Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  “You lose, and everybody wins. Quarantined, but alive.”

  After a few minutes of walking around, mostly checking plants for damage, all of us probably felt like lying down. I fought the impulse by going to the exercise machines. At least I could sit down on the stationary bicycle. Watch the water splashing into the pool. In a couple of hours, it would be full; I looked forward to cooling off in it.

  I wondered whether the Martians would try it. Their underground lakes were shallow and muddy, and I couldn’t remember any reference to their using water recreationally. It was pretty rare stuff.

  They didn’t wash for personal hygiene. They used flat scrapers, like ancient Roman athletes, the residue stirred into water that would be used for agriculture.

  I got up and went back down the yellow corridor to the pantry, to see what I could put together for our first shipboard meal. (I hadn’t attempted cooking in zero gee.)

  It was cold, maintained about ten degrees above freezing in the main area. Forty below in the “freezer,” which of course was heated up to that relatively balmy temperature, from the iceberg’s ambient coldness, about three degrees above absolute zero.

  I’d spent hours studying the pantry’s organization and modifying it according to some logic and aesthetic that was arcane even to me. “This is the way I want it” was what it boiled down to. I would be the one spending the most time down here.

  I took a basket and collected what I would need for a pasta dish that would resemble spaghetti and meatballs, comfort food, though there was no actual meat, and I assumed the spaghetti would have to be done in a pressure cooker. The air pressure was like Little Mars, about equivalent to nine thousand feet in altitude; boiling water wouldn’t cook fast.

  I filled bottles with olive oil and wine concentrate, which I’d keep in the kitchen. No sense in making wine out of it for cooking; the alcohol would just boil off anyhow.

  It would be a month before I had any fresh vegetables or herbs. But I did have dehydrated tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions in resealable jars, and flash-frozen green beans and corn for a side dish.

  Moonboy came in with two-liter flasks for wine. They had lines marked for 130 ccs of alcohol and 50 ccs of concentrate; he chose Chianti when I told him what we were having. Some bureaucrat had set up the alcohol supply so you had to type in your initials and the quantity dispensed—or you could type in “communal,” as Moonboy did. Mr. Communal might wind up being quite a lush.

  Nobody’d said anything about limits. Would you be cut off if the machine decided you were drinking too much for a pilot, or a doctor? For an out-of-work spy?

  The wines we’d made in Little Mars that way weren’t too bad. The water has more oxygen dissolved in it than normal air would provide, and the theory was that it gave it a “brighter” taste. Whatever, I could live with it. I enjoy fine wine but will take any old plonk rather than nothing.

  (In the desert, we boy soldiers made a horrible wine out of raisins and cut-up citrus, with bread- making yeast. I still can’t look at raisins.)

  There was a lot of floor space beyond the pantry, which took up less than a quarter of the storage warehouse. The rest was a combination of replacements for things we knew would wear out, like clothes, and tools and raw materials for fabricating things we hadn’t predicted needing.

  Like weapons, I supposed. We made a point of saying that the mission was peaceful and unarmed. But when I floated through the warehouse and its large semisentient machine shop, I saw that it wouldn’t take much inventiveness or skill to put together individual projectile and laser weapons and small bombs.

  It was unlikely that any conventional weapon would have a non-trivial effect on the Others. But they might not be the only enemies out there. Sooner or later, we’d have to talk about that. I would just as soon not be the one to bring it up, though.

  All that stuff waiting for something to go wrong made me wonder whether we might have traded in one of our xenologists, or even a spy, for a gifted tinkerer. We had engineers in a couple of flavors, and smart machines to do their bidding. But could any of those engineers take a blade to a piece of wood and carve a useful propeller out of it? An oar? I could, of course. But that’s not like having someone who would say, “You don’t need a propeller. This is what you need.”

