Midway: Chapter 19

  Attention.   Attention please.  Crew of the New Horizon, may I have your attention please.   Thank you… this is Johannes.  I know recent events have caused much concern amongst you.  There will be a general meeting in the dining hall tonight at nineteen hundred hours to address these concerns.  Attendance is strongly encouraged, but there will of course be a ship wide broadcast for those of you who have unavoidable duties or responsibilities.  Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you all there.

   

  “I wonder what they’ll say,” Dhika mused.

  “Hard to know… there sure is a lot to talk about though,” Tycho answered.

  “Well… maybe they finally received the message from Earth,” Nusrah optimistically offered.   Dhika, Tycho, Nusrah, and Alissa were all sitting around a small table in the dining hall a few minutes to nineteen o’clock.  They were waiting for the general meeting Johannes had announced and convened.  All four were atwitter with anticipation and curiosity; everyone there was.   The room was abuzz with murmurs and cautious speculation.  No one knew quite what to expect.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, I think it would have been impossible to keep something like that a secret for any length of time at all,” Tycho answered.

  “Your father hasn’t said anything to you?” Dhika asked.

  “No, not a word…” Tyco answered, “I really haven’t heard from him much since he came home after doing the last of his interviews.  I was watching the kids when he was, though.  He sure seemed preoccupied by something… maybe they figured out who the killer is?”

  “Killer.  So you really think he was murdered, hunh?” Nusrah asked.  His thick bushy eyebrows furrowed and his sharp features tightened as he asked the question.  His brown skin combined with his light blue eyes gave him a striking and intense look which was generally considered quite attractive.

  “That’s the rumor I keep hearing…” Tyco answered.  “Granted rumors are just that and not fact, but it does seem to be a persistent rumor.  I’ve heard from several people who Johannes has interviewed that he showed them a gruesome picture of the murder scene.  It’s hard to believe though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not just hard to believe Tycho, it’s… it’s just unthinkable!” Nusrah answered.  “Nothing like that has ever happened, not even close!   We don’t even have any policing or any sort of defense force, there’s… there’s just never been any need for any!   Well,” he chuckled, “aside from Alissa here.”  He hugged his fiancée with a proud grin, but she seemed to be somewhere else.  

  Alissa’s tertiary and quaternary training revolved around conflict.  At some point in her childhood it had become clear that she had a strong aptitude for grace of movement combined with strong force of body and will.  She had been singled out to be made Keeper of Defense, if she was willing.  Although there had never been any real need of her skills to date, she was nonetheless an expert in combat with or without any kind of weapons, as well as a studied tactician in all matters from small engagements, to international total war.  She knew the history and had studied both successful and unsuccessful tactics and campaigns.  

  Alissa didn’t have any investigative or psychological training, and thus her talents had not been deemed most appropriate to be assigned to investigate the murder instead of Johannes.  The possibility that somebody onboard had been victimized, and that her skills and talents had been entirely useless to prevent it from happening in the first place, had been deeply troubling her.  Anaru had consulted with her on the establishment of a quarantine to securely imprison someone in their suite, but she’d been asked to keep it to herself.  She’d asked who they were imprisoning, but he’d asked her to be patient and that the announcement would be made soon.

  “There’s a first time for everything, Nusrah…” she said despondently, “you might even say that it was bound to happen eventually.”

   

  Johannes walked out onto the stage, followed closely by Maharet and Anaru, who stood on his left and right respectively.  Johannes stepped forward to the podium.

  “Friends and family.  First of all, I will address the issue of the absent transmission from Earth.  As you are all aware, it has been one week today since we were expecting that transmission.”  He felt so tired…  “We have done repeated diagnostics on our equipment and systems, and we have not found any technological fault at our end.  We’ve kept Gamma telescope pointed at Earth continuously since and intend to indefinitely, but we have still not received any signal.  We can only surmise that for whatever reason, there has been no signal sent to us from Earth.   While it is possible for them to have misdirected their signal, we sadly consider it far more likely that for whatever reason, no signal was ever sent at all.  Just in case though, today we have lasered a notice towards Earth stating simply that we did not receive any transmission from them, as well as sending them an update of our specific location.  We will send this message daily for the next month, and then once a month afterwards indefinitely.  As you are all aware though, the distance between us only grows, and we do not expect any response to our currently broadcasting signals for approximately twenty years at least.  

  Johannes shifted his feet and took a deep breath.  “Secondly, I can confirm the rumors that there has indeed been a murder onboard.”  A wave of gasps and murmurs spread in multiple directions through the crowd.   “Quiet please… please, quiet.  Thank you.  I know this is shocking, and that this casts a very dark shadow over everything we are doing here… but the culprit has been identified to the satisfaction of the matriarch, the captain, and myself.  We don’t have any formal judicial system on the ship of course, but I can assure you that the three of us are satisfied that we have indeed correctly identified the perpetrator, and we have determined that he will live out the remainder of his days locked in his suite.  This solution will serve the dual purposes of both ensuring the safety of the crew, as well as humanely sanctioning him.  We will not demean ourselves by satisfying any primitive compulsions for some kind of retributive vengeance.  Thank you… we will now take any questions.”

  “Who was it??” Tycho immediately called out, a little surprised at himself and the forcefulness of his curiosity.

