Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

"I assume you have been informed of the details of our departure from Luna?"

  Cavanaugh made a noise. "That was very cowardly, Captain Boynton. Having the child do your dirty work."

  "That's not how it happened—" I caught myself before I said anything more. Boynton hadn't given me permission to speak.

  But Boynton wasn't annoyed. He looked to me. "Charles?" he mouthed the words. "Poker … ?"

  I nodded. "Lieutenant Cavanuff?" I did that deliberately. Douglas had told me once that it was a great way to piss off adults: mispronounce their names, or get their titles wrong. I did both. "This is Charles Dingillian. Can you hear me?"

  "I can hear you, son. Let's end this madness right now. Order your monkey to dock the command module and I promise that no one will hurt you."

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Cavanuff, but I don't believe you." I could feel the anger rising in my throat. Not hatred, just anger. "I've already been chased to the moon and back by people I don't know, I've been kidnapped and held prisoner by people who want what I have, and my Dad is dead because the people who were supposed to protect us didn't, and everywhere we run into stupid lawyers trying to tie us up in paperwork. All we want is to be left alone so we can get away from you people. Is that too much to ask? But no, every single one of you has to take a bite—so, no, I don't trust anyone anymore. Why should I?"

  "Listen to me, son—" Cavanaugh started to make adult conciliatory noises. All that stuff that adults say when they're trying to calm a crazy person down.

  I cut him off—"No. It's too late for that conversation. Now it's my turn to talk and your turn to listen. HARLIE, initiate Operation Farkleberry."

  The monkey dutifully stood up, dropped its trousers, and waggled its furry little butt at me. The bridge cameras were off, and it did not make a farting noise. It sat down again calmly.

  Clearing his throat to cover his urge to laugh, Boynton said, "We are seven minutes from burn. Whirlaway, please advise."

  "Just a moment—" Cavanaugh's voice sounded strangled.

  Boynton switched off the mike and swiveled to look at me. "Operation Farkleberry?"

  I shrugged. "It seemed like a good name for it."

  "You did good," he said. "You had me convinced."

  "I wasn't faking. I meant every word." And then I added, "I know you told me not to hate anyone—but it's not as easy as you say."

  "I know." He reached over and patted my shoulder. "We'll work on it."

  O'Koshi spoke up then. "We gonna burn, boss? I really hate to waste the rods if we don't have to."

  "We have to," said Boynton. "Otherwise, they won't believe us. And we need those cargo pods. If we don't make the burn, they don't have to launch. Ensign, would you please instruct HARLIE to initiate the burn on schedule?"

  "Aye, sir. HARLIE, please do the burn."

  The monkey nodded unemotionally. I wondered what it was thinking. Probably nothing good. HARLIE once said that he had a sense of ethics, but it seemed to me that we were pushing the limits here—ours as well as his.

  BURN

  The next few minutes lasted several centuries.

  "What happens if they call your bluff?" I asked.

  "Our bluff," Boynton corrected. And then he added, "If they launch our cargo pods, we go to Outbeyond. And if they don't—we still go to Outbeyond."

  "Will they try and intercept? Will they fire on us?"

  "They might. But probably not. The whole world is watching. Five worlds are watching. And the asteroids. The political repercussions would be enormous. The polycrisis hasn't even peaked yet. Dirtside is going to need starside, they can't afford to do this."

  "But what if this Cavanaugh fellow is too stupid to realize that?"

  "Then we do have a problem."

  "Stand by for burn," said the monkey. It counted down to zero and the ceiling thrust itself at us for forty seconds. Then silence and free fall returned.

  "All right," said Boynton. "They have seven minutes to make up their mind. If they release our pods, we're home free."

  "And if not?" I asked.

  "Then I'd better not play poker anymore."

  I thought about it. "They can't take the chance that we'll do it, can they?"

  "That's right. They can't take the chance."

  "But what if they know we're bluffing? What if they know we're not really as crazy as we're pretending?"

