Analog SFF, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The next evening, after a “normal” day of teaching a seminar and doing my official research, I fought the start of evening rush-hour traffic down 880 to Black Box, tried to work in my lab, couldn't, and went out to stare at Tara's ship again.

  After half an hour I swore under my breath and went down to the work floor, into the wreck. Tony and Ardis emerged as I entered, carrying another piece of what we thought was the communication system. “I think we're getting close,” said Tony. He's been saying that for years, and still sounds as convinced as the first time. I suppose that's how he keeps his faith—or maybe his sanity.

  Whatever works . . .

  I mumbled something, entered the ship, and went to the place I'd avoided yesterday—the bridge.

  Once, I spent endless hours there, looking for a connection between the “instrumentation” and the drive.

  Since I realized what Tara was, I hadn't been able to go through the hatch.

  The bridge had taken the impact. More than anywhere else, the Scotch tape and super glue—and a lot of chewing gum—showed.

  I stood behind the chair—which looked the right size and shape for her—and stared at the flat panels (twisted and torn apart in the middle and patched together with very visible seams).

  They had to be screens.

  A smaller, similar, overhead panel was intact but just as mysterious, just as dead.

  The angled console (three pieces patched together), with bumps and grids and squares and circles, had to be controls that would bring the ship and screens to life—if it had power.

  The control yoke was the only thing, other than the human-scale furnishing, that bore a clear resemblance to anything we knew. The yoke looked like it could bolt directly onto the control column of any aircraft now flying and look more mundane than anything Industrial Light and Magic would devise for a Star Wars film.

  I tried to imagine Tara in that chair. For a vertiginous few seconds, I could feel her presence as a psychic force, something that abruptly made this cabin as uniquely hers as the kisses with which she so often covered my body.

  I blinked, shook my head, and tried to imagine—again—what would happen if I asked, “Tara, is this your ship?"

  I'd been through that conversation in my head a million times, fantasizing everything from, “I suppose it could be. I don't remember a thing,” to, “You've got my ship? Let me help you make it fly again!” None of the fantasies, I was sure, would be real . . . but I kept hoping her response might be something in the direction of the latter.

  My cell phone buzzed. Sandy said, “Jack, can you come to my office?"

  "Sure."

  I wasn't doing anything useful. I wondered whether I should tell her I'd had it with Black Box and resign, while knowing I couldn't walk away from something that had once been Tara's.

  I entered Sandy's office.

  Tara sat in a government-issue executive guest chair, smiling her “I've got what I want” smile. She wore a softly draped black dress I'd never seen. It looked a lot like her midnight blue silk robe, except that it stayed closed.

  I said, “Oh, hi, Tara,” and managed to do it without showing my shock.

  Sandy smiled professionally and said, “Dr. Farallon has agreed to join us as a consultant. She may be able to help decipher the microcircuits—or whatever those things are. I thought that since you two know each other so well—” A hint of knowing smirk in her smile, “—you might want to show her what we've got."

  "Of course,” I said, offering Tara my hand.

  She whispered in my ear, as Sandy's door closed behind us, “Told you I got what I wanted, Jack. One day a week here, and Starburst picks up part of my salary in return for the benefits of whatever I learn."

  "You should have gone into business administration, my love."

  "Nah. That's no fun. You hire people like Joan to do that. You should try it."

  I said, “I've been thinking about it. Did Sandy tell you what we've got?” Traditionally, new staffers weren't told what they'd be working on until they saw the ship.

  "Classified chip circuit architecture, ‘from an unknown source.’ Sounds like government-sponsored industrial espionage."

  "Got a surprise for you,” I said, and opened the door onto the walkway that looked down on the ship.

  "Oh!" she said, sounding like she'd been kicked in the stomach. Then, quietly, anger and disgust underlying every word, “You've spent almost twenty years of your life on a fucking aircraft accident investigation? Whose is the damn thing, anyway? Iranian? They don't know shit about chips!"

  Well, I was right.

  Reality wasn't any of my fantasies.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and said, softly and with more passion than I thought I still had for Black Box, “Tara, look again. That ship is from nowhere on this Earth."

