“There always is,” I said.
I went back to our room and changed clothes. Funny to think that the old ones would sit there for a quarter century before being cleaned. My mother would just shake her head and say “typical.”
Would she be alive still? She was born in 2035 (three years older than Namir) and we would be back in 2138. She has good heredity for long life, but did I really expect to see her at 103? Did I want to?
Well, who knows. With a half century of progress in cosmetic science, she might look my age. Younger. That would be too creepy.
Paul came in over the intercom and asked for a meeting in a half hour, in the compromise lounge. Snowbird would smile, if she had a human mouth.
I got there a bit early, which was fortunate. Namir had found a jar of Iranian caviar, which we cautiously slurped with two spoons, and some dexterity in midair retrieval.
Paul joined us in time to help scrape the bottom of the jar. He’d also had the foresight to put some alcohol in the freezer, half and half with water, so we could wash the fish eggs down with ersatz vodka.
Meryl came out, dressed in a pretty plaid shift with a peasant blouse, mincing along gecko style. “Is that booze?”
Namir tossed it slowly. “Cheap vodka. Pretty cold.”
I’d never seen her drink anything stronger than wine, and not much of that. She squirted a big blast of the vodka into her mouth, and on her face, and immediately had a coughing fit. She started to laugh, then sneezed, with enough force to free her slippers and start her in a slow pinwheel. The skirt billowing around was quite pretty, in an abstract way, though the performance might have been more dignified with underwear. She wound up laughing and crying, not a bad combination under the circumstances.
After we were settled down, Paul said, “I just wanted to make sure everybody has everything sorted out. I’m planning to go into the lander tomorrow at noon. Push the button and see what happens.”
“Do you want us up there, too?” Namir said.
Paul paused, probably remembering Namir’s reaction last time. “Strapping in wouldn’t be necessary. But maybe we should all be in the same place.”
The diffuse feeling of grief, of loss. Elza took Namir’s hand. “We should,” she said.
“I would like that, too,” Snowbird said. “Even with the heat.”
“We don’t know anything about the process,” Dustin said. “The emotional impact may be less, now that we’re expecting it. Or it may be of a different nature. Joy, perhaps.”
“Or anger,” Namir said. “Perhaps we should all be restrained. All but one, who has the key.”
“Sometimes you scare me,” I said, smiling, but meaning it.
“Then you should hold the key.” He shook his head. “Actually, it was only Moonboy and I who had severe reactions last time. Maybe in lieu of a straitjacket, I should have Elza give me a sedative.”
“And anyone else who wants one,” she said. “Except the pilot. Snowbird, I wouldn’t know what to give you.”
“There is a food that prepares one for the unexpected. It worked well enough last time.”
“Wish they made it for humans.” Paul said. “I’m going to assume that with no time elapsed, or no duration, we don’t have to do anything special with the plants. Just everybody complete the maintenance roster before noon tomorrow.” He shrugged. “I know you would anyway. Guess I’m just at a loss for anything constructive to say or do.” He passed around a handwritten note:
Don’t say anything of a sensitive nature to anyone until we know we’re at turnaround. The walls have ears etc.
“Can’t play badminton in zero gee,” I said.
“Namir,” Meryl said, “could you get your balalaika and do me a song or two?”
“Yes,” Dustin said, with no sarcasm in his voice: “I would like that, too.”
“The end of the world is at hand,” said Elza.
14
PREDICTIONS
I woke up slowly from the sedation Elza had given me. I remembered having had dreams. They hadn’t been as intense or persistent as the first time, but they left behind the same malaise, guilt and self-loathing.
If the process had driven Moonboy back into that childhood closet, bound and gagged and strangling in the darkness, I could only hope for his sake that he was truly dead now. Memory is a prison from which there is no other escape.
But there are distractions. I found my slippers and went out into the hall, and rip-ripped my way along the tomato vines toward the exercise machines, which I could hear ticking along.
A tomato was floating free, so I ate it like an apple. Not quite ripe, a little sour. My stomach gave a warning growl, so I saved most of it to finish with some bread.
No need for parsimony anymore, of course. We probably had two hundred times the amount of food we could consume between here and Earth.
Carmen and Paul were working out on the walking and bicycling machines, their VR helmets in tandem. I could hear her soft voice, not quite understandable over the noise of the machines, as they chatted.
She was wearing a white skinsuit, translucent with sweat. Perhaps I was studying her too intently.
