by
Gustavo Bondoni
“It almost looks as if you're enjoying this, Rob.” The accusation was actually pretty difficult to deny, but Rob felt he had to try.
“Why would you say that?" He asked.
“Oh, come on! Ever since you got the call this morning you're eyes have been shining with a fire I've never seen in them before. I swear, if you were forty years younger…”
“Eileen, that's not funny. Didn't they teach you not to tease your superior officer at the academy? Especially about his age?”
“There is no academy, Rob, you taught me everything I know. But I guess you've probably forgotten that in your dotage. Anyway, you've got to admit that you've been treating this case with just a little more enthusiasm than usual.”
“OK. You win. It's just that this is the first time in those forty years you're so fond of reminding me about that I've actually had real work to do,” said Rob.
And it was true. He was the head of the security force, and, for almost the entirety of his career, the sole representative of that august body. But had been sorely underworked during most of that time. In fact, only his imminent retirement had forced him to even consider looking for a replacement, and then only after a direct request from the council. And he still couldn't see the point. What was the point of having a security force in a place without crime? Nothing ever happened here.
Until this morning. This morning had broken the routine. And Rob had a feeling that things would probably never be the same.
“Maybe we should try talking to them again.” Said Eileen, looking at the armored door in front of them, as if trying to open it through sheer strength of will. Rob shook his head.
“It's still too soon. Let them sweat it out a little; consider what they're doing. Or threatening to do.”
“‘Sweat it out?'” Eileen rolled her eyes. “You must be even older than I thought!”
Staring at the door, Rob wondered how they had ever come to this.
He himself had been born here, in the womb, and he would die here. Anything that had happened before the launch was not only outside his experience, it was probably outside his capacity for comprehension.
Nevertheless, he found himself remembering long forgotten history lessons, trying to explain the current situation. Trying to explain the unexpected, the unthinkable.
The inevitable?
After the initial conquest of the solar system, his electronic tutors had taught him, humanity had grown complacent. Living on their domesticated planets and under their titanium and aluminum domes on countless moons and asteroids, the population had slowly started to decline for the first time since the bubonic plague. Over a period of only one hundred years, the ranks of humanity lost nearly a billion people. The population of the solar system had dipped below the thirty billion mark.
Drastic measures had probably not been needed, but politics dictated that they be taken anyway. It was mainly a case of placating the media and drawing public attention away from real issues, in order to win the next elections. The issues in this case had been a series of disasters on the gas mining stations in low orbit around Neptune. Something had been inadvertently brought onto one of these outposts by the second mission to Pluto. There had been no sign of anything wrong until all the energy from the batteries had drained itself. Then healthy crewmembers began to die, one by one, for no visible reason. Finally, in desperation, the last surviving man had fled to another station in panic.
Where the cycle had repeated itself. Two stations. Three. Four.
The most prominent scientists and epidemiologists in the solar system were unable to explain the situation, or propose a viable solution. In the end, the system government had been forced to take a hard decision. The fleeing survivor of the fourth outbreak had been met by a government patrol ship, which immediately opened fire, dropping the escape craft flaming into the gaseous atmosphere of the planet. The infected stations were also destroyed.
The ensuing government cover-up was a clumsy affair, and it was only a matter of weeks before the media learned of the crisis and its brutal resolution. The Trinet news ratings had gone through the roof, and the resulting public outcry had nearly been enough to topple the system government.
Something obviously had to be done. But what?
In the time-honored tradition of politicians everywhere since the Pharaohs, the System premier had taken the rostrum and tried to capture the imagination of his subjects, basically to try to get them to think about something other than the perceived indiscretions of his government. He did this by announcing an engineering project on a scope never seen before, “for the furtherance of mankind”.
And he was successful. The plan to colonize Tau Ceti II, a rocky planet orbiting a star nearly twelve light-years from the sun, had completely overshadowed the events around Neptune. The massive undertaking involved using the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid fitted with enormous ion engines to push a half million colonists towards the planet. Despite the size and power of the drives, and the relativistic velocities achieved, the trip would take over one hundred and sixty years. Eight generations.
The engineering challenges alone would have been enough to keep the public distracted, but there had also been another factor, probably even stronger than the first, which made even the most cynical critics of the government's shamelessly transparent methods of distraction pause before openly criticizing the plan. Simply stated, humanity was in decline. The solar system, while harsh in places, no longer presented a real challenge. Humanity needed challenges. The alternative was decadence and stagnation.
But mankind, always quick to regain its drive when pushed hard enough, once again rose to the challenge. The flood of volunteers threatened to overwhelm the processing capacity of the government office set up for the task. In the end, the very best and brightest form among the tens of millions of men and women who had volunteered had been accepted. An even split between men and women, with only one condition having been imposed: each person had to have at least two children while on board. It would, after all, be a hundred-sixty year trip and someone had to be around at the end to colonize the planet. None of the original volunteers would be alive to do so.
