To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  “Your Grandmother is spinning in her grave.” Mom shakes her head bitterly. “She was an English teacher.”

  By the end of his teens, Jack has fully mastered the art of drowning. “People are mostly just water walking around, right?” he says. “If you can just get over the fear of suffocating in water, you can let it all go. It’s easy.”

  When I leave for Earth, he can drown to his left side or his right, face up or face down, feet first or in the fetal position.

  “Todd and Mark took me to a pro—a black woman,” Jack says wearily. “I—we—just couldn’t do it.”

  In most waters, the main threat to life during a prolonged immersion is cold or cold combined with the possibility of drowning.

  “Looks like I’m not going to manage to break out as early as you did,” he says, his voice quavering slightly. On the vid I can see he’s grown a beard, dark and full, though not so dark and full as his eyes. “I tried to pull a covert escape op like the one you managed two years ago, but Mom caught me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, pretty much the same thing that happened with you,” he says with a loud exhale. “She’d started yelling like a crazy woman. Even pulled the kitchen-laser trick again.”

  “And?”

  “I couldn’t do it.” He stares off. “Couldn’t bring myself to hit her the way you did. Couldn’t use physical force against her. I caved in. So I’m stuck here ’til I graduate, I guess. Another two years up here in cislunar space, suffocating in the metal womb.”

  A mystic is a diver who can swim. A schizophrenic is a diver who can’t.

  “Think you’ll hang in long enough to make it through the second birth?”

  “I’ve got plans,” he says, nodding. “I think I’ve got the grades, too. Gonna shoot for grad work at the Georgetown School of Interorbital Studies.”

  “Georgetown? Good choice. Pipeline to the Ambassadoriat. How’re you doing otherwise?”

  “The storm’s passed,” he says with a small smile. “Just shaken up a bit, is all.”

  When, in the time of his troubles, Jack comes to visit me in Hawai’i, he spends more and more time drowning, “doing the dead man’s sink,” particularly when there are dolphin pods about. Altered on KL 235, he plops overboard in full dive gear and swims down among them, while I watch worriedly from my small boat at the surface. Seated in lotus position on the bottom, he removes his regulator, pinches off its airflow, and slowly blows out his air. The dolphins gather in a rosette about him, motionless. For endless minutes he sits there like a drowned Buddha. Occasionally he takes a breath of air from his regulator. The dolphins lift their blowholes to the surface. Sometimes it seems he’s going to stay down there forever, but he always comes back, eventually.

  “What are you doing down there all that time?”

  “Communing,” Jack says. “Most of their discourse is non-referential—philosophical poetry, songs, that sort of thing. When I’m around them and flying on KL, though—‘Human awake’—they just skip language altogether and beam me imagery directly, faster and denser than I can understand, though it’s still all up here in my head somewhere, I think. After they zap me I feel better—much better.”

  “In what way?”

  He pauses, thinking.

  “Kind of like I’m being rescued. Like I’m being lifted up into the light.”

  I don’t understand it. The voice of the dolphin in air sounds harsh to me—jarring gibbering clicktalk. I must admit, though, that after a month of “communing” with them he seems saner, more able to face the world as he leaves the islands.

  “All life is sorrowful,” Jack says, reading words attributed to Gautama Sakyamuni. “All life is painful.” Looking disgusted, he fingers the headplug button on the back of his skull. “All life is corporate.”

  GREAT PROGRESS ON MARS! OXYGEN AND WATER LEVELS UP ALL OVER THE PLANET! FULLY VIABLE ECOSPHERE! GENE-ENGINEERED FLORA, FAUNA, CROPS, HERDS! 300,000 SETTLERS ALREADY—MORE ARRIVING EVERYDAY! RIDE THE RANGE ON THE FINAL FRONTIER! JOIN US IN THE GREAT ADVENTURE! KOGAKU AND KOGAKU, DEVELOPERS. WE’RE BUILDING A BETTER WORLD.

