A Study in Starlight—Chapter Thirty
Continuing this serialised novel, in which Holmes and Watson find themselves very far indeed from Victorian/Edwardian London
Part Three
Rangitīkei
Further Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.,
and of Commander Mary Syrtis Mall’stang.
Watson
The accommodation on the Rangitīkei was anything but spacious. My cabin’s floor space was minimal, not much bigger than the shower-cubicle in our apt. I’d be able to get dressed and undressed without banging my elbows, but only with care. The only way for two people to have a private conversation in a cabin like this, without feeling unduly intimate, would be for one to sit on the chair, which folded down from one wall when needed, and the other to lie on the bed.
I was surprised at first, given how roomy Trevallan’s two shuttles, and even the skiffs, seemed in comparison, but the steward, Naivalu, gave me a different perspective. “In the future, we might be doing runs to systems fifty or a hundred light years out. Doubling the distance doesn’t double the overall time, because so much of it’s still outrun and inrun, but the Tangent Drive isn’t instantaneous. The Steps mount up. And we might take in more than one system in one voyage, and then you get multiple in-and-outs. These ships are still new, we’re still gaining experience with them and with the Drive, but we might be building up to trips of a year, or even more.
“How do you feed a crew for that length of time? Recycle everything you can, but recycling’s never hundred-per efficient. We can pretty well rely on being able to compile basics like reaction mass, and we can always lay our hands on the six key elements of organic chemistry…” Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, I reminded myself. “…But human life isn’t sustainable without a whole raft of other elements. There’s no guarantee of being able to find all of those in a new system, not within a reasonable timeframe. So you have to carry feedstock reserves. Plus compilers themselves add a fair chunk of mass and take up space…
“You know, they’re saying now the efficient way to ship passengers for long-haul would be in induced coma. Minimises space requirements as well as nutrition needs.” Ve looked at me with a lopsided grin. “Sounds grim? Tell me at the end of this trip whether you still feel that way.”
I thought about that as I inspected my cabin. My cabin, alas, not ours. The Rangitīkei simply wasn’t set up to allow sharing. The bed… I tried not to think of it as coffin-like, to think instead of the box-beds that had been a feature of country dwellings even into Victorian times. Mine was set low, its mattress below knee-height, and the only storage space was a locker beneath, no bigger than a medium-sized suitcase.
One blessing was that everything on the ship was scaled to allow for Martians. Mary would still have to duck when passing through doors, but she could walk the corridors or stand in a cabin without risk to her head. And the bed itself was generous enough in length, so that she could stretch out—though she, generally a curled-up sleeper, would have preferred more width instead. It was possible, as we established through experimentation, to get two people in, but a good night’s sleep would have been unlikely.
I thought about this as I tried to settle for my first night. The ship was accelerating at well over 1g for the outrun, but ‘spurious g’ compensators meant we felt normal weight. I thought about what it must have been like for Mary, Aurel, and the many other Martians in the Service, having grown up in not much over a third of Earth’s gravity. They had to acclimatise not only to 1g for spells on Earth, where the bulk of their training was based, but to the higher forces experienced sporadically on board ship. Smaller or more basic ships often lacked the refinement of spurious g., and even when present it could only compensate within limits.
I thought more about Mary herself; how much I missed her nocturnal presence. We had been together for over eight years now: close on three thousand nights. In all that time occasional night duty or trips off-station might take her away for perhaps two do’Zen nights a year: nocturnal callouts for me were fewer still. I had never grown reconciled to those separations. And this felt worse, perhaps because everything on the Rangitīkei was new and strange…
I had to smile at myself, then. New and strange. Would the Victorian John Watson have seen such a sharp difference between the strangeness of a spaceship and that of a space station? It had all been strange at first—but from the first day Mary had been there to help me through it.
Mary was, in fact, close enough to touch; if I could reach through the bulkheads, I wouldn’t even need to fully extend my arm. Her cabin adjoined mine, and her bunk extended above mine just as mine slotted in beneath hers. Sometimes in our own bed we found ourselves further apart than that; but always we only needed to reach out. If I wakened in the night, slave to the ageing bladder, as often as not there’d be a long cool foot gently resting against my thigh or buttock.
Here she was just as close, and yet quite out of reach. And we’d already established that no sound penetrated the bulkhead, neither voice nor the thump of a fist.
Of course we could still talk through our Agents. Some people seemed to find that just as satisfactory; some, perhaps, felt it even more intimate. For me, the opposite was true, and either Mary felt the same or she was happy to humour my atavistic quirk. Right now, our brief ‘goodnight’ exchange had served only to accentuate the separation.
Never had so near and yet so far seemed more poignant
In general, the Rangitīkei would accelerate and decelerate at 1g, which provided a sensation of gravity most of her complement would consider normal. Higher acceleration (beyond the scope of the spurious g compensators) was only to be expected in a few scenarios: undertaking a ‘slingshot’ manoeuvre; in the immediate run-up to ‘T-space Ingress’; and the (unspecified) ‘in case of emergency’.
The advice to those of us who weren’t trained Spacers had been delivered in serious tones during our briefing, and was reinforced by being printed on the back of every cabin door, confronting me every time I ventured out. 1—1.5 g.: move around with care; use grab-rails if needed. 1.5—2g.: move around only when essential; exercise extreme care; use grab-rails at all times. 2—3g.: do not attempt to move around unless absolutely necessary: remain in g-seat or bunk. The briefing officer had added, “Needing the bathroom does not count as ‘absolutely necessary’.” 3g and above: do not leave g-seat or bunk for any reason. If injured or unwell, call for assistance. Under these forces even trained crew did not move around without a powered armature called an exoskeleton.
The fold-down chair in my cabin was extremely comfortable, because it was designed to function as a g-seat. Similar seats were dotted around through all the communal spaces, to be readily accessible if a high-g warning occurred at short notice.
For further comfort when high-g was anticipated, we were advised to wear shipsuits at all times. These were form-fitting one-piece outfits, a sleeker version of the loose coveralls the Spacers wore on duty elsewhere. The lingering Victorian in me saw them as unduly revealing, but there was a sound practical reason why there clung so closely. Think how irritating a wrinkle or seam in the wrong place can become even under normal gravity. Now imagine your weight doubled or trebled or worse… Shipsuits were specifically configured to eliminate wrinkles. Those for civilians were green, though the bald heads would have been sufficient to set the Spacers apart.
Holmes had not yet taken to coveralls, let alone a shipsuit; he was still in his tweeds. I reflected, again, that he was still, as far as his consciousness was concerned, only a few weeks away from 1902.
The flight-crew of the Rangitīkei numbered eighteen, though she’d carried more Spacers on the outward voyage and several of them were now returning to report back. The flight-crew were split into three watches of six. The rest of us were not on such strict schedules, but we had all been assigned to sleep-cycles and strongly advised to keep to them. This was mostly to keep the galley and other common areas from becoming overcrowded.
Space was at a premium here too. The galley, for instance, had a nominal seating capacity of twenty, but I could see that the tables would have been crowded to the point of constantly jostling elbows if all had been in use. In fact only half were set out, the rest being folded and stacked in a niche. It meant that even those on a given watch/sleep-cycle could not all eat at once.
It seemed likely that this voyage would take a little less time than my travels to and from India in the 1870s. All things considered, however, I wondered whether it might feel longer.
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