All of which left Rob staring at a sealed, armor-plated door seventy years later. More than five light-years from the sun. In the middle, as it were, of nowhere.
He smiled. It was almost certain that whoever had coined the phrase “in the middle of nowhere” had never imagined taking it to this extreme, so perhaps, perversely, it actually didn't apply to his case. Maybe better would be a phrase he had once heard from his father, nearly fifty years ago, which he couldn't quite recall at the moment. Something about a creek and the lack of paddles. It had stuck in his mind after all these years mainly because he had had to look up what, exactly, a creek was. The inside of a hollowed-out asteroid just wasn't the best place to find creeks lying around.
Grimacing ruefully, he gently chastised himself, aware that this train of thought was not helping him to solve his current problem. Aware, as well, that Eileen was patiently awaiting his signal. Aware that the council expected him to have this situation cleared up by suppertime.
That thought brought a chuckle. He suspected that the council simply couldn't conceive of how serious the problem really was. They called it an “isolated incident”. The worst part of it was that the council members were all Womb-born themselves, and all had children. Were they really so blind?
“Eileen, please open a channel to the control room.”
“Yes, sir. They can hear you… Now.” Rob paused and took a deep breath.
“This is Rob Walker. Can you hear me?”
“We hear you,” came the reply. A man's voice. He sounded as if he was too young to shave, thought Rob, shaking his head. “Are you ready to meet our terms?”
“We're ready to discuss them. First, however, we need to clarify what, exactly, it is that you want from us.”
“Our announcement was perfectly clear.”
Rob said nothing, waiting for the demands to come. He was certain they would. An uncomfortable few moments of silence ensued.
“We demand that the ship turn around immediately. We want to go to Earth.” The tone of voice invited no argument, and left no room for discussion.
And herein lay the problem. It was actually physically impossible for the ship to turn around and return to Earth. It was a question of fuel. The ship had been designed to accelerate for fifty years, then cruise without power until it had nearly reached its destination. Only then was deceleration planned. The now-silent engines did not have enough fuel to bring them to a complete stop without the aid of the planet's gravity, much less turn the ship around and return to Earth.
All of this had been patiently explained to the individuals inside the control room, who had disagreed with this reasoning and shut off the air supply for the entire ship. It was at this point that the council decided that it was a security matter and had called Rob in to assist.
The air inside the ship was kept clean by way of four enormous scrubbers, whose job was to separate the carbon from the oxygen in the carbon dioxide generated by the breath of over a million people. Without the scrubbers, the ship could survive for three days, the third of which would be rather unpleasant. It was these scrubbers that had been switched off from within the locked control room twelve hours before.
The operation had been well planned. Turning off the scrubbers was the only viable way to endanger the physical well-being of the people inside this ship, which had been designed specifically to insure that a load of healthy, breathing humans arrived at Tau Ceti II. The only reason the scrubbers could be turned off at all was as a tool of last resort. In the case of an uncontrollable fire, colonists in emergency breathing suits could shut down the supply of fresh oxygen. There could be no fire without oxygen.
But this had been planned as an avenue of last resort under desperate circumstances – there were only five hundred emergency suits on board.
Rob shook his head once more. He wasn't trained for this. And his forty years of experience just weren't relevant. Despite his position, crime wasn't really a factor in his world.
How could it be? On the ship, everyone was entitled to precisely the same amount of comfort and luxury. There were no ranks or castes to create material injustice, or even material differences. Nobody went hungry.
Occasionally, of course, tempers would flare, sometimes reaching the point where his intervention was required. But this need was minimized by the fact that everyone on board over the age of fifteen was assigned a personal stun weapon. While, to many, this seemed like an invitation to mayhem, teams of psychologists studying the mission prior to its launch had concurred that it would save innumerable lives in the long run. The possession of stunners made it virtually impossible to get into a fight, or attack another person with a bladed weapon. And, of course, there were no projectile weapons on board. The last thing the designers had wanted was someone shooting holes in the hull.
Stunning was unpleasant, basically an electric discharge aimed at confusing the central nervous system, but essentially harmless, with no side effects. And every stunner was linked to the ship's computer, which, in turn, alerted Rob whenever a stunner was used. Rob could usually arrive at the scene in less than one minute (an asteroid, even a big one, is a pretty small place), and avoid any real injury. He had a very quiet job.
Until today. Today he had to deal with something completely unexpected. Having no idea what to say, he decided to respond in kind.
