Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

  “He sails, Amy. That’s no fantasy.”

  “You’re the first time he’s taken that boat out in over a year. Done TransPacs in Virtual, though. Even has a cycle where he goes through the heart of a killer typhoon.”

  Nicole remembered. “You don’t hold with that?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “But you don’t see the sense in going farther.”

  “Like you? Astronaut Annie, blazing her trail through the heavens. Not a chance.”

  “No curiosity?” And she thought of the last three weeks, immersed with Kymri and Tscadi in their lives, learning more about the Hal than she had from a year’s worth of briefing packs and tapes. And remembered her grandfather talking about a trip he’d made to Israel when he was in college, on his way home after two months working a kibbutz, chatting with some tourists, a synagogue from New Jersey, telling him how three weeks was more than enough time to see any country. Which made him laugh because in the time he’d been there he figured he’d just gotten to the point where the locals were starting to trust him enough to accept him. And she thought about Amy’s words of a few minutes ago, about her becoming an alien among her own kind.

  “Curiosity like that is for people who’ve nothing better to do. Or who can’t fit into society.”

  “Maybe both apply to me?”

  “For all the good that’ll do you anymore.”

  “Touché.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt.” And Nicole, to her surprise, realized the girl meant exactly that. “You know, Daddy likes you.”

  “He’s a charming man.”

  “Told me once, you were the only person he’d met outside the family could give me a run for my money, what d’you think of that?”

  “What do you?”

  “Still working on it.” With no doubt, Nicole knew, as to who would eventually end up on top. “Was she a friend, Nicole, that Secret Service agent who died?”

  “She was growing into one.”

  “Pretty tough. You must be upset.”

  “Simone knew the risks.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “Not yet, but I’m getting there.”

  “And you figure that’s a good thing?”

  “You expect me to roll over and die, just because someone says so? This isn’t play, Amy. It isn’t one of Alex’s Virtual games, nor the tag Kymri and I run all over the Edwards ridges.”

  “I know that, I don’t need any lecture.”

  Nicole saw the young trooper again, in her mind’s eye, back on the wolfpack asteroid the crossbow bolt punch into his back, the body twisting under the powerful impact, the light leaving his eyes. Saw a twisting, different vision, herself sitting sprawled against a bulkhead where she’d drifted, a football-sized hole from Morgan’s rifle blaster burned through the center of her chest, a death so quick and clean you’d think from her expression she was ready to leap up and continue the fight. Heard the metallic shriek of Paolo DaCuhna’s radio melting as the blast flare of an antimatter detonation instantaneously vaporized his spacecraft. Remembered the hollow sickness deep in her belly as she watched helplessly while Harry Macon’s aircraft disintegrated before her eyes into a puff ball of ceramic sparkles cooked from within by the dull fury of the elongated fireball formed by its exploding fuel. His sheer velocity smeared flame and wreckage for hundreds of meters across the sky before they began their tumbling descent to the desert better than ten kilometers below. Saw Simone Deschanel crumpled on a bed, the light doused from her eyes by a horror that left no external mark.

  It could have been me, Nicole thought, and someday it will. But only partly believed it.

  “You going to that stupid party?”

  “Reception.” A slightly threadbare smile as she made the automatic correction. “It’s why I’m here.”

  “To shill for NASA.”

  “They invested a lot to put me into the sky, this is part of the payback.”

  “They kicked you out, too, why should you owe them anything?”

  “I wear the uniform, Amy.”

  “Better you than me.”

  “What’s best for you, then?”

  “Blow ’em off. I mean to, though that’s why Daddy called for me.”

  For a moment, Nicole was thrown, until she twigged that Amy’s remark had nothing to do with her question.

  “Just like that. A full complement of military and NASA brass, plus State, plus U.N.—not to mention the President.”

  “You don’t want to be there.”

  “You offering an alternative?”

  “We already played that scene. I don’t ask twice.”

