Robert Silverberg - The Secret Sharer

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The Secret Sharer

by Robert Silverberg

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First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1987

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction

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IT WAS MY first time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at all, and this was the

voyage that was supposed to make me someone.

But though I was no one at all I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great

sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night,

each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds

go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in

place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And I -- I who stared at the worlds

of heaven and was swept with compassion for them -- I knew that though I seemed to be standing

still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was

spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no

speed at all.

I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the Sword of Orion, on a journey out of Kansas

Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan's Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual

spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would

lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the

losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.

Roacher thought I was sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead

already.

You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to

know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind

anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you

give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it.

Most do. But it isn't any good to you any more, not in the ways that you think a body is good to

you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the Sword of Orion, so many

years ago.

I was the youngest officer on board, so naturally I was captain.

They put you in command right at the start, before you're anyone. That's the only test

that means a damn: they throw you in the sea and if you can swim you don't drown, and if you can't

you do. The drowned ones go back in the tank and they serve their own useful purposes, as push-

cells or downloaders or mind-wipers or Johnny-scrub-and-scour or whatever. The ones that don't

drown go on to other commands. No one is wasted. The Age of Waste has been over a long time.

On the third virtual day out from Kansas Four, Roacher told me that I was the sweetest

captain he had ever served under. And he had served under plenty of them, for Roacher had gone up

to heaven at least two hundred years before, maybe more.

"I can see it in your eyes, the sweetness. I can see it in the angle you hold your head."

He didn't mean it as a compliment.

"We can put you off ship at Ultima Thule," Roacher said. "Nobody will hold it against you.

We'll put you in a bottle and send you down, and the Thuleys will catch you and decant you and

you'll be able to find your way back to Kansas Four in twenty or fifty years. It might be the

best thing."

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Roacher is small and parched, with brown skin and eyes that shine with the purple

luminescence of space. Some of the worlds he has seen were forgotten a thousand years ago.

"Go bottle yourself, Roacher," I told him.

"Ah, captain, captain! Don't take it the wrong way. Here, captain, give us a touch of the

sweetness." He reached out a claw, trying to stroke me along the side of my face. "Give us a

touch, captain, give us just a little touch!"

"I'll fry your soul and have it for breakfast, Roacher. There's sweetness for you. Go

scuttle off, will you? Go jack yourself to the mast and drink hydrogen, Roacher. Go. Go."

"So sweet," he said. But he went. I had the power to hurt him. He knew I could do it,

because I was captain. He also knew I wouldn't; but there was always the possibility he was

wrong. The captain exists in that margin between certainty and possibility. A crewman tests the

width of that margin at his own risk. Roacher knew that. He had been a captain once himself,

after all.

There were seventeen of us to heaven that voyage, staffing a ten-kilo Megaspore-class ship

with full annexes and extensions and all virtualities. We carried a bulging cargo of the things

regarded in those days as vital in the distant colonies: pre-read vapor chips, artificial

intelligences, climate nodes, matrix jacks, mediq machines, bone banks, soil converters, transit

spheres, communication bubbles, skin-and-organ synthesizers, wildlife domestication plaques, gene

replacement kits, a sealed consignment of obliteration sand and other proscribed weapons, and so

on. We also had fifty billion dollars in the form of liquid currency pods, central-bank-to-

central-bank transmission. In addition there was a passenger load of seven thousand colonists.

Eight hundred of these were on the hoof and the others were stored in matrix form for body

transplant on the worlds of destination. A standard load, in other words. The crew worked on

commission, also as per standard, one percent of bill-of-lading value divided in customary lays.

Mine was the 50th lay -- that is, two percent of the net profits of the voyage -- and that

included a bonus for serving as captain; otherwise I would have had the l00th lay or something

even longer. Roacher had the l0th lay and his jackmate Bulgar the l4th, although they weren't

even officers. Which demonstrates the value of seniority in the Service. But seniority is the

same thing as survival, after all, and why should survival not be rewarded? On my most recent

voyage I drew the l9th lay. I will have better than that on my next.

You have never seen a starship. We keep only to heaven; when we are to worldward,

shoreships come out to us for the downloading. The closest we ever go to planetskin is a million

shiplengths. Any closer and we'd be shaken apart by that terrible strength which emanates from

worlds.

We don't miss landcrawling, though. It's a plague to us. If I had to step to shore now,

after having spent most of my lifetime in heaven, I would die of the drop-death within an hour.

That is a monstrous way to die; but why would I ever go ashore? The likelihood of that still

existed for me at the time I first sailed the Sword of Orion, you understand, but I have long

since given it up. That is what I mean when I say that you give up your life when you go to

heaven. But of course what also goes from you is any feeling that to be ashore has anything to do

with being alive. If you could ride a starship, or even see one as we see them, you would

understand. I don't blame you for being what you are.

