Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  The wars began as the peoples of the planet struggled to migrate and feed themselves amidst crop failures and famine. The oceans retreated, exposing land that had not seen sunlight since the last ice age. In the universities, the purely academic debate over how quickly ice ages came and went became moot. Now the answer was in. Having vast mantles of ice at both poles was the natural state of the Earth. Global warming had not stopped the return of the ice. The warm interlude that provided a nest for human civilization to flourish was an aberration.

  It all went into my model.

  The psychiatrists have names for me, neat categories to confine my mind. All my life the psychiatrists knocked at my door with their tests and questions and I have never opened the door. Only my mother and my wife got inside.

  My wife changed my life. I still worked sixteen hours a day on my modeling, but she filled the rest of my time. Mother was still there, her presence surrounding us, a womb of comfort.

  My wife lived in my bedroom with me, keeping quiet so as not to disturb me. Sometimes she and my mother went shopping or out to have fun. I didn’t go with them.

  She liked to do things in our bed, and I wanted to make her happy. It was exciting. She relaxed me on days when I was so jacked up that I could not form even a simple equation.

  One day about a year after my wife arrived, the general came to our apartment again, dressed in his uniform and looking official. My wife saluted him. He explained a plan to us, conceived as a way to reverse our present ice age. He said that the physics engine in my Ice Wars model showed that the plan would really work. All we had to do was crash a comet into the Earth. Not just any comet. The comet needed to have the right mass and velocity to survive entry and hit at just the right spot during the right season.

  The general summoned a map on his tablet. The target point lay off the old Yucatan peninsula, where the receding waters had exposed a large deposit of iron ore; ironically enough, the ore came from the asteroid that had ended the time of the dinosaurs. Back then, the asteroid had put enough water vapor and dust into the atmosphere to cool the earth and change the environment, killing all the large animals. This time, the iron particles from the collision, cast into the upper atmosphere, would provoke a greenhouse effect, melting the ice mountains, refilling the oceans, and ending the ice age. Humanity could reoccupy the rest of the globe. Truly, multiply and replenish.

  Think of it. To reclaim what was lost and defeat a foe that had handed us so many chilly defeats. The idea appealed to my fighting instincts.

  Why a comet? Why not use nuclear weapons? The weapons would have to be so strong and numerous, churning up deposits of iron ore into radioactive fallout, that the planet would be poisoned. An asteroid could have been used, but a comet of the right size had already been located, coming toward the sun in a languid orbit.

  To guide a comet into Earth required a crew on its surface. The comet was not a single mass of dust and ice, but a chaotic tumbling mass of separate planetesimals constantly shifting as the sun heated them on their long fall in from the Oort Cloud. Guiding the comet was a difficult process, requiring constant corrections as the planetesimals shifted, and the cometary halo interfered with data transmission, so they needed a modeler with the crew to provide navigation.

  I did not want to leave our apartment, but my wife asked me to do it. She did not ask for much and so I agreed. Mother came with us. The government built a new apartment for us near Houston, an exact duplicate of our apartment, and moved all the furniture into our new home.

  We began to train for spaceflight at the Johnson Space Center. Apparently my wife had trained as an astronaut before she came to me. We didn’t ever talk about her past and it really didn’t interest me. The training was stressful, so many people, too much emotion. My wife thrived on it, enthusing about her life’s destiny. Anything that made her happy at least made me less cranky.

  Just one time did I ever venture out on a trip. Other people had field trips, so why not me? My wife and I drove for a day to the south. She didn’t care for self-driving cars, and she knew how to drive, a skill completely unnecessary for me. The four Secret Service men assigned to protect us, bulky with body armor and bristling with weapons, dutifully tagged along in their own car. We reached a ridge overlooking the Rio Grande near Brownsville. In the past two decades, the river had revived from a muddy trickle depleted by irrigation to a raging torrent fed by the glaciers in Colorado.

