Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  “Thank you. Snowbird was not yet two when you humans came. The novelty of it made a huge impression on her unformed mind.”

  “You will never win this argument, or lose it,” Snowbird said. “I know you’re wrong, and you know I’m wrong.”

  “And since you are wrong, that settles it.” Fly-in-Amber crossed all four arms in a human-looking gesture. “That’s logic.”

  Dustin stayed out of it, but I didn’t. “Why does it have to be one or the other, Fly-in-Amber? Your science was fine in the old days, but it wouldn’t get you off Mars.”

  “And to the planet of the Others, where we’ll be destroyed along with everybody on Earth, and perhaps in Mars as well? That’s not progress, Carmen.”

  “Not the example I would choose,” Snowbird said.

  “But it’s relevant,” I insisted. “Human science explained everything pretty well until we met you, and found you had this energy-out-of-nowhere thing. Now we have to fit you into our universe, just as you have to fit us into yours.”

  “How can you say that? If you hadn’t stumbled onto us, we could have happily gone on for an eternity, or at least until the cows came home. If we had cows.”

  “Was that a joke, Fly-in-Amber?”

  “Of course not. I am only trying to adapt to your idiom.”

  “He pretends not to have a sense of humor,” Snowbird said, “which makes him even funnier.”

  “Idiom,” Fly-in-Amber repeated. “Idiom is not humor.”

  “What does the philosopher say about that?”

  He grinned. “I have enough for a monograph already.”

  “Humans do not understand this, and neither does Snowbird.” Fly-in-Amber made a complex gesture that started him rotating. I reached out and stabilized him. “Thank you. It’s not a concept that I can express in English, or any human language.” He rattled off about thirty seconds of noises in the Martian consensus language. I recognized three clear repeated sounds—one for negation, one for “human,” and one that signals an “if . . . then” statement.

  Snowbird was totally still, absorbing it. “Can you translate?” Dustin said.

  “Not exactly . . . no. But I could try to say part of it.”

  Fly-in-Amber put his small hands together and made a slight bow, perhaps a parody of human gesture.

  “It’s about the social function of humor in both races. As if humans were one culture.” Fly- in-Amber barked, and Snowbird answered with a series of clicks. “He points out that you are essentially one culture, in Mars.

  “From the first time we communicated—with Carmen, after we decided to let her know we spoke human languages—it’s been obvious that humor both unites and separates the two species. Martian humor is almost always about helplessness, about fate and irony. Humans also recognize this, but most of your humor is about suffering—about pain, loss, death. To us . . . that preference itself is beautifully funny, and is even funnier as you think about it. Like a hall of mirrors, the images fading off into infinity.

  “I’m not saying this well. But for most of us, humor is absolutely necessary for survival—if you lived in a small hole in the ground, and knew there would never be anything else, you would perhaps feel the same way.”

  “Sort of like what we call ‘gallows’ humor,” Dustin said.

  “ ‘Ask for me tomorrow,’ ” Fly-in-Amber quoted, “ ‘and you will find me a grave man.’ ” He said it with a British acting voice. “That was a BBC radio production of Romeo and Juliet in 1951. Very Martian humor. Mercutio has been stabbed, and he jokes about dying. Most human humor is not so clear to me.”

  “Nor as funny,” Snowbird said. “So many jokes about people falling down, which is hardly possible with four legs. Sex jokes aren’t funny because we have to figure out what the people are doing, and why that’s more funny than what they normally do.” She turned to Fly-in-Amber and made the thumping laughter sound. “Only two people! Only two!”

  “Some of us don’t think that’s funny,” Fly-in-Amber said. “They can’t help the way they’re made.”

  “Do you tell jokes about Martian sex?” Dustin asked.

  Snowbird pantomimed scratching her head, which was kind of funny, avoiding all the eyes up there. “No . . . no fate or irony or helplessness there. What is there to laugh about?”

  “Trust me,” he said. “Humans find Martian sex pretty entertaining.”

