Starborne

So he sets out once more down the corridor to the dropchute, descends to the lower levels, moves with his usual feline grace through the tangle of stored gear that clutters those levels, and, pressing his hand against the identification plate that gives access to the deepest storage areas, steps through the opening hatch into the secret world of the ship’s most precious cargo, its bank of genetic material.

Not many people have Need-to-Enter access to this area coded into the ship’s master brain. Chang does — he is the custodian of the Wotan’s collection of fertilized and unfertilized reproductive cells — and so does Sylvia, the ship’s other genetic specialist. But the expedition is a long way from any point where the birth of children aboard ship would be a desirable thing, and neither of them has reason to come down here very often. Michael, whose primary job is maintenance of all of the ship’s internal mechanical functions, is another one who can enter this part of the vessel without the year-captain’s specific permission. There are two or three others. But most of the time the unborn and indeed mostly still unconceived future colonists of the as yet undiscovered New Earth sleep peacefully in the stasis of their freezer units, unintruded upon by visitors from above.

Julia is not someone who should be authorized to come to this part of the ship. Her responsibilities center entirely on the functioning of the stardrive, and no element of the stardrive mechanism is located anywhere near here. The year-captain has added her palmprint to the section’s Need-to-Enter list for purely personal reasons. He has given her the ability to pass through that hatch because hardly anyone else has it, which makes this an excellent location for their clandestine meetings. The chances of their being disturbed here are very small. And if ever they should be, why would anyone care that the year-captain has illicitly permitted his lover to join him down here? He suspects that his little crime, such as it is, would be taken merely as a welcome indication that he is human, after all.

This is a dark place, lit only by little pips of slave-light that jump into energized states along the illuminator strands set overhead as he passes beneath them, and wink out again when he has gone by. To the right and the left are the cabinets in which germ plasm of various sorts is stored. The plan of the voyage calls for no births aboard ship at all during the first year; then, if it seems desirable in the context of what position the ship has attained and what potential colony-worlds, if any, have been located, births will be authorized to shipboard couples interested in rearing children. There is room on board for up to fifty additional passengers to be born en route. After that, no more until a planetary landing. The stored ova and spermatozoa are to be kept in the cooler until that time as well. A mere twenty-five couples, no matter how often their couplings are rearranged, will not be able to provide sufficient genetic diversity for the peopling of a new world. But all those thousands of stored ova and the myriad sperm cells will be available to vary the genetic mix once the colony has been established.

A single small light illuminates the year-captain’s love nest, which is an egg-shaped security node, just barely big enough for two people of reasonable size to embrace in, that separates one of the sectors of freezer cabinets from its array of monitoring devices. The year-captain peers in and sees Julia stretched out casually with her arms folded behind her head and her ankles crossed. Her clothes are stacked in the passageway outside; there is no room in the little security node to get undressed.

“Was there a problem?” she asks.

“Heinz,” says the year-captain, wriggling quickly out of his tunic and trousers. “There was something he felt I ought to be told about, so he stayed after the meeting and told me. And told me and told me.”

“Something serious?”

“Nothing I didn’t already know about,” he replies.

He is naked now. She beckons to him and he crawls in beside her. Julia hisses with pleasure as he curls up around her cool, muscular body. It is an athlete’s body, a racer’s body, taut-bellied, flat-buttocked, not a gram of excess flesh. Her thighs are long and narrow, her arms slender and strong, with lightly corded veins strikingly prominent along them. She swims an hour each day in the lap-pool on the recreation level. Occasionally the year-captain joins her there, and although he is not unlike her in build, an athlete too, his body hardened and tempered by a lifetime of discipline, he invariably finds himself breathing hard after fifty or sixty turns in the pool, whereas Julia goes on and on without a single break in rhythm for her full hour and when she climbs from the water she seems not to have exerted herself at all.