Going Interstellar (collection)

Ennio bit his lip. “It seems so. I don’t like to think about it anymore than you do, but it seems so. They’re killing him just for trying to find this information.”

“And you want us to look at the nursery rhymes?” I said, baffled. If this was true, it seemed more productive to call a public meeting; to shout it from the roof tops; to sound the alarm; to try the administrative board for treason. Which is where I came up against an obstacle. The administrative board and the captain had absolute power aboard. Who would try them?

“No, not just look at nursery rhymes,” Ennio said. “You weren’t listening. I have compiled all the instructions on how to find the wise old owl.” He looked at me, his gaze so determined that you’d swear he was the one condemned to death and seeing only one means of escape.

“What good would that be? Even if it’s another computer.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we got into this by looking at the rhymes. And they all told us to find the Wise Old Owl. If you don’t come with me, I’ll look myself.”

I took the reader from his hands, looked at his notes. If he’d culled the hints properly, then the wise old owl, whatever it was, was located in one of the external maintenance tunnels, in section 25. That section was little inhabited and I couldn’t remember ever going into that tunnel. How something like a computer would stay undetected all that time, I couldn’t imagine, but neither could I tell him categorically that it hadn’t happened.

“Tonight,” I said. “After my parents go to bed. I’ll meet you in the alley where you were today.”

“You’ll help me look?” he asked, and, for the first time that day, I heard a smile in his voice.

“Of course.” The last thing I needed was an educational machine programmer lost in the maintenance tunnels. With my luck, he would trip over some wiring and destroy one of the air pumps or the light banks.

* * *

That was the longest dinner of my life. Nighttime is artificial on the ship. It always falls at precisely 20:00, when they close the system of mirrors that brings sunlight into the ship. My mom had said that her parents said sunlight used to be a lot stronger, when we were closer to Sol. Now it had to be supplemented with specialized lamps. I knew because I had to fix them, rearrange them and, occasionally, install them.

Plants and animals—and humans—need a certain cycle of daylight and darkness and since we didn’t have it naturally, it had to be simulated.

My family ate an hour before nightfall, but that night we were—of course—delayed. And then mom wished to talk about the shocking news of Ciar’s arrest. I don’t know what answers I made, other than indicating how surprised I was, myself, with my father joining our dismay.

I know it was well past their normal bed time of 22:00 when they retired. I waited another hour to make sure they were asleep, because the last thing I needed—the absolute last thing—was for them to intercept me at the door and ask where I was going or why.

This felt like insanity, but it had that curious glimmer of a suspicion that there might be something in it. Just a sliver of hope, the barest of chances that there was something more in this than Ennio’s gallant and silly attempt to save his friend and rival.

By the time I made it to the meeting place, I halfway expected Ennio to be gone to his bed in the bachelors’ quarters, but he was waiting, clutching his reader.

“Right,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Come.”

* * *

“This way.”

Even on the most external of tunnels there were several layers of material between ourselves and space so there was no dangerous radiation. But we were on the outermost area accessible to humans. Beyond that was an area where only specialized crews in spacesuits were allowed to make repairs.

The space was a tunnel so narrow we had to shuffle side by side along it. To compensate for the narrowness, it was very high, seeming to climb all the way up the side of the ship, to …the top of the ship?

Of course, I had no business being here after hours, looking around for a chimera born of Ciar’s overexcited imagination, of Ennio’s gallant impulses and desire to save our errant friend.

At least, I thought, I was less likely to be caught than Ciar. I’d never been here, I saw nothing here to maintain, and so I doubted that anyone could come to do anything in here and bump into us. And of course, I wasn’t leaving clear codes behind, as Ciar had.

The problem was that there was nothing here to maintain. Just walls—not very smooth, I’ll grant you. They rarely are in the less frequently used maintenance tunnels. Occasionally there might be a protruding pipe. But that was about it.

We seemed as likely to find a computer here as to find …well, a wise old owl.

“Here,” Ennio said. “We’re supposed to stand here.” He turned into a passage so narrow we had to squeeze between the walls. The floor was solid but grimy underfoot, and the ceiling was lost somewhere in the darkness above.

“Now what?” I asked. “The wizard comes and rescues us?”