Tadders pursed her lips, then lifted her shoulders a bit. “You want my best guess? I think they’re other suns, like the one our ancestors encased in the sphere, but so incredibly far away that they’re all but invisible.” She looked up, out the clear roof of the dome covering our town, out at the uniform blackness, which was all either of us could make out. She then used one of the words I’d taught her, a word transliterated from the ancient texts—a word we could pronounce but whose meaning we’d never really understood. “I think,” she said, “that the points of light are stars.”
There were thousands of documents stored in the ancient computers; my job was to try to make sense of as many of them as I could. And I made much progress as Dalt continued to grow up. Eventually, he and the other children were able to match the patterns of stars they could see in the sky to those depicted in ancient charts I’d found. The patterns didn’t correspond exactly; the stars had apparently drifted in relation to each other since the charts had been made. But the kids—the adolescents, now—were indeed able to discern the constellations shown in the old texts; ironically, this was easier to do, they said, when some of the lights of our frontier town were left on, drowning out all but the brightest stars.
According to the charts, our sun—the sun enclosed in the Dyson sphere—was the star the ancients had called Tau Ceti. It was not the original home to humanity, though; our ancestors were apparently unwilling to cannibalize the worlds of their own system to make their Dyson sphere. Instead, they—we—had come from another star, the closest similar one that wasn’t part of a multiple system, a sun our ancestors had called Sol.
And the planet—that was the term—we had evolved on was, in the infinite humility of our wise ancestors, called by a simple, unassuming name, one I could easily translate: Dirt.
Old folks like me couldn’t live on Dirt now, of course. Our muscles—including our hearts—were weak compared to what our ancestors must have had, growing up under the stupendous gravity of that tiny, rocky world.
But—
But locked in our genes, as if for safekeeping, were all the potentials we’d ever had as a species. The ability to see dim sources of light, and—
Yes, it must be there, too, still preserved in our DNA.
The ability to produce muscles strong enough to withstand much, much higher gravity.
You’d have to grow up under such a gravity, have to live with it from birth, said Dr. Tadders, to really be comfortable with it, but if you did—
I’d seen Kobost’s computer animation showing how we might have moved under a much greater gravity, how we might have deployed our bodies vertically, how our spines would have supported the weight of our heads, how our legs might have worked back and forth, hinging at knee and ankle, producing sustained forward locomotion. It all seemed so bizarre, and so inefficient compared to spending most of one’s life floating, but—
But there were new worlds to explore, and old ones, too, and to fully experience them would require being able to stand on their surfaces.
Dalt was growing up to be a fine young man. There wasn’t a lot of choice for careers in a small community: he could have apprenticed with his mother, Delar, who worked as our banker, or with me. He chose me, and so I did my best to teach him how to read the ancient texts.
“I’ve finished translating that file you gave me,” he said on one occasion. “It was what you suspected: just a boring list of supplies.” I guess he saw that I was only half-listening to him. “What’s got you so intrigued?” he asked.
I looked up, and smiled at his face, with its bits of fuzz; I’d have to teach him how to shave soon. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve found some documents related to the pyramid. But there are several words I haven’t encountered before.”
“Such as?”
“Such as this one,” I said, pointing at a string of eight letters on the computer screen. “‘Starship.’ The first part is obviously the word for those lights you can see in the sky: stars. And the second part, hip, well—” I slapped my haunch—“that’s their name for where the leg joins the torso. They often made compound words in this fashion, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what a ‘stars hip’ might be.”
I always say nothing is better than a fresh set of eyes. “Yes, they often used that hissing sound for plurals,” said Dalt. “But those two letters there—can’t they also be transliterated jointly as shuh, instead of separately as ess and hih?”
I nodded.
“So maybe it’s not ‘stars hip,’” he said. “Maybe it’s ‘star ship.’”
