Maintenance closets are spaced along corridors, both large and small. Most of them have access to the wiring for that portion of the ship. Some of them just contain tools, others have the specialized machines that clean the corridor floors. This one had a machine, so that to pull me in, Ennio had to squeeze himself behind it, then make room for me.
“Close the door,” he whispered urgently.
I did, because at that point I was going with the assumption he’d gone stark raving mad, and everyone knows the best thing with lunatics is to humor them until you can get them to a medtech.
Closing the door left us in complete darkness, surrounded by a smell of mustiness and detergent. “All right,” I said. “Now what?”
But nothing prepared me for the tone of his voice much less what he said, as he spoke out of the dark, “They arrested Ciar this morning.” He sounded as if he was about to cry.
The sound was so odd, that I was sure I had misunderstood him. “What?”
“They arrested Ciar this morning. I had to talk to you where no one could hear us. I brought a lantern here earlier. I don’t think there are any listening devices.”
“I don’t think there are listening devices anywhere in the ship,” I said. “Oh, maybe in the supply areas, to make sure things are not stolen, but I don’t think so. Why should there be?”
“Why should they arrest Ciar?”
“He went to his place of employment after hours and probably without permission.”
“That’s an administrative sanction,” he said. “It’s just an administrative sanction. It’s not a capital crime.”
“A …capital crime? They are going to kill him? How do you know this? Why do you think this?”
“It’s what the news says,” he said. “They say he was arrested for activities against the community, and that he’ll be executed.”
“You have to have misunderstood.”
“I didn’t.” And the woebegone tone of his voice made me begin to believe him. Ennio couldn’t possibly be confused about something that important.
“But …” I said
“I figured it was his search. He was using his ID on the terminal. Someone correlated all his searches. Someone doesn’t want that stuff looked at.”
“What? Nursery rhymes?”
A desperate sniffle from the darkness, that might have been an attempt to sound ironical, but sounded only sad. “I hope that’s not it, since I just downloaded all I could find.”
“Ennio!”
“I have to know. We have to find out. We have to do something to save Ciar.”
This was truly delusional. Fine, so there hadn’t been an execution in the last ten years, meaning there hadn’t been one in the time I’d been conscious of them, or an adult, able to interpret the news. But even I knew enough, from hearing my parents talk, to know that when someone was arrested for a capital crime and it was announced as such, everything was decided and there was no reprieve. Like Ennio I couldn’t imagine what Ciar had done to deserve capital punishment. Other than his silly search into the nursery rhymes and how many generations there had been in the ship, I didn’t think he’d so much as talked back to his supervisor this last year. Ennio and I would have known if he had. We talked over almost everything. So this left…. “When are they executing him?”
“Next week,” Ennio said.
“Why that long?”
Even without being able to see Ennio, I knew he had shrugged. And I realized I was a total idiot. There were many things to do before an execution, most of them procedural and technical. While the administration alone decided on death or life, they had to be really sure that nothing could be done to reclaim a trained linguist, like Ciar.
“Where are they holding him?” It seemed impossible we were talking about this, in connection with Ciar. Like Ennio, I kept thinking there had been some horrible mistake and we should, somehow, be able to clear him. I’d read stories of Earth where someone was broken out of jail and he and his rescuers vanished into the sunset, but aboard the ship there was no possible way to do that. Unless we escaped into the no-grav areas, and even there, repair people and maintenance people would find us eventually—let alone the fact that staying in no gravity too long would make us ill in very short order.
Ennio made a sound of dismissal, and then turned on something. It had a small screen that glowed feebly, but in the total darkness it looked like a spotlight. After my eyes adjusted, I realized it was just a little data port, which could function independently of the main computer. It was what most of us used to read for amusement.
“I correlated all the things the nursery rhymes say about the wise old owl,” he said. “While I was waiting for you. I think …I think it’s a hidden computer somewhere in the ship.”
“Right,” I said. “Because it makes perfect sense to spend twice the needed amount of money, to give a ship like this two completely separate computer systems.”
He shook his head. “It does, if you think about it. For one, there could be a space disaster or something, that wiped out the other one. And besides, there’s …other reasons. Like for instance, people not wanting us to know things, like how many generations there have been in the ship.”
“Why would they want to do that?” I asked. “I mean, you’re assuming someone is deliberately hiding the number of generations from us. What you said earlier is much more likely. That they don’t want feuds and such to propagate and perpetuate.”
But he shook his head. “No, I think it’s more than that. I think the administration doesn’t want us to arrive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at them. They have all this power, over the ship and over us. Why would they want us to arrive?”
“Because the whole point of this trip is to arrive?”
“Is it? It was when we launched, but is it still? Most people aboard care about what? Who they’ll marry, how many children they’re allowed to have, and how many luxury points they have that they can spend this week. And when we arrive, what is supposed to happen?”
“We …we’ll settle,” I said. “Depending on what the world is like. I mean, they know it has water and is the right temperature and …” I dredged up from my mind the memory of childhood lectures. “I think they somehow established that it either had life or could support life. Depending on which one it is, we either settle right in, or we warm up the plants and animals and give them some time to establish. And then we move down to the surface, and we have farms and …and stuff down there, just like we have here. The whole point was to expand human civilization and knowledge.” The idea of living somewhere without the upper limits of the tunnels overhead, of the floor beneath, made my heart pound. Just looking at movies of Earth made me a little dizzy, unless I thought of the sky as a tunnel top. But I knew the name for that was acrophobia and that there were hypnotic treatments for it. We’d been provided with those, since everyone knew after …ten generations? In the ship that was bound to happen.
“Right,” Ennio said. “But there won’t be any restrictions on how many children you can have, anymore. And after a while there won’t be any restrictions on how much you can eat, and where you can go.” He looked at me with the look of someone who’d just won an argument, and exhaled, forcefully. “Think, Nia. The administrators will lose all their power over us.”
“But they’ll have farms and …and stuff.”
“Right. Only they can’t be assured they’ll be the best farmers. Remember what I said about what most people care about?”
“Children and luxury points, I think you said.”
“Yeah, that and how much other people admire and respect you.”
“But we’ll all have all the children we can want, and unlimited food, and….”