Starbound m-2

by Joe Haldeman

  It might come just after the Others had blown humanity into elementary particles. There was no need to say anything about that.

  We weren’t sure exactly where we would arrive. When we went from turnaround to Wolf 25, we were deposited in orbit around the wrong planet, technically, since we’d planned to go to the moon of the gas giant where the Others lived.

  So now, we presumably would go wherever in the solar system the Others wanted us to stop. If it was back where the iceberg started, past Mars orbit, we’d have a longish trip back to Earth.

  Or maybe Mars, if Earth wasn’t there anymore.

  Paul followed the rest of us into the shuttle and helped Snowbird with her harness. Then he floated up the aisle and strapped himself in. He swiveled around partway and looked down at us.

  “Does anybody pray?”

  After a long silence, Namir whispered, “Shalom.”

  “Yeah.” Paul’s finger hovered over a red switch. “Good luck to all of us.”

  We were all ready for the transition’s emotional blow, but most of us cried out, anyhow. And then a gasp of relief.

  The blue ball of Earth was below us, the Pacific hemisphere. To my left, the Space Elevator, with the Hilton and Little Mars, Little Earth, and several new structures, including three smaller elevators.

  I could faintly hear a burst of radio chatter from Paul’s direction.

  “One at a time!” he shouted. “This is Paul Collins, pilot of ad Astra. We are safe.” He looked back at us with a grin. “I should have thought up something historic to say.”

  “One long trip for a man,” Elza intoned; “one ambiguous stumble for mankind.”

  We were quickly surrounded by identical small spaceships that were obviously warcraft. No streamlining, just a jumble of weaponry on top of a drive system, with a little house in between. Probably called a “life-support module,” or something equally homey.

  Earth was in a panic because we had inexorably approached, decelerating full blast, without answering any queries or attempting to communicate.

  “The explanation is both simple and complicated,” Paul said, echoing what Snowbird had said a couple of days, or six years, ago. “I think it’s reasonable that I start with the highest possible authority.”

  The battalion commander identified herself and demanded an explanation. “Of course we know what you are. But we’ve been alongside you for weeks and have gotten no cooperation.”

  “I am not under your command,” he pointed out. “This is not anybody’s military expedition. Is there still a United Nations?”

  “Not as such, captain. But all nations are united.”

  “Well, let me talk to whoever’s in charge. With some science types listening in.”

  “This is completely against protocol. You—”

  “I don’t think you have a protocol covering how to deal with a half-century-old spaceship returning from a mission to save the planet from destruction. Or does it happen all the time?”

  “We have been expecting you, sir, since your message arrived last month. But when the ship did not respond as it approached Earth, we had to expect the worst.”

  “The worst did not happen. Now I’m going to break contact and will talk only when I can talk to someone who outranks everyone who outranks you. Out for now.” He cut off the battalion commander in midbluster and spun half around. “Drink?”

  I tossed him the squeeze bag of ersatz Bordeaux. “Holding out for champagne, myself. In gravity.”

  He took a long drink, two swallows, and passed it to Namir, who had been sitting silent.

  “Suit yourself,” Namir said to me, his voice husky. “It might be a long wait.”

  I unstrapped and swam up front to visit with Paul and watch the monitor. The wait was less than a minute.

  An elderly man with a seamed dark face and white full beard came into the monitor as it pinged. A voice said, “Mervyn Gold, president of the United Americas.”

  “Paul?” the old man said. “ ‘Crash’ Collins?”

  Paul stabbed a finger at the camera button. “Professor Gold!”

  He smiled broadly. “We’ve both come up in the world, Paul.”

  Paul laughed, and said to me, “He was my history prof at Boulder. You met him.”

  Subtract fifty years and the beard. He’d come to Little Earth with some government agency and talked with Paul for hours through the quarantine window.

  “Amazing,” Gold said. “You don’t look a day older. You’ll be hearing that a lot, I suppose.”

  And from really old people, I thought.

  “The Others did some trick with time.”

  The old man nodded. “I saw your transmission from turnaround. Some people thought it was all a trick, you know. If they’d prevailed, you wouldn’t have made it to Earth.”

  I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Just as well.

  “I’m glad you didn’t listen to them.”

  “Oh, I listen to everyone; comes with the job. But I don’t have to obey anyone.” He shuffled some papers, an everyday gesture that we hadn’t seen in some time. “First, let me tell you that you will come to Earth, not New Mars. The quarantine was lifted, oh, about twelve years ago.”

  “That’ll be great.”

  How many years since I’d actually been on Earth? I was not quite nineteen when I stepped aboard the Space Elevator. Thirty- four when ad Astra left. Fifteen years plus about four, subjective, that we spent going to the Others’ Home and back.

  Exactly half my life—thirty-eight actual years. Whatever “actual” means.

  The president and Paul were chatting about our return. “We could take you down on the Space Elevator, which would be more comfortable than using the lander. But the lander, an actual landing, would be really good for public morale.”

  “Propaganda.” Paul said.

  “I wouldn’t deny it. Do you think it would be safe?”

