The Second World

The Question The argument was about forty-eight kilograms, which was one reason James Ellery had let it go on for eleven minutes before intervening. The discrepancy would have been negligible on a freighter. On the Kestrel, whose departure mass had been negotiated among engineers, scientists, insurers and governments for most of a decade, it had acquired the standing of a constitutional dispute. Nisha Raman had taken the cover off the environmental control cabinet and left it on the deck beside her chair. James suspected she had done this to make it harder for anyone to end the meeting. The cabinet occupied a corner of the ship's cramped engineering office, and its exposed plumbing and pale ceramic valves offered silent support for her position. "The reserve cartridge assembly is forty-eight kilograms," she said. "The attachment rack is another six. You can't keep pretending the number is only the cartridge because it makes the spreadsheet easier to look at." On the wall display, the departure allocation had been divided into narrow bands of colour. Selene Okafor touched the one marked discretionary scientific payload and enlarged it with an impatient movement of two fingers. "I'm not pretending anything. I'm telling you where the extra mass has to come from. Operations won't sign off on taking it out of braking reserve." "Nor should they. I'm operations too, when everything goes wrong." "You are engineering. That's why this meeting was called." "And I came. Look how cooperative we're all being." James had known both women for years. Selene had the rare gift of making an objection sound like an invitation to reconsider something before it became embarrassing. Nisha was less interested in saving anybody embarrassment. She had brought three annotated service histories to a meeting in which the ground office had hoped to approve the final manifest without a single change. "What's the actual consequence if we don't carry it?" James asked. Nisha turned from the screen. "We have two cartridges in the installed loop. We can refurbish one under clean conditions, but not if the adsorption bed fractures during a bad thermal cycle. A third assembly gives us an independent spare." "And the consequence if we leave behind the supplementary imaging package?" Selene answered. "The remote team will complain that we're crippling the science before we arrive." "I meant the operational consequence." "Less spectral coverage on the far side. More uncertainty about what we'll find." Nisha pushed her chair back with a heel. "We are going somewhere nobody has verified, with no promise that the return link behaves the same way from both directions. I'd rather have clean air while we're being uncertain." James looked at the allocation. The imaging package was expensive, extraordinarily sophisticated and backed by a scientific committee whose chair had sent him three messages in the previous twelve hours. He had read the first two. The third remained unopened because it began with the words in light of your personal commitment to the mission, which was never an encouraging opening to a technical request. "Take the supplementary unit off the manifest," he said. "Keep the cartridge and the rack. Selene, advise ground we're making the change under final authority." "They'll ask for your rationale." "Give them Nisha's service histories. All three." Nisha made a satisfied noise and reached for the cabinet cover. James stopped her with a hand before she could set it back in place. "Have someone check those fasteners. Two of them have fresh tool marks and one doesn't." "You came to a mass meeting to inspect my cabinet?" "I came because you asked me to settle a dispute. The cabinet was a free extra." Selene closed the display. "I'll put it in the message. 'Commander exercised discretion after investigating the structural dignity of the environmental control system.'" "Keep it under two hundred words," James said, and stood. Outside the engineering office, the Kestrel had the unfinished appearance of a place just vacated by builders. Inspection tags hung from handrails. A temporary cable cover crossed the central passage, and somebody had labelled it REMOVE BEFORE DEPARTURE in three languages, none of which had so far persuaded anyone to remove it. The ship was perfectly capable of flight. James had spent enough years overseeing spacecraft acceptance to know the difference between untidiness and a defect, though he preferred the former when it belonged to other people. He stopped at a junction to let Ben Carver pass with a rectangular equipment case balanced against his hip. Ben was a broad, economical man whose years in field operations had left him with an excellent judgement of whether an object would fit through an opening before he committed himself to carrying it. The case cleared the doorway by less than a finger's width. "Last of the surface anchors?" James asked. "Last of the ones the field team admits to owning. Linh has another box in her quarters and calls it linguistic equipment." "Does it have anchor bolts in it?" "Twenty. Also biscuits." "Tell her the bolts need manifesting. The biscuits are between her and her conscience." Ben shifted his grip and moved on, a quiet smile briefly altering his face. He would be responsible for the safety of any team the Kestrel put onto an unfamiliar surface, a job requiring considerable patience with experts whose lives had been spent demonstrating that ordinary limits did not always apply to their discoveries. James had never seen him raise his voice in a field emergency. He had, once, seen him spend forty minutes explaining to an eminent researcher why an apparently harmless ravine in Iceland would kill her if she