It takes a long time to say goodbye to a country, and she didn’t realize she was, really realize she was until it was too late.
She flicked her monitor to the analysis of the white residue she’d found in the crack. She’d asked the computer to identify it and run a match. It was plastic, the same kind that formed almost everything on the ship that wasn’t metal. How did plastic end up blocking a crack that could have been disastrous to their mission? What saved the ship during the two hours when the maintenance bots were down?
After a few key clicks, the time line for the collision came up. At zero hundred hours, a marble-sized rock hit The Redeemer. Power supplies to the bots and most of the ship’s key systems, including the computer, were interrupted. Automatic routines independent of the computer kicked in, warming a Caretaker crew and searching for alternate paths around the system breaks. An hour and fifty minutes later, the computer regained ship control. The bots started moving, and ten minutes after that, the crew began to awaken to klaxons and emergency lights.
Anise tapped her finger against the monitor. The bots scurried everywhere in the record. They had to have found the crack she’d found. They couldn’t miss it. But by then it was already sealed.
Anise’s mattress felt stiff beneath her. Not that that was surprising. It was 2,600 years old, as were the sheets and blankets and the clothes she wore. Everything on the ship had a brittle look to it. The engineers and manufacturers put The Redeemer together out of theory and hope. Could humans survive repeated cold sleep to make the 4,000 year long trip? Could the ship keep itself repaired? Could the crew remake and recalibrate the hundreds of times it would take to arrive at the distant star? Yes, in theory.
As she tried to sleep, she thought about the computer, a redundantly designed, decentralized intelligence interlaced throughout the ship, capable of independent action, controlling all the systems, directing the toaster-sized, multi-tooled bots that scurried through the maintenance tunnels like industrious mice. What did the computer do while they were asleep? Why didn’t her collision calculations done by hand match the numbers the computer spit out? And, most nagging, how did the plastic that undoubtably saved their lives end up in the crack the bots hadn’t found?
Finally, after what seemed like hours of trying to find a comfortable position, she drifted on the self-aware edge of consciousness, half hearing the ship, half hearing the mountain rush of her own blood- stream. Lazily she thought of an old lover, long dead now on Earth. She had picked him because he looked like William Butler Yeats, a long face behind black, wire-rimmed glasses. Anise asked him to read her poetry, and as she settled deeper into sleep, she heard his voice until he became a part of a dream, and in the dream he became William Butler Yeats sitting on a rock along the trail to the flat-topped mountain, Benbulbin. Not the old Yeats who wrote “The Second Coming,” with its prophetic, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” —the rough beast indeed of the mutagen that had driven them to build the ark-ships and sent them skyward, trusting that not everything human need end—but a young man in his mid-twenties, the one who collected Irish folktales and wrote, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: nine bean rows will I have here, a hive for the honey bee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.”
Yeats held a walking stick in one hand, and a book lay open on his lap. “What are you looking for, lass, so early on a morning as fine as this?”
But before she could answer his question, a wind came up, and the figure of Yeats dissolved into a wisp and the rock was empty. Behind her, something laughed. She turned, and the long trail down the mountain was empty, though there were many limestone boulders a being could hide behind. She thought, there must be leprechauns or Sidhe, the fairy folk.
Yeats’s voice came out of the wisp. “One wonders if the creatures who live followed us from the ruins of our old towns, or did they come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had shone for a moment?”
Even in the dream, she was puzzled, and when she sat on the rock where Yeats had been, she found it wasn’t rock at all, but white plastic. She scraped at it and white remnants stuck under her fingernails. The wind blew again, moaning through the rocks. She could see it, eddying through the fog below her where the trail disappeared, twisting the gray cloud into fantastic shapes. For a second she saw faces. Scowling faces, and she couldn’t breathe.
They were taking the air, the faces in the fog, stealing the air from around her. The hull is breached, Anise thought. She tried to scream, but when her mouth opened all the breath rushed out. No air! She flopped off the rock, hand at her throat, while the sky darkened so quickly that within a few eye blinks stars shone through.
The hull is breached!
Deep in the warehouse module, Anise found what she’d been searching for, the raw polychloride supplies that served as a base for any of dozens of kinds of plastics the ship might need. Six huge vats standing on stubby legs held the chemicals. Sierra wandered toward the back of the room. “I don’t see what the point in coming down here. It’s been hundreds of years since this area’s been used.”
The low ceilinged room absorbed the sounds of their footsteps. Recessed wall lights illuminated the area poorly. Anise imagined steely-eyed little people watching them from the deep shadows. She shook her head, then popped the latch on the first vat and pushed the lid. It resisted for an instant, then the hinges gave way reluctantly. According to the records, this vat hadn’t been opened in eight-hundred years. Grainy, white flakes filled it to the top. She dipped her hand in thoughtfully. Plastic, exactly like what she’d found choking the crack in the hull fell from her grip like sand. Under the atmospheric pressure from within the ship, the plastic had solidified into an airtight seal. If the crack had been any more than a complex set of fissures, the plastic would have flown into space with their air, but the break had been so narrow and filled with twists and turns that the plastic piled up, expanded and corked the leak.
Anise picked up another handful, let the grains trickle between her fingers and tried to picture what had happened in the minutes after the collision. The records showed the computer went off line. The bots, without direction, froze. Emergency lights with their own power supplies turned on. At the break, air would have been screaming: the deadly whistle that spelled death, only no one was awake to hear it. How did the plastic get into the crack?
She massaged her forehead. In the old stories, leprechauns would sometimes do a worthy family a favor. Every culture, it seemed, had stories of little people by various names: elves, fairies, peri, pooka, nymphs, dwarves, gnomes, brownies, goblins, nixes, kobold, trolls and gremlins.
In her dream, Yeats had asked where the creatures came from. Had they followed humanity from town to town, or did they generate spontaneously from the land? Old Earth was dead now or dying. Was it possible that something other than the thoroughly inventoried supplies, the carefully thought out stockpiles of embryos and tools and equipment was aboard The Redeemer?
How would it live?
Anise said, “You checked on air consumption like I asked?”
Sierra peeked over the top of one of the vats. “Yep. The numbers line up perfectly. Nothing is breathing on this ship that we don’t know about. Not only that, but nothing is eating, drinking or processing waste either. I suppose you’ll say that confirms a supernatural explanation.”