“Thirty years.”
“Thirty! Thirty! Thirty …”
“Just think of it, honey,” I said, getting up from the couch. “When I return, you’ll have a trophy wife, twenty-three years your junior.”
I’d hoped he would laugh at that. But he didn’t. Nor did he waste any time getting to the heart of the matter. “You don’t seriously expect me to wait for you, do you?”
I sighed. “I don’t expect anything. All I know is that I can’t turn this down.”
“You’ve got a family. You’ve got kids.”
“Lots of people go years without seeing their kids. Sarah and Jacob will be fine.”
“And what about me?”
I draped my arms around his neck, but his back was as stiff as a rocket. “You’ll be fine, too,” I said.
So am I a bad mother? I certainly wasn’t a bad one when I’d been on Earth. I’d been there for every school play, every soccer game. I’d read to Sarah and Jacob, and taught Sarah to cook. Not that she needed to know how: instant food was all most people ever ate. But she liked to cook, and I did, too, and to hell with the fact that it was a traditional female thing to do.
The mission planners thought they were good psychologists. They’d taken holograms of Jacob and Sarah just before I’d left, and had computer-aged them three decades, in hopes of preparing me for how they’d look when we were reunited. But I’d only ever seen such things in association with missing children and their abductors, and looking at them—looking at a Sarah who was older now than I myself was, with a lined face and gray in her hair and angle brackets at the corners of her eyes—made me worry about all the things that could have happened to my kids in my absence.
Jacob might have had to go and fight in some goddamned war. Sarah might have, too—they drafted women for all positions, of course, but she was older than Jacob, and the president always sent the youngest children off to die first.
Sarah could have had any number of kids by now. She’d been going to school in Canada when I left, and the ZPG laws—the zed-pee-gee laws, as they called them up there—didn’t apply in that country. And those kids—
Those kids, my grandkids, could be older now than my own kids had been when I’d left them behind. I’d wanted to have it alclass="underline" husband, kids, career, the stars. And I’d come darn close—but I’d almost certainly missed out on one of the great pleasures of life, playing with and spoiling grandchildren.
Of course, Sarah and Jacob’s kids might have had kids of their own by now, which would make me their …
Oh, my.
Their great-grandmother. At a biological age of 49 when I return to Earth, maybe that would qualify me for a listing in Guinness eBook of Solar System Records.
Just what I need.
There’s no actual border to the solar system—it just sort of peters out, maybe a light year from the sun, when you find the last cometary nucleus that’s gravitationally bound to Sol. So the official border—the point at which you were considered to be within solar space, for the purpose of Earth’s laws—was a distance of 49.7 AU from the sun, the maximal radius of Pluto’s orbit. Pluto’s orbit was inclined more than 17 degrees to the ecliptic, but I was coming in at an even sharper angle. Still, when the ship’s computer informed me that I’d passed that magic figure—that I was now less than 49.7 times the radius of Earth’s orbit from the sun—I knew I was in the home stretch.
I’d be a hero, no doubt about that (and, no, not a heroine, thank you very much). I’d be a celebrity. I’d be on TV—or whatever had replaced TV in my absence.
But would I still be a wife? A mother?
I looked at the computer-generated map. Getting closer all the time …
You might think the idea of being an old-fashioned astronaut was an oxymoron. But consider history. John Glenn, he was right out of Norman Rockwell’s U. S. of A., and he’d gone into space not once but twice, with a sojourn in Washington in between. As an astronaut, he’d been on the cutting edge. As a man, he was conservative and family-centered; if he’d run for the presidency, he’d probably have won.
Well, I guess I’m an old-fashioned astronaut, too. I mean, sure, Greg had spent months each year away from home, while I raised the kids in Cocoa Beach and worked at the Kennedy Space Center (my whole CV could be reduced to initials: part-time jobs at KFC while going to university, then full-time work at KSC: from finger-lickin’ good to giant leaps for … well, for you know who).
When Greg was in South Africa, he searched for Australopithecus africanus and Homo sterkfonteinensis fossils. Of course, a succession of comely young coeds (one of my favorite Scrabble words—nobody knew it anymore) had accompanied him there. And Greg would argue that it was just human nature, just his genes, that had led him to bed as many of them as possible. Not that he’d ever confessed. But a woman could tell.
Me, I’d never strayed. Even with all the beefcake at the Cape—my cape, not his—I’d always been faithful to him. And he had to know that I’d been alone these last seven—these last thirty—years.
God, I miss him. I miss everything about him: the smell of his sweat, the roughness of his cheek late in the day, the way his eyes had always watched me when I was undressing.
But did he miss me? Did he even remember me?
The ship was decelerating, of course. That meant that what had been my floor up until the journey’s halfway point was now my ceiling—my world turned upside down.
Earth loomed.
I wasn’t going to dock with any of the space stations orbiting Earth. After all, technology kept advancing, and there was no reason for them to keep thirty-year-old adapter technology around just for the benefit of those of us who’d gone on extrasolar missions. No, my ship, the Astarte—“Ah-star-tee,” as I kept having to remind Greg, who found it funny to call it the Ass Tart—had its own planetary lander, the same one that had taken me down to Athena’s surface, four years ago by my calendar.
I’d shut down the ramjet now and had entered radio communication with Houston, although no one was on hand that I knew; they’d all retired. Still, you would have thought someone might have come by especially for this. NASA put Phileas Fogg to shame when it came to keeping on schedule (yeah, I’d had time to read all the classics in addition to watching all those movies). I could have asked about my husband, about my daughter and son, but I didn’t. Landing took all my piloting skills, and all my concentration. If they weren’t going to be waiting for me at Edwards, I didn’t want to know about it until I was safely back on mother Earth.
I fired retros, deorbited, and watched through the lander’s sheet-diamond windows as flames flew past. All of California was still there, I was pleased to see; I’d been worried that a big hunk of it might have slid into the Pacific in my absence.
Just like a big hunk of my life might have—
No! Concentrate, Cathy. Concentrate. You can worry about all that later.
And, at last, I touched down vertically, in the center of the long runway that stretched across Roger’s Dry Lake.
I had landed.
But was I home?
Greg looked old.
I couldn’t believe it. He’d studied ancient man, and now he’d become one.
Seventy-two.