Asimov's SF, February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Money isn't the only element in the Cold Equations. Space systems seem to grow more complex and unwieldy with every year. Do a Google search on military space programs like SBIRS or AEHF or FIA if you want to see just how little you can get for billions of tax dollars. The engine trade-offs made in CEV are only the beginning of what could be a long siege of technical ... challenges.

  Assuming the money and schedules work out, in success, where are we? Humans have proven that they can function in Earth orbit, though anyone who can point to a commercial, medical, or technical breakthrough from the International Space Station should get in touch with NASA and let them know. The Apollo missions demonstrated our ability to get safely to and from the Moon.

  Ah, but Mars? With current, non-nuclear propulsion on a mission that would have to last three years? At the moment, NASA medical specialists put the expected death rate from exposure to cosmic rays during such a mission at 5 percent. By comparison, workers in the radiation business face a 3 chance of dying.

  While there will be no shortage of volunteers for a mission with those odds—which compare favorably to, say, those of Magellan's crews—I'm guessing that NASA will have a tough time getting funding for a vehicle that so blatantly violates OSHA standards. The technical fix? Add a few tons of shielding to the vehicle. Of course, that pretty much makes it impossibly heavy.

  If the cosmic rays don't get you, other human factors might. Those are best simulated and studied on the International Space Station ... the same facility that Mike Griffin wants to get out of.

  And Mars is the easiest, most-Earthlike planet. To reach Europa, scale up the challenges accordingly.

  * * * *

  Yes, the veterans of the Paradigm Shift have their doubts. There were those like Frank Borman, who years ago expressed skepticism about the claims of the Shuttle program, especially when it came to the fiction that the vehicle was safe enough to fly school teachers and politicians. There are others who will tell you quite frankly, over a beer or three, that no one is going to Mars any time in the next twenty years, and possibly the next fifty or a hundred.

  If you think there's something ironic in the idea of a man who saw the Earth from lunar orbit wondering if the trip was worthwhile—or even possible—well, life is full of ironies.

  To be fair, not all former astronauts feel this way. Some, like Buzz Aldrin, are still busy trying to complete the Paradigm Shift—to make human or piloted space travel a reality.

  Then there are those like Deke Slayton, who had grown quite disenchanted with NASA by the time he left in 1982, and became one of the pioneers of the Private Space business.

  And, let's face it, a group of retirees is much less likely to be willing to take risks than the same men at the age of thirty.

  The younger, Shuttle-era of astronauts, exposed to the same SF I was, remains hopeful. Scott “Doc” Horo-witz, a Ph.D. who made four flights, now heads the space agency's Exploration Systems Directorate. Shuttle, Mir, and ISS veteran Mike Foale is still an active astronaut busy with, among other things, the design of a pressure suit that can be worn for launch and entries, and still used on lunar EVAs. Former Shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz—seven missions!—has been working for years on a radical new propulsion system called Vasimr. I could name half a dozen more who have been members of the Mars Underground, a group of space professionals and enthusiasts using Robert Zubrin's concepts to further the cause of a flight to the Red Planet. Some of these astronauts played a direct role in shaping Orion/Ares.

  * * * *

  No, the skepticism about the standard model as practiced by NASA is not uniform.

  And there is an alternative. There is a growing, vibrant, raucous world of privately funded efforts effectively profiled in this magazine ("More than Halfway to Anywhere” by Joe Lazarro, March 2006).

  I wish them luck, but my middle-aged sense of reality makes me afraid that some time around the year 2012 I'll be looking at Branson's Virgin Galactic sub-orbital tourist flights the same way one ex-employee looked at Grand Canyon Airways: “Their motto is, ‘We don't crash all of them!’”

  On a possibly brighter note, know that when I first went to college, I considered majoring in astronomy, either as a career or a way into the space program. It was, in fact, one of the reasons I chose the school I did.

  Within a year I had given up the idea.

