“I’d think a Wild Talent like that would make you a top choice for crew,” Mei Mei, the only other woman in the tub, said, and Moira shook her head.
“Too unreliable. And they think it’s phasing out as I get older, anyhow. More likely they’ll try cloning me, and see if it’s genetic or reproducible.” Moira frowned, remembering the time she had absolutely refused, for no reason she could identify, to go on a piece of play-ground equipment. She had been given a severe lecture on obedience and antisocial behavior by the playground director, who had been killed, five minutes later, when the equipment collapsed under five children, under Moira’s horrified eyes.
Would that special talent be a handicap or a benefit on a Survey Ship? Moira didn’t know. Tuning her ears to the sound of the Jacuzzi, amusing herself by locating from that soft sound the hidden flaw in the machinery which would, if not fixed, put the pump out of commission within four or five days, she reminded herself to tell the maintenance man before she left the pool area. That was the talent that would win her a place on the Ship, if she did win a place, she told herself. The knowledge, so deep-rooted that it was almost instinctive, of how machines worked, and what could interfere with the working. Nobody had noticed the flaw in the sound of the pump, which increasingly grated on her ears like a false note in a Haydn quartet. The pump was like an apparently healthy man with a small, asthmatic rasp which ought to warn a doctor of ncipient emphysema, but seldom did. Scotty was murmuring to her, caressing her freckled breast under the hot water, but she pushed him impatiently away.
“Later, Scotty. Something’s wrong with the pump, I’ve got to go and tell the janitor.” “It sounds fine to me,” Mei Mei said. “Are you having psychic flashes again, Moira?”
“No, no,” Moira said, impatiently. “Can’t you hear it?” Machines, she thought, climbing wet and dripping out of the Jacuzzi and draping a huge towel about her body, had to be perfect. They were so much more reliable than human talents. She listened, frowning, to the almost-imperceptible sound, tilting her head, grit-ting her teeth. Poor old fellow, she whispered to the laboring machinery, just take it easy, we’ll have you fixed up and comfortable pretty soon, I’ll make sure they take good care of you.
And in her solitary cubicle in the dormitory where the other students, alone or together, tried to forget tomorrow and the impending finality of the choices, the small, slight, dark-haired girl who had been dubbed “Ching” in her first week in the Academy, stood brushing her teeth before the mirror. The teeth were perfect — any predisposition toward dental or gum disease had been eliminated from her altered genetic makeup. Academy nutrition and conscientious brushing kept them that way.
She had the Oriental eye-fold; the insemination do-nor who had “fathered” her, she had been told, was a Japanese architect. But her face was too much a racial blend to have any other distinguishing characteristics. Even a touch of ugliness, she thought, would have made her more interesting. But, like all G-Ns — Genetically ENgineered Superiors — her face was boringly average and ordinary. She wondered if the scientists who had created the G-Ns had done it that way so that there would not be one more thing for the ordinary, genetically mixed humans to envy; great beauty would have set them even further apart from everyone else.
Tonight she had kept to the exact routine she had known all her life; she had put on a tape of one of her favorite violin sonatas, later practiced a half hour on the viola as she had every night since her fifth year, and now, her teeth brushed and tingling with cleanliness, she showered and went peacefully to bed, wondering how showers and other hygienic maneuvers would be managed in the low gravity of a Ship. Alone among her classmates, she knew she would be chosen. The experiment which had created the G-Ns was an unqualified success; in the class below Ching, there were twenty of them; two classes below her, there were forty, and not one had dropped out due to illness or physical or mental incompetence. The other G-N in Ching’s class, the one that would graduate tomorrow, had left them on her fifteenth birthday; some unsuspected randomness in the engineered musical talent had given her such a soprano voice as was heard only once or twice in a generation, and she had left, with the blessing of the Academy, to pursue a concert career. Ching thought, a little wistfully, of Zora —who had been given back her own name, Suzanne Hayley, and her own nationality, which was Canadian. She, Ching, would never be anything but Ching, of the UNEPS Academy. No name, no country, only a Ship, and fame she would not be able to enjoy. Zora had been allowed to follow her own choice and her own destiny.
But the G-Ns were certainly the wave of the future; some day, no doubt, the G-Ns would be the staff of all the Survey Ships. Ching had no doubt that next year’s class would be the full Ship complement often, instead of leaving it to competitiveness. And she, Ching, had been chosen to be the first to test the sufficiency of G-Ns, and that ought to be enough.
She was an experiment; she had been lonely, having no real peers. And no real friends, either, she thought with a touch of cynicism. They tolerated her, because there was no room in the Academy for anyone who could not get along with all kinds, and any dislike or unfairness shown to Ching would have damaged that person’s career more than Ching’s. But she sometimes envied Moira’s hordes of admirers and her easy sexuality, even admired the close tenderness of Peake and Jimson while she recognized its unwisdom. There was no one she had ever cared for that much, and no one who had cared so much for her; she supposed, a little wryly, that she was the only virgin in her class.
It was worse, she supposed, than being a member of a racial minority in the old days. But she was different, and there was no point in resenting it. Ching turned on her side, and within minutes was peacefully asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
The Ship had been constructed in free orbit, free of the limitations of gravity — on Earth it would have weighed so many tons that the fuel costs of lifting and moving would have been multiplied exponentially. The hull had been constructed from metal refined and manufactured within a Lunar Dome, and the machinery assembled and tested there. The Ship had a name; for political reasons — there were still some of those on Earth — she had been called after a little-known general in the Space Service a hundred years ago. But not one of the crew ever called her, or were ever to call her, anything except The Ship. Anyone who needed to refer to this particular Ship, as distinguished from others, would have had to look up the name in an official register, by the year.
The six members of the crew had their first sight of the Ship from the observation deck of the Lunar shuttle. Only Moira and Teague, both of whom had specialized in the drive units and had helped, with the others in their class who had studied space engineering, to assemble her, had ever seen her before. Ching had worked with identical computers, but had never seen this particular one. She picked out the small, spherical computer module. Peake and Ravi had studied deep-space navigation on simulators and mockups. As for Fontana, she had never been in free-fall, except in the training centrifuge, and brief trips in free-fall transit rockets; she spent the trip out trying to conquer her faint queasi-ness.