Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  On one hand, I consider “Near Space” to be finished. Five novels and fifteen short works should be sufficient; time to move on. On the other hand, I’d be crazy to swear that there won’t be any more. I never intended to write a sequel to “The Death of Captain Future,” yet “The Exile of Evening Star” came three years later. My file cabinet contains a fragment of a novella about the Moon War which begs to be completed, and although I once believed I had covered Mars to my own satisfaction when I wrote Labyrinth of Night, Mars Pathfinder inspired me to write “Zwarte Piet’s Tale”…and when that was done, I found that I’d created a half-dozen aresian colonies, along with sufficient backstory to allow me to create a mini-series about them. And I still haven’t written about Mercury, or the outer planets of the solar system, or the Kuiper Belt, or the Oort Cloud, or the Sun itself…

  Whether or not I continue this future history, only time will tell. The stories have been arranged in chronological order; you may discover minor inconsistencies as you make your way through the book, as may be expected of a project which has taken ten years to complete. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

  As I told that editor, I’m making it up as I go along. That’s the way the future is, really. The best science fiction stories won’t be science fiction, and they’ve yet to be told.

  —June 25, 1998

  “Highgate”

  Whately, Massachusetts

  INTRODUCTION 2 (2010):

  Return to Near-Space

  On the warm Sunday afternoon of May 25, 2008, I sat at my desktop computer and watched, via NASA’s website TV, as the Phoenix Mars lander made its final descent on the subarctic tundra just south of the Martian north pole. At the moment JPL mission controllers in Pasadena announced that Phoenix has safely touched down, I scared my dogs half to death by leaping up from my chair and yelling at the top of my lungs.

  It wasn’t just that NASA had managed to put another probe on Mars, or that it was the farthest north any of those probes had gone, or even that Phoenix was the first lander since the Viking missions of the ’70s to make a powered descent. As important as all these things were, for me they were minor considerations. I had a personal stake in the outcome of this particular mission.

  Aboard Phoenix is a DVD created by the Planetary Society. Made of weather-resistant silica glass and fastened to the lander’s upper fuselage, the disk contains a digital cache of novels, stories, paintings, sketches, movie stills, and audio recordings, all of which are about Mars as imagined from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Called “Visions of Mars,” the stated purpose of this disk is to provide a library for future colonists, but everyone knows the true reason why the Planetary Society and NASA sent it to Mars: it’s a tribute to the generations of writers, artists, and filmmakers who foresaw the exploration of the red planet long before Phoenix lifted off from Cape Canaveral.

  Among the 84 works of fiction preserved on the “Visions of Mars” disk is a story of my own: “Live from the Mars Hotel”, published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine almost exactly 20 years earlier and also included in this collection. Of all the awards I’ve won and honors I’ve received, nothing has thrilled me as much as the knowledge that my first nationally published short story is now on Mars, part of a digital time capsule that may one day be read by an aresian colonist.

  It’s been over a decade since I wrote the first introduction to this collection, and while quite a bit has changed since then, almost just as much has remained the same. Although the purpose of science fiction is not the prediction of the future, it’s interesting to see how the realities of the early 21st century stack up against the events portrayed in some of the stories in this book.

  Humans won’t be returning to the Moon by 2010, and I doubt very much that anyone will be walking on Mars by 2020. However, it’s likely that someone will on the Moon by then—if not from the U.S., then from India or China—and NASA is actively pursuing the long-range objective of sending a manned expedition to Mars sometime within the next couple of decades. Indeed, the one positive legacy of the Bush Administration may be the federal space initiative that it introduced in 2004, which formally established returning to the Moon and sending men to Mars as NASA goals for the 21st century. The current presidential administration has opposed sending people back to the Moon, but quite a few members of Congress from both parties want to keep the lunar part of the initiative; we’ll have to see how this plays out in Capitol Hill.

  As of this writing, the NASA shuttle fleet is about to be retired, with the final few missions being sent to the International Space Station to complete its construction. Once the shuttles are grounded, there will be no second-generation shuttles like those described in these stories. On the other hand, the prototype of its Orion spacecraft has made its public debut, and it won’t be long before it’s transporting people to the space station and—with luck—eventually to the Moon.

  In the meantime, space is no longer the sole domain of government programs. SpaceShipOne proved that private industry can successfully build and fly a manned spacecraft. Virgin Galactic is building the first tourist-class spacecraft, with several competitors not far behind, and a commercial spaceport is currently under construction in New Mexico. Orbital Sciences has also sent up two prototypes of its inflatable space station, one of which is nearly the size of an ISS module. So it’s possible that we may soon see private spacecraft making regular flights to private space stations.

  Solar power satellites are still on the drawing board, and it’s unlikely that any will be in orbit by 2016. However, powersats are being taken seriously again, now that it’s obvious that new means of large-scale energy production will be needed by the end of the century. For much the same reason, the Moon is being looked at as a source for helium-3; indeed, China has stated that this is a major reason why they’re planning to send men to the Moon. No one is waiting for the first commercial fusion tokamak to become operational; the major industrial nations know that they will need to develop new means of supplying electricity to their populations, and space power isn’t being regarded as the wild-eyed fantasy that it may have once been.

