Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  “I’m a fearsome interstellar warrior,” Namir said. “I’m not changing diapers.”

  “I don’t think we have any diapers aboard,” I said, “nor ovulating women.”

  “I can fix the ovulation,” Elza said. “And we could improvise diapers and such. But really, where could we go, to play Adam and Eve, if we couldn’t go back to Earth?”

  “Mars,” Fly-in-Amber said. “It’s a nicer place anyhow.”

  We got the ersatz news broadcasts from Earth, but of course they weren’t beamed, and were too weak and distorted by noise to be worth everyday amplifying and cleaning up. Namir had some experience and expertise to apply to it, though, and eventually had decoded about six hours of broadcasts prior to noon of July 3, when Lazlo Motkin had made his imperial request. All we found were two small stories, one a pro forma announcement that Lazlo was going to run for president of the United States on a third-party ticket, and the other a human-interest story about how he and his wife formed the Free America party and, working through several religious denominations, got enough signatures and funding to put himself on the ballot in several Southern states.

  So how to interpret the tight-beam message to us? Probably just a crazy rant. But suppose the rest of the news was sanitized, and there really had been a theocratic revolution in the United States?

  Paul raised that possibility during dinner, rehydrated mushrooms fried with pretty convincing butter over corn cakes, with actual green onions from the farm, our first crop.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Dustin said, “unless it’s a very levelheaded theocracy. Why would they censor the news of their victory?”

  “Maybe they’re not idiots,” Namir said. “Even theocrats might not want to invite the Others to their victory parade.”

  “The real question is what our response should be,” Paul said. “I’m inclined to play it straight; tell them thanks, but no thanks. We’re going to stick with the original plan.”

  “Which is to make it up as we go along,” I said.

  “Or just don’t respond at all,” Namir said. “He sent that a week ago. He knows our answer would take a week or eight days. If he’s still in control of that powerful laser transponder a couple of weeks from now, that tells us something.”

  Meryl shook her head. “You’re presupposing that the Earth authorities are aware that he’s done this. I think he’s just a rich fruitcake out in the middle of the ocean with his laser transponder and delusions of grandeur.”

  “In which case,” I said, “we ought to send the message back to Earth and ask whether anyone can vouch for Mr. Lazlo.”

  “We could do that,” Paul said, “but no matter what we hear back, we should stick to the original mission. If we’d wanted to just cannonball into the planet, there wouldn’t be any need for a human crew and all this lovely life support.” He held up a forkful of mushroom. “We could’ve just put an autonomous AI pilot on the iceberg and set it loose. But we are on board, and in charge, and we’ll do what we’re supposed to do.”

  He looked around the table. “So I second Carmen’s idea—send the message back and see what the reaction is. But continue on regardless. Is everyone in favor of that?”

  People nodded and shrugged. Moonboy said, “It’s not as if they could do anything to us, right? I mean, there’s no way they could set up another starship and have it overtake us before we got to Wolf 25.”

  “No,” Paul said, “even if they had an identical iceberg in place, and all the people and resources. They couldn’t catch up with us. We’re already going two-tenths the speed of light.”

  “They couldn’t catch us with a starship and crew,” Namir said. “But they could catch us with a probe. A bomb.”

  “Always Mr. Sunshine,” his wife said.

  12

  MEDICAL HISTORY

  1 September 2088

  So Elza thinks Moonboy is a little crazy. Maybe more than a little. He’d been acting more odd than usual for a couple of weeks, I saw in retrospect, but it hadn’t made a big impression. He’d been moody as long as we’d known him; so now he was a little moodier, withdrawn.

  I’m somewhat snoopy, but then that is what I’m paid to do. So when Elza said she was going down to the kitchen for a snack and set down her notebook without turning it off, I did what was natural for me and leaned over to take a look.

  It was Moonboy’s medical file, open to a confidential psychological evaluation, eighteen years ago. It was in a folder labeled “Aptitude for long-term assignment, Mars Base.”

