Arrival: Chapter 5

  After walking alone through the corridors of the ship for a while, Sadhika decided that she needed more information about what had happened on the ship, and what had given rise to such obvious political tensions within it.  She figured that since she’d already had a one on one encounter with the captain Halley and that they’d seemed to have established a bit of a rapport, she’d seek him out first to get a better understanding.  She asked the ship where she could find him, and it informed her that he was currently in the dining hall.

  When she entered, it felt as familiar to her as it should have if she’d personally overseen the design and construction of every part of the ship, including the dining hall.  As far as it seemed to her, she had.  She could clearly remember a lot of the initial construction process, but her simulation finalization had taken place sometime before the ship had actually been completed and launched.  Still, to her it felt as though she’d just been in this room the other day.

  It was midafternoon on the ship’s now twenty-sixish hour clock, and there weren’t many people in the large room, certainly not as many as there would have been if it was a regularly scheduled meal time.  The room was a large open space on the ship, and second in size only to the arboretum which took up a full third of the habitat ring’s total volume which was half a kilometer wide, two hundred meter deep, and twenty-four meters high with eight floors.  The dining hall was designed to be able to accommodate the full three hundred maximum capacity of the ship at once if need be, but there was rarely any need to actually shoehorn everyone so uncomfortably into the room at once.  Whatever the occasion, a skeleton crew usually had to be maintained elsewhere on the ship regardless of whatever else was going on.

  The room was large enough to clearly show the curvature of the habitat ring in the floor and the ceiling.  It was on the bottom level which meant that a series of windows could be, and were, embedded in the floor.  Through most of the journey they were only portals into empty blackness since the dining hall lights which were usually fully illuminating the room washed out the view of the stars.  Now that they were in orbit around Haven though, the portals periodically allowed a clear and brilliant view of the planet down beneath their feet, as the ring section of the ship slowly circled around to simulate gravity.

  Rectangular tables were neatly arranged up and down the room in rows, with the exception of the round central table which was reserved for the captain, matriarch, patriarch, and department heads.  She… or rather, the original she and her cohorts, hadn’t wanted the typical hidden away captain’s table.  They’d wanted to foster more of a family feel to everything than just the feel of a crew on a ship.  As she went over to join Halley and Søren who were sitting alone at the captain’s table, she passed one of the spiral staircases leading up to the second level balconies which looked down on the main area below.

  She was wearing the same standard coveralls which most of the crew wore the majority of the time.  They were functional enough and rather quite comfortable, but it probably explained why neither of the men immediately noticed her when she entered the room.   Not only was she wearing the same coveralls as everyone else, but she was wearing the greys, the most common colour which Halley and Søren were also wearing  Some of the other people in the room were also wearing the few different colours which indicated that they belonged to specific departments.  

  Beyond that though, there were quite a few West Asian women onboard (exactly as many as there were of the other four ethnicities), and to look at her in passing she really didn’t stand out much from the crowd with her straight nose, wide eyes, brown skin and long dark hair.  The only difference was that she was fully of Indian descent as opposed to the homogenized West Asian ethnicity which existed on the ship today.  Five such homogenized ethnicities were preserved onboard for the sake of genetic variability once they landed.  Besides the West Asian, there were also the East Asian, African, Australasian, American, and European ethnicities.  

  They were preserved through carefully creating appropriately matched zygotes from preserved or digitized genomes as opposed to any kind of social controls over whom one could and couldn’t mate with.  People simply had children to replace themselves through blending their own gametes with those of an appropriately match genome.  Although this scheme was preserved on the ship while en route, once on the planet they would not have the sophisticated genetics laboratories and equipment available on the New Horizon.  Once a settlement was established on the planet, the colonists would simply reproduce the old fashioned way, with the benefit of the enhanced genetic diversity which had been so carefully preserved on the ship.

  When he did notice her, Halley waved his hand to invite her to come and join them.  As she approached, he and Søren exchanged some last words as he stood to leave.  “Master Sengupta,” he acknowledged with a nod as he left to give them some privacy.  It was an old title which her progenitor had earned before the New Horizon had ever even been a concrete idea.  She was heartened to find that Søren was acknowledging her so.  So far the human crew seemed generally accepting of the sims.

