“Yeah, I remember. But somehow we still never managed to save enough for a horse.” Karen sighed. “Do you think it was easy growing up with a bratty little sister dogging my footsteps, trying to imitate everything I did?”
“I wasn’t ever bratty.”
“You were too.”
“No, I wasn’t. I adored you.” Did she? “I worshipped you.”
“I know you did. Let me tell you, kid, that didn’t make it any easier. Do you think it was easy being worshipped? Having to be a paragon all the time? Christ, all through high school, when I wanted to get high, I had to sneak away and do it in private, or else I knew my damn kid sister would be doing it too.”
“You didn’t. You never.”
“Grow up, kid. Damn right I did. You were always right behind me. Everything I did, I knew you’d be right there doing it next. I had to struggle like hell to keep ahead of you, and you, damn you, followed effortlessly. You were smarter than me—you know that, don’t you?—and how do you think that made me feel?”
“Well, what about me? Do you think it was easy for me? Growing up with a dead sister—everything I did, it was ‘Too bad you can’t be more like Karen’ and ‘Karen wouldn’t have done it that way’ and ‘If only Karen had …’ How do you think that made me feel, huh? You had it easy—I was the one who had to live up to the standards of a goddamn angel.”
“Tough breaks, kid. Better than being dead.”
“Damn it, Karen, I loved you. I love you. Why did you have to go away?”
“I know that, kid. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. I love you too, but I have to go. Can you let me go? Can you just be yourself now, and stop trying to be me?”
“I’ll … I’ll try.”
“Goodbye, little sister.”
“Goodbye, Karen.”
She was alone in the settling shadows on an empty, rugged plain. Ahead of her, the sun was barely kissing the ridgetops. The dust she kicked up was behaving strangely; rather than falling to the ground, it would hover half a meter off the ground. She puzzled over the effect, then saw that all around her, dust was silently rising off the ground. For a moment she thought it was another hallucination, but then realized it was some kind of electrostatic charging effect. She moved forward again through the rising fog of moondust. The sun reddened, and the sky turned a deep purple.
The darkness came at her like a demon. Behind her only the tips of mountains were illuminated, the bases disappearing into shadow. The ground ahead of her was covered with pools of ink that she had to pick her way around. Her radio locator was turned on, but receiving only static. It could only pick up the locator beacon from the Moonshadow if she got in line of sight of the crash site. She must be nearly there, but none of the landscape looked even slightly familiar. Ahead—was that the ridge she’d climbed to radio Earth? She couldn’t tell. She climbed it, but didn’t see the blue marble. The next one?
The darkness had spread up to her knees. She kept tripping over rocks invisible in the dark. Her footsteps struck sparks from the rocks, and behind her footprints glowed faintly. Triboluminescent glow, she thought—nobody has ever seen that before. She couldn’t die now, not so close. But the darkness wouldn’t wait. All around her the darkness lay like an unsuspected ocean, rocks sticking up out of the tidepools into the dying sunlight. The undervoltage alarm began to warble as the rising tide of darkness reached her solar array. The crash site had to be around here somewhere, it had to. Maybe the locator beacon was broken? She climbed up a ridge and into the light, looking around desperately for clues. Shouldn’t there have been a rescue mission by now?
Only the mountaintops were in the light. She aimed for the nearest and tallest mountain she could see and made her way across the darkness to it, stumbling and crawling in the ocean of ink, at last pulling herself into the light like a swimmer gasping for air. She huddled on her rocky island, desperate as the tide of darkness slowly rose about her. Where were they? Where were they?
Back on Earth, work on the rescue mission had moved at a frantic pace. Everything was checked and triple-checked—in space, cutting corners was an invitation for sudden death—but still the rescue mission had been dogged by small problems and minor delays, delays that would have been routine for an ordinary mission, but loomed huge against the tight mission deadline.
