by Ben Bova
“Two hundred years,” said Brad, hiking his rump onto one of the stools lining the bar.
“And another two hundred going home,” Felicia said as she placed the bouquet on the kitchen’s narrow table.
“What made you do it?” Brad asked. “What made you come out on this expedition?”
She pursed her lips, almost frowned. “I don’t know. It sounded … important. My thesis advisor said I’d be able to write my own ticket when I returned home. We all will, I imagine.”
“But … four hundred years,” Brad said. “Nobody we know will still be alive by the time we get back.”
Tightly, Felicia said, “That was one of the reasons I joined this mission. There are some people I don’t want to see again.”
Her face was dead serious. Not angry, not sorrowful, just—determined. She’s got a strong will, Brad thought. And guts.
“What about your parents?” he asked.
“My father’s remarried. He’s not interested in me.” Then, brightening, she said, “My mother’s had herself frozen, with instructions to be awakened when I return to Earth.”
“Wow. That takes guts.”
“She’s a gutsy woman.”
“Like you.”
Felicia stared at him, then turned to check the microwave.
Brad realized he’d been stupid. What if she asks me why I came out here? What can I tell her? Would she understand, or would she think I’m a coward, a failure?
But Felicia turned her attention to setting the table. When Brad offered to help she cheerfully told him to stay out of her way.
“The kitchen’s too small for two people to work in it,” Felicia insisted.
Once they sat down at the kitchen’s foldout table to eat dinner, Brad hardly paid attention to the food, or to the ice-cold white wine Felicia proffered. His attention was entirely focused on her.
“I’ll call you every day,” Felicia said. “I won’t let you get lonely.”
Thinking that a call was a lot different from actually being together, Brad said, “That’ll be wonderful.”
At last dinner was finished, they drank the last of the wine, and Brad sat staring across the little table at her, certain of what he wanted to do, but uncertain of how to go about doing it.
Felicia solved his problem. Without a word, she got up from the table, took his hand, and led him to the bedroom.
* * *
Hours later, as they lay sweaty and spent in bed together, Brad whispered, “I wish I didn’t have to go.”
“You’re spending the night here, aren’t you?” She sounded surprised, almost alarmed.
“I meant go to Alpha,” he explained. “I want to stay here. With you.”
“I’ll wait for you, Brad.”
“And I’ll wish for you.”
“It won’t be that long, will it?”
“Three months, at least.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“I’ll be alone out there. In exile.”
Felicia was silent for several long moments. Brad could feel her breathing as she lay against him.
At last she whispered, “We’re all in exile, aren’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone aboard this ship, everyone on this mission, we’ve exiled ourselves from Earth, from home. For four hundred years. We’ll never get back to the world that we left.”
He let out a long, sighing breath. “I’ve got nothing to go back to.”
“I volunteered for this mission.”
“We all did.”
“My fiancé had just dumped me,” she confessed. “I felt I had nothing to keep me on Earth. That’s the real reason.”
“He must have been an idiot.”
“No. He was ambitious, all right, but not stupid.”
Brad said, “Everybody on the ship has left their home, their family, everything they ever knew.”
“Why? Why would they willingly go on this one-way trip? Even when we return to Earth, hundreds of years will have passed. It won’t be our home anymore. We’ll be strangers there.”
“The official explanation is that we’ve volunteered to help save intelligent aliens from the death wave.”
“But that’s not the real reason, is it?”
“No, it’s not. Every person on this mission has a real, inner reason for exiling themselves like this.”
“My reason was stupid. I wanted to get away from my ex-fiancé. A silly little girl’s reason.”
“You’re not a silly little girl. He must have hurt you a lot.”
“What was your reason?”
Brad’s breath caught in his throat. Finally, he confessed, “I let my family die. I stood out there, safely, while they were crushed to death by the avalanche. I didn’t even try to help them.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t even try to help them,” Brad repeated. “I should have at least tried.”
Felicia wrapped her arms around him. “I’m glad you didn’t. I’m glad you lived and you’re here and we’re together.”
“I am too,” Brad admitted. And, with some surprise, he realized it was true.
BOOK TWO
Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep, in exile…?
—Arthur Rimbaud
EXILED
Brad unbuckled himself and floated weightlessly up from the treadmill. The shuttlecraft was in orbit around planet Alpha and he was effectively in zero gravity. That meant a ruthless regimen of physical exercise to maintain his muscle tone. Otherwise he’d be a helpless cripple when he returned to Odysseus.
He was no stranger to hard, remorseless physical exercise. Born and raised in the gentle gravity of Mars, Brad had to work mercilessly to meet the rigors of Earth’s heavier g load. He remembered the pain and embarrassment of those months in Kazakhstan, but finally he passed the physical tests and was certified to join the starship mission.
He ran an absorbing towel over his sweaty face, his nose twitching with distaste at his own body odor. Better put everything in the washer, he told himself, before the smell knocks me out.
Reaching a hand up to the overhead panels, he pushed himself over to the wall screen that showed the bloated, oblate planet he was orbiting. Beyond Alpha’s colorful bands of clouds he could see the star Mithra, deep red, its surface mottled with seething bubbles of roiling plasma. It seemed to be glowering at him angrily.