walked into it. She had eventually thanked him. Ben had looked surprised. At the docking collar, a two-person maintenance team was releasing the last of the station utility couplings. Beyond the open hatch lay the departure terminal, with its pale flooring and wall-sized windows looking across the Earth. The planet filled much of the view: coastal cloud over the Atlantic, a long quiet blue curve, the brilliant edge of morning sliding towards Europe. People crossing the terminal still tended to stop and look, although the station had been occupied for twenty-two years and the sight was available from nearly every public corridor. James had half an hour before the crew's final briefing. He used eight minutes of it to return a call from his daughter. Alice's face appeared at an angle, the camera aimed somewhere between her chin and the ceiling of a kitchen. Behind her, a cupboard stood open and a man James didn't recognise was attempting to prise the lid off a jar with the back of a spoon. "You're early," she said. "I said eleven. It's eleven." "Eleven for me was ten minutes ago. I was in the laundry room." "The clocks on the station are still set to Coordinated Time. We discussed this." "We discussed time zones. We didn't discuss the fact that I'm the only person I know who has to book a phone call with someone who's leaving the Solar System." The man behind her won his struggle with the jar. Something spilled across the counter. Alice turned and said, "That wasn't the plan, Theo," before carrying the screen into a small bedroom. A washing rack stood in front of the window, its crossbars loaded with clothes that had plainly not dried. "Who is Theo?" James asked. "Flatmate. You've met him on a call. He had a beard then." "That doesn't narrow it down." "He's the one who made you promise not to explain the fusion drive while we were eating." "A wise young man." Alice had begun the second year of her four-year university course the previous month. James had missed the move into her new flat because the Kestrel's final integration tests had been delayed. They had eaten a late lunch together at a station hotel two weeks earlier, a meal during which she had spent a great deal of time asking about the ship and almost none talking about herself. The following day he'd sent a message about her course. She'd replied with photographs of a mouldy windowsill and a badly repaired bicycle. "How did the assessment go?" he asked now. “They moved it,” Alice said. She pushed aside a folder, revealing the corner of a laptop whose screen was dense with notes. “To Friday. Apparently half the group wasn’t ready, although I don’t know who they imagine was.” “Gives me until Friday to get clever.” She sat on the edge of her bed, with the phone balanced against one knee. “Have you finished all the things you were supposed to finish?” He had spent the morning settling arguments about equipment that had already been signed off twice. “Mostly,” he said. “That’s reassuring.” Alice reached behind her to push a sleeve off the drying rack. It fell to the floor, and she left it there. “We finished the important ones.” The words sounded less convincing outside a briefing room. “That’s much worse.” He could see she wanted to ask something and was deciding whether to make a joke of it. He tried not to assist. Alice had inherited her mother's unwillingness to be rushed into a conversation, and the quickest way to lose her was to answer a question before she had properly asked it. "They keep saying five years," she said at last. "On the news." “Five is the planning number. It depends on what we find, and the return journey.” He could hear the voices in the kitchen outside her room, Theo asking somebody where the clean tea towels had gone. "And if you find nothing?" "We come back sooner." “You would?” Alice had stopped trying to prop the phone upright. Her face was close to the camera now. "Yes. We're going to find out where a particular piece of space leads, Alice. There isn't a list of places we're determined to visit." He smiled at her expression. "I know how that sounds." "Like you work for an organisation that should have thought about its publicity a bit harder." He agreed. For years the mission's public language had confused a practical scientific question with the hopes people attached to it. The wormhole was real; they had spent a decade studying the fixed distortion at the edge of the Sun's domain and had learned enough to send packages to its mouth and retrieve signals from the surrounding field. Everything beyond the throat remained an inference. Some models predicted a connection to a distant stellar neighbourhood, the first chance humanity might have to travel between stars without spending a lifetime doing it. Other models gave them an exit that could not sustain a ship, or no navigable exit at all. The outward apparatus had swallowed and returned signals in ways the engineers could measure, which was enough to justify attempting a controlled crossing and nowhere near enough to promise a destination. "Will I be able to send you things?" Alice asked. “Whenever the relay’s working. Sometimes they’ll arrive late. If I don’t answer for a while, it doesn’t mean I haven’t read it.” "I was going to send you a picture of the kitchen after Theo cleans it. That might take longer than the message." "Send me both. A before and after." “You really are going.” She looked past the phone towards the door, where somebody had begun playing music badly through a small speaker. “Yes.” He wished he had arranged the call when neither of them had somewhere else to be. She looked down at something outside the frame, perhaps the cracked screen she had refused to replace, perhaps the loose thread