The ship received. “A message for the captain,” she said.
Kenmuir and Valanndray were playing double chaos. Fractals swirled through the viewtank before them, in every color and in shapes beyond counting. Guided more by intuition than reason, fingers stroked keyboards. Forms changed, flowed, swept toward a chosen attractor, tumbled away as the opponent threw in a new function. Caught in their game, the players breathed quickly and shallowly of air that they had ordered to be cool, with a tang of pine. They ignored the cabin-wide audiovisual recording at their backs, a view from the Andes, rock and sky and snowdrift on a shrill wind.
The ship spoke.
“Halt play!” snapped Kenmuir. The contest for a stable configuration froze in place.
He spent a moment beneath Valanndray’s gaze before he decided, “I’ll take it at the console. No offense meant. It may be a private matter.” Belatedly he realized that the apology would have gone better had he expressed it in Lunarian.
He felt relieved when his passenger replied, in Anglo at that, “Understood. Secrecy is precious by scarcity, nay?” If the tone was a bit sardonic, no harm. The two men had been getting along reasonably well, but tension was bound to rise on a long mission, and more than once they Bad skirted a fight. After all, they were not of the same species.
Or maybe that saved them, Kenmuir thought flittingly, as he had often thought before. A pair of Terran males like him, weeks or months on end with no other company, would either have to become soul-brothers or else risk flying at one another’s throats. A pair of Lunarians like Valanndray—well, alterations made in ancient genes had not brought forth any race of saints. But neither of this team found his companion growing maddeningly predictable.
Kenmuir doubted that their occasional encounters with sophotects had soothed them. An inorganic intelligence—a machine with consciousness, if you wanted to think of it in those terms—was too alien to them both.
He shrugged the reflection off and walked out into the passageway.
The ship murmured around him, sounds of ventilation, chemical recycling, self-maintenance of the whole structure. There went no sound or shiver of acceleration; the deck was as steady beneath his feet, at one-sixth of Earth weight, -as if he were on the Moon. The corridor flickered with a chromatic abstraction, Valanndray’s choice. When it was Kenmuir’s turn to decorate, he usually picked a scene from his native world, contemporary, historical, or fantasy.
Where his path descended, he used the fixed ladder rather than the conveyor. Anything to help himself stay in trim. The command cabin lay near the center of the spheroidal hull. Its interior displayed ambient space, a representation better than reality. Solar radiance was muted lest it blind. Star images were brightened to overcome shipboard lighting. Unwinking, they beswarmed the dark, white, amber, coal-red, steel-blue, the galactic belt icy among them. Jupiter glowed like a lamp, the sun was a tiny disc rimmed with fire-tongues. Kenmuir settled at the main control board. “Screen the message,” he ordered.
His voice sounded too loud in the encompassing silence. For an instant, bitterness woke anew. Command cabin! Control board! He told the ship where and how to go; she did the rest. And hers was a narrowly limited mind. A higher-order sophotect would not have needed anything from him. He knew of no emergency that even this craft couldn’t handle by herself, unless it be something that destroyed her utterly.
His glance swung over the stars of the southern sky and came to a stop at Alpha Centauri. Longing shook him. Yonder they dwelt, the descendants of those who had followed Anson Guthrie to a new world, and so tremendous a voyage would scarcely be repeated ever again. From here, at least. Maybe their own descendants would find ways to farther suns. They must, if they were to outlive their doomed planet. But that wreck would not come for lifetimes yet, and meanwhile, meanwhile—
“Pull yourself together, old fool,” Kenmuir muttered. Self-pity was contemptible. He did get to fare through space, and the worlds that swung around Sol should have grandeurs enough for any man. Let him thank Lilisaire for that.