Midway: Chapter 9

  The classroom door slid open, and all fourteen children poured out.  Johannes had timed his arrival to coincide with the expected ending of classes for the day, and they had all now been kept over time due to his talk.  One could never be sure, but Johannes was relatively confident that Bao had understood on some level what he was trying to explain to her.  It was still unreal to her in the way most aspects of life on Earth were to the crew but especially to the children.  True and experiential understanding of life on Earth was simply beyond the real understanding of the current New Horizon crew, not one person alive today had ever set foot on any planet at all.  He hoped though that he had adequately planted the seeds for Bao and the others, which might bloom into a deeper existential understanding later on.

  While it was true that the same forces he had described were all actively at work in all of the children aboard the New Horizon, the culture and world-view passed onto the children onboard the ship was by design far less rigid.  It focused on creating as many of those questioners as possible, on welcoming and encouraging inquiry and open challenge.   The New Horizon was a place where no questions or intellectual challenges were forbidden.  Here one was more likely to be chastised for being too credulous, and the value in chastising inquiry instead and encouraging ignorance, was as lost on most of the crew as it was on Bao.  Johannes had to admit that he himself still found some of it difficult to understand.

  “You have to remember that this is a primary class, Johannes…” Tycho chuckled.  “Bao may be exceptional but that’s why she’s getting bumped up.  I bet she’s the only one who understood half of what you said.”

  “I think she understood well enough,” Johannes reflected.  “In fact I hope she continues to show an interest in existential psychology… I’d love to tutor her personally if she did; she certainly knows how to ask the right questions.”

  “You’ll have to get in line, there’s a lot of people who hope she’ll want to study under them.”   Johannes nodded that he understood.   “Johannes…” Tycho continued, awkwardly attempted to broach a question, “do you ever think about the similarities between our mission and a religion?”  His father looked at him quizzically.  “I’m not suggesting that we’re fed lies or believe in myths or anything, but… I mean, it is something we’re not at liberty to opt out of, and while we’re free to question it… I think what I’m getting at is that sometimes it feels like the ship’s mission is a sort of horrifying worst case scenario for a religion.”

  “How so?”

  “Well… it’s true.”

  “An interesting if… disturbing though,” Johannes considered thoughtfully.

  “I mean,” Tycho continued, “there are no facts in dispute… all anyone could really question is whether or not the mission was worth it in the first place, and that’s just a question of value as opposed to fact… and a rather pointless question at this point since we’re already out here.”

  “Since you bring it up, and now that I think about it… there is a sense in which the original four are becoming somewhat deified if in a rather benign way.  That will probably only continue the longer the mission goes on too…”  Tycho laughed out loud at that.

  “What?” his father asked.

  “Nothing, it’s just… when you said that I realized that in the future they’ll be, from a certain point of view, ‘resurrected.’”  He was referring to the artificial life forms in storage which were perfect simulations of the four and were due to be activated when the ship arrived at Haven.  Johannes laughed at this though too, but a little more uneasily than Tycho.  He then looked altogether sad when he had his next thought.

  “You know son, as long as we’re exploring the whole… ‘mission as religion’ idea,”

  “Yes?”  Tycho was listening with rapt attention.  His father up until today had been as far as he knew among the most enthusiastically faithful about the ship’s mission.

  “What if… what if they did it wrong?  What if they didn’t think of everything when they put this mission together?  What if they missed something?  What if they overlooked things?  Could they really have thought of everything?  If not it’s… it’s us, not them who are going to have to find out the hard way…   This mission was a long shot from day one, and now we are entirely at the mercy of their careful planning… planning by humans as flawed as any others…”   He was thinking out loud, giving voice to thoughts that he’d been pushing away for days now.  Tycho had never heard his father talk like this before; he’d never heard him voice any doubts at all about the mission and its founders.  It was at once cathartic and disturbing.

  “The only thing worse than having gods,” Tycho offered thoughtfully, “is having humans for gods…”   After a few moments of silence, Tycho felt the need to change the conversation, or at least the mood.  He reached into a cage beside his desk and pulled out a guinea pig which had black eyes, pink little feet, and bright green hair.   The hair looked as though it was once all white, but had been stained lime green somehow.  “You’ve gotta see this,” Tycho proclaimed as he put the guinea pig into Johannes hands, who held it very awkwardly at first, but figured it out eventually.  Tycho then reached back into the cage and pulled out the matching second animal.   He then thought off the room’s lights and the fur of the guinea pigs luminesced and glowed fluorescent green.

  “What?” Johannes marveled.  “Oh well that’s amazing!” 

  “I know,” Tycho agreed.  “Min just finished her tertiary in synthetic genetics and these little guys were his final project to create a viable organism from its digital genome on file and introduce a novel mutation.  I was supposed to get one of the students to take them for the night but I forgot.”

  “You don’t seem too worried about it,” Johannes remarked as Tycho turned the lights back on.   He replaced the pig he’d been holding and then took Johannes’ from him.

  “Johannes,” Tycho asked as he returned the second guinea pig to the cage, “there are some parts of the ship’s dogma which are unquestionable aren’t there?”

