Starbound m-2

by Joe Haldeman

  “Right,” he said. “Have to be careful with the babies.”

  “Were you going to have any?” I asked. “Before you got orders to waltz off into outer space and tilt with monsters?”

  “Well, neither Elza nor Namir wanted any children. They’re not that optimistic about the future. Immediate or distant. If it were up to me, yes, I’d like to watch one grow up. Help it grow up.”

  “Sort of a social experiment? A philosophical one?”

  “Cold-blooded, I know. You have two?”

  “Technically. They were born ex utero, though, for which my ‘utero’ is grateful. And they’re being raised by the community, in Mars. Which I don’t like much.”

  “You’re so right. Speaking as someone who was raised by a commune. With my mother and father warned not to bond too closely.”

  “You didn’t have a mother figure or father figure at all?”

  “No. There was a couple in charge of children. But it was obvious we were just a chore. They were pretty harsh.”

  “That must have been rough. The two in charge of our kids are nice people; I’ve known them for years.”

  “Good luck. Ours were nice to adults.”

  We moved on to the carrots, frilly and delicate. “Working in Washington, did you commute every day?”

  “No, I had a little flat in Georgetown. Go back to New York on Thursday night or Friday. Sometimes bring Elza back to DC if our schedules allowed. Sometimes I’d just go up overnight; it’s only an hour and a half on the Metro.”

  “Best of both worlds.”

  “Started out that way. Washington’s falling apart. Both the cities, actually. Less comfortable, more dangerous.”

  “Did you go armed?”

  “No, I’m fatalistic about that. Elza had a gun, but I don’t think she carried it normally. Namir usually did, and he had a bodyguard as well. But he was threatened all the time, and attacked once.”

  “In the city?”

  “Oh, yeah, right downtown. Stepped off the Broadway slidewalk and a woman shot him point-blank in the chest. Somehow she missed his heart. She turned to run away, and the bodyguard killed her.” He shook his head. “He got hell for that, the bodyguard. No idea who she might have been working for. No fingerprints or eyeprints. DNA finally tracked her down to Amsterdam; she’d been a sex worker there twenty years before.”

  “No connection with Gehenna?”

  He shook his head. “And Namir says he’s never used the services of a ‘sex worker,’ not even in Amsterdam. Men lie about that, but I’m inclined to believe him.”

  “Point-blank in the chest. That must have laid him low for a long time.”

  “Had to grow a new lung. Takes weeks, and it’s no fun.”

  Another bit of mystery for the mystery man. “He’s made other enemies, obviously, since Gehenna. Being a peacekeeper.”

  “Mostly in Africa. Very few pale beautiful blondes.”

  “It’s not my field. But I assume you could hire one.”

  “Yes and no. In New York, you could rent a beautiful blond hit woman and probably specify right- or left-handed. But you can’t hire someone so totally off the grid, not in America. If she ordered a meal in a restaurant, she’d get a cop along with the check, asking what planet she just dropped in from.”

  “It’s gotten that bad?”

  “Since Triton, yeah. But even then, a couple of years before that, America was… more cautious than most places.”

  “A police state, my mother said. She calls herself a radical, though.”

  He laughed. “She’s no more radical than I am. From her dossier.”

  “You’ve read my mother’s dossier?”

  “Oh, sorry. You thought I was a lepidopterist.”

  “No, but… I assumed you’d read mine and everybody’s…”

  “I’m just nosy. And seven days is a long time to kill on the Space Elevator.”

  “So what about my father? Was he banging his secretary?”

  “Nothing personal. Just blow jobs.” He smiled at my reaction. “Bad joke, Carmen, sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets into gear a little ahead of my brain.”

  “I like that in a spy,” I said, not sure whether I did. “Not so Earl Carradine.”

  “You see the last one?” he said. “Where he solves your little problem with the Others?”

  “Haven’t had the pleasure. What, he takes his Swiss Army knife and turns a bicycle into a starship?”

  “No, he discovers the whole thing is a hoax, from a corrupt cabal of capitalists.”

