Once upon a time there was a ship.
Not a ship that floated across the water. Not a ship that sailed across oceans on Old Earth (Old Earth: you know the globe you see carved out of aluminum foam over by Pylon Twenty Two’s fountains?).
No, this is a ship that soared between the stars themselves.
It is shaped like a can, like that can of Fizzy Panda you’re drinking right now, Bivi, in the back where you think I can’t see you.
And on that small tin can, deep in the dark of the depths of space, were the fine, no the brave, women and men of Deck Crew Two…
…and the Watch Captain who saw it all…
…through and through.
***
“Our ship! Our world!” shouted the children arranged on the lawn around the base of Pylon Seven. Their paper clothes flashed all the primary colors they had scribbled and decorated themselves. And many of them were ripped and tattered from chasing each other around the gardens. “Our home!”
Jahn Sheriff paused and watched Mama Sun, who had been telling the tale of Deck Crew Two, smile and throw her leathery, wrinkled hands into the air.
“So smart. Yes, it happened right here, under your feet, in the skin of the world. The greatest tragedy we have ever known, and the single bravest act our people ever saw.”
So began the story of Deck Crew Two, sealing off their section and waving to their loved ones through the portholes as the vacuum ripped its way into the world, stopped only by their quick sacrifice.
Jahn tapped his waterproof paper hat at Mama Sun, who tapped her wrist to show she had seen him, and then he reluctantly entered the elevator to head toward the Core of the World. He shook the long raincoat off as he ascended. He’d been called to the Alexandria Division, and Jahn’s brother had said was that it was about a possible murder.
If true, it was the first pre-meditated one in almost thirty years among the roughly ten thousand souls scattered among the dorm pylons and multiple decks of the world.
***
Alexandria was a strange section. Firstly, it was in the upper section of Pylon Seven, so the gravity here was minimal. That made Jahn bounce as he walked, and often fall over if he misstepped.
And then there were the pillars and odd carvings on the walls. The decoration made no sense to Jahn or anyone else, nor did the pyramids etched into the floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the world mean anything to his people. It was, this close to the center of it all, nice to see the world curve in on itself, though. This far away from the farms and greenery meant you had a view of everything: all of the Builders’ creation itself.
The Pylons, thirty five of which rose from the outer shell of the world to the shaft that ran down the hollow center, held most of the industry and dorms of the world. They were a few hundred feet wide, and most of the rooms in them were pie-slice shaped.
Alexandria, the archive of the world, took up several floors of Pylon Seven, including room [censored], another slice of a room that was taped off and guarded by Arin, Jahn’s older brother. Two Watch Mates in blue kilts with yellow command sashes were arguing with him, demanding to be let in.
“It is against regulations to let anyone but the senior Sheriff into an active crime scene,” Arin kept insisting.
He looked utterly relieved as Jahn approached.
Both the Mates turned and began shouting at Jahn. “We need to assess the data loss immediately. This is a Navigation and Command matter, one of Worldly Import.”
Jahn held up a hand. “Everyone shut up.”
He was the youngest here, but his harsh order silenced everyone. One of the Mates, a burly man used to deference by right of his sash, looked just about ready to step forward and push past Arin and Jahn, as he moved next to his brother. Jahn patted his baton, hanging from the right belt loop, and the other Mate, an older woman, grabbed the man’s elbow.
“That room holds the navigation protocols for the Final Approach,” she said. “Do you understand? This was the backup room.”
The Mates looked slightly hysterical.
Jahn could understand why. He looked over at Arin, who shifted from foot to foot nervously. “Dad said, the scene could not be entered until the senior Sheriff went through it,” he said. “Been drilled that since I could walk. I know what the Sheriff’s rights are. You can’t sash your way through me, the Sheriff’s are an independent Function of the world. We’re separate from Command and Navigation, and even from Communal Organization.”
“Yes, but you can’t get in the way of the World Functions, and Navigation is our domain,” the woman said.
“Arin?” Jahn leaned over, getting tired of the pissing match over who could go where. “Why am I here? You said there was a murder.”
Arin was a stickler for Sheriff rules. He wasn’t the brightest in the family, but as their great-grandfather, his father, and his hother, Arin took the family occupation very, very seriously. Even if he wasn’t actually good at figuring out what the rules were really for. He was always one for the letter of the law and never the spirit of it.
“It’s the fingerprints,” Arin said. “And a logbook.”
He handed over a grimy, actual-paper book.
