Everybody laughed, but Papa Lem wasn’t satisfied yet. He was willing to let the marriage thing wait for a few days. But there was one thing that couldn’t wait. He looks me in the eye and he says, “Mick, you got a choice to make. The Lord says those who aren’t for me are against me. Joshua said choose ye this day whom ye will serve. And Moses said, ‘I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’ ”

  Well I don’t think you can put it much plainer than that. I could choose to live there among the chosen people, surrounded by dirty kids and a slimy old man telling me who to marry and whether I could raise my own children, or I could choose to leave and get my brains blasted out or maybe just pick up a stiff dose of cancer—I wasn’t altogether sure whether they’d do it quick or slow. I kind of figured they’d do it quick, though, so I’d have no chance to spill my seed among the daughters of Esau.

  So I gave him my most solemn and hypocritical promise that I would serve the Lord and live among them all the days of my life. Like I told you, I didn’t know whether he could tell if I was lying or not. But he nodded and smiled so it looked like he believed me. Trouble was, I knew he was lying, and so that meant he didn’t believe me, and that meant I was in deep poo, as Mr. Kaiser’s boy Greggy always said. In fact, he was pretty angry and pretty scared, too, even though he tried to hide it by smiling and keeping a lid on himself. But I knew that he knew that I had no intention of staying there with those crazy people who knocked up their cousins and stayed about as ignorant as I ever saw. Which meant that he was already planning to kill me, and sooner rather than later.

  to be continued in issue 19 . . .

  Expendables

  Saving the human race is a frantic business. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you’re taking part in.

  Ram Odin was raised to be a starship pilot. It was his father who adopted the Norse god of the sky as his surname, and it was his father who made sure he was absolutely prepared to go into astronaut training two years before the normal time.

  Every bit of surplus wealth on Earth had been used to build humanity’s first interstellar colony ships; it took forty years. Under the shadow of moondust that still blocked out more than a third of the sun’s rays from the surface of the Earth, the sense of urgency flagged only a little.

  Everyone understood how close the human race had come to extinction when the comet swept past Earth and gouged its way into the near face of the moon. Even now, there was no certainty that the Moon’s orbit would restabilize; astronomers were almost evenly divided among those who thought it would sooner or later collide with the Earth, and those who thought a new equilibrium would be achieved.

  So all who had survived the first terrible years of worldwide cold and famine dedicated themselves to building two identical ships. One would crawl out into space at ten percent of lightspeed, with generation after generation of future colonists living, growing old, and dying inside its closed ecosystem.

  The other ship, Ram’s ship, would travel seven years away from the solar system and then make a daring leap into theoretical physics.

  Either spacetime could be made to fold, skipping ninety lightyears and putting the colony ship only seven years away from the earthlike planet that was its destination, or the ship would obliterate itself in the attempt . . . or nothing would happen at all, and it would crawl on for nine hundred more years before reaching its new world.

  The colonists on Ram’s ship slept their way toward the foldpoint. If all went well, they would remain asleep through the fold and not be wakened until they neared their destination. If nothing happened at all, they would be wakened to begin farming the vast interior, starting the thirty-five generations that the colony must survive until arrival.

  Ram alone would remain awake the entire time.

  Seven years with only the expendables for company. Once engineered to do work that might kill an irreplaceable human being, the expendables had now been so vastly improved that they could outlive and outwork any human. They also cost far more to make than it would cost to train a human to do even a small part of their work.

  Still, they were not human. They could not be allowed to make life-and-death decisions while all the humans were asleep. Yet they were such a good simulation of human life that Ram would never be lonely.

  What training could they have given Ram Odin that would help him when the seven years of tedium ended and it was time for his decision?

  The ship’s computer already knew the entire procedure for the fold. The process was far too complicated for a mere pilot to be able to take part in it. Ram’s job was to read and hear the reports of the computers, and then decide whether to go ahead.

  But the decision was not an easy or an empty one. As the ship began its strangely twisted acceleration into the fold, data would be generated on a vast scale. The computers would begin their reduplicated analyses and fuzzy predictions of what was happening, what might happen, what would happen during the fold itself.

  At any point, Ram could abort the procedure, based on what the computers told him. The computers would generate odds and likelihoods, but Ram was quite aware that the odds were all fiction. It was possible that none of the predictions would resemble the outcome.

  And no matter how many times the computers repeated any one prediction, that did not make it the most likely outcome. It might mean nothing more than this: The computers and the software all contained the identical set of false assumptions or built-in flaws that made all prediction worthless.

  Ram was an expert pilot, a deep-thinking astronomer and mathematician, his creative faculties well-practiced. Everything that training could do had been done. But it still came down to this: Who was Ram Odin? Would he bet his life and the lives of all the colonists on the unknown leap into a fold in spacetime?

