That might be alien to our culture, but it’s not alien to human nature. In the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, suicide attacks have often been used as a practical response to an imbalance in technology. There were uneven results—the handful of suicide pilots in America’s 9/11 had a stupendous kill ratio, but the five thousand Japanese kamikazes only sank thirty-six ships. In both cases, though, it was an understandable military sacrifice, when the enemy’s technological base made them unbeatable by conventional methods.
And their situations were nothing compared to the technological imbalance between the human race and the Others. Should we feel guilty for not making the ultimate sacrifice? Do we deserve to be condemned as cowards? Having been there at the time, I’d say no. Those with the benefit of hindsight may feel differently.
There have been threats on our lives. Our public appearances have two cadres of bodyguards, I found out—armed soldiers in uniform surrounding us, but twice as many in civilian clothes circulating in the audience.
So I was relieved when the celebrations were abruptly canceled after two days. We didn’t get to return on Air Force One—would never see the president again—but took a spartan private jet back to California, where we’d left Snowbird.
She was more or less hidden for the time being. As unpopular as the six of us were with the angry populace, we could only imagine how they would react to a Martian. Alien tools of the Others.
She would eventually be moved to a sanctuary in Siberia, where conditions were more Mars-like. A foundation had been set up there when the quarantine was lifted, and now it would support as well as study the five or six Martians marooned on Earth. She would find edible Martian food growing there, and the company of her own kind. But she wanted to say good-bye to us first, and take a swim in the ocean.
She would get that, but not much more.
20
THE LONGEST JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP
The last person I talked to on Mars was my good old mentor Oz, who said he was not quite 64 years old now—that’s in Martian years, though, which comes to about 120 on Earth. He didn’t look a day over a hundred, though. Wizened and wrinkled, but still with a wry intelligent look and a sparkle in his eye.
We were in the space communications room at Armstrong Space Force Base, where we’d landed from orbit. It was a bright clean room that felt old, too many coats of paint. Paul exchanged pleasantries with Oz, then left after the twelve-minute lag.
“How bad is it, Oz? Can the colony survive without support from Earth?”
Following the same protocol as we’d used fifty years before, Oz’s image froze on the screen when he hit the SEND button. I’d brought the Washington Post to read while the signals crawled back and forth.
The only story about us was on page 14, and it wasn’t complimentary.
Oz came back smiling. “We’re completely self-sufficient, Carmen; have been for more than twenty years. Human population’s over three thousand, a third of them native-born. Our living and farming space is probably twenty times what it was when you left.
“The big debate over here is whether we should stay out of space; whether the Others meant to include us in their warning. There were no Martian ships in the fleet.
“A majority says stay home. We have a Space Elevator, and they didn’t blow it down, but its only real function was as a terminal for the shuttle to and from Earth.
“Personally, I think that Earth can go to hell in its own way. My big regret is that now you and Paul can’t come home. You could have a natural baby or two now; they solved the lung problem and recycled the mother machine for scrap.
“And you’re still young enough. In-fucking-credible.
“Look, I have to go off to the old folks’ dinner. Can you call me again tomorrow”—he looked offscreen—“about 1600 your time?”
“Definitely at 1600,” I said. “If you have new art, bring some to show me.”
It wasn’t going to happen.
I heard Paul in the next room, one loud bad word. Went through the door and found him staring at a flatscreen monitor.
“Shit,” he said. “Would you look at this?” It was a picture of a human newsie, male and handsome, standing in front of a familiar background: here. The Armstrong Space Force Base.
“We on the news?”
“Not really.” He picked up the chaser and ran it back a minute or two. There was an obviously simulated picture of a lander like ours taking off tail first, the way they did spaceflight before the Elevator.
“Back to old-fashioned ways,” the newsie said. “Our Space Force is sending a rocket up into the cloud of rocks that now surrounds our planet, to get some close-up observations—and perhaps work its way through. Blasting the little obstacles with the powerful laser in its nose and maneuvering around the larger ones.
“The Space Force confirms that they don’t believe this first try will actually penetrate the millions of miles of debris, but it will be a good start. And no human pilot will be endangered; all the flight controlled by virtual-reality interfacing. Rumor has it that the VR pilot will be none other than Paul ‘Crash’ Collins, back on Earth, still young through the magic of general relativity!”
“Rumor has its head up its ass,” Paul said. “Nobody’s said anything to me.”
“Could you do it? Would you?”
“No, and no way in hell. I never trained for that kind of launch off Earth; only from Mars, where it’s a lot simpler. But more, it’s . . . it’s thumbing our nose at the Others. Are they insane?”
Maybe they all are, I thought; the culture. “Maybe they have a more complicated plan. Looks like propaganda, doesn’t it?”
He calmed down a little. “Might be. Shoot up an empty rocket that they know won’t make it through. Just to show that they’re doing something. But I won’t be in on it with them.”
