3.9
29 October
I.R.V. Intercession
Extra-Kuiper Space
3,336 A.U. from Earth
Igbal was impatient. Like a kid on Christmas morning, he wanted to tear ahead with the Encounter, like, now. Well, they were tearing ahead with it, but “it” involved a lot of steps. Before they could start thawing out frozen people, they had to deploy and inflate the Encounter Bubble—a process that required everyone to first put on spacesuits. Michael of course insisted on making a safety drill of it, and seemed satisfied that everyone was sealed up tight within 3.5 minutes. In their suits, in their lockers, without help.
“Good,” he said, over the suit radio channel. “We all survived.”
“Thanks, Padre,” Igbal said, although he knew that was the wrong title and would irritate Michael. He just liked saying it.
Once that was done, Hobie exited his locker and went back up into the bridge. Everyone else had to hang around in their spacesuit lockers, although most opted to at least open their door.
As with the crew quarters, each spacesuit locker had a video display above it. On one of these, from a camera mounted to the superstructure surrounding the cargo deck, Igbal watched while eight rectangular panels opened up in the conical hull, like flower petals around the circumference of the ship. They kept rising and rising until they folded all the way back against the hull, with an audible hum as the motors did their thing, and a thump as the doors reached their full extension.
The open panels left a two-meter gap all the way around the hull, where smooth metal gave way to folded textile. A hundred lives depended on the Encounter Bubble remaining airtight for the next week, so it was actually one of the heavier parts of the ship—two layers of thickly woven ballistic nylon, with a stretchy silicone layer in between. On the inside and outside, it was aluminized polymer film, coated with a thin, white, non-woven textile, like a painter’s suit. The whole thing weighed ten thousand kilograms—as much as a garbage truck, and more than one percent of the ship’s total mass.
“Everything look good?” Hobie asked. “You want to go outside and inspect?”
“No,” said Igbal, exiting his locker to look at each of the screens in turn, “Everything looks good. Go ahead and crack the valves, slow bleed.”
Another heavy payload was the six thousand kilograms of compressed air needed to inflate the bubble, and the associated four thousand kilograms of tankage and plumbing.
The sudden airflow from these tanks was surprisingly loud in the close confines of the cargo deck. Well, maybe not that surprising, since the pipes ran right between the spacesuit lockers, but it meant they were really doing this.
On the viewscreens, the fabric of the Encounter Bubble started to swell and, very slowly, unfold.
“Are you getting any pressure drop?” Igbal asked anxiously.
“No sign of any leak,” Hobie assured him. “You want me to crank these valves all the way?”
“Slowly,” Igbal said. “Very slowly, but yes.”
The hiss of air through steel piping grew louder, and louder still. After that, it was like watching a mushroom grow—which was something Igbal had done a couple of times in his life. The gas was going in there fast enough that Igbal could clearly tell, minute to minute, that the Bubble was slowly expanding toward the final, toroidal shape that would encircle the hull. But he could also see that the total process was going to take hours.
“Well,” he said, “here we are. How’s everyone’s oxygen doing?”
Everyone reported that their oxygen was fine.
Rachael said, “Slow breaths. We’re going to be sitting here a while, and acidosis is not something we want to be dealing with.”
“When can we take the suits off?” Thenbecca asked.
“When the Bubble is fully inflated and inspected,” Igbal said.
And although he’d started to find all the philosophical discussions pretty annoying, Igbal wished somebody would start one now. But nope, nobody did. This wasn’t that kind of moment. It was in fact the kind of moment that space exploration was full of: long, slow, tedious, deadly, and deeply consequential. Nobody had ever done this before—any of it—and there was no guarantee it would go as planned. Many things did not.
For a long time, nothing really happened. Then came the scary, thrilling moment when the white walls behind the glass spacesuit lockers suddenly whooshed away, and they were all looking into the inside of the partially inflated Encounter Bubble. People gasped and jumped. Even Igbal himself, who had seen the process once before.
“Yikes,” said Harv.
“Yah,” Igbal said. “Bit of a scare, there. Sorry, I should have warned you that was going to happen.”
“We weren’t aboard for the dry run,” Harv said in a testy voice.
“I know. I said I was sorry.”
