by John Barnes
We keep planting and harvesting in the farm section; fruits and nuts come in and out in brief seasons in the Forest. Now that we’ve jailbroken his brain so that he can mature and learn, Fwuffy turns out to have a taste for adventure stories and mysteries, and loves most kinds of music, but math is a struggle. He sticks to it anyway, determined to pass at least a few practice PotEvals before we are rescued.
F.B and Marioschke are always in the same sleepsack now, and whenever they’re awake and not working, they’re leaning against each other. I haven’t heard a word about astronomy from F.B. or metaphysics from Marioschke in ages; they talk about work, studying for PotEvals, recorded meeds they watch together, and food. They’re the poster couple for letting people do something productive even if they’re not out at the right tip of the bell curve; they’ve already decided that after our rescue, they’ll apply to join a space crew or go to Mars, and take Fwuffy with them.
Wychee and Glisters are kind of a couple, I think, or at least they’re tight with each other and sometimes in the same sleepsack. After a few months, at the ending of one session of running through checklists in the cockpit, I ask them, “Hey, I’m just wondering; why all this discretion about being all coupled up? If you dish on what all the secrecy’s about, my solemn promise, I won’t tell Fwuffy about it at lunch.”
Wychee laughs and says, “Oh, I know I can trust my best girl buddy with our secret. We’re being discreet for three reasons. One, Glisters is shy—you know he still wears pajamas.”
Glisters looks up from the screen. “But I wear clowns for Wychee. I could never wear ducks for someone else after all we shared, Susan.”
I snort. “All right, I was afraid you might think I’d be jealous.”
Wychee shakes her head. “Not really, we all know each other too well. But affection in front of you, when there’s not really anyone here for you—”
“There’s everyone,” I say. “All four of you and one charming pink flying elephant. And I’m a lone wolf anyway, and besides something about being commander seems to mostly kill the sex drive. When I get lonely there’s usually someone around to hang with and talk to, and that’s what I really need. One of the best things about having celeb-eenie status pretty much guaranteed when we get back is that I’ll never again have to think about my recognition score when I’m considering whether I think a guy or a girl is my type—and I think I’ll usually decide they’re not. Actually, when we get back, I’m thinking about a career as a hermit, as an alternative to living my life in meeds.”
“Well, that’s the third reason that Gliss and I have agreed to sneak around,” Wychee says. “He’s been careful not to include anything in Life on Virgo about me and him as a couple—so when we get home, with a little luck, we won’t be splyctered into Count Down to Break Up.”
“Wow, you’re right. If you two are a couple in the minds of the fans, everybody will be waiting for the fights to start, so they can argue about whose fault it is and which stress was just too much.” I laugh at a sudden thought. “F.B. and Marioschke are so happy with each other, hooks of them will be on Count Down to Break Up the first week we’re back. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they stuck together till one of them died, the way my grandparents did.”
Wychee nods. “And they’re the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a forever-couple—they just want a cozy little satellite where they can raise vegetables, babies, and hortons. That’s okay, if they screw up Count Down to Break Up it’ll just be one more thing to love them for.”
Glisters chuckles. “Oh, yeah. Well, you know, when we all get rescued, let’s make hash out of every media story about us. I think it’s something we owe to ourselves.”
That conversation seems to settle whatever small tension there was; they settle into being discreet rather than sneaky. Virgo falls on and on, month after month, gaining speed as, on the big oval track around the sun, we move down to the inside rail, lapping Mars (though it is still below us) and building up the speed we’ll need to chase down the Earth just before it catches Mars again.
And far out in the cold and dark, our antenna still picks up nothing; we’re too far out for broadcast and no one back home aims a beam at us. To some extent it feels like we could go on like this forever, and to some extent like we must, but mostly it feels like we already have.
November 30, 2130. On board Virgo, downbound from aphelion to perihelion. 288 million kilometers from the sun, 449 million kilometers from Mars, 163 million kilometers from Earth.