  And Skycorp is no longer fiction. It’s a real company—albeit named SkyCorp—and, just like the private space firm depicted in some of these stories, it’s based in Huntsville, Alabama, with a corporate logo similar to the one I described in Orbital Decay. This is not a coincidence; I licensed the name to its founder and president, Dennis Wingo, for one dollar.

  When I wrote the first introduction to this book 12 years ago, I stated that humankind was on the verge of a new space age. I’m sticking to that conjecture; it may seem as if it’s taking awhile to come around, but I’ve seen little to suggest that it won’t eventually happen. Yes, there have been setbacks—the loss of the shuttle Columbia being the most obvious—yet the technology exists and the will is there, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we become a spacefaring species.

  So perhaps it’s appropriate that this collection, which has been out of print for several years now, gets a new lease on life. In 1998, I wrote that it was possible that I’d eventually write more stories in the Near-Space series. This has come to pass; as a result, the second edition of Sex and Violence in Zero-G has been expanded to include five stories written in the last decade. I’ve also revised the timeline in Appendix 1 so that it tells where the various novels and stories of the series occur in the chronology.

  I’ll never claim that these stories are prophesy. If anything, they represent the work I did in the early years of my career. All things considered, though, I think they’ve stood up pretty well. As before, I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.

  —Whately, Massachusetts;

  July, 2010

  Walking on the Moon

  Over the next couple of decades, the three of them would get together once every few years, usually with their families for an afternoon or an evening. Once they had mo
ved away from the Cape, all three had relocated to different parts of the country, so their reunions were normally arranged during vacations. They would spend a few hours in each other’s company, eating, drinking, telling funny stories, trading business tips, admiring each other’s wives and children, sometimes reminiscing about the glory days. They rarely, however, talked about walking on the Moon.

  A year after Roy and Irene moved to rural New Hampshire following Roy’s early retirement from Citicorp, Roy put out phone calls to Dick and Howard, inviting them to come up next Fourth of July for a barbecue. Both men agreed, naturally. It had been a little over two years since the last time they had seen each other during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., at the National Air and Space Museum, not really a get-together for them since they had been surrounded, and kept apart, by NASA brass, congressmen, various dignitaries and reporters. Roy figured that it was time for another, more private reunion.

  Howie and Beth were living in Syracuse, New York, so New Hampshire was only a half-day drive away. Howie wasn’t teaching any classes during the university’s summer semester, so he simply had to pack Beth, the twins Jackson and Veronica, and their outdoor gear into the Bronco; the stop at Roy’s lakeside cabin would be on their way to a camping trip in the White Mountains.

  Dick was a different story. Although he had long since retired from the Air Force, he was still working for NASA as a civilian consultant at the Johnson Space Center, so he had to fly all the way up from Houston. Roy had to mince around the subject of family while talking on the phone with Dick. Word on the grapevine was that Dick’s home life had gone to hell lately; Grace, his wife of twenty-four years, had just divorced him, and Richard, Jr. had been last seen hitchhiking around the country, coasting from one Grateful Dead concert to the next.

  Trouble at home had always made Dick irritable, and Roy had half-expected his former teammate to turn down the invitation, but to his surprise Dick eagerly agreed to come up for the weekend. He caught an American flight out of Houston, connected in New York with a commuter flight to New Hampshire, and arrived at the tiny Manchester municipal airport on the morning of July 4. His rented Ford Escort pulled into Roy’s unpaved driveway only fifteen minutes before the arrival of the Happy Howie clan.

  There were the usual joyous, yet vaguely uncomfortable, first minutes of greeting each other again. The three men embraced, laughed, pounded each other’s backs, then stood back and mumbled at each other while noticing the changes—receding hairlines, touches of grey, thicker stomachs, new mustache and beard on Dick’s face, old mustache missing from Roy’s, Howie’s slight limp from when he had busted his leg last November on his ice-covered front walk. Meanwhile Irene and Beth, old rivals from their days in the Astronauts’ Wives Club, were carefully sizing each other up after quick hugs of their own: Irene noticing the deep crow’s-feet around Beth’s eyes, Beth deciding that Irene was definitely getting lumpy. Howie’s twins didn’t pay a bit of attention to any of this, of course; Roy’s friendly old collie, Max, came bounding out of the woods to meet them, and soon Jack and Ronnie were chasing the dog down to the lakeshore.

  Another summer afternoon, another barbecue. They all changed into their swimsuits and went down to the dock to swim and admire Roy’s second-hand Christcraft cabin cruiser which he was gradually restoring. Roy, Dick, and Howie attempted to play softball with Jackson and Veronica, giving up when Howie popped a fly ball into the dense woods behind the house, losing it so thoroughly that even Max couldn’t find it. By this time, Irene had started the charcoal in the grill on the backyard deck while Beth had fixed the salad, so Roy put the steaks on the grill and opened the case of Coors he had tucked in the refrigerator.