Igbal never knew quite what to make of Harv Leonel. He’d published hundreds of papers on quantum computing, and clearly knew his shit. That whole genetic past life regression thing, though—the thing Harv was actually famous for—was a bit of a wild card. A favorite of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, Harv’s claims might be pure New Age bunk. Might be. But something about it had rung true for Igbal, and, hell, even if Harv was just a brilliant nutcase, he wouldn’t be the first human being to do good work in spite of being crazy. Or because of it.
Thenbecca certainly seemed to like him. Of course, she didn’t have much in the way of formal scientific training, so she might not be able to tell if he was crazy. Hell, she might not even care. She was a cheerful person, and Igbal would be happy to have her on the mission even if she weren’t the best CHON chef in the solar system. But she was, thank God, or they could’ve been eating porridge three meals a day. The CHON synthesizer only held a handful of built-in patterns—none of them closely resembling food—and it took a lot of skill and persistence to get anything that might be called “cuisine.” But she managed it, nearly every day.
“Looks like the webbing is intact,” said Dong Nguyen.
“Yep,” Igbal agreed.
When the Encounter Bubble was fully inflated, the normal air pressure inside the ship would be more than enough to hold its donut shape. However, the interior of the Bubble was crisscrossed by cables that served a dual purpose. First, to soften the failure mode if the fabric somehow ripped, so it would be a little less likely to pop like a balloon, or anyway the popping process would take a few seconds longer. Second, to provide idiot civilians a way to move around in zero gravity, without stranding themselves in midair. And Dong was right; the cables looked good. Their yellow Kevlar cores were hidden by white polymer cladding, and each of them, as far as Igbal could see, was firmly anchored at both ends to the fabric of the Bubble.
Igbal hadn’t known Dong before the start of the mission training, but he was a solid astronaut, highly recommended, and Igbal planned on poaching him from Transit Point Station once they all got back into cislunar space.
After a painfully long ninety minutes, the Bubble was finally fully inflated, and Igbal cautiously opened one of the eight glass doors leading into it, mingling the atmosphere of the Bubble with that of the ship’s interior.
All readings were nominal, so everyone except Hobie (who was still up in the bridge) filed through the doorway and out into the Bubble to look for any damage or other anomalies. None were found, so Hobie was summoned back down, his task complete. And then, fully two hours after the valves were first opened, the crew of Intercession could finally take off their spacesuits.
Next came the inevitable gymnastics, as eight people who’d been cooped up for a year finally got a chance to really stretch out their limbs and move. Cartwheels! Somersaults! Banging back and forth between the tensioning cables! That one was Rachael—or Dr. Lee as she used to insist on being called back at ESL1. She looked like she was having fun for about fifteen seconds, until Brother Michael put a stop to it.
“A small chance of killing us all is still an unnecessary risk, don’t you think?”
He said this in that relaxed but firm way of his, that really left you no room to disagree.
“Aw,” Rachael said. But she stopped what she was doing, and ruefully said, “My bad.”
It actually didn’t take very long for everyone to get worn out from the exercise; their hours in the ship’s tiny gym were no substitute for actually moving around. And then it was time to eat, and then it was time for bed.
Igbal passed out sleeping pills, saying, “Get some sleep, seriously. The next several days are going to be crazy.”
He had a hard time sleeping anyway, though, through a combination of being jazzed up and also, privately, worried about looking stupid. Either the whole history of the universe was about to be rewritten, or he was a fool, and would go down in history as such. When he finally did sleep, though, he dreamed he was in a strange house, with strange voices coming from another room. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but their tone was friendly and soothing, and made him feel as though everything was going to be all right.
In the morning, Michael arose refreshed, and prepared for whatever the day might bring. His role here was to help wherever help was needed, and he intended to do exactly that. Thenbecca presented them all with a hearty breakfast, and then everyone—Igbal included—got the hell out of the way while Michael and Rachael and Hobie went down into the hibernation vault to start waking people up.
There were ninety-two people, to be thawed in eleven groups of eight and one group of four. The process would nominally require four hours per group, and they would be running it around the clock, so there were forty-eight hours scheduled for it.
Rachael was the only one here who had actually performed the full revival procedure before. An M.D. obstetrician who had become a hibernation specialist in her forties, she carried herself like someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
Hobie was here because, as the former pilot of an ion ferry, he had a lot of experience guiding passengers in and out of the much milder state of “squirrel hibernation.” He had a bit of experience with deeper “bear hibernation” as well, but these coffins plunged their victims into “frog hibernation”—basically a very mild form of clinical death. Michael knew Hobie himself had actually been frozen and revived back at ESL1, but had only ever participated in the process from the outside during training, one single time. So Hobie was here as Rachael’s apprentice, and would take over for her during the (presumably brief) times she was asleep.
