“Very true. The Cuchulain doesn’t land. Ever. This is a deep space ship.”
“So how do you pick up your cargo?”
“With the cargo beetles. See them?”
And I did, when he pointed them out. Each of the little warts along the axis of the ship was a whole ship in itself, a rounded shell hugging the central column.
“But they don’t have cushion plates, either.”
“Because they don’t need them. The Forty Worlds are a low gravity environment except for Antrim and Tyrone, and those two are gas giants where we never land. Nowhere else has a hundredth the pull of Erin. Lucky for us, or scavenging would be impossible.”
While I was asking questions—I still had a hundred more—we had been approaching the structure at one end that Danny Shaker called the living sphere. It loomed ahead of us now, twice as big as a whole ferry ship. I could see that its exterior, a uniform cloudy grey from a distance, was a whole patchwork mess of seams and scars and scratches.
“And not surprising,” Danny Shaker said, in answer to my question. “The Cuchulain is like the rest of our ships. It’s old. Old and beat up. Built long before the Isolation, and been through a lot.”
“But why don’t we build new ones?”
“Ah, that’s a fair question. We’ll talk about that when we have a bit more time. All right?”
He sounded casual enough, but something made me think that he didn’t want to talk to me about that at all until he had first discussed it with Doctor Eileen. With every kilometer that we moved away from the surface of Erin, I had the feeling that the balance between life down on the planet and life out in the Forty Worlds shifted. The Isolation loomed more real and more significant, changing from vague myth to a central fact of survival. Living with Mother on the shore of Lake Sheelin, I had felt myself in a safe, stable world. Now I was hearing that Erin survived only because space systems in place before the Isolation were still working—and those systems were becoming steadily older and more worn as the years went on.
The interior of the Cuchulain, when we finally passed through the entry lock and shed our suits, did nothing to change that idea. The chambers where I first met the rest of the crew were clean enough, and kept in good order. But everything showed the signs of long, hard wear. It’s tempting to say that the crew themselves showed those signs most of all.
With only two samples to judge from, I don’t know what I had expected. Captain Shaker and Tom Toole were as different as two men could be: Tom Toole big-boned and gravel-voiced and argumentative; Danny Shaker slender and soft-spoken and neat.
The rest of the crew seemed just as diverse when I was introduced to them by Danny Shaker.
“This is Patrick O’Rourke.” Shaker led me to the first man in the line. “Patrick and Tom Toole are like my right and left hands. They keep things going when I’m not here. Anything you need, Jay, you ask one of them. Now, here’s Sean Wilgus, Connor Bryan, William Synge, Donald Rudden, Alan Kiernan, Seamus Sterne, Dougal Linn, Joseph Munroe…”
There were nine general crew men, in addition to Pat O’Rourke and Tom Toole. I lost track of their names after the first two, although I did notice some peculiarities. Donald Rudden was so fat that I could not imagine how he carried his weight around—though that problem should be less in space than down on Erin. Sean Wilgus didn’t even pretend to be pleased to meet me, he glared when I came to him.
Everyone wheezed as they growled their greetings, just about as bad as Paddy Enderton, but Robert Doonan certainly held the record for that. Every breath turned into a gasp. Apparently Danny Shaker was a real exception among spacers in having good working lungs. He was also an exception in size. Patrick O’Rourke was a black-haired giant, the biggest man I had ever seen, and the others were all huge. Tom Toole, whom I had thought of as big when I met him, an inch or two taller than Uncle Duncan, turned out to be one of the smallest.
There was one other thing that they had in common, but I didn’t know what it meant. As each crewman bent to shake my hand, he stared at me with genuine interest and curiosity. I could even sense it in Sean Wilgus, behind the hostility.
By the time that I reached the last man in line, Rory O’Donovan, I began to feel that perhaps they all recognized something unusual in me. Maybe, as two people different as Paddy Enderton and Daniel Shaker had suggested, I was going to make an outstanding spacer. Maybe these men saw that potential, and instinctively reacted to it.
I decided to do my best to make the prophecy come true. When Dan Shaker asked me if I would like to go around the ship with him as he made his final inspection of supplies, drive, control systems, and cargo beetles, I leaped at the chance.
And when, eight hours later, everything was pronounced ready and the Cuchulain left the hangar on Upside and swooped off for deep space and the Forty Worlds, I didn’t have a worry left in my head. I had no doubt that the next month or two would be the happiest of my whole life.
Chapter 13
Twenty-four hours after the Cuchulain started our outward journey, the inside of my head began to sort itself out. So much had happened to me, in so short a time, that it had produced what Doctor Eileen called an “experience overload.” I didn’t have a name for it. All I knew was that I had seen masses of stuff and I’d had it all explained to me—but often I only understood when I met the same thing for a second or third time. Even then I had problems.
For instance, before we left the Upside hangar Danny Shaker had shown me over the interior of the ship. We had visited the engine room, and the drive unit at the far end—off limits during powered flight to everyone except suicides—and we had been all through the labyrinth of the expandable cargo hold, corkscrewed down now into its tightest form. Shaker had pointed out the electrical supply system, and the air duct system, and the various vacuum escape systems, and he even explained the waste disposal apparatus in the living area. But it was only late the next day, wandering around with Doctor Eileen, that I began to get any feeling for what was where.
And then it became really embarrassing. Doctor Eileen knew I had been through the ship before, and naturally she asked me questions. Half the time, I had no idea of the answer.
“Look at the mess there,” she said, when we were in the living quarters and walking along a tight little corridor. “Why is that room different from everywhere else?”
The corridor was clean. But one room that led right off it was filthy, coated in what looked like years or decades of dust.
I shook my head. Shaker had shown me that same room, and said something about it. But as to what he had said…
I went inside, bent down, and pulled the air duct grille away from the wall. It was a mistake. Dust clouded around me, in my hair and up my nose. The duct tunnel itself was clear, and I could hear air sighing along it. I remembered Danny Shaker telling me that the air duct passages were usually a couple of feet wide. They formed an alternative programmed pathway for the cleaning machines, and they could also be used in an emergency by humans as an escape route from one part of the ship to another. But none of that explained why the cleaning robots had chosen to ignore this particular room completely, while diligently collecting the dust and trash everywhere else.
I came out of the room sneezing and feeling like a moron. I had been told, and I knew I had been told. But I had been told a thousand and one other things, too, at a time when I was sick and nauseated from a first exposure to free-fall, and giddy with the novelty of everything. I simply didn’t remember.