  This was in the mid-1970s. All I missed were the Viking landings on Mars, the Voyager encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and a dozen other platforms ... call it the most fruitful and vibrant era of astronomical discovery in the history of the human race, a twenty-five year period when we learned more about the universe than we had in the previous hundred thousand years.

  So it's possible I could be wrong about the ultimate success of private space.

  Nevertheless, it's still a matter of putting human beings on top of rockets. That's the old paradigm.

  Maybe it's time for a completely new one.

  * * * *

  SF writer Greg Bear may have pointed the way. Years ago I heard him ask an audience at an SF convention if its members believed that a century from now, humans would still look the way they do now.

  "Of course!” “What else?” were the answers, proving that middle-aged SF fans are just as conservative as retired astronauts.

  "You're wrong,” Bear said, and in the general grumbling, managed to point out that developments in bio-mechanics, genetic engineering, and nano-technology were going to re-shape the human form. (Maybe it's just living and working in Hollywood, but every day I am confronted with proof that, given the tools, human beings will re-shape themselves.)

  Why not imagine future astronauts being bio-engineered humans, as in Frederik Pohl's classic Man Plus? What about creating space probes that allow full-sensory links for operators back on earth, as in my own story “More Adventures on Other Planets"?

  What about designing post-human astronauts in the womb? This sounds like a logical extrapolation of what Bradbury was writing about in “R is for Rocket” sixty years ago.

  This is hardly a comprehensive list. And the ethical problems of womb-design are frightening.

  Yet, I find this potential Paradigm Shift strangely hopeful ... I wasn't likely to travel to the Moon, much less Mars. But some version of me—my avatar—might make it, and have a better time of it.

  That's good enough for me.

  And I owe it to my old buddy Deke to encourage it.

  Copyright (c) 2006 Michael Cassutt

  AUTHOR'S NOTE: Allen Steele kindly consented to the use of his name. Check out the introduction to his fine collection, Rude Astronauts (Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 1993; New York: Ace, 1995).

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  OUTGOING by Alex Wilson

  Alex Wilson is a writer, actor, and comic-strip creator from northern Ohio. Now settled in Carrboro, North Carolina, he runs the online audiobook project Tell-tale Weekly. Alex is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion writing workshop. “Outgoing,” his tale of two unlikely astronauts headed for a fateful collision, is his first professional fiction sale.

  TEN: THE SIDEWALKSPHERE

  Tara Jones was nine when her father warned her how she could break if she wasn't careful. He wasn't yelling, he said. He sounded like he was yelling. He wasn't angry, he said. He smelled like cigarettes.

  On a Thursday afternoon, Tara and her best friend Caimile played marbles on the sidewalk outside the gray brick apartment building in Buffalo where Tara and her father lived. Caimile was the same age as Tara, and about the same size. Their dresses matched, except for the color.

  Tara's favorite marble looked like a little globe, with milky white oceans and continents painted blue. She liked to thumb Antarctica before shooting this marble across the sidewalksphere where all their little worlds settled into the porous texture of the concrete.

  Their legs sore from squatting over the marbles, Tara and Caimile took standing breaks ever
y few minutes and pretended they were animals. Caimile was a giraffe, and she tilted her head back as though this elongated her neck. Tara took her sandals off and tried to pick up a marble with her toes, which were now her talons. She squawked. She was a bird.

  "What kind of a bird are you?” Caimile asked.

  "A red one,” Tara said. Her dress was red. Caimile's was green. Caimile was a green giraffe.

  "Let's play helicopter,” Caimile said. She took Tara's hands in her own and sidestepped into a dance, then faster into a full spin.

  Tara giggled as she tried to keep up with Caimile's steps, first on the sidewalk, then spilling out onto the patches of dirt flanking the sidewalk. Tara bit her lip and watched her feet. She didn't want to step on the broken lime-colored glass, all sprinkled and shiny on the dirt. She didn't want Caimile to step on her feet. She heard then felt the beat of her box braids against the side of her head.

