Starbound

  They were as real as dirt, as real as death.

  The memory family didn’t know that they had another function, besides using their eidetic memories to keep track of things. They also retained a coded message, generation after generation, that would be transmitted to humans when the time was right.

  The decoded message seemed innocuous. By means of a checkerboard digital picture, a “Drake diagram,” we learned that the Others were a silicon-nitrogen form of life; they evidently lived immersed in the liquid nitrogen seas of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

  Various mysteries began to come together after the Others revealed their existence, like the paradoxical combination of high technology and scientific ignorance in the Martian city. (They apparently lived only in one huge underground complex, about the size of a large city on Earth, but with more than half of it covered with creepy fungoid agriculture.) The Others had built the city and populated it with thousands of bioengineered Martians, evidently for the purpose of keeping an eye on Earth, an eye on humanity.

  The city had no obvious power source, but they had apparently limitless power from somewhere. Human scientists eventually figured it out, which gave us unlimited power as well, evidently bled off from some “adjacent” universe. I wonder what we’ll do if they show up with a bill.

  The Other that lived on Triton—many other Others were light-years away—gave us ample demonstration of what unlimited power can do.

  It nearly destroyed the satellite Triton in one tremendous explosion. An instant before the explosion, it escaped, or something did, in a spaceship that screamed away at more than twenty gravities’ acceleration. Its apparent destination was a small star called Wolf 25, about twenty-four light-years away.

  Before the Other made its spectacular exit, it prepared an equally spectacular exit for the human race. The head Martian, my friend Red, was unknowingly a direct conduit to the otherworldly source of energy that powered the Martian civilization, and when he died, that connection would open up, with world-destroying intensity.

  The world it destroyed would not be Mars. The Other had contrived to send Red to Earth before the time bomb was triggered.

  Red knew he didn’t have long. He asked my husband Paul, who is a pilot, to take him to the other side of the Moon to die. There was no way of knowing exactly how large the explosion was going to be, but presumably the Moon had enough mass to block it.

  It did. Red’s funeral pyre was bright enough to be seen light-years away, but only a few gamma rays leaked through.

  Would the Others see the flare and assume that their little problem—the existence of the human race—had been solved?

  That was not likely. We had to go to them.

  5

  LOGICS

  Magic trumps science for most people, and wishful thinking drives a lot of decision-making. So a large and vocal fraction of the human race thought the best way to deal with the Others would be to lie low.

  If we didn’t try to contact them and didn’t broadcast any signals into space—who needs to, since everybody has cable?—then the Others would think that their plan had worked, and so would leave us alone.

  Of course there’s no cable between Earth and Mars, but the idea of abandoning Mars actually sounded pretty attractive to some, since without Mars none of this would have happened.

  Then there was also the problem that we didn’t think to turn off all the transmitters right after the big explosion on the other side of the Moon, so it would be like closing the barn door long after the horse had trotted off to Wolf 25.

  A different kind of logic asserted that we had better start building a defense against the Others right now. Assuming that the ship that left Triton couldn’t go faster than the speed of light, it would be more than twenty-four years before they got back home and found out Earth had survived, and a similar time before they came back.

  A half century can be a long time in the evolution of weapons. Fifty years before Hiroshima, soldiers were still killing each other with bayonets and single-shot bolt-action rifles.

  With unlimited energy, we could make our own planet- buster. And a starship to take it to them.

  A lot of humans (and all Martians) thought that was a really bad idea. There was no reason to assume that what they did on Triton and the Moon represented the pinnacle of the Others’ ability to do damage. If we got them angry, they might flip a switch and blow up the Sun. They might send us all off to wherever the energy was coming from. Or some other place from which there would be no returning.

  Meanwhile, the Earth’s various economic and political systems were trying to deal with the mixed blessing of free energy. It wasn’t quite literally free, since someone had to pay for the manufacture of an outlet. But there were dozens of factories, then hundreds, then one on every block, popping them out for pocket change. A black box with a knob and a place to plug in, for alternating current, or a couple of terminals, for DC. There were other ways to access different kinds of power—like the direct matter-to-energy inferno that would power ad Astra.

  The consortium that had built the Space Elevator, which put things in orbit cheaply and made endeavors like the Martian colony possible, had grown into an enterprise that had an annual cash flow greater than all but the two wealthiest countries. It had a lot of influence on matters like whether or not to build a fleet of starships and go kick some alien butt. It could have made the largest profit in the history of commerce if it had decided to encourage that, but a version of sanity prevailed: it would only make a small fleet of warships, and leave it here in the solar system. And before it did anything aggressive, it would send a peace-seeking delegation to Wolf 25. Sacrificial lambs, some said, and of course its best- known public representative, “The Mars Girl” Carmen Dula, would be one of them. She was not thrilled by the idea.

  6

  EARTH AND MARS AND IN BETWEEN

  None of us who had set foot in Mars was allowed to return to Earth. The logic was clear: until we knew why everyone of my generation and younger simultaneously came down with the Martian lung crap, there was no telling what other strange bugs we might harbor. So we’re all Typhoid Marys, until proven otherwise.

