Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Thinking about it in the weeks that followed, he realized two things.

  First, that he wasn't sure why he wanted what he wanted. Her face was nothing exceptional, but to him it was beautiful. He didn't know why. As for the rest of her—a guy could hardly not notice—she was middling tall, slim, moved easy, and an hourglass figure that a twentieth century noir writer would have described as right on time. Those details, though, were not important. What mattered was the person behind those perfect blue eyes. He wasn't sure of the why about that, either. All he knew, she knocked sparks off him. Blew from his mind the cobwebs of long held assumptions. Like music and dance, he didn't understand why he liked what he heard and saw. All he knew, she mattered in his life.

  But she'd said don't get serious. It would spoil things.

  Second, they came from different worlds. By peculiar happenstance their lives had become entangled. Moment to moment the entanglement felt good. Neither wanted to terminate but, unless her switches flipped, the time would come when the path of their lives would break apart. Were he to force the question would be to hasten the moment.

  So it stayed platonic. Not once did they, as the going phrase put it, get down and gloriously dirty. From time to time they hugged affectionately, as when the Cornhusker team crazyplayed an impossible touchdown for a last second win, but almost never did they kiss. The time he remembered...

  A midwinter day, deeply cold but windless, they came back from his ‘spresso break but lingered at the Information Company's door, prolonging their time together with talk of no great consequence. She hadn't sealed her jacket; styled for show, it closed with long, tapered rods that fitted through loops. He was in shirtsleeves, but in her presence the cold didn't matter. As they talked, hardly thinking what he did, he began to connect the rods and loops. Suddenly she noticed.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded and, mockingly, put a thumb to her mouth. Treating her like a child, she meant. Bundling her up against the cold.

  Sigmund Freud could have explained what he was doing, but no one took Old Sigmund seriously anymore. Taken by her jest, though, his reply came automatic. Not touching her otherwise, he bent to kiss. At the last moment she saw it coming and turned her head so it found her cheek instead of her lips, but that was all right.

  Laughing—secretly delighted?—she backed a step. “You nut,” she bubbled, quickly turned, and walked away.

  Next afternoon, she showed up at the Information Company again. Things were busy; word had just got out of a more-than-routine update in the genome assay textbook, and everyone taking the course had to have it down copied to their units Right Now. There were all the usual compatibility and unit capacity problems, plus update status of each unit's copy and a few unsanctioned or pirated copies turning up. Those often caused the copy to be scrambled. That, just as often, caused the unit's owner to blame the Information Company instead of the textbook's copyright holder, so it had to be watched for. All those details had to be patiently checked out and explained. It took time. Lines formed.

  Normally, when things were like that she'd smile, wave friendly-like, and go away. This time, though, she hung around until Mr. Nordstrom noticed and sent someone to take over Don's station so he could go. Peter Nordstrom was a nice guy to work for; he understood things like employee morale and what it was like to be young.

  On their way to the ‘spresso joint he explained what the problem had been. She replied with something unclean about how the Big Bucks entertainment lobbies had made a greedy mess of intellectual property law, which then everyone else with a foot in some branch of the business tried to take advantage of. She was always blowing off about things like that. Most of the time she was dead on right and he liked her for it. Now and then, though, something could be said for the other side.

  “Mr. Nordstrom says it's a lot of work to make a textbook,” he told her, “and the workers have to be paid. Students, if they didn't have to pay, they wouldn't, but then there wouldn't be the book to begin with.” He didn't add that—so he'd heard—a bunch of information tech guys had cracked into a federal surveillance system and, through that backdoor, were quietly selling down copies at half the publisher's price. Not relevant to the conversation.

  “Oh, I'm just a nut,” she replied. He understood instantly; she'd hung around because she wanted to apologize for calling him a nut, but, equally, didn't want to be direct about it. Nice of her, but she needn't have. He'd felt fine.

  Things went on like that. He continued to hope her switches would flip but never heard the click. Instead, he suspected she was using him to fend off any more determined suitor. That further discouraged him from speaking his mind.

