Earthbound

by Joe Haldeman

  Aboard ad Astra we had a short shelf of actual books, one of which Namir still carried with him, the volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets bound in leather. His new wife had given it to him just before she died in Gehenna.

  A sense of order did emerge, in that one area would be dominated by history books, another by cookbooks, or by mathematics or novels. Between chemistry and poetry there was a coffee machine surrounded by upholstered chairs. We settled in.

  “I probably don’t have much time to live,” Lanny said, easing into an overstuffed recliner. “I have a heart chip and started having angina pains soon after the power went off.” He waved that off like a mosquito. “But I’ve spent a life and fortune satisfying my curiosity about this and that, and don’t see any reason to stop now.”

  An elderly white man in a tuxedo brought out a tray of cups and saucers and served each of us as Lanny talked. “I’m mainly curious about the Others, of course, and what direction you think this thing is going to go.” He was looking at Namir.

  “Well, it’s the end of the world, no matter what they do. The old world is irretrievably gone. Even if they were to disappear and never come back.”

  “Something we could never know for sure,” I said. “They can go away for ten thousand years, and come back to undo everything we’ve done. Anything we’ve done.”

  “In the name of self-protection,” Paul said, “like this time. No defense against it.”

  “So we live from day to day,” Lanny said, “as some of us have always done anyhow. Surviving to the next day will be more problematic soon. But that’s always been the human condition.”

  “Yeah, but we used to be the masters of creation,” Dustin said. “The pinnacle of evolution, the top of the food chain. Philosophically, that’s the main difference the Others have made.”

  “Philosophy may be our big weapon now, Dustin,” Namir said. “We’re counting on you.” And the doctorate he’d never used.

  “Physical weapons just seem to annoy them,” Lanny said. “Or do you have any ideas along those lines?”

  Namir and Paul exchanged glances. “We never know when we’re being listened to,” Paul said quietly. “Maybe all the time. So you couldn’t take them by surprise.”

  “How could they listen to you here?” Lanny said.

  “Homeland Security could do it back in our day,” Elza said, “from across the street, maybe from orbit. Bounce a coherent beam of light off the window and analyze the vibrations.”

  “No windows here,” I said.

  “Clear line of sight to the display window in front,” she said, “so it would just be a matter of getting a signal out of the noise.”

  “They don’t even need that, though,” Paul said. “They want us to carry a cube everywhere.” He held up the bright orange knapsack. “It’s not supposed to be a transmitter, any more than the one at Funny Farm was. But they talked with us through that one.”

  “And back at the NASA motor pool,” I said. “They managed to turn on a set without touching it. How do you do that?”

  “Use a remote,” Card said. “I mean, the circuitry is there. It’s not magic.”

  “From orbit? Pretty sophisticated engineering,” Paul said. “We don’t have any idea what their limits are.”

  “Like, we know they can’t go faster than the speed of light,” Dustin said. “But they can handle time in ways we don’t understand.

  “Our trip back from their planet seemed to take no time at all, though almost twenty-five years passed on Earth. And it wasn’t a subjective perception—the plants in our life-support system didn’t die. If you think of the plant’s physiology—or ours—as a slow clock, well, it barely ticked in those twenty-five years.”

  “How do you explain that?” Lanny said.

  “That is fucking magic,” Card said. “If you want an accurate name for it.”

  Justin laughed. “It’ll be interesting to see what theoretical physicists do with it, mathematical physicists. They’ve only had a week to think about it, though. It might take another century.”

  “So in a way, they do go faster than the speed of light,” Lanny said, “or you and your carrots and all did. You spent a quarter of a century and didn’t grow a single gray hair.”

  “Maybe not ‘faster’ than light. Wish I’d paid closer attention in physics class,” Paul said. “It seems to me that the only way you can travel at the speed of light is to stop time, somehow.” He shrugged. “Photons don’t age.”

  “And if you go faster than light,” Dustin said, “time goes backwards; effect precedes cause.”

  “So what does that mean?” I asked. “Things happen before they start?”

  “Hard to visualize,” he admitted. As if he could draw a picture if he only had a pencil.

  “If they can do that, there’s no point in even trying to fight them,” Lanny said.

  “Assume they can’t,” Namir said. “Or if they can . . . subvert causality, we know that they don’t use the power. Or haven’t yet.”

  “Maybe they have,” Lanny said. “Have they ever made a mistake?”

  “Sure,” I said. “They could have destroyed the whole human race, remember? If Paul hadn’t stopped them.”

  “No disrespect, Paul, but there’s another way to look at that. You flew their cosmic time bomb to the other side of the Moon, and saved us from that. But then what happened to the Moon? What if they tried it again today?”

  “Good point,” Paul conceded. “So they were testing us?”

  “Or just scaring the shit out of us. Who knows why they do anything? It’s like asking ‘why did the earthquake hit San Francisco?’ With all those people there.”

  “We have to assume they do things for a reason,” Namir said.

  “What does that mean?” Lanny said. “We can say ‘the earthquake hit San Francisco because it was built on a fault line,’ or ‘God sent the earthquake to punish them for Chinese food,’ or it happened because of all the gold mining. The reason you prefer depends on the information and prejudices you bring to the question. How much actual information do you have about them?”

