by Jerry Oltion
"We might."
Glory shook her head. "I don't think so. The velocity difference on that scale is huge. We'd be days just matching speed with the local stars. For that matter there's the rotation of the galaxy to consider even if we stay right here in the Milky Way. The farther we go, the more the relative difference in velocity."
"Oh," Nick said.
Oh indeed, Trent thought. He could almost hear the rush of air as his first impression of Glory flew out the window. "You, uh, know orbital mechanics?" he asked.
"No, we're just acquaintances," she said. She winked at Trent, and he felt himself blushing. Donna said, "How does that work, about things moving faster the farther you go?" Glory thought about the question for a second, then stuck her finger in her beer and swirled it. "The galaxy spins kind of like that," she said. "We're about two-thirds of the way out from the middle, moving along with everything else. If we're here—" she pointed to a spot near the handle of the mug "—then our vector is aimed toward Greg. But if we jump over here—" she pointed to a spot halfway around the mug
"—everything else is moving away from Greg at the same velocity. So we have to kill twice our galactic orbital velocity to match speed with the stars in that region of space. That's a worst-case scenario, but even if we just jump halfway around, everything's going sideways. We'd have to change 1.4 times our orbital velocity to match the stars in this region of space."
"How much velocity are we talking about?" Donna asked.
"Quite a bit. The galaxy rotates about once every quarter of a billion years, and we're about thirty thousand light-years out from the center, so we're moving about half a million miles per hour. That's about thirty times the velocity of a satellite in low orbit around a planet." Trent hoped she hadn't just calculated those numbers in her head. He was feeling dumb enough as it was; if she could do math like that on the fly, he didn't want to know.
Donna seemed to be following her, though. "Holy cow," Donna said. "No wonder you don't hear of colonies more than a couple of hundred light-years away."
"Actually," said Glory, "It takes a few thousand for the difference to really become a problem. The biggest reason people don't go farther is because our star maps aren't that good. Until we got the hyperdrive, we couldn't measure interstellar distances all that accurately beyond a hundred light-years or so."
Trent wondered what she did for a living. Astronomer, maybe? Whatever it was, he bet she wouldn't be doing much of it playing Adam and Eve with Nick.
"How far back to basics do you plan to go when you settle on your hideway planet?" he asked.
"That'll be part of the experiment," Nick said. "We'll take what we can carry in one load—mostly tools and books and stuff—and we'll teach our kids everything we know, but the tools won't last forever, or the books, either. It'll pretty much depend on memory after the first couple of generations."
"And condoms," Greg said, and everybody laughed.
Trent looked over at Donna to see if she understood what was so funny, but she shrugged and shook her head. "We're missing the joke," Trent said.
"Nick was showing us how to make a slingshot with a wedding ring and a condom when you walked in."
Nick held up what Trent had thought was a rubber band. Now he could see that it was indeed a condom.
Nick said, "Unlubricated ones work best. What you do is, you poke the open end of the condom through the ring, then fold it back over the ring so you've got a stretchy pocket that's held open in front. Drop a piece of gravel, or in this case a popcorn granny, down inside . . ." He did that. "Hold the ring tight between your fingers, stretch the end with the granny back to your nose, aim, and fire." He let go and the condom flapped forward just like a regular slingshot. The granny pinged off the same beer mug as before, and zinged off toward the back of the bar.
"Use a thumb ring and a rock, and you can kill a chicken with it," Nick said.
"You're going to teach your kids to hunt chickens with a condom and a ring?" Trent asked.
"I'm going to teach them to hunt chickens with their brains," Nick replied. "We'll eventually run out of condoms and rings, but brains will be the one resource that'll grow exponentially."
"If you don't freeze to death the first winter."
Nick pocketed the condom and slipped the ring on his finger. "We'll settle in the tropics. We've got just as good a chance of making it as anybody. Probably better."
