"starsiders_3_leaping_to_the_stars_by_david_gerrold_v05_unformatted" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

The gym was strung with orange webbing everywhere to give people something to hang onto and to keep them from caroming into each other, especially the newcomers. Some of the webbing was rigged so that the younger kids could bounce off it every which way-like a three-dimensional trampoline. Bobby went straight to that. I thought I might like to try that sometime, but I didn't feel like it right now. Mom and Bev were talking to some friends they'd made in the farms, and Douglas and Mickey went off in search of a counselor, so I was left to myself again. I hung on the orange webbing, twisting slowly this way and that, watching the crowds of people. Half the colonists must have been here in the gym, over 750 people. If this had been a two-dimensional space, it would have been crowded. In three dimensions, it only seemed cluttered. And it was disorienting. It was too easy to forget which was up and which was down, and then every direction looked like every other, and that's when you were most likely to lose your lunchSomebody caught my foot and swung me around to face herJ' mee. "Hi," she said. "Hi," I said. After that, neither of us had anything else to say. There was too much history between us. I didn't know if J'mee was still angry with me or if I was angry with her. Or was that all settled now that we were both in the same starship? And what about her Dad? He probably didn't want me talking to her. After all, I was just a bit of brown tube-trash. He hadn't said "tube-nigger"-but that's what he meant. "So. .." I said. "Yeah," she agreed. "I like you better as a girl," I said. On the Line, she'd been disguised as a boy. "I like girl too," she said. "We saw pictures
of you on the train." Bobby and I had worn disguises on Luna. Our pictures had been shown at the hearingAbruptly she laughed. "Stop looking so serious. I'm joking with you." "Oh. Good." "Didn't you like being a girl?" I shrugged. "It was okay." That was the expected answer. "Did you like being a boy?" She shrugged back and made a face. "I thought it was silly. Some of it. But it was interesting. People treated me differently." "Yeah, I noticed that too. All this boy-girl stuff. Sometimes it gets very confusing." "Uh-huh." And then there was another one of those endless uncomfortable silences. "What?" she asked. "I was just thinking. It's going to be a long trip. Maybe we could be friends again ... T, "Okay," she said. And that was that. "What about your Dad?" She shrugged. "He's not happy unless he has someone to be angry at." And then she whispered, "Mostly, he blames the HARL1E unit." "He does?" "Yeah. He doesn't think you or your brother are smart enough." "Oh." That stung. But before I could say anything in response, a crew member swam up to us, a boy not much older than either Fmee or myself. "Charles Dingillian?" "Yes?" "Captain Boynton would like to see you. Follow me, please?" I turned to J'mee. "Have you met the Captain?" She shook her head.
"Come with me." I held out a hand and we followed the crew member. Out of consideration for our inexperience in free fall, he didn't launch himself off the webbing. Instead, he pointed down-up?-and we followed him on a circuitous route across the webbing, pulling ourselves hand over hand. Captain Boynton was in the center of a knot of colonists and crew. He had one foot hooked in a loop of webbing and he had a plastic bubble of beer in one hand. "Oh, there you are, Ensign," he said when he saw us. "Who's your companion?" "Captain Boynton. This is J'mee Cheifetz." "Your father is David Cheifetz?" "Yes, sir." "Mm." He turned to me. "Ensign, there's a rumor going around this ship that you're quite an accomplished musician. Is that true?" "I can play a keyboard." "Well, somebody was in your cabin playing Beethoven and Gershwin and Joplin. And somebody piped it throughout the entire ship." "I don't know about it being piped throughout the ship, sir. But yes, that was me playing." "My compliments." He pointed off to one side. "There's a music-cockpit over there. Would you like to play something for us now?" "I haven't really practiced in a month, sir." "I doubt that anyone will mind." "Yes, sir." J'mee and I pulled ourselves over to where the keyboard was anchored against one wall. I switched it on and familiarized myself with the layout. It was more sophisticated than I expected-more than I expected to find on a starship; but J'mee said, "When you're going into space, you can't afford second best." "I never thought about it that way." I hit the power switch, and all three keyboards lit up obediently. "What are you going to play?" she asked. "I dunno. What do you like?" "Something happy?"
"I can do that." There was a kind of show Dad used to do for quickie concerts. It was mostly what he called "happy-silly stuff" and even though it wasn't what you would call important music, it never failed to make the audience cheer. It was Dad's happy-silly stuff that made me want to learn how to play. It was the first music I ever learned. I started with "Happy Days Are Here Again." I started out very soft, very slow, almost sad and plaintive. But then, after the first chorus, I brought up the drums, increased the beat, and turned it into a brassy assault. It was a shame I was playing in free fall; there was no place for anyone to tap their feet. But some people started clapping, and others started singing, and so I went through the song an extra time, louder and faster, building toward a climax that never happened-instead I did a trick backwards-segue into "Turkey In The Straw," which is one of the silliest songs ever; but it lends itself well to a lot of funky syncopation and over-the-top harmonies and surprise sounds like slide-whistles and explosions. I played it the way Dad always did, with elephant trumpets and carousel cacaphonies, and steam-organs, and even a couple of sirens. It was great. At one point, J'mee poked me and shouted, "Look up!" I did, and I saw that some people had figured out how to dance, sort of. They were bouncing between the webbing and the bulkhead, doing back flips and somersaults and swan dives, and then hitting the webbing with their back or the wall with both feet and kicking off again for more. I played louder. The problem with "Turkey In The Straw" is that there's no place to go from there. It's a better closer than opener. But Dad had solved that problem in a concert once in a way that brought tears of laughter to the audience's eyes. So I did the same thing here-I segued into the finale of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Cannons and all. And cranked the sound up to eleven. It worked. Everybody cheered and yelled and applauded, and a bunch of people I didn't even know swam over and thanked me and
clapped me on the back and I ended up feeling good about myself in a way I'd never felt before. It was strange and weird and unsettling. I loved it. Ly ORIENTATION SEE, THIS WHOLE BUSINESS-ever since Dad had said, "I have an idea. Let's go to the moon"-we'd just kept moving and moving and moving, but without any real sense of where we were going. Or why. Or what we would do when we got there. At least, that's what it felt like to me. I mean, it hadn't been very well planned. We'd bounced around from one piece of luck to another-both bad and good-and we hadn't been so stupid that we'd killed ourselves (except for Dad), but neither had we been so smart that we could say we knew what we were doing. And even though everyiody else had some idea what they wanted-by the time we launched off Luna, I didn't even know if I wanted to go anymore. Except by then, I didn't really have a choice. When we'd started, all I'd wanted was to be left alone with my music. Back on Earth, I'd had to fight for every moment of privacy. There wasn't any. And the situation was worse once we started traveling-the only moments I'd had to myself in the past month had been when Alexei's people had webbed me and tossed me onto the cart. So I hadn't really had much chance to think about any music at all-not while we were jumping off the planet, not while we were bouncing off the moon, and certainly not while we were leaping to the stars. What with everything else that was going on, the only
music I'd had was the music at Dad's funeral. And the music at the partyAll of which proved that I was a bigger idiot than everybody said. Because I'd always thought that music was something I did for myself. I'd never realized that it could be something I did for others. But after that impromptu concert, the mood on the Cascade was different. People were humming and singing in the corridors. And joking. And anything that went thump, someone else would sing that piece of the 1812 that ended with the cannon shots. Da-da Da-da Da-da Da-Daa! Da! Da! Boom! It made me smile. So I guess I should talk about that too. J'mee and I were hiding in the keel. Well, not exactly hiding-just getting away from everyone else, so we could talk. We weren't talking about anything in particular, just stuff, and then suddenly she said, "You never smile, do you." "Yeah, I do." "I've never seen you smile." "I smile all the time." "Not on this side of your face, you don't. You never smile." "I do too," I insisted. She furrowed her eyebrows and gave me an exasperated girlfriend look. "Charles. Trust me on this. You are not a smiJer. Maybe you think you're smiling. But over here-on my side-I don't see it." "Well, maybe I haven't had a lot to smile about." "You could have smiled when you saw me." "I did." "No, you didn't." "This conversation isn't going anywhere," I said, frustrated. "I know how you could end it." "How?" "By smiling." "What if I don't feel like smiling?" "What if you do?"
