Encounter With Tiber Read online

  And then her advisor had come to her and mentioned a couple of connections, and a possibility of being chosen for Tenacity’s mission, the first crewed voyage to Alpha Centauri. And though she hadn’t been in space or off Earth for almost ten years, something in the family heritage had sat up and said, “Yes, I need to do this.” She had tested, prepared—and, because the primary requirement was to be a historian with a solid track record of publication, in excellent health, under the age of thirty (so that there was at least a chance for some years of service after she got back) she had surprised everyone (except perhaps her family) by qualifying.

  And here I am, she thought. A little late to have any doubts, and I don’t think I have any anyway.

  She clicked idly through her computer files. Every document she had found in Sig Jarlsbourg’s collections at the ShareSpace Global Corporate Museum, and every interview she had ever done on this project—more than four hundred, with a hundred six different subjects—was there in an ultrahigh-resolution copy. One more benefit of our study of Tiberian technology, she thought: we’ll preserve a better record of our journey to go find them, or at least find the place where they were. And still we haven’t caught up with them; they made materials we can’t begin to duplicate. This very ship’s design is built around having to use their awesome power source with our weak and inferior materials.

  She clicked faster, looking at the images of strange objects on the Moon and the Tiberian pictures of their own departure for the stars, millennia ago. How strange that on our first voyage to the stars, we humans already know, to a great extent, what we will find circling the nearest star. In that, our experience will certainly differ from theirs. And how strange, too—

  Idle clicking through the files landed her on the picture of Chris Terence the day he arrived for astronaut training. Jason’s father, the man her cousin had been named after. Unbidden, phrases leapt into her mind—something that might make at least a decent beginning, in rough draft, of From the Moon to the Stars.

  “Between July 20, 1969, and July 20, 2069, humanity went from a collection of squabbling nations to a more or less unified global civilization, and from barely achieving that voyage to the Moon, one and one half light-seconds from the Earth, to attempting one of four and a third light-years. I write these words as one who was born on Mars, who will be among this first human crew to leave the solar system, who can almost no longer remember how many times she has been to the Moon, and no matter how many times I compare the numbers to see how far we have come, still there is something lost that is central to the sense of it all.

  “At our eventual top speed, we will take 3.75 seconds to go the distance that took Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins three days in 1969. Or think of it in the way astronomers measure things here within our solar system: the distance between the Earth and the Sun is called one astronomical unit, or one AU. In 1962, Mariner 2—the fastest manmade object up to that time—took more than three months to travel about half an AU in a curving orbit on its way to Venus; at peak speed, riding on the beam of a Casimir-effect laser, we will cover the same distance in ten minutes. The Moon is one quarter of one percent of an AU away, and it took Apollo three days to get there; every year on its way around the Sun the Earth travels about six and a third AU and takes a year to do it; in twelve years, we are going to go 275,000 AU. The difference in speed, and in distance covered, between our Tenacity and Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok is far bigger than the difference between Columbus’s Santa Maria and Vostok.

  “And yet, as amazing as the numbers may be, our species itself excels them. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that during the single century in which we went from barely reaching the Moon to voyaging to the stars, we very nearly stood still for the first thirty years—”

  PART I

  CONTACT LIGHT*—ANOTHER SMALL STEP

  2002–2013

  *First words spoken by a human being on the Moon, July 20, 1969; what Buzz Aldrin said when the light that indicated there was something under Eagle's feet came on.

  1

  A LOT OF TIMES I think I remember, but the mind plays tricks. One giveaway, I guess, is that I remember myself from outside, not as if I were seeing things happening, but as if I were watching myself. There’s a shrink I know, a guy who only came up to Mars a couple of oppositions ago, who says that’s not infallible, but a pretty good indicator that I don’t really remember it myself. Probably I heard it told to me so often that now I have a story about it in my head, one in which I picture my four-year-old self sitting there on the living room rug at Grandma Terence’s house, watching the TV, listening to my mother explain how my father might be about to be killed.

  Talk to the old guys at NASA, the ones who were retiring when I was a rookie, and they call the period that started after the last Moon landing in 1972 the Bad Decades. The exact dates are kind of hard to pinpoint; a lot of people say NASA was still doing okay with Skylab and Viking and the Soyuz rendezvous, fell apart more in the late Carter and early Reagan years, and that they had really pulled themselves out of their slump when they made their commitment to Starboosters for some missions in 2000—which was the year Dad joined the astronaut corps, so I guess you could count him as part of the turnaround. But most of the old guys count the wreck of the Endeavour as the last gasp of the Bad Decades, and so you could say that’s the period my dad really came out of.

  Dad was Chris Terence, astronaut and astronomer, born the year of the first Moon landing. He was what they called a “do-looper” at Cal Tech, because in one of the old computer languages, a do-loop was a group of code that the computer would keep doing over and over, and at Cal Tech, a do-looper was a guy who got his bachelor’s, came back for his master’s, and then came back again for his doctorate. So Dad was class of ’90, class of ’93, and class of ’97, with as much time spent as possible in the 144th Fighter Wing of the California Air National Guard, getting his jet hours for his astronaut application.

