Starbound Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART 1 - THE SEED

  Chapter 1 - NATIVITY SCENE

  Chapter 2 - HISTORY LESSON

  Chapter 3 - GERM THEORY

  Chapter 4 - NO ORDINARY HERO

  Chapter 5 - LOGICS

  Chapter 6 - EARTH AND MARS AND IN BETWEEN

  Chapter 7 - INTRODUCTIONS

  Chapter 8 - FAMILY MATTERS

  Chapter 9 - SECRETS

  Chapter 10 - NEW WORLD

  Chapter 11 - GOOD-BYES

  Chapter 12 - GROWING THINGS

  PART 2 - THE PLANT

  Chapter 1 - GRAVITY SUCKS

  Chapter 2 - YEAR ZERO

  Chapter 3 - RECORD

  Chapter 4 - WEIGHTY MATTERS

  Chapter 5 - SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE

  Chapter 6 - PRIVATE PARTS

  Chapter 7 - KAMIKAZE

  Chapter 8 - WATER SPORTS

  Chapter 9 - ADULTERY FOR ADULTS

  Chapter 10 - SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE

  Chapter 11 - HEROES

  Chapter 12 - MEDICAL HISTORY

  Chapter 13 - TRAUMA DRAMA

  Chapter 14 - LOVE AND BLOOD

  Chapter 15 - SEX AND VIOLENCE

  Chapter 16 - INJURIES

  Chapter 17 - THERAPY

  Chapter 18 - ANNIVERSARY

  Chapter 19 - YEAR TWO

  PART 3 - THE FLOWER

  Chapter 1 - YEAR THREE

  Chapter 2 - TURNAROUND

  Chapter 3 - THE GRAND TOUR

  Chapter 4 - OTHER-NESS

  Chapter 5 - TURNAROUND

  Chapter 6 - ADJUSTMENTS

  Chapter 7 - ABOUT TIME

  Chapter 8 - LOOSE CANNON

  Chapter 9 - RELATIVITY IS RELATIVE?

  Chapter 10 - RAMPAGE

  Chapter 11 - DEAD WORLD

  Chapter 12 - NO SURVIVORS

  Chapter 13 - END OF A WORLD

  Chapter 14 - PREDICTIONS

  Chapter 15 - CHANGES

  Chapter 16 - MOONBOY SPEAKS

  Chapter 17 - CLOCK-WATCHING

  Chapter 18 - RESPONSES

  Chapter 19 - INFALL

  Chapter 20 - THE LONGEST JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP

  Ace Books by Joe Haldeman

  WORLDS APART

  DEALING IN FUTURES

  FOREVER PEACE

  FOREVER FREE

  THE COMING

  GUARDIAN

  CAMOUFLAGE

  OLD TWENTIETH

  A SEPARATE WAR AND OTHER STORIES

  THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE

  MARSBOUND

  STARBOUND

  Ace Books edited by Joe Haldeman

  BODY ARMOR: 2000

  NEBULA AWARDS STORIES SEVENTEEN

  SPACE FIGHTERS

  Ace Books by Joe Haldeman and Jack C. Haldeman II

  THERE IS NO DARKNESS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Joe Haldeman.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17143-1

  1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Interplanetary voyages—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A353S73 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2009040932

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Gay, Judith, and Susan: Muses, Graces

  PART 1

  THE SEED

  1

  NATIVITY SCENE

  An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.

  You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.

  (And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)

  But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.

  “You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.

  “I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.

  “Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.

  It wasn’t much like conventional motherhood, since it didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t pick up or even touch the little ones yet. On their “birth” day, they were separated from the machine’s umbilicals and began to ease into real life. As close to real life as they would be allowed to experience for a while.

  Josie, Oz’s love, broke the uncomfortable silence. “Try to be serious, Oswald.” She gave Paul a look, too.

  A bell dinged, and our drinks appeared on a sideboard. Paul brought them over, and I raised mine in toast. “Here’s to what’s- her-name and what’s-his-name. We do have another week.” Actually, there was no law or custom about it yet. These were the first, numbers one and two in a batch of six, the only twins.

  Children born naturally in Mars hadn’t done well. They all got the lung crap, Martian pulmonary cysts, and if they were born too weak, they died, which happened almost half the time. When it was linked to an immune system response in the womb, in the third trimester, they put a temporary moratorium on natural births and had the mother machine sent up from Earth.