  Then Tara stepped on a marble: her favorite marble, the one that looked like Earth. She felt it fling out from under her, behind her, as her foot kicked back into the air. She spun her head around both ways, trying to see which way the marble flew, but she was dizzy and off balance from all the spinning.

  Tara's other foot followed back and out, and then she was looking at Caimile, whose feet still danced on the ground. Caimile swung Tara like a purse. She swung Tara around her as she continued to turn. Tara would have been airborne if her friend were to let go. Tara would have been a bird.

  And just when Tara thought Caimile would have to let go because the spin itself was pulling her away and into the air, she screamed, two parts terror, one part glee. She pulled herself in toward Caimile. They hugged each other as they stopped.

  "You're really strong,” Tara said, after getting control of her breath again.

  "You're really light,” Caimile said. “I bet I could throw you over Mrs. Nelson's fence."

  "You could not,” Tara said. Mrs. Nelson was an angry old white woman who lived in a small house down the block. She was the only white person Tara knew by name. Sometimes Mrs. Nelson yelled at the kids in the neighborhood, so sometimes they threw stuff at her windows. But never a person. “I mean, could you?"

  And, though Tara didn't break anything—not a bone, not a window—on her first attempt over Mrs. Nelson's chain link fence, Tara's father told her it was just because she was lucky. He wasn't yelling, he said as he swabbed her scraped knee with something from a brown plastic bottle. But she needed to be more careful. He wasn't angry, he said. He was just concerned.

  Tara's bones were not like other people's bones, her father told her. “All bones are light, but yours are really light. Fragile."

  "Like a bird's?” Tara asked.

  "No, not hollow like a bird's,” her father said.

  Tara's eyes opened wide. A bird's bones were hollow? This was her most favorite thing, ever.

  "They're just fragile,” her father said, not yelling, not angry. “You also have some baby teeth in your mouth, where no adult teeth grow under them. We didn't have fluoride in the water when you were a baby, and we think..."

  But Tara wasn't listening. She was wondering about the bones of birds and all the neat stuff they could keep inside them. She wondered if she'd ever find her marble again, the one that looked like a milky Earth. And more than anything else she wondered whether she was light enough to fly over Mrs. Nelson's fence.

  Tomorrow she would have to find out.

  * * * *

  Chris Moser was thirteen when he shot his first object into space from Chatham County, North Carolina.

  Moser—as he preferred to be called—had actually figured out how to do it when he was twelve, but it took another year to calculate the right trajectory and exact launch window that would put his rocket into proper orbit from where they lived. One morning, finally confident in his preparations, he brought an empty Cherrygale can to breakfast. He placed it neatly in the middle of his empty plate.

  "You're not having soda for breakfast,” his mother said.

  "I know,” Moser said. “This can is going to be the first man-made object to go around the Sun."

  His father said, “Well, you still need to eat something."

  "In six months,” Moser said, “It will return to Earth. I wanted to put some recording device in it, but it was too heavy with the engine, and it probably wouldn't survive anyway."

  "Six months?” His parents looked at each other the way they looked at each other when they thought they knew something Moser didn't know. “You mean a year? It takes a year to go around the Sun, you know."

  "Yes, Dad,” Moser said slowly, patiently. “I know."

  "A year then,” his father said.

  Moser sighed, looking at the hint of his own reflection in the rim of the Cherrygale can. It was vague enough that it could have been anyone's reflection. He liked to think it was the reflection of Christopher Columbus.

  "It takes a year for us,” Moser said. “And it takes a year for the can going in the opposite direction. In six months, we'll meet again, on the other side of the Sun."

  His father made an exaggerated kissing noise as he sucked on his own bottom lip for a moment, and then: “I was just kidding you, Chris. Six months sounds about right. Good luck with that."

  "It's going to be awesome,” Moser said.