Glisters and I are hanging out in the cockpit, because it’s his watch and I happen to be awake and it’s time to do routine check-throughs of a bunch of minor things. The company is nice but the task is dull, and mostly we’re talking about anything other than business.
We both jump when the distinctive brawnk! of his special alarm goes off; the antenna has managed to lock on to a beam from Earth long enough for the reception program to break the encryption on a face. We have our first readable signal since December 5, almost a year ago.
“That’s so weird,” Glisters says. “But maybe it will make more sense once we decrypt it.”
“You weren’t really expecting to get anything till February,” I venture.
“Yeah, I thought that was the earliest we’d be in range to get a clear connection through that antenna, because I thought I knew what signal strength they use for signals to us. The weird part is that this signal is definitely coming from Earth and it’s about 80% more power than it should be. Either they really want to talk to us or that’s just a really hot station.”
“Or they’ve upgraded the whole system,” I suggest.
“Yeah. Or maybe it’s the power level they use for live cyclers and they’ve reclassified us as live instead of derelict. It could be—”
The decrypted face pops up on the screen.
We both laugh. “No reason to wake anyone else up yet,” he says.
It’s a shopping face, selling quartz crystals specially blessed by the Polythete of Tashkent. “I’d forgotten how many faces Earth has,” I say. “And what they use them for. Well, at least there will be new meeds. That has to be good for morale. Does this mean our face is open on Earth, for sure, now?”
“It’s probably never been closed. And the power requirement to reach us would be no big deal; they could have opened a channel anytime, even when we were near aphelion and they were on the far side of the sun. The upper system probes out by Saturn and Uranus talk to home all the time, on the same gear, just at very short wavelengths and with a lot of juice.”
“So probably, still, the reason they’re not answering is the lawsuit? You think they’re going to hear us and keep ignoring us?”
“You’re the people person, Susan, what do you think?”
“It all turns on popularity,” I say. “My guess is that the number of miney girls that wish Derlock was their boyfriend is ultra more than the number of mineys who can’t wait to watch us grow broccoli in reprocessed sewage. And frankly, sex with Derlock is more exciting than running a smashed-up spaceship.”
Glisters winces. “This unit’s limits for information are being exceeded in category icky.”
“Sorry. But if you’re certain there’s no physical problem—”
“For a little while back in early May, when Earth was all the way round on the backside, we were close to the sun in Earth’s sky, which probably impaired reception, but now we’re a good 40 degrees away. Really, Susan, I’ve checked everything ten million times. The problem isn’t our antenna, it’s Derlock’s evil bastard daddy.”
“Yeah.”
Brawnk!
He checks. “News face! We can find out if anything happened in the last eleven months. I hope the Squid People from Tau Ceti haven’t landed and taken over while we’ve been gone.”
“If they have,” I point out, “they’ve left at least one shopping face up and running. But I kind of hope they have, because I’ll get to see Pop—he’ll be the wily older advisor to the hero leading t
he Resistance.”
“Yeah, and Mom will be doing the first in-depth interview with the charismatic, reform-minded Squid Person in Charge of Cultural Affairs.”
He catches my eye as I catch his. Tiny shared headshake: No more of this. Especially not in front of the others. We’ve just made ourselves homesick, and everyone else is more susceptible than we are. We both bend to read the stream of information pouring out of the news feed, exclaiming to each other over some of the surprises, even though a year ago we’d have thought this was the dullest news day we’d ever seen.
But we don’t get to read nearly as much news as we try to, because the world suddenly gets wonderfully, though inexplicably, busy. Faces pour into clarity, faster and faster; at first we’re gaining a face every three minutes, then a face a minute, until finally it settles into gaining a face every ten seconds. Glisters flips off the horn so we don’t go crazy being honked at constantly. “I just had that rigged up because I thought by the time we had signal again, people wouldn’t be checking. Look at that data flood in. We have so much catching up to do.”
