“I was a fifth wheel down there anyhow,” he explained as I sat down at the elegant table. “My two projects put on hold for half a century. They’ll be political curiosities when I come back.”
“We’re political curiosities already,” I said. “What’s a spook without a country?” He politely didn’t say that I should know.
We talked shop for a few minutes. I’d worked out of Houston for a year sometime back and made friends there.
When Elza showed up, I nodded to the human waiter, and he poured us each a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé and returned the bottle to ice.
I held up a glass. “To getting back alive.”
“To getting there alive,” she said, and we all touched glasses. “You wrote to Carmen Dula and the others?”
“It went up on the Elevator day before yesterday.” Since ad Astra was technically part of the fleet, we weren’t allowed to contact it electronically. So I sent a paper note telling them we’d be on the next Elevator.
“It’s too strange,” Dustin said. “We’re going to spend thirteen years with these people, and we can’t even chat beforehand.”
“Worse for them. We can at least look up their bios and news stories—millions of words, for her and Paul Collins. But they shouldn’t be able to find a single word about us.”
“You enjoy being a man of mystery,” she said. “Poor little Mars Girl won’t have a chance.”
“You doctors are all about sex. It hadn’t crossed my mind.”
Elza looked at me over her glass. “She’s an old hag anyhow.”
“Eight months older than you. But you knew that.”
“Maybe we should have just snuck up on them,” Dustin said. “This way, they’ll have plenty of time to get dressed and put away the sex toys.”
“Dream on,” Elza said.
The maître d’ came over, and we negotiated the complex combination of food- ration credits, legitimate currency, and hard cash that dinner would cost. Maybe by the time we got back, they’d have that mess straightened out. Meanwhile, it cost the same no matter what your entrée was, so I had pheasant under glass, very very good.
With the coffee and dessert, we mostly talked about what we were leaving behind.
We’d all been visiting family, Elza in Kansas and Dustin in California. I told them about the uncomfortable meeting with my father. Elza’d had a warm family reunion all weekend, but Dustin’s parents were even worse than mine. They’re old anarchists and have hardly spoken to him since he joined the service. Now they’re deniers, convinced that the whole thing is a government conspiracy. They live in an Earthlove commune, surrounded by like- minded zealots. Dustin fled when he turned eighteen, eleven years ago.
“They claim to be self- sufficient,” he said of the commune, “trading organic dairy goods for things they can’t raise on the farm. But even when I was a kid, I could tell something was fishy. We all lived too well; there was money coming in from somewhere.”
“Now who’s paranoid?” Elza said.
“You could have them investigated,” I said. “Section E audit.”
“Well, they were, of course, back when I joined the Farce. I’ve read the file, but it doesn’t go beyond a few background checks, my parents and the commune’s leaders. All harmless nuts.”
“You want them to be more interesting than that.”
“Dad was always hinting that the commune was part of something big. When I was old enough, I’d be brought into the inner circle.”
I’d heard the story. “But you ran away anyhow.”
“Along with most of my generation. Not many people under fifty there now.” He tasted his coffee and added more hot. “That’s typical of cults, once the charismatic leader dies or leaves. That was Randy Miles Brewer; he was pretty senile when I left.”
“Dead now?” Elza said.
He shrugged. “Technically not. He’s composting away in some LX center in San Francisco.” The Life Extension centers could keep you going past legal brain death, in some states, as long as blood or some equivalent fluid kept circulating. “So tell me, who pays for that? It’d be a lot of eggs and cheese.”
“You could subpoena their records,” I said.
He waved it away. “Don’t want to cause my parents any grief. In fifty years, it’ll all be in some dusty file in Washington, or Sacramento. I’ll look it up then.”
“They might still be alive.”
“Not with natural medicine. Your dad has a better chance at, what, ninety?”
“Ninety-two. He says he’ll try to wait it out, but I don’t think he’ll try hard. That age, if you don’t really enjoy life, you won’t get much more of it.”
“It feels strange,” Elza said, her voice a little husky. “Saying good-bye to my granddad and g- ma. If I were staying on Earth, I might have twenty more years with them.”
“Think of it as being social pioneers,” Dustin said. “The social protocols of relativity. When you come back, you’ll be thirteen years older. But your parents and grandparents . . .”
She broke the moment of silence by laughing, with an edge of hysteria. “Like it’ll make any difference. Chances are . . . chances are we’re not . . .”
“Elza,” I said, “sweetheart—we ought to make it a rule: We don’t talk about the end until it’s near. There’s no use plowing the same field over and over.”
“I don’t think that’s healthy,” Dustin said. “Ignoring reality. When you were in combat, you guys never talked about dying?”
I tried to be honest. “In the Faith War, no, not much. But we were all eighteen and nineteen, and felt immortal. When someone got killed, it was like a supernatural visitation.
“Gehenna was totally different. I mean, there were bodies everywhere you looked, so after a while they were just part of the scenery. It was more dangerous, I guess, with all the loonies and looters. But the corpses, they were like a dream landscape, a nightmare. They weren’t individuals; you didn’t see yourself becoming one of them.” They nodded, as if they hadn’t heard all this before. Turning points in life bring out the same old stories. Even among relativity pioneers.
