“I’ll miss you, son,” I said to Dalt. Tears were welling in my eyes. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, so much harder than I could manage.
“And, Suzto,” I said, moving to my daughter-in-law, while my wife moved to hug our son. “I’ll miss you, too.” I hugged her, as well. “I love you both.”
“We love you, too,” Suzto said.
And they entered the pyramid.
I was hovering over a field, harvesting radishes. It was tricky work; if you pulled too hard, you’d get the radish out, all right, but then you and it would go sailing up into the air.
“Rodal! Rodal!”
I looked in the direction of the voice. It was old Doc Tadders, hurtling toward me, a white-haired projectile. At her age, she should be more careful—she could break her bones slamming into even a padded wall at that speed.
“Rodal!”
“Yes?”
“Come! Come quickly! A message has been received from Dirt!”
I kicked off the ground, sailing toward the communication station next to the access tube that used to lead to the starship. Tadders managed to turn around without killing herself and she flew there alongside me.
A sizable crowd had already gathered by the time we arrived.
“What does the message say?” I asked the person closest to the computer monitor.
He looked at me in irritation; the ancient computer had displayed the text, naturally enough, in the ancient script, and few besides me could understand that. He moved aside and I consulted the screen, reading aloud for the benefit of everyone.
“It says, ‘Greetings! We have arrived safely at Dirt.’ ”
The crowd broke into cheers and applause. I couldn’t help reading ahead a bit while waiting or them to quiet down, so I was already misty-eyed when I continued. “It goes on to say, ‘Tell Rodal and Delar that they have a grandson; we’ve named him Madar.’ ”
My wife had passed on some time ago—but she would have been delighted at the choice of Madar; that had been her father’s name.
“ ‘Dirt is beautiful, full of plants and huge bodies of water,’ ” I read. “ ‘And there are other human beings living here. It seems those people interested in technology moved to the Dyson sphere, but a small group who preferred a pastoral lifestyle stayed on the homeworld. We’re mastering their language—it’s deviated a fair bit from the one in the ancient texts—and are already great friends with them.’ ”
“Amazing,” said Doc Tadders.
I smiled at her, wiped my eyes, then went on: “ ‘We will send much more information later, but we can clear up at least one enduring mystery right now.’ ” I grinned as I read the next part. “ ‘Chickens can’t fly here. Apparently, just because you have wings doesn’t mean you were meant to fly.’ ”
That was the end of the message. I looked up at the dark sky, wishing I could make out Sol, or any star. “And just because you don’t have wings,” I said, thinking of my son and his wife and my grandchild, far, far away, “doesn’t mean you weren’t.”
Above It All
Winner of the CompuServe SF&F Forum’s HOMer Award for Best Short Story of the Year
The first anthology Edward E. Kramer invited me to write for was Dante’s Disciples, which he co-edited with Peter Crowther; it was a book about literal or figurative encounters with the devil. “Ed,” I’d said upon receiving the invitation, “I’m a hard-SF writer—I don’t know anything about any devil.” But Ed said, “Why not try something set aboard a spaceship?”—and from that suggestion this story was born.
“Above It All” turned out to be a rather controversial tale, since many read it as a condemnation of the space program (although I did get a wonderful fan letter praising it from someone at NASA); if it is a condemnation, I think “The Shoulders of Giants” (the last story in this book) more than makes up for it.
Rhymes with fear.
The words echoed in Colonel Paul Rackham’s head as he floated in Discovery’s airlock, the bulky Manned Maneuvering Unit clamped to his back. Air was being pumped out; cold vacuum was forming around him.
Rhymes with fear.
He should have said no, should have let McGovern or one of the others take the spacewalk instead. But Houston had suggested that Rackham do it, and to demur he’d have needed to state a reason.
Just a dead body, he told himself. Nothing to be afraid of.
There was a time when a military man couldn’t have avoided seