by Allen Steele
The bag was threadbare, dusty, and obviously quite old. When Karen opened it, she discovered that it contained a thin plastic cartridge with a plug and a serial port at one end. It took a few minutes for her to recognize what it was: an antique backup drive, the sort once used to store digital information.
Karen realized that this was an artifact from Earth that Gran’pa had carried with him aboard the Alabama. For a historian such as herself, such a find was priceless; there was no telling what might be stored on it. The technology was obsolete, of course, but the University’s history department possessed a 21st Century computer, itself another Alabama relic, which was carefully maintained for the express purpose of reading such data caches when they were found.
A few days later, once she had the time, she took the old drive to the University, where she showed it to the history curator and asked if he could find out what it contained. After warning her that it was entirely possible that its memory might have decayed to the point of uselessness, the curator carried the backup drive to a dust-free room where an impossibly old comp stood upon a table. He ran a cable from the comp to the drive, then carefully typed instructions into the brittle keyboard that opened the drive’s file directory.
As it turned out, the curator’s warning had been correct. Of the dozens of files contained on Gran’pa’s drive, all but a few had eroded over time, leaving behind only a list of filenames—notes.doc, SPsched, phonelist, and so forth—which offered nothing but tantalizing clues as to what they’d been about. Yet among those still readable was one with an intriguing name: 100YrSS—Grandfather.
Karen asked the curator to open this one. Instead of text, they discovered that it contained an old-style video wavefile. Was this something Gran’pa had once recorded? This was Karen’s first thought, until she realized that her grandfather would have never referred to himself as such. And what did “100YrSS” mean? “100 Year” was the most likely interpretation for “100Yr”, but the letters “SS” were mysterious.
The chronometer indicated that the wavefile had once been a little more than twenty minutes long, but what had survived was much shorter than that: less than two minutes had survived. When the curator played it, they saw:
An elderly gentleman, wearing a dark sport coat and necktie of late 20th Century style, stood before a podium. The word Hilton was visible on a plaque attached to the front of the podium, but this was less obvious than what projected on the large video screen beside him: 100 Year Starship, the words superimposed upon a stylized celestial compass, obviously a logo of some sort. The video was apparently shot from a camera located in the back of a meeting room. At the bottom of the screen were the backs of a dozen or more heads; at one point a young woman briefly walked in front of the camera, obscuring the image for a second.
“You know,” the man at the podium said, “I’ve been thinking about how we should go about interstellar travel, and it occurs to me that we should do this much the same way the great cathedrals of Europe were built. Not as a short-term project, with goals that can be achieved only within a few years and everything else pushed back to a hazy and not well-conceived timeline, but rather as a long-term initiative that may not be completed until our children’s or even grandchildren’s time. When we currently think about the logistics of space exploration, such as returning to the Moon or going to Mars, we tend to fall into a pattern that we used during Project Apollo. That was good for putting men on the Moon within a decade, but it’s not so appropriate when confronting the challenges of sending a vessel to another star system a hundred years from now, if not sooner…”
He raised his left hand toward the screen, fumbled with something he was holding. The logo disappeared, replaced an instant later by a diagram which looked like a pair of parabolic curves placed against each other on either side of a horizontal line. “Indeed, the technology for building a practical warp-drive engine may not come into existence for another couple of generations. However, because we can project with some degree of confidence just what such a drive might entail, we don’t necessarily have to push this into our grandchildren’s laps. We can begin thinking about it now. The Alcubierre Metric, for example, postulates using negative energy to generate a field, or warp bubble, around a spacecraft which would it allow it to…”
The video came to an abrupt end. The curator tried to salvage the remaining data, but was unable to retrieve anything more than harsh static and a few grainy images. The rest was lost to time.
What little they saw, though, was enough to cause Karen to stop breathing for nearly two full minutes. For in those few precious moments, she realized that the man at the podium wasn’t her grandfather, but rather his grandfather, and that he was speaking to her from across a gulf of nearly 400 years.
“There’s not much family resemblance, is there?” Sitting up in bed, Arturo studied the image of Karen’s great-great-grandfather which her data pad had projected on a wall screen. He smiled as he glanced at her. “You’re sure he’s related to you?”
“I’m sure.” Karen sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a hemp bathrobe and drying her damp hair with a towel. “You told me yourself…Dr. Frank O’Connell, Ph.D., professor of physics, Stanford University, and NASA.” She frowned. “That’s the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, isn’t it?”
“National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Otherwise, yes, you got it…that’s what I found when I double-checked the historical records.” He gazed at the image again. “I’m just saying, he doesn’t…he didn’t…look a lot like you.”
“The Asian bloodline hadn’t entered my family’s gene pool quite yet.” Karen laid down the damp towel, then picked up a brush and began combing out her long, black hair. “From what I remember of my family history, my great-grandmother married a guy from Seoul. That’s how Koreans came to belong to an otherwise Irish-American family.” She nodded toward the holo. “I see the resemblance. You just have to look hard, that’s all.”
