We didn’t get an explanation until that evening when Danny Shaker came by to report on his progress in producing a trajectory for us.
That’s another thing that I ought to have mentioned earlier, right when it happened. But I didn’t, so rather than fiddle with the record back there, I’m going to stick it in here.
It had happened on the previous day, before we had been heading out from Upside for an hour. Danny Shaker came to see Doctor Eileen as we were preparing for our first night of sleep in low gravity.
“I want to remind you of your promise, Doctor,” he said. “You indicated that you would tell me our destination as soon as we were on the way.”
“You certainly haven’t wasted much time in asking.” Doctor Eileen sounded more amused than annoyed.
“That’s because I don’t want to waste your money or your time. As soon as I know where we are going, I can calculate an optimal trajectory. At the moment, though, for all I know we have the Cuchulain heading in exactly the wrong direction.”
I knew from what Doctor Eileen had told me that this was a crucial moment. Once she informed Danny Shaker where we were going, there was no way to keep the information secret. A message from our ship to another one, closer to the destination, might allow someone to reach Paddy’s Fortune ahead of us. On the other hand, there was no way to hold the information to ourselves indefinitely.
The doctor knew all that. She merely nodded, and held out a folded slip to Shaker. “Here are the coordinates. The position in orbit is given for midnight today, Erin Standard Time.”
Shaker unfolded the slip and stared at it in silence for a few moments. Then he placed the paper in his pocket and sat down, uninvited, opposite Doctor Eileen. “That is an orbit in the Maze.” His face was as calm as ever. “Do you know what that means?”
“I thought I did. From the way you ask the question, I suspect that I do not. Do you have trouble taking us there?”
“No more trouble than to anywhere else in the Maze. And no less, either.”
“So you can take us?”
“Certainly. What I can’t do is take you there quickly. How much do you know about the Maze, Doctor?”
“That it’s hundreds of different bodies, of all sizes. That their orbits aren’t accurately known, for any but the biggest ones.”
“Change hundreds to millions, Doctor Xavier, and you have a better picture. The Maze is a great jumble of rocks, everything from midsized planetoids to pebbles. Constantly perturbed by the gravitational fields of Antrim and Tyrone, and mostly uncharted. A ship can certainly go there. But unless you want to risk running into a thousand-ton boulder at a relative velocity of a few miles a second, and shattering your ship and yourself to bits, you don’t fly through the Maze. You creep through it. That’s why I say I can get you there—eventually.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.” Shaker stood up and patted his pocket. “I have to feed these coordinates into the navigation computer, and see what we come up with as the best approach trajectory. The Maze is complicated. It may take us a while. I am a coward, you see, by both experience and natural inclination.”
Then he winked at me, as though he was joking and I knew it, and left without another word. And now, twenty-four hours after that first discussion of where we were going, he was back.
We were sitting around the table, me between Doctor Eileen and Walter Hamilton, with Jim Swift and Duncan West opposite us, and an empty seat between them.
“You won’t like this any too well,” Shaker began, direct as usual. “We’ve done the trajectory calculation, Pat O’Rourke and I, and the safest route to where you want to go has to skirt out wide of the Maze. It will take us nearly four weeks.”
I don’t know if he could read the doctor’s wince, but I could. In making her plans she had hoped to be out and home again to Xavier House in less time than that. But all she did was nod, and say, “Keep it safe, Captain, that’s the first priority.” And then, in what seemed like an odd change of subject, “Tell me, is the Cuchulain a safe ship?”
Shaker must have been as puzzled as I was by the question, but he didn’t let his feelings show any more than she had. “I certainly believe it is,” he said, “or I would not fly in it. As I told you, in space cowardice is a virtue. But why do you ask?”
“Jay and I did a quick tour earlier today. I noticed that some areas of the ship are neglected and dirty. It made me wonder how well your central control computer is working.”
Shaker sighed, and sat down between Uncle Duncan and Jim Swift. “Doctor Xavier, I believe that the Cuchulain is perfectly spaceworthy, at least for the moment. But I don’t pretend that the ship is as good as new. It has been in use, more or less continuously, for hundreds of years. There is natural wear, in everything from main drive to maintenance, and when certain things go wrong we do not have enough knowledge of the original design to fix them. I’m well aware that some parts of the ship are being neglected by the cleaning robots, and I assume that the problem lies in the controlling software in the ship’s main computer. But I have no one able to understand that software, and safely change it.”
His answer, oddly enough, seemed to please Doctor Eileen. She was nodding.
“Captain Shaker,” she said, “you have been very patient with me. You have never asked me the natural question: Why are we going to the Maze? But I think that now you deserve an answer.”
Doctor Eileen really liked Danny Shaker, I could tell she did. There was a lighter tone in her voice when she talked to him, and a different little smile on her face. It did not surprise me. I felt the same way myself. He was different from any man I had ever met in and around Toltoona.
“Let me start by asking a question,” she went on. “You and I both know that the Isolation is real, and that before it happened there was travel between the stars. Materials and people came to Erin from far away, from planets around other stars. Why do you and your crew think they stopped coming?”
“Me and my crew? To be honest, Doctor, I doubt if anyone else on this ship spends two minutes a year worrying that question. But I do. I think there must have been some great emergency, far from Maveen. All the Godspeed ships were called there to help. And every one was destroyed. Perhaps in a great battle, but much more likely in some natural disaster. Maybe the whole fleet was turned to vapor in one flash of a supernova. Maybe they were all trapped around a chasm singularity, and they are still there. But we don’t know. And I have to agree with my crew: Without real information, guesswork like this is no better than a game.”
“I totally concur. But what do you think happened to the other worlds, all the other destinations served by the Godspeed ships?”
That made Danny Shaker’s smooth forehead wrinkle, and he crossed his arms to massage his biceps through the sleeves of his blue jacket. “I don’t like to think too much about that. I’ve been to libraries in Skibbereen and Middletown. There’s not much left in the general data banks, but you get the feeling that our survival on Erin after the Isolation was not easy.”
“That’s a prize understatement, if ever I heard one.” Walter Hamilton had been sitting aloof, still not fully over his spacesickness but much improved in the tenth-gravity field of our living quarters. Now he was showing signs of life.
“The first generation after Isolation survived by an eyelash,” he went on. “Without the space launch system, and the local space fleet, and the access to minerals and light metals from the Forty Worlds…”