Starbound

  “I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop myself,” I said. “The way Paul looks at her when he thinks I’m not watching.”

  “But you’ve always been, what, open?”

  “Sure, for years, he was in Mars and I was in Little Mars. We didn’t actually marry until we got the lottery and were going to have children. Before that, we both had considerable variety.”

  “I bet you did.” She grinned. “Being famous and all.”

  “Well, guys had long layovers on their way to Mars.”

  “Layovers.”

  “Probably half of them just wanted to be able to say ‘I fucked The Mars Girl.’ ”

  “The price of fame. And Paul the most famous pilot in history? He was not exactly a monk, if I recall correctly.”

  “But we’d talked it through before either of us was famous, long before we were married. I thought fidelity was a holdover from old times, when women were property.”

  “Do you still?”

  “Not as strongly. But yes.” It wasn’t something I’d put into words. “Things are different, now that we’ve had children, but really there’s no reason for that. Parenthood in Mars is so detached from biological reality.”

  She nodded. “You don’t go through all the physical grief. And then you don’t raise them by hand.”

  “Which I sort of regret. They have my genes, and Paul’s, but we’re more like an aunt and uncle who play with them now and then.” I had a cold feeling, deep. “Under the circumstances, of course, that’s for the best.”

  “When you get back . . .”

  “They’ll be older than me. Fifty years pass for them, twelve for us. In the unlikely possibility that we survive.”

  “Yeah.” She leaned back and closed her eyes; she was dead tired. “I shouldn’t be so concerned about where Moonboy puts his weenie. Let him have whatever pleasure he can find.”

  “For symmetry, you ought to go after Namir. He’s old, but not that old. And good-looking.”

  “If good-looking was important to me, I wouldn’t have grabbed Moonboy. Besides, if Namir is interested in anyone aboard, it’s you.”

  “Really.”

  “Don’t act surprised. It’s pretty obvious.”

  “We’ve liked each other from the beginning. But not that way.”

  “Man, woman. It’s the basic way.”

  “He’s never made any kind of . . . gesture.”

  “I don’t think he ever would. He’s the kind of man who waits for you to ask.”

  “Well, he’s got a long wait, then.” Or maybe not.

  10

  SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE

  Elza was late coming to bed. I’d just turned off my book and the light when the door opened and closed and I heard her slip out of her clothing. I touched her shoulder as she eased into bed. Cool and damp with sweat.

  “Exercising this late?”

  “In a way. Moonboy.”

  “Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. “Meryl know?” They have both their beds together in one large suite.

  “No. She was with the Martians.”

  “A . . . sort of a milestone, I suppose.”

  I could feel her smile in the darkness. “The first act of adultery outside of the solar system.”

  “That presupposes an abundance of virtue on the part of extraterrestrials. We’ll put up a plaque anyhow.”

  “You’re too sweet.”

  There was a long pause. “So how was it?”

  “It was Moonboy. Men don’t normally reveal hidden depths.”

  “Or lengths?”

  “Men.” She made a quarter turn and pressed her back into my chest, spoon fashion. “Get some sleep.”

  “What, I don’t get sloppy seconds?”

  “Thirds. Get some sleep.” I didn’t press the issue, though I found the situation curiously stimulating.

  I hadn’t brought along my balalaika because I knew it annoyed Dustin, and it was unlikely that the four “Martian” humans would care for it. (Most of the actual Martians seemed indifferent to music; it was background noise to them, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.) But I hadn’t thought about all the room in the warehouse, where the four workers had lived before we arrived. It was a little cold, but large and totally isolated from our own living quarters. You could back up your balalaika with a brass band, and no one could hear you.

  So I set out to make a thing like a balalaika. I could have just described it to the automatic shop machine, but there was no satisfaction in that.

  No wood around to work with except the blocks of koa I brought for carving, so I asked the machine what it could simulate. My balalaika at home was made of rosewood, light and dark, and ebony. I found a picture of myself playing it, and so was able to measure it precisely from the image. I found instructions for making your own balalaika in Russian, no problem.

  The three strings were easy, carbon fiber and nylon wires. The “wood” had the right color and density but wouldn’t fool a termite. The thinnest stock it could generate was two or three times too thick. So my first order of business was to take a strip of it and see whether I could plane it down.

  No luck. No fibrous structure, so the hand plane would just bite out a chip at a time. But I blocked it in place and used a sander to bring it down to two millimeters’ thickness. It was still strong and stiff; I clamped it to the edge of the worktable and plucked it, and it made a satisfying twang.

  I experimented with scrap and decided to forego tradition and cut the “wood” by laser, which left a more accurate, smooth edge than any saw in the shop. And with modern glues, I didn’t have to improvise the elaborate clamps that the Russian plans called for. I also cheated on the tuning pegs, bridge, and tailpiece, by describing them and letting the shop turn them out robotically. So it only took a couple of days, and a lot of that was learning. If I wanted to put together another one, I could probably do it in an afternoon. Give it to Dustin, so we could do duets.

