Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  “She’s not a girl, not particularly pretty, and I was doing a side-stroke.”

  “Okay, showing off your bare side. To the most famous woman on two planets.”

  “Well, you know me. I really wanted her autograph.”

  “Is that what they call it now?”

  I poked her in the ribs. “Where is that off switch?”

  “I’ll be good.” She put her head against my shoulder and was asleep in a couple of minutes, her warm breath regular against my skin. So familiar and so unpredictable.

  Her jibing made me think about Carmen. I was attracted to her, not because she was The Mars Girl. Probably not a smart course to follow, though I didn’t think it would bother Elza a lot. Carmen’s relationship with Paul was not monogamous on either side. Fly- in-Amber told me that when he was asking about our triune. She “mated” (his word) with several men who stayed in Little Mars waiting to go on to Mars, and he knew from talking with Carmen that it was with Paul’s blessing, and that Paul was casually involved with a couple of women on Mars. This was before the one-gee shuttle, so going between the two planets was a complex affair taking months of zero-gee coasting.

  Speaking of complex affairs. Trapped inside this small box together, we all know that the wise course would be to treat one another as friends and not let it go beyond that. But it probably would, even if the mission were prosaic, because it’s so damned long. Add the desperate knowledge that we will all probably die at Wolf 25, or before, and the impulse to be impulsive is hard to resist.

  I’ve heard Carmen denigrate her body as unwomanly three times, which is too often for it to be a casual remark. But in fact her supposed shortcomings are what make her so alluring to a man like me. I suppose her slight, tomboyish body reminds me of the young schoolmates who were the first focus of my teenaged passions—who never said yes, but have never quite relinquished their hold on me. Maybe they never said yes because I never had the courage simply to come out and ask.

  Odd to think that they’re old enough to be grandmothers now, those who lived past Gehenna. I’m sure that none of them remembers the plump Jewish boy whose hair wouldn’t stay put. Or maybe one of them is obsessed by plump Jewish boys and can’t figure out why.

  Today was the first time I’ve seen her completely nude, and I looked away quickly so as not to make my interest too obvious. Then I got a glimpse as she turned around and swam on her back, as I was saying good-bye. No apparent tattoos except for the functional timepiece on her wrist. No obvious scars. Her pubic hair is shaped so as to accommodate a brief bathing suit, which is odd, since there are no bathing suits within a hundred million miles. In fact, she probably hasn’t worn one since she left Earth, twelve or thirteen years ago. Maybe it’s permanent. I’ll have to work it into a conversation somehow. “I couldn’t help but notice, as I was scrutinizing your pubic region . . .” Perhaps not. I shall be patient, and wait for a time and place when it will be natural to ask.

  7

  KAMIKAZE

  8 May 2088

  Instead of a regular diary entry, I’m going to put in part of a transcript of the meeting we just had.

  Namir suggested that it would be a good time, starting the second week, for all the humans and Martians to get together and record a consensus of what we think we’re headed for. We met at 0900 in the “compromise” lounge, at the entrance to the Martian area.

  Part of it became a little dramatic. My husband would have said “annoying.”

  Namir: My proposal was that we record a kind of “baseline” report on what we expect to happen when we arrive at Wolf 25. Our ideas will change over the next six years, naturally.

  Paul: One possibility is that there will be nothing there. The one on Triton said that’s where they live, and took off in that direction. But we lost track of him after a few minutes. He could have gone anywhere.

  Snowbird: Why would they do that?

  Paul: They may have misrepresented their strength, or rather their vulnerability. If we were to attack swiftly, they might not be able to react in time.

  Namir: Possibly. Doesn’t seem likely. We have ample evidence of their strength.

  Me: They had hundreds of centuries to plan ahead.

  Paul: That’s what I mean. They don’t want to confront us in real time.

  Fly-in-Amber: They have planned ahead for this. We will not surprise them.

  Elza: We have to try.