  I added a frozen cherry pie to the basket and a quart of something supposedly resembling ice cream. By the time I got to the kitchen, everybody was relaxing with a drink in the dining room or the study. Moonboy was intently playing the piano, silent with earphones, studying a projected score. Snowbird was standing by the small bookshelf, studying one of the few physical books we’d brought along.

  Had to get used to their standing all the time. There are no social signals in their posture that I can recognize. When are they relaxing? Does the term have any meaning to them?

  I set the stuff out in proper order on the work island, and put the pseudomeatballs in the microwave to thaw, then poured a glass of reconstituted Chianti. Not really bad. Asked the screen for pressure-cooking directions, and it said at this “altitude” I didn’t have to pressure-cook pasta; it just took longer. Okay; filled the pot three-quarters with water and added a little salt and oil, and put it on high.

  My skin seemed to relax on my body, blood pressure coming down. I had so missed this plain thing. Whenever we were in a situation where it was possible, cooking was my main relaxant and restorer. Neither Elza nor Dustin did much cooking, though they had their specialties. Dustin’s Texas chili was a possibility here, but Elza’s skill with sushi was unlikely to be of use, unless we met some edible aliens. She could handle tentacles.

  For two summers before I joined the kibbutz in Israel, my aunt Sophie hired me to do “dog work” in her New York restaurant, Five Flags. I did a lot of vegetable chopping and some simple sous-chef things, and was exposed to basic techniques in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese cooking. College and combat took me away from that world, and I never pursued it professionally, nor actually wanted to. That might make it too serious, no longer relaxing.

  Meryl came over and refilled her glass. “Can I help?”

  I measured some water into the dehydrated onions. “Nothing much to do, I’m afraid. I would love to have an onion to chop.”

  “Not for a month or so.” She looked out over the hydroponic farm, more white plastic than greenery. “When we left Mars for Little Mars, I didn’t think I’d miss it, working with the plants.”

  “No green thumb?”

  “Well, no enthusiasm. I thought the ‘ag hours’ were somebody’s bright idea for morale. But I did grow to miss it, in Little Mars. One thing to look forward to, here.”

  I nodded. “You’re not looking forward to six years of leisure? Or twelve?”

  “Sure.” She retreated into thought, expression momentarily vacant. “I had an elaborate course of research planned, the thing we talked about the other day.”

  I remembered. “Delphinic and cetacean pseudosyntax.”

  “The more I think about it, the more futile it seems. No new data, no experimental subjects. I could work like a dog for twelve years while everybody else in the field is working for fifty. I come up with some brilliant insight and find it’s been old news for thirty years. People are having tea with whales and sex with dolphins.”

  “Better than the other way around.”

  “If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.”

  The meatballs dinged, and I took them out. “It seems to me your work would have value as methodology even if people on Earth came up with different results, with newer data.” I touched a couple, and they were thawed, still cool.

  “Too abstract. I mean, you’re right, but eventually it would be old data pushed around by outdated methodology. Xenolinguistics is moving fast now that we have actual xenos.”

  “None of us will be doing anything on the cutting edge.” I poured a little oil into a large pan and put it on to heat. “Can’t beat relativity.”

 
Even if communication with Earth were completely unrestricted, you couldn’t stay current with research. At turnaround, three years and a couple of months from now by ship time, twelve years would have passed on Earth. If you sent a message there to a colleague who answered immediately, the answer would get to Wolf 25 almost thirty-seven Earth years later. Not so much communication as historical record.

  I shook the wet onion flakes into the oil, and they sizzled and popped. The cooking-onion smell was intense but faded in seconds in the thin air.

  “Smells good.” She leaned back against the island and took a sip of wine, then sighed. “I just haven’t been admitting it to myself. I should table the cetacean stuff till I get back to Earth. Little Mars, anyhow. Join the crowd and study the Martian language.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “I resisted it back on Mars because I didn’t have any special talent for it. But neither did Carmen, and she’s making headway.”

  “At least you’ll be carrying your research materials along with you.”