“Ship,” I repeated. “Ship, ship, ship—I’ve seen that word before.” I riffled through a collection of papers, searching my notes; the sheets fluttered around the room, and Dalt dutifully began collecting them for me. “Ship!” I exclaimed. “Here it is: ‘a kind of vehicle that could float on water.’”
“Why would you want to float on water when you can float on air?” asked Dalt.
“On the homeworld,” I said, “water didn’t splash up in great clouds every time you touched it. It stayed in place.” I frowned. “Star ship. Starship. A—a vehicle of stars?” And then I got it. “No,” I said, grabbing my son’s arm in excitement. “No—a vehicle for traveling to the stars!”
Dalt and Suzto eventually married, to no one’s surprise.
But I was surprised by my son’s arms. He and Suzto had been exercising for ages now, and when Dalt bent his arm at the elbow, the upper part of it bulged. Doc Tadders said she’d never seen anything like it, but assured us it wasn’t a tumor. It was meat. It was muscle.
Dalt’s legs were also much, much thicker than mine. Suzto hadn’t bulked up quite as much, but she, too, had developed great strength.
I knew what they were up to, of course. I admired them both for it, but I had one profound regret.
Suzto had gotten pregnant shortly after she and Dalt had married—at least, they told me that the conception had occurred after the wedding, and, as a parent, it’s my prerogative to believe them. But I’d never know for sure. And that was my great regret: I’d never get to see my own grandchild.
Dalt and Suzto would be able to stand on Dirt, and, indeed, would be able to endure the journey there. The starship was designed to accelerate at a rate of five bodylengths per heartbeat squared, simulating Dirt’s gravity. It would accelerate for half its journey, reaching a phenomenal speed by so doing, then it would turn around and decelerate for the other half.
They were the logical choices to go. Dalt knew the ancient language as well as I did now; if there were any records left behind by our ancestors on the homeworld, he should be able to read them.
He and Suzto had to leave soon, said Doc Tadders; it would be best for the child if it developed under the fake gravity of the starship’s acceleration. Dalt and Suzto would be able to survive on Dirt, but their child should actually be comfortable there.
My wife and I came to see them off, of course—as did everyone else in our settlement. We wondered what people in the sphere would make of it when the pyramid lifted off—it would do so with a kick that would doubtless be detectable on the other side of the shell.
“I’ll miss you, son,” I said to Dalt. Tears were welling in my eyes. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, so much harder than I could manage.
“And, Suzto,” I said, moving to my daughter-in-law, while my wife moved to hug our son. “I’ll miss you, too.” I hugged her, as well. “I love you both.”
“We love you, too,” Suzto said.
And they entered the pyramid.
I was hovering over a field, harvesting radishes. It was tricky work; if you pulled too hard, you’d get the radish out, all right, but then you and it would go sailing up into the air.
“Rodal! Rodal!”
I looked in the direction of the voice. It was old Doc Tadders, hurtling toward me, a white-haired projectile. At her age, she should be more careful—she could break her bones slamming into even a padded wall at that speed.
br /> “Rodal!”
“Yes?”
“Come! Come quickly! A message has been received from Dirt!”
I kicked off the ground, sailing toward the communication station next to the access tube that used to lead to the starship. Tadders managed to turn around without killing herself and she flew there alongside me.
A sizable crowd had already gathered by the time we arrived.
“What does the message say?” I asked the person closest to the computer monitor.
He looked at me in irritation; the ancient computer had displayed the text, naturally enough, in the ancient script, and few besides me could understand that. He moved aside and I consulted the screen, reading aloud for the benefit of everyone.
“It says, ‘Greetings! We have arrived safely at Dirt.’”
The crowd broke into cheers and applause. I couldn’t help reading ahead a bit while waiting for them to quiet down, so I was already misty-eyed when I continued. “It goes on to say, ‘Tell Rodal and Delar that they have a grandson; we’ve named him Madar.’”
My wife had passed on some time ago—but she would have been delighted at the choice of Madar; that had been her father’s name.
