Charlie glared at her for a long moment and left.
~ * ~
June 2076
From Fax & Pix, 4 June 2076:
SPACE FARM LEAVES FOR
STARS NEXT MONTH
The John F. Kennedy, that goes to Scylla/Charybdis next month, is like a little L-5 with bombs up its tail (see pix up left, up right).
The trip’s twenty months. They could either take a few people and fill the thing up with food, air, and water—or take a lot of people inside a closed ecology, like L-5.
They could’ve gotten by with only a couple hundred people, to run the farms and stuff. But almost all the space freaks wanted to go. They’re used to living that way, anyhow (and they never get to go anyplace).
When they get back, the farms will be used as a starter for L-4, like L-5 but smaller at first, and on the other side of the Moon (pie down left).
For other Tricentennial fax & pix, see bacover.
~ * ~
July 2076
Charlie was just finishing up a week on Earth the day the John F. Kennedy was launched. Tired of being interviewed, he slipped away from the media lounge at the Cape shuttleport. His white clearance card got him out onto the landing strip alone.
The midnight shuttle was being fueled at the far end of the strip, gleaming pink-white in the last light from the setting sun. Its image twisted and danced in the shimmering heat that radiated from the tarmac. The smell of the soft tar was indelibly associated in his mind with leave-taking, relief.
He walked to the middle of the strip and checked his watch. Five minutes. He lit a cigarette and threw it away. He rechecked his mental calculations: the flight would start low in the southwest. He blocked out the sun with a raised hand. What would 150 bombs per second look like? For the media they were called fuel capsules. The people who had carefully assembled them and gently lifted them to orbit and installed them in the tanks, they called them bombs. Ten times the brightness of a full moon, they had said. On L-5 you weren’t supposed to look toward it without a dark filter.
No warm-up: it suddenly appeared, an impossibly brilliant rainbow speck just over the horizon. It gleamed for several minutes, then dimmed slightly with a haze, and slipped away.
Most of the United States wouldn’t see it until it came around again, some two hours later, turning night into day, competing with local pyrotechnic displays. Then every couple of hours after that, Charlie would see it once more, then get on the shuttle. And finally stop having to call it by the name of a dead politician.
~ * ~
September 2076
There was a quiet celebration on L-5 when Daedalus reached the mid-point of its journey, flipped, and started decelerating. The progress report from its crew characterized the journey as “uneventful.” At that time they were going nearly two tenths of the speed of light. The laser beam that carried communications was redshifted from blue light down to orange; the message that turnaround had been successful took two weeks to travel from Daedalus to L-5.
They announced a slight course change. They had analyzed the polarization of light from Scylla/Charybdis as their phase angle increased, and were pretty sure the system was surrounded by flat rings of debris, like Saturn. They would “come in low” to avoid collision.
~ * ~
January 2077
Daedalus had been sending back recognizable pictures of the Scylla/Charybdis system for three weeks. They finally had one that was dramatic enough for groundhog consumption.
Charlie set the holo cube on his desk and pushed it around with his finger, marvelling.
“This is incredible. How did they do it?”
“It’s a montage, of course.” Johnny had been one of the youngest adults left behind: heart murmur, trick knees, a surfeit of astrophysicists.
“The two stars are a strobe snapshot in infrared.Sort of. Some ten or twenty thousand exposures taken as the ship orbited around the system, then sorted out and enhanced.” He pointed, but it wasn’t much help, since Charlie was looking at the cube from a different angle.
“The lamina of fire where the atmospheres touch, that was taken in ultraviolet. Shows more fine structure that way.”
“The rings were easy. Fairly long exposures in visible light. Gives the star background, too.”
A light tap on the door and an assistant stuck his head in. “Have a second, Doctor?”
“Sure.”
“Somebody from a Russian May Day committee is on the phone. She wants to know whether they’ve changed the name of the ship to Brezhnev yet.”
“Yeah. Tell her we decided on `Leon Trotsky’ instead, though.”
He nodded seriously. “‘Okay.” He started to close the door.
“Wait! Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Tell her, uh… the ship doesn’t have a commemorative name while it’s in orbit there. They’ll rechristen it just before the start of the return trip.”
“Is that true?” Johnny asked.
“I don’t know. Who cares? In another couple of months they won’t want it named after anybody.” He and Ab had worked out a plan — admittedly rather shaky — to protect L-5 from the groundhogs’ wrath: nobody on the satellite knew ahead of time that the ship was headed for 61 Cygni. It was a decision the crew arrived at on the way to Scylla Charybdis; they modified the drive system to accept matter-antimatter destruction while they were orbiting the double star. L-5 would first hear of the mutinous plan via a transmission sent as Daedalus left Scylla/Charybdis. They’d be a month on their way by the time the message got to Earth.
It was pretty transparent, but at least they had been careful that no record of Daedalus’ true mission be left on L-5. Three thousand people did know the truth, though, and any competent engineer or physical scientist would suspect it.
Ab had felt that, although there was a better than even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn’t stay angry for 23 years — even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders…
Besides, Charlie thought, it’s not their worry anymore.
As it turned out, the crew of Daedalus would have bigger things to worry about.
~ * ~
June 2077
The Russians had their May Day celebration — Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship Leonid I. Brezhnev — and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others waited nervously for the “surprise” message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn’t say what it was supposed to:
This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal.
Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.
As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We’re maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can’t steer, and we can’t shut off the main drive.
We didn’t have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting since we were inside Roche’s limit. Coming in, as you know, we’d managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.
If we could turn off the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can’t keep up with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.
We’re working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clear. We were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before reading.
Endit.
It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of in
terest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960’s.
They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a look at the situation. She’d sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped.