“What am I looking at?” Jahn asked wearily. This would not have been the first small crisis entirely created by Arin’s over-literal following of protocol. Jahn wanted to solve this little stand off and get back to patrol. Wandering the world was his favorite activity. But it was Jahn that dad had given the Chief Sheriff badge, even though he didn’t want it.
“Last signature, and the date,” said Arin, tapping the yellowing paper.
Jahn looked. And then looked again. “That date?”
“And I took fingerprints,” Arin said. “They’re her’s.”
Jahn looked at the closed door and the red tape Arin had pulled across it. Then, for a third time, he looked down at the paper sign-in sheet. “Inika Historian.”
Inika had gone missing five years ago.
There had been many theories about that. She’d gone down into the decks between in the world’s skin, and found an airlock, and jumped out into the void. Foul play, and she was buried in one of the gardens. And, Jahn’s favorite when he’d been still in training and was asked what he thought, was that she’d slipped and fell into the yeast vats and you were all still drinking her in your beer today!
But dad had worked the case, and griots like Mama Sun sang the story, though not to the little ones, but in bars for tips, so everyone knew the last known location of Inika Historian, and when that was.
And it was not in Alexandria, room [censored], at the start of Third Watch, fifth bell, on January 5^th^ of 1076AL.
It had been days earlier, at Pylon Five. Third bell, if he remembered right.
Arin was right. This was a potential crime scene. This was important.
There was flurry of activity near the elevator, and more yellow sashes arrived.
“Oh no,” Arin said, looking sick. “It’s the Overcaptain.”
***
Overcaptain Kiwa’s sash was thousand-year-old artificial silk, and it was tied tightly around her chest and midriff, finishing in a very formal Fender Knot at her neck. She held herself with an air of long-assumed leadership. It had run in her genetic line for almost three hundred years, the dynasty of the Command family line, which she could trace directly in the world’s geneological records.
Jahn’s line had only married into the Sheriff line within the last century.
Kiwa didn’t measure the color of her sash against Jahn’s, but pulled him aside.
“Termites,” she said. “They got into the physical media. I need to know what the damage is. How bad. You ask why this matters, and I tell you that this is the only backup of the stellar navigation data and the world’s systems aren’t running navigation because one of my predecessors had to make some very scary choices about using the extra memory and processing power to handle balancing our ever more complex ecosystems. This is a Command secret, so you will, of course, swear to me that no one will know about this just yet until we get in there.”
Jahn appreciated the directness. They were speaking leader to leader here and there was no dancing around.
“Kiwa…” he trailed off. They had studied together in Crafts, and had even done the wilderness survival trek from Pylon Ten to Fifteen, keeping the old planetary skills alive that they would one day need when the world arrived at its destination. They would never use them, but by studying how to live in the wild and passing it on down to their children, one day their ancestors would stand on the surface of some planet and use them.
“I know. It’s a fucking disaster,” Kiwa said.
“Just you and me, then, together,” Jahn offered. “We’ll figure out what’s going on and make it up as we go along.”
“Jury rigging is the way of the world,” she agreed.
They explained the situation, and everyone defered to them. Then Jahn broke the tape and opened the door. Kiwa tapped the lights on.
The room was a large, slice-shaped near triangle that expanded out from the door. The curve of the windows had a dramatic view of the rolling green hills as they curved up on either side like wings. Jahn looked up, following the two sides of land, to see the other side of the world that looked down at them, but the core of the world was in the way here.
Further on down he could see the many of the thirty five pylons marching off down through the world. Most of his entire world, visible in a glance.
But it was the contents of the room that he need to pay the most attention to, even if a part of him dreaded and delayed doing it. This was the part of the job that Arin did better and Jahn hated. The walls, inscribed with their odd ancient decorations of flattened two-dimensional figures and picture symbols, were stacked with conservation shelves. These were air-tight glass units designed to hold ancient artifacts in strict environmental conditions so that they didn’t detoriate.
Room [censored] held ancient media mostly. Old movies, in languages that only the struggling Linguists and occasionally cross-trained Historian families would be able to understand.
There were traditionalists who worked hard alongside the Historian families to make sure that as much of the old media was kept, so that there was a proper record of the old ways and what Old Earth had been like. But few bothered. The motion pictures were for a culture and a place that made no sense and had no bearing on world life. The ones that survived, with subtitles, were movies about people in cities that had buildings like the Pylons and were as cramped as life in the world. Science documentaries and nature pictures as well, for readying a people to get to a planet again, but few in Kiwa or Jahn’s generation watched those.
