Starbound m-2

by Joe Haldeman

  Eventually, in tens or hundreds or thousands of centuries, all that cloud of rock and gravel would settle into rings, like Saturn’s, very pretty and easy for a spaceship to avoid.

  That was longer than Paul wanted to wait. And with us on Air Force One was a man who thought he wouldn’t have to: U.S. Air Force General Gil Ballard, the president’s defense secretary.

  Namir coldly excused himself and went back to the press side of the huge plane. He later told me he had read the man’s remarks about our mission and left before he could make a scene in what looked like a ceremonial meeting.

  I wished he had stayed. It might not have changed things, but it would have been good theater.

  The meeting room in the middle of Air Force One was extravagantly massive, a projection of masculine power—heavy woods, fragrant leather, deep carpeting. General Ballard, a large, intense man, maybe sixty, blazing eyes and shaved bullet head, fit the room perfectly. He sat next to the president, facing us across the table.

  “It’s just a different scale from what you did with ad Astra,” the general argued. We had used powerful lasers to vaporize things the size of grains of sand, and maneuvered out of the way of larger obstacles. “Same principle. Just going slower and dealing with more interference.”

  I had mixed feelings. I wanted Paul to be happy, and he’d always said he could never be happy without space. But having space hardly seemed possible anymore. Or smart.

  And after mourning for Mars, I started to feel a kind of long-repressed relief. I’ve spent half my life off Earth and was ready to try living here again. Imagine, oxygen and water and food that you didn’t have to recycle endlessly through yourself. Just let the planet do the recycling for you.

  We might even try raising actual children, maybe even making them the old-fashioned way. I was ready to start ovulating and being difficult once a month.

  Paul’s reaction pulled me out of my reverie. “No way it’s the same, General. Much more seat-of-the-pants.” They both smiled, jet jocks imagining a situation that would have a normal person quivering in fear.

  “And you’d want a lot of physical shielding,” Ballard said, “which wouldn’t help the handling characteristics.”

  “It would be a job and a half,” Paul said.

  The general laced his fingers together on the table and looked Paul straight in the eye. “You’d need the best pilot in the world.”

  The president hadn’t said a word. He looked at Paul expectantly.

  Paul’s expression was blank, but I could read him pretty well. He was choosing his words.

  “If the best pilot in the world… were also a lunatic, he might say yes. But no.”

  “We could do any number of practice runs in VR,” the general said. “You wouldn’t have to go up physically until you were sure.”

  “We wouldn’t want to lose you,” the president said.

  “But what else might we lose?” Paul shook his head. “It’s not the danger, the physical danger. It’s what the Others might do in reaction.”

  “They said it was a test,” the general said. “This is the most direct response.” What?

  “I respectfully disagree, sir. They’re not testing our ability to solve a tactical problem.”

  “It was a warning!” I blurted out. “I thought that was pretty clear.”

  The general looked at me. He tried without much success to keep condescension out of his voice: “He did use the word ‘test,’ Dr. Dula.” My father’s name. “It might be a warning at the same time, but against aggression, not simple space travel.”

  Dustin came to my defense. “General, that’s like saying someone who puts a high fence around his property doesn’t care whether people break in.”

  Elza added, “Nothing we learned at Wolf 25 indicated that they have anything like subtlety or patience. That was a punishment and a warning.”

  The president stood up. “Thank you all. This is all very valuable. We’ll talk more later… I have to go get camera- ready for the landing. General?”

  The general also stood and thanked us, and followed the president into the inner sanctum.

  “I sure feel valuable,” Elza said. “How do you feel?”

  “Doomed,” Dustin said. Paul nodded agreement.

  19

  INFALL

  All sorts of festivities had been planned for us hearty heroes, but their execution was somewhat muted by doom and gloom and the regular infall of meteors. A lot of expensive liquor was spilled at a congressional reception when a boulder the size of a grand piano redesigned a shopping mall in nearby Maryland, a town improbably named Rockville.

  By the time the sound reached us, it had attenuated to where it was only as loud as a land mine going off in the next room. I dove under a table and found two younger people had beaten me there; so much for combat reflexes. A good place to be when the chandeliers are raining glass, though, and the girl I had landed on was agreeably soft.

  Of course all the congratulatory speeches had to be rewritten with appropriate funereality, and I came to dread the cognitive dissonance that united them all in clumsiness. As if good things and bad things couldn’t happen at the same time. I suppose that if one is to stay sane as a soldier, that incongruent congruence always has to be there in some part of your mind: no matter how terrible are the things you have seen and done, in another country there is room for happiness and friendship, beauty and love.

  American soldiers in their war against Vietnam had a bleak catchphrase for when the worst happened: “Don’t mean nothin’.” I heard about that when I was a teenaged soldier generations later, and knew exactly what it meant. Nihilism is the soldier’s ultimate armor.

  Soldiering and the memory of Gehenna might have made it easier for me to accept the huge cataclysm of the Others’ revenge, easier not to surrender to anger. Don’t mean nothin’.

