Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen
Page 39
I stopped there, considering.
It would be hard, the new world. So much work to do. If I’d hated the gee exerted on the ship during downthrusting, I’d hate the real gravity twice as much. My old body might last a week or two in such an environment, but probably no more than that. I’d have a stroke, or my heart would give out, or I’d fall and bust a hip. That was no way to go. Not when they still needed the Osprey to remain functional in orbit. As a satellite relay, both for on-world communication and for pitching messages back towards Sol System—our far away brothers and sisters on the old world.
“No,” I finally said to my friends. “I can’t go down. But you can do one thing for me. Take Janicka’s body and bury it in a sunny place, with the others who died. Where the trees grow tall and the noise of the ocean is in the wind.”
I gave them my kite.
“Make sure one of the children gets to fly this too.”
There was, of course, much protest.
But I waived them off.
“Are you going to argue with your senior?” I said, half-joking. “I will stay here. It’ll be just the Osprey and me. Together. She’s my woman now. We are the only ones old enough to understand each other.”
Their faces showed concern and sorrow, but they ultimately left me in peace.
Audio Journal Transcript: Final Entry
And here onboard the Osprey I remain.
The ship is all but empty. Nobody comes up anymore, though occasionally I do send something down when they need it—in one of the numerous emergency re-entry pods. Eventually I’ll run out of those, but not before the ship has been stripped of virtually every usable piece of technology that can be put to work below. There’s only enough left onboard these days to keep the power, the air, and the hydroponics farm running.
My lovely farm.
Where I grow just enough for me to eat, which isn’t much.
And where I suppose someday I’ll lay down and let the universe take me.
To be totally honest, it’s not been a bad life. I’ve had responsibilities and I’ve taken lovers and I’ve made amends for my wrongs. I’ve also helped bring a miracle to fruition. There’s a new civilization going on down there, on that new world. I think they named it something lofty-sounding, but I can’t remember what. A pretty name. Doesn’t really matter. They’re doing what needs to be done. And I am fully confident that a thousand years from now, this place will be vibrant and alive with people. Maybe launching their own ships towards still more distant stars? Maybe cracking the light-speed barrier altogether, and turning voyages like mine into a question of months, weeks, or even days.
Who knows?
I’ve got the Osprey’s long-range radio dishes fine-tuned for communication traffic with Earth. Broadcasts back to Sol System take a long time. I let them know that the Osprey has arrived, and that her mission is officially accomplished to satisfaction.
I don’t expect anything in return. I won’t be alive to listen to their reply.
One thing, though.
Today Leah sent me a high-resolution image of Janicka’s grave, where the four bodies of our fallen starfarers now rest.
It’s a monument, actually. A huge stone obelisk twenty meters high watches over a gorgeous bluff that looks out across an amazing, endless, wave-tumbled sea.
The plants look a bit strange. Not like Earth plants.
But green is still green.
And the clouds are bright white.
And the sky is true blue.
NOTE: to date, no Analog story has gotten me as much kind mail as “Life Flight” has gotten me. By a country mile. All of it overwhelmingly complimentary. Well, save for one letter. What follows is my magazine-printed response, to an astute reader comment received by the Brass Tacks column, which has run in the back of Analog magazine since long before I was born. Trevor Quachri was nice enough to give me space for a pleasant rejoinder. In short? Oops. Even us “Hard SF” guys don’t always get it right.
January 2014
Steve Gray is correct to complain that my math in “Life Flight” was not precise. As a devotee (and collaborator) of Larry Niven, I take my “hard” science fiction very seriously. Still, even Larry himself was not perfect. There’s a filk song about Larry’s most famous example: oh, the Ringworld is unstable, the Ringworld is unstable, did the best that he was able, and that’s good enough for me!
For my short works, I usually don’t invest the kind of calculating time one might log on a full novel. And if ever I do novelize “Life Flight” I will absolutely be taking Steve’s notes and using them to refine the specifics of the Osprey’s journey. Just as Larry used criticism of the first Ringworld novel to greatly inform the descriptions and events of the second. To that franchise’s credit.
Suffice to say that for “Life Flight” the novelette, I was satisfied with what I call back-of-the-creative-envelope educated guesses. Which are reasonably informed by the realities of the physics in question, without dwelling so much on the physics that the human aspect of the story gets swamped by the equations.
I imagined the Osprey as a thick, super-skyscraper-sized fuel tank filled with slush hydrogen isotope. The crew module is a very long, insulated, relatively thin cylinder running centerline through the slush. At one end of the Osprey is the bow shield, to protect against induced cosmic rays and other interstellar debris. At the other end is a pusher/shield plate punctured by the exhaust nozzle of a supremely efficient, yet necessarily very-low-thrust fusion drive. A drive that consumes reaction mass and reactor fuel at an amazingly miserly rate. So, it takes a long time for such a drive to push the Osprey up the relative acceleration curve, and then brake accordingly on the other end of the journey. How long—precisely?—was something I didn’t feel the story needed to worry about. Nor did I factor in total time spent at one gee, in a per-second-per-second cumulative sense. Just that the ship would never, ever come close to reaching truly relativistic speeds.
