A Stitch In Space Read online

  “Except for the superstructure, and armor on the outside,” Xiao said.

  “You know a lot about cargo ships?” Fr. Xris asked.

  “I was a crew member on several voyages” Xiao said. “It pays well enough. But I wish to settle down, perhaps raise children. A cargo ship is a bad place to work if you get along with your family.”

  “Do you also have dreams of setting up some sort of outdoorsy life?” Fr. Xris asked. “Hannah wants to raise horses, and Xanadu is supposed to have some beautiful wilderness. I hear it’s what attracts a lot of its settlers.”

  “I would like to run a camping guide business, but I doubt that I can get that started immediately,” Xiao said. “Now, I am looking forward to the fun of a world which is not yet working perfectly. Why are you going?”

  “I’m Going where I’m told to go,” Fr. Xris said.

  Xiao looked at him. “Oh!” he said, recognizing the cassock and collar. “You are a Christian priest?”

  “Yes,” Fr. Xris said. “There’s a small Christian community on Xanadu. The priest they have is 94 and having a hard time coping, so my bishop has sent me to help him. Basically that means that I’m to take over and let him enjoy a hard-earned retirement.”

  As he finished this explanation, a woman in the sort of loose fitting utilitarian clothing typical of space station and cargo ship crew members came up to them.

  “I’m Kari,” she said, “Second officer on the Hopeful. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Despite her ID being broadcast electronically, Kari took the polite route of introducing herself. Something had to be the content of the ritual of greeting, and in any event introducing yourself let people know how you pronounced your name.

  The others introduced themselves.

  “Are there many more passengers besides us?” Hannah asked.

  “Only one,” Kari said cheerfully. She was a young woman. If Hannah was 31, Kari might have been a few years younger, but not less than 25.

  “His flight is on time and due to arrive at the station in twenty minutes. With docking time and getting over here, we should see him in about an hour, so why don’t I take you aboard the ship and show you around? Just leave your luggage here and Stan will make sure it gets to your quarters.”

  The passengers surmised, correctly, that Stan was the robot standing a respectful distance behind Kari.

  She led the way through the personnel door, which opened into a narrow corridor, which was in fact a long tube leading to the crew section of the ship.

  “For those of you who’ve never been on a cargo carrier before, the living area is just forward of the middle of the ship. Since the living area is only twenty four meters long, we have eight 3-meter high decks.”

  “What is the gravity differential on the inner decks?” Xiao asked.

  “It’s .6g on the innermost deck,” Kari said.

  “Very nice,” Xiao replied.

  They came after a several minute walk to where the tunnel made a right-angle turn to go out to the docked ship. The walls were lined with windows, and the ship was a truly impressive sight from the middle. Walking out to it on a gangway suspended in the middle of nothing allowed the sense of enormity to strike one unimpeded. It was huge in both directions at once.

  “How do we get on?” Hannah asked. “I mean, if the living quarters are spinning to generate gravity, how do we get in from the outside edge?”

  “Actually,” Kari said, “the living quarters are locked at the moment. We do that whenever we dock because it’s too disorienting to have two different gravities pulling at you at once. That doesn’t answer your question, though. There’s a tube from the outside to the center on the main part of the ship which connects up to the living quarters in the center. It allows space-walks in emergencies when we are rotating the living quarters, and there’s no point in having a second entrance just for when the living quarters are locked.

  “At the center the rotation is very slow. The living quarters only spin at a little over three rotations per minute, which gives a tangential velocity of thirty meters per second on the outside, but it’s almost nothing on the inside. If you think about it, three rotations per minute is only three times faster than the second hand on a watch.”

  Kari clearly liked the ship, and despite its obvious inferiority in comfort to a passenger ship, she was proud of it. Whether justified or not, this enthusiasm was rubbing off onto Hannah, who was starting to let go of the fear that choosing the cargo ship for its cheap fare was a mistake as big as the ship itself.

  “We dock with the station so that down, in the space station’s inertial frame of reference, is towards what is normally the back wall. All of the rooms are equipped to make this livable, with ladders and other conveniences built into the floors, walls, and ceilings. The Hopeful is a modern design, if she is about thirty years old, so the rooms are quite comfortable, by cargo standards.”

  That qualifier was necessary. Passenger ships were designed around comfort and convenience, especially considering how unlike regular life space travel was, the vast interstellar distances making connection to the internet impractical. Passenger ships were thus designed to allow people to get away from each other as well as to help them congregate. Part of this was large bedrooms for the passengers, since many of the passengers would spent most of their time there.

  When the group made its way through the inner decks to the deck with the sleeping rooms, they saw that the berths were not what one would call spacious, though if you were familiar with historical cargo ship designs you would have to be in an ungenerous mood to call them cramped. Each had a single long bed, a small closet with drawers built into it for clothing, and a fold-out desk which took the place of the foot of the bed once the bed was folded up into storage.

  “What do you do for a chair?” Hannah asked.

  Kari pointed to the wall under the bed.

  “You just text it the chair command, and it folds into place.”

  She demonstrated, and a thinly cushioned chair came out.