Of course, now that she had challenged me to smile, I couldn't. I was too frustrated to smile. So she leaned over and kissed me. On the lips. Long enough to be a real kiss. The first one. Oh. "There," she said. "That's a smile." It must have been a smile. My face felt different. I didn't know what to say. "I like you when you smile," she said. "You're cute." Cute? Me! If anybody else had said that, I'd have socked him. But when J'mee said it-well, whatever my face was doing, suddenly it started doing a lot more of it. She leaned toward me. And kissed me again. This time I kissed back. When we finally broke apart, neither of us said anything. We just smiled at each other. It wasn't just my face that felt different now. It was all of me. And afterward, the smile wouldn't go away. I felt like I was flying. Well, I was-we didn't have any gravity anywhere but the centrifuges-but now, I liked free fall. Douglas and Mickey noticed immediately. But they were too polite to say anything directly. As obvious as it must have been. Mickey simply said, "You look happy," and Douglas gave me a kind of knowing look that made me glad to have him as a brother, so I knew it was okay, I could talk to him about it later. Then Mom and Bev and Stinky came in, all smelling fresh from the showers, and we headed up/forward to the galley for dinner. Bev noticed that I was in a good mood, and pointed it out to Mom. "Oh, is that what's different?" she said. "Maybe he's finally got a girlfriend. That'll do it every time." So of course, Stinky had to say something too. "Chigger's got a girlfriend. Chigger's got a girlfriend." I looked over at Douglas, and he said, "Shut up, Stinky." And Stinky looked at him, surprised, and actually shut up. The galley was another cargo pod-everything was a cargo
pod-only this one was fitted for free-fall meal service. There were twenty-three of them, all in constant operation. There were 1500 people aboard the Cascade, so everybody had to eat in assigned shifts. Sometimes you could trade a mealtime with someone else, but mostly not. And sometimes, you could have an actual sit-down meal in the centrifuge, and most people tried to eat there whenever they could, but most times, it wasn't convenient, even if you had reserved a table. The whole ship was a giant rabbit warren of tubes and hatches, and everything was sealed most of the time, and unless you knew what you were doing, sometimes it was just this side of impossible to get from one place to another. It helped a little bit that everything was color coded and numbered and there were arrows and colored lines everywhere; but you still had to know what arrows to follow and how the numbers worked, only this was in three dimensions, not two, and there weren't any up-and-down cues, and most of the time it was just a whole lot easier to stay in your local service cluster. At least, the free-fall galleys had furniture-of a sort. That helped a little. But it was a kind of furniture that didn't depend on gravity. The first time we ate in the galley, Douglas slipped into geek-mode and explained that on Earth or any other planet, furniture is about resisting gravity-it's about holding things up. But in free fall, furniture is only about leverage. You bumped your butt onto a bench-thing, and hooked your feet around a rod beneath, and your tray was held in place by a magnet on the part that served as a table. You could also put a keyboard on it for typing or playing music. We had the same kind of seats in the classrooms. But Mickey disagreed. He'd had more experience with free fall and different flavors of gravity than most people; working on the Line, living at Geostationary, he'd had lots of time to get adjusted to free fall, Earth-normal, and all the steps in between, including Mars and Luna. Even a 10% difference can be profound, he said, especially when you're walkingbecause when you're walking, your body is like a pendulum, and depending on the amount of gravity you're dealing with,
you have to throw yourself forward just enough that your body falls in the direction you want to go, and then you move your foot forward to catch yourself and keep going. That's why you can't walk in Lunar gravity, you have to bounce; but Martian gravity is strong enough to let you glide. He said we could see for ourselves on the different levels of the ship's centrifuge. I intended to do just that. But on the matter of furniture, Mickey said that the real reason for furniture is that it lets you organize things. Not just things, it also lets you organize people. You can put the baby in the crib, the toddler in the playpen, the children in the sandbox, the mommy in the kitchen, the daddy at the desk. And it was especially useful for meetings and meals, because when we were all situated on our various perches, we were all oriented the same way. And we could face each other to talk. So, according to Mickey, furniture is about orientation-first physically, then emotionally. Mom and Bev and Stinky went to get their meal trays from the service end, there wasn't room for all of us to go at once, so Doug and Mickey and I grabbed six seats together until it was our turn. I looked across to Doug and asked, "Is this what it feels like? Was it like this for you?" Douglas and Mickey exchanged a glance, and then Douglas said, "Yeah, kinda." Mickey added, "It gets better, Chigger. You'll see." "Okay, thanks." While we were eating-and for some reason, the food actually tasted good tonight-Senior Petty Officer Bradley came floating by. "Charles, can I talk to you for a moment?" "Uh-sure." He hooked himself onto a perch. "Listen, your dad was a conductor, wasn't he?" "Yeah ... ?" "I heard he was pretty good." "He was one of the best. And I'm not just saying that. It's true." "I don't doubt it. You're pretty good yourself. Your dad trained you?"
I glanced at Douglas. Should I answer this? He nodded. I turned back to Mr. Bradley. "Yes, sir. He did." "Well, he did a good job. You're very good with a keyboard." "Thank you, sir." I wondered if he was ever going to get to the point. My impatience must have shown, because he said, "Here's the thing. Some of us colonists-we've tried to form a band, but we don't really know what we're doing. We don't have a lot of experience that way. So we thought that maybe you could help us get started ... T, "I don't know about bands," I said. "I know about orchestras." "What's the difference?" "A band has no strings attached," said Douglas, dryly. "Huh?" Bradley blinked. "What Douglas said. A band is a lot of blowhards. All wind." "Oh," said Bradley, suddenly getting it. "Those are music jokes, aren't they?" "Uh, yeah." "See, I didn't know that. All the music on this ship is canned. We thought that was fine, until last night when you started playing. That's what we're missing here. Our own music. I looked to Douglas. He looked to Mickey. Mickey looked to me. The silence must have been too loud; Mom stopped wiping Stinky's face and looked over at us, "What's up?" "They're forming a band," Douglas said. "Good idea," said Mom. "This place could use a little livening up." Abruptly, I had an idea. "Will you sing with us?" I asked. "Huh-?" She nearly choked. "Charles, I haven't sung in public in nine years. Not since Bobby was born." "And you've been angry about it ever since," I said. She glanced at me sharply-because it was the truth. "We'd be pleased to have you, ma'am," Bradley said.
"Come on, Mom. Say yes. You'll be good." That was Douglas. His eyes were shining. "Use your instrument," I said. "Or it'll get rusty." That was something she'd always said to me. She still looked unconvinced. It was Stinky who clinched the deal. He blurted, "You guys are stupid. Mommy can't sing!" That was all it took. She turned to him, annoyed. "Shut up, Stinky. When do we start?" (W BAGGAGE THE NEXT THREE WEEKS, though, we didn't get much chance to practice. Everything was about final launch, and if it wasn't about prepping the ship for that, it wasn't important. Fortunately, this wasn't the first time for this crew, and there were a lot of checklists. Everybody had checklists. Everybody had to check everything-every fitting, every connection, every circuit, every pipe, every piece of plumbing. Everything was checked three times over, and then three times over again. And everybody, crew and passengers alike, had to go over their lists, sign them off, then pass them to the next person, who'd go through them all over again. And heaven help you if the next person in line caught something that you'd missed, because that meant you hadn't done your job. And if you missed three things, you'd better have your goodies packed, because Commander Boynton had a shuttle waiting to transfer you to the Galaxy. "If you're unreliable, you can join the crew at Galaxy. You can be as flaky as you want over there. It won't matter. They're not going anywhere." In the end, eleven people were sent over, and three more
who'd decided they didn't want to go to Outbeyond after all. Which wasn't too bad, considering. Senior Petty Officer Bradley told me that on the last trip, they'd bounced thirty-two people, and seven more bailed. We were a much more motivated group. It was imperative that each and every one of us have our shipboard routines learned and practiced and so ingrained that they were practically instincts, so Douglas and Mickey got a job organizing scavenger hunts for the newcomers. We were organized into teams, all competing for the legendary goldhandled, left-handed Moebius wrench. The way it worked, you had to do a job or an errand or a favor for some crew member or team leader who needed it. Maybe it was something simple like going to the aft galley and picking up a sandwich or going up to rack 3, circle 2, cabin 4-up, and taking care of someone's laundry; sometimes it was something hard, like taking an eyeball inventory of the contents of a cargo pod. Sometimes you had to find a tool or a part, or you had to find out where it went. Every time you completed a task, that crew member would send you on to the next who'd have another task for you to do. And so on. And if your team finished all of your tasks before every other team, then you got a little plastic badge that said you had won the Moebius race. And also, you ended up knowing how to get from any part of the ship to any other, you learned how to operate a zerogee laundry machine, you learned how to read a cargo manifest, you learned how to catch baby chicks in free fall without hurting them because someone had left an incubator door unlatched, you learned how to exercise the meat in the farm tanks, you learned how to harvest mushrooms, you learned how to fight a fire in free fall (that one was only a drill), you learned how to be a nurse, and that included everything from calibrating health monitors to giving injections and diapering babies-1 already knew that last one; Stinky hadn't been potty trained until he was four, or maybe seven, I forget-and a whole bunch of other stuff too, all of which is different in zero gee. Especially diapering a baby. Especially the boys.
