Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space

by Jack Dann

  “Hey, Leeila,” I said.

  She leaned back slightly against my hand. “Hey, Dylan,” she said. Sina, Darty, and Nan, the friends she was hovering around with, acknowledged me with slight nods.

  I stood there with my hand on her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her flesh though the jumper, not really knowing what to say. The girls she was with had suddenly become silent, which didn’t help any. “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Leeila said. “Talking.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Guess I shouldn’t disturb you.”

  “You’re not disturbing us,” she said.

  “Well, I’m heading for the library.”

  “Sure,” she said. “With your cluster.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I’d never really introduced her to Kibbie and Barb and the two Teniman kids who sometimes stuck around with us, but she knew well enough who my cluster was; I guess everybody in the cohort pretty much knew, just like I knew that Sina, Darty, and Nan, and a couple of other girls I didn’t know very well were hers. Everybody has their cluster. Clusters grow and shrink and change, but me and Barb and Kibbie had always been a cluster, as long as I could remember. It was hard to imagine that we would grow up and drift apart, making new clusters based on our work and our families.

  I knew that eight pairs of eyes were watching me as I walked away. I focused on walking gracefully, swinging my arms a little, and was concentrating on walking so hard I almost ran right into a structural column. I tried to ignore the giggling. It was too far away for me to actually hear, but I knew it was there.

  I always liked the library. I liked it even if I just closed my eyes and smelled.

  Visitors have remarked with distaste on the closed atmosphere of our habitat, where every molecule of air has circulated a thousand times. But it seems to me that it would be very disconcerting to be in a place where you couldn’t smell the air. You could blindfold any one of us and put us down anywhere on Malina, and we could tell right where we were on the habitat by how it smelled. The greenhouse modules had their smells of chemicals and water and chlorophyll, the machine bays the more subtle scents of ozone and silicone oil, the dormitories the odors of humanity. The library had a complicated smell mixed of paper and people and electronics and recirculated air. It actually did have some books—real, physical books; words printed on sheets of paper—but mostly it was a quiet place for students to study, with fast-bandwidth connections to the electronic databases. Barb was already waiting there for Kibbie and me.

  Barb, as usual, went directly to the point. “It’s really weird,” she said. “There’s kilotons of information about the Hercules disaster here, but no details. Nothing ever quite says just exactly what happened.”

  “So?” Kibbie said. “I know what happened. It was an impact event, right? I mean, that was before space traffic control, right? All the habitats and construction bots and trailers and ore-freighters and old fuel tanks, and who knows what all stuff. Nobody was shepherding all that junk.”

  “That’s why we have space traffic control now,” I said. “We learned that in class. One chunk of steel at twenty thousand miles per hour can ruin your whole day.” That was an expression Mr. Cubertou had used in the unit we did on hazards of orbital environments. It showed how old-fashioned he was, talking about miles per hour instead of meters per second.

  “Yeah,” said Barb, slowly. “But exactly what hit it? Nobody quite mentions it.”

  “What kind of habitat was it, anyway?” Kibbie asked. “Any of your sources say? Refugees?”

  “Or idealists, I’ll bet,” I said. Many of the habitats from way back then had housed refugees. Earth had a lot of wars, and people were always kicking other people off of one chunk of desert or another. That’s a problem with planets; you can’t just build more land when you want to. It’s hard to see how anybody would want to live on a planet. Back in those days, a lot of the old habitats were full of idealists and dissidents, people who didn’t like the governments and rules of Earth, thinking that—hah!—space would be a place of fewer rules, instead of more. A few were even prison habitats. Today, the new habitats were capitalist—places for people going into the space mining, manufacturing, and service economy, staging areas for asteroid mining, and manufacturing and transport nodes for industrial production. But not back then—it took a while for the mining economy to take off.

  “Oh, I did find that out,” Barb said. “It was an old nation-state habitat. You know, patriotism? We learned about that in school.”

