‘Well, there she is. Your home for the last ten years, Sky, and the only home I’ve ever known. I know; there’s no need to hide your feelings. She’s not exactly beautiful, is she?’
‘She’s big, though.’
‘She’d better be — she’s just about all we’ll ever have. You’re luckier than me, of course. At least you’ll see Journey’s End.’
Sky nodded, but his father’s quiet certainty that he would be dead by then could not help but make him feel sad.
He looked back to the ship.
The Santiago was two kilometres long; longer than any ship which had ever sailed any of Earth’s oceans and easily the equal of any of the largest craft which had plied the solar system in the days before the Flotilla’s departure. Her skeleton, in fact, was an old fusion-drive space freighter, retrofitted for a journey into interstellar space. With small variations, the other Flotilla ships had been converted from the same sources.
This far from any star, almost no light fell upon the ship, and she would have been invisible were it not for the light spilling from tiny windows dotted along her length. At the very front was a big sphere encircled by lights. That was the command section, where the bridge was, and where the crew spent most of their time when they were on duty. It was where the navigational and scientific instruments were kept, forever pointed towards the destination star; the one they had nicknamed Swan, but which Sky knew really had the much less poetic name 61 Cygni-A: one cool red half of a binary star system located in the random sprinkle of stars which had been given the name Cygnus in antiquity. Only towards the end of the voyage would the ship flip around to bring its tail to bear on Swan, so that it could slow itself down with exhaust thrust from the engines.
Behind the control sphere was a cylinder of the same diameter, which held the freight bay from which they had just come. Beyond that was a long, thin spine, studded with regularly spaced modules like immense dinosaur vertebrae. At the very end of the spine was the propulsion system, the intricate and fearsome engines which had once burned to accelerate the ship up to its present cruising speed, and which would burn again on some immeasurably remote day when Sky was fully grown.
Sky knew all these aspects of the ship; he had seen models and holograms of it many times, but it was something else to be seeing it for himself, from outside, for the first time. Slowly, but with grinding stateliness, the whole ship was rotating on its long axis, spinning to create the illusion of gravity on its curving decks. Sky watched it turn; watched lights heave into view and disappear ten seconds later. He could see the tiny aperture in the cargo cylinder, where the taxi had departed. It looked very small, but not perhaps as small as it should have done, given that this ship was all his world could ever be. Almost. He was young now, and he had only been allowed to explore a small fraction of the Santiago, but surely it would not be long before he knew it all intimately.
He noticed something else, too; something that the models and the holos had definitely not got right. As the ship turned, it looked darker on one side than the other.
What could that mean?
But almost as soon as the troubling inconsistency had begun to worry him, he had forgotten it; marvelling in the sheer immensity of the ship; the pin-sharp way the details held their clarity across kilometres of vacuum; trying to imagine where his favourite places in the ship mapped into this strange new view. He had never been very far down the spine, that was for certain, and even then only under Constanza’s guidance, some daredevil adventure before the adults caught them. No one had really blamed him for that, however. It was natural curiosity to want to see the dead, once their existence was known.
Of course, they were not really dead — just frozen.
The spine was a kilometre long; half the ship’s total length. In cross-section it had a hexagonal form, with six long, narrow sides. Along each of those sides were spaced sixteen sleeper modules; each a disk-shaped structure rooted to the spine by umbilical attachments. Ninety-six disks in total, and each of those disks, Sky knew, contained ten triangular compartments, each of which held a single momio sleeper and the bulky machines necessary for their care. Nine hundred and sixty frozen passengers, then. Nearly a thousand people in total, all submerged in an icy sleep which would last the entire duration of the voyage to Swan. The sleepers, needless to say, were the most precious commodity that the ship carried; its sole reason for existence. The one hundred and fifty-strong living crew were there only to ensure the wellbeing of the frozen and to keep the ship on course. Again Sky measured his current familarity with the ship against that which he could reasonably hope to attain by the time he was an adult. At the moment he knew fewer than a dozen people, but that was only because his upbringing had been deliberately sheltered. Soon he would know many of the others. His father said that there were one hundred and fifty warm humans on the ship because that was some kind of magic number in sociological terms; the population size towards which village communities tended to converge and which carried with it the best prospects for internal harmony and general wellbeing amongst its members. It was large enough to allow individuals to move in slightly different circles if they wished, but not so large that there were likely to be dangerous internal schisms. In that sense, Old Man Balcazar was the tribal leader and Titus Haussmann, with his deep knowledge of secret lore and his abiding concern for the safety of the population, chief medicine man, or top hunter, perhaps. Either way, Sky was the son of someone in a position of authority, what the adults sometimes called a caudillo, meaning big man, and that augured well for his own future. It was open talk amongst his parents and the other adults that Captain Balcazar was an ‘old man’ now. Old Man Balcazar and his father were professionally close: Titus always had the Captain’s ear and Balcazar routinely consulted Sky’s father for advice. This trip outside would have required Balcazar’s authorisation, since use of any of the Santiago’s spacecraft was to be kept to a minimum, the ships themselves irreplaceable.
He felt the taxi decelerate, false gravity easing off again.
‘Take a good look,’ Titus said.
They were passing the engines: a huge and bewildering tangle of tanks and pipes and flared orifices, like the gaping mouths of trumpets.
‘Antimatter,’ Titus said, mouthing the word like a quiet oath. ‘It’s the devil’s own stuff, you know. We carry a small amount even in this shuttle, just to initiate fusion reactions, but even that makes me shiver. But when I think about the amount aboard the Santiago, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.’
Titus pointed to the two magnetic storage bottles at the rear of the ship: huge reservoirs for penning macroscopic quantities of pure antilithium. The larger of the two reservoirs was empty now, the fuel it had contained completely consumed during the initial boost phase up to interstellar cruising speed. Though there was no external indication that this was the case, the second bottle still contained its complete load of antimatter, delicately balanced in a vacuum fractionally more perfect than the one through which the great ship flew. There was less antimatter in the smaller bottle, since the ship’s mass would be less during deceleration than acceleration, but there was still enough to give anyone nightmares.
No one, at least in Sky’s experience, ever joked about antimatter.
‘All right,’ his father said. ‘Now get back in your seat and do your belt up.’
When he was secure Titus gunned the taxi, increasing the thrust to its maximum. The Santiago diminished until it was just a thin grey sliver, and then became difficult to see unless one searched the starfields carefully. It was hard to believe, seeing it against apparently fixed stars, that the ship was moving at all. It was, but eight hundredths of lightspeed, though faster than any crewed ship had ever moved before, was still almost zero when set against the vast distances between the stars.