  “What can I do for you Sadhika?” Halley asked.  “Are you hungry?  Can I get you some lunch?  Wait… do you even get hungry?  Can you even eat?”  He’d never had to wonder such a thing before.

  “Yes Halley, I can eat,” she answered as she pulled a chair out and sat down.  “I can eat if only for the enjoyment of the tastes and smells, or… even just for fitting in.  Most of it goes right through me after an appropriate interval, but there are certain things I really do need to extract from food from time to time, like hydrogen for the compact fusion reactor which powers me.  There are also other raw materials I need to extract from food to manufacture things I need to make me go…  I rarely actually need to eat, but I certainly can, and as often as I like.”

  “And presumably without ever putting on any weight, lucky you!”  Halley remarked with a smirk.

  “Quite true…” she hadn’t actually considered that part.  “My physical dimensions will never change for any reason.”  Halley was scrutinizing her; he was still waiting for an answer to his original question of what it was that she wanted.

  “I need some information from you Halley, I need you to fill me in on what’s happened here, why there’s so much bad blood on the ship.”

  “Ah… of course,” Halley said as he took a sip of his drink.  “Let me tell you a story Sadhika, let me take you back, oh… thirty years ago, to the election for the captain who preceded me.  My father Herschel, the clone who raised me as my father was in the running.  He was an ideal, and… perfectly valid candidate.  He was remarkably competent and had an impeccable record.  

  “His only flaw, was a state of being beyond his control; he was a clone, and this alone was enough to condemn him in many people’s eyes.  They could only ever see him as something unnatural… their fear of him made them see his lineage as an abomination which most certainly should have stopped at his predecessor.  No amount of good deeds, no amount of service to the ship, the crew, or the mission, could ever redeem him in their eyes.  His very existence was considered unforgivable; and doubly so, for his ‘son.’   Me.

  “His opponent was well-liked; she too was quite suited to the job.  She was of a humble background, and she too worked hard her whole life at cultivating relationships on the ship.  Both candidates were thoroughly qualified and there was no extraordinary or particular reason to vote for either.  But the election became about the clones; they made it, about the clones.  They made it into a referendum on whether or not Herschel had redeemed the cloning program or not, and whether or not the Bowland Experiments should be allowed to continue at all.”

  “Who?” Sadhika asked. “Who made it about that?”

  “Aset and Asari’s parents!” Halley explained in a surge of anger which he immediately checked and suppressed.  “Specifically, Aset’s father and Asari’s mother.  By marriage, Aset and Asari are both the great grandchildren of the first clone Johannes, and the great great grandchildren of Markus Bowland who started it all in the first place.  No they’re not clones themselves, nor are they in any way genetically linked to any of them, but they deeply resent the historical associations they do have with them.  I think, that they all so vigorously oppose the clones as a way of distancing themselves from their own links to them.  Me thinks they doth protest too much…”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve actually done some poking around about it, since you ask…  The serious resistance to the cloning program seems to have started with two women.  One was former Matriarch Maharet, and the other a woman named Kirana.  She was the son of Johannes and the brother of Tycho.  She found out that her brother and father were clones of the man she’d known as her grandfather at the same time as everyone else did, and at the same time as she was finding out that there were plans to make yet another clone… it must have all really gotten to her.

  “Kirana’s children… Aset and Asari’s father and mother respectively, came to hate my father and later on myself especially, and they were sure to pass that hatred down to Aset and Asari as well.  They were taught that they needed to not just be against us, but to be seen to be against us, and to avoid being… contaminated with the same stain.”

  “My father, on the other hand, had been taught his whole life about loyalty, about forgiveness, and about honour.  When he was young, he took it upon himself to redeem the existence of all of the clones, and to validate the decision to create him.  He wanted to become the model crew member, and maybe someday even captain or patriarch.   All he wanted his whole life was to serve, to be appreciated, and to feel an ever elusive sense of acceptance.   This was his response to the stress of being the living embodiment of all political conflict on the ship.”