~ * ~
Daedalus: A.D. 2081
Earth: A.D. 2101
The following news item was killed from Fax & Pix, because it was too hard to translate into the “plain English” that made the paper so popular:
SPACESHIP PASSES 61 CYGNI—SORT OF
(L-5 Stringer)
A message received today from the spaceship Daedalus said that it had just passed within 400 astronomical units of 61 Cygni. That’s about ten times as far as the planet Pluto is from the Sun.
Actually, the spaceship passed the star some eleven years ago. It’s taken all that time for the message to get back to us.
We don’t know for sure where the spaceship actually is, now. If they still haven’t repaired the runaway drive, they’re about eleven light-years past the 61 Cygni system (their speed when they passed the double star was better than 99% the speed of light).
The situation is more complicated if you look at it from the point of view of a passenger on the spaceship. Because of relativity, time seems to pass more slowly as you approach the speed of light. So only about four years passed for them, on the eleven light year journey.
L-5 Coordinator Charles Leventhal points out that the spaceship has enough antimatter fuel to keep accelerating to the edge of the Galaxy. The crew then would be only some twenty years older—but it would be twenty thousand years before we heard from them…
(Kill this one. There’s more stuff about what the ship looked like to the people on 61 Cygni, and how cum we could talk to them all the time even though time was slower there, but its all as stupid as this.)
~ * ~
Daedalus: A.D. 2083
Earth: A.D. 2144
Charlie Leventhal died at the age of 99, bitter. Almost a decade earlier it had been revealed that they’d planned all along for Daedalus to be a starship. Few people had paid much attention to the news. Among those who did, the consensus was that anything that got rid of a thousand scientists at once, was a good thing. Look at the mess they got us in.
Daedalus. 67 light-years out, and still accelerating.
~ * ~
Daedalus. A.D. 2085
Earth: A.D. 3578
After over seven years of shipboard research and development — and some 1500 light-years of travel — they managed to shut down the engine. With sophisticated telemetry, the job was done without endangering another life.
Every life was precious now. They were no longer simply explorers; almost half their fuel was gone. They were colonists, with no ticket back.
The message of their success would reach Earth in fifteen centuries. Whether there would be an infrared telescope around to detect it, that was a matter of some conjecture.
~ * ~
Daedalus: A.D. 2093
Earth: ca. A.D. 5000
While decelerating, they had investigated several systems in their line of flight. They found one with an Earth-type planet around a Sun-type sun, and aimed for it.
The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.
Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5 — give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillennial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms.
No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day too would be ignored.
The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.
~ * ~
INTRODUCTION TO “BLOOD SISTERS”
This story was written with a sense of relief, having ground through nine months of writing a novel I really didn’t want to do (but there was a contract and a deadline and I’d spent half of the money). I wanted to do something fun, and a private eye story set in the future sounded appealing.
I’d just read an article in Esquire about how real-life private investigators worked, and it was not appealing story material. Law books, searching for technicalities. Finding obscure contract violations, jurisprudential loopholes. They didn’t even carry guns!
Of course the future would be a lot more interesting. There would be huge powerful computers and clones. Beautiful girl clones! If the beautiful girl clones were naked, maybe the story would sell to Playboy! They were and it did.
BLOOD SISTERS
S
o I used to carry two different business cards: J. Michael Loomis, Data Concentration, and Jack Loomis, Private Investigator. They mean the same thing, nine cases out of ten. You have to size up a potential customer, decide whether he'd feel better hiring a shamus or a clerk.
Some people still have these romantic notions about private detectives and get into a happy sweat at the thought of using one. But it is the twenty-first century and, endless Bogart reruns notwithstanding, most of my work consisted in sitting at my office console and using it to subvert the privacy laws of various states and countries—finding out embarrassing things about people, so other people can divorce them or fire them or get a piece of the slickery.
Not to say I didn't go out on the street sometimes; not to say I didn't have a gun and a ticket for it. There are Forces of Evil out there, friends, although most of them would probably rather be thought of as businessmen who use the law rather than fear it. Same as me. I was always happy, though, to stay on this side of murder, treason, kidnapping—any lobo offense. This brain may not be much, but it's all I have.
I should have used it when the woman walked into my office. She had a funny way of saying hello:
"Are you licensed to carry a gun?"
Various retorts came to mind, most of them having to do with her expulsion, but after a period of silence I said yes and asked who had referred her to me. Asked politely, too, to make up for staring. She was a little more beautiful than anyone I'd ever seen before.
"My lawyer," she said. "Don't ask who he is."
With that, I was pretty sure that this was some sort of elaborate joke. Story detectives always have beautiful mysterious customers. My female customers tend to be dowdy and too talkative, and much more interested in alimony than romance.
"What's your name, then? Or am I not supposed to ask that either?"
She hesitated. "Ghentlee Arden."
I turned the console on and typed in her name, then a seven-digit code. "Your legal firm is Lee, Chu, and Rosenstein. And your real name is Maribelle Four Ghentlee: fourth clone of Maribelle Ghentlee."
"Arden is my professional name. I dance." She had a nice blush.
I typed in another string of digits. Sometimes this sort of thing would lose a customer. "Says here you're a registered hooker."
"Call girl," she said frostily. "Class One courtesan. I was getting to that."
I'm a liberal-minded man; I don't have anything against hookers or clones. But I like my customers to be frank with me. Again, I should have shown her the door—then followed her through it.
Instead: "So. You have a problem?"
"Some men are bothering me, one man in particular. I need some protection."
That gave me pause. "Your union has a Pinkerton contract for that sort of thing."
"My union." Her face trembled a little. "They don't let clones in the union. I'm an associate, for classification. No protection, no medical, no anything."
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The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 12