by Allen Steele
What the psychologists told them, in fact, was that, in terms of social order, the most stable collections of individuals were families. It they wanted to make sure that no more Brahe disasters occurred the future, they would do well to put entire families in space. And since ten-person families, in which all the members had the necessary expertise to serve aboard a deep-space vessel, were practically impossible to find, the only available recourse was to generate them.
Fortunately, this had already been done.
The concept of extended families is not new to the human race, but with few exceptions, the practice has been frowned upon, if not made illegal, in western civilization. Yet when intermarriage re-emerged as during the formation of the first self-sufficient colonies on the Moon and Mars, the longstanding Judeo-Christian mores against polygamy were forced to take a back seat to practicality.
The first space colonists didn’t have to worry about raising families on the high frontier. They were, for the most part, itinerant blue-collar laborers who had signed temporary contracts with the major space companies, leaving their spouses and children at home to fend for themselves for a year or two while they went to work in near-Earth orbit or on the Moon.
Indeed, the first married couple did not journey together into space until 1992, and that was almost by accident; NASA had assigned two astronauts to an early shuttle mission, then had to watch in chagrin as those two astronauts exchanged wedding vows before their flight. Even after that, however, it remained the policy of first NASA, then later the private space companies, not to allow married partners in space, under the theory that a couple could disrupt crew morale. Visions of wild orbital orgies danced in the faux-puritanical minds of too many officials, who refused to believe that love, or at least normal sexual urges, could coexist with the conquest of space. “One in the sky, one on the ground” was the unspoken rule of thumb.
The same went for unplanned pregnancies, and even more so. Female crew members were sometimes knocked up, usually the outcome of one-night stands. Rules against sex were virtually unenforceable, but pregnancy was; the inevitable result of getting in a family way was either that the woman lost her job but went back to Earth to have a baby, or kept her job but had an abortion. Keeping both the job and the kid was not an available alternative.
This began to change when Lunar Associates, Ltd. was established in 2024 as an employee-owned company; Descartes Station was now controlled not by corporate suits on Earth but by its own workers. As a result, there was now an economic incentive for moondogs to become permanent settlers rather than temporary laborers…and it wasn’t long before many of Descartes Station’s employee-stockholders demanded the right to marry and have children.
Marriage was widely considered to be okay…but kids? It took long and impassioned debate among the lunar colonists, but in the end the old Skycorp regulations were voted out of LA’s charter (although a one-child-per-family rule was put firmly in place) and on April 1, 2025, Mary Selene Rosenkrantz made history by being the first child to be born beyond the planet Earth.
Mary wasn’t unique for very long. Very soon she had many other kids to play with, and this opened yet another can of worms. Finding good day-care has been one of the vexing problems of the ages. Since everyone on the Moon was expected to work for a living, this made finding a reliable babysitter once every three shifts a major obstacle.
Simultaneously, there was also the problem of rampant adultery among the colonists. With only a hundred and fifty people in Descartes Station, all living together in close quarters, there was strong temptation for even the closest of couples to have secret extramarital affairs with other persons. As the colony prospered, the population of the base began to rise, but by the time Descartes Station was officially renamed Descartes City, wives often found themselves sleeping with their best friend’s husbands and vice-versa, sometimes while their kids were romping in the very next compartment. Even after there were the inevitable discoveries, quarrels, separations, and tearful make-ups, the trend continued, leading many to observe that the atmosphere within Descartes City had begun to resemble an ongoing soap opera, only without theme music and commercial breaks.
The solution to both problems found itself in 2031 when three families—the Phillips, the Freys, and the Horowitzes—came to the mutual epiphany that they didn’t mind so much the fact that they fooling around with each other’s spouses as they did the betrayal of trust that went along with it. This was coupled with the realization that their babies didn’t really seem to care who was at home at what time, so long as their diapers continued to be changed and they were regularly nourished. Since none of the three couples had any strong religious feelings against the idea, the three families decided to cut the Gordian knot by tying a different one altogether: they presented themselves to Descartes City’s resident priest, the Rev. Luther Paulsen, and demanded to be intermarried.
