by Jack Dann
“But what did this?” she pressed. “How could it happen? Who was it?”
“How?” the man said, as if it had never occurred to him to ask. “God was angry.”
And with that, he kicked the wall and twisted down a corridor, expertly adding speed with a push off of the wall on each rebound, too deftly and quickly to follow, leaving us alone.
***
We floated onward, for the most part, in silence. As we got closer to the center of the colony, the spaces got larger and more empty, and it was easier to see how the colony had been savaged. We floated across emptiness, toward the wreckage of what had once been the central hub.
But it was looking like we would have to cut our voyage short. After all this, I was getting worried. My radio was beginning to hiss and chatter, although nobody was broadcasting. Radiation levels were rising. It seemed impossible that there could be a solar storm with no warnings, but my radiation monitor was slowly counting upwards. My fingers unconsciously fondled the pull-tab that activated the emergency beacon, but I didn’t tug on it yet. If I had to, I would use it—better to be iced than to be fried—but we weren’t in trouble, not yet, not as long as the radiation level didn’t continue to rise.
“Barb?” I said. “You watching the radiation?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Pretty weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The sun was supposed to be calm.” We had been watching the solar alert predictions for the entire last week, and no solar events, not even little ones, were predicted.
“The sun?” Barb said, as if something entirely different had been on her mind. “That’s not it—look at the breakdown. We’re seeing neutrons here. What in the universe could be emitting neutrons?”
“Neutrons?” I said, baffled, but then I toggled over to a breakdown display, and saw that she was right. The rising radiation was entirely neutrons and neutron-decay electrons. That couldn’t be right, I thought. Neutrons don’t have enough lifetime to make it from the sun.
And then we were inside the hub. “Yow,” Kibbie said. “I don’t believe it.”
I grabbed onto a strut and stopped, amazed. There was nothing to say.
In the center of the habitat we had expected mostly empty space, perhaps the wreckage of a few transfer ships that had been too damaged to bother to salvage.
We entered a huge chamber with racks upon racks of warhead-tipped missiles. Weapons. The colony had wielded weapons.
In its high-inclination orbit, it had flown over every part of the Earth—well, all of the inhabited parts—twice a day.
At last, I understood everything.
Hercules had been a threat.
All around us, plutonium from hundreds of shattered nuclear warheads leaked neutrons into space. In and around the weapons grew the weeds. They had adapted to the vacuum perfectly and were spreading out, seeking the light, scavenging whatever organic material they could find. Could they actually be living off the radiation? The leaves had a tough, waxy surface to hold in water. When I pulled on a leaf, it was tough, and would not tear loose. I cut it, and a viscous sap welled out of the stem, drying almost instantly to a hard resin that sealed the wound against the vacuum.
Barb pried out a single plant and placed it into a collector’s bag. Me and Kibbie filled our bags, ignoring the wreckage of weapons around us.
“We can’t stay,” Barb said. “Too much radiation.” She looked at us. “Finish up, you guys, we’re getting out of here.”
Our suit waste bags were almost empty—we’d replaced the urine pouches the Hercules dwellers had taken, but the new ones had barely been used. We used them now, and then, in tribute to the plants’ tenacity, we opened our waste bags into space. The liquid contents foamed out, boiling and freezing, and a fine white frost glittered for a moment in the sunlight. Most of it would be lost to the vacuum, but the plants would scavenge some of it, getting back a little fraction of what they’d lost to our harvesting.
We headed out straight along what had once been the spin axis of the habitat, and saw neither the squatters nor the Adders as we went. From the center of the hub we jetted across to the rim, tethered ourselves together for safety, and swung off into the long transfer orbit that would take us back to Malina.
We coasted in silence, and I was alone with my thoughts.
We were fragile. That was the meaning of Hercules habitat. I had always thought that, in the orbital colonies, we did not have wars because we were better than the people left behind on Earth, but that was not it at all. We had no wars because we couldn’t, because we were so fragile that our first battle would also be our last.