“Nice view,” Dustin said in a whisper, behind me. “How are you doing?”
“Not quite awake yet.” I held up the tomato. “Eating in my sleep.”
“Dreams?”
“Not as bad this time. Seen Elza?”
“In the library with Meryl. Looked kind of deep. Get some chow?”
“Sure.” We took the long way around to the kitchen, avoiding the library. I settled for cheese and crackers to go with my tomato; Dustin zapped a steak sandwich. I got a squeeze bag of cold tea out of the fridge; he opted for wine.
“Paul verified that we’re where we’re supposed to be and got the rotation started.” He checked his watch. “It’s 1340 now. We’ve got, um, twenty hours, twenty minutes, till we point ’er toward Earth and go. Away from Earth.”
I set my watch. “I slept late.”
“Last one up.”
“Let me guess: Paul wants a meeting.”
He smiled. “Good guess. He said 1500 if you were up.”
Couple of hours to kill. Normally, this time of day, I’d ping Fly- in-Amber and see whether he wanted to practice some Japanese. Not that he ever needed to practice old vocabulary, since he never forgot.
My only Martian friend, dead now six years.
“New game?” Dustin said.
It took me a second to sort that out. “Sure. I believe you’re white?”
“Pawn to K-4.”
“God, you sneaky bastard.”
We bundled up and met in the compromise lounge.
“So what are we going to find on Earth, fifty years in the future?” Paul said. “Worst case, Namir?”
I guess someone had to articulate it. “In the worst case, there will be nothing there except a messenger from the Others, which will detect and destroy us with no hesitation or explanation.” No one looked surprised.
“The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”
“Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.
“You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”
“It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”
And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”
“Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”
 
; “Not yet,” Elza said.
“It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”
That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes . . . energy.
“None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”
I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”
“Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”
Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”
“Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.
“It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.
“This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”
“You’re products of their intelligence.”
She nodded, bobbing. “It’s like a human play, or novel. Öedipus Rex or King Lear—the children can misunderstand their parents in ways that nobody else can.”
“Good examples,” Dustin said. “Happy endings.”
15
CHANGES
Paul and I twice tried to make love during turnaround, but we were too nervous and distracted. Doom-ridden, perhaps.
A couple of hours before we filed into the shuttle, we all together made a long transmission to Earth, explaining everything as well as we could and hoping for the best for all of us. If Spy’s description of the process was accurate, they would get the message less than a year before we arrived.
It might come just after the Others had blown humanity into elementary particles. There was no need to say anything about that.
We weren’t sure exactly where we would arrive. When we went from turnaround to Wolf 25, we were deposited in orbit around the wrong planet, technically, since we’d planned to go to the moon of the gas giant where the Others lived.
So now, we presumably would go wherever in the solar system the Others wanted us to stop. If it was back where the iceberg started, past Mars orbit, we’d have a longish trip back to Earth.
Or maybe Mars, if Earth wasn’t there anymore.
Paul followed the rest of us into the shuttle and helped Snowbird with her harness. Then he floated up the aisle and strapped himself in. He swiveled around partway and looked down at us.
“Does anybody pray?”
After a long silence, Namir whispered, “Shalom.”
“Yeah.” Paul’s finger hovered over a red switch. “Good luck to all of us.”
We were all ready for the transition’s emotional blow, but most of us cried out, anyhow. And then a gasp of relief.
The blue ball of Earth was below us, the Pacific hemisphere. To my left, the Space Elevator, with the Hilton and Little Mars, Little Earth, and several new structures, including three smaller elevators.
I could faintly hear a burst of radio chatter from Paul’s direction.
“One at a time!” he shouted. “This is Paul Collins, pilot of ad Astra. We are safe.” He looked back at us with a grin. “I should have thought up something historic to say.”
“One long trip for a man,” Elza intoned; “one ambiguous stumble for mankind.”
We were quickly surrounded by identical small spaceships that were obviously warcraft. No streamlining, just a jumble of weaponry on top of a drive system, with a little house in between. Probably called a “life-support module,” or something equally homey.
Earth was in a panic because we had inexorably approached, decelerating full blast, without answering any queries or attempting to communicate.
“The explanation is both simple and complicated,” Paul said, echoing what Snowbird had said a couple of days, or six years, ago. “I think it’s reasonable that I start with the highest possible authority.”