One of the aliens said something in a soft voice that sounded like it was coming from the other end of a long concrete culvert. A second behind him, a louder synthetic voice spoke from the pendant hanging by a silver chain around his neck. "Nick makes very much sense. He and Glory will provide backup for all of you when other colonies fail."
It took Trent a second to puzzle out what he meant. "Doesn't look like this place is in a whole lot of trouble," he said.
"Not today," the alien replied. "But war comes soon. Earth likes not uncontrolled colonies. What it can't control, it will kill."
"It's too late for that," Trent said. "There's already too many colonies for anybody to stop 'em all."
"Tell that to the United States," said Nick. "They've been threatening us since day one, and they're threatening everybody else they can find, too. Any colony that tries to recruit enough people to make a go of it the civilized way winds up on their watch list, and if you let a Frenchman or an Arab or a Korean move in, or if you try a form of government other than a dictatorship under one of their chosen puppets, boom, you're on their shit list. Economic sanctions, embargoes, shows of force. You haven't lived until you've been buzzed by an F-16. They haven't started bombing yet, but how long do you suppose that'll last?"
Trent took another swig of his beer. "The Galactic Federation won't let them bomb—"
"The Galactic Federation won't do a damned thing. It's no more able to stop them than the UN
could stop them from walking all over the Middle East twenty years ago. There's at least seventy members in the Federation, and half of them would love to see humanity blow itself up. They're not going to stop it; hell, they'd probably egg 'em on if they thought they needed to." He looked at Trent and Donna for a long moment, then said, "Sorry if I've offended you, but I was an American, too, until five months ago, and it was the government's belligerent foreign policy that made me leave. That and the way they lied to us about damn near everything they did."
Trent felt like he should defend his country, but if what Nick was describing was true, it didn't sound like there was much defense. And sad as he was to hear it, it fit with what he'd seen back home. Donna said, "If you left five months ago, then you must have been one of the first ones here." Everyone at the table laughed. "The very first," Nick said. "My full name is Nicholas Onnescu."
"Oh," said Donna. "And you're going to leave the planet that's named after you?" Nick nodded solemnly. "Believe me, it's not a decision I made lightly. I would love to stay here and watch it grow into something wonderful, but I don't see that happening. Eventually the U.S. is going to decide we're a threat, and that'll be the end of it. I don't want to stay just to watch it all go up in flames when the war starts."
"What about you guys?" Donna asked the others. "You're not all bailing out, are you?" Greg said, "Not me. At least not yet. I haven't been convinced that it's hopeless. For one thing, we're inviting as many aliens to move in as we can, so it's not just a human conflict. That might move the Federation to intervene if the U.S. tries anything, and with any luck the U.S. won't risk it in the first place once they realize they'll be starting a war with more than just other humans." Trent looked over at the two aliens. "How do you guys feel about that?" The same one who had spoken before said, "Exchanges of hostage may work, but even if not, we must do this to repay for damage we did long ago."
"Damage to who?"
"Humanity."
Trent laughed. "Can't have been too long ago. We just got into space a few months back." The alien said, "We were in space long before. We traveled the slow way
, spending many years between stars. We came to Earth when your species was still young. Very amusing was your science. Anything not understood was work of God. So we became God. Worked miracles, took offerings, then went away. Never thought people would continue to worship us after we left. Now we find you again, and we see how belief grew, how it fights with science, how it makes you fight with each other. We never intended such things. Never understood danger until now, but damage already is." These guys were on Earth thousands of years ago? Trent said, "You're trying to tell me you're responsible for religion?"
"Belief was already there," the alien answered. "But we made it stronger." Trent took a long pull on his beer. What was he supposed to say to that?
Donna saved him the trouble. "How many other species have religion?" she asked. The alien shook his head. "No others we meet."
"None?"
"Zero."
