Starbound m-2

by Joe Haldeman

  After we finished the cake and tej, we switched to regular wine and other alcohol, and Snowbird asked whether Namir would bring out his balalaika and do a duet with Moonboy. Namir asked Dustin whether he could stand it, and he said that once a year wouldn’t kill him.

  By the time Namir had retrieved the balalaika from the workshop, Moonboy had figured out how to simulate a primitive accordion, and with his sensitive ear he had no trouble squeezing out chords that matched the Eastern European and Israeli tunes Namir knew, and did an occasional simulated-clarinet solo, what he called klezmer style. Most of it was new to me, and I was glad of the Martian request.

  When we went to bed, Paul and I made love, even though it wasn’t Saturday (badminton brings out the beast in him).

  Afterward, he was restless. “I’m the most useless pilot in history.” “I don’t know. The guy in charge of the Titanic didn’t exactly earn his paycheck.”

  “This morning while you were gardening, I went up to the shuttle and put it through some simulations for landing.”

  A few years premature. “Practice makes perfect?”

  “I could do them in my sleep, which is the problem. There are really only four basic situations in the VR—Earth, Mars, Moon, and zero- gee rendezvous. I can fiddle with the parameters. But I’m not really learning anything.”

  “Well, it’s not rocket science, as they used to say. Except that it is rocket science. And you’re the best. I read that somewhere.”

  I could feel his smile in the dark, and he patted my hip. “The best within a half light-year, anyhow. But we should have thought to make up some weird simulations, like a dense, turbulent atmosphere. A dusty one. You’d never land in a dust storm if you had a chance. But I’ll have to take what I get.”

  “Well, it’s just software, isn’t it? Describe what you need and tight-beam it to Earth. They could develop and test it, and send it to you after turnaround.”

  He paused. “Sometimes you surprise me.”

  I resisted the impulse to reach down and actually surprise him. It was already late, though, and I didn’t want to give him any more ideas.

  19

  YEAR TWO

  8 May 2090

  Our second year began with a smaller useful crew, and perhaps reduced efficiency from those of us who are left.

  We’ve essentially lost Moonboy. Whenever he’s not in VR, he’s locked into earphones. He doesn’t even take them off to eat. If you ask him a question, he hands you a notebook; write down the query, and he’ll write a short response, or nod or shrug, usually.

  It started with noise coming from the air-conditioning. At first it was a high-pitched whistle. We were able to program the self-repair algorithm and reduce it to bare audibility, but in the process introduced a varying frequency component: if you listen closely, it’s like someone whistling tunelessly in another room. I can hardly hear it at all, but Moonboy said it was going to drive him mad, and apparently it did.

  We can still use him after a fashion, to try to translate if one of the Martians says something incomprehensible. But it’s hard to get his attention, and impossible to make him concentrate.

  Elza says he’s apparently in a dissociative fugue. His medical history is dominated by dissociative amnesia, not being able to remember a murderous assault by his father when he was a boy.

  Medication isn’t effective. A dose large enough to give him some peace knocks him out, and when he wakes up, the noise is still there, and he claps on the ’phones.

  Meryl is of course, depressed, with Moonboy such a wreck, but everyone else seems stable, if not happy. Elza seems resigned to Paul’s obstinate monogamy. I should thank him.

  Memo to the next people who staff a mission like this: make sure nobody in the crew is fucking crazy.

  Of course, we may all be, in less dramatic ways.

  Other than the noisy life-support system, the ship seems shipshape. In December I spent a couple of weeks in advanced menu planning—we’ve been too conservative in using the luxury stores. We could use more than half of them on the way to Wolf. If we do survive the encounter with the Others, we’ll probably be content with anything on the way back. Morale’s only a problem on the way there.

  I talked with Paul about this, but not with the others. The last thing I need in the kitchen is a democracy.

  I’m continuing my study of first-contact narratives in human history. Usually less destructive than the Others’ contact with us, though the ultimate result is often extinction, anyhow.

  There aren’t really close analogies. Aboriginal societies didn’t send off diplomats to plead peace with their high-tech conquerors. What would have happened if the Maori, on learning where their invaders came from, had taken a war canoe and paddled around the Cape and up the Atlantic and the Thames to parley with Queen Victoria? She’s atypical, actually. Reports of Maori military performance led her to offer them at least symbolic equality in the governance of New Zealand. The Others would probably just have nuked them all. With the wave of a hand.

  Of course, we don’t really know anything about their psychology or philosophy, other than the fact that they observed us, judged us, and tried to execute us all, with no discussion. When I was a boy, I watched my father spray a nest of wasps that had grown on the side of our house. You could see in their frantic paroxysms how painful an end that was, and my father laughed at me for crying. Maybe some few of the Others will mourn our necessary extinction.

  In a way that I would hesitate to call mystical, life becomes more and more precious as we ply our way toward whatever awaits—and I mean that in the most prosaic sense; I wake up every morning eager for the day, even though I do little other than cook and read and talk. A little music, too little.

  I swim almost every day, trying to reserve the pool for the half hour after Carmen swims. I can legitimately show up a few minutes early and look at her.

