Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “As long as they have ducks,” he says.

  Finally, at the big meeting, we find out how many different things our parents have been setting up, aside from just arranging for the first real advance in spaceship design in decades. The whole thing was so complicated that they brought along Courtland, Pop’s main lawyer, who insisted on running most of the case from Perdita, “Because being a lawyer is the dullest job in the world that people still get paid for, and I’m not passing up the one real chance for an adventure I’ll ever get.” She’s another funny-looking big-head pink person like Glisters, and like him she’s obsessive and painfully smart and totally on our side, and has my love and gratitude forever. If I ever decide to get married I swear I’m taking out a personal ad, extremely famous person seeks pink macrocephalic.

  As crew in possession of Virgo at the time another ship reached her, we have the salvage claim, and they think there’s a way they can make money off our poor battered old ship, now lagging so far behind this fast modern one. “The best guess I can give you is that there might be three years of real profit in the theme park,” Courtland is saying.

  Right now she’s explaining that Destiny has a huge claim against the UN Interplanetary Transportation Board, which owns Virgo and the five remaining Aldrin cyclers. She has a draft deal with the board that will let Destiny claim ownership for the “salvageable remainder of Virgo,” by which they mean the pod, or Virgo as we’ve known her while we were her crew. There’s more than enough left over to go partners with Pop and the consortium and have a robot pellor swarm, and a flock of iceballs, intercept Virgo as she approaches Earth, hook up into a workable configuration, and fly her to lunar orbit.

  “The reason we think that orbiting the moon is the place for Virgo,” Courtland says, “is that there will probably be about a three-year period during which we can operate her profitably as a theme park, something to visit and see for people taking a lunar vacation. After that, it’ll be old news, but with the money we make on the theme park, we can then convert the two vacuum cargo sections into farms, put a Forest in each farm, and change most of the Pressurized Cargo Section into luxury living quarters—living quarters for a small crew plus several bed-and-breakfast setups.”

  “I might like to live and work there,” Marioschke said, “if I can apply.”

  F.B. nods. “It would be a fun place for little kids and families and all,” he says. “And with us there—”

  Courtland nods and says, “We’re estimating that if you’re there, and especially if Fwuffy is, it’ll make quite a bit of additional money because it will be more ‘authentically’ Virgo.”

  “What else would it be?”

  “Well, of course it’ll be Virgo in the sense of the same ship, but for most of the solar system, what makes it Virgo is the crew, especially Fwuffy. So if you can imagine yourselves running a farm and a B&B, your presence there would make it ‘really’ Virgo to the tourists. And of course you would be good at it anyway—you have the skills and you’re nice people. It would feel like such a warm, welcoming place; and of course even though there are farms on the moon, and with temptrol boxes, anyone anywhere can eat the best food from the best Earth restaurants, we think the cachet of ‘fresh from Virgo’ will mean premium pricing and another angle on more money. Maybe do some ag research there, get a few vegetables named after it—”

  “I’d love to work on that,” Marioschke says.

  “As I said, the financial angles are endless, but what’s more important, it’s a place where we can keep Fwuffy alive and relatively free.”

  “Awive and wewativewy fwee is good.”

  “It’s very good. And it’s not easy. It is illegal in depth to have anything to do with hortons, upgrapes, and flipperwillies—that’s an enhanced marine mammal, I didn’t even know those existed till I tangled with PermaPaxPerity regulators and saw all the secret protocols, that’s how systematic they are about the rules.

  “Legally under PermaPaxPerity, no one can do anything connected to intelligence enhancement, ever, in any way. It’s illegal to do any research into the process that creates them, illegal to perform any part of the process, illegal to hide the creation of one, illegal not to inform the police if you know about anyone doing it. However—luckily for Fwuffy—the first rule of PermaPaxPerity is never turn off the entertainment, and the second rule is if you have to turn off the entertainment, don’t let anyone see you turning it off. They realize that Fwuffy’s fan support is probably good for decades, so they’re stuck—they can’t kill him and they can’t keep him.