  It looked identical to mine at home except for the inlaid red star and “Souvenir of Soviet Olympics 1980,” which made mine a fairly valuable antique, in spite of being very ordinary in a musical way. A gift to my father on his tenth birthday. His parents had gone to the Olympics before he was born.

  I was working on the finish when Fly-in-Amber came in and addressed me formally in Japanese. I set the instrument down and stood, and returned the greeting with a slight bow, which he had tried to do.

  “Snowbird should be asking you this,” he said, “since human behavior is her area of expertise, but she was unsure about politeness.”

  “And you don’t care.”

  “Of course not. I am not human.”

  I chose not to pursue the obvious there. “So what does Snowbird want to know?”

  “Oh, I want to know as well. But my interest is not professional.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Please ask the question.”

  “It is more than one question.”

  “All right. Ask them all.”

  “It’s about your wife Elza mating with Meryl’s husband Moonboy.”

  Good news travels fast. “Well, they weren’t mating. There was no possibility of offspring.”

  “I know that. I was being polite. Should I say ‘fucking’?”

  “With me, either one is fine. But your instinct is right.”

  “Snowbird wanted me to talk to you in private, which is why I am bothering you here. She wants to know if this causes you pain, the adultery.”

  “Not really. I’ve been expecting it.” I didn’t want to get into a definition of adultery.

  “Is there symmetry? Are you going to mate with one of the other women?”

  I had to smile. “Not immediately. It doesn’t always work that way.”

  “Are you not attracted to any of them?”

  “I’m attracted to all of them, in varying degrees. I just don’t act on that attraction as directly as Elza does.”

  “Is that bec
ause you are old?”

  “I’m not that old. It’s less youth on Elza’s part than impulsiveness. I want to know someone well before I am intimate with her.”

  “Always ‘her’? You are not intimate with men?”

  How honest do you have to be with a Martian? “Not in many years. Not since I was boy.”

  “Not with Dustin Beckner?”

  “No. Definitely not Dustin.”

  “Yet you are married to him.”

  “Yes, and I love him, but in a different way. You can love without mating.” He was silent for a moment, so I asked, “Do you feel love? Do you love Snowbird, for instance?”

  “I don’t think so, in human terms. She says there was a word in ancient Greek, agape, that approximates the way Martians feel about one another.”

  “You wouldn’t have erotic love.”

  “No. That wouldn’t make sense. There is pleasure in mating, but you often don’t know ahead of time who will be involved, or how many. And, of course, you don’t know which of you will be the female until the contest is over. The female feels it more strongly.”

  “Well, ‘erotic’ means more than that, if you go back to Snowbird’s ancient Greek. It’s an intense feeling one has for another, whether or not sex is involved.”

  “Humans do that?”

  “Some. Most.”

  He hugged himself, which I knew signified thinking. “We are simpler, I think. I feel especially close to the other members of the yellow family. But they are the only ones I can speak to plainly, in the language I was born with.”

  “Is that the same with all Martians?” I knew the yellow ones had a reputation for being standoffish, but I hadn’t met any Martians except our two.

  “Oh, no. Blues cooperate with everybody; they were the example Snowbird used, to explain agape to me. My family is less open than the others, but that’s appropriate to our function.”

  “Impartial observers.”

  “Yes.” He switched to Japanese and apologized for the intrusion, and backed out.

  He was often abrupt like that. As if he had some internal timer.

  I finished polishing the balalaika and admired its strangeness. From a distance, it was a pretty close copy. The “wood” was exactly right in color, but it had no grain, close up, and it had the cool smoothness of ceramic.

  The strings were not easy to mount, my big fingers clumsy with the knots. I almost called Elza but didn’t want to interrupt her at her needlepoint, a fractal pattern that apparently required intense concentration. Finally, I got all three in place and taut, but the two nylon strings (both tuned to the same E note) kept relaxing out of tune. Then I remembered a young folksinger in Tel Aviv, replacing a string in the middle of a performance. He pulled it dangerously taut and released it with a snap, over and over, flattening the tone, then tuning it up. After a couple of minutes doing that on both nylon strings, they were remarkably stable.

  I played a few simple tunes from memory, and scales in the four keys I used, then some arpeggios, working through the left- hand pain until my joints agreed to loosen up.

  As sometimes happens, I felt my audience before I saw her. I turned, and there was Elza, leaning in the doorway behind me. She was holding two glasses, a wineglass with red in it and a cup of clear liquid with ice. I must have subliminally heard it clinking.

  “It sounds good,” she said. “I’ve missed it.”

  “I hope you didn’t hear it inside.”

  She set the wine down next to me. “You buy the next.” She folded into a graceful lotus, not spilling a drop of her vodka. “No, Fly-in-Amber told me you were almost done with it. I went into the pantry for a drink and heard you. Peeked and saw you didn’t have anything.”

  I sipped the wine. “Mind reader.”

  “So what were you talking to Old Yeller about?”

  “Old Yeller?”

  “It’s a Texas thing. Thang.”

  “Gossip and biology. He wondered about you ‘mating’ with Moonboy.”