Let me show you the Sword of Orion. Though you will never see it as we see it.

What would you see, if you left the ship as we sometimes do to do the starwalk in the Great

Open?

The first thing you would see was the light of the ship. A starship gives off a tremendous

insistent glow of light that splits heaven like the blast of a trumpet. That great light both

precedes and follows. Ahead of the ship rides a luminescent cone of brightness bellowing in the

void. In its wake the ship leaves a photonic track so intense that it could be gathered up and

weighed. It is the stardrive that issues this light: a ship eats space, and light is its

offthrow.

Within the light you would see a needle ten kilometers long. That is the ship. One end

tapers to a sharp point and the other has the Eye, and it is several days' journey by foot from

end to end through all the compartments that lie between. It is a world self-contained. The

needle is a flattened one. You could walk about easily on the outer surface of the ship, the skin

of the top deck, what we call Skin Deck. Or just as easily on Belly Deck, the one on the bottom

side. We call one the top deck and the other the bottom, but when you are outside the ship these

distinctions have no meaning. Between Skin and Belly lie Crew Deck, Passenger Deck, Cargo Deck,

Drive Deck. Ordinarily no one goes from one deck to another. We stay where we belong. The

engines are in the Eye. So are the captain's quarters.

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That needle is the ship, but it is not the whole ship. What you will not be able to see

are the annexes and extensions and virtualities. These accompany the ship, enfolding it in a

webwork of intricate outstructures. But they are of a subordinate level of reality and therefore

they defy vision. A ship tunnels into the void, spreading far and wide to find room for all that

it must carry. In these outlying zones are kept our supplies and provisions, our stores of fuel,

and all cargo traveling at second-class rates. If the ship transports prisoners, they will ride

in an annex. If the ship expects to encounter severe probability turbulence during the course of

the voyage, it will arm itself with stabilizers, and those will be carried in the virtualities,

ready to be brought into being if needed. These are the mysteries of our profession. Take them

on faith, or ignore them, as you will: they are not meant for you to know.

A ship takes forty years to build. There are two hundred seventy-one of them in service

now. New ones are constantly under construction. They are the only link binding the Mother

Worlds and the eight hundred ninety-eight Colonies and the colonies of the Colonies. Four ships

have been lost since the beginning of the Service. No one knows why. The loss of a starship is

the worst disaster I can imagine. The last such event occurred sixty virtual years ago.

A starship never returns to the world from which it was launched. The galaxy is too large

for that. It makes its voyage and it continues onward through heaven in an endless open circuit.

That is the service of the Service. There would be no point in returning, since thousands of

worldward years sweep by behind us as we make our voyages. We live outside of time. We must, for

there is no other way. That is our burden and our privilege. That is the service of the Service.

On the fifth virtual day of the voyage I suddenly felt a tic, a nibble, a subtle indication

that something had gone wrong. It was a very trifling thing, barely perceptible, like the scatter

of eroded pebbles that tells you that the palaces and towers of a great ruined city lie buried

beneath the mound on which you climb. Unless you are looking for such signals you will not see

them. But I was primed for discovery that day. I was eager for it. A strange kind of joy came

over me when I picked up that fleeting signal of wrongness.

I keyed the intelligence on duty and said, "What was that tremor on Passenger Deck?"

The intelligence arrived instantly in my mind, a sharp gray-green presence with a halo of

tingling music.

"I am aware of no tremor, sir."

"There was a distinct tremor. There was a data-spurt just now."

"Indeed, sir? A data-spurt, sir?" The intelligence sounded aghast, but in a condescending

way. It was humoring me. "What action shall I take, sir?"

I was being invited to retreat.

The intelligence on duty was a 49 Henry Henry. The Henry series affects a sort of slippery

innocence that I find disingenuous. Still, they are very capable intelligences. I wondered if I

had misread the signal. Perhaps I was too eager for an event, any event, that would confirm my

relationship with the ship.

There is never a sense of motion or activity aboard a starship: we float in silence on a

tide of darkness, cloaked in our own dazzling light. Nothing moves, nothing seems to live in all

the universe. Since we had left Kansas Four I had felt that great silence judging me. Was I

really captain of this vessel? Good: then let me feel the weight of duty upon my shoulders.

We were past Ultima Thule by this time, and there could be no turning back. Borne on our

cloak of light, we would roar through heaven for week after virtual week until we came to

worldward at the first of our destinations, which was Cul-de-Sac in the Vainglory Archipelago, out

by the Spook Clusters. Here in free space I must begin to master the ship, or it would master me.

"Sir?" the intelligence said.

