I clambered across and felt for some sort of handle. There was one, of course, which I turned. I shoved the door inward.
Light came on, inside.
“See?” Ennio said.
I felt Ennio close the door.
A voice, polite and cool, sounding like a well-brought up young woman, said, “What are you seeking?”
There were many answers to that, including asking who the woman was. But before I could speak, I heard Ennio say, “The Wise Old Owl.”
There was a click and I thought he’d done it now, and the medtechs would come get us for a serious mind adjustment, but instead a door opened in what looked like a completely smooth wall. Ennio stepped through it, so I had to go after. I was only slightly startled when it closed. And, somehow, the chamber began to move. Like a mobile capsule.
After awhile, it stopped. And opened.
We looked into yet another completely blank room. Ennio led the way in, and the door closed automatically behind us.
“What do you wish to ask theWise Old Owl?”
The voice came from nowhere. Ennio and I spoke at the same time, “How many generations we’ve been in the ship,” he said.
“How far are we from our destination?” I asked.
Another click, and we looked into a large, carpeted room, with chairs, and the appearance of one of the upper-rank staterooms. It felt like one, too. It was smooth and polished.
Almost the minute we came in and the door closed behind us, an entire wall came to life. In it an owl with enormous eyes sat on the branch of a tree, against a blue sky. “I am the wise old owl,” the pleasant young woman’s voice said.
Of course it wasn’t an owl, or a young woman, but a computer designed for extrapolative reasoning, which explained how it had managed to understand our disparate answers and still make sure we were on the right quest. I wondered if many other people—or any other people— throughout the history of the ship had been in that first room and been sent away because they lacked the exact answer.
I won’t relate our interaction with the computer, or at least not in detail. It had been programmed to ask us a series of questions to find what, if any, knowledge had been lost in the time since it had been buried in what appeared to be dead—or perhaps—solid space around the ship. Hidden away.
It had also been designed to be programmed and worked with in what seemed to be plain everyday language. It answered questions by inductive logic when we asked them. Sometimes it stopped and asked us to rephrase, but it seemed to understand everything. Speaking to it was almost like speaking to a foreign-language speaker, someone who didn’t fully understand what we said, but understood most of it and could carry on a conversation. Turned out that its story was exactly what we thought—it had been hidden so that should what it called unforeseen social difficulties come to pass, there would be one computer aboard that the administration could neither reprogram nor tamper with.
“How long have we been in the ship?” I asked, then rephrased, “How long ago did the ship leave Earth?”
“The ship was constructed in Earth orbit.”
I’d asked the wrong question. “How long since the ship left the sol system, then?” Ennio asked.
“Four hundred and twenty five years,” the voice answered.
I felt my heart clench. That had to be ten generations. Perhaps more. “How …how near are we to Alpha Centauri?” I asked.
“We should prepare to slingshot around the sun in …twenty four hours,” the computer answered.
Needless to say Ennio and I panicked. Twenty four hours. We couldn’t possibly learn to pilot the ship in that time.
This was, of course, silly. Whoever had designed the ship couldn’t expect us to. Turned out it didn’t even expect us to tell it to detach the outer portion of the sail, so the outer sail could focus the lasers—similar to the lasers that had given us additional speed on leaving sol orbit—onto the inner sail and slow the ship. The ship was wired hard to this hidden computer in a way that could not be severed. This computer would be executing the maneuver, no matter how much the other computer had been corrupted or its programing overpowered.
No, it turned out what we were needed for was something much more vital. We had to prepare everyone aboard ship for the hours of weightlessness as the ship stopped spinning while slowing and maneuvering into orbit at the new world. In the long time aboard, the practice of securing everything that could float had long stopped. Weightlessness could destroy the ponds in which we grew fish, it could forever break terminals capable of reading our records. Not to mention what it would do to toilets.
The computer told us all that would happen, but more importantly, it said, the people aboard would need to find out about the secret lifeboat bays—the ones that couldn’t be opened, so the landers couldn’t be cannibalized for parts, as it appeared the other well-known landers had been. In the situation we were in, the wise old owl said, everyone aboard would have to be told at the same time, so that a few people couldn’t find the boats and destroy them before anyone could take them and land.
Someone needed to tell the panicking population what was happening. Someone needed to have people expecting it and prepared. Oh, most people probably wouldn’t want to land. Not right away. Perhaps not ever. Once the ship was in orbit around our new home, and the ship’s sails retracted, life could go on as it had aboard the ship for eleven generations. Humans are creatures of habit and most people cared for nothing but their luxury rations. But after coming all this way, people should know there was another option available. An option to finish our mission. And people who wanted to leave should not be constrained to stay. And—most of all—in the confusion of the moments of weightlessness, it was necessary to keep fights from breaking out and disorder from descending on the ship. In just a few hours of riot, damage could be done that would lessen forever the chances of the colonists.
This seemed almost impossible. Neither Ennio nor I had any particular power in the ship. And who would listen to us? Look what had happened to Ciar, just for trying to see forbidden files.
And then I had an idea. It required me to work madly the rest of the night, but I could—and did—wire the Wise Old Owl so that it could speak to the whole ship at once. Many people might not believe it. And many people would ignore it, or suspect a prank. But at least there would be some warning. And when the people looked out at the stars around us, they’d see confirmation.
Then—as soon as we could—we asked the Wise Old Owl what to do about Ciar. It could not—so much the worse—magically open the door to his cell. It was directly wired to the ship’s navigation and landing systems, but not to the rest of the ship. All it could do was access the other computer’s memory and tell us where Ciar was kept.
That was enough, I assured Ennio. Even with the cell locked, I probably could open it. And when gravity stopped most people—even if alerted—would be disoriented long enough to lose track of keeping watch on a prisoner.
They didn’t know how to cope with null g, while I did. Null-g maintenance jobs are rare but they do happen aboard ship, and I’d been trained to handle that kind of environment.
The problem was that we were not on Earth. There was nowhere to run.
This was when the computer pitched in with the information that the landers were also scouts. As soon as we’d escaped the pull of the star around which we’d slingshot to slow our velocity, the larger of the lifeboats could take us there, and it would have provisions for the month we would need to land and for one more month afterwards.
We could lock ourselves in the boat and hide if the computer didn’t reveal our location until we’d departed.
I looked at Ennio, “If there’s no life on the planet, or no life compatible with ours. If we can’t eat the plants and animals of the world, we’re going to starve long before they come down with seeds and animals.”