“Careful,” he said to Linc. “Slow your speed or you’ll hurt yourself when you hit the deck. Just ’cause you’ve got no weight doesn’t mean you’ve got no inertia.”
He can never say more than three words in a row that make sense. Linc thought. He always uses words I never heard before.
The deck was made of cold metal, and Linc could see that several desks and odd-looking instruments were attached to it. The biggest loomed far over their heads; the cylinder of metal struts that Jerlet had grabbed a few moments earlier.
“Telescopes,” Jerlet said. “Devil’s own time keeping them aligned right. Our closing rate is outrunning the old computer program and I haven’t figured out how to update it. Gyros must be wearing out, too.”
Linc shook his head and said nothing.
Jerlet squeezed his soft body into a seat behind one of the desks. “Take a look at this screen,” he said as he touched some buttons on the desk top. Linc noticed that the desk top seemed to be nothing but buttons, row upon row of them.
The screen lit up and showed a fiery yellow ball that seethed and shimmered and shot out tongues of what could only be pure fire.
“That’s the yellow sun we’re heading for,” Jerlet said. “I tried for years to find out if the old generations had a name for it, but the tapes don’t have their star catalogues on ’em. Not anymore, anyway. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right tape— Anyway, I’ve named it Baryta, in honor of its color and in memory of my long-lost education in chemistry. That’s the name for our star: Baryta.”
A tiny voice inside Linc’s head began to whisper, He’s sounding crazy again.
Linc watched Jerlet’s face. The slanting light from the yellow star threw weird long shadows across his stubbly jowls and strongly-hooked nose. The creases under his eyes and around his mouth became deeply-shadowed crevasses. The glow from the little viewscreen where the blazing star smoldered wasn’t enough to penetrate the shadows.
“Now my frightened-looking friend,” Jerlet smiled up at Linc, “take a look at this —”
H e touched another set of buttons, and the screen went blank for a moment, then showed a picture of a bluish-green circle. It was flecked with white spots. It seemed to be hanging in outer darkness, because all around it was nothing but black.
“The new world.” Jerlet’s voice was barely audible now, a low rumble of hope and awe. “It’s a planet, Linc. A world that orbits around Baryta. I call it Beryl. It’s the destination that this ship has been heading for, for who knows how many generations.”
“A… world?”
“An open, beautiful, free world, Linc. With good air and clean water and more room than any of us could even imagine. Like the old Earth, except better: cleaner, freer, newer. It’s our destination, Linc. Our new home. That’s where we’re going!”
Slowly, Linc began to learn.
With Jerlet as a teacher, and the ship’s computer and memory tapes to help, Linc began to understand the who, the how, and the why of life.
The ship was incredibly old, so old that no one—not even the computer and its memory tapes—knew how long it had been sailing through space. Linc saw that the Living Wheel, the section where he had lived all his life, was actually the outermost wheel in a series of twenty concentric circular structures. The tube-tunnels linked them together like spokes that radiated outward from the central hub. The hub was Jerlet’s domain, permanently weightless. The Living Wheel, turning endlessly on the widest arc of all the twenty wheels, was in a one g, Earth-normal gravitational condition.
The origins of the ship were shrouded in mystery, but the computer tapes made it clear that the ship’s oldest generation was forced to leave Earth, sent away to roam the stars against their will. Watching the men and women who spoke from the computer’s viewscreen, Linc saw that they regarded the Earth as evil and corrupt.
But when the history tapes showed pictures of Earth on the viewscreens, the pangs of ancient memories twisted inside Linc and made tears flow. All the old stories he had seen as a child, before the machines had died down in the Living Wheeclass="underline" open skies of blue, bright soft clouds of purest white, mountains with snow on their shoulders, streams of clear water, grass and farms and forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. Cities that gleamed in the sunlight and sparkled at night. And people!
People of all ages, all sizes, all colors. By the uncountable multitudes. People everywhere.
Not everything he saw of Earth was good. There, was sickness. There was death. There was violence that turned-Linc’s stomach—gangs beating people on city streets, strange machines that spewed fire, people lying dead and twisted on the streets.
Now I know why Jerlet warned us against violence. Linc told himself.
But even at its worst, it was clear to see that Earth was a beautiful world. It made the cold metal walls of the ship seem like a prison to Linc.
“Beryl’s a planet that’s very much like Earth,” Jerlet said one evening as they watched the ancient tapes together. The viewscreen was showing a broad grassland with strange, long-tailed beasts thudding across the landscape on hooved slim legs. “It’ll be even better than Earth. Untouched. Our new world. Our new Eden.”
“When will we get there?” Linc asked.
“Not when, son… if.”
As Linc learned more of the history of the ship, he soon realized how badly the machines had fallen apart. Here in Jerlet’s domain everything worked well, but that was only one tiny section of the vast ship. Most of the other sections were shattered, ruined, decayed beyond all hope of repair.
“Some of the machines are still working down in the Living Wheel,” he told Jerlet.
“I know,” the old man said. “We spent the best years and the best people we had among us to set you kids up in a strong, safe area. But it might not have been good enough. We’re in a race against time.”
Again and again Jerlet told him the story. How the ship had come to a planet almost like Earth. How the people aboard had decided not to stop there, but to look for a world that was exactly like Earth.
“Beryl is that world… but it might be too late for you kids. It’s already too late for me.”
Jerlet explained it all. Time after time. He kept talking about the ship’s bridge, and how important it was to make the machines there work again. Slowly Linc began to realize that he was speaking of the Ghost Place, and the “ghosts” were Jerlet’s friends and companions who had been killed in some terrible accident.
The old man taught Linc how to read and count, how to work the computers, how to understand the strange words that were needed to run the ship. And every night, during dinner and far into the night, until Linc nodded and fell asleep, Jerlet would tell his own story.
The ship was never designed to function for so long without complete overhaul and repair. Although the ancient generations had been very wise, still they could not keep the ship’s machinery from slowly deteriorating.
As the ship cruised blindly through the depths of interstellar space, seeking the unknown world that was exactly like Earth, the machines that kept the people alive began to break down and die.
Whole sections of the ship became unlivable. The sections that remained intact were quickly overcrowded with too many people. Tempers flared. Violence erupted. And for generations the people of the ship lived in separate warring groups, each hating all the others, learning to fear strangers, to fight, to kill.