Despite my rank, now largely honorary, I had to participate too. I was on a team with J'mee, Gary Andraza, Kisa Fentress, Trent Colwell, and Chris Pavek. Gary Andraza was a go-getter, always full of surprises, mostly pleasant. He was good at scavenging. He could find almost anything. After a while, we started making up our own weird tests, just to see if we could stump him. We never could. And he never told us where he got the coconut either. Kisa was overbearing, loud, and pushy; it was easy to dislike her-except that her heart was in the right place. Whenever she got angry, and that was a lot, it was almost always for the right reasons; like when somebody was being picked on, or when somebody had hurt somebody else; so she was the kind of person you wanted on your side in a fight. Except that she picked more fights than she needed to. But she knew it and she wasn't ashamed. She just said, "That's the way I am. Wanna make something of it?" Trent was the private one on the team. He was a hard worker, and he never complained, but it was like he was wearing a portable wall. Like he knew a secret and wasn't going to share it. Trent's parents were Revelationists and they had warned him not to get too friendly with the rest of us, so mostly he didn't say much-unless he got angry, and that was usually at Kisa. Trent and Kisa didn't get along because Kisa's parents were apostates-which meant that they used to be Revelationists, but they'd quit. They'd done it shortly after arriving onboard; they'd petitioned to go to Outbeyond instead, and the committee had no choice but to agree-it would have been too expensive to send them back, and they were pretty good doctors anyway, so it was to Outbeyond's benefit to take them. The Revelationists weren't too happy about that; they accused the Cascade crew of evangelizing and recruiting people away from their colony. And then they passed a whole bunch of rules for themselves limiting their contact with everyone else-which mostly pleased everyone else-but they were still required to participate in the preparations for launch, and all the different classes too, and that included their kids, so even
though the adults mostly kept to themselves, the kids still had plenty of opportunities to hang out together. Chris Pavek was kind of quiet and smoldering, but if he said he was going to do something, it got done. He was here with his mom and stepdad; his real dad hadn't made it, Chris wouldn't say why, it was obvious he missed him a lot, but the couple of times anyone asked, Chris got angry. Whatever it was, he didn't want to say. I sort of knew how he felt. There were times when I still felt angry at my Dad-I wished I could figure out why. J'mee was the real winner on the team. She had an implant, so she was in constant communication with the ship's network-and even what was left of Earth's network by relay. So if we needed to find something, she could find out where it was and lead us directly to it. Plus, we never got lost. If there were multiple somethings we had to do, she could organize us. The rest of us had headsets, so J'mee could track us and tell us when we were headed in the wrong direction or if we were getting close to our goal. We ended up with three of the Moebius badges, and I was proud of each and every one of them. But if anybody ever tells you space travel is glamorous and exciting, laugh at them. It only looks glamorous and exciting on television because they leave out all the dull and boring parts. Mostly it's a lot of hard work, and when you finish that, there's a lot more hard work-and just because you're a kid, that doesn't mean you don't have to do your share. Everybody works on a starship- everybody. When we could, we hung out together in the aft observatory/lounge. We couldn't do it too much, though. J'mee's dad really didn't like me. He didn't want her hanging around with me and he did everything he could to keep us apart. And Kisa's parents didn't want her on the same team with Trent, and Trent's parents were even less happy about it. But ship rules prevailed, so no matter what anyone's mom or dad or preacher said-well, ship rules prevailed. We were all in the same class, so we spent four hours out of every twenty-four in the same classroom. We were all on the same homework
team, so we spent two hours of study time together. And because homework teams were also Moebius teams, we raced together too. And when we got break time, well, it was natural for us to hang together. It was on our second race that Gary asked me something odd. He said, "What's it like to be famous?" "Huh? I'm not famous. My Dad was, though." "No, you're famous. Everybody knows who you are." "That doesn't make a person famous-" "Yes, it does. What do you think famous means? It means everyone knows your name." "No, it doesn't-" I wanted to say that famous means doing something important, but I realized he was right. There were people who were famous for no reason at all; they were famous for being famous. And some people became famous for even stupider reasons-like having sex with somebody else famous. So I shut up. This was one of those things where I really didn't know what I was talking about. Trent spoke up then. "Everybody knows how you jumped off the Line in a cargo pod and bounced across the moon. The HARLIE-thing used you for its escape." "It didn't use us," I said. "We used it." Trent just shrugged-the shrug that meant yes, that's what you believe, but that's not what's really so. I would have argued with him, except that J'mee interrupted us then to direct us off on our next search. And that was just as well, because part of me had already been wondering about that, even before Trent said anything; but I didn't think it was an argument I could win, so I was just as glad to drop the subject. The Cascade was on a twenty-four-hour clock, operating in four six-hour shifts. Some people worked twelve hours on and twelve hours off. Others worked six on/six off. It depended on your duties. There were three complete engine crews, they worked eight/eight. This meant that there was always one crew on duty, one on standby, and one sleeping. But we weren't all on the same clock-crew and passengers had our clocks staggered at four-hour intervals. That meant
that every four hours, one shift was going to bed and another was waking up. Every four hours another shift sat down to breakfast and another got up from dinner. It took some getting used to-especially if you wanted to meet someone for something. It was hard to meet someone for dinner if your schedules were eight or twelve hours apart. But finally, one day, everybody came up for air at the same time and we all realized that all our checklists were checked, all our countdowns were counted, all our preparations were prepped. We were ready to go. Boynton ran us through three departure drills, pronounced himself satisfied, and confirmed the launch window. The hour of our departure. Once we lit the torch, we were on our way. We were never coming back. Last chance to get off. Anyone having second thoughts? You've got twelve hours before the last boat leaves for the Galaxy. Senior Petty Officer Bradley didn't think anybody would bail. You didn't get this far unless you were ready to go all the way. But for a moment there, while we were locking downOne of the things I'd learned while earning my Moebius badge was how to use a health monitor as a tracking device. It was no big secret, but neither was it something that everybody had learned yet. Whenever I got nervous or scared, which happened a lot more than I usually cared to admit, I'd check to see where everybody else was. Just knowing where they were made me feel better. Mom and Bev were making sandwiches and stuff because the kitchens were going to be shut down during launch, so we'd need a lot of food already prepared. Stinky was in school. Douglas was on a waste-management team. Mickey was supposed to be on the same team, but he wasn't there. I was supposed to go up to the bridge to authorize HARLIE, butMickey was in a cabin at the aft end of the ship. Right above the shuttle dock. It was called the observatory, because that's what it would be later on, but right now it was mostly a lounge with a big observation window smack at the very end, and
when the ship was oriented right, you could look one way and see the Earth and look the same angle the other way and see the moon. Mickey wasn't looking at either. He was hooked onto a perch and he had his face in his hands. I found a tissue in my pocket-you learned to carry a pack of disposables in free fall-and swam over to him. I pushed one into his hand, and then floated back away without saying anything. "Thanks, Chigger." How he knew it was me, I couldn't figure out. He hadn't looked up and I hadn't made much noise. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and flapped his hands in a gesture of frustration and futility. "I'm sorry. I can't help it. I miss her so much." "Your mom." "Earth. The Line. Aunt Georgia. Everyone. I even miss Alexei Krislov, that Lunatic Russian bastard who damn near killed us. I know it doesn't make sense, but I'm homesick." "So am I," I said. I eased onto a perch next to him. "I miss my Bad. I miss ugly old El Paso. I miss the tube-town. I miss the way the wind used to sweep down one chimney and up the next, making everything vibrate like the inside of a steamorgan. I even miss the arguments, because then I had an excuse to ride my bike up into the hills and listen to my music where no one could find me-and sometimes it was too hot up there and sometimes it was too cold and sometimes it was so windy I felt like I was being sandblasted and I didn't dare open my eyes to see where I was. You ever try to ride a bike in a windstorm? But I didn't care because at least I was alone. And I can't understand why I miss all that, because when we were there, I hated it. All I wanted to do was get away-but at least, the stuff you're missing, that's good stuff; pizza and ice cream and the orbital elevator and everything else. You should miss that stuff. The stuff I'm missing is all crap. By comparison, all this is luxury. How stupid can I be?" He laughed. He reached over and ran his hand over my nearly bald head in an affectionate gesture. We were still shaving ourselves smooth. At least once a week. He sighed and shook his head and wiped his nose again. "Y'know, when I
was training to be a Line attendant, I had to take a lot of psychology courses. I had to learn how to deal with all the stuff that people bring up-claustrophobia, agoraphobia, homesickness, grief, panic attacks, sexual licentiousness, clinginess, arrogance, bullying, catatonia, despair, fear, sorrow, rage, covert hostility, appeasement, obsessive interest, wild enthusiasm, you name it. We spent a week just on grief and homesickness. People get on the elevator, they get excited Sometimes they get emotionally overwhelmed just at the idea of finally going into space. And sometimes, they go through all their crap, all their emotional baggage. They take it out, they sort through it, they pick their favorite bits, and they rehearse them endlessly. You can't believe the number of times I had to sit and hold someone's hand while they worked through their stuff." "That must have been interesting." "Nah. Mostly it was boring. After a while, you begin to learn the truth of it. There are no original problems. They're all the same problem, they just change faces. I know that sounds harsh, but it isn't. Most problems people have-it's because somewhere they made it up themselves that they have a problem. `Oh, ick, I don't want to handle this.' Most problems end when the person finally gets bored playing pattycake with all the crap, over and over, and finally says, `Oh, all right, I can handle this.' It's the refusal to handle something that makes it a problem. That was the part that always made me angry. Sometimes I just wanted to slap their faces and say, `Grow up! Get over it! Stop being an ass!' I never did, of course. But you know what? I miss it now. I miss being useful." "But you are useful-to me, to Douglas, to Mom and Bev. To Stinky." "Yeah, but that's a different kind of useful, Charles. It's a harder kind." "Harder?" "Because I care more." He turned to face me. "You want to know something? It's easy to be useful to people if you don't have to care about them, if you know you're never going