  Excuse me all to hell, Nicole thought, but said, “No matter. It isn’t as if I have a choice.”

  “You don’t want to be there,” Amy repeated quietly, with no more emphasis than before, almost like a looped recording.

  “Why? Is something going to happen?” Nicole asked jokingly.

  But that was the last the girl said, and a look at the displays showed Nicole that she’d switched off her intercom and gone to sleep. If there was an answer, Nicole would have to find out the hard way.

  * * *

  twelve

  The entrance to the hotel was jammed worse than a mid-town subway platform at rush hour, people clamoring for transport while taxis and limos vied for curb space, defying the best efforts of cops and traffic marshals to keep even a semblance of order. A mob scene made all the worse by the departure of the President, Secret Service holding everyone else in place until he was into his own Cadillac and away to the gala reception downtown.

  Parents in tow, Nicole bulled her way to the street and flashed an ID at the nearest uniform. On command, a car appeared, complete with an NYPD blue-and-white up front and an unmarked federal cruiser as backup. But before they could enter, a local news crew popped into their way, correspondent and camera in Nicole’s face, demanding her comment. Nicole spased, canceling her instinctive reaction to deck the man, once more grateful as her mother slipped smoothly into frame, to announce, taking full advantage of the fact this was a live telecast: “Twins, you’d better not be watching this. But if you are, go to bed!” And with a gracious smile—as the news crew found themselves body-checked between city police and a couple of no-nonsense feds—shoved her daughter through the open car door. The moment the three of them were inside, the procession shot away down the avenue, using lights and sirens to clear their path.

  “I am impressed,” said Conal, rearranging himself a trifle more decorously from the tangle on the back seat caused by their precipitate departure. “You have friends in high places?”

  Nicole fought to repress a giggle, thinking that she had them in very high places, depending on what perspective you viewed the Moon, or the Universe beyond. But also had to shake her head.

  “This isn’t exactly for me,” she explained, tongue-tied as usual around her parents, “as me per se. It’s, uhm, a reflection of my status among the Halyan’t’a.”

  “Status?” her mother asked, and the look in her eye was one Nicole remembered too well from the days when Siobhan had been a hell-on-wheels newspaperwoman. A word, she could hear her say, in the tone that meant some poor sod (could be some journalistic target, could just as easily be her own children, Nicole as first-born heading the list, Siobhan never played favorites) was about to get royally skewered, and a half.

  “Well, position might be a better term.”

  “How much better?”

  “To be honest, Mom, I’m not quite sure. A lot of this, I sort of seem to be discovering as I go along.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  Nicole made a small, moderately helpless gesture, hating the way parents always managed to make children feel like kids, no matter how old, no matter how supposedly mature. And she reflexively touched the fireheart necklace, snug against the stand-up collar of her dress uniform. She hadn’t planned on wearing it or the pendant earring, or accepting any of the perks that had shown up un
expectedly on her doorstep, until a seriously stressed woman from State who’d come along with them patiently explained the facts of protocol, in a tone that brooked neither discussion nor argument. Yes, Nicole was a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. But she was also—and the Hal had been quite specifically forthright in this matter—a Primary of Shavrin’s House, which made her a Very Important Personage indeed, and they wanted her treaed as such.

  “Christ,” Nicole had cried in frustration, “it wasn’t my idea.”

  “I appreciate your discomfiture, Lieutenant,” the woman said, “believe me, it’s shared by not a few of us at State. No one really—outside perhaps the Halyan’t’a themselves—understands the ramifications of your adoption. On the other hand, we’d be fools not to use it to our advantage. If honoring your special status earns us some points with them, so be it. We’re more than happy to oblige and so, I might add, will you be. Very happy. Consider it an order. Will that make this ordeal easier to endure?”

  “What would be easiest would be not to be here at all.”

  “Life is tough, Lieutenant. Just make sure not to lose your glass slippers at the ball.”

