Teague watched Moira’s face quivering as she moved her hands on the controls, and remembered how she had looked, once, when he kissed her… he himself felt as useless as a vermiform appendix. Life-Support was fail-safe and idiot-proof; barring some unimaginable catastrophe, he would have nothing important to do for years, except for synthesizing food. When, or if, they found a habitable planet — when, not if, he reminded himself sternly — it would be quite different; as the biologist, he would be responsible for every fragment of their physical safety in an alien environment. Aboard ship, he had a sinecure; he was a piece of dispensable software, whose work was being done by machinery and computer.
Well, they were all like that, really. The ship could have been sent out, unmanned, as a probe — but an unmanned probe could not have surveyed the planets at the hypothetical other end of the voyage. Only Peake, as their doctor, and Fontana, as their psychologist, would have much to do on the voyage of nine light-years. Once they were out of the Solar System, only Moira would have much of anything to do inside the ship, and that was mostly trimming the sails by calculating light-pressures. The ship would navigate on a course which Peake and Ching had already set; to change it now would mean decelerating down to zero and re-computing from the beginning. Every second they remained in flight, they were reaching velocities which were more and more unthinkable. More than nine meters per second per second — maybe Ravi could have figured out how fast they were actually travelling by now. He couldn’t.
So the most interesting thing he’d be doing for the next several years was synthesizing catgut for violin strings!
Perhaps he would have time to learn to play the oboe — there were spare instruments aboard. Or he would have time to compose the string quartet which had been in his mind ever since he learned, at fourteen, that he did not have the manual dexterity to be more than a mediocre violinist, and taken up the flute. Melodies moved constantly in his mind; now he would have time to write them down.
He’d never tried before; most music was computer-written. He remembered a story from the early days of the Academy, when the computer, programmed to write a chorale, had exactly duplicated, missing only four notes in the tenor part, Bach’s setting for O Sacred Head. Well, given the information about how to compose music, that was the perfect chorale, the logical and perfect way to write and harmonize the music, the inevitability of perfection. The people who programmed the computer had been overwhelmed by Bach, after all; and after that episode the Melody Mark VII had been nicknamed JOHANN.
How could anyone write music greater than that, or worth naming in the same breath? Well, the twentieth-century classic composer Alan Hovhaness had done it; critics had said that he had taken music in the direction it might have gone if Bach had never written his Well-Tempered Clavier. Perhaps there were still other directions, though he was sure Peake didn’t think so, and Peake was a real musician.
Now the Earth could barely be distinguished; it had lost its blue color and was a point of light against black, against other points of light. Ravi glanced at his chronometer and said, “My shift, Peake.” Peake drew his attention from the window and said, “Right.” Formally, they exchanged places. Teague said, “Are we going to keep on Greenwich Time for the whole voyage? Hours, days… weeks, months, years — they don’t make much sense out here. Anyhow, as we approach light-speed, there’ll be changes… it’s not as if we could keep the clock set for what time it is back in dear old Greenwich of whatever!”
Peake said, turning his back on the vista of stars — that was Ravi’s responsibility for the next twelve hours — “We have to keep a 24 hour ship’s day, or something near it. For circadian rhythms. God alone knows what light-speeds and zero gravity will do to our body rhythms. But we have to try and keep them as stable as we can, and for the next few months it won’t matter much.”
“The ship’s already on Universal Solar,” Ravi said, looking at a small tell-tale at the very center of the ceiling of the Bridge; the seats swivelled through a full circular rotation — so they could be turned to any angle, though they would lock at whatever angle the sitter chose. The tell-tale displayed, in smooth-flowing liquid crystal digital numbers the time by what was called Universal Solar, or sometimes only true time; a kind of reckoning in seconds from the pulses of energy, elapsed time from the original Big Bang; true time, so-called, measured the exact age of the known Universe.
“But Universal Solar is clumsy,” said Peake, looking at the long stream of numbers which measured time, in seconds, from the beginning of the universe,
“Clumsy!” Moira said, disbelieving, and Ching said, “How can anything as precise as that be clumsy?”
“Because,” Peake said, good-naturedly, “by the time you read all that off, in seconds, it’s some other time already. I suggest we keep Greenwich Time just to figure out when our shifts begin and end, and when we’re going to meet for those daily music sessions Fontana, or was it Moira, thought were so important.”
Looking at the long, ever-changing stream of numbers on the tell-tale, they all, one by one, agreed to that. Greenwich Time would become a kind of biological time-clock for them; Ching’s flying fingers programmed, into the computer, a sequence of “elapsed time, in hours and days, from leaving the space station,” basing it on 24-hour days, of which this — they all agreed — was Day One. Years calculated in Earth reckoning, Anno Domini, a religio-political reckoning, they all agreed, had no meaning for them. Day One became the day they had been skylifted, first to the Space Station, then to the Ship; and by that reckoning, when Ravi took his first shift, it became noon of Day One. Peake would go on-shift again at Midnight, which they would call the first moment of Day Two.
“And we have been aboard for four hours,” Ching said, “and my biological rhythms are beginning to tell me that it’s dinner-time. Is there any reason we have to stay in the Bridge, or must one of us be here to tend the machines at all times? And what will that do to our theory that we all ought to meet once a day?”
Moira made a final finicky adjustment to a sail, a great triangular translucency blotting out a third of the stars, From the lenticular window she could see that the ship was rotating on its own axis as it moved against the stars. They seemed to be standing still, now, without the reference points of Space Station and Earth, and when she shut her eyes, the DeMag units told her that “down” was the floor of the Bridge, and the lenticular window was straight before her; but when she looked out to the small slow spin of the ship around them, the other shaped modules that came into view and were obscured again, themselves obscuring nearby stars, she felt a trace of vertigo, her inner ear channels rebelled, and she wondered how she could manage to swallow against this queasiness. She shut her eyes and the Bridge settled into homey normal up-and-down. Stability again.
“Nobody has to be here,” she said, looking with tender farewell at the exquisite delicacy of the sail shivering across the stars, “the sails are programmed to trim themselves; strictly speaking, we could leave the Bridge now and spend the next four years or so playing string quartets and making love in our cabins. Each of us ought to check in here on our instruments once every shift or so, but mostly that’s busy-work. Once our course is set, that’s it.” And she wondered why a faint, sick shiver went through her at the words; and she remembered her younger self, crying and refusing to step on a piece of playground equipment which, a few minutes later, cast several of her playmates, and one of her counselors, to the ground in screaming heaps….