“Hey,” he spoke into the receiver, “you're the ones in the control room. Why don't you turn the ship around yourselves?” This was followed by a long silence, broken only by the sound of Eileen shifting nervously from one foot to another.
“What do you think we've been trying to do for the past twelve hours?” said the voice, finally.
“Well, if it can't be done from the control room, how do you expect us to be able to do it from out here?”
“We know you have a way. It's just that your generation is trying to keep control of the Womb. Well, now it's time for youth to prevail. Your time is up.”
Rob rolled his eyes. He had been hearing variations of this speech from third-generation colonists for months, ever more frequently. It was the sort of thing that irked him, but stopped short of true concern, since everyone on board knew that not only was a revolution nearly impossible on account of the distribution of stunners, it was also useless. The council “ruled” only in the sense that they served to smooth out small differences that could arise and enforce codes of conduct and decency. No privilege came from being a member, and the workload was often a burden, especially in a place where there was no need for the majority of the inhabitants to work.
“Don't be stupid,” said Rob, “you know as well as I do that all the controls are inside that room.”
“Send in an engineer, then.”
“There are no engineers on board,” sighed Rob, without activating the channel. To the would-be hijackers, he said, “give us a little while, and we'll see what we can do.”
“Hey, it's your air. We're in no hurry.” They cut the communication off.
“Damn,” said Rob. He wasn't trained for this. He was also sure that his generation, which had been born between five and twenty-five years after the start of the mission hadn't been so obsessed with controlling their destiny. It was something he would have loved to discuss with his parents, had they been alive to respond. They certainly had never resorted to trying to hijack the ship. And the transition of power from the previous generation had been smooth and logical.
Although it wasn't, strictly speaking, true that there were no engineers on board, since there were a few survivors from the first generation, what was true was that the youngest of these was ninety-five years old, and in no condition to be locked in with a roomful of potentially violent malcontents.
The reason for this lack was simple enough. The ship had been designed to be fully automatic. It had been designed to function for five hundred years, three times more than necessary. Redundant emergency systems backed up redundant secondary systems, which, in turn, existed in case the primary systems broke down. Which they never did.
So the second generation - his generation - had never trained any engineers. If they ever needed any knowledge, they would just look it up in the enormous computer-learning database. The second generation had gone to school, of course, but only because their parents had burned into their minds the utter importance of learning, in order to be ready to pass on this attitude to their successors. It was their responsibility to the future inhabitants of New Earth, the name chosen by the colonists for their destination.
Driven by the passion of men and women who had chosen to give up their lives for the advancement of humanity, the second generation had been bound and driven by a sense of duty, not directed towards humanity itself, but adopted because it was important to their parents. And, dutifully, they had educated their children.
But the single-minded passion was not there.
The third generation had been born to relatively old parents and had grown up slowly. And although their attitude towards life would have been familiar to countless generations of parents of aimless, confused teenagers throughout the history of mankind, it was something that their parents, having been brought up in the driven pioneer culture of the early years of the flight of the womb, hadn't been prepared to deal with it. And, like countless generations of parents, had, in the best of cases, judged it in terms significant only to their point of view. Others simply pretended the problem wasn't there at all.
Unchecked, the abyss between the children of the men and women who had sacrificed their futures for the sake of humanity and their own children, raised in a controlled, unchanging environment, had grown progressively larger. It was as inconceivable to the younger generation that they had obligations to anyone or anything beyond their own wishes as it would have been to the older to disregard the dreams of their beloved parents and their duty to them.
The womb, as it had been known for nearly thirty years, had finally reached it's own adolescence, a period in which the established rules were being questioned.
And Rob knew that, deep down, he had always known things would come to a head someday. He had admittedly been surprised by the violence and simmering anger. But he had known.
The anger had been fed, he saw now, with the clarity of hindsight, fed by inaction and deaf ears. And restlessness. The way his generation had been living was a duty-driven parody of the way they interpreted the lifestyle of their parents. It had never reflected the realities of life in the womb. Their children had never accepted the status quo, being unable to comprehend the rationale behind it. To them, living in a caricature of the outside way of life was not only unacceptable but also an insult to their intelligence. And, predictably, the implacable wall of silence from their parents fanned the flames.
Leaving them precisely where they were right now. Divided not only by a thick steel door, but by a much greater mental gulf.
“Damn,” Rob sighed, “I've got to get inside.”
“They won't just let you in, Rob.”
“They will if I tell them we're sending in an engineer.”
“Oh.” There was another drawn-out, uncomfortable silence. “I don't really think it's very safe, though.”
“So I guess I get to earn forty years back wages.”
“Nobody's been paying you.”
“I know.”
And, having no other choice, he went in.
***
“You did what?”