“This shelf,” Kiwa said, looking down at a small pad, the glow from it lighting up her chin.
Jahn had been looking for a body. He had been expecting a body, hidden away in a shelf, maybe. Or just lying somewhere in a corner.
But the floor was clean, kept immaculate by some spidery robotic cleaner, no doubt, that scuttled in through panel every week to keep an eye on things.
The shelves were mostly all airtight, clean, museum-like, as they should be.
All except one stack that Kiwa now looked at.
Tiny, fat little carapaces squirmed and writhed inside, covering every surface inside the locked shelves. In some places their mandibles were cutting through the shelves so that they could get at what was on the other side.
A few weeks, and the entire archive room would have been nothing but termites boiling around inside. They’d even eat the service cleaner when it arrived.
“Can I bring in my people, now? I see no body,” Kiwa said.
“That’s really the navigation data?” Jahn asked, looking at the mangled discs the termites swarmed over.
“Yes. Can I bring them in?”
“Yes. Of course.”
***
No one historian could put a finger on when the termites officially started being a problem, but it was generally accepted a plastic-eating strain had started appearing in between the decks four hundred years ago.
They were starting to develop a taste for metals, now. The scientists said that was because of forced adaptation. The whole world had gotten so good at checking for termites that it was causing an evolutionary pressure on them to adapt.
Folk adapted, repairing damaged equipment after infestations. But this was an unusual disaster, Alexandria was more alert to this sort of thing than anywhere else, due to the nature of their work.
In fact, it started bugging Jahn, even as he watched the Mates get to work on recovering what they could from the cases with a lot of swearing.
“Where are you going?” Arin asked, as Jahn left the room.
“When they’re done, see if you can get any prints off the shelves that were contaminated,” Jahn told him. “Screen out the Mates, see what shows up.”
There was a sense of relief that washed over him as he took the elevator down several floors to the lobby of Alexandria. The Chief Librarian sat on a dias between a pair of stone cats with human faces. Her eyes were dark with liner, and her silk robe covered with a blue sash, for the knowledge families.
Normally a reference librarian would be here with a pad linked into the stacks, and an assistant to watch over anyone looking at something physical in the inventory. But someone must have seen Mates and the Overcaptain and told her, so she was here in person to watch over her domain.
Jahn gave a non-ironic half bow, he’d spent enough time wandering around Alexandria and asking questions as a kid that Aziza knew him.
“Is it that bad?” she asked, stepping off the dias and dropping the regal pose she’d been holding.
“Termites in room twenty three,” he told her. There was no reason to keep it a secret from her. Like the Overcaptain and himself, she was owed the information sooner or later. Better sooner, so she had time to prepare. A scholar and keeper of antiquities like Aziza would be devestated by the news.
She kept a calm face, though Jahn saw her jaw clench. “Termites. The fuck you say. We’ve *never* had an infestation in the archives. We scan daily.”
“I would expect no less,” he said. “But here we are.”
Aziza looked down at her sandaled feet, a beaten gesture that surprised Jahn. She took a deep breath. “What was damaged?”
“Navigation data.” He didn’t tell her it was the only copy. Not his secret to tell, and you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the Overcaptain of the entire world. Her power wasn’t absolute, the families could vote a recall and choose a different Watch Captain, or even someone from a Mate family.
But, until they did, the Overcaptain’s power ranged very, very widely.
“*Nav data*? This close to Destination Day? This is going to be a tough year for Alexandria.” Aziza folded her arms. “I’m going to have to publicly resign to save the scholarly families embarrasment. I have to do it before the traditionalists demand it.”
Some of the heavy eyeliner had started to run.
“I’m sorry,” Jahn told her, and reached out for her shoulder. To see the end of a great career like this, it was maddening. “I do have official business, though, as a Sheriff.”
He hated having to do that. He had always felt a kinship to the scholars, one of his great grandfathers had been a linguist, before the study of non-primary ancient languages had been shelved as unnecessary to the world’s survival. Even as an active Sheriff, Jahn felt it was his need to find answers and truth, like a scholar, that drove him to be a good Sheriff. It was not, unlike his brother, the focus on rote and rule that excited Jahn.
Aziza steadied herself. “Of course. What do you need?”
“I need all the visitor logs to Alexandria for the last five years, your maintenance records, and any information on file pertaining to room twenty three. I also want a copy of a patron’s reading materials.”