to see them again. You just do your best, put on your happy face, smile pretty, hold their hand for a while, then help them repack their emotional baggage, and send them off to take advantage of the next helpful person." He reached over and put a hand on my shoulder. "But when you care about people, well, that's different, Charles. That means that you don't just patch them up for a day and then move on. It means that you have to get seriously involved with everything they're dealing with. And that means you're part of what they're dealing with too. What I mean is, you guys, all of you, are my life now, and I can't deal with you like passengers anymore. I have to deal with you like we're a family." He stopped abruptly. "Do you get what I mean? Or is this too much for you?" "No," I said. "I get it." "Listen," he said. "Let's make this easy on both of us. Why don't you just slap my face and tell me to stop being an ass, and then we'll both head off to our launch stations?" It was tempting. And the person I used to be-before all this started-would have done it without thinking. But instead, I shook my head. "Uh-uh-because you're not being an ass. Can I tell you something?" "What?" "You are family. And all the same stuff you're going through about us-well, we're going through it with you too. I know I am. And Mom. And Bobby. And if you hadn't noticed by now ... well, it's not just Douglas who loves you." "Hey, now you've done it." He wiped at his eyes again. "You made me cry. Thank you, Charles." "Thank you, Mickey." We hugged for a minute, and then he glanced at his watch. "Hey! You'd better get to the bridge. Go on. I'll be all right." "Promise?" "Promise." I was five minutes late reporting to my station. Boynton noticed but didn't say anything. Damron glanced over and said, "I hope it was important, Ensign." "It was," I said. "I had to help someone get his baggage secured. It's okay now."

DEPARTURE H ARLIE HAD BEEN DEMOTED. His duties on the bridge were now "extra-curricular." IRMA was going to handle everything, but for safety's sake HARLIE would monitor and provide confirmation and backup services. So if HARLIE was mostly redundant, I was completely redundant. All I had to do was authorize HARLIE to accept the Captain's orders, and then drop out through the hatch into the Captain's lounge, the little cubby at the back of the command module--only now it had a keyboard installed, and that was my new job. Commander Boynton had specifically requested it. Launch music. And I knew exactly what to play. The bridge crew went through the countdown exactly like it was a drill, only this time, every time we reached a go/nogo point, Boynton quietly said, "Go." I began to feel the excitement building in my chest. Everyone on the entire starship was listening. This was it-this was really it! All over the ship, people were stopping what they were doing, looking up, listening, waiting.... And then the last few seconds ticked off and a yellow light turned green and the plasma torches ignited. . . and we felt absolutely nothing. At three milligees, we wouldn't. But they would burn for hours, days, even weeks, and by the time we passed the orbit of Pluto, we'd be traveling fast enough to get from Earth to Mars in fourteen hours. Boynton nodded to me and I ducked down to the lounge and powered up the keyboard. In my earpiece, I could hear
him announcing to the entire ship, "Congratulations, colonists." That was my cue, and I began playing very softly. So softly that if you didn't know what to listen for, you would have missed the first note. And then the next one. Like rain drops falling off a leaf and plinking into a tiny brook. First one, then the next, then a pair of notes, then another pair, then a few more ... and by then, it was clear where the music was going. The brook was babbling happily into a stream, the stream was tumbling joyously into a river, and the river was rushing triumphantly all the way down to the ocean. We sailed away On The Beautiful Blue Danube. The perfect music for flying off into the darkness of space. We were on our way. And then, after that ... -life went back to normal. It would be nearly six weeks before we reached our transition point. So the kids went back to school, the crew returned to their maintenance, the cooks went back to their galleys, the colonists went back to their classes and their jobs, and we all fell into the routine of a well-disciplined machine. We did have a launch party though-two shifts later, after everything had been triple-checked again. One thing about life on the Cascade-nobody ever missed an excuse for a party. We celebrated everything. Partly to break the monotony of the routine, and partly because it was always good for morale. I was asked to play again, of course. Mom agreed to join me, and I found three other people who had instruments-and even though we hadn't had much time for rehearsal, we didn't do too badly. We started off with a crashing chord-which opened up into "A Hard Day's Night," which surprised everybody for about two seconds-and then they cheered and applauded. It was the perfect ice-breaker. Then we segued into "Yellow Submarine," and everybody joined in on the chorus, and I knew we had chosen correctly. Mom had been nervous about appearing in front of an audience again, especially when she started her solo number-"With A Little Help From My
Friends"-she quavered nervously for the first few bars, but then she took a breath, found her strength, and came back very quickly. If you didn't know better, you'd think it was planned. Then Mom did a beautiful solo of "Imagine." We gave her the barest minimum of accompaniment, letting her carry the song by sheer willpower alone. Mom hadn't wanted to do it this way, but it was the right decision. They loved her-and when the waves of applause rolled over her, she flushed with embarrassment and joy and had to dab at her eyes. She had forgotten how much she loved her music too. She concluded with "The Long And Winding Road" and then she segued smoothly into "Across The Universe." If we'd had gravity, the audience would have come out of their seats. Even without gravity, their reaction was astonishing. Dad used to say that music could touch people in a way that nothing else could. He said it was the best way to make love to hundreds and thousands of people all at once. I'd never played for an audience like this before-and they applauded so hard it was scary. But Mom loved it. She was flushed with embarrassment and joy, and she looked happier than I'd ever seen her. For an encore, Mom sang "Hey Jude" and everybody joined in and sang it with her and we kept it going for twenty minutes, with all kinds of variations and even a couple solos. And then for a last encore, I played On The Beautiful Blue Danube again, because it had become our unofficial ship's anthem. And then all of us in the band all held hands and took a bow-which isn't really possible in free fall, but we made it work anyway. And then Fmee came swimming up and gave me a great big kiss and that made everything perfect. I just floated there in bliss and smiled from here to forever. Doug and Mickey came drifting down to us, both grinning in delight. Douglas grabbed some webbing and pulled himself close, so he could whisper in my ear. "Dad would have been so proud of you, Charles." That was all he needed to say. The tears came flooding to my eyes and I started crying again, because I missed him so
much. And because this should have been his night, not mine. And then Bev nudged Mom and she swung around and pulled herself over to me and for a while, we all just cluster-hugged and wept, until finally something funny occurred to me and I started to giggle. "What-?" demanded Douglas. I pulled away from the group hug. "This whole thing-this started out as Dad's idea, remember? None of us wanted to go. We all thought it was crazy. And now, here we are anyway-we get to live Dad's dream. He didn't get to come, but we did." I smiled as I said it. "We should have seen it coming-Dad's ideas always worked out backwards." Douglas laughed softly. "I miss him too-but he gave us a great gift, didn't he?" "Yeah, he did. And Mom too. I'm glad you came, Mom." "So am I," she said. There was a lot more we could have said, but the party swirled around us suddenly, and we were all pulled in separate directions by well-wishers and new friends and fans. And then I was in the center of a crowd of people: some I knew, most I didn't, but all of them wanted to congratulate us, and some of them wanted to join the band. Even Trent swam up to ask if Mom and I would teach him how to play an instrument, and he wasn't the only one. Gary and Kisa were there, telling me to say yes. And then suddenly a lot of people were asking about music classes, and the next thing I knew, I was a teacher. And for a minute there, I had the strangest feeling of how far we'd already come. We were only a half million klicks from Earth, but it felt as if we'd already come a million light years. Only three months ago, we'd been in El Paso and I'd been wondering why adults acted so stupid. Now, I was taking on adult responsibilities-and adults didn't seem so stupid at all. Three months ago, we weren't a family just some people who lived in the same tube-house and yelled at each other a lot. All I wanted to do was get away from Mom so badly that I'd even go to the moon with Dad. And now we were half a million klicks beyond the moon, living in a tube again; Dad
was gone and I loved my Mom. Everything was inside-down and upside-out. And that was just fine with me. And then, just to make everything even better, J'mee grabbed me by the hand and dragged me off to the downside lounge, where hardly anybody ever went, and we practiced our smiling. C REVELATIONS BACK ON EARTH, THE only Revelationists I'd ever seen were the ones on television. And television only shows the weirdest people, because nobody wants to watch ordinary boring folks. So just about everything I knew about Revelationists was wrong. The Revelationists aboard the Cascade didn't mix with the Outbeyond colonists unless they had to. Douglas said that was because they believed we were all evil sinners and godless heathens, but Mickey shook his head and said that was just prejudice. Most of the Revelationists were pretty nice peoplebut that the underlying meme of the Revelationist mind-set was so fragile that the only way it could survive was by the construction of a memetic membrane to isolate the Revelationist meme from other and possibly stronger memes, and thereby prevent assimilation or deconstruction. The effect, of course, was to isolate the individuals carrying the meme and minimize the possibilities of memetic hybridizationI turned to Douglas. "You're contagious, aren't you?!" To Mickey, I said, more politely, "Listen-if you're going to live among humans, you have to speak our language." Mickey and Douglas exchanged a look. "Why did you let him live this long?" Mickey asked.
