Red nodded. "I can't say, one way or the other."
I tried to listen with Dargo's skeptical ears. The Other might have been lying to him. Or Red might be lying to us. "It could just be a test," I said. "The Other observing to see how we react to this extremity."
"If it were a human or a Martian, I would say that was possible." Red shook his head. "Not the Other. I don't think we have any hope in that direction. Moonboy is right; I should be sent away. But I don't know that I can go far enough in two days."
"I have an idea," Paul said. He licked his lips and stared straight ahead. "Let's put Red on the other side of the Moon. Get three thousand kilometers of solid rock between Earth and the explosion."
"Ha ha. Perfect. I'll do it now."
"You're not doing it yourself. You need a pilot."
"Paul..."
"We don't need the whole shuttle; just the Mars lander. We'll compute the right time for a slingshot transfer and have it blow the separation bolts. We do the transfer and I come in ass-backwards, kill velocity, look for a place I can land with skis."
"It's suicide," Moonboy said.
"No, I can do it; plenty of smooth areas on Farside. I'll take a few weeks’ life support. If Red doesn't blow up, the Tsiolkovski will be coming in with a pilot next week. She can come get us."
"You don't have to be aboard," I said, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice. "You can pilot by VR."
"Afraid not. No repeater satellites. Once I'm on the other side of the Moon, I'm out of contact with here. It's seat of the pants, just look and do. I'm confident I can land it."
"And if you're wrong," Red said, "we'll just crash. That might set off the explosion, or it might prevent it."
"You're so cheerful," I snapped.
"We don't agree about death," he said. We had argued about that, on Mars and here. He invoked the human philosopher Seneca, saying that he had not existed for 13.7 billion years and apparently enjoyed that state. One spark of a couple of centuries’ life, and he'd be back to not existing for some trillions of years and would enjoy it as much as the previous billions.
"Which leads to a solution," he said. "Paul, if we just set up the thing to crash on the other side of the Moon, we won't need a pilot. I'll just be the cargo. Dying is not so important to me."
"Red, that's great! You don't have to be a fucking hero, Paul!"
Paul didn't look at me, but he wasn't looking at anybody. When he spoke, it was like a class recitation: "Red, I appreciate it, but it's not a simple computation. The Mars lander was not built for this, and it will be out of touch for the most crucial phases."
"So he crashes!" I said. "He just said—"
"No. With one kind of mistake he crashes, but with most others he stays in orbit. It's not like dropping a ball. Things in orbit tend to stay in orbit, at least in the short term. And whenever he was not directly behind the Moon, he'd be the doomsday machine for Earth."
"How long would the flight take?" Oz asked.
"I could get it down to a day and still have plenty of fuel for the landing maneuver."
"We'd better get busy."
"Can I ... could I come?"
His face was completely still. "No. Darling. Minimum life support, maximum maneuverability." He stepped toward me and took me in his arms.
He whispered, speaking slowly and carefully. Only I could hear: "You know I am not so far away from Red with the death thing. I love you and will regret the years we would have had together—do miss them already—but at worst, in one instant I'll only be back to where I spent most of forever.
"And we had a wonderful time while we had it. Better than most people get."
I was crying and didn't try to say anything other than the obvious.
11
Endings, Beginnings
In the last few hours neither Paul nor I brought up the possibility that nothing would happen and he would be back in a couple of weeks. As if talking about it might have jinxed us.
Red did drop a hint, though, obliquely. I was waiting by the airlock that led to the shuttle, and he came walking up with a bundle tucked under a large and small arm. It was the gauzy tent he wore when he ventured out onto the surface of Mars.
"Just for safety's sake," he said. "You never know." It would protect him for a couple of hours’ EVA or moonwalk, or keep him alive for a while if the shuttle's life support shut down.
Paul came out of the airlock looking like a Space Force recruiting cubeshot, gleaming white spacesuit. He had shaved his head and had feelie contacts pasted on his skull.
I was composed. Oz had given me a couple of slap-on tranquilizers, but I wanted to hold off on them until after the launch.
Paul put his helmet down and swept me up in an armored hug. That was not exactly the way I wanted to remember his body, hidden behind bulletproof plastic. But I could imagine what was underneath.
"You remember the day we met," I said, "throwing a pebble at the iguana?"
He smiled. "Yeah."
"Think you can manage to hit the Moon?"
"It's a lot bigger." He gave me a last hard kiss and stepped back. No good-bye or see you. Just a long intent look and then he picked up his helmet and went through the airlock.
When it closed, I put one of the patches on my wrist. When the reverberating bang meant they had launched, I slapped on the second.
We had saved one bottle of the imported Bordeaux for some future celebration. I held it for a long time, remembering. But then I put it back and went down to the mess and made a glass of grape juice laced with ethanol.