  “But it’s so plain and innocent, compared to human sex. We don’t hide away and do it in private, and kill people if they do it with the wrong person.”

  “You’d never have a Shakespeare,” I said.

  “I think we do have individuals like Shakespeare,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Though it would be difficult to explain, to translate, what I mean by that.”

  “I should think so. Since you don’t seem to have anything like drama.”

  “Nothing dramatic used to happen to us, before you came. I suppose we’re going to need drama now.”

  “And psychoanalysis,” Dustin said. “Social workers. Police and jails.”

  “We look forward to evolving.”

  PART 2

  THE PLANT

  1

  GRAVITY SUCKS

  On Earth we’d seen pictures of the iceberg, and so didn’t expect it to look like an iceberg, glistening and pure. I was once stationed in Greenland in the winter; it looked something like that, cold and dirty. Elza said it reminded her of North Dakota in the winter—windstorms drive dark topsoil to mix with blizzard snow to make a black substance they call “snirt,” neither snow nor dirt.

  It was the fossil nucleus of an ancient comet. Billions of years ago, Mars had bent the thing’s orbit around, turning it into a small asteroid of ice and impurities, never to be warm enough to have its day in the sun and grow a magnificent tail.

  So it was a huge dirty snowball, somewhat out of round. White splashes where engineers and their robots had blasted and drilled to turn it into a huge fuel tank. It provided reaction mass for the main drive and an array of small steering jets, mainly for turning us around at midpoint—and evading rocks, if it came to that.

  Everything had been tested out; the main drive fired for several days, stopped, turned around, and fired again. Now we coasted in to meet it.

  It was a death trap in several ways. The sheer amount of energy blowing out behind was like a continual thermonuclear explosion, and although stars do that for millennia on end, no machine has ever done it before—let alone for thirteen years. And it wasn’t as straightforward as nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation; it was just the magic Martian energy sources stacked up, or nested, for a multiplicative effect. I didn’t have the faintest idea why it worked, and its designers were only a couple of baby steps ahead of me. All we knew for sure was that the scale model had worked, going out a hundredth of a light- year and back, with one pilot/passenger.

  It was like successfully testing a motorboat, and saying, okay, launch the Titanic.

  Which brings up another actuarial disaster waiting to happen: what if we hit something on the way?

  It wouldn’t have to be another iceberg, real or metaphorical. Going at 0.95 the speed of light, a fist- sized rock would be like a nuclear bomb. We did have an electromagnetic repeller to keep interstellar dust from grinding us down to a sliver. But it wouldn’t work on anything as big as a marble.

  Bigger things we could sense at a distance, and avoid with a quick blip from the steering jets, which explains our lack of fine glassware and china. Though if our cosmological models were right, such encounters would be rare. If we were wrong, it would be a bumpy ride.

  There had been no serious problems with the test run. But we were going twenty-four hundred times farther.

  Four engineers were still living on the iceberg. They would get us screwed down tight into the ice and connect our habitat with the storage area, where they’d been living the past ten months. Have to check the caviar and vodka supplies. (Actually, the modifications that allowed them to live the
re made the storage building a de facto alternate living area, if something made ad Astra uninhabitable, and if we somehow survived that event.)

  We’d been talking with them for days, via line-of-sight laser modulation, and were glad to be able to aid them in a small conspiracy.

  The plan was supposed to be that we not make physical contact with them, because they were all from Earth, and we were all quarantined because of exposure to Mars and Martians. They’d been talking it over, though, and decided to come say hello and be contaminated. Then they’d go back to Little Mars instead of Earth and wait for a chance to hitch a ride on to Mars. Which seemed like a better prospect than their home planet.

  All four of our resident semi-Martians thought they’d be welcome, thumbing their collective nose at Earth. Of course, the two actual Martians didn’t understand why anyone would want to live on Earth in the first place. All that gravity. Humans everywhere.

  Paul brought us in smoothly, a couple of small bumps. The comet didn’t have any appreciable gravity, of course, so it was more a docking maneuver than a landing.

