by Nancy Kress
“So what?” Capelo said. “My work is real. The tunnel closed, just about … let me see … ten minutes ago. And if that’s the way it happened, Pierce is trapped on the other side of the tunnel. Forever. Man missed the last lifeboat on the Titanic, the last ship out of Atlantis.”
Slowly the lieutenant turned to face the three civilians in the room. Kaufman was suddenly glad he was wearing an army uniform; it might make the young man answer. “Lieutenant, if Admiral Pierce is trapped on the other side of the tunnel, who’s in charge here?”
“General Dvorovenko, sir.”
Would Dvorovenko have engineered this? No, Kaufman decided. Dvorovenko had been reluctant for the entire press conference to go forward. So who?
Marbet said to Kaufman, very low, “Not Dvorovenko. Not any military. The reactions of the officers are wrong for that.”
Capelo heard them. Unlike the others, he didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Maimed and battered, covered with foamcasts and med patches, too skinny and too stressed, the physicist looked like a chewed-upon rat. He said loudly, “Not military? But who else would Pierce listen to? What bloody civilian genius would have had the sheer balls, not to mention the sheer influence, to convince Pierce that scientific truth wasn’t actually truth but just a political conspiracy directed at him personally? Somebody played on Pierce’s weakest point, his paranoia.”
General Dvorovenko came back into the room, trailed by his officers. Kaufman didn’t have to be a Sensitive to read the shock and excitement in their bearings.
“Gentlemen, madam,” Dvorovenko said, “we have a change of plan. The press conference will go forward, but not with you. The situation has changed. You will be conducted to your quarters to await further briefing.”
“Wait, please, General,” Marbet said sweetly. All at once she looked younger, very vulnerable, a defenseless woman appealing to a knowledgeable source of power. “Could you tell us what happened? I mean, we’d hear it on the news, I know, but … could you tell us?”
“Certainly, Ms. Grant. Admiral Pierce has been tragically trapped behind the closing tunnel while fighting off a last sudden attack by Fallers. He cannot return. The effective government he left behind will guarantee a smooth transition to his second-in-command on Mars, Acting Supreme Commander General Yang Lee.”
Capelo gave a hilarious snort.
Kaufman knew nothing of Yang Lee; the general must have risen in power while Kaufman was on World. He said to Dvorovenko, “General, is General Lee in a position to keep in check the unrest that will inevitably occur with such huge changes to the … the Solar System as a whole?” No war. No space tunnels. No commerce with colonies. Half the navy gone forever behind the tunnels.
“I’m sure he will be able to do that,” Dvorovenko said. “You three will be escorted now to your quarters.”
“Thank you,” Marbet said.
They followed the young lieutenant from the room. In the corridor Marbet said to Kaufman, “I’m staying with you, Lyle.”
“Me, too,” Capelo said. The lieutenant, eager to return to the conference room, made no objection.
In a stateroom Kaufman had never seen before (“your quarters”), he and Marbet and Tom looked at each other. Marbet said, “Another revolution? More fighting?”
“Can’t tell,” Kaufman said. “Everything’s different.”
“And Pierce is gone,” she said.
Capelo said, “When do you think they’ll take us home?”
“Oh, soon,” Marbet said. “We’re public figures now. Of course, Tom, you were before.”
“Fuck that,” Capelo said, “I just want to see my family again.”
Kaufman said, “We still have to stick to the story Marbet concocted.”
She faced him. “You resent me for that, Lyle, don’t you.”
He didn’t answer.
Capelo said, “She saved all our lives, Lyle.”
“I know.”
Capelo said, with sudden force, “And if you’d have thought of it, you’d have done the same thing, Lyle. Look at all the lies you told to get us as far as Tunnel Number One. Don’t resent it now because this time you’re not the one who masterminded the brilliant deception. Give her the Goddamn credit and stop trying to be the only one who can run the show.”
Anger flooded Kaufman. Before he could react, Capelo had headed his power chair toward the door. “I’m going to sleep while I can. But I know one thing … I’d really like to meet whoever set up Pierce to stay behind that tunnel long enough for it to close. There’s the brilliant deceiver that makes both you and Marbet look like snakeoil salesmen.