“Best we all stay out of it. Those crowds in Washington.” I leaned on a bookshelf and looked out the window at the dry brown hills. “Let’s get away, Paul. Just disappear from the public eye for a while. We have plenty of money.”
He nodded. “The government would be glad to see us go. Let’s talk it over with everybody tonight. Have to arrange for Snowbird to get to that Siberia place safely.”
“The swim first. That’s important to her.”
We talked it over with the Space Force press people and came up with a workable plan. There was a beach to the north of the base, closed to the public, which would afford a good view of the launch. Snowbird could get her swim, and they would get publicity shots of us watching the launch. (With Paul “regrettably” declining the VR pilot’s seat; too tired and out of practice.) Then we could fade out of sight, to the relief of all concerned.
Namir and Elza and Dustin wanted to go back to New York City. That didn’t sound smart to me. Elza thought with hair dye and a dab of makeup, they’d regain their former anonymity, lost in the crowd. I thought Namir was too handsome for that, and Dustin too weird-looking, his hair in spikes, but I kept it to myself.
We had a last family dinner in the mess hall, Namir ecstatic at having actual steaks to grill. Real potatoes and fresh asparagus. Bottles of good California wine.
I didn’t sleep well, and neither did Paul. Crazy days.
Just at dawn, we all piled into Space Force vans and went down a bumpy gravel road to the beach. There was a hard beauty in the dusty, persistent plants.
The ocean a churning, eternal miracle. Snowbird was awestruck, speechless.
Paul and I rolled up our pant legs and waded into the frigid surf with her, hand in hand. “So warm,” she said. “Feel the sand.”
We gave her a line to hold, just a clothesline that was in the back of the van, and she floated out past the breakers for a few minutes, Space Force divers watching her anxiously. They didn’t want to preside over the first Martian to die of drowning. She might have enjoyed the irony.
The time for the launch approached. The camera crew had written our names in the
sand (Dustin remarked on the metaphor) where we were supposed to stand. We took our positions and watched the countdown on the off-camera monitor.
I had visions of the old twentieth-century launches, a roaring fury of fire and smoke. But they didn’t have free power. In our case it was kind of a hiss and a screech, a nuclear-powered steam engine. A blue-white star sizzling in its tail.
It rose slowly. At first it looked like ad Astra, but of course it was one of the replicas they’d used for practice. The nose had some white stuff painted thickly on, which Paul called an “ablative layer.” I had to think of the thick white sunscreen he’d been wearing the day we met, in the Galápagos, the day before I left Earth.
It was pretty high when the light in its tail went out. The monitor went out, too, then flickered back on as the sound of the rocket stopped abruptly.
Spy again, on the monitor. Shaking its head.
“You don’t listen, do you?”
The rocket started falling in a tailspin, then rolled to point down.
“I suppose we have to be less subtle.”
The rocket nosed into the ocean, about a mile away, raising a high white spume.
“All this energy that you call ‘free’ comes to you at the expense of a donor world in a nearby universe. You are donors now.” The monitor went dead.
A tracking airplane pancaked into the sea and sank. Another plummeted to crash on the beach to the south.
The camera crew were shouting into their phones.
A jet plane that had been high screamed to its death in the sea.
I went to my purse. The phone was blank. Namir slid into the driver’s seat of a van and punched the START button over and over.
Snowbird stopped toweling herself and looked in some direction. “So this is the end,” she said, as if you had asked her for the time.
“Idiots,” Paul said.
“Surprise,” Dustin said.
Even Elza was almost speechless. “So what do we do now?”
For some reason they looked at me. I was standing at the gate. I tried it and it swung open, its electronic lock dead.
“I think we better start walking.”
EARTHBOUND
JOE HALDEMAN
www.sfgateway.com
For Gay and Judith, only bound by gravity
1
I’d been off Earth for so long I didn’t recognize the sound of gunfire.
We were walking up a gravel road from the beach at Armstrong Space Force Base, where we’d just watched, I don’t know, the end of the world? People were checking phones, watches—nothing electronic was working. Even my wrist tattoo was stuck at 10:23. That’s when the rocket we were watching lift off sputtered out and fell into the Pacific.
It didn’t explode or anything. It just stopped. Like everything else.
Guns did seem to work, hence the merry popcorn-popping sound. “Get down, Carmen,” Namir said conversationally. “We don’t know who they’re shooting at.” Everybody was kneeling or lying on the road, below the level of the sand dunes on both sides. I joined them.
An older man in a white suit, clutching a sun hat to his head, fancy camera on a strap bumping against his chest, came running down the gravel, looking anxiously back at the gunfire.
“Card?” I wouldn’t have recognized my brother if he hadn’t called a couple of days earlier. He almost slipped on the gravel, but came to rest crouching next to me.
