The starship Odysseus had been designed to make life as agreeable as possible for the voyagers who would travel two hundred light-years from Earth. Each living compartment was furnished comfortably—within the constraints of budget and the psychotechnicians’ estimation of the difference between comfort and extravagance.
There were three dining areas on the ship, plus a cafeteria big enough to handle roughly half the ship’s complement at a sitting. Robot servers were unfailingly polite and efficient. Hydroponics farms provided fresh vegetables and fruits, biovats produced high-quality meats from cell samples that were cultured and grown continuously, and seafood was bred in the artificial stream that meandered through the ship’s middle.
The most lavish of the dining rooms had been dubbed the Crystal Palace in a naming contest carried out before the ship’s human travelers entered cryonic sleep.
Now, as Brad escorted Felicia into the dining room, he saw how appropriate the name was. Crystal chandeliers—donated by a consortium of European jewelers—hung from the high ceiling, and crystal candlestick holders decorated every one of the damask-covered tables. Even the stubby flat-topped robots that buzzed between the tables each bore a fresh flower in a crystal vase.
“It’s all so beautiful,” Felicia said as the human maitre d’ led them to a table for two along the far bulkhead. She was wearing a V-necked golden blouse and a knee-length skirt of deep brown. Brad felt distinctly shabby in his usual slacks and turtleneck.
He admitted, “It’s a lot fancier than any restaurant I could afford back Earthside.”
As they took the chairs the robots proffered, Felicia said, “I thought you’ve never been to Earth.”
Brad felt a pulse of alarm. She’s read my dossier!
“Only for the final stage of our training,” he replied. “In Kazakhstan.”
“It must have been difficult for you,” Felicia said, her face etched with concern, “with the higher gravity and all.”
Brad nodded. “I had to wear an exoskeleton suit until my body adapted to a full g. I still get back pains now and then.”
“Even though we’re at half Earth-normal gravity?”
He nodded and changed the subject. “So where are you from?”
Once Felicia started talking there was no stopping her. Brad happily listened right through the appetizers and their main courses, glad that he didn’t have to say anything more than the occasional “Really,” as Felicia spoke warmly of her childhood in Oregon and her family.
But then her tone changed and her face grew somber. “Then my parents divorced. I was twelve. It was a blow.”
“You didn’t know…?”
With a sad shake of her head, Felicia replied, “I thought they were happy together. They kept their quarrels from me until the very end.”
“That’s sad,” Brad sympathized.
“It hurt,” she said softly. “It still hurts. You wonder if maybe it was your fault, maybe you made them unhappy.”
Brad reached across the table and took her hand in his. “It wasn’t your fault. Couldn’t be.”
“I don’t know.”
“Couldn’t have been your fault,” Brad insisted.
Felicia tried to smile. “Strange. I’ve never told anybody on the ship about the divorce. It hurt too much.” Her smile brightened. “But I told you. We’re practically strangers and I told you.”
Suddenly feeling uncomfortable, Brad tried to think of some way to change the subject. “Have you ever been married?” he blurted, as their serving robot trundled up to their table with two orders of tiramisu on its flat top.
“Almost,” she said, her smile dimming again, “but it didn’t work out.”
Smart move, Brad chided himself. You picked a great subject to lighten the mood. He wondered if the failed romance led to Felicia’s joining the star-voyaging volunteers. Or did she leave Earth because of her parents’ divorce?
“And you?” she was asking. “Have you been married?”
“Almost,” he echoed.
“What happened?”
“She walked out on me. I guess I wasn’t enough of a party animal for her.”
“On Mars?”
“Tithonium Chasma.”
Felicia’s tentative smile disappeared completely. “That must have hurt.”
“Yeah,” he said tightly.
“Your whole family died in that avalanche?”
“Father, mother, and kid brother.”
“How terrible for you.”
“Yeah,” he repeated.
Trying to brighten up, Felicia said, “Well, that’s all in the past. We’re here now, and we’ve got an important job to do.”
Brad nodded agreement. Glad to be on easier ground, he asked, “Felicia, you’re a biologist. Do you think it could be possible to bring a couple of the natives up here to the ship and then return them to their villages without their being aware of it?”
“We’d have to keep them sedated the whole time. Otherwise it would be a tremendous emotional shock to them. They wouldn’t know what to make of us.”
“Maybe they’d think we’re gods, and they’ve been transported to heaven.”
Shaking her head, “Where the gods open them up to see what’s inside them?”
“We’d have to keep them sedated, like you said.”
“I suppose so. Dr. Steiner doesn’t seem to be happy with the idea, though.”
“She’d rather kill them once she’s through with them,” Brad grumbled.
Strangely, Felicia’s smile came back. “The difference between biology and anthropology,” she said. “She sees her subjects as animal specimens, you see them as equivalent to humans.”
“They’re intelligent.”
“Do they have souls?” Felicia asked, almost jokingly.
Brad answered, “If they do, Steiner won’t find them on her dissecting table.”
More seriously, Felicia wondered, “Do we have souls?”
“We have intelligence, that’s what a soul really is: the smarts to recognize the difference between right and wrong.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I do. Don’t you?”
She shrugged her slim shoulders. “I’m not sure. I know it’s an old, ancient concept, the soul. But maybe it’s something more than intelligence, some divine spark…”
Brad countered, “Look, those intelligent machines that the New Earth people call their Predecessors—do you think they have souls?”
“Machines?” She seemed startled by the thought. “No, they can’t have souls. They’re not alive, not the way we are.”
“But they have an ethical sense. They built New Earth—built an entire planet—and populated it with humanlike creatures, just like us. And why? To get us to help them reach other intelligent species that’re going to be wiped out by the death wave unless we can save them.”
“And here we are,” Felicia said, “two hundred light-years from Earth, trying to save a world.”
“A world that hosts intelligent creatures.”
“Yes.”
“And Steiner wouldn’t blink at killing a few of them, so she can study their innards.”
“It’s not right, is it?”
Brad felt his guts clenching. “I didn’t come all this way to commit murder.”
Felicia stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then she asked, “Why did you come all this way, Brad?”
He started to answer, held himself back. At last he murmured, “To save an intelligent species from the death wave.”
But he knew that wasn’t the truth. Not all of the truth, at least. He had come to Mithra to save his own soul.