SARAH SPIVAK

Sarah Spivak drove a small electrical cart along a worn dirt road. To her left was a field of tall grass and wild flowers, to her right a forest of young oak and beech. The day was warm bordering on hot, and there was not a cloud in the sky, nor was there a sun in the sky, or even a sky in the sky. Instead there was a ruler strait ribbon of powerful lights stretching miles ahead and behind Sarah and her cart. The only sound was soft whine of the carts motors blended with the low insect hum coming from the field. It was a meditative tableau, the road and light running parallel to the shortened horizon while the heat and hum pushed a gentle lassitude on Sarah.

Sarah had worked as an arborist in the ship for ten years. She had walked, climbed or crawled over just about every inch of the ship’s garden interior, and had found a real satisfaction in her work. But today was special; she was going to work on one of the grandfather trees. There was only so much space inside the ship, so most trees were not allowed to grow old or large. The grandfather trees were the exception; this one was a three hundred year old white oak. It grew at the end of the forest Sarah was driving next to, a massive period to the hardwood grove. Already she could see it, it’s thick lower branches hanging over the road.

She parked her cart a short distance from the edge of the huge oak’s canopy. Something flew by high overhead, a bird maybe. Sarah got out of the cart and grabbed a small chain saw from the back of the cart. She was going to climb the oak and give it a mild pruning. Something flew past her, much lower, just above the ground. The wind of its passage was shocking, making her jump back. Even as she reacted she heard the crash. Sarah dropped the chainsaw and ran toward the oak. The thing had shattered branches and pulled down leaves with the force and turbulence of its passage. At the trunk she stopped, this was where it had ended. She put in a call to SPI on her handheld, then she walked back the way she came and collected the chainsaw. She put the saw back on the cart.

The air seemed thick and hard to breath, she stumbled a few steps away from the cart and vomited into the grass. There was a water bottle on the cart, she washed her mouth and took a swig. She still felt light headed, so she sat down in the grass with her back leaning against the cart. Someone would come to clean it up soon, they would collect the bits of bone and viscera that used to be a living body and the bloody shredded rags that used to be clothing and take it all away. In a few hours the soft earth would absorb the pools of blood. The wound to the tree, the shattered gap in its canopy, would be the last trace, but soon it to would vanish under the cover of new growth. In two years there would be nothing left of the horror at the base of the tree but her memories. It was small comfort.

Richard Spindal

The central offices of Inter-Personal Safety were a disheartening beige maze of cubicles at the fore end of the ship. They were, by universal acclaim, acknowledged to be the ugliest, most dispiriting offices on the ship. This was deliberate. IPS personnel were the police of the ship. They investigated every unplanned death and injury, and just as importantly, they enforced the will of Captaincy. These were duties that had no room for imagination, and as such, they were given a brutally unstimulating workspace. At least, that’s what Richard Spindal theory on the matter. Twenty years of working in the IPS had robbed Spindal of his belief in the arbitrary. Behind every event there was intention. Belief in serendipity, in the arbitrary, was just an excuse to give up short of finding the truth. Without the truth, any undertaking was doomed to failure. So it wasn’t a short straw, random chance, or apathy that had landed IPS in the beige purgatory; no IPS had been put there because someone had wanted them there. Knowing that made Richard hate the place even more.

So it was with a sense of righteousness that Richard shut down his workstation and began making preparations for an early and unauthorized departure. Spindal had found that the key to stealth in such situations was to act as though nothing out of the ordinary was going on. Simply turn off the computer, stand, and without comment walk casually through the maze of cubicles toward the exit, being sure to hand out a few nods and judicious salutations as required. He was nearly free, hand literally on the frosted glass door that separated him from the greater world of the ship, when duty called.

“Spindle! I have something for you.” Duty, in this case took the form of Tom Concaph, a sergeant in the PSI and Richard’s immediate superior. The sergeant was a huge man. Looking at his massive girth it was hard to believe, but he’d been a celebrated boxer as a younger, smaller man. Battered knuckles and a broken nose were the only legacy of that early glory.

“What is it Tom?” Spindal felt rivulets of cool sweat begin to trickle from his armpits. The very size of the sergeant always made him feel claustrophobic, as if the man was a precarious boulder moments from tipping into avalanche.

“Call just came in. There was an accident at the core, a welder fell.” Tom leaned a shoulder against a cubical divider. Richard watched the lightweight steel and plastic bow and groan under the strain, waited for it to buckle or break. Somehow it held.

“Where’s the body?” There was no question of surviving such a fall. In order to maintain the illusion of gravity the ship completed a rotation every 100 seconds, that meant that the interior of the ship was spinning at 350 mph while the exterior of the core spun at 20 mph. Once a person lost connection to the core they would stop rotating with the ship and start drifting toward the inner rim, 100 square miles of intense farming, forest, and field, the living seed bank that would make life on an alien planet possible. The fall would have taken nearly four minutes, an eternity punctuated by the catastrophic impact with a surface moving at deadly perpendicular to the unfortunate.

“I have the spot right here.” Tom handed Richard a piece of paper. On it were scrawled two numbers “Mi 5.5, 128°,” the first was the distance from the front of the ship, the second the degree longitude from the bridge.

“Is anybody there?”

“Right now it’s just the gardener who saw it happen. Recycling will probably have somebody over there to clean up pretty soon though.”

“Okay, I’ll check it out.”

“Yeah, I thought you would.” The sergeant gave Spindal a hard look. “By the by Dick, stop trying to sneak out of here early.”

Spindal let the comment stand uncontested and pushed his way out the door. At least he was getting out of the office.