  There was a huge amount of anger in the air, understandably, and frustration—a profoundly powerful enemy who is absolutely beyond reach, now and for any foreseeable future.

  If the moon’s destruction had only deprived us of spaceflight, most people wouldn’t see it as a tragedy. For many people, space is just an expensive playground for scientists and the military. Keep that money and brainpower at home.

  But modern civilization needs satellites. Most communication and entertainment goes by optical fiber, with the satellites a backup except in primitive countries. But GPS devices are in the heart of every car and plane. Big-city traffic, dependent on computer control, froze solid. Nonessential flights were grounded. Computers died.

  Of course, we get some fallout from that. Even among the sophisticated government and news workers who are our daily companions, there is the undercurrent of blame, and it’s not undeserved, if someone does have to be blamed. We were the only people who could have done something, out where the Others live, and all we did was deliver the message, the lie, that precipitated this disaster.

  The plain fact that we could have been the aggressors—the kamikaze option—is generally known and widely discussed. From one very understandable point of view, we should not have considered any other course of action.

  It’s interesting that among our crew, only the Martians thought the kamikaze option was a reasonable idea, but to them death is an unremarkable event. It’s not as if we humans couldn’t do the math and apply the logic. What if we had all been Shinto or fundamentalist Moslem or Christian extremists? We might have just as universally discarded the idea of negotiation and blasted full speed ahead toward the enemy planet.

  That might be alien to our culture, but it’s not alien to human nature. In the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, suicide attacks have often been used as a practical response to an imbalance in technology. There were uneven results—the handful of suicide pilots in America’s 9/11 had a stupendous kill ratio, but the five thousand Japanese kamikazes only sank thirty-six ships. In both cases, though, it was an understandable military sacrifice, when the enemy’s technological bas
e made them unbeatable by conventional methods.

  And their situations were nothing compared to the technological imbalance between the human race and the Others. Should we feel guilty for not making the ultimate sacrifice? Do we deserve to be condemned as cowards? Having been there at the time, I’d say no. Those with the benefit of hindsight may feel differently.

  There have been threats on our lives. Our public appearances have two cadres of bodyguards, I found out—armed soldiers in uniform surrounding us, but twice as many in civilian clothes circulating in the audience.

  So I was relieved when the celebrations were abruptly canceled after two days. We didn’t get to return on Air Force One—would never see the president again—but took a spartan private jet back to California, where we’d left Snowbird.

  She was more or less hidden for the time being. As unpopular as the six of us were with the angry populace, we could only imagine how they would react to a Martian. Alien tools of the Others.

  She would eventually be moved to a sanctuary in Siberia, where conditions were more Mars-like. A foundation had been set up there when the quarantine was lifted, and now it would support as well as study the five or six Martians marooned on Earth. She would find edible Martian food growing there, and the company of her own kind. But she wanted to say good-bye to us first, and take a swim in the ocean.

  She would get that, but not much more.

  20

  THE LONGEST JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP

  The last person I talked to on Mars was my good old mentor Oz, who said he was not quite 64 years old now—that’s in Martian years, though, which comes to about 120 on Earth. He didn’t look a day over a hundred, though. Wizened and wrinkled, but still with a wry intelligent look and a sparkle in his eye.

  We were in the space communications room at Armstrong Space Force Base, where we’d landed from orbit. It was a bright clean room that felt old, too many coats of paint. Paul exchanged pleasantries with Oz, then left after the twelve-minute lag.

  “How bad is it, Oz? Can the colony survive without support from Earth?”

  Following the same protocol as we’d used fifty years before, Oz’s image froze on the screen when he hit the SEND button. I’d brought the Washington Post to read while the signals crawled back and forth.

  The only story about us was on page 14, and it wasn’t complimentary.

  Oz came back smiling. “We’re completely self-sufficient, Carmen; have been for more than twenty years. Human population’s over three thousand, a third of them native-born. Our living and farming space is probably twenty times what it was when you left.

  “The big debate over here is whether we should stay out of space; whether the Others meant to include us in their warning. There were no Martian ships in the fleet.

  “A majority says stay home. We have a Space Elevator, and they didn’t blow it down, but its only real function was as a terminal for the shuttle to and from Earth.

  “Personally, I think that Earth can go to hell in its own way. My big regret is that now you and Paul can’t come home. You could have a natural baby or two now; they solved the lung problem and recycled the mother machine for scrap.

  “And you’re still young enough. In-fucking-credible.

  “Look, I have to go off to the old folks’ dinner. Can you call me again tomorrow”—he looked offscreen—“about 1600 your time?”

  “Definitely at 1600,” I said. “If you have new art, bring some to show me.”

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  I heard Paul in the next room, one loud bad word. Went through the door and found him staring at a flatscreen monitor.

  “Shit,” he said. “Would you look at this?” It was a picture of a human newsie, male and handsome, standing in front of a familiar background: here. The Armstrong Space Force Base.

  “We on the news?”

  “Not really.” He picked up the chaser and ran it back a minute or two. There was an obviously simulated picture of a lander like ours taking off tail first, the way they did spaceflight before the Elevator.