  “That’s their dilemma. If they kill him they’ll have global rioting, revenge murders of bureaucrats and revenge viruses all through the global net, decades of bad things; if they keep him, he’s a magnet for all the people who like the idea of enhanced intelligence for any reason, from wanting a green dog that talks to wanting their kids to be Villanova-level geniuses.

  “So, Fwuffy, officially, you’re going to be a terribly nice but horribly shy and reclusive horton, unable to cope with all the publicity, who likes to meet people a few at a time, and too attached to Virgo to live anywhere else. We’ll charge the B&B people extra to meet you—don’t worry, they’ll all pay it—but you’re on the ship forever, and the conditions include that you won’t do anything to secure legal rights for hortons.”

  Fwuffy nods. “I wike wuhking on the fawm, and Vuhgo is home. But I wish I could’ve twied faw my PotEvals, just faw the chawwenge.”

  “It might not have to be forever. Once we have you legally protected and in a safe place, and they’ve gotten used to the idea that your public existence isn’t making the sun go out, we might find some ways to work out from under the restrictions, and maybe eventually overturn them. But till then… well, for the moment we have to play the game.”

  “But I’ll be there with you,” Marioschke says, reaching out and rubbing his face.

  “And I will too,” F.B. says.

  Courtland checks a box on her tablet. “All right. Next issue. Incidentally, all of you, including Fwuffy, may change your minds about what you’ll be doing, once you hear this offer. Destiny?”

  Aunt Destiny says, “Perdita will reach Earth in about two months instead of the five it would take on an Aldrin cycler or four in a Space Patrol cruiser. After that we’ll be re-outfitting her for the greatest crewed expedition in decades: a tour through six dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt and out beyond it. We’ll be doing about a 45° slice of it this first time, and going out a bit past 130 AU, which means we’ll be out a bit over four times as far as the previous record holders, the Triton expedition. And we’ll get home before they do, because by picking up ice out there from the various KBOs, we can spend a lot of time way up above orbital speeds.

  “In point of fact we’ll have to use gravity assists to slow down as we return, but we’ll be back on Earth in just eleven years, after planting our footprints on six big worlds and maybe thirty small ones, and of course stomping a pathway through history that will never be forgotten. For what it’s worth we’ll also have astronomical recognition—”

  “Boo,” I say. We all spend a minute on making gagging noises.

  When we’re done, Destiny says, “All right, I’m an evalist, not a humorist. Anyway, the thing is, we’ll be laying the groundwork for farther and deeper expeditions. Being blunt about this, I need crew that will do two things: try anything and never give up. Ideally, they should be young, because I want to try to get in four or five of these deep voyages before I’m too old. I’m putting up all my settlement money from the Interplanetary Transportation Board toward this, and Robert”—she nods at Pop—“has agreed to invest as well; we have half a dozen more investors lined up. So, fame, fortune, your name living forever… for a crew that follows the two basic rules, try anything and never give up. And in the whole solar system, where else can I find young people with exactly those attitudes?”

  Glisters’s and Wychee’s heads have been pumping up and down like they’re goin
g to come off; they glance sideways, clearly expecting me to join in. And I float there in Perdita’s “conference bubble,” the beautiful little starry room set up for everyone to talk, wondering what I will say, because perhaps when I say it, I’ll know what I think.

  Marioschke breaks the spell. “Well, when you come right down to it, I’m a space farmer—and the farmer part comes first. I’ll want to visit some outdoor wilderness—with trees and grass and air I can breathe and no roof over it—a lot sooner than eleven years. I guess I’ll stay with Virgo.”

  “Me, too,” F.B. says, taking her hand.

  “I’d miss pwants and fawming too much,” Fwuffy says.

  Destiny is shaking her head. “You won’t have to miss that, Fwuffy; we’ll be putting a farm module on Perdita; it’s the only way we can travel that far over such a long time.”

  “Then I’d miss Mawioschke,” he says.

