by Joe Haldeman
I was sweating a little from the exercise, but a new patch of cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck:
What if we were twenty- four light-years away and decided to do something subversive, like surrender to the Others? The Earth couldn’t do a thing to stop us.
But Namir and Dustin and Elza, for all their quiet and civilized manners, had once been trained to kill. And were presumably loyal to Earth.
What were their orders?
We weren’t headed out to the iceberg for a couple of weeks, but ad Astra itself—the habitat we’d be living in on the way to Wolf and back—was up and running, and we wanted to live in it in Earth orbit for a while. If something went wrong, we could always send out for a plumber.
Speaking of plumbing, we did have a week or so of roll- up-your-sleeves work before we took off. The large crew who’d set up ad Astra had the hydroponics working as they would in the normal one-gee environment, on the way to Wolf. But it would take at least a week of zero gee before we hooked up with the iceberg, and of course you can’t have standing pools of water in zero gee. They turn into floating blobs. So we had plant-by-plant instructions as to what had to be done to keep root systems and everything moist en route.
(Good practice. We’d be doing it again at the halfway point, since we’d be in zero gee while the iceberg slowly rotated around to start braking.)
Quarantine rules made the transfer into the Space Elevator a little complicated. Every area had to be sterilized after we passed through—from Mars side through the air lock to the hub, then down the extension tube to where the Space Elevator was waiting. It took three trips, awkward in zero gee, especially for our spook pals, who didn’t have a lot of experience. Finding handholds when your hands are full.
It wasn’t too hard to say good-bye to Little Mars, as much time as I’d spent there. It was actual Mars, the Mars colony, that felt like home. Florida was a distant memory. Another world.
We spent four and a half days in the Space Elevator, first at zero gee, but with increasing gravity as we moved out to the end of the Elevator’s tether.
About halfway, I started feeling heavy and depressed. For years, I’d been used to exercising an hour or more a day in Earth gravity, but it was always a relief to get back to Mars- normal. I’d get used to it in time. But it felt like carrying around a knapsack full of rocks, permanently attached.
There wasn’t much to see of ad Astra as we approached, but we didn’t expect anything dramatic. A big flat white box with a shuttle rocket attached. The rocket would maneuver us into rendezvous with the iceberg, then shut down till we got to Wolf, where it would be a landing craft. If the Others let us land.
Going from the Elevator into ad Astra was simple. They coupled automatically, and we walked through two air locks into our new home.
It was stunning. It was huge, at least to my eyes. The line of sight was about fifty meters, over the gym and swimming pool and hydroponics garden. I had trouble focusing that far away, and it made me grin.
Namir, Elza, and Dustin were not smiling. By Earth standards, this was not a big place to be locked up in for a large part of your life. The rest of your life, perhaps.
We stacked our boxes and suitcases there by the air lock, next to the life-support/recycling station, and sent the Space Elevator back down, to pick up our Martians. We went off together to explore.
The hydroponics garden was technically a luxury. There was enough dehydrated food in storage to keep us alive for twenty boring years, and plenty of oxygen from electrolysis. But fresh fruit and vegetables would mean more than just variety in the diet. The routines of growing, harvesting, propagation, and recycling had helped keep us sane in Mars, where we had fifteen times as many people, and more than fifteen times as much living space. Plus the chance to take a walk outdoors, which on ad Astra would be a short walk. Then light-years long. Eternity.
Everything was in a sort of early-spring mode, still a month or more from the earliest harvest. Grape tomatoes and spring onions, from a first look. They smelled so good—nostalgia not for Earth, where I never gardened, but for the Martian garden, where I’d worked a couple of hours a week.
The central space was larger than all the rest put together. There was a padded track for jogging or running around its hundred- meter perimeter. On the “southern” end of it (we decided to call the control room “north”) there was a small Japanese- style hot bath and a narrow rectangular swimming pool, which could maintain a decent current to swim against.
South of that were the exercise and VR machines, similar to what we had in Little Mars, with a relatively large lavatory and an actual shower, and the infirmary, with an optimistic single bed. The lavatory had a zero- gee toilet exactly like the one on the Space Elevator, for the few days we’d be weightless.
Farthest south was the large and rather forbidding Life- Support/ Recycling area, a bright room full of machines. Every metal surface was inscribed with maintenance instructions, I supposed in case the computer system failed. So we could stay alive until we died.
That was an interesting prospect if something did go wrong, and we went merrily blasting away for years, leaving Wolf 25 far behind. Paul said that if we just kept going in a straight line, without turning around midway to slow down, we had enough reaction mass to go more than a hundred thousand light- years. At which point, we’d be twelve years older, while the unimaginably distant Earth would have aged a thousand centuries.
Our seven cabins were in a north-south line along the hydroponics garden. We checked a couple of them, apparently all the same, but very malleable, with moveable walls and modular furniture. The wall that separated them from the hydroponics area was semipermanent, a lattice for vines.
The kitchen and dining room were twice the size of their Little Mars counterparts, where we did little actual cooking. Elza volunteered that Namir was an excellent cook, which was good news. I can just about flip a burger or scramble eggs, and we wouldn’t have either of those.