  Paul and I had won the gamete lottery, along with four other couples. For all of us, the sperm and ova came from frozen samples we’d left on Earth, away from the radiation bath of Mars.

  I felt a curious and unpleasant lightness in my breasts, which were now officiall
y just ornaments. None of the new children would be breast-fed. None of them would suffer birth trauma, either, at least in the sense of being rammed through a wet tunnel smaller than a baby’s head. There might be some trauma in suddenly having to breathe for oneself, but so far none of them had cried. That was a little eerie.

  They wouldn’t have a mother; I wouldn’t be a mother, in any traditional sense. Only genetically. They’d be raised by the colony, one big extended family, though most of the individual attention they got would be from Alphonzo Jefferson and Barbara Manchester, trained to run the “creche,” about to more than double in population.

  My wine was too warm and too strong, made with wine concentrate, alcohol, and water. “They look okay. But I can’t help feeling cheated.”

  Josie snorted. “Don’t. It’s like passing a loaf of hard bread.”

  “Not so much the birth itself, as being pregnant. Is that weird?”

  “Sounds weird to me,” Paul said. “Sick all the time, carrying all that extra weight.”

  “I liked it,” Josie said. “The sickness is just part of the routine. I never felt more alive.” She was already 50 percent more alive than a normal person, a lean, large athlete. “But that was on Earth,” she conceded.

  “Oh, hell.” I slid my drink over to Paul. “I have to take a walk.”

  Nobody said anything. I went down to the dressing room and stripped, put on a skinsuit, then clamped on the Mars suit piece by piece, my mind a blank as I went through the rote safety procedure. When I was tight, I started the air and clomped up to Air Lock One. I hesitated with my thumb on the button.

  This was how it all began.

  2

  HISTORY LESSON

  Carmen Dula never set out to become the first human ambassador to an alien race. Nor did she aspire to become one of the most hated people on Earth—or off Earth, technically—but which of us has control over our destiny?

  Most of us do have more control. It was Carmen’s impulsiveness that brought her both distinctions.

  Her parents dragged her off to Mars when she was eighteen, along with her younger brother Card. The small outpost there, which some called a colony, had decided to invite a shipload of families.

  A shitload of trouble, some people said. None of the kids were under ten, though, and most of the seventy- five people living there, in inflated bubbles under the Martian surface, enjoyed the infusion of new blood, of young blood.

  On the way over from Earth, about halfway through the eight-month voyage, Carmen had a brief affair with the pilot, Paul Collins. It was brief because the powers-that-be on Mars found out about it immediately, and suggested that at thirty-two, Paul shouldn’t be dallying with an impressionable teenaged girl. Carmen was insulted, feeling that at nineteen she was not a “girl” and was the only one in charge of her body.

  The first day they were on Mars, before they even settled into their cramped quarters, Carmen found out that the “powers”-that-be were one single dour power, administrator Dargo Solingen. She obviously resented Carmen on various levels and proceeded to make the Earth girl her little project.

  It came to a head when Dargo discovered Carmen swimming, skinny-dipping, after midnight in a new water tank. She was the oldest of the six naked swimmers, and so took the brunt of the punishment. Among other things, she was forbidden to visit the surface, which was their main recreation and escape, for two months.

  She rankled under this, and rebelled in an obvious way: when everyone was asleep, she suited up and went outside alone, which broke the First Commandment of life on Mars, at the time: Never go outside without a buddy.

  She’d planned to go straight out a few kilometers, and straight back, and slip back into her bunk before anyone knew she was gone. It was not to be.

  She fell through a thin shell of crust, which had never happened before, plummeted a couple of dozen meters, and broke an ankle and a rib. She was doomed. Out of radio contact, running out of air, and about to freeze solid.

  But she was rescued by a Martian.

  3

  GERM THEORY

  Humans call me Fly-in-Amber, and I am the “Martian” best qualified to tell the story of how we made contact with humans.

  I will put Martian in quotation marks only once. We know we are not from Mars, though we live here. Some of the humans who live here also call themselves Martians, which is confusing and ludicrous.

  We had observed human robot probes landing on Mars, or orbiting it, for decades before they started to build their outpost, uncomfortably close to where we live, attracted by the same subterranean (or subarean) source of water as those who placed us here, the Others.