Michael himself made some programmed adjustments to the life support system, setting it to gradually ramp up to the level of throughput necessary to support one hundred people. After which he was merely an assistant and backup for the de-freezing process. God forbid he actually needed to run anything by himself, but he’d been assured many times that the people who awoke would be disoriented and needy, and he meant to coordinate the non-medical portions of their care.
Of course, no one had assigned him this job. No one had assigned anyone this job. But it needed doing.
Rachael started at the bottom of the chamber, farthest from the hatchways into the Encounter Bubble. The first patient was male—someone named Joona Lao. Michael had never met him—he’d never met the vast majority of the frozen passengers—but he’d read all the dossiers, and vaguely recalled that Joona Lao was some sort of linguist.
The heartbeat and respiration lines on Lao’s status display were pure flatlines. His core temperature was two degrees Celsius. Pulse ox was a quasi-nonsensical eighty-five percent.
Rachael started by turning on a simple warming circuit, which would pump water through the shell of the hibernation pod, and through a tube down Lao’s throat, at gradually warmer and warmer temperatures. Lao wasn’t technically “frozen” at all; his tissues were packed with antifreeze proteins that prevented ice crystals from forming, or else this process would have taken a lot longer. And also, Lao would be dead, his cells ruptured by microscopic needles of ice. Nodding in apparent satisfaction, Rachael moved on.
Next came a mathematician, two diplomats, a judge, an astronomer, a botanist, and a retired army general. Michael wasn’t entirely clear why any of these people had been selected for the mission, but the underlying premise was clear: getting as many dissimilar points of view as possible. Given how little was known about the Beings, it was a sensible enough strategy.
Once all of them had started warming, Rachael turned her attention back to the first pod again. Joona’s core temperature had only risen half a degree but he already looked a bit less frozen-dead.
“Now we wait,” she said.
Michael wished they could simply start the warming cycle on some more people while they were waiting, but of course this was a delicate procedure. He’d read all about it as the magic date approached, so he knew that warming someone up too early or too fast could be lethal. On the other hand, when they hit four degrees centigrade, the bodies would start actually dying if you didn’t get the metabolic processes going within half an hour or so.
No one had anything to say. The moment was simply too portentous to cheapen with blather. Hobie busied himself by checking and rechecking the nonexistent vital signs of the other patients, while Rachael hovered over Joona Lao.
It took forty-seven minutes before Lao’s core temperature was up to four degrees centigrade.
“His blood should be mostly liquid now,” Rachael finally said, “and the heart should be capable of contraction. I’m going to hit him with the defibrillator.”
She buzzed Lao with five hundred volts. Once, twice. She edged up to six hundred and buzzed him again.
On the monitor, the heartbeat line wiggled a litter bit and then settled back to zero. Then, a few seconds later, wiggled and settled again. And then a third time. “Sinus rhythm established,” Rachael said. “Looks like six beats per minute, which is fine; we can now start warming the blood directly.”
She pressed controls on the panel that activated the pumps to warm and oxygenate Lao’s blood. Breathing came later, Michael knew, but she withdrew the tube from Lao’s throat anyway. An electric motor purred somewhere as it retracted.
She moved on to the other pods, shocking their inhabitants back to life one by one. And then it was back to Lao again.
“Electrolyte drip is on,” Rachael reported, mainly for Hobie’s benefit. “Leg squeezers are on. Brain stimulator is on . . . and . . . the patient is breathing.”
It seemed a miracle to Michael, that this man—gray and covered in frost just an hour ago—was now basically alive again. How many doctors and researchers had spent their whole careers making the incremental discoveries and improvements that had made this moment possible?
Rachael performed the miracle seven more times, and then she was back at Lao’s pod again, actually opening it up.
She’d been basically ignoring Michael up to this point, but now she looked him in the eye and said, “I’m going to add epinephrine and vasopressin to his drip. It’s going to wake him up, probably sometime in the next half hour. He’s going to want . . . comforting.”
Michael understood. Under the circumstances, her bedside manner was basically nonexistent.