  “I think they’re broadcasting all the details of my personal life,” Jack says, laughing oddly, eyes darting. “They’ve tapped into my perceptions, my innermost thoughts—I’m sure of it.”

  The last time I see him in the flesh is when I marry Noriko. The wedding disturbs Mom for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m getting married at all. Performing his part in the ceremony, Jack reads passages from 1 Corinthians 13 in the New Testament and from Eihei Dogen’s “Universal Recommendation for Zazen.” From the way he reads them it’s clear Jack’s been drugging and pleasureplugging too much—disoriented one moment, too acutely focused the next. I try not to notice.

  “The School of Interplanetary Studies is worse than L-5 enwombment,” Jack tells me distractedly during the reception. “Classist fascist institution. I’ve signed on to go to Mars and work in terraversion. Nix Olympica Station.”

  “You’re quitting grad school?” I ask, bewildered. “You’ve only been at Georgetown a couple of months—”

  “Long enough to see that just studying about population dynamics isn’t going to cut it. I want to do something about it.”

  Victim appears to have surgically removed his occipital umbilicus receptor—the police report says, for “headplug”—not long before estimated time of death.

  “But why Mars?”

  “That’s the frontier,” Jack says, his dark eyes bright like the last light of a supernova fleeing its own collapse into a black hole. “Look, it’s easier to build expensive imitation earths than it is to persuade human beings to voluntarily limit their own reproductive capacities, right?” His focus begins to drift again.

  Recognizing the drowning victim is sometimes difficult. Once a true drowning situation is certain, the idea of swimming after the victim should be entertained only after all other less hazardous ways of rescuing the drowning person have been exhausted. Too often the would-be rescuer becomes another victim.

  “It’s not good for me to be around people right now. I’d rather die than hurt anybody.”

  When executing a rescue, it is good to let the victim know your intention. Talk to the victim. Keep in personal contact.

  “Jack’s quit work and moved into the wilderness,” Mom says worriedly over the downlink. “The last time I talked to him, he said he wasn’t going to be calling any more. He said I had nothing more to say to him and he had nothing more to say to me. I don’t understand it. The last words I said to him were ‘I love you, Jack. I love you’.”

  Exhaustion is simply loss of energy and the resultant inability to make the necessary movements to keep afloat and make progress through the water.

  “Then he goes and disappears like this!” Mom sighs, on the verge of tears. “He hasn’t called us in over a month, but the police still won’t list him as a missing person. They say they’ve seen him—or at least someone who looks like him. Has he called you?”

  Buoyancy of a body depends on the type of body. Some bodies are fairly buoyant. Others have marginal buoyancy. Still others have no buoyancy at all.

  “No, Ma, he hasn’t,” I say. I haven’t seen Jack since the wedding. Two years, and far away from the dolphins now. I haven’t contacted him long-link in at least six months—married life, a new professorship in the Toyo haborb, busy, too damn busy. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The authorities can always activate the homing signal on his headplug if they think it’s necessary. There probably aren’t a lot of long distance uplinks he can plug into in the Martian outback. You know Jack. He’s always at the edge, but he always comes back.”

  Drowning is my brother’s meditation. He is the bodhisattva of suffocation in water. A being who has awakened from the painful sleeping whirlpool of births and deaths to accomplish—what?

  My mother’s voice in my head is less a voice than a wail of raw pain. In it cries something terrible, inhuma
n, an elemental force rising from the deepest abysses of grief. It is almost with relief that I hear the voice break into sobs.

  “Oh God,” I say, weakly, my hand clutching into an impotent fist that I can only drop against the wall and lean upon.

  “The Coroner called me—me—to say they’d found my son’s body,” Mom says between broken sobs. “The Coroner says he’d been dead six months! Oh God, this is horrible! He’s been dead all this time and we didn’t even know it. Jack’s dead! Dead! Dead!”

  I feel numb, hollow, insubstantial. My heartbeat is the tolling of a sunken ship’s bell. I link up to Mars. Jack’s body was found by a man on a snohorse at twilight the previous evening. Riding the fences, rounding up strays, bringing them down before hard winter sets in—winter too hard even for genetically engineered stock to survive.