“‘Dirt is beautiful, full of plants and huge bodies of water,’” I read. “‘And there are other human beings living here. It seems those people interested in technology moved to the Dyson sphere, but a small group who preferred a pastoral lifestyle stayed on the homeworld. We’re mastering their language—it’s deviated a fair bit from the one in the ancient texts—and are already great friends with them.’”
“Amazing,” said Doc Tadders.
I smiled at her, wiped my eyes, then went on: “‘We will send much more information later, but we can clear up at least one enduring mystery right now.’” I smiled as I read the next part. “‘Chickens can’t fly here. Apparently, just because you have wings doesn’t mean you were meant to fly.’”
That was the end of the message. I looked up at the dark sky, wishing I could make out Sol, or any star. “And just because you don’t have wings,” I said, thinking of my son and his wife and my grandchild, far, far away, “doesn’t mean you weren’t.”
Above It All
Winner of the CompuServe SF&F Forum’s HOMer Award
for Best Short Story of the Year
Author’s Introduction
The first anthology Edward E. Kramer invited me to write for was Dante’s Disciples, which he co-edited with Peter Crowther; it was a book about literal or figurative encounters with the devil. “Ed,” I’d said upon receiving the invitation, “I’m a hard-SF writer—I don’t know anything about any devil.” But Ed said, “Why not try something set aboard a spaceship?”—and from that suggestion this story was born.
“Above It All” turned out to be a rather controversial tale, since many read it as a condemnation of the space program (although I did get a wonderful fan letter praising it from someone at NASA); if it is a condemnation, I think “The Shoulders of Giants” (the last story in this book) more than makes up for it.
Above It All
Rhymes with fear.
The words echoed in Colonel Paul Rackham’s head as he floated in Discovery’s airlock, the bulky Manned Maneuvering Unit clamped to his back. Air was being pumped out; cold vacuum was forming around him.
Rhymes with fear.
He should have said no, should have let McGovern or one of the others take the spacewalk instead. But Houston had suggested that Rackham do it, and to demur he’d have needed to state a reason.
Just a dead body, he told himself. Nothing to be afraid of.
There was a time when a military man couldn’t have avoided seeing death—but Rackham had just been finishing high school during Desert Storm. Sure, as a test pilot, he’d watched colleagues die in crashes, but he’d never actually seen the bodies. And when his mother passed on, she’d had a closed casket. His choice, that, made without hesitation the moment the funeral director had asked him—his father, still in a nursing home, had been in no condition to make the arrangements.
Rackham was wearing liquid-cooling long johns beneath his spacesuit, tubes circulating water around him to remove excess body heat. He shuddered, and the tubes moved in unison, like a hundred serpents writhing.
He checked the barometer, saw that the lock’s pressure had dropped below 0.2 psi—just a trace of atmosphere left. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm himself, then reached out a gloved hand and turned the actuator that opened the outer circular hatch. “I’m leaving the airlock,” he said. He was wearing the standard “Snoopy Ears” communications carrier, which covered most of his head beneath the space helmet. Two thin microphones protruded in front of his mouth.
“Copy that, Paul,” said McGovern, up in the shuttle’s cockpit. “Good luck.”
Rackham pushed the left MMU armrest control forward. Puffs of nitrogen propelled him out into the cargo bay. The long space doors that normally formed the bay’s roof were already open, and overhead he saw Earth in all its blue-and-white glory. He adjusted his pitch with his right hand control, then began rising up. As soon as he’d cleared the top of the cargo bay, the Russian space station Mir was visible, hanging a hundred meters away, a giant metal crucifix. Rackham brought his hand up to cross himself.
“I have Mir in sight,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. “I’m going over.”
Rackham remembered when the station had gone up, twenty years ago in 1986. He first saw its name in his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World Herald. Mir, the Russian word for peace—as if peace had had anything to do with its being built. Reagan had been hemorrhaging money into the Strategic Defense Initiative back then. If the Cold War turned hot, the high ground would be in orbit.