  “If they cooperate. Fly-in-Amber isn’t happy about being source material, I can tell that already.”

  I shrugged. “He’s studying us. Turnabout’s fair play.”

  “I’ll point that out to him.”

  I shook the onions around in the pan and slid the meatballs into it.

  She laughed. “They’re subtle, the yellow ones. As he says, he can’t lie. But he’s very careful in the kinds of truth he shares.”

  “You’ve known him awhile?”

  “Sure, since he came to Little Mars, ’79. I’m not sure I know him any better than the day we met, though.”

  “He acts as if he’s just a recording device.”

  “Yeah, that’s his pose. But he’s a lot more complicated than that. Mysterious. Talk to Snowbird about him sometime. He’s more strange to her than we are.”

  “Really.” I drew a liter of water and dumped the tomato and wine concentrates in it.

  “That’s what she told me, in those words. All the yellow family . . . she says they act as if they’re the only ones who are really real. The rest of us, we’re just a dream.”

  “They’re all delusional?”

  “Maybe. Snowbird thinks it may be true.”

  I smiled at that, but at the same time had a little twist of something like fear. “If you were a dream, would you be aware of it?”

  She looked straight at me, not smiling. “Not if the dreamer knew his business.”

  2

  YEAR ZERO

  The Corporation asked us all to keep daily diaries, and gave us a program guaranteed to keep them private until fifty years after the last one of us has died. Our privacy guarded, I suppose, by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.

  I’ll pretend they’re telling the truth, and anyhow I don’t have a lot to hide. I admit that I pick my nose when no one is looking. I don’t like my body very much. I prefer masturbation to sex with my husband. I’m jealous, and a little bit afraid, of Elza, and trust her not at all. She will have every man on this boat, then come after the women. But it’s not as if I don’t have fantasies about her men. One of them, anyhow.

  I’ve started writing because the trip has officially begun. We started blasting today. What a verb, as if we were miners. But it’s accurate; we’re standing on top of a matter/antimatter bomb that will keep exploding for 12.8 years plus.

  Trying to get used to Earth- strength gravity. I asked Paul how long it would take if we accelerated with Mars- normal gravity. He said he couldn’t do hypogolic cosines or something in his head, then fiddled with his notebook and said it wouldn’t work; it would take umpty-ump years to get there; umpty- less-ump, but long, in our time frame. But we might get there with our backs intact. I can’t find any way to stand that doesn’t make my back hurt.

  Part of the problem is associative dissonance, how nice to have a college education and have names for everything. My body feels this gravity and thinks I should be in the gym in Little Mars; an hour of sweat, then back to normal. But this is normal; all through human history people put up with weighing this much. So settle down, back, and get used to it.

  (later) I heard splashing; the pool finally filled. Took a towel over. Namir had the current on and was swimming in place.

  I’d never seen him naked. He looks good for a man his age. Solid muscles and only a little paunch. A lot of hair. He’s circumcised, something I’d only seen in pictures. It makes him look vulnerable. It also makes his dick look longer, or maybe it just is longer. I’ll have to ask Paul. Or maybe not.

  The timer rang, and he got out. I would like to report that his vulnerable penis sprang instantly erect when I stepped out of my robe, but alas it just sat there. Perhaps he’s seen a naked woman or two before. Maybe even one with tits.

  The water was cold but felt good, and I warmed up fast with the current at six knots. Turned it down to one for the backstroke. Namir did glance at my frontal aspect, cunt-al, but then politely turned away. I had a wicked impulse to tease him but don’t feel that I know him well enough. Which is odd, after all these weeks. But he’s a formal, quiet man. He jokes and laughs when it’s appropriate; but when he’s by himself, he looks like he’s thinking about something sad.

  Which of course he must be. He walked through Tel Aviv right after Gehenna, millions of his countrymen dead and rotting in the desert sun. What could anyone learn, or do, or believe, to get over that?

