Earthbound
Page 21
“We had to jump on board,” Snowbird said, “from a snow-covered roof.”
“I’m afraid there’s not much time,” the voice said. “In the absence of Paul, you could bring another. But you have to decide now.”
I turned to Namir. His eyes were wide. Elza stepped up next to him, without touching, her face a mask. “Go with her,” she said softly. “You have to.”
Dustin limped up and put his hand on her shoulder. “For both of us,” he said. “For all of us. Go.”
Namir embraced them both, and said something I couldn’t hear.
Then he turned his back on everything and held out his hand to me.
His hand was large and strong. The skin was rough. “Shall we?”
We took two steps together and leaped into space.
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Epilogue
It’s been a long time since dying was simple. When I returned to Mars, almost forty ares ago, two of the first people I met were my dead brother.
Before the Others pulled the plug on the Earth, back in 2138, there had been a constant data exchange between the two planets for most of a century. Absolutely total backup, which included the cybernetic copies of Card’s two reserve bodies, although they were physically destroyed along with Los Angeles.
Of course there are billions of such “people,” sitting around as passive records, whose physical bodies are long gone. Some of them even had citizenship, back on Earth, if they’d filed the right incorporation papers before they died. Card had. I guess he could still vote in California if anyone was running for office.
I talk to one or the other every now and then, but it’s creepy. The calendar peeps me when it would be their birthday on Earth. His birthday.
They’ve never asked me about the day that he died.
If only my parents had lived long enough to be duplicated; I’d love to talk to either of them. They might not have done it anyhow. I haven’t. It takes weeks of immersion, and a desire to outlive your body.
I may do it yet. Both universities are after me, so all this valuable history should not be lost.
But maybe it should be lost. It’s not as if they don’t make new history to take its place.
When my dear Namir died, after we’d been together almost thirty ares, he declined to leave a copy. He quoted Wordsworth to me: “The old order changeth, making place for new / And God fulfils himself in many ways.”
He didn’t believe in gods any more than I do. But it’s a convenient shorthand.
Twice in these forty ares we have seen signs of life, communications, from Earth. There’s a powerful telescope at the observatory that’s dedicated to that task, at least one person watching the Earth whenever it’s up.
During the second-most-recent opposition, a tiny cross burned in Siberia, the place where Martians last lived on Earth. Each arm of the cross was forty miles long, so it was quite an engineering feat with primitive tools. Twenty ares before, a fiery cross—or X—appeared in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico, and was visible as a black mark on Earth’s crescent for months.
They are still there. Still looking up.
Sometimes before dawn or just after sunset, I go up into the old dome and watch the blue spark of Earth rising or setting.
I did that this morning, for no special reason on the Martian calendar, but mine peeped and reminded me that on Earth I would be ninety years old today. Or my bones would be.
So I carried these old bones up and sat there alone, watching the Earth fade as the sky went from indigo to pale orange. Remembering the morning more than seventy years ago, waiting for a cab in the Florida dark. My father pointing out the bright unblinking red dot that we were about to visit. Saying we’d be back home in about five years.
But home was where we were going.
Ace Books by Joe Haldeman
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CAMOUFLAGE
OLD TWENTIETH
A SEPARATE WAR AND OTHER STORIES
THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE
MARSBOUND
STARBOUND
EARTHBOUND
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