Millennia worth of exhaust trailed behind the Laagehemel as it continued to accelerate past its destination point. Something must have knocked the generation ship off-course, for the star system that should have become the ship's inhabitants' new home was too far to reach with their interplanetary shuttles, let alone pull them into a gravity well five or so centuries hence.
Ivan knew he shouldn't worry about such things --- leave that to statesmen like his father --- but Georg's manuscript on Laagehemel's history, from the mysterious Awakening, through two dark ages and the Re-unification, to the present made him think about the futility of the voyage if their civilization would just die in a few hundred years because they missed their target. Georg's history depressed him --- Ivan would have preferred listening to his beloved recordings of Old Hemels, the ship's language before the first civil war. But he had promised his friend he would read the manuscript. Ivan had to admit that, though history was his least favorite of the New Sciences, Georg's version engaged him.
Rather than recounting more than two millennia of events, from the Awakening to the Re-unification, Georg tried to reconstruct the factors behind those events and explain their implications. The approach produced several mysterious dead-ends, and even more radical hypotheses that even some of Ivan's and Georg's colleagues would have trouble swallowing. The idea that the Awakening was the result of a mechanical malfunction activating a contingency computer program was just one of the hypotheses that could get this work censored and Georg in jail. Like many of his other hypotheses, though, the data Georg had found eliminated the few generally accepted explanations, and left this scandalous one. Georg had accepted it, and his manuscript had convinced Ivan. Ivan would not admit that. He realized why most historians did not theorize the way Georg did --- they were afraid of what they'd find, and they were afraid of incarceration.
Ivan suspended his reading when his father got home from a hard day of debate on the Senate floor. Since Ivan's mother had died three years earlier, Senator Fyodor insisted on eating dinner with his son, a man he hardly knew. It was an arrangement Ivan railed against and took every opportunity to dodge. Tonight, he had no escape.
The Senator interrogated his son about his activities that day. When Ivan mentioned reading Georg's manuscript, the Senator proceeded to engage in his favorite after-dinner pastime --- New Scientist bashing. It was part of his campaign to dissuade Ivan from his frivolous, scatter-brained pursuits. Tonight's target, Georg, who was, in the Senator's words, "a dangerous dilettante in history, computer science, and fifteen other obscure subjects," was his favorite.
"So, the expert has seen fit to enlighten us on our history. Has he fabricated some computer file that shows how we were thrown off-course? Or has he gone the philosophical route and proven that our star is actually where it should be, right in front of us --- it's just our instruments that deceive?"
"Georg doesn't fabricate files; he reconstructs them."
"Semantics. I have no faith in his computer work --- no ersatz historian can program. When he wears his historian hat, can he explain our current predicament? I would like to hear why, in Georg's fantasy world, the Builders would doom the Laagehemel by aiming it in the wrong direction."
"Maybe they didn't. Maybe we hit something that knocked us off course." Ivan's father had again drawn him into an unwanted argument. As usual, this would not end well, and Ivan tried to look for a way to change the subject. He didn't feel like letting the Senator's expert ability and experience belittle him into another concession.
"The Builders would have seen such a possibility and taken care of it."
"Father, the Builders were not infallible. Georg says that the belief that they were infallible led to most of our problems, including, perhaps, the current one."
"How so?"
"Well, had your beloved Senate listened to Phillip's warnings seventy-five years ago, we could have corrected our course before it became too late."
"How? By adjusting the settings in the guidance control program?"
"That's what they're there for."
"Not according to the Builders' Manual."
"The Builders didn't write that book, though."
"Fifteen hundred years of tradition proves you wrong. Besides, can you imagine how far off course we'd be had we tried to correct seventy five years ago and then a Builder program had corrected, too?"
Ivan knew his father was toying with him. If the blessed Manual was so sacrosanct, why was the Senate now considering altering the ship's course? It wouldn't do any good to alter the course now, though --- they were headed into the dead zone below the galactic plane and nothing could stop them. The ship had too much inertia for any amount of course-correction to do much good, and they would run out of radio-actives in a few centuries, long before gravity pulled them back into the galaxy. If they couldn't get off the ship and establish a new home before that, their civilization would die. Their only hope had been the destination star, and that was too far away.
Ivan had to leave his father's argument unresolved. It was a relief when time for his weekly seminar with Georg and his local colleagues arrived. Ivan begged Fyodor's leave.
"Go ahead, go talk with your radical friends. What's on the plate tonight?"
"There's a guest visiting from New Mount Palomar who studies celestial mechanics --- the movement of stars and planets."
"Eh, what good is that? Your problem is that you can't stick with one thing. If you did, then you'd accomplish something, like me."
"Yes, Father." But what was the point to accomplishing something, as his father advocated? Ivan, Fyodor, Georg, and everyone on Laagehemel would die of disease or old age --- that was a given for everyone since the Awakening. So, people had accomplished things in order to advance their culture and give it to their children. The children of the future were doomed, though, and, without children, there was no reason to accomplish anything or advance culture. Maybe, many of the New Scientists thought, this concentration on advancement and accomplishment in specific areas had led them to miss something. Maybe it was time to step back and look at all the specifics as a whole, to see how it all fit together. Wasn't that, after all, the point of the Re-unification before the professional politicians and statesmen had stepped in?