  "Oh?” She grimaced and stiffened under my hands. “You're not kidding, are you?"

  "No, Tara."

  She turned to the rail, moving out of my grasp. I followed her motion with one hand resting lightly on her waist. She stared for a moment. “I never paid much attention to aircraft design, except that the shuttle sitting on its launch pad looks a bit like a 767 that should go to Weight Watchers. Sorry I snapped. Too much build-up for too much letdown, I guess. Let's look at the circuits."

  "You get a tour of the ship, first,” I said.

  She grimaced. “So it's a ship. I came to see the circuits."

  "Okay. The tour can wait. We'll go see Tony and Ardis.” Despite her reaction, I was more convinced than ever that it was her ship.

  * * * *

  We stayed with Ardis and Tony until after ten, surviving on snacks from the machines and killer coffee from Ardis's stained Chemex.

  Tara blew them—and me—away with her knowledge of current advanced work in chip design and the imaging equipment needed for design and quality control. She never said we were working with obsolete equipment, any more than she said she was the pilot of the ship. She didn't need to. At times her terminology became so esoteric it seemed as if she was speaking in tongues—and I keep up with a lot more fields than my own. I'd thought I was pretty conversant with what she was into.

  When she decided she'd heard enough, she said, “Give me a quick look at the ship. I need some idea how it's put together. Might help figure out the thinking behind the circuits."

  Tony and Ardis went home, heads together, muttering intensely. I led Tara down the metal stairs, across the half-darkened floor to the ship, and turned on the interior lighting we'd taped to the overhead.

  She stood in the main cabin, hands on her hips. “Hm!” she grunted. “Damn interstellar Learjet.” She looked at everything quickly, not as if she was intimately familiar with it from years in space, but more the way she looked at each new thing while we traveled the world—taking it all in and learning, quickly.

  We went aft to the drive, which she looked at as if it was totally alien.

  When we returned to the cabin with the bunk, she said, “You know, Jack, it's been too long.” Her black dress dropped to the floor as if she'd turned a switch, leaving her standing there in thigh-high stockings and earrings while she unbuttoned my shirt.

  When we were done, I knew she'd told me, without words, that this was her ship, but she couldn't tell me. That made sense. One of my fantasies was that her culture had a prohibition on giving primitive cultures knowledge they hadn't discovered for themselves.

  She didn't look at the bridge. Maybe she was afraid she'd give herself away. Maybe the thought hurt too much.

  We drove her old Porsche 911 to the nearest decent restaurant, had dinner, and checked into the motel next door. No point driving back to Berkeley this late when we both had to be at work in the morning, we told ourselves, or maybe we'd gotten too used to motels while we traveled the world.

  "I'll be gone the rest of the week,” she said, as we held each other on the too-hard motel bed, “but Saturday I want to go to the Red and White Beach so I can be naked und
er the sun again. God, I miss that."

  * * * *

  Going to work was hard.

  Irrational hope that with Tara on the project we'd get somewhere warred with a sharpened sense of the vast gulf between what we knew and the technology that made the starship work . . . and, with it, a sudden inability to duck the vast gulf between who Tara was and who I was, never mind how much we loved each other.

  I went to see Sandy, and asked whether we could do something about upgrading our research equipment.

  "No budget,” she said, with a frustrated shrug. “The spooks don't want to declassify us, but they won't pay for what we need. Dr. Farallon is an experiment. They're going to let her take parts to the Starburst labs and use their equipment in the presence of present and former project personnel. Roy will arrange transportation and security."

  When I got up to leave, she stopped me at the door. “Jack . . .” Something odd in her voice.

  "Yes?"

  "This is a funny question; kind of hard to ask. You're aware that Dr. Farallon was rescued the night Our Bird came down?"

  "Yeah. Found out when I bought her a birthstone ring and figured that was the only date I had to go on.” I felt a funny sweat, like a new sunburn beginning to itch.

  "Some of the spooks think she might have been on Our Bird."

  "The impact was more than five hundred miles west of the Farallons!"