  With more than a century to prepare for the inevitable meeting, we had time to plan various responses. Violence was discussed and discarded. We had no experience with it other than in observation of human activities on radio, television, and cube. You would kick our asses, if we had them, but we are four-legged and excrete mainly through hundreds of pores in our feet.

  The only actual plan was to feign ignorance. Not admit (at first) that we understood many human languages. You would eventually find out we were listening to you, of course, but you would understand our need for caution.

  We are not good at planning, since our lives used to be safe and predictable, but in any case we could not have planned on Carmen Dula. She walked over the top of a lava bubble that had been worn thin, and fell through.

  She was obviously injured and in grave danger. Our choices were to contact the colony and tell them what had happened or rescue her ourselves. The former course had too many variables—explaining who we were and what we knew and all; she would probably run out of air long before they could find her. So our leader flew out to retrieve her.

  (We have one absolute leader at a time; when he/she/it dies, another is born. More intelligent, larger, stronger, and faster than the rest of us, and usually long-lived. Unless humans interfere, it turns out.)

  The leader, whom Carmen christened Red, took a floater out and picked up Carmen and her idiot robot companion, called a dog, and brought them back to us. Our medicine cured her broken bones and frostbite.

  We are not sure why it worked on her, but we don’t know how it works on us, either. It always has.

  We agreed not to speak to her, for the time being. We only spoke our native languages, which the human vocal apparatus can’t reproduce. Humans can’t even hear the high-pitched part.

  So Red took her back to the colony the next night, taking advantage of a sandstorm to remain hidden. Left her at the air-lock door, with no explanation.

  It was very amusing to monitor what happened afterward—we do listen to all communications traffic between Earth and Mars. Nobody wanted to believe her fantastic story, since Martians do not and could not exist, but no one could explain how she had survived so long. They even found evidence of the broken bones we healed but assumed they were old injuries she had forgotten about, or was lying about.

  We could have had years of entertainment, following their tortuous logic, but illness forced our hand.

  All of us Martians go through a phase, roughly corresponding to the transition between infancy and childhood, when for a short period our bodies clean themselves out and start over. It isn’t pleasant, but neither is it frightening, since it happens to everybody at the same time of life.

  Somehow, Carmen “caught” it from us, which is medically impossible. Our biologies aren’t remotely related; we don’t even have DNA. Nevertheless, she did have the transition “sickness,” and we brought her back to our home and treated her the way we would a Martian child, having her breathe an unpleasant mixture of smoldering herbs. She expelled everything, especially the two large cysts that had grown in her lungs. She was fine the next day, though, and went home—which was when the real trouble started.

  She had apparently infected all the other youngsters in the colony—everyone under the age of twenty or so.

  It was all sorted out eventually. Our lead
er Red and a healer Martian went over to the human colony and treated all the children the way they had Carmen, not pleasant but not dangerous. Unfortunately, no one could explain how the “disease” could have been transmitted from us to Carmen and from Carmen to the children. Human scientists were mystified, and, of course, we don’t have scientists as such.

  The children seemed to be all right. But people were afraid that something worse might happen, and so the humans on Earth put all of Mars under quarantine, where it remains to this day, although there have been no other incidents. People who come to Mars do so in the knowledge that they may never see Earth again.

  There is still no shortage of volunteers, which makes me think that Earth must be a very unpleasant place.

  4

  NO ORDINARY HERO

  I had to name the boy Red, after my friend who gave his life to save us all. Paul and I tried on various names for our daughter, and settled on Nadia, Russian for “hope.” Which we need now. (They both had the middle name Mayfly, sort of a joke between me and the memory of Red.)

  There were probably a good number of human boys and girls named after that particular Martian. You couldn’t say the name in Martian, a series of clacks and creaks and whistles that means “Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader.” He saved me from dying of exposure, or stupidity, and a few years later, he saved the world by putting himself on the other side of the Moon when he realized he’d become a planet-destroying time bomb. Not something that happens to ordinary heroes.

  The Martians had told us about the “Others” early on—the other alien race that supposedly had brought the Martians to Mars, tens of thousands of years ago. At first we wondered whether they were myth, or metaphor, but the memory family (those who always wore yellow, like Fly-in-Amber) insisted that the Others were actual history, though from so far ago the memory was all but lost.