Encounter With Tiber Page 21

  Peter whisked me into a little space to get out of the pressure suit and into a comfortable suit coverall—changing clothes in space is challenging and fun the first time you try it, since your clothes have a tendency to want to leave the dressing booth without you. In five minutes we each had a squeeze container of hot chocolate and were floating in space by the window, looking down on the vast expanse of the Earth.

  “It’s so … immense,” I found myself saying.

  “And it’s just one of a lot of planets,” Peter said, grinning at me. “There’s at least one more that we could get on our way to, today, if we had the nerve and will to do it.”

  “Mars,” I said. “And after that Mercury and maybe some of the Jovian moons. Dad used to tell me about the order things could happen in, that you had to forget about Venus for the time being because the equipment to keep someone alive there would be so difficult to develop. I know, he used to give me whole guided tours of the solar system.”

  As we came around to the night side, I saw the strands of cities, like brilliant gems peeking through the gray-blue clouds whose tops glowed in the broad bright moonlight. “Hard to believe from here,” I said, “that it’s really a very small planet circling an ordinary star out toward the edge of an undistinguished galaxy.”

  “Chris used to say that,” Peter said.

  “I know. I wondered what it felt like to say that while you’re looking at it.”

  “How did it?”

  “Well, it didn’t make me feel like my father,” I said, and took another sip of the chocolate. “Peter, can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I always knew this could happen. Space travel is dangerous. Dad told me about how maybe he might not come back, some time, years ago, I think before I was six, about as soon as I could get any grasp of the subject at all. I miss him a lot, but it’s not like this is a big surprise to me. It’s a shock but not a surprise, if you see what I mean. But everyone keeps acting like I’m going to die or something, rather than just be sad for a while, and then get over it. And I keep wondering why that is. I’m not that fragile, I know I’ve got Mom and Sig to take care of me, and all of Dad’s friends still look in on me, you and Aunt Lori and everyone … so why does everyone act like I’ll break?”

  Peter smiled a little sadly. “You may just be a long way ahead of the rest of us,” he said. “But I guess that doesn’t answer the question. Now that the Sun has set, want to change windows and go look outward for a while?”

  “Sure.”

  Swimming through the air to the other window was a lot of fun, and Peter said we’d do more of that in a bit. I sat down and looked out the viewing port; he pulled a curtain behind us, to mask the station’s internal lights from glaring off the windows, and then we looked out into the vast fields of stars. “I asked your father once, on the Moon, about how many more stars we can see up here than down there,” Peter said, and told me the whole story about standing outside with my father and Xiao Be, watching the lander come in.

  I listened eagerly and asked questions for the next few hours as he took me around the recently added third American Big Can hab, down the tunnels into labs, and over to the European hab where we visited some astro-Fs. Along the way, we played an odd game the Japanese had devised, Ping-Pong inside a Plexiglas cylinder that they had shipped up for some now-forgotten reason (to get the ball “over the net” you had to get it through the central hole), got a couple of people to explain their experiments, and used the new Terence Telescope to get a good look at Mars. It was just in its dust season and thus relatively featureless, but you could still see the poles plainly and the black smear across it that marked the Valles Marineris.

  And all the while we did that, we talked about Dad. Mom and Sig had seemed afraid to, the NASA people hadn’t been willing to, all the expensive counselors had just kept tiptoeing around the issue, all of them afraid to do or say something wrong. Even Aunt Lori had evaded the issue most of the time. But plain old straight-from-the-heart Peter Denisov wasn’t devious enough for that; I had said I was ready to start talking about Dad, and he had taken me at my word, so we talked about everything either of us remembered. Sometimes it hurt a little, but mostly it felt good, like having him back, like now it was okay to remember him.

  Lori joined us for our first meal and showed me a couple of tricks for getting around in weightlessness. “As soon as there’s enough room up here,” I said, “there’s going to be a real tourist trade. This is more fun than skiing and skydiving at the same time. If there were just room enough, think of what you could do.”

  Lori grinned. “Now you’re talking like Sig. And you may get your wish sooner rather than later on that one. I understand that now that they’ve finally come up with standard Big Can racks, so that they can put up space stations about as fast as they can get equipment built into HTs and get them launched into orbit, your stepdad has already started the process of buying four of them to be linked together into a ‘space hotel’—and he says one Big Can is going to be just an empty padded space that people can use as a gym. If you’ve ever seen the old Skylab films of people playing in weightlessness—well, lots of people will be, and soon. You’ll probably be to orbit ten times before you’re an astronaut.”

  I was a little startled. “Me, an astronaut? I mean, I have been thinking about it, but … well, how’d you know?”

  She ticked it off. “Smart. Natural athlete. Not too tall. More inside connections than anyone could count. You don’t have to be, of course, but do you know how many kids have the same dream and don’t have a tenth of the chance you do? Why throw it away?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I hadn’t had anyone add it up that way to me, before. But you know, Dad really seems to have decided when he was only two years older than I am now—or maybe even before that.” I told them about the college guide with his careful pencil notations on the nearest flying bases.

