Right to Know

Chapter 1-2

“Yeah, but I still shouldn’t have said it.”

“Why not?”

“I pulled rank on him.” He shook his head. “That’s a Council trick. A Crew trick.”

“That’s all right,” Treena said brightly. “You practically are Crew.”

He almost hit her. Instead, he stopped, there on the ceramic street, until he could say, gently, “I’m not. I’m Shipborn. Like him. Like you.”

“But—”

“Don’t talk.” Art roughly pulled her close. “Haven’t we got better things to do than talk?”

She nodded and smiled, back on familiar ground. “Where—”

As if there were any choice. He could no more take her to his home in Habitat Three then he could have fixed the matter-antimatter reactor that powered the ship. “Your place,” he said, and let her lead him away into the artificial night.

Night still filled Habitat Three when the insistent beeping of Art’s alarm dragged him from the depths of sleep. “s**t,” he said. The alarm immediately cut off, responding to one of several swear words he’d programmed the system to recognize as meaning he was awake. Simultaneously the lights came on, stabbing a lance of pain into his fogged brain.

He’d only been in his own bed for a couple of hours, but it was 0500, and he had to be on the air at 0630. Knowing if he closed his eyes, he’d be asleep again in an instant, he swung his legs over the side of the mattress, lurched to his feet, and stumbled into the bathroom.

The pulsing water of the shower brought him to some semblance of full wakefulness, but as he stepped out of the stall and grabbed a towel, he glanced at his image in the full-length mirror, expecting to see bloodshot, puffy eyes looking back at him.

Instead, he saw what he always saw—a 32-year-old man with features some people thought were too good-looking, a carefully nurtured tan that covered every inch of his lean, muscular body, straight, chestnut-brown hair now spiky with moisture, and blue eyes that met his quizzically. “You can’t go on like this,” he told his reflection. “You’ll never live to a ripe old age if you don’t get your rest.”

He snorted and turned toward the smaller shaving mirror over the sink. Old age on the Mayflower II would be very ripe. Overripe, in fact. Stinking, rotting ripe. “Canned fruits, that’s what we are,” he muttered as he ran the shaver over his chin. “The universe is a cellar, and we’re all preserves.”

Pleased with his metaphor, he grinned at his clean-shaven face, then went back into the bedroom and dressed in what he thought of as his uniform: a dark-blue jacket, a light-blue shirt, a nondescript red tie, all of a style no one else on the ship wore—any more than he did when he wasn’t on duty. Then as quietly as possible, he slipped out, taking care not to wake his parents.

If he’d lived on his own, of course, he wouldn’t have had to worry about it…but his father, the esteemed—by some—Councillor Randall P. Stoddard, had made it clear that any application he might make for housing elsewhere would not be approved. He wanted his son close at hand. And since any housing Art might have been able to get even without his father’s interference would most likely have been Habitat Eight or Nine at best, Art had never tried too hard to change the elder Stoddard’s mind.

Their house, in Neighbourhood One, was only a short walk from the nearest intraship transport access station. The stacked, teeming warrens of the higher-numbered Habs weren’t for the residents of Habitat Three. Here, trees of uniform height and shape bordered the ubiquitous cream-coloured ceramic pavement; bicycles, identical except for colour, stood on kickstands beside the walk to each square house. Despite white paint and blue, carved shutters and lawn sculptures. and variations in landscaping, their basic sameness could not be disguised.

Here and there, no disguise had even been attempted, and a house bore the unmistakable stamp of mass manufacture proudly, like a sign of distinction. These were the homes of the Councillors, Earthborn every one of them, appointed by the government on Earth before the ship launched and in power ever since…and Art, son of a Councillor, had lived in one of them his entire life.

He strode down the walk and turned right, breathing in the sweet scents of flowers and other growing things. In Habitat Three, every house had its own manicured plot of oxygenating greenery, potted trees, and banks of flowers, and even the occasional vegetable crèche. Art’s route also took him past the edge of the central park, a manufactured bit of “wilderness” impenetrably dark this early in the morning, when even the “stars” were switched off and the only light came from the widely spaced light posts, but he didn’t spare the shadows a second glance. There was nothing to fear in the dark in the Mayflower II’s controlled environment.

Even so, he suppressed a start as a maintenance robot burst out of the darkness and crossed the street not five metres ahead of him, scuttling over the pale ceramic surface like a giant black spider. He snorted at his own foolishness and walked on.

His footsteps echoed back to him from a side street, so that it sounded for a moment as if he were being followed—but he knew he wasn’t. Down in the mid-Habs, they sometimes followed him, or crowded him—he was as much of a celebrity as the Mayflower II had, after all—but no one ever followed him in Habitat Three, which, along with the identical Habitat Four, was home to Councillors and high-level bureaucrats. They knew him for what he was: someone highly visible and completely powerless.

