Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  So the approach of turnaround was a great outlet for his stalled energies. He had a checklist with nearly a thousand items, compiled before we left, and he added a few himself. The original list didn’t say anything about making sure the balalaikas were secured.

  We will be in zero gee for a little over two days, while our dirty iceberg slowly turns to point its jet toward the Others. The Martians will love it. I’m looking forward to the novelty myself. Good memories.

  Taking care of the plants won’t be the big project it was before we took off. Just keep everything damp. Try not to crash into anything while cruising from place to place.

  I do have one big irrational worry. Nobody has ever stopped and restarted a huge engine like this one—the test vehicle was hardly a thousandth this mass. What if it doesn’t start? Nobody really knows what makes it work, anyhow.

  Maybe they do by now, on Earth. But if it didn’t restart, and we radioed “What do we do now?” it would be more than twenty-four years before we got the answer. “Slam the doors and try again.”

  Even Fly-in-Amber, who wouldn’t blink at the Second Coming, seemed a little excited about turnaround. Well, it will be the journey’s midpoint, as well as a brief respite from the burden of Earth-style gravity. He was not happy that we had to drain their makeshift pool (and Paul was not happy about having to recycle the water separately, to keep all their germs and cooties in their own ecosystem). Our own pool came with a watertight cover.

  We had the furniture secured and the plants taken care of a couple of hours before Paul was to shut down the engine. Namir prepared a luxury feast, lamb chops baked with rehydrated fruit and Middle Eastern spices, served over couscous. We opened one of the few bottles of actual wine.

  After a pastry dessert, Paul checked his wrist and got up from the table. “Forty-eight minutes,” he said. “I’ll turn it off at 2200 sharp. No need for a countdown?”

  We all agreed. “I’ll go remind the Martians,” Namir said. “When will you start the rotation?”

  “After a general systems check, maybe an hour. Don’t think we’ll feel anything. Six degrees per hour.” Two small steering jets on opposite sides of the iceball’s equator would get us slowly spinning, then stop us twenty-eight hours later.

  I had a queasy feeling that maybe I should have dined on soda crackers and water instead, Paul’s reassurances notwithstanding. It was a little more than waiting for the other shoe to drop. I went back to the bathroom and found a stomach pill.

  It didn’t help that Moonboy sat there with his drugged smile, listening to the music of the spheres. When Meryl told him what was about to happen, he typed out LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. NOISE MIGHT STOP. Sure, if life support stops.

  To distract myself, I went to the bicycle machine and took a VR ride through downtown Paris, trying to hit every man with a mustache.

  At about five minutes to the hour, I joined the others in the compromise lounge. Everyone had filled squeeze bottles with water and other things to drink in zero gee, good idea. I went to the storeroom and drew six liters of water in a plastic cow, and concentrate for two liters of wine, which made a red light blink next to my name. Paul’s light wasn’t blinking, so I drew a couple of liters for him, too. He must have been too busy, hovering over the OFF switch.

  I returned to the lounge with my armloads of water and wine. “You are ready for a party,” Snowbird said. I croaked out a catchphrase that meant something like “I wish the same state for you.” She clapped lightly with her small hands.

  We were all sort of braced for it when 2200 came, but of course it wasn’t like slamming on the brakes. Gravity just stopped. I pushed off gently and floated toward the ceiling. Namir and Snowbird followed.

  “I guess nothing went wrong,” Meryl said, rotating by in a slow somersault.

  Moonboy hadn’t moved. He took off the earphones and listened intently for a couple of seconds. “Still there.” He put them back on, hovering a foot off the couch.

  Elza floated up to join Namir, clasping him with her arms and legs. Well, he wouldn’t be able to shoot pool; have to do something for two days.

  Paul came out of the control room walking on the floor with his gecko slippers. He had a strange expression. My stomach fell as he spoke: “Something’s screwy.” He shook his head. “The proximity—”

  There was a faint metallic sound. Then three more.

