The Engineer

            I’ve learned to hate echoes. The sound of my own footsteps bouncing off the bulkheads reminded me that I was alone. For weeks at a time, I roamed the ship and tended to its needs, only to put myself back into cold-sleep for years. Two more maintenance cycles, twenty more years, and we’ll arrive at where we’re going: all one hundred thousand of us. Then the war will start. There hadn’t been a war for five hundred years, since the Parting. In the weeks I spent alone listening to the echoes, I often thought about the Parting. 

            The Doctrine said that we had come from a paradise; that three fourths of the people turned away from the Doctrine. That man made war on himself for thousands of years. In the end, the Doctrine said, the last two great political philosophies, and the last two remaining religions, fought a last great war. They could not defeat each other, and they could not continue to fight if the human race was to survive, for the ravaged Earth could no longer sustain them. They went into space, each setting out in a different direction, in hopes of finding peace. That was five hundred years ago.
        The followers of the Doctrine drifted in space, sleeping a dreamless sleep in the cryonic chambers; except for the engineers. Engineers like me were awakened periodically to see that the ship was functioning properly. I often wondered if the engineers on the ships of the Parting hated echoes as much as I did.
            This was going to be a long maintenance cycle. The ship was designed for multiple redundancies and the computer monitored all of the systems. Minor repairs were handled by robots, so little maintenance work had to be done by the crew, but some repairs were too complex for anything but people to perform. Engineers were awakened for periodic checks, or when a critical system had actually failed or was about to fail. Even with all the back-ups, parts could give out. Whenever a back-up for a key system was activated an engineer, or several if they were needed, would be awakened. This time I had to repair several key components that cooled the fusion reactor, and would have to wait for several days to make sure that the repairs held, before going back to sleep. Having completed a few other maintenance checks, I found myself confronted with days with nothing to do. 

            The ship’s Elder would have told me to read the Doctrine but, in truth, I found it tiresome. Except for books related to my profession, I had never been allowed to read books other than the Doctrine. As a boy, I was beaten for reading another book. Oddly enough, it was about space travel, but only the Elders were allowed to read books other than the Doctrine. My grandmother had a small horde of books, ten or twelve of them, which had been secretly passed from generation to generation. My older brother had them now (except for the one I was caught with), or rather his descendants did. He would be long dead now, back on the new Homeworld.
            The repairs had to be redone, this time I decided to replace the reactor's cooling unit entirely, instead of trying to fix it. I would have to wait for over a week to be sure that the new cooling unit wasn’t factory defective and worked over the long term. This meant further days of boredom. I tried reading the Doctrine, but couldn’t stand it for more than an hour or two, and passed the time wandering the ship. My wandering took me by the Elder’s stateroom.
            The ship was designed to be a headquarters for the new war, and the Elder had a spacious suite of rooms. No one but the Elder and the ship’s captain were permitted inside, but I had access to it in case repairs were needed. Boredom overcame good sense, and I let myself in. From the second I entered the chamber I knew my concept of reality was no longer valid. Inside that chamber was a different world. Books, hundreds of them, lined the walls three meters high. They were paper books, not data chips or memory drives. What information was in the computers had been edited in order to conform to the Doctrine, which made it nearly useless. These books were very old, and complete. There were so many secrets, so much forbidden knowledge.
            I picked a book at random. It was almost like the Doctrine, but seemed to be older. The people and places were the same as those in the Doctrine, but the stories were different. There were the wars and stories of sinners being horribly punished, but there were also stories of forgiveness and salvation for even the greatest of sinners. For the People of the Doctrine, to be caught sinning meant horrible pain, possibly even painful death, but in the new text I was reading, God was willing, even eager, to forgive nearly any transgression.
            By the time I finished the new Doctrine-like book, the repairs to the fusion system had been broken in and were functioning properly, and I should have gone back to sleep. Instead, I went back to the Elder’s quarters, and read. I read about the original Homeworld, I read about how there were once hundreds of religions, and many nations and forms of government. I read about the wars between the religions and the nations, and how they led to the Parting. I read and read.
            There were other things too. There were poems about love, stories of great heroes, and sweeping histories of the original Homeworld that directly contradicted the Doctrine. The Elder had more than just books. He had data-chips of music and images of art. The music was not the melancholy, droning music of the Church; it was flowing, inspired music that could bring me to tears one second and laughter the next. The art was not just crude illustrations of events from the Doctrine; it was full of life and imagination; forbidden and dangerous things to the people of the Doctrine.
            Weeks passed as I read. I couldn’t go back to sleep with so much to learn so easily at hand. It was then I found a book about the time just before the Parting. The last two nations had, at last, decided they could not prevail against each other, and began building the first of the ships that would be used in the Parting. The followers of the Doctrine and the People of the Prophet then began to war over which of them would control the lands abandon by the retreating nations. After years of unimaginable misery, the two religions, like the two nations, found that victory was impossible and joined the nations in the Parting. Each of them saved one percent of their surviving population, leaving the rest to die with the war-ruined old Homeworld.
            Finally, I found the book that explained why, after five centuries, the followers of the Doctrine were again going to war. A signal; a simple radio signal had been received on the new Homeworld. The signal carried the teachings of the People of the Prophet. The Elders seemed to have felt quite threatened by the ideas carried on the signal. In fact, they seemed to have gone mad. Within days of receiving the signal, the Elders began preparing for war.
            Now the sleeper-ships were heading for the source of the signal, loaded with troops and machines of war. I walked through the forest of sleep chambers holding the troops. I saw young, sleeping faces seen through frosted windows. Even in such a state, they seemed eager to reach their destination and rush into battle. They did not know what I now knew: that it was we who were starting this war. The Elders were afraid to expose the Doctrine to other ideas; so afraid that they had to stamp out those ideas.

