Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “You have been holding back all day,” Angee said. “What is it?”

  She was looking out at the small stage, tapping her foot to Kanayama's bass accompaniment. Peter, looking at the way her blond hair cascaded onto her bare shoulders, wondered again how he had ever been lucky enough to snag a woman this beautiful. His self-image was of a man too dull-looking to achieve ugliness. He actually had the sort of regular features that are often considered handsome, and with a different hairstyle he might actually have been considered so. Instead, he had a crew cut because it allowed him to ignore his hair. He was tall and in good shape from biking and tennis, but many who talked to him came away with the impression of a man only intermittently involved with his own body, that in some ways he viewed it as a distraction from things that really mattered.

  “I received an e-mail just before I came over. I have been selected for the Saturn expedition. Novak wants me to be his principal assistant in the exobiology section.”

  Conflicting expressions passed over Angee's face as quickly as summer lightning. “Why, that's ... wonderful. But I thought you had been passed over in favor of what's his name, uh, Zimmerman?”

  “Josh died in a hang-gliding accident yesterday.” Peter grimaced. Zimmerman had been a fierce competitor but immensely likable for all that. His death left Peter shaken. “Novak needs to fill the slot as quickly as possible to have a full complement at launch.”

  “Oh.” Angee's shadowed face was thoughtful.

  Peter put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. As usual, there was something akin to electric shock when his fingers touched her flesh. “I told them no.”

  “What? How could you? This expedition could make your career. It's the sort of chance that won't come again.”

  “I had not even met you when I applied to join the expedition. When Josh was chosen, I was actually relieved. I had already decided to marry you.”

  Angee looked thoughtful. “Why didn't I know anything about this?”

  “I had to convince you that you were in love with me.” Then, with reluctant honesty: “I had to get enough courage to pop the question.

  “Anyway, it's too late now. Five years is just too long to wait, or to expect you to wait. We have our wedding date. Professionally, there is more than enough work for me to do on Martian methanogens and the samples being returned by the cometary probes.”

  Angee might have said something, but the break ended and she went out to sing her second set. It ended exactly at midnight amid showers of confetti and popping corks. After that, things became hazy. Perhaps the goodnight kiss was a bit perfunctory. Perhaps they were both simply tired or feeing the effects of too much champagne.

  In any event, Peter woke at eleven the next morning. His head throbbed, his stomach signaled incipient rebellion. Perhaps that was why he did not at first see the envelope that had been shoved under the front door of his apartment. It was strangely lumpy. A ring fell to the floor when he tore it open. There was a note.

  DEAR PETER,

  I THOUGHT YOU A MAN OF VISION AND AMBITION, ONE WHOSE TALENTS AND INTELLIGENCE WERE DESTINED TO LEAVE THEIR MARK ON THE WORLD. I SEE NOW THAT I WAS WRONG. WE SHOULD END THIS NOW BEFORE WE MAKE ANY MORE MISTAKES.

  He was sitting on the floor without knowing how he got there. The world tilted around him.

  Throughout history, young men in a similar position have gone out and gotten drunk. Peter was already hungover, so he was ahead of the curve in that regard. Others have fled into war or exploration. As soon as he could control his voice, Peter called up the message from Vaclav Novak and accepted his appointment to the Saturn expedition.

  Some have been so disappointed in romance that they swore off women forever. Here, the last part of the twenty-first century, they had a previously unavailable option. The Neo-Victorian Age (called more darkly, by some, the Repression) was as fascinated by sex as the original Victorians had been. The plan to send a mixed crew of fifty, most of whom were not married (to each other, at least) seemed rife with possibilities, most of them bad.

  For those who wished to avail themselves of it, there was an alternative beyond frustration or sin. A simple biochemical fine-tuning, completely reversible, decreased certain hormone levels and tweaked others. To call it gelding, as some did, was certainly unfair, while “chemical castration” was even more so. Medical practitioners preferred to refer to it simply as the Treatment. It put certain urges into the background, making them fond memories rather than steadily increasing torments. If one of its side effects was an increase in weight, that was considered a plus for those using the hibernation chamber.