For Hercules, it had been. They had weapons, lots of them, but a cargo-load of ball-bearings ejected into place for them to run into at orbital velocity had destroyed them.
We entered eclipse, and, for a moment, all the sunsets of Earth painted us in rusty orange. The stars came out. I turned my gloves’ heater on.
Barb broke into my silence, speaking on the suit-to-suit channel. “You know you don’t really need it, Dylan.”
It took me a moment to come back from my thoughts and realize she was talking to me. “What?”
“The weed. You know you don’t need it.”
The mesh bag was at my belt, filled with the salvia vacui I’d collected. “Don’t I?”
Her voice was infinitely soft, with a gentleness I’d never heard her use before. “Of course not. Didn’t you know that?”
Far ahead of us, I could see flashing strobe beacons that marked the docking ports of Malina, where a hundred thousand people went about their daily lives in a habitat that was as fragile as a glass ornament, ignoring the vacuum that surrounded them.
Home.
I toggled my radio. “Yes,” I said to her. “Yes, I know.”
SPACE BOY
Orson Scott Card
* * *
Orson Scott Card began publishing in 1977, and by 1978 had won the John W. Campbell Award as best new writer of the year. In' 1986, his famous novel Ender's Game, one of the best-known and best-selling SF novels of the '80s, won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards; the next year, his novel Speaker for the Dead, a sequel to Ender's Game, also won both awards, the only time in SF history that a book and its sequel have taken both the Hugo and Nebula awards in sequential years. He won a World Fantasy Award in 1987 for his story "Hatrack River," the start of his long "Prentice Alvin" series, and another Hugo in 1988 for his novella "Eye for Eye." His many short stories have been collected in Cardography, Tales from the Mormon Sea, Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories, The Folk of the Fringe, The Elephants of Posnan and Other Stories, First Meetings: Three Stories from the Enderverse, and the massive Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card. His many novels include Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Hot Sleep, A Planet Called Treason, Songmaster, Hart's Hope, Wyrms, Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, Heartfire, The Call of Earth, Earthborn, Earthfall, Homebody, The Memory of Earth, Treason, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. As editor, he has produced Dragons of Light, Dragons of Darkness, Future on Ice, Future on Fire, and Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. His most recent books are the novels Magic Street and Shadow of the Giant. Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his family.
In the deceptively simple story that follows, he shows us that sometimes if you can't go to space, space will come to you . . .
* * *
TODD MEMORIZED THE Solar System at the age of four. By seven, he knew the distance of every planet from the sun, including the perigee and apogee of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, and its degree of declension from the ecliptic. By ten, he had all the constellations and the names of the major stars.
Mostly, though, he had the astronauts and cosmonauts, every one of them, the vehicles they rode in, the missions they accomplished, what years they flew and their ages at the time they went. He knew every kind of satellite in orbit and the distances and orbits that weren’t classif
ied and, using the telescope Dad and Mom had given him for his sixth birthday, he was pretty sure he knew twenty-two separate satellites that were probably some nation’s little secret.
He kept a shrine to all the men and women who had died in the space programs, on the launching pad, on landing, or beyond the atmosphere. His noblest heroes were the three Chinese voyagers who had set foot on Mars, but never made it home. He envied them, death and all.
Todd was going into space. He was going to set foot on another planet.
The only problem was that by the time he turned thirteen he knew was never going to be particularly good at math. Or even average. Nor was he the kind of athletic kid who looked like an astronaut. He wasn’t skinny, he wasn’t fat, he was just kind of soft-bodied with slackish arms no matter how much he exercised. He ran to school every day, his backpack bumping on his back. He got bruises on his butt, but he didn’t get any faster.
When he ran competitively in P.E. he was always one of the last kids back to the coach, and he couldn’t ever tell where the ball was coming when they threw to him, or, when it left his own hand, where it was likely to go. He wasn’t the last kid chosen for teams—not while Sol and Vawn were in his P.E. class. But no one thought of him as much of a prize, either.