  “Wow, weird,” I said. I knew about nations; they still even had them on Earth, although I couldn’t see why. The idea sounded so strange to me that I just couldn’t imagine it. Millions of people—sometimes billions—so many that most people didn’t know people who knew each other? How odd.

  “Which nation was it?” Kibbie asked.

  “One of the old books said, but I don’t remember,” Barb said. “Austrians. Or Australians. Armenians, maybe? I think it was something with an A. Does it matter?”

  “Nah, doesn’t make any real difference,” Kibbie said. “One nation is just like another. It hardly matters—they’re dead now anyway.” Kibbie bounced in his seat as he spoke.

  Did I describe us yet? I don’t think so. Kibbie was squat and powerfully built, with hair so dark and curly his head looked like a sponge. He was sitting there, constantly moving, one moment his legs up over the chair in front of him, the next moment bouncing to internal music.

  Unlike Kibbie, I’m perfectly average—average height, average weight, average-looking face and hair. So boring that nobody could even pick me out in a crowd of two.

  I hate being average.

  Barb has long legs and an awkward way of moving that seems as if she hasn’t quite grown into her body and is about to trip over her own feet. But when she gets into low gravity, she moves like a dancer. She has hair that’s some undetermined color, right on that dividing line where some people say it’s brown, and others are certain it’s blonde. It’s straight, and she keeps it cut to a length where, when she goes into micro-gee, it flies straight out from her head, like a sea anemone, waving in each puff from the circulation fans. I want to go up and run my hands through it, just to feel the way it moves under my fingers, but of course I don’t.

  Barb’s my best friend, not my girlfriend. I don’t have a girlfriend.

  I’d like to change that.

  We were studying antique technologies in science the next day, and the teacher—Mr. Cubertou again—had just gotten to explaining Otto cycle engines before the class got released. We would be building them the next week, I bet. “I got it,” Kibbie said, as we headed out. “Suck, squeeze, bang, blow.” He counted it out on his fingers. “That’s not a technology, Dylan, that’s my new philosophy of life.”

  I cracked up. “I’m with you,” I said, although, to be truthful, my knowledge of the subtleties of human relations was mostly theoretical. So was his, I’m pretty sure.

  We met Barb coming out of her last lecture, and I decided I’d better change the subject.

  “Which way are you thinking to go next year?” I asked Barb. “What do you figure you’ll select?” I didn’t need to ask; I just wanted some reassurance.

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas,” she said, “but haven’t picked one.”

  “Really? I thought you were in for pilot.” It surprised me that she was still uncertain. With her lightning ability to calculate orbits, being a pilot was the obvious choice. And she’d be great at it.

  “I don’t know, don’t know,” she sang. “Maybe, maybe not. There are so many choices. You?”

  I scuffed the deck with a foot. “Dunno either.”

  Kibbie said, “Anything but fish nanny for me.”

  “Anything?” I asked. “Sure. How about oxygen plant monitor.” That was the lowest job I could think of, overseeing the algae that turn carbon dioxide into oxygen in their endless transparent spaghetti tubes. A job for somebody with no ambition.


  Kibbie shrugged. “Suits me,” he said. “Easy work, not a lot of tension. Might be nice.”

  I stared at him. “You’re joking. Algae monitor? You?”

  He cracked a grin. “Of course I’m joking. I don’t know, I’m still thinking about it. I like vacuum welding. Building stuff.”

  Yeah, that was something Kibbie was good at. I could see him as a vacuum welder.

  “But that could get boring too, I guess,” he said. “I want some adventure, you know it? Maybe I’ll pick planetary geophysics as a specialty, so I can go be an ammonia prospector for the outer moon expeditions. That would be cool.”

  “You gotta like being lonely if you want to do icy moon expeditions,” Barb said. “I don’t think I could take the outer moons.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s way out there.”

  “Maybe I should go for medicine,” Barb said, as if she hadn’t heard Kibbie. “You can use that anywhere.”

  “Anywhere?” I said. “You thinking of emigrating to another hab?”

  Barb looked at the deck. “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said.

