Starbound

  I tried to be honest. “In the Faith War, no, not much. But we were all eighteen and nineteen, and felt immortal. When someone got killed, it was like a supernatural visitation.

  “Gehenna was totally different. I mean, there were bodies everywhere you looked, so after a while they were just part of the scenery. It was more dangerous, I guess, with all the loonies and looters. But the corpses, they were like a dream landscape, a nightmare. They weren’t individuals; you didn’t see yourself becoming one of them.” They nodded, as if they hadn’t heard all this before. Turning points in life bring out the same old stories. Even among relativity pioneers.

  This was the wrong place. It was becoming a fashionable hour for the rich and famous; the Four Seasons was filling up and getting loud with background chatter, people wanting to be noticed. We three, arguably the most-talked-about people here, definitely didn’t want to be noticed.

  Our identities hadn’t been revealed, and wouldn’t be, as long as friends and relatives cooperated, until we were safely in orbit.

  We took the Fifth Avenue and SoHo slidewalks back, less for the time saved than from a desire to be part of a crowd. We dawdled at the entrance and transfer point so my bodyguard could catch up. When we got to the condo door, I gave him the good-bye signal, stroking an eyebrow twice.

  “Same old signal,” Dustin said as he palmed the night lock.

  “Yeah. I’d change it if I thought someone might actually be after me. If somebody really wanted my ass, they’d have it by now.”

  “So you’re wearing flared trousers for the look,” Elza said.

  “Force of habit.” Once we were in the elevator, I pulled the ankle holster off.

  “A .289,” she said. “Not with legal rounds, I hope.”

  “Neuros.” I’d never fired one at a person, but they were impressive on a dummy. Smart round that finds an eye and blows a small shaped charge across the frontal lobes.

  “Jesus,” Dustin said. “You got them where?”

  I laughed, thumbing the door open. “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”

  “Boys and toys.” Elza went by me, flopped down on the couch, and slipped her shoes off. “So I get to take an extra seven kilos of clothes?”

  “Only sexy ones,” Dustin said.

  “I don’t have seven kilos of the kind you like. That’d be about a hundred outfits.”

  I sat in the easy chair and picked up the balalaika and plucked an arpeggio.

  “Say you’re not taking the banjo?” Dustin said, with hope in his voice.

  “No. I’ll be in my sixties when we get back. Take it up seriously then, as a retirement project.”

  Elza laughed. “You’ll retire about a year after you’re dead.”

  I had a sudden impulse to throw the instrument against the wall, just to do something unpredictable. Instead, I set it gently against the bookcase. “I don’t know. In a way, this is early retirement. Cleaned out my desk to embark on a new life of travel and adventure.”

  “Or stay in one room for thirteen years, trying not to go mad,” Dustin said.

  “There is that. I wonder whether they’ve packed enough straitjackets.”

  Elza got up and went to the refrigerator. “Wine?” She poured two glasses of white wine and a small glass of vermouth for herself. Bunched them together in two hands and brought them over to the coffee table. “I’m kind of torn,” she said. “Maybe go out to the Galápagos early, do some snorkeling.”

  Dustin held his glass up to her. “I’ll catch up with you. Say good-bye to London and Paris, maybe Kyoto. Come from the other direction.”

  “City boy.”

  “Don’t care much for the water. Fish fuck in it.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “People do, too.”

  “I’ll wait for zero gee.” He looked at me. “You’ve been there.”

  “It was all men. None of them appealed to me.”

  “I mean the Galápagos. Diving.”

  “Wasn’t recreational. Bomb threat to the Elevator.”

  “I remember. The note said something about Gehenna.”

  “Someone in Personnel must have sat down and entered Gehenna/ skindive/license to kill.”

  Elza sighed. “And I’m still on my learners’ permit.”

  “Well, you’ve got four days. I could get you a quick transfer to the Zone. You’d get more experience in four days than I’ve had in twenty years.”

  “I’ll think about it. Did you see many fish there?”

