drained lake’s worth of water–and a much smaller glowing ball of antimatter, a perfect sphere of sparkling blue pinpricks.
I stared at it for some time, the ship droning on about technical specifications that I could look up later. That glittering ball was our ticket to a new life, one that suddenly seemed real. Freedom, in this small prison.
It had occurred to me that it wasn’t just the bland tyranny of Man and Tauran that I wanted to escape. It was also everyday life, the community and family that I had watched growing for the past generation. I was dangerously close to becoming a tribal elder–and despite the fact that I was technically the oldest person on the planet, I wasn’t nearly ready for that. Time and spirit for a couple of adventures more. Even a passive adventure like this.
Call it fear of becoming a grandfather. Settling into the role of observer and advisor. I shaved off my beard years’ ago, when it started to show patches of white. I could just see growing it long, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch…
Marygay wiggled my elbow. “Hello? Anybody home?” She laughed. “The ship wants to take us downstairs.” We wended our serpentine way back to the lift, and in my mind’s eye I could almost see fields of grain and fruits and vegetables; the tanks roiling with fish and shrimp. When we reached the midpoint we got out of the lift and followed Man, floating down the corridor lined with artwork that was showing age. We were out of practice with this kind of locomotion, and kept butting and nudging each other until, with the aid of handholds, we managed to stay in a more or less orderly line.
The “bottom” cylinder was the same size as the one we’d just left, but it looked larger, for the lack of things on a familiar human scale. Five escape craft dominated the cargo hold, each one a fighter modified to hold thirty people. They could only accelerate up to one-tenth the speed of light (and decelerate at the other end, of course), but the life-support equipment included suspended-animation tanks that would keep people somewhat 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.”