  He graduated in the upper fifteen percent of his class. Good enough to assure employment but not instant standing in the first rank. Neither was Nebraska Engine one of the top tech schools in the country.

  She didn't stick around for the ceremonies; her own classwork was done for the year, she had another year to go, and meanwhile her dad had wangled her an intern job in Washington for the summer; she had to be there, bright and eager, next Monday morning. Early.

  He helped load her skimmer. Her stuff made a tight fit, but eventually they got it shoehorned. All that remained was to face each other. He had a job waiting down in New Mexico where a wind farm was being renovated. Nothing had been said about when he'd see her again.

  He reached, whether to kiss or merely to embrace ... well, he hadn't thought that far. She saw it coming and backed a step. “Friends,” she said firmly, and offered her hand. “All right?”

  It wasn't all right. It was a javelin to the heart.

  She must have known that, and had she not known she'd have seen it on his face. It was, though, her choice to make and too profoundly vital to dissemble about. Neither, having never dared to speak seriously, had he any right to protest.

  Therefore, suppressing his pain, he gripped, lingered, and let go. “Keep in touch,” he mumbled.

  For reply she moved her lips without making a sound like she did sometimes, met his eyes for a brief, uncertain moment, and turned away. Boarding her skimmer, she pulled the door down and, not looking his way again, boosted quickly away. He watched her out of sight and then, for a time he never measured, merely stood. He felt like a small boat found adrift, empty, far out to sea.

  * * * *

  V

  Scarborough fiddled with his unit, whether to check an entry or to let the silence speak, Don didn't know. For the moment the external view displays showed mostly clouds and open water as their craft streamed steadily north. Off to the west near the world's curved edge lay a scatter of blotches that might have been islands. Don found his voice. “And after that,” he said, “a lot of the places I found jobs, you wouldn't want to take a woman. Not one you cared about.”

  Perhaps Scarborough heard a nuance. A few heartbeats passed before he said, “You acquired something of a reputation, you know. You'd go places others wouldn't. Did you know that?”

  “Nobody told me. Some, I know they offered me first.”

  “Any connection, do you think?”

  Don was slow to understand. “What you mean?” he asked, “Because I hadn't anyone but me?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Don had to think; it was all so long ago. “Growing up where I did, sort of empty country, you got accustomed to being off by yourself,” he said. “Nothing much to do except the work.” Maybe it was truth; if it wasn't, this man didn't need to know.

  Scarborough let another silence pass; Don knew better than to break it.

  “And can we presume,” Scarborough said at last, “no children?”

  “None I heard about,” Don said. Absolute truth, but something of an evasion. His few involvements had been brief, care had been taken, and both he and the women had known they'd be moving on. “Can't guarantee,” he added, “but I don't expect.” Shrug. “They'd have to be full grown by now.”

  “We did have a few claimants turn up,” Scarborough said
. “The usual frauds and opportunists. Didn't check out, of course.”

  Don let a heartbeat pass. “What's to claim?” he asked.

  “People like to feel important. Kinship to a public figure can give that, and some will cheerfully lie for the privilege. Others—I should think you know—in the early days, all of you up there, no one thought you'd survive.”

  Don remembered that bleak first year, a Martian year long. “We didn't, either,” he said.

  “And even if you did, no one imagined that you'd ever get home again.”

  True, Don thought, and nodded.

  “That would mean there'd be an estate to collect.”

  “Huh,” Don humphed. “Shirt off my back. Come up and get it.”

  “Also, your name was the one people heard,” Scarborough said. “I'm not suggesting these people were anything near smart. Very easy to disprove.”

  “Hardly needed to bother,” Don said.

  “Perhaps not, though—I don't have the particulars—you'd have had some sort of retirement fund, wouldn't you?”

  “Not much of one.” “We had to see to your interests,” Scarborough said. “All of you. Some would have owned property. Debts and taxes would have to be paid or put in suspense. Some, inheritances might come up. All sorts of things had to be looked after.”

