Ad Astra (7 page)

“She’s dead.” Whatever Halley saw in my expression made her lean forward a bit and squeeze my hand. “You did everything you could. Her suit must’ve been open at some point. Yes? She’d suffered too much decompression. You got her onto the lifeboat, but it was too late.”

I was silent for a long time, letting the sorrow roll through me. And the guilt of relief. Captain Weskind had died on the ship she loved. Maybe she’d understood enough of what was happening to make that decision. Now she’d no longer have to face a universe her mind couldn’t deal with anymore. Now she wouldn’t have to try to go on without the
Lady
. But when everything else had passed, one thought still stung. “I think I remember her being pulled on the lifeboat before me.”

“That’s right.”

“The Captain should’ve been the last one to leave the ship.”

Halley leaned back again and regarded me. “The
Lady
’s Captain was the last to leave the ship.”

“You just told me you took Captain Weskind onto the lifeboat first.”

“So I did.” I waited, but she didn’t explain her statement. “Any more questions?”

“Yeah. Who the hell are you?”

Halley gave me that twisted smile again. “I have a confession to make, Kilcannon. Keracides isn’t my real name. My actual name is Halley Vestral.”

“Vestral?” The name took a minute to connect. “As in Vestral Shipping?”

“Yes. My mother’s the majority owner.”

I inhaled deeply. “I wondered why First Officer Chen deferred to you. As if you weren’t just some passenger.”

“He knew who I was and so did the Captain of the
Canopus
. Nobody else on the ship did. Mother and I often travel under false names for security reasons.”

“Good thing, I guess. Why tell me now?”

“Because I want to offer you a job, Kilcannon. After consulting with the Vestral Shipping officers and sailors who observed you on the
Lady
, my mother agreed without reservations.”

A job. With Vestral Shipping. On a bright, clean ship. “That’s…thank you. I, uh, know I’ll need to work my way up from whatever I’m hired at -.”

“The job offer is for Captain of one of our ships.”

I just stared for a long moment. “I’m not qualified.”

“We think you are.”

“I’ve never served as a Captain.”

Halley started to speak, then paused. Eventually, she just nodded. “We think you’re qualified,” she repeated.

“What about the rest of the crew from the
Lady
?”

“I knew you’d ask about them. We’ll find positions for all of them.” Halley paused again. “That System Tech. Siri. Some people were panicking while we waited for you in the lifeboat, trying to get us to go. She kept her body across the lifeboat hatch so no one could close it until you got there. She’s awful strong for such a small girl.”

“I’ll have to thank her, if I ever see her again.”

“You will. She’s signed on as crew on this ship.” She saw my face. “She’s clean now and deserves the opportunity. It’s the least I could do, Kilcannon.”

“Uh, thanks.” The word felt so hopelessly inadequate, but what could I say that would convey what the offer to me meant? I wouldn’t be roaming the docks, trying to find another old ship willing to hire me on as, maybe, Third Officer. Instead, I’d be Captain of one of the bright, shining ships of Vestral. With a full crew and a maintenance budget. Good runs to good planets.

I ought to feel something.

I leaned back against the bed, wondering why everything seemed so empty. Here was everything I’d ever dreamed of, everything I’d ever envied, everything I’d ever wished for. I had it. “Why aren’t I happy?”

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken that until Halley shook her head. Her eyes were looking right into mine, as if she could see something there. “I’m sorry. You aren’t happy because you know the odds are vanishingly small that you’ll ever find Haven again.”

“Haven? What are you talking about? I’ve never found Haven.”

She smiled that not-a-smile again and shook her head once more. “You still don’t know where Haven is?”

“I’ve never known where Haven is. And I thought you said Haven isn’t real.”

“No, I said there isn’t any
one
place which
all
sailors could call Haven. But it does exist.”

Riddles. I couldn’t handle them at the moment and broke eye contact with her, staring up at the overhead. “Then where is it?”

“Kilcannon, you fool. Haven is that place you most want to be, the place that holds everything important to you.”

