“That’s reasonable enough.”
“But this inflection is not a generalization. It’s directed at you, I suppose the one hundred forty-eight of you. Or maybe even all humans. And it is…an admonition? A warning.”
I read the English again. “Warning that we’re headed for the unknowable?”
“Either that or the other way around: the unknowable is headed for you. The nameless.”
I thought about that. “It could just be talking about relativity, then. It gets pretty mysterious.”
It scraped out a syllable of negation. “Not for us.”
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Chapter seventeen
It was little things at first. No pattern.
A whole bed of oysters stopped growing. The other beds were okay. It only interested me academically, since I had an oyster once and decided once would do it for me. But I helped Xuan and Shaunta run environmental tests, having been a fish farmer in another life, myself, and there wasn’t one molecule of difference that we could detect between the affected bed and the others. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the oysters, except that they refused to grow beyond thumbnail size.
We finally decided to sacrifice the bed and harvest them immature, making about ten liters of soup, which I declined to savor. Then we drained and sterilized the pool and reseeded it.
All the movies and cubes that began with the letter C were missing. No Casablanca or Citizen Kane. But an article would preserve them, so we still had The Cat Women from Mars and A Cunt for All Seasons, so some ancient culture was preserved.
Little things.
The temperature regulator on the children’s pool refused to work. It would run hot one day and not at all the next. Lucio and Elena took it apart and put it back together, and so did Matthew Anderson, who had an affinity with such things. But it never did work, and Elena took it out of the system altogether after she tested the water one morning and it was scalding. The kids didn’t seem to mind the cold water, but it made them a little more noisy.
Something happened to the floor of the handball court. It got tacky; it was like trying to move around on half-dried glue. We stripped it and revarnished it, but of course it was the same varnish, and soon after it dried, it became tacky again.
That wouldn’t have seemed important; just an unfortunate choice of materials, but it was the same varnish we used on all of the ship’s fiber surfaces, and it only had gotten tacky in that one location. Handball players do sweat. As if weight lifters did not.
Then a small thing happened that had no reasonable explanation at all. It could only have been an elaborate but pointless practical joke: the air was sucked out of a food storage locker.
Rudkowski sent a report to me, annoyed, and I went down to look at the thing. It was a grain storage locker, free-standing, with no possible connection to vacuum.
There’s no lock on the door, but when Rudkowski, a strong, fat man, had gone to open it, it wouldn’t budge. Another cook helped him pull on it, and it jerked open suddenly, with a sucking inrush of air. Same thing happened the next day, and so he sent up the report.
We emptied out the locker and went over it minutely, and even had Antres 906 come up and use his differently acute senses. The only way for the thing to lose air would be for somebody to pump it out, but none of us could find any opening.
“Fearsome,” was the Tauran’s only reaction. We were still annoyed, rather than scared. But then we had the locker watched all afternoon and night. No one came near it, but by the next morning it was full of vacuum again.
Against the obscure possibility of conspiracy, I stood watch over it all night myself, drinking what passed for coffee. The air disappeared again.
Word got out about this strangeness, and reactions were diverse. Some stolid people–or people in ignorant denial–didn’t think it was a big deal. The locker was small, and the daily air loss from it was not even I percent of what we lost through normal accepted leakage. If we left it closed, we wouldn’t even lose that.