  “Oh, good. We can go home now.”

  “It actually was a little clever this time. Not so much gadgets and gunplay.”

  I had to laugh. “Unlike real life. Where a beautiful blond mystery woman nails the spy as he steps off the Broadway slidewalk. For God’s sake!”

  “What can I say?” He injected the last carrot bunch. “Life does imitate art sometimes.”

  We could’ve just stayed in the habitat for launch, which might have been fun. Suddenly detached from the Space Elevator, we’d be flung toward the iceberg at a great rate of speed, but the sensation to us would be “oops—someone turned off the gravity.”

  For safety’s sake, though, all of us climbed through the connecting tube into the spaceship ad Astra. (We should come up with a separate name for the habitat. San Quentin, maybe, or Alcatraz.)

  We helped the Martians get strapped into their hobbyhorse restraints—with all those arms, they still can’t reach their backs—and then got into our own couches, overengineered with lots of padding and buckles. But that was for the landing, 6.4 years from now, at least. Paul didn’t expect any violent maneuvers on the way to the iceberg. There were two course corrections planned right after launch, and unpredictable “refinements” as we approached the iceberg.

  Paul had said to expect a loud bang, and indeed it was about the loudest thing I had ever heard. No noise in space, of course, but the eight explosive bolts that separated the habitat from the Elevator made the whole structure reverberate.

  “Stay strapped in for a few minutes,” he said, and counted down from five seconds. The attitude jets hissed faintly for a minute and stuttered. Then the main drive blasted for a few minutes, loud, but not as deafening as the bolts had been. I suppose it was a quarter of a gee or so, not quite Martian gravity.

  “That should do it. Put on your slippers and let’s go check for damage.”

  Our gecko slippers would allow us to walk, as if there were weak glue on our soles, down the ship’s corridor, and through most of the habitat. The sticky patches on the walls and floor and ceiling were beige circles big enough for one foot. (You could squeeze both feet into one if you liked the sensation of being a bug stuck in a spiderweb.)

  Those of us used to zero gee just sailed through the tube into the habitat, the others picking their way along behind us. Namir was game for floating through but banged his shoulder on the air lock badly enough to leave a bruise. He’d had a little experience before, in the military and of course getting from the Elevator to Little Mars, perhaps just enough to make him too confident.

  My immediate concern was the plants. A small apple tree had gone off exploring and made it almost to the galley, and a couple of tomato plants had gotten loose. Meryl unshipped the hand vacuum and was chasing down the floating particles of medium before we had a chance to ingest them. I returned the apple tree to its proper place and replanted the tomato vines.

  The three spooks were doing the various things people do when they’re getting used to zero gee—except barfing, fortunately. They practiced pushing off from surfaces and trying to control spinning. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard to eyeball the distance to wherever you’re going, and do a half turn, or one-and-a-half turn, to land feetfirst. You can also “swim” short distances, but nobody needs that much exercise.

  There was a very distinct look in Dustin’s eye, and Elza returned it. I hoped it worked for them better than it does for most. (Paul and I
first had sex in zero gee, and it worked all right. My first time with anybody, whatever the gravity, so it was a double miracle for me.)

  Snowbird and Fly- in-Amber were clumsy in zero gee. The gecko slippers were less effective with them, since they had more inertia than humans—if I’m moving slowly and put my foot down onto a beige spot, it will stop me. Snowbird has four times my mass, though, and will rip off and keep going.

  I went into Mars territory with her to check their garden, since it was easier for me to move around and manipulate things. It was dark and cold, as it was supposed to be. Their garden was simpler than ours; Martian tastes didn’t run to a lot of variety.

  Trays of stuff that resembled fungi and a few stubby trees. As on our side, one of the trees had come loose, but it was easy to retrieve and fix with duct tape.

  A screen all along one whole wall was a panorama of their underground city, which was almost all of her planet she had ever seen. Though Mars wasn’t “her” planet the way Earth was ours.