  We could live in Earth orbit, though, inside a quarantined satellite, Little Mars. I commuted back and forth, Little Mars to Mars, on the one-gee shuttle, which (without spending months in free fall) took between two and five days. I was happier in Mars, and would have settled down there if the Corporation would have left me alone. See my kids often enough for them to remember my face.

  In Little Mars, I could don a virtual-reality avatar and electronically walk around on Earth without infecting anyone. Usually my avatar looked like a twelve-year-old girl in shiny white tights who staggered a lot and ran into things, with my face and voice, kind of. When I visited Starhope, though, the spaceship factory, for some reason they gave me a male avatar. Six feet tall, broad-shouldered, glossy black. Still clumsy and a little dangerous to be around.

  It was even more clumsy than the girlish avatar I was used to, because everything I did and said went through a censoring delay, in case I inadvertently said, “Hey, how are those warships coming along? The ones we’re going to use against the Others?”

  It was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the mostly symbolic completion of ad Astra, the ship we were eventually going to take to Wolf 25. All that was really complete, though, was the habitat, the living and working quarters for the crew of seven humans and two Martians. The ship itself was being built out in space, attached to the huge iceball that would provide enough reaction mass to go twenty-some light-years and back.

  A miniature version of it was already well past the Oort Cloud, the theoretical edge of the solar system. It had more spartan quarters and the modest goal of going a hundredth of a light-year and back without exploding or otherwise wasting its test pilot.

  Our ship would be reasonably comfortable, bigger than the John Carter, which had taken twenty-seven of us on an eight- month journey to Mars. We
’d been weightless then, though; on our trip to the presumed home of the Others, we would be traveling at one-gee acceleration, once the ship got up to speed. Then turn around at the midway point and decelerate at the same rate.

  Scattered among the merely real humans at the ceremony were eight avatars identical to mine, I guess standard issue at Starhope. One of them was Paul and two would be Moonboy and Meryl, the other two xenologists who were going with us. Maybe three of the others were the Corporation/UN team, who couldn’t be in Little Mars—no place to hide—but might have been in orbit somewhere. Or just in the next room, for that matter, their identities hidden.

  (We’d never met face-to-face, but we had exchanged letters. Nice enough people, but a married threesome, two men and a woman, seemed odd to me. One man is hard enough to handle.)

  I missed some of the oratory. It’s easy to fall into a drowse when you’re standing motionless in VR. If I missed something important, I could trivo it back.

  Our mission was so vague I would be hard- pressed to write a speech about it more than a minute or two long—or shorter than a book. Go to the planet we think the Other went to, just to demonstrate that we could. Then react to whatever they do. If “whatever they do” includes vaporizing us, which doesn’t seem unlikely, then the fact that we didn’t try to harm them first will have been our default mission. Aren’t you sorry you killed us?

  As soon as the ceremony was over, they started taking the habitat apart. It broke down into modules small enough to be lifted by the Space Elevator.

  Once the habitat was delivered, Starhope would settle down into what would be its regular business for the next forty years: building warships.

  It was a really stupid idea, since the Others had already demonstrated how easy it would be for them to destroy the Earth. Why aggravate them?

  Of course, the warship fleet’s actual function was more about keeping the peace on Earth than carrying war into space. It gave the illusion that something was being done; we weren’t just a passive target. It also provided employment for a large fraction of the Earth’s population, who might otherwise be fighting each other.

  The fleet was never mentioned in any broadcast medium; people used euphemisms like “space industrialization” to keep the armament project secret from the Others. I supposed it could work if the Others weren’t listening too hard or were abysmally stupid.

  It was good to get out of VR and shower and change. When I was finished, there was a message from Paul saying he was down in the galley with fresh coffee and news.

  The coffee was a new batch from Jamaica. He let me take one sip and gave me the news: the Earth triad was coming up to get to know us, ahead of schedule.

  “No idea why,” he said. “Maybe Earth is too exciting.”

  “Probably just scheduling. Once they start shipping up the pieces of ad Astra, it’s going to be hard to find a seat on the Elevator.” But it was odd.

  7

  INTRODUCTIONS

  I had thought about this moment for some time, often with dread. Now that the moment had come, I just felt resignation, with an overlay of hope. On the other side of this air- lock door was exile from humanity, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Until the Mars quarantine was lifted.

  I looked at my mates, Elza and Dustin. “I feel as if someone should make a speech. Or something.”

  “How about this?” Dustin said. “ ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’ ”

  “My words exactly,” Elza said. “Or approximately.”

  We were floating in a sterile white anteroom, the hub of Little Mars. There were two elevator doors, facing one another, slowly rotating around us: EARTH SIDE and MARS SIDE. People could come and go from the Earth side. The Mars side was one-way.