  “Well… there are things which are unquestionable in a particular kind of way, in that to deny them could only be self-destructive.  They’re more like… premises upon which we argue the rest, as opposed to some sort of unquestionable commandments or decrees from on high.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well... such as this; we want to get to Haven, so we therefore have a duty to maintain the ship which can get us there.  It’s more of an if/then statement than a commandment.  That duty we have is only questionable by challenging the premise which precedes it.  The important thing is that we don't ever claim those premises are unquestionable.  We need to always be ready to concede that if one does not share that premise for some reason, then the duty to the ship can't follow from it, and I think that's the most important distinction.  It's like how some criticize you or… or Alissa and Nusrah for example, for not wanting to have children of your own.  It’s only fair to criticize you if one believes that we all equally share the burden of raising children.”  Johannes reflected on this thought for a moment and then added, “though they probably resent you specifically a little less on that front given how dedicated you’ve become to your teaching position.”

  Tycho looked at him for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to respond to that comment, but this time he decided against it.  Instead he turned back towards the screen with the Abrahamic monotheistic flow chart, leaned against his desk and folding his arms as he reflected on it.   Tycho started tapping the screen stylus with his left hand against the palm of his right hand.  He appeared to be studying it in serious contemplation, but he nevertheless acknowledged Johannes’ continued presence without looking away from the screen.  “So Johannes… what can I do for you?”

  “You know, son... it really is always such a pleasure to see you after class, you just seem so much more... so much more positive about things.”  

  Tycho shrugged.   “Well, I do enjoy my work… I guess it’s just something about seeing the kid's faces light up when they fit a new piece of information into the larger intellectual puzzle they've been wrestling with, and the way a whole new understanding seems to wash over them.  I enjoy that so much myself, I... I just really enjoy seeing it in them, I guess...  

  “Plus these young ones now, they’ve actually got an outside chance of seeing Haven.  I think there’s something soothing and exciting about that for me, almost like I can in some small way share that existential reality with them vicariously.”  Tycho tapped the inert back end of the stylus against the section of the screen where the Mormons were listed.  “Do you know off the top of your head how much longer it is until the Mormon ship is scheduled to arrive at its destination?”

  “I believe they were due to arrive about seventy-five years ahead of us, so… actually they should be just about there by now, within a few years anyway.”  Tycho hummed his acknowledgment and further contemplation.   “Anyways, the reason I’m here Tycho, is that I’d like to ask you something that I really wish I could ask your predecessor… but of course I can’t with him being long dead and all.”

  Tycho chuckled.   A penchant for somewhat dark humour was something the two shared.  “Shoot.”

  “Well, it’s about this murder I’ve been investigating.  I’m really not supposed to talk about it with anyone, so first I really just need your word that you’ll keep this conversation between us, alright?”

  “Sure, no problem… had some trouble have you?”  An air of seriousness overtook Tycho at this request for secrecy.  Secrets were unusual and very difficult to keep in a community this small.

  “Well, my being at a complete dead end would be more accurate…”

  “Hunh… I’m sorry to hear that.  The kids have started asking me questions… obviously I don’t know what to tell them.   It’s a really uncomfortable thought though… thinking that someone on this ship is a murderer… it’s even more disturbing to think that we have no idea who it is...”  Tycho seemed genuinely concerned, and Johannes guessed it was probably magnified by his concern for the welfare of his students.

  “It was a particularly violent thing Tycho…  Trust me, I saw the scene and it was, well… well it was just brutal.  Listen, I intend to ask the secondary teacher as well, but have you noticed anything well… odd, about any of your students?  I know that’s vague, but I’m kind of desperate and at the same time I can’t be very specific about anything.  I just need to know if you’ve noticed any behaviour that might indicate that one of your students knows something, or is hiding something, or… or maybe is suffering something, maybe a student who seems disturbed or distracted in some way?”

  “Oh my…” Tycho remarked, not sure how to respond to the oddly open ended question.  “Well… honestly nothing comes to mind, but I can certainly think about it and um… you know, keep an eye open for you,” he offered.

  “Well I appreciate that Tycho.  I know it’s a long shot, but sadly that’s just where I am at this point.”  Johannes found himself once again distracted by one of the posters his brother had put up on the classroom wall when he’d taken over.   “By the way, I still really do wish you’d take down that poster.  It sends an unhealthy message to the children.”

  “Yes, I know you do.   But you also know that I won’t.   It’s my classroom, and I think it’s inspiring.  It’s supposed to motivate them to work harder.  I want them to value the more difficult disciplines in part because of their difficulty, and to understand that that’s what makes them that much more rewarding and worth pursuing.”  Posted on the adjacent wall to the left of the main screen was a poster which clearly stated in bold black print against a plain white background:

   

  “Philosophers speak only to Psychologists,

  Psychologists speak only to Biologists,

  Biologists speak only to Chemists,

  Chemists speak only to Physicists,

  Physicists speak only to Mathematicians,

  and Mathematicians speak only to God.”

   

  “But that’s just not true!” Johannes pleaded after reading it again.  “The difficulty of any discipline is only a function of how naturally it comes to the individual person!”

  “Of course, but it’s also a good reminder of how all of the disciplines builds on one another, that good biology requires a good foundation of chemistry and physics and so forth.”

  “Well I certainly agree with you about that…” Johannes conceded.

  “I think it just bothers you because you’re a psychologist.”  Tycho chuckled and grinned despite himself.  Johannes dramatically groaned and rolled his eyes, and then got up to leave.  

  “Yes I know, and you have the hard science degrees… Goodbye.” he uttered as he good naturedly feigned contempt.   

  As he left and before the door closed behind him, Tycho called out after him:  “Hey, it could be worse, at least you’re not a philoso-” The door closing cut him off, and Johannes walked off, shaking his head but smiling a little despite himself.