Starbound m-2

by Joe Haldeman

  “You would have nitrogen, a liquid, in your veins.”

  “The Martian would have to be me,” Fly-in-Amber said.

  “That’s right,” Spy said. “The human…”

  There was a lengthy silence. Paul half raised his hand. “I—”

  “You’re the pilot,” Namir said, “and not expendable. I’m the oldest”—he looked at his spouses—“and, among the military people, I have the highest rank. The honor will be mine.”

  “No!” I said. “Namir, be practical.”

  “It can’t be Moonboy,” he said. “He’s not competent. Did you want to volunteer?” He was smiling, rueful rather than mocking.

  “With all respect,” Dustin said, “this is not a job for an espionage specialist. You want a philosopher.”

  “A doctor,” Elza said. “I know more about human beings than both of you combined.”

  “We should do it by lot,” I said. “Excluding Paul and Moonboy.” When I said it, my stomach dropped. I looked at Meryl, and she nodded, looking grim.

  “This is fascinating,” Spy said, “and I’m tempted to let you keep fighting it out. But what makes you think the choice is yours to make?

  “The fact that Moonboy has been unconscious since arriving here makes him the most attractive of you, to the Others.”

  “What?” Namir said. “He’s mentally incompetent.”

  “Your mental competence is not an issue. The most intelligent of you, which would be Dustin, is still only human. What’s more interesting about Moonboy is that he’s immune to any consensus the rest of you might have arrived at since coming here. He is a tabula rasa with regard to the Others, and therefore will be easier to work with.”

  “What makes you think you can wake him up?” Elza said.

  “He won’t be awake when he joins the Others. He won’t even be alive, technically.”

  “So the human race is going to be represented by a somewhat dead lunatic,” Namir said.

  Spy paused, as if deciding whether to make a joke of that. “His individual characteristics and experiences are not particularly important. His recent experiences are, though; the less he knows about the Others, the better.”

  “I think I understand,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Like positive feedback in a circuit. Interfering with the signal because of its similarity.”

  That was the most science I’d ever heard from Fly-in-Amber. “You aren’t upset about this, yourself? Being kidnapped and killed and stored in a deep freeze?”

  He clasped his head in appreciation of humor, a gesture he rarely used. “Another way of saying it is that it’s a chance at literal immortality, representing my race among the Others. How many foreign races would I be joining, Spy?”

  “Two hundred forty-eight. Though more than half of them would be so different from you that communication would be unlikely.”

  “You see, Carmen? As Namir said, it’s an honor.”

  “I was not being literal, Fly- in-Amber. My feelings are more like Carmen’s.”

  “I think Moonboy’s would be, too,” Meryl said, her voice thick and shaking. “We should try to revive him.”

  “Shock him out of it?” Elza said. “And tell him ‘Prepare to die’?”

  “That is what it would be,” Spy said. “If his comfort or happiness is at issue, I think your course is clear.”

  Meryl crossed her arms over her chest, holding herself. “My course is not clear. It’s euthanasia to treat mental illness. For my husband of twenty-three years.”

  “One of you is headed there.” Spy stepped toward her, and his voice lowered. “An objective observer would see that he is giving up the least. You can’t say that’s not true.”

  “You’re not going to be able to care for him. He needs constant medical attention.”

  Not if he’s going to die, I thought.

  “In terms of duration,” Spy said, “he will spend less time going there than you will spend returning to ad Astra from here. Minutes.”

  “It might be a kindness,” Dustin said. It was clear that Meryl was struggling with it—it would be a kindness to her, as well, of course.

  “Take me, too?” she said.

  “No. We don’t have two of any race. Not possible.”

  She sat down and stared at nothing.

  “I wonder if it would be possible for me to kill you,” Namir said quietly.

  “It’s an interesting thought,” Spy said. “How would you propose to do it?”

  “Physical force. I’ve done it to bigger and stronger creatures.”

  “It wouldn’t be smart,” Paul said.

  “We’re running out of smart.” Only his lips moved, and his eyes. But the quality of his poise changed. He was gathering himself, ready.

  “Don’t,” I said. “They can kill you with a thought.”

  “We could,” Spy said, “but might not. Go ahead and try.”

  After the longest second in my life, Namir said, “It was a hypothetical question. You’ve answered it,” and relaxed, turning his back. Spy looked at each of us in turn, perhaps recording our reactions.

  “So. We just go back to Earth?” Paul said. “How will that work?”