Presently, Joona Lao began to shiver.
“That’s a good sign,” Hobie said.
Indeed, over the next ten minutes, Joona’s eyes began to flutter. So did those of several other patients, as Rachael performed her miracles on them as well.
It was actually the mathematician, Evelyn Chang, who awoke first.
“Where am I?” she asked, fully opening her eyes. She coughed, then—the dry-throated cough of someone desperately in need of a drink of water.
“You’re safe,” Michael told her.
Underneath each hibernation pod was a drawer containing a bungied-down kit of all the things that person would allegedly need here on Intercession. One of these was a squeeze bottle of Gatorade, which Michael removed from the drawer. He unscrewed the squirt cap, pulled off the safety seal, screwed the cap back on without spilling a drop.
“Where am I?” Evelyn repeated, as if unaware she’d asked the question already.
“You’re in the hibernation bay of the starship Intercession,” Michael said, judging she was conscious enough to get some value out of that. Then: “Here, drink this. It will make you feel better.”
“I’m so cold,” she said. She was clad only in space underwear.
“I’ll get you some clothes,” Michael said, “but first, drink a little Gatorade for me.”
She did this. And then asked again where she was. “Oh, my God,” she said, after receiving the answer again. “Oh my God. Are we there?”
“In the dark between the stars,” Michael confirmed, handing her a blue Renz Ventures jumpsuit. “Here, put this on. It will help you warm up. Oh, belay that. You’d better wait for the doctor.”
She was, of course, still covered in wires and tubes.
She seemed to realize for the first time that she was strapped down. Undoing the Velcro of the top strap, she then realized she was weightless, and promptly vomited up the Gatorade she’d just ingested.
Chiding himself for not anticipating this, Michael grabbed a towel from the drawer and used it to sweep the globules out of the air.
“You’re fine,” he said. “Just hold still for now.”
But then someone else was waking up, so the best he could do was hand her the towel and the coverall and say, “I’ll be back. Take it slow. Wait for the doctor.”
Soon all eight of them were awake, and Michael was busy tending to all of them at once, while Rachael hopped from pod to pod unhooking wires, withdrawing IV catheters, and pulling white silicone disks off their skin. She performed perfunctory medical examinations while she was at it—checking pupils, having them squeeze her finger.
Everyone had the same questions. Everyone was cold, even though the heaters in their pods were now on full blast. Everyone needed help getting dressed. Fortunately, the prep for being frozen was much like the prep for a colonoscopy, so there wasn’t actually all that much vomitus produced, and no one desperately needed a bathroom. Yet.
The mathematician, now free of her pod and sorting through the gear in her bag, held up her barf-stained towel and said, “Wait, this is my towel? My only one? How can I get this cleaned?”
You can’t, Michael thought but did not say. Laundry facilities on the ship consisted of a single tiny machine whose capacity was maxed out by eight people, and he didn’t want anyone getting the idea that that resource was something they could fight over. Perhaps if he got a chance he could wash it sneakily, and then tell her it was a completely different towel. But he did not expect to get that chance. What he did say, somewhat deceptively, was: “All in due time, Ms. Chang.”
It took a while, but eventually Michael had all eight of them assembled in a group: four men, three women, and one person whose gender was listed as nonbinary, all (necessarily) of roughly similar size—heights within fifteen centimeters of each other, and weights within ten or twenty kilograms. All in identical unisex jumpsuits.
The nonbinary person—a botanist from Ecuador, according to their profile—peered out from under a Santa-Claus-red crew cut, and seemed to regard Michael with confused, bleary suspicion. Michael felt for a moment how strange it must be, to be frozen on Earth, and to wake up nineteen light-days away, among strangers, on a corporate starship you’ve never seen except in computer renderings. In the best possible view, it was like the first day at a new school, only you really did show up naked! And it was worse than that, for shaking off the effects of hibernation was no quick process, and it was scary being this far from home and help. Even for Michael it was scary. So yes, it was a lot to cope with. But imagine if, on top of all of that, you found yourself, inexplicably, being ushered around by a robed Benedictine monk!
“You aren’t dreaming,” he said gently. “And yes, it is strange, my being here. If there’s time, I’ll tell you the tale of it, but for now it’s time to move.”