  Six months later, when the can didn't come back down as predicted, his mother and father were very nice about it, even after begrudgingly driving him halfway across the state to the side of the lake where Moser thought it should return.

  They even offered to wait a little longer, but Moser said there was no point. If he was off by a minute, he was off by hundreds of miles. More than likely the Cherrygale can never made it into orbit, if it even cleared the atmosphere in the first place.

  "You got it off the ground, that's something to be proud of,” his father said on the drive home.

  "Maybe it burned up in the atmosphere,” his mother said. “Doesn't that happen? Sometimes?"

  His father suggested: “Extra wind? Something you didn't calculate?"

  "Maybe,” Moser said. He was only half-listening.

  "An asteroid field? Like in your video game?"

  "Mom, the chances of that..."

  "We can't know every variable, Chris. Just predicting the weather is a crapshoot."

  "Maybe it hit a bird,” his mother said.

  * * * *

  NINE: THE HOLLOW BONES OF THE BUDDHA

  Tara was sixteen and had never left Buffalo when she lost her virginity in the flower shop owned by David's parents. It was a life experience she figured she was ready to have. She was going to be a poet, like Rita Dove or Maya Angelou, both of whom had lots of life experience. It was late in the summer. She had a lot to do.

  On the way into the flower shop, David told her how much he liked the thing she wrote for English class. “You know,” he said. “That thing about angels. You should totally publish it."

  "I will,” Tara said. “I'm going to be poet laureate."

  David had a hidden stash of marijuana in one of the few plastic plants toward the back of the shop. “They used to be real,” David said, “But Mom never waters anything she can't sell, so they died."

  He and Tara sat on the tile floor behind the register, and there she got high for the first time. Tara wore shorts and a camisole. The tile was cold. She leaned against the refrigerated glass case, which was even colder.

  Tara decided to tell David a secret. At first she thought she'd save it for herself, and put it in a poem. But there would be many secrets to come along that she could keep for herself. She planned on having lots of life experience. She planned on being mysterious.

  "It feels like the smoke is in my bones,” Tara said.

  "I know,” David said.

  "No, I mean like it's trapped in there."

  "Cool."

  Tara told him that her bones were hollow, which she knew wasn't true. A bird's bones were hollow but strong. Hers were just brittle, only ab
out five pounds lighter than they should be. But it was important that she make it sound cooler than her father had made it sound when he had explained it to her. It was important that she focus.

  "I'm not yelling,” she said. She couldn't feel her lips moving when she spoke. It was like ventriloquism. Or telepathy.

  David said, “Yeah, you're like the reincarnated Buddha."

  All Tara knew about Buddhism was something about breathing and letting go. She asked: “Does the Buddha have hollow bones?"

  "Probably,” David said. “Take off your shirt."

  Her eyes were puffy and her nose ran. She didn't know whether it was the weed or whether she was allergic to one of the pretty flowers or whether this was just one of those moments when she would cry. There weren't many so far, but there were some. All poets cried.

  Surrounded by so much green, Tara felt like she was in a jungle and she never wanted to go home. She concentrated on her breathing. She wondered whether they'd ever let a reincarnated Buddha become poet laureate. She wondered whether David would somehow always be inside her, like the smoke.

  "Don't break me,” she said.

  "Okay,” he said, his hand on her cheek.

  * * * *

  Moser excelled in physics and engineering while attending Akron University in northern Ohio. He excelled sometimes to the detriment of any social life.

  His favorite professor seemed particularly encouraging and interested in Moser, so much so that Moser decided to tell her about the Cherrygale soda can he launched into space seven years earlier. He wanted to know her opinion about what went wrong, though he suspected it was a wind problem, that he would have needed to manually correct any minor disturbances in its trajectory. He did not brag when he told his professor about it. He wanted to brag, but he didn't.

  "This is a crazy notion,” she responded, suddenly more rigid and professional than he had seen her with even the most unruly of students. “And it sounds like a very dangerous experiment which you shouldn't have tried."