  “Not so many pretty ones. You want to go into the shallows, the reefs near the shore, unless you’re after big sharks.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “They’re protected. If one bites you and gets sick, there’s a huge fine.”

  “But you were there before,” Dustin said.

  “Twenty-five years ago, first wife. I could hardly get her out of the water, sharks and all.”

  “You think of her a lot,” she said.

  I tried to be accurate. “Her image comes to me often. I don’t sit and dwell on the memory of her.”

  “I know that. I guess that’s what I meant.” She shook her head. “Crazy time.”

  “We’re all dwelling on the past these days,” Dustin said. “Leaving everything behind.”

  There was so much I didn’t want to say. She gave me the Shakespeare book in the morning; at noon, she took one breath and died. Was it more or less horrible that it happened to so many at the same time?

  “You’re the philosopher,” I said. “I’m more an engineer, cause and effect.” Elza was watching me closely. I don’t think I’d ever raised this directly with her before. “We were crazy in love, like schoolkids, and although I know it was all blood chemistry boiling away, brain chemistry . . . still, we were addicted to each other, the sight and sound and smell of each other, like a heroin addict to his junk . . .”

  “Been there,” Elza said.

  “But you never lost anyone the way I lost her. Like a sudden traumatic amputation—worse, because you can buy a new arm or leg, and it will do.”

  “So that’s what I am? Your—”

  “No. It’s not simple.”

  She picked at a nail, concentrating. “I had a friend lost a leg before she was twenty, AP mine in Liberia. She said the new one did everything she asked it to. But it was never really part of her. Just an accessory.” She stood up. “I better pack some clothes.” She put her glass in the refrigerator and went into the bedroom.

  “For a diplomat,” Dustin said softly, “you don’t have an awful lot of tact.”

  “I don’t have to be a diplomat with you and her. Do I?”

  “Of course not.” He got up and went to the fridge. “Cheese?”

  “I just ate a whole bird.”

  “A little one.” He set out five chunks of cheese, including half a wheel of Brie, and put them on a platter with some bread and a knife. “They won’t have cows in ad Astra.”

  I sliced off a piece of something blue. “Not going to keep for fifty years,” he said.

  “Not much will.” I was still seeing her. “Gehenna will just be a history lesson to most people.”

  He broke the lengthening silence. “Her name was Mira?”

  “Moira. My father approved of her, nice Jewish girl. I think he’s a little scared of Elza.”

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “I’ll give you something to be scared of,” she said from the bedroom, bantering, the hurt gone from her voice.

  “Best offer I’ve had today,” he said.

  I didn’t hear her walking up behind me, barefoot. She put both hands lightly on my head and tangled my hair with her fingers. “I’ll sleep with Namir tonight.”

  “Okay by me,” I said.

  “We have to talk.” She rubbed my temples. “You can love her. You will love her, always. But you have to leave her here. Here on Earth.”

  “I think that’s already done.” Literally, anyhow.

  “We’ll talk about it.” She went back t
o the large bedroom.

  I joined her there an hour later and we did talk. Moira was my generation, a year older than me, but forever young to Elza, and not much I could do about that.

  She wanted to know what Moira and I had done that I didn’t do with her, and I tried not to think of it as an invasion of privacy. Of course the big thing she couldn’t do was have me as a twenty-five-year-old lad, and there was another thing I didn’t mention, to preserve the woman’s dead dignity. But I did describe a trick Moira would do with her breasts, and we were both happy and relieved when she made it work. Elza’s a little self-conscious about her small breasts, as Moira was about her large ones. I decided not to bring that up.

  While we lay there entwined, the diplomat in me affirmed that I could leave Moira here on Earth. I didn’t say that part of me would stay with her, too; neither of us buried, neither dead.

  I pretended to be asleep, as always, when she slipped away to join Dustin. Thinking furiously about the lies that grace our lives.

  12

  GROWING THINGS

  The Martians came up a week after we did. We helped them unload their few packages. Earth-normal weight was oppressive to them, and they clumped around with exaggerated care. Well, it wasn’t exaggeration. Like having to carry around a weight one and a half times as heavy as you are. Carry it for thirteen years with no relief.

  Snowbird didn’t complain, but her voice was unnaturally high and reedy. I doubt that they spoke much English on the way up.

  I put my arm gently around her shoulders. “It’s very hard, isn’t it?”

  “Hard for you, too, Carmen. You haven’t been to Earth in a long time.”

  “I exercise in Earth gravity every day.”

  “I should do that,” she said. “Become Earth-strong. By the time we return, the quarantine may be lifted.”

  Fly-in-Amber, behind us, made a dismal noise. “I have a better idea. Let’s just go home. We can’t live this way.”

  She gave him a long blast and high-pitched growl in consensus Martian, and he squawked and clattered back.

  She turned back to me. “Perhaps we should rest in Mars territory for a while.” They plodded off, muttering.

  “Before long, they’ll be in zero gravity,” Paul said. “He’ll complain about that, too.”

  The last thing we would have to do before Paul cut us loose was to tape things down, mostly chairs. When we were flung away from the Space Elevator, we’d be in free fall, like someone jumping out of an airplane. But we would plummet for eleven days. Jostled every now and then by steering jets. That would be tomorrow.

  The habitat didn’t have any independent propulsion, of course, but it was firmly attached to the ship that would eventually be our landing vessel, much smaller. It would fly away like an eagle clutching an elephant.

  Before that, we had to water the plants. We’d spent six days following the directions the hydroponic engineers had left behind, making sure all the root structures could be kept moist without water surrounding them. There was a water-absorbent granular medium held inside a fine-mesh net for each plant or group of plants. There was no automation in this temporary arrangement, of course. Every morning we’d spend an hour giving each plant a measured shot of water from a portable hydrator, a water pump with a hose and syringe.

  The first morning, still in gravity, I split the chore with Dustin. It was interesting to get him alone; he usually deferred to Namir or Elza.

  I had to ask him about his weird family, growing up. “I never gave it much thought,” I said, “but isn’t it strange that a person who winds up in espionage should have grown up in a commune, with anarchist parents?”

  He laughed. “Not so odd. Like a kid whose parents are lawyers or cops might want to escape and become a bohemian artist.

  “I didn’t want to be a spy, anyhow. A philosophy degree doesn’t open many doors, though. The Space Force paid through my doctorate in exchange for four years’ service, which I thought was going to be in communications. You go where they send you, though. They needed engineers for communication.”

  “And philosophers for spookery?”

  “It’s a grab bag, intelligence. Not that they’d ever admit it, but it’s where you go if you have education but no useful skills. The personnel database says there are three other philosophy Ph.D.s in intelligence. We ought to get together. Form a cabal.”

  “Namir says there are more officers in intelligence than any other part of the military.”

  He nodded amiably. “As if that were a good thing? It’s been that way for a long time.”

  “I’ve never known a philosopher before. If it wasn’t for the Space Force, what would you be doing?”

  “Staying out of harm’s way! You know, sit around, think deep thoughts. Beg for scraps.”

  “And teach, I suppose.”

  “And write papers that two or three people will read.” The bush he was watering had tiny white flowers with a penetrating sweet smell. He bent down and breathed deeply, and read the label. “Martian?”

  “Martian miniature limes. They tweaked the genes so it wouldn’t be all branch, growing tall in Martian gravity. We’ll see what it does in one gee.”

  “The past year and a half, I’ve been assigned to a think tank in Washington. All the services, multidisciplinary. The Ethics of Military Intervention.”

  “Any conclusions?”

  He made a sound I’d come to recognize, a puff of air through his nose: amusement, contempt, maybe patience. “Under the present conditions . . . it’s hard to justify most wars, anyhow, that aren’t a purely defensive reaction to invasion. But now, with the Others threatening the whole human race with casual destruction? How does anyone justify a war against any human enemy?”

