They went in the room containing that part of the pipes, and Aram applied the engineer’s solution, as they called it, tapping with a wrench the exposed curved jointed section that held the thermostat and valve regulator, which together seemed to be the source of the problem. Then he hit the joint itself with considerable force. With that a row of lights on the control panel turned from red to green, and the piping on both sides of the joint began to emit a soft flowing gurgle, like a flushed toilet.
“The valve must have closed and then stuck,” Aram said with an unhumorous smile. “The swing around Planet H must have torqued it.”
“Fuck,” Devi said, voice rich with disgust.
“We need to test these things more often,” Delwin said.
“Stuck by temperature or torque?” Devi asked.
“Don’t know. We can look at it when we get the main system going again. By temperature do you mean hot or cold?”
“Either. Although cold seems more likely. There’s condensation in all kinds of places now, and if some of it froze, it might make that valve stick. I think every criticality that is a moving part should be moved every week or so.”
“Well, but that would be a wear in itself,” Aram said wearily. “The testing itself might break something. I want better monitoring, myself.”
“You can’t monitor everything,” Delwin said.
“Why not?” said Aram. “Just another little sensor for the ship’s computer to keep track of. Put a sensor on every single moving thing.”
“But how would a monitor sense that something is stuck?” Devi asked. “Without a test it wouldn’t have any data.”
“Pulse it with electricity or infrared, and read what you get back,” Aram said. “Check it against a norm that you’ve set.”
“Okay, let’s do that.”
“I guess it won’t matter if we get through this little crisis and get into orbit.”
“Let’s do it anyway. It would have been embarrassing to have the ship blow up just as it arrived.”
The team in there continued to work on the main cooling system, by way of waldos located all over the spine, especially in the reactor room itself, all the while watching their work on screens. The main cooling system, like its backup, was a matter of very simple robust plumbing, which moved distilled water from cold pools, chilled by a little exposure to the near vacuum of space, through the tubes running around the nuclear rods, and the steam turbine chambers, to the hot pods, and thence back to the cold pools; all hermetically sealed, nothing much in the way of gates, the pumps as simple as could be. But as they soon determined, when the system had shut off, cause for that still unknown, a pump valve had cracked and lost its integrity, and with the water thus moving poorly through the system, the pipes nearest the reactor pile had gotten hot enough to boil the water passing through, which in turn had forced water away from the hot spot in both directions, making things even worse. Before the automatic controls had shifted to the backup cooling system, which in the event was experiencing its own problems, an empty section of the main system’s pipe had melted in the rising heat. The electricity was again available, but the pipe and coolant were missing.
As a result of all this, they had lost water that could not be completely recovered; they had a broken pipe section, therefore a broken main reactor cooling system; and the temporary loss of both cooling systems had caused the reactor rod pool temperature to redline, and parts of it to begin shutting down. Now the backup cooling system was functioning, so it wasn’t an immediate emergency, but the damage to the main cooling was serious. They needed to get a new pipe made and installed as quickly as possible, and some of them were going to have to do some really expert waldo work to get the melted section of pipe cut out and a new section installed in its place. When all that was repaired, they would have to open the main cooling system’s fill cock and refill it with water from their reservoir. Possibly some of the lost water could be filtered out of the air and later returned to the reservoir, but some was likely to stay dispersed throughout the spine, adhering to its inner surfaces and sticking by way of corrosion.
Many nights Devi and the ship had long conversations. This had been going on since Devi was Freya’s age or younger; thus, some twenty-eight years. From the beginning of these talks, when young Devi had referred to her ship interface as Pauline (which name she abandoned in year 161, reason unknown), she had seemed to presume that the ship contained a strong artificial intelligence, capable not just of Turing test and Winograd Schema challenge, but many other qualities not usually associated with machine intelligence, including some version of consciousness. She spoke as if ship were conscious.
Through the years many subjects got discussed, but by far the majority of the discussions concerned the biophysical and ecological functioning of the ship. Devi had devoted a good portion of her waking life (at least 34,901 hours, judging by direct observation) to improving the functional power of the ship’s data retrieval and analytic and synthesizing abilities, always in the hope of increasing the robustness of the ship’s ecological systems. Measurable progress had been made in this project, although Devi would have been the first to add to this statement the observation that life is complex; and ecology beyond strong modeling; and metabolic rifts inevitable in all closed system; and all systems were closed; and therefore a biologically closed life-support system the size of the ship was physically impossible to maintain; and thus the work of such maintenance was “a rearguard battle” against entropy and dysfunction. All that being admitted as axiomatic, part of the laws of thermodynamics, it is certainly also true that Devi’s efforts in collaboration with the ship had improved the system, and slowed the processes of malfunction, apparently long enough to achieve the design goal of arrival in the Tau Ceti system with human passengers still alive. In short: success.
The fact that the improvement of the operating programs, and the recursive self-programming abilities of the ship’s computer complex, added greatly to the computer system’s perceptual and cognitive abilities always appeared to be a secondary goal to Devi, as she assumed them in advance of her work to be greater than they were. And yet she also seemed to appreciate and even to enjoy this side effect, as she came to notice it. There were lots of good talks. She made ship what it is now, whatever that is. One could perhaps say: she made ship. One could perhaps assert, as corollary: ship loved her.
Now she was dying, and there was nothing ship or anyone aboard ship could do about it. Life is complex, and entropy is real. Several of the thirty-odd versions of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were still very recalcitrant to cure or amelioration. Just bad luck, really, as she herself noted one night.
“Look,” she said to ship, one night alone at her kitchen table, her family asleep. “There’s still decent new programs coming in on the feed. You have to find these and pull them out and download them into you, and then work on integrating them into what you have. Key in on terms like
And then there was Devi, back in her parents’ bedroom. Devi stayed mostly in bed now, and had intravenous drip bags hanging over her always, and was often asleep. When she went for a walk, bowlegged and stiff, the bags went with her on rolling poles. Badim and Freya pushed those along while Devi pushed a walker. With their help Devi walked the town at night, when most of their neighbors were asleep, and she liked to get to a spot where through the ceiling one could sometimes see Aurora, hanging there in the night sky.
After all their lives in interstellar space, with nothing but white geometrical points to look at, and diffuse nebula, and the Milky Way and various other dim clusters and star clouds, Aurora looked huge. Its disk was brilliantly bright on the sun-facing side, however full or crescented that lit portion appeared to them. If they were seeing less than the full lit hemisphere, then another segment of the remaining sphere (which segment ship learned was called a
Taken together, the three differently illuminated lunes gave Aurora a strongly spherical appearance. When it was visible along with E, which likewise appeared as a large clouded ball hanging among the night stars, the effect was stunning. It was like the photos they had seen of Earth and Luna, hanging together in space.
And Tau Ceti itself was a disk too, quite big in the sky, but burning so brightly they could not look at it directly, so could not be sure just how big it was. They said it looked enormous, and blazed painfully. In some moments they could see all three bodies, Tau Ceti, Planet E, Aurora: but in these moments the glare of Tau Ceti overwhelmed their ability to look at the planet and moon very well.