The question had been answered and the point made with a minimum of words. David had been created to serve. The relationship would brook no further discussion. There would be no argument, no debate, no balancing of relative merits. The created served the creator. This was a fact, and facts were not mutable. Provided they were first proven to be fact. According to the dictates of science, that could only be done through the application of study to evidence. Accumulate a sufficiency of evidence, and one had a fact. The missing ingredient was time.
Standing beside Weyland, waiting for the next question or command, David remained silent. He had plenty of questions.
And plenty of time.
II
Daniels slept. Daniels dreamed. The cognitive borderland her thoughts inhabited was profound, yet such distinctions were of no interest to her. What mattered was that the content meant contentment.
Something traced its way across her lips. It was slim, fleshy, and the pressure it exerted was slight. Enough to alert her. Recognizing it, she smiled before opening her eyes. The usual slight downturn of her mouth was subsumed in a smile.
A familiar face hovered above hers. She knew every pore, every crease, every line in it. There weren’t many of the latter but she wouldn’t have minded had there been a few more. They would come with time, though. More than likely she would be responsible for some of them, she knew. That was just reality. Real life.
It was something she looked forward to. A bit of mutual countenance inscribing. Part of me in your face, part of you in mine. Living together, growing together. Wife, husband, and eventually, children.
Smooth visage and all, Jacob leaned a little closer and kissed her.
“Morning,” he said. “I moved the chimney.”
Information, but hardly news. With a groan she smiled anew and tried to entomb herself under the pillows. Grinning, he pushed them aside. She blinked, her wide brown eyes gazing affectionately into his. They dominated a face that was girlish yet serious, framed by neatly clipped bangs that covered her forehead and a very slightly cleft chin. Though she had the aspect of someone who was often thinking of something else, she was very much alert to her surroundings.
“C’mon, sleepy-head. You have to see this.”
Holding a small cube, he rubbed one discolored side. A three-dimensional image sprang to life from within, expanding in front of them. It appeared perfectly solid. Holding the cube in one hand, he used his other to manipulate the image of a modest structure, sometimes rotating it to provide a different angle, at others zooming to the interior, and then out again. With a single finger gesture he imposed notations on the image, occasionally enlarging them to make them easier to read, sometimes shunting them aside.
Finally settling on the perspective he wanted, he nudged a profusion of notes out of the way to permit an unobstructed view of the building. His excitement was barely restrained.
“Look, look. I moved it from the southwest corner to the northwest corner. Looks better there, right? And if we ever actually have to use it for heating, the airflow will be better from the northwest.”
Her expression one of resigned amusement, she shook her head a couple of times, clutching one pillow while gazing up at him.
“You did not wake me up for that,” she said. “Tell me you did not wake me up for that.”
“And I made coffee,” he added by way of atonement. “And it’s snowing.”
She sighed, momentarily buried her face in the pillow, and then rolled out of the bed.
He would have brought the coffee to her had she asked, but somehow his version of the ancient brew was never quite right. Easier to prepare it herself. A glance out the window showed that it was indeed snowing. Large, fat flakes accumulated on the sharp angles of tall buildings outside, softening the normally bleak cityscape. The metropolis was tired, spiritless, all but visibly sagging.
Unable to avoid the weather, a few pedestrians slogged their way along the sidewalks, not talking, not looking up, not communicating with their neighbors. Their perceptible gloom matched that of the surrounding structures. In the weather, their lives, and their prospects, they took no joy.
Coffee in hand—two creams, two sugars—she wandered back toward the bed. Having appropriated her place, Jacob was lying on his back tinkering with the module’s projection. As his index finger traced, bits and pieces of the cabin projection responded.
“This is gonna be our home, the chimney location’s important.” He frowned. “Wait, maybe it was better on the other side after all. Without having a proper picture of the actual surroundings, it’s hard to tell. Airflow’s important, but so’s aesthetics. Only gonna build this once, so have to get everything right the first time.”
She didn’t interrupt. Just sipped her coffee and watched him. He was so in love with his log cabin… and she was so in love with him. She could have spoken, could have voiced an opinion, if only to indicate that she was listening and paying attention, but she didn’t want to interrupt. Didn’t want to break into his dream.
Turning, she peered again toward the window and the winter wonderland outside. She wondered if their new home would have snow. For all they knew at this point, all of their options might be tropical.
A voice declaimed. She didn’t hear it. It wasn’t Jacob, and it wasn’t in his dream. It wasn’t in her dream. It was real.
“Seven o’clock,” Mother declared in exactly the same voice she utilized for all such declarations. “All’s well.”
The announcement was followed by a brief musical tone. It was a recording of a ship’s bell, early twentieth century, brought forward in time on something of a whim by the Covenant’s designers. A fragment of the past carried far into the future by builders of the present. A small amusement to gratify those who added it to the ship’s program but who, stuck on Earth, would never be able to hear it when it was actually in use.
* * *
On the other side of a long curving transparency that wasn’t glass and was not a window looking out onto a grim urban panorama, a figure stood gazing down at the sleeping, smiling Daniels. Its name was Walter and it… he… was perfect—as perfect as perfection could be rendered in synthetic form.
