Right to Know

Chapter 1-3

“Go,” said Art. The pod door slid shut, and acceleration pressed him back against the seat.

There were no windows; like an elevator, the pod moved people from place to place without ever providing them a glimpse of the rather utilitarian spaces they traversed. He felt the change in momentum as the pod crossed from Habitat Three’s boom into the Core. There, subject only to the deceleration forces, his stomach flip-flopped as his weight abruptly dropped to what he’d been told it would have been on Mars, not that he had any way to tell.

Momentum shifted again as the pod moved from the Core along the boom to the Administration Hab, and then he felt the pod slow and stop, the door opened, and he stepped out into the access station, once more at normal weight.

It was never night in Admin Hab since no one actually lived there; instead, the skyplate gave a featureless white light that replicated a day of high overcast on Earth. The buildings were almost as featureless as the sky: white blocks marked with a few mirrored windows and dark-blue doors bearing white text identifying each building’s purpose. Signs on the corners directed newcomers to “Food Production” or “Population Management”—the former workplace of Peter’s late father—or any of dozens of other administrative offices, but Art barely glanced at them; although he’d gotten lost in Admin Hab a few times in his early days on the job, now he could have found the studio in his sleep. A couple of times, he thought he had.

Three lefts, a right, two blocks, and another right, and he stood in front of a dark-blue door like all the others, labelled “Internal Communications.” A bar of light flashed over his face again, and the door swung inward. He strode down the carpeted hallway beyond to the studio at its end. His techies, Teresa and Norman, were running a quick system check, huddled together head to head behind the control board. “’Morning,” Art said and received brief, distracted nods in return. He withdrew back down the hall to the office and checked his messages. Nothing new from Crew or Council; that meant the morning ’cast would basically be a repeat of the previous evening’s. Art queued and previewed the necessary video files, ran over his script, and still found himself with twenty-five minutes to kill until the scheduled recording time. There was nothing particularly stopping him from recording early—except for his agreement with Teresa and Norman to always leave them with half an hour alone in the studio to “double-check the equipment.” He figured he knew exactly what equipment they were double-checking, and he wasn’t about to interfere.

So he stayed where he was, his thoughts inevitably falling back into the same track as before.

No, it wasn’t fair for Peter to blame him for his job. It wasn’t as if he had wanted it: he had wanted to join the Mayflower II’s small professional acting troupe, the Relativistic Pilgrims, but there’d been no chance of that after the escapade with the maintenance robot. The artistic director had privately confided to him once at a party that it was a damn shame since he had “a fine voice.” The director had been hitting on him at the time, though, so he wasn’t sure if he should take the compliment seriously; certainly, he’d lost interest once Art had made it clear he was straight.

No, Art’s job was entirely his father’s doing. Randall P. Stoddard was one of the original Councillors, the ones appointed by the bi-partisan Launch Committee before the Mayflower II had so hastily set out. In his late thirties then, he was now pushing seventy, and he had never lost his almost fanatical loyalty to the Crew, a loyalty engendered in part by the way the Crew, all career military, had fought off an attack, just a week before launch, by a force from who-knew-where on Earth. Crew had died that day to save the ship and its passengers.

In fact, so far as Art knew, not one of the original Councillors objected to how the Crew ran the ship…well, none except for Jonas Woods, the Councillor he’d stumbled over—literally—at Rick’s Place. He’d been appointed as a sop to the Liberty Party, a party so far out of the mainstream of political thought that it was generally seen as a joke—except that it had powerful and wealthy adherents who had made it clear they would withhold their support, both financial and moral, for the building of the ship if he were not included.

Woods had made some fiery speeches in support of individual liberty and responsibility in his early days—Art had covertly watched a couple of them, although he’d only been able to do so because of his relatively unfettered access to the ship’s official records; most Passengers would never have been able to get near those recordings.

But despite that—or maybe because of the fact those early attempts at rabble-rousing had gone nowhere—Jonas Woods had long since sunk into drunkenness and debauchery, and as someone who was quite familiar with drunkenness and debauchery, the fact Art even thought of it in those terms was telling.

Jonas Woods was a joke, his long, rambling, pointless speeches having even given rise to a new description, “pulling a woody,” applied to anyone who talked a long time without saying anything of note. (That it was also something of a double entendre had probably contributed to its popularity.) The days when he was not a joke now lay more than thirty subjective years in the past—ancient history, as far as Art was concerned. And no one else questioned the Crew.

These days, the Crew kept to itself. Despite his job, the only Crew he had ever met personally were Peacekeepers—and even most of the ’keeps were actually Shipborn, although Crew Shipborn were a different kettle of fish than guys like Pete.

Habitat One was off-limits to everyone but Crew: a modern version of the Forbidden City of ancient China. Even the Prime Councillor did not have access. At its heart, like a spider at the centre of a web, dwelt Captain Harold Nakos, supreme authority of the ship—and a man no one not of the Crew had seen in person since shortly after Launch.

Sometimes Art wondered if the Captain still lived. But he never said that out loud—especially not where his father could hear it.

Norman stuck his head in the door. His face was flushed. “Ready for you now, Art.”

“Thanks, Norm. On my way.” Art gathered his script and went into the studio.