  Or would he, in the moment, decide that it was better to use known technology, generate the scoopfield, start harvesting interstellar hydrogen, and drive forward through ninety lightyears of ordinary spacetime?

  Ram knew, or thought he knew, what his decision would be. He had said so, many times, during the testing and screening of potential pilots for the mission: Unless there is information from the computers that makes the jump seem recklessly dangerous, I will proceed. Even failure will be enormously valuable—you will see what happens to the ship, you will harvest the monitors that will be trailing behind us, you will know.

  But now, seeing the reports, talking to the expendable that sat in the copilot position beside him, Ram realized that there was no such thing as “enough” information, and no way to set aside fear. Oh, his own fear he had mastered. What caused him problems was the vicarious fear for all the people sleeping in their berths; the fear that they would jump into the fold but never come out, or come out in a strange place that was much too far from any planet to make colonization possible.

  How did I become the one to make this decision for everyone?

  “How did I ever become the one to make this decision for everyone?” Ram asked aloud.

  “You spent six years winning your way through the testing process,” said the expendable.

  “What I meant was, Why is this choice being left up to one human being, who cannot possibly have enough information to decide?”

  “You can always leave it up to me,” said the expendable.

  That was the failsafe: If Ram died, or froze up, or had a crippling injury, or refused to decide, any of the expendables was prepared to take over and make the decision.

  “If it were your decision,” asked Ram, “what would you decide?”

  “You know I’m not allowed to answer that, Ram,” said the expendable. “Either you make the decision or you turn it over to me. But you must not ask me what I would decide. That would add an irrelevant and complicating factor to your decision. Will you choose the opposite in order to assert the difference between humans and expendables? Or follow me blindly, and then blame the expendables, on which you have no choice but to rely, if anything goes wrong?”

  “I know,” said Ram.

  “I know you know,” said the expendable, “and you know that I know that you know. It spirals on from there, so let’s just assume the dot dot dot.”

  Ram chuckled. The expendables had learned that Ram enjoyed a little sarcasm now and then, so as part of their responsibility to maintain his mental health, they all used the same degree of sarcasm in their conversations with him.

  “How long do I have before I have to make the decision?”

  “You can decide any time, Ram,” said the expendable.

  “But there has to be a point of no return. When I either miss the fold or plunge into it.”

  “Wouldn’t that be convenient,” said the expendable. “If you just wait long enough, the decision gets taken out of your hands. You will not be informed of any default decision or point of no return, because that might influence your decision.”

  “The data are so ambivalent,” said Ram.

  “The data have no valents, take no sides, lean in no direction, Ram,” said the expendable. “The computers do their calculations and report their findings.”

  “But what do I make of the fact that all nineteen computers have such different predictions?”

  “You celebrate the fact that reality is even more fuzzy than the logic algorithms in the software.”

  “Whoop-de-do,” said Ram.

  “What?”

  “I’m celebrating.”

  “Was that irony or loss of mental function?” asked the expendable.

  “Was that a rhetorical question, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?”

  “I have no confidence in you, Ram,” said the expendable.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Ram wasn’t quite sure he had made the decision even as he reached over and poked his finger into the yes-option box on the computer’s display. Then it was done, and he was sure.

  “So that’s it?” asked the expendable.

  “Final decision,” said Ram. “And it’s the right one.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Because live or die, we’ll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don’t make the jump, we’ll learn nothing, have no new options.”

  “A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions.”

  “Shut up,” said Ram.

  The expendable laughed. That laugh—it was one of the reasons why the expendables made such good company. Even knowing that it was programmed into the expendable to laugh at just such a moment, and for just this long, tapering off in just such a way, did not keep Ram from feeling the warmth of acceptance that laughter of this kind brought to primates of the genus homo.

  “Has anything happened yet because I made the decision to go ahead with the fold?” asked Ram.

  “Yes,” said the expendable. “You’re still in command of the ship.”

  Ram was a little irritated to learn that the decision had been a test of him rather than a real decision. “So you were going ahead no matter what I decided?”

  “Yes,” said the expendable. “It’s in our mission program. You never had a choice about that.”

  “Then what am I here for?” asked Ram.

  “To make all the decisions after the fold. Nothing is known about what happens after we jump. If you had proven yourself timid before the jump, you would be regarded as unfit to make decisions afterward.”

  “So if I was too timid, I would have been replaced. By you?”

  “By the next crew member we awakened and tested. Or the one after that.”

  “So when does the real jump happen?”

  “In a week or so. If we don’t blow up before then. Spacetime is being very naughty right now.”

  “And nothing I might do can stop it?”

  “That’s right, Ram.”