  They had known for thousands of years that Mars was not their natural home. They only learned recently that they were put on Mars as a sort of warning system for the Others: when humans had advanced enough technologically to come in contact with the Martians, they were advanced enough to present a danger to the Others, even light-years away. Which led to the Others’ attempt to destroy us, thwarted by Paul and the Martian leader Red. The cataclysmic explosion that was supposed to sterilize Earth only rearranged the farside of the Moon. Killing Red in the process.

  So from one point of view, the Martians were humanity’s saviors. Another point of view, more widely held, says that it was all the Martians’ fault. (And since I was the first to come into contact with them, I shared the blame.)

  After taking care of the garden, we went into the “compromise” lounge, not quite as dark and cold. There was a bench for humans to sit on, not of much utility in zero gee, and a skillful mural of the above-ground part of our Mars colony, a mosaic of pebbles from both Earth and Mars. It was special to me, made by Oz, Dr. Oswald Penninger, who had been my mentor when I first came to Mars.

  I told Snowbird about it. “I met Dr. Oswald,” she said. “I breathed for him.” Oz had spent some time in the Martian city, measuring the metabolism of the various families.

  “I miss him,” I said. “He was one of my closest friends.” He and Josie might have been on this expedition if the Corporation hadn’t been pressured into taking three military people.

  “It is difficult for us to gauge human personality. But I can understand why you would like Dr. Oz. He is interested in everything. Or should I say ‘was,’ as you did? He will not live long enough to see us again.”

  “I should have said ‘is.’ As long as the person is alive.”

  “He told me about Norway,” she said, “where he studied art. I’d like to go there someday. It sounds a little like Mars.”

  “Maybe they’ll do something about the gravity by then.”

  “I hope so. This is nice.” She pushed up gently, rose to the ceiling, and floated back down. “But you are joking.”

  “Yes. Gravity’s like death and taxes. Always with us.”

  “Not always. There’s no gravity here, nor death, nor taxes. Not for some time. And when we take off for Wolf 25, it will be the ship’s acceleration that presses us to the floor.”

  “Homemade gravity. You can’t tell it from the real thing.”

  “Ha-ha. Dr. Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence. A good joke.”

  Was it I who had made the joke, or Einstein? I decided not to pursue it.

  Dustin came into the lounge, sideways and a little fast. He crashed into a wall with a modicum of grace.

  “Good aim,” I said. “You want to work on the speed.”

  He brushed himself off, rotating toward the center of the room. “Good aim if I’d been aiming for this door,” he said. “Good afternoon, Snowbird. What’s up?”

  “Carmen helped us with a tree. Now we are discussing general relativity.”

  That raised his eyebrows a few millimeters. “A little beyond me. The math, anyhow. Tensor calculus?”

  I had to come clean. “Don’t ask me. I’m just sitting around being impressed. What is tensor calculus?”

  “To me, it was a big ‘stop’ sign. I withdrew from the course and changed my major to philosophy. From physics.”

  “Pretty drastic.”

  “I try to be philosophical about it. Snowbird, your family is both, right? Science and philosophy?”

  “Not in the sense of being scientists and philosophers, no. We don’t experiment, traditionally. Not on things and not on ideas. I am in a small group that wants to change that. Which I think is why the others were glad to see me go.

  “Traditionally, you know, we learn by rote. It’s not like human physics and chemistry and biology. Things and processes are described in great detail, but those descriptions aren’t tested, and the underlying relationships aren’t studied.”

  “We’d call that Aristotelianism, in a way. If you had an Aristotle.”

  “I know. It was studying the ways you classify different methods of thinking that made some of us want to change the ways we think.”

  “Some of us who are not completely grown yet.” Fly- in-Amber came drifting out of Mars territory. “Not completely sane…” He gently collided with me, as I put my other foot down on the beige spot to anchor us.

  “Thank you. Snowbird was not yet two when you humans came. The novelty of it made a huge impression on her unformed mind.”

  “You will never win this argument, or lose it,” Snowbird said. “I know you’re wrong, and you know I’m wrong.”