  “You can adjust the cushioning by command, as a percentage of maximum cushiness.”

  She sent it what Fr. Xris presumed was the 100% command, because it puffed up resembling a French feather cushion recently fluffed by a conscientious, if not enthusiastic, servant.

  At the same time that Hannah was thinking about how tiny the room was, Xiao was impressed by how it had a desk as well as a bed in a single room! When he had been a hand on a cargo ship, the berths were arranged with three people to a room, and had no provisions for anything but sleeping.

  Kari then took them on a quick tour of the other parts of the ship which would normally be open to them. The lounge was surprisingly spacious, and Fr. Xris guessed that this was where the crew was meant to spend most of their time. The cafeteria was a long, narrow room with one table running its length. There were two communal bathrooms, one for males and the other for females. They were equipped with showers, though there were only two showers in each. The bath water system only carried enough water to run four showers at once. (The showers were high efficiency immediate reclamation systems which ran a continuous loop of water. Water is heavy, and weight costs fuel.)

  Kari timed things so that the tour of the ship ended right as she needed to go meet the fourth passenger, and she left them in the lounge while she fetched him.

  “What have we gotten ourselves into?” Hannah asked, possibly jokingly.

  “I do not understand your concern” Xiao said. “This ship is practically a luxury liner.”

  “I take it that you’ve been on more primitive ships?” Fr. Xris asked.

  “Yes,” Xiao said. “Two, but they were both Shue class cargo ships. They are old designs, and are not meant for the same sort of deep space trips as the Hopeful. The newer of the ships I was on was built eighty years ago, and then it was a sixty year old design. One hundred and forty years ago, people were willing to put up with very little comfort in exchange for being in space for
a month.”

  The silence that followed made Fr. Xris feel free to change the subject.

  “Do you read much?” Fr. Xris asked Hannah.

  “Some,” she said. “Not that much. I like playing games. Swordcraft is my favorite—it’s an online game. I like the social part as much as the game itself.”

  “Online games do not work in deep space,” Xiao said. “Some of the passenger lines run their own ORG servers, but I doubt the shipping line has spent that money for a cargo ship. I have brought some single player sword and sorcery games. I can lend them to you, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” Hannah said. It would make the trip better, but she was still apprehensive.

  “Feeling claustrophobic?” Fr. Xris asked.

  “Kind of,” Hannah said.

  “Even though so much of modern life is lived online, it’s still different when you don’t have the option of going anywhere, isn’t it? Just having something as an option can make you feel better despite never taking advantage of it. But don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. The glory and the shame of the human race is that we can get used to anything.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Hannah said.

  “This is the lounge,” they heard Kari say from right outside the door as it opened. She stepped in, followed by a tall African man.

  She introduced the man, whose name was Shaka, to the other passengers.

  “I’ll introduce you to the crew in the mess hall at dinner, once we’re underway,” she said. “In general, feel free to go where you want on the ship. All of the controls are electronically locked to the people responsible for them, so you can’t accidentally cause problems. Just make sure to stay out of people’s way. As long as you don’t go into the bridge without Belle’s invitation or into engineering without Katie’s invitation, no one will throw you out of an airlock... Just kidding! Seriously, don’t go there without an invitation, but the worst they would do is yell at you.”

  Kari smiled at this as if it was hilarious. It was more of an in-joke than she realized.

  “I’ll come get you when it’s time to get ready for departure. There’s a procedure that I’ll need to explain for transitioning from the station’s gravity to zero-g during maneuvers, and then to our own gravity afterwards. Since it involves equipment, it’s easier to explain then.”

  The passengers thanked Kari, and she left to go about her duties. Shaka excused himself to go to his room to take a nap since he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before his flight, and the remaining three passengers stayed in the lounge. They talked with each other about what they had done on earth before deciding to leave.

  Father Xris had been an engineer before entering the seminary, and was ordained a priest six years when he was assigned to Xanadu. He had served in two different parishes before getting this assignment.

  Xiao had gone to school for computer science, but didn’t like it and spent a few years unemployed before he signed up with a space shipping company. He enjoyed mountain climbing, and had tried to join the Sherpa’s union several times, but it was the old story of there being several hundred applicants for every opening, and he at last decided that earth was just too crowded.

  Hannah was a sculptor, though she had yet to sell anything. To pay for that, she worked part-time as a guest relations specialist on a vacation ranch and part-time as nude model at an art school.

  The topic then turned to hobbies.

  “I love horses,” Hannah said. “That’s why I work on the ranch—I get a fair amount of time with the horses for free.”

  “I had wondered,” Xiao said. “Horses are very expensive. That is one thing I like about hiking. All you need are shoes and a public park.”

  “I could never afford horses otherwise,” Hannah said. “The rest of my hobbies are cheap. Like dancing.”

  “What sort of dancing?” Xiao asked.

  “Some ballroom, but mostly Australian swing,” she said.

  “Most excellent,” Xiao said. “I only know a little Taiwan two-step.”

  “I always wanted to know how to dance,” Fr. Xris said.