  Only about forty percent of yearly drownings occur to people who are swimming or playing in water.

  “How could he be so hard-hearted?” my mother cries. “How could he be so—so insensitive? How could he turn away like this? Where did I go wrong? What did I do to deserve this?”

  “It’s not you, Mom,” I say flatly, patiently. “It’s not anybody. You didn’t do anything wrong. Jack wanted to cut his ties with everyone and everything. He was following his leadings, living the life he wanted to live. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not anybody’s fault at all.”

  I ask that his ashes be buried where his body was found. I need a locus for my grief, a spot in space and time. Noriko and I decide to go to Mars the following summer, to view the burial site.

  “I can’t do it, Jack. I just can’t let go that last burst of air.”

  `The depth to which a rescuer may go to retrieve a victim will depend upon the depth itself and how long the breath can be held after swimming to the site.

  “Please, for my sake don’t go. That place killed your brother. Those people he worked for killed your brother, as sure as they killed the whales and elephants.”

  “Mom, I’m married to one of ‘those people’.”

  “I don’t care. That place killed him. Please, promise me you won’t go.”

  The settlement police are too busy and too short-handed to show us the spot where his body was found, but the undertaker—a gray-haired, gravel-voiced man with extremely dry hands—kindly agrees to take us there. We proceed by landmarks into the great new-tundra emptiness of the Nix Olympica range. We get lost again and again.

  “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” my father reads. “I do not think they’ll sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the wave, combing the white hair of the waves blown back, when the wind blows the water white and black.”

  Eventually we come upon a mountain valley, bisected by a stony wash and overlooking the high plains to the south and west. Genetic-engineered sage and thistle and low grass grow roundabout, even a few stunted things like incredibly tortured bonsai. Not far from the wash is a cairn of stones.

  “That’s it,” the undertaker says. We leave the aircar and move toward the cairn.

  Eternal return. Avalokitesvara. Kwan Yin. Kwannon. Bodhisattvas and saviors do not leave the world, but regard its lives and deeds with the eyes and tears of compassion.

  “There was snow on the ground again when we brought the ashes up for burial,” the undertaker remarks, standing next to the cairn. “Cold and snowing when we did the service, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t bury them in exactly the right place.” He gazes along the slope of the valley leading into the wash, eyes a bare spot in the stubby sage and highland grass about five meters away. On closer examination the bare spot is in fact the distorted but still discernible shadow of a man. “We missed it, all right. Ashes should be buried over there.”

  Socrates. Jesus. Gandhi. King. Ohnuki. Walking Bear. Eternal return.

  “This is where we found your brother’s body. He was out on the surface here for several months, so what growth was already here was killed out under him. His flesh saponified, too—ran like liquid soap into the ground in pretty much the shape you’re looking at. For a while it’ll keep things from growing back, but when they do, they’ll probably come back greener and lusher than just about any other place on Mars.”

  Jack always comes back.

  “Might we move his ashes to this spot?” I ask.

  The undertaker nods and we begin moving the rocks and digging into the site where the ashes have been misburied.

  “Shadow of the dead—like at Hiroshima,” Noriko says. The tears that refuse to well up in my eyes well up in hers instead. I nod.

  Experience teaches rescuers how far into the water they can safely go and how much of a load they can bear.

  “Immersion hypothermia is a peaceful way to die,” the undertaker says as I carry the box of ashes over to Jack’s shadow and we begin digging where his flesh flowed into the soil, digging and digging. Noriko and the undertaker carry over the rocks from the other cairn. I put the box in the hole we’ve dug, cover it over again with the rich new soil, then pile the stones on top of that. “A sleep and a forgetting.”

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown. Again and again. Drown in frozen water, to become the fire and ashes that remain, to lie buried in unearthly earth.

  I rise from the grave, wiping the dirt from my hands. The winds of approaching nightfall begin to howl around us. We turn and make our way toward the aircar. As we lift off, I look back at the shadow with stones piled on its heart and try to remember what it reminds me of. A shadow of a body, the body itself a shadow. But for there to be shadows, there must be light.