Nick laughed softly. "None of the hundred or so intelligent races that we've discovered so far have religion. Kinda makes you wonder, don't it? Are we special, or are we just, well, special?" Trent knew which way he felt at the moment. These aliens' ancestors must have had quite a laugh when they stumbled across humanity. A whole race that believed in imaginary beings, who fought wars over whose imaginary beings were stronger. The temptation to take advantage of that must have been too strong to resist. He looked at the two aliens sitting at the table with him, with their red skin and gaunt features. Was it just coincidence that they looked like comic-book devils, or had some of the people who passed along the legend to their children known what was going on?
There was a long silence at the table, then Nick snorted and said, "Well, we've sure been a ray of sunshine for you two, haven't we? I never even asked what brings you here. The boundless opportunity of a frontier planet, I assume?"
Trent shrugged. "It's about half job hunt, half vacation. We were thinkin' about relocating if we found the right place, but after that little pep talk of yours, I don't know if that's such a smart idea."
"Earth's no safer than anywhere else," Nick said. "Maybe less. The U.S. is used to keeping its wars at arm's length, but this time one's going to wind up right in their laps. Anybody with a hyperdrive can drop a fast rock on a city, and they'll do it if the U.S. pushes 'em too far."
"Yeah." Trent wondered how many of the terrorist attacks in the last few months had been from colonies trying to shake off the iron fist. The government had blamed them all on the French and the Arabs, who had been fighting U.S. domination for decades, but that wasn't necessarily the whole story.
"Your best bet is to look for something farther out, even if you do have to spend a day or two changing velocity," said Nick. "There's a limit to how thin the U.S. can stretch itself." There was a limit to how thin humanity could stretch itself, too. Trent wasn't a city boy, but he didn't want to be a hermit, either. Or a farmer. He wanted to buy his groceries in a store, and when he lost a wheel motor in his truck, he wanted to be able to buy a new one without going halfway across the galaxy to do it. And when it came right down to it, he wanted his neighbors to be human beings. He didn't say any of that, not with Nick and Glory headed off to play Adam and Eve, and with two aliens at the table. He just dug another handful of popcorn out of the bowl, washed it down with the last of his beer, and said to Donna, "It's gettin' kinda late. You 'bout ready to hit the sack?" It wasn't all that late, Rock Springs time, but she got the hint. "Yeah, that sounds pretty good," she said. She finished up her own beer, and the two of them stood up.
"Well," Trent said, "It's been a pleasure meetin' all of you. Nick, Glory, good luck to you wherever you wind up. And Greg, thanks again for talkin' us in."
"Any time," Greg said. "You going to stick around for a while?"
"Don't know yet. If the alien kid's doing okay in the morning, we'll probably have to take the family back home tomorrow. That's a long ways into the sticks, and a long ways back if we decide to drive it. We may just take off for another planet once we get out there. We wanted to see as many different places as we could before we have to go home."
Greg nodded. "I understand. Drop by the dispatch office before you leave. I might have a courier job for you if you're interested."
"Carryin' what?"
"We can talk tomorrow."
"Right." He obviously didn't want to say anything more in a bar full of people. "Where's the dispatch office?"
"Two blocks down and a block to your left." He pointed. "It's the building with the radar dish on top."
"That ought to be easy enough to spot."
"It is."
"See you later, then." Trent took Donna's hand in his and they went out into the night. The air was cooling off. Trent looked up at the starry sky before he got into the pickup. Except for Orion and Cassiopeia, the constellations looked just the same here as they did back home. The Big Dipper wasn't in the north, though. At least Trent didn't think it was. Without the sun to help him, he suddenly realized he had no sense of direction here. In more ways than one.
"What next?" he asked.
Donna said, "You know, I actually could just climb into bed and read for a while." Reading was a sure-fire way to put Trent to sleep, but he supposed that might not be such a bad idea. Morning would be along in just a few hours, and Katata and her kids would probably be eager to get back to the rest of their family as soon as they could.