But he didn’t give up. He spent an hour a day in the backyard throwing a baseball against the pitchback net. A lot of the time, the ball missed the frame altogether, and sometimes it didn’t reach the thing at all, dribbling across the lawn.
“If I had been responsible for the evolution of the human race,” he said to his father once, “all the rabbits would have been safe from my thrown stones and we would have starved. And the sabertooth tigers would have outrun whoever didn’t starve.”
Father only laughed and said, “Evolution needs every kind of body. No one kind is best.”
Todd wouldn’t be assuaged so easily. “If the human race was like me, then launching rockets and going into space would have to wait for the possums to do it.”
“Well,” said Father, “that would mean smaller spaceships and less fuel. But where in a spacesuit would they stow that tail?”
Really funny, Dad. Downright amusing. He actually thought about smiling.
He couldn’t tell anybody how desperate and sad he was about the fact that he would probably have to become a high school drama teacher like his Dad. Because if he did say how he felt, they’d make him go to a shrink again to deal with his “depression” or his “resentment of his father” the way they did after his mother disappeared when he was nine and Dad gave up on searching for her.
The shrink just wouldn’t accept it when he screamed at him and said, “My mother’s gone and we don’t know where she went and everybody’s stopped looking! I’m not depressed, you moron, I’m sad. I’m pissed off”
To which the shrink replied with questions like, “Do you feel better when you get to call a grown-up a ‘moron’ and say words like ‘pissed’?” Or, worse yet, “I think we’re beginning to make progress.” Yeah, I didn’t choke you for saying that, so I guess that’s progress.
Nobody even remembered these days that sometimes people were just plain miserable because something really bad was going on in their lives and they didn’t need a drug, they needed somebody to say, “Let’s go get your mother now, she’s ready to come home,” or, “That was a great throw—look, after all these years, Todd’s become a terrific pitcher and he’s great at math so let’s make him an astronaut!”
Ha ha, like that would ever happen.
Instead, he took a kitchen timer with him out to the backyard every afternoon, and when it went off he’d drop what he was doing and go inside and fix dinner. Jared kept trying to help, which was okay because Jared wasn’t a complete idiot even though he was only seven and certifiably insane. Todd’s arm was usually pretty sore from misthrowing the ball, so Jared would take his turn stirring things.
There was a lot of stirring, because when Todd cooked, he cooked. Okay, he mostly opened soup cans or cans of beans or made mac and cheese, but he didn’t nuke them, he made them on the stove. He told Dad that it was because he liked the taste better when it was cooked that way, but one day when Jared said, “Mom always cooked on the stove,” Todd realized that’s why he liked to do it that way. Because Mom knew what was right.
It wasn’t all soup or beans or macaroni. He’d make spaghetti starting with dry noodles and plain tomato sauce and hamburger in a frying pan, and Dad said it was great. Todd even made the birthday cakes for all their birthdays, including his own, and for the last few years he made them from recipes, not from mixes. Ditto with his chocolate chip cookies.
Why was it he could calculate a half recipe involving thirds of a cup, and couldn’t find n in the equation n = 5?
He took a kind of weird pleasure from the way Dad’s face got when he bit into one of Todd’s cookies, because Todd had finally remembered or figured out all the things Mom used to do to make her cookies different from other people’s. So when Dad got all melancholy and looked out the window or closed his eyes while he chewed, Todd knew he was thinking about her and missing her even though Dad never talked about her. I made you remember her, Todd said silently. I win.
Jared didn’t talk about Mom, but that was for a different reason. For a year after Mom left, Jared talked about her all the time. He would tell everybody that the monster in his closet ate her. At first people looked at him with fond indulgence. Later, they recoiled and changed the subject.
He only stopped after Dad finally yelled at him. “There’s no monster in your closet!” It sounded like somebody had torn the words from him like pulling off a finger.
