I had an inexplicable urge to visit the whole of the ship. I went down to Level 2. The exercise room in which I’d battled Vax was empty. A few people were in the passengers’ lounge: the Treadwell children, Mr. Barstow, Derek Carr. I left quickly, in no mood for conversation.
I wandered into the dining hall. Empty tables, set with gleaming shining glassware and china on starched white cloths, waited for the evening’s throng. I acknowledged the good sense of the ship’s designers; by having officers and passengers eat separately twice a day, and merging us into one unit for the evening meal, they provided continuing variation in our routines while subtly reminding us of the difference in our status.
I closed my eyes to summon Captain Haag, competent and reassuring in his dress whites, delivering the Ship’s Prayer to an attentive hall. I found the table where I’d apprehensively awaited my first dinner, upon reporting to Hiberniabut a few months past.
Morose, I left the dining hall, wandered past the row of hatches to the passengers’ cabins. In the passengers’ mess the steward, startled to find me where the Captain seldom ventured, dropped his tray of silverware on the table and snapped to attention. I released him with a wave.
The mess could hold thirty passengers at a time; they came for their breakfast and lunch on rigid schedule. The compartment was plain, almost cheerless, unlike the ship’s dining hall above.
I took the ladder down to Level 3, feeling my weight increase perceptibly as I did so. Here, crewmen hurried about on errands, snapping to attention as I passed unheeding. I stopped at the crew’s presentation hall, or theater; its rows of practical, sturdy seats depressed me. Farther along the corridor was the crew’s exercise room, identical to the passengers’ gym a level above.
“Pardon me, Captain, can I help you find someone?”
Carpenter’s Mate Tsai Ting, whom Mr. Vishinsky had brought to the munitions locker. He stood at attention.
“No. Carry on, sailor.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He went about his business. Now it wouldn’t be long before the whole crew knew I was poking around in their territory.
I looked into crew berth one, knowing I was violating custom. The crew had no place of their own except their berths and the privacy rooms, and little time to themselves.
It was understood that the Captain would not harass them in their bunks by unannounced inspections.
A dozen crewmen were sleeping; one lad sitting on his bunk saw me and was about to leap to his feet; I put my finger to my lips and shook my head. He remained in his place, his eyes locked on me, while I looked about from the hatchway.
The crew berth smelled of many men in close quarters; it was clean without being cleanly. Calendars were posted on some of the lockers; unused bunks were neatly made. It was no more, no less than I expected.
Restless, I went into the adjoining head. The lack of privacy in its large open spaces made our midshipmen’s head seem positively luxurious. This room, at least, was scrupulously clean. The petty officers saw to that.
There was nothing aft but the engine room and the shaft.
I climbed down the ladder to the engine room at the base of the disk. The insistent throb of the fusion drives pervaded my senses. The outer compartment was empty; the Chief would be farther aft, then, in the drive control chamber. I wandered starboard to the hydroponics unit.
“They’ll be all right.” The voice came from around the curve in the corridor just ahead. I stopped.
“I don’t know. He’s a bastard; look how he shoved the Chief aside to get to the top.”
“Sure, Captain Kid’s ambitious and saw his chance. But he’ll let them go; he’s just waiting ‘til the last minute.”
“Yeah? Why?”
Heart pounding, I pressed my head against the bulkhead to spy on my crew.
“He’s showing us he could, if he wants to. But he can’t really hang them. There’d be a mutiny and he knows it. He’d be out the airlock before a single one of them got it.”
There was a pause. “I’m not part of any mutiny,” the voice said cautiously. “I’m out of it. We’re just talking.”
“Hey, I didn’t say I’d do anything myself. I just said the Captain didn’t dare. You know the joes, some of them are real tough grades. You think Captain Kid wants to go up against them? Why should he bother? All that happened was some joeys got shoved around a little. Nobody got killed.”
Another pause. “They got the death sentence, didn’t they?”
“Ah, that’s a lot of crap. This isn’t officers’ country, with all their young gentlemen. We settle things our own way. So what if Terrill got knocked around some? Serves him right for butting in. He knew better.”
“What if Captain Kid goes through with it, Eddy? What if Rogoff and Tuak and Herney get roped?”
I strained to hear the answer. “Who’s gonna do the roping, huh? Which crewman’s gonna tie a rope around another joey’s head? Look, they think they run the ship. But it’s us. We do the work. We run the drives, cook the food, recycle the air.
We’re symbiotic. You know what that means? It means they need us like we need them. He won’t rope them. He’s smart enough to know that, for all his being a joeykid.”
I backed away until I reached the ladder, scurried up to Level 3. Still uneasy, I didn’t stop until I’d reached the safety of Level 1.
Time for lunch. In the officers’ mess I sat by myself at a small table, brooding. As was the custom, conversation went on around me but nobody bothered me. When the Captain sat at the long table he was part of the group. When he sat by himself he was alone and invisible.
After mess I went back down to Level 2 and wandered along the corridor until I found the hatch I was looking for.
I knocked.
Mr. Ibn Saud seemed disconcerted to see me. “Oh! Come in, Captain.” He stood aside. His prayer rug was folded neatly at his bedside.
On the bulkhead was a large color print of Jerusalem’s golden mosque of al-Aqsa, its glimmering dome rebuilt after the Last War to look as it had before.
“Could we talk awhile, Mr. Ibn Saud?”
“I am at your disposal.” He offered me his only chair, sat on his bunk facing me.
“I have a decision to make. I know what my superiors would expect, but the choice isn’t theirs, it’s mine. I think it’s arbitrary and rigid to put our condemned sailors to death for a brawl. On the other hand, their riot was just short of mutiny. Wouldn’t it be weak and permissive of us to pardon them?”
“Have you studied history, Mr. Seafort?”
“Not with a teacher.” Father had taught me at home, with a page-worn encyclopedia and the Bible as our curriculum, along with used math and physics texts for the holo.
Mr. Ibn Saud frowned. “Social trends follow a pendulum motion. Repression, then rebellion; rigidity, then anarchy.
We’re frozen at one end of the pendulum.”
I sat. “What do you mean?”
“Look back, say, to the twentieth century. It began conservatively, swung in the 1920s to more permissive social mores, swung back to conservatism a generation later.”
“So?” It sounded rude, and I immediately regretted it. He was doing his best.
“When the Eastern dictatorships collapsed, America was left the dominant power just as it was entering its liberal, or anarchic, phase.”
I waited, wondering how this would help me.
“Willing to try new forms, America set up the U.N. Government, and transferred a few powers to it. So the skeleton of world government was in place when the American-Japanese financial structure collapsed. If not for that, who knows what chaos the world would have then endured?” He shuddered.
I tried not to show my impatience. What did ancient history have to do with Hibernia?“Do you know, Micky”--he paused, perhaps sensing my discomfort at the casual use of my name--”Captain, that the U.N. was once a force for liberal change? In the early twentyfirst century most of the great reforms originated in the U.N.”
“You call the reforms of 2024 liberal? They banned most stimulants, public gambling, racing of horses, even some sexual practices.”