There was a lounge next to the dining room, with a pool table and keyboard and various places to sit or, I suppose, lounge. I hadn’t touched a piano keyboard in a dozen years. Would boredom drive me back to it?
Between the lounge and the Martian area was a meeting place that would be maintained at a compromise ambience—a little too cool and dark for humans; a little warm for Martians.
At the northernmost area, the lounge led into a library and study, with workstations but also wooden panel walls and real paintings. Then there was another air lock and Paul’s control room. He sat down at the console and ran his hands over the knobs and dials, smiling, in his element.
The spies looked kind of grim. It was understandable. They were losing a whole planet, one the rest of us had written off a long time ago. I did feel sorry for them, especially Namir, shut off from his complex history.
Which he was also bringing with him.
11
GOOD-BYES
After our final briefing in New York, and before we flew out to the Space Elevator, Elza and Dustin and I had been given a few days to settle our affairs on Earth.
We didn’t have to empty out our New York City apartment. Elza had made a clever deal with Columbia University, where they assumed the mortgage and will maintain the place for the half century we’ll be gone. If we don’t come back, it will be a unique small museum. In the unlikely event that we do return, we can either step back into the old place or leave it as a museum and negotiate an alternative—probably more comfortable—living space with the university.
I had to go say good-bye to my father, which I could no longer put off. He has two rooms in a Jewish assisted-living complex in Yonkers, which offers free room and board for people in his situation: he was in Israel for the first stage of the Gehenna attack, and so his body is suffused with the nanomachines that comprise half the poison. The second half could await him anyplace in Israel. People die every year when they return and open an old closet or something. I knew a man who went back
and lived for years, then, for a reunion, put on his old army uniform and stopped breathing.
Father had been in New York, staying in my apartment, when the bombs went off in Tel Aviv. I was going to bring my mother back to join him for a tour of the American West.
Instead I brought her ashes, months later.
We have had few words since then, and none in Hebrew. When I greeted him with Shalom, he stared at me for a long moment and said, “You should come in. It’s raining.”
He made a pot of horrible tea, boiling it Australian style, and we sat on the porch and watched the rain come down.
When I told him what I was about to do, he crept away and came back with a dusty bottle of brandy and tipped a half inch into our tea-cups, which was an improvement.
“So you come to say good- bye, actually. God is too kind to give me another fifty years of this.”
“You may outlive me. God can be cruel in his benevolence.”
“So now you believe in God. Wonders will never cease.”
“No more than you do. Unless living here has weakened your mind.”
“Living here has weakened my stomach. A constant assault of bad kosher cooking. A good son would have brought a ham sandwich.”
“I’ll bring one if I come back. At 142, you’ll need it even more.”
He closed his eyes. “Oh, please. You really think those alien bastards will kill you?”
“They haven’t been well-disposed toward humans in the past. You did see the moon thing?”
“Two nights running, yes. Some people here thought it was staged, a hoax.”
He sipped his tea, made a face, and added more brandy. “I know bubkes about science. I couldn’t see how they’d fake that, though.”
“No.” They could have faked the halo of dust, I supposed, but not the rain of gamma radiation. Orbiting monitors had pictures of the explosion, too, from farther out in the solar system. “It’s real, and it demands a response.”
“Maybe. But why you?”
I shrugged. “I’m a diplomat.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a spy. A spy for a country that hardly exists anymore.”
“They needed three military people in the crew. Our triune was perfect because we wouldn’t upset the social balance—two other married couples.”
“Your shiksa wife could upset some marriages. Your husband . . . I’ve never understood any of that.”
I decided not to rise to that bait. “They got a diplomat, a doctor, and a philosopher.”
“They got three spies, Namir. Or didn’t they know that?”
“We’re all military intelligence, Father. Soldiers, not spies.”
He rolled his eyes at that. “It’s a new world,” I said, I hoped reasonably. “The American army has more officers in intelligence than in the infantry.”
“I suppose the Israeli army, too. That did a lot of good with Gehenna.”
“In fact, we did know something was about to happen. That’s why I was called back to Tel Aviv.”
“ ‘Something’ had already happened. If I recall correctly.” His face was a stone mask.
Maybe love could get through that. But I’d known for years that I’d never loved him, and it was mutual.
He wasn’t a bad man. But he’d never wanted to be a father and did his best to ignore me and Naomi when we were growing up. I think I’m enough of a man to understand him, and forgive. But love doesn’t come from the brain, from understanding.
I so didn’t want to be there, and he released me.
“Look. I can see you have a million things to do. I will take all my pills and try to be here when you come back. Okay?” He stood and held out his arms.
I clasped his fragile body. “Shalom,” he finally said into my shoulder. “I know you will do well.”
I took the skyway across to the Port Authority and walked a mile through the rain back to our apartment. Saying good-bye to the city, more home to me than Tel Aviv or any other place.
Life without restaurants. Walking by so many favorites, the Asian ones especially. But it was less about missing them than it was all the ones I’d been curious about and put off trying. I read that you could eat at a different restaurant for every meal in New York City and never eat at all of them. Does that mean that three new places were opened every day?