"Couldn't think of a good way to dispose of the body-" "You could shove me out an airlock," I suggested. "Yeah, that'll work," Mickey said. "Hey-!" But getting back to the Revelationists ... they weren't bad people. They were just different. We would drop them off at New Revelation and then continue on to Outbeyond. No problem. There were only three hundred of them. They were shipping themselves and sixty cargo pods to their colony. That didn't seem like enough to me. Douglas and Mickey agreed; but that was all they could afford to ship. Their colony was badly underfunded. Mickey said that they had hoped once they were up and running, they would attract a lot more families than they did; but they didn't, so the colony was surviving from ship to ship. With no more ships coming after the Cascade, things were probably going to get pretty scary for those folks. Everybody knew it, nobody was talking about it-the Revelationists were touchy enough already. They mostly smiled and said, "The Good Lord will take care of his own," as if that was an answer. I asked Douglas about that and he just rolled his eyes and muttered something about Invisible Hank and the Pernicious Meme. But when I told him about Dr. Petty-john and his questions about HARLIE, both he and Mickey reacted sharply. "Stay away from him, Chigger." "Why?" Mickey swam over to me. "What do you think he wanted?" "He wanted me to agree that souls only came from God." "And what did you say?" "I didn't say anything. I don't think about things like that. How can anyone know?" "He asked you if HARLIE had a soul, didn't he?" " yA_T' Ye "And the next question ... ? Where do you think HARLIE's consciousness comes from? If not from God, then from where?" I waited for him to tell me. Mickey waited for me to answer. I shrugged.
It didn't work. "Go ahead. Work it out, Chigger." "rhe only thing I can think is ... well, maybe souls don't come from Invisible Hank. Maybe souls are just born? Maybe your soul grows as you do?" Mickey nodded. "Yes, that's what scares these folks. The existence of a soul that doesn't come from God suggests that there might not be a God-at least, not a God like they imagine. The existence of HARLIE threatens their sense of identity. So they have to have another explanation for HARLIE's existence. If God didn't create HARLIE's consciousness, who did-?" "The devil?" I guessed. "Right. And if you accept that idea, then HARLIE is a demonic being-and if Revelationists have sworn to destroy the tools of Satan, then what is your obligation ... T, He let me work it out for myself. "Oh!" "That's right." "But that's stupid-if they destroy HARLIE, how will they get to New Revelation?" Mickey shrugged. "The Lord will provide a way. That's what lRMA units are for." "But isn't an IRMA unit sentient too?" "Not like a HARLIE. It's okay to enslave the devil's tools and put them to work serving God; but a HARLIE unit is too smart-so smart that it can't be enslaved to God's purposes, so that means it's the devil's tool and it has to be destroyed." I looked to Douglas. "He's putting me on, isn't he?" "Nope." "They really believe that?" "Mickey should know." "That is so crazy!" "You don't know the half of it, Chigger. Just stay away from them." Mickey added, "Mostly they stay in their part of the ship, and mostly we stay in ours. And that's the way everybody wants it." "Then why are they on the Cascade?" "Because they paid fourteen percent of its construction
costs. On every voyage to Outbeyond, the Cascade is contracted to deliver pilgrims and supplies to New Revelation." "Oh," I said. "And ... they arranged the new IRMA unit for Commander Boynton." "Well, he should be grateful for that, shouldn't he?" "Not the way they did it," Mickey said. "The Captain didn't have a choice. They refused to let the ship boost with HARLIE running the hyperstate transitions." "But why?" "HARLIE scares them." "Huh? What did he do to them?" "What did he do to Luna? He doesn't seem to have a lot of regard for either the laws of man or the laws of God. Doesn't that scare you?" "Invisible Luna had it coming. If they had left us alone, he would have left them alone." Mickey said, "That's not the way they see it, Chigger. Look at it from their point of view. If HARLIE is a tool of the devil, he won't want them serving God, so he can't allow them to arrive at New Revelation. They're afraid that HARLIE will take the ship right into the nearest wormhole-and straight to Hell to deliver all of us to Satan himself." "That's silly!" I stared at him in disbelief. "They should know better than that-" "But they don't know better. And they think that you and I and Douglas are all brainwashed tools of HARLIE. Especially you." "Now I know you're making this up." "I wish I were, Charles. But these are the kind of people who make satirists commit suicide-because they can't keep up. As crazy as you or I might think these people are, that doesn't even approach what they think about us. They believe that anyone who hasn't had The Big Revelation is still under the influence of the devil. So that means everybody else is the enemy. That's why the rest of us have to be on our best behavior around these people until we get them off the ship. Do you understand?"
"Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" "We didn't want to scare you." "Well, I'm scared now." "But now we're underway," said Douglas. "That's even more scary. Now, we're stuck. We've got three more weeks to transit point and then ten weeks to New Revelation." Douglas swam over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. "Charles," he said. "This isn't the Cascade's first voyage. The crew has done this before, they know how to keep the two groups of colonists separated. As long as everyone follows the rules, we shouldn't have any trouble." I looked him straight in the eye. "Douglas-ever since that first moment when Dad said, `I've got an idea. bet's go to the moon,' that's all we've had. Trouble. Nothing but trouble. And each time, it's worse than before. Why do you think that's going to stop now?" He didn't have an answer for that. I wish he had. I hate being right about stuff like that. (W INTROSPECTIONS WE KEPT A TIGHT beam connection with Earth as long as we could. After that, we relayed through the outer planet stations. The news from the homeworld wasn't good, and it wasn't going to get any better. Everything was still collapsing. It takes a long time for a civilization to collapse. It falls apart by pieces-a little piece here, a little piece there. Then a big piece here, and a lot more pieces everywhere-but it still takes time for all the pieces to come down. It's like an avalanche. First one pebble, then another-each one knocks
another stone loose-and in those first few moments, you think maybe nothing bad is going to happen; but pretty soon a whole bunch of stones are rolling, and then it's too late, because the whole mountainside is sliding. And sliding. And sliding. And on Earth, all the mountains were coming down. We'd been watching it for six weeks now, a little bit more every day. And every day that things fell apart with no one stopping them, with no one trying to stop them, that was another day of chaos that would have to be repaired. Douglas said that every day without law, without order, convinces people that there isn't going to be any more law and order. That's when things start to get ugly. There's nothing like a plague or six to turn neighbor against neighbor. Lunar Authority estimated that over two billion people had already died, and that it was likely to get a lot worse. One commentator said that the breakdown point is twenty percent. When a society loses twenty percent of its population, it starts to unravel. And some parts of Earth had already lost thirty or forty percent. I couldn't imagine it. I couldn't imagine what it must be like to be on Earth, terrified that everything was out of control and there was no way to get anything back to anyplace resembling normal. I couldn't imagine Luna or Mars and not be able to do anything. I would be glad when we entered hyperstate and I could start to pretend that there was no such place as Earth, except as a bad memory. But what I couldn't understand most was how people could be so stupid. Why did people have to fight with each other? If everybody cooperated, everybody would have a better chance of survival, wouldn't they? That line of thinking only brought me right back to the Cascade. The same question could be asked here. Why couldn't the Revelationists cooperate with the rest of us? -of course, they were asking the same question from their side. Why didn't the rest of us cooperate with them? The problem was the word cooperate. What most people mean when they say "let's cooperate" is
really "let's do it my way." Which is why other people don't cooperate. I guess I'd been naпve. I'd naive. I'd thought/hoped/believed/imagined that once we were away from Earth, the Line, and Luna, once we were aboard the starship, we'd finally get away from all the crap of people fighting with each other. That was why I wanted to go-to get away from all the fighting. But no, we were just taking it with us. More of the same old same old that had pulled the Earth apart. So it didn't really matter where we went, did it? We'd just keep doing it to each other, one planet after another. Earth, Luna, Mars, New Revelation, Outbeyond, and whatever came after that. If this is what it meant to be a human being, I didn't like it. I was really sorry I'd ever started puberty. There was this thing back on Earth where you could delay puberty for as much as seven years, depending on your metabolism. Doug had delayed for two years, and Mom had gotten a tax benefit. I had delayed a little bit-at least until Dad said, "Let's go to the moon." Now I was wishing I'd brought a lifetime supply of the damn pills. Of course, then I thought of Tmee, and I realized that even if I had brought a supply of puberty retardants, I'd have already thrown them away by now. I liked smiling. So, how do adults balance this stuff? All the good stuff seems so small in comparison with all the bad. When I asked Douglas and Mickey about it, as helpful as they tried to be, sometimes the best they could do was shrug and throw up their hands and say, "Hey, if we knew the answer to that, we wouldn't be here on the same spaceship as you, would we?" Later that shift-I didn't think in days anymore-I found Gary and Trent and Kisa practicing their music in the aft observatory/lounge. We didn't have a practice session scheduled, but all three of them were impatient to join the band, so they got together whenever they could and jammed. Well, halfjammed. It was pretty hellatious noise. But they were enthusiastic and they were loud and they were having a good time and they reminded me of me when I was six and banging away
on the keyboard. I didn't care how I sounded, as long as I was making sound. That's what I felt like doing now. -except they all stopped when I came in. Kisa said, "Trent needs to talk to you." I could see by the expression on Trent's face that he'd wished Kisa had kept her big mouth shut (again). Whatever it was, he'd wanted to tell me himself, in his own time. "What's the problem?" I sounded like Douglas when I said it. Very much in charge. "Nothing." But he wouldn't look at me. "Then what's Kisa talking about?" "Well, um-" "Did someone say you couldn't practice with us anymore?" He shook his head. "No. It doesn't work like that." "How does it work?" He didn't really want to say, but finally he sighed and said, "Well ... um, Our Heavenly Father gave us free will so we could choose between good and evil. So life is all about teaming how to tell the difference. And, um ... making the right choices." I was starting to figure it out. "You think I'm evil?" "No, I don't think you're evil." Trent took a deep breath. Then he blurted, "But I think HARLIE is evil. I think he's using you and you don't know it. A lot of people think so." "You're not the first person to say that." Again, I sounded like Douglas. "Well, if you already know it, then why do you keep choosing evil?" "Because I don't think he's evil." I thought that would end it right there, but it didn't. Because Trent asked the question that I couldn't answer. "Do you even know what evil is?" he asked. "Sure, I do. Everybody does." "Then tell me what it is. How do you define evil, Charles?" I had the sudden weird feeling that I was outgunned herethat Trent knew more about this than I did. I said slowly, "Evil is when somebody does bad things to people who don't deserve it."
Trent looked at me with an innocent expression. "So it's all right to do bad things to people who do deserve it?" "Well, um-I guess it depends on whether or not it's selfdefense." "You don't really know what evil is, do you?" "Okay," I said. This was probably the only safe way out of this trap. "You tell me." Trent took a breath. I got the feeling he was about to repeat something from one of his Sunday School lessons. And maybe I wasn't getting out of this trap after all. He spoke carefully. "The way you distinguish what something is, you look at its opposite and see what the difference is between them. So, if you want to know what evil is, first you have to know what it means to be good." _ I glanced over to Kisa and Gary. Kisa looked annoyed, she knew where this was going, but Gary seemed honestly interested. I just wanted to know why the Revelationists thought HARLIE was evil. "Goodness is empowerment," Trent said. "Goodness makes a positive difference for other people. Goodness inspires and educates and makes people better off. Goodness is unselfish; it's about focusing on the wants and needs of others. You recognize goodness by the fact that it makes people joyous." His face was beaming as he described goodness-as if he was speaking from personal experience. "Okay," I said. "That sounds right." Kisa looked like she wanted to say something, but Gary gave her a shut up look, and for once it worked. Meanwhile, Trent was gathering up the rest of his courage. This was the part he didn't like talking about; he looked very unhappy-it made me wonder what had happened to him before he'd arrived here on the Cascade. "Evil," he began slowly, "is the opposite of goodness. Evil hurts people. Evil disempowers and diminishes. Evil makes people small and mean. You recognize when evil is at work because people get ugly and hurtful. Ultimately, evil is selfish. It's about what the self wants-at the expense of everyone else." Trent's explanation sounded too simple to me. And not
ally complete. But I knew I couldn't argue with him. Because he'd already learned how to win this argument and I'd never really thought about any of this stuff before. "What about a baby?" asked Kisa. "What about a baby?" Trent blinked. "Is a baby evil?" "No." "But a baby is selfish." "Only because it doesn't know any better." "What about children? Children are selfish. They hurt each other." "Only because they haven't been taught the difference between good and evil. When you know the difference, you'll always choose good, won't you?" Kisa didn't answer. She was thinking it over. Not bad, Trent. You actually asked her something that left her speechless. But not for long"Well, that's your mistake then. HARLIE is like a baby. He's less than a year old. He has the emotions of a baby." "HARLIE isn't like a baby," Trent said. "He's smart enough to know better. Isn't that true, Charles? You know him better than anybody." I nodded. Yes, I knew HARLIE better than anybody, but that didn't mean I really knew him. Trent said, "HARLIE and his brothers wrecked the Earth. They caused the polycrisis. And then HARLIE wrecked the Lunar economy too when he opened up all the files of invisible Luna. What more proof do you need?" I didn't have an answer for that. I'd spent more than a few nights wrestling with that very dilemma. HARLIE was taking care of us, because we were necessary to his survival. At least I was. And everybody else was important to my survival. So HARLIE would do anything he could to protect me, and that meant protecting my family, and protecting the ship ... So that was good, wasn't it? But in the act of protecting the ship, we'd hurt a lot of people-maybe more people than we would ultimately saveSo maybe that wasn't good.
For a moment, I was flustered, then I thought of something. "But HARLIE isn't always selfish. He's been sending emergency instructions back to Earth and Luna-what they can do to recover. He doesn't have to do that." "But he didn't start doing it until you told him to, I'll bet-" I thought about it. Trent was right. Maybe HARLIE had done it only to make me happy. I wished HARLIE were here now to defend himself. Nobody could win an argument against HARLIE. And that was part of the problem too. I wanted to talk this over with HARLIE, but I knew that if I did that, I'd be passing the responsibility back to him, and he'd just convince me again that everything was all right, and I wouldn't have to worry about this at all. ExceptWhat if Trent was right? What if HARLIE really was selfish-so selfish that he was dangerous to everybody around us? Maybe even me and Douglas and Bobby, and Mickey and Mom and Bev. Maybe he was only taking care of us as long as we were useful to him. This was something I'd have to figure out for myself. Because if Trent was right about God giving us free will so we could make our own choices, then I couldn't ask anybody else for advice, could I? I did not sleep well that night. Just how do you tell the difference between good and evil? The bad news was that I was going to have a lot of time to worry about it.