she was always finding in her sleeves. "All right. Well. Don't become one of those people who makes everybody listen to travel stories when he gets home." "I was planning to describe the engineering in considerable detail." "I'm serious." "I know." He waited until she looked up. "I'll call before we leave the station." "You just said this was the last one." "I have twelve minutes if nothing catches fire." "Then use them for something useful. Find your socks or whatever astronauts do." The picture vanished after a hurried goodbye. James remained by the window for a little while. His reflection stood over the eastern Atlantic, an older man wearing a plain dark flight shirt with the mission insignia stitched above one pocket. Behind him, two visitors were comparing pictures on their phones. One of them had taken a photograph of Earth. The other was showing her a picture of a cat. The briefing room on the Kestrel had twelve seats and a display that unfolded from the ceiling. There were more than twelve people involved in launching the ship, but those who would remain aboard had got used to finding places in the doorway or perching on a storage locker. By the time James entered, Ravi Sen had claimed a corner of the table with a mug of something that smelled strongly of cardamom. Selam Bekele was reading the science manifest over his shoulder with increasing disapproval. "That's a terrestrial contamination protocol," she said. "You can't borrow the entire sampling budget and call it equipment quarantine." "I borrowed the paragraph. I'm trying to work out which sentence everyone keeps misreading." "It's the one you wrote." Ravi had the open, attentive expression of someone who expected a conversation to contain at least one thing worth learning. It made him pleasant to work with and, in certain circumstances, exhausting. James respected his judgement. They had been on two missions together, though neither had required sharing a vessel for years. Ravi's background in comparative cognition and evolutionary systems had made him an unusual choice for an expedition ostensibly concerned with stellar physics. He had spent six years arguing that if the mouth opened beside an inhabitable world, the first human visitors would need to understand what they were looking at before doing anything clever to it. "Is there a dispute I should hear about?" James asked. "Not one you'll enjoy," Selam said. "Then I'm happy you got here early." Keiko Mori brought up the instrument schedule. She had corrected a timestamp in the final transit simulation that morning and was still mildly affronted that anyone had considered it a cosmetic error. Beside her, Tomás Ibarra sat with one foot hooked under his chair, moving an empty pen case back and forth between his hands. His manner suggested a man who took very little seriously, an impression that evaporated whenever a calculation involved the lives of people sitting behind him. Caleb Foster was attempting to connect two encrypted transmitters to the same port without admitting that one of them belonged in another compartment. Linh Tran had arrived with a paper notebook and a narrow case strapped to the leg of her chair. Ben sat by the hatch with Samira Darwish, whose medical kit looked so modest that nobody would have guessed how much of the ship's accommodation she had fought to secure for the infirmary. Inês Almeida and Nisha were still talking about the environmental circuit as they came in. Selene closed the hatch after them. James had told himself he would not make the final briefing ceremonial. The briefing began, accordingly, with a failed screen connection and three minutes of waiting while Caleb crouched under the table and moved a cable into the socket James had indicated when he first walked in. "In my defence," Caleb said from the floor, "they look identical." "One says FLIGHT," Keiko replied. "The other says CATERING." "I can read. I thought it was a comment on the quality of the data." Once the display worked, Keiko outlined the transit plan without trying to make it exciting. The first leg would take them into the outer system on a high-efficiency fusion transfer, with a scheduled period of coasting while their approach geometry was refined. The wormhole mouth occupied a predictable volume of space relative to the Sun; it was not a hole that anyone could steer towards on a whim. Decades of observing a stable distortion had made the approach possible. Successful passage remained untested at this scale. Tomás showed the navigation corridors, their width and abort points. The Kestrel could brake, turn back, and return under its own power at several stages before the final crossing commitment. On the far side, if there was a far side, they would need time to re-establish a stellar reference frame before any manoeuvre larger than station-keeping. "One question," Ravi said when Tomás finished. "If the far-side star really is the one the spectral model suggests, could we leave the vicinity of the exit mouth long enough for a planetary survey?" Keiko glanced up. "There is no confirmed far-side star." "I said if." "Your if has a great deal of work to do." "A planetary survey would require an adjusted power profile," Nisha said. "And before you ask, we haven't taken the extra cartridge on the assumption that you'll use it to live there." Ravi held up a hand. "I was asking a reasonable question." "You asked a geographical question about a place we're not sure exists," Selam said. "It's reasonable in your department." James let the discussion run until they had reduced it to an operational question. They might need to move away from the far mouth to characterise the destination and test the return, but any proposed journey to