  “The air lock,” Namir said.

  Surprise, then terror. Inappropriately, I laughed, and so did Meryl.

  “Has to be the Others,” Paul said.

  “Might as well let them in,” Namir said, “before they just blow it open.”

  The people who designed the ship should have put a camera out there. But we hadn’t expected callers.

  We all followed Paul, all of us but Moonboy, floating various trajectories toward the air lock. Paul opened the control box and pushed the OPEN SEQUENCE button. A pump hammered for less than a minute, fading as the air was sucked out of the lock.

  The outer door opened onto total darkness. There was a moment of terrible suspense. Then a man in a conventional white space suit used a navigating jet to float in and stopped by touching the inner door window.

  “I’ll be damned,” Dustin said. “They caught up with us this soon?” We’d talked about the possibility of Earth’s inventing a speedier spacecraft, which would catch up with us. Turnaround would be a logical place to meet, when our engine was turned off.

  “No,” Paul said, “if they were from Earth, they would have radioed.” He pushed the CLOSE SEQUENCE button, and the outer door closed and air sighed back into the little sealed room. The inner door opened and the stranger floated out toward us.

  He or she or it undid the helmet clasps and let the helmet float away. A male in his twenties or thirties, no obvious ethnicity.

  “Good for you. You didn’t try to kill me.”

  “You’re an Other?” Paul said.

  “No, of course not.” It wasn’t looking at Paul, just studying each of us in turn. “They couldn’t speak to you in real time. Your lives are trivially short and swift. I’m an artificial biological construct, like you two Martians, created to mimic a human rate of perception and reaction.

  “I’m a tool made by a tool. The one who communicated with you from Triton—”

  “Who tried to destroy the Earth,” Paul said.

  “Only the life on Earth, yes. I was made in case you survived that. As I believe you know, the one who made me lives slower and longer than humans or Martians, but is still a mayfly compared to the Others.”

  “It left Triton, though,” Paul said, “just before the explosion.”

  “Yes. It is here now, in a small habitat near your air lock. Fastened to the iceberg by now. We’ve been nearby for some time, within a few million miles, but of course did not physically connect until your engine stopped.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “To keep an eye on us?”

  “That, yes. And to help decide whether you should be allowed near the Others’ home planet.”

  “Then you’re set up to destroy us, as Red was?”

  “Not at all. It’s not necessary.” His expression revealed nothing. It was not neutral, exactly, but more controlled than the serving robots at McDonald’s.

  “Because the Others themselves won’t let us get close enough to hurt them,” Namir said.

  “That’s correct. We have already begun sending them information. I think the more you let me know, the better your chances will be.”

  “Do you have a name?” I asked.

  “No. You may call me whatever you please.”

  “Spy,” Namir said.

  “Considering the source,” it said, “I am honored.”

  “You know a lot about us?” I said.

  “Only what has been public knowledge on Earth. Namir, Elza, Paul, Carmen, Dustin, Meryl, Snowbird, Fly- in-Amber.” It pointed. “That would be Moonboy.”

  He was facing away from us, floating halfway to the
kitchen, listening to music. “Yes,” Meryl said. “He’s not feeling well.”

  “Perhaps none of you are.” It looked around. “I will be as small a burden as possible. I will spend most of my time in my quarters, with the Other. Conversation necessarily takes a long time. Once we have deceleration, I can walk back and forth at will. The external air-lock control is simple; I didn’t use it this time because I didn’t want to frighten you with an alarm.”

  “That was neighborly,” I said. “Can I offer you something to eat or drink?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to burden your life support; I can take care of that in my own ship. Like the Martians, I consume very little.”

  “We were made by intelligent design,” Snowbird said, “not haphazard evolution.” She had been studying the history of human science. But it was correct; Martians needed only a third of the life-support mass humans required. (Being indifferent to what you eat or drink is a factor, too—if we were willing to live on hardtack biscuits and water, we could save a lot of reaction mass.)