  A week later, Peter presented himself to Richard Beard, the physician in charge of the medical staff of the Roc. There he was poked, prodded, injected, and tweaked. After which he was put on a high-carbohydrate diet for a week and then put to sleep.

  On March 15, 2058, while totally unconscious and with a body temperature of seventy degrees Fahrenheit, Peter left Earth orbit on a five-year journey to go where no one, man or woman, had gone before.

  * * * *

  ii.

  June 15, 2058

  Waking was a slow, painful process. Lips and mouth and throat were so dry that they seemed to have fused together into an impenetrable mass. He was simultaneously famished and nauseated. He let the attendants sponge his lips, prop him upright, and swing his legs off the bed because he had neither strength nor will to resist.

  “That's it, Peter. You're doing wonderfully.”

  It was more than just physical discomfort. He knew that something bad was lying in wait for him. He would remember it as soon as he was fully awake. Despite all the precise biochemical adjustments signaled by his embedded blood monitor, it did not hit him until he finished his first hour of physical therapy nearly an hour later.

  Angee! It was like moving wrong and reopening an old wound. In his last few moments of consciousness, he had wondered if the Treatment would do anything to dull this continual ache. It was now clear that it would not. Physical desire was indeed gone, but it left in its wake a void, a feeling that his insides had been yanked out. More than half the hurt was bewilderment. How could he have been so wrong? He had been so sure she would be pleased by his decision, that she would take it for what it was, proof of his commitment to her, to them as a unit. If he could miscalculate that severely...

  Then maybe he was a fool, deserving of her contempt.

  Work through pain. It was the one way he knew to diminish the sting. He put in an extra hour in the exercise room. The Roc was a long tube housing the ion drive, bisected by a disk that rotated around the tube with just enough speed that the outer ring generated approximately 1g worth of centrifugal force. The exercise room was located along this outer ring. When he could push himself no further, he showered, left the exercise room, and followed the always upwardly curving corridor to the elevator and then up three floors to his workstation. It identified his thumbprint and lit the screen, displaying his schedule. It was heavy with increasingly strenuous physical conditioning, which was the main reason for breaking his hibernation period in the first place. Then there were meetings with the exobiology staff.

  And there, in the upper corner, there was a blinking icon signifying an urgent message. He fingered it.

  DEAR PETER,

  WHEN YOU GET THIS, YOU WILL BE CLOSER TO THE ORBIT OF MARS THAN TO EARTH. THERE WILL BE NO WAY BACK FOR YOU UNTIL THE Roc RETURNS IN FIVE YEARS. SO I CAN ADMIT TO YOU NOW THAT I LIED. YOU TOLD ME WHEN WE FIRST STARTED DATING HOW MUCH YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO GO INTO SPACE FROM THE TIME YOU WERE FIVE YEARS OLD. THIS WAS YOUR CHANCE. I COULD NOT LET YOU THROW IT AWAY.

  I KNOW HOW STUBBORN YOU CAN BE WHEN YOUR MIND IS MADE UP. THAT IS WHY I SENT BACK THE RING. IT WAS THE HARDEST THING I HAVE EVER HAD TO DO. THAT USED UP ALL MY WILLPOWER, SO I PROGRAMMED MY PHONE NOT TO ACCEPT YOUR CALLS. IF YOU HAD MANAGED TO GET THROUGH, I WOULD HAVE BROKEN DOWN COMPLETELY.

  LIVING FIVE WHOLE YEARS WITHOUT YOU IS ALSO MORE THAN I CAN BEAR. I DON'T WANT
TO GROW OLD IN YOUR ABSENCE. IF I CAN'T AT LEAST TALK TO YOU THIS WAY, THERE IS NO JOY IN EVEN BEING CONSCIOUS. SO I WILL BE HERE IN HIBERNATION EVERY DAY YOU ARE. I WILL BE AWAKE WHEN YOU ARE. AND WHEN WE SLEEP, WE CAN DREAM TOGETHER.

  I HOPE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FORGIVE MY DECEPTION AND CLAIM THE DESTINY YOU DESERVE.