Then, in a chatter-cutting voice directed at everyone, he said, “Okay, listen up, please. I’m going to escort you, single file, to the Encounter Bubble, which will be your home for the next several days. You all have questions. You all have concerns. None of you have experience operating in zero gravity. I sympathize, and will speak with each of you as time permits. But right now, time does not permit. We’re going to play ‘follow the leader’; do exactly what I do. Use your hands and feet exactly as I do, or as the person in front of you does, if you can’t see me.”
And then, without further discussion, he kicked off from the rim of an empty hibernation pod, launching himself toward the ladder and then up, toward the spacesuit lockers and the hatchways into the Encounter Bubble.
It was, of course, a shitshow. People collided with one another, and drifted away from handholds, and caught their sleeves on obstacles. In all the time he’d spent planning for this moment, he should have thought to tie a rope along this path for them to follow, hand over hand. It all took much longer than it should have, but eventually he got them all up into the cargo deck and through an open hatch into the Encounter Bubble. Soon after, he had them all huddled in a little tribal knot, against the gray-white fabric wall, with feet or elbows secured on the cables.
“You each have a bag of personal effects,” he said. “This includes a sleeping sack with your name on it. I’m going to encourage each of you, before you do anything else, to find a place to tie yours down. There should also be tape and Velcro, and you’re adults who can figure it out. Once you’ve defined a little personal space for yourself, you’ll feel a bit less disoriented.”
“Can we have a tour of the ship?” asked Evelyn Chang.
“Possibly,” Michael said, trying to work out in his head whether it was actually feasible, much less advisable, to show ninety-two people around the service deck, crew quarters, and cockpit. “You’ve already seen most of the habitable volume, and you’ll see more when you need to use the bathroom. Speaking of which, does anyone have an urgent need, that can’t wait half an hour? No? Then I will leave you here for the moment. I’m sorry again for the circumstances.”
On his way out, he ducked up into the service deck, where the galley, shower, gym, and bathroom were located. Thenbecca was in the galley, her slippers hooked into stirrups on the floor.
“Hello, I’ll be back,” he said as he floated past her into the crew quarters. There, he grabbed a rung to stop himself and latched his gaze on Harv Leonel, who was inside his bunk with the door rolled open.
“We’re going to need babysitters. Are you available?”
“Quite,” Harv said.
“Round up whoever else you can. Keep our guests busy. Mentally prepare them for what’s coming. If possible, engage them in philosophical dialogue. This is the most amazing thing any of them have done, and we need to keep their minds on that fact, and not on their deprivations.”
“Got it,” Harv said.
“But,” Michael added after a moment’s reflection, “keep Igbal out of it. We’ll have him give a speech when all hundred are assembled, but for now let’s keep him hidden if we can.”
Harv snorted at that. “If we can.”
Two other bunk doors were closed, and presently one of them rolled open, revealing Dong Nguyen.
“I will help,” he said, and Michael sighed inwardly, because of course the only people available to help Harv were Dong (an eager little man with minimal social grace) and Sandy (whose emotional intelligence was easily the lowest on the ship). But one worked with the tools at hand.
“Excellent,” Michael said, and kicked downward along the ladder.
He stopped in the service deck.
“We’ve got eight live ones,” he told Thenbecca, who was typing something into the CHON synthesizer’s touchscreen, in the “Beverages” menu.
“No kidding,” she said, for the pandemonium had occurred just below her stirruped feet.
“Soon to be sixteen,” he said, “and we’ll have thirty-two by the nominal start of the sleep shift, and forty-eight by morning. You will keep them all fed and hydrated?”
“Yup.”
“Sleep when you can. Gather helpers as you need to, myself included. If the forces of darkness hold sway out here in the big empty, we could be as little as one meal away from mutiny.”
“Michael, I’ve got this,” she said. “Go do what you need to.”
Thenbecca had perhaps the highest emotional intelligence on the ship, and a fine chef’s mind for logistics, so he nodded, crossed her off his mental list of things to worry about, and kicked back down through the cargo deck, past the Bubble and the spacesuit lockers, and into the hibernation bay.
Rachael and Hobie had already started thawing out the next batch of passengers, and Michael wanted to watch their every move, knowing full well that, sometime in the next two days, when everyone was weary as rented mules and as prone to error, he might be called upon to perform some portions of this ritual. Or to catch the mistakes of those who did.
Lives depended on it.