  “Watch!”

  I remember then, and all I can see is Jack, passionately still at the bottom of a deep sun-filled pool, waiting to surge toward the surface and the light once more.

  —For Jay

  THIS WORLD IS OURS

  by Philip E. High

  This is Hacket’s Town now; it used to be called Ocean City. Semi-tropical, fertile, a spectacular background of huge mountains. Once it was prosperous and overcrowded, a tourist haven, but now it is Hacket’s Town.

  Ocean City had a population of one and a quarter million, excluding tourists. Hacket’s Town can just make one hundred thousand if it includes the very young.

  Hacket’s Town has the hell of a job holding itself together—too many facilities and not enough people to run them. Without the robots, Hacket’s Town and most of civilization would be in chaos.

  What remained of World Authority took nineteen supposedly special men and let them loose on various parts of the world. They gave David Hacket Ocean City—what was left of it—and said, “This one is yours, see what you can do with it.”

  They did not add, “You and eighteen others are the last hope of civilization,” but a few thought it. Many of them had no hope at all: as far as they were concerned, this was just another example of a drowning humanity clutching at straws.

  Fortunately, power was still available, solar power was there in abundance, and a fair number of units providing cosmic energy; but neither solved the problem. Many had to be shut down because there were not enough men or robots to use them.

  An automatic flyer put Hacket down on the sea front with a small pile of luggage and two robot assistants.

  He was met by an auto-carrier and conducted to what had once been The Grand Ocean Hotel. Now it was the Administration Center, the police station, and a military unit—two private soldiers and a junior weapons officer.

  There was also Alan Brewster—two generations ago, he would have been known as the Mayor. Today, he was the Area Commander.

  He was not an embittered or an unpleasant man, but just one who had given up hope. He was overwhelmed. Wherever he looked, he saw only closed doors.

  He pushed a glass of whisky across his desk at Hacket. “Compliments of the management, sir.” He ran his fingers tiredly through his mop of graying, wavy hair and sighed. “Don’t know what it is you do, Hacket, or more to the point, I have been
told but fail to grasp it. Without being personal, however, even if it succeeds, as a race we have too much to deal with.

  “First, the plague cut us to pieces and numerically we are dead. Secondly, if we are able to increase our numbers in the next three generations, the robots will have trebled theirs. Oh, yes, we’re all pally-wally now, but how long will that last when they gain numerical superiority? I’ll be the first to admit that the average, garbage-clearing robotic truck is a hundred times smarter than I am.”

  Hacket took a sip of his whisky. “Any other cheering news?”

  Brewster smiled twistedly. “Sorry, nothing personal against you, but to finish the sorry picture off, you must have heard that a number of alien vessels have been detected passing through the solar system. Sadly, I cannot persuade myself that they are here to admire the view—it looks more like a careful survey to me.”

  He laughed softly and shook his head. “You know, Hacket, I’ve been wanting to rid myself of that lot for some years, but I am not obstructive. I’ll give you every possible help. I see you’ve brought two robots of your own. I’ll give you an R/Carrier in the morning. Room enough for all of you and additional equipment should you need it. Further, this particular unit knows the boundaries exactly. We only control one-third of this city, and we’re losing that around a meter a day.”

  He paused and smiled ruefully. “So I’m a defeatist. Don’t deny it, facts are facts.”

  “Don’t deny it for one moment, Mr. Brewster, it’s just that you’re only in possession of half of them.” His smile was friendly. “When I come back tomorrow, I’d like to have a talk about our mechanized friends.”

  “Why not, time on my hands and always prepared to listen. On the other hand, Mr. Hacket, you’re pro-robot.”

  * * * *

  It was an impressive street, wide, airy; the morning sun turned the tall graceful buildings to a gentle rose color. Hacket thought it might once have been a happy city, but not now. There were a fair number of pedestrians around, but they walked in groups, and two was the minimum. All were armed; something could slink in unnoticed at any time.