He thought back to the encounter with Pete, Treena’s later efforts to make him forget what had happened notwithstanding. Of course, Pete was jealous of him. Who could blame him? They’d played together as kids, back when Pete had lived in Habitat Three as well, before his family’s fall from grace. It wasn’t Pete’s fault his dad, senior administrator of the Population Management Authority, had gone crazy and started making wild accusations against the Prime Councillor…not to mention the Captain. But it sure as hell wasn’t Art’s fault, either. And Pete hadn’t been a kid anymore by then. He could have stepped away from his father, kept his own nose clean. No way he’d have stayed in Habitat Three or Four, but he might have hung on in the mid-Habs. Instead, he’d defended his father to the bitter end, and after the freak accident involving the maintenance robot had made some pretty wild accusations himself about his father being murdered. He’s lucky he’s even doing make-work, Art thought. In the early years, the Captain might have spaced him.

Now he saw Art doing all right for himself and wondered why it couldn’t be him. Especially…

Art sighed. Especially since he’d almost screwed up as badly as Pete.

He remembered the night. He could hardly forget it, what with his father reminding him every couple of weeks. He’d been nineteen, Pete a year older. They’d been out drinking in the mid-Habs. Pete had been going on and on about how his father’s death hadn’t been an accident, how someone had altered the maintenance robot’s programming, made it kill him. Everyone knew the robots were incapable of harming anyone. But somehow it had started to make sense, especially after the fifth beer and second—or was it the third?—whisky. They’d staggered out of the bar in search of a maintenance robot. Even drunk as they were, it hadn’t been hard: there was always one around, like the one that had just startled Art. They’d cornered it and beaten it to pieces with a chair they’d stolen from the bar. The robot had finally quit twitching just as the Peacekeepers arrived. The ’keeps had hauled them up to Administration, processed them, locked them up in the brig. It had been the last time Art had seen Pete until the night before in Rick’s Place, and Art knew he could just as easily have ended up a make-work jerk, too, except…

…except his father was a Councillor. Art had only been in the cell for an hour before his father had shown up, tight-lipped and furious, and hauled him out of there. An endless lecture later, Art had been on probation, kept on such a short leash by his father he hadn’t even seen the mid-Habs for another five years. By that time, his father had landed him his current position as Information Dissemination Specialist.

He tried to shake off his black mood. Who cared what the other Shipborn thought? They were wrong. He was more like them than they knew. He didn’t like the way the Council ruled, deciding where people would live, what jobs they would do, what they could hear and see and read, forcing women to have children, forcing those children into whatever roles they saw fit. But what could he do about it? The ’keeps didn’t wait for trouble before arresting troublemakers, and what good would getting arrested do anyone?

All he was doing was making the best of things—and sometimes, he had to admit, things were pretty good. After all, however some of the Shipborn felt about him, there were plenty of others to whom his closeness to the Council and Crew didn’t seem to matter—including a lot of girls. Like Treena.

A short distance ahead, a small red-and-white sign identified the intraship transit station. The pod inside would whisk him up the habitat’s “boom” (properly known as the Service and Transit Conduit) to the Core, and from there to Habitat Two, the Administration Hab. Habitat One, of course, was Crew Country: home not only to the crew, but to the ship’s bridge, CentComp, and associated control systems, tucked away on a restricted-access deck above the Hab’s skyplate.

There were no habitats further “up” the Core: forward of Habitats One to Four, there was only the massive sphere of the Forward Service and Propulsion Module, a place where only maintenance robots ventured except in extraordinary circumstances. It housed the projectors for the powerful electromagnetic fields that had kept the Mayflower II—at least so far—from a catastrophic encounter with some anonymous bit of space matter while moving at relativistic speed, and itself nestled in behind the huge umbrella-shaped Forward Shield, a solid chunk of reshaped asteroid that was the last defence against such collisions.

Currently, the Forward Module also housed the matter-antimatter reactor and the propulsion system, for the Mayflower II was decelerating. For the first fifteen years of the ship’s journey, the reactor and the engines had resided in the Aft Module, accelerating the giant vessel at a constant 0.3 g to almost the speed of light. Now they were just as enthusiastically slowing its journey, though what lay at the end of their long downward slide no one knew…or at least no one was talking about it.

Supposedly there was a good chance of finding a habitable planet in the system at which they had been aimed so many years ago. Art’s parents certainly believed it. Art had his doubts.

Art stepped inside the waiting pod and sat on its worn vinyl seat of faded blue, patched in one spot with a bit of duct-tape—presumably the work of an actual human being, not a spectacularly lazy maintenance robot.

“Please place palm on the scanning panel for biometric evaluation,” said a pleasant female voice, and a panel slid aside in the front of the compartment, revealing a glowing blue square. Art placed his hand on the square, and it blinked green as CentComp ensured he was indeed Arthur Stoddard and had the necessary clearance to visit the pod’s preprogrammed destination, the Administration Hab. For all he knew, it sniffed his sweat, too.

“Identity confirmed,” said the pod. “Please ensure all hands and feet are inside the pod and say ‘Go’ when ready to depart.”