  No one wanted to live near here, though it was good cropland. Fibulas and tibias, ribs and skulls, and grey fragments of smashed bones littered the ridge. Amidst the bones were pieces of clothing and the debris of makeshift weapons: knives, hoes, clubs, a few hunting rifles, an occasional pistol.

  Here was one of many places where the Ice Wars turned nasty. Starving Americans flowed across the river, a desperate horde seeking the fertile crops of Mexico. The Mexican army massacred them. They called it inoculation, as if people were a disease. There was not enough food for everyone. Eventually there were not enough people left to fight and the Ice Wars ended.

  Many more graveyards of the Ice Wars littered the world, monuments to the struggle to survive, yet avoided in shame.

  I forget my meds and the grief overwhelms me. Roaring a toneless howl, pounding the keyboards with my fists, punching a screen repeatedly until a lattice of cracks satisfies me, and bouncing around the room, eventually exhausts me. The equipment is built to be strong and my flailing limbs are weak.

  Something within myself, perhaps a shade of her memory, helps me find the determination to put my arm in the autodoc and key up an injection. The meds bring an edgy sulkiness that is nothing like the calm that my wife once brought. Those same meds got me through the worst time of my life, when we lifted off and I left my mother behind on Earth. I was in a stupor for weeks. I only left because the fate of Earth depended on me leaving and the general guaranteed she would be safe.

  Another message comes from the engineers: Where are the coordinates of the next burn?

  I send back my standard response—Message received—and am surprised when they instantly answer.

  A threat: We are going to cut off your oxygen and water supplies if you don’t talk to us. What are you doing over there?

  Are they lying? Intellectually, I know that a person can lie, but when I watch them, I can never tell. I check the emergency supplies for my pod. Three months of oxygen and water and an intact filtration system that will last for more years than I planned to live; that is, if I didn’t mind the faint whiff of urea in my drinking water.

  Now that my wife is dead, my Ice Wars model consumes almost all of my time and most of my computing power. The processors and memory units in my living pod are as powerful as anything I ever used back on Earth.

  Over and over again I run my Ice Wars model, sometimes with the comet crashing into the iron ore deposit, sometimes without the comet crashing. There is no doubt that the comet will reverse the mountains of ice. The oceans grow again, drowning the new cities, forcing the population to flee. A new Ice Wars erupts as people fight for food amid a rapidly changing climate. A field that grows a good crop one year might not grow any crop the next year. Where only desert plants now live becomes flush and fertile the next year. Starvation haunts the land once again, and exotic diseases prune weakened populations. Hard times for all.

  Without a comet, the ice age keeps its lock on the planet. In fact, only an external event like a comet or asteroid can pull the planet out of the ice age. Of course, if I expand the timeline of the model to forty million years and include continental drift as an agent, the ice ages eventually end when Antarctica drifts north and allows the world’s oceans to permanently warm. A tropical paradise last seen by the dinosaurs arrives.

  My model clearly shows me that the comet I ride will provoke a rerun of the Ice Wars. A sobering conclusion.

  I have never considered the nature of my mission. That my wife wanted to do it was enough for me. To not fulfill the mission would make the dea
th of my wife meaningless, but her death is only one of many possible deaths.

  My models no longer interest me. We are only fourteen days from Earth. The time passes with memories playing on all my screens. Many are of my mother, who I have not seen for some eleven years. Others are of my wife back on Earth. Still more show us as a family of three, and I still wear a sweater that my mother knitted for me, though the threads are now bare. On one screen, my wife dies over and over again.

  A vibration shakes the memories. We are starting our last course correction. One screen switches from my mother smiling at my ninth birthday to a view of the comet’s surface. The rockets burn brightly like candles on a misshapen cake. The planetesimals of the comet shift, sending seismic waves shivering through the pod. A few waves are strong enough to even rattle the equipment.

  For the first time in my life I have deceived someone. The calculations that I have fed into the rockets will take the comet past Earth. No one will notice for several hours.