“I wonder who the hell it was.”
THIRTY-FOUR
THERA STATION, MARS ORBIT
During the weeks traveling from Space Tunnel #1, Kaufman divided his time between the observation deck and the confused, contradictory, delayed broadcasts from Mars.
He and Capelo and Marbet traveled first class, aboard a luxury liner with the silly name Golden Diamond. The ship had been carrying businesspeople, diplomats, and tourists to Artemis System. Now, having no tunnel to Artemis, it had turned around and sailed for home with its bewildered load of passengers. Most of the tunnel fleet was likewise being detached and sent back to Mars. At this end of the Solar System there was nothing left to defend, and no one to defend it against.
General Yang Lee’s provisional military government fell within a week. Kaufman gathered from the broadcasts that Lee, although firmly in command of the navy, had neither the army support nor a sufficient political base to hold onto power. Mars had controlled the Solar System because she controlled the space tunnels. Without the tunnels, Earth’s enormously greater population asserted its force. That force, however, was two months away from Mars. Fighting broke out in Lowell City, in Tharsis, in Arcadia, in N’sanga, in Pomeroy, in Kepler City, in Shangsitsu. A triumvirate was formed and struggled to organize a popular election on two planets, two moons, space stations that were declaring themselves separate political entities, and the Belt. The effort failed.
Businesses declared bankruptcy. Others were suddenly privatized, sometimes with opposition and sometimes without. Out of the chaos the Martian utilities emerged as popular heroes. Against great odds, and pretty much without choice, they kept operational the domes, the farms, the transportation infrastructure. Would-be dictators began to cultivate ties with leading civil servants, who had accomplished practical miracles far exceeding their authority. Since no one could define that authority anyway, the people of Mars began to pledge support for engineers and transport czars.
In this confused time, communications were disrupted, restored, disrupted again. The data packets that Kaufman viewed sometimes contradicted each other. Trying to sort through them all, Kaufman began to sense something else underlying the political hysteria, the military maneuvering, even the endless tearful interviews with people whose families had been cut off forever by the closings of the space tunnels.
“The Lost,” the broadcasts were calling those souls. But it was more than individuals, Kaufman saw, that had been lost. More than colonies or warships or business empires. Humanity as a whole had lost something large in its conception of itself.
Sol System’s expansive optimism had come from the space tunnels, even in wartime. We travel to the stars! We are in conflict with aliens! The galaxy is at stake! We have potential control of spacetime itself!
No more. Gone, all of it, severed like some healthy limb amputated by mistake: an arm, a leg. Even though the Solar System believed it was the Fallers who had closed the tunnels despite Admiral Pierce’s heroic fight to stop them, the tunnels were still amputated. Humanity was in systemic shock. It was also diminished.
Mankind had lost the stars.
No one believed that current human technology could build ships to span the huge distances between star systems. No one had needed to even begin to develop such technology; there were the tunnels, handed to humans by gods so long gone that no one felt the human g
odship threatened. Now that Space Tunnel #1 was a floating solid invisible wall, all that was left was the Solar System. Once it had seemed a huge unknowable ocean of space. But in contrast to what had been lost, it was a puddle.
From the observation deck Kaufman traced the familiar constellations in the black sky. In the direction of Draco lay Artemis System. Han System was not far from Betelgeuse, in Orion. Virgo “held” Gemini System. Inhabited, all three of them. Visible but unreachable from Sol. Nor could their human colonies reach the mother world. It was a shared loss among systems that would never share anything else again.
Kaufman tried to express some of this to Tom Capelo. The physicist was unsympathetic.
“Lyle, the alternative was to put spacetime through a flop transition. Compared to that, this isn’t such a bad outcome.”
“I know. But what we’ve lost—”
“Look at what we gained,” Capelo said impatiently. “The new equations—not that I’m boasting, of course—shed tremendous light on the physics of large-scale flop transitions. Plus losing Hell-Bent-On-Destruction Pierce. Not that this new string of would-be rulers looks any better.”