  The box the psychiatrist had checked said “marginally acceptable,” with a scrawled “see attached” alongside. I tapped on it, and the document was fascinating. Disturbing.

  Moonboy had had inpatient psychiatric treatment, on Earth, for assault and claustrophobia. When he was eleven, a stepfather had gotten angry with him for crying and taped his mouth shut, then bound his arms and legs in tape, too, and pushed him into a dark closet for punishment. He choked on vomit and died, but was revived on the way to the hospital. He never saw the stepfather again, but the damage was done.

  “Pretty interesting?” I hadn’t heard Elza come back.

  “I’m sorry. Compromising professional ethics.”

  “Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, and Moonboy wouldn’t be my psychiatric patient anyhow. I really shouldn’t have had access to the file. But I saw a thread to it and just asked, and it opened. You could have done the same thing.”

  “I’m surprised they accepted him for Mars.”

  “Hmm. A married pair of xenologists probably looked like a good package deal, and Mars itself isn’t too bad for a claustrophobe. The base is big, and you can go outside. Unlike here.”

  “There are other factors for his moodiness,” I said. “You’re sitting on one of them, I must point out.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But I should talk to him.” She picked up the notebook and tapped through a few pages. “Meryl’s okay with it. I talked it over with her. She hasn’t been a saint.”

  “That’s not too relevant.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Are you still . . .”

  “No, not really. We haven’t closed any doors, but . . . yeah, I should talk to him.”

  “Would it do any good for me to talk to him? Give my okay?”

  “No. He knows you’re not bothered by it. Besides, you’re an authority figure to him.”

  That was comforting. “Authority figures might be a problem, if one had tried to murder you at age eleven.”

  “Didn’t just try. Though he doesn’t remember dying. He passed out, puking, and was revived. He still doesn’t know he died.” She shuddered. “What a bastard.”

  “He does remember the incident up to that point?”

  She tapped some more and shook her head. “Guy doesn’t say whether he learned that from Moonboy himself or from hospital records.” She put it down and leaned back, hands behind her head. “I ought to see whether I can get him to talk about his childhood.”

  “As his doctor?”

  She gave me a look. “I’m always his doctor. Yours, too. But no; I don’t want him to see me as a shrink.”

  “What as?”

  She looked back at the notebook. “Why don’t you and Dustin play some pool after dinner? A nice long game?”

  13

  TRAUMA DRAMA

  I was headed for bed after watching a bad movie—Paul had given up halfway through—when the door to Elza’s suite burst open and Moonboy ran out, naked, carrying his clothes. That did get my attention. He hurried straight to his room, I think without seeing me.

  Then Elza appeared, also naked, hand over her lower face, blood streaming from her nose, spattering her chest, a rivulet running between her breasts. I took her by the elbow and led her to the bathroom. Tried to seat her on the toilet, but she got up and inspected her face in the mirror, a mess, and gingerly touched her nose in a couple of places, wincing. “Broken,” she said, though it sounded like “pro
gen.”

  “What can I do? Get Namir?” He and Dustin were playing pool in the lounge.

  “Just stay a minute.” She was carefully packing her nostrils with tissue, her head bent over. “Hurts. More than I would think.” She turned and got to one knee and spit blood into the toilet, and convulsed twice, holding back vomit. Then she sat on the floor, holding the scarlet wad of tissue over her nose.

  “Moonboy?”

  “Yeah. If you see him, would you pitch him out the air lock for me?”

  “What happened?”

  “We were just talking.” She dropped some tissues into the toilet, and I handed her fresh ones. “Well, we sort of fucked, I guess that’s obvious, and I was talking to him, reassuring him . . . and, I don’t know. I must have blinked. He was starting to sit up, and he whacked me a good one with his elbow. Said it was an accident, but no way. Had all his weight behind it.” She shuddered and rocked a couple of times. Another woman, I would have held, comforted. Elza wouldn’t like that.