A holo I recognized as James Joyce abjured me to come into a new place, Finnegans Wake, and have a pint of Guinness. I checked my watch and went in for a small one. A quartet was holding forth around the piano, with more spirit than talent, but it was pleasant. When I left, the rain was more forceful, but it wasn’t cold, and I had a hat. I rather liked it.
Eleven years eating computer-generated healthy recycled shit. Well, I’d survived on army rations for some years. How bad could it be?
When Elza came home, we’d have to decide where to go for dinner, the last one in this city. Maybe we should just walk until we got hungry and take whatever appeared.
I was going to miss the noise and the crowds. And the odd pockets of quiet, like the postage-stamp park behind our apartment, two benches and a birdbath, running over as I took my last look.
Neither Elza nor Dustin was home. The place felt large without them. About twelve hundred square feet. In ad Astra, we’d have three cabins, each less than a hundred square feet.
Wrong comparison. How many square feet did I have aboard the Golda Meir? A hot hammock, shared with two other guys.
We were allowed to take fifteen kilograms of “personal items including clothing,” though we’d be supplied utility clothing and one formal uniform. What would that look like? Tailor-made to impress creatures who live forever in liquid nitrogen. They probably dress up all the time. “Dress warmly, son; it’s only going up to minus 253.”
Books. I immediately picked out the slim leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets my first wife gave me, the only Passover we shared. I took a small drawing of her out of its frame and trimmed it with scissors so it would fit inside the book.
I took some comfortable worn jeans out of the closet, but then traded them for some newer ones—they will have to last thirteen years, or at least six and a half. A chamois shirt from L.L. Bean. Army exercise outfit. Comfortable leather moccasins.
There were hundreds of books I would have enjoyed having, but of course the ship would have all of them in its memory. Likewise movies and feelies.
I should take a few books I could read over and over, in case the library malfunctioned. A volume of Amachai, one of cummings. A large slim book with all of Vermeer.
I hesitated over the balalaika. It gave me pleasure, but the others probably wouldn’t like it much even if I were talented. No one in the world except Elza thought that I was. It would probably wind up going out the air lock, and maybe me with it.
Three blocks of fine-grained koa wood and two carving knives, with a sharpening stone.
The bathroom scale said eight kilograms. I decided to leave it at that and let Elza make up the difference with clothes. That would benefit all three of us. She would never admit it, but she liked dressing up a little and was easier to get along with if she felt she looked attractive. To me, she would look fine in a potato sack.
I sat down at my writing desk, opened the right- hand drawer, and lifted out the 10.5- mm Glock, with all its reassuring and troubling weight. Illegal in New York City despite the state and federal permits clipped to the side of its shoulder holster. It would be a central exhibit in the apartment-museum. “With this weapon, Namir Zahari killed four looters who attacked him in the ruins of Tel Aviv.” And no others, of course. No Others, certainly. It would not be that kind of diplomacy.
I wiped it clean with an oil-impregnated cloth. The breech smelled of cold metal and faraway fire. I’d last used it at a pistol range in New Jersey, first week of January. Elza’d been with me, with her little .32. An annual family custom that would not be welcome on ad Astra.
Putting it away, I had a familiar specific feeling of memento mor
i. Two of our team in the Gehenna cleanup committed suicide, both with Israeli-issued pistols like this one.
I used to wonder how much horror and sadness I could absorb before that kind of exit seemed attractive, or necessary. I’m fairly sure now it couldn’t happen; I’m not set up that way. I’ll keep plugging along until my luck runs out; my time runs out. Along with eight billion others, perhaps, at the same instant.
Though what does “at the same instant” mean in our situation? Twenty-four years later? Or perhaps the Others have a way around Einsteinian simultaneity.
My phone pinged, and it was Dustin. He was landing at Towers in a few minutes. He’d already talked to Elza, and they’d decided to meet for dinner at the Four Seasons, okay? I said I’d make an early reservation, for seven. An hour away, plenty of time to walk.
The rain was over and not programmed to resume until tomorrow. I put on evening clothes and left the Glock in the drawer. Strapped the little .289 Browning to my right ankle. Called Security and told them the route I’d be walking. There was already someone on duty down the block, they said; the same one who’d followed me back from New Jersey. I walked the stairs to the basement and went out through the service entrance of the apartment building next door. No one in the alley.
It had been years since the tail had caught anyone, but that one time saved my life. I recognized this one, a small black man, as I passed him at the first intersection, but of course we didn’t acknowledge one another.
That would be one nice thing about leaving the Earth behind. I wouldn’t have to worry about bodyguards. Though I’d never faced a more dangerous adversary.
So much for my romantic stroll with Elza (and our usually invisible companion), ending in a random restaurant. I’d thought Dustin was going to be in Houston till the next morning.
“I was a fifth wheel down there anyhow,” he explained as I sat down at the elegant table. “My two projects put on hold for half a century. They’ll be political curiosities when I come back.”
“We’re political curiosities already,” I said. “What’s a spook without a country?” He politely didn’t say that I should know.