  “You set up the flight as you normally would. You will begin to accelerate, then, after a period of no duration, stop. That will be at the turnaround point. You spend thirty hours or so there, turning around again, then you complete the journey, also with no duration. Almost twenty-five years will pass, of course, while you travel the twenty- four light-years.”

  “Will we be seeing you again?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you’d better hope not.”

  13

  END OF A WORLD

  So we left Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber to the tender mercies of the Others and made our weightless way along the cable back to ad Astra. Before we got to the air lock, the starfish rose and sped away. Namir stood still and watched it depart. I wished I could have seen his face.

  Once inside, I stayed close to Meryl, but she didn’t want to talk about it. We all raided the pantry for human food, however uninspiring.

  “I’ll need a day or two to consolidate the data we have about the planet; make sure all of it’s mapped,” Paul said. “Though we could spend years mapping and measuring, and scientists on Earth would still want more. The first detailed observation of an Earth-like exoplanet.”

  “It probably won’t be the first,” Dustin noted. “They’ll have had fifty years to explore nearer Earth.”

  Paul laughed. “I hope you’re right. There ought to be robot probes all over the place.”

  I pulled gecko slippers out of the rack by the air lock and followed Snowbird into the Martian quarters. Not too cold for a short visit.

  She was inspecting the racks of mushroomlike plants. “Hello, Carmen.”

  “Hello, Snowbird.” I didn’t know what to say. “You will be lonely?”

  “Only for a short while, if what Spy said is true. I may be on Mars soon.”

  “That will be a comfort.”

  “Neither Fly-in-Amber nor I ever expected to see it again.”

  “I will miss him,” I said. “Though there hasn’t been time for it to sink in, him or Moonboy.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for Fly-in-Amber. This is the best possible outcome for him. He was extremely happy when we left.” She turned slightly, to face me. “We will never know about Moonboy, I suppose. He may never know what’s happened to him but just die.”

  “Probably.” Though what his chill reincarnation might be like, we could only guess. No worse than dying, we could hope.

  I shivered. “You’re cold,” she said. “I’ll see you later, in the compromise lounge. I’m sure there will be a meeting.”

  “There always is,” I said.

  I went back to our room and changed clothes. Funny to think that the old ones would sit there for a quarter century before being cleaned. My mother would just shake her head and say “typical.”

  Would she be alive still? She wa
s born in 2035 (three years older than Namir) and we would be back in 2138. She has good heredity for long life, but did I really expect to see her at 103? Did I want to?

  Well, who knows. With a half century of progress in cosmetic science, she might look my age. Younger. That would be too creepy.

  Paul came in over the intercom and asked for a meeting in a half hour, in the compromise lounge. Snowbird would smile, if she had a human mouth.

  I got there a bit early, which was fortunate. Namir had found a jar of Iranian caviar, which we cautiously slurped with two spoons, and some dexterity in midair retrieval.

  Paul joined us in time to help scrape the bottom of the jar. He’d also had the foresight to put some alcohol in the freezer, half and half with water, so we could wash the fish eggs down with ersatz vodka.

  Meryl came out, dressed in a pretty plaid shift with a peasant blouse, mincing along gecko style. “Is that booze?”

  Namir tossed it slowly. “Cheap vodka. Pretty cold.”

  I’d never seen her drink anything stronger than wine, and not much of that. She squirted a big blast of the vodka into her mouth, and on her face, and immediately had a coughing fit. She started to laugh, then sneezed, with enough force to free her slippers and start her in a slow pinwheel. The skirt billowing around was quite pretty, in an abstract way, though the performance might have been more dignified with underwear. She wound up laughing and crying, not a bad combination under the circumstances.

  After we were settled down, Paul said, “I just wanted to make sure everybody has everything sorted out. I’m planning to go into the lander tomorrow at noon. Push the button and see what happens.”

  “Do you want us up there, too?” Namir said.

  Paul paused, probably remembering Namir’s reaction last time. “Strapping in wouldn’t be necessary. But maybe we should all be in the same place.”

  The diffuse feeling of grief, of loss. Elza took Namir’s hand. “We should,” she said.

  “I would like that, too,” Snowbird said. “Even with the heat.”

  “We don’t know anything about the process,” Dustin said. “The emotional impact may be less, now that we’re expecting it. Or it may be of a different nature. Joy, perhaps.”

  “Or anger,” Namir said. “Perhaps we should all be restrained. All but one, who has the key.”

  “Sometimes you scare me,” I said, smiling, but meaning it.

  “Then you should hold the key.” He shook his head. “Actually, it was only Moonboy and I who had severe reactions last time. Maybe in lieu of a straitjacket, I should have Elza give me a sedative.”