  “Well, it’s never been used, so it’s brand-new in a way. It’s been sitting around for years, which isn’t good for any machine. But that is what it was designed to do.”

  I wished telepathy would work. Space Elevator Space Elevator Space Elevator. I’d had my fill of atmospheric braking.

  “If you’re uncertain,” the president said, “we have two qualified pilots waiting at the Hilton.”

  I guess you don’t get to be president without a knack for psychology. “Oh, there’s no question I can do it. No question at all. I’ve done seven Mars landings and a hundred on Earth, in flight training.”

  “And one on the Moon, I recall.” The one that saved the Earth. Paul smiled. Score one for the prez.

  “So when do you want me to bring her down? Where?”

  “They still have the landing strip in the Mojave Desert. Um…” He looked to his right. “They say they have the old software to guide you in, but want to test it out with a duplicate. Anytime tomorrow would be fine. Daylight, California time?”

  “No problem. We came on board with one suitcase apiece. Won’t take us long to pack.”

  “Good, good. Will you accept our hospitality at the White House?” Another glance to the right. “Once the medics let you loose, that is.”

  “An honor, sir. Professor.”

  “See you tomorrow in California.” He looked at his watch. “Would you mind debriefing with my science and policy advisors, say, an hour from now?”

  “No problem, sir.” He let out a big breath after the cube went dark. “Let’s move this circus back downstairs. Get Snowbird out of the heat.”

  “Paul,” Namir said, “be careful what you say to them.”

  “Sure. Careful.”

  “If they don’t like what they hear… if they don’t want the public to hear what we say… this is their last and best chance to silence us.” He looked around at everybody. “There could be a tragic accident.”

  “That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said.

  He nodded, smiling. “You know us spies. We come by it naturally.”


  The cabinet members who talked with us were urbane and friendly, not at all threatening. If they were planning to have us all murdered, they hid it pretty well. They mostly worked from a transcript of our long transmission from turnaround, asking us to clarify and broaden various things.

  I actually knew one of them, Media Minister Davie Lewitt, now a dignified white-haired lady. She had been the brassy cube commentator who gave me the name “The Mars Girl.” She remembered and apologized to me for that.

  After the cabinet people thanked us and signed off, they were replaced by a couple who introduced themselves as Dor and Sam, both pretty old and probably female. Dor was muscular and outdoorsy and had about a half inch of trim white hair. Sam was feminine and had beautiful long hair dyed lavender.

  “We wanted to help you prepare for returning to Earth,” Dor said. “We were both in our early thirties when you left, so we were born about the same time as most of you.”

  “Twenty years after me,” Namir said. “I suppose the first thing most of us would like to know is whether we have living family. I doubt that I do; my father would be over 140.”

  “Rare, but possible,” Sam said. She unrolled what looked like a featureless sheet of metal, obviously a notebook, and ran her fingers over it. “No, I’m afraid he died a few years after you left.” She stroked her neck, an odd gesture. “I think it would be best if we mailed this information to each of you privately?”

  I nodded, curious but patient. I looked around and nobody objected.

  “Which brings up a big thing,” Dor said. “This is kind of like the Others, or like your poor friend Moonboy. We do have people, many thousands, whose legal status is ambiguous, because it is not clear whether they are dead or alive.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Dor,” Sam said. “This was just starting back when you were alive—shit! I mean before you left, sorry.”

  “No offense taken,” Dustin said. “We really are like ghosts from the dead past.”

  “Cranach versus the State of California, 2112,” Dor said. “Cranach was a lawyer. He was dying, and needed more and more profound life-support equipment, which in his case—he was very wealthy—eventually included a complete computer backup for his brain and associated nervous system.

  “Because of the way California defined ‘brain death,’ Cranach deliberately let his body die, but first essentially willed everything to himself—the computer image of his brain, which was technically indistinguishable from the original organic one.”

  “When his body died,” Sam said, “nobody noticed for weeks, because the computer image had long been in complete charge of his complex business affairs and investments. And it was a person; it had a corporate identity independent of Cranach himself.

  “What you’re saying,” Paul said, “is that this guy Cranach, dead as a doornail, could be legally immortal, at least in California, as long as his brain is not brain-dead. Even though it’s a machine.”

  “Exactly,” Dor said. “And people like him, like it, are only the most extreme examples of, well, they call themselves ‘realists’ in North America.”

  “As opposed to ‘humanists,’ ” Sam said. “It had started when we, and you, were young, in the mid-twenty-first. People who spent most of their waking hours in virtual reality.”

  “Robonerds,” Meryl said. “Some of them even worked there, jobs piped in from the outside world.”

  “We didn’t have much of that on Mars,” I said. “Except for school.”

  “There still isn’t,” Sam said. “Mars is a hotbed of humanists.”

  “But even on Earth,” Dor said, “most people are somewhere in the middle, using VR sometimes at play or work or study. Depends on where you live, too—lots of realists in Japan and China; lots of humanists in Latin America and Africa.”

  Paul scratched his head. “They give the name ‘realist’ to people who escape normal life in VR?”

  “Well, it is a higher reality,” Dor said. “The VR you have on your ship is antique. It’s a lot more… convincing now.”