Aziza looked horrified. “I can’t give you checkout history—”
“The patron is dead. I need Inika Historian’s files.”
Aziza bit her lip and blinked. “That’s legal, of course. But… Jahn… what’s going on?”
Jahn shrugged. “That’s what I am trying to figure out.”
***
There were two things he found quickly in the data. One, the general comings and goings had been altered. Arin had definitely found a logbook in the room, or requested it from the right reference librarian who hadn’t realized what they’d done, and that logbook had Inika’s signature and date on it from a time no one had known she was alive. And the general front desk had erased that from their own data at some point.
Two, Jahn felt Inika’s requests for archive material were falsified. It was all antiquities.
Jahn leaned back in a cubicle and thought about that. Inika had been anti-traditionalist, so even as a Historian, she had chosen to write about and give speeches on recent history. She felt that Old Earth’s true reasons for creating the world had been lost, that they only had legend to guide them. They knew about the destination, the world’s programming, and what materials they had. Studying recent events had more important things to reveal about the world that was being formed because it was, by definition, right here right now.
So she wouldn’t have been studying antiquities, what she called irrelevant history.
Jahn couldn’t prove it.
Or could he?
He didn’t bother the reference librarian, but left the cubicle to go to one of the public channel archive stacks. He plugged his pad in and had it search until he found what he vaguely remembered as a child.
INIKA HISTORIAN TO RESEARCH AND WRITE EPIC NEW SAGA ABOUT DECK CREW TWO.
“And on that small tin can, deep in the dark of the depths of space, were the fine, no the brave, women and men of Deck Crew Two, and the Watch Captain who saw it all, through and through,” Jahn muttered to himself.
There was, a tangled line in here of something happening just under the surface of the world.
“Sometimes, you tug on that too hard, you find out a truth you don’t want,” his father had told him. “You’re independent, but everyone has a place and a part. Don’t tug too hard things fall apart.”
But Jahn always found the truth to be a shiny thing in the dark, and he was drawn to it like dust to a static air filter.
***
Every year Destination Day caught Jahn off guard. The Sheriff family would get caught up in the planning early, of course, they had to figure out where to send all the active and experienced old-timers for the festivities. Bars, yes, but also the other places that weren’t on record, usually hidden away in between the world’s skin instead of out in the wild areas or the pylons.
Once, Jahn had tracked down shroom eaters operating in an old shuttlecraft in a bay in one of the world’s endcaps. Fifteen hull maintenance crew who said that it wasn’t an illegal operation but a private ‘member’s only club.’
Then, younger Sheriffs were dispatched to carnivals and presentation festivals, where mostly younger kids thronged to watch old time renderings of what it would look like for the world to pull into orbit around a planet and descend down into a foreign biosphere for the first time. Kids loved it, but by the time you were a teenager and realized you would never see any of that, that it was some distant ancestor a hundred years down the line that would, all interest was lost.
By the time Destination Day rolled around Jahn had been in meetings, planning sessions, and arguments about staffing for so long it wouldn’t make any sense that all he had to do was walk around and respond to the day’s actual crisises, not just come up with plans for imagined ones.
Banners fluttered from pylon balconies, and parade routes were getting set up with chairs and platforms for bands or speeches. Costumes were in shop windows.
Jahn passed a pack of kids running in a circle.
“Ring around the rosies…” they screamed. “A pocket full of posies.”
That was as old as he was. Kids passed those rhymes on to other kids. And how inventive and nonsensical. What were posies?
There was a Mate waiting by his office door.
“What’s going on?” Jahn asked, but was met with professional silence. The Mate, Jahn noticed, had a baton swinging from the side of his kilt. That was new.
Inside, the Overcaptain was patiently waiting for him. Arin sat off to the side looking… scared.
Jahn swept in, letting his waterproof paper coat swing by them all as he took it off and hung it, along with his hat, on a hook by the door. He sat down on his side of the desk, enjoying the feel of full gravity now that he was back in his own space in a pylon close the inner green skin of the world.
It was a power move, making everyone wait. But the truth was, Jahn was going through motions to steady himself. He didn’t want the Overcaptain in his office. You didn’t have Overcaptains show up in your space, you were summoned to their’s. And seeing Kiwa in person yesterday at Alexandria was enough interaction with the Command families for a month, Jahn figured.
Things were upside down, and Jahn, for all that he made fun of Arin’s resistance to change and nascent traditionalism, didn’t like the feeling.
“Overcaptain?” he began.
