We felt it blow more powerfully than we had ever felt anything blast since we’d left Earth. The ground shook us all so we tumbled; no one could stand through the violence of the tremor. But only Nikita and Yuen looked up. The rest of us started to run as soon as we felt the first shock.
I don’t remember how I got back to Romulus Base. One of the older kids, I guess, or one of the colder ones, Nikita or Simon or Ana Luz, got us all back. We hadn’t wandered so far.
The base remained untouched. Victor and Madison looked at the sky and held each other, sobbing. Then they said we had to leave. Now.
We asked where our parents were, and Madison said carefully that they had all been killed in an ice plume. That we had to get back to Earth immediately. That we had to prioritize and pack, food and water, suits and tanks first, then records and samples, whatever we could salvage.
Victor sank to his knees, wrapped his arms around himself and started to rock back and forth. He said nothing intelligible for months. I understood much later that they would have heard our parents die.
We hauled what we could to the transport, food packs and water. Our parents had been strong people, large and powerful, but we were all small for our ages. Stunted by the lack of food, by the lack of gravity to work out muscles, we tired easily and had trouble getting even the barest necessities stowed away. Paul Song, the smallest of us, though not the youngest, downloaded the records, or as many as he could get over.
The ground shook at times and reminded us that we were not on solid ice, that we could be blasted out to Jupiter or churned into ice. We went too fast in our fear, we ran as fast as we could, as we dared. We wanted to finish and be gone from this place that had become a nightmare.
I am not so sure we even cared so much about remaining alive, but getting away was something to fix our minds on rather than the fear. Better to go through checklists, to calculate escape velocity and fuel reserves than think about the body of my mother hurled toward Jupiter, cremated in its atmosphere
I took navigation; even before we left Earth my talent for mathematics had been clear. Aunt Olga had offered to keep me home so I could attend the best math schools in the country, maybe the world. How many times on Europa did I wish I were back on Earth instead of far away? I had wondered constantly why my mother had insisted on dragging me off when I could have remained in Moscow and won school prizes and worn dresses and shoes and not a vacuum suit whenever I left the enclosure. Where people would have praised me and paid attention the way they always had and said what a prodigy I was instead of having only this pack of unevenly educated kids as friends. Didn’t she know my life was horrible?
And then she was dead. Gone forever. I did not mourn so much at first, but later, later …
I had to navigate. Madison stepped in as pilot and she was barely qualified. Her training was in evolutionary biology and she’d only completed the required safety training for any crewmember. All she knew were the basics of how to fly. Victor, who had been one of Mama’s graduate students, was no better trained, and less help. Nikita was more use; Madison taught him enough that he could spell her so she could sleep. Ana Luz organized the younger children into life support, Paul took care of the onboard computer systems and little Hailan turned out to be quite good at mechanics. Every hour I worried about asteroids, gravitation and fuel requirement and how to get home. I had constant nightmares of getting the reentry angle wrong and burning us all alive. To this day I wake up in panic thinking that I am burning, burning, dying inside the Rosemary Yalow.
The only way I could remain sane was to focus on the math. Trajectories, geometries moving through space, distant, abstract equations that had nothing to do with life or death, that comforted me in their stillness, were my safety. They whispered to me and I could see into them, see the next movement and the one after as if it were a thing done. So I moved into that space in my mind, where only the equations existed. Nothing threatened me there. Nothing hurt and no one died. Here in the equations only truth existed, and the deeper I went into the truth the more clearly I could see it. Why would I ever want to leave that place for the real world of hurt and fear and lies?
And then we began to get sick, one by one. First Ana Luz, and then Carlos. Nikita and Madison had to get Victor to take the helm although he wasn’t able to speak, but both of them were sick. And me, I ignored the symptoms for as long as I could. We were so very close to Earth by then and I believed Earth would be my salvation.
I was wrong. Earth is full of nightmares. Only in the world of mathematics am I safe.