“Hmm…I suppose.” The smile reappeared, a little more coy this time, as Arturo’s hand slid across the bed. “Perhaps I should make a more thorough investigation,” he said, taking hold of the sash that held closed the front of her robe.
“Quit.” Karen gave his hand a gentle slap. The two of them had been sleeping together for the past several months, having met at the University, but this was the first time she’d felt comfortable having Arturo share her bed. Because she didn’t want to have her grandfather hear them from the next room, they’d always made love at his place instead. “I’m serious. I know so little about him. That’s why I asked you to look into it for me. So you found out his name and that he’d worked at Stanford and NASA…”
“Sure. That was easy enough.” Arturo let go of her sash, picked up her pad and used it to expand the image until the 100 Year Starship logo filled the wallscreen. “Once I knew where the vid was recorded, I just had to dig into the history archives until I found the proceedings of the conference. And there he was, listed right there on the agenda. ‘Warp Drive Mechanics’, F. O’Connell…12:50 P.M., Florida Ballroom 5.”
“And the date was…?”
“Saturday, October 1, 2011.” He ran a hand through his dark brown hair. “Can I use the shower next? I’d like to freshen up a bit, too.”
“Let’s talk first.” Karen laid down her comb. She wanted to get dressed, but she was afraid that if she removed her robe, Arturo would get distracted and…well, they’d never get through this. “So you got his name, and from his biography in the published proceedings you got the rest.”
“Uh-huh.” He lowered an eyebrow and stared at her intently, an expression that she’d learned to recognize as inquisitive puzzlement. “I don’t understand. How can you realize that he was your ancestor, but know so little about him? His name, for instance?”
“My grandparents left Earth with almost nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Everything they owned was left behind, and the government of United Republic of America confiscated all t
hat once they were gone. So what little I know about my family has been pretty much what I’ve been told.”
“I understand,” he said. “Same sort of thing happened to my family.”
Arturo’s parents had come to Coyote only about twenty years earlier, during the second great immigration wave following the collapse of Earth’s major governments which occurred in the wake of the global environmental catastrophes that made humankind’s homeworld all but uninhabitable. It wasn’t quite the same thing—those immigrants had been able to bring a few belongings, at least—but Karen wasn’t about to argue the point with him.
“Sure,” she said. “Anyway, Gran’pa used to tell me that his grandfather had been one of the first scientists to work on interstellar travel, and that his work had led to Project Starflight, which in turn led to the construction of the Alabama.”
“But since that was all hearsay, you had no way of knowing for certain.” Arturo nodded. “All right, I understand. So now you do…”
“No, I don’t…not completely, I mean.” Karen let out her breath in a frustrated sigh. “Look, I know there’s not much here, but from what I can tell, my great-great-grandfather didn’t have anything to do with the Alabama or Project Starlight. He was involved in something else entirely, the theoretical development of a warp drive…and that’s not what was used by the Alabama.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Stretching luxuriously beneath the sheets, Arturo folded his arms behind his head. “Alabama used a RAIR engine…a ram-augmented interstellar rocket. Sort of a variation on a Bussard ramscoop. The designers decided on that because no one yet knew how to build a warp engine…those were still many years away from being built or perfected…and starbridges were only a vague possibility.” An ironic chuckle. “You know what’s funny? Of all the possible propulsion systems discussed during that conference, Bussard rams were not among them. I don’t know why, but…” He shrugged.
“Then my great-great-grandfather didn’t contribute anything.” Karen’s voice echoed her disappointment. Another story about her family debunked. All of a sudden, she wondered if Gran’pa had been little more than a freeloader who’d managed to get aboard the Alabama simply out of blind luck.
“I wouldn’t say that.” Arturo shook his head. “Warp drive was eventually developed, wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t used by the Alabama, but the subsequent ships sent by the Western Hemisphere Union used that technology.”
“The Millis-Clement Drive, sure. But my great-great-grandfather…”
“Might have had something to do with it. Who knows? I’d be willing to bet that, if you were to investigate the history of its research and development, you’d find citations to theoretical work by Dr. Frank O’Connell. And even if not…well, consider him one of the cathedral’s anonymous bricklayers.”
She looked at him askance. “Come again?”
“Think about what he said, when he compared building a starship to building a cathedral.” Pushing aside the sheets, Arturo swung his legs over the side of the bed. “The cathedrals of Earth…the ones built in Europe during the Renaissance, I mean…were the result of generations of labor. Those who built them had to work with the available technology of their time, which was not much more advanced than bricks and mortar, ropes and pulleys. So the ones who started work on cathedrals like Notre Dame knew that their work probably wouldn’t be finished in their own lifetimes, but probably by their children or grandchildren. And they were content with that.”
“You think so?” Karen couldn’t help but watch Arturo as he rose from bed. She enjoyed seeing him nude. “I mean, to spend your life working on something, knowing that you won’t benefit from it yourself…”
“I don’t know about you, but I think it would give my life purpose. I think that’s what people like your ancestor were doing when they went to that conference…starting something which they intended to be finished by their children or grandchildren, if not themselves. Like a cathedral.”