  “Is that a question I’m supposed to answer?”

  “No.” He growled a string of foreign syllables. “That’s Farsi: ‘There is some shit a man does not have to eat.’ Adapted from American English, I think, though the principle is widely spread.”

  “But it implies there’s another kind of shit that a man does have to eat. Glad I’m a woman.”

  He smiled at me. “See? You’re a philosopher already.” He sniffed the lime flowers again. “Though living on recycled shit is something I tried to become philosophical about, before we came up.”

  “Hunger helps.” It dominated the menu in Little Mars. The pantry machine broke up all organic waste, and some inorganic, and put it back together to make amino acids, then protein. Mixed in with measured amounts of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, some trace elements, it could produce blocks of edible stuff in programmed colors, textures, and flavors. “Elza said that Namir is a good cook. I wonder what he can do with pseudobeef and pseudochicken.”

  “Make pseudo-Beef Stroganoff and pseudo-Chicken Florentine, I guess.” He sighed and leaned back against the lattice that would be supporting bean vines. “Carmen, what do you think our chances really are? Are we just wasting our time? Intuition, I mean, not science.”

  “I don’t think you can do science without data. I do have an intuition, though, or an optimistic delusion.” I sat down on the edge of the tank. “Do you know the story of the lucky chicken?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, suppose you had a flat of fertilized chicken eggs—that’s one hundred and forty-four—and you dropped the flat from waist height or shoulder height. Some eggs would break. Discard them and do it again, and again, until finally you have just one egg.”

  “The lucky egg.”

  “You’re getting it. You hatch it and collect its fertilized eggs—”

  “Unless it’s a rooster.”

  “Then you have to start over, I guess. But you do the same thing, dropping them over and over until one survives. Then you wait for it to mature and collect its eggs. And again and again.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Eventually, you will produce the luckiest chicken in the world. The version I heard, the benefactor was the pope. He put the chi
cken in a fancy papal chicken basket, and it never left his side. So nothing bad ever happened to him.”

  “This is not the last pope we’re talking about, then.”

  “Not a real pope. Me, actually. I’m the lucky chicken.”

  “They dropped your mother from a great height?”

  He was so much like Paul I could smack him. “Not that I know of. But ever since I got to Mars, I’ve had the most incredible luck. All ‘The Mars Girl’ crap. All kinds of trouble, and I always seem to come out on top. So maybe my main qualification for this job is as a talisman. Stay close to me, the way the pope stayed close to his lucky chicken.”

  He was nodding, looking serious. “You do believe in luck?”

  “Well, at some level I suppose I do. Not in lucky charms, talismans. But just as an observation, sure. Some people seem to be lucky all the time, while others seem to be born losers.”

  “That’s true enough. Something that statistics would predict.”

  “I suppose you could pretend to be scientific, and put the whole population on a bell curve, just like you would for height or weight. Normal people bulking up in the middle, the unlucky ones off to the left, the luckiest trailing off on the right.”

  “Ah ha!” He grinned and rubbed his beard. “There’s your fallacy. You can only do it with dead people.”

  “What? Dead people have all run out of luck.”

  “No, I mean, all you can say of someone is after the fact: ‘he was lucky all his life’ or ‘she was unlucky’—but a living, breathing person always has tomorrow to worry about. You could be the luckiest person in the world, in two worlds, in the whole universe. But some tomorrow, like the day you meet the Others, boom. Your ‘luck’ runs out, like a gambler’s winning streak. And in that particular case, so does everybody else’s.”

  “Are you always such an optimist?”

  He picked up his hydrator, and we moved on to the next patch. “By Earth standards, America anyhow, I really am an optimist. You can define that as ‘anyone who isn’t suicidally depressed.’ There may be free energy, but that doesn’t translate into universal prosperity. Most people work at unsatisfying jobs with ambiguous or worthless goals and low pay, and anyhow, they’re just marking time until the end of the world. Namir and Elza and I, like you guys, are in the unique position of being able to do something about it.”