  The robots had carved out a rectangular hole in the ice, two meters deeper than the habitat was tall. Paul nudged us in there, and the robots slid blocks of ice and dirt in place over us, a kind of ablative protective layer. He detached the small lander and inched it onto the surface. A flexible crawl tube connected the ship’s air lock with ours.

  Paul swam through in a space suit, followed by the four engineers. We were all wearing our usual motley, so the five of them looked like an Invasion of the Space People movie.

  They all popped out of their suits as quickly as possible, Carmen aiding Paul and the engineers unscrewing each other. They were two couples, Margit and Balasz from Hungary and Karin and Franz from Germany.

  They were wearing skinsuits, of course. Margit filled hers in a spectacular way, but Karin was more attractive to me, compact and athletic like Elza. As if there were any scenario where that would make a difference. (“Oh, a Jew,” she says in my dreams, speaking German—“Let me make up for World War II.”)

  Margit spread her arms and inhaled hugely, starting a slight rotation. “Ah! Martian air. I feel so deliciously contaminated.”

  We shook hands all around and made introductions, though we’d met on-screen. Snowbird and Fly-in-Amber came floating tentatively out of the darkness.

  The four newcomers were somewhat wide-eyed at the apparitions, but Balasz croaked and whistled a fair imitation of a greeting.

  “The same to you and your family,” Snowbird said. “You are almost correct.”

  “Not bad for a human,” Fly-in-Amber grumbled. High praise.

  “This is so huge,” Karin said, apparently of the farm. “How many species?”

  “About three dozen,” Meryl said, “with another dozen to be planted in a few months. And eight Martian varieties.”

  “It will make it easier,” Franz said. “Playing with your food. The same meals over and over can drive you crazy.”

  Paul laughed. “Make you do irrational things, like give up Earth for Mars.”

  All four of them smiled. “Definitely,” Karin said. “Though it might depend where on Earth you call home.”

  “I will miss New York,” I said. “Though it’s not exactly the simple life.”

  “Mars has plenty,” Paul said. “Small-town life, but something new every day, every hour. Trade with you in a minute.”

  Karin shook her head. “No, I’m not that great a pilot. You can keep your starship.”

  “So when are you going to tell them?” Carmen said.

  Karin and Franz exchanged glances. “Actually, we were waiting to get your opinion,” he said.

  “A pity we aren’t a little farther out,” I said. The outer limit for line-of-sight transmission was set at four hundred million kilometers, the maximum distance between Earth and Mars, and we were still within that.

  “It is,” Franz said. “They’ll know we’ve been withholding the fact.”

  “You ought to wait until the last minute,” Carmen said. “Don’t give them time to round up a bunch of lawyers.”

  “The worst they can do is shoot you down,” I said, “but I don’t think they can afford to waste a spaceship.”

  Paul agreed. “They’ll fine you the expense of decontamination and the flight to Mars. But since there’s no money on Mars, all they could do is seize your assets on Earth.”

  “Which aren’t much,” Karin said.

  “None from us, of course,” Margit said. Hungary was part of the Cercle Socialisme.

  “It would be courteous to give them enough warning, so they don’t send up an ‘uncontaminated’ Space Elevator.”

  Moonboy held up a hand. He hadn’t spoken before. “Wait. You’re missing the obvious.” Everybody looked his way. “Just lie to them. Make up some story about how you were forced to come aboard ad Astra. Medical problem or something.”

  “Of course,” Balasz said. “Once one was exposed to Martian- ness, we might as well all be, since we all have to go back together.”

  “Could you cooperate with us in this ruse?” Margit said.

  There was a general murmur of assent. “I cannot lie,” Fly- in-Amber said. “It is not a matter of choice for me. My function is to record things as they happen.”

  “My function,” Snowbird said, “is to sit on you if you open your mouth. You have to record everything, but you don’t have to communicate it to everybody. Least of all to humans on Earth.”