  Dustin: I’m not convinced that that is true. As you know, Elza.

  Elza: Pacifist swine. (Note: said smiling.) Explain, for the record.

  Dustin: This mission is predicated on two things: one, that they know they did not destroy us; and two, that they care. But we know almost nothing about their psychology. Maybe they are so confident they won’t bother to check, in which case, showing up on their doorstep may be a disaster. Or they might know they didn’t destroy us but feel the spectacular demonstration was enough to keep us out of their hair. So again, don’t go bother them.

  Namir: Dustin, even if the mission is a mistake, we can’t turn around and go home. The die is cast.

  Me: It’s still a good viewpoint to put in the mix, trying to predict what they’re going to do.

  Paul: Let’s get a sense of the timing. From the Earth’s point of view, the Other left Triton in July of 2079. At its rate of acceleration, it will take only about twenty- four and a half years to get there, assuming it decelerates at the same rate. Say it gets there in January 2104.

  In the worst-case scenario, they find out the Earth hasn’t been destroyed and turn around to finish the job. Which they do in the middle of 2128.

  Namir: That’s not the worst case.

  Paul: What is?

  Namir: You assume that the Others have to obey the same speed limit as we do. Suppose they can go a lot faster than the speed of light and are due here tomorrow?

  Paul: Relativity won’t let them. They’d be traveling into the past.

  Namir: (Laughs.) And show up tomorrow. They’ve done other impossible things.

  (Namir and Paul argue fruitlessly for a few minutes. Never argue science with a lawyer, I told Paul.)

  Meryl: Let’s assume there’s no magic superscience involved, all right? (She looks at her notebook.) If they go straight to Wolf 25, they’ll get there around 2104, by the Earth calendar. We won’t be there until eight years later. And they’ll have our “ready or not, here we come” message months before that. Which I was so enthusiastic about.

  Can we agree that the probability they won’t be ready for us is almost exactly zero? (General agreement.) And at any rate, if we did surprise them, there’s not much we can do about it. Short of using the ad Astra as a huge kamikaze bomb?

  Snowbird: What is that?

  Fly-in-Amber: It’s a Japanese word meaning a suicide airplane.

  Snowbird: Oh. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’re expecting to die anyhow.

  Fly-in-Amber: Most humans won’t do that. Not if they have a chance of living.

  Snowbird: But they don’t live that long anyhow.

  Namir: I’m glad you brought that up, Snowbird. We ought to consider it.

  Elza: I’m not sure I can. We would be murdering a whole planet, besides ourselves.

  Meryl: That’s right.

  Namir: Which is what they tried to do to us.

  Dustin: He wants you to think like a soldier, love, not a doctor.

  Moonboy: What if we had to do it to save the human race? What if we got a message like “Fuck you and the planet you came from”?

  Paul: We never could save the human race, if they decided to destroy it. We could never catch them. We could only take revenge, after the fact.

  Namir: I could do that.

  Dustin: You would. Definitely.

  Moonboy: I would, too. It’s not as if they were human.

  Me: Namir, it would be like Gehenna. There could be innocent races on that planet. For all we know, the one who attacked us was a lone lunatic, who claimed to represen
t the Others but actually did not.

  Namir: With due respect, Carmen, I have been there, and you have not. Genocide is not murder. You can forgive a murder and go on with life. But if we had found a country responsible for Gehenna, we would have had no mercy. We would have leveled it, in retribution. Which is not the same thing as revenge.

  (There was a long silence.)

  Paul: The kamikaze thing is not going to happen. I’m the only one who could do that, and I won’t. Besides, if our intent had been to launch a huge relativistic bomb, there would be no need for a crew. One kamikaze pilot, perhaps.

  Dustin: (Laughs.) Now that does make me nervous. You would need a crew, if only to keep that pilot from going mad during six years of isolation. But of course the crew wouldn’t know they were all going to die.

  Paul: Are you a philosopher or a story writer?