“I come here, in my formal capacity, as the Overcaptain of our World, and as the Chief of Navigation and Command.”
That was not a good start.
“The navigation data is ruined,” Kiwa said somberly. “There is not enough recoverable data for the software to boot and run the world safely for any destination maneuvers. I’ve had two different communications and code families put their best people on it. They all agree.”
It sounded, apocalyptic. Something that couldn’t be true. Yet here she was, saying it.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“There is no sense in delaying it, we are going to make a worldwide announcement today, at the height of the parade. We’re going to need all your resources at hand. The traditionalists are going to panic.”
“Well, our whole purpose was to stop at the star we’re aimed, go into orbit, and check out a planet. When you tell people they have no purpose they do tend to get upset.” Jahn tapped the desk. “Arin, call the emergency.”
It was going to be another damn planning meeting.
“And, Mr. Sheriff,” Kiwa said, all too formal.
“Yes?” He didn’t like that tone.
“Before she gave her resignation, the Chief Librarian said you were digging further into Inika Historian’s disappearance? Do me a personal favor, Chief to Chief. Pause it until after this is all cleaned up. I don’t need everyone dealing with two big sensationalized disasters at once.”
“Of course,” Jahn lied.
This was bad. He was now in some sort of struggle with the Overcaptain. Only, he didn’t know the rules or the stakes. It was all invisible to him, which meant he was in the most danger.
Sheriff versus Overcaptain. Who wins that?
Jahn suspected he knew.
***
He hated himself for not being able to let go of this thread. But Jahn had been taught since he was a child that a Sheriff was independent and that a mystery should be solved. If people got away with murder, then more would do it, and eventually the world would fall to chaos.
But, more than that, Jahn just wanted to *know the truth.*
Who did this?
And, more to the point, why?
The Mate guarding the door to the supercomputer facility, high up in the core and close to the engines of the world, startled when Jahn appeared.
“Hey!”
He had his hand on a baton, but Jahn identified himself and walked in as if it would make no sense at all for the Mate to try and stop him. So the assumed authority worked and he got in.
The younger man inside, from a good communications family, no doubt, looked just as startled when Jahn came in to look over the ruined media.
It was termite damage, through and through. Jahn handled the media with gloved hands carefuly.
“Why do you want to see it?” the young computer specialist asked, nervous. Too nervous.
“Well, there were some fingerprints in the room that didn’t make sense,” Jahn sort of lied. “We didn’t have a chance to check for them in Alexandria, the Command crisis seemed more important. But know I want to be thorough. For the investigation, right?”
“Um, right.”
Jahn made a big show of using UV lights, and spraying material on the outside casings as if trying to find the prints, even as riddled as they were with boreholes from the termites. And, using an old trick taught to him by a pickpocket he’d kept locked up for several weeks until he’d learned how to do it himself, Jahn bumped into the young man and swapped one of the better-looking navigation data drives for one he had in his sash.
It was confiscated pornography, something from antiquity and quite out of sorts with the current moral code. But Jahn had drilled holes in it and scuffed it on the road to get it looking ruined enough.
As he swept his way out, the Mate outside tried to stop him. “The Overcaptain needs to see you. She insists.”
“I’m so sorry, I barely had time for this. It’s the new Destination Day changes. It’s too much.”
On the elevator down, Jahn found that his heart was racing. The Overcaptain would be suspicious, now.
Whatever this was, the face off had begun. And Jahn had triggered it.
He was starting to feel a little claustrophobic.
But it was too late now.
On to the next stop. Because time was running out before Destination Day parades and announcements. And knew everything was going to fall to shit when that announcement came.
***
Mama Sun was in the dressing room behind a stage. Outside, the arena, a great bowl where a thousand people would be waiting to hear her rendition of the Leaving Song. The sad saga of Nissi and her lover, separated when the world launched before they could be reunited.
“Jahn Sheriff,” she said, looking at him via the mirror. She had on her Leaving Day crown, glittering with representations of the Immobile Worlds that orbited Old Earth like jewels in a bracelet.
“I know you’re getting ready, but I’m here officially.”
Mama Sun waved her hand in a sort of ‘of course’ gesture. “Get it out, little Sheriff.”
“You are the oldest griot here, one of the chosen, not born to it, but called to it.” Jahn sat down on a pillowed stool next to her.
“Well, aren’t you just the lady charmer,” Mama Sun said.