  “Glad my martial arts instructor isn’t here. She would slap the shit out of me.”

  “Was it something you said?”

  She looked up at me, ghastly but a little comical. “Yes. But I’m not sure what, exactly. I’ll talk with him after he’s . . . after we’ve both calmed down a little.”

  “Maybe you should slap the shit out of him. I mean, just as therapy.”

  She nodded. “Therapy for me, anyhow.”

  Namir appeared in the doorway, galvanized. As if a silent lightning bolt had struck. “Blood,” he said. “What?”

  “An accident,” Elza said, standing carefully. “Stupid accident. Get outa here and let us clean this mess up.”

  “It’s broken,” he said. Dustin had come up behind him and was staring.

  “No shit, it’s broken. But a doctor has already looked at it.”

  “You were with—”

  “An accident, Namir. Make yourself useful and get me some ice. And a drink, while you’re at it.” He backed away, and Dustin followed him.

  I wet a handcloth with cold water and handed it to her. She dabbed and rubbed at the blood one-handed. The stream had pooled at her navel and gone on to mat her pubic hair. I gave her another cloth and rinsed the first one out.

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  She scrubbed her pubic hair unself-consciously. “They know I was with him. Namir, at least, knew I was going to raise some . . . delicate matters. For the time being, I’m going to stand behind doctor-patient confidentiality.” She threw the rag into the sink. “Help me get dressed?”

  She pulled a brown shift out of a drawer and wriggled into it, switching arms to keep the wad of tissues in place. She went back into the bathroom and spit out a clot and retched.

  “Ugh.” She sat heavily on an ottoman, elbows on her knees.

  Meryl tapped on the doorjamb and stepped in. “Moonboy hit you? Elza?”

  “Said it was an accident. Pretty well aimed.”

  “I don’t understand. I can’t imagine a less violent man.”

  “Wonder how often people say that. After ax murders and such.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “In bed.” They were set up with separate bedrooms currently and a small shared anteroom. “I haven’t talked to him. I was reading in the kitchen, and Namir came in.”

  Elza peered up at her. “He’s never, um?”

  “Never even raises his voice, no.”

  “Well, he’s sitting on something. A powder keg.” She looked at the tissues and replaced them. “At least he didn’t break any teeth. ‘Dentist, heal thyself.’ ”

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” Meryl said with an odd tone of voice, like “I’m kind of sorry my husband hit you while you were fucking, but not really.”

  “Look,” Elza said, “it probably was an accident. Let’s leave it at that. I’ll talk to him after he’s rested.”

  “I suppose accidents aren’t always accidents,” Meryl persisted. “Maybe it wasn’t you who was the actual target.”

  “Maybe not.” She shook her head. “Probably not. But not you, either. Childhood thing.”

  “He had a happy childhood. He adores his mother.”

  “And his father died?”

  “Left. But it was amicable, no-fault.”

  “You might talk to him about that. Or no. Let me talk to him. It’s something we were . . . closing in on.”

  Namir came in with a tall drink and a plastic bag of chipped ice. “Thanks. Carmen, do we have a clean washcloth left?”

  “Sure.” I handed it to her and she wrapped it around the ice, dropping the bloody wad, and pressed the cold pack to her nose.

  She sipped the cold drink, holding it at an awkward angle. “Thanks. Look. I don’t think he knows how badly he injured me. Let’s not make a big deal of it?”

  Dustin shook his head. “No. He’s got to know he—”

  “Trust me, no, darling. This is something I have to control, whether he knows it yet or not.”

  “I could,” Namir began.

  “No. You boys get back to your game. Please. Just be normal.”

  Sure, a normal family full of Martians and spies, hurtling toward its doom a contracted quarter of a century away.

  Paul stepped into the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and stared at the sight of all the blood. “What the fuck?”

  “A reasonable question,” Elza said.