  He told us that two of the men under his command killed themselves that first day. Shot themselves. He said that like he was describing the weather.

  But I think his calm fatalism gives us all a kind of strength. We will probably die on this trip. The trick is to say that without being brave or dramatic. We will probably have powdered eggs for breakfast. We will probably die in five years and three months. Pass the salt, please.

  Namir cooked his first dinner last night, and it was pretty good, considering the restrictions he’s working under. Spaghetti with meatless meatballs, with reconstituted vegetables that weren’t too mushy. Before long we’ll all be staring at the hydroponic garden chanting “grow, grow.”

  Actually, we’ll all be doing something more or less constructive. We talked about that after dinner. Paul’s continuing his VR course work for a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics, to complement his geology degrees. Elza is studying trauma medicine, and also does abstract needlepoint and God knows what kind of bizarre sex. Dustin says he doesn’t have to actually do anything. A philosopher by training, he might burst into thought at any moment. He’s also practicing trick shots on the pool table, though I don’t know how long that will last. Elza asked him to limit the noise to ten minutes at a time, preferably once a year.

  Moonboy is a good pianist, huge hands, but he usually plays silently, with earphones. He’s writing a long composition that he began when he left Mars. He’s a xenologist, of course, like Meryl and me, so we have plenty to do, getting ready to meet the Others. Meryl also does word and number puzzles with grim seriousness. Taped to her wall she has a crossword puzzle that has ten thousand squares.

  Namir does woodwork as well as cooking; he brought some fancy wood and knives from Earth. He also studies poetry, though he says he hasn’t written any since he was young. He works with formal poetry in Hebrew and Japanese as well as English; his job title at the UN before Gehenna was “cultural attaché.” I wonder how many people knew he was a spy. Maybe they all did. He even looks like a spy, muscular and handsome and dark. He moves with grace. I sort of want him and sort of don’t.

  The Martians weren’t in on the after-dinner conversation; they rarely join us for meals. They don’t eat human food and perhaps they’re uncomfortable watching us consume it. But I’m pretty sure that their answer to “What do you plan to do for the next six and a half or thirteen years?” would be “Same as always.” They’re born into a specific social and intellectual function and don’t deviate much.

  Fly-in-Amber’s yellow family are recorders; they si
mply remember everything that happens in their presence. They’re weirdly acute and comprehensive; I could fan a book’s pages in front of Fly- in-Amber and immediately afterward—or ten years after—he could recite the book back to me.

  Snowbird’s white clan is harder to pin down. They classify things and visualize and articulate relationships. They’re naturally curious and seem to like humans. Unlike Fly-in-Amber’s family, I have to say.

  Every kind of Martian has remarkable verbal memory. They’re born with a basic vocabulary, evidently different for each family, and add new words just by hearing them. They have no written language, though human linguists are making headway on that. Meryl and Moonboy and I are adding to an existing vocabulary of about five hundred words and wordlike noises, with help mainly from Snowbird. Meryl is best with it; she worked with porpoise and whale communication, inventing phonemelike symbols for repeated sounds.

  We’ll never be able to speak it; it’s full of noises that people can’t make, at least not with the mouth. But Moonboy believes he can approximate it with a keyboard in synthesizer mode, with percussion, and fortunately Snowbird is fascinated by the idea and willing to work with him hour after hour, tweaking the synthesizer’s output.

  This doesn’t read much like a diary. I remember my freshman year, on the way to Mars, studying the London journals of Pepys and Boswell. But Pepys was wandering around his ruined city, and Boswell had Dr. Johnson to write about, then going down to London Bridge for his whores. The professor said Boswell had a condom made of wood. That’s stranger than Martians.

  We need a Boswell or a Pepys instead of, or along with, this ragtag bunch of scientists and spies. The huge tragedy of London’s collapsing under fire and plague is small, compared to eight billion human beings snuffed out for being human.

  3

  RECORD