Part 14 (1/2)

Resting on the pool's edge after some strenuous splas.h.i.+ng, they took up again last year's discussion about the s.h.i.+p and its purposes. Bart got the idea that now they talked a lot on this subject. Today he remarked that maybe soon they would be having children, so eventually people would fill up the empty rooms still waiting on the other levels.

Fuad shook his head. ”The s.h.i.+p's told us we're all sterile-know what that means?”

”You can't make any babies.”

”That's right. Girls and men both. We can do all the s.e.x we want, but nothing can ever happen from it.”

Later alone, Bart asked the s.h.i.+p: ”Am I sterile too? I mean, am I going to be, when...”

”No.”

That was a definite answer at last, but to his old questions he still got only the old answers.

Nineteen.

Bart's chronic worry that his life was going fundamentally wrong was lightened when he met his s.h.i.+pmates today. They were now so obviously adults that he could produce an inner sigh of relief and decide to leave the worrying to them.

Most of the teaching machines had been removed. At the few remaining, people were abstractedly at work, printouts and papers stacked around them.

As soon as the word spread that Bart had joined them for the day, most of the adults abandoned other activities and came towering around him, smiling and calling greetings, squeezing his shoulders and ruffling his hair. A number of people wanted to show him things.

Basil took him to see the stars. They went drifting, swimming through a part of the s.h.i.+p where gravity was turned off, and though there was air Basil made him wear a breathing device just in case. Through the gla.s.s Bart looked along the curves of the hull, unreal in their great size and distances, and at the stars that looked even more unreal, like a vast bright scattering of powdered paint.

After lunch he asked to go swimming again. Lotis, in the pool with him and others, now had a peculiar slightly mottled look at her thighs that Bart eventually decided must be caused by fat under the skin. And on her left thigh was the thread-like red tracery of an enlarged vein.

After dinner Baruch and Tang took him aside ”Bart-do you really like this one-day-a-year-life ?”

”I dunno. It's all right, I guess. The s.h.i.+p must have some reason. It's taking care of us all, right?” He might have said something else, but s.h.i.+p heard everything.

The men exchanged glances over his head. With several of the girls they walked him back to his room, when s.h.i.+p called for him, and almost tucked him into bed.

Twenty.

He learned soon after rejoining the others that Tang and Ora had been killed, some months ago, trying to work their way into a part of the s.h.i.+p from which humans were ordinarily sealed out.

”Were they trying...I mean, did it have anything to do with me? With waking me up more often, or...”

”No.” Fay shook her head definitely. ”Oh no, Bart, don't worry about that.”

The thought hadn't really worried him. Actually it had generated some hope.

”They were trying to get to the far end of the s.h.i.+p,” Ranjan explained, ”You know, the aft, as the old records call it. Have you seen any of the old records? The part of the s.h.i.+p where the drive controls and so many other things seem to be located.”

They explained to Bart such elementary knowledge of the s.h.i.+p as they had been able to piece together, and his understanding of it grew a little. He found out also that they meant to keep on trying to get through to the other parts of the s.h.i.+p, and eventually to take over its control. That was a strange thought, and Bart wasn't at all sure how much he liked it.

Twenty-one.

It had been many days since his s.h.i.+pmates paid him as little attention as they did today. He was greeted cheerfully enough, but no crowd gathered around. A couple of people went with him to swim, ina pool that had again been remodeled and made safer and more pleasant.

He learned that some of the people were working hard to raise plants from seeds the s.h.i.+p had long ago provided for their school biology program. They showed him the new garden. It held nothing ready to eat yet, but maybe next time he came.

He saw Kichiro limping by and heard that his knee had been lamed in some contest with another man, but whether it was a fight or a game Bart did not learn.

Twenty-two.

There were no beds in the old common-room any more, and Bart found that most of the people had paired off two-by-two, sleeping in more or less stable partners.h.i.+ps.

More noticeably, most of the people he talked to today had runny noses. Sharon told him that an experiment in the new biology lab had gone wrong and some viruses had escaped. Nothing to worry about, they a.s.sured him. He wasn't worried, really, not about viruses anyway.

All in all, it was a casual, low-pressure sort of day.

Twenty-three.

Lotis, working in the garden, wore shorts today, and he noticed that her legs and bottom were getting quite lumpy with fat. The red vein on her thigh had extended itself into a little tracery of defective blood vessels in the skin.

All the runny noses had dried up. Some medicine the people had made for themselves was ready for Bart in case he caught the infection too. He didn't.

”Maybe the s.h.i.+p's still taking good care of you,” Chao commented.

Twenty-four.