  The reception was on the topmost floors of the Millennial Tower, itself—since the turn of the century, hence the name—the tallest building in Manhattan and one of the top five in the world, under the auspices of the Wings Club. Constructed on the site of the old World Trade Center, it topped the old Twin Towers by another hundred fifty meters, with a view of New York and the surrounding metropolitan area that, on a clear day (or better yet a clear night), could steal the breath of even the most jaded sightseer.

  Nicole had been there earlier today, in the Club itself, to give her speech to the annual meeting of the International Society of Astronauts and accept—on behalf of the Wanderer crew—their Gold Medal for the successful First Contact with the Halyan’t’a. The room had been jammed and when the presenter—none other than Cullen Lucas himself, NASA’s Chief Administrator since Lord knew when and chief architect of the American Interstellar exploration program—had stepped away, leaving her all alone at the podium, she hadn’t been sure she could even talk, much less plow through her text.

  Many of the faces before her were familiar, some of them had been pictures on the wall over her bed since junior high, when she’d crystallized her desire to become an astronaut. Others she knew by reputation. They were her peers, but only she felt in the most technical sense, the way a brand-new cub reporter for the New York Guardian might consider himself towards Siobhan just before she packed up her two Pulitzers and quit. And she found herself wishing her mother could be here, to give the speech for her. Or her father, with the dry courtroom eloquence for which he was justly known.

  And then, stumble-tongued and desperate, certain that hours had passed since she was abandoned on-stage (when in reality it wasn’t more than a few seconds, unnoticed by anyone in the room save her), she found herself thinking of the people who weren’t there. Harry Macon for one, Paolo DaCuhna for another, each in their own way reduced to ashes and memories, each partly responsible for putting her where she stood. Judith Canfield on the Moon and Ben Ciari, incalculably farther away—and the pang she felt thinking of him stabbed all the deeper because it wasn’t so much that she missed the man but that she was jealous of where he was, somewhere she was starting to believe she’d never be allowed to go—and without realizing she was speaking aloud, words came to her.

  “There’s no point, really,” she said, “in telling you the technical aspects of the mission, or the Contact itself. The reports are all on file, firsthand recollections, after-the-fact, objective analyses—you name it, it’s there. In quintuplicate.” Small laugh from the audience, since everyone present had a working knowledge of the federal bureaucracy. “For you all to peruse at your leisure, those few of you that is who haven’t already done so.

  “I remember as a kid reading how Neil Armstrong described the Eagle landing on the Moon. One of the things that stayed most strongly with him was the smell. Like gunpowder, was how he put it. That cordite residue left over when you fire a cap pistol. And I remember coming back in after my first Lunar excursion, sure enough there it was.

  “The same applies to our exploration of the Hal starship Range Guide. We’d been poking about the better part of an hour, and what struck us all was how much like one of our ships it was. And we weren’t sure, any of us, whether that was a good thing or not, because we were all thinking, extrapolating how we might feel if the situation were reversed and we maybe found strangers nosying about the innards of our ship. And the fact is, we human beings have never been all that hospitable to others of our own kind.

  “Then, at last, on their flight deck—what the naval bods in NASA insist on calling the ‘bridge’—we found out.” So many emotions, running riot, totally out of control as she pivoted on Ciari’s cue to face the assembled Hal, yet even though she was scared beyond all comprehension of the word, there wasn’t a tremor to her body, a quaver to her voice. Whatever happened wouldn’t be because she made a mistake. “All they could see of us,” she continued, “were four figures in pressure suits, features hidden behind gold anodized visors. All they could tell of us were pretty much what we’d deduced of them from the pictographs we’d seen: bilateral, bipedal creatures with a central torso. So I decided we’d be better off giving them a sense of what we really were. We’d been scanning the atmosphere since boarding, we knew it was compatible and, as far as the sensors could tell, safe to breathe. Of course, that guarantee wasn’t much good against bugs outside the sensors’ data field and violating suit integrity was as much a danger to the Hal as us. But we had to break the ice somehow and the fact was, we were running out of air and had nowhere else to go. We either made friends pretty damn quick or we were as dead as our murdered crewmates. So, I popped my helmet.