* * *
I read my mother’s private memoire during the months we flew out, and I was surprised by how deeply I felt for her. I was amazed at her courage. What had appeared as fragility all my life attested to a kind of nerve beyond anything I had ever imagined. She never spoke of her time on Europa or her mother’s death. Only when I told her I was going, in the dining room of my grandparents’ apartment, she surprised us all.
Dad brought Mama in. As always, she was the only blonde, porcelain white skinned person in a room full of black people, and she was a good four inches shorter than anyone else at the gathering (Sergei’s French wife being the next smallest and fairest member of the family). She looked delicate, her wide blue eyes haunted, still so thin that one might think that she had never seen a decent dinner since her return to Earth. We gathered around the same table where we had every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner and birthday and graduation party in my life. Sergei served some fancy concoction and Grandpa George stood up. “I believe we are here because our brand new Dr. Anna has an announcement.”
I stood up to general applause, though they’d called me “doctor” to death a month earlier at my graduation.
“I’ve got an amazing opportunity for my post-doc,” I started, not daring to look at my parents. “I’m one of the geologists for Michael Liang’s expedition and we’ll be leaving in eighteen months.” I took a deep breath. “For Europa.”
Dead silence. Then I glanced under my lashes to see my mother smiling slightly. She nodded. “Yes, I always knew you’d go,” she said as everyone else held their breath. “You are just like her, you know. My mother. Tatyana Kolninskaya. You are her very image.”
Which I found very hard to believe since Kolninskaya had been all the colors of ice, white skin and pale blue eyes and platinum hair.
“And now,” she said with a quiver to her voice, “let us enjoy this wonderful meal Sergei has made. It will be a long time before I have all my children together again.”
She even tried to smile. Was this the mother I had known as a child? I was in awe of her courage.
* * *
I was right about the vent. We drilled and took samples and this time it was Liang who didn’t sleep. We had to make our re-entry window, but he wanted to make every minute count. On our twentieth dinner he announced that he had confirmed an actual cell sample from the vent area. True extraterrestrial life.
“I’ll still have to run more screens for contamination,” he said when he made the announcement. “But the first pass looks like no match to anything of Earth origin.”
* * *
I spent the week before we left for Europa in Brooklyn. The day before I had to leave, Mama took me for a walk around the Japanese garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. We wandered around the reflecting pond with the azaleas and cherry trees and drifting willows, all as serene as my mother appeared. We sat for a while on one of the benches in silence, just appreciating the scene.
Then she pressed a chip into my hand. “My memoire,” she said. “Of Europa. I’ve never shown anyone, not even your father. But you are so much like my mother, and you’re going there.”
But as she pressed it into my hand, she did not let go of my palm and we sat together, her tiny bird fingers strong, grasping my much larger hand.
“What do you mean that I’m like your mother?” I had to ask. The whole idea confused me. I thought of myself as a Taylor, as very much l
ike Grandma Fritzie and perhaps Dad.
She smiled softly. “You need so deeply to know things. You are so passionate. You are strong and single-minded. But also, you love. That is the gift you gave me. I wondered why my mother took me to Europa, why she did not leave me in Moscow with Aunt Olga.”
“Aunt Olga is a twit,” I couldn’t help but respond.
Mama laughed. “Agreed. But more, I realized, I realized for myself when you children were born, and the more I knew you, that she took me because she wanted me with her. We believed it was safe then, after the Lunar colony established protocols for children living in space communities. She enjoyed my company. She told me what she did in the day, what interested her, why she loved the ice. I think she was sad because I did not love it, too.”
“So it’s okay.”
She smiled. “We’re surrounded by these cherry trees. You know what the Japanese say about the cherry blossoms and their beauty. I think that is true of all life, of all of us. Come back to me, my Anna. You are so like my mother, so unafraid, so sure about your great adventure. Come back.”
Growing up I thought Mama was weak and afraid of everything. This woman before me was something different, some person I had never seen before. I held her very hard against my chest and if I cried on her shoulder, no one saw.