When I looked down again she was walking away. I wondered what she’d meant.

Saints, I miss the
Lady
.

Author's Note on
As You Know, Bob

Reviews are often the bane of writers. This is especially true if the reviewer chooses to write about the book they wish the writer had written rather than the one the writer did write. Sometimes the reviewers’ complaints leave writers scratching their heads in bewilderment. And sometimes that all works out fine. When the first book in my Lost Fleet series was published, one reviewer took
Dauntless
to task for many perceived sins. Among these were assertions that it wasn’t multi-cultural enough, and didn’t contain explicit references to trendy new science fiction concepts, and above all didn’t explain in detail how everything worked. In short, I was being called to task for not having done the sort of things for which SF is often mocked by the wider world. The reviewer concluded that
Dauntless
could have appeared in John W. Campbell’s old
Astounding
magazine. As it turned out, many readers yearned for that sort of story, so the put-down ended up generating a lot of sales for me. In addition, the review inspired
As You Know, Bob
. I got a lot of good things out of that negative review.

As You Know, Bob

The agent: How’s that science fiction novel you’ve been working on coming along? Send me an excerpt from the beginning so we can see about getting it into shape for today’s market.

#

The story begins: The phone rang with Bob’s signature tune, so Bill tapped the receive button. Bob’s face appeared, looking unusually enthusiastic since he normally tried to coast through life with minimum effort. “Did you hear about the frozen Lumpia?”

“Not yet.” Lumpia. That sounded important enough for Bill to pause his work and face the phone. “As you know, Bob, frozen Lumpia isn’t nearly as good as fresh.”

“This stuff is! There’s a new process. Meet me in the lobby and we’ll go get some and check it out.”

Bill’s conscience tugged at him. “I dunno, there’s this analysis of the signals from the Eridani Probe that I’m supposed to be running . . .”

“It’ll be there when we get back.”

“Okay.” Bill stood up, powering down his workpad and heading for the door.

In the hallway he met Jane, a researcher who worked a few doors down. Bill tried not to stare as she crossed her arms and looked at him. “You’re in a rush. Going on some important mission?” she asked dryly.

“I guess you could say that. I’m going to pick up some frozen Lumpia.” Bill hesitated. Jane had the kind of smarts and attitude that had always attracted him, but she had never shown much interest in Bill and had turned him down the one time he had asked for a date. Maybe she would be willing to consider a more casual errand together. “Do you want to come along?”
Jane pulled out a money card and checked it, then shrugged. “Sure. Why not? I need to pick up some stuff, too.”

#

The agent: This is okay, but I can’t sell it. Something’s missing. It’s not SciFi enough, do you know what I mean? This is supposed to be happening in the early twenty-second century and there’s nothing about the singularity or nanotech or quantum states or cyberspace or posthumans or multiculturalism or complex antiheroes. How can you call that SciFi? I know, I know, you’ve told me that when people use tools they don’t think about how they work. But readers expect certain things from SciFi. Oh, and the characters. Those aren’t SciFi characters. Punch them up and make them the sort of characters you see in
real
science fiction. And get some gratuitous sexual content in there.

#

The revised story begins: The singularity had crashed and burned in a viral-cataclysm that had destroyed most of civilization and every decent coffee house east of Seattle. Now a complex array of probability states undulated down a fiber-optic line surviving from pre-singularity days. The electrons carrying the message didn’t so much move as they did alter the places where they had the highest probability of existing.

Since the electrons didn’t truly exist anywhere, neither did the strange cyber-world in which they didn’t move, filtering through an immense alternate reality in which normal physical rules of the macro-world didn’t apply.

Entering a complex series of transformational states, the electrons that weren’t there interacted with the receiver mechanism, propagating through layered nano-light-emitting-diode projectors to generate a three dimensional image.