  “For Armstrong, the resonance was powder. For me, cinnamon. The kind of high-country tang to the air up in the Grand Tetons, or maybe the most northern Scottish highlands when the heather’s in bloom. There was a moment, when Shavrin and I stood face-to-face, that defines what happened there and, I think, I hope, our reason for being as astronauts and explorers. She reached out to me, touching my face with her fingertips. Now”—and this time the laugh came from her, a hollowly amused chuckle—“that may not seem a major big deal to those who think solely in terms of human nails. But the Hal evolved from a far more overtly predatory line. Their nails are more like claws, even though they’ve pretty much grown out of the use of them as such. So here stands this Alien—with all the resonances that implies, good, bad, indifferent—painting a touch-portrait of me with a hand that looks like it could tear my face right off without the slightest effort or trouble. Yet I trusted her, as she did me when I removed my helmet. We at least knew something of what to expect from their air; the Hal had no such guarantees about us. Yet the need to reach out, to make a positive contact, to bring our two species together, that outweighed the fears we both brought to that moment. That meeting.

  “Here we are, as President Russell has said, with our own house so torn and divided it’s a miracle we’re still around to talk about it. For all our technology, all our supposed maturity, we as a species still find it so easy to hate—people of other colors, other religions, other tribes—and to exercise that hate with casual murder. Now, suddenly, we’re asked to put all that aside. To face outward from this world that’s our home to a galaxy we now know beyond all shadow of a doubt is inhabited. Both by those who are willing to be our friends and others who may well become our enemies. We’re asked as a species to adopt the fundamental reality that those of us who work and live beyond our atmosphere accept as a matter of course. That in space, there’s no such thing as color or race or creed or even sex; all you can tell from a standard suit is that we’ve got five extremities—four major, one minor—grouped around a central trunk. It doesn’t matter where a person comes from, only what they do once they’re out there. You have to be
accepted because you have to be trusted, because that mutual interdependence is the only thing—the only thing—that keeps us alive.

  “Now—far in advance of even the most wildly fanciful timetable and far before we’re even remotely prepared—we’re at a crossroads. Stay the way we are and hope to muddle through. Or perhaps change as a race. Truly evolve, at long last. Folks used to say that what marked test pilots and astronauts—what made the Yeagers and the Shepards and the Canfields different from the rest of us mere mortals—was that they, that we, ladies and gentlemen, possessed the ‘Right Stuff.’ Well, I submit that it’s time to pull the rest of the world up to our level. To realize that Earth is just as much a spacecraft as anything you or I have flown, or are ever likely to fly. And that if we are to simply survive, much less prosper, in a Space where we are no longer alone, we all need to discover that ‘Right Stuff’ within ourselves. We need to embrace the change that’s coming, no matter how terrified it makes us.

  “In effect, the baby’s on its feet. It can either start walking or forever stay close to the ground where it’s nice and safe and spend the rest of its life in a crawl. The risk is that we’ll fall. The reward, that once we walk, we can begin to run.”

  She was preaching to the converted, they gave her a standing ovation. And for the bulk of the afternoon, she ragged her throat raw fielding questions from every quarter, on every aspect of the mission, actually enjoying herself even though she was running mostly on autopilot, her mind months and miles removed, picking over the very things she’d been ordered by Arsenio Rachiim to leave alone. Listening to the conversations rippling around her, offering subtle guidance when needed, to steer talk in the directions most useful to her, hoping to find the answers Al Maguire needed.

  Mostly, as she herself had known, it came down to personnel. Three countries in the world officially trained astronauts: the United States, the Russian Soviet Republic, and Japan. And only the first two actually built and operated spacecraft. Partly a matter of expertise, mostly one of cost; no one else could—or really wanted to (national pride for once giving way to practicality)—afford it.