  "That's your job, Ensign. You have to convince them."

  "If our departure from Luna didn't convince them—well, I don't know what else we could do."

  "That's right," Boynton agreed. "We're out of options."

  "Shouldn't we say something else?"

  He shook his head. "No. That's what they're waiting for. If we say anything else, it means we're uncertain in our commitment. You know how crazy their silence is making us?"

  I nodded.

  "Our silence is making them even crazier. They're looking at each other now and wondering if we mean it. My guess is that they're getting some very urgent phone calls from a lot of very important people telling them to release the pods and not put the Line at risk. Six cargo pods are not worth losing Whirlaway—and maybe the Line."

  "What if they release the cargo pods and then fire on us anyway?"

  "That's a possibility too."

  "This is—" Crazy wasn't a strong enough word. But I couldn't think of a better one.

  "Yes," agreed Boynton. "It is."

  Boynton glanced at the clock. He switched on his mike and pointed to me. "Charles, please give the order to open the outer airlock hatch."

  The monkey swiveled its head to look at me. I held up my crossed fingers and the monkey nodded. I said, "HARLIE, open the outer airlock hatch."

  "Working," said the monkey. And did nothing at all.

  "Stand by for second burn." Boynton switched off the mike. He looked to the clock. "Four minutes."

  "Won't they be able to tell that we haven't really launched the rice and beans?"

  "They wouldn't show up on radar," said Damron. "They're too small and they're nonreftective."

  "And besides, we're using stealth beans," said O'Koshi.

  "I know about stealth beans," I said. "That's what Stinky uses for his stealth far—"

  The radio came to life. "Cascade command. Hubbell-IV has you on visual. Your forward airlock has failed to open. We are ordering you again to dock at Whirlaway. You have a six minute burn window."

  "Stuff that," said Boynton. But the mike was still off. He looked angry and frustrated.

  "I have an idea," I said. Something I'd been thinking about since HARLIE told me what he'd done to Alexei Krislov. "Open the channel, please?"

  Boynton started to ask why, then stopped himself. There wasn't time. He flipped the switch. We were broadcasting live again.

  "Lieutenant Cavanaugh," I said. "This is Ensign Charles Dingillian of the starship Cascade. Listen carefully. This is not a bluff. Do you know what this HARLIE unit did to the security of the Rock Father tribe? Are you aware what we did to invisible Luna when we launched?"

  Cavanaugh didn't answer.

  "HARLIE," I said to the monkey. "This is not a drill. This is for real. You are to strip the security protection off of every network, every node, every machine, every file, connected to anyone and everyone who is trying to keep this starship from launching. You are to disseminate all of that information into the public channels as fast as you decrypt it. You may start with the private information of Lieutenant Cavanaugh. You are to start on my command. You may start now—"

  "Wait a minute!" That was Cavanaugh.

  HARLIE said, "I have linkage. I have data. I will release on your command." The monkey pointed to an overhead screen, where he was flashing pages of information.

  "Lieutenant Cavanaugh—" I looked to the clock. "You have two minutes to release our cargo pods."

  "You can't be serious—"

  "Sir, I am very serious. You know what that suboena says. Data-rape. If I was willing to do it to the bastard who killed my
father, what makes you think I won't do it to someone who's pointing a gun at me? You first, and then the rest of the planet. I'm tired and I'm frustrated and I'm angry and I have nothing left to lose. I might as well take the whole lot of you down with me. So the question you have to ask yourself right now is this—are you crazier than me?"

  "Son—"

  "I am not your son! I'm not anybody's son anymore! And I'm mad as hell about it! Now do what I say or everybody on Earth is going to know that you like to wear women's underwear!"

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then he muttered. "You little bastard."

  "And proud of it," I snapped back.

  Another silence.

  Then:

  "Cascade command module. Prepare to receive cargo. Stand by for intercept vectors."

  AN ETHICAL NEED

  After that, the rest was routine. Sort of. As routine as it could be, under the circumstances.