  “Yes Tycho of course, excuse me.  It was Uzodimma Adewunmi.”  Nobody would have ever thought of Uzodimma when speculating about who the murderer might be, but somehow nobody seemed especially surprised by the revelation.   The general consensus seemed to be that there had always been something not quite right about Uzodimma, and there was no one on the ship who was close enough to him to immediately leap to his defence.  No one seemed to believe his guilt to be impossible.  He had after all, always kept largely to himself.

  “Is that really the appropriate response Johannes, to just… to just lock him in his quarters?” someone from the crowd asked.  Maharet touched Johannes’ arm to indicate she would take this question.  

  “We discussed this at length, Abiona.  We decided upon what we thought would be the least objectionable option.   We believe that anything amounting to an execution is of course out of the question, in that such an act would poison the soul of the crew and mission forever.  While there were… extenuating circumstance which made his actions in some ways… understandable, we nevertheless cannot risk any further danger to the crew.  We wish to treat him with compassion, and to avoid succumbing to any less developed elements of our instincts which might compel us to wish vengeance upon him.   This is the kind of barbarism which we abandoned a century before we even left Earth.”

  Nobody was quite sure what to make of that.  On an intellectual level, her words made perfect sense.  Committing harm to punish harm does not erase the original harm; it merely doubles it and worse still, it brings the judges down to the moral level of those being judged.  At the same time though, their fear of Uzodimma, and having him kept alive on the ship… was undeniable.  It was likewise difficult to deny the instincts for vengeance which those fears elicited in them.  The entire crowd seemed to be squirming in unison, struggling under the conflict between what their sophisticated modern minds rationally understood, and what was understood by their instincts based on millions of years of evolution whispering in their ear.

  Captain Tynes could sense their collective unease, and he moved his way to the podium to reassure them.  “I know that you are all concerned about Uzodimma remaining on the ship.   Let me assure you that I am taking full and personal responsibility for the security of this arrangement.”  He punctuated ‘full’ and ‘personal’ with hard pokes at the podium with his right index finger.  “I have consulted with Alisa and I can assure you, that every possible security arrangement has been made.”  This seemed to placate them, at least for now.

  “What about Earth?” somebody asked.  It was hard for Johannes to tell exactly who had asked the question, but it was not important since as soon as they did, the entire crowd wanted to know the answer just the same.

  “Yes…,” answered Johannes, sounding almost indifferent or uninterested somehow.  “Earth.   I regret to concede that there is a good chance that we will never receive another transmission from Earth ever again.”  A wave of chattering and murmurs rippled through the crowd again.  “Quiet, quiet please!  The possibilities around why we have not received this latest transmission are bound only by the imagination, and we feel it would be best for us all to begin to operate under the assumption that we are on our own out here, and that we should no longer expect any further contact from Earth.  We will hold out hope, and we will keep listening.  But I encourage you all to think of recent events as a reaffirmation of our mandate, and of this ship’s primary mission.”

  Maharet stepped forward and held up her hands against the murmur and chatter.  “Listen, please!  We always knew that this day would come.  We always knew that one day the cord between us and Earth would have to be cut and that like any child we would need to learn to fend for ourselves, that we would eventually be entirely on our own.  Each of you has trained your whole life for this day; every one of you has been trained from birth to be an integral part of this moment in time.  

  “If something happened to Earth or its people, then we must consider what that would mean for us.  That would make us possibly the last, but most certainly the best hope for the continued existence of not just our culture anymore, but of the human species itself.  Art, science, culture, community, everything of value which humanity has contributed to the cosmos, there is now a definitive possibility that that we are the last guardians of these sacred things.”  Stepping back, Maharet made room for Johannes once again.

  The old man had to swallow hard, and work himself up.  He was not feeling positive at all.  The last two weeks he’d felt incredibly depressed and rudderless.  He’d been feeling recently as though he’d just begun to move on after the devastatingly painful and confusing suicide of his wife some two years ago.  Nothing in his life had ever hurt like that hurt; he’d never known hurt at all until that happened, or at least that’s how it seemed to him.  The worst part was that to this day he still couldn’t understand it at all; sure she’d seemed less and less happy over the previous few years but he never knew why, and to this day he still couldn’t fathom what could have possibly driven her to it.  And now, despite that, just when he felt like there could be more of his own life worth living and exploring, this… damned murder happened.  And not just the murder, but all of the revelations around it and the unknown misery which must be out there due to the victim’s own atrocious crimes.  And now, here he was, having to reassure the rest of the crew because of his position.   He couldn’t let on how miserable and pessimistic he was himself…  He needed to give the performance of a lifetime.  

  “There is one person among us who has understood all of this long before any of the rest of us could, my dear son Tycho,” to whom he nodded approvingly, “has been telling us for years that we have invested far too much of our energy looking backwards and to the past, looking to Earth for our identity.”  The whole room looked at Tycho in unison, who now squirmed heavily under the dense scrutiny.  “I encourage you all to look forward as Tycho does, and to follow his lead, his example now.

  “We are officially at the midway point of our journey, and in more ways than one.  We are midway to Haven and to our new home, but we are also now midway toward understanding our mandate aboard the New Horizon.  We must now recognize that we are midway between launch and arrival.  I urge you all to look forward, to learn everything you can about Haven, and to think more about what you can do with your life from today until your death, to serve our eventual successful implantation onto the surface of Haven.  Let everyone born from this day forward understand, that we are no longer inhabitants of Earth heading into the void, but instead inhabitants of Haven on our way home!”