  “Mostly inference,” Dustin said. “All they’ve actually said to us, you could put on a couple of screens. And some of that was deliberately misleading.”

  “Spy is a key, obviously,” Paul said. “Assuming that, with all their powers, they can watch us anywhere, any time, then they don’t really need him for information.”

  “He’s a temporal interface,” I said. “It’s convenient for them to talk to us in real time, our time.”

  “You did converse with them once,” Lanny said. “When you were out at their star?”

  “We had Spy then,” I said. “We’d say something and wait for several minutes while they answered, through him.”

  “It would take them a couple of minutes to just say yes or no,” Dustin said. “The more complicated responses wouldn’t take much longer, but they apparently had billions of things pre-recorded, so it was just a matter of hitting the right billion switches.”

  “A lot of bases to cover,” Lanny said.

  “They think a lot faster than we do,” he said. “Faster than we can imagine thinking, Fly-in-Amber said. He was the other Martian with us when we went to meet them. The resident expert on the Others.”

  “He knew next to nothing,” Paul said. “As opposed to nothing.”

  “That was frustrating,” I said. “Like all the Martians in the yellow family, he was born with an ability to communicate with the Others—”

  “Born with the knowledge of their language?”

  “Weirder than that. More like being born with a sixth sense, which you’re unaware of until it’s triggered.” I tried to remember how he had described it. “He didn’t make any sense out of the Others’ message himself. He said it was like being able to speak the language perfectly, but only as a mimic. Like a parrot.”

  “Are any of the Martians up in Russia in the yellow family?”

  “None that we me
t,” I said, “and no way we can talk to them on Mars.”

  I missed what anybody might have said then. My mind went a little haywire, realizing I could see Mars in the evening sky—could see light from the planet where my family and friends lived—and so could talk to them, in theory. But theory wasn’t practice; communications satellites were dust. They would all grow old and die without me.

  Or might be dead already, along with all the Martians and other humans in Mars, if the Others had pulled the plug on them.

  I should have asked Spy. And then wonder whether to believe his answer.

  The white butler came back to refill our coffee, and produced a flask of brandy when Elza asked for something stronger. That led to some chat about living conditions aboard ad Astra, which reminded me to be grateful for gravity, and coffee that came from actual beans, made with water that had never passed through a kidney.

  “Coffee may be more valuable than the books,” Lanny said. “I took delivery on two tons of roasted beans on 28 April, the day before they pulled the plug. The basement’s full.”

  “Make everyone who buys a cup of coffee buy a book,” Dustin said.

  “Paying with what?” Paul said.

  Lanny shook his head. “Barter gets complicated fast. Especially with books. I can trade you one poem for another, or two small ones for a big one. But how many for a chicken, and where do I put the chicken?”

  “In the first stanza,” Elza said. “Or maybe that’s the egg.”

  He ignored that. “We’re pretty much on the barter system now, but it’s money-based. You bring in twenty dollars’ worth of books, and I’ll give you ten dollars’ worth in trade, or five dollars in cash. Phasing out the actual cash, but it’s still a unit of exchange.”

  “What about California bucks?” Roz said, smiling.

  “Useful for personal hygiene.” The governor of California had authorized the printing of paper money, backed in some arcane way by the state’s natural resources. None of it had made its way to Funny Farm.

  Lanny pulled a wad of bills out of his front pocket and sorted through them. “I did take one yesterday; gave him ten cents on the dollar. Here.” It was greener than the others, labeled ONE HUNDRED CALIFORNIA DOLARS. There was a picture of a rugged-looking man in a cowboy hat, identified as Ron Reagan. Small print said it was legal tender anywhere in the universe.

  “That will be handy,” Paul said, “once we have this business with the Others straightened out. California oranges in grocery stores all over the galaxy.”

  “Governor was a fucking nut-case even before this all happened. Like I have to tell you guys.”

  “He used to be the funniest thing on the cube,” Roz said. “He didn’t just want to secede from the States. He wanted to put California into orbit, and declare independence from Earth.”

  “Not really?” I said.

  “Science wasn’t his strong suit. His handlers said it was metaphor. Everybody knew better.”

  We talked for a couple of hours, satisfying Lanny’s curiosity about our flight out to Wolf 25 and meeting with the Others. About half the time we just talked about our remote pasts, growing up in the last half of the twenty-first century.

  The Others first made their presence known almost sixty years ago. There aren’t too many people around who remember everyday life as adults back then, without a Sword of Damocles hanging in the sky. Back when there was “everyday life,” uncomplicated by doom.

  Lanny said that suicide had been the leading cause of death for as long as he could remember, for children as well as adults. He was born in 2068, right after Gehenna. His Jewish mother killed herself before he was one. He grew up with his father’s fierce atheism and had never been tempted away from it.

  He led us around the store with a shopping cart. Roz had a scribbled list of all the titles in Funny Farm’s library.

