‘There’s still fifty years to go,’ Ky reminded Erens.
Eren waved a bottle. ‘I can wait. It isn’t forever.’
Ky nodded at the bottle. ‘You’ll kill yourself with that stuff, and all the other junk you take. You’ll never make it. You’ll never see real sunlight again, or taste rain. You won’t last one year let alone fifty; you should go back to sleep.’
‘It isn’t sleep.’
‘You should go back to it, whatever you want to call it; you should let yourself be frozen again.’
‘And it isn’t literally frozen… freezing, either.’ Erens looked annoyed and puzzled at the same time.
The man they’d woken up wondered how many hundreds of times the two had been through this argument.
‘You should go back into your little cold cubicle like you were supposed to, five years ago, and get them to treat you for your addictions when they revive you,’ Ky said.
‘The ship already treats me,’ Erens told Ky, with a kind of slow drunken dignity. ‘I am in a state of grace with my enthusiasms; sublimely tensioned grace.’ So saying, Erens tipped the bottle back and drained it.
‘You’ll kill yourself.’
‘It’s my life.’
‘You might kill us all; everybody on the whole ship, sleepers too.’
‘The ship looks after itself,’ Erens sighed, looking round the Crew Lounge. It was the only dirty place on the ship. Everywhere else, the ship’s robots tidied, but Erens had worked out how to delete the Crew Lounge from the craft’s memory, and so the place could look good and scruffy. Erens stretched, kicking a couple of small recyclable cups off the table.
‘Huh,’ Ky said. ‘What if you’ve damaged it with all your messing around?’
‘I have not been “messing around” with it,’ Erens said, with a small sneer. ‘I have altered a few of the more basic housekeeping programs; it doesn’t talk to us anymore, and it lets us keep this place looking lived-in; that’s about it. Nothing that’s going to make the ship wander into a star or start thinking it’s human and what are these intestinal parasites doing in there. But you wouldn’t understand. No technical background. Livu, here; he might understand, eh?’ Erens stretched out further, sliding down the grubby seat, boots scraping on the filthy surface of the table. ‘You understand, don’t you, Darac?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted (he was used to answering to Darac, or Mr Livu, or just Livu, by now). ‘I suppose if you know what you’re doing, there’s no real harm.’ Erens looked pleased. ‘On the other hand, a lot of disasters have been caused by people who thought they knew what they were doing.’
‘Amen,’ Ky said, looking triumphant, and leant aggressively-towards Erens. ‘See?’
‘As our friend said,’ Erens pointed out, reaching for another bottle. ‘He doesn’t know.’
‘You should go back with the sleepers,’ Ky said.
‘They’re not sleeping.’
‘You’re not supposed to be up right now; there’s only supposed to be two people up at any point.’
‘You go back then.’
‘It isn’t my turn. You were up first.’
He left them to argue.
Sometimes he would put a spacesuit on and go through the airlock into the storage sections, which were in vacuum. The storage sections made up most of the ship; over ninety-nine per cent of it. There was a tiny drive unit at one end of the craft, an even tinier living unit at the other, and – in between – the bulging bulk of the ship, packed with the un-dead.
He walked the cold, dark corridors, looking from side to side at the sleeper units. They looked like drawers in a filing cabinet; each was the head-end of something very like a coffin. A little red light glowed faintly on each one, so that standing in one of the gently spiralling corridors, with his own suit lights switched off, those small and steady sparks curved away in a ruby lattice folded over the darkness, like some infinite corridor of red giant suns set up by some obsessively tidy-minded god.
Spiralling gradually upwards, moving away from the living unit at what he always thought of as the head of the ship, he walked up through its quiet, dark body. Usually he took the outermost corridor, just to appreciate the scale of the vessel. As he ascended, the pull of the ship’s fake gravity gradually decreased. Eventually, walking became a series of skidding leaps in which it was always easier to hit the ceiling than make any forward progress. There were handles on the coffin-drawers; he used them once walking became too inefficient, pulling himself along towards the waist of the ship, which – as he approached it – turned one wall of coffin-drawers to a floor and the other to a ceiling, in places. Standing under a radial corridor, he leapt up, floated towards what was now the ceiling with the radial corridor a chimney up through it. He caught a coffin-drawer handle, and used a succession of them as rungs, climbing into the centre of the ship.
Running through the centre of the Absent Friends there was an elevator shaft that extended from living unit to drive unit. In the very centre of the whole ship, he would summon the elevator, if it wasn’t already waiting there from last time.
When it came, he would enter it, floating inside the squat, yellow-lit cylinder. He would take out a pen, or a small torch, and place it in the centre of the elevator car, and just float there, watching the pen or torch, waiting to see if he had stationed it so exactly in the centre of the whole slowly spinning mass of the ship that it would stay where he’d left it.
He got very good at doing this, eventually, and could spend hours sitting there, with the suit lights and the elevator lights on sometimes (if it was a pen) or off (if it was a torch), watching the little object, waiting for his own dexterity to prove greater than his patience, waiting for – in other words, he could admit to himself – one part of his obsession to win over the other.
If the pen or torch moved and eventually connected with the walls or floor or ceiling of the elevator car, or drifted through the open door, then he had to float, climb (down) and then pull and walk back the way he had come. If it stayed still in the centre of the car, he was allowed to take the elevator back to the living unit.
‘Come on, Darac,’ Erens said, lighting up a pipe. ‘What brought you along on this one-way ride, eh?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ He turned up the ventilation to get rid of Eren’s drug fumes. They were in the viewing carousel, the one place in the ship where you could get a direct view of the stars. He came up here every now and again, opened the shutters and watched the stars spin slowly overhead. Sometimes he tried to read poetry.
Erens still visited the carousel alone as well, but Ky no longer did; Erens reckoned Ky got homesick, seeing the silent nothingness out there, and the lonely specks that were other suns.
‘Why not?’ Erens said.
He shook his head and sat back in the couch, looking out into the darkness. ‘It isn’t any of your business.’
‘I’ll tell you why I came along if you tell me why you did,’ Erens grinned, making the words sound childish, conspiratorial.
‘Get lost, Erens.’
‘Mine is an interesting story; you’d be fascinated.’
‘I’m sure,’ he sighed.
‘But I won’t tell you unless you tell me first. You’re missing a lot; mm-hmm.’
‘Well, I’ll just have to live with that,’ he said. He turned down the lighting in the carousel until the brightest thing in it was Erens’ face, glowing red with reflected light on each draw of the pipe. He shook his head when Erens offered him the drug.
‘You need to loosen up, my friend,’ Erens told him, slumping back in the other seat. ‘Get high; share your problems.’
‘What problems?’
He saw Erens’ head shake in the darkness. ‘Nobody on this ship hasn’t got problems, friend. Nobody out here not running away from something.’
‘Ah; ship psychiatrist now are we?’
‘Hey, come on; nobody’s going back, are they? Nobody on here’s ever going back home. Half the people we know are probably dead already, and the ones that aren’t will be, by the time we get where we’re going. So if we can’t ever see the people we used to know again, and probably never see home again, it has to be something pretty damn important and pretty damn bad, pretty damn evil to make a body up and leave like that. We all got to be running from something, whether it’s something we did or something we had done to us.’
‘Maybe some people just like travelling.’
‘That’s crap; nobody likes travelling that much.’