  "They theorize an escape capsule. They've never found one. There's just the coincidence of dates—a long stretch if you ask me, and they admit it—but it may be why they let her into the project.” She hesitated. “You know her better than anyone.” She didn't want to ask the real question.

  I shook my head and told her about Tara's reaction when she saw the ship.

  "Thought so. Sorry I had to ask, but when the spooks tell me to . . .” She shrugged. “Forget I mentioned it, okay?"

  "Okay."

  I went back to work and found I couldn't. Oh, I looked busy, did things I'd done for years, but now I knew I might as well be a Babylonian astronomer trying to figure out the function of a calculator with a dead battery—marked with English numbers and letters.

  I decided I'd stick with the project as long as Tara did, no longer. Maybe I'd follow her example and become a consultant . . . except that there was the thing I did for the project that didn't appear in my job description—helping people talk to each other about what little we learned. Maybe I could fit that into a day a week....

  * * * *

  Tara called on Thursday, asking me to meet her at Starburst Friday night. She said, “Your old project buddies want to take us to dinner. Bring your toothbrush and camping gear. We'll go straight to Red and White, if they leave one of us sober enough to drive."

  Mack, Tammie Lee, and Mel hadn't changed a bit. Crazier than ever, if anything. It was a real nostalgia trip—and a recruiting dinner, though none of them said a word about wanting me to work for Starburst.

  Tara confined herself to one glass of wine and got us out in time to make the campgrounds at Red and White before dark. She said, “I've been down here every night, all week. I found a private place where we won't have to listen to anyone else, or worry about someone stumbling over us on their way to the john."

  We left our clothes in her Porsche—which sported a new bumper sticker, ALPHA CENTAURI OR BUST—shouldered backpacks with our sleeping bags, and lugged a Coleman chest with food for tomorrow. She didn't like to leave the beach once she found a good spot.

  She led the way to a sheltered knoll, screened on three sides by trees and bushes but open to sea and sky. We watched the sun go down in a spectacular blaze of reds, oranges, and yellows, fading into blues, purples, and night. We didn't say much, just enjoyed nature and each other, and the light touch of skin on skin.

  Some time after the horizon turned black, we made love, tenderly and quietly. Afterward, we lay on our sleeping bags, glad the night chill hadn't settled in, looking up at the stars, holding hands.

  "Which star is yours, Tara?"

  I couldn't believe the words had escaped my mouth.

  Her hand tightened on mine and relaxed.

  After a long silence, she said, “I don't know."

  Anyone who knew her less intimately would not have heard the pain and longing in her voice. I squeezed her hand gently.

  "I'm sorry, Tara."

  "Have you told anyone?"

  "No."

  "Don't."

  "Never, Tara."

  Another long silence. “How long have you known, Jack?"

  "The day after you said you wouldn't marry me."

  She made a little sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. “I can't give you children, and the world needs your kids. You need a real wife, someone who can do that. Don't argue, not now. I know what you'll say, and what I'll say, and I don't want to. Later.” She rolled over, put her arm across my chest, hugged me, and gave me a long, silencing kiss.

  "So you really are the pilot of Our Bird.” I wanted to ask what it was like to sail between the stars, but didn't want to open up the pain, the loss, she'd been feeling all these years.

  "No, Jack. Nothing like that.” She laughed, a low, sad little chuckle. “I was along for the ride. You know those courier flights we took when we saw the world? I got a free trip to Kzxandarszaan for making sure the documents in the hold were delivered to the right people. We encountered a . . . the best translation is ‘anomaly’ . . . in the fabric of space. Such things are rare, but they can develop out of nowhere. It messed up the drive. The pilot headed for the nearest inhabited world where people were known to be similar to us—Earth. He said we'd try to establish high orbit, which takes no energy except keeping us alive, and wait for the emergency beacon to bring help. The drive didn't make it. We were aimed at Earth, without much directional control, at a speed that might destroy the world. All he could do was use what little power and control he had left to try to slow the ship. When he got it slowed enough that he no longer risked destroying the world, he told me to get out while I could. He said, ‘Pray that the people down there look like you!'