I walked among the sleep chambers, reading the names from the plates on each one. Names made them real to me: real beyond maintaining the system that kept them alive. It would be those names and faces that would die for the Elders fear. I walked the forest of sleep chambers; trying to read every name, and look at every one of the thousands of frozen faces. Sadness overcame me in that crowd of would-be martyrs.
            I screamed. The hated echoes brought my scream back to me. My sobs echoed back to me too. When my scream faded, I cried. I don't know how long I cried, but when I stopped, I could barely stand. They were going to start it all again. They would lay waste to another world, and then to another and another, all because of fear. Why did the People of the Prophet send that signal? Couldn't they be content with the world and the worshipers they already had? Could they not have been satisfied? Why must they win others to their ways? It seemed so utterly useless: fighting, killing and ruining worlds over differences in philosophy that were essentially minor. 
            I knew they would though. My people would attack, the People of the Prophet would retaliate, and the cycle of vengeance would begin again. Perhaps I, in my solitude, protected from the verbal bile of the Elders, was the only one of my people who could think clearly. Perhaps God was using me to stop ridiculous slaughter in his name. Perhaps I could do what no one in the previous generations could. Perhaps I could stop the cycle of violence.
            In all my wanderings through the ship, I had never gone to the chapel. I had never found comfort in the churches of the Doctrine. They were cold and harsh, and threatened doom at every turn. I went to the chapel now. Without the Elder, I could be alone with my God. I could get the truth. Again, time escaped me. When I left the chapel I was hungry and thirsty, but I knew what must be done.
            It was a simple thing to override the auto-navigation system and fire the ship’s engines. I let them burn until the fuel was all but gone, leaving just enough to bring us into a safe orbit if we should encounter a habitable planet on the new course I had placed us on. My ship was the flagship, so the rest of the fleet would follow it. I didn’t know where the fleet was going now. I had simply turned well away from the source of the Prophet’s signal. I didn’t know what awaited us as the fleet drifted through the endless void. But, as the door of my sleep chamber closed, and I felt the deepest of sleeps come over me, I knew that there would be no war, at least not for some time. This time someone asked questions. This time someone said no.