  The burn completes. The engineers, in their elation and ignorance, congratulate me through a video feed. They are sucking on champagne squeegees, hoarded for this occasion.

  I finally send the engineers a message. We have completed the last course correction for the comet and we now coming up to an optimal launch point for Earth. If you launch the escape vehicle within two hours and fourteen minutes, you can make it home. I have already downloaded the proper burn sequences into the escape vehicle.

  A quick response from the life systems engineer: What about you? Don’t you want to go home?

  An easy question to answer.

  I have no home anymore.

  I will not be the one to renew the Ice Wars; and soon, as the comet is sucked ever deeper toward the sun, I will join my wife.

  Making Legends

  Jaleta Clegg

  Neptune hung in space like a giant, blue jewel. Jack Williams, captain of the USS Kepler, rested his chin on his steepled fingers as he mentally composed an ode to the planet. His crew, all well-trained and probably much more qualified than he would ever be, functioned perfectly without him. First Officer Emily Kaile kept them in line with utmost military precision and decorum. She was a decorated career officer, born to the service and probably bred to the service. Her parents were both admirals, and her grandparents, and so on back for generations, or so it was rumored. Jack was a frustrated poet. His appointment as captain had happened only because of his mother. The meddling witch.

  Not that he wanted to complain. He’d seen sights, unbelievably breathtaking vistas, on this voyage. Saturn, resplendent amid rings and moons. Jupiter’s atmosphere swirling in grandiose curlicues. Even Mars had its moments. And now Neptune. Another six months and the Kepler would swing back towards Earth with her crew of intrepid explorers. Three long years before they reached Earth again. Humankind’s first long-term venture through the solar system. At least in person.

  “Status on the Ares?” He spoke as Kaile passed his command chair in her endless pacing of the bridge.

  “Resupply ship is on schedule to rendezvous at Nereid in three days’ time, sir.”

  Jack nodded acknowledgement.

  She paced away, her back straight and unbending as the proverbial iron rod.

  If only he had some way of getting her to speak more often. Her voice was low, musical, sweet, and easy on the ears. But bridge discipline must be maintained, and the conn was not the place for idle chitchat. Perhaps tonight over dinner.

  He turned his thoughts back to his half-composed poetry featuring the blue ice planet and its glimmering necklet of moons.

  Emily Kaile sat in her pale blue nightgown, her back ramrod straight, as she prepared for bed. She pulled pins from her hair, one by one, letting it escape into soft ringlets. Captain Williams had been different at dinner. He’d tried talking to her about non-Navy topics. He’d even quoted poetry over the sorbet served for dessert. Bad poetry, but nonetheless, poetry. She pulled the last pin anchoring her bun. Soft curls framed her face, changing the sharp lines she showed when in uniform, which was pretty much any time she wasn’t actually asleep.

  She pulled her brush from the drawer under her mirror, running it slowly through her hair. The gold locket around her neck glinted in her reflection. Someday, she’d escape the military life. She’d break free of her family and do something wild, like wearing a dress and going dancing. She’d marry an insurance adjuster or an accountant and settle for a life in a little seaside cottage where she could be nothing more than a neighborhood mum. She’d have at least four children, all sweet little cherubs who messed about and got dirty and did not in any way wear uniforms. She’d put their pictures in her locket. She fingered the bauble as she dreamed.

  Emily had spent her life in uniform, ever since she was first enrolled in a military school at age three when her mother had gone back to active command duty. Emily bounced back and forth between boarding schools, military internships, and time with her parents, which was just another form of military training. Career Navy, both in space and on water, ran through her veins instead of blood.

  She pulled her hairbrush through her ringlets and imagined the roses that would bloom outside her kitchen window. Fat pink blossoms that smelled of traditional grandmothers. Her grandmothers smelled of moth balls, official insignia, and Naval offices. She would smell of lavender and roses and vanilla cookies when she became a grandmother. But that would require that she have children, which required she marry, which required Emily to find a man to date and fall in love with. First officer on a Navy ship was not the place for such a search, no matter how politically and militarily advantageous for her career. The Space Navy frowned on romantic entanglements, especially involving higher ranking officers.

