Greg was no idiot. He was aware that he hadn’t aged well, and was looking for a sign from me. But he was still Greg, still putting things front and center, so that we could deal with them however we were going to. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said.
That wasn’t quite true, but, then again, everything is relative.
Einstein had been a man. I remember being a student, trying to wrap my head around his special theory of relativity, which said there was no privileged frame of reference, and so it was equally true to claim that a spaceship was at rest and Earth was moving away from it as it was to hold the more obvious interpretation, that the ship was moving and Earth was stationary.
But for some reason, time always passed slower on the ship, not on Earth.
Einstein had surely assumed it would be the men who would go out into space, and the women who would stay at home, that the men would return hale and youthful, while the women had stooped over and wrinkled up.
Had that been the case, the women would have been tossed aside, just as Einstein had divorced his own first wife, Mileva. She’d been vacationing with their kids—an older girl and a younger boy, just like Greg and I had—in Switzerland when World War I broke out, and had been unable to return to Albert in Berlin. After a few months—only months!—of this forced separation, he divorced her.
But now Greg and my separation was over. And my husband—if indeed he still was my husband; he could have gotten a unilateral divorce while I was away—was an old man.
“How are Sarah and Jacob?” I asked.
“They’re fine,” said Greg. His voice had lost much of its strength. “Sarah—God, there’s so much to tell you. She stayed in Canada, and is running a big hypertronics company up there. She’s been married, and divorced, and married again. She’s got four daughters and two grandsons.”
So I was a great-grandmother. I swallowed. “And Jacob?”
“Married. Two kids. One granddaughter, another due in April. A professor at Harvard—astronautics, if you can believe that. He used to say he could either follow his dad, looking down, or his mom, looking up.” Greg shrugged his bony shoulders. “He chose the latter.”
“I wish they were here,” I said.
“I asked them to stay away. I wanted to see you first, alone. They’ll be here tomorrow.” He reached out, as if to take my hand the way he used to, but I didn’t respond at once, and his hand, liver-spotted, with translucent skin, fell by his side again. “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” he said.
“You wanted it all,” Greg said, sitting opposite me in a little cafe near Edwards Air Force Base. “The whole shebang.” He paused, the first syllable of the word perhaps catching his attention as it had mine. “The whole nine yards.”
“So did you,” I said. “You wanted your hominids, and you wanted your family.” I stopped myself before adding, “And more, besides.”
“What do we do now?” Greg asked.
“What did you do while I was gone?” I replied.
Greg looked down, presumably picturing the archeological remains of his own life. “I married again—no one you knew. We were together for fifteen years, and then…” He shrugged. “And then she died. Another one taken away from me.”
It wasn’t just in looks that Greg was older; back before I’d gone away, his self-censorship mechanism had been much better. He would have kept that last comment to himself.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and then, just so there was no possibility of him misconstruing the comment, I added, “About your other wife dying, I mean.”
He nodded a bit, accepting my words. Or maybe he was just old and his head moved of its own accord. “I’m alone now,” he said.
I wanted to ask him about his second wife—about whether she’d been younger than him. If she’d been one of those grad students that went over to South Africa with him, the age difference could have been as great as that which now stretched between us. But I refrained. “We’ll need time,” I said. “Time to figure out what we want to do.”
“Time,” repeated Greg, as if I’d asked for the impossible, asked for something he could no longer give.
So here I am, back on Earth. My ex-husband—he did divorce me, after all—is old enough to be my father. But we’re taking it one day at a time—equal-length days, days that are synchronized, days in lockstep.
My children are older than I am. And I’ve got grandchildren. And great-grandchildren, and all of them are wonderful.
And I’ve been to another world…although I think I prefer this one.
Yes, it seems you can have it all.
Just not all at once.
But, then again, as Einstein would have said, there’s no such thing as “all at once.”
Everything is relative. Old Albert knew that cold. But I know something better.
Relatives are everything.
And I was back home with mine.
Star Light, Star Bright
Ever since reading Larry Niven’s essay “Bigger Than Worlds” in 1974, I’ve been fascinated by artificial habitats larger than the planet Earth—but I never wrote about one until a quarter-century later, when I penned this story for Marty Greenberg and Larry Segriff’s anthology Far Frontiers.
In 1997, I happened to run into WKRP in Cincinnati star Gordon Jump at a deli in Los Angeles; I introduced myself by saying I wanted to shake the hand of the man who had uttered the funniest line in sitcom history—a line that was echoing gently in my mind as I wrote this story.
“Daddy, what are those?” My young son, Dalt, was pointing up. We’d floated far away from the ancient buildings, almost to where the transparent dome over our community touches the surface of the great sphere.
Four white hens were flying across the sky, their little wings propelling them at a good clip. “Those are chickens, Dalt. You know—the birds we get eggs from.”
“Not the chickens,” said Dalt, as if I’d offended him greatly by suggesting he didn’t know what they were. “Those lights. Those points of light.”
I squinted a bit. “I don’t see any lights,” I replied. “Where are they?”
“Everywhere,” he said. He swung his head in an arc, taking in the whole sky. “Everywhere.”
