Starbound (12 page)
Authors: Joe Haldeman
“My function,” Snowbird said, “is to sit on you if you open your mouth. You have to record everything, but you don’t have to communicate it to everybody. Least of all to humans on Earth.”
“True enough.” He turned to the engineers. “I do not have lips. But my orifice is sealed.”
Snowbird turned to Carmen. “See? He doesn’t know.”
So we manufactured a credible medical crisis, choosing Karin because she was the pilot. We gave her severe bronchitis that didn’t respond to their ship’s primitive treatment, and so she had to spend a few days in our infirmary. Actually, she was outside most of the time, helping the other three finish battening down the hatches.
We took pleasure in their company for the eight days they remained on the iceberg, enjoying the last contact with people from outside our circle. I’m sure that Elza enjoyed more than social intercourse with Balasz, a warm and handsome man. Dustin and I exchanged a raised eyebrow or two over it. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if she had kept her hands to herself.
(Dustin, I think, had more than a passing interest in Margit, but would never initiate a liaison himself. I’ve told him that if Adam had waited for Eve to ask, none of us might be here. But he remains diffident.)
We said our good-byes, and they “cast off,” drifting a few kilometers behind the iceberg, well out of the line of fire. They were sending a record of our launch to Earth, and also to Paul—though if anything serious went wrong, I’m not sure what he could do.
It took all morning to secure the plants, some of which would be glad to have gravity again. Beans and peas were going totally schizophrenic in zero gee, with no up or down. Carrots had started growing beet-shaped.
After everything was secured and misted, we crawled and glided up into the ship and strapped in. I’d wanted to stay down in the habitat, taped into one of the chairs, but Paul talked me out of it with one pained expression. For the most daredevil pilot ever to elude a miniature supernova, he’s an extremely cautious man.
We were all nervous when he pushed the LAUNCH button; only a fool would not have been. If there was any noise or vibration, I didn’t sense it (though Snowbird said she did). Perhaps the sensation was too subtle compared to the sudden clasp of gravity. Acceleration, technically.
It seemed greater than one gee, though of course it wasn’t. It also seemed “different” from real gravity in some indefinable way, as if (which we knew to be true) the floor was aggressively pushing up at us. Relativistic heresy.
After about five minutes, Paul said “Seems safe,” and unbuckled. If something had gone wrong, we could theoretically have blasted off in this lander and left
ad Astra
behind. Go back to Earth and start over.
ad Astra
behind. Go back to Earth and start over.
I undid my seat belt and levered myself up, trying not to groan. I’d been desultory on the exercise machines, which were awkward in zero gee. Time to pay the piper now.
Dustin did groan. “I’m going on a diet.”
“We don’t want to hear any Earth people complain,” Fly-in-Amber said, inching painfully toward the air lock. “You are built for this.”
“So are we,” Snowbird said. That was true; they were overengineered for Martian conditions. But then they would have inherited the Earth, if the Others’ grand plan had succeeded.
They had both been spending two hours a day in the Earth- normal exercise rooms in Little Mars, but that didn’t make the change welcome. In an open area, we can help them get along, offering an arm or a shoulder, but in the spaceship aisle and the tube connecting the air locks, they had to crawl along on their own.
“I’ll bet the Others have a way around this gravity,” Snowbird said. “We should have asked them while we had their attention.”
“We had our fill of their attention,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Besides, they live in liquid nitrogen, floating like fish in Earth’s water. They don’t care about gravity.”
I’d never thought of that. We didn’t really know what they looked like, so my image was of crystalline or metallic creatures lying almost inert under the cryogenic fluid.
“I want to go to Earth and see the water,” Snowbird said. “I want to wade in the sea.”
“Things go well, you probably will,” I said. “Surely the quarantine can’t last another fifty-some years.”
“For a spy, you’re a hopeless optimist,” Carmen said. “I don’t suppose you’re a betting man as well.”
“If the odds are right.”
“Then I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky—good single-malt Scotch whisky, bottled this year—that the quarantine will still be in place when we return. If we do.”
“A fifty-year-old bottle?” Maybe half a month’s pay. “I’ll accept the wager. Even against the Lucky Chicken—
especially
against her, so I can lose.”
especially
against her, so I can lose.”
“You lose, and everybody wins. Quarantined, but alive.”
After a few minutes of walking around, mostly checking plants for damage, all of us probably felt like lying down. I fought the impulse by going to the exercise machines. At least I could sit down on the stationary bicycle. Watch the water splashing into the pool. In a couple of hours, it would be full; I looked forward to cooling off in it.
I wondered whether the Martians would try it. Their underground lakes were shallow and muddy, and I couldn’t remember any reference to their using water recreationally. It was pretty rare stuff.
They didn’t wash for personal hygiene. They used flat scrapers, like ancient Roman athletes, the residue stirred into water that would be used for agriculture.
I got up and went back down the yellow corridor to the pantry, to see what I could put together for our first shipboard meal. (I hadn’t attempted cooking in zero gee.)
It was cold, maintained about ten degrees above freezing in the main area. Forty below in the “freezer,” which of course was heated up to that relatively balmy temperature, from the iceberg’s ambient coldness, about three degrees above absolute zero.
I’d spent hours studying the pantry’s organization and modifying it according to some logic and aesthetic that was arcane even to me. “This is the way I want it” was what it boiled down to. I would be the one spending the most time down here.
I took a basket and collected what I would need for a pasta dish that would resemble spaghetti and meatballs, comfort food, though there was no actual meat, and I assumed the spaghetti would have to be done in a pressure cooker. The air pressure was like Little Mars, about equivalent to nine thousand feet in altitude; boiling water wouldn’t cook fast.
I filled bottles with olive oil and wine concentrate, which I’d keep in the kitchen. No sense in making wine out of it for cooking; the alcohol would just boil off anyhow.