  Don frowned. “Not sure I follow. Who was doing all this?”

  “When the Mars Repatriation Project was established, someone realized you folks were not well positioned to manage your affairs. We—Space Administration, that is—had to set up an office to deal with such matters. Sort of a trustee arrangement.”

  “Had to?” Since when did government do anything it didn't feel like doing?

  “Specified in the legislation for the project.”

  As if legislators had the slightest concern for the needs of ordinary people. Don tried to adjust his thoughts. It sounded off center.

  “I'm sure you'd have been informed at the time,” Scarborough said.

  At the time, other matters had pressed more urgently. “Might have,” Don admitted. “Some stuff we never got, and a lot we didn't pay much attention to.” Just the day-to-day business of staying alive, regardless what piece of essential equipment failed, had been top on the priority list. “So you checked out my kids and found out they wasn't?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you kept a finger on our business? All of us, I mean?”

  “Precisely,” Scarborough said. Don thought it through. Before he'd gone, he'd asked Larry to keep eye on his earthbound concerns. Not that he had all that many. “Most of us made some sort of arrangement before we went,” he said.

  “True. However, you only expected to be gone four or five years. When it became clear you might be up there indefinitely, the need for something more durable was obvious.”

  Possibly obvious, Don thought, but...

  “Why?” he asked. “I mean, that makes it government's business?”

  Scarborough shrugged. “Why Congress decided as it did, I don't really know. I've only been with Space Ad the last eight years, so I wasn't around when the legislation was made. What Congress was thinking, and why they thought it ... I suppose there was input from a lot of sources. But when a law's being written, a lot gets done where nobody sees. The reasons for a particular provision, or where it came from, sometimes even the people who worked on it don't remember.”

  An engineer who worked like that would be asked to turn in his unit. Don reminded himself it had been lawyers at work. “And the arrangements we set up?” he asked.

  “Were kept in place. Under oversight, of course, to ensure no one took advantage. Where time's passage made adjustments necessary, they were made under standard advocacy rules.” Now it sounded like government meddling. Good intentions, perhaps, and in his own case not likely much damage could have been done. For others...

  “I'll get to talk to these people?” Don asked.

  “We have it on your schedule. When they're done with you at Bethesda, we'll set up a meeting.”

  Don shrugged and let it go. If a mess had been made, he could deal with it later.

  Scarborough consulted his unit. “Let's go back a bit. This woman you thought about marriage, would she have any claim on you?”

  “Not likely,” Don said, so quickly it came almost before he had breath to speak with. Inwardly though, came a small cry of pain. So after all these years, it could touch him still. “She's the one broke it off. Long time ago.”

  * * * *

  VI

  He never saw her again. No message ever came. His first few weeks, down there in New Mexico's emptiness, blundering around in the new job, too much demanded attention for thoughts of even the most vital things in his life. All the same, thoughts came. Like Cyrano, maybe he should have said something, either then or before. But, well, he hadn't. Now, too late. Nights, if sleep came slow, the hurt would come back. Then he'd sleep poorly and, though he did not remember dreams beyond the first minutes of waking, he knew they were disturbed by her. Her face, her voice, and that devastating word she'd spoken.

  Give it time, he told himself. Neither could he think what he should say if/when they met again.

  Some time late October, Ma phoned; he'd be coming for Thanksgiving, wouldn't he? Sure, Ma; he'd have a half week off, wouldn't miss. Then he thought Lincoln wouldn't be that much farther. Jeni would be going home, too, he supposed, to be with family. But maybe not. And if she didn't...

  Wouldn't hurt to ask.

  But her web address came back: “Vacated.”

  Could something have happened? Something bad?

  For a day while he struggled to calculate the requirements for alternating current output synchronization for direct line transmission from seventeen generating units of assorted capacity, automatic shunt to on-site charge cells when/if demand tapered down, he dithered. That evening he made a direct voice phone call to her sorority. Was she all right?