The battalion commander identified herself and demanded an explanation. “Of course we know what you are. But we’ve been alongside you for weeks and have gotten no cooperation.”
“I am not under your command,” he pointed out. “This is not anybody’s military expedition. Is there still a United Nations?”
“Not as such, captain. But all nations are united.”
“Well, let me talk to whoever’s in charge. With some science types listening in.”
“This is completely against protocol. You—”
“I don’t think you have a protocol covering how to deal with a half-century-old spaceship returning from a mission to save the planet from destruction. Or does it happen all the time?”
“We have been expecting you, sir, since your message arrived last month. But when the ship did not respond as it approached Earth, we had to expect the worst.”
“The worst did not happen. Now I’m going to break contact and will talk only when I can talk to someone who outranks everyone who outranks you. Out for now.” He cut off the battalion commander in midbluster and spun half around. “Drink?”
I tossed him the squeeze bag of ersatz Bordeaux. “Holding out for champagne, myself. In gravity.”
He took a long drink, two swallows, and passed it to Namir, who had been sitting silent.
“Suit yourself,” Namir said to me, his voice husky. “It might be a long wait.”
I unstrapped and swam up front to visit with Paul and watch the monitor. The wait was less than a minute.
An elderly man with a seamed dark face and white full beard came into the monitor as it pinged. A voice said, “Mervyn Gold, president of the United Americas.”
“Paul?” the old man said. “ ‘Crash’ Collins?”
Paul stabbed a finger at the camera button. “Professor Gold!”
He smiled broadly. “We’ve both come up in the world, Paul.”
Paul laughed, and said to me, “He was my history prof at Boulder. You met him.”
Subtract fifty years and the beard. He’d come to Little Earth with some government agency and talked with Paul for hours through the quarantine window.
“Amazing,” Gold said. “You don’t look a day older. You’ll be hearing that a lot, I suppose.”
And from really old people, I thought.
“The Others did some trick with time.”
The old man nodded. “I saw your transmission from turnaround. Some people thought it was all a trick, you know. If they’d prevailed, you wouldn’t have made it to Earth.”
I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Just as well.
“I’m glad you didn’t listen to them.”
“Oh, I listen to everyone; comes with the job. But I don’t have to obey anyone.” He shuffled some papers, an everyday gesture that we hadn’t seen in some time. “First, let me tell you that you will come to Earth, not New Mars. The quarantine was lifted, oh, about twelve years ago.”
“That’ll be great.”
How many years since I’d actually been on Earth? I was not quite nineteen when I stepped aboard the Space Elevator. Thirty- four when ad Astra left. Fifteen years plus about four, subjective, that we spent going to the Others’ Home and back.
Exactly half my life—thirty-eight actual years. Whatever “actual” means.
> The president and Paul were chatting about our return. “We could take you down on the Space Elevator, which would be more comfortable than using the lander. But the lander, an actual landing, would be really good for public morale.”
“Propaganda.” Paul said.
“I wouldn’t deny it. Do you think it would be safe?”
“Well, it’s never been used, so it’s brand-new in a way. It’s been sitting around for years, which isn’t good for any machine. But that is what it was designed to do.”
I wished telepathy would work. Space Elevator Space Elevator Space Elevator. I’d had my fill of atmospheric braking.
“If you’re uncertain,” the president said, “we have two qualified pilots waiting at the Hilton.”
I guess you don’t get to be president without a knack for psychology. “Oh, there’s no question I can do it. No question at all. I’ve done seven Mars landings and a hundred on Earth, in flight training.”
“And one on the Moon, I recall.” The one that saved the Earth. Paul smiled. Score one for the prez.
“So when do you want me to bring her down? Where?”
“They still have the landing strip in the Mojave Desert. Um . . .” He looked to his right. “They say they have the old software to guide you in, but want to test it out with a duplicate. Anytime tomorrow would be fine. Daylight, California time?”
“No problem. We came on board with one suitcase apiece. Won’t take us long to pack.”
“Good, good. Will you accept our hospitality at the White House?” Another glance to the right. “Once the medics let you loose, that is.”
“An honor, sir. Professor.”
“See you tomorrow in California.” He looked at his watch. “Would you mind debriefing with my science and policy advisors, say, an hour from now?”
“No problem, sir.” He let out a big breath after the cube went dark. “Let’s move this circus back downstairs. Get Snowbird out of the heat.”
“Paul,” Namir said, “be careful what you say to them.”
“Sure. Careful.”