“They might be.”
“No evidence of it so far,” Capelo said, and moved gingerly away to check his messages again. With the superb medical care on the Golden Diamond, he was healing rapidly. But he still moved carefully, and his stress over his family was not helping. Carol and Sudie were safe on Earth. It had been a great joy to Capelo to learn that Amanda was with his sister Kristen and her husband. But since this message had come through, from a third party on an official channel (another unexplained mystery), Capelo had heard nothing of their whereabouts. The broadcasts reported fighting in Tharsis.
To Kaufman’s surprise, Marbet didn’t share his sense of loss over the space tunnels any more than Capelo had. “We should never have been trusted with those tunnels in the first place,” she said.
“‘Should’? ‘Been trusted with’? Those are moral judgments, Marbet. History isn’t morality.”
“I know that,” she said, her chin hardening as she looked at him. Things hadn’t been easy between her and Kaufman since Marbet had concocted the elaborate public lie about Pierce’s heroism and their own passive role as observers. The lie had, as Capelo acidly pointed out, saved their lives. But it had also bound them, including Kaufman, to live the lie for the rest of their lives. Kaufman didn’t like it.
“History might not be moral,” Marbet continued, “but whatever beings made the tunnels and artifacts were intensely moral. They set it up so that any species who didn’t respect the limits of the artifacts and tunnels didn’t get to use them anymore.”
“You make it sound as if we’re naughty children-who have been sent to their room:”
“We are. We were never ready for the space tunnels. Think of Essa.”
Kaufman never thought of Essa. He said, “To you, she’s some sort of symbol, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Reckless, adventurous, totally undisciplined. Like humanity. Even though she wasn’t human, she came from the same DNA seed. And where is Essa now? If she’s lucky, she’s been confined again to World. If she wasn’t lucky, she’s dead. We were lucky, Lyle. We got home. Ann and Dieter were lucky, too—they got confined to where they wanted to be anyway. The unlucky ones are trapped in systems that can’t support them without supplies from Sol. We caused that—the bigger we, humanity—with our recklessness and undiscipline. Until we can do better, we should stay in our own star system.”
He looked at her bleakly. So beautiful, so perceptive, so tender. And he had never before realized how far apart their thinking was.
She read him accurately, of course. Marbet said quietly, “You don’t agree, I know. You’re thinking we two really don’t belong together, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked away from him, out at the stars. “That’s your decision, of course.”
“And yours.”
“No,” she said. “It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.”
To that there was no answer. He moved away, but Marbet caught his arm. “Lyle … don’t.…” But what he wasn’t supposed to do took her a while to get out.
Finally she said, “Listen, dear heart. It’s a hard truth, but truth nonetheless. Let me borrow an image from Tom. From his physics.”
She stopped again, and Kaufman saw in the working of the smooth brown skin at her throat how much this mattered to her.
“In Tom’s quantum universe, as I understand it, everything is probable. Everything, even the existence of matter. Things like mass and energy can change form but can’t ever get lost. Time can flow forward or backward. Nothing is completely irreversible. But that’s just not true in the human universe we live in. Some actions—some choices!—are irreversible. The tunnels closed. Ann and Dieter chose World. Tom’s first wife died. At the human scale, many things happen forever, and all we can do is live with the consequences.”
He said stiffly, “I don’t understand the significance of your trite little homily.”
“Yes, you do,” she said, dropping his arm. “I told a lie you didn’t like. It can’t be undone. I don’t even want to undo it, although it wouldn’t have been your choice for yourself. You either accept that it happened and we go on together, or we don’t. But not this polite, half-together-half-not stance you’ve taken. I don’t accept that. So choose, Lyle, and accept the irreversible consequences.”
He said nothing. Marbet said, “I won’t wait forever.” Still Kaufman didn’t reply. A ripple ran through the crowd of passengers at the other end of the observation deck, and Kaufman turned to see what had happened. It was Tom Capelo, barreling heedlessly toward them, elbowing people aside. “Lyle! Marbet!”