* * *
Contamination. I could not get the idea out of my head that the earlier mission had compromised our findings. I told him about how all those who returned from Romulus had become seriously sick on the voyage back.
“Most doctors thought that was a result of food that had turned, Anna. And we have always been aware there was some possibility of contamination,” he said after a while. “But I’ve done the comparisons and run the numbers and the tests. And what we have found, what we have in this sample, does not show any sign of contamination. The sequences are too radically different from any terrestrial life that we know, at least so far. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, of course, and I’ll take it into consideration.”
* * *
Our return trip was fairly uneventful. I started writing up the papers that I would submit on my return and Richard and I started talking about more than just geology. We had another year to go on the post-doc, and then there was job hunting and the two-body problem, and it’s not exactly like there are a million jobs screaming out there for geologists. But both of us decided not to think about it until after we finished our post-docs.
Mama and Dad had come down to Houston to spend some time with me while I did the de-comp and re-established my wobbly Earth legs. I knew it was a big deal for Mama especially, but she was smiling, normal, even when everybody in the flight center tried not to stare at her (though one of the interns did ask for her autograph on one of her books, which she granted graciously, and even let him snap a selfie with her and said book). Though most of the time it was both my parents with me and Richard, Mama and I did ditch the guys to get our nails done, and so that Mama could talk to me alone. But she didn’t want to talk about Richard, or even about Europa.
“You are so much like her, Anna. So curious, so brave, so absorbed in what you do. Did you read what I gave you?”
I nodded.
She bit her lip and the two little lines between her blue eyes stood out hard. “I don’t know, Annushka, if you can tell me, but you are like her. What do you think? Why do you think she took me with her to that place? Why didn’t she leave me safe in Moscow?”
“Mama,” I took my one dry hand and touched the back of her arm. “She took you because she couldn’t bear to be away from you. Don’t you see it? And when you say I’m like her, I’m like you. I’m just like you. But maybe not as brave.”
“But I am not brave and I hate the ice,” she said.
“Mama, you’re the bravest person I know. But look at this.”
I showed her my first article from the Europa mission right there in Geology. With me as first author. Anna Kolninskaya Taylor. “And I’ve been offered a more senior position on the Enceladus team as well.”
Mama blinked and swallowed hard. “You will go out again?”
I smiled. “No, Mama. I’ve done what I had to do. It’s a robot mission. I don’t need to go out again.”
The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello
DAVID GERROLD
David Gerrold has been writing science fiction for fifty years, leaving a long trail of novels, scripts, short stories, columns, and articles in his wake. His TV work includes episodes of Star Trek, Land of the Lost, Twilight Zone, Babylon 5, and Sliders. (He created Tribbles for Star Trek in one of that series’ most famous episodes, and Sleestaks for Land of the Lost.) His novels include the time-travel classic, The Man Who Folded Himself, When HARLIE Was One, The Dingilliad Trilogy of YA novels, The Star Wolf Trilogy, and The War Against the Chtorr series. In 1994, Gerrold shared the adventure of how he adopted his son in The Martian Child, a semi-autobiographical tale of a science fiction writer who discovers his adopted child might be a Martian. The Martian Child won the science fiction triple crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Poll. It was the basis for the 2007 film Martian Child starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. (The book is better.)
The fast-paced story that follows is a posthumous sequel to Theodore Sturgeon’s well-known story, “Mr. Costello, Hero.” In this one, the eponymous Mr. Costello, a shrewd and persuasive con man with nobody’s better interests at heart except his own, arrives on a frontier colony planet to pitch a grandiose scheme that could change life on the colony forever, and becomes entangled with—and, eventually, opposed by—a pioneering farming family, one of whom gradually realizes the terrible effects Mr. Costello’s scheme could have if it succeeds. This one is a lot of fun, in tone reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels, with a hefty dose of John Varley mixed in as well, one of the year’s most enjoyable reads. If you hear somebody say, “They don’t write ’em like that anymore,” here’s proof that they do.