  They listened, shaking their heads. “That was Chris, all the way,” Lori said, wiping her eyes a little. “The first time I met him it was because we were the only two people still awake studying, I was desperate for coffee, and I smelled his. I was up late because the math was a struggle; he was up because he wanted to make sure he came in first.”

  We shared stories for a while, and then Peter said, “Well, did you get it authorized?”

  “François told me that if we lose him, he’s going to lock the doors and we’ll have to walk home, but otherwise yes.”

  That was how I found out that aside from being “the first kid in orbit” (as one of the annoying cable channels had dubbed me) I was also going to be the first kid on an EVA. It wasn’t much—they just took me out and tethered me to the truss, letting me float in space for a few minutes, while I looked down at the immense dark Earth decorated with cities, out at the huge numbers of distant stars, and occasionally up at the nearly full Moon, cold and shining with a clarity you never see on Earth.

  I guess it was then that I knew, before my ride back down with Peter. Something made me say, deep inside myself, This is not something you can turn your back on, Jason. I felt like a lot of the adults in my life would be very pleased at that decision, but that wasn’t why or how I made it; no, it was just the moment of realizing that if I wanted to come back here, if I wanted to live out here between the stars and set my boots on worlds that no one had visited since the Sun began to shine, the opportunity was there and I could get about as much help as I wanted. And knowing that, I felt, somewhere inside me, that I could finally let go of Dad’s death, that after all everyone dies somewhere, many people on the job, and that there was no meaning in where and how he had died, only in how he had lived.

  When we went back inside, Peter apologized because we had spent a little bit of extra time on the EVA and now would have to hurry to be ready for the Peregrine return window. “That won’t bother me,” I said, “I’ll just hurry.”

  “Well, there really wasn’t time for you to see much,” Lori
said sympathetically.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

  I liked the way my father’s friends smiled at each other.

  The ride back had its astonishments, too; for two-thirds of the distance we were still in space for all practical purposes, and to fly in space is an amazing sensation. The Peregrine carried only me, Peter, and the pilot; I sat close to the front so I could see from the pilot’s viewpoint, but I didn’t look out the window as much as I had thought I would—I was too interested in all the things Peter was doing to steer the ship.

  I had been home a week when Lori’s expedition finally reached and searched the lander wreckage. They found Xiao Be still on her couch, her visor, oddly, open; one theory was that she might have released it in the last instants, to make sure that, badly injured as she was, she would not have to spend minutes or hours dying alone on the Moon. Dad’s body had been pierced by a torn piece of metal from the hull; freeze-dried blood had dotted the lunar soil, and the best guess was that he had died all but instantly from the combination of blood loss and explosive decompression. A long time afterwards Lori told me that he had had a strange, warm smile, as if somehow he were laughing at a little, private joke.

  And the Encyclopedia had broken into a dozen pieces as it rolled down the slope, and each piece, when it finally hit a rock or fell to a resting place in the deep pits below, had splintered into many smaller pieces. The little bits of silver-colored metal and glass, speckled with gold and black, were lovely but useless; microscopic examination over the next few years revealed that it was an immensely sophisticated optical switching system which could undoubtedly have held as much information as they said it had, and—if it were in one piece, or if it could have been put back together—would have been quite readable. Physicists learned immense numbers of things about optical microswitches, tunable lasers, and a dozen other things from examining the bits and pieces of the Encyclopedia.

  But all this was like learning neurology by examining the cut-up brains of a dead genius; you might eventually understand a great deal about how a brain worked, but the thoughts that had been there, wandering from neuron to neuron, were lost to you forever.

  Or perhaps not quite so lost. Within a few months I found myself going to the White House—I took the bus because Sig was in New York about some deal or other, buying out a couple of old partners, and Mom was covering a volcanic eruption in Celebes. There were a lot of us standing there on the Rose Garden lawn. I was the youngest, of course; the three Apollo 11 astronauts, now into their eighties, surprised everyone by the presence of all of them. The president got to the point pretty fast; she said that China had joined the four powers, that the five space powers were now committed to exploration and to recovery of the Tiberian artifacts, and that we would be moving ahead rapidly, expanding the Moon base at Tiber Base, establishing a separate American base at Tranquillity, expanding John Glenn Station at Star Cluster, adding a separate LEO station to be named Shepherd, building a new space port to be called Armstrong at the lunar libration point L1—and, most importantly, moving ahead with plans for Mars ships and for the new single-stage-to-orbit Yankee Clipper. “We have demonstrated, time and again, that we lead the world in hardware for space; we are going to devote ourselves to continuing to be the best at it,” she said.

  She ended by committing us to a landing on Phobos before the end of the decade—fifty years after the first American Moon flights.

  I liked the speech, but then, considering what I wanted to do for a living, you’d have to expect me to. Afterwards, in the receiving line, she shook my hand and told me how much everyone had admired Dad (that seemed to be something everyone had to do several times), and then said, “And the Secret Service detail tells me you just came here on the bus? They say you just walked up to the gates and presented your ID. We could have gotten someone to drive you, you know.”