  “And anyone else who wants one,” she said. “Except the pilot. Snowbird, I wouldn’t know what to give you.”

  “There is a food that prepares one for the unexpected. It worked well enough last time.”

  “Wish they made it for humans.” Paul said. “I’m going to assume that with no time elapsed, or no duration, we don’t have to do anything special with the plants. Just everybody complete the maintenance roster before noon tomorrow.” He shrugged. “I know you would anyway. Guess I’m just at a loss for anything constructive to say or do.” He passed around a handwritten note:

  Don’t say anything of a sensitive nature to anyone until we know we’re at turnaround. The walls have ears etc.

  “Can’t play badminton in zero gee,” I said.

  “Namir,” Meryl said, “could you get your balalaika and do me a song or two?”

  “Yes,” Dustin said, with no sarcasm in his voice: “I would like that, too.”

  “The end of the world is at hand,” said Elza.

  14

  PREDICTIONS

  I woke up slowly from the sedation Elza had given me. I remembered having had dreams. They hadn’t been as intense or persistent as the first time, but they left behind the same malaise, guilt and self-loathing.

  If the process had driven Moonboy back into that childhood closet, bound and gagged and strangling in the darkness, I could only hope for his sake that he was truly dead now. Memory is a prison from which there is no other escape.

  But there are distractions. I found my slippers and went out into the hall, and rip-ripped my way along the tomato vines toward the exercise machines, which I could hear ticking along.

  A tomato was floating free, so I ate it like an apple. Not quite ripe, a little sour. My stomach gave a warning growl, so I saved most of it to finish with some bread.

  No need for parsimony anymore, of course. We probably had two hundred times the amount of food we could consume between here and Earth.

  Carmen and Paul were working out on the walking and bicycling machines, their VR helmets in tandem. I could hear her soft voice, not quite understandable over the noise of the machines, as they chatted.

  She was wearing a white skinsuit, translucent with sweat. Perhaps I was studying her too intently.

  “Nice view,” Dustin said in a whisper, behind me. “How are you doing?”

  “Not quite awake yet.” I held up the tomato. “Eating in my sleep.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Not as bad this time. Seen Elza?”

  “In the library with Meryl. Looked kind of deep. Get some chow?”

  “Sure.” We took the long way around to the kitchen, avoiding the library. I settled for cheese and crackers to go with my tomato; Dustin zapped a steak sandwich. I got a squeeze bag of cold tea out of the fridge; he opted for wine.

  “Paul verified that we’re where we’re supposed to be and got the rotation started.” He checked his watch. “It’s 1340 now. We’ve got, um, twenty hours, twenty minutes, till we point ’er toward Earth and go. Away from Earth.”

  I set my watch. “I slept late.”

  “Last one up.”

  “Let me guess: Paul wants a meeting.”

  He smiled. “Good guess. He said 1500 if you were up.”

  Couple of hours to kill. Normally, this time of day, I’d ping Fly- in-Amber and see whether he wanted to practice some Japanese. Not that he ever needed to practice old vocabulary, since he never forgot.

  My only Martian friend, dead now six years.

  “New game?” Dustin said.

  It took me a second to sort that out. “Sure. I believe you’re white?”

  “Pawn to K-4.”

  “God, you sneaky bastard.”

  We bundled up and met in the compromise lounge.

  “So what are we going to find on Earth, fifty years in the future?” Paul said. “Worst case, Namir?”

  I guess someone had to articulate it. “In the worst case, there will be nothing there except a messenger from the Others, which will detect and destroy us with no hesitation or explanation.” No one looked surprised.

  “The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”

  “Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.

  “You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”

  “It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”

  And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”

  “Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”

  “Not yet,” Elza said.

  “It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”

  That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is
that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes… energy.

  “None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”

  I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”

  “Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”

  Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”

  “Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.

  “It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.

  “This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”

  “You’re products of their intelligence.”

  She nodded, bobbing. “It’s like a human play, or novel. Öedipus Rex or King Lear—the children can misunderstand their parents in ways that nobody else can.”

  “Good examples,” Dustin said. “Happy endings.”

  15

  CHANGES

  Paul and I twice tried to make love during turnaround, but we were too nervous and distracted. Doom-ridden, perhaps.

  A couple of hours before we filed into the shuttle, we all together made a long transmission to Earth, explaining everything as well as we could and hoping for the best for all of us. If Spy’s description of the process was accurate, they would get the message less than a year before we arrived.