A tune distinct to the originator of the message chimed from the nano-manufactured receiver. It was the First Movement of Genghis Juan Feinstein’s folk-rock Hindustani opera, which, William knew, meant the message had to be from Roberto Sigma, the latest in a string of complicated and untrustworthy clone/cyborg hybrids who nonetheless followed their own indecipherable code of honor. William moved his palm over a light sensitive but robust section of his desk to command his virtual work-station to pause in its operations. Now as the stacked image displays created a perfect visual representation of Roberto Sigma, William saw that the enigmatic posthuman seemed happy about something.

“I assume,” Roberto Sigma began in the Libyan-Croatian accent he had acquired from his last neural-upgrade, “that you are aware of recent developments in micro-cryogenics.”

William nodded, his own implants from his days as a special forces commando during the Betelgeuse incursion activating automatically at the sight of his sometime friend/sometime enemy. “As you know, Roberto, cryogenics hasn’t yet worked to expectations, especially since several promising lines of research were lost when the singularity crashed.”

“Ancient history, William! That is so five nanoseconds ago. I know of a means to demonstrate how well the new process works. It originated in Asia. Interested in meeting me to investigate it?”

William hesitated, his implants jangling internal warnings. The last time he had followed Roberto Sigma it had been into an unending maze in cyberspace from which he had narrowly escaped. But if what Roberto was saying was true, he had to know. “I’ve been working on analyzing signals from the Eridani Probe. It’s been using the new quantum state transmitter to tunnel data through to us at amazing speed.”

“If the signals have propagated through quantum paths they will still have a probability of existence when you return.”

“You’re right. I’d forgotten about the addendums Jonquil made to the Hernandez postulates back in 2075,” William agreed. He gestured another command over the light sensitive control pad, ordering his workstation to shut down and watching as it swiftly cycled through functions and closed them before powering off automatically.

William stood, his lean muscles rippling as the commando implants amplified William’s own natural speed and strength. There weren’t a lot of former special forces commandos doing astrophysics research, so he tended to stand out during the virtual conferences. William walked across the floor tiled with panels from the Toltec/Mayan revival period, nano-circuits in the panels sensing his movement and sending commands to the door, which slid open silently on nano-lubricated rails as William approached.

He slipped cautiously into the hallway and saw Janice from a few pods down, the nanoparticles in her lip gloss making it glow a delicious ruby red. Janice spun to face him with all of the pantherish grace you’d expect from a first degree black belt, her blue eyes watching William speculatively. He tried not to stare back. At 23 years old, Janice was the most brilliant and the most beautiful quantum physics researcher in the entire world. What was left of the world after the singularity crash, that is.

Janice crossed her arms, drawing William’s gaze to the magnificent breasts which led her hetero-male colleagues to speak admiringly of the amplitude of Janice’s wave functions. “You’re in a rush. Going on some important mission?” Janice purred.

“You might say there’s a high probability of that,” William replied. “I need to acquire some samples of a new cryogenic process.”

Janice’s gorgeous eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about the Renz/Injira process? I understand that freezes organic matter in crystalline matrices that preserve cell structure. When it’s returned to normative temperature its composition is perfectly preserved.”

“That’s what they say. I need to find out if it’s true, and there’s a certain item of Asian origin which will give me the answer.” William hesitated, feeling a strong attraction to Janice that had nothing to do with the gluons holding her quarks into such an attractive package. She had once told him that they would never occupy the same space. Did her exclusion principle still apply to him? “Would you like to come along?”

Janice’s eyes glowed a little brighter as her nano-vision enhancement implants reacted to her excitement. She reached into one pocket and checked the charge on the twenty-gauss energy pistol she carried everywhere. “Sure. I’d calculated there was a high probability of deflection in my plans for today. It looks like I was right.”

#

The agent: Much better! Very SciFi. But I did notice that the story doesn’t seem to flow as well as it used to. Maybe you can fix that by using some of the real cutting-edge concepts. You know, quantum foam and dark energy and stuff. And try to make the characters a little more exotic. You know. Weird. More science-fictiony. Give it a shot and see if you can clean the story up a bit.