  The girl who answered told him Jeni wasn't living there. Was she a member? Who did he say was calling? With mounting anxiety and clumsy words, Don explained. The girl decided he should talk to Melinda. Melinda came on. She was membership secretary, and yes, she remembered him. The funny guy who actually did things instead of just talk himself big. So here's what. Jeni had zipped them a note. She'd decided to take a year off to think about what she really wanted to do. A lot of us girls, Melinda said, did things like that; know how it is? And just so nothing from outside would nudge her one way or another she was dropping out of her webname and all that stuff.

  Don wasn't sure he knew how it was, but it calmed his worst fears. Sort of. He thanked Melinda and signed off.

  It left him wondering. What Jeni wanted to decide about wasn't clear. Oh sure, there was the law school thing, but there'd been a lot of other things, too, including maybe things he knew nothing about. Tempted—hoping?—he let himself imagine, just possibly, it was himself she wanted to decide about. Telling himself she'd already made up her mind about him didn't make the hope go away.

  So, well, if she decided in his favor, he'd hear. If it was something else, or if she decided negative, he wouldn't. And, thinking hard and sharp, if she did not want what he wanted, well, foolish to want it himself. To protest, therefore, would be absurd. Let it go.

  That spring a team was being organized to evaluate a combination wind, water flow, and solar cell installation down in Honduras. Was he interested? The New Mexico job was winding down, so he went. Other jobs followed. From Jeni, nothing ever came. After a while, he knew nothing would. She became just a photoprint card in his credentials wallet, rarely looked at. Then, edges worn soft and 3D scuffed to mistiness, it got left aside when the wallet wore out and Larry sent him a new one for a solitary Christmas in a village five bad-road hours southwest of Ulan Bator. That's how life was.

  * * * *

  VII

  “Why did you go to Mars?” Scarborough asked.

  Hard to put himself back in the moment. “D
idn't go looking for it,” Don said at last. “They came to me. And, well, after Antarctica, jobs seemed to be thin on the ground. Worked a few months, feasibility study for a site up on Baffin Island, which was sort of a joke, but that was about it. So when they knocked on my door, I didn't say I wasn't home. Thought it was a crazy scheme, of course, but they kept talking. After a while, taking it as an engineering problem, it started to make sense.”

  Scarborough considered. “You weren't excited at the prospect?”

  “I'd thought Antarctica made sense,” Don said. “Didn't need another mess on my record.” At first look, to imagine a resource could be mined on Mars and delivered to some point on Planet Earth more cheaply than it could be taken from Earth's crust had seemed absurd. No way could such an enterprise be made to pay.

  The people who created Mars Petro, though, had given it a more thoughtful review.

  * * * *

  Already in place were the geosynch stations with their skeins of fullerene cable down to Ground Zero in Brazil and Kenya. Traveling those skeins up and down, elevator capsules made inexpensive the delivery of great masses of material from Earth's surface to orbit or from orbit down, the only requirement being that, in keeping with the laws of energy conservation, the masses transferred up and down should be somewhere near equal.

  Already on the edge of feasibility, spacecraft of tremendous capacity taking energy from the Sun's radiation and able to navigate between the planets through the interaction of their own controllable magnetic field with that of the Sun and such other worlds as had magnetic fields that the spacecraft passed near, if any. A bonus would be that energy spent on a flight outward from the Sun—say, to Mars—could be largely recovered and stored in charge cells during return to the orbital neighborhood of Planet Earth. Not swift, perhaps, but economical to operate once built. Only one factor would limit their ability to move huge masses of freight: Because their method of propulsion worked by cumulative effect, they could never touch down on a world's surface.

  Already practical, the construction of a geosynch station orbiting Mars and, from there, skeins of cable down to a toehold on the planet's surface. Similar to Earth's geosynch stations and their skeins, the technology was well developed and completely understood. (Famous last words!)