  How do I really feel toward her? We talk about everything but that. If I were closer to her age, I might move toward romance, or at least sex, but I’m almost as old as her father. She brought that up early on, and I have no desire to appear foolish. Besides, I’m married to the only certified nymphomaniac within light-years. Another woman might be too much of a good thing.

  But I do feel close to her, sometimes closer than I am to Elza, who will never let me or anyone else into her mysterious center—a place I think she herself never visits. Carmen seems totally open, American to the core, even if her passport says “Martian.”

  I think my foreignness attracts her, but at some level frightens her as well. The opposite of Elza, in a way. The fact that I’ve been a professional killer thrills Elza, I think, though she would be less thrilled if she knew how many I’ve killed, and how, and why.

  PART 3

  THE FLOWER

  1

  YEAR THREE

  8 May 2091

  This is the end of the third Earth year of our voyage to Wolf 25, to meet with the Others and learn our fate. Humans being superstitious about anniversaries, they asked that we each write up a summarizing statement for these occasions.

  For me it’s pointless, since I recall everything whether it is important or not. But I will do it. (Snowbird is more intimately involved with the humans than I am. That’s natural; the white family is more social, even among Martians. We yellows are better observers.)

  The most interesting thing about the year to come is that we’re approaching the midpoint, turnaround time. The past year has been more or less uneventful for Martians, though it could have been our ending. The brown pyatyur fungus almost stopped growing, which would eventually have been fatal for us, but Meryl and Carmen figured out what was wrong. It was lacking nitrates—that is, the pseudo-Martian ecosystem was not properly recycling nitrates. We only need trace quantities, so the lack wasn’t obvious. Human agriculture needs large amounts, though, and they are full of it. A day’s production of human urine gives us a year’s worth.

  Snowbird continued working with Meryl
and Carmen on their language lessons, and I sometimes participated, though it has become steadily more difficult. We seem to have covered all of the easy vocabulary, and it’s hard to explore the more difficult words and phrases without Moonboy’s synthesizer. They can’t even approximate many of the sounds. Moonboy could do well within the range of his hearing.

  (I think he might be able to help us more if the other humans weren’t so afraid of him. Snowbird says that some of that fear is reflected fear of their own potential for not-sane behavior. Moonboy scares them, and he knows he’s scaring them, which reinforces the behavior. Meryl explained this to Snowbird, but being able to explain it is not the same as coping with it.)

  Namir and I have been playing chess, a variation of the game called Kriegspieler, where neither player is allowed to look at the board; you have to keep the positions of the pieces in your memory as you play. That requires no effort on my part, of course; like any other yellow Martian, one glance will fix the board in my memory for the rest of my life. Namir makes up for his occasional memory lapse by what he calls “killer instinct,” and he wins almost every time. (I think it’s less killer instinct than the fact that his moves are sometimes based on a board that doesn’t exist, and so are impossible for me to anticipate.)

  Kriegspieler is normally played with a third person, a referee who keeps track of the progress of the game with a physical board, out of sight. The referee tells you whether a move is impossible (blocked by another piece) or whether you’ve successfully captured a piece. We started out with Carmen as a referee, but I pointed out that she was supernumerary. I could tell Namir if a move was not possible or had been successful, and of course would not lie.

  Snowbird plays a board game with the humans, too, a word game called Scrabble, which Meryl had brought along as part of her weight allowance, indicating that the game is important to her, and she is skilled at it. Carmen also plays, and they have a list of Martian words that may be used, and count double. I have played the game but find it maddeningly slow.

  Badminton, on the other hand, is plenty fast enough for us in this gravity. Snowbird enjoys it, and I do not. Jumping around like that is ungraceful and painful. But a certain amount of exercise is necessary, as is the appearance of working with the humans as a team.

  Whose side will we be on when we get to Wolf 25? The Others did make us, and (speaking as an individual) I can’t pretend to be a free agent, independent of their will. I had absolutely no control over myself the one time the Others needed me to do their bidding, when I suddenly parroted their message in 2079. There could be a large variety of complex behaviors they are able to trigger with a word. Or just a particular beam of light, as happened then.

  Suppose they ordered me to open the air-lock door?

  But I suspect the fact that we haven’t yet been obliterated means that the Others know where we are and what we’re doing. The humans’ efforts to keep the mission secret probably amuse them.

  If they are capable of being amused. There are so many basic things we don’t know about them, or have just inferred from incomplete data.

  One thing that does seem inescapable is their lack of concern for human life, and probably Martian life as well. When we meet them, we will need to come up with some reason for their allowing us to live—something that doesn’t have to do with the immorality or injustice of exterminating us.

  What is important to them? Is there anything we can do that would make them happy? Whatever “happy” means. Maybe destroying planets is the only thing that pleases them.

  We inhabit a different world of time. They seem glacially slow to us, and we must seem like annoying insects to them—buzzing around with our inconsequential lives, our tiny and evanescent concerns. (That was the way Namir put it. There are no glaciers as such on Mars, and no insects other than the ones that humans brought along for agriculture.)