  “But he lost the election?” Sadhika asked.

  “That’s right.   He told me that something died in him when that happened… he’d spent almost fifty years trying to prove himself worthwhile, but that night he realized that no matter what he did, it could never happen.  When he lost the election, it wasn’t just a matter of being electorally defeated.  He was personally impugned and rejected.  

  “Mathematically it was clear that many of the people on the ship who had told him they would vote for him in the secret ballot had instead voted against him.  It broke the poor man’s spirit.  To his death he never spoke ill of any of those who had so casually lied and stabbed him in the back, nor did he ever confront of condemn those who had.  He just didn’t have an angry or spiteful bone in his body.  He was truly good to the core… those who knew him before I was born told me that when he lost the election something seemed to have broken in him, his spirit seemed to slump and he was never the same again.  He existed, he spoke, and he… did the work that was required of him.  He faithfully served the ship and did his duty to the very end until his death a few years ago, but there was no more spark left in his eyes.  His heart had been permanently broken.”

  Halley went quiet for a moment in reflection.  He looked down through one of the windows as the ship flew through the night-day boundary and the landscape lit up beneath their feet.  “A whole lifetime spent being the bigger and better man, of letting it all roll off of his back, only ever earned him more hatred.  Losing the election finally made him completely deaf to all of the cries of outrage when he announced his intentions to have another clone-son; me.”

  “But why?” Sadhika asked in confused frustration, “Don’t get me wrong Halley, I’m not suggesting that there’s something wrong with you or that you don’t have any right to exist or anything, but… but why do that?  Why go through it all over again if he’d already seen for himself that nothing could ever make the rest of the crew okay with it?”   Sadhika just couldn’t understand.

  “Well, in part because it wasn’t the whole crew who was against him!  From the beginning and to this day, the crew is pretty evenly split between those who would condemn it all and those who would accept it.  Many came to see it as a legitimately interesting biopsychosocial experiment, one which could never get past any academic ethics boards back on Earth!  Having gone this far already, many found it a shame to simply abandon the whole project altogether, if only on the grounds of intellectual curiosity and scientific study.

  “The more vocal the opposition became, the more the pro side justified itself, the more it became about our right to do what we wanted to do as a matter of principle, and it just spiraled and spiraled from there.  There’s been a kind of bitter… resonance between the two sides, the opposition just keeps pushing harder, and supporters keep pushing back even harder in defence.  When my father announced his intention to make me, the anti-clone faction were absolutely livid but politically there was nothing they could do stop it because between the three leaders, only the patriarch of the day was willing to outright condemn it.”

  “And how did you respond to all of this Halley?   How do you feel about Aset and Asari and… and about all of their people’s attitudes towards you?”  Sadhika asked cautiously and somewhat afraid of the answer.

  “Fierce indignation.” he answered coldly.  “What I learned, was that they would never accept me no matter what, no matter how good I was.  I learned to be angry, to be aggressive, and I developed a burning desire to take all of the things which my father had deserved to be given but was denied.  I decided that if they wouldn’t accept my father, I was better off becoming his opposite, better off being the very embodiment of their nightmare, and to make all of their worst fears about us come true.  I decided to make them all wish that they’d given my father everything he was due, everything he’d earned.

  “It became me and my people against Aset and Asari’s people every day, and for a long time now.  We took every opportunity to oppose them, but we never broke the rules or pushed things too far.  The more their responses to us were excessive and disproportionate, the more people came over to our side in response to their unfairness and belligerence.  

  “It just so happened that in the last six years, all three leadership positions came up.   Their cruelty had won me enough support to win the captaincy, but unfortunately they still had enough support to squeak out victories as the matriarch and patriarch despite every possible effort from me and mine.  Since that time Aset and Asari were married, and many of the crew have been uncomfortable with the idea of a married couple monopolizing two thirds of all the political power on the ship.  This increasingly unpopular imbalance of power has made even more of the crew sympathetic to us.”

  “What a mess…” Sadhika exclaimed in overwhelmed dismay.

  “Indeed….” Halley replied with a knowing smile as he took another drink from his glass.