"Sounds good to me," he said. They walked down the boardwalk to their pickup, but when they climbed inside and closed the doors, he laughed and said, "I just realized we don't have a good place to park for the night."
"We could just drive out of town a ways."
"We could, but we'd probably wind up in somebody's driveway or something." Donna thought for a moment, then said, "Actually, the best place is probably right back at the hospital. That way if Katata gets a little jumpy being in a strange place all by herself, she can at least look out the window and see that we haven't abandoned her."
"Now that's smart." Trent backed out onto the street and headed back the way they had come. Spending the night in a hospital parking lot wasn't exactly how he'd imagined their first night on Onnescu, but he supposed it could be worse. Given their landing today, they could easily be the ones inside the hospital.
He parked close to the building. While Donna went into the camper to make the bed, he went around to the emergency entrance to see how Talana was doing and find out if he could plug in and recharge the pickup's batteries, but the lights were out and the door was locked. There was a big red button beside the door with a sign beside it that said "Ring for service" in about a dozen languages, but Trent didn't think Dr. Chen would like to be dragged out of bed just to say "Sure, you can plug in." Trent decided he could pay the hospital a few dollars for the charge if it wasn't okay, so he went back around the side of the building and searched along the wall until he found a power socket, but it wasn't shaped right.
"Damn," he muttered. This was getting ridiculous. Half the people on the planet didn't speak English, and they didn't even use standard power plugs. Was this what all the colonies were going to be like?
9
As Trent had expected, Katata was up and ready to go at the crack of dawn. Dr. Chen had given Talana one more checkup and decided she—he had apparently decided his patient was female and her younger sibling was male—was probably going to heal, so there was no reason to hold her any longer, and every reason to get back to make sure Katata's mate, Magalak, was okay. They stopped at the dispatch office on their way through town. Greg was right: it was easy to spot. The radar dish was only a few feet across, and it looked like it was made out of rabbit wire bent into a bowl, but it was the only parabolic reflector in town, and it called even more attention to itself with its constant circling. It squeaked as it turned, too.
Donna and the aliens stayed in the truck while Trent went in to talk to Greg. They had spread a tarp over the seat this time, and Donna had worn some old clothes, so she didn't mind too much, and Trent was glad to have her there
to keep Dixit from messing with things he shouldn't. Trent had taken the pistol out of the glove box and put it in the camper last night, and he'd tucked the rifle behind the seat, but who knew what other mischief a baby could get into, even with its mother right there. Greg met him at the door. "So you're taking off today?"
Trent nodded. "Yep. Provided we can get a recharge somewhere. We used up a lot of juice doing all that driving yesterday."
"Of course," Greg said. "You can plug in while we're talking." He showed Trent the outlet closest to where he had parked, but it was the same as the hospital's.
"You got an adapter?" Trent asked.
"Adapter? Oh, that's right, you're using American, and all our stuff's from Australia. Just a sec." He went inside, and a moment later came out with the right plug.
"Is it one-ten, or two-twenty?" Trent asked.
"Two-forty, actually. Will your charger work with that?"
"I don't know. Let's see." He opened the hood and looked at the label on the power distribution unit, which wasn't very helpful, but there was a slider switch in the back that had "115" showing through the window. Trent got a thumbnail on it and shoved it the other way, and sure enough, it said "230."
"That ought to be close enough," he said. He pulled the cord out of its reel above the bumper and plugged it in.
"We got juice?" he asked Donna.
She looked at the dash light. "Says we're charging."
"All right. Don't let me forget to set that back to normal when we get home."
"Right."
"And we might as well top off the air tanks while we're plugged in," he said.
"Good idea." She flipped the switch, and the compressor started up. Trent turned back to Greg. "So what kind of stuff do you want hauled, and where's it going?"
"Mail," Greg said. "And the destination, well, that's the tricky part. It's a French colony." He led the way inside, while Trent tried to decide whether or not he was joking.
"I'm an American," Trent said at last. "They'll shoot us on sight."
