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Ren, her official second, was a Belter and, like all Belters, passionate about environmental control systems the way normal people were with sex or religion.
Every ship had a black economy. Someone on the Behemoth would be trading sex for favors. Someone would run a card game or set up a pachinko parlor or start a little protection racket. People would be bribed to do things or not do things. It was what happened when you put people together. Bull’s job wasn’t to stamp it all out. His job was to keep it at a level that kept the ship moving and safe. And to set boundaries.
Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience. That had been replaced with the idea that only measurable and testable concepts had value.
She had a sudden vision of Jesus, who’d asked His disciples to keep doing this in remembrance of Him, watching her little congregation as they floated in microgravity and drank reconstituted grape beverage out of suction bulbs. It seemed to stretch the boundaries of what He’d meant by this.
Disaster recovery could only go two ways. Either everyone pulled together and people lived, or they kept on with their tribal differences and fear, and more people died.
“I don’t know that I see it that way,” she said. “We didn’t come here to glorify ourselves. We did it to keep people from fighting. To remind ourselves and each other that we’re all together in this. I can’t think that’s an evil impulse. And I can’t see what happened to us as punishment. Time and chance—” “Befall all men,” Hector said. “Yes.”
Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.
If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there. Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.
It had occurred to Anna then that there really wasn’t any such thing as a “mixed” church group. No matter what they looked like, or what they chose to call Him, when a group of people called out to God together, they were one. Even if there was no God, or one God, or many gods, it didn’t matter. Faith, hope, and love, Paul had written, but the greatest of these is love. Faith and hope were very important to Anna. But she could see Paul’s point in a way she hadn’t before. Love didn’t need anything else. It didn’t need a common belief, or a common identity.
“I thought you were the law and order here.” “I’m aiming for order, mostly.”
“Don’t be flip,” Anna said, and was gratified when Bull straightened a little in his walker. In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.
The great body of the drum stretched out before him, a world wrapped into a tube. The long strip of the false sun glowed white above him, now that there was a clear “above,” and reached out across two kilometers to a swirling ramp at the other end, the mirror of the one he was on. Thin clouds drifted in tori around the unbearable brightness. The air clung to him, the heat pressing at his skin, but he could imagine the bare metal of the drum’s surface covered in green, the air sweet with the scent of apple blossoms, the cycle of evaporation and condensation cooling it all. Or if not, at least
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Who got to sit in the doomed ship’s captain’s chair seemed like a terribly petty thing to worry about. It was like arguing about who was the prettiest girl in the prison camp. Still, it was the only show playing, so she watched.