Jahn leaned further over, so he could look her in the eye and not the mirror. “When I was a boy, you told me that there were only so many data banks on the world. So, over time, what we kept had to be pruned. At first, it was the ancients, and they knew what was valuable and what was not, to their mission and identity. But eventually, their children’s children made those decisions, and then their’s, and we began to lose pieces of ourselves as we flew on.”
Mama Sun stopped fiddling with her garb and turned toward him. She looked suddenly old as the birth certificate said she was.
“And I told you,” she said, “that it was a griot’s job to find the truth and the story that is the thread that connects us to our ancestors. Because no matter how good the historians are, stories pass on forever and make a community. Yes, I didn’t think you listened that closely.”
“I always hunt truth,” Jahn said.
“A truth,” Mama Sun said.
“I’m hunting a murderer,” Jahn said. “Tell me everything you remember about the real Deck Crew Two. What your griot told you, when you weren’t singing for the community. The truth.”
Mama Sun snorted. “The truth. The truth. Look at you—”
“Inika died looking for it. She was at Alexandria. She was trying to get into room twenty three, to get to the navigation data.”
Mama Sun spun on him and took in a deep breath. “Is that—”
“True?” They stared at each other for a long moment. “You know me. It’s as true as I know.”
Mama Sun let out that shocked inhalation. “This is a long time coming. You know, I was the one that changed the story. I… they were brave. I felt that they should have been remembered that way, and I set out to give that back to them. This isn’t a story about truth, Sheriff. It’s a story about what we build out of the wreckage of history handed down to us by our damn ancestors.”
“What happened?”
“You were looking for a murder? I’ll give you murder, Sheriff. The murder of all one hundred and ninety members of Deck Crew Two. My griot saw it. He was a Mate, then. He put in the codes. He did what his Overcaptain ordered. And left. I took the story. I made them self sacrificing heroes that closed the doors to save us all. It was the best I could do, back then, when the command families tried to claim them as traitors, or worse.”
A stagehand burst in. “Sheriff?”
Jahn looked up. “Yes?”
“There are Mates in here. With guns. Looking for you. Both of you.”
Mama Sun snorted. “Better run out the back, little Sheriff.”
“What about you?”
“I’m getting ready to go sing the Leaving Song. No Mate can stop that. Your family may have independence, but I’m the griot that raised them all.”
Jahn stood up and ran for the back.
“Not that back entrance,” the stagehand said, noticing where he was turning to go. “The real one for getting in and out without any, uh, Sheriff catching you after curfew. Follow me.”
***
The annoncements went out as Jahn was sneaking his way back to the family offices. Speakers from the pylons blared it, large screens set up over pavilions showed it instead of Destination Day graphics.
Something holy and permanent had broken.
There was always navigation data, and the orbit vectors that were planned when they were to hit insystem. Four hundred years from now, it was to be the greatest moment of their civilization. It was what they all worked toward, sacrificed for.
Or that was the official story.
Most people hustled through their days. They ate, they argued, they made love, they tried to gain power, they partied, they lived. As any other civilization, the people lived day to day.
And yet.
And yet there was wailing in the streets. A sense of dread in the wind that was blown from endcap to endcap across the world.
They had lost the ability to stop at a planet.
They had fallen low from their ancestor’s plans for them.
There was a scholar being interviewed by a command family elder.
“What you must understand is that skills and specialties fade in smaller communities like ours over time. It takes a large civilization to have the extra people to devote to something like stellar cartography. Our own descendants may be able to relearn what we need to make sense of the navigation data our world is seeing out there, plus a team of software engineers that can build new routines for maneuvering. If we can grow our civilization, it may be possible.”
“But we have used our skills to double the ship’s carrying capacity already. We live in ways our ancestors couldn’t have imagined.”
Jahn’s radio began to explode with reports of drama. A lot of people had succumbed to existential angst tonight and would end up zip tied to a post outside Sheriff’s offices all over the world.
He took the navigation data down to a place deep inside the ship’s skin, where family didn’t matter so much as skill. The people who walked the hull of the world valued ability over all else, and Jahn had long learned to keep a catalogue of who could actually do what, and not what their family last name was.
***
There were Mates with pistols waiting for him in his office. Most of the Sheriffs were running around all over the world, but the few remaining had surrounded the door casually. A baton versus a pistol. That wasn’t going to go well. But they all had the sense something was wrong, that Sheriff independence was being threatened.
Footsteps outside, someone taking off running. Maybe Arin, going to see about getting more people back here, maybe even try to get some guns from antiquties. Though Jahn assumed that there would be Mates on guard over them.
