Free The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis Page A

appraised by an entity far more highly evolved than the game we’re playing.
    The paper log mentions a crew of three, two men and a woman. And yet the cassette tape I found suggests that there were many more people on board. How do I know that the tape wasn’t recorded on Earth before the crew left? I don’t.
    What if it was a record of a fleeting moment on board? What are the possible explanations? Stowaways. A log that lied. That extra people joined them from another vessel. And Nona’s suggestion: that the journey they took was much further than from Earth. That’s the most radical idea of all, a new frame that changes everything.
    The VR may well be a more accurate record of the voyage than the log, even though it’s through the eyes of the Mastermind. It’s like trying to reconstruct how a person danced from a few heel prints left by shoes on a floor.
    And why this feeling of being interrogated by the story itself? That could be myth. It’s designed to describe the desires of the self as an archetype, so it’s hardly surprising that certain parts of the tale, or certain characters should interest us more than others, they match our preoccupations. I’ve been obsessed with Gwydion, why is that?
    If I’m honest, it’s something to do with work. It’s on my mind because I’m about to retire. I love the way he conjures a future for himself and the people he loves. That seems to be key – he’s always using his magic to help someone else. His brother. His son.
    What kind of magician works his magic on behalf of himself? A lonely man. A man like me.
    Why did I give everything up for work? Because I believe it’s good in itself. That every action of trying to see what happened is a blow struck for the real. That it’s possible to know the exact sequence of events that led to disaster. That it’s a service to others to be able to say: The mistake was in the calibration of the log, which error led the crew to ignore the blind spot on their port side which led to collision. That the chaos of which I’m so afraid is abated, for a moment, at least.
    I love the sounds of the ship at night. The reactor’s hum and crackling of the hull as debris hits us. The click, click, click of equipment as it digests its interior measurements, adjusting to light, temperature and yaw. The fans on the hydroponics, as the plants breathe and sigh to make us our oxygen.
    I know we’re in orbit, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that I’m on the night watch of a very long voyage. I feel protective of Nona as she sleeps. She’s the heart of the vessel for me. Someone who seems to need work just as much as I do. I haven’t asked why, nor has she told me. We have a pact of discretion but for the first time, I have a student whose appetite for what happened is just as strong as mine. If I’d been assigned her earlier we might have…
    What was it like for those people on a long- distance flight of years? In a closed-loop system? So that nothing new could come in or go out of their vessel? So that they had to survive only on the resources they had? How would you keep the sense of a day just by counting the hours? Would you be able to sleep without the cues of light and sunset? Wouldn’t your fellow crew members’ habits become distinctly annoying? How one slurps his food? How the other farts? As you got further and further away from home, would the same things continue to be important to you? The chain of command? The original mission? Might you not start feeling ill if you imagined that the ship was toxic in some way? That pollutants had entered the system and were starting to kill you slowly, that the very air you breathed was compromised?
    And what about mutiny? Disputes on a spaceship can easily become a matter of life and death.
    Campion, you’re daydreaming. Get a grip.

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    Flower
    Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 09:00

    Inspector of