Even then, even in grade eight, Rackham had been dying to go into space. No price was too much. “Whatever it takes,” he’d told Dave—his sometimes friend, sometimes rival—over lunch. “One of these days, I’ll be floating right by that damned Mir. Give the Russians the finger.” He’d pronounced Mir as if it rhymed with sir.
Dave had looked at him for a moment, as if he were crazy. Then, dismissing all of it except the way Paul had spoken, he smiled a patronizing smile and said, “It’s meer, actually. Rhymes with fear.”
Rhymes with fear.
Paul’s gaze was still fixed on the giant cross, spikes of sunlight glinting off it. He shut his eyes and let the nitrogen exhaust push against the small of his back, propelling him into the darkness.
“I’ve got a scalpel,” said the voice over the speaker at mission control in Kaliningrad. “I’m going to do it.”
Flight controller Dimitri Kovalevsky leaned into his mike. “You’re making a mistake, Yuri. You don’t want to go through with this.” He glanced at the two large wall monitors. The one showing Mir’s orbital plot was normal; the other, which usually showed the view inside the space station, was black. “Why don’t you turn on your cameras and let us see you?”
The speaker crackled with static. “You know as well as I do that the cameras can’t be turned off. That’s our way, isn’t it? Still—even after the reforms—cameras with no off switches.”
“He’s probably put bags or gloves over the lenses,” said Metchnikoff, the engineer seated at the console next to Kovalevsky’s.
“It’s not worth it, Yuri,” said Kovalevsky into the mike, while nodding acknowledgment at Metchnikoff. “You want to come on home? Climb into the Soyuz and come on down. I’ve got a team here working on the re-entry parameters.”
“Nyet,” said Yuri. “It won’t let me leave.”
“What won’t let you leave?”
“I’ve got a knife,” repeated Yuri, ignoring Kovalevsky’s question. “I’m going to do it.”
Kovalevsky slammed the mike’s off switch. “Dammit, I’m no expert on this. Where’s that bloody psychologist?”
“She’s on her way,” said Pasternak, the scrawny orbital-dynamics officer. “Another fifteen minutes, tops.”
/>
Kovalevsky opened the mike again. “Yuri, are you still there?”
No response.
“Yuri?”
“They took the food,” said the voice over the radio, sounding even farther away than he really was, “right out of my mouth.”
Kovalevsky exhaled noisily. It had been an international embarrassment the first time it had happened. Back in 1994, an unmanned Progress rocket had been launched to bring food up to the two cosmonauts then aboard Mir. But when it docked with the station, those cosmonauts had found its cargo hold empty—looted by ground-support technicians desperate to feed their own starving families. The same thing had happened again just a few weeks ago. This time the thieves had been even more clever—they’d replaced the stolen food with sacks full of dirt to avoid any difference in the rocket’s pre-launch weight.
“We got food to you eventually,” said Kovalevsky.
“Oh, yes,” said Yuri. “We reached in, grabbed the food back—just like we always do.”
“I know things haven’t been going well,” said Kovalevsky, “but—”
“I’m all alone up here,” said Yuri. He was quiet for a time, but then he lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Except I discover I’m not alone.”
Kovalevsky tried to dissuade the cosmonaut from his delusion. “That’s right, Yuri—we’re here. We’re always here for you. Look down, and you’ll see us.”
“No,” said Yuri. “No—I’ve done enough of that. It’s time. I’m going to do it.”
Kovalevsky covered the mike and spoke desperately. “What do I say to him? Suggestions? Anyone? Dammit, what do I say?”
“I’m doing it,” said Yuri’s voice. There was a grunting sound. “A stream of red globules…floating in the air. Red—that was our color, wasn’t it? What did the Americans call us? The Red Menace. Better dead than Red…But they’re no better, really. They wanted it just as badly.”
Kovalevsky leaned forward. “Apply pressure to the cut, Yuri. We can still save you. Come on, Yuri—you don’t want to die! Yuri!”