In her dream Daniels smiled anew at some secret thought. It prompted a reactive smile from the synthetic. Moving to the side of the sleeping woman’s pod, he made a quick check of the readouts. All normal. Methodically, without minding the repetition that would have numbed a human but did not bother him in the slightest, he moved on to check the adjacent pod.
Jacob. Also normal.
Having completed his morning round of the crew hypersleep room, he turned and made his way to the adjoining chamber.
Two thousand individual cryo-pods were ranged along both sides of the facing walls, pod beside pod, simultaneously defying time and comprehension. Behind the transparent view ports could be seen the sleeping faces of men, women, children. All content, all slumbering, all nominally swaddled in the comfort of reassuring dreams. The continuing life, health, and especially the future of each and every one of them was his responsibility.
Walter did not take it lightly.
In the distance, a single flashing amber telltale called out. No human—not even one with the very best eyesight—could have picked it out. He noticed it immediately. Making his way to its source, he checked the applicable pod’s diagnostics. The briefest of pauses allowed for analysis, following which he made a small necessary adjustment. The amber light promptly turned a steady green. He was pleased.
Time to check the embryo containment unit. Opening one of the drawers, each of which held a human embryo at a different stage of development, he sampled the readouts. All were green and, as Mother had observed, all was well. He allowed himself a smile.
“Walter.” Mother’s voice again. Informative, instructive, never commanding. A computer could no more issue a command than could a synthetic. “Please report to the bridge. It’s about time to recharge the grid. Let’s be about it.”
“On my way, Mother.”
“Please,” she had said. How thoughtful of her designers to allow for the inclusion of a politeness protocol, employed even when speaking to a synthetic. Walter had no need of the spoken courtesy, but he appreciated it nonetheless.
Compared to the size of the Covenant itself, the bridge could almost be called intimate. It was, Walter mused, exactly the right size to accommodate a crew and all necessary instruments and functions. While the ship’s builders could easily have made the area larger, they hadn’t been the types to waste space. No waste space in space, he told himself, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. He was quite able to appreciate his own sense of humor, even if at the moment there was no one to share it with.
Settling into his station, he ran through the pre-checks required prior to grid deployment. Telltales and readouts responded punctually.
INITIATING AUTOMATED DEEPSPACE RECHARGE CYCLE
Nodding to himself, Walter replied aloud.
“Deploying collectors now.”
As his was the only voice to be heard on the Covenant, he missed no opportunity to employ it. Not that it would go rusty—another joke—from disuse, but his voice had been designed to sound pleasant, and when the situation demanded it, he enjoyed listening to himself.
Though the collectors had the look of vast sails, they were not. The size of a small city, they expanded with extraordinary speed, reaching their full extension in a matter of minutes. With only the stars—and Walter— to witness their beauty, they gleamed in the interstellar night, gathering energy of which ancient man had been long ignorant.
While the names of such energies were simple, their physics were not. It had taken mankind thousands of years just to discover their existence, but only hundreds to learn how to utilize them. Their diffuseness forced the collectors to focus them and concentrate them. Only then were they made useful to the Covenant’s engines and able to power her internal systems. Walter thought of them as the ship’s invisible strength.
He waited for a while on the bridge, monitoring the steady accumulation, until he was assured the operation was proceeding normally. Only then did he move on to check on one of his favorite parts of the vessel. The part that was green. The part that was Earth.
Hydroponics Section was filled with vegetation, most carried for its nutrient value and eventual planting, some for purposes of experimentation, other sorts simply to supply memories of home. For their psychological value to the colonists. Ornamental plants and trees shared space with cucumbers and quinoa. He strode among them, whistling aimlessly as he checked flows of nutrients and water, analyzing the lighting to make certain it was just the right wavelength to maintain healthy growth. His hands gently caressed stems, leaves, trunks, flowers, bark, as he whistled.
“That’s a fallacy, you know.” Mother, always present, always watching.
He didn’t look up. “What?”
“That music facilitates plant health and growth.”
“Why, do you think I was whistling to the plants?”
“Very droll. Though I don’t know I would call the sounds you were making ‘music.’ I suppose you—”
She stopped abruptly.
Walter was instantly alert. Mother never did anything abruptly. He voiced a prompt into the continuing silence.
“Mother?”
“Walter. We… may have a problem.”
Many things had been programmed into Mother. Knowledge. Technical skill. Allgegenvartig understanding. And understatement. Walter waited.
“An atypical energy burst has been detected,” she continued, “consisting of heavy particulate matter. Analyzing composition.”
“Where?”
“Sector 106. Very close. Source was masked, hence the unusual—no, extreme proximity prior to discovery. Undetectable earlier due to unique concatenation of spatial and gravitational distortion in the vicinity. Apologies. Initial analysis was insufficient to gauge intensity, as well as proximity. Reappraisal suggests possibility the event could be substantial. Unable at this time to predict risk.”
“Likelihood of intersect?” Walter stood motionless, listening intently.
“Very high. Now detecting extreme proximity. Calculating for precision.”
Without waiting for further details he abandoned Hydroponics and raced toward the bridge, giving orders as he ran.
