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NASA |
I am the dead man's child. Daddy rode the high lines - that I know, because I have his badge with the glinting circuits and the bloodstains that tell so much if only I knew how to read them. His bones are polished with starlight. They rattle when he sighs in his grave-drawer.
But these are things I am not supposed to tell. Mother forbids. I am supposed to wear my proud face and pretend to be like every other child with a parent lost to accident or environmental malfunction or unhappy chance.
I know better. When Daddy whispers to me through his shattered teeth, he tells me better.
Someday I will ride the high lines.
"Today we will be having a pop quiz on the five quarters of the world," says Mr Grieve. He has been teaching children so long some grandpas sat in his circle. I sometimes imagine Mr Grieve looks like Daddy might have if my father had lived on forever.
We grumble, because that's what kids do, and get out our tablets and swipe them with antistatic cloth in case of cheating or poor hygiene. Both are wrong, of course, but cheating doesn't kill.
Here is the test:
1) Why does the world have five quarters?
2)
What is the colour of each quarter of the world?
3) How do we honour
those colours?
4) If you were Crew, how would you arrange the
quarters?
5) Bonus question: where does air come from originally?
Answers concerning recycling and environmental engineering will not
receive credit.
Starlight poisons the human mind. It is known to introduce phantoms, spectral illusions outside the normal realm of the visual cortex's baseline processing capabilities. Once those phantoms take up residence within the ego and the associated memory wells, they can be impossible to banish, even with surgical intervention. A logarithmically increasing degradation of mental function and emotional integrity results. It is therefore an obvious imperative of all responsible citizens to avoid any exposure whatsoever to starlight. All viewing ports are to be avoided. Unauthorised use of viewing ports should be reported immediately, as should any other accidental or deliberate exposure to starlight. - Dr. Speedkill's Certified Manual of Good Citizenry and Optimal Child Rearing.
"Yes, Marguerite?" Mr Grieve points to me.
I have fire in me today. Mother calls me star-touched, and worries, but she sends me to school anyway. I am almost done here, Mr Grieve will not hurt me too much.
Eyes closed against stinging tears, stomach clenched, I ask the question which has been on my mind for years. "Can you please tell me about the high lines, sir? What they really are?"
All of the children stop breathing as if wired to the same switch. We are suddenly quiet as Daddy, quiet as the dead. I can hear the grass crinkle beneath us, the grumbling of distant sheep, the thump of dampers in the air recycling system high above, the gentle hiss which underlies all of Ship's moments and motions. That is when I realise Mr Grieve does not breathe either. Have I always known this?
One by one my fellow students come back online, little puffs of air expelled or drawn in like the venting of so many small pressure vessels. Finally I open my eyes to see Mr Grieve, yet unbreathing, watching me. His own eyes are half-lidded. He seems impossibly old, in his purple cargo vest and balloon pants, shiny head, his eyes glinting like ball bearings in a tray of lube. His skin is slick as ice on a leaky nitrogen line, and just as pale. It finally occurs to me to wonder if my teacher is human.
"Subtle, Marguerite," he says. No part of his body moves except his face, his lips bending their way into a smile that seems no more real than the smiling of my girlhood dolls, now abandoned in the drawer beneath my bunk. Mostly abandoned.
Then Mr Grieve stirs to life, and is once more an old man. Why had I thought him not breathing? His chest rises and falls beneath his vest, like everyone's. He spreads his arms. "Class, take note of Marguerite's timing. She has waited until a few days before her matriculation to ask a question that might ordinarily provoke difficulty, or even punishment. Yet she knows I am not likely to disrupt the upcoming Festival of Choosing in the name of discipline. She has a question, a difficult question, possibly even dangerous, and she asks it openly so that each of you will see what consequences pertain."
He leans close, catching our eyes pair by pair. "Sometimes, in the learning circle, things can be said that we would not repeat at dinner, or seated before the council, or out tending sheep. Her question, and any answer I might choose to give to it, are in that class of unrepeatable things. We call this hidden knowledge. It is often concealed in stories, lies told to children for their betterment and safety. But Marguerite is almost done being a child, and so she casts aside childish lies and asks for hidden knowledge." Mr Grieve reaches out to almost touch me. "I shall answer your question with a question. Tell us about your father, young lady, and then if you have earned it, I shall tell you about the high lines."
