Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

  Carmen and Paul were working out on the walking and bicycling machines, their VR helmets in tandem. I could hear her soft voice, not quite understandable over the noise of the machines, as they chatted.

  She was wearing a white skinsuit, translucent with sweat. Perhaps I was studying her too intently.

  “Nice view,” Dustin said in a whisper, behind me. “How are you doing?”

  “Not quite awake yet.” I held up the tomato. “Eating in my sleep.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Not as bad this time. Seen Elza?”

  “In the library with Meryl. Looked kind of deep. Get some chow?”

  “Sure.” We took the long way around to the kitchen, avoiding the library. I settled for cheese and crackers to go with my tomato; Dustin zapped a steak sandwich. I got a squeeze bag of cold tea out of the fridge; he opted for wine.

  “Paul verified that we’re where we’re supposed to be and got the rotation started.” He checked his watch. “It’s 1340 now. We’ve got, um, twenty hours, twenty minutes, till we point ’er toward Earth and go. Away from Earth.”

  I set my watch. “I slept late.”

  “Last one up.”

  “Let me guess: Paul wants a meeting.”

  He smiled. “Good guess. He said 1500 if you were up.”

  Couple of hours to kill. Normally, this time of day, I’d ping Fly- in-Amber and see whether he wanted to practice some Japanese. Not that he ever needed to practice old vocabulary, since he never forgot.

  My only Martian friend, dead now six years.

  “New game?” Dustin said.

  It took me a second to sort that out. “Sure. I believe you’re white?”

  “Pawn to K-4.”

  “God, you sneaky bastard.”

  We bundled up and met in the compromise lounge.

  “So what are we going to find on Earth, fifty years in the future?” Paul said. “Worst case, Namir?”

  I guess someone had to articulate it. “In the worst case, there will be nothing there except a messenger from the Others, which will detect and destroy us with no hesitation or explanation.” No one looked surprised.

  “The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”

  “Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.

  “You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”

  “It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”

  And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”

  “Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”

  “Not yet,” Elza said.

  “It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”

  That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes . . . energy.

  “None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”

  I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”

  “Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”

  Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”

  “Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.

  “It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.

  “This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”

  “You’re products of their intelligence.”

  She nodded, bobbing. “It’s like a human play, or novel. Öedipus Rex or King Lear—the children can misunderstand their parents in ways that nobody else can.”

  “Good examples,” Dustin said. “Happy endings.”

  15

  CHANGES

  Paul and I twice tried to make love during turnaround, but we were too nervous and distracted. Doom-ridden, perhaps.

  A couple of hours before we filed into the shuttle, we all together made a long transmission to Earth, explaining everything as well as we could and hoping for the best for all of us. If Spy’s description of the process was accurate, they would get the message less than a year before we arrived.

  It might come just after the Others had blown humanity into elementary particles. There was no need to say anything about that.

  We weren’t sure exactly where we would arrive. When we went from turnaround to Wolf 25, we were deposited in orbit around the wrong planet, technically, since we’d planned to go to the moon of the gas giant where the Others lived.

  So now, we presumably would go wherever in the solar system the Others wanted us to stop. If it was back where the iceberg started, past Mars orbit, we’d have a longish trip back to Earth.

  Or maybe Mars, if Earth wasn’t there anymore.

  Paul followed the rest of us into the shuttle and helped Snowbird with her harness. Then he floated up the aisle and strapped himself in. He swiveled around partway and looked down at us.

  “Does anybody pray?”

  After a long silence, Namir whispered, “Shalom.”

  “Yeah.” Paul’s finger hovered over a red switch. “Good luck to all of us.”

  We were all ready for the transition’s emotional blow, but most of us cried out, anyhow. And then a gasp of relief.

  The blue ball of Earth was below us, the Pacific hemisphere. To my left, the Space Elevator, with the Hilton and Little Mars, Little Earth, and several new structures, including three smaller elevators.

  I could faintly hear a burst of radio chatter from Paul’s direction.

  “One at a time!” he shouted. “This is Paul Collins, pilot of ad Astra. We are safe.” He looked back at us with a grin. “I should have thought up something historic to say.”

  “One long trip for a man,” Elza intoned; “one ambiguous stumble for mankind.”

  We were quickly surrounded by identical small spaceships that were obviously warcraft. No streamlining, just a jumble of weaponry on top of a drive system, with a little house in between. Probably called a “life-support module,” or something equally homey.

  Earth was in a panic because we had inexorably approached, decelerating full blast, without answering any queries or attempting to communicate.