  He’d hit on the tactic of going to Cal Tech and joining a Guard squadron that flew fighter jets long before he actually did it. I remember that years later, among his things, we found a list from a student college guide of the top fifty scientific and technical universities, with his penciled-in notes on the nearest Guard airbases; from the date, it had been October of his sophomore year of high school. There at the top of the list was Cal Tech and Fresno ANG Base. Grandma said it didn’t surprise her at all to realize he’d started planning that when he was sixteen; she used to say that his next word after “Mama” had been “astronaut”—“There was never anyone who wanted a particular job more than that boy wanted to be an astronaut.”

  So he’d poured himself into a BS in aeronautical engineering while working as a crew chief in the Guard, a good student job that not only helped him pay for college but got him the leg up for his next steps—a master’s in applied physics plus flight school, and finally his doctorate in astronomy with as many hours of flight time as he could squeeze in.

  After he picked up the doctorate, he discovered for himself what any number of scientists had been finding out in the USA in the nineties—that unless you were working on something that Xerox or IBM wanted to build this week, or doing medical work under the protection of some congressman with plenty of clout, nobody in the States wanted you. We were training the world’s scientists, and they were going home and opening up a thousand frontiers, but we were sending our young scientists—the ones who were quite often in their potentially most productive years—off to teach community college, write gaming software, or do routine hospital lab tests. Those were the years, after all, when the woman who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her doctoral dissertation pointing the way to making specific viruses against specific cancers got the call from Stockholm at the clinic in Beverly Hills, where she had gone after taking her specialty in dermatology. Whether it was conscious policy or not, America wanted its affluent teenagers to look good a lot more than it wanted to maintain its dominance in science and technology
. Boldly going where no one had gone before was all right on television, but in real life people who wanted to do that had to pursue it as an expensive hobby.

  So Chris, who was stubborn, shrugged and decided that if he wanted a steady income, he’d have to get the astronaut job sooner than he’d planned on. Between the Guard, adjunct jobs teaching the same beginning astronomy course at each of three different LA-area colleges, and sometimes filling in as a ferry pilot for FedEx, he was eking out a living, able to afford a little apartment all to himself in Saugus.

  It just happened that as one of his ongoing projects, he was obtaining deep-sky images (telescope pictures of the sky in areas that didn’t have relatively nearby objects like the planets) over the Internet from various observatories. He had set up a program to record the date and time the pictures were taken and see if any similar bit of sky had been photographed at some other time, then compare the two; if any of the stars in the picture seemed to move, his computer would flag the case, because apparent motion indicated that the object might be an asteroid or comet. By having his computer program search the pictures mainly in the plane of Earth’s orbit, he could look for ECOs, “earth-crossing-objects”—asteroids or comets that might someday hit the Earth. There were several small journals that were willing to publish any paper that identified a new ECO, and right now one of the things he needed, while looking for a better job and hoping to get into the astronaut corps, was more papers in his curriculum vitae, the resumé of publication that a research scientist has to submit with every job or grant application.

  It was his fourth find, nothing that could ever either be a threat to the Earth or a reasonable destination for space explorers. It was only a lump of tarry rock, about the size of a smallish mountain on Earth, but at least under the International Astronomical Union rules it was named Terence 1995 BR, which simply meant “the asteroid discovered by Terence in 1995, with the randomly generated code ‘BR’ attached in case he gets lucky again this year.”

  And again, more or less by chance, one community college where he taught had an aggressive PR director, who faxed an account of the find to the local television stations. This was during the second week of August, traditionally a slow news time when many programs run large numbers of human interest stories. Consequently, Channel 9, needing a little bit of footage for its 10 P.M. news, dispatched a brand new reporter, Amber Romany, with a cameraman, to get a comment.

  Chris was just emerging from his classroom, surrounded by the usual array of bewildered students who were trying to get out of a requirement, or into a class, when he was approached by a young woman with flame-red hair, not much older than his students, who pointed a microphone at him. Behind her a bearded and ponytailed young cameraman with a nose ring, wearing a paint-spattered T-shirt, crouched down and brought the camera up to his shoulder, zooming in on Chris. Startled, he took a step back.

  Amber turned to face the cameraman, pushed her red hair up slightly, got the nod from him, and said, “We’re here with Dr. Christopher Terence, discoverer of a new asteroid which has been named in his honor. Dr. Terence, any comment?”

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. Dad was never to be noted for his tact.

  “Amber Romany. Channel Nine. Doing my job, at the moment; the station said to interview you and the college said you’d be here. So what’s it like to discover a new asteroid?”

  “I got home and when I checked my computer screen, the program told me I had done it,” he said. “So I rechecked the results from the program and it looked like it was right; then I checked to make sure it wasn’t a previously known one; then I notified the IAU, they agreed with me, and that was it. About as exciting as accounting but it doesn’t pay as well.” He turned to storm off, intending to find out who had gotten TV people involved in this.