Again, all back-of-the-creative-envelope guesswork. Sorry if the way I described the action rang too many physics alarm bells, for those with better arithmetic skills than myself. Hopefully Steve (and anyone else who noticed my imprecision) will forgive me.
Steve, for what it’s worth, if the novelization does reach fruition, you can expect a nice credit for having done my homework for me. Where the Osprey’s journey is concerned. Thank you, sir.
Now, to the instability syndrome that keeps our hero from being able to sleep out the trip to his new world. For this plot point, I made a single, key assumption: even well-funded, highly engineered operations sometimes can’t plan for all possible contingencies.
In the body of the story I dropped the hint that the syndrome is fantastically rare and cannot reasonably be tested for. Why not? Well, maybe it takes different lengths of time for the problem to manifest in different people? Time the pre-mission planners didn’t have? Or maybe the testing is prohibitively expensive? So much so that it wasn’t in the mission budget? Or maybe medical science assumes that if the parents don’t have it, their kids won’t either? But the science got it wrong in our hero’s case? Or maybe our hero just didn’t have the problem when he boarded, but later grew into the problem post-puberty? I left it as a mental puzzle for readers to invent (using their own imaginations) why this problem would have gone unchecked before the Osprey’s launch.
As with the math surrounding the Osprey’s journey, I didn’t dwell so much on the technical details of the instability syndrome so much as I dwelt on its human impact: the way such a discovery would virtually destroy a young man, and condemn him to a life not of his own choosing. How would any of us, faced with such a thing, react? What might our choices entail? How would we derive meaning from living out our days on a ship in a proverbial bottle? I found these questions much more engaging than the actual question of why the syndrome went undetected. And again, I hope Steve (and anyone else who wrinkled his or her brow at the issue) will forgive me.
Cheers, Analog! I lo
ok forward to seeing you all next time. And thank you for being the sharpest SF readers in the literary quadrant!
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Afterword
As of the writing of these words, it’s been approximately one year since I released my very first short fiction collection, Lights in the Deep, through WordFire Press. The tremendously positive audience reaction to that book, and its subsequent financial success, are precisely responsible for this new volume coming into being. As with Lights, I hope that you’ve enjoyed Racers of the Night. This collection represents the best of my most recent short science fiction, and continues my personal tradition of telling tales which are (I hope) robustly optimistic about the human future, despite potentially disastrous or dire circumstances.
Again, as with Lights, I have to offer my most profound thanks to Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, and the whole crew at WordFire Press, for their kindness, diligence, and patience. It’s not been an easy year for me, trying to juggle a writing career, a part-time military career, and an increasingly challenging civilian career. Racers of the Night should have been done months before it actually got done. Thus I put an added burden on WordFire’s crew.
Ladies and gentlemen of WordFire Press, my hat is off to you all. It’s been a tremendous treat doing business with you, and I look forward to working with you all on additional short fiction volumes in the future.
And to the readers, eager to see more from me, do please check out my novel The Chaplain’s War, from Baen Books! Also, take a look at my collaboration with Larry Niven, called Red Tide, from Arc Manor!
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Additional Copyright Information
Introduction 1
Copyright © 2014 by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Introduction 2
Copyright © 2014 by Kevin J. Anderson
Introduction 3
Copyright © 2014 by Dave Wolverton
“The Curse of Sally Tincakes”
Copyright © 2012 (first appearance: Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show magazine, issue #28)
“The Bricks of Eta Cassiopeia”
Copyright © 2013 (first appearance: Beyond the Sun anthology, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.)
“Guard Dog”
Copyright © 2012 (with Mike Resnick. First appearance: Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.)
“Recapturing the Dream”
Copyright © 2014 (first time in print)
“The Flamingo Girl”
Copyright © 2013 (first appearance: Galaxy’s Edge magazine, issue #2)
“Reardon’s Law”
Copyright © 2013 (first appearance: Five by Five #2, WordFire Press)
“Blood and Mirrors”
Copyright © 2011, 2014 (first time in print)
“The Shadows of Titan”
Copyright © 2012 (with Carter Reid. First appearance: Space Eldritch, edited by Nathan Shumate)
“The Nechronomator”
Copyright © 2014 (first appearance: Galaxy’s Edge magazine, issue #7)
“The Hideki Line”
Copyright © 2014 (first appearance: Spark: A Creative Anthology, edited by Brian Lewis.)
“Peacekeeper”
Copyright © 2012 (with Mike Resnick. First appearance: The Mammoth Book of SF Wars, edited by Iat Watson, and Ian Whates.)
“Life Flight”
Copyright © 2014 (first appearance: Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, March 2014)
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Other Books by Brad R. Torgersen
Lights in the Deep
The Chaplain’s War
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