Todd had been doing the dishes while Dad put Jared to bed, and by the time Todd got to the back of the house, Jared was in his room crying and Dad was sitting on the edge of his and Mom’s bed and he was crying and then Todd, like a complete fool, said, “And you send me to a shrink?”
Dad looked up at Todd with his face so twisted with pain that Todd could hardly recognize him, and then he buried his face in his hands again, and so Todd went in to Jared and put his arm around him and said, “You’ve got to stop saying that, Jared.”
“But it’s true,” Jared said. “I saw her go. I warned her but she did the very exact thing I told her not to do because it almost got my arm the time I did it, and—”
Todd hugged him closer, “Right, I know, Jared. I know. But stop saying it, okay? Because nobody’s ever going to believe it.”
“You believe me, don’t you, Todd?”
Todd said, “Of course I do. Where else could she have gone?” Why not agree with the crazy kid? Todd was already seeing a shrink. He had nothing to lose. “But if we talk about it, they’ll just think we’re insane. And it made Dad cry.”
“Well he made me cry too!”
“So you’re even. But don’t do it anymore, Jared. It’s a secret.”
“Same thing with the monster’s elf?”
“The monster itself? What do you mean?”
“The elf. Of the monster. I can’t talk about the elf?”
Geeze louise, doesn’t he let up? “Same thing with the monster’s elf and his fairies and his dentist, too.”
Jared looked at him like he was insane. “The monster doesn’t have a dentist. And there’s no such thing as fairies.”
Oh, right, lecture me on what’s real and what’s not!
So it went on, days and weeks and months, Todd fixing dinner and Dad getting home from after-school play practices and they’d sit down and eat and Dad would tel) funny things that happened that day, doing all the voices. Sometimes he sang the stories, even when he had to have thirty words on the same note till he came up with a rhyme. They’d all laugh and it was great, they had a great life . . .
Except Mom wasn’t there to sing harmony. The way they used to do it was they’d take turns singing a line and the other one would rhyme to it. Mom could always make a great rhyme that was exactly in rhythm with the song. Dad was funny about
it, but Mom was actually good.
Grief is like that. You live on, day to day, happy sometimes, but you can always think of something that makes you sad all over again.
Everybody had their secrets, even though everybody else knew them. Jared had his closet monster and its elf. Dad had his memory of Mom, which he never discussed with anyone. Todd had his secret dreams of going to other worlds.
Then on a cool Saturday morning in September, a few weeks after his thirteenth birthday, he was out in the side yard, screwing the spare hose onto the faucet so he could water Mom’s roses, when he heard a hissing sound behind him and turned around in time to see a weird kind of shimmering appear in midair just a few feet out from the wall.
Then a bare child-size foot slid from nowhere into existence right in the middle of the shimmering.
If it had been a hairy claw or some slime-covered talon or the mandibles of some enormous insect, Todd might have been more alarmed. Instead, his fear at the strangeness of a midair arrival was trumped by his curiosity. All at once Jared’s talk about mother disappearing in the closet because she did the same thing he did when the monster “caught his arm” didn’t sound quite as crazy.
The foot was followed, in the natural course of things, by a leg, with another foot snaking out beside it. The legs were bare and kept on being bare right up to the top, where Todd was vaguely disgusted to see that whoever was coming was not a child. It was a man as hairy as the most apelike of the guys in gym class, and as sweaty and naked as they were when they headed for the showers. Except that he was about half their size.
“Eew, get some pants on,” said Todd, more by reflex than anything. Since the little man’s head had not yet emerged, Todd didn’t feel like he was being rude to a person—personhood really seemed to require a head, in Todd’s opinion—but apparently the dwarf—no, the elf, it was pretty obvious that Jared must have been referring to something like this—must have heard him somehow because he stopped wriggling further out, and instead a hand snaked out of the opening and covered the naked crotch.