Igbal couldn’t help mingling with the defrosted passengers. Michael had specifically asked Harv to ask Igbal to stay away for a while, but Igbal found he couldn’t do that. Harv’s reasoning—that it would be “more dramatic” for Igbal to address them all at once, in two days’ time—was specious at best, and insulting at worst.
Igbal knew what people thought of him: that he was a robber baron, that he’d gotten rich off the sweat of millions of other people’s brows. That he was an asshole who didn’t care about the world, or the plight of the poor.
All of that was, of course, bullshit. Igbal had been fortunate enough to be born with a brain that thought up exciting ideas. And those ideas . . . well, they excited people, and the rest of it kind of followed naturally. They came to work for him. They helped him build the stuff he dreamed up, because it was their dream, too. Governments and corporations hurled money at him, because he could solve their problems and relieve their pain. That’s what people paid for; that’s what made the world go ’round. That and dreams—nothing else.
And what better way to care for the world than to build a grander future for it? To enhance the capabilities of the human species, while reducing its waste? As for the plight of the poor . . . men like Igbal made the whole world richer. Provably, measurably. And he paid good wages, too—wages that flowed down to grocers and plumbers and auto mechanics. Wages that sent people’s children to college and cared for their elderly parents. Was that really less noble than if he worked forty hours a week at a soup kitchen? Seriously.
Also, what exactly was he supposed to do for the poor? He didn’t even have money in the usual sense; he had a multinational corporation. Was he supposed to give that to the poor? How would that even work? No, these criticisms were all madness and noise, and he had learned long ago that his critics could not be reasoned with.
Even if they were Harv.
Fact was, Igbal had made this whole thing happen—this incredible thing, that would change the course of history even if the Beings didn’t deign to speak. So yeah, he was damn well going to meet with the people he’d brought out here with him.
He had some business stuff to attend to first—light-lagged by three weeks and at a bandwidth of barely ninety bits per second—because he always had business stuff to attend to. Making dreams come true was an absolutely full-time job, and things had gotten crazy bad down at ESL1.
By the time he got down to the Bubble, the first batch of passengers had set up their own little zero-gee campsite, with hammocks and sleeping sacks and clotheslines, and seemed well on their way to forming a bold new society.
“Hello,” said one of the women, as he floated out into the Bubble to meet them. Her hair was short, and she had somehow put on lip gloss and eyeliner.
“Hi,” Igbal said, taking her hand and shaking it minutely, so as not to destabilize her. Newcomers to zero-gee were surprisingly bad at shaking hands, and sometimes even puked. “Are you the leader?”
“I don’t know about that,” she said, casting over-shoulder glances at her fellows. “Evelyn Chang.”
“Ah,” he said, “Yeah, I remember you. Math, right? University of . . .”
“MIT. Right.”
“I went there, too, and I love math,” he said. “We should talk.”
Igbal turned to one of the men, who introduced himself as Bryan Parr.
“Ambassador Parr,” Igbal said, shaking his hand.
Igbal had a good memory, and although he’d never met most of the passengers, he’d hand-picked them all from their dossiers. Most were free of family and business entanglements that would prevent their taking two years away. They had been approached and negotiated with in secrecy, and he’d been heavily involved in that process. Very few of the candidates, once approached, had refused the invitation, so in principle he knew at least a little bit about each of them.
“And you must be the other Ambassador Parr,” he said to the man adjacent. The two were not twins, but the family resemblance was strong—both had black hair, broad chins, and dark, soulful eyes over beige-colored skin.
“Adam,” the man said, shaking hands.
And so it went. Igbal talked with each of them for a few minutes, and offered some tips about living weightless. He’d been a resident in space for most of the past seven years, and had welcomed dozens into the life on board ESL1 Shade Station, so this was a subject he knew a little about.
When it was done and he was on his way back to work, Harv took him aside and said, “That went surprisingly well.”
“Fuck off,” Igbal told him, and kicked up the ladder toward the bridge.
Michael had a better idea what to do as he ushered the second batch of sleepers into wakefulness, and then escorted them to the Encounter Bubble. Also, fortunately, there was now a small community in place to welcome them. So in that sense, the job was now easier.