This was the wrong place. It was becoming a fashionable hour for the rich and famous; the Four Seasons was filling up and getting loud with background chatter, people wanting to be noticed. We three, arguably the most-talked-about people here, definitely didn’t want to be noticed.
Our identities hadn’t been revealed, and wouldn’t be, as long as friends and relatives cooperated, until we were safely in orbit.
We took the Fifth Avenue and SoHo slidewalks back, less for the time saved than from a desire to be part of a crowd. We dawdled at the entrance and transfer point so my bodyguard could catch up. When we got to the condo door, I gave him the good-bye signal, stroking an eyebrow twice.
“Same old signal,” Dustin said as he palmed the night lock.
“Yeah. I’d change it if I thought someone might actually be after me. If somebody really wanted my ass, they’d have it by now.”
“So you’re wearing flared trousers for the look,” Elza said.
“Force of habit.” Once we were in the elevator, I pulled the ankle holster off.
“A .289,” she said. “Not with legal rounds, I hope.”
“Neuros.” I’d never fired one at a person, but they were impressive on a dummy. Smart round that finds an eye and blows a small shaped charge across the frontal lobes.
“Jesus,” Dustin said. “You got them where?”
I laughed, thumbing the door open. “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”
“Boys and toys.” Elza went by me, flopped down on the couch, and slipped her shoes off. “So I get to take an extra seven kilos of clothes?”
“Only sexy ones,” Dustin said.
“I don’t have seven kilos of the kind you like. That’d be about a hundred outfits.”
I sat in the easy chair and picked up the balalaika and plucked an arpeggio.
“Say you’re not taking the banjo?”
Dustin said, with hope in his voice.
“No. I’ll be in my sixties when we get back. Take it up seriously then, as a retirement project.”
Elza laughed. “You’ll retire about a year after you’re dead.”
I had a sudden impulse to throw the instrument against the wall, just to do something unpredictable. Instead, I set it gently against the bookcase. “I don’t know. In a way, this is early retirement. Cleaned out my desk to embark on a new life of travel and adventure.”
“Or stay in one room for thirteen years, trying not to go mad,” Dustin said.
“There is that. I wonder whether they’ve packed enough straitjackets.”
Elza got up and went to the refrigerator. “Wine?” She poured two glasses of white wine and a small glass of vermouth for herself. Bunched them together in two hands and brought them over to the coffee table. “I’m kind of torn,” she said. “Maybe go out to the Galápagos early, do some snorkeling.”
Dustin held his glass up to her. “I’ll catch up with you. Say good-bye to London and Paris, maybe Kyoto. Come from the other direction.”
“City boy.”
“Don’t care much for the water. Fish fuck in it.”
She arched an eyebrow. “People do, too.”
“I’ll wait for zero gee.” He looked at me. “You’ve been there.”
“It was all men. None of them appealed to me.”
“I mean the Galápagos. Diving.”
“Wasn’t recreational. Bomb threat to the Elevator.”
“I remember. The note said something about Gehenna.”
“Someone in Personnel must have sat down and entered Gehenna/ skindive/license to kill.”
Elza sighed. “And I’m still on my learners’ permit.”
“Well, you’ve got four days. I could get you a quick transfer to the Zone. You’d get more experience in four days than I’ve had in twenty years.”
“I’ll think about it. Did you see many fish there?”
“Not so many pretty ones. You want to go into the shallows, the reefs near the shore, unless you’re after big sharks.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“They’re protected. If one bites you and gets sick, there’s a huge fine.”
“But you were there before,” Dustin said.
“Twenty-five years ago, first wife. I could hardly get her out of the water, sharks and all.”
“You think of her a lot,” she said.
I tried to be accurate. “Her image comes to me often. I don’t sit and dwell on the memory of her.”
“I know that. I guess that’s what I meant.” She shook her head. “Crazy time.”
“We’re all dwelling on the past these days,” Dustin said. “Leaving everything behind.”
There was so much I didn’t want to say. She gave me the Shakespeare book in the morning; at noon, she took one breath and died. Was it more or less horrible that it happened to so many at the same time?
“You’re the philosopher,” I said. “I’m more an engineer, cause and effect.” Elza was watching me closely. I don’t think I’d ever raised this directly with her before. “We were crazy in love, like schoolkids, and although I know it was all blood chemistry boiling away, brain chemistry . . . still, we were addicted to each other, the sight and sound and smell of each other, like a heroin addict to his junk . . .”
“Been there,” Elza said.
“But you never lost anyone the way I lost her. Like a sudden traumatic amputation—worse, because you can buy a new arm or leg, and it will do.”
“So that’s what I am? Your—”
“No. It’s not simple.”
She picked at a nail, concentrating. “I had a friend lost a leg before she was twenty, AP mine in Liberia. She said the new one did everything she asked it to. But it was never really part of her. Just an accessory.” She stood up. “I better pack some clothes.” She put her glass in the refrigerator and went into the bedroom.
