Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  I was still living in a kind of double-vision world, the sanitized version that was broadcast (and which I sort of believed for years) versus the grim reality that was in Namir’s newspaper. And America was far from being the worst off. The front-page picture in the last paper showed the Ganges, a clot of corpses from shore to shore. A block-wide funeral pyre in Kuala Lumpur, within sight of the proud old Twin Towers.

  These were beets, four small plants per net bag, 50 ccs water each. I wouldn’t touch beets as a girl, but in Mars I came to love them. Red planet and all. I mentioned that to Dustin.

  He laughed. “I grew up in a vegetarian family. Beets were the closest thing I had to meat until I got off the commune.”

  “Bothers you to go back to veggies?”

  “No, I just eat to fuel up. Pseudo-hot dogs with fake mustard, yum. Elza’s about the same. Namir might go crazy, though.”

  “He likes his meat?”

  “Fish, actually. He doesn’t like to be far from the sea.”

  “He better take a good last look.”

  “On Mars, you had actual fish.”

  We said “in Mars,” usually. “A pool of tilapia.” They lived on plant waste.

  “He was hoping.”

  “Guess we’re not a big enough biome. It was marginal on Mars, a luxury, and we didn’t have to deal with water at zero gee.” I clicked on the notebook. “Twenty kilos of dried fish in the storeroom.” The storeroom was already in place on the iceberg. It had five hundred kilos of luxury food. Including fifty liters of two- hundred-proof alcohol, more than enough for each of us to have two drinks a day.

  “He can do something with dried fish, Spanish. Some kind of fritters.”

  His smile was interesting. “You really like him. I mean, apart from . . .”

  “There’s no ‘apart from,’ but yes. We’re closer than I ever was with any of my natural family.”

  I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. I wanted prurient details. “You knew Elza first, though.”

  “By a few weeks, maybe a month. By then it was obviously a package deal or no deal.

  “I’d heard of Namir professionally, and was curious anyhow. We first met without her, very American, shooting pool.”

  “You beat the pants off him.”

  “Not a chance. He’s a shark. Shows no mercy.”

  “You knew about him and Gehenna.”

  “In what way?” he said without inflection.

  “That he missed the first part, and so survived the second.”

  “Oh, sure. He was about the highest-ranking officer of the Mossad in Israel, certainly in Tel Aviv, who survived.”

  That was interesting. “I wonder why he didn’t press his advantage with that.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s still with the UN, isn’t he? If he’d stayed in Israel—”

  He laughed. “Smartest thing he ever did was go back to New York. Lots of ruthless people jockeying for position in the Mossad, with three-quarters of them suddenly gone. His turf in New York was safe. Besides, it’s the place he loves best.”

  We moved on to the delicate celery plants. “There’s an odd chain of circumstance that winds up putting the three of us here. As if we’re collectively a lucky chicken—or an unlucky one.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Like this . . . the Corporation wound up agreeing that they needed no more or less than three military people on the mission. So they sent the computers out sniffing for three military people who could live together in close quarters for thirteen years, getting along with four civilians at the same time, people who had a certain amount of academic training and professional accomplishment. They didn’t want three men or three women, so as not to have one gender dominate on ad Astra.”

  “And they had to be spies, of course. Don’t forget that.”

  “In fact, the probability that they’d come from intelligence was high. A person who’d spent his professional life shooting down planes or disarming bombs wouldn’t be too useful. They wanted one of the three to be a medical doctor, too, who’d done general practice.”

  “We all agreed on that. Someone who could work without consultation.”

  “That may be what happened. The computer pulled out Elza, and she dragged me and Namir along.”

  “That could be it,” I said. But computers have to be programmed, and it would be easy to start out with Namir and his mates and make sure they would be the ones the program selected. “I’d hold them like this.” He was picking up the plant by its stalk; I slid my hand under the ball of medium and lifted it out.

  “Right,” he said. “Have to be careful with the babies.”