Then the horn begins sounding again.
“I thought you turned that off.”
“I did for faces. It’s still on for channels. We must have already picked up another channel and—look at that.”
The screen is showing nine additional channels, a thousand faces each, have logged in within one minute.
“Ten channels have checked in?” Glisters says. “Ten? At this distance? Maybe your guess was right and the whole solar system is now just running at higher power. It’ll be a few days to crack all those faces, but we’re back in regular communication. Fifty million kilometers sooner than we have any business being, too.”
“Maybe we should have the artificial intelligences hunt around and see if there’s a related news story, maybe on one of the boring policy channels,” I say. “Hey—are we just being egotistical?”
“Uh, clarify?”
“Maybe we’re in line with some other ship, maybe an upper system expedition or something? And the beams trying to find them happened to rake across us, and because they’re high powered, they were able to get a lock and keep sending?”
“It would be the biggest coincidence ever,” Glisters says. “I don’t think there’d be any ship due back from Jupiter or Uranus, and those are the two where the trajectory might take them into our part of Earth’s sky. But supposing there were, the whole point of using submillimeter-wave is that it’s a tight beam so it carries farther with the same power. Tight means the beams they’ve got focused on us are only spread out to… uh…” He pounds on his wristcomp. “Wow. These channels are all at wavelengths around 0.14 mm, and the beam spread for that, out this far, with a standard aperture, should only be about 450,000 km.”
“So that means it’s hitting a disk that big? That’s about the width of the moon’s orbit, Glisters, it’s not like it’s a tiny target.”
“At this distance it’s a tiny, tiny target. For us to be in the beam of some ship behind us we’d have to be so lined up that a telescope on Earth would see them hiding behind us. There’s a lot of other sky for them to be in and it’s really a major coincidence.” He raises his hands in surrender. “It’s not that you didn’t come up with a good explanation, just it’s so improbable.”
“Yeah, and it’s still only ten channels”—Brawnk! Brawnk!—“uh, twelve, out of six million,” I say. “I guess you can kill that horn.”
“Yeah. There’s still alarms set for a lot of other events, but I think this one has definitely happened, even if it didn’t make much sense for it to happen now.”
“I don’t suppose diverting twelve channels—”
“It just went to fifteen—”
“Whatever, I’m guessing it’s not enough to get us any attention.”
“Not a prayer. There are porn-splyctering hobbyists in spacecrew who use up more bandwidth and energy, all by themselves, than we’re plugging into right here. No one’s going to notice a few diverted beams.”
“Just hoping.”
“I know. We all take a lot of long shots. F.B. spent ages writing a program to make the ship respond to a safety radar hit, and that’s even less likely.”
“Safety radar?”
“That radar system the idiots in the UN decided to require, the thing that’s supposed to prevent collisions, because even though ships have been going through the asteroid belt for centuries, and the asteroids are so thin in the belt that most of the time none of them is even visible to the naked eye as a dim star, there’s all those old meeds where the asteroid belt is a huge smear of floating rocks. And, you know, there could be up to fifty ships in space at once, more than enough for a traffic jam. Even though interplanetary ships usually never come within a hundred thousand kilometers of each other. But the UN insisted on installing those radars on everything in interplanetary space, and it’s just possible we’ll detect incoming radar sometime. And if we do, F.B.’s program will activate, and Virgo will fire three short thruster bursts, three long thruster bursts, and three short.”
“SOS.”
“Right. The anomaly would be reported to some AI, and if we were very lucky, that AI might put up a public request for information, violate the injunction, and create more of a case for us. That might or might not do us any good, but probably the more ways we can violate it, the better.”
“But we won’t even be close enough to show up on safety radar during Earthpass?”