  “Back to old-fashioned ways,” the newsie said. “Our Space Force is sending a rocket up into the cloud of rocks that now surrounds our planet, to get some close-up observations—and perhaps work its way through. Blasting the little obstacles with the powerful laser in its nose and maneuvering around the larger ones.

  “The Space Force confirms that they don’t believe this first try will actually penetrate the millions of miles of debris, but it will be a good start. And no human pilot will be endangered; all the flight controlled by virtual-reality interfacing. Rumor has it that the VR pilot will be none other than Paul ‘Crash’ Collins, back on Earth, still young through the magic of general relativity!”

  “Rumor has its head up its ass,” Paul said. “Nobody’s said anything to me.”

  “Could you do it? Would you?”

  “No, and no way in hell. I never trained for that kind of launch off Earth; only from Mars, where it’s a lot simpler. But more, it’s… it’s thumbing our nose at the Others. Are they insane?”

  Maybe they all are, I thought; the culture. “Maybe they have a more complicated plan. Looks like propaganda, doesn’t it?”

  He calmed down a little. “Might be. Shoot up an empty rocket that they know won’t make it through. Just to show that they’re doing something. But I won’t be in on it with them.”

  “Best we all stay out of it. Those crowds in Washington.” I leaned on a bookshelf and looked out the window at the dry brown hills. “Let’s get away, Paul. Just disappear from the public eye for a while. We have plenty of money.”

  He nodded. “The government would be glad to see us go. Let’s talk it over with everybody tonight. Have to arrange for Snowbird to get to that Siberia place safely.”

  “The swim first. That’s important to her.”

  We talked it over with the Space Force press people and came up with a workable plan. There was a beach to the north of the base, closed to the public, which would afford a good view of the launch. Snowbird could get her swim, and they would get publicity shots of us watching the launch. (With Paul “regrettably” declining the VR pilot’s seat; too tired and out of practice.) Then we could fade out of sight, to the relief of all concerned.

  Namir and Elza and Dustin wanted to go back to New York City. That didn’t sound smart to me. Elza thought with hair dye and a dab of makeup, they’d regain their former anonymity, lost in the crowd. I thought Namir was too handsome for that, and Dustin too weird-looking, his hair in spikes, but I kept it to myself.

  We had a last family dinner in the mess hall, Namir ecstatic at having actual steaks to grill. Real potatoes and fresh asparagus. Bottles of good California wine.

  I didn’t sleep well, and neither did Paul. Crazy days.

  Just at dawn, we all piled into Space Force vans and went down a bumpy gravel road to the beach. There was a hard beauty in the dusty, persistent plants.

  The ocean a churning, eternal miracle. Snowbird was awestruck, speechless.

  Paul and I rolled up our pant legs and waded into the frigid surf with her, hand in hand. “So warm,” she said. “Feel the sand.”

  We gave her a line to hold, just a clothesline that was in the back of the van, and she floated out past the breakers for a few minutes, Space Force divers watching her anxiously. They didn’t want to preside over the first Martian to die of drowning. She might have enjoyed the irony.

  The time for the launch approached. The camera crew had written our names in the sand (Dustin remarked on the metaphor) where we were supposed to stand. We took our positions and watched the countdown on the off-camera monitor.

  I had visions of the old twentieth-century launches, a roaring fury of fire and smoke. But they didn’t have free power. In our case it was kind of a hiss and a screech, a nuclear-powered steam engine. A blue-white star sizzling in its tail.

  It rose slowly. At first it looked like ad Astra, but of course it was one of the repli
cas they’d used for practice. The nose had some white stuff painted thickly on, which Paul called an “ablative layer.” I had to think of the thick white sunscreen he’d been wearing the day we met, in the Galápagos, the day before I left Earth.

  It was pretty high when the light in its tail went out. The monitor went out, too, then flickered back on as the sound of the rocket stopped abruptly.

  Spy again, on the monitor. Shaking its head.

  “You don’t listen, do you?”

  The rocket started falling in a tailspin, then rolled to point down.

  “I suppose we have to be less subtle.”

  The rocket nosed into the ocean, about a mile away, raising a high white spume.

  “All this energy that you call ‘free’ comes to you at the expense of a donor world in a nearby universe. You are donors now.” The monitor went dead.

  A tracking airplane pancaked into the sea and sank. Another plummeted to crash on the beach to the south.

  The camera crew were shouting into their phones.

  A jet plane that had been high screamed to its death in the sea.

  I went to my purse. The phone was blank. Namir slid into the driver’s seat of a van and punched the START button over and over.

  Snowbird stopped toweling herself and looked in some direction. “So this is the end,” she said, as if you had asked her for the time.

  “Idiots,” Paul said.

  “Surprise,” Dustin said.

  Even Elza was almost speechless. “So what do we do now?”

  For some reason they looked at me. I was standing at the gate. I tried it and it swung open, its electronic lock dead.

  “I think we better start walking.”

  Ace Books by Joe Haldeman

  WORLDS APART

  DEALING IN FUTURES

  FOREVER PEACE