The scheduling was almost impossibly tight—the mission had been set to launch in four months, not four weeks. Technicians scheduled for vacations volunteered to work overtime, while suppliers who normally took weeks to deliver parts delivered overnight. Final integration for the replacement for Moonshadow, originally to be called Explorer but now hastily re-christened Rescuer, was speeded up, and the transfer vehicle launched to the Space Station months ahead of the original schedule, less than two weeks after the Moonshadow crash. Two shuttle-loads of propellant swiftly followed, and the transfer vehicle was mated to its aeroshell and tested. While the rescue crew practiced possible scenarios on the simulator, the lander, with engines inspected and replaced, was hastily modified to accept a third person on ascent, tested, and then launched to rendezvous with Rescuer. Four weeks after the crash the stack was fueled and ready, the crew briefed, and the trajectory calculated. The crew shuttle launched through heavy fog to join their Rescuer in orbit.
Thirty days after the unexpected signal from the moon had revealed a survivor of the Moonshadow expedition, Rescuer left orbit for the moon.
From the top of the mountain ridge west of the crash site, Commander Stanley passed his searchlight over the wreckage one more time and shook his head in awe. “An amazing job of piloting,” he said. “Looks like she used the TEI motor for braking, and then set it down on the RCS verniers.”
“Incredible,” Tanya Nakora murmured. “Too bad it couldn’t save her.”
The record of Patricia Mulligan’s travels was written in the soil around the wreck. After the rescue team had searched the wreckage, they found the single line of footsteps that led due west, crossed the ridge, and disappeared over the horizon. Stanley put down the binoculars. There was no sign of returning footprints. “Looks like she wanted to see the moon before her air ran out,” he said. Inside his helmet he shook his head slowly. “Wonder how far she got?”
“Could she be alive somehow?” asked Nakora. “She was a pretty ingenious kid.”
“Not ingenious enough to breathe vacuum. Don’t fool yourself—this rescue mission was a political toy from the start. We never had a chance of finding anybody up here still alive.”
“Still, we had to try, didn’t we?”
Stanley shook his head and tapped his helmet. “Hold on a sec, my damn radio’s acting up. I’m picking up some kind of feedback—almost sounds like a voice.”
“I hear it too, Commander. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
The voice was faint in the radio. “Don’t turn off the lights. Please, please, don’t turn off your light … .”
Stanley turned, to Nakora. “Do you … ?”
“I hear it, Commander … but I don’t believe it.”
Stanley picked up the searchlight and began sweeping the horizon. “Hello? Rescuer calling Astronaut Patricia Mulligan. Where the hell are you?”
The spacesuit had once been pristine white. It was now dirty gray with moondust, only the ragged and bent solar array on the back carefully polished free of debris. The figure in it was nearly as ragged.
After a meal and a wash, she was coherent and ready to explain.
“It was the mountaintop. I climbed the mountaintop to stay in the sunlight, and I just barely got high enough to hear your radios.”
Nakora nodded. “That much we figured out. But the rest—the last month—you really walked all the way around the moon? Eleven thousand kilometers?”
Trish nodded. “It was all I could think of. I figured, about the distance from New York to LA and back—people have walked that and lived. It came to a walking speed of just under ten miles an hour. Farside was the hard part—turned out to be much ro
ugher than nearside. But strange and weirdly beautiful, in places. You wouldn’t believe the things I saw.”
She shook her head, and laughed quietly. “I don’t believe some of the things I saw. The immensity of it—we’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll be coming back, Commander. I promise you.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Commander Stanley. “I’m sure you will.”
As the ship lifted off the moon, Trish looked out for a last view of the surface. For a moment she thought she saw a lonely figure standing on the surface, waving her goodbye. She didn’t wave back.
She looked again, and there was nothing out there but magnificent desolation.
FOR WHITE HILL
Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) was in Canada when his draft notice arrived in his mailbox in 1967. When he arrived home to find the envelope from the Selective Service, despite thoughts of getting back in the car and heading back across the border, he opened the envelope and ultimately went to Vietnam. Though he was a pacifist and had tried to apply for conscientious objector status, he went because he wanted to become an astronaut. His first novel was a distinguished young adult book, War Year (1972), and his novel 1968 (1995) is an ambitious attempt to represent and confront a year spent as a soldier in Vietnam. His experiences as a soldier have informed much of his most important work.
When he was drafted, he had already written the first two science fiction stories he would sell. And before going into the army, Haldeman had earned an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. After his return he earned an MFA in writing. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Gay.