It would be a month before I had any fresh vegetables or herbs. But I did have dehydrated tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions in resealable jars, and flash-frozen green beans and corn for a side dish.
Moonboy came in with two-liter flasks for wine. They had lines marked for 130 ccs of alcohol and 50 ccs of concentrate; he chose Chianti when I told him what we were having. Some bureaucrat had set up the alcohol supply so you had to type in your initials and the quantity dispensed—or you could type in “communal,” as Moonboy did. Mr. Communal might wind up being quite a lush.
Nobody’d said anything about limits. Would you be cut off if the machine decided you were drinking too much for a pilot, or a doctor? For an out-of-work spy?
The wines we’d made in Little Mars that way weren’t too bad. The water has more oxygen dissolved in it than normal air would provide, and the theory was that it gave it a “brighter” taste. Whatever, I could live with it. I enjoy fine wine but will take any old plonk rather than nothing.
(In the desert, we boy soldiers made a horrible wine out of raisins and cut-up citrus, with bread- making yeast. I still can’t look at raisins.)
There was a lot of floor space beyond the pantry, which took up less than a quarter of the storage warehouse. The rest was a combination of replacements for things we knew would wear out, like clothes, and tools and raw materials for fabricating things we hadn’t predicted needing.
Like weapons, I supposed. We made a point of saying that the mission was peaceful and unarmed. But when I floated through the warehouse and its large semisentient machine shop, I saw that it wouldn’t take much inventiveness or skill to put together individual projectile and laser weapons and small bombs.
It was unlikely that any conventional weapon would have a non-trivial effect on the Others. But they might not be the only enemies out there. Sooner or later, we’d have to talk about that. I would just as soon not be the one to bring it up, though.
All that stuff waiting for something to go wrong made me wonder whether we might have traded in one of our xenologists, or even a spy, for a gifted tinkerer. We had engineers in a couple of flavors, and smart machines to do their bidding. But could any of those engineers take a blade to a piece of wood and carve a useful propeller out of it? An oar? I could, of course. But that’s not like having someone who would say, “You don’t need a propeller. This is what you need.”
I added a frozen cherry pie to the basket and a quart of something supposedly resembling ice cream. By the time I got to the kitchen, everybody was relaxing with a drink in the dining room or the study. Moonboy was intently playing the piano, silent with earphones, studying a projected score. Snowbird was standing by the small bookshelf, studying one of the few physical books we’d brought along.
Had to get used to their standing all the time. There are no social signals in their posture that I can recognize. When are they relaxing? Does the term have any meaning to them?
I set the stuff out in proper order on the work island, and put the pseudomeatballs in the microwave to thaw, then poured a glass of reconstituted Chianti. Not really bad. Asked the screen for pressure-cooking directions, and it said at this “altitude” I didn’t have to pressure-cook pasta; it just took longer. Okay; filled the pot three-quarters with water and added a little salt and oil, and put it on high.
My skin seemed to relax on my body, blood pressure coming down. I had so missed this plain thing. Whenever we were in a situation where it was possible, cooking was my main relaxant and restorer. Neither Elza nor Dustin did much cooking, though they had their specialties. Dustin’s Texas chili was a possibility here, but Elza’s skill with sushi was unlikely to be of use, unless we met some edible aliens. She could handle tentacles.
For two summers before I joined the kibbutz in Israel, my aunt Sophie hired me to do “dog work” in her New York restaurant, Five Flags. I did a lot of vegetable chopping and some simple
sous-chef
things, and was exposed to basic techniques in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese cooking. College and combat took me away from that world, and I never pursued it professionally, nor actually wanted to. That might make it too serious, no longer relaxing.
sous-chef
things, and was exposed to basic techniques in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese cooking. College and combat took me away from that world, and I never pursued it professionally, nor actually wanted to. That might make it too serious, no longer relaxing.
Meryl came over and refilled her glass. “Can I help?”
I measured some water into the dehydrated onions. “Nothing much to do, I’m afraid. I would love to have an onion to chop.”
“Not for a month or so.” She looked out over the hydroponic farm, more white plastic than greenery. “When we left Mars for Little Mars, I didn’t think I’d miss it, working with the plants.”
“No green thumb?”
“Well, no enthusiasm. I thought the ‘ag hours’ were somebody’s bright idea for morale. But I did grow to miss it, in Little Mars. One thing to look forward to, here.”
I nodded. “You’re not looking forward to six years of leisure? Or twelve?”
“Sure.” She retreated into thought, expression momentarily vacant. “I had an elaborate course of research planned, the thing we talked about the other day.”
I remembered. “Delphinic and cetacean pseudosyntax.”
“The more I think about it, the more futile it seems. No new data, no experimental subjects. I could work like a dog for twelve years while everybody else in the field is working for fifty. I come up with some brilliant insight and find it’s been old news for thirty years. People are having tea with whales and sex with dolphins.”
“Better than the other way around.”
“If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.”
The meatballs dinged, and I took them out. “It seems to me your work would have value as methodology even if people on Earth came up with different results, with newer data.” I touched a couple, and they were thawed, still cool.
“Too abstract. I mean, you’re right, but eventually it would be old data pushed around by outdated methodology. Xenolinguistics is moving fast now that we have actual xenos.”
“None of us will be doing anything on the cutting edge.” I poured a little oil into a large pan and put it on to heat. “Can’t beat relativity.”
Even if communication with Earth were completely unrestricted, you couldn’t stay current with research. At turnaround, three years and a couple of months from now by ship time, twelve years would have passed on Earth. If you sent a message there to a colleague who answered immediately, the answer would get to Wolf 25 almost thirty-seven Earth years later. Not so much communication as historical record.
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