People started going about their business. They knew that much of what they did was make-work; the ship, by necessity, could run itself. Even the agriculture, being integral to the life-support system, was closely monitored by the ship.
Sometimes it bothered me to know that the ship was intelligent and self-aware. It could greatly simplify its existence by turning off life support.
We, in turn, could override the ship. Marygay’s captaincy, now largely symbolic, would suddenly become a real and huge burden. The Time Warp could be run without its brain, but it would be a daunting enterprise.
The fifteen children aboard did need parents and teachers, which gave some of us real work. I taught physical science and still had “father” in my job description, though most of my job there was keeping out of Sara’s way.
Everybody who didn’t have children had some other ongoing project. A lot of them, of course, were engaged in creating and dissecting scenarios about what we were going to do forty thousand years from now. I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm for that, myself. It seemed to me the only model worth planning about was the tabula rasa one, where we came back to find nothing left of humanity. Otherwise, we were Neanderthals speculating about starflight.
(The sheriff was in favor of a scenario where not much would change over forty thousand years, except increasing mastery over the physical universe. Why would Man want to change? I was more in favor of the one where Man, refusing to allow change, declines into gibbering savagery, in obedience to the Law of Increasing Entropy.)
There were several people writing histories of our voyage, whom I could visualize waiting hungrily for something bad to happen. No news is bad news for historians. Others were studying the social dynamics of our little group, which did seem worthwhile. Sociology with a uniquely reduced set of variables.
Others were writing compositions or novels, or otherwise engaged in the arts. Casi was already whittling away at his log, and on the second day out, Alysa Bertram announced she was holding auditions for a play that was in progress; the actors to collaborate on the script. Sara was one of the first to show up, and she was chosen. She wanted me to try out, but the idea of memorizing pages of dialogue always had sounded like mind-numbing torture to me.
Of course I did have my position on the council to keep me out of trouble. But we had a lot less to do, now that the voyage had begun.
With “gravity,” the ship was a totally different place. In orbit, the floors were just nuisances, obstacles you had to swim around, and you thought of the ship in a sort of horizontal way, bow to stern, like a water ship. But now forward was up and aft was down. Less than an hour into the flight, Diana had to treat her first broken bone, when Ami–who had lived for months in zerogee–instinctively tried to float down a staircase.
When that happened, I realized we didn’t have anyone who was a safety inspector. So I gave myself the job, but wanted an assistant trained in civil engineering. One of the three people qualified was Cat. I guess I chose her so as not to appear to be avoiding her.
I didn’t dislike Cat, though I’d never felt completely comfortable around her. Of course, she’d been born, if you can call it that, nine hundred years after me, into a world where heterosexuality was an affliction so rare most people never even encountered it. But the same was true of Charlie and Diana, our best friends.
Some were more hetero than others, though; Charlie’ d had at least one fling with a guy. I wondered about Cat, who had left her husband behind. (Though at the time I’d been relieved; he was kind of worthless except for chess and go.)
Cat accepted the offer with enthusiasm. Most of her work was not really going to start for another ten years, when and if we had to roll up our sleeves and start building a new world.
We decided to work from top to bottom. There wasn’t much to be concerned about on the top floor, just cargo and control. Nobody would be going there regularly except for Marygay and her assistants, Jerrod Weston and Puul Ten. The five escape ships weren’t locked, and I supposed people might sneak into them for privacy, so we checked them with that in mind.