When Paulsen, a Presbyterian minister who was also the station’s chief dietician, refused to condone the intermarriage, they found a bulldozer driver who was a licensed Justice of the Peace. He listened to their reasons for intermarriage and agreed to officiate, and thus the three families were married together in a public ceremony conducted in the station greenhouse. Rather than to have their surnames changed to one couple’s last name, or to have an unwieldy three-way hyphenated surname, the clan randomly selected a neutral name—Jones—to be their shared surname. Therefore, they became the Jones-Phillips, Jones-Frey, Jones-Horowitz family—in short, the Joneses.
As bizarre as it initially seemed, the concept of clannish intermarriage soon caught on. It gave greater stability to preexistent two-person marriages, eased the problem of raising children, and virtually eliminated the eternal question of whose turn it was to take out the garbage. Although it was initially done only on the Moon, the practice soon spread to Clarke County and the Arsia Station colony on Mars. Polygamy was still technically illegal, but when so many people started participating in multi-partner marriages, the governments of the colonies couldn’t do much more than look the other way.
Following the Moon War and the formation of the Pax Astra, polygamy was formally legalized on the Moon and in Clarke County as the 11th Amendment of the Pax’s Bill of Rights. This had the unanticipated side-effect of luring a new breed of colonists into space—the so-called “jack-Mormons.” Although the Church of Latter Day Saints officially condemned polygamy as inherently sinful, the Mormons had virtually pioneered the concept of intermarriage before it was outlawed in the United States in the 1800’s. Even so, quite a few jack-Mormons had continued to secretly practice intermarriage. When polygamy was made legal in the Pax Astra, many of these jack-Mormons migrated to space, where they not only practiced intermarriage without fear of criminal prosecution, but also won converts to the Church among the extended families which felt the need for spiritual guidance.
This caused considerable debate within the Church’s upper hierarchy, since it opened a hellish conundrum: either all those jack-Mormons in the Pax had to be excommunicated from the Church, although what they were practicing was legal and they were rapidly gaining new converts to the faith, or the Church had to officially sanction polygamy despite its earlier admonishments. In the end, the Church’s leadership had a divine revelation in which God said it was okay for polygamy to be practiced “within certain situations in an extraterrestrial environment.”
By the time ConSpace began interviewing prospective crews for the Jupiter Run, there were quite a few extended families on the Moon, Mars and Clarke County from which to choose. The first of these to be selected, as the crew of the newly christened Medici Explorer, was the Smith family of Descartes City.
This decision didn’t come as an accident or as the result of favoritism or clout. The Smiths were chosen because of they were stable, they were tough, and they were experienced. They could haul the weight.
3. THE FOURTH WATCH
I was revived from my zombie tank on September 30, eight months and
twenty days after the Medici Explorer’s departure from the Moon.
Awakening from coma-like biostasis was by no means pleasant; it felt very much like being resurrected from the grave. Dr. Tanaka would not allow me out of my bed in Deck 2-F, the ship’s hibernation bay, until he was convinced that I was ready to walk on my own, even in the one-tenth gravity of Arm Two. Through an archway on the other side of the deck, I could see a sealed zombie tank which contained one of the ship’s two other passengers: Marianne Tillis, a ConSpace administrator whom, I was told, was scheduled to make an inspection of Valhalla Station.
Tillis wasn’t scheduled to be revived until we had arrived at Callisto. On the other hand, Dr. Karl Hess, a German astrogeologist, had been resuscitated two months earlier when the Medici Explorer passed Hailey’s Comet in the asteroid belt. Hess was a heavyset man with a pale mustache and a prematurely balding scalp. He came to briefly visit me once while I was recuperating; although polite, he seemed quite nervous, leaving as soon as Yoshio reappeared. Hess spent the remainder of the trip in the passenger deck in Arm One, taking his meals alone in the galley.