Haven? Yeah, it used to be a nice place, great place even.
You could raise a podful of kids and not have to worry about traffic and cities and taxes—we didn’t have any. In the evening, we’d sit out on the front porch and watch the suns go down, double sunsets worth staying up late for—one red, one blue, and sometimes the two of them together would edge the howling green sky with orange and yellow streamers so brilliant you had to put on goggles. The best was when they lit up the spiral rings that arced across the southern sky, shimmering the night for hours.
There was a fella one time, he said, “There ain’t no Earth-like planets; there’s only wishful thinkin’.” Well, maybe so, but he never saw Haven. It’s as close to the homeworld as I ever found, and I bounced across fifty planets before finally coming to rest on this one. It’s an unlikely planet in an unlikely place—an ephemeral zone of livability around a binary dance, but somehow all the unlikelies cancelled each other out and Haven was the result. A 37-hour day, 93-percent Earth-gee, a dollop more oxygen, a thirty-seven-degree tilt on the axis which made for some spectacular seasons, and a temperate zone that stretched around the planet’s equator like a slippery cummerbund. Yeah, I know what a cummerbund is. Second time I had to wear one, it was time to move on.
I bounced lucky and ended up in a contract family with four beautiful wives and two strong husbands—well, most of the time, except when we switched around, which wasn’t too often, unless one of us wanted to get pregnant, which hadn’t happened yet because we weren’t ready to start a tank-farm and didn’t want to rent a gestation bottle somewhere else, either. As a family, we only had one rule: nobody ever goes to bed hungry or angry; the rest was details. That rule lasted as long as the contract did. Which was quite a long time, and probably would have been a lot longer if it hadn’t been for him.
Some people can’t handle contracts, no big deal to me, I like ’em when I find one that suits me. A few years in a can wrestling vacuum, you learn how to live close with others. Some people don’t learn, and that
buys them a one-way ticket out the airlock. I knew several captains more than happy to sign the warrant. That’s how they got well-behaved crews.
On Haven, though, if you and a neighbor started bumping heads, either he got up and moved or you did. One or t’other. Wasn’t that hard; most of the houses were already on wheels. Our closest neighbor was a fella named Jasper, ten klicks to the west, but as long as he kept to himself we all got along fine. He was a good man, when he was a man, and a good woman the rest of the time. Called herself Jasmine then, Jas for short. Never borrowed anything she didn’t return the next week, never spoke bad of anyone, never slept in where she wasn’t invited, and didn’t deserve the shit that came down when it did. None of us did.
But that’s a story for another time and it happened long enough before Costello arrived that it doesn’t matter here. This is about Costello—him and his fancy orange suit. First we heard of him, we thought he was just another star-grazer. Folks pass through Haven all the time, get caught up in her, and start planning resorts or industries or grand utopian communities—their utopias, of course. We listen politely, then go home and get back to the real work. Star-grazers are good entertainment, not much more; though every once in a while, we have to explain to one of them how an airlock works dirtside and why it would be a good idea to build his resort or his industry or his utopia somewhere else.
We didn’t meet Mr. Costello until Midsummer Jubilee. We unhitched and drove in to Temp, short for Temporary, which was all the name that place was ever going to have. Midsummer was the best time for restocking medicines and spices and any other stuff we couldn’t lab ourselves. The weather was calm, traveling was easy, and the bots could manage the crops while we were away.
Temp wasn’t the best-stocked place, but it was a lot more convenient than driving three days to the other side of the mountain, to Settlement, and then driving three days back. We always ordered ahead anyway, and anything Temporary didn’t have, they’d get Settlement to toss it on the next truck over, so we made out okay. I’d only been to Settlement once and had no wish to go there ever again. I don’t do crowds. Not even small ones. And any place big enough to need a jail was no place I wanted to stay. I learned that lesson a long time ago.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 38