“Yes, but I think they changed the nursery rhymes, so that we would have something to remind us if we forgot.”
“To remind us of what?” Ennio asked. “That the wise old owl keeps his mouth shut? Or that we’re going to Alpha Centauri? Honestly, Ciar.” He turned to me, “There’s a dance tonight at the bachelor’s dorm, and I was wondering if you—”
“You don’t understand,” Ciar said, his voice in the slow pedantic tone he used when he thought he was schooling us. “The thing is that nursery rhymes are the most linguistically conservative bit of language. Not just in terms of how exactly they get passed on, but they retain fossilized references and pronunciations for centuries after they’ve died out of any normal use. They would be a …they are a superb medium for encoding instructions. But instructions for what?”
“For people who’ve forgotten that we’re on our way to Alpha Centauri and who, probably, think that this is the only world that exists.” He shook his head. “Now, Nia,” he said, looking at me. “Will you go with me to the dance?”
I said yes, mostly, I think, to try to get Ciar to let go of the crazy subject of nursery rhymes. When he got an idea in his head, he tended to hold onto it like a well-placed rivet. And this one was truly one of the strangest ones he’d come up with.
But when I looked up to see if he was upset or interested, I met with a frown, and his eyes half-closed, but he was staring into something we couldn’t see. “Oh, the dance,” he said, slowly. “Yes. I’ll see you two there.”
He walked out through the terminals, towards the door and Ennio and I met each other’s eyes and laughed. “Now, do you suppose he thinks I invited him to the dance?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems to think both of us did.”
Ennio shook his head. “Ciar has a bug in his processor again!”
I confess I completely forgot about Ciar and the nursery rhymes. Unlike the men, I still lived with my parents. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting enough ration coupons to live alone, but I disliked the single women dormitory. Too much cackle and giggling, too much scent and makeup. My mom shook her head when I complained and said women had always been like that, and always would be, but frankly, I owned a mirror and could see my face as well as the next person. My face was not as soft and round as I’d have liked. I had a broad forehead, and dark blond hair. The best that could be said about me was that I didn’t cause men to run screaming into the night, and that I had two guys who wished to court me—even if they were not exactly potential heartthrobs. But makeup didn’t improve my looks and frankly I didn’t think either of my two very odd suitors would notice, unless I put blue circles on my cheeks and dyed my hair purple. They seemed to enjoy my company and talking to me, more than actually looking at me.
Besides, I was mom and dad’s only daughter. Mom had got into some trouble when she was young. I’d never found out exactly what it had been, but whatever it was meant she was only licensed for one child, so here I was. And it didn’t seem fair to move out before I absolutely needed to.
Mom insisted on fussing over my going to the dance with Ennio, and finding me one of the dresses she’d worn when she was young and which she hadn’t traded in for material credits. It looked very odd on me, because though our bodies are about the same size, mom is a beautiful woman, delicate and blond. I’m …not. But she said I looked beautiful in the pink, ruffled top and skirt, and she found me the shoes that went with them. Though she told me I could do better than Ennio, she approved of my playing the field.
But she didn’t mention Ciar and I didn’t think of him, until I got to the dance. Both Ennio and Ciar were standing at the entrance, looking out with anxious expressions.
The way their faces cleared when they saw me approaching did my heart good, but I soon saw that they were relieved for completely different reasons, as Ennio looked towards Ciar and said, “See, I told you she was fine. You and your paranoia.”
“I’m not paranoid,” Ciar said, in an urgent whisper. “And don’t talk about it here. And I have to show you something.”
Ennio lowered his eyebrows, as his features shaped into a frown. “You are insane. This is a dance. Nia came here to dance.”
I could see, past his shoulders, the dimmed lights, and couples gyrating to the convoluted strains of something that—from my classical music history—I knew should be a waltz, but wasn’t. Not quite. They called it the Cuddle Bug, but really, like the waltz in its time it was an excuse for young people to hold each other and spend time together in a form the population planners might otherwise find inappropriate in unmarried couples.
Ennio put his hand on my forearm to guide me inside, but Ciar was shaking his head, making his hair flop in front of his eyes. “Come. Forget the dance. This is more important.” His voice got louder, as he got more agitated, and I could see Ennio thought that if he were to refuse to listen to whatever Ciar had to say, Ciar was quite likely to cause a scene and then we’d all be investigated for—at the very least—antisocial activities.
“You just want to undercut my one chance to dance with Nia,” Ennio said, in the tone of someone trying desperately to turn the whole thing into a joke.
“No,” Ciar said. “No, this is important.”
And it was clear that to him it was. Not just a joke, not just a side pursuit, not just a way to take the shine off his rival. At any rate, I told myself, it was impossible that either of them was that serious about their rivalry. First, they were as good friends as two young men of their solitary temperaments could be. And second, suppose one of them won my hand. The other one could find a woman just as good looking and with as good prospects on any given evening, at the single women’s dormitory. Frankly, I thought the only reason they both courted me was because it allowed all three of us to spend time together, as we had since we’d started instruction.
I could see Ennio weigh all this too, and judge the anxiety in Ciar’s eyes, and the way he kept looking around wildly, as though sure he was being followed. And then a hint of resignation appeared in his eyes, as it had in our childhood, when we finally gave in to one of Ciar’s crazy schemes and investigated his mad suspicions—like the time Ciar had decided that the food in the cafeteria was made from the bodies of people who died and the entire thing with the recycler and converter was a cover up. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Let’s dispose of your insanity, shall we? What did you discover this time? Are they using school children for propulsion?”
But Ciar didn’t laugh or argue, he just shook his head, and his voice changed to a whisper. “I’ll go ahead. You don’t want to be seen with me. Or at least, we shouldn’t leave together,” he said. “I’ll go ahead, and then in ten minutes or so, meet me at the archive.”
“At the—” Ennio said.
“Where I work. You know very well where it is. I’ll leave it open for you.”
His being in his place of work after hours seemed strange enough. If he didn’t have a work order from his supervisor, he could get into serious trouble over it. His letting us in after hours was even more dangerous.
“He’s riding for a fall,” Ennio said, as he watched Ciar leave. “I wonder what’s got into him?”
“Isn’t it strange,” I said, “how we use expressions for things long vanished, things neither we nor anyone on board the ship could know about personally?”
Ennio gave me an odd look. “What are you talking about now?” he asked.
“Riding for a fall. None of us has ever ridden anything.”
He rolled his eyes. “We’ve ridden the ship our whole lives,” he said. “But that’s not the point. Don’t you go talking of old language now, or I’ll think both of you have gone completely insane. I wonder what he’s chasing?”