  ALL MY LOVE,

  ANGEE

  Each member of the expedition had a bandwidth allotment. Most of this was supposed to be used for professional communications. Beyond that, there was enough for personal use for one fifteen-minute video message per week or effectively unlimited text messaging. (With a six-minute delay at this stage of the voyage, live conversations were already impractical.)

  Peter reread the message half a dozen times, trying to tease out tone and nuance. Finally, setting his mouth in a determined line, he called up the voice software and began dictating.

  * * * *

  Goldie blew up when Angee told her the plan. “So, just when your career is about to go into high gear, when I'm able to line up dates and recording contracts, you decide you have to take half the year off in quarterly increments for, what, the next five years. Wake up call for Miss Lamont: You are not in the Tokano and Sinatra category. The dates won't wait for your convenience. If they can't get you for the dates they have open, the clubs will get someone else. Any momentum your career might have had gets tossed away.

  “And why are you doing this? Because you drove away a guy who wanted to marry you, and now you're afraid you're going to grow old waiting for him to come back, supposing he will ever speak to you again. What am I not getting about this?”

  Goldie was more than an agent. In the four years they had worked together, she had become a surrogate mother, warning her away from the wolves in the business, providing dietary advice, even making sure that she got enough sleep so that she would not need the chemical enhancers that were still the crutch (and the entry to more problematic drugs) for so many performers.

  “I'm sorry, Goldie.” Angee turned her face away, feeling guilty about her agent's anger. “I know everything you have done for me, and if you are saying that you don't want to be my agent—”

  “Jesus Christ, kid, have you listened to a word I've said?” Goldie's carefully dyed hair shook with emotion. Her lipstick made it look like she had taken a bayonet in the mouth. “That is not what I am saying. I want to be your agent. I want you to make a lot of money so I can make a little bit to keep body and soul together in my lonely old age.

  “Used to be, you weren't just talented, you were smart. You caught the craze for bounce music at its beginning, saw its relation to swing, and started featuring pieces from everyone from Benny Goodman to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. That made the fans comfortable. Then you added songs that they might not have expected from the likes of Lennon-McCartney, Joni Mitchell, and Yoko Kanno. That kept them interested.

  “Next week you have your first live performance vid-disk coming out and will you be around to promote it? No. Why? Because you'll be in hibernation dreaming about Prince Charming. You think just your career will melt away? How about Shinichi and Jose. You think they will just hang around waiting for you to wake up? They can't! They have to take the gigs offered when they're offered. They can't just drop everything for you.”

  That hurt because it was obviously true. Good sidemen are almost beyond price. Angee knew this from having worked with the not so good. As she had been able to command bigger fees for her appearances, she had increased what she paid Shinichi and Jose proportionately. But Goldie was right. They could not afford extended layoffs. She could only barely afford it herself.

  “And here's the final thing,” Goldie said. “Do you know what this is going to do to you physically? I don't, because the human hibernation process is still experimental. Some of the researchers talk about the Saturn expedition as just an extended field test to prove it out for excursions into the Kuiper Belt.”

  “I will be in a hospital annex,” Angee said, “under the care of the people who invented the process. It will certainly be much safer than it will be for Peter and his crewmates.”

  “Not necessarily. Ever heard of bedsores? They're not a problem in free fall. Back here on Earth, it's a different story. Yes, they cradle you on a multisectioned air mattress that rocks you continuously, so that no one section of your skin is continuously under pressure. Still, there have been incidents. And settlements.

  “I haven't even mentioned how you have to bloat up to survive three months without eating. You think your fans are going to like what that does to you?”

  * * * *

  In that respect, at least, Goldie had been wrong. You did not have to gain fifty pounds before they put you under. Instead, you were fitted with a gastrostomy port in your stomach. A watery, nutritious paste wormed its way through a plastic tube and into your digestive system.

  Despite Goldie's fears, the system had worked as advertised. Angee woke three days before Peter's scheduled resuscitation. Time enough to get her strength back to walk about the city without artificial aids. Almost time enough for her digestive system to become fully functional.

  She was walking to Holiday's to meet the musicians Goldie (bless her!) had lined up for her when rain whipped out of the dull gray sky. That, and an absolutely irresistible smell enticed her into the coffee shop she was passing.