“Mother, retract the collectors and channel all reserve and backup power to ship shielding. Initiate emergency crew revival.”
“Underway. Recalculation indicates extreme proximity achieved. Intersection in nine, eight, seven…”
The particle wave itself was not visible, but its effects were unmistakable as the shockwave slammed into the ship. Strong enough to knock the preternaturally stable Walter off his feet, it swept past the shielding and wreaked havoc on the giant vessel.
Even as the collection sheets continued to retract, some of those caught unfurled began to shred. Expansive as they were, the sprawling energy collectors could not withdraw fast enough to escape the consequences. Fashioned of incredibly thin material, they weren’t designed to withstand an assault by such an intense storm of energized particles, however infinitesimally small each one might be on an individual basis.
It was all Walter could do just to stabilize himself. He could do nothing for the ship itself. He could only hope that Mother could deal with the particle onslaught.
As for himself, he could understand helplessness, he could feel it.
He did not like it.
III
It went away in an instant, like a delicate flower caught in the wind of a thunderstorm. The room in the unnamed city, the log cabin, the bed, the coffee, the husband—all vanished in a flash, as if none had ever been.
Daniels found herself jerked awake, fully alert and being thrown from side to side within the hypersleep pod. As awareness dawned a fresh jolt sent her flying upward to slam against the clear, curved lid. When she dropped back down, her nose was bloody from the impact. Her first thought was that she might have suffered a concussion. Dazed, her training took over in the absence of coherent thought.
The fingers of her right hand, still half numb from the after-effects of hypersleep, machine-gunned the pod’s internal keypad. Dream-visions of warmth, taste, and love were replaced by the cool white rigidity of the sleep bay, its hard surfaces and intense illumination visible through the canopy. Woozy from months spent in hypersleep, as well as from the abrupt awakening, she struggled to make sense of her surroundings. Of reality.
Some of the other pods were already open. A couple were empty, but the majority still held their occupants. Like her, her colleagues were struggling for mental and physical equilibrium. Unlike her, several were suffering from some of the stronger side effects of hasty revivification. Much cursing accompanied a wide assortment of puking, sweating, and shaking.
Ideally, emergency revival from hypersleep wasn’t supposed to produce those kinds of consequences. But then, she told herself, emergency revival wasn’t supposed to happen, period.
Lights flashed around her and from several wall-mounted panels, sparks erupting in satanic electronic celebration. There was also smoke. Smoke in a spaceship was a bad sign indeed. At the moment, the scrubbers in the circulation system were barely keeping up with it. Alarms assailed her ears.
It wasn’t how she was supposed to arise from hypersleep. There should have been coffee. There should have been food. To make matters worse, the fragmenting wreck of the wonderful soothing dream continued to linger in her mind until…
Someone was slapping her. That definitely wasn’t part of the dream. It didn’t bother her that it was part of the reality, because it helped to clear her head in a way the excess of visual and audible alarms did not.
“Daniels—Daniels, we—can you hear me? It’s Oram! Christopher Oram!” His tone was intense and no-nonsense, as befitted someone already fully revived. Though still clad in his soft white sleep suit, he was plainly in better s
hape than she was, only sweating slightly and not visibly ill. In contrast to his slender frame his voice, like his grip, was strong, and he plainly had no time to coddle her or anyone else.
“Wake up! Daniels! Wake up! I’ve got no time for this. I need you—I need everybody—now! We’ve sustained some serious damage and…” He looked to where another recent revivee was stumbling toward them. “Tennessee— give me a hand over here. I’ve got to see to the others!” Leaving the still unsteady Daniels to the newcomer, Oram hurried toward another pod that was opening.
“Come on, darlin’.” An old friend and colleague, Tennessee helped to ease her out of the pod and steady her. “Jacob’s in trouble.” Big, powerful, with his head of thick black curls and facial hair that usually looked more hacked than trimmed, he resembled someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley behind a bar instead of a fully qualified colony ship pilot. When appropriately stimulated, or agitated, he could sound like the former, too. In his sleep suit, he looked like a giant, albeit suddenly intense, teddy bear. He leaned toward her, his voice strong.
“Jacob needs us.”
It was the final jolt she needed to snap her fully awake. Whirling, she looked toward the pod beside hers. Jacob’s. Unlike nearly all the others in the crew chamber, it had not opened. Her husband lay motionless within, still locked in the Morphean grip of hypersleep. He was smiling, which was normal. Swirling vapor began to accumulate beneath the transparent lid, masking their view of the sleeper. That was most definitely not normal. Worse still, she knew what it signaled, and what would happen if—
“GET IT OPEN!”
When repeated efforts to engage the pod’s external controls produced no response, Tennessee moved to the manual override. Wrenching, pulling, leaning with all his weight on the levers did nothing—they wouldn’t budge. Seeing what was happening, Oram returned and began trying everything he could think of to get some kind of response from the pod’s instrumentation.
Nothing worked. The only result was an increase in the amount and a thickening of the vapor within, abruptly accompanied by an intensifying shower of sparks and crackling sounds from the base of the hypersleep unit where it was attached to the deck.