“Sister, love . . .” he was still looking back at the gunfire—“What the fuck is going on? Weren’t you supposed to be taking care of all this alien crap?”
“Didn’t quite work out,” I said. “It’s a long story. If we’re alive tomorrow, I’ll give you chapter and verse.”
There were a couple of especially loud bangs, I guessed from bombs or grenades. “Where did Namir go?”
“Back there,” his wife Elza said, jerking her thumb toward her other husband, Dustin, who pointed toward Snowbird, who pointed all four arms to the right.
I should note that we were a mixed group, not to say a menagerie: three humans from Earth, three from Mars, and one actual Martian. And now my brother, who was something in between.
Card waved at the Martian Snowbird and tried to croak “hello.” He’d stayed on Mars for the required five years, and then escaped back to Earth. Never could speak Martian well, as if anyone could.
“Hello, Card. I remember you much younger.”
“Fucking relativity,” he said. To me: “You used to be my older sister.”
“I guess we’ll sort it out somehow.” I was born eighty-four years ago, but figured I’d only lived thirty-seven of them. My bratty little brother was twice my age now, in a real sense. From acne to pattern baldness in one stroke.
Namir came clattering back with two automatic weapons under one arm and a holstered pistol in the other hand. He gave the pistol to Elza and a machine gun to Dustin.
That’s good. All the spies had guns.
Elza did something complicated with the pistol, inspecting it. “Tell me you found a gun shop behind some dune.”
“Didn’t kill anybody.”
“But somebody’s going to be looking for them,” Dustin said.
“Not for a while.” He looked at Card. “You must be Carmen’s brother.”
Card nodded. “You must be one of the spies.”
“Namir. We have to find someplace less exposed.”
“The last place we drove by, did it look like a motor pool?” Elza said.
“I remember, yes. Sandbag wall around it.”
“So maybe there’s no one there now. Since no vehicles seem to be working.”
“We can’t just walk up with guns,” I said.
“Right. So you go first.”
“Once the shooting stops.” Actually, I hadn’t heard any for a minute or so. “What direction was it coming from?” I asked Card.
“I guess the press and VIP area. They had bleachers set up. They were gonna leave me there even though I had a pass. I paid a guy to take me to the last checkpoint, a half mile from here.”
“Glad you found us,” I said, and stood up cautiously. The motor pool was about a block away. One low building and dozens of blue NASA trucks and carts. No people obvious. “Paul, let’s go.”
He got up, and Meryl followed him, and then my brother. “I can talk to the natives,” he said. “Lived in California thirty-five years.”
“Leave the armed guard with Snowbird,” Paul said. “Martians might not be too popular right now.”
“Don’t risk anybody’s life for me,” the Martian said. “I won’t live long in any case.”
“You don’t know that,” I said lamely.
“I can’t live on human food, and only have a few days’ worth of mine here. The only renewable source is in the Martian colony in Siberia. I can’t walk there—or I could, if I had time, and it might be pleasantly cold. But it would take a long time. I can’t live off the land.”
“The power could come back any time,” Namir said. “We still know nothing about how the Others’ minds work.”
“No need to comfort me, friend. I lived long enough to swim in the sea.”
Namir stared at her for a moment, nodding, and then looked toward me. “Okay, Carmen, go up to the motor pool and nose around. If the coast is clear, give us a signal.” He considered that and shook his head, smiling. “I mean, you stay here with the gun, and I’ll—”
“Don’t be such a man,” Elza said. “Carmen, do you know how to shoot?”
“Never learned, no.”
“So you guys go up unarmed and knock on the door. None of that shooting’s anywhere near us.”
“Okay.” Three unarmed space travelers versus God knows how many auto mechanics with wrenches and battery testers.
“Don’t try anything aggressive,” Namir said. “Just give us the signal, and we’ll come up behind the sandbags.”
“Or I could scream my lungs out,” I said. “Just kidding.”
We walk
ed up the incline and then down the paved road. The last of the morning cool had baked off, and the motor pool shimmered in the heat.
“What is it about the power?” Card asked. “I saw the rocket sputter out and crash. But what does that have to do with cars?”
He might be the only person in America who didn’t know. Walking down this road, toward us, he couldn’t have been watching the cube when it happened.
“The Others pulled the plug,” Paul said. “When they disintegrated the moon and filled nearby space with gravel, that was supposed to turn Earth into a ‘no space flight’ zone.” Only last week.
“That seemed pretty obvious. But the rocket jocks had to try anyhow.” With heavy shielding and lasers to blast their way through the gravel.
“So they turned off all the free power?” Card said. “That’s serious. How long has it been since there were any actual power-generating plants?”
“It’s even more serious than that,” I said. “Your watch and your cell won’t work. It affects batteries; anything electrical.”
“Not everything,” Meryl said. “Our brains are electromagnetic, electrochemical.”