Canticle Blue

33. Confluence

Music -  'For Eamonn' by Nightnoise
(from A Different Shore)

"The ship's lot was always to be forsaken."
—Clayden Bryn (Latent Souls: The Ghost of the Terreska)

The plan of the colonists who crossed the "Great Bridge" had always been to remove everything from the Terreska that might be useful when they reached their new home world. They realized that, in doing so, air quality in the ship would have to be sacrificed at some point. To that end, they created alternate access points to the parts of the ship that would be affected first. Some of those points were airlocks between the inter-ring passageways and the interior of the habitat section. For the new residents of the Terreska, those would become a God-send.

The restoration of the Terreska began with light. As soon as the Castel departed, Gilon used the Maire Meid R-drives to gradually turn the bow of the Terreska toward Havel's sun. She did this by controlling them remotely from an open space behind the canopy airlock, generating brief surges of thrust and counter-thrust from various drive-panel combinations and measuring the changes in light intensity with each rotation of the ship. It was the most challenging thing she had undertaken thus far, not so much because of the difficulty of orienting the ship, but because of a confluence of compelling images created by the light.

Its brilliant penetration into the habitat section revealed an amazing variety of colors and patterns: in cultivation areas, interlacing walkways, individually decorated habitat windows, and even colonist murals on the outer ring surfaces themselves. Added to that now were countless, slowly rotating Shil reflections from the Maire Meid throughout the chamber, beams of sunlight rolling through the landscape, and spinning shadows of the bow canopy running all the way to the aft wall. From where Gilon stood, the receding rings were like concentric portals of burnished rose-gold.

She found these images so appealing that she sought to retain them. She created a dynamic, mind's-eye panorama of all them at once, as if seen through a compound eye, then found herself using that as a template for something surprising, even to her. She accessed the C-link to enhance her montage with rare archived images created by the colonists themselves, calling them to mind, animating them, and fitting them into plausible contexts wherever she could until, for her, time itself fell away, and the Terreska came to life. She saw the greening of things, even trees with blossoms, and colonists standing in parks and fields, with raised arms, rejoicing in the warmth and light of this same sun.  All of this coalesced into one impression as she continued to move the ship. Then, as the sun settled into a fixed position behind the canopy, she began to sense something completely new. She was grateful to exist, and to be who she was.

With the seeming heart of the Terreska now aglow, Gilon and Aedh set out to preserve everything valuable left in the ship, especially the scant amounts of air and water. Much of the residual atmosphere in the open parts of the ship had been lost in trying to save it. On the positive side, life-support redundancy, built into the Terreska, gave them a place to start. Each habitat ring was designed to be self-sufficient and self-contained in emergencies, and several of them were still sealed when found. Because of this, they still held small amounts of air and water vapor. Using equipment from the utility module, the Middi were able to capture and transfer air to the two rings closest to the bow of the ship and pressurize them.

After several weeks, the Castel returned to the Terreska with a large transport module and passengers. Once inside, Pa'keh transferred it to the collar-drive section of the Maire Meid, and Gilon, in what by then seemed almost a routine maneuver, synchronized the module with the surface rotation of an inter-ring passageway and eased its airlock adapter into place. After two millennia, the Terreska again carried human voyagers.

Inside the module were Annibet Sem, three of her staff, two Middi, and enough food, supplies, and equipment, especially when added to what the Castel had brought previously, to sustain them for several months. The new equipment included heaters, ventilation fans, air scrubbers, and exotic-matter lighting.

Except for limited views from the Castel canopy, there had been no windows during the trip from Havel. When Annibet stepped into the first habitat ring with Gilon and Aedh, she was instantly captivated by the sunlight in the ship's interior. She felt her knees bending slightly, as if in some kind of instinctive obeisance, and quietly thanked God for the privilege of being there. Above her she could see the glowing arcs of many habitat windows, and the sunlight itself was like a prolonged daybreak, with every particle of dust brilliantly highlighted by waves of light as the ship rotated. In the back of her mind, she knew the dust would have to be dealt with eventually, but at that moment, it was—as Gilon affirmed—like something magical. She found it wonderful, too, to feel a warmth in the Terreska that did not come from artificial sources. The light was so glorious that she had to resist the temptation to stare at it directly. With her eyes closed, she lapsed into imagination. Even with the unfamiliar scents within the ring, she could have been outdoors.

Except for their windows, the actual Terreska living quarters were like modules themselves. They were basically rectangular in shape. Their first floors were typically reserved for living rooms, kitchens, and storage spaces, while the upper stories contained bedrooms and closets. The levels were linked by compact circular staircases which extended all the way to rooftop decking. Above each trio of habitat modules was a large skylight in the ring itself.

The sub-floor areas of the living quarters were hollow and convex. They rested on bearings designed to fit a system of channels in the inner surfaces of the rings. The individual habitats were designed to be self-orienting with changes in the ship's rotation or speed. For the new crew of the vessel, this presented unique—though minor—problems because the bearings were extremely old, and some of the habitats had frozen at odd angles as the Terreska was being abandoned. They would all have to be rebuilt eventually, but a few were already beginning to shift as the temperature in the rings increased.

Gilon and Aedh had done their best to prepare a group of habitats for the newcomers. To some extent they were even able to remove dust by fitting a small vacuum pump with filters. But any major cleaning or resurfacing would have to wait until the air-scrubbers were installed.

Annibet was very touched to see that they had actually found a few pieces of colonist furniture and brought them to her habitat, though she wondered if they could still be safely used. As she explored her new quarters, Aedh delivered the rest of her things: a folding cot, one chair, a box of clothing, and three globe lights from the island.