  “You took a chance coming over here,” Paul said. “One course correction, and you’d be adrift.”

  “I’m replaceable. How often do you do that?”

  “Every few days.” Enough to keep us from going outside.

  “A reasonable risk.” It looked around. “I would like to have a tour of your ship, if you don’t mind. Then you may tour ours.”

  Paul nodded slowly. “We have nothing to hide.”

  “I can speak consensus Martian,” it said, turning to Fly- in-Amber. “Would you guide me?”

  Fly-in-Amber trilled a “yes” sound, and they headed off toward the Martian rooms. A logical starting place, but both Paul and Namir looked unhappy. “Wish it had chosen you,” Paul said to Snowbird.

  “I wish that as well,” she said. “I’m curious.”

  And more communicative, I didn’t bother to add. Fly-in-Amber might remember every detail, but we’d have to drag it out of him if he didn’t feel like talking.

  “Well . . . come into the control room,” Paul said. “We’ll see what their ship looks like.”

  I put on my gecko slippers and followed him. We waited at the door for the others.

  “General,” he said as he walked in, and the control surfaces morphed to that configuration, a lot more dials and knobs and switches than the set he’d been using. He strapped himself into the swivel seat, and said, “Outside view.”

  There was a flatscreen a meter square in front of him, and it darkened to a velvet blackness with a thousand sparks. He twiddled a joystick, and the angle veered around dizzyingly until it came to rest on a familiar view of the iceberg surface, with a decidedly unfamiliar visitor.

  It didn’t look like a spaceship; it didn’t look like a machine at all. It looked kind of like a starfish with seven legs, pebbly skin that was mottled red and black, with filaments like cilia or antennae wiggling on ribs that ran down each leg. It would have looked right at home on the ocean floor if it were hand-sized. But it was easily half as big as the ad Astra landing craft.

  “I wonder what makes it tick,” Namir said. “It can’t be carrying enough reaction mass for interstellar travel.”

  “Well, if it’s the same thing that left Triton, it took off at twenty-five gees,” Paul said. “That argues for something more exotic than we’ve got. Spy says they’ve been following us, for who knows how long . . . so I guess it went out far enough to be undetectable, then just watched and waited. Then tailed us at its leisure.” He cranked up the magnification and slowly examined the thing. No obvious portholes or gunports or wheels or grommets. I suppose if you examined a starfish with a magnifying glass, you would see about the same thing.

  “Maybe it’s alive, too,” Meryl said, “the way Martians are, and Spy claims to be. Grown for a specific purpose.”

  “I would vote for that,” Snowbird said.

  “Looks like a relative?” Dustin said.

  “In a way. If the Others have an aesthetic, and our design reflects it, so does the vehicle’s design. Don’t you think?”

  “See what you mean,” I said. Though “aesthetic” isn’t the word I would have chosen. It was almost ugly—but then so were the Martians until you got used to them.

  I went back to my workstation and considered the pictures of the ship, thinking of it in terms of a living organism. I’d studied Terran invertebrates, of course, and remembered a seven-legged starfish. I clicked around and found the one I remembered, a pretty British creature, nicely symmetrical and less than a foot wide. There was also a seven-legged one from New Zealand waters, almost a yard wide, that looked octopoid and menacing, and in fact a footnote warned that if it grabbed your wet suit, it was almost impossible to pry loose. But it was the slender British one, Luidia ciliaris, that resembled the starship.

  Nothing but its shape was relevant, of course. The only other creature I could find with seven legs, other than sadly mutated spiders, was the extinct Hallucigenia sparsa, a tiny but mean-looking fossil.

  The only picture we had of the Others was a simple diagram they sent that we interpreted as having six legs and a tail. Maybe they did have seven legs, instead. So built a starship in their own image.

  It was an odd shape for a vehicle, counterintuitive, but maybe my intuitions would be different if I had a seven-based number system.