He called out for the calendar display. He knew it by heart but still he needed to see it. Yes, he saw: I’ve been in this orbital Siberia for nine weeks now; three more to go.
He had all the communications and entertainment gear that could be crammed into the craft’s narrow command center. Everything from holographic displays to links to Odysseus’s formidable library of entertainment videos. Plus, in his sleeping compartment, his personal virtual reality system that could produce nearly perfect simulations of anything from swimming among the tentacled denizens of Alpha to sexual gymnastics with a bevy of imaginary women.
But it was Felicia he ached for. If it weren’t for her daily calls, he would have gone insane with loneliness weeks ago.
Now he hovered before the three-dimensional display stage, waiting for her to call his name.
“Brad?”
His heart leaped. There she was, warm, smiling, beautiful.
“Hello, Fil.”
They couldn’t really have conversations; the distance between them was too great. It took slightly more than three minutes for messages to get from his shuttlecraft orbiting Alpha to the starship at Gamma and then back again. Awkward. Inconvenient. Yet he treasured every moment of their being together, even so tentatively.
The starship had a faster-than-light communications link with Earth that sent messages back and forth across two hundred-some light-years within less than an hour. At the distance between Brad and Felicia the FTL system could make it seem that they were in the same room, conversing normally with no discernable time lag. But Captain Desai had re
fused to allow Brad to bring such equipment with him on the shuttlecraft. Too delicate. Not enough spares. Excuses, Brad knew. The wrath of Kosoff.
So he and Felicia spoke and waited, listened and waited, longed for each other’s touch. And waited.
It’s a good thing that she can’t smell me, Brad thought. Then he wondered what perfume she might be wearing.
“Dr. Steiner has decided to send a small team down to the surface of Gamma to collect plant and animal specimens,” Felicia was saying. “They’re trying to determine a spot where the team is least likely to be seen by the locals.”
Brad listened, but most of his attention was on Felicia’s face. She was smiling pleasantly, and in the holographic image she looked close enough to touch, to fold into his arms, to feel the warmth of her body, smell the scent of her hair.
Stop it! Brad commanded himself. You’ll drive yourself crazy.
At last she asked, “So what’s new with you, Brad?”
It took him a moment to realize that he should reply. “You know,” he began, “I’m actually making some progress on making sense out of the octopods’ beeps and squeaks. I mean, the neuronal analysis system’s making some progress. It’s identified several sounds as meaningful words, like ‘food,’ ‘heat,’ and ‘cold.’ I bet if we got a couple of the real linguists here we’d be able to decipher their entire language.”
And then he waited. Turning weightlessly, he called up the images that the underwater cameras had recorded: the octopus-like creatures in that vast world-spanning ocean gliding through the water, graceful as ballet dancers.
“Brad, that’s wonderful!” Felicia beamed. “Have you shown your results to the linguistics team?”
“Dr. Littlejohn has. I report to him and he keeps the linguistics team’s chief informed about my results.”
As he waited for Felicia’s reply, he seethed inwardly at the awkward system of reporting his results. Kosoff demanded the strictly hierarchical chain of command. That way I don’t get any credit for anything, Brad knew. He’s using me as a technician, not a researcher.
With so much time on his hands, Brad had started to study the data that the shuttlecraft’s sensors were obtaining about Alpha’s physical conditions. Ocean temperature profiles, cloud cover, weather patterns, migratory paths of the octopods, heat inputs from Mithra across the planet. He was amassing considerable information. When I get back I’ll hand it all over to Littlejohn, Brad thought sourly, and let him parcel it out to the various departments. Keep Kosoff’s red-tape factory stumbling along.
But Felicia didn’t seem to understand the implications. She beamed at his progress with the octopods’ primitive language. “Brad, you could make meaningful contact with another intelligent species!”
“I’d rather make meaningful contact with you,” he blurted, then waited, embarrassed, fearful of how she might react.
Felicia’s holographic image broke into a healthy laugh. “When you get back, Brad. When you get back.”
Almost fearfully, he asked, “Um … Kosoff hasn’t been hassling you, has he?”
And then he waited, waited for the answer he dreaded.
But Felicia shook her head and replied, “He hasn’t even said hello to me. Not since you left. It’s as if I don’t exist anymore, as far as he’s concerned.”
Brad thought, He’s made his point. He’s shown the whole staff that anyone who gets in his way gets stomped flat.
Aloud, he merely said, “That’s good.”
But he thought that Felicia looked troubled, almost as if she resented Kosoff’s coolness.
* * *
Hours later, as Brad was getting ready for sleep, the communications console chimed. Wearing only his pajama bottoms, Brad wriggled out of the mesh cocoon that served as his zero-gravity bed and manually activated the comm set.
It was a recorded message from Dr. Littlejohn. “Brad, Professor Kosoff is very pleased with the progress you’re making. So pleased that he’s thinking of extending your stay at Alpha. I told him that that’s completely unacceptable. You’re due to return to Odysseus in three weeks and he can send someone else out there to continue your work. He wasn’t pleased, but he finally agreed with me.”