  In a few months, the charade will be over. No sense in trying to hide our existence once we’ve pointed our matter-annihilation jet directly at the Others. Prior to our turnaround, a small fast probe will broadcast a description of what we’re planning to do.

  Though it’s not much of a plan. “Please don’t kill us before you hear what we have to say.”

  As if we could really understand each other.

  2

  TURNAROUND

  Paul has been at loose ends ever since he finished his dissertation—and it really was “finished” more completely than most scientific theses, since he couldn’t make new measurements or read current research on the topic, which was Data Granulation in Surveys of Gravitational Lensing in Globular Clusters, 2002-2085.

  So the approach of turnaround was a great outlet for his stalled energies. He had a checklist with nearly a thousand items, compiled before we left, and he added a few himself. The original list didn’t say anything about making sure the balalaikas were secured.

  We will be in zero gee for a little over two days, while our dirty iceberg slowly turns to point its jet toward the Others. The Martians will love it. I’m looking forward to the novelty myself. Good memories.

  Taking care of the plants won’t be the big project it was before we took off. Just keep everything damp. Try not to crash into anything while cruising from place to place.

  I do have one big irrational worry. Nobody has ever stopped and restarted a huge engine like this one—the test vehicle was hardly a thousandth this mass. What if it doesn’t start? Nobody really knows what makes it work, anyhow.

  Maybe they do by now, on Earth. But if it didn’t restart, and we radioed “What do we do now?” it would be more than twenty-four years before we got the answer. “Slam the doors and try again.”

  Even Fly-in-Amber, who wouldn’t blink at the Second Coming, seemed a little excited about turnaround. Well, it will be the journey’s midpoint, as well as a brief respite from the burden of Earth-style gravity. He was not happy that we had to drain their makeshift pool (and Paul was not happy about having to recycle the water separately, to keep all their germs and cooties in their own ecosystem). Our own pool came with a watertight cover.

  We had the furniture secured and the plants taken care of a couple of hours before Paul was to shut down the engine. Namir prepared a luxury feast, lamb chops baked with rehydrated fruit and Middle Eastern spices, served over couscous. We opened one of the few bottles of actual wine.

  After a pastry dessert, Paul checked his wrist and got up from the table. “Forty-eight minutes,” he said. “I’ll turn it off at 2200 sharp. No need for a countdown?”

  We all agreed. “I’ll go remind the Martians,” Namir said. “When will you start the rotation?”

  “After a general systems check, maybe an hour. Don’t think we’ll feel anything. Six degrees per hour.” Two small steering jets on opposite sides of the iceball’s equator would get us slowly spinning, then stop us twenty-eight hours later.

  I had a queasy feeling that maybe I should have dined on soda crackers and water instead, Paul’s reassurances notwithstanding. It was a little more than waiting for the other shoe to drop. I went back to the bathroom and found a stomach pill.

  It didn’t help that Moonboy sat there with his drugged smile, listening to the music of the spheres. When Meryl told him what was about to happen, he typed out LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. NOISE MIGHT STOP. Sure, if life support stops.

  To distract myself, I went to the bicycle machine and took a VR ride through downtown Paris, trying to hit every man with a mustache.

  At about five minutes to the hour, I joined the others in the compromise lounge. Everyone had filled squeeze bottles with water and other things to drink in zero gee, good idea. I went to the storeroom and drew six liters of water in a plastic cow, and concentrate for two liters of wine, which made a red light blink next to my name. Paul’s light wasn’t blinking, so I drew a couple of liters for him, too. He must have been too busy, hovering over the OFF switch.

  I returned to the lounge with my armloads of water and wine. “You are re
ady for a party,” Snowbird said. I croaked out a catchphrase that meant something like “I wish the same state for you.” She clapped lightly with her small hands.

  We were all sort of braced for it when 2200 came, but of course it wasn’t like slamming on the brakes. Gravity just stopped. I pushed off gently and floated toward the ceiling. Namir and Snowbird followed.

  “I guess nothing went wrong,” Meryl said, rotating by in a slow somersault.

  Moonboy hadn’t moved. He took off the earphones and listened intently for a couple of seconds. “Still there.” He put them back on, hovering a foot off the couch.

  Elza floated up to join Namir, clasping him with her arms and legs. Well, he wouldn’t be able to shoot pool; have to do something for two days.

  Paul came out of the control room walking on the floor with his gecko slippers. He had a strange expression. My stomach fell as he spoke: “Something’s screwy.” He shook his head. “The proximity—”

  There was a faint metallic sound. Then three more.

  “The air lock,” Namir said.

  Surprise, then terror. Inappropriately, I laughed, and so did Meryl.

  “Has to be the Others,” Paul said.

  “Might as well let them in,” Namir said, “before they just blow it open.”

  The people who designed the ship should have put a camera out there. But we hadn’t expected callers.

  We all followed Paul, all of us but Moonboy, floating various trajectories toward the air lock. Paul opened the control box and pushed the OPEN SEQUENCE button. A pump hammered for less than a minute, fading as the air was sucked out of the lock.

  The outer door opened onto total darkness. There was a moment of terrible suspense. Then a man in a conventional white space suit used a navigating jet to float in and stopped by touching the inner door window.