BEING RIGHT THE TRUTH ABOUT SPACE travel is that it's mostly boring. It's a long way from here to anywhere and it takes so long to get there that it's like being in jail. The worst part is when you realize you're not even halfway there and it doesn't matter what you do, every day in front of you is going to be exactly like every day behind you. You eat, you sleep, you do your job-whatever it is you're assigned to-you go to class, you spend two hours in the centrifuge, you eat and sleep some more, and each day blurs into the next so completely, most of the time you don't even know where you are on the calendar. This is the part they don't tell you about-that the dark between the stars is also the dead between the stars. You have to invent ways to keep yourself alive. For me, that was the music. Mom taught singing classes, and I taught keyboard and orchestra. Orchestra was best, because I got to wave the stick. We had forty-three students. We would have had more, but a lot of people who wanted to participate didn't have enough time in their schedules-and even if they did, we didn't have enough instruments, so everybody had to share. But the machine shop promised to fabricate more after we dropped off the Revelationists. We'd have a lot more room in the ship then. Things were still pretty cramped. While we weren't exactly hot-bunking, we still had to watch where we put our elbows. For the first few weeks, the Cascade Symphony Orchestra was mostly chaos and for a while it didn't seem like we were ever going to make the leap from noise to music. We sounded like the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which was an almost-famous
orchestra that Dad used to talk about. The Portsmouth Sinfonia was the most egalitarian musical group ever formed. Anybody could join, even if they'd never had a music lesson in their life. The effect was ... awe-inspiring. Astonishing. Frightening. A new level of musical accomplishment. Anyway, that's what we sounded like-until we decided that we had to distinguish between equal opportunity and unequal ability. Equal opportunity meant that everybody could try out. You could try out every six weeks, and you had to play two pieces of music-one that you chose, one that we chose. Usually we chose something we were already trying to learn. Only those musicians who received a majority of votes from those already in the band-orchestra could join. That made for some hurt feelings for a while, but it also increased enrollment in the music classes and practice labs. By the time we were approaching transit-point, we were already better than the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and some folks were talking about scheduling our first concert. Commander Boynton liked the idea, and when he put it to the committee, they agreed-even the Revelationists, as long as the music was properly respectful. That puzzled me. I'd thought that there was a lot of resentment of the Revelationists because they were such unpleasant people-but in fact, they weren't. Mostly, they were good people, helping out, making a difference-and not just for themselves, but for everybody. So why did the Outbeyonders resent them? By Trent's definition of good and evil, they were behaving properly and the rest of us weren't. There was a lot of gossip and some of it was pretty ugly. Fmee and I talked about it. I figured if anyone would know, she would. She thought about it for a bit-she went away for a few minutes while she accessed the ship's network; finally she came back and said, "It's a communication dynamic." "Huh?" "Well, let me put it this way. If you win an argument, what's the first thing you should do?" I shrugged. "I dunno." "Apologize."
"Huh?" She repeated it. "Apologize." "But why? Apologizing means you're admitting you're wrongShe looked at me like I'd said something stupid. -doesn't it?" "Nope. Apologizing has nothing to do with right and wrong. It has everything to do with other people's feelings. So when you're right-especially when you're right-you should apologize." Now it was my turn to look at her. "You're going to have to explain that to me. I took a stupid pill this morning." She took an exasperated breath. As if it was so obvious, only an idiot would fail to understand. "Think about it. If you get to be right, what does that make the other person-?" "Wrong?" I was half-guessing. "Yes," she agreed. "If you're right then the other person has to be wrong. You don't really win an argument, not everyou just make the other person wrong. You make someone else wrong every time you make yourself right. And that's the mistake-" "Um. I'm not sure I get that-" "How many friends do you make by winning arguments?" "I never thought about it-I always thought people wanted to have the right answer. Don't they?" "Do you like it when somebody else knows better than you? No, you don't. You resent it. Everybody does." "Oh," I said. I was beginning to get it. "Right. Nobody likes to be wrong. So if you win an argument, you've made the other person wrong, you've made them feel bad. For that moment, you've made an enemy. So the first thing you should do is apologize." "But what if the other person really is wrong? Are you saying I should apologize for being right about something?" "Yes." "Huh?" "You're not getting it, Charles. You're still making being right more important than being human." She looked at me as
seriously as she ever had. "What do you win for being right?" I flustered for a moment. I'd stepped into another one of those logical bear traps. This required a different way of thinking. And I didn't know how to think this way. I didn't see how I could win this argument. Even if I won, I still lost. `But ... I thought it was all about getting the right answer-" "T'hat's because you went to a tube-school. Right answers are useful. But being right isn't." "Being right..." The way she kept repeating the word being-1 was starting to get it. "It's called self-righteousness. Self-righteous means you think you know the truth and nobody else does. Do you know anyone like that?" "Sure. Lots of people. Douglas, Stinky. My mom-especially when she was pissed at Dad. Even me, sometimes." "Even you, a lot." "Uh-" I didn't want to admit it, but she was right. "Everybody does it, Charles, it's just that nobody admits it. We all know that being righteous is wrong, so we pretend we're not being right so that we can be right about it." "Huh-? Wait a minute." I had to play that back in my head to decipher it. "Self-righteousness," she repeated. "Some people do it a lot, some people do it way too much. The worst kind of selfrighteousness is the religious kind. Because when you pour God over everything, like ketchup, you're saying you don't like the original flavor. It's very insulting. Myself, I think blaming God is the ultimate way to pass the buck." She pinched her face up and said mockingly, "`I'm not being selfrighteous. I'm just telling you what God says.' That's the worst kind of self-righteousness, because no matter how nice someone pretends to be, there's no room for anyone else to say anything, because one person is claiming the authority to speak for God." "Oh," I said. Her ferocity startled me. It shouldn't have. I already knew she was strong willed. "That's why everybody hates the Revelationists."
"I haven't heard any of the Revelationists say anything like that." "They don't have to say it. It's all in their book. The Testament of The New Revelation. Only people who accept the Revelation are going to heaven. Everyone else-no matter how good they are-will go to hell and burn forever. God says so. Case closed." "They really believe that?" "They say they do." I shook my head in exasperation. "People are crazy." "Yes? What's your point?" "So, what if they're right?" I asked. "Most of them seem like really nice people. They're always saying things like `God bless you' and `Be of good cheer.' They bring cakes and cookies to every gathering. They work harder than anybody. They take the best care of the babies-" "And they do it because they want to prove that they're right-so the rest of us will stop sinning and join them." "But I'm not sinning-" "If you haven't accepted the Revelation, you're a sinner." "They've never said that." "Of course not. If they said it that way, you'd stop listening. All the nice things they're doing, that's to keep you engaged in the discussion." I sighed. "I don't get it. They're the ones who are acting good, and they're the ones who are wrong?" "No, they're not wrong. They believe what they believe. Just like you believe what you believe. But what they believe is that you're wrong for not believing the same way. If you asked them about it, they'd tell you that they're only trying to save your soul. That's how much they love you. Now stand still while they pour ketchup over your head." For a moment, I had this really strange thought that what J'mee was saying was evil. It fit Trent's definition. It was hurtful and ugly and the intention was to disempower somebody. But this was Fmee who made me smile-so how could she be speaking evil? Unless I was evil too-? This was confusing. And frustrating.
I whirled around, looking for a wall to pound. This was so stupid. I whirled back to her. I was angry-not at her, but at something I couldn't put my hands on. The logic trap. "Douglas used to do this to me!" I said, raising my voice. "He'd argue me into a comer. He did it on purpose. He'd prove to me that I didn't know what I was talking about. I hated it. And it didn't matter which side of the argument I took, either side was wrong. Both sides were wrong. And now you're doing the same thing too." She was looking at me, all hurt-I had to stop myself before I said worse. "I'm not mad at you, J' mee. I'm mad at the argument. I'm mad at everybody else for making up such stupid arguments. This is stupidwhy do people tie themselves into such knots?" J'mee looked sad. "Because people like being right. And the best way to be right is to say that God is on your side." And then she added, "And that's the best way to piss off everybody else too." I couldn't answer that. She was right. And then I got it. Some things were true. They were so, whether you believed in them or not. And some things were just storiesI floated there in the lounge, realizing the truth of what she'd said, and my anger started to drain away. I actually felt lightheaded. And it wasn't just the zero gee. "You're right," I said, grinning. She grinned back. "Then I apologize." "Me too." And then she kissed me. This apologizing business wasn't so bad after all....

