Shocked into a stiff silence by this new development, I went back into the halls, and then to the small lounge around the corner from my room. There I met the leader of the non-MSA people from Lermontov, a dour man named Ivan Valenski. He had been the Committee police leader aboard, until the mutiny. I did not like him — he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed. He seemed as little impressed by me as I by him. Duggins, I thought, would be more to his taste. They were men scared by so many years of authority that they actively worked for its continuance — to justify their lives up to this point, perhaps. But how was I different from them?
I returned to my room. My new roommates left me the top bunk; the bottom, which I had used as a convenient counter, was occupied by Nadezhda. Marie-Anne planned to sleep in the corner where the walls met the ceiling. Their belongings were strapped all over the floor. I talked with them for a while in English, with some fumbling attempts on my part at Russian. They were nice women, and after the earlier meetings of the day I appreciated the company of calm, undemanding people.
That night Swann came by my room, and asked me if I wanted to eat dinner with him. After a moment’s thought I agreed.
“I’m glad you aren’t still angry with me,” he babbled, ingenuous as ever. Although I had to remind myself that he had been high in the councils of the MSA for as long as I’d known him. So how well had I known him?
“Shut up about that and let’s go eat,” I said. Somewhat subdued, he led the way to the dining commons through the dark halls.
Once there I looked around at the place, imagining it as the dining commons of the starship. People in neutral-toned one-piece suits walked up to the food counter; there they pushed the buttons for the meal they desired, most of them never looking up at the menu. The foods grown on ship — salads, vegetable drinks, fish or scallops or chicken or rabbit, goat cheese, milk, yoghurt — were supplemented by non-renewable supplies: coffee, tea, bread, beef… They would run out of those things pretty fast. Then it would be the ship- grown stuff, in enclosed plates, with drinks in bulbs. I watched all the precise forking going on around me. It had a Japanese tea ceremony atmosphere.
“You’ll have to keep accelerating,” I said. “You can’t stay weightless for long, it would kill you.”
He smiled. “We’ve got forty-two cesium tanks.” I stared at him. “That’s right. This is the biggest theft in history, Emma. At least that’s one way to think of it.”
“It sure is.”
“So, we plan to keep a constant acceleration-deceleration pattern, and create half-Mars gravity most of the time.” We walked up to the food counter and punched out our orders. Our trays slid out of their slot.
We sat down against the wall away from the mirror wall; I don’t like to eat next to the mirror image of myself. The other three walls of the commons were bright tones of yellow, red, orange, yellow-green. It was autumn on Rust Eagle. “We’ll keep up the seasonal colors on board the starship,” Swann said as we ate. “Shorten the daylight hours in winter, make it colder, colors all silver and white and black — I like winter best. The solstice festival and all.”
“But it’ll just be a game.”
He chewed thoughtfully. “I guess.”
“Where will you go?”
“Not sure. No, seriously! There’s a planetary system around Barnard’s Star. That’s nine light-years. We’ll probably check that out, and at least resupply with water and deuterium, if nothing else.”
We ate in silence for a time. At the next table a trio sat excavating their trays, arguing about the hydrogen-fixing capabilities of a certain Hydrogenomonas eutropha. Engineering the rebirth of breath. At the next table a young woman reached up to capture an escaping particle of chicken. The diminution of it all!
“How long?” I asked, eating steadily. Swann’s freckle-face took on a calculating look as he chewed. “We could go a hundred, maybe two hundred years…”
“For God’s sake, Eric.”
“It’s only a quarter of our predicted lifetimes. It’s not like generations will live and die on the ship. We’ll have a past on Mars, and a future on some world that could be more like Earth than Mars is! You act like we’re leaving such a natural way of life on Mars. Mars is just a big starship, Emma.”
“It is not! It’s a planet. You can go outside and stand on the ground. Run around.”
Swann shoved his tray away, sucked on his drink bulb. “Your five-hundred-year project is the terraforming of Mars,” he said. “Ours is the colonization of a planet in another system. What’s the big difference?”
“About ten or twenty light-years.”
We finished our drinks in silence. Swann took our trays to the counter and brought back bulbs of coffee. “Was — is Charlie one of you?”
“Charlie?” He looked at me strangely. “No. He works for the Committee’s secret police, didn’t you know that? Internal security?”
I shook my head.
“That’s why you don’t see him on miners anymore.”
“Ah.” Who did I know, I thought unhappily. He was looking beyond me. “I remember… about 2220 or 21… Charlie dropped by one of our labs with one of his police friends. This was in Argyre. We had completely infiltrated the Soviet space research labs, and had requisitioned this particular one for some tests — reactor-mass conservation, I think it was. I was visiting to help with a supply problem. They couldn’t get all the cesium they wanted. And then there was Charlie and this woman, him saying hello how are you Eric, just dropped by to see how you’re doing. And I could not tell whether the woman was his girlfriend and he really was just saying hello to me, or whether they were checking out the lab as part of their police work. I showed them all around the lab, told them that we were doing all the work for a Soviet-Arco-Mobil consortium, which of course the record would confirm. I remember walking around talking about old times with him, explaining some of the lab rooms, all the time wondering if both of us were acting, or just me. And I was scared, that somehow our security had broken, and this was the first sign of it…” He shook his head, laughed shortly. “But computer government came through again. They scarcely knew enough to be aware of their losses. Computer bureaucracy — no wonder Earth is falling apart. I have no doubt all of those governments are being stolen blind.”
“There’s probably a Terran Starship Association that you’ve never heard of,” I said absently, thinking of the past.
He laughed. “I wouldn’t doubt it.” He put his drink bulb down. “Although we have kept pretty good track of the other underground organizations on Mars. In fact, we chose this particular time for the construction of the starship because we think that the Committee police will be too busy back on Mars to make much of a search for us.”
“Why is that?”
“A group called the Washington-Lenin Alliance is planning to start a revolt sometime in mid-August, when Mars is farthest from Earth. Some other groups are going to join them. We don’t know how big it will get, but there should be enough turmoil to keep the police occupied.”
“Great.” Oh, no, I thought. Not Mars, too. Please. Not Mars.
Swann moved his hands nervously. I sipped coffee.
“So you’re not going to help us?” he said suddenly.
I shook my head, swallowed. “Nope.”
The corners of his mouth tightened. He looked down at the table.
“Does that end your starship attempt?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “They’ll get very near full closure, I’m sure. It’s just — well, on a voyage this long, the slightest difference in the ship’s efficiency will mean a lot. Really a lot. You know that. And I know that if you were to help them the system would end up being more efficient.”