  “F.B., are you sure you want to miss the adventure?” Marioschke asks, anxiously. “I don’t want to keep you home—”

  “If I do, I’ll go on the next one. We won’t even be thirty when they come back, and that means probably sixty, maybe eighty, more good years in my life.” He shrugs. “I just like the idea of being somewhere where people need me and want me, doing what I know I can do well.”

  It clicks, inside me, that that’s what I want to do. Why did we ever, ever think that F.B. was dumb?

  The problem is that for F.B. it’s obvious that being somewhere where people need me and want me, doing what I know I can do well is working on Virgo for at least the next few years. For me… well, what is that?

  “I think I want to think,” I say, and try to convince myself that their smiles are supportive, rather than puzzled.

  January 24, 2131. On board Perdita, downbound to Earth. 210 million kilometers from the sun, 68 million kilometers from Earth.

  “If the world made any sense,” I tell Destiny, “I would be trying to talk Pop out of going with you. But I’m reasonably willing to accept that my father is a grown-up.”

  “And I appreciate it,” Pop says. “Many children never get that far with their parents.”

  The three of us are floating in the conference bubble together, just we three, watching the stars wheel slowly around us.

  He tries again, tentatively, “It’s just… well, a few months of travel in space, surrounded by all these stars, all the time. Just the peace of floating among them, feeling like the whole universe is there, you know?”

  “I know that feeling, yeah, Pop.”

  “Meanwhile back home… there are a lot of roles for tired, jaded, old men. Some for evil, jaded, old men. Even a few for good, wise, old men. But nothing that I couldn’t pass up. I’ve already done James Tyrone and Willy Loman, and King Lear can wait till I get back. So the more I thought about the last year when I mostly saw this”—he gestures, and I marvel that he’s figured out a way to do a big sweeping movement of the arm like that without tumbling himself—“the less need I felt to put my feet down onto a stage. So it’s hard for me to imagine someone wanting something else. But I’ll try, Susan, really I will, if you’ll just reassure me that this isn’t some passing whim. I can’t help but feel that if Perdita leaves and you’re not on it, you’re going to regret it, maybe—”

  “‘—not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life,’” I say, finishing out the quote. “One of your best revival roles, Pop, I’m glad you felt I was worthy of the lines. Look, the reason why I won’t regret it is that I know if Perdita leaves and I am on it, I’ll be wishing I was home for the next eleven years. Really. Because here’s what I’m thinking. Three months after Perdita leaves, it won’t be even a blip in the media. A year after it leaves it’ll be part of a nostalgia quiz. When it does come back, eleven years later, it’ll be two months of excitement—if that, because all the images will have been transmitted home long ahead of it, and the images are going to be mostly of you all bouncing around on big fluffy snowballs, which is apparently what all those dwarf planets are.”

  “I…” Destiny looks sad—no, hurt.

  “What’s wrong, Aunt Destiny?”

  “I just thought, if we can’t even get you, Susan, to understand why we’re doing it or what it’s about… even with all the experiences you’ve had, if you just want to go back to your old life… that’s so discouraging—”

  She’s breaking my heart, and I can tell Pop is thinking the same things she is, so I put an arm around each of them, and squeeze tight, and say, “I know why it’s important. I know why you’re doing it. I know sometimes I’ll wish I was with you, because I’ll miss you, and because you’ll be doing interesting things that I wish I could be there for. But it’s not that I want to stay back here because I think I’ll miss my chance for a higher recognition score. My recognition score is already mathematically indistinguishable from universal recognition; the only people who can’t recognize my picture, my voice, or my name are hermits in suspended animation. It’s not about that either.

  “What I was trying to say was, if you do what you’re planning to do, and I come along, it just means that every five or ten years there’ll be an interesting exploration story on the meeds. And only that much. People back here won’t be any different; there won’t be any more ships like Perdita going out, there won’t be any great decades-long exploration races like Scott against Amundsen, Korolev against Von Braun, or Santo against Nakamura. It’ll be a twenty-days-out-of-a-decade media feature, like the Olympics without as many cute people.”

