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 “uneventiful.” At that time they were going nearly two tenths of the speed of light. The laser beam that carried communications was red-shifted 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 interest 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 howcum 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 Trimillenial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sand-storms.
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.
Afterword
Where do you get your crazy ideas? Well, if we tabulate the assertions made in the introductions to these stories, it goes like this: Magazine articles, two. Editorial suggestions, four. Cover painting, one. Works of other writers, two. The weather, two. Personal joke, one. Stylistic experiments, two. Personal emotional experience, two. Out of nowhere, two.*
Actually, I think all of them came out of nowhere.
R. A. Lafferty, than whom there is no more original writer in science fiction, claims that there’s no such thing as an original idea, and writers who think they sit down and go through some rational process to arrive at a story are kidding themselves. He claims that all ideas float around as a kind of psychic public property, and every now and then one settles on you. That sounds dangerously mystical to me—subversive—but I think it’s true.
So how can you square that with obeying the editor who calls in the middle of the night and asks for a four-thousand-word story about the person who ate the first artichoke? Easily.
When a writer sits down to start a story he faces a literal infinity of possibilities. Being told to write about a specific thing, or to a given length, doesn’t really diminish the number of possible stories. The effect is the same as dividing infinity by a large but finite number: you still have infinity. Obviously, a writer who figures out his own story idea and then proceeds to write it is duplicating this not-really-restrictive process. Writing what he wants to write about may allow him to write a better story—or it may not, if his infatuation with the idea interferes with his objectivity—but I think any really good writer can take any editorial requirement, so long as it’s not patently stupid or offensive, * and wind up writing a story he would have written anyhow.
Ideas are cheap, even crazy ones. Every writer has had the experience of a friend or relative—or stranger!—saying, “I’ve got this great idea for a story.. you write it and I’ll split the money with you fifty-fifty.” The proper response to this depends on the generous person’s occupation. In the case of a prizefighter, for instance, you might offer to name a few potential opponents, and only demand half the purse. An editor, of course, you humor. They rarely ask for as much as half.
All of this is not to say that there aren’t days when you sit down at the typewriter and find that your imagination has frozen solid; you can’t come up with anything to write, no ideas come floating down out of Lafferty’s ether. When this happens in the middle of a novel, it’s a scary thing. But if you’re just feeing a short story that won’t get itself started, there’s an easy way to cope with it, a trade secret that Gordon R. Dickson passed on to me, saying it hadn’t foiled him in twenty years:
Start typing. Type your name over and over. Type lists of animals, flowers, baseball players, Greek Methodists. Type out what you’re going to say to that damned insolent repairman. Sooner or later, perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of a desire to stop this silly exercise, you’ll find you’ve started a story. It’s never taken me so much as a page of nonsense, and the stories started this way aren’t any worse than the one about the artichoke.
One restriction most good science fiction writers accept without question is that the scientific content of their stories be as accurate as possible. Is this really necessary? Yes, but not for the obvious didactic reason. We are not obligated (or qualified, in most cases) to teach science to anybody.
A person who thinks he learns science from science fiction is like one who thinks he learns history from historical novels, and he deserves what he gets. Some few science fiction writers, like Gregory Benford and Philip Latham, are working scientists, and a good fraction of the rest of us have degrees in some science. That doesn’t make us qualified to write with authority on subjects outside of our areas of study—but we do it; you’d have a short career if all of your stories were about magnetohydrodynamics or galactic morphology. So we try to be intelligent laymen in other fields, staying current enough so that our inevitable errors won’t be obvious to other laymen.
Any fiction writer is in the business of maintaining illusion. Like a stage magician, his authority lasts only until he makes his first error.* Every writer has to deal with mechanical consistencies like making sure the woman named Marie in chapter one doesn’t turn into Mary in chapter four. He also has to be careful about routine details, not letting the sun set in the east (as John Wayne made it do in The Green Berets), and so forth. If he writes in a genre, he has an added burden of detail, since most of his readers consider themselves experts. Mundane esoterica: Spies call the CIA the Company, not the Agency. A private eye doesn’t have to break into a car and read the registration card to find out who own it; he jots down the license number and sends a form to the Department of Motor Vehicles. A cowboy normally carried only five shots in his six-shooter; only a fool would leave the hammer down on a live round.
One reason science fiction is harder to write than other forms of genre fiction is that this universe of detail is larger, more difficult of access, and constantly changing. I wonder how many novels-in-progress got thrown across the room in 1965, when scientists found that Mercury didn’t keep one face always to the Sun, after all. I wonder how many bad ones got finished anyhow.
Nobody can be an expert on everything from ablation physics to zymurgy, so you have to work from a principle of exclusion: know the limits of your knowledge and never expose your ignorance by attempting to write with authority when you don’t really know what’s going on. This advice is easier to give than to take. I’ve been caught in basic mistakes in genetics, laser technology, and even metric nomenclature—in the first printing of The Forever War I referred time and again to a unit of power called the “beva-watt.” What I meant was “gigawatt”; the only thing “bev” means is billion-electron-volt, a unit of energy, not power. I got letters. Boy, did I get letters.
The letters are humbling, and time-consuming if you feel obligated to answer them (I do, so long as they aren’t abusive or idiotic). But the possibility of being caught in error isn’t the main reason for taking pains.
When I finish writing a science fiction novel I have a notebook or two of technical notes, equations, diagrams, graphs. Even a short story, if it’s a hard-core-science one like “Tricentennial,” might generate a dozen pages of notes. Not one percent of this stuff finds its way into the story. It may even be naive science and weak mathematics—but it will have served its purpose if it has made a fictional world solid and real to me.
Because this business of illusion works both ways. For a story to succeed, the writer must himself be convinced that the background and situation the story is
built on make sense. Ernest Hemingway pointed out (though I think Gertrude Stein said it first) that the prose of a story should move with the steady grace of an iceberg, and for the same reason an iceberg does: seven-eighths of it is beneath the surface. The author must know much more than the reader sees. And he must believe, at least for the duration.
Which brings us back to Mr. Lafferty. What I’m really doing with all these equations and graphs, I think, is putting myself into a properly receptive frame of mind. Other writers draft endless outlines to the same purpose, or sharpen pencils down to useless stubs, or take meditative walks, or drink bourbon. And through some mystical—or subconscious, or subrational—process, where there was white paper there’s a sentence, a page, a story. Finding the proper words is not at all a mystical process, just creative labor. The ideas that serve as scaffolding for the words, though—they come from out of nowhere, and serve you, then return.
—Joe Haldeman
Florida, 1978
* You may note that these add up to more than the total number of stories. I can’t balance my checkbook, either.
* An editor of recent memory, who came to science fiction from the editing of wrestling magazines, and has since gone on to even greater things, once petitioned a number of writers for “an anti-homosexuality science fiction story.” None was quite that desperate for work.
* I saw an act in Las Vegas where the magician exploited this sentiment by deliberately introducing mistakes, which grew more and more outrageous until his act degenerated into slapstick, and it was more entertaining than any straight sleight-of-hand. Good surreal writers like Brautigan, Disch, and Garcia Marquez also succeed by deliberately manipulating the consensus of illusion we call reality, but that’s not the kettle of fish we’re discussing here.
A Biography of Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman is a renowned American science fiction author whose works are heavily influenced by his experiences serving in the Vietnam War and his subsequent readjustment to civilian life.