  “For a Martian, he has a very dirty mind.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible. Anyhow, I think he was asking on Snowbird’s behalf. She wasn’t sure what would be polite.”

  “And he doesn’t care.”

  “Well, he approached me in Japanese, with an apology. But that was for interrupting my work, not for asking about my wife’s extramarital affairs. Still, politeness.”

  “I don’t suppose you told him it was none of his business.”

  “Slapped him with a glove and said ‘lasers at dawn.’ It’s not personal with him, of course.”

  “I know. So why didn’t he just ask me?”

  “You don’t speak Japanese.” I set down the balalaika and picked up the wine. “I think he likes me. Or likes talking to me. Maybe being oldest male has something to do with it.”

  “Did you tell him any gory details?”

  “I don’t have any, dear. I’m not that close to Moonboy, and you haven’t shown me the feelie yet. Did he know something I don’t?”

  She shrugged. “All men do. Have something no other man has. And I’m saving the feelie for our old age.”

  “In case we have one?”

  She nodded, silent for a few moments, looking at the floor. Then she knuckled her eyes. “Could you play me that silly love song? The first, the first time . . .”

  “Sure.” I picked up the instrument and tuned up the flatted E strings, then plucked out the simple melody. “Shteyt a bocher, shteyt un tracht . . . tracht un tracht a gantze nacht . . .”

  It’s a song about a man finding a smart woman to marry.

  11

  HEROES

  Paul had always questioned the necessity for radio silence between Earth and ad Astra. It assumed the Others were so inattentive and stupid that they wouldn’t know we were on our way. Of course, our presence would be obvious after turnaround, with a gazillion- horsepower matter-annihilation engine blasting in their direction. The little probe that preceded us would deal with that by sending a warning and a message of peace well before we turned around and started blasting, decelerating.

  What if they destroyed the probe before it delivered the message?

  What if it delivered the message, and the Others destroyed us anyway?

  What if they weren’t on a Wolf 25 planet after all?

  We went along with the order and were resigned to not hearing from anyone on Earth for another 3.4 years. Paul kept the radio on, though, in case things changed.

  On July 10, 2088, things did. A fifty-two-second message came from Earth. He called us all together in the lounge, Martians and humans, and played it back for us.

  “This is Lazlo Motkin, just elected president of the world. One reason I was elected was that I wanted to change your mission and make it more in line with what the Earth’s people really want.

  “You are the finest heroes in Earth’s history, hurtling into the unknown on a mission that will almost surely end with your deaths.

  “We ask that you make this grim probability a glorious certainty. Rather than slowing down, we would ask you to continue accelerating. Going at almost the speed of light—and invisible until the last moment—you will strike the enemy planet with ten thousand times the force of the meteorite that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  “Even the ungodly science of the Others cannot protect them from this apocalyptic assault. Please answer that you have heard and are willing to give your life in this noble enterprise.

  “God bless you and keep you.”

  We all just stared at each other. “Who is that guy?” I said. “Lazlo what?”

  “Motkin,” Namir said. “He’s a cubevangelist.”

  “Powerful signal,” Paul said. “Pretty tight laser.”

  Namir shrugged. “He has lots of money, or did when money meant something, and a powerful broadcast site in the Atlantic, beyond the seven-mile limit. He could do it once.”

  “Once?” Paul said.

  “They’l
l have people like me in the water in thirty minutes. Home-land Security. Unless Reverend Motkin really is president of the world, he’s about to have a serious accident.”

  “Or had it about a week ago,” Paul said.

  “It’s hard to get used to that. He was arrested or dead before that message was a tenth of the way here.”

  “What if he really is king of the world,” Moonboy said, “or president or whatever. Some pretty loony people have made it to the top, even in normal times.”

  “I still wouldn’t feel I had to kill myself on his behalf,” Dustin said.

  “Besides, the order is stupid,” Paul said. “We don’t know for certain which planet in the Wolf 25 system is their home world.” There was a “cold Earth” planet that seemed likely, but also two gas giants with Triton-sized satellites.

  “As we get closer, we might be able to tell which one it is,” Moonboy said.

  “It probably would be the one with all the missiles rising up to greet us.”

  “Maybe not,” Namir said. “If we stopped accelerating the last month or so, we’d be coming in cold. They might not detect us until it was too late to respond. We’d still be going at 99 percent the speed of light.”

  “You’re not arguing in favor of this kamikaze scheme,” Elza said.

  “Not this particular one. President of the world. But it’s always been a possible strategy.”

  “As I said before,” Snowbird said, “if we’re going to die anyhow, we could still exercise some control over the situation that way.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission. Besides, even if we knew what planet they were on, we don’t know who else might inhabit it. It might be like destroying Earth just to get Lazlo what’s- his-name.”

  “Which might be happening even as we speak,” Namir said. “Or after however long it takes his message to be picked up by the Others.”

  “Comforting prospect,” I said.

  “And an interesting thought experiment,” Moonboy said. “If they did destroy the Earth, should we try to destroy them in turn? Or should we go someplace safe and try to restart the human race?”