“How many points do you see?”
“Hundreds. Thousands.”
I felt my back bumping gently against the surface; I pushed off with my palm, rising into the air again. The ancient texts I’d been translating said human beings were never really meant to live in such low gravity, but it was all I, and countless generations of my ancestors, had ever known. “There aren’t any points of light, Dalt.”
“Yes, there are,” he insisted. “There are thousands of them, and—look!—there’s a band of light across the sky there.”
I faced in the direction he was pointing. “I don’t see anything except another chicken.”
“No, Daddy,” insisted Dalt. “Look!”
Dalt was a good boy. He almost never lied to me—and I couldn’t see why he would lie to me about something like this. I maneuvered so that we were hovering face to face, then extended my hand.
“Can you see my hand clearly?” I said.
“Sure.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, Daddy…”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Two.”
“And do you see lights on them, as well?”
“On your fingers?” asked Dalt incredulously.
I nodded.
“Of course not.”
“You don’t see any lights in front of my fingers? Do you see any on my face?”
“Daddy!”
“Do you?”
“Of course not. The lights aren’t down here. They’re up there!”
I touched my boy’s shoulder reassuringly. “Tomorrow, we’ll go see Doc Tadders about your eyes.”
We hadn’t built the protective dome—the clear blister on the outer surface of the Dyson sphere (
to use the ancient name our ancestors had given to our home, a term we could transliterate but not translate). Rather, the dome was already here when we’d come outside. Adjacent to it was a large, black pyramidal structure that didn’t seem to be part of the sphere’s outer hull; instead, it appeared to be clamped into place. No one was exactly sure what the pyramid was for, although you could enter it from an access tube extending from the dome. The pyramid was filled with corridors and rooms, and lots of control consoles marked in the script of the ancients.
The transparent dome was much larger than the pyramid—plenty big enough to cover the thirty-odd buildings the ancients had built here, as well as the concentric circles of farming fields we’d created by importing soil from within the interior of the Dyson sphere. Still, if the dome hadn’t been transparent, I probably would have felt claustrophobic within it; it wasn’t even a pimple on the vastness of the sphere.
We’d been fortunate that the ancients had constructed all these buildings under the protective dome; they served as homes and work spaces for us. In many cases, we could only guess at the original purposes of the buildings, but the one that housed Dr. Tadders’ office had likely been a warehouse.
After sleeptime, I took Dalt to see Tadders. He seemed more fascinated by the wall diagram the doctor had of a human skeleton than he was by her eye chart, but we’d finally got him to spin around in midair to face it.
I was floating freely beside my son. For an instant, I found myself panicking because there was no anchor rope looped around my wrist; the habits of a lifetime were hard to break, even after being here, on the outside of the Dyson sphere, for all this time. I’d lived from birth to middle age on the inside of the sphere, where things tended to float up if they weren’t anchored. Of course, you couldn’t drift all the way up to the sun. You’d eventually bump against the glass roof that held the atmosphere in. But no one wanted to be stuck up there, waiting to be rescued; it was humiliating.
Out here, though, under our clear, protective dome, things floated down, not up; both Dalt and I would eventually settle to the padded floor.
“Can you read the top row of letters?” asked Doc Tadders, indicating the eye chart. She was about my age, with pale blue eyes and red hair just beginning to turn gray.
“Sure,” said Dalt. “Eet, bot, doo, shuh, kee.”
Tadders nodded. “What about the next row?”
“Hih, fah, roo, shuh, puh, ess.”
“Can you read the last row?”
“Ayt, doo, tee, nuh, tee, ess, guh, hih, fah, roo.”
“Are you sure about the second letter?”
“It’s a doo, no?” said Dalt.
If there’s any letter my son should know, it should be that one, since it was the first in his own name. But the character on the chart wasn’t a doo; it was a fah.
Dr. Tadders jotted a note in the book she was holding, then said, “What about the last letter?”
“That’s a roo.”
“Are you sure?”
Dalt squinted. “Well, if it’s not a roo, then it’s an shuh, no?”
“Which do you think it is?”
“A shuh…or a roo.” Dalt shrugged. “It’s so tiny, I can’t be sure.”
I could see that it was a roo; I was surprised that I had better vision than my son did.
“Thanks,” said Tadders. She looked at me. “He’s a tiny bit nearsighted,” she said, “Nothing to worry about.” She faced Dalt again. “What about the lights in front of your eyes? Do you see any of them now?”
“No,” said Dalt.
“None at all?”
“You can only see them in the dark,” he said.
Tadders pushed against the padded wall with her palm, which was enough to send her drifting across the room toward the light switch; the ancients had made switches that were little rockers, instead of the click-in/click-out buttons we build. She rocked the switch, and the lighting strips at the edges of the padded roof went dark. “What about now?”
Dalt sounded puzzled. “No.”
“Let’s give your eyes a few moments to adjust,” she said.
“It won’t make any difference,” said Dalt, exasperated. “You can only see the lights outside.”
“Outside?” repeated Tadders.
“That’s right,” said Dalt. “Outside. In the dark. Up in the sky.”