“Well Kiwa,” he said, hanging up his paper coat and hat casually once more. “This is turning into something quite regular. I didn’t know you liked my office that much.”
She smiled, and then quenched it.
“I’m here for your resignation,” she said.
“Sheriffs are independent,” one of Jahn’s nieces shouted into the office. “You do not have the authority!”
Jahn looked at the ancient pistols. Some of them would misfire. But enough wouldn’t.
“Both the Chief Librarian and the Chief Sheriff in one day,” he said. Arin had left the fingerprint reports for room [censored] on Jahn’s desk. He started looking through them as he continued. “On any other day, that would be an epic shake up, a momumental shift in world politics.”
“These are tough times. Everything is changing, and if we can all guide the world with good leadership, we can come through all this.”
“Come through what? Shooting past the target star our ancestors aimed us at and plummeting endlessly through the void forever?” Jahn hadn’t said it out loud, but doing so made realize how it sounded. How it felt like a punch in the gut.
He was more of a traditionalist than he realized. He stopped reading the fingerprint report. He had what he needed. What he suspected.
“We were fated to do that anyway,” Kiwa said. “You and I, we’re not the generation that would have seen a world. We have lived in the void, and we always have. Now, some distant ancestor will live just like us.”
“But—”
“Be careful what you say next,” Kiwa said, pointing out the door. “There are some things that cannot be known by all.”
“Close the door,” Jahn said.
The Sheriffs outside protested. Jahn stood up. “She will not harm me, not with so many witnesses, and with so many of you saying there is a confrontation here on the radio.”
He hoped they would take the hint and start broadcasting. He saw Kiwa’s face twitch, and that gave Jahn some pleasure. The stand off was not totally unequal.
“Leave,” Kiwa said to the Mates in the office.
Now it was their turn to protest, but finally the door was shut, and it was just Overcaptain and Sheriff.
“You have guns, my franchise on force for order is gone, and independence as well,” Jahn said.
“My historians assure me that there have been times in ship history where the Sheriffs reported to the command families,” Kiwa said. “We will still need the investigative skills your family has passed on so well to each generation.”
“You want me to order them to change over to your rule peacefully.”
“You could have stopped and worked with me. I wanted an ally, at a time like this. I really did. I also want the media stick back.”
Jahn tossed the stick onto the desk, and she snapped it up.
“You found out quick.”
“When I heard you went to the lab I knew you were learning too much. The young man who rechecked all the media at my order is traumatized by what you swapped it for,” Kiwa said. “So was I, for the matter.”
Jahn smiled.
“I assume you got a look at the navigation data,” Kiwa said. “Though I’m not sure how you got someone better than my computer families.”
“I did. It was an antique moving picture,” Jahn said. “I’m told it was called Blank House. There was a referendum on deleting it so that we could use the storage for something else twenty years ago?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Kiwa said.
“So you have the navigation data?”
“I wouldn’t have ever let it get eaten, no, we’re not that incompetent a family,” Kiwa said.
“But you want to control the story, the real story,” he said. “That, even with the data under your control, there’s no way we can ever stop ourselves. We don’t have enough fuel.”
Kiwa pressed her lips hard against each other. “And that is why you have to resign. We have a story, that it’s bad luck and a harsh universe of systems failures conspiring against us. A librarian resigns in shame, but, everyone has lost something useful to termites, or a blown seal, or other rot like that. It’s the nature of the world. She can be forgiven, that’s the public story I have, and I will show her tolerance by giving her a good command post. She and I have arranged the deal, she knows her part. She will be well rewarded.”
“It’s the nature of the world,” Jahn agreed. “But, why did you have to kill Inika?”
Kiwa took a step back. “She was going to tell everyone the story. Before we had time to prepare. She was going to tell a story that would have ripped the world apart. Set family against family. Because she didn’t care about how to tell the truth right, but she had to do it hard and no matter what.”
They looked at each other, and Jahn could see that they were now on either side of some unfathomable vacuum with no air between them on the subject.
“Inika found out about Deck Crew Two, and you murdered her for it.”
Kiwa’s face had paled. “I—”
“You, personally, murdered her. The prints in that room, they’re yours and hers. It’s only been bots and archivists with gloves on since then. Prints with finest layer of dust over them.”
“If the people found out, we would all be lost,” Kiwa hissed.