"Run a data uptake," I ordered. "All Passenger Deck input for the past half hour. There

was movement. There was a spurt."

I knew I might be wrong. Still, to err on the side of caution may be naive, but it isn't a

sin. And I knew that at this stage in the voyage nothing I could say or do would make me seem

other than naive to the crew of the Sword of Orion. What did I have to lose by ordering a

recheck, then? I was hungry for surprises. Any irregularity that 49 Henry Henry turned up would

be to my advantage; the absence of one would make nothing worse for me.

"Begging your pardon, sir," 49 Henry Henry reported after a moment, "but there was no

tremor, sir."

"Maybe I overstated it, then. Calling it a tremor. Maybe it was just an anomaly. What do

you say, 49 Henry Henry?" I wondered if I was humiliating myself, negotiating like this with an

intelligence. "There was something. I'm sure of that. An unmistakable irregular burst in the

data-flow. An anomaly, yes. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?"

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"Yes, sir."

"Yes what?"

"The record does show an irregularity, sir. Your observation was quite acute, sir."

"Go on."

"No cause for alarm, sir. A minor metabolic movement, nothing more. Like turning over in

your sleep." You bastard, what do you know about sleep? "Extremely unusual, sir, that you should

be able to observe anything so small. I commend you, sir. The passengers are all well, sir."

"Very good," I said. "Enter this exchange in the log, 49 Henry Henry."

"Already entered, sir," the intelligence said. "Permission to decouple, sir?"

"Yes, you can decouple," I told it.

The shimmer of music that signalled its presence grew tinny and was gone. I could imagine

it smirking as it went about its ghostly flitting rounds deep in the neural conduits of the ship.

Scornful software, glowing with contempt for its putative master. The poor captain, it was

thinking. The poor hopeless silly boy of a captain. A passenger sneezes and he's ready to seal

all bulkheads.

Well, let it smirk, I thought. I have acted appropriately and the record will show it.

I knew that all this was part of my testing.

You may think that to be captain of such a ship as the Sword of Orion in your first voyage

to heaven is an awesome responsibility and an inconceivable burden. So it is, but not for the

reason you think.

In truth the captain's duties are the least significant of anyone's aboard the ship. The

others have well-defined tasks that are essential to the smooth running of the voyage, although

the ship could, if the need arose, generate virtual replacements for any and every crew member and

function adequately on its own. The captain's task, though, is fundamentally abstract. His role

is to witness the voyage, to embody it in his own consciousness, to give it coherence, continuity,

by reducing it to a pattern of decisions and responses. In that sense the captain is simply so

much software: he is the coding through which the voyage is expressed as a series of linear

functions. If he fails to perform that duty adequately, others will quietly see to it that the

voyage proceeds as it should. What is destroyed, in the course of a voyage that is inadequately

captained, is the captain himself, not the voyage. My pre-flight training made that absolutely

clear. The voyage can survive the most feeble of captains. As I have said, four starships have

been lost since the Service began, and no one knows why. But there is no reason to think that any

of those catastrophes were caused by failings of the captain. How could they have been? The

captain is only the vehicle through which others act. It is not the captain who makes the voyage,

but the voyage which makes the captain.

Restless, troubled, I wandered the eye of the ship. Despite 49 Henry Henry's suave mockery

I was still convinced there was trouble on board, or about to be.

Just as I reached Outerscreen Level I felt something strange touch me a second time. It

was different this time, and deeply disturbing.

The Eye, as it makes the complete descent from Skin Deck to Belly Deck, is lined with

screens that provide displays, actual or virtual, of all aspects of the ship both internal and

external. I came up to the great black bevel-edged screen that provided our simulated view of the

external realspace environment and was staring at the dwindling wheel of the Ultima Thule relay

point when the new anomaly occurred. The other had been the merest of subliminal signals, a nip,

a tickle. This was more like an attempted intrusion. Invisible fingers seemed to brush lightly

over my brain, probing, seeking entrance. The fingers withdrew; a moment later there was a sudden

stabbing pain in my left temple.

I stiffened. "Who's there?"

"Help me," a silent voice said.

I had heard wild tales of passenger matrixes breaking free of their storage circuits and

drifting through the ship like ghosts, looking for an unguarded body that they might infiltrate.

The sources were unreliable, old scoundrels like Roacher or Bulgar. I dismissed such stories as

fables, the way I dismissed what I had heard of the vast tentacular krakens that were said to swim

the seas of space, or the beckoning mermaids with shining breasts who danced along the force-lines

at spinaround points. But I had felt this. The probing fingers, the sudden sharp pain. And the

sense of someone frightened, frightened but strong, stronger than I, hovering close at hand.

"Where are you?"

There was no reply. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had slipped back into

hiding after that one furtive thrust.

But was it really gone?

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