Dalt was the first child born after our group left the interior of the Dyson sphere. Our little town had a population of 240 now, of which fifteen had been born since we’d come outside. Dalt’s usual playmate was Suzto, the daughter of the couple who lived next door to my wife and me in a building that had clearly been designed by the ancients to be living quarters.
All adults spent half their days working on their particular area of expertise, which, for me, was translating ancient documents stored in the computers inside the buildings and the pyramid, and the other half doing the chores that were needed to support a fledgling society. But after work, I took Dalt and Suzto for a float. We drifted away from the lights of the ancient buildings, across the fields of crops, and out toward the access tunnel that led to the pyramid.
I knew that the surface of the sphere, beneath us, was curved, of course, and, here on the outside, that it curved down. But the sphere was so huge that everything seemed flat. Oh, one could make out the indentations that were hills on the other side of the sphere’s shell, and the raised plateaus that water collected in. Although we were on the frontier—the outside of the sphere!—we were still only one bodylength away from the world we’d left behind; that’s how thick the sphere’s shell was. But the double-doored portal that led back inside had been sealed off; the people on the interior had welded it shut after we’d left. They wanted nothing to do with whatever we might find out here, calling our quest for knowledge of the exterior universe a sacrilege against the wisdom of the ancients.
As we floated in the darkness, Dalt looked up again and said, “See! The lights!”
Suzto looked up, too. I expected her to scrunch her face in puzzlement, baffled by Dalt’s words, but instead, near as I could make out in the darkness, she was smiling in wonder.
“Can—can you see the lights, too?” I asked Suzto.
“Sure.”
I was astonished. “How big are they?”
“Tiny. Like this.” She held up her hand, but if there was any space between her finger and thumb, I couldn’t make it out.
“Are they arranged in some sort of pattern?”
Suzto’s vocabulary wasn’t yet as big as Dalt’s. She looked at me, and I tried again. “Do they make shapes?”
“Maybe,” said Suzto. “Some are brighter than others. There are three over there that make a straight line.”
I frowned. “Dalt, please cover your eyes.”
He did so, with elaborate hand gestures.
“Suzto, point to the brightest light in the sky.”
“There’re so many,” she said.
“All right, all right. Point to the brightest one in this part of the sky over here.”
She didn’t hesitate. “That one.”
“Okay,” I said, “now put your hand down, please.”
She drew her arm back in toward her body.
“Dalt, uncover your eyes.”
He did so.
“Now, Dalt, point to the brightest light in this part of the sky over here.”
He lifted his arm, then seemed to vacillate for a moment between two possible choices.
“Not that one, silly,” said Suzto’s voice. She pointed. “This one’s brighter.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Dalt. “I guess it is.” He pointed at it, too. I couldn’t see anything, but it seemed in the darkness that if I could draw lines from the two children’s outstretched fingers, they would converge at infinity.
Dr. Tadders was an old friend, and with both Suzto and Dalt seeing the lights, I decided to join her for lunch. We grew wheat, corn, and other crops under lamps here on the outside of the sphere, and raised ch
ickens and pigs; if you wanted the eggs to hatch, you had to put low roofs over the hens, because they needed to be in constant contact with their clutches, and their own body movements were enough to propel them into flight; chickens really seemed to love flying. Tadders and I both knew that we’d have had more interesting meals if we’d stayed inside the sphere, but the ancient texts said that although the interior was huge, there was still much, much more to the universe.
Most of those on the interior didn’t care about such things; they knew that the sphere’s inner surface could accommodate over a million trillion human beings—a vastly larger number than the current population—and that our ancestors had shut us off from the rest of the universe for a reason. But some of us had decided to venture outside, starting a new settlement on our world’s only real frontier. I didn’t miss much about the inside—but I did miss the food.
“All right, Rodal,” Dr. Tadders said, gesturing with a sandwich triangle, “here’s what I think is happening.” She took a deep breath, as if reviewing her thoughts once more before giving them voice, then: “We know that a long, long time ago, our ancestors built a double-walled shell around our sun. The outer wall is opaque, and the inner wall, fifty bodylengths above that, is transparent. The area between the two walls is the habitat, where all those who still live on the interior of the sphere reside.”
I nodded, and kicked gently off the floor to keep myself afloat. We drifted out of the dining hall, heading outdoors.
“Well,” she continued, “we also know that there was a war generations ago that knocked humanity back into a primitive state. We’ve been rebuilding our civilization for a long time, but we’re nowhere near as advanced as our ancestors who constructed our world were.”
That was certainly true. “So?”
“So, what about that story you translated a while ago? The one about where we supposedly came from?”
I’d found a story in the ancient computers that claimed that before we lived on the interior of the Dyson sphere, our ancestors had made their home on the outer surface of a small, solid, rocky globe. “But that was probably just a myth,” I said. “I mean, such a globe would have been impossibly tiny. The myth said the homeworld was six million bodylengths in diameter. Kobost”—a physicist in our community—“worked out that if it were made of the elements the myth described, even a globe that small would have had a crushingly huge gravitational attraction: five bodylengths per heartbeat squared. That’s more than ten thousand times what we experience here.”