  She whispered curses down upon her mother for arranging her appointment to the Kepler. Although if Emily played her cards right after she returned, she could land herself a—

  Her thoughts cut off abruptly as alarms shrilled. The lights flickered and faded to solid red glow.

  She stood, reaching for her uniform. It wouldn’t do for the First Officer to appear in a lacy nightgown for a uniform drill.

  “Kaile?” The ship’s purser hammered on her door. “Captain wants you on bridge, now!”

  She shouted acknowledgement as she jammed her legs into the uniform. Was that real panic in the man’s voice? Was this not a drill? What emergency would summon her to the bridge in the middle of the night? The crew knew their jobs and fulfilled them perfectly. They’d had the last three and a half years to work out any kinks. Emily was proud of them, and they knew it. They gave their best. They wouldn’t be summoning her for a routine event.

  She yanked the zipper up on her jumpsuit as she opened her door. The corridor was a madhouse of crewmen rushing to and fro in the red lights, shouting over the howling alarms. Emily grabbed the first officer she spotted, the ship’s engineer.

  “What is all the fuss about?”

  The man jerked his sleeve from her grasp. “Meteor swarm. Dark albedo, impact in five minutes.” He hurried away.

  Emily stared after him for a long breath. The space rocks had to be very large and dark to be missed by their scanners and radar. Especially if they were so close. She whirled on her heel and ran for the bridge. Her hands fumbled her hair into a messy bun as her feet carried her to the center of the crisis.

  The first meteor hit the ship as she was scrambling up the last ladder to the bridge. She clutched the rungs as the ship shuddered. These were not tiny ice chunks that their electrified grid could deflect or melt. These rocks had to be at least the size of her fist. The sound of them smashing into the hull echoed over the shrieking alarms. Emily bit her lip and climbed faster.

  “Get your lazy butt down that tube! Seal off the sewage leaks. Can’t have those pipes bursting.” Davey, the head engineer, threw a roll of duct tape at Nigel Jones. The burly man turned away, shouting orders at the rest of his engineering crew. Alarms shrilled as the ship jerked. “Get those engines shut
down!”

  Nigel glared daggers at the man. The last place he wanted to be in an emergency was down in the septic chamber, patching holes in the sewage lines. He pulled a hazard suit from the locker and yanked it on. He should be the one balancing the containment fields for the ion flux drive. Nigel knew more than the grease monkeys clambering their ham-fisted way into the engine of the Kepler. But did any of the engineers appreciate his self-taught particle physics expertise? No, they sent him into the cramped septic containment chamber to wade through filth as he taped the flexible conduits leading to the biomass digester.

  Air hissed in his mask as he sealed the suit. The environmental filter unit started automatically. It kept out potential toxins and gases, but not the smell. Nothing could keep out the smell. Davey said it was all mental, in his head, but Nigel knew what he smelled, and it wasn’t pleasant. He squeezed his narrow body into the tight space. The ship lurched as another swarm struck the hull. Even here, in the heart of the ship, Nigel heard the clang.

  He slapped tape over leaks as he bitterly recited his list of grievances. He’d jumped at the chance to join the crew of the Kepler. Finally, his theories of quantum particle energistics would have a testing ground. He’d be able to rub shoulders with others who loved the practical applications of entanglement string theory. Or so he’d thought. Out of the six engineers and fourteen engineering assistants, Nigel was the only one not Navy or former Navy. And none of the others knew anything about subatomic particle energy transference, in the lab or otherwise. Nor did they care. They smashed wrenches into things. They banged about like giant, lumbering bilge rats spreading carnage and destruction in the heart of the ship. They didn’t care about the delicate tuning of the engines or the beauties of quantum field theory. If it worked good enough, they were content.