Rob hadn't been expecting a hero's welcome, which was just as well. But, he reflected, it could certainly have been much worse, all things considered. At least the loud nuisance shouting at him had air with which to shout at him with.
Yes, he could see how things could definitely have been worse.
“I elected them council.” said Rob, calmly.
“You can't do that!”
“Why not?”
“Because the procedure for choosing the council calls for a vote by all elder members of the crew.” said the old man with the irritating voice. Silver haired heads nodded all across the audience chamber.
“Who says?”
“Well, it's the council bylaw. That's how we've been doing it for years. Why, these young pups must not be a day older than twenty-five.”
This was, undeniably, true. Off in a corner stood the group of youngsters that, just a few hours ago had held the lives of the entire population of the womb in their hands. They did not look very intimidating outside the walls, mainly young and wide eyed. They glared at the speaker, but remained silent.
“Yes, but it's your council bylaw, and, as I already explained, you are no longer the council. Besides, as the representative of the council in that room, anything I decided should be binding to all of you.”
“What, on your say-so?” the councilman gave a derisory laugh. He turned to the rest of the council. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe Mr. Walker has been in office quite long enough. In recognition of his years of duty, I think he should be allowed to step down at this time. All in favor?”
A large number of hands went up.
“Please give me your badge of office, Mr. Walker,” said the councilman.
“I can't do that.”
“Are you truly thinking about mutiny, Mr. Walker? We have been at peace for seventy years. Is this as far as it goes? Is it possible that mankind can only have peace and order for limited amounts of time before barbarism and despotism finally take over?”
“It may be, at that. Sometimes it takes rather direct action to get things moving back in the direction in which they should be. Besides, I didn't say I wouldn't give you my badge of office and the central control to the stunners. I said I couldn't,” said Rob. “There are two reasons for this.”
“The first,” he went on, “is the fact that it would be unethical for me to do so. Not only on the grounds that I gave my word to the new council-”
He was forced to his voice over the protests of the Council of Elders, who, whether they liked it or not, were now the former Council of Elders.
“But also because of the fact that our generation didn't have the faintest idea of what we were doing. We just wanted to go on like we always have.”
“Of course. It's the only way to insure that we can continue human civilization when we arrive at Tau Ceti. Or haven't you realized that they,” he jerked his head at the group of younger men and women off to one side, “don't behave remotely in the way human beings should? Look at them! They look like small children after a naked paint fight. It seems to me that it would be ironic if the first humans to arrive at a new star were not even recognizable as members of a civilization, wouldn't it?”
“I think it would have been more ironic if the womb had arrived at Tau Ceti empty of people, and this is the reason I had to act. Had we held our course, we would have ended up dead or insane. ” Said Rob, shaking his head. “The greatest engineering feat in history undermined by the stubborn pride of a generation trying to resist change despite the fact that no group of humans has ever had to deal with what we have to go through.
“We had our parents to tell us about the passion and the glory of what we were doing. And we believed them. But they,” he indicated the representatives of the third generation, “they don't believe us. Why should they? Even we don't believe us.”
His words were met by silence. He went on.
“Human beings have always had a goal in life. They have had to strive to against nature or oppression or poverty. They have always had a journey ahead of them. Well, we don't. We are probably the first generation in the history of humanity who knows, absolutely knows what will happen with our lives. We were born in the womb. We will die in the womb. In the middle of it all, we won't be sick, we won't be able to get into fights, and we will be as rich or as poor as we want to be. No more, no less. The only impact we will have on history is through our children.
“We can accept this because of the way we were brought up. But our children can't. They might not be alive to see the end of the journey, but they intend to make sure that they influence the result. The very definition of humanity in the stars will be formed by their ideas, not ours. Think of this ship as the crucible for the forging of a new type of humanity. Or, if you prefer, think of it as the womb where a new type of humanity will be born. And they intend to be the midwives.”
“Rob,” said the councilman, finding his voice at last, “do you really intend to let them destroy the values and traditions that have made humans human for the past five millennia?”
“I certainly intend to let them try.” Rob chuckled. “And besides, if this first reason hasn't convinced you, there's always the second one.”
“And what would that be?
“They made me give them the central control to the stunners when I went into the control room. Right now, they're the only group of people with the capability for offensive action on the whole ship. Which means that they're in charge whether I managed to convince you or not.”
He turned and walked off, Eileen falling into stride beside him.
“Did you really give them the central control to the stunners?”
“Of course not. There's no such thing. The stunners are a safety feature – we can't turn them off.”
“But then…” her voice trailed off.
“I won't tell the council if you don't. You are the present now. It's all in your hands. Good luck.”
Walking off into a well deserved retirement, Rob mused that what happened next should be interesting. He thought he would enjoy it. He had a front row seat, after all.
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