  “True enough.” He turned to the engineers. “I do not have lips. But my orifice is sealed.”

  Snowbird turned to Carmen. “See? He doesn’t know.”

  So we manufactured a credible medical crisis, choosing Karin because she was the pilot. We gave her severe bronchitis that didn’t respond to their ship’s primitive treatment, and so she had to spend a few days in our infirmary. Actually, she was outside most of the time, helping the other three finish battening down the hatches.

  We took pleasure in their company for the eight days they remained on the iceberg, enjoying the last contact with people from outside our circle. I’m sure that Elza enjoyed more than social intercourse with Balasz, a warm and handsome man. Dustin and I exchanged a raised eyebrow or two over it. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if she had kept her hands to herself.

  (Dustin, I think, had more than a passing interest in Margit, but would never initiate a liaison himself. I’ve told him that if Adam had waited for Eve to ask, none of us might be here. But he remains diffident.)

  We said our good-byes, and they “cast off,” drifting a few kilometers behind the iceberg, well out of the line of fire. They were sending a record of our launch to Earth, and also to Paul—though if anything serious went wrong, I’m not sure what he could do.

  It took all morning to secure the plants, some of which would be glad to have gravity again. Beans and peas were going totally schizophrenic in zero gee, with no up or down. Carrots had started growing beet-shaped.

  After everything was secured and misted, we crawled and glided up into the ship and strapped in. I’d wanted to stay down in the habitat, taped into one of the chairs, but Paul talked me out of it with one pained expression. For the most daredevil pilot ever to elude a miniature supernova, he’s an extremely cautious man.

  We were all nervous when he pushed the LAUNCH button; only a fool would not have been. If there was any noise or vibration, I didn’t sense it (though Snowbird said she did). Perhaps the sensation was too subtle compared to the sudden clasp of gravity. Acceleration, technically.

  It seemed greater than one gee, though of course it wasn’t. It also seemed “different” from real gravity in some indefinable way, as if (which we knew to be true) the floor was aggressively pushing up at us. Relativistic heresy.

  After about five minutes, Paul said “Seems safe,” and unbuckled. If something had gone wrong, we could theoretically have blasted off in this lander and left ad Astra behind. Go back to Ea
rth and start over.

  I undid my seat belt and levered myself up, trying not to groan. I’d been desultory on the exercise machines, which were awkward in zero gee. Time to pay the piper now.

  Dustin did groan. “I’m going on a diet.”

  “We don’t want to hear any Earth people complain,” Fly-in-Amber said, inching painfully toward the air lock. “You are built for this.”

  “So are we,” Snowbird said. That was true; they were overengineered for Martian conditions. But then they would have inherited the Earth, if the Others’ grand plan had succeeded.

  They had both been spending two hours a day in the Earth- normal exercise rooms in Little Mars, but that didn’t make the change welcome. In an open area, we can help them get along, offering an arm or a shoulder, but in the spaceship aisle and the tube connecting the air locks, they had to crawl along on their own.

  “I’ll bet the Others have a way around this gravity,” Snowbird said. “We should have asked them while we had their attention.”

  “We had our fill of their attention,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Besides, they live in liquid nitrogen, floating like fish in Earth’s water. They don’t care about gravity.”

  I’d never thought of that. We didn’t really know what they looked like, so my image was of crystalline or metallic creatures lying almost inert under the cryogenic fluid.

  “I want to go to Earth and see the water,” Snowbird said. “I want to wade in the sea.”

  “Things go well, you probably will,” I said. “Surely the quarantine can’t last another fifty-some years.”

  “For a spy, you’re a hopeless optimist,” Carmen said. “I don’t suppose you’re a betting man as well.”

  “If the odds are right.”

  “Then I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky—good single-malt Scotch whisky, bottled this year—that the quarantine will still be in place when we return. If we do.”

  “A fifty-year-old bottle?” Maybe half a month’s pay. “I’ll accept the wager. Even against the Lucky Chicken—especially against her, so I can lose.”