I carried the drink up to Earth A, where almost everyone else was gathered. I almost wished they had let Dargo out to watch the consequences of her judgment. But I would probably have said something or done something I'd later regret. If there was a later.
The Hubble showed the little ship drifting along in the bright sunlight, occasional background stars going by unhurriedly. Paul talked with technical people here and on Earth, and Red kept up a constant monologue. Fly-in-Amber said it was all apparently in Red's own language, a message for his successor. Or perhaps for the Others, eventually.
The alcohol and drugs made me very sleepy. I ate a hamburger because I knew I had to have something and then went up to my quarters and slept dreamlessly for twenty hours.
I awoke to my own timer, the phone, and the computer screen all buzzing and pinging. I turned them all off, knowing what they meant, and went to the head. Splashed water on my face and jerked a comb through my hair and went up to Earth A.
They weren't using the Hubble, because the Moon is too bright for it to focus on. Oz said it was a telescope in Hawaii. It showed the Mars lander as a small cylindrical shape, moving toward the limb of the Moon. I knew it would be decelerating, but you couldn't tell by looking.
Paul's voice was suddenly loud. "We'll be making planetfall, moonfall I guess, in about twenty-two minutes. Twenty-one. Lose radio contact in less than a minute."
The image of the ship and the Moon's limb were almost touching. "Hmm ... I don't have any last words. ‘Crash’ Collins signing off. Hope this works. Dargo, I'll see you in Hell. Darling ... darling ... good..."
Well, at least Dargo would get all of her message, even if mine required a little imagination. Josie came up and held me from one side, and Meryl from the other.
Meryl sobbed. "People won't know he already had the nickname."
The view shifted to earthside, the nearly full moon high over a placid ocean. Maybe it was from the Hawaiian mountaintop where the observatory was.
After what seemed a lot longer than twenty minutes, a voice from the cube said, "One minute to touchdown."
We held our breath for a minute. Then another minute. We didn't know what to expect.
After twenty minutes or so, people started drifting away, back to their quarters or down to the mess, or just to wander.
For some reason I kept staring at the moon, maybe wishing I was there in Hawaii, maybe not thinking anything much—
whatever, I was one of the few people actually watching when it happened.
At first there was just a faint glow surrounding the moon, as if a wispy cloud had moved in front of it. Then it was suddenly dramatic.
People who have seen total solar eclipses say it was like that, but more so. A brilliant nimbus of pearly light spread across half the sky, the full moon suddenly a black circle in the middle, dark by contrast.
A crackle of static and a human voice. "Holy shit. That was close." Paul!
* * * *
It was Red who had suggested the plan, which was probably not something a sane space pilot would have come up with.
After touchdown, when he was careening along on skis trying not to live up to his nickname, he should look for an area that was locally "uphill." Try to stop with the lander pointed at least slightly skyward. Then Red would get off, stand clear, and Paul could hit full throttle—get over the horizon and try to make orbit. When he disappeared from sight, Red would measure off ten minutes and then open his suit and die. That would give Paul time to make orbit. But not so much time that he would go completely around and be over Red when he died.
The supposition that Red's death would trigger the explosion turned out to be a good guess.
It was a combination of luck and skill. He could steer to a certain extent with the skis, and so when he had almost slowed to nothing, he aimed for the slope of some small nameless crater. When he slid to a stop, he was pointing about fifteen degrees uphill, with nothing in the way.
Red was already wearing his gauzy suit. He cycled through the airlock and picked his way down the crater side. As soon as he said he was clear, Paul goosed it. Once over the horizon, he tweaked the attitude so he got into a low lunar orbit and waited.
When it blew he was almost blinded by sparkles in his eyes, gamma rays rushing through, and he had a sudden feverish heat all over his body. Behind him, he could see the glow of vaporized lunar material being blasted into the sky.
That little crater that saved him really earned the right to a name. But it had boiled completely away, along with everything else for hundreds of kilometers, and in its place was a perfectly circular hole bigger than Tsiolkovski, previously the largest crater.
I thought they should name it Crash.
* * * *
So every January first we present a petition for lifting the quarantine, and every year our case is not strong enough. But now there's a Space Elevator on Mars, so there's a lot of pretty cheap travel back and forth within the quarantine. After five years on New Mars we went back, and it was good to have a planet beneath your feet—and over your head as well.
Oz invented a Church of Holy Rational Weirdness so that he could marry me with Paul and not offend any of our sensibilities. I was pregnant and thought there were already too many bastards on Mars.
My first was a girl, and I named her after her grandmother, so I could see her smile. Her middle name is Mayfly, and I hope she lives forever. The second, with the same middle name, was a boy.
People who don't know us might wonder why a kid with jet-black hair would be named Red.