  Dustin: Sometimes the difference is moot. Are you lying? Don’t answer; we covered that one in freshman logic.

  Fly-in-Amber: Are you two joking? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when humans are serious.

  Dustin: Sometimes jokes are serious, Fly in-Amber.

  Paul: Not this time. He’s just playing games.

  Dustin: One of us is.

  Snowbird: This is making my brain hurt. I have to leave.

  So everyone laughed, and talked Snowbird into staying, promising that they would keep things straight. And the rest of it was pretty much a recital of what we already knew.

  But no one here knows Paul as well as I do, and I know he has a deep reserve of seriousness, which sometimes frightens me. I’m a little frightened now.

  A few days ago, out of the blue, before we went to sleep, he suggested that Namir, and perhaps the other two, were under orders to kill the rest of us if we tried to surrender, and use the ad Astra as a kind of 9/11 on the Others.

  But a starship isn’t a jet plane. They wouldn’t know how to do it.

  There’s only one person here who does.

  8

  WATER SPORTS

  Last night when all the humans were in bed, I walked quietly out past the hydroponics to the gym. I touched the water in the pool—it was very warm—and decided to try floating in it. See whether it indeed would give Snowbird and me some relief from all this gravity/ acceleration.

  There was no easy way for a four-legged person to get in. Humans just sit on the edge and slide in. We can’t quite bend that way.

  In retrospect, I realized I should have waited until at least one human was around. But there is a dignity factor about clothing, and I was not sure how to interpret it across species.

  They almost never appear without clothing in front of one another—like us, they take off their clothing in order to prepare one another for reproduction, and like us it is indecorous to look at another without clothing except under special circumstances. Swimming was one of those for them. Would they feel the same about us? I have only appeared unclothed before humans as part of a scientific investigation, and even that was uncomfortable. But they certainly don’t want people to go into their swimming pool with clothing on.

  Finally, I took off my cloak and simply jumped in. It made more of a splash than I had expected. A light came on, and I heard human footsteps coming around the hydroponic trellises.

  It was a most strange feeling. The water was only a little more than a meter deep, but it had splashed all over me. I had never been completely wet except in the process of being impregnated, so with the approaching footsteps I felt somewhat indecent, and was also embarrassed that I had splashed so much precious water out of the pool.

  I did feel lighter, even though my feet were on the floor, which is to say the bottom of the pool. Then I moved sideways and tipped over—I was suddenly floating and had no weight at all! I inhaled some water and had a little coughing fit, but of course was in no danger, since my breathing spiracles are distributed evenly around my body surface. The noise did upset Carmen, though, who was the first human on the scene. She cried out my name and Snowbird’s—of course she couldn’t tell us apart without our clothing—and seized my head and pulled me upright.

  She was yelling, asking if I was all right. The water was doing strange things with my hearing, and when I spoke, my voice sounded hugely amplified.

  “I am all right, Carmen, and I am Fly-in Amber, and I’m sorry to waste water and make a mess.”

  “Don’t worry about water; we’re riding a mountain of it. Did you have an accident?” Paul rushed up and said more or less the same thing.

  “No, no. I just wanted to try floating, but didn’t want to bother any humans while they were using the pool.” In fact, although several could have stood in the pool with me, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to swim.

  “Want to try it with the current?” Paul asked.

  “Please, yes.” He stepped on a button and it was marvelous, like thousands of tiny fingers wiggling over your skin. It also felt deeply obscene. “That is very good.”

  Snowbird appeared and addressed me in the consensus language, which we don’t normally use among humans. “Fly-in-Amber! You . . . I find you naked!”

  “Speak English, Snowbird. Yes, I am naked, and so are humans when they do this. You should try it.”

  “Not at the same time,” Paul said quickly. “You displace too much water.”

  “I’ll get out, then, and let Snowbird—”

  “I’m not ready to be naked in front of all these people! I have to think about it.”