“We’ll be 18 million kilometers from Earth at our perigee in June. On a normal Earthpass they come in to just inside a million kilometers. Even 18 million would be a reasonable trip for a Space Patrol cruiser, of course, with enough warning, and there should be three of those ready to go in Earth orbit and probably another one around the moon. We’d be duck soup to save, if they’d admit we were here, but since they won’t, and we don’t have a cap, we’re screwed.”
“So either we do something to force them to break the injunction, and answer a radio hail—or we’re in for another two-year ride to nowhere?”
“More of a hundred-year ride to nowhere. Without course correction, after this one, we won’t even come within cap range of Mars—not even the extreme one-way version Derlock did—and we’ll be even farther from Earth on the Earthpass after, and so on. It’ll be the early 2250s before the pattern of orbits carries Virgo back around to making any close passes. That’s why I’ve sort of messed around with giving us another option.”
“You think there’s some way to force them to acknowledge the distress call?”
“No, there’s a way we could maneuver into permanent Earth orbit; they wouldn’t be able to ignore us when we were right there in their sky all the time.” He pulls up a screen and shows me a thrust diagram and an orbital plot. “See, technically, we could extract most of the water from the farm sections—we’re not using two of them anyway—and take all the water from the hull—”
“Our radiation shielding!?”
“Then we just run it all out through the remaining engines and thrusters, and steer into a close approach to Earth. The pod was made to be able to do a limited aerobrake; we could come in at a shallow angle, skip off Earth’s atmosphere and lose some speed doing that, and fire the engines to push us back in again for a second bounce off the atmosphere. Of course, that’s if the engines aren’t torn off on the first aerobrake.
“Then we repeat that process one more time, and after the third aerobrake, we’d fall into an Earth orbit. Very high and elliptical, of course—our orbit would go out four times as far away as the moon, taking more than two months to do it, then shoot back in and tear across the sky in a matter of hours, but we wouldn’t be going anywhere, they couldn’t ignore us, and we’d be in easy reach for ships from the moon or Earth to intercept us, from then on.”
“But with all our water thrown away, wouldn’t we have radiation poisoning, early cancer, and genetic damage?”
“Everything has its drawbacks. We’d a
lso be surviving on what’s left of the stored food because Farm Section 1 wouldn’t have enough water to feed us anymore. Not to mention that without the farm, our air supply would slowly become unbreathable.”
“Those are some drawbacks, Glisters.”
“I haven’t even mentioned the big drawbacks yet. If we’re even an eensy bit wrong coming in on the first aerobrake, or if we lose engines or thrusters from hitting at the wrong angle or debris flying off or just pure bad luck, we could go bouncing right off the atmosphere at way above Earth escape velocity. That would put us into a new orbit around the sun that would make it really hard for the Space Patrol to retrieve us, even if they were allowed to try. Or on any of the three aerobrakes, with no water supporting the space between the hulls, besides losing engines we might have a cave-in that would start breaking up the whole ship. And then, too, the accelerations in aerobraking are around four g. That’s more than enough to kill Fwuffy—he wouldn’t be able to open his lungs to breathe, and he’d probably rupture some internal organs. Cube square law and all that stuff.”
“So the whole plan is utterly insane—”
“Well, I think it would have about a 15% chance of working—”
“That’s about one chance in six for us, none for Fwuffy. Tell you what, I’ll shoot Fwuffy and then roll a die; if it comes up anything except a three, I’ll shoot you. Want to take that chance?” I’m trying to sound all even-voiced and reasonable about it, but I am itching to punch his idiot head—and then I see it. “How long will it take you to do some estimates about bringing us into Earth orbit—how we might do it, risks we’d have to run, chances of coming out okay?”
He looks a little puzzled at my sudden reversal, but he’s always game and always prepared. “You know me, Susan, I’ve been working on it for weeks. I have all that already.”
I pull my phone out of my pocket. “Did I hear Wychee in the kitchen?”
“These questions keep getting more random. Uh, yeah, she was going to—”
“Just wanted to make sure she wasn’t still asleep.” I put the phone to my ear. “Access Wychee voice.”