“For a diplomat,” Dustin said softly, “you don’t have an awful lot of tact.”
“I don’t have to be a diplomat with you and her. Do I?”
“Of course not.” He got up and went to the fridge. “Cheese?”
“I just ate a whole bird.”
“A little one.” He set out five chunks of cheese, including half a wheel of Brie, and put them on a platter with some bread and a knife. “They won’t have cows in ad Astra.”
I sliced off a piece of something blue. “Not going to keep for fifty years,” he said.
“Not much will.” I was still seeing her. “Gehenna will just be a history lesson to most people.”
He broke the lengthening silence. “Her name was Mira?”
“Moira. My father approved of her, nice Jewish girl. I think he’s a little scared of Elza.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“I’ll give you something to be scared of,” she said from the bedroom, bantering, the hurt gone from her voice.
“Best offer I’ve had today,” he said.
I didn’t hear her walking up behind me, barefoot. She put both hands lightly on my head and tangled my hair with her fingers. “I’ll sleep with Namir tonight.”
“Okay by me,” I said.
“We have to talk.” She rubbed my temples. “You can love her. You will love her, always. But you have to leave her here. Here on Earth.”
“I think that’s already done.” Literally, anyhow.
“We’ll talk about it.” She went back to the large bedroom.
I joined her there an hour later and we did talk. Moira was my generation, a year older than me, but forever young to Elza, and not much I could do about that.
She wanted to know what Moira and I had done that I didn’t do with her, and I tried not to think of it as an invasion of privacy. Of course the big thing she couldn’t do was have me as a twenty-five-year-old lad, and there was another thing I didn’t mention, to preserve the woman’s dead dignity. But I did describe a trick Moira would do with her breasts, and we were both happy and relieved when she made it work. Elza’s a little self-conscious about her small breasts, as Moira was about her large ones. I decided not to bring that up.
While we lay there entwined, the diplomat in me affirmed that I could leave Moira here on Earth. I didn’t say that part of me would stay with her, too; neither of us buried, neither dead.
I pretended to be asleep, as always, when she slipped away to join Dustin. Thinking furiously about the lies that grace our lives.
12
GROWING THINGS
The Martians came up a week after we did. We helped them unload their few packages. Earth-normal weight was oppressive to them, and they clumped around with exaggerated care. Well, it wasn’t exaggeration. Like having to carry around a weight one and a half times as heavy as you are. Carry it for thirteen years with no relief.
Snowbird didn’t complain, but her voice was unnaturally high and reedy. I doubt that they spoke much English on the way up.
I put my arm gently around her shoulders. “It’s very hard, isn’t it?”
“Hard for you, too, Carmen. You haven’t been to Earth in a long time.”
“I exercise in Earth gravity every day.”
“I should do that,” she said. “Become Earth-strong. By the time we return, the quarantine may be lifted.”
Fly-in-Amber, behind us, made a dismal noise. “I have a better idea. Let’s just go home. We can’t live this way.”
She gave him a long blast and high-pitched growl in consensus Martian, and he squawked and clattered back.
She turned back to me. “Perhaps we should rest in Mars territory for a while.” They plodded off, muttering.
“Before long, they’ll be in zero gravity,” Paul said. “He’ll complain about that, too.”
The last thing we would have to do before Paul cut us loose was to tape things down, mostly chairs. When we were flung away from the Space Elevator, we’d be in free fall, like someone jumping out of an airplane.
But we would plummet for eleven days. Jostled every now and then by steering jets. That would be tomorrow.
The habitat didn’t have any independent propulsion, of course, but it was firmly attached to the ship that would eventually be our landing vessel, much smaller. It would fly away like an eagle clutching an elephant.
Before that, we had to water the plants. We’d spent six days following the directions the hydroponic engineers had left behind, making sure all the root structures could be kept moist without water surrounding them. There was a water-absorbent granular medium held inside a fine-mesh net for each plant or group of plants. There was no automation in this temporary arrangement, of course. Every morning we’d spend an hour giving each plant a measured shot of water from a portable hydrator, a water pump with a hose and syringe.
The first morning, still in gravity, I split the chore with Dustin. It was interesting to get him alone; he usually deferred to Namir or Elza.
I had to ask him about his weird family, growing up. “I never gave it much thought,” I said, “but isn’t it strange that a person who winds up in espionage should have grown up in a commune, with anarchist parents?”
He laughed. “Not so odd. Like a kid whose parents are lawyers or cops might want to escape and become a bohemian artist.
“I didn’t want to be a spy, anyhow. A philosophy degree doesn’t open many doors, though. The Space Force paid through my doctorate in exchange for four years’ service, which I thought was going to be in communications. You go where they send you, though. They needed engineers for communication.”
“And philosophers for spookery?”
“It’s a grab bag, intelligence. Not that they’d ever admit it, but it’s where you go if you have education but no useful skills. The personnel database says there are three other philosophy Ph.D.s in intelligence. We ought to get together. Form a cabal.”
“Namir says there are more officers in intelligence than any other part of the military.”
He nodded amiably. “As if that were a good thing? It’s been that way for a long time.”