However, there were now sixteen people asking him questions, logistical and otherwise, and he could not keep ignoring them all. And so he spent a good half hour talking to them, telling them first the date and time. The ship was still on Paramaribo time—the Atlantic time zone, one hour later than the east coast of the United States, and it was currently four-twenty in the afternoon. For people who, subjectively, had been on Earth (indeed, in Paramaribo) just a few hours ago, this kind of information was quite important in bringing them forward into the present.
“Many of you must feel almost as though you’re dreaming,” he said, “and you must help each other overcome this. We’re in a hazardous environment, far from rescue, and there is no margin for nonsense. Please remember your training, conduct yourselves as guests, and tolerate nothing less from your peers.”
Next, he explained that the lighting would dim between 9:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m., and how—ahem!—to use the sleep masks and earplugs in their gear kits. Then a quick summary of who he was and why he was here on the mission, and where exactly they were in space, and how long it would be before they started taking the drugs that would let them talk to aliens. Also, where the toilet was and how to use it, where the bridge was and how to stay far away from it. He explained that none of them would be taking showers at all, except by special arrangement, and that they were also to refrain from harassing Thenbecca for food unless they were experiencing some genuine blood sugar emergency.
“Some of you may already have received your pre-packaged rations. Others will receive them within the next few hours. Please feel free to hoard and trade as you see fit. Please put the empty packaging back into your kit bags. Although it costs a fortune to haul their mass back with us, and although interstellar space is unimaginably vast and empty, we will not be leaving behind any litter.”
Some of the passengers had already heard some of this from Harv and Dong, but it never hurt to hear it again.
“Unprofessional,” muttered the passenger with the Christmas-red hair.
“Assuredly lacking in precision and polish,” Michael agreed in a much louder voice. “This is the first mission of its kind, and it relies in part on the fact that you’re all highly respected lateral thinkers. As for myself, I haven’t drawn a salary in decades, and so cannot lay claim to being a professional anything.”
After a moment’s reflection, he then added, “There are barf bags in your kit as well. If you should fill one, I won’t ask you to hang onto it. I’ll see to it that a receptacle is set up. Are there any further questions?”
One hand went up.
“Yes?” Michael asked, pointing to a black-haired man.
“Will you pray with us?”
“Assuredly,” Michael said, “But not right now. If there’s nothing else . . .”
There wasn’t. Michael went back to work.
Despite Michael’s best efforts, as the Encounter Bubble filled up with people, it also filled with loose globules of vomit, which eventually landed on the walls, cables, and (in one spectacular example) hatches. He distributed precious motion sickness patches to the worst offenders.
And then he found he needed to eat and sleep. He asked Ptolemy to wake him in three hours. Michael had always been blessed with the ability to fall asleep quickly, and to awake quickly when circumstances demanded it, but his body nearly refused to cooperate when the alarm went off, dragging him insistently back down into a slumbery quicksand. He barely made it out before the next batch of sleepers began to awaken.
By this time, Hobie was fully in charge of the process, Rachael having retreated to her own bunk to sleep off what must by now be an awful fatigue. And Hobie had no appetite for interference or delay; whenever Michael got even slightly in his way, he said, “Move it, man, we’re chasing clocks here,” or “Don’t watch where you’re going, watch where I’m going,” or “We’re going to run out of air, you keep slowing down our schedule!”
That was true enough, and a good reminder that Michael, having inserted himself into this process, had an obligation to, first and foremost, not cause the deaths of everyone involved. The ship was already running on bottled oxygen and chemical CO2 scrubbers, as the life support system could not cope with even a quarter of the passengers awake. And if those consumables ran out before the passengers were back in their pods and safely frozen for transit . . . Well, everything about this was deadly serious, and deadly, period.
“I will redouble my efforts to assist without hindering,” he said solemnly, and then really did go about his business differently, making sure he was as far away from Hobie—and any plausible trajectory Hobie might launch on—as humanly possible.
And yet, another batch of human beings really was waking up. Groggy, disoriented, in some cases frightened and in others, cranky. It wasn’t their fault; different parts of the brain woke up at different rates. They needed fluids and electrolytes, towels and coveralls, instructions and warnings that Hobie had no time or patience to give them.
The rest of the night passed in a blur, until Michael found he had to sleep again. This time, he didn’t reckon three hours would cut it, so he woke up Harv and pressed him into service, briefly explaining the task and then trusting that Harv could, at the very least, do more good than harm down there.
“Wake me in six hours,” he told Ptolemy, and faded before he could even roll his bunk door closed.