  Sam smiled broadly. “Yeah. You can tell when you’re unplugged because everything’s boring.”

  “Guess who’s the realist here.” Dor patted her on the knee.

  “Not really. I don’t spend even half my time plugged.”

  “I’m curious about politics,” Paul said. “Mervyn Gold is president of what? What is this United Americas?”

  “Let me see.” Sam moved her hands over the notebook. “It’s most of your old United States, except Florida and Cuba, which now are part of Caribbea, and South Texas (which is its own country) and Hawaii, which is the capital of Pacifica. The United Americas otherwise runs from Alaska down through English Canada, the old U.S., most of Mexico, and most of Spanish-speaking Central and South America down to the tip of Argentina. Not Costa Rica; not Baja California.”

  “Thank God for that,” Dor said. “Baja’s such another world.”

  “The United Americas are really not that united.” Sam continued. “It’s an economic coalition, like Common Europe and Cercle Socialisme.

  “The smallest country in the world is the one we’re citizens of, Elevator.”

  “The smallest country but the longest,” Dor said. “The Space Elevator Corporation declared sovereignty back when there was still a United Nations.”

  “And now?” Namir said. “Instead of the UN?”

  “All nations are united,” Sam said, echoing the commander. Her expression was a tight-lipped blandness.

  United against the Others, I realized, through the fleet, which they couldn’t mention in public. Everyone else was probably thinking the same thing.

  “I wonder who will pay my UN pension,” Namir muttered.

  Sam overheard him. “You have all been well taken care of. The world is wealthy and grateful.”

  For what, I didn’t want to say. We took a long trip to talk with the enemy, and they sent us back without even saying a word. But at least the Earth wasn’t destroyed. Something to be grateful for.

  So we were each given fifty million dollars to spend, in a world where Namir’s New York City penthouse could be bought for ten million.

  The only thing I really wanted was a hamburger.

  My mother and father were dead, no surprise, though she had made it to 101, waiting for me, and left behind a brave, wistful note that made me cry.

  My children were still on Mars as well, but were not speaking to each other, the girl a total humanist and the boy a total nerd realist. I spent over an hour in difficult conversation with both of them, difficult for the twelve-minute delay as well as emotional factors. I signed off promising to visit both of them as soon as I could get to Mars. Though with the realist I’d have to communicate electronically, no matter what planet I was on. He’d sold his organic body for parts.

  That gave me a flash of irrational anger, but it passed. He actually only had half of one cell of mine.

  My brother, Card, was also a realist, but he had not yet become bodiless. He lived on Earth now, in Los Angeles, and promised he’d put on his formal body (he had three) and come see me when we landed. I waited while he made a few calls, then called back and said he’d gotten all the vouchers and permissions to make the trip.

  I wondered how free the Land of the Free was nowadays. But I guessed I could always go back to Mars.

  16

  MOONBOY SPEAKS

  I put the two balalaikas in the padded boxes I’d made for them, and set the Vermeer book, and the Shakespeare and Amachai and cummings poems, into the titanium suitcase. I’d done a laundry in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and padded the books with clean folded clothes I would never want to wear again.

  What were the actual odds that we were about to become dead heroes rather than inconvenient witnesses? Small but finite, as a mathematician would say. We really knew nothing about current politics. When President Gold had been Professor Gold, Paul said he taught medieval history—Machiavelli and
the Medici. The Borgias. He could make them seem like current events, Paul said. Maybe current events, then and now, were not so far removed from those good old days.

  We hadn’t been publicly interviewed yet. That was disturbing. But they had let us talk to relatives. So they couldn’t be claiming that we didn’t make it back.

  (Assuming people did talk to their relatives, and not to VR constructions. Cesare Borgia would have liked that little tool.)

  Well, they couldn’t really claim the ad Astra hadn’t returned. What’s left of our iceberg is still bigger than the Hilton, and you can see that in the sky all over the Pacific, brighter than the Pole Star.

  Of course, when we got off the lander, we’d go straight into biological isolation. No telling what kind of bug we might be bringing back from the Others. Though a bug that thrived in liquid nitrogen might find human body temperature a little too warm. And there had been nothing alive on the planet Home to infect us. If Spy had told the truth.

  We might have been infected with something accidentally or on purpose. Spy was an artificial organism designed to interface with humans. But then so were the Martians, and they had carried the pathogen for the juvenile pulmonary cysts that gave the colonists such trouble.

  I should have asked about Israel—find out whether the country I worked for all my life still exists. My notebook didn’t pull any new information about anything, which was not necessarily suspicious. Fifty-year-old hardware and software. But it would be nice to find out some information about the world that hadn’t been handed to us by handlers.

  I should be grateful for a few more hours of blissful ignorance and obscurity. The idea of celebrity is not compatible with my choice of career, and thus with my personality. Not that I will ever be a spy again, whatever Israel is or is not today.

  Maybe I’ll take up music seriously. Practice several hours a day. That would keep Dustin out of the house.

  My notebook pinged in my personal tone. Funny, the only people with that number were close enough to come knock.

  I thumbed it, though—and an image of Moonboy appeared!