Why, in short, do we long to blaze?
Ever since I turned twelve, I’ve known. Only a minuscule fraction of the stuff of our universe glows. The rest, the bulk, drifts in darkness, unmoored or rudely tugged. The cold vast black of interstellar night cloaks it from our eyes, our telescopes, our roachlike searchings. We belong to the part that does not glow, to the swallowing dark.
Why wonder, then, that a yearning to leap into the furnace, to god-fashion ourselves in fire, drives us starward on the engines of a mute cri de coeur?
* * *
“Whurh we guhn?” Dean asked me.
“It’s a surprise. Have a little patience.”
“Huvh uhliddle”—he grinned up at Lily—“payshuhns.”
Excitedly, I gripped one of roly-poly Dean’s hands. Lily Aloisi-Stark, my son’s mother, a systems specialist, held the other. Dean swung between us like a baby orangutan, a creature habituated in utero to a starship’s sterile bays, bioengineered for life aboard a space ark.
Except that he hadn’t been. After more than an E-standard century of travel, U.N.S. Annie Jump Cannon and the other two great wheelships of our colonizing armada pulsed a mere three years from a rendezvous with the Epsilon Eridani system. The brakes were on.
Along with U.N.S. Fritz Zwicky and U.N.S. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Annie was slowing to keep from overshooting our target, a world where Dean might find himself ill-suited to cope. Of course, I had to admit, that might prove true of all of us.
I led Lily and Dean up a rampway and thumb-keyed the panel of the topmost room in G-Tower of Annie’s rotating wheel, a structure so large that the sight of any portion of it always summons my awe.
We entered the observatory. A scaffold supporting the enameled barrel of the ArkBoard Visual Telescope (ABVT) reared over our heads.
We rode an electric lift up through this scaffolding to a carpeted platform with chairs, handrails, and a large shielded viewport. At the platform’s other end, two men stood talking at the base of a ladder to the ABVT’s sighting mechanisms. One man I knew only as a fuel-systems specialist whose up-phases rarely coincided with mine. The other man, however, was my friend Thich Ngoc Bao, our mission’s chief astrophysicist.
Bao sprinted up the ladder. The fuel-systems man turned toward us brushing invisible lint from his tunic. Dean, who had fixed all his attention on Bao and the ABVT’s shiny ivory tube, paid him no mind.
“Whurh are we?” Dean said.
“The observatory,” Lily said.
“I go up … thurh!” Dean pointed at the ABVT.
“No. Sit.” I made him sit down in front of the shielded viewport. Dean burrowed into the chair and rolled his head against its cushion, his eyes hungry for new wonders. Clearly, this place excited him.
“Watch,” I said.
The shields on the forward viewport retracted, exposing a window into space two meters tall and at least twice that wide. Dean quivered. Gaping, he pulled himself forward, his pudgy legs banging the chair’s undercarriage, his pudgy hands bouncing on his knees.
“Holy crow,” he said. “Holy crow.”
Lily put a hand on his shoulder. “Happy birthday, DeBoy. Many happy returns.”
“Whurh iz,” straining hard to see, “New Hohm?”
“There.” I nodded at the window. “Straight ahead. Among those fuzzy match flames and haloes.”
Actually, between Annie Jump and the edge of the Epsilon Eridani orrery there now lies an arc of interstellar debris—tumbling chunks of dirt-ice, frozen gas, a chaos of nomadic mongrel rocks—not unlike the Oort Cloud beyond the orbit of Sol’s Pluto. Our armada’s astronomers, using radio telescopes as well as ABVTs, detected this belt less than five E-years ago. Today, we call it the Barricado Stream. Given the dimensions of this shadowy region, however, Commander Odenwald and his counterparts on Zwicky and Chandrasekhar foresee no trouble taking even our prodigious arks through its far-flung hazards into the system’s heart.
The tech who’d been talking to Bao strolled over and halted in front of Dean. From this new vantage, he stared at Dean. The relentless blankness of his gaze annoyed me so much that I stared pointedly back at him.
“Hello, Mr.—?” I prompted.
“Mikol. Kazimierz Mikol. Children have no place up here.”
“Sez who?” Lily said.