  “The explanation is both simple and complicated,” Paul said, echoing what Snowbird had said a couple of days, or six years, ago. “I think it’s reasonable that I start with the highest possible authority.”

  The battalion commander identified herself and demanded an explanation. “Of course we know what you are. But we’ve been alongside you for weeks and have gotten no cooperation.”

/>   “I am not under your command,” he pointed out. “This is not anybody’s military expedition. Is there still a United Nations?”

  “Not as such, captain. But all nations are united.”

  “Well, let me talk to whoever’s in charge. With some science types listening in.”

  “This is completely against protocol. You—”

  “I don’t think you have a protocol covering how to deal with a half-century-old spaceship returning from a mission to save the planet from destruction. Or does it happen all the time?”

  “We have been expecting you, sir, since your message arrived last month. But when the ship did not respond as it approached Earth, we had to expect the worst.”

  “The worst did not happen. Now I’m going to break contact and will talk only when I can talk to someone who outranks everyone who outranks you. Out for now.” He cut off the battalion commander in midbluster and spun half around. “Drink?”

  I tossed him the squeeze bag of ersatz Bordeaux. “Holding out for champagne, myself. In gravity.”

  He took a long drink, two swallows, and passed it to Namir, who had been sitting silent.

  “Suit yourself,” Namir said to me, his voice husky. “It might be a long wait.”

  I unstrapped and swam up front to visit with Paul and watch the monitor. The wait was less than a minute.

  An elderly man with a seamed dark face and white full beard came into the monitor as it pinged. A voice said, “Mervyn Gold, president of the United Americas.”

  “Paul?” the old man said. “ ‘Crash’ Collins?”

  Paul stabbed a finger at the camera button. “Professor Gold!”

  He smiled broadly. “We’ve both come up in the world, Paul.”

  Paul laughed, and said to me, “He was my history prof at Boulder. You met him.”

  Subtract fifty years and the beard. He’d come to Little Earth with some government agency and talked with Paul for hours through the quarantine window.

  “Amazing,” Gold said. “You don’t look a day older. You’ll be hearing that a lot, I suppose.”

  And from really old people, I thought.

  “The Others did some trick with time.”

  The old man nodded. “I saw your transmission from turnaround. Some people thought it was all a trick, you know. If they’d prevailed, you wouldn’t have made it to Earth.”

  I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Just as well.

  “I’m glad you didn’t listen to them.”

  “Oh, I listen to everyone; comes with the job. But I don’t have to obey anyone.” He shuffled some papers, an everyday gesture that we hadn’t seen in some time. “First, let me tell you that you will come to Earth, not New Mars. The quarantine was lifted, oh, about twelve years ago.”

  “That’ll be great.”

  How many years since I’d actually been on Earth? I was not quite nineteen when I stepped aboard the Space Elevator. Thirty- four when ad Astra left. Fifteen years plus about four, subjective, that we spent going to the Others’ Home and back.

  Exactly half my life—thirty-eight actual years. Whatever “actual” means.

  The president and Paul were chatting about our return. “We could take you down on the Space Elevator, which would be more comfortable than using the lander. But the lander, an actual landing, would be really good for public morale.”

  “Propaganda.” Paul said.

  “I wouldn’t deny it. Do you think it would be safe?”

  “Well, it’s never been used, so it’s brand-new in a way. It’s been sitting around for years, which isn’t good for any machine. But that is what it was designed to do.”

  I wished telepathy would work. Space Elevator Space Elevator Space Elevator. I’d had my fill of atmospheric braking.

  “If you’re uncertain,” the president said, “we have two qualified pilots waiting at the Hilton.”

  I guess you don’t get to be president without a knack for psychology. “Oh, there’s no question I can do it. No question at all. I’ve done seven Mars landings and a hundred on Earth, in flight training.”

  “And one on the Moon, I recall.” The one that saved the Earth. Paul smiled. Score one for the prez.

  “So when do you want me to bring her down? Where?”

  “They still have the landing strip in the Mojave Desert. Um . . .” He looked to his right. “They say they have the old software to guide you in, but want to test it out with a duplicate. Anytime tomorrow would be fine. Daylight, California time?”

  “No problem. We came on board with one suitcase apiece. Won’t take us long to pack.”

  “Good, good. Will you accept our hospitality at the White House?” Another glance to the right. “Once the medics let you loose, that is.”

  “An honor, sir. Professor.”

  “See you tomorrow in California.” He looked at his watch. “Would you mind debriefing with my science and policy advisors, say, an hour from now?”

  “No problem, sir.” He let out a big breath after the cube went dark. “Let’s move this circus back downstairs. Get Snowbird out of the heat.”