  “I couldn’t even think of leaving Malina,” I said.

  I was suddenly sucking vacuum at the thought of Barb and Kibbie leaving. I didn’t know what I wanted. Sometimes Malina seemed so tiny, so claustrophobic; I hated all the adults and their endless rules. But I couldn’t think of leaving it, and everybody I knew.

  I guess that didn’t matter to Barb, though. Barb was heartless. It was good that I learned that about her. She was the ice princess, ruthless and unsentimental.

  “I want to be an explorer,” I blurted. It didn’t make any sense, even to me. Hadn’t I just said I never wanted to leave Malina? But suddenly Malina seemed so tiny. So, I don’t know, safe.

  I didn’t know what I wanted.

  “Yeah? An explorer?” Barb said. “You just said you weren’t going to leave Malina. What are you going to explore?”

  “We’re starting with Hercules,” Kibbie said. “You coming?”

  “You bet your oxygen I am,” Barb said, and suddenly everything was cool, and it was clear we were a cluster again.

  ***

  Hercules haunted my dreams, my nightmares.

  Hercules had been a stressed-shell colony, one of the first, interior tension cables holding it together like a suspension bridge, with parks and tiny groves of forest on an outermost level, and habitats and offices and manufacturing levels suspended above, in the lower gravity regions. I could see it vividly. All at once the air inside the colony must have come alive with lines of fire. Cables pinged and then snapped, and the broken cables whizzed through the air, singing like whips, slashing aluminum structures into ribbons of twisted metal. Stressed panels ripped, releasing air that froze as it boiled off into vacuum. The lakes in the outermost park levels rose up in waterspouts as the pressure suddenly dropped, serpents of water writhing in crazy agony, and then there was fire, real fire, as million-liter tanks of rocket propellant were ripped open and the spilled fuel burst into flame, ignited by sparks from meteor trails.

  The fire didn’t last long. With the outer panels breached, the shell blew apart, exploding into shards like a punctured balloon.

  Fifty thousand people had lived in Hercules.

  I will skip past our weeks of planning, not that it wasn’t important, but without showing all the diagrams and calculations, which would certainly bore you, it wouldn’t make much sense. Space suits have rocket packs, but they are only designed for jetting around the outside of the habitat, and if we used up a kilometer per second of backpack fuel going out to Hercules and getting back, it would have been noticed. Our first plan had been to do a Tarzan-style swing over to the colony, using a super-strength tether as a whip to give us the velocity to change orbits. That was a dangerous move, one that would certainly get us iced if we got caught, no matter what our target might be. But the problem was that the ruined colony of Hercules was on the radar watch— nothing that big was allowed to go unwatched, and the swing trajectory was too long; there was no way space traffic wouldn’t see us going, and ask who we were, and alert our parents.

  “There’s no way to do it in our suits alone,” Barb said, frustrated. “I’ve looked and looked for a way, but it doesn’t work, not without too high a risk of getting caught.”

  “So how do we do it,” I asked her.

  “We have to sneak a ride on an oat-boat.”

  Oat-boat was the nickname everybody used for orbital transfer boats, the small spaceships used for ship-to-colony transfers. They were “oat-boats” partly because that was easier to say than orbital transfer ship, and partly because what they shipped from one colony to another was very often food. The orbit-to-orbit run, Barb pointed out, dropped in to a slightly lower orbit—one that, if we picked it right, would just kiss the Hercules habitat’s orbit. On the right boat, we could drop free with almost zero velocity relative to Hercules. The delta-V we’d need would be small enough that we could use our suits to do the final maneuvering, and we could swing back according to our original idea.

  “An oat-boat?” said Kibbie. “Not a problem. I know a guy.”

  The guy Kibbie knew was a friend of his older brother, a guy named Rip. Rip, as Kibbie told us, was apprenticed as a hand on an inter-colony freighter, and didn’t have a problem if we decided to sneak on board right before a colony-to-colony run. We all agreed that this would be a better plan.

