Yes.
“But — ”
Suddenly, almost without warning, the familiar skyscape of convection cells and flux tubes was misting from her sight, whiting out. There was whiteness above, before, below her; it was like being suspended inside some huge, chilling eggshell.
But what? What is it, Lieserl? What’s wrong?
For the first time she felt real panic creep around her mind.
“I can’t see, Kevan.”
Mark, rising through brightly lit air, looked down. He was nearing the top of the loading bay now. The base was a floor of glass far below him, with the spine and drive section ghostly forms beyond; people and ’bots criss-crossed the bay, hauling their cargo.
Mark tried to analyze his own impressions as they rose. For a moment he fought an irrational surge of vertigo: a feeling — despite the evidence of his eyes that he was in zero-gee — that if he tumbled from this scooter he would plummet to that floor of glass, far below. He concentrated on the environment close to him, the thick layer of warm, bright air all round him. But that made the glimpses of the spine and drive — the brutal limbs of the ship — seem unreal, as if the emptiness of space beyond the fragile walls of the dome was an illusion.
Mark felt uneasy. The ship was so huge, so complex — so convincing. After a few decades, it would be terribly easy to believe that this ship was a world, to forget that there was anything real, or significant, beyond its walls.
Now they were approaching the roof of the bay: the maintenance bulkhead. Mark drew level with Garry Uvarov, and they stared up at the mile-wide layer of engineering above them. The bulkhead was a tangle of pipes, ducts and cables, an inverted industrial landscape. There were even tree-roots, Mark saw. People and ’bots swarmed everywhere, working rapidly and apparently efficiently; even as Mark watched the bulkhead’s complex surface seemed to evolve, the ducts and tubes creeping across the surface like living things. It was a little like watching life spread through some forest of metal and plastic.
“Extraordinary how primitive it all is,” Mark said to Uvarov. “Cables and ducts — it’s like some sculpture from a museum of industrial archaeology.”
Uvarov waved a cultured hand toward the pipes above him. “We’re carrying human beings — barely-evolved, untidy sacks of water and wind — to the stars. We are cavemen inside a starship. That’s why the undersurface of this bulkhead seems so crude to you, Mark; it’s simply a reflection of the crudity of our own human design. We sail the stars. We even have nanobots to rebuild us when we grow old. But we remain primitives; and when we travel, we need immense boxes with pipes and ducts to carry our breath, piss and shit.” He grinned. “Mark, my passion my career — is the improvement of the basic human stock. Do you imagine the Xeelee carry all this garbage around with them?”
They passed through access ports in the maintenance bulkhead and ascended into the habitable sections.
There were fifteen habitable Decks in the mile-deep life-dome, each around a hundred yards apart. Some of the main levels were subdivided, so that the interior of the life-dome was a complex warren of chambers of all sizes. Elevator shafts and walkways pierced the Decks. The shafts were already in use as zero-gee access channels; they’d be left uncompleted, without machinery, until closer to departure.
Now the little party entered one shaft and began to rise, slowly, past the cut through Decks.
Many of the chambers were still unfinished, and a succession of Virtual designs were being tried out in some of them; Mark peered out at a storm of parks, libraries, domestic dwellings, theaters, workshops, blizzarding through the chambers.
Uvarov said, “How charming. How Earthlike. More concessions to the primitive in us, of course.”
Mark frowned. “Primitive or not, Uvarov, we have to take some account of human needs when designing an environment like this. As you should know. The chambers have been laid out on a human scale; it’s important people shouldn’t feel dwarfed to insignificance by the scale of the artifacts around them — or, on the other hand, cramped and confined by ship walls. Why, some of the chambers are so large it would be possible for an inhabitant to forget he or she was inside a ship at all.”
Uvarov grunted. “Really. But isn’t that more evidence that we as a species aren’t really yet up to a flight like this? It would be so easy to be immersed in the sensory impressions of the here-and-now, which are so much more real than the fragility of the ship, the emptiness outside the thin walls. It would be tempting to accept this ship as a world in itself, an invulnerable background against which we can play out our own tiny, complex human dramas, much as our distant forefathers did on the plains of Africa, billions of miles away.
“Think of the pipes and ducts under that maintenance bulkhead. Perhaps our ancestors, in simpler times, imagined that some such infrastructure lay underneath the flat Earth. The Universe was a box, with the Earth as its floor. The sky was a cow whose feet rested on the four corners of the Earth — or perhaps a woman, supporting herself on elbows and knees — or a vaulted metal lid. Around the walls of the box-world flowed a river on which the sun and moon gods sailed each day, entering and vanishing through stage doors. The fixed stars were lamps, suspended from the vault. And, presumably, underneath it all lay some labyrinth of tunnels and ducts through which the waters and the gods could travel to begin their daily journeys afresh. The heavens could change, but they were predictable; to the human consciousness — still half-asleep — this was a safe, contained, cozy, womb-like Universe. Mark Wu, is our Northern, today, so unlike the Earth as envisaged by — let us say — a Babylonian, or an Egyptian?”
Mark rubbed his chin. Uvarov’s patronizing style irritated him, but his remarks plugged in closely to his own vague sense of disquiet. “Maybe not,” he replied sharply. “But then you and I, and the others, have a responsibility to ensure that the inhabitants of the ship don’t slip back into some pre-rational state. That they don’t forget.”
“Ah, but will that be so easy, over a thousand years?”
Mark peered out at the half-built libraries and parks uneasily.
Uvarov said, “I’ve heard about some of the programs you and your social engineering teams are devising. Research initiatives and so forth — make-works, obviously.”
“Not at all.” Mark found himself bridling again. “I’m not going to deny we need to find something for people to do. As you keep saying, we’re primitives; we aren’t capable of sitting around in comfort for a thousand years as the journey unravels.
“Some of the work is obvious, like the maintenance and enhancement of the ship. But there will be programs of research. Remember, we’ll be cut off from the rest of the human Universe for most of the journey. Some of your own projects come into this category, Uvarov — like your AS enhancement program.” He thought about that, then said provocatively, “Perhaps you could come up with some way of replicating Milpitas’ triple-redundancy ideas within our own bodies.”
Uvarov laughed, unperturbed. “Perhaps. But I would hope to work in a rather more imaginative way than that, Mark Wu. After all AS treatment represents an enormous advance in our evolutionary history — one of our most significant steps away from the tyranny of the gene, which has ruthlessly cut us down since the dawn of our history. But must we rely on injections of nanobots to achieve this end? How much better it would be if we could change the fundamental basis of our existence as a species…”