  "People have evolved pretty much the same on all worlds, but there's a lot of variation in what ‘the same’ looks like. I was lucky. I look enough like the people of Earth to pass for one.

  "He stayed with the ship, trying to slow it enough to prevent it from causing a tidal wave. He succeeded. He must have gotten out before the impact, since you found no body, but he probably died. I'd have heard, I think, if anyone else showed up with no Earth language or memories, or he'd have heard about me. My escape suit failed before I reached land. I was damned lucky to see lights on the water and make it to them. I guess he wasn't so fortunate..."

  "I'm sorry.” I couldn't say anything else. I didn't know what to say to the sadness in her voice.

  After a time, she said, “You want to know whether I can help you make the ship work, don't you?"

  "I suppose your culture forbids giving us primitives anything we haven't figured out for ourselves."

  She laughed. “You're a damn fool romantic, Jack. But that's why I love you. Nobody's thought about it, that I know of. How can it be a worry? I mean, could a fifteenth-century blacksmith fix a time-warped 767? Learn much from it? Even if Boeing's chief engineer was along for the ride?"

  Her humor was contagious, as always. My image of a Babylonian astronomer punching futilely at a dead calculator flashed across my mind. I thought of the advances Tara had made in chip technology. “Well, chief engineer,” I said, “there seem to be a few things you can teach us poor blacksmiths."

  "Oh, Jack! You don't understand! I'm a beach bum. I barely made it through . . . I suppose it would be the equivalent of a couple of years of junior college. Dropped out, decided to see how many beaches on how many worlds I could lie on before I got old enough that I had to get serious about life. That's all I was doing—I'm just a party girl."

  "You—you seem to have gotten serious. You've shown us a few things,” I said, a
bit weakly, trying to understand what she was saying.

  "Hey, my love,” she said, rolling on top of me. “Think of the other side of it. What could a kid with a passable junior college knowledge of math, physics, chemistry, and astronomy do if dumped into the fifteenth century? Provided nobody burned her as a witch? Provided someone loved her, understood her, explained how fifteenth-century tech worked, and supported her crazy ideas? I always wanted to be a scientist, but I'd never have made it at home. Now, I get to be a great scientist and lie on all the beaches I want, too! This world has the greatest beaches! Ah, Jack, you can't imagine how I glad I am to be here."

  I said, “I know how glad I am you're here,” and pulled her lips down to mine.

  Copyright © 2010 Walter L. Kleine

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  We read science fiction for a lot of reasons. SF can be inspiring, educational, exciting. Science fiction can exercise the mind, stir the spirit, tug at the heart, and stretch the imagination. Science fiction can make us laugh and bring us to tears; it can lead us to question our firmest beliefs or to see our familiar world from a different perspective. Science fiction can be funny, tragic, even transcendently sublime.

  And besides all this, SF can be fun. This time around, I have a selection of books that are fun in a number of different ways.

  * * * *

  Catalyst

  Anne McCaffrey and

  Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Del Rey, 256 pages, $26.00 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-345-51376-2

  Series: Barque Cats 1

  Genres: Adventure SF, Animal Companions

  * * * *

  From Andre Norton's Beast Master to Alan Dean Foster's Pip and Flinx stories, faithful animal companions (often telepathically linked to their owners) have a long and illustrious history in science fiction. Heinlein's young adult books featured a veritable menagerie of flat cats, bouncers, and a Star Beast named Lummox. And there are mice, from Frederic Brown's Mitkey ("The Star Mouse,” 1942) to Daniel Keyes's Algernon ("Flowers for Algernon,” 1959). Marion Zimmer Bradley's Hawkmistress (part of her Darkover series) features a relationship between girl and hawk. Andre Norton's Catseye gives us a whole pet store full of unusual animals. Harlan Ellison famously explored the bond between A Boy and His Dog. Superman has his Krypto and Doctor Who his robot dog K-9. And by far the most beloved animal companions in all of SF are the dragons and fire lizards in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern books. (Oddly enough, one doesn't often see my favorite animal, hamsters, in science fiction.)