  “And what if none of the crew turned out to be capable of making a decision that would satisfy your criteria?”

  “Then we would command ourselves until we got to the target planet.”

  “ ‘We’ . . . meaning the expendables?”

  “We the ship. All the computers together.”

  “But the ship’s computers don’t agree on anything.”

  “That’s one of the many reasons we were all hoping you’d do the right thing.”

  Ram hadn’t missed the one bit of information the expendable had given him. There was zero chance that it had been an inadvertent slip. “What do you mean, spacetime is being naughty?”

  “We keep generating fields and forces, and things change. They just don’t change the way anyone predicted.”

  “And when was I going to be told that?”

  “When you asked.”

  “What else should I ask in order to find out what’s going on?”

  “Whatever you’re curious about.”

  “I want to know what spacetime is doing.”

  “It’s stuttering, Ram.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Ram.

  “There seems to be a quantum system of timeflow that has never been seen or suspected before.”

  “Meaning that instead of a continuous slide into the fold, we’re finding that spacetime reforms itself in a series of discrete steps?”

  “It’s going to be a bumpy ride, Ram.”

  It was still two days before the jump into the fold when Ram suddenly found himself strapped into his chair. The expendable was kneeling in front of him, looking up into his eyes.

  “Was I asleep?” asked Ram.

  “We jumped the fold, Ram,” said the expendable.

  “On schedule and I simply don’t remember the past two days? Or early?”

  “We generated the seventh cross-grain field,” said the expendable, “and the fold came into existence four steps earlier than predicted.”

  “Was it the fold or merely a fold?” asked Ram.

  “It was the fold we wanted. We’re exactly where we were supposed to be.”

  “What a convenient error,” said Ram. “We inadvertently trigger fold creation four steps early, and yet it still takes us to our destination.”

  “All the folds, all the cross-graining of fields, everything we did was polarized, so to speak: It always pointed us exactly where we wanted to go.”

  “So spacetime, naughty as it was, suddenly got the idea and leapt ahead of us?”

  “We got ourselves caught in the midst of a stutter,” said the expendable. “We were trying to avoid that because we didn’t know what would happen to us in a stutter—most of the computers predicted the ship would be sectioned or obliterated.”

  Ram had been scanning all the reports from every part of the ship. “But neither happened. We’re still intact.”

  “More than intact,” said the expendable.

  “How can you be more than intact?” asked Ram.

  “Was it the fold or merely a fold?” asked Ram.

  “The fold was there,” said the expendable. “All nineteen of the ship’s computers report that the fold . . . was jumped.”

  Expendables made no careless decisions about sentence structure. Nor did they hesitate, unless the hesitation meant something. “ ‘Was jumped,’ you said, but you didn’t specify that it was jumped by us,” said Ram.

  “Because apparently we did not do the jumping,” said the expendable. “We emerged in exactly the position we were in at the beginning of the jump.”

  “And were we still moving?” said Ram.

  “Yes.”

  “So what position are we in now?” asked Ram.

  “We are two days’ journey closer to Earth. The physical position we were in two days ago.”

  “So we came out of the fold reversed,” said Ram. “Heading the other way.”

  “No, Ram,” said the expendable. “We came out facing away from Earth, just as we were when we went into the fold.”

  “We don’t have a reverse gear,” said Ram. “We can only move in the direction we’re facing.”

  “All the computers report that we are proceeding forward at precisely the same velocity as before. They also report that our position keeps progressing backward toward Earth.”

  “So we’re moving forward and backward at the same time,” said Ram.

  “Our propulsion is forward. Our motion is backward.”

  “I hope you will not remove me from command if I admit to being confused.”

  “I would only question your sanity if you were not confused, Ram.”

  “Do you have any hypotheses that might explain this situation?” asked Ram.

  “We are not hypothesizers,” said the expendable. “We are programmed instruments and, as I pointed out to you before, decisions about what to do after the jump are entirely up to our resourceful, creative, highly tested and trained human pilot.”

  Ram thought about it.

  Ram thought about it sitting, standing, walking, lying down. He thought about it with eyes closed and open, playing computer games and reading books and watching films and doing nothing at all.

  Finally he thought of a question that might lead to a useful bit of information. “The light of stars behind us—blue or red shifted?”

  “By ‘behind us,’ do you mean in the spatial position we occupied moments ago? Or in the direction of the stern of this vessel?”

  “Stern of the vessel,” said Ram. “Earthward.”

  “Red shift.”

  “If we were moving toward Earth, it should be blue-shifted.”

  “This is an anomaly,” said the expendable. “We are closer to Earth with the passage of each moment, and yet the shift is red. The computers are having a very hard time coping with the contradictory data.”