  I pushed the button. The door, which was the elevator’s ceiling, slid open. We clambered and somersaulted so that our feet were touching the nominal floor. I said “close,” and the ceiling did slide shut, though it might have been automatic rather than obedient.

  As it moved “down” toward the rim of the torus, the slight perception of artificial gravity increased until it was Mars- normal, very light to us. An air- lock hatch opened in our floor, and we climbed down a ladder. The hatch closed above us with a loud final-sounding clunk. A door opened into the supposed contamination of Little Mars.

  I’d expected the typical spaceship smell, too many people living in too small a volume, but there was a lot more air here than they needed. It smelled neutral, with a faint whiff of mushroom, probably the Martians’ agriculture.

  I recognized the woman standing there, of course, one of the most famous faces in the world, or off the world. “Carmen Dula.” I offered my hand.

  She took it and inclined her head slightly. “General Zahari.”

  “Just Namir, please.” I introduced my mates, Elza Guadalupe and Dustin Beckner, ignoring rank. They were both colonels in American intelligence, nominally the Space Force. Israeli for me, but we spooks all inhabit the same haunted house.

  She introduced her husband, Paul Collins, even more famous, who would be piloting the huge ship, and the other two xenologists, Moonboy and Meryl. We would meet the Martians later.

  We followed them down to the galley. Walking was strange, both for the lightness and a momentary dizziness if you turned your head or nodded too quickly—Coriolis force acting on the inner ear, which I remembered from military space stations. It doesn’t bother you after a few minutes.

  Dustin stumbled over a floor seam as we went into the galley, and Carmen caught him by the arm and smiled. “You’ll get used to it in a couple of days. Myself, I’ve come to prefer it. Sort of dreading going back to one gee.”

  The ad Astra would accelerate all the way at one gee. “How long have you lived with Martian gravity?”

  “Since April ’73,” she said. “Zero gee there and back, of course, in those days. I’ve been back and forth a couple of times on the one-gee shuttle. I didn’t like it much.”

  “We’ll get used to it fast,” Paul said. “I split my time between Earth and Mars in the old days, and it wasn’t a big problem.”

  “You were an athlete back then,” she said, with a little friendly mocking in her voice. “Flyboy.”

  Terms change. For most of my life the old days meant before Gehenna. Now it means before Triton. And a flyboy used to fly airplanes.

  “Nice place,” Dustin said. Comfortable padded chairs and a wooden table, holos of serious paintings on the walls, some unfamiliar and strange. Rich coffee smell. They had a pressure-brewer that I saw did tea as well.

  “Pity we can’t take it with us,” Paul said. “Best not get too used to Jamaican coffee.”

  There was room around the table for all of us. We all got coffee or water or juice and sat down.

  “We wondered why you came early,” Moonboy said. “If you don’t mind my being direct.” He had a pleasant, unlined face in a halo of unruly gray hair.

  “Of course not, never,” I said, and, as often happens, when I paused Elza leaped in to complete my thought.

  “It’s about the possibility that we, or one of us, might find the prospect impossible,” she said. “They want us to think this is all cast in stone, and they’re sure from psychological profiles that we’ll all get along fine—and at any rate, we have no choice; there’s only one flight, and we have to be on it.”

  Moonboy nodded. “And that’s not true?”

  “It can’t be, absolutely. What do you think would happen if one of us seven were to die? Would they cancel the mission?”

  “I see your point . . .”

  “I’m sure they have a contingency plan, a list of replacements. So what if the problem is not somebody’s dying, but rather somebody’s realizing that before the thirteen years is up, some one or two of the other people are going to drive him or her absolutely insane?”

  “Don’t forget the Martians,” Meryl said. “If anybody here is going to drive me fucking insane, it will be Fly-in-Amber.” The other three laug
hed, perhaps nervously.

  “Walking through that air lock did trap you,” Paul said. “There’s no going back.”

  “Not to Earth, granted. But one could stay here, or go on to Mars,” I said, looking at my wife. “You’ve never said anything about this.”

  “It just came into my head,” she said, with an innocent look that I knew. Happy to have surprised me.

  “It’s a good point,” Paul said. “A couple of days out, we’re past the point of no return. Let’s all have our nervous breakdowns before then.”

  It did cause me to reflect. Am I being too much of a soldier? Orders are orders?

  Thirty-five years ago, in the basic training kibbutz, a sergeant would wake me up, his face inches from mine, screaming, What is the first general rule?

  “I will not quit my post until properly relieved,” I would mumble. Much more powerful than I will obey orders.

  “What is the first general rule?” I asked her softly.

  A furrow creased her brow. “What is the first what?”

  Dustin cleared his throat. “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.”

  She smiled. “My soldier boys. We need a better first rule.” She looked at Carmen and raised her eyebrows.

  “How about ‘Don’t piss off the aliens’?”

  “Except Fly-in-Amber?” I said to Meryl.

  She gave a good- natured grimace. “He’s no worse than the other ones in the yellow tribe. They’re all kind of stuck-up and . . . distant? Even to the other Martians.”

  I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.