  “Were you going to have any?” I asked. “Before you got orders to waltz off into outer space and tilt with monsters?”

  “Well, neither Elza nor Namir wanted any children. They’re not that optimistic about the future. Immediate or distant. If it were up to me, yes, I’d like to watch one grow up. Help it grow up.”

  “Sort of a social experiment? A philosophical one?”

  “Cold-blooded, I know. You have two?”

  “Technically. They were born ex utero, though, for which my ‘utero’ is grateful. And they’re being raised by the community, in Mars. Which I don’t like much.”

  “You’re so right. Speaking as someone who was raised by a commune. With my mother and father warned not to bond too closely.”

  “You didn’t have a mother figure or father figure at all?”

  “No. There was a couple in charge of children. But it was obvious we were just a chore. They were pretty harsh.”

  “That must have been rough. The two in charge of our kids are nice people; I’ve known them for years.”

  “Good luck. Ours were nice to adults.”

  We moved on to the carrots, frilly and delicate. “Working in Washington, did you commute every day?”

  “No, I had a little flat in Georgetown. Go back to New York on Thursday night or Friday. Sometimes bring Elza back to DC if our schedules allowed. Sometimes I’d just go up overnight; it’s only an hour and a half on the Metro.”

  “Best of both worlds.”

  “Started out that way. Washington’s falling apart. Both the cities, actually. Less comfortable, more dangerous.”

  “Did you go armed?”

  “No, I’m fatalistic about that. Elza had a gun, but I don’t think she carried it normally. Namir usually did, and he had a bodyguard as well. But he was threatened all the time, and attacked once.”

  “In the city?”

  “Oh, yeah, right downtown. Stepped off the Broadway slidewalk and a woman shot him point-blank in the chest. Somehow she missed his heart. She turned to run away, and the bodyguard killed her.” He shook his head. “He got hell for that, the bodyguard. No idea who she might have been working for. No fingerprints or eyeprints. DNA finally tracked her down to Amsterdam; she’d been a sex worker there twenty years before.”

  “No connection with Gehenna?”

  He shook his head. “And Namir says he’s never used the services of a ‘sex worker,’ not even in Amsterdam. Men lie about that, but I’m inclined to believe him.”

  “Point-blank in the chest. That must have laid him low for a long time.”

  “Had to grow a new lung. Takes weeks, and it’s no fun.”

  Another bit of mystery for the mystery man. “He’s made other enemies, obviously, since Gehenna. Being a peacekeeper.”

  “Mostly in Africa. Very few pale beautiful blondes.”

  “It’s not my field. But I assume you could hire one.”

  “Yes and no. In New York, you could rent a beautiful blond hit woman and probably specify right- or left-handed. But you can’t hire someone so totally off the grid, not in America. If she ordered a meal in a restaurant, she’d get a cop along with the check, asking what planet she just dropped in from.”

  “It’s gotten that bad?”

  “Since Triton, yeah. But even then, a couple of years
before that, America was . . . more cautious than most places.”

  “A police state, my mother said. She calls herself a radical, though.”

  He laughed. “She’s no more radical than I am. From her dossier.”

  “You’ve read my mother’s dossier?”

  “Oh, sorry. You thought I was a lepidopterist.”

  “No, but . . . I assumed you’d read mine and everybody’s . . .”

  “I’m just nosy. And seven days is a long time to kill on the Space Elevator.”

  “So what about my father? Was he banging his secretary?”

  “Nothing personal. Just blow jobs.” He smiled at my reaction. “Bad joke, Carmen, sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets into gear a little ahead of my brain.”

  “I like that in a spy,” I said, not sure whether I did. “Not so Earl Carradine.”

  “You see the last one?” he said. “Where he solves your little problem with the Others?”

  “Haven’t had the pleasure. What, he takes his Swiss Army knife and turns a bicycle into a starship?”