STARBOUND
JOE HALDEMAN
www.sfgateway.com
For Gay, Judith, and Susan: Muses, Graces
PART 1
THE SEED
1
NATIVITY SCENE
An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.
You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.
(And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)
But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.
“You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.
“I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.
“Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.
It wasn’t much like conventional motherhood, since it didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t pick up or even touch the little ones yet. On their “birth” day, they were separated from the machine’s umbilicals and began to ease into real life. As close to real life as they would be allowed to experience for a while.
Josie, Oz’s love, broke the uncomfortable silence. “Try to be serious, Oswald.” She gave Paul a look, too.
A bell dinged, and our drinks appeared on a sideboard. Paul brought them over, and I raised mine in toast. “Here’s to what’s- her-name and what’s-his-name. We do have another week.” Actually, there was no law or custom about it yet. These were the first, numbers one and two in a batch of six, the only twins.
Children born naturally in Mars hadn’t done well. They all got the lung crap, Martian pulmonary cysts, and if they were born too weak, they died, which happened almost half the time. When it was linked to an immune system response in the womb, in the third trimester, they put a temporary moratorium on natural births and had the mother machine sent up from Earth.
Paul and I had won the gamete lottery, along with four other couples. For all of us, the sperm and ova came from frozen samples we’d left on Earth, away from the radiation bath of Mars.
I felt a curious and unpleasant lightness in my breasts, which were now officially just ornaments. None of the new children would be breast-fed. None of them would suffer birth trauma, either, at least in the sense of being rammed through a wet tunnel smaller than a baby’s head. There might be some trauma in suddenly having to breathe for oneself, but so far none of them had cried. That was a little eerie.
They wouldn’t have a mother; I wouldn’t be a mother, in any traditional sense. Only genetically. They’d be raised by the colony, one big extended family, though most of the individual attention they got would be from Alphonzo Jefferson and Barbara Manchester, trained to run the “creche,” about to more than double in population.
My wine was too warm and too strong, made with wine concentrate, alcohol, and water. “They look okay. But I can’t help feeling cheated.”
Josie snorted. “Don’t. It’s like passing a loaf of hard bread.”
“Not so much the birth itself, as being pregnant. Is that weird?”
“Sounds weird to me,” Paul said. “Sick all the time, carrying all that extra weight.”
“I liked it,” Josie said. “The sickness is just part of the routine. I never felt more alive.” She was already 50 percent more alive than a normal person, a lean, large athlete. “But that was on Earth,” she conceded.
“Oh, hell.” I slid my drink over to Paul. “I have to take a walk.”
Nobody said anything. I went down to the dressing room and stripped, put on a skinsuit, then clamped on the Mars suit piece by piece, my mind a blank as I went through the rote safety procedure. When I was tight, I started the air and clomped up to Air Lock One. I hesitated with my thumb on the button.
This was how it all began.
2
HISTORY LESSON
Carmen Dula never set out to become the first human ambassador to an alien race. Nor did she aspire to become one of the most hated people on Earth—or off Earth, technically—but which of us has control over our destiny?
Most of us do have more control. It was Carmen’s impulsiveness that brought her both distinctions.
Her parents dragged her off to Mars when she was eighteen, along with her younger brother Card. The small outpost there, which some ca
lled a colony, had decided to invite a shipload of families.
A shitload of trouble, some people said. None of the kids were under ten, though, and most of the seventy- five people living there, in inflated bubbles under the Martian surface, enjoyed the infusion of new blood, of young blood.
On the way over from Earth, about halfway through the eight-month voyage, Carmen had a brief affair with the pilot, Paul Collins. It was brief because the powers-that-be on Mars found out about it immediately, and suggested that at thirty-two, Paul shouldn’t be dallying with an impressionable teenaged girl. Carmen was insulted, feeling that at nineteen she was not a “girl” and was the only one in charge of her body.
The first day they were on Mars, before they even settled into their cramped quarters, Carmen found out that the “powers”-that-be were one single dour power, administrator Dargo Solingen. She obviously resented Carmen on various levels and proceeded to make the Earth girl her little project.
It came to a head when Dargo discovered Carmen swimming, skinny-dipping, after midnight in a new water tank. She was the oldest of the six naked swimmers, and so took the brunt of the punishment. Among other things, she was forbidden to visit the surface, which was their main recreation and escape, for two months.
She rankled under this, and rebelled in an obvious way: when everyone was asleep, she suited up and went outside alone, which broke the First Commandment of life on Mars, at the time: Never go outside without a buddy.
She’d planned to go straight out a few kilometers, and straight back, and slip back into her bunk before anyone knew she was gone. It was not to be.
She fell through a thin shell of crust, which had never happened before, plummeted a couple of dozen meters, and broke an ankle and a rib. She was doomed. Out of radio contact, running out of air, and about to freeze solid.
But she was rescued by a Martian.