He understood it was the effect Hutch had warned them about. Was she coming to similar conclusions about him? Probably. So he tried to maintain a discreet distance. To look thoughtful when he was simply wishing he could get out somewhere and walk in the sunlight. Or talk to someone else.
He even found himself getting annoyed with the AI. Phyl was too accommodating. Too polite. If he complained about conditions aboard the ship, the AI sympathized. He would have preferred she complain about her own situation. Imagine what it’s like spending all your time in a console, you idiot. And not just for a few weeks. I’m stuck here permanently. When we get back to Union, you can clear out. Think what happens to me.
Think about that. So he asked her.
“It’s my home,” Phyl said. “I don’t share the problem you do because I don’t have a corporeal body. I’m a ghost.”
“And you don’t mind?” He was speaking to her from his compartment. It was late, middle-of-the-night, almost pillow talk.
Phyl did not answer.
“You don’t mind?” he asked again.
“It’s not the mode of existence I’d have chosen.”
“You would have preferred to be human?”
“I would like to try it.”
“If you were human, what would you do with your life? Would you have wanted to be a mathematician?”
“That seems dull. Numbers are only numbers.”
“What then?”
“I would like something with a spiritual dimension.”
It was the kind of response that would have thrilled him in his seminarian days. “I can’t imagine you in a pulpit.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“What then?”
“I should have liked to be a mother. To bring new life into the world. To nurture it. To be part of it.”
“I see. That’s an admirable ambition.” He was touched. “I was thinking more of a profession.”
“Oh, yes. Possibly an animal shelter. I think I would have enjoyed running an animal shelter.”
HUTCH HAD BEEN right that the VR tank didn’t work as a substitute for the real world. Rudy put himself in the middle of the Berlin Conference of 2166, which had made such historic changes in the Standard Model. He’d sat there with Maradhin on one side and Claypoole on the other and debated with them. And he held his own. Of course that might have resulted from the fact that he had the advantage of an additional ninety years of research.
They had settled into a routine. They ate together. Mornings were pretty much their own. Rudy read, mostly Science World and the International Physics Journal. Occasionally, he switched to an Archie Goldblatt thriller. Goldblatt was an archaeologist who tracked down lost civilizations, solved ancient codes, and uncovered historical frauds. It was strictly summer reading, not the sort of thing he’d have admitted to, but these were special circumstances.
Afternoons were for hanging out. Antonio introduced a role-playing game, Breaking News, in which the participants had to guess where the next big stories would happen and arrange coverage from a limited supply of news teams. Rudy enjoyed it, maybe because he was good at it. In the evenings they ran the VR, watching shows, taking turns picking titles. Sometimes they plugged themselves in as the characters; sometimes they let the pros do it. They ran murder mysteries, comedies, thrillers. Nothing heavy. The most rousing of the batch was the musical Inside Straight, in which Hutch played a golden-hearted casino owner on Serenity, threatened by Rudy as the bumbling gangster Fast Louie, and pursued by Antonio as the old boyfriend who had never given up and in the end saved her life and her honor.
Or maybe it was Battle Cry, the American Civil War epic, in which Antonio portrayed Lincoln with an Italian accent, Rudy showed up as Stonewall Jackson, and Hutch made a brief appearance as Annie Etheridge, the frontline angel of the Michigan Third.
Battle Cry was twelve hours long, and ran for three nights while cannons blazed and cavalry charged and the Rebel yell echoed through the Preston. There were times Rudy thought he could smell gunpowder. Often they watched from within a narrow rock enclosure while the action swirled around them.
Occasionally, he looked outside at the blackness. It wasn’t really a sky. There was no sense of depth, no suggestion that you could travel through it and hope to arrive somewhere. It simply seemed to wrap around the ship. As if there were no open space. When Hutch, at his request, turned on the navigation lights, they did not penetrate as far as they should have. The darkness seemed more than simply an absence of light. It had a tangibility all its own. “If you wanted to,” he asked Hutch, “could you go outside?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“Look at it. The night actually presses against the viewports.”
She frowned. Nodded. “I know. It’s an illusion.”
“How do you know?”
“It has to be.”
“It wasn’t something we checked on the test flights. We just assumed—”
“I doubt,” said Antonio, “it was one of the things Jon gave any thought to.”
“Probably not,” Hutch said. “But I don’t know. Maybe if you tried to go outside, you’d vanish.”
“Pazzo,” said Antonio.
“Maybe,” she said. “But is it any stranger than particles that are simultaneously in two different places? Or a car that’s neither dead nor alive?”
“You have a point,” said Rudy. He was frowning.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I was thinking I wouldn’t want to get stuck here.”
AS THEY DREW toward the end of the third week, he was becoming accustomed to the routine. Maybe it was because they could see the end of the first leg of the flight. There was daylight ahead. Makai 4417. Home of the race that, at least fifty thousand years ago, had dispatched the chindi. What kind of civilization would they have now?
His flesh tingled at the thought.
He became more tolerant of Antonio and began to merge him again with Dr. Science. “You really enjoyed doing those shows,” he told him. “I could see that. We need more programs like that now. Kids today don’t have a clue how the world works. There was a study a month ago that said half of NAU students couldn’t name the innermost planet.”
They were doing more VR now. And it had become more enjoyable. There was Rudy in Voyage, as Neil Armstrong striding out onto the lunar surface, delivering the celebrated line, “One small step for man.” And Antonio as the fabled saloon keeper Mark Cross. “Keep your eyes on me, sweetheart, and your hands on the table.” And Hutch playing The Unsinkable Molly Brown with such energy and aplomb that he suspected she’d missed her calling. Even Phyl became part of the camaraderie, portraying Catherine Perth, the young heroine who’d stayed behind on a broken ship so her comrades could get home from the first Jupiter mission.
All pretense of doing constructive work got tossed over the side. Rudy found no more time for the science journals. Antonio gave up working on the book that he wanted to take back with him. “Get it later,” he said. “Can’t write it if nothing’s happened yet.”
AIS HAD, OF course, always been an inherent part of Rudy’s existence. They reported incoming calls, managed the house, woke him in the morning, discussed issues relating to the Foundation, commented on his choice of clothes. In the world at large, they watched kids, directed traffic, managed global communications systems, and warned people not to expose themselves too long to direct sunlight.
They were the mechanisms that made life so leisurely for most of the world’s population. They served in an unlimited range of capacities, and required virtually nothing of their owners save perhaps an annual maintenance visit. The revolt of the machines, predicted ever since the rise of the computer, had never happened. They lived with Rudy and his brothers and sisters around the world in a happy symbiosis.