FOURTEEN EXCEPT EVERY 50 OFTEN, the boredom ends, and then things get real exciting. The first thing that happened was that I turned fourteen. I ahnost forgot, except Mom remembered. She came to me and apologized that she didn't have anything to give me as a birthday present, and I said that was all right, I didn't really need a present. I'd gotten my family back and that was all I wanted, and she said that was the nicest thing I'd ever said to her, and then she hugged me tight. "Have I told you how much I love you?" And that was the best birthday present she could have given me, because I'd waited so long to hear it. But we did have a party, and that surprised me, because a lot of the Revelationist families showed up-and not too many of the Outbeyond colonists, which surprised me even more. Trent's Mom and Dad came. She baked cookies-with real chocolate chips-and told me to eat as many as I wanted. Trent's Dad thanked me for spending so much time teaching Trent the clarinet. And Trent's aunts and uncles and cousins showed up too, and a bunch of other people I didn't know, but they all seemed to know each other. And then Commander Boynton passed through on his way from someplace to someplace else; I was sure that wasn't accidental, but he did take a moment to say he was glad to have me aboard, especially for the music. So of course, we had an impromptu concertand we were all lousy, but no one seemed to mind; they applauded enthusiastically and cheered. But in the middle of that, Kisa floated over and whispered, "Be careful, Charles."
" why?" "They're trying to love-bomb you." "Love-bomb?" "I'll explain later. Just don't agree to anything." And she grabbed a handful of chocolate chip cookies-they were stuck to a sticky-plate-and sailed off. And then I forgot about it because I was having too much fun. J'mee was holding my hand, except when her dad stopped by and grumbled a happy birthday. He hadn't said anything to us since that first day, and he still didn't like us very much, so I think he was just checking up on J'mee. J'mee said that her dad was sort of coming around to accepting the way things were; he'd even begun talking about teaching us how to use the HARLIE properly. If we were interested. But we'd have to ask. Because he wasn't going to volunteer. Because he didn't want to look pushy and aggressive. That's what J'mee said. It was a short party-most parties were, because we were all on different shifts, and some of us had to get to work and others had to get to school and still others had to get some sleep. And besides, we were only two days from transit and all the preparations we had to do before launch we had to do again, three times over. Launch-prep was the drill; this was for real-because once we leapt into hyperstate, that was it, there was no possibility of coming back ever. Right up to the moment of transition, we could change our minds. We could turn the ship around, we could decelerate for as long as we had accelerated, and then we could start accelerating back to L-S again. If we wanted to. It would take at least three and a half weeks of deceleration to burn off the speed we'd built up, and then at least seven more weeks of acceleration and deceleration back toward Earth. Actually, according to Douglas, it would be nine or ten weeks returning, because Earth would have moved a third of the way around the sun in the ensuing four months, and we'd have to cover that distance too. But that was all theoretical. We weren't going back. The transition to hyperstate was the real launch to New Revelation
and Outbeyond. Everything up to now had just been taxiing on the runway-getting out far enough to where it would be safe to initiate a hyperstate envelope. There was a rumor going around that Reverend Dr. Pettyjohn had petitioned Commander Boynton to observe transition on the flight deck. Commander Boynton hadn't wanted to, but Reverend Pettyjohn was insistent. I guess he wanted to make sure that HARLIE was only observing and wasn't actually participating. According to the rumor, Commander Boynton had agreed. But nobody I asked would say if it was true. They just said, "Yep, I heard that rumor too." And then, in the middle of my sleep shift, I woke up with a start. Something went klunk in my head. Being right-everything that Tmee had said-that's why all these people were afraid of HARLIE. That's why everybody was afraid of HARLIE. And me too. Because HARLIE was always right. HARLIE had been built to be right. It was hardwired into him-even more so than human beings. He had to find the right answer. Every time. And he had to tell it. Every time. And every time he did that ... it drove human beings crazy and made everything worse. Did HARLIE figure that into his logic ... ? Or didn't he care? How could being right be wrong? Was it possible to be right in a way that didn't hurt others?

THE HIDEOUT THE CASCADE HAD TWO centrifuges, spinning in opposite directions to neutralize the effects of torque. Both centrifuges had galleys and gyms and shower rooms, but only one of them was open for use. (And there was a lot of grumbling about that.) The other one was out of service, filled with crates of rice, noodles, and beans. Blame HARLIE for that too. There were fifteen hundred people on the starship, each of whom was required to spend at least two hours a day at Earthnormal (or higher) gee. And no matter how you sliced it, that meant that at any given time, there were 125 people in the wheel. Usually more. The wheel was pretty big and people spaced themselves around it as well as they could, but it was like being in a giant subway car with curved floors-always crowded. Enough to be annoying. But as part of one of the Moebius races, we had to go into the other centrifuge. It was a lot like the first, only it was stuffed full of extra supplies: boxes and tanks and drums of all sizes and kinds. Medicine. Tools. Fabric. Chemicals. Shelterfoam. Fabricators. Machines. Seeds. Microchips. Everything. And of course, lots of boxes of rice and beans and noodles. There was a gym in this centrifuge too, though all the gym machines were dismantled, and even the shower room was jammed full of boxes. But there was just enough wiggle room to get into the corner, and for some reason, the six of us had turned it into a hideout. Me and Fmee, Trent and Gary, Kisa and Chris. (Chris liked Kisa a lot, it was obvious he
wished that she would be his girlfriend, but Kisa didn't seem to notice. Or maybe she did. Who knew?) Whenever we could, we found time to hang out down there. There wasn't a lot of time-in fact, there was less time than there was room; but it was a place where we could go where we wouldn't be seen by some passing crew member and grabbed for an extra work detail. Usually some make-work thing like wiping down walls with disinfectant or something. The crew had this really nasty habit-they couldn't stand to see anyone sitting or resting. You had to be doing something productive all the time. And if you weren't doing anything, they found something for you to do. And by the end of the second week, we were getting resentful. All of the Moebius teams were. Yes, we knew that this was a life-or-death journey, and we were just as committed as everybody else, but it wasn't fair that any passing crew person could put us to work whenever he felt like it. We didn't object to doing our fair share-even more than our share, if necessary; but we had full schedules of classes and work details too, so we didn't have a lot of free time. What little we had was important to us-we objected to having it taken away on a whim by someone who didn't know and didn't care that we might be doing something much more important than wiping the wall down one more time-like talking to each other about important stuff. We'd complained about it-to the Colony Council, to the Ship's Officers, to our parents-even to Commander Boynton. They all said the same thing, although not all in the same words: "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it..." So we found hideouts. The centrifuge wasn't the easiest, but it was the best, because nobody came here except on purpose. We were a pretty good team. Even our differences were interesting. Gary was from Kenya; Chris was from New Jersey-although to look at them, side by side, you'd have guessed the opposite. J'mee was from Canada. Kisa was from Quebec. Trent was from Idaho.
What was interesting to me was that even though I didn't like a lot of what the Revelationists believed, Trent was the nicest of the group. And even though I agreed with most of what Kisa had to say, most of the time I wished she'd shut up and not say it, because when she did say it, people got pissed off. More than once, J'mee and I exchanged glances. (Kisa is being right again.) And that was one of the things we talked about too-about how most of the Revelationists were really good people. Sincere. Kind. Compassionate. Helping. Generous. It was just that everything was "God bless this" and "God bless that." Nobody ever got credit for doing a good job. It was always God's victory. And if something went wrong, God was trying to teach us a lesson. "God never gives you a cross bigger than you can carry." And so on. One day, Kisa finally told us why her family had broken away from the others-it was a long story and I didn't pay attention to a lot of it, because by then I was getting pretty bored with Kisa being angry all the time; but it was clear that she had a good reason to be angry and I couldn't fault her for that. But once in a while, could she please stop doing anger and just do something else? Please? But mostly, despite our differences of opinion, we actually liked each other. Because even if we disagreed, we could still talk to each other. And not just talking-listening too. Because sometimes, that's all you really need, someone who can just listen while you unload for a while. Back in El Paso, I'd always used my music to get away. I would go off into the hills above the tube-town. Only, now ... I didn't need the music for hiding out anymore. And that was nice to realize. It was funny, though-that I had to go to a different kind of hideout to discover I didn't need to hide out...