“You make it sound almost religious.”
“Faith doesn’t need religion. Just the ability to believe in something greater than yourself.” Arturo stood up, started to head for the bathroom. “Does that make sense to you?”
“Umm-hmm.” She couldn’t take her gaze off his buttocks. “It does, I suppose.”
“Good.” He glanced back at her, then paused in mid-step. “But I think we were talking about something else before then. Family resemblances? Expanding the gene pool? That sort of thing?”
She felt a smile coming to her face. “Yes, we could have been.”
Arturo turned around to walk back to her. She stood up from the bed, and he began untying the sash of her robe. “Maybe we ought conduct a little experiment of our own…”
After he finished his talk, Frank was given about five minutes to take questions from the audience. There were only a few, but nonetheless they were worth answering, giving him a chance mostly to explain a few of the more technical aspects of his presentation. Then Jim reminded everyone that they were scheduled for a fifteen-minute break before the next sessions began, and there was a brief smattering of applause before everyone stood up to leave the room.
All the sessions let out at the same time, and the convention center mezzanine was filled with attendees, each with laminated name badges dangling around their necks. Frank took a Coke from one of the beverage carts the Hilton staff positioned in the mezzanine during breaks, and stood off to one side, decompressing from the efforts of the last half-hour.
A knot of people stood in front of the British Interplanetary Society table, examining their exhibit on Project Icarus. Over here, Jill Tartar chatted with people who’d been at her talk. Over there, Douglas Trumbull was deep in conversation with another person. A group of science fiction writers—instantly recognizable as such because nearly all of them had beards and were losing their hair—were clustered together, perhaps discussing what they were managing to learn from these sessions that they would later use in their stories. Frank had just spotted Stewart Brand walking by when the cell phone in his coat pocket purred.
He dug out his Android and glanced at the screen: L. Cho 415-555-0994. Smiling, he ran his finger down the screen, then held the phone to his ear. “Hello, Lisa,” he said, raising his voice a little so he could be heard above the crowd around him.
“Hi, Dad. How’s the conference going?”
“Pretty well. I just finished my presentation a few minutes ago.”
“Great! How did it go?”
“Umm…not bad. Could have used a few more people in the room, but there’s a lot going on here, so I had a lot of competition.”
“I’m sure they were all there for you.”
Frank grinned. That was his daughter: always trying to be optimistic. “Yeah, well…how’s things with you this weekend?”
“Good. Kim went off to the gym, so I’m taking care of David this morning. We’re going to the zoo in a little while.”
“Sounds like fun.” It had taken Frank a few years to get used to the fact that his daughter had married an artist from South Korea, but Kim Cho seemed like a nice enough fellow. He spent a lot of time working out at the Y, though. “I’m sure Davy will like the zoo.”
“Yeah.” A sigh of motherly exasperation. “I know he will…he insists on going at least once a month.”
“Maybe he needs to expand his interests. Couldn’t you take him to the science museum instead?”
“He’s four, Dad…give him time. Anyway, when are you flying back tomorrow? Kim and I were thinking about picking you up at the airport, then going out for dinner after that.”
“That would be great. I’d like that.” Frank rubbed his forehead, trying to remember his flight schedule. “Umm…I think I get in around 4:30 P.M. your time. Is that too early for you?”
“Not at all. Once we get through traffic, it’ll be about time to eat.”
“All right, then. If you’ll pick me up outside the United baggage claim area, we can…”
A
child babbled from somewhere in the background. “Oh, all right,” Lisa said, voice a little distant, then she returned again. “David wants to talk to you.”
Frank grinned. “Put him on, by all means.”
He heard hands fumbling at a distant cell phone, then a small boy’s high-pitched voice. “Gran’pa!”
“Hello, David,” he said, turning away and placing a hand over his left ear so that he could hear better. “How are you?”
An uncertain pause. “Fine.”
“Good, that’s good. I hear you’re going to the zoo today.”
Another pause. “Yeah.”
“Oh, that’s good. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that. Do you know where I am?”
A couple of seconds passed. “No.”
“I’m in Florida, talking about starships.”
For a second or two, he was unsure whether David had heard him. Then his grandson piped up again. “What’s a starship?”
Frank smiled. “Well, then…I suppose I’ll have a lot to tell you when I see you tomorrow.”
There’s already a foreword to this story, but like the story itself, it becomes counterfactual about halfway through; that is, while based on true facts, it is untrue. Some might call this alternative history, but I don’t think that really describes what’s going on here: in this instance, I decided to play with the reader’s head by telling a story which isn’t entirely a work of fiction.
I am a great fan of pulp fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s my opinion that the pulp era was one of the great periods of American literature. Although it’s usually ignored or dismissed by academia, it can’t be denied that some of the best American writers of the 20th Century—from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury, among many others—made their first appearances in ten-cent magazines with covers that were lurid beyond belief and back-page ads for rupture belts. So this story is a tribute to the pulp writers of the 1930s, and the people who published them.