“Regs, I’m afraid. Ask Heraclitus.” He hitched his thumb at the nearest toadstool unit. “Check for yourself.”
Seeing a quick tautening of the cords under Lily’s jaw, I said, “Dean’s just come off a short ursidormizine nap. He’s six. This is his first observatory visit. Why try to squelch his pleasure?”
Mikol shrugged.
“This is his birthday present,” Lily said. “Abel wanted to give him—” She stuck.
Mikol superciliously lifted an eyebrow.
“—the stars,” Lily finished in some consternation.
“Oh? Is that right? Who’s Abel?”
“I am,” I said. “Abel Gwiazda. When I was twelve, my adoptive father gave the stars to me for Christmas on my first Mars trip.”
Mikol clasped his hands at his waist and smiled. “Ah. The reenactment of a family tableau. How sweet.”
Lily and I exchanged a look.
“Of course, the reg in question has its roots in a wholly legitimate concern for mission efficiency,” Mikol said. “In addition—as if it mattered in this case—it means to protect our youngest from the deleterious effects of either cosmic rays or overexcitement, I forget which.”
Dean kept gaping at the stars, but I gaped at Mikol. I had never known such rudeness, even under the guise of enforcing shipboard discipline, since coming aboard Annie Jump Cannon off Luna in 2062. Reputedly, the U.N.’s planners had selected against egregious social blunderers like Mikol. If so, how had he contrived to get aboard?
Pointing, Dean suddenly cried, “I see … New Hohm!”
“No,” I said. “New Home’s sun, maybe. We’re still too far away to make out planets.”
“Or even the biggest rocks in the Barricado Stream,” Mikol told Dean in a grating adult-to-child voice.
Dean twigged next to nothing of the insult. He grinned at Kazimierz Mikol.
Mikol turned to Lily. “Does the boy like rocks? Take him down to the beach garden in hydroponics.”
“Abel’s done that already,” Lily said. “Dean likes it.”
“Likes rocks, does he? Good. Maybe we’ll grab one with a Colombo tether while crossing the Barricado.”
“Whatever for?” Lily said.
“To abandon him on,” Mikol said as a parting shot. He strode to the scaffold lift before Lily or I could blink, much less frame a rejoinder.
Dean, heedless, sat there gnomishly. Starlight, modestly color-shifted from our deceleration, washed over his face like melting diamonds.
I was outraged. I stared after Mikol, thankful only that Lily and I could give our son the stars.
* * *
Me? Just as I told Mikol, I am Abel Gwiazda. My adoptive parents came to the United States from Poland in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century. My father, a physicist trained in Krakow, and my mother, the science journalist who broke Poland’s so-called “Coca-Cola/Cyclotron” scandal in the late twenties, took positions with the ISCA (International Space & Colonization Authority) in Hutchinson, Kansas. After discovering that they could have no children of their own, they adopted me, a nameless Tanzanian child orphaned in the last of the Drought Riots and smuggled to Puerto Rico by profit-taking babyleggers.
I grew up well-loved, but aimless and deracinated. I spent three years as a teenager in a dome community beneath the great escarpment of Mons Olympica on Mars, learning, more by accident than deliberate application, the agrogeology skills that, upon our joint return to Earth in 2056, I took up formally in Oran, Algeria. With doctorate in hand and recommendations from my well-placed parents, I qualified for, and easily landed a spot in, the Epsilon Eridani Expedition—whose planning, funding, and assembly in lunar
orbit occupied the entire world throughout the turbulent fifties. You can’t go home again, but you can try to make one Elsewhere, and for me the E’s in E 3 stand for that very hope.
A part of any home is family. I can’t help it: I feel the call of family intensely. So strongly did I feel it before the making of my son Dean that I (respectfully) sought reproductive contracts with a half dozen women in G-Tower—including Etsuko Endo, Nita Sistrunk, and even the menopausal physicist Indira Sescharchari—before Lily Aliosi-Stark, a kindly woman in her late twenties, agreed. Her only stipulation was that I expect and solicit only minimal help from her in raising the child. To raise a child in the habitat tower of an ark, at least one parent must forgo the balm of ursidormizine slumber, submitting to the pitiless depredations of aging to care for, teach, and discipline that child.