  “So what would you be doing staying back here?” Pop asks, quietly. “Running the space exploration fan club? Giving interviews to people who didn’t care?”

  “Making people care,” I say. “What’s Prince Henry the Navigator known for? This is a trick question, just answer it.”

  Crossly impatient to get to the point, Destiny says, “Well, he was the prince of—one of those countries back before the UN reorganized all the borders—in Europe, I’m pretty sure—Spain? Burgundy?”

  “Portugal,” I say. “And what was this navigating thing?”

  Pop’s gaze is far away as he sorts through a lifetime of memorized material. “Um, back in the Renaissance, he’s the one who kept developing better and better ships, and sending them farther out on longer voyages, and kept records and maps of what they’d found, and I guess he was sort of European Exploration Central,” Pop says. “This is all research from some role I was offered, not playing him, I don’t think. It was a long time ago.”

  “Unh hunh. That’s what we remember him for today. What was he known for in his own time?”

  They look at each other, shrug. “No idea.”

  “Being rich, being a very eligible bachelor, being a guy who might get promoted to king any time, dressing beautifully, building beautiful houses…”

  Pop starts to laugh. “I’m beginning to see this.”

  “The secret,” I say, hugging them both tight, “is that Henry didn’t get to be a prince because Navigator-ing was cool; his being one of Europe’s hottest princes is what made exploration cool. It was the hobby of the most zoomed guy in the Western Christendom celeb circuit. So ultra cool that other kings and princes got into the exploration racket, too, and kept it going after his death; he was dead a generation before the caravels reached around Africa, and over to the New World, and circumnavigated the globe. But without Henry, voyages of exploration would have been occasional stunts. With Henry… you see?

  “And one more reality, folks. You’re old set-in-your-ways farts; you don’t care if you ever set a fashion, or at least I hope you don’t because I don’t want to see sweaters like that one—”

  “Hey!” Pop says.

  “—or utility coveralls become fashion. I happen to be young, hot, recognizable, good-to-great at style and styling, and in six months I can own the media. What interests me and what I care about will be the fashion. You see? Somebody’s got to sail the ship, but somebody has to stay home and teach peo
ple to care that it’s sailing.”

  EARTH,

  12

  YEARS

  LATER

  APRIL 3, 2143

  27

  THE PRINCESS WHO STANDS ON THE SHORE

  Wednesday, April 3, 2143. Headquarters of Tervaille Interstellar, Copenhagen, District of Scandinavia, Earth.

  THE PERSKAB TURNS off the high-speed tracks and settles onto its wheels to glide up to my skyscraper. The first time I saw the plans for it, when they were building it for my nineteenth birthday back in ’32, I thought I’d love it forever. Now that I’m turning thirty, it’s just that damned building where I work—even if I do get the whole top floor to myself.

  And I’m already busy enough tonight and I have to put in this silly appearance.

  The front gate of Tervaille Interstellar appears beside my PersKab, which settles onto the walk. It’s a big day, so I need to do my very best Susan Tervaille Awe-Inspiring Entrance for the robot cameras and whatever crowd has turned up besides the usual hundred or so tourists that come to gawk at me every morning.

  Chrome stilettos with gyros and smart straps, set to cling to my feet and brace me up if I teeter, check. Deep cleavage surrounded by geneered self-grown silk lace, check. Skin as perfect as geneered resurfacers can make it. I run the coswand over my face to fix any stray issues in the makeup. I check myself in the mirror and style Devil May Care But Happy, that mix of sardonic upper-class eyebrows and common-touch grin that is ultra, ultra the style this year.

  Checklist complete.

  Showtime.

  “PersKab, open door.”

  As it does, I stick one of those big pricey stilettos outside onto the pavement and rise through the door. There’s an angle that minimizes the crotch flash and maximizes visible leg, and I hit the mark perfectly. Usually there’s a few appreciative whistles or whoops; this time there’s a roar like I just made a touchdown.