  “It doesn’t bother us,” Carmen said. “It’s proper, for being in the water.”

  “But the whole idea—‘being in the water’! You can’t even say it in our language. It’s like ‘breathing in outer space.’ It should not be possible.”

  Carmen gestured toward me. “You’d better come up with a word for it. I don’t think Fly-in-Amber wants to come out.”

  “In fact,” I said, “I’m not sure how I’m going to get out. I can’t jump high in this gravity.”

  Namir had come up. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll get a couple of planks.” He went off toward the storeroom. I wanted to tell him not to hurry.

  “We’ll improvise a ramp,” Carmen said. She stepped out of her robe and slid into the water. Her body was strange, warmer than the water, and soft. “We should have made this bigger. We weren’t thinking about you guys.”

  “We hadn’t thought of it either, Carmen. It’s such an odd idea.”

  “Fly-in-Amber,” Snowbird said, “are you losing part of your skin?”

  I had a moment of panic. There was an iridescent sheen on the water, evidently oil from my skin, and small floating particles, perhaps flakes of skin. Carmen was looking at the water with alarm.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing.” I bent over and looked at it closely. “It’s just been two days since I scraped.”

  “Of course,” she said, though her smile did not look normal. She of all people might have reason to fear, since she had been the first human to catch a disease from us, and, of course, no human had ever bathed with us.

  “Humans do catch skin diseases from other humans,” Snowbird explained, “like athletes’ foot and herpes. But we have never had skin diseases.”

  “That’s, um, reassuring.”

  “There would have been no reason for us to be designed with skin disease,” I said. “The difference between intelligent design and random evolution, I’m afraid.”

  “We ought to build a special pool for you two,” Paul said. “Deeper, so you have maximum buoyancy. Not as wide, since you probably won’t be swimming.”

  “That would be most kind of you. Perhaps with colder water?”

  “If we put it in your area, it will be plenty cold.”

  “That’s wonderful. Carmen, you could come over anytime and enjoy the cold.”

  “Thank you, Fly-in-Amber, but we really prefer the warmer water.” She was shivering a little. “In fact, I think I’ll go take a nice hot shower right now.”

  Going from a swim to a
shower seemed redundant. But nothing about them surprised me.

  Namir returned with the plastic boards then, and looked at her in what I think is a sexual way when she got out of the water. I wondered if they’d begun mating but had learned not to ask.

  Over the next four days, they used boards like that to build us a big waterproof box, large enough for both of us to stand in, and improvised a pump that circulated the water and filtered it.

  It will make the gravity so much more manageable. And Snowbird and I will be the cleanest Martians in history.

  9

  ADULTERY FOR ADULTS

  1 June 2088

  Gone for a month now. A real-time view to the stern shows the Sun as the brightest star in the sky; the Earth is of course invisible.

  The only milestone of note, dear diary, is that Elza has apparently made her first sexual conquest—I say “apparently” because who knows? Though if it had been Paul, I think he would have told me, or politely asked me first.

  It was Moonboy. Meryl told me after we finished an especially frustrating session with the Martians, tracking down their elusive and totally irregular verb forms.

  We were alone at the coffee tap. “So do you know about Moonboy and Elza?”

  “No, what?” I knew it wasn’t billiards, of course.

  “Well, they got together yesterday. In the fucking sense, I mean.”

  An odd choice, I thought, but she had to start somewhere. “Is it, um, I mean, is it a big deal to you?”

  “More so than I let him know when he told me. It’s always been theoretically okay. But this is the first time . . . for him.”

  “Not for you?” I pretended I didn’t know.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Back on Mars.” I knew of two men, one of them married, some years ago. Mars is like a small village with no place to hide.

  “Think it’s a one-time thing?”

  “It was already a two-time thing when he told me.” She looked around. “It may be becoming a three-time thing as we speak. But no, I don’t think they’re going to get married and run off to the big city.”