  They ate on the deck while, across the still twilight waters of the lake, local teenagers shot off bottle rockets and firecracker strings. When dinner was over, Irene and Beth cleared the table and carried the remains into the kitchen. Max lay down on the deck and gnawed at a T-bone Howie had tossed his way. Jackson found the carved-wood Saturn V model in the living room and tried to take it out into the front yard before Roy stopped him and gently removed the prized model from the child’s grasp; the kids found their toys in the Bronco and ran back down to the dock with the dog.

  Wives gossiping in the kitchen—thank God, they had finally learned to get along with each other after all these years—kids torturing the dog, the sun setting behind the distant hills, Roy, Dick, and Howie sat together on the deck, chugging beer. As the photosensor switched on the backyard lights, their talk finally turned to space.

  As usual, the grapevine stuff came first, stories about what other ex-astronauts were doing. Glenn was making another re-election run in the Senate; no doubt his constituents in Ohio would let him keep his seat (“But, Christ, you’d think he would have switched parties by now.”). Collins was publishing another book (“He knows how to write, but if he wants another bestseller, he’d better do fiction like that Tom Clancy guy.”). Armstrong was maintaining a low profile again after his stint on the Rogers Commission (“You gotta admire the guy. He could have opened shopping centers for the rest of his life.”), and Bean was solidifying his reputation as a fine artist (“He ain’t no Rembrandt, but his stuff is pretty.”).

  Then there were the old yarns about themselves, retold countless times, always worth hearing again: the time when Dick had been chewed out for doing low-altitude aerobatics over the Cape in his T-38 trainer; when Howie had let a urine sample “slip” out of his hands to splatter all over a flight doctor’s penny loafers; when Roy, flying a Gulfstream over Merritt Island just before the Apollo 14 launch to check the weather conditions, had buzzed a Soviet spy trawler operating just outside the ten-mile coastal limit. There were other stories they all knew—like when Howie had played “Moon River” on a Jew’s-harp while in lunar orbit, just to annoy CapCom—but these weren’t brought up. Stories about being up there meant, eventually, that they would talk about walking on the Moon.

  Yet there are subjects which cannot be ignored for long. As night settled on the New England countryside, an alabaster crescent began to rise over the distant shoreline, tinting the lake with silver beams. The three men gradually fell silent and gazed at the Moon, each absorbed with his own thoughts. Through the cabin’s open windows they could hear the unintelligible voices of Irene and Helen from the living room, just under the electronic beep-boop-beep of the kids playing a computer game in the den on Roy’s Macintosh. The collection of dead beer bottles had grown around them and Roy was beginning to wish he had picked up a second case the day before, when the stores had been open, when Dick committed a heresy.

  “Don’t you sometimes wish you were back there?” he said.

  Happy Howie looked at him with his habitual deadpan expression. “Back where?” he asked. “Oh, you mean Cincinnati…no, no, I never really wanted to go back. Why?”

  “I don’t mean your home town. I mean…” He tipped his beer bottle toward the Moon. “Don’t you find yourself thinking about that sometimes?”

  “Oh, that. Sure. I love beer. Can’t get enough of it.”

  Roy chuckled. Dick glared at Howie. “You know what I’m talking about. The Moon. It’s been more than twenty years now. Don’t you…y’know…ever wish you could go back?”

  “Jesus, Dick,” Howard sighed. “Y’know, once each term, I get a kid in my office at the university, some sophomore from the campus paper who thinks he’s made the biggest discovery…one of the engineering profs used to be a real, live astronaut, he once walked on the Moon. The kid sits there wide-eyed, just like one of the newshounds who used to hang around the Cape, and he always asks me in this solemn voice…”

  Roy picked it up, from long familiarity with the same tired question. “Don’t you wish you could go back to the Moooooooooon?”

  All three of them laughed; post-flight press conferences had made them all irreverent about the press. “And I look across my desk at this future Pulitzer Prize winner,” Howard continued, “and I say, ‘Hell, no, now
ask me another question!’”

  “And they always get flustered after that,” snickered Roy, “because that’s usually their best shot.” He shook his head. “I don’t miss talking to reporters, not one bit.”

  “Amen, brother,” Howie said.

  Dick took a swig from his beer and settled his feet on the deck’s railing. “Well, I’m no news hack, and I want a straight answer from you guys. Do you ever wish you could go back to the Moon?”

  Howie balanced his beer on his stomach and stared into the foamed amber glass. “Straight answer, huh?” he said slowly, and paused to think it over. “Yes. No. What day of the week is it? Monday? Okay, the answer’s yes. Tomorrow’s Tuesday, so the answer then is going to be no.”

  Dick blew out his cheeks. “What kind of a swabbie answer is that?” Howie was a former Navy man. “Are you trying to tell me you never thought about it?”

  “Of course, I’ve thought about it,” Howie replied. “Jeez, I wanted to go back the minute the capsule splashed down. Even after going without water for two days and living in the same underwear for a week, I wanted to go back that minute. Going up was the greatest thrill of my life.”

  He sloshed the beer around in the bottle, laughed and nodded his head. “When Spiro Agnew said that the next goal was going to be Mars, I was all set to sign up. Just back from the Moon, and I was ready to volunteer for the Mars shot in 1976. I’d made my name bigger than Neil’s. Gimme more, gimme more.”