The rest of the day passed in normal routine; he had interviews with three people and spent an hour getting vid of a dozen maintenance robots, supervised by two harried engineers, scuttling around the river recycler in the Habitat Five, the Forest Hab, which had recently been giving the stream a unique colour and odour definitely not in the original specifications.

Art doubted the vid would ever air. Two stories he’d submitted for approval the day before had both been rejected without explanation. Art frowned at the Crewcomm terminal. One story had been about a mysterious fungal infection that had wiped out a whole tankplot of green peppers, and the other about the loss of half a day’s credit transfer records after an unexplained power surge. Both were already the talk of the mid-Habs—but he’d had no choice but to ignore them.

He cleared the screen with an angry swipe. Six months ago, he had not only been allowed to report on a similar computer malfunction, he had been ordered to. And agricultural die-offs due to disease or tankplot malfunction were nothing new; every other week, it seemed, some fruit or vegetable crop had to be re-started from the genetics bank, while everyone did without. They’d once gone six months without potatoes, and it had been nearly that long since he’d seen a tomato. Why wasn’t he supposed to say anything about it anymore?

He was reduced, in his evening recording session, to reading practically the same script again, except for two frothy human-interest bits, one on the 85th birthday of the oldest Passenger, a man born just after the inaugural meeting of the Caliphate of the Holy and Oppressed and just before the destruction of Ottawa provided the impetus to Unification, and one on an amateur sculptor who made models of the ship out of scrap metal. Art allowed himself the cynical thought that that could quite plausibly be considered a political comment; he was surprised the Council censors, much less the Crew ones, had allowed it.

The only “hard” news was already ancient history: the publication of the latest lists of women required to attempt conception and the men designated as acceptable fathers. Sure, the semi-annual “Sperm-’n’-Eggs” list was big news—and had led to the previous night’s energetic and entirely pleasurable, if exhausting, activities with Treena, and since he was on the male side of the list, he was more than happy to continue to draw other eligible women’s attention to it—but still, three days after its release, it wasn’t exactly new “news,” was it?

Norman gave him the traditional thumbs-up as he finished the recording, then closed down the control board and headed off, hand-in-hand with Teresa. Art watched them go and sighed. Teresa was young and sexy and…completely uninterested in him. Unfortunately, even though she was on the current Egg-’n’-Sperm list, so was Norman, and that suited them both so well Art knew he didn’t stand a chance.

Not that it stopped him from fantasizing every once in a while.

He’d just reached the door when his terminal beeped three times, the high-low-high pattern indicating an incoming voice call. For a moment, he considered ignoring it since he was officially off-duty, but then he decided reluctantly it could be important. He went over to his terminal. “Answer,” he said. “Internal Communications, Stoddard here.”

He expected the screen to light with the image of the caller, but instead, it remained stubbornly blank; and the voice that spoke was both distorted and neutered. “Why didn’t you report on the cred-transfer breakdown?”

Art frowned at the blank screen. “Who is this?”

The voice laughed, the distortion giving it an eerie, horror-movie sound. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”

Art blinked in surprise. He’d have bet he was the only person on the ship who would have gotten that particular ancient pop-culture reference. “What?”

“I’ve got something for you. I know who caused the data loss. Interested?”

Art sighed. Every problem brought the crazies out of the deckplates. “A power surge caused the data loss.”

“But who caused that?”

“Who? Don’t you mean what?”

“No,” the distorted voice said. “I mean who. I can tell you. If you want to know.”

Crazy, he thought again, and Call the ’keeps, another part of him urged.

But it has to be a hoax, he argued with himself. Do you really want to waste the Peacekeepers’ time on a hoax? Time enough to call after you talk to this nut if you have to. Play it safe.

“Well?” the voice said impatiently.

“I’m interested,” he said cautiously.

“Good. Take the pod as usual. We’ll meet you.”

“Meet me? Where? There’s no place to—”

“As long as we know, you don’t need to, do you?” The line went dead.

Art stood still for a moment. He could still call the ’keeps…but then he swore at his own faintheartedness and quickly finished closing up. Five minutes later, he stepped out into the ever-bright Hab and made his way to the pod.

Halfway there, the lights went out.

Art stopped dead, shocked. The lights never went out in Admin Hab. Never. It was a given. Had something drastic happened? Have we hit something?

The lights came back on.

He gulped. Coincidence, he thought. It doesn’t have anything to do with that mysterious voice.

He was almost able to convince himself.

The pod trip back to Habitat Three was uneventful, though Art held himself tensely the whole time, waiting for something to happen. When he stepped out into the transit station, he took a quick, nervous look around. Again, he saw nothing unusual.

A prank? he thought. Could be…

Peter! Peter or one of his friends. That’s gotta be it.

Convinced he’d solved the mystery, he set off down the street toward his parents’ house.

Well, half-convinced: he couldn’t help taking quick looks around as he walked down the dimly lit street, the skyplate shining with “stars” above him but little else in the way of artificial lighting except for the widely spaced glowing light posts, casting fuzzy patches of silver on the scuffed ceramic street but making the darkness between them even blacker.

As he approached the park, he quickened his pace. Just beyond the park’s patch of deeper night, he could see the more concentrated glow of Neighbourhood One. The park was two hundred metres wide. He was maybe fifty metres into it when all light posts along the street went out at once.

He stopped in confusion, heart suddenly racing; an instant later, two dark figures leaped out of the shadows.