—amazing—
—but what’s going on?—
“Questions?” said Kamilah.
“Questions?” he said under his breath. “Damn right I have questions.” When he shouted, he could hear the anger in his voice. “Rocks. Mean. What?”
“Speedy. Slows. Down.” She paused. “We. Don’t. Know. Why.” Another pause. “Act. Normal. More. Later.”
—act normal?—
—we’re fucked—
“Comm.” He screamed. “On.”
“Careful,” she said. “Adel.”
He felt a slithering against his suit as she let go of him. He bashed at the comm switch and brought the suit lights on.
“…the most amazing experience, isn’t it?” she was saying. “It’s almost like you’re standing naked in space.”
“Kamilah…” He tried to speak but panic choked him.
“Adel, what’s happening?” said the Godspeed. “Are you all right?”
“I have to tell you,” said Kamilah, “that first time I was actually a little scared but I’m used to it now. But you—you did just fine.”
“Fine,” Adel said. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it might burst his chest. “Just fine.”
Since the Godspeed left the orbit of Menander, fifth planet of Hallowell’s Star, to begin its historic voyage of discovery, 69,384 of us stepped off her transport stage. Only about ten thousand of us were pilgrims, the rest were itinerant techs and prospective colonists. On average, the pilgrims spent a little over a standard year as passengers, while the sojourn of the colony-builders rarely exceeded sixty days. As it turns out, Sister Lihong Rain held the record for the longest pilgrimage; she stayed on the Godspeed for more than seven standards.
At launch, the cognizor in command of the Godspeed had been content with a non-gendered persona. Not until the hundred and thirteenth year did it present as The Captain, a male authority figure. The Captain was a sandy-haired mesomorph, apparently a native of one of the highest G worlds. His original uniform was modest in comparison to later incarnations, gray and apparently seamless, with neither cuff nor collar. The Captain first appeared on the walls of the library but soon spread throughout the living quarters and then began to manifest as a fetch, that could be projected anywhere, even onto the surface. The Godspeed mostly used The Captain to oversee shipboard routine but on occasion he would approach us in social contexts. Inevitably he would betray a disturbing knowledge of everything that we had ever done while aboard. We realized to our dismay that the Godspeed was always watching.
These awkward attempts at sociability were not well received; the Captain persona was gruff and humorless and all too often presumptuous. He was not at all pleased when one of us nicknamed him Speedy. Later iterations of the persona did little to improve his popularity.
It wasn’t until the three hundred and thirty-second year that the stubborn Captain was supplanted by a female persona. The new Speedy impressed everyone. She didn’t give orders; she made requests. She picked up on many of the social cues that her predecessor had missed, bowing out of conversations where she was not welcome, not only listening but hearing what we told her. She was accommodating and gregarious, if somewhat emotionally needy. She laughed easily, although her sense of humor was often disconcerting. She didn’t mind at all that we called her Speedy. And she kept our secrets.
Only a very few saw the darker shades of the Godspeed’s persona. The techs found her eccentricities charming and the colonists celebrated her for being such a prodigious discoverer of terrestrials. Most pilgrims recalled their time aboard with bemused nostalgia.
Of course, the Godspeed had no choice but to keep all of us under constant surveillance. We were her charges. Her cargo. Over the course of one thousand and eighty-seven standards, she witnessed six homicides, eleven suicides and two hundred and forty-nine deaths from accident, disease, and old age. She took each of these deaths personally, even as she rejoiced in the two hundred and sixty-eight babies conceived and born in the bedrooms of Dream Street. She presided over two thousand and eighteen marriages, four thousand and eighty-nine divorces. She witnessed twenty-nine million eight hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred and forty-seven acts of sexual congress, not including masturbation. Since she was responsible for our physical and emotional well-being, she monitored what we ate, who we slept with, what drugs we used, how much exercise we got. She tried to defuse quarrels and mediate disputes. She readily ceded her authority to the project manager and team leaders during a colonizing stop but in interstellar space, she was in command.
Since there was little privacy inside the Godspeed, it was difficult for Kamilah, Adel, Jarek, Meri, Jonman and Robman to discuss their situation. None of them had been able to lure Sister out for a suit-to-suit conference, so she was not in their confidence. Adel took a couple of showers with Meri and Jarek. They played crank jams at top volume and whispered in each other’s ears as they pretended to make out, but that was awkward at best. They had no way to send or encrypt messages that the Godspeed couldn’t easily hack. Jonman hit upon the strategy of writing steganographic poetry under blankets at night and then handing them around to be read—also under blankets.
Steganography, Adel learned from a whisperer in the library, was the ancient art of hiding messages within messages. When Robman gave him the key of picking out every fourth word of this poem, he read: We can’t go home she must have killed up would. This puzzled him until he remembered that the last pilgrim to leave the Godspeed before he arrived was Upwood Marcene. Then he was chilled. The problem with Jonman’s poems was that they had to be written mechanically—on a surface with an implement. None of the pilgrims had ever needed to master the skill of handwriting; their scrawls were all but indecipherable. And asking for the materials to write with aroused the Godspeed’s suspicions.
Not only that, but Jonman’s poetry was awful.
Over several days, in bits and snatches, Adel was able to arrive at a rough understanding of their dilemma. Three months ago, while Adel was still writing his essay, Jarek had noticed that spacewalking on the surface of the Godspeed felt different than it had been when he first arrived. He thought his hardsuit might be defective until he tried several others. After that, he devised the test, and led the others out, one by one, to witness it. If the Godspeed had actually been traveling at a constant 100,000 kilometers per second, rocks dropped anywhere on the surface would take the same amount of time to fall. However, when she accelerated away from a newly established colony, rocks dropped on the backside took longer to fall than rocks on the frontside. And when she decelerated toward a new discovery…