“Tom,” she said, “don’t crack your cast against—”
Too late. Capelo winced. The elderly woman rubbed her own arm and glared at Capelo, who remained oblivious. “I heard from Kristen!”
“Wonderful. Where are—”
“On Thera Station, in orbit around Mars. I don’t know what they’re doing there, the message was short, but she and Martin have Amanda with them and they’re all safe!” Capelo’s thin dark face glowed. His hair needed cutting; it gave him the wild look of a happy drunk.
“I’m so glad,” Marbet said warmly.
“Come with me to convince our paranoid captain that the ship can make a brief docking at Thera Station without being vaporized into quantum particles.”
Marbet and Capelo left. Kaufman keyed data into his handheld, which connected him to ship’s library. Thera Station was owned by Ouranis Enterprises, a huge business complex with heavy military contracts, extensive presence throughout the Solar System, and a reputation for maneuvering somewhat outside interstellar law. A large Ouranis facility might be a player in the political chaos on Mars; the station would certainly be heavily defended against any bellicose results of that chaos. But Kaufman couldn’t see how Tom’s sister would have ended up at Thera Station.
* * *
As the Golden Diamond approached Mars, the disturbing view of lost stars was partly blocked by the dark curve of the planet’s night side. Kaufman watched the curve grow larger and larger. It looked solid, eternal.
The newscasts had introduced a new name into the political struggle going on below: General Tolliver Gordon, SADC. Gordon was the person who had sponsored Kaufman’s initial trip to World, to dig up the Protector Artifact. Without his deft, visionary, practical maneuvering, that expedition would not have happened, nor anything that had followed. Gordon was trying to forge a workable alliance among the military factions and commercial transnationals that contended for control of Mars.
“Tom is everywhere at once,” Marbet said to Kaufman, practically the first words she had spoken to him in days. They stood with Capelo in the shielded reception area of the Golden Diamond’s vehicle bay. The ship’s captain hadn’t agreed to dock at Thera Station; he had too many passengers urg
ently clamoring to get home. But he had agreed to allow a shuttle from the station to pick up the famous Dr. Thomas Capelo. Capelo’s wife and his younger daughter remained on Earth, where Capelo was headed to resume his professorship at Harvard, but in a few minutes Kristen, Martin, and Amanda would be aboard the Golden Diamond.
Capelo couldn’t stay still. The reception area, which didn’t depressurize when the vehicle bay did, was no more than ten meters long and three wide: a miniature observation deck of clear tough plastic. Capelo paced it rapidly, bumping into people, his every movement jerky as an armament recoil. For every action, Kaufman thought wryly, is an opposite and equal reaction. Capelo hadn’t seen his beloved daughter in months. His gleeful impatience infected them all. Even the ship’s tech smiled.
The captain of the Golden Diamond, a genemod-handsome man with sharp blue eyes, watched Capelo warily. Kaufman recognized the look. It was how he himself had once regarded Capelo: as an alien to be carefully kept track of before he did something too bizarre to control.
The vehicle bay door slid open. The shuttle, marked with the Ouranis logo, edged inside. Kaufman saw the reception display chart the repressurization. The second the plastic door unlocked, Capelo hurtled through it.
“Amanda!”
The shuttle airlock opened, and Amanda Capelo threw herself into her father’s arms.
Kaufman blinked. He hadn’t seen Tom Capelo’s daughter in—what? Two years? Three? He remembered her as a polite, tall, skinny young girl with straight fair hair. Hugging Capelo now was a young woman with a spectacular figure and short, fashionably-sheared blonde hair drawn back to show wickedly expensive diamond earrings. He said to Marbet, “How old is Amanda?”
“Older than Tom thinks.”
They followed the captain of the Golden Diamond into the vehicle area. Three more people emerged from the shuttle airlock. The short thin woman who looked like Tom was undoubtedly his sister. Her husband hung back, smiling quietly, in sharp contrast to a handsome boy who thrust his hand at Capelo the moment he released Amanda.
