That was why the passengers were frozen, so that they could sleep out the whole thing while three generations of crew lived almost their entire lives tending them. Cocooned in their cryogenic sleeper berths, the passengers were nicknamed mummies by the crew, momios in the Castellano which was still used for casual conversation within the ship.
Sky Haussmann was crew. So was everyone he knew.
‘Can you see the other ships yet?’ asked his father.
Sky searched the forward view for long moments before finding one of the other vessels. It was hard to see, but his eyes must have adapted to the darkness since leaving home. Had he imagined it, even so?
No — there it was again, a tiny, toylike constellation in its own right.
‘I see one.’ Sky pointed.
His father nodded. ‘That’s the Brazilia, I think. The Palestine and the Baghdad are out there too, but they’re much further away.’
‘Can you see it?’
‘Not without a little assistance.’ Titus’s hands moved in the dark across the taxi’s control board, painting an overlay of coloured lines over the window, bright against space like chalk on a blackboard. The lines boxed the Brazilia and the two more distant ships, but it was only when the Brazilia loomed large that he thought he could make out the slivers of the other two vessels. By then the Brazilia had revealed itself to be identical to his home ship, down to the disks studding its spine.
He looked around the taxi’s window, searching for an intersection of coloured lines that would demark the fourth ship, and found nothing.
‘Is the Islamabad behind us?’ he asked his father.
‘No,’ his father said, softly. ‘It isn’t behind us.’
There was a tone in his father’s voice which troubled Sky. But in the gloom of the taxi’s interior his father’s expression was hard to read. Perhaps that was deliberate.
‘Where is it, then?’
‘It isn’t there now.’ His father spoke slowly. ‘It hasn’t been there for some time, Sky. There are only four ships left now. Seven years ago something happened to the Islamabad.’
There was a silence in the taxi which stretched endlessly before Sky found the will to reply.
‘What?’
‘An explosion. An explosion like nothing you can imagine.’ His father paused before speaking again. ‘Like a million suns shining for the tiniest of instants. Blink, Sky — and think of a thousand people turning to ashes in that blink.’
Sky thought back to the flash he had seen in his nursery when he was three. The flash would have troubled him more if it had not been eclipsed by the way Clown broke down that day. Though he had never quite forgotten it, when he thought back to that incident, it was never the flash that was the more important thing but his companion’s betrayal; the stark realisation that Clown had only ever been a mirage of flickering wall pixels. How could the brief, bright flash ever have signified something more upsetting than that?
‘Someone made it happen?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Not intentionally, anyway. They might have been experimenting, though.’
‘With their engines?’
‘Sometimes I think that was what it probably was.’ His father’s voice grew hushed; almost conspiratorial. ‘Our ships are very old, Sky. I was born aboard our ship, just as you were. My father was a young man, hardly even an adult, when he left Mercury orbit with the first generation of crew. That was a hundred years ago.’
‘But the ship isn’t wearing out,’ Sky said.
‘No,’ Titus said, nodding emphatically. ‘Our ships are nearly as good as the day they were built. The problem is that they aren’t getting any better. Back on Earth, there were still people that supported us; wanted to help us on our way. Over the years they had thought long and hard about the designs of our ships, trying to find small ways in which our lives might be improved. They transmitted suggestions to us: improvements in our life-support systems; refinements in our sleeper berths. We lost dozens of sleepers in the first few decades of the voyage, Sky — but with the refinements we were slowly able to stabilise things.’
That was news to him, too: the idea that any of the sleepers had died was not at first easy to accept. After all, being frozen was a kind of death itself. But his father explained that there were all sorts of things that could happen to the frozen which would still prevent them being thawed out properly.
‘Recently though… in your lifetime, at least — things have become much better. There have only been two die-offs in the last ten years.’ Sky would later ask himself what became of those dead; whether they were still being carried along by the ship. The adults cared deeply about the momios, like a religious sect entrusted with the care of fabulously rare and delicate icons. ‘But there was another kind of refinement,’ his father continued.
‘The engines?’
‘Yes.’ He said it with emphatic pride. ‘We don’t use the engines now, and we won’t use them again until we reach our destination — but if there was a way to make the engines work better, we could slow down faster when we reach Journey’s End. As it is, we’ll have to start our slowdown years from Swan — but with better engines we could stay in cruise mode longer. That would get us there quicker. Even a marginal improvement — shaving a few years off the mission — would be worth it, especially if we start losing sleepers again.’
‘Will we?’
‘We won’t know for years to come. But in fifty years we’ll be very near our destination, and the equipment which keeps the sleepers frozen will be getting very old. It’s one of the few systems we can’t keep upgrading and repairing — too intricate, too dangerous. But a saving in flight time would always be a good thing. Mark my words — in fifty years, you’ll want to shave every month possible off this voyage.’
‘Did the people back home come up with a way to make the engines work better?’
‘Yes, exactly that.’ His father was pleased that he had guessed that much. ‘All the ships in the Flotilla received the transmission, of course, and we were all capable of making the modifications that it suggested. At first, we all hesitated. A great meeting of the Flotilla captains was held. Balcazar and three of the other four thought it was dangerous. They urged caution — pointing out that we could study the design for another forty or fifty years before we had to make a decision. What if Earth discovered an error in their blueprint? News of that mistake could be on its way to us — an urgent message saying “Stop” — or perhaps, a year or two down the line, they would think of something even better, but which it was not now possible to implement. Perhaps if we followed the first suggestion, we would rule out ever being able to follow another.’
Again Sky thought of the cleansing brilliance of that flash. ‘So what happened to the Islamabad?’
‘As I said, we’ll never know for sure. The meeting broke up with the Flotilla Captains agreeing not to act until we had further information. A year passed; we kept debating the issue — Captain Khan included — and then it happened.’
‘Perhaps it was an accident after all.’
‘Perhaps,’ his father said doubtfully. ‘Perhaps. Afterwards… the explosion didn’t do any serious damage. Not to us or the others, luckily. Oh, it seemed pretty bad at first. The electromagnetic pulse fried half our systems, and even some of the mission-critical ones didn’t come back online immediately. We had no power, except for the auxiliary systems serving the sleepers and our own magnetic containment bottle. But in our part of the ship — up front — we had nothing. No power. Not even enough to run the air-recyclers. That could have killed us, but there was so much air in the corridors we had a few days’ grace: enough time to hard-wire repair pathways and lash together replacement parts. Gradually we got things running again. We got hit by debris, of course — the ship wasn’t totally destroyed in its own explosion, and some of those shards went through us at half the speed of light. The flash burned our hull shielding pretty badly, too — that’s why she’s darker on one side than the other.’ His father said nothing for a moment, but Sky knew that there was more coming. ‘That was how your mother died, Sky. Lucretia was outside the ship when it happened. She was working with a team of techs, inspecting the hull.’