a planet required an independent assessment of fuel, shelter, radiation and the return geometry. He would not commit the ship on the basis of a photograph and a convincing speech from its scientific director. Ravi read the limits twice and asked for a copy of the fuel calculation. He let the argument rest. Selene opened the final authorisation sheet. Ground control's instructions occupied more pages than the Kestrel's flight plan. Some were mandatory safety standards. Others concerned publicity, committee notification and the sequence in which participating nations expected to receive scientific data. Those provisions had been written for a ship that could report back frequently enough to receive advice. Beyond the mouth they might spend days, possibly longer, without reliable communication, depending on how the aperture treated radio signals and whether the relay packages behaved as designed. "We've resolved the last operational exemption," Selene said. "You have authority to return without requesting further approval if you lose the independent navigation solution, if reserve margins fall below the agreed threshold, or if the far side does not support a controllable return. Anything outside those conditions goes to a command conference." James read the page. It had taken months to get this wording. Some of the people responsible for it would never see the ship, and the legal phrasing still seemed to him to assume that a commander could receive an answer from a meeting more reliably than he could receive a reading from a pressure gauge. "And if we find something none of the conditions describes?" he asked. "You document it. You consult the relevant specialists. You make the decision." Selene's expression did not change. "Then I help you explain it when we get back." Nobody made a joke. James signed the electronic order and sent it to the station archive, where it would remain accessible long after the twelve people in the room had become a small historical curiosity or a conspicuous failure. He asked Keiko for the last verified reference solution, Nisha for the final service release, and Samira whether anyone had managed to conceal a medical problem simply to avoid losing a berth. "Not successfully," Samira said. "I should mention that several of you seem determined to prove the caffeine intake guidance is theoretical." "No names," Ravi said. "I have names." The briefing ended with chairs scraping and people collecting papers they could have stored digitally. James held Selene back to ask about an unresolved equipment insurance certificate. She dealt with it in the time it took him to turn around and find his pen. Selene waited until the door had shut behind the last of the crew. “You’re doing that thing again,” she said, while he looked through the remaining papers. "Which thing?" "Where you solve every remaining small problem because there's one you can't solve." “The insurance certificate is a real problem.” He had found the page and was still holding it, although he had no reason to think she needed to see it. "It was, for about twenty seconds." She handed him the pen from the table. "Your daughter called?" "Yes." "All right?" “She wanted to know whether we had finished all the things we were supposed to finish.” He put the certificate back in its folder, which turned out to be empty apart from that single sheet. Selene smiled. "Tell her about the environmental cartridge." "I did not. I'm trying to keep a relationship with her." At the end of the departure shift, James went once more through the ship, with no inspection list this time. Nisha had put the cabinet cover back on. Somebody had finally removed the temporary cable cover from the passage. From the galley came the low sound of two crew members disagreeing about which food containers were communal, and at the medical compartment Samira was listening to Ben describe an old expedition injury with a level of scepticism that suggested she had heard every version of the story before. By the time James reached the forward flight station, the docking collar had been withdrawn. The view ahead showed the station's curved structural arms and, beyond them, the Earth turning under its cloud. Tomás sat at the controls with Keiko beside him. Both had their harnesses fastened and were running through the departure checklist while the flight computers waited for their final commands. "Clearance in three minutes," Tomás said. "They've asked us to hold the departure burn until the press feed gets its last pictures." "They can take them during separation." "That's what I told them. They seemed disappointed that the ship wasn't going to wave." James took his seat and secured the harness. A message from Alice waited in his personal queue: a blurred photograph of a laundry rack, with a pair of socks resting on the floor beneath it. Found yours, she had written. Too late to send them. He typed a reply, read it and deleted half of it before sending: Keep them. I'll need a spare pair when I get home. A minute later the docking clamps released. The station began to drift to one side of the forward windows as the Kestrel moved slowly clear, a ship built for a question humanity had been asking since it first understood that the stars were other suns. The first engine pulse passed through the hull as a steady pressure against James's back. He checked the figures on Tomás's display, then watched him make a small correction that brought the trajectory into line. There were still people taking photographs of the Earth behind them. In the navigation bay, Keiko had already replaced the departing station with the plotted approach to the wormhole, and James turned back to his instruments to begin the long journey out.