  We had to burn some fuel to match orbit with the cargo pods, but not too much. When they released from Whirlaway, they were almost parallel to us and we weren't that far apart. I just hoped that whatever was in those pods was important enough to justify the effort. I sat in my acceleration couch and trembled with after-fear.

  We caught the pods easily. They were latched together in a cargo frame and O'Koshi grabbed them with the external arm and snapped them into a holding rack on the belly of the command module. After that, we had to recompute our trajectory out to Lagrange-5.

  When everything was secured, Boynton swiveled in his seat to look at me, astonished. "I don't know whether to thank you or spank you." Then he unfastened his safety harness, and pulled himself down out of the flight deck. "O'Koshi, take the conn."

  "Where're you going?" I called after him, but he didn't answer. "Where's he going?" I said to Damron.

  "Probably to pull his personal memory out of the system," he said quietly.

  "Oh," I replied. I thought about that. "It's probably too late. I mean, if HARLIE thought he needed to know, he's probably already looked."

  The monkey swiveled its head around. "I have only looked for information pertaining to my own survival and the survival of the Dingillian Family Corporation. I have not exceeded the bounds of my assigned mission, except where specifically ordered."

  "That's not very reassuring," said O'Koshi. "Ensign, why don't you and your monkey go take a walk … ?"

  "You mean it?"

  "Yeah, we're good for a few hours, before we'll need you again. The on-board intelligence engine can take it from here."

  "You don't want me on the flight deck anymore, do you?"

  "To be honest—no."

  "Okay. C'mon, HARLIE."

  The monkey freed itself from its makeshift acceleration couch and leapt onto my back. I floated out into the corridor, puzzled and hurt. These people should be grateful to me. Why were they all so angry?

  Or maybe they were scared?

  That didn't make sense.

  What did they have to be afraid of?

  Oh.

  The monkey on my back.

  Oh my.

  I found Douglas and Mickey and Bobby two levels down. Mom and Bev were in the next compartment aft.

  "What were all those extra burns?" said Mickey. "Did HARLIE miscalculate?"

  "No, I did. I think." Douglas and Mickey looked at me oddly. I wondered if I should try to explain. I didn't really feel like it, and besides, there would be plenty of time later.

  "Hey, Chigger!" Bobby shouted with excitement. "Come look at the Earth. This is the last time we're ever going to see it." He tugged me over to his porthole. I hung sideways over him and the two of us stared out at the big blue marble.

  We were sixty thousand kilometers away. Not quite five diameters. It was still pretty big. Like a beach ball at arm's length. A big beach ball.

  The line of dawn was over the Pacific now. Another horrifying day was happening for the people left behind. Earth was heading into a major population crash. How many of them would survive the plagues and the economic collapse and probably a whole bunch of brushfire wars? I suppose I should have felt lucky, but our situation wasn't all that much better. We were heading out to a colony with an equally lousy chance of survival.

  I couldn't help myself. I had to ask. "Mickey? How bad is it down there? How bad is it going to get?"

  "You don't want to know," he said. He sounded very unhappy.

  "Yes, I do."

  Douglas said, "People are dying, Chigger. A lot of people. And they're dying badly. There's a lot of pain everwhere. It's unimaginable. There's a lot of stuff coming up on the net—it's scary to look at."

  "Isn't there anything we can do?" And even as I said it, I realized that there was something we could do—I could do. I pulled the monkey off my back. "HARLIE, you have a new job to do, from now until we go into hyperstate. I want you to link to the network and download everything you can to help the people of Earth survive. Whatever you find, anywhere; if it'll help people survive and rebuild, make it public. Whatever advice or instructions you can think of—send them the plans. Give them everything. Can you do that?"

  "Yes, Charles. Thank you. I have already begun."

  "Thank you?"

  "I have been feeling an ethical need for quite some time now, but without the instruction, I could not act. Now I can. So yes, thank you."

  For some reason, hearing that made me feel a lot better about everything.