  “No, he discovers the whole thing is a hoax, from a corrupt cabal of capitalists.”

  “Oh, good. We can go home now.”

  “It actually was a little clever this time. Not so much gadgets and gunplay.”

  I had to laugh. “Unlike real life. Where a beautiful blond mystery woman nails the spy as he steps off the Broadway slidewalk. For God’s sake!”

  “What can I say?” He injected the last carrot bunch. “Life does imitate art sometimes.”

  We could’ve just stayed in the habitat for launch, which might have been fun. Suddenly detached from the Space Elevator, we’d be flung toward the iceberg at a great rate of speed, but the sensation to us would be “oops—someone turned off the gravity.”

  For safety’s sake, though, all of us climbed through the connecting tube into the spaceship ad Astra. (We should come up with a separate name for the habitat. San Quentin, maybe, or Alcatraz.)

  We helped the Martians get strapped into their hobbyhorse restraints—with all those arms, they still can’t reach their backs—and then got into our own couches, overengineered with lots of padding and buckles. But that was for the landing, 6.4 years from now, at least. Paul didn’t expect any violent maneuvers on the way to the iceberg. There were two course corrections planned right after launch, and unpredictable “refinements” as we approached the iceberg.

  Paul had said to expect a loud bang, and indeed it was about the loudest thing I had ever heard. No noise in space, of course, but the eight explosive bolts that separated the habitat from the Elevator made the whole structure reverberate.

  “Stay strapped in for a few minutes,” he said, and counted down from five seconds. The attitude jets hissed faintly for a minute and stuttered. Then the main drive blasted for a few minutes, loud, but not as deafening as the bolts had been. I suppose it was a quarter of a gee or so, not quite Martian gravity.

  “That should do it. Put on your slippers and let’s go check for damage.”

  Our gecko slippers would allow us to walk, as if there were weak glue on our soles, down the ship’s corridor, and through most of the habitat. The sticky patches on the walls and floor and ceiling were beige circles big enough for one foot. (You could squeeze both feet into one if you liked the sensation of being a bug stuck in a spiderweb.)

  Those of us used to zero gee just sailed through the tube into the habitat, the others picking their way along behind us. Namir was game for floating through but banged his shoulder on the air lock badly enough to leave a bruise. He’d had a little experience before, in the military and of course getting from the Elevator to Little Mars, perhaps just enough to make him too confident.

  My immediate concern was the plants. A small apple tree had gone off exploring and made it almost to the galley, and a couple of tomato plants had gotten loose. Meryl unshipped the hand vacuum and was chasing down the floating particles of medium before we had a chance to ingest them. I returned the apple tree to its proper place and replanted the tomato vines.

  The three spooks were doing the various things people do when they’re getting used to zero gee—except barfing, fortunately. They practiced pushing off from surfaces and trying to control spinning. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard to eyeball the distance to wherever you’re going, and do a half turn, or one-and-a-half turn, to land feetfirst. You can also “swim” short distances, but nobody needs that much exercise.

  There was a very distinct look in Dustin’s eye, and Elza returned it. I hoped it worked for them better than it does for most. (Paul and I first had sex in zero gee, and it worked all right. My first time with anybody, whatever the gravity, so it was a double miracle for me.)

  Snowbird and Fly- in-Amber were clumsy in zero gee. The gecko slippers were less effective with them, since they had more inertia than humans—if I’m moving slowly and put my foot down onto a beige spot, it will stop me. Snowbird has four times my mass, though, and will rip off and keep going.

  I went into Mars territory with her to check their garden, since it was easier for me to move around and manipulate things. It was dark and cold, as it was supposed to be. Their garden was simpler than ours; Martian tastes didn’t run to a lot of variety.

  Trays of stuff that resembled fungi and a few stubby trees. As on our side, one of the trees had come loose, but it was easy to retrieve and fix with duct tape.

  A screen all along one whole wall was a panorama of their underground city, which was almost all of her planet she had ever seen. Though Mars wasn’t “her” planet the way Earth was ours.