“This is what you want,” Lily said. “I wish to save myself for New Home. I don’t want to set foot there feeling achy and antiquated. Understand?”
I did. So Dean is my child. I begot the Down’s-syndrome boy on Lily during several bouts of fiery lovemaking. Later, in a burst of self- and partner-mocking irony that startled and then tickled me, Lily called our wild sessions a “screwbilee.” Aboard Annie, I have a reputation for straight-laced stoicism stemming from my Reform Catholicism and the twin concerns of my arkbound work, agrogeology and poetry. The former I do for business (ultimately, the business of survival), the latter for love—just as, looking ahead, I persuaded Lily to conceive a child and then finagled authorization from med services for her to carry it to term.
During our lovemaking, Lily said, “Boy or girl, give it your name. I decline to hang another hyphen around the poor kid’s neck.”
“Gwiazda-Aliosi-Stark?”
“Absolutely not. Throw in a double first name, Claude-Mark or Julia-Cerise, and it’d go down like a swimmer in a titanium wetsuit.”
So, months before giving birth, Lily renounced any claim on handing the child her surname. This fact comforted me. What if she had waited until the photoamnioscan at the end of the first trimester revealed the embryo’s trisomy 21? (Which, of course, it did.) At that point, the imperfect fetus would have thrown her motives forever in doubt. I would have wondered if she had deferred to me not solely out of her wish to set aside the demands of parenting, but also out of scorn for our botched offspring.
Masoud Nadeq, the chief physician in G-Tower, showed us the results of the photoamnioscan and listed our options, namely, to abort the pregnancy, to bring it to term with no effort at gene rectification, or to intervene at the chromosomal level with the highly limited procedures available on board. During the past seven E-years, nearly two hundred other children have been born on the Annie Jump Cannon alone, and Nadeq’s records show that only one other couple—cosmic rays, variable gravity, and the other gene-crippling aspects of near-light-speed travel aside—has conceived a Down’s-syndrome infant.
Lily: “What did they do?”
Dr. Nadeq: “They chose to terminate.”
“Is that what you advised?” I asked.
Dr. Nadeq: “For quite good reasons, expedition guidelines strongly advance that option. In cases like yours, however, there’s no unappealable directive to terminate.”
I said, “To get a directive, our fetus would have to have two heads or no brain. Is that it?”
Dr. Nadeq: “In a manner of speaking.”
Lily: “Then our baby is reprieved.”
Dr. Nadeq: “Do you agree, Dr. Gwiazda?”
I said, “Of course. Didn’t I lobby this woman to help me call our hatchling’s pent-up spirit from the dark?”
Dr. Nadeq: “That’s … very poetic.”
“My avocation. Didn’t I run our application through every nook and switchback in Heraclitus’s cybernetic innards?”
Dr. Nadeq: “Then you accept the role of guardian as well as that of sire?”
Lily: “He does.”
“I do,” I said.
Dr. Nadeq: “Excellent. Sign off on this waiver.”
“What waiver?”
Dr. Nadeq: “Of unadulterated community support—once, that is, your child is born and later when we begin to colonize New Home.”
I despised the waiver’s threat of premeditated abandonment, but I signed off on it. How could I condemn a society under extreme environmental and psychological duress for declining to accept with open arms a handicapped child? Especially when Lily and I chose to bring him to term in full knowledge of his handicap and his potentially disruptive needs?
Even so, the waiver galled. I signed it with a trembling hand.
* * *
Most voyagers treat Dean with kindness. To date, this Kazimierz Mikol bastard comprises a boorish minority of one. Despite recycling and other ingenious reclamation schemes (his reasoning must go), we have finite supplies, and once we make planetfall, anyone with a mental and/or physical handicap will represent an outright drag on the colonization process.
Better that Dean had come stillborn from the womb, Mikol must figure. Better, now, that we recommit him to the darkness through an ejector tube.
I think too much on Mikol’s hostility. Most people, as I have said, are kind.
Item: Etsuko Endo, a biologist who passes her up-phase time doing adjustment counseling, recently spent four hours casting sticks of different lengths for Dean and helping him lay them out in educational patterns.
“Rhommm-buhz!” he said when Etsuko brought him back to me. “Daddy, I cuhn make a … rhom-buhz!” So proud. Even as he made, not a rhombus, but a triangle whose unequal sides did not quite touch one another.