Yoshio later told the reason why he had become a hermit. Three weeks earlier, he had cornered his first-wife, Leslie, in the hydroponics bay and had made a rather insistent pass at her, and was only deterred when Old Bill happened to stop by. There had been no violence, but the captain had warned him to keep away from Leslie Smith-Tanaka. Hess seemed to realize that he had become persona non gratia aboard the Medici Explorer.
“It happens now and then,” Yoshio said. “Occasionally, you meet someone who thinks that extended marriage means anything goes. They believe that if a woman can sleep with three different men, then it won’t matter if she has a fourth partner for a little while.” He shrugged off-handedly. “I’ve become used to it. I don’t even hold a grudge against Dr. Hess…just so long as he doesn’t come near Leslie again.”
The ship was now twenty million kilometers from Jupiter, which seemed a long distance until the first time I spotted the giant planet gliding past one of the hibernation deck windows. To the naked eye, Jupiter looked much as it does when observed through a strong observatory telescope on Earth: a bright, ruddy sphere, its reddish-orange bands distinctly visible, the Red Spot an oval blur in the southern hemisphere. Yet this was not a magnified view, but what I could see with the naked eye, just outside the square window near my bed. To be able to see something that far away so clearly brought home to me the enormity of the planet, and made me only more eager to get out of bed, no matter how weak I felt.
Yoshio was a good host. He brought me the few messages I had received from home before Earth had gone around the far side of the Sun, severing communications between the ship and the deep-space network based at Descartes City, and helped me with basic calisthenics which gradually restored my muscle tone. He also sent Wendy Smith-Makepeace to cut my hair, trim my fingernails and toenails, and give me a shave.
Wendy had changed a bit during my long nap. She had celebrated her ninth birthday on July 28; by coincidence, this was the same day that the ship made its closest approach to Hailey’s Comet, while the Medici Explorer was cruising through the asteroid belt and the comet was heading the other way. While she clipped my hair, Wendy distracted me by telling a long story about how Cousin Bill let her sit in his lap in one of the observation blisters and study the comet through a telescope; then she had gone down to the wardroom where her mother and Aunt Lynn had baked her a special birthday cake (sans candles, of course—no inflammables were allowed aboard ship). Wendy looked a little taller, and she wasn’t quite as solemn as she had been when I had first met her; when I told her a little joke about a 20th century rock band called Bill Haley and the Comets, she laughed gaily, beaming a smile which made me realize that, ten years from now, she would be a true heartbreaker.
She was also a good barber and manicurist; once she was through, I looked pretty much as I had before I climbed into the tank. Yet when I told her so, her small face tightened up again. “I’m only doing this because I practice on my uncles and Captain Montrose,” she said reproachfully. “I don’t want to be a barber…Aunt Lynn is training me to be a hydroponicist!” Then she climbed down off the stool behind me, laid down her scissors, and stiffly walked out of the hibernation bay, leaving me with the impression that I had insulted her intelligence.
Saul Montrose came to visit me at the end of my convalescence. It was the first time we had met since our brief introduction in ConSpace’s Descartes City offices, just before the Medici Explorer departed from the Moon. During the past eight months he had shaved off most of his beard, retaining long sideburns and a handlebar mustache which lent his face a rather Victorian sea-captain appearance.
Saul seemed pleased to have me awake; he sat on the edge of the bed and gave me a quick run-down of the major events of the outbound trip. There was not much to tell: a midflight course correction on April 11, just before the ship had entered the asteroid belt, which had taken the Medici Explorer slightly out of the plane of the elliptic, and the close encounter with Hailey’s on July 28, during which he, Dr. Hess and Young Bill conducted extensive long-range scans of the comet’s core and corona.