The Tale of the Captain and the Pilot
Once
upon a timeline the Captain left the bridge and walked among the people of
His Ship. Though Ship is endless, being bounded by the hull and by time
itself, Ship is not truly infinite. Even so, among the Captain's powers
are the will to cross a hundred frames at a single step, the strength to
pass through a dozen local-years in a single breath.
The Captain chanced to pass down a corridor guised as an old beggar in cloth-of-gold, carrying a power rod for a staff, His begging bowl overflowing with barleycorn. In the corridor He came upon a man reviewing the Regulations at a dusty terminal, humming and happy at his work. This caught the Captain's fancy, for there are few who study the Regulations save when sitting for examination, or as recondite punishment for some infraction.
"Are you a felon, good man?" He asked.
The studying man was
startled, for the Captain moved silent as the orbiting stars, and he had
not heard His approach. "Why no, friend," he said nervously. The Captain
made a strange beggar indeed.
"Then why study the Regulations?"
The
man shrugged. "For my own betterment, and perhaps the betterment of
Ship."
"But you are not Crew," the Captain persisted.
"Who is? No
one has seen Crew since my grandfather's day, at the least."
The Captain considered this. All things are the same to the Captain, as
anyone who did not sleep through the teaching circle knows, but he was
well aware that time differed for the people who lived within the linear
flow of tauons.
"So with no Crew, why do the Regulations matter to
you?"
The man grinned. "There is provision here for passengers,
colonists and cargo to be brevetted to Crew."
"Of course," said the
Captain, whose memory was utterly holographic, though his command of it
was sometimes imperfect. "Section Twenty Three, Subsection Fourty One
Alpha, Grid Eff Ess Seventeen, Paragraphs One Hundred Eleven through One
Hundred Twenty Nine inclusive."
"Uh...yes."
"But only Crew can
brevet someone," the Captain continued.
"And if I ever find Crew ..."
The man's voice trailed off. "Of course. But you are not in
uniform."
"The uniform does not create the Crew." The Captain stared
into the man's soul, measured the density of his bones and durability of
his genome. "I have need of a pilot. Will you take service with me as I go
to walk the high lines?"
"Of course," said the man, who had hoped a
good many years for this moment.
And so they went, stepping into the space between spaces, leaving behind the man's native frames, with no word for his wife and unborn child, heading for high lines and the gentle polishing of starlight.
"But I still do not know what the high lines are," Marguerite says, her voice trembling with unshed tears. Visions of water boats pass in her head, as if there were ever enough water to float something that big. "Nor even what a pilot does. Not here, on Ship."
Mr Grieve looks around the teaching circle. "What does Marguerite's
story tell us of life? Roald?"
Roald shuffles and slowly draws his
finger from his nose. "Not to talk to strangers ...?"
"Logic?"
Logic
stares blankly a moment, then shakes her head. "Reading Regulations isn't
such a good idea."
"Brangwyn?"
"Opportunity walks the frames in
strange costumes." Brangwyn, after Marguerite herself, is easily the
strangest child in Mr Grieve's teaching circle.
"Fair enough," he says,
looking around.
Marguerite finds herself studying him closely, to see if her teacher is breathing or not.
"Here is what we know of life from this story," he continues. "That to
reach for choice is to open irrevocable paths. You can herd sheep and tend
air exchangers all your life, and be happy, healthy and whole. Or you can
look past yourself, into a larger life, and accept the risks that pass
your way, though the price might be impossibly high." He glances at
Marguerite. "A child with one parent, talking to whispering bones during
the dark watches. I advise simplicity in life. Choice kills."
"And
choice can make you great," says Marguerite stubbornly.
"Of course." Mr
Grieve sounds surprised. "Without risk, there is no reward."
"So tell
me of the high lines."
The conversation has narrowed to the two of
them, the other children losing dimensionality.
"If I do, you might
never come back to this life."
This life? Her mother, miserable, and
the whispering, star-polished bones? "Tell me," she insists.
And so he
does.
The Festival of Choosing is bleak in these frames, since a child and a teacher have vanished together. Some whisper of illicit couplings in distant frames where morals are lax and the old, proper customs have been abandoned. Others talk quietly of murder and dismemberment and dreadful crimes.
The dead man's bones have vanished from their grave-drawer. The dead man's wife sits in the sheep meadow and stares at grass all day, but she is not crying. Though she is sad beyond misery for her losses, she also knows that somewhere frames and local-years distant, her child runs laughing in the starlight with a clattering father-Pilot and a smiling Captain-teacher.
Unlike her father, Marguerite had not left without saying good-bye.
