Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

final ten
or twelve days of preparation time, as the Coalition fleet sneaked up
in the dark, had made a significant difference. So the crew laboured
to complete the ship’s systems in flight.
    The most significant difficulty, Rusel believed, was the sudden
upping of the design targets. A thousand-year cruise, the nominal
design envelope, was one thing. Now it was estimated that, cruising
at about half lightspeed, it would take Ship Three fifty times as
long to reach Canis Major. Even relativistic time dilation would only
make a difference of a few per cent to the subjective duration. As a
consequence the tolerances on the Ship’s systems were tightened by
orders of magnitude.
    There was yet another goal in all this rebuilding. A key lesson of
ecosynthesis was that the smaller the biosphere, the more conscious
control it would require. The Ship was a much smaller environment
than a Port Sol habitat, and that presented problems of stability;
the ecological system was poorly buffered and would always be prone
to collapse. It was clear that this small, tight biosphere would
always have to be consciously managed if it were to survive.
    That was manageable as long as the first crew, educated on Port
Sol, were in command. But to ensure this in the long term the Ship’s
essential systems were to be simplified and automated as far as
possible, to reduce the skill level required to maintain them. They
couldn’t foresee all that might befall the Ship, and so they were
trying to ’future-proof’ the project, in Andres’s jargon: to reduce
the crew to the status of non-productive payload.
    As Diluc put it with grim humour, ’We can’t allow civilisation to
fall in here.’
    Despite the horror of Port Sol, the hard work, and the daunting
timescale Andres had set - which Rusel suspected nobody believed
anyhow - the rhythms of human life continued.
    Diluc found a new partner, a plump, cheerful woman of about thirty
called Tila. Diluc and Tila had both left lovers behind on Port Sol,
and Tila had been forced to give up a child. Now they seemed to be
finding comfort with each other. Diluc was somewhat put out when they
were both hauled into Andres’s small private office to be quizzed
about their relationship, but Andres, after much consulting of
genetic maps, approved their continuing liaison.
    Rusel was pleased for his brother, but he found Tila a puzzle.
Most of the selected crew had been without offspring, back on Port
Sol; few people with children, knowing they would have to leave them
behind, had even offered themselves for selection. But Tila had
abandoned a child. He saw no sign of this loss in her face, her
manner; perhaps her new relationship with Diluc, and even the
prospect of more children with him in the future, was enough to
comfort her. He wondered what was going on inside her head,
though.
    As for Rusel, his social contacts were restricted to work. He
found himself being subtly favoured by Captain Andres, along with a
number of others of the Ship’s senior technicians. There was no
formal hierarchy on the Ship - no command structure below Andres
herself. But this group of a dozen or so, a meritocracy selected
purely by proven achievement, began to coalesce into a kind of
governing council of the Ship.
    That was about as much social life as Rusel wanted. Otherwise he
just worked himself to the point of exhaustion, and slept. The
complex mass of emotions lodged inside him - agony over the loss of
Lora, the shock of seeing his home destroyed, the shame of living on
- showed no signs of breaking up. None of this affected his
contributions to the Ship, he believed. He was split in two, split
between inside and out, and he doubted he would ever heal. In fact he
didn’t really want to heal. One day he would die, as so many others
had, as Lora probably had; one day he would atone for his sin of
survival in death.
    Meanwhile there was always the Ship. He slowly widened the scope
of his work, and began to develop a feel for the Ship as a whole. As
the systems embedded, it was as if the Ship was slowly coming alive,
and he learned to listen to the rhythm of its pumps, feel the sighing
of its circulating air.
    Though Andres continued to use the fanciful name she had given it,
Rusel and everybody else thought of it as they always had: as Ship
Three - or, increasingly, just the Ship.
     
    Almost a year after Jupiter, Andres called her ’council’ of twelve
together in the amphitheatre at the base of the Ship. This