Four days ago, the Medici Explorer had navigated the first marker of the Jovian system, when it had passed through the so-called “bow shock” caused by the collision of the solar wind with Jupiter’s magnetosphere (“We hardly felt a tremble,” Saul says). Only yesterday the ship had crossed the orbit of the outermost moon, Sinope, located almost twenty-four million kilometers from Jupiter. While the ship traversed the orbits of the remaining three moons in the system’s outer belt—Pasiphae, Carme, and Ananke—its crew performed the critical rollover maneuver, during which the Medici Explorer and its drones were rotated 180 degrees on their lateral axes until their main engines were facing Jupiter. Once all four vessels were flying backward, the first of several engine burns had been executed, slowing the convoy against the tug of Jupiter’s gravity.
Everything else was minor. Geoffrey Smith-Makepeace had broken his right thumb while fixing a broken hatch in Arm One, but it was healed now. Old Bill was forced to go EVA to repair a frozen valve in one of the aft maneuvering engines, and he was still struggling to keep it from gimballing incorrectly. Leslie and Lynn lost a rack of tomatoes in the hydroponics deck when Wendy had failed to set the timer on the UV lamps for a few days.
Other than that, there was nothing else to report.
“Nothing else?” I asked, and Saul gave me a blank look. “The crew is doing okay? There’s been no…disagreements? Arguments? Fights?” Saul smiled a little, the corners of his elegant mustache curling upwards. Yoshio, standing nearby, turned away and pretended to examine a cabinet of surgical equipment.
“Sure, there’s been disagreements,” Montrose said quietly. “Kaneko won’t eat his greens until Leslie threatens to spank him at the table…he says asparagus makes him sick. Betsy wanted to try a new program she’s devised for the navigation system but Old Bill wouldn’t let her, and since Geoff keeps losing to Leslie in poker he claims she’s cheating, but I don’t he’s really serious.” He shrugged indifferently. “Nothing much. Why?”
I wasn’t willing to let it go at that. Yoshio had already told me about Hess’s pass at Leslie Smith-Tanaka; however minor the incident had been, it was still an indication that not all was well aboard the ship. “C’mon, skipper,” I said as I sat up in bed. “You know better than that. You told me yourself that nothing ever goes perfect on any long voyage. Now you’re telling me that this has been a perfect trip so far…”
I let the unspoken question hang in the air. Yoshio coughed into his fist and excused himself from the room, the soles of his stikshoes whisking softly on the carpet as he walked through the archway to the other side of the hibernation bay. Saul watched him leave before he turned back to me. “Mr. Cole…Elliot…how well do you know my record?”
He knew perfectly well that he was the only crewmember I had interviewed before boardi
ng the Medici Explorer. Saul Montrose had spent a considerable part of his life working in space, much of it as the first mate, then as captain, aboard the Skycorp cycleship Percival Lowell. When ConSpace had offered him the job of commanding the Medici Explorer for this run to the Jovian system, he had taken the assignment even though it is a one-shot deal.
Although the Smiths are permanent crewmembers, ConSpace replaces the Medici Explorer’s captain after each voyage. One reason is that ConSpace has more deep-space captains than it does spacecraft; in order to keep all the commanders employed, the Cosmonauts Professional Union has mandated that captains be rotated once every two years. The other reason is that, at least in theory, having a new commander once each voyage would keep the crew on its toes, whereas a permanent captain would inevitably allow the crew, and himself, to fall into familiar, lazy patterns.
Montrose is the one crewmember of the Medici Explorer who is not part of the Smith clan. In fact, since he is expressly forbidden by company regulations from becoming involved with any member of the clan, he cannot marry into the extended family. Long-term hormone suppressants injected into his bloodstream before launch guarantee that his sexual urges are kept safely in check for the duration of the voyage. His role is that of a benevolent tyrant, the final arbiter of personal disagreements and consensual decisions. Even if, in the most extreme instance, the Smiths were to mutiny against him, he alone holds the trump card: the ship’s master computer will not obey any major set of commands unless his retina scan confirms his presence on the bridge.