  NO ROBOTS, the sign on the door promised. ALL HUMAN STAFF. And so it appeared as she stepped inside, though some of the baristas looked so tired that the difference was not immediately obvious. Angee ordered a small cup and sipped carefully, not sure how her intestines would handle caffeine. Flipping open her notebook, she scrolled through a list of songs and began arranging titles, thinking how the sequence would first establish a mood and then build it, expand it, until suddenly the evening was over and the audience was clapping for encores. That's what you hoped for anyway. A lot depended on not straining your voice and the capacities of your sidemen—

  The notebook chimed suddenly. A small but exquisitely detailed picture of Peter began flashing in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. It made him look so far away, as if she were gazing through the wrong end of a telescope. Angee raised her hand to the winking image.

  And stopped. Supposing he will ever speak to you again. Goldie had touched on her greatest fear. How badly could you hurt someone, even for his own good, and expect him to be forgiving? Peter's calm, professional exterior was only the mask worn by a proud and passionately focused man.

  She stabbed the screen with her index finger. A message came up. There was no salutation.

  I THOUGHT WE TRUSTED EACH OTHER, THAT WE MADE DECISIONS TOGETHER. NO LIES, NO DOMINANCE GAMES. A PARTNERSHIP OF EQUALS. NOW YOU SAY YOU LIED, THAT YOU COULD NOT LET ME THROW AWAY THE BIG CHANCE FOR MY CAREER. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LITTLE THAT MEANT TO ME COMPARED TO US? OR THAT I MIGHT BE THE ONE BEST ABLE TO VALUE MY CAREER?

  I AM GOING TO STOP NOW BEFORE I WRITE SOMETHING BOTH OF US WILL REALLY REGRET.

  Rain drummed on the glass, an irregular beat more suited to bebop than ballad. Angee did not feel the tears on her cheeks until a barista came by and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don't take it so hard, hon. He probably isn't worth it anyway.”

  * * * *

  iii.

  “These are not the circumstances under which I wished us to have our first departmental meeting,” Novak said dryly.

  Peter wished he could see Novak's face, but he was three quarters of the way across the chamber, his view blocked by half a dozen heads. Wedged sideways as he was by the crowd, there was no way to get a better view unless he jumped. This was not an entirely absurd idea. This close to the hub, centrifugal force created an effective gravity no more than one-third Earth standard. He could probably jump high enough to bang his head painfully on the ceiling, which was barely a meter above his head. On the other hand, there was nothing to grab, and he would definitely look silly bouncing up and down.

  Modern spacecraft had air-recycling systems,
which made perfumes and colognes allowable shipboard. At the moment, the system in the chamber was close to being overloaded and these odors were obtrusively prominent. Still, those were the more pleasant smells. One of the less-publicized effects of free fall and near free fall was increased flatulence. All you could do was pretend not to notice it.

  “Captain Zhen assures me that this flare should end in no more than six hours.” The communal groan almost drowned out the end of Novak's sentence. “Be grateful!” Surely the man was joking. “Some solar flares last for days.”

  The situation was made doubly frustrating by the fact that it should have been completely unnecessary. A magnetic field extended twenty meters out from the ship's hull. It had been designed to withstand storms fiercer than this, as much to protect the electronics as the crew. Yet this was its first severe test of the voyage, and the Chief Engineer had declared that safety would be ensured through a belt-and-suspenders approach. Three “storm cellars” were situated around the hub of the wheel and until the magnetic field proved itself, they were mandatory shelters. Together they would provide more than enough space for all the passengers. Unfortunately, the alarm had gone off while all of Novak's staff was assembled in the ship's one large conference room and everyone had made for the nearest storm cellar. By the time it became obvious that this was a big mistake, the sirens had altered from preliminary warning to storm-in-progress. If the magnetic fields were insufficient, no one wanted to be outside while protons sleeted invisibly through the corridors.

  “Think of this as an excellent opportunity to get to know your colleagues,” Novak concluded.

  That brought scattered laughter from some, who, like Peter, thought they might be getting to know their colleagues too well.