  Zero gee isn’t conducive to abstract thinking, which may be one reason space pilots have not distinguished themselves as philosophers. Another reason may be that they are basically jocks with fast reflexes. I pinged my pilot and said I was going to nap for a while, and he joined me in the bedroom for a few minutes of not napping. Then we did doze together, floating in midair with a sweat-damp sheet wrapped around us. I dreamed of monsters.

  3

  THE GRAND TOUR

  The humans of course wanted to interrogate me as soon as Spy went back to its ship. But I hadn’t learned all that much about the creature. It asked all the questions.

  We first went to the Martian quarters. It already knew the basic principles of our recirculating ecology; in fact, it knew more about some of the science and engineering than I did. It appears to have a memory like mine, perfect, but it had studied Martian physiology, for instance, with more depth than I was ever exposed to.

  Part of what we discussed there is not translatable, because it has to do with an intimacy between Snowbird and me that has no human counterpart. To answer the obvious (to humans) question, it is not a sexual relationship, nor does it have anything to do with emotional bonding. It is a practical matter that has to do with being ready to die.

  The pool that you built for us interested it; it wanted to know what humans gained by this demonstration of friendship. Altruism was difficult to explain, but it understood about doing favors in expectation of eventual return.

  Then I took it around to all the crops. This took the most time, because for some reason it needed to know details about the propagation and maintenance of every species.

  (I would call this a hopeful sign. Why would the Others need this information other than to help humans survive after some life-support mishap?)

  Similarly, I took it through the warehouse area, which is mostly human food storage. It was interested in Namir’s homemade musical instruments. Music seems not as mysterious to them as it is to Martians; it asked me some questions that I could not answer; I said to ask Namir.

  It also asked questions about the shop area that I could not answer, mostly about the weapons that obviously could be made there. They can’t be thinking that we will be making swords and pistols to attack them. I expressed this thought, and Spy said of course I was right. But I assume the situation is more complex than that and recommend that Paul or Namir, with their experience as warriors, engage him on this topic, to reassure them.

  (I did not say anything, of course, about our conversation, our group meeting, on 8 May 2085, where we discussed the possibility of a kamikaze attack, using all of ad Astra as a high-velocity
bomb. I assume that is no longer a possibility, so there was no need to discuss it.)

  It was very interested in the swimming and exercise area, with the virtual-reality escape masks, or helmets. It looked at the exercise log carefully, perhaps to have a picture of each person’s physical strength. There was a long and odd discussion about the physical differences between humans and Martians, which covered things it must already have known. I think it was examining my attitudes (or mine and Snowbird’s) toward you humans.

  I think that when we arrive at Wolf 25, the Others will want to exploit the difference between the two races and take advantage of the fact that we are, in some abstract essence, their children. As you know, from several conversations over these past three years, our allegiance is with you. Of course, that is exactly what I would say if I were lying, especially if I were on its side.

  It wanted to investigate some private quarters. Since I am closest to Namir, I prevailed upon him. I explained to Spy about the sexual relationship among him and Dustin and Elza, as well as I can understand it, and how that mandates the arrangement of the sleeping area of each.

  Of course, Namir’s bedroom is small (as is Dustin’s, since they are just for sleeping), and its walls are a constantly changing art gallery, thousands of reproductions from the great museums of Earth. Spy had difficulty understanding this, as do I. One thing Martians and humans have in common is a preference for darkness and quiet when we sleep. So what does it matter what’s on the walls? Dustin’s room is plain, with only an abstract picture he calls a mandala on one wall.

  In Elza’s bedroom there is a large cube for showing movies, which usually are depictions of humans mating in various ways, which Namir explained as being an aid in their own mating, or I should say “fucking,” since I understand that Elza, like the other females, has suspended her reproductive function for the duration of the flight.

  Of course Spy knew enough about human nature not to be surprised by that, as it was not surprised when we then visited the kitchen, where Namir pleases himself and the rest of you by preparing your food in various original ways. Neither we nor the Others see the point in changing the appearance and flavor of fuel.