  “And since you are wrong, that settles it.” Fly-in-Amber crossed all four arms in a human-looking gesture. “That’s logic.”

  Dustin stayed out of it, but I didn’t. “Why does it have to be one or the other, Fly-in-Amber? Your science was fine in the old days, but it wouldn’t get you off Mars.”

  “And to the planet of the Others, where we’ll be destroyed along with everybody on Earth, and perhaps in Mars as well? That’s not progress, Carmen.”

  “Not the example I would choose,” Snowbird said.

  “But it’s relevant,” I insisted. “Human science explained everything pretty well until we met you, and found you had this energy-out-of-nowhere thing. Now we have to fit you into our universe, just as you have to fit us into yours.”

  “How can you say that? If you hadn’t stumbled onto us, we could have happily gone on for an eternity, or at least until the cows came home. If we had cows.”

  “Was that a joke, Fly-in-Amber?”

  “Of course not. I am only trying to adapt to your idiom.”

  “He pretends not to have a sense of humor,” Snowbird said, “which makes him even funnier.”

  “Idiom,” Fly-in-Amber repeated. “Idiom is not humor.”

  “What does the philosopher say about that?”

  He grinned. “I have enough for a monograph already.”

  “Humans do not understand this, and neither does Snowbird.” Fly-in-Amber made a complex gesture that started him rotating. I reached out and stabilized him. “Thank you. It’s not a concept that I can express in English, or any human language.” He rattled off about thirty seconds of noises in the Martian consensus language. I recognized three clear repeated sounds—one for negation, one for “human,” and one that signals an “if… then” statement.

  Snowbird was totally still, absorbing it. “Can you translate?” Dustin said.

  “Not exactly… no. But I could try to say part of it.”

  Fly-in-Amber put his small hands together and made a slight bow, perhaps a parody of human gesture.

  “It’s about the social function of humor in both races. As if humans were one culture.” Fly- in-Amber barked, and Snowbird answered with a series of clicks. “He points out that you are essentially one culture, in Mars.

  “From the first time we communicated—with Carme
n, after we decided to let her know we spoke human languages—it’s been obvious that humor both unites and separates the two species. Martian humor is almost always about helplessness, about fate and irony. Humans also recognize this, but most of your humor is about suffering—about pain, loss, death. To us… that preference itself is beautifully funny, and is even funnier as you think about it. Like a hall of mirrors, the images fading off into infinity.

  “I’m not saying this well. But for most of us, humor is absolutely necessary for survival—if you lived in a small hole in the ground, and knew there would never be anything else, you would perhaps feel the same way.”

  “Sort of like what we call ‘gallows’ humor,” Dustin said.

  “ ‘Ask for me tomorrow,’ ” Fly-in-Amber quoted, “ ‘and you will find me a grave man.’ ” He said it with a British acting voice. “That was a BBC radio production of Romeo and Juliet in 1951. Very Martian humor. Mercutio has been stabbed, and he jokes about dying. Most human humor is not so clear to me.”

  “Nor as funny,” Snowbird said. “So many jokes about people falling down, which is hardly possible with four legs. Sex jokes aren’t funny because we have to figure out what the people are doing, and why that’s more funny than what they normally do.” She turned to Fly-in-Amber and made the thumping laughter sound. “Only two people! Only two!”

  “Some of us don’t think that’s funny,” Fly-in-Amber said. “They can’t help the way they’re made.”

  “Do you tell jokes about Martian sex?” Dustin asked.

  Snowbird pantomimed scratching her head, which was kind of funny, avoiding all the eyes up there. “No… no fate or irony or helplessness there. What is there to laugh about?”

  “Trust me,” he said. “Humans find Martian sex pretty entertaining.”

  “But it’s so plain and innocent, compared to human sex. We don’t hide away and do it in private, and kill people if they do it with the wrong person.”

  “You’d never have a Shakespeare,” I said.

  “I think we do have individuals like Shakespeare,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Though it would be difficult to explain, to translate, what I mean by that.”