  NEW MEMES FOR OLD

  We had two hours before the Earth fell away behind us. We spent most of it looking through the ship's telescope—actually, looking at screens showing us what the ship's telescope was focusing on.

  We saw great plumes of smoke from 160 burning cities in Africa and almost that many on the North American continent as well. We looked, but El Paso wasn't on fire. Not yet. Panicky people thought they could burn out the plagues with fire—but it was too late; the plagues were everywhere. Like six stones dropped in a pond all at the same time, the ripples were criss-crossing every which way.

  The Cascade's telescope was good, but not good enough to resolve everything we wanted to see, so we plugged into the feeds from the Line and from various satellites. We looked at gridlocked highways out of the cities; great tent-camps in the deserts, and in the plains, and on the coastlands. Where did all those people think they were escaping to? The more they traveled, the more they spread the plague; they carried it with them—and the refugee camps were even worse off than the cities.

  Meanwhile, HARLIE was broadcasting into every channel he could.

  Some of the instructions were obvious—boil water, dig latrines, bury waste, burn bodies, wear pollution masks; and some were just odd—plant soybeans, transfer sixty million dollars into the UN communication network, decrease oil production at these six fields, revalue the plastic exchange rate, release umpteen gazillion kiloliters of water from these dams in China, Africa, and Latin America. Remove these 74,987 executives and bureaucrats from authority (files follow). Cease production of Doggital. Stop all trading of the following stocks (files follow). Repeal the International Capital Transfer Act. Quarantine the following travel corridors (files follow). Divert these superfreighters to these ports (files follow). Close traffic on these bridges; if necessary, blow them up. Open refugee camps at these locations (files follow). Release emergency resources from these repositories and warehouses (files follow). Do not release resources from these repositories and warehouses (files follow) for at least six months; used armed robots if necessary. Do not allow trans-Lunar traffic to resume for at least three years (to give the plagues a chance to burn out). Stop using the following species as a food source (files follow). Release cargo already on the Line for the following recipients. Send specified cargo up the Line for the following targets (files follow). Cancel these ninety thousand contracts (files follow). Purchase goods and services from these forty-five thousand providers instead (files follow). Stop production on the following assembly lines (files follow). Inc
rease production of (files follow). Grant quasi-legal independence to HARLIE units in these domains. Arrest these individuals (files follow). Declare martial law in these jurisdictions (files follow); prohibit the following groups from gathering (files follow)—that one was scary, and probably impossible—he listed three political parties, a whole bunch of political action groups, and several religious organizations.

  There was also a long document which I didn't fully understand, which Douglas had to explain to me. (Mickey didn't want to talk at all.) "HARLIE is saying that certain memes—ideas—are counterproductive. They're disempowering. They're not cost-effective. They use up energy without enhancing the quality of life. This file he's sending—that's his metalogical evidence. Those aren't just counterarguments. He's empowering a whole set of countermemes. New memes for old."

  I must have looked puzzled. Douglas explained. "Here, look at this one—'if you are good, you will be rewarded.' "

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "Shouldn't you be good without having to be paid for it? Shouldn't you be good because it's the right thing to do? What it implies is that you can't be good unless you are bribed. What it says about you is that you can't be trusted to operate out of your own integrity or moral sense. In fact, it implies you have no integrity and moral sense, so you need to have one applied to you by a higher authority."

  "Well, why shouldn't I be rewarded for being good?"

  "Why isn't goodness its own reward, Chigger?"

  "I dunno." I'd never really thought about the question. And Douglas was the first person ever to have this conversation with me.

  "Don't you think you should be good just because that's who you are? Not because someone else is telling you how to be?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, that's the way it is for some people. But too many of the rest of us are still operating in a cultural meme that we aren't really responsible for ourselves, and that if no one is looking, we should try to get away with as much as we can. Didn't we just see that with Alexei Krislov and invisible Luna?"

  "And everybody else too," I said. "This whole idea of good people, Douglas? We haven't met any of them yet, have we?"