Infinite Dreams (29 page)
Authors: Joe Haldeman
Charlie glared at her for a long moment and left.
June 2076
From
Fax & Pix
, 4 June 2076:
SPACE FARM LEAVES FOR
STARS NEXT MONTH
1. The
John
F.
Kennedy
, that goes to Scylla/Charybdis
next month, is like a little L-5 with bombs up its tail (see pix upleft, upright).
The trip’s twenty months. They could either take a few people and fill the thing up with food, air, and water—or take a lot of people inside a closed ecology, like L-5.
They could’ve gotten by with only a couple hundred people, to run the farms and stuff. But almost all the space freeks wanted to go. They’re used to living that way, anyhow (and they never get to go anyplace).
When they get back, the farms will be used as a starter for L-4, like L-5 but smaller at first, and on the other side of the Moon (pic downleft).
2. For other Tricentennial fax & pix, see bacover.
July 2076
Charlie was just finishing up a week on Earth the day the
John F. Kennedy
was launched. Tired of being interviewed, he slipped away from the media lounge at the Cape shuttleport. His white clearance card got him out onto the landing strip, alone.
The midnight shuttle was being fueled at the far end of the strip, gleaming pink-white in the last light from the setting sun. Its image twisted and danced in the shimmering heat that radiated from the tarmac. The smell of the soft tar was indelibly associated in his mind with leave-taking, relief.
He walked to the middle of the strip and checked his watch. Five minutes. He lit a cigarette and threw it away. He rechecked his mental calculations; the flight would start low in the southwest. He blocked out the sun with a raised hand. What would 150 bombs per second look like? For the
media they were called fuel capsules. The people who had carefully assembled them and gently lifted them to orbit and installed them in the tanks, they called them bombs. Ten times the brightness of a full moon, they had said. On L-5 you weren’t supposed to look toward it without a dark filter.
No warm-up; it suddenly appeared, impossibly brilliant rainbow speck just over the horizon. It gleamed for several minutes, then dimmed slightly with the haze, and slipped away.
Most of the United States wouldn’t see it until it came around again, some two hours later, turning night into day, competing with local pyrotechnic displays. Then every couple of hours after that. Charlie would see it once more, then get on the shuttle. And finally stop having to call it by the name of a dead politician.
September 2076
There was a quiet celebration on L-5 when
Daedalus
reached the mid-point of its journey, flipped, and started decelerating. The progress report from its crew characterized the journey as “uneventiful.” At that time they were going nearly two tenths of the speed of light. The laser beam that carried communications was red-shifted from blue light down to orange; the message that turnaround had been successful took two weeks to travel from
Daedalus
to L-5.
They announced a slight course change. They had analyzed the polarization of light from Scylla/Charybdis as their phase angle increased, and were pretty sure the system was surrounded by flat rings of debris, like Saturn. They would “come in low” to avoid collision.
January 2077
Daedalus
had been sending back recognizable pictures of the Scylla/Charybdis system for three weeks. They finally had one that was dramatic enough for groundhog consumption.
Charlie set the holo cube on his desk and pushed it around with his finger, marvelling.
“This is incredible. How did they do it?”
“It’s a montage, of course.” Johnny had been one of the youngest adults left behind: heart murmur, trick knees, a surfeit of astrophysicists.
“The two stars are a strobe snapshot in infrared. Sort of. Some ten or twenty thousand exposures taken as the ship orbited around the system, then sorted out and enhanced.” He pointed, but it wasn’t much help, since Charlie was looking at the cube from a different angle.
“The lamina of fire where the atmospheres touch, that was taken in ultraviolet. Shows more fine structure that way.
“The rings were easy. Fairly long exposures in visible light. Gives the star background, too.”
A light tap on the door and an assistant stuck his head in. “Have a second, Doctor?”
“Sure.”
“Somebody from a Russian May Day committee is on the phone. She wants to know whether they’ve changed the name of the ship to
Brezhnev
yet.”
“Yeah. Tell her we decided on ‘Leon Trotsky’ instead, though.”
He nodded seriously. “Okay.” He started to close the door.
“
Wait!
” Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Tell her, uh … the ship doesn’t have a commemorative name while it’s in orbit
there. They’ll rechristen it just before the start of the return trip.”
“Is that true?” Johnny asked.
“I don’t know. Who cares? In another couple of months they won’t
want
it named after anybody.” He and Ab had worked out a plan—admittedly rather shaky—to protect L-5 from the groundhogs’ wrath; nobody on the satellite knew ahead of time that the ship was headed for 61 Cygni. It was a decision the crew arrived at on the way to Scylla/Charybdis; they modified the drive system to accept matter-antimatter destruction while they were orbiting the double star. L-5 would first hear of the mutinous plan via a transmission sent as
Daedalus
left Scylla/Charybdis. They’d be a month on their way by the time the message got to Earth.