“That Deck Crew Two wasn’t a deck crew?” Jahn said. “That they were political prisoners your great-grandfather rounded up when they learned that our even more distant forefathers had chosen to plunder the fuel to make more water, more air, and to add more hydrocarbons to the food stock so we could grow our size. That the largesse and comfort we enjoy today under the command families is a lie, that it stole Destination Day away from our descendants?”
“Yes. That’s all true. Because why should we suffer and starve when it was our ancestors who gave us this prison sentence? Us, who are trapped between the stars, why do we have to give up everything, including children, to a Grand Plan we *can’t even remember* other than as a set of instructions to stop at a star we will never see with our eyes?”
“And Inika was going to sing that saga, and destroy your family name by listing their atrocities.”
“She had to be stopped,” Kiwa sobbed. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“Overcaptain Kiwa, I place you under arrest for the murder of Inika Historian.” Jahn stood up. Kiwa swung her pistol, aiming at across the desk at him.
“That isn’t how this works. I will order your people killed, Jahn. Do you understand you have a responsiblity to those lives?”
Jahn saw it, the stalemate. The path into civil war between their families. And how did they get out? They’d slipped into this place, like hull repair techs with no lines who suddenly look back and realize how far they’ve drifted.
But, he had thought very long on the way here about his own story. The things he believed about himself. About his own truths.
I am about the truth, he thought.
I untangle these hidden threads, he thought.
*But I am also a Sheriff.* And what was a Sheriff if not a person who brought justice to a murderer?
He hit her with the baton, one smooth movement so quick she only had time for one shot, then another, before the end of it slammed into her chin and the full charge emptied in a shock of lightning up through her mouth.
The gunshots were so loud they seemed to explode in the office.
Jahn fell over the desk clutching his stomach. She’d known how to use the damn antique, and it had worked. He had thought he had a chance. He’d been wrong.
Mates burst in, screaming, but there were more Sheriffs with batons swinging up and down in rage. And more coming in, people that Jahn trusted, that he’d stationed nearby. In case.
And there were more gunshots with the screams and zaps of the batons.
This was it. He had started a fire, but he did not know its size or how long it would burn.
But there was justice.
There was that.
***
Once upon a time there was a ship.
Not a ship that floated across the water. Not a ship that sailed across oceans on Old Earth (Old Earth: you know the globe you see carved out of aluminum foam over by Pylon Twenty Two’s fountains?).
No, this is a ship that soared between the stars themselves.
And on that small tin can, deep in the dark of the depths of space, were the fine, no the brave, women and men of Deck Crew Two…
“Would you like to hear their story?” the old griot with the limp asked. “Would you like to hear the *real* story of Deck Crew Two?”
And the children all clapped and laughed and screamed yes, yes they would. This was the most popular, the grimmest, the bloodiest mystery story you would ever hear. Parents would complain about the kids having nightmares after it, but what could you do, silence a griot?
No, they were the soul of the world, the heart of the ship.
And this griot, he was much loved by this generation of eager ears.
They said he was once the Sheriff of the whole world, and that he’d killed an Overcaptain who had murdered someone. They said that when she shot him (that’s what gave him the limp), fires had burned for nights, and Command families and Sheriff families fought battles in the corriders in the skin between the dark night of vacuum and the inside of the world, along with other families that chose sides.
And one day, peace came, when the Sheriffs surrendered and the Mates selected a new Overcaptain who wanted that peace, as enough had died that the price became too high. Another chapter had been written in the thousand year annals of the world.
Of course, just as the Mates chose a new leader, no one in the world would allow the old Chief Sheriff back to his office. A younger Sheriff was chosen, and pledged marriage to a strong command family to create a bond and a new generation that would not see each other as enemies, though the old folk of those families still shunned each other at functions, old blood bitterness having no way to find peace but death.
And Father Jahn, he left the family to be a griot, to tell the stories and wander the world.
So it was said. But it all seemed fantastical and long ago to the children.
“Okay,” the old griot said. “But before I tell you that tale, I need to tell you another tale. Because some stories are older than our world, older than us, and will go on after us. I will tell you the story of Anansi the Spiderman, a wily trickster.”
There was power in telling the right story, the old griot told them, at the right time. Tell the right story, it goes on past Destination Day, which will never happen because we’re gonna swing right on past that star.
You’ll need the stories of your history. But you’ll need also need to learn how to be wily like Anansi, because this world is all you’ll ever have, now, and you’ll have to keep it running after we’re gone, however you can.
Just like Anansi, the Spiderman…
…who could shoot webs from his fingers, and beat the Doctor Octopus with nothing more than a clever riddle.