Chapter VI
The cavernous chamber was not unlike a planet... It's light and heat patterns were locked into continual fluctuations caused by gaps in the power systems. There were times when the electric glow would dim into almost complete darkness, and the moisture in the air would freeze and condense into a thin layer of frost covering everything there. The people would pull their blankets tighter around them, huddling in clusters where possible, and slept, waiting for day to come.
And then the power networks would re-align themselves, the lights and heating elements would reactivate, and the contained world would come alive again. Or, as much as it cared to.
As the energy flowed once more through the endless veins and arteries of the ship, the man saw his metal shell-bowl illuminated before him, with the residual sludge faintly glowing. Wearily, he stood, stumbled away from his sleeping pad and moved off into the shadows.
The man was just another Hiigaran among the masses, no longer distinguishable from the crowds around him. Just another nameless figure hidden under ragged sheets of ancient cloth. And yet, he was not like them, in one crucial detail... He knew that among all of them, he was the only one who was three millennia unborn.
In all his time there, Ordin had grown into the prison ship. From the carbon dioxide content of the air, from the fine metallic dust that had worn into his clothes, or from any of the other elements of this strange place; he had become one of the prisoners. He hardly recognized himself in comparison with his sparse memories of the past anymore--But they recognized him.
All the exiles around him looked up momentarily as he passed, nodding from time to time in silent recognition. He must have been physically unidentifiable, and yet they knew who it was, guided by some unknown intuition. It was miraculous at first, but it was easy to understand in hindsight. These prisoners, lying in their vast fields of apparent indolence, were not sleeping but rather meditating. They had been traveling across the stars for a century or more in search of a world, a place for them to live, a home. In that time, the search had become a sort of religion, although Ordin didn't feel right to call it that. It was an idea, a belief, a last hope of these refugees, that when all else rejected them, God would give them life.
Many of them seemed to remain still and almost dead for days at a time, sitting up in a position of perpetual prayer. Toward the center of the central chamber, they would sit in a half-conscious state... Evidently, the low oxygen content gave them visions and acted like a ceremonial drug.
Indeed, the appearance of the small crew must have seemed providential to them... Who else but a divine entity could have produced a means to repair the damaged hyperdrive? So, in all this time, the exiles must have seen Ordin and the others as messengers or servants of that entity... Perhaps they recognized him by the halo that their subconscious minds drew around him.
Regardless of whatever these people thought, Ordin felt anything but godly. For the past innumerable weeks, the pain in his chest had only worsened, aggravated by prolonged exposure to the increasingly poisonous atmosphere.
His diet couldn't have been helping his condition, either.
Ordin reached his destination. The line moved slowly forward, and he reached the two small faucets sticking out of the materials processing plant. One was silver, and dispensed water that was usually clean, the other was iron, and gave out a thick gel that supposedly contained all the nutritional value of any other food and more. The sugar the machines added was the only thing that made the taste bearable. Each day he ate it he felt weaker, as if the substance was stripping the minerals from his body rather than replenishing them.
The pale synthetic glow continued to intensify... Dawn had come.
Something about the corner of the chamber made it more homely to Ziir. It vaguely reminded him of his home in childhood... A small mud-walled house by the side of one of the greater plateaus walling the banded desert of the forgotten world of Kharak. Perhaps he looked up at the two walls here and saw that shack of his birth... Or perhaps it was simply the needs of his equilibrium to establish a reference point for the place.
The lights were slowly rising around him. Stirring to consciousness, he pulled one of the sheets from the crude framework that had functioned as the foundation of his small tent-home and let the light pierce the space. It reflected into his eyes, bouncing off a shiny plate of bronze metal on the wall. He bent down and peered at it, counting the tally... After a time, he picked up one of his old tools and used it to make another scratch.
"That's seven hundred twenty eight standard days and counting..." he said to himself, perpetuating the tradition he had held for all that time since the permanent departure of the Ir Miilas. It had, unfortunately for them all, been a departure too abrupt for him to take the necessary supplies off the ship, to fix the ancient hyperdrive for the prison ship. For nearly all the time he'd been here, he'd been working at the limit of his abilities to construct replacement parts from scraps of metal, to jury-rig connections when he lacked the material, even to re-invent the technology where nothing else could be done. He knew the ancient hyperdrive up and down, and yet there were pieces missing from it that he was unable to synthesize.
No matter... Ziir was not the type to loose confidence, even after so much failure. After taking a sip of old water and clearing his throat, he returned to his makeshift laboratory and contemplated new ways to fix the machine. After all, the day had just begun.
A'Kuul's inability to locate a working computer system on the ship had greatly impeded the speed of his calculations. The display on his head was often ineffective for the more intricate calculations of hyperspace geometry, and so he'd been forced to resort to more unconventional means. Since there were no writing tools on the prison ship, let alone paper, A'Kuul had improvised... He had taken to scratching numbers and mathematical symbols into large sheets of thin, flexible metal, which he was able to gather from the casing of damaged systems. This method of working the equations was almost unbearably slow, but it was all he had.
The sheet before him was almost covered over in his computations... When he had reached the limit of space on the "page", he rolled it up and put it with the rest. All his data was now on sheets like that... There was a stack in the corner of the tent containing all his work from the past year, ten sheets of solid mathematical data and all for one fractal algorithm. He sighed, pulled out a fresh sheet, and went back to work, hoping to identify the perfect wavefront... Hopefully, the one that would carry this ship to its elusive destination.
There was still a lot of work ahead of him.
Creta stumbled awake late that day... The last images of another recurring dream stained her eyes. Looking out at the ceiling of the cavernous chamber again, acrophobia set in. She took a long, strained breath of the thickening air and raised her strength enough for movement.
She found herself in the smaller rooms at the forward portions of the prison ship, small rooms with big windows, originally used as navigational posts or quarters for whatever crew had once inhabited this freighter. The darkness here was, somehow, comforting... Her burned retinas could relax for a time. She felt cold here, and empty, such feelings as extra-galactic space had always induced in her. But the emptiness was a rest from the crowded, wall-less houses of the central chamber.
Her joints seemed to flex like rusty metal when she took a seat at the old, lifeless console. She reached out and grasped the nearby object; the tarnished metal cylinder that formed the casing for the eyepiece of the telescope. Wearily, she adjusted the knobs and positioned the lens with her eye. She pulled it down to an angle with the window and the infinite beyond, and directed the thing at the denser regions of her own distant galaxy. When she had it focused, she relaxed and gazed silently down at the comforting orange glow of the core, just as bright as all her memories of it. The thoughts still hung heavy on her mind, that she was truly trapped on the prison ship forever, and would never see the inner rim again, but she let her worries drip into that eternal void from which they came. Her thoughts became still and calm, and the rich star clusters glimmered before her eyes, and for a moment, memory permitted Creta to return home to that distant origin, and the world that was her home.
She could see it, even as she knew she would never be able to return.