  14

  LOVE AND BLOOD

  I lay in the dark holding a pack of tissues, listening to Elza’s ragged breathing as she went in and out of sleep. I passed her a tissue whenever a stoppage woke her. Then the pills would carry her back to sleep.

  When people stopped falling out of the sky, the day of Gehenna, I took an embassy car and drove out to the suburb past Neve Tsedek, where my parents lived. Driving was difficult downtown, streets clotted with cars that had gone out of control as their drivers died. Some automatic cars were stalled, pushing against piles of metal and flesh. I tried not to drive over bodies, but it was impossible. I saw perhaps fifty people walking or standing in all of downtown Tel Aviv, sharing with me the inexplicable gift of life.

  On the thruway there were long stretches of uninterrupted pavement, and then immense pileups, surrounded by empty undamaged cars. Of course people would stop, then open their doors and take one breath of unfiltered air.

  My mother’s neighborhood looked unaffected, except for a few cars oddly parked in yards or in the middle of the street. There were no people about, but that could have been normal.

  The front door was unlocked. I called for her, and, of course, there was no answer.

  I found her in the kitchen, lying on her back in a tidal pool of blood. The door to the garden had been kicked down from the outside.

  A nurse by training, combat nurse by politics, she had rushed to the knife rack and snatched a razor-sharp Toledo steel paring knife, a souvenir from Spain that she used daily and kept keen. A straw in her left hand, she had tried to give herself an emergency tracheotomy. Then nicked an artery, a carotid artery. Of course the tracheotomy wouldn’t have helped.

  She wrote in blood on a white plastic cutting board CAN’T EXHALE, with a drying fingerprint apostrophe. She had always been careful about grammar.

  Too much blood in this life.

  15

  SEX AND VIOLENCE

  2 September 2088

  This was a very interesting day for observing humans. I didn’t witness the precipitating incident last night but have reconstructed it from several accounts, including Snowbird’s interpretation. She is closer to Carmen than I am, and Carmen saw much of it.

  Apparently Elza and Moonboy were mating (or “fucking,” to be more accurate), an intimacy outside their traditional pairing and tripling but not forbidden. Something went seriously wrong, and Moonboy struck Elza with such force that he caused a serious injury to her face. Then he went back to his own area, leaving Elza alone and bleeding.

  Carm
en saw that she was in trouble and came to her aid. Elza is a doctor, but perhaps with only two hands had trouble treating herself.

  I heard the noise when other humans became involved and watched from a distance I hoped was polite. It was fascinating.

  Much of human action is, of course, predicated on passion, but for all the indirect evidence I have of this from reading and cube, I had never before seen one person injure another out of emotion. He hit her face with his elbow, which makes me think they must have finished mating. In all the postures they use for mating, there are some where the female might surprise the male that way, but not vice versa. The elbow is not as complex as our joints; it is more or less a bony hinge that connects the upper and lower parts of the arm.

  Evidently Carmen helped her give “first aid” to herself. Her two husbands showed up, and Dustin, at least, wanted to “discuss” the matter with Moonboy, which implied a desire to inflict reciprocal injury, a natural human trait. Elza insisted that he not do that.

  Meryl, Moonboy’s wife, showed up and argued that he had never done anything like this before, which Elza accepted, but said it didn’t help her nose. Pilot Paul, who had been asleep next door, joined them, and so everything was explained again. So now every human knew what was going on, or at least part of it.

  Namir and Dustin had been playing pool, and they obeyed their wife when she asked them to resume. The rest dispersed, Carmen staying behind to comfort Elza.

  That is when the second phase began. Namir and Dustin were playing their game and talking when Moonboy came out of his room, staggering from the effects of alcohol, and asked them, or commanded them, to quiet down.

  This seemed unreasonable to Dustin, at least, and he attacked Moonboy with the stick they use to propel the pool balls around. Namir moved in quickly to intervene, perhaps to prevent his spouse from murdering the young man. He is larger than either and was able to separate the two men and disarm Dustin and throw him into the swimming pool, which was probably wise. I know how calming that is.