  When you’re thirteen, talking to adults is bad enough; famous adults you don’t know at all is even worse. So I stood as straight as I could, and said, “It’s okay, Madam President, I like going to places I’ve never been before. It’s fun to see how far you can go.”

  Clio Trigorin:

  April 2075

  THERE ARE NO BOUNDARY lines in space, of course; not even a road sign to tell you when you cross from one imaginary place to another, nothing that says “leaving Sol System” or “entering Alpha Centauri.” But according to the astrogation people, 100,000 AU was about as close to an outer boundary of the Sol System as there was, and so the crew of Tenacity had elected to have a party on the day that they crossed it. One hundred thousand AU, a little over one and a half light-years, was the outermost boundary of the Oort Cloud, the great cloud of cometoids (frozen balls of ice and gases that, if they ever fell into the center, would become comets) that surrounded the solar system in all directions, so far away from the sun that it looked like nothing more than a very bright star, and the outermost of them had only completed two journeys around the sun since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  Out here in the freezing dark, the last of the cometoids was past—not that Tenacity had come within any significant distance of them, for space is so vast that even a huge number of objects can leave it mostly empty. Hollywood has always loved to depict “asteroid belts” of floating rocks, all apparently within a mile or so of each other, but any such group of bodies, so close to each other, would long ago have fallen together into a single one. The fact is that you could point a ship through the “thick” part of the asteroid belt and zoom through at peak velocity with almost no risk at all. And the Oort Cloud is even emptier—it is only its immense size that allows it to contain so many cometoids, for all of the planets whirl around the sun in a volume that takes up only about a trillionth of the space taken up by the Oort Cloud.

  So the boundary between the Oort Cloud and empty space is mostly a philosopher’s game, if it is anything. But the ship needed a celebration, and besides, crossing out of the Oort Cloud represented just a little less than one third of the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri, and very nearly half the time. So Captain Olshavsky had proclaimed a party for that work shift and told everyone to attend with something to celebrate.

  Clio had no problem finding something to celebrate: she had finally completed the first part of From the Moon to the Stars, covering the career of Chris Terence, and she had promised herself she would take a year or so off of that project to work on something else: a college translation of The Account of Zahmekoses and The Account of Diehrenn. It was a strange thing to think about; Uncle Jason had actually been there when humanity finally retrieved the Encyclopedia and got its connection to Tiberian culture, after his father’s death in that horrible bungle. And that had happened less than five years before she and Chris II had been born.

  Yet the knowledge from the Encyclopedia had become pervasive almost overnight. For her, the Encyclopedia had always been there, and she had started taking Tiberian in her freshman year in college; by that time every Harvard instructor in the language had a Ph.D. in it and there was increasingly a standard reading list that anyone was expected to know if they were a serious student of the Tiberian culture. A few years after their discovery, they were a basic part of our culture.

  So she smiled and nodded to the other people at the party—the same people who had been there at dinner every night, whom she would see every night for seven more years—and gave them very little attention. Instead she thought about the whole problem of doing a college translation; you had to be accurate enough for faculty to assign it and interesting enough for students to read it, not easy with a language so different from her own. Her publisher had insisted that this be a book for undergrads who would never take Tiberian; thus, it had to introduce them to the two great accounts of the Tiberian voyages to Earth, and yet not be so alien as to put them off. In vain, Clio had pointed out that when you deal with material this alien, there is bound to be something truly alien about it.

  Her job, then, was
to give something of the flavor of Zahmekoses’s and Diehrenn’s stories, even though she was also supposed to keep from making beings who were completely strange appear to be completely strange. How did you begin, expressing to adolescents the views of a species that had no adolescents—for with Tiberians the age of reason came so early, and sexual maturity so late, that they spent decades as sexless adults with reason and emotion but no sexual feeling of any kind? How did you deal with the problem of subspecies differences? All human beings are racially the same in every way that is important. We are all fully interfertile and not much more different genetically than fiftieth cousins could be expected to be. Inuit and Bantu, Andean Indian and Ainu, Swede and Maori, are far more alike genetically than any two breeds of dog, horse, or cat are, despite millennia of genetic isolation from each other. How to explain a species where the races were as distinct as dogs and coyotes, or horses and donkeys, so that it took so much more than ordinary common sense and courtesy to overcome bigotry? Or to explain the actual differences between Shulathian, Palathian, and Hybrid without mirroring any of their ancient prejudices? And what about a culture in which every sentence you spoke was addressed by gender, social class, and age? How to get across to them that the Tiberians had managed to be free and joyous, to have fun and explore, even while following a code of conduct that—

  A voice beside her said, “Excuse me, do you mind if I get drunk and act silly while you muse?”

  Looking up in some surprise, she saw Sanetomo Kawamura, the expedition’s astronomer, grinning at her. “Here,” he said, handing her a glass of wine. “Musing assistance. What are you celebrating today?”

  “Oh, I finished part of a large book project. And I’m just starting into something that I think will be fun; I’ve got a contract to do a translation of Zahmekoses and of Diehrenn. For undergrads, supposedly to make it easy and entertaining reading.”