  They had known for thousands of years that Mars was not their natural home. They only learned recently that they were put on Mars as a sort of warning system for the Others: when humans had advanced enough technologically to come in contact with the Martians, they were advanced enough to present a danger to the Others, even light-years away. Which led to the Others’ attempt to destroy us, thwarted by Paul and the Martian leader Red. The cataclysmic explosion that was supposed to sterilize Earth only rearranged the farside of the Moon. Killing Red in the process.

  So from one point of view, the Martians were humanity’s saviors. Another point of view, more widely held, says that it was all the Martians’ fault. (And since I was the first to come into contact with them, I shared the blame.)

  After taking care of the garden, we went into the “compromise” lounge, not quite as dark and cold. There was a bench for humans to sit on, not of much utility in zero gee, and a skillful mural of the above-ground part of our Mars colony, a mosaic of pebbles from both Earth and Mars. It was special to me, made by Oz, Dr. Oswald Penninger, who had been my mentor when I first came to Mars.

  I told Snowbird about it. “I met Dr. Oswald,” she said. “I breathed for him.” Oz had spent some time in the Martian city, measuring the metabolism of the various families.

  “I miss him,” I said. “He was one of my closest friends.” He and Josie might have been on this expedition if the Corporation hadn’t been pressured into taking three military people.

  “It is difficult for us to gauge human personality. But I can understand why you would like Dr. Oz. He is interested in everything. Or should I say ‘was,’ as you did? He will not live long enough to see us again.”

  “I should have said ‘is.’ As long as the person is alive.”

  “He told me about Norway,” she said, “where he studied art. I’d like to go there someday. It sounds a little like Mars.”

  “Maybe they’ll do something about the gravity by then.”

  “I hope so. This is nice.” She pushed up gently, rose to the ceiling, and floated back down. “But you are joking.”

  “Yes. Gravity’s like death and taxes. Always with us.”

  “Not always. There’s no gravity here, nor death, nor taxes. Not for some time. And when we take off for Wolf 25, it will be the ship’s acceleration that presses us to the floor.”

  “Homemade gravity. You can
’t tell it from the real thing.”

  “Ha-ha. Dr. Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence. A good joke.”

  Was it I who had made the joke, or Einstein? I decided not to pursue it.

  Dustin came into the lounge, sideways and a little fast. He crashed into a wall with a modicum of grace.

  “Good aim,” I said. “You want to work on the speed.”

  He brushed himself off, rotating toward the center of the room. “Good aim if I’d been aiming for this door,” he said. “Good afternoon, Snowbird. What’s up?”

  “Carmen helped us with a tree. Now we are discussing general relativity.”

  That raised his eyebrows a few millimeters. “A little beyond me. The math, anyhow. Tensor calculus?”

  I had to come clean. “Don’t ask me. I’m just sitting around being impressed. What is tensor calculus?”

  “To me, it was a big ‘stop’ sign. I withdrew from the course and changed my major to philosophy. From physics.”

  “Pretty drastic.”

  “I try to be philosophical about it. Snowbird, your family is both, right? Science and philosophy?”

  “Not in the sense of being scientists and philosophers, no. We don’t experiment, traditionally. Not on things and not on ideas. I am in a small group that wants to change that. Which I think is why the others were glad to see me go.

  “Traditionally, you know, we learn by rote. It’s not like human physics and chemistry and biology. Things and processes are described in great detail, but those descriptions aren’t tested, and the underlying relationships aren’t studied.”

  “We’d call that Aristotelianism, in a way. If you had an Aristotle.”

  “I know. It was studying the ways you classify different methods of thinking that made some of us want to change the ways we think.”

  “Some of us who are not completely grown yet.” Fly- in-Amber came drifting out of Mars territory. “Not completely sane . . .” He gently collided with me, as I put my other foot down on the beige spot to anchor us.