  “Paul,” Namir said, “be careful what you say to them.”

  “Sure. Careful.”

  “If they don’t like what they hear . . . if they don’t want the public to hear what we say . . . this is their last and best chance to silence us.” He looked around at everybody. “There could be a tragic accident.”

  “That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said.

  He nodded, smiling. “You know us spies. We come by it naturally.”

  The cabinet members who talked with us were urbane and friendly, not at all threatening. If they were planning to have us all murdered, they hid it pretty well. They mostly worked from a transcript of our long transmission from turnaround, asking us to clarify and broaden various things.

  I actually knew one of them, Media Minister Davie Lewitt, now a dignified white-haired lady. She had been the brassy cube commentator who gave me the name “The Mars Girl.” She remembered and apologized to me for that.

  After the cabinet people thanked us and signed off, they were replaced by a couple who introduced themselves as Dor and Sam, both pretty old and probably female. Dor was muscular and outdoorsy and had about a half inch of trim white hair. Sam was feminine and had beautiful long hair dyed lavender.

  “We wanted to help you prepare for returning to Earth,” Dor said. “We were both in our early thirties when you left, so we were born about the same time as most of you.”

  “Twenty years after me,” Namir said. “I suppose the first thing most of us would like to know is whether we have living family. I doubt that I do; my father would be over 140.”

  “Rare, but possible,” Sam said. She unrolled what looked like a featureless sheet of metal, obviously a notebook, and ran her fingers over it. “No, I’m afraid he died a few years after you left.” She stroked her neck, an odd gesture. “I think it would be best if we mailed this information to each of you privately?”

  I nodded, curious but patient. I looked around and nobody objected.

  “Which brings up a big thing,” Dor said. “This is kind of like the Others, or like your poor friend Moonboy. We do have people, many thousands, whose legal status is ambiguous, because it is not clear whether they are dead or alive.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Dor,” Sam said. “This was just starting back when you were alive—shit! I mean before you left, sorry.”

  “No offense taken,” Dustin said. “We really are like ghosts from the dead past.”

  “Cranach versus the State of California, 2112,” Dor said. “Cranach was a lawyer. He was dying, and needed more and more profound life-support equipment, which in his case—he was very wealthy—eventually included a complete computer backup for his brain and associated nervous system.

  “Because of the way California defined ‘brain death,’ Cranach deliberately let his body die, but first essentially willed everything to himself—the computer ima
ge of his brain, which was technically indistinguishable from the original organic one.”

  “When his body died,” Sam said, “nobody noticed for weeks, because the computer image had long been in complete charge of his complex business affairs and investments. And it was a person; it had a corporate identity independent of Cranach himself.

  “What you’re saying,” Paul said, “is that this guy Cranach, dead as a doornail, could be legally immortal, at least in California, as long as his brain is not brain-dead. Even though it’s a machine.”

  “Exactly,” Dor said. “And people like him, like it, are only the most extreme examples of, well, they call themselves ‘realists’ in North America.”

  “As opposed to ‘humanists,’ ” Sam said. “It had started when we, and you, were young, in the mid-twenty-first. People who spent most of their waking hours in virtual reality.”

  “Robonerds,” Meryl said. “Some of them even worked there, jobs piped in from the outside world.”

  “We didn’t have much of that on Mars,” I said. “Except for school.”

  “There still isn’t,” Sam said. “Mars is a hotbed of humanists.”

  “But even on Earth,” Dor said, “most people are somewhere in the middle, using VR sometimes at play or work or study. Depends on where you live, too—lots of realists in Japan and China; lots of humanists in Latin America and Africa.”

  Paul scratched his head. “They give the name ‘realist’ to people who escape normal life in VR?”

  “Well, it is a higher reality,” Dor said. “The VR you have on your ship is antique. It’s a lot more . . . convincing now.”

  Sam smiled broadly. “Yeah. You can tell when you’re unplugged because everything’s boring.”

  “Guess who’s the realist here.” Dor patted her on the knee.

  “Not really. I don’t spend even half my time plugged.”

  “I’m curious about politics,” Paul said. “Mervyn Gold is president of what? What is this United Americas?”

  “Let me see.” Sam moved her hands over the notebook. “It’s most of your old United States, except Florida and Cuba, which now are part of Caribbea, and South Texas (which is its own country) and Hawaii, which is the capital of Pacifica. The United Americas otherwise runs from Alaska down through English Canada, the old U.S., most of Mexico, and most of Spanish-speaking Central and South America down to the tip of Argentina. Not Costa Rica; not Baja California.”