  Some choices were obvious, like medical manuals and a five-volume gold mine, the Foxfire Journals, a twentieth-century compendium of low-technology solutions to the problems of country living, from midwifing to burial. Chicken raising, building a smokehouse, foraging for wild plants, how to make a banjo. That got Namir’s interest. He’d made a balalaika to pass the time on the starship, but left it in orbit, to be sent to Earth later. Pulverized now.

  Lanny unlocked a glass case and gave us a fat one-volume Medical Practices from 1889, before antibiotics. Some of the medicine seemed more superstition than science; the surgery, painful butchery.

  How long would our anesthetics hold out? Long enough for me to die before needing them?

  Paul chose a judicious assortment of books on science and engineering, and Lanny gave him a thing called a “slide rule,” along with a fragile yellowing folder of instructions. It was a foot-long slab of yellow metal with numbers printed all over it. Paul squinted at it and moved the middle bar around and told me the cube root of 100 was 4.64. I supposed that might come in handy some day.

  By mutual consent, we all got to choose two books without argument. I got the fat old poetry book that had sustained me the year before my family moved to Mars, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and a one-volume complete Shakespeare in tiny print. Roz’s list already had a Shakespeare, but Rico said it was a simplified edition for children.

  About half the cart was filled with children’s books, a mixture of schoolbooks and play. Raising kids without the cube was going to be a challenge. I had a disturbing vision of myself as an old lady, scaring children with stories around the campfire. Though they wouldn’t be so easy to scare by then.

  One priceless find was a thirty-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica , from 2031. It had been a curiosity, not for sale, but when the cloud evaporated, it would be all we had. A finger-powered paper memory bank. I decided to read through it, five pages a day. That would be eighty-four hundred days, so when I finished I would be twenty-three years older and wiser.

  There was a whole section of survival manuals, mostly earnest and useless, either painfully obvious or relying on technology we used to think was basic. There was a Girl Scout manual, Handbook for Girls, that had useful tips about getting along in the woods. For a fun week away from home.

  What we really needed was a book about how to rebuild civilization from scratch, but if there was one, it was checked out.

  Lanny had a good idea, a practical use for his printing press. Try to boil down everything that made Funny Farm work, and everything they’d done wrong, and print it on a single sheet of paper, both sides. Send copies up and down the coast, and out into the Plains, so that people wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

  We sat down and, with Lanny’s help, made a chart covering the benefits civilization provided. He traced it on a three-foot flatscreen, drawing circles around words with his finger while a teenaged boy drew a copy on a piece of paper with a pencil. It did look odd, but paper was going to be it soon. We’d better be learning how to make the stuff.

  After about twenty minutes, we all ran out of ideas and looked at the thing quietly. Something important was missing.

  “Where is art?” I said.

  Rico looked at me quizzically. “Who?”

  “There’s no place there for art . . . or science.”

  “Or philosophy,” Dustin said. “All that comes later.”

  “She has a point,” Lanny said. “If all you do is plant crops and haul water and keep a roof over your head, and fight off the other savages, what are you?”

  “Successful savages,” Namir said. “You’d rather be a cultured corpse?”

  “To be realistic,” Roz said, “how much art and science did we get done at the farm?”

  “How much did we need?” Rico said. “We aren’t exactly an art colony. And we had the cube to keep up with science.”

  “Had,” Roz said. “Maybe art will take care of itself. People do draw and paint and make music. But science and technology . . . what will it be like a hundred years from now? When everybody who ever got a degree in science is dead?”

&nb
sp; “I guess you want general textbooks about every discipline,” Lanny said, “and then be selective about advanced texts.”

  “Civil engineering,” Dustin said, “which we used to call a contradiction in terms. Buildings, roads, sewers. Chemical engineering rather than pure chemistry. That kind of selectivity.”

  “We can take all the time you need,” Lanny said.

  “We’re not going to find paper books that are up-to-date on technology,” Paul said. “I didn’t have any when I got my degree back in ’63.”

  “Same at the university here,” Lanny said. “If you want to look at a paper book in the library now, you have to go to the reserve room or Special Collections, and wear gloves. The only new paper books I see here are gift items or things that were printed for collectors.

  “Library books are how I started this store. The university library was selling off books by the pound when they went paperless, back in ’21.”

  “During the big depression,” the butler said.

  “Yeah; my dad had made a fortune in real estate. When he died, I got this building and enough money to fill it with books.” He laughed. “It was 2121, and I had just turned forty-two. Not that I’m superstitious.”

  I thought the world economy was under central control before 2121. Would there be an economics book printed later than that? A Child’s Garden of Macroeconomics?

  Lanny led us around the store with the paper copy of the diagram and helped us choose old academic books that weren’t outdated or too fragile to be of use. There was a debate over electronics and computer science. Justin thought they were about as useful as a “how to wrap a mummy” book. But they compromised on a couple of general texts and a wall chart full of arcane symbols.

  I have some sympathy for Paul’s side, the sciences, even though I’m a useless liberal-arts type myself. How could anybody decode all that stuff from scratch? Maybe the electricity would come back in a hundred years.

  People might remember how to turn on the lights, or the machines, but who could repair or replace them?

  A uniformed soldier came rushing in, and saluted Lanny. “Sir, California has . . . they bombed the border.”