  “Why didn’t you learn?” Hannah asked. “If you look around a little, you can always find a free dance class in some style or other.”

  “When I had the opportunity, I didn’t have the courage. By the time I finally had the courage, I no longer had the opportunity.”

  The conversation soon shifted again, and several hours passed quickly as they talked about the experiences of their very different lives.

  Chapter 2

  The topics of conversation had not yet been exhausted when Kari re-entered the lounge.

  “It’s time to get ready,” she said simply. “Where’s Shaka?”

  “It was nighttime where his flight left Earth, so he went to take a nap,” Fr. Xris said.

  Kari stared off into space in the manner characteristic of someone sending a text message through their personal optical interface. “I just paged him,” she said. It was generally polite to explain what you were doing to others when they had no way of knowing. There were some subcultures where people configured their electronics to broadcast a typing icon above their head when entering text messages, but it never became mainstream. Most people preferred the excuse to talk to each other out loud.

  Shaka called her on the ship’s person to person intercom system and apparently said that he’d be right there, as she replied, “I’m giving the instructions for preparing for departure. I’ll start now and just stay on the line while you come.”

  “There are three basic phases of getting going,” Kari said, beginning the departure lecture. “First, we’re going to be towed out of port and clear of the station, then pointed in the right direction. During this phase of the trip, we’ll lose the station’s artificial gravity, but won’t be making our own. Next, we’re going to start moving under our own power. During this phase, we’ll be accelerating for four days at point-nine g. We’ll ease into it, but basically this means that we’ll be walking on the walls for four days. That’s the same walls that we’re walking on right now. Once we’ve gotten to cruising speed, we’ll cut the main engines which will return us to zero-g, then the third phase will begin: we’ll start accelerating the living ring. It will take 90 minutes for gravity to get to a usable level, and four hours for gravity to reach 1g. Once artificial gravity gets going, things will finally get back to normal.

  “Since it’s not legal to use Mercury for gravity braking any more, it will take approximately eighteen days to reach the slipstream entry point. I’ll talk about the entry procedure around the time we get there.

  “During the zero-g times, maneuvering, and acceleration, you’ll be required to wear a magnetic jumpsuit, or as experienced sailors call them, gravsuits. You can find emergency gravsuits in every room on the ship. The ones for this room are right there.”

  She pointed to a locker door with a stick figure of a man flailing wildly while things floated around him. Father Xris was surprised at the size of the handle on the door until he realized that it was an emergency locker. If you needed the suit, it was probably because gravity was already gone, and when you’re tractionlessly floating around a room is probably not the time to fiddle with an aesthetically pleasing, but tiny, handle.

  At this point Shaka entered the room.

  “Command: Hang Up” Kari said.

  “The intercom doesn’t automatically hang up when you enter the same room, Ma’am?” Shaka asked. He had a rich, deep voice, that was at once reserved but gentle.

  “There’s more than one reason why you might be using the intercom,” Kari said. “Just because you’re in the same room doesn’t mean you can necessarily hear each other. On a cargo ship, the computers are configured for safety, not convenience.

  Anyway, come with me and we’ll go to to the equipment room where the standard gravsuits are kept.”

  She led the way down the corridor, up two floors, and to a room whose only features were lockers and a few benc
hes.

  Kari went up to one of the lockers, opened it, and took out a gravsuit. She motioned for the others to take one from each locker in a section about a dozen lockers down.

  “Are there sizes?” Hannah asked.

  “They’re pretty much one size fits all,” Kari said. “Due to the way it works, it has to adjust to your body anyway. Not that it’s flattering, but you don’t have to wear them for very long. Shaka, if you need an extra tall suit, the last eight on the other end of this row are the big-and-tall sizes.

  “The main difference between standard suits and emergency suits is adaptation. Emergency suits come pre-programmed with standard control gestures, so they work fairly well if you know how to use them or just happen to move like the model they used. If not, they can be very awkward. Standard suits learn while there’s still gravity, so they feel very natural in zero g. Let’s put our suits on.”

  Fr. Xris looked at his suit, which had two individual legs, and immediately concluded that there was no way to get his cassock to fit in it. Kari guessed what he was thinking about, and said, “Unfortunately, Xris, the gravsuit doesn’t work over skirts. You might be able to stuff it in around your waist.”

  “I think that it will be much easier to just take my cassock off,” he said. He took off his collar and started unbuttoning the cassock. “Don’t worry,” he said with a smile, “I’m wearing pants and an undershirt under it.”

  He finished taking off his cassock, laid it aside on the bench, and put his gravsuit on, still managing to finish before Hannah, who was more taking her time than having any difficulty with it.

  “The gravsuit uses near-field communications for control, so go ahead and pair with it. It uses spatial access control, so there’s no authentication code. Once you’re paired with it, it’s forgotten its old user and is now in learning mode. At this point, you just need to move around, and it will learn the pattern of what pressure you put where to create a command set for zero-g moving. My suit already remembers my movements, but since you guys won’t have any duties while we’re in zero-g, basically all you need to do is move about like normal for a minute.”