“Something related to those nursery rhymes, I think.”
Ennio made a sound that, without being a profanity, consigned the nursery rhymes and everyone who wrought them to the hells of the ancients. “You’re not going to marry him, are you, Nia?” he asked me, with a pleading look. “The man is my best friend, but sometimes I think he’s a half-wit. He does more thought transgression in ten minutes than other people do in their entire lives.”
I shrugged. “I’m not going to marry anyone,” I said. “At least not just yet. I have enough to support myself, and I enjoy living at my parents’ lodging. Why bother merging, when I can fly solo just as well?”
He gave me a wolfish smile that told me he wasn’t buying my answer, not for a second, then tugged on my arm again, gently this time. “But you do dance, don’t you, Nia? Come and dance with me.”
We did dance, in the dark, confined warmth of the great room of the bachelor’s quarters. I knew from visiting Ennio there—usually under close supervision—that this room was normally used for terminals for learning or gaming or any other leisure activities, but someone had cleared them all away, and dimmed the lights to the lowest setting and the large, well-lit room looked like a cavern, confined and close. The semi-darkness made the whole space more intimate, more …isolating, so that while you spun with your partner to the winding strains of the Cuddle Bug the two of you might well have been in the middle of nowhere, gloriously alone.
And the music was sensuous, I’ll give you that. The warm firmness of Ennio’s chest against mine was reassuring, his arms around my body were comforting. But as one set ended and another began, I pulled away, regretfully, and whispered to him, “Come on, we’d better meet him.”
“Nia,” Ennio whispered back, looking betrayed.
“Do you want to risk what he might do if we don’t meet him?”
“No …no. I guess not. I …oh, but he’s a pain.”
I smiled up at his annoyed expression. Perhaps he was courting me in earnest after all. Oh, sure, he could find a better bride around any corner and down any section corridor, but maybe he didn’t know that.
I’m a woman of machines and solid objects. I understand malfunctions based on some defective component, and I understand the logic of mechanics. I also understand humans aren’t always logical, which is why they are such bewildering creatures. And why I normally do my best not to get that involved with them. But sometimes I still have trouble with the idea that humans aren’t logical in their choice of a mate.
I’ve read the classic romances just as well as everyone else has, but the one thing no one ever explained to me was exactly why people did any of these things. And perhaps that was where I failed to understand Ennio. Maybe he was in the grip of one of those illogical convictions that only one woman would do for him, and that I had to be that woman. I don’t pretend to understand, but I was gratified by it anyway.
I gave him my arm, and we walked, in an ambling sort of way, as if we had nothing much to do, out of the room, out of the center, down a corridor, then down another, on a seemingly random path.
“People will think we are bundling,” I told Ennio. “But I get a feeling it’s better than their thinking that we’re meeting Ciar. I don’t think this time if we’re caught we’ll escape with just a severe reprimand, like the time we got into the kitchens to find out where meat came from.”
Ennio nodded. “Oh, yeah. He’s always getting us into crazy adventures. And would it be so bad if we were?”
“If we were what?” I asked. “Trying to figure out where the meat comes from?” I was counting back the years since the last crazy adventure and figuring out that even Ciar might be allowed a moment of insanity every ten years or so.
“If we were going to bundle,” he said.
“Unauthorized contact before marriage?” I asked. “Do you want your coupons docked and your child allowance lowered?”
He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged, and this time I wondered which of us had lost his mind.
So we didn’t talk about it anymore. Instead, we walked down the corridors, more or less aimlessly, until we were far enough away that we could head back in the direction we were supposed to be going, to meet Ciar.
This circuitous route took us through narrow little tunnels, the ceramic material that curved overhead patched in a hundred places. Then we emerged onto a larger path amid fields, which were planted with some form of wheat that gave off a rich and earthy smell.
And then we curved back toward lodgings and the administrative buildings, and fetched up at the door to the archives. Which was closed, the lights off on either side, of course. For a moment I wondered if Ciar was in there, or if he had decided to skip this anyway, or even if this was some sort of elaborate prank. But Ciar didn’t play pranks, and even Ennio knew that.
Making another sound that betrayed his annoyance, Ennio pushed at the door. It swung inward.
Come into my home, said the spider to the fly flitted through my mind and that, too, I thought, was a fragment of some long-forgotten story. But I went in, as Ennio held the door open for me.
The archives was where they kept all the data for everything in the ship, and for everything before the ship. Somewhere beneath us computers sat that were separate from the computers used for navigating and powering the ship, but could look into those if needed. Into this computer had been poured all of the knowledge of humanity since we’d first walked on two legs in that Earth which I’d only observed in illustrations and only read about in books, but never actually seen.
It was possible that they’d skipped a file teaching us how to chip flint, but everything else was in it, from animal husbandry and taming to the shaping of clay and the smelting of metal. Everything needed to start human civilization as far up as possible on our ladder of learning, in the new world.
And because, by the time we’d left, humanity had worked out that knowledge wasn’t often as simple and clear cut as it seemed, this repository involved other skills that would seem less important to interplanetary civilization, including linguistics and literature, law, history and other disciplines where people argued a lot and used math very little.
Ciar and his fellow linguists worked here translating and transcribing: a work that would be needed until all records were converted, which is to say probably forever.
The space looked like what it was. There were terminals, so close together that for someone to get out of his he had to ask the permission of his fellow on the next one. They were grey, smooth and rounded on top, with a sort of privacy hood you ducked under, presumably so that your work wouldn’t disturb that of the workers next to you. In the dark, with a soft light glowing from each of them, they looked as if they were sleeping undisturbed, like children who let their heads droop while napping.
“Oh, we shouldn’t be here,” Ennio said.
This, of course, was not news, and of course we shouldn’t have been there. But we were, and the best thing to do was deal with Ciar so that we could get out of there as soon as possible and with as little trouble as possible.
“Ciar?” I whispered.
He popped up from behind one of the terminals like a jack in the box, his face flushed, his eyes shining and looking feverish. “You came,” he said, and before either of us could comment, “Good. You’ll never believe this.”
From Ennio’s snort, I could tell he was already working on not believing it, before Ciar showed us whatever it was.
At first I had no idea what Ciar was getting at. He took us to his terminal and showed us the screen. It said, Access denied, you do not have permission to ask this question. Under it there were codes, presumably explaining why we didn’t have the right to look at it.
“Very exciting,” Ennio said. “I’m all agog. Perhaps you linguists are different, pal, but in my job I get one of these every other day. People don’t think I have a need to know the nutritional mix in classroom lunches, or the stories selected for next year’s primer.”