“The last scarcity economy in the galaxy.” I could hear the smile.
“I mean, it was the Synarche. It wasn’t like I grew up in a Freeport, or totally outside civilization.”
“Civilization is not evenly distributed. Did you join the Judiciary to get away from your backwater homeworld?”
I was starting to get irritated with his obtuseness, but at least it distracted me from the hardsuit pinching and banging in uncomfortable ways. “I said it got me better medical care—”
The tinkertoys seemed to be getting more responsive again. I wondered if the patch we’d just wormed through were reinforcing a structurally weak spot. Or if they were so old they didn’t work very well.
I risked standing up, and the cloud of microbots got out of my way. I rubbed elbows I’d bruised on the inside of my hardsuit while Tsosie levered himself to his feet also.
“Crap,” he said. “This is like caving.”
“Better light,” I joked. “I joined the Judiciary because it got me this exo. And it seemed interesting. A chance to travel and see things. And then they offered me medical training, and I found being a doctor was even more interesting than being a cop, so I transferred to Core General once I got good enough.”
Tsosie waited to see what I would say next. His boots scraped along beside me. We’d both turned off the electromagnets and were moving more or less normally, given the low simulated gravity. It wasn’t quite push-off-and-bound, but one definitely had to be aware of the ceilings.
Core was installing a new artificial gravity tech salvaged from a Koregoi archaeological site. Sally would probably get it next, unless one of the other ambulance ships was the guinea pig. Most ships in transit aren’t designed to spin up gravity, but it’s hard to operate on somebody when you’re floating, and their bodily fluids tend to form large rippling balls under surface tension. So we had fake—centripetal—gravity now, and soon we would have better fake gravity still.
“I feel safe at Core,” I finally told Tsosie.
“And you never felt safe before.”
“No,” I agreed. “I never felt safe before. So I believe in Core, because it makes me feel safe.”
“Congratulations. Now you understand why people go to church.”
“To feel safe? Is that all faith is?” I pounced on the next control panel. “Aha!”
“Aha?”
It was push buttons and little toggles. Mechanical linkages rather than electronic: the sort of thing you could fix with a tiny screwdriver. Smart, when wandering off into space for generations.
I flipped one of them, and heard a pop as the beige panel beside it unlatched. “Help me slide this gently.”
Tsosie didn’t argue. And after two steps sideways, I saw his body language perk up as he got it.
The beige panel was a cover over a viewing port two meters wide and a meter tall. It sealed, airtight, when the port wasn’t in use, and slid aside so crew could look outside and check the structure. Or take in the view.
Which was breathtaking. A sweep of hull decked with antennae and other protrusions was visible below the window. The port itself was bubbled outward, and if we stuck our heads in, we could see the hub far above us, and the massive arch of the wheel made to seem like a fragile tower by the vastness of its diameter. Far in the distance, against velvet black, the stars revolved.
And there was Sally, right where she should have been, holding her position alongside Big Rock Candy Mountain while the wheel whipped beneath her. Or, from our perspective, she was zipping backward along the great, motionless arch of the ship we were in.
She looked intact, and her navigation was obviously working. Tsosie reached out and tapped his fingers on my shoulderplate, silent acknowledgment of our profound shared relief.
We each let out our tension on a held breath in turn. Hand still trembling a little, I flashed a light out the port.
We’re okay. Continuing.
I repeated the message three times.
Copy, Sally flashed back, after a while. Standing by.
We went on.
Step by step—and occasionally crawl by crawl—we came quite a way around the ring of the generation ship. One pie slice, maybe, depending on the size of your slicer. We checked in again with Sally when we found a viewport pointed in the right direction. We also checked side passages and chambers, when we passed them, and found—mostly—predictable things, all filled with more lattice. What was this stuff?
“Tsosie.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you…” I got embarrassed and trailed off.
“…do I?”
“May I ask you a personal question?”
He laughed. “I started it. Be churlish to say no.”
“Do you go to church?”
He smiled. It turned into a grimace. “No. I don’t go to church. My people thought the world was their church. So now, I act as though the galaxy is.”
“The galaxy isn’t a safe place, though.”
The grimace went back to a smile, but it wasn’t an easy one. “Neither, it turns out, was the world.”
I was still wondering about that—about Tsosie having a connection to “his people,” even going back to Terra, a standard hour or so later when he looked up from his wrist and said, “I might have a thermal signature.”
“Might have?”
“It’s a big ship and there’s a lot of stuff in the way.”
The macro-microbots were unzipping before us and zipping back up after us again. Tsosie and I had both opted to reskin our hardsuits, which were normally marked all over their chest and backplates with an inelegant clutter of galactic medical and rescue symbols. Based on the provenance of Big Rock Candy Mountain, we were opting to prioritize the Red Crescent, the Red Cross, and the Rod of Asclepius, and deemphasize the others. (It didn’t escape me, given my conversation with Tsosie, that all of those had started off as religious symbols back on Terra.)
My favorite was the Nazzish symbol, the Blade of Life, because it looked so badass. But walking around with a great big scalpel on my pec plate probably wouldn’t inspire confidence in the descendant of refugees from one of the more barren and brutal periods of Terra’s history.
People who fled the Eschaton in their primitive space arks did so because they believed that anybody who stayed behind would die, along with the rest of humanity.
And if those of our ancestors who hadn’t made it onto an ark hadn’t discovered rightminding, the Alcubierre-White drive, and the Synarche (in roughly that order), those with the resources to become refugees might have been right. As it was, we managed to start making decisions that took the pressure off the Terrestrial environment and ameliorated climate change in time to save both Earth and humanity.
I overstate the peril. Earth would have been fine. The biosphere would have persisted and expanded again, as after other extinction events. Even a mass die-off from a methane burp is recoverable on a geologic scale.
But I and my species are predictably ethnocentric. We would have missed us, even if nobody else would. And thus: primitive space arks.
I was struck again, as we explored, that this particular primitive space ark showed signs of long habitation before its current state of abandonment. It was spotlessly clean—I wondered if there were more bots devoted to scrubbing—but the surfaces were worn, the finish on the walls buffed to a matte shine with layers of polishing scratches.
Tsosie said, “On the bright side, we haven’t found any more cadavers.”
Or even any skeletons. The giant ship we were searching seemed to be not just spotless and not full of dead people, but perfectly functional. Those side doors had led us to endless low-moisture farms full of food plants. The air that we weren’t breathing was heady with oxygen, and the hardsuits were filtering it out of the environment to recharge their own tanks.