  And when we met him to check the plan, Rip mentioned that he’d been to Hercules.

  “Really?” I asked, suddenly interested. “When?”

  “Oh, years ago. When we were kids.”

  “You’ve been there? Yourself?” I’d known that some of the more daredevil kids in previous cohorts had gone over to the abandoned habitats, but I hadn’t met somebody who’d done it.

  “Oh, yeah.” At my look of astonishment, he said, “See, in our cohort—we were what, four years ahead of you? That was the thing to do. Hit the old wrecked hab, paint it up a little. It was macho, you know that word? And there’s a certain thing there, you know of it, right? Weed. We used to call it chinga weed.” He laughed. “It grows in vacuum, anywhere that there’s enough contamination for it to scavenge.”

  A thrill ran through me. Yeah, I knew about the weed.

  “So what’s it like? Hercules, I mean.”

  He paused. “You’ll see.”

  “And—do you know? What happened to it, anyway? We couldn’t figure that out from the records.”

  Rip shook his head. “Look around. Maybe you’ll find out.”

  The weed was my other objective, the one I’d told Kibbie about but not Barb. Going to the ruined habitat and seeing it close up, understanding firsthand what had happened, that was the main part of it. The adults always said that you can never understand something just by reading or being told about it, and we had been told about disasters that could happen to orbital habitats for the last fourteen years. I wanted to see it. Hercules had been an old habitat, a first-generation colony, but I wanted to see it for myself, feel the bent and shattered metal under my gloved fingers, maybe even find something that might explain the mystery of exactly what had happened to it.

  But weed was my second goal. It had an official name, salvia vacui—literally sage that grows in the void—but the kids had a cruder name for it.

  If you chewed on it, it made you relaxed, happy. Or so the gossip went; I’d never had any. I’d never even seen it. It had some kind of drug in it, I guess, but mild enough that you wouldn’t lose your judgment and open a valve to vacuum or forget to do your suit check. The older kids called it chinga weed, because the story was that if you shared some of the weed with a girl you liked, and you both chewed some, then she’d be so relaxed and happy that you’d be able to get some time in. It was—or I’d heard the older kids say it was—a surefire way to score.

  I couldn’t quite picture how it went. What did you do, come up to a girl and say, let’s go away alone somewhere, see, I have some of
this weed, let’s chew it? Surely they’d know what you were thinking about, they must know the same stories. I couldn’t ever see Barb doing that. When I tried to picture Leeila, it was a little easier, but the picture was still a little fuzzy in the details.

  But I wanted to find some of the weed anyway.

  So that was it, my dirty secret. Exploration, sure, that’s mostly why I wanted to go.

  But the weed, well, that was part of it, too.

  ***

  We did our planning in bits and chunks of time, between our schooling and our work rotations. Schooling had finished lectures for the term and was a series of overlapping projects. Form teams and build a closed life-support pod. List five economic factors that caused the Anteros asteroid rebellion to fail. Form teams and debate your reasons. Could the rebels have known that it would fail? Form teams to debate both sides of the question.

  A lot of team building.

  Outside the formal schooling, we had our jobs, and that was schooling, too. They rotated us kids through every position in colony maintenance and life support. This was partly so we would have some experience in different roles, to help us when we made our selections, and partly so that we would all have the knowledge and training to be able to fill in a position without warning in an emergency. But mostly, though, we were rotated through the crud jobs, the icky work nobody else wanted to do, and we kids were all a hundred percent certain that the main reason we rotated through was because the adults had the power to force us to do the crud work so that they wouldn’t have to.

  That was our big worry, the X-for-unknown factor in our planning. Assignments hadn’t been announced for the next work cycle yet. I might be assigned, say, to external maintenance. That was a job that was just like breadfruit pudding to me, one I’d grovel and beg to get in any other cycle, but one where the work crew had to be on call 24 hours, available on twenty minutes notice to fix a problem for the whole duration of the twenty-day shift. No way I’d be able to sneak away until after Hercules was receding far into the distance.