He nodded. That made sense. With the doors locked and under Redmond’s command, Grant would have to go outside. He could be in transit now, incredibly vulnerable. Redmond accessed the meteor defense system. It wouldn’t take but a few commands to control the cannons manually and threaten him as he made his way along the hull. But the computer couldn’t find him. “No external activity detected,” it said. Redmond checked the vids and other sensors. Nothing.
Suspicious, he called up the exterior suit inventory. They were all there.
“Where’s Grant?” he said again.
“There is no one named Grant aboard the ship.”
“Grant Mayer, when did he wake up?”
“Redmond Mayer is the only member on board with that last name. Would you like to see a crew roster?”
Redmond thought the computer sounded mocking, and he squeezed his eyes shut in frustration. “Damn.” Generally he liked the computer; it was Grant who hated it, although he was just as genius in programming as Redmond. Grant once said darkly, “What does it think about the hundred years we’re asleep?”
Redmond glanced at the north sleeproom’s vid. A pod gaped open, a mirror image of his own.
“Computer, where is the crew member who exited pod N49?”
“N49 has never been occupied.”
“Double damn.” It took him several minutes of going through the records, but he discovered it quickly enough. Every mention of his brother had vanished, neatly erased. As far as the computer was concerned, Grant didn’t exist, and if he didn’t exist, then the computer wouldn’t track him. All Grant had to do was stay away from the vids. He had free reign and was effectively invisible, which is just the way he’d want it. Redmond keyed in a find and repair routine. Now that he knew the computer had been tinkered with, he could search out the changes and neutralize them. A progress counter winked into existence, but it couldn’t tell him when the routine would finish. It was possible the changes were too deep or too well hidden.
Redmond rubbed sweat from his forehead and glanced up. Everything was perfectly stilclass="underline" the pods with their comatose cargo, the conduits running overhead, the shadows on the wall, but Redmond felt an expectancy, as if the ship were holding its breath, waiting for him to move. This was the stillness of the stalk, of the patient wait.
Four long corridors, interrupted every fifty feet with doubled airlock doors, stretched between the north and south ends of the Atonement. As far as Redmond could tell, all the doors were secured, and only he could open them. Before preparing himself for the long sleep, he’d spent hours and hours programming subroutines into the computer for just such an eventuality as this. Theoretically Grant would be marooned in the north end or trapped between two doors in one of the corridors.
Of course, according to theory, Grant couldn’t exit his sleep-pod before Redmond did, and according to theory, he couldn’t erase himself from the computer. Redmond stared at the monitors thoughtfully. Were they accurate? Were they showing real time, or had Grant figured a way to have them display empty rooms as he walked in front of them? For that matter, were all the doors truly closed? He toggled a key; the doors showed locked and airtight. Could he trust the computer? After all, he had hidden his work from everyone else, yet Grant had subverted at least part of it. He wished he could ask it if it were trustworthy so he could listen to its tone of voice. Maybe he could hear a lie if it existed, but that was Grant kind of thinking. Grant talked to the computer like it lived. He called it the Blind Man. “All vids and no eyes,” he said. It was his eccentricity. Every crew member developed one.
The back of his neck prickled, and he twirled, gun up, so close to squeezing off a shot that he couldn’t believe the dart didn’t slip away. The sleepbay was empty. One hundred pods in four rows filled the room’s middle. Air whispered out of the vents, the sole sound other than his breathing. Normally when he was awake, so were the forty-nine other members of his shift. He hadn’t been alone in the ship from the time the trip started a thousand years earlier. Since he was awake two weeks of every hundred years, he’d experienced about five months of travel time, but it still felt as if he’d been on board his entire life. He could barely recall another time where the gray walls didn’t bind his existence. They cradled him and comforted him. They held him close, focused him, concentrated him. His imagination coalesced into a ship-shaped, palpable entity a mile long, no wider than the largest room, just as it molded his creativity and hopes, his knowledge and his fear, but mostly his fear.
No one can understand you more and hate you for it than a brother, Redmond thought. It’s a mile long ship, and there’s no place to go. Once the hatred exists, hiding it is hard. Ignoring it is impossible. After a while, there doesn’t need to be a reason. But he remembered it in the top bunk twenty-two years ago—if he didn’t count the thousand years they’d dozed—in the top bunk and who would sleep closest to the wall. Redmond slept on the edge when he was seven, forced there by his brother, facing the room’s empty middle, Grant behind him, whispering, “The monsters will eat your face, Redmond. They’ll eat it, and I’ll have time to run.” Redmond believed only the knowledge that their parents were in the next room kept Grant from throttling Redmond in his sleep.
By breakfast they were the wonder twins again, competitive, cooperative, and grades ahead of the pack.
The computer told him all of his routines were in place. The complex was geared to Redmond’s voice. Grant wouldn’t even be able to get basic information, and certainly not control. Or, at least from here it appeared Grant didn’t have control. It was impossible to know. The Atonement’s computers were so huge, decentralized and redundant that no one really understood the system. Redmond had never felt so paranoid.
Where was Grant, and what was he doing?
Two doors led from the sleeproom. One opened into living quarters, workstations, the power plant and engines behind him; the other would take him to workshops, the ova repositories, the cafeteria, hydroponics and gym. Beyond them waited the corridors with their locked airlocks. If Grant had passed through, he could go around the sleeproom and get him from behind. Redmond dogged the back door so it couldn’t be opened. Wearing a visor with a computer interface and heads-up display, he toggled the other door open. A vid showed the room beyond was empty, but he didn’t completely trust the information. The door sighed on its hinges. He waited for a minute before moving; his ears ached from listening.
Staying next to the wall, Redmond peeked around the door. The vid was right.
After the workshops, he stalked between the cafeteria’s empty tables. He paused to cycle through the vid views again. Two hundred and thirty-seven cameras in total. Three had failed since the last crew had done maintenance thirteen years earlier. The next crew wouldn’t be up for twelve years. They’d have two weeks to fix or replace the broken equipment, check their course, and nurse the ship into another twenty-five years of automated competence before the third of the four crews woke. The ship had already lasted a thousand years, and it had three thousand to go. By the time they arrived at Zeta Reticuli, every part of her would have been remade. Only the crews and cargo would be original equipment. Camera failures were common, but he’d have to check each one for Grant. Redmond glanced around. No dust on the tables—the bots took care of that—but the ship felt utterly abandoned, like a museum after hours, or a morgue. It made him feel like a child again, like he did when he was fourteen, separated from his tour, hiding from Grant with half a Roman brick pried from an ancient wall along the Appian Way for protection, ready to smash Grant’s teeth to the back of his throat if he had to, but a teacher came by first. For as long as they had fought, there was always a third party in the way, as if an intelligent fate kept them from tearing each other apart and goaded them into excellence.