Item: Commander Odenwald visited Lily only two hours after Dean was born. Repeatedly since that visit, he has used small portions of his long up-phases (despite enzyme cocktails and downtime cell repairs, his hair has turned cayenne-and-silver) to watch Dean trip-sleep or to guide him around the various facilities in G-Tower. In fact, had I not begged him to leave the observatory to Lily and me, Odenwald would have long ago showed that to Dean, too. I believe, then, that with a simple request I can have Mikol dressed down, if not sent packing to his biorack.
Why bother? If Dean had understood any part of Mikol’s insult in the observatory, or read the least shade of disdain in his face, I would do it. But Dean thinks everyone loves him. In a universe of swallowing dark, and despite the eclipse of his reason at conception, he scatters a property so similar to light that it dims my vision.
* * *
Until, less than a decade ago, a few of us began to have children, you could seldom find more than twenty people awake at any one time in any single living tower on the ever-clocking wheels of our ships. Ten percent of the expedition’s personnel oversaw the armada’s running, tracked the stars, maintained ship-to-ship communications, studied their specialties like workaholic monks, and ministered to the quasi-corpses stacked in each ark’s bioracks.
Only a few days into these up-phases, loneliness settled. An ineffable strangeness pervaded Annie’s labs and corridors, as if a winged fairy tripping along at light-speed had cast a spell over my sleeping arkmates, a dark enchantment over every workroom, crawlspace, and maintenance deck. I could hear this implacable sorcery in the hydrogen hiss of the stars; in the white noise of generators, computer-cooling fans, and hidden air recirculators.
I came aboard U.N.S. Annie Jump Cannon as a hotshot Ph.D. of twenty-two. So far, this voyage to Epsilon E has taken a little over 109 standard years—relative, that is, to the arks in our fleet. Had I left an infant child with my parents in Algeria, it would have long since doddered into codgerhood—if it remained alive at all.
As for me, given the periodic metabolic respite of U-sleep, I have aged (Dr. Nadeq tells me) the physiological equivalent of only thirteen years. In short, I am a thirty-five-year-old centenarian. But no one stays up-phase much longer than a month each shipboard year (other than Commanders Odenwald, Roosenno, and Joplin, and a few engineering troubleshooters and continuity personnel), so that, among us would-be co
lonists, youthful centenarians—of many different ages—register as commonplaces, not freaks.
Of course, in this final decade of our approach to Epsilon Eridani, an expedition policy authorizing the conception, in utero gestation, and natural birth of children took effect for screened personnel young enough to carry out their parental obligations on New Home. Six years after Lily and I made Dean, this policy lapsed because “children under four will impact negatively on the efficient settlement of the target world that we have hopefully denominated New Home.”
Then why permit the arrival of any children at all? Or, at least, the arrival of any offspring under the able-bodied age of, say, sixteen?
Well, the original U.N. planners believed that “in the long term, a generation of colonists reared on the target world’s surface from midchildhood, adapting daily to that world, will prove of incalculable benefit to the planting of a permanent human base in an alien solar system.” Nobody, of course, had factored Dean into this reckoning.
In any case, with the advent of children, the living towers on our three wheelships seem less like mausoleums and more like chatter-filled atria or aviaries. I have stayed continuously up-phase ever since Dean’s birth (Lily, by contrast, opted for ursidormizine slumber soon afterward and comes up-phase only on his birthday). Although Dean takes closely monitored “naps”—to foster cell growth, to husband our various dry-good stores, and to ease the burden on our recirculating systems—I have no desire to down-phase just to match my sleep periods to his. I sleep when I need to, without drugs, and plot ways to sample, test, and seed the unearthly (conjectural) loams, marls, and humuses of New Home.
At other times, of course, I work in G-Tower’s polyped, where Dean has become a cherished favorite of his playmates; a mascot, almost. His blockish head, flat nose, spongy tongue, and stubby hands endear him to, rather than estrange him from, the group. The curiosity and altruism of well-loved children has a weird dynamic. It astonishes and uplifts. It soothes. So how can I regret the nearly six extra years that I’ve aged as a result of going up-phase for Dean?
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 64
