Going Interstellar (collection)

It was nothing like the blackout three years ago that left a whole wing of the ship with minimal air recycling. This was more a matter of clothes washers not working, freezers becoming suddenly warm and heating systems having gone south over an entire section.

Since we were requested to hurry and since we were being offered extra luxury rations on completion, I worked straight through lunch, and didn’t talk to anyone until I headed home.

Which was when Ennio intercepted me. This wasn’t so rare, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Or at least, I was disquieted. He didn’t look as he normally did.

To begin with, he wasn’t waiting at my home or within sight of my home, as he usually did. Instead, he seemed to have been patrolling all my possible paths of approach to home—which, of course, varied, since I came from different locations, depending on the last job I’d been busy with—to meet me out of possible sight of my parents and neighbors. And then, instead of falling into step beside me, as he usually did, and easing into a conversation, he came just close enough to motion me to follow him.

This was strange enough behavior that I almost had to obey. I confess if Ennio had been a different type of person I might have thought that he had ulterior motives. He took increasingly smaller and narrower corridors, each one less populated, until I half expected him to pull me into a repair tunnel. Instead, he pulled me into a maintenance closet.

Maintenance closets are spaced along corridors, both large and small. Most of them have access to the wiring for that portion of the ship. Some of them just contain tools, others have the specialized machines that clean the corridor floors. This one had a machine, so that to pull me in, Ennio had to squeeze himself behind it, then make room for me.

“Close the door,” he whispered urgently.

I did, because at that point I was going with the assumption he’d gone stark raving mad, and everyone knows the best thing with lunatics is to humor them until you can get them to a medtech.

Closing the door left us in complete darkness, surrounded by a smell of mustiness and detergent. “All right,” I said. “Now what?”

But nothing prepared me for the tone of his voice much less what he said, as he spoke out of the dark, “They arrested Ciar this morning.” He sounded as if he was about to cry.

The sound was so odd, that I was sure I had misunderstood him. “What?”

“They arrested Ciar this morning. I had to talk to you where no one could hear us. I brought a lantern here earlier. I don’t think there are any listening devices.”

“I don’t think there are listening devices anywhere in the ship,” I said. “Oh, maybe in the supply areas, to make sure things are not stolen, but I don’t think so. Why should there be?”

“Why should they arrest Ciar?”

“He went to his place of employment after hours and probably without permission.”

“That’s an administrative sanction,” he said. “It’s just an administrative sanction. It’s not a capital crime.”

“A …capital crime? They are going to kill him? How do you know this? Why do you think this?”

“It’s what the news says,” he said. “They say he was arrested for activities against the community, and that he’ll be executed.”

“You have to have misunderstood.”

“I didn’t.” And the woebegone tone of his voice made me begin to believe him. Ennio couldn’t possibly be confused about something that important.

“But …” I said

“I figured it was his search. He was using his ID on the terminal. Someone correlated all his searches. Someone doesn’t want that stuff looked at.”

“What? Nursery rhymes?”

A desperate sniffle from the darkness, that might have been an attempt to sound ironical, but sounded only sad. “I hope that’s not it, since I just downloaded all I could find.”

“Ennio!”

“I have to know. We have to find out. We have to do something to save Ciar.”

This was truly delusional. Fine, so there hadn’t been an execution in the last ten years, meaning there hadn’t been one in the time I’d been conscious of them, or an adult, able to interpret the news. But even I knew enough, from hearing my parents talk, to know that when someone was arrested for a capital crime and it was announced as such, everything was decided and there was no reprieve. Like Ennio I couldn’t imagine what Ciar had done to deserve capital punishment. Other than his silly search into the nursery rhymes and how many generations there had been in the ship, I didn’t think he’d so much as talked back to his supervisor this last year. Ennio and I would have known if he had. We talked over almost everything. So this left…. “When are they executing him?”

“Next week,” Ennio said.

“Why that long?”

Even without being able to see Ennio, I knew he had shrugged. And I realized I was a total idiot. There were many things to do before an execution, most of them procedural and technical. While the administration alone decided on death or life, they had to be really sure that nothing could be done to reclaim a trained linguist, like Ciar.