Today would be the day. Reder had decided it. He had
received a repair slip in his box, a neat, tiny red square of paper (almost
imperceptibly hand-cut, as the carbon copy forms had long since run out and the
papermill took effort and resources the Helios could seldom spare). It was a
command directly from the captain, something in her ready room, a light
flickering, from what he could tell.
The captain trusted Reder, and this is why he decided he
would be the one to have to bring it to the table again. The children’s
training had to be advanced. They needed to work harder, to learn faster. The
older members of the Helios crew—those that had learned from the first
generation, the men and women that built and lived in the ship for the first
vibrant decades of her life, were going to die soon. Some had petitioned the
captain for cryosleep, forseeing a future where all of them died at
approximately the same time, effectively draining the ship’s repair and
engineering resources.
Even though he had taken the last two hours of Atticus’
shift, and his body felt as tight and languid as a mass of knotted rope, Reder
could not sleep. He remembered Thomas now, the man who brought him first into
the belly of the ship, a weird series of metal bowls filled with pipes and
gears and always hissing with heat. Thomas was the eldest child of one of the first
Helios crew. His father, one of the Helios engineers, had first shown him the
shell of the hull when he was just a tiny infant, and the ship was just a
meaningless world-shape. Thomas grew up with the ship, as some children grow
old with a pet. Only the Helios would outlive Thomas.
Thomas was ancient when he trained Reder, and, as a boy of
13, he was sure that Thomas was the oldest man alive. He might have been the
oldest man on the ship, though he was still strong enough to squeeze through the
despairingly thin passages between the rails and beams that crisscrossed the
Helios’ mechanical space.
They were not meant to be down there. Thomas was crew chief,
but had been desk bound by the time Reder came up to train. Captain Carol, the
second captain of the ship, and an interim captain, had instituted an emergency
policy—the same policy that Reder would now bring to Alice in secret, that he
would urge her to take up. Thomas never took a wife, and so never had children.
But where many of the trade supervisors—officers of the crew that oversaw the
management of vital operations—were exasperated by the sudden induction of the
young (with their ignorance, their impatience, their inherent lack of
accountability) into their teams, Thomas was invigorated. He explained
everything about the machines at the heart of the Helios with an excited awe,
which caught hold in Reder. Thomas took him down into the ship on many nights,
and they would make routine repairs and tune-ups, with Reder watching at first,
and then assisting in some small ways, a turn of the wrench, removing covers,
stripping wires. He learned the ship like children learn their mother tongue.
Was it just because Reder had done it—had been through this
training at an early age, and had so flourished under the guidance of his
mentor, though this fact was mostly unknown to the rest of the crew—that he
thought it best for the children of the Helios to level up to post assignments?
Alice had been in that same crop, too. She was one of the early cadets, those
children cut on the task of running a ship with the aging parent population.
She, too, had flourished under Caroll’s system. But now, as an adult, and as captain,
she was with those who advocated extended schooling, longer control training,
and more time in their family’s quarters before moving out into the common
bunk.
Was it because she, the captain, was also a mother? Alex was
a strange child. Would she place the mission of the Helios crew at the mercy of
the love for her own son?
Reder was not an unkind man, and he stirred at the cold
thoughts that welled up suddenly inside of him.