Suddenly wide awake, Brad replied, “Thanks, Dr. Littlejohn. I appreciate your sticking your neck out for me.”
And he thought, I only hope that Kosoff doesn’t cut it off.
* * *
When handed a lemon, Brad told himself over and over, make lemonade.
In the solitude of his exile, Brad decided to fill the empty hours by learning as much about philology and the automated probes he had dropped into Alpha’s ocean as he could.
Emcee, back on the starship, had an extensive tutoring program among its files. After several days of mind-numbing bleakness aboard the orbiting shuttlecraft, Brad had his ship’s computer copy Emcee’s tutorial program.
To his happy surprise, the program had a personality, a lean-faced, mild-speaking human that for some reason called itself Jonesey. It spoke with a slight accent that Brad couldn’t identify, but it was always available whenever he called on it, and it was there in the shuttlecraft with him. No time lag.
Over the weeks of his exile, Jonesey explained how the neuronal analysis equipment used neutrino scans to see which parts of the octopods’ brains were activated when they communicated with one another.
“And that works underwater?” Brad had asked.
With a wry smile, Jonesey replied, “The neutrinos go through the seawater as if it wasn’t there. The big trick with neutrinos is to get a few of them to register on your receiving equipment.”
Little by little, Brad learned how the analysis system compared the octopods’ brain activity to the actions they took. How certain flurries of neural sparks were connected to activities.
“Connecting neural excitement to abstract concepts is much more difficult,” Jonesey told Brad, his computer-generated face looking grave, concerned. “But with enough sampling it can be done. Tentatively, of course.”
“Of course,” said Brad.
The octopods didn’t seem to mind the strange objects that had appeared in the ocean among them. At first they had assailed the probes with intense chattering, then approached the devices and touched them with their tentacles. Within a few days they were ignoring the alien probes that floated alongside them, and went about their business as if they didn’t exist.
Brad concluded, They’ve decided that the probes aren’t dangerous and they’re not food. That’s where their curiosity ends, I guess.
But as his understanding of the octopods’ language grew, he learned differently.
The probes swam along with the swarm of octopods, powered by nuclear generators capable of running for years. They regularly sent bursts of audio information to the ocean’s surface, where the acoustic waves were detected by minisatellites that dipped into the planet’s atmosphere briefly to pick up the signals. The minisats, in turn, relayed the data they received to the shuttlecraft.
The octopods avoided those data bursts. Within the first few days they learned to move out of the way whenever the probes sent their messages toward the surface of the sea.
They learn pretty quickly, Brad realized. Probably the intense audio bursts are painful to them.
Pain makes man think, Brad recalled from somewhere in his childhood. Thought makes man wise.
So they say, Brad told himself. So they say.
BRAD’S DREAM
Brad drifted into his sleeping compartment and stared at the mesh cocoon hanging limply against one of the bulkheads. He had put off trying to sleep for as long as he could, forcing himself to stay awake even when his eyelids grew as heavy as anvils.
He knew that if he slept he would dream. The same dream. Its details changed now and then, but it was always the same.
Now, so weary that, as he hung weightlessly in the middle of the narrow sleep compartment fighting against his body’s need for sleep, he knew that his struggle was futile.
Sooner or later he would fall asleep. Better to succumb in the zero-g cocoon than while trying to operate the ship’s systems.
He had thought of asking the ship’s doctors, back on Odysseus, for some medication that would block out the dream. But that would mean explaining why he was troubled and he’d end up being examined by the psychiatrists, or worse, being taken off duty entirely. And he certainly didn’t want Kosoff to know about his problem.
So, wearily, warily, he peeled off his coveralls and popped them into the washer, then slid into the mesh cocoon and zippered it up to his chin.
He commanded the lights to shut down, then stared into the enveloping darkness. Totally dark, except for the unblinking red light at the base of the comm console.
Just like my room at Tithonium. Dark. Black as night. Dark as death.
The dream always began the same way. He was jarred from his sleep by a rumbling, growling sound. Like some alien beast snarling at him.
Fourteen-year-old Brad sat up in his bed. Mom and Dad were in the next room, he knew. Davie was in the bed next to his own.
The room was shaking.
And somehow Brad was outside, out in the open, wearing a pressure suit and helmet, standing on the floor of Tithonium Chasma, and it was bright daylight. The wall of the canyon rose up, a serrated sheer scarp that ran more than a thousand kilometers in either direction. Atop the rim, the Martian sky was a dull butterscotch yellow-brown.
Suddenly a streak of fire blazed across that sky. A meteor, young Brad understood. A big one. It roared terrifyingly as it disappeared over the canyon rim. And exploded.
The concussion knocked Brad off his feet. And the red, rock-strewn ground beneath him was shaking, trembling as if some invisible, gigantic, monstrous hand was shaking it. Pebbles skittered and jittered as Brad climbed shakily to his booted feet. Pressure-suited people were running away from the crumbling chasm wall. Rocks were tumbling down the scarp, some as big as houses. They fell slowly, almost leisurely, in the low Martian gravity, but still smashed whatever they hit as they struck the chasm floor.