  Then Amber asked, “Any intention to go there yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Your vice president said you fly F-15s for the Air National Guard. The 144th’s office in Fresno says you fly a lot. You’ve published a ton of papers since you got your Ph.D. That’s just the basic research I could do with some phone calls and an on-line search of scientific abstracts, but I think I see a pattern in it. All that time in jets plus all that scientific work is a guy who wants to qualify for the astronaut corps.”

  Chris looked around. Some of his students were still hanging around, either watching him or trying to sneak in behind him and Amber to wave at the camera. They were looking at him a little strangely; he shrugged and raised his hands. “All right, caught and convicted. I can’t imagine a less interesting rock in space, but I’d be happy to go there or anywhere else.”

  She smiled at him. “Now will you tell me how you felt about finding the asteroid?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s always kind of astonishing; there’s a lot of space and all the asteroids ever found, together, wouldn’t make up one percent of the Moon’s mass …”

  Her interview with him took almost an hour in the hallway; afterwards, as he was grading papers and even as he drifted off to sleep, he kept telling himself that what had happened was that Amber was so pretty that he’d foolishly kept talking, and also kept reminding himself that the interview would probably come out so distorted that no one with any scientific knowledge would even be able to figure out what she had been talking about.

  To his surprise, he stayed up later than usual to catch the news, and he had to admit that the interview seemed to be intelligent and seemed to focus on the important issues. Also, looking at Amber on the screen, he realized she was every bit as beautiful as he remembered.

  The next day, summoning his courage because he remembered how he had snapped at her when she first appeared outside his classroom, he wrote her a note, in which he grudgingly admitted that she had done a pretty good job on the interview, adding that it was one of the few times he had seen a science story done well. He even apologized for his gruffness when she first approached him—and apologizing didn’t come easily to Chris Terence.

  Three days later, after he had decided that he’d really made a fool of himself and he needed to stop thinking about her, she phoned him. They met for coffee, and she turned out to be at work on a documentary about JPL, where he knew a lot of people. More or less, that’s not only how my parents met, that was to be the whole pattern of their relationship: two smart, talented people yelling at each other, then getting interested in a conversation, and later (sometimes) apologizing.

  They were married within a few months, startling all their friends. Following the wedding they had a couple of lean years, during which her salary was three times his and they never bought a car in working order, only junkers he could get to run for a few weeks or months. Afterwards, when they would tell stories about what they had done to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, I wondered more than once whether maybe those hadn’t been the years in which they were happiest.

  Anyway, I was born in August 1998, and I guess that made getting a little more cash more urgent, so they borrowed money and put together “Spacetour,” a ten-half-hour documentary about the solar system, with Mom narrating and Dad giving some little on-screen lectures, using a lot of footage from public archives. It was a hit with kids and got widely syndicated; I remember it was still showing up on various TV stations when I was about ten because Dad tended to describe the decades-long orbits of the outer planets with phrases like “when my son Jason is thirty …” and my friends would hear that and tease me.

  It was their last really lean year. By the time I was learning to walk, their careers were taking off abruptly. Dad was accepted into the astronaut corps within a week of Mom getting picked up by the network for their morning show. They moved to Houston, which shortened Mom’s commute to Washington and put them near Dad’s mother—a very important resource, because they were both away a lot, and sometimes at the same time. I’m told that when Dad flew his rookie mission in late 2000, he was in orbit on my second birthday, and Mom was in Afric
a somewhere covering a famine. Grandma made them a video of me with the cake; considering the mess that was happening between me and the cake, I wouldn’t have wanted to be there either.

  Now that I was four, in 2002, I at least could recognize my parents on television when they appeared, which for my mother was every night. Ever since last year, when Mom had switched networks and gotten the evening news anchor job on one of the dozens of little startup networks that had proliferated at the turn of the century, the one firm rule from Grandma was that we never missed the evening news. Dad sometimes teased his mother that what she liked about it was that this way she had a relative on television. Astronauts were never on TV anymore.

  So Grandma and I had just tuned in to Mom’s show, and neither of us was expecting to hear anything about Dad’s shuttle flight on Endeavour. The pace of the American space program had picked up a little bit since 1999, when the Chinese had startled everyone by announcing that they would launch a man into orbit on the fiftieth anniversary of their revolution, at the very moment when the Cold Peace was getting underway between the U.S. and China. Even though their first two launches had fizzled, it had still accelerated NASA’s program. But though there were more launches, and to everyone’s surprise the International Space Station looked like it would get done only about six months late, American manned spaceflight was just not making it onto the news much; it was too routine, and it contained practically no sex or violence.

  The broadcast started out with no mention of Endeavour, but it was possible that if this were a slow news day, maybe they’d cut to the liftoff, or so Grandma said. I think I remember her saying that as we watched, anyway.

  I have a copy of that particular news show, and I’ve watched it a few times; it’s hard to capture, anymore, even in memory, any sense of how much everyone was worried about China. Mom’s lead story was about China making new threats against the Republic of Taiwan, and the 82nd Airborne rushing there to back up the Taiwanese Army. It looked like a bad June; the American, Philippine, and Vietnamese navies were already holding joint exercises off the Spratley Islands, intended to put pressure on Beijing not to carry out their announced plans for constructing a missile tracking station there.