Although there were always political divides in SF, it has been said that the famous magazine ads taken out by groups of SF writers listing their names in Galaxy magazine in 1968, one to express opposition to, and the other to express support for, the Vietnam War, would serve as well as anything to mark the beginning of an overt divide of hard SF from the rest of the field. From that perspective, Haldeman’s work, in particular The Forever War, is an interesting precursor to the political changes in hard SF over the past decade of so. It may be read in different ways from the left (anti-military and anti-imperialist) and the right (patriotic military adventure about the suffering of the ordinary soldier).
Haldeman is now one of the great living science fiction writers, known worldwide particularly for his hard SF adventure stories. His SF novels include The Forever War (1974), which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, Mindbridge (1976), Buying Time (1989), and The Hemingway Hoax (1990). His most recent novel is The Coming (2001), a first contact novel set in Gainesville, Florida, in 2054. In 1999, he published a sequel to The Forever War, and to Forever Peace (1997), which won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, entitled Forever Free. His short fiction ranges from humor to horror, but most often has a darkness deep within it. Such is “For White Hill”: a romance, set against the staggering background of the approaching doom of Earth, about the role of art in the face of apocalypse. This was one of five fine novellas (by Haldeman, Greg Bear, Donald M. Kingsbury, Charles Sheffield, and Poul Anderson) in Far Futures.
“For White Hill” is an unusual example of hard SF as an experimental literary exercise. Judith Clute and Ellen R. Weil published an essay on the story (excerpted here from The New York Review of Science Fiction) explaining that
Haldeman’s novella … is his most deliberate use yet of the arts as a structuring device for his fiction. Set in a far future Earth devastated by an apparently hopeless war with superior aliens, “For White Hill” is a very sensual and romantic love story, and is also one of Haldeman’s most thorough explorations of the artist’s mind to date. Furthermore, it is a rarity among science fiction stories in that it achieves its effects by using, in almost equal measure, the resources of the literary and visual arts. “For White Hill” describes, in fourteen segments of varying lengths, a meeting in the distant future between two artists, brought to a burnt-out and nearly abandoned Earth as part of a context in which artists from many planets are asked to create memorial works inspired by the ruins. Two important clues point toward the key to this story’s main literary source. One is the dedicatory title, “For White Hill,” which subtly echoes Shakespeare’s famous dedication of his sonnets to “Mr. W. H.” … The other is the story’s fourteen-part structure. In the published versions of the text, these numbered sections (marked only by mathematical symbols in the manuscript) suggest that the story itself follows the movement of a sonnet. And in fact the story is an expansion of not only the theme but of the precise images of Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” With few exceptions, each segment of the story takes the corresponding line from the sonnet and transforms it into a literal part of the narrative. Haldeman’s story (almost) ends with the words, “After the sun is a cinder, and the ship is a frozen block enclosing a thousand bits of frozen flesh, she will live on in this small way” (279). Shakespeare’s sonnet ends with the line “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines—not just thinking machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.
Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then, ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.
Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was “roach,” or at least that’s as close as English allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.
One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over fifty. You can’t defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between “How are you?” and “Fine.”
The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located. There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians, religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general, and sterilized the world.
White Hill and I were “bred” for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.
I didn’t like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.
When I worked through the final airlock cycle, for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue
and green body paint. Everything else around was gray and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of gray and black and cobalt sky.
“Welcome home,” she said. “You’re Water Man.”
She inflected it properly, which surprised me. “You’re from Petros?”
“Of course not.” She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. “Galan, an island on Seldene. I’ve studied your cultures, a little language.”
“You don’t dress like that on Seldene, either.” Not anywhere I’d been on the planet.
“Only at the beach. It’s so warm here.”
I had to agree. Before I came out, they’d told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock, which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.
She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. “My name is White Hill. Zephyr-Meadow-Torrent.”
“Where are the others?” I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world. The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.
“Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration.”
“You’ve already been around?”
“No.” She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. “All the story’s here, anywhere. It isn’t really about history or culture.”
Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. “Did you visit my world when you were studying it?”
“No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago.” She smiled at me. “It was almost as beautiful as I’d imagined it.” She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn’t say it precisely in English, which doesn’t have a palindromic mood: Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 78