Any crew that has worked long together wraps itself snug into a little society—a culture of shared beliefs, customs, legends, and practices. A newcomer never quite fits in, at least not easily and not right away. There are things that went without saying that now must be said; unspoken accommodations that could no longer be accommodated. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece, the newcomer must turn this way or that until he can nestle comfortably.
So the acting first and the acting astrogator posed problems to this unknown in their midst. They ran him through the gamut of the instrument tech’s art, from magbeam targeting to Doppler readings to parallax imaging. It wasn’t exercise, of course. This was a for-profit voyage, not a bleeding nursery school—as Tirasi pointed out—and the problems Kalim worked were all relevant to New Angeles’s progress. If, over the first week or so, the results were double-checked by others, the Fudir didn’t mind. “They just want to make sure,” he told Little Hugh afterward, “that I am what I say I am.”
“Sure, there’s comfort for you,” O’Carroll replied, well aware that the Fudir was not what he said he was. “I suppose when you counterfeited the certificates, you counterfeited the skills that go with them.”
“The best disguise,” the Fudir told him with a wink, “is yourself.”
Past the orbit of Ashterath, Jehovah Space Traffic Control passed New Angeles on to Platform Number 18 cupped in Ashterath’s L5; then afterward to others, until finally the push was taken over by the platforms feeding off Shreesheeva, a superjovian in the outer reaches of Jehovah Roads. Each time the direction of the push changed, Maggie B. took her astrogator’s cap back from Tirasi and adjusted the ship’s deflection to maintain the flight plan. Artificial intelligences were all well and good, but they weren’t the natural sort, and there was always that one percent that could not be left to thoughtless algorithms.
The intelligence perceived only abstract mathematical objects and theoretical approximations. It believed the data it was fed. But magnetic bottles and steering jets and parallax imaging cameras were real objects made of composites and metals and fields, and subject to all the ills of nature. Models only approximate the physical world, especially at the extremes; and the extremes were precisely where New Angeles was bound.
By the time she passed the orbit of Shreesheeva, she had achieved a sizable fraction of light speed, and was homing for a hole in space. You can’t get much more extreme than that and stay inside the universe.
Which, of course, they would not.
“We call it ‘threading the needle,’” Maggie B. told Ringbao one day in the wardroom when she had come below for a bite before turning in. Ringbao had just finished an overhaul to the portside air-scrubber under Hogan’s profane direction, and he and the engineer had also come to have a supper. O’Toole was present, too, a shwarma pita in one hand, a small beer in the other, and a flatscreen propped on the table before him which he studied intently.
“Course, both the thread and the needle’s eye are fookin’ invisible,” the pilot said without lifting his eyes from the flatscreen.
“He means the ship’s trajectory and the entrance ramp,” Hogan explained to Ringbao.
“Surely, entrance well known,” the deckhand said. He had to take care, especially around O’Toole, not to use an Eireannaughta accent, and consequently had been falling more and more into the rhythms of his childhood.
“Well, now, ’tis and ’tisn’t,” O’Toole told him. “I’m only the pilot. It’s Maggie who has to find the fookin’ hole in space.”
“All them stars,” said the ship’s hole-finder, “are a-movin’ relative to each another, which pulls on the currents connecting them—changes what we call the speed of space—and that means the entrance ramp is movin’, too. So, we have to take dopplers and triangulations during the run-up to pin down the position. You gotta hit the dang thing just under light speed, and at just the right angle.”
“Otherwise, ye skid,” said O’Toole, giving Maggie B. a significant look.
“Skidding isn’t good,” Hogan added helpfully.
“Not if ye don’t have a top pilot t’ compensate, it isn’t.”
“One time,” said Maggie B. “One time!”
“Twice.” O’Toole tapped the flatscreen with his nail. “That’s why Jehovah Traffic is after giving us the current parameters here—electrical potential, plasma direction, flow rate of space. Your boyo, Kalim, takes the readings, Maggie checks with the astrogation program, and the intelligence computes our heading and speed.”
“We’ll be on the alfvens by then,” Hogan interjected, to show that the power room had everything in hand.
“The square-head there”—O’Toole wagged a thumb at Hogan—“thinks he’s flyin’ the ship.”
“Piece of pie,” said Hogan.
“I don’t know why they were telling me all that,” Hugh said to the Fudir later, when relieved by Tirasi, the Terran had come down to the wardroom. The two of them were now alone. “Sure, and I’ll never be astrogatin’ a starship.”
“You were a new pair of ears,” the Fudir said, shoving a readymeal of gosht baoli handi into the cooker. “Each of them was trying to impress you with how skilled he was, and how he had things well in control. There’s a Terran word for it: ‘upsmanship.’”
Hugh sniffed the meal’s aroma and made a face.
“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir said, without even looking up.
“It lacks something. What’s the ‘true coriander’?”
“No one knows for certain. We find it called for in many recipes, but whether a vegetable, a spice, or the flesh of some rare Terran beast, who can say? It was found only on Old Earth and the secret of it has been lost for centuries.” With a distant look, he added, “It is all that we have lost, and all that we hope once more to have.” He nodded toward the spiral stairs. “On Old Earth,” he added, “the intelligence could have handled everything, with no human needed to take bearings or make piloting adjustments.”
“Sure, and it must have been a wonderful age, the age of Old Earth,” said Hugh.
“It was. We had true AI. We had nanotech. A lot was forgotten during the Cleansing.”
“Coriander,” Hugh suggested.
“We had science. Not just engineering, but the real thing. There hasn’t been a new discovery in centuries. Back on Old Earth, we discovered seven impossible things before breakfast.”
“It does make you wonder,” Hugh said, “how the Dao Chettians managed to overthrow it all.”
The Fudir looked disgusted, but the cooker chimed and the Fudir took his lunch to the table and sat across from Hugh. He looked about the wardroom to check that no one else had entered. Then he leaned across and lowered his voice. “January may give us trouble. Upstairs, we were talking about his little adventure. He wants the Twister back.”
“Wants it back…?”
“As in, ‘you don’t get it.’”
O’Carroll bowed, striking his breast. “So unworthy, signore. Ringbao only simple deckhand. Not understand deep thoughts of elder.”
The Fudir looked disgusted, again checked the wardroom, listened for footsteps on the spiral stairs leading up to the control deck. “You know what I mean. If he gets the Twister—the Dancer, he calls it—then there goes your chance to restore the rightful government to New Eireann without another civil war.”