It was pretty transparent, but at least they had been careful that no record of
Daedalus’
true mission be left on L-5. Three thousand people did know the truth, though, and any competent engineer or physical scientist would suspect it.
Ab had felt that, although there was a better than even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn’t stay angry for 23 years—even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders …
Besides, Charlie thought, it’s not their worry anymore.
As it turned out, the crew of
Daedalus
would have bigger things to worry about.
June 2077
The Russians had their May Day celebration—Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship
Leonid I. Brezhnev
—and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others
waited nervously for the “surprise” message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn’t say what it was supposed to:
“This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal
.
Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.
As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We’re maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can’t steer, and we can’t shut off the main drive.
We didn’t have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting, since we were inside Roche’s limit. Coming in, as you know, we’d managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.
If we could turn off the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can’t keep up with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.
We’re working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clear—we were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before-reading.
Endit.
It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook—and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of interest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960’s.
They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily-shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a
look at the situation. She’d sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped.
Daedalus: A.D. 2081
Earth: A.D. 2101
The following news item was killed from
Fax & Pix
, because it was too hard to translate into the “plain English” that made the paper so popular:
SPACESHIP PASSES 61 CYGNI—SORT OF
(L-5 Stringer)
A message received today from the spaceship
Daedalus
said that it had just passed within 400 astronomical units of 61 Cygni. That’s about ten times as far as the planet Pluto is from the Sun.
Actually, the spaceship passed the star some eleven years ago. It’s taken all that time for the message to get back to us.
We don’t know for sure where the spaceship actually is, now. If they still haven’t repaired the runaway drive, they’re about eleven light-years past the 61 Cygni system (their speed when they passed the double star was better than 99% the speed of light).
The situation is more complicated if you look at it from the point of view of a passenger on the spaceship. Because of relativity, time seems to pass more slowly as you approach the speed of light. So only about four years passed for them, on the eleven light-year journey.
L-5 Coordinator Charles Leventhal points out that the spaceship has enough antimatter fuel to keep accelerating to the edge of the Galaxy. The crew then would be only some twenty years older—but it would be twenty
thousand
years before we heard from them ….
(Kill this one. There’s more stuff about what the ship
looked like to the people on 61 Cygni, and howcum we could talk to them all the time even though time was slower there, but its all as stupid as this.)
Daedalus: A.D. 2083
Earth: A.D. 2144
Charlie Leventhal died at the age of 99, bitter. Almost a decade earlier it had been revealed that they’d planned all along for
Daedalus
to be a starship. Few people had paid much attention to the news. Among those who did, the consensus was that anything that got rid of a thousand scientists at once, was a good thing. Look at the mess they got us in.
Daedalus:
67 light-years out, and still accelerating.
Daedalus: A.D. 2085
Earth: A.D. 3578
After over seven years of shipboard research and development—and some 1500 light-years of travel—they managed to shut down the engine. With sophisticated telemetry, the job was done without endangering another life.
Every life was precious now. They were no longer simply explorers; almost half their fuel was gone. They were colonists, with no ticket back.
The message of their success would reach Earth in fifteen centuries. Whether there would be an infrared telescope around to detect it, that was a matter of some conjecture.
Daedalus: A.D. 2093
Earth: ca. A.D. 5000
While decelerating, they had investigated several systems in their line of flight. They found one with an Earth-type planet around a Sun-type sun, and aimed for it.
The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.
Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5—give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillenial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sand-storms.
No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day too would be ignored.
The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.
Where do you get your crazy ideas? Well, if we tabulate the assertions made in the introductions to these stories, it goes like this: Magazine articles, two. Editorial suggestions, four. Cover painting, one. Works of other writers, two. The weather, two. Personal joke, one. Stylistic experiments, two. Personal emotional experience, two. Out of nowhere, two.
*
Actually, I think all of them came out of nowhere.
R. A. Lafferty, than whom there is no more original writer in science fiction, claims that there’s no such thing as an original idea, and writers who think they sit down and go through some rational process to arrive at a story are kidding themselves. He claims that all ideas float around as a kind of psychic public property, and every now and then one settles on you. That sounds dangerously mystical to me—subversive—but I think it’s true.
So how can you square that with obeying the editor who calls in the middle of the night and asks for a four-thousand-word
story about the person who ate the first artichoke? Easily.
When a writer sits down to start a story he faces a literal infinity of possibilities. Being told to write about a specific thing, or to a given length, doesn’t really diminish the number of possible stories. The effect is the same as dividing infinity by a large but finite number: you still have infinity. Obviously, a writer who figures out his own story idea and then proceeds to write it is duplicating this not-really-restrictive process. Writing what he wants to write about may allow him to write a better story—or it may not, if his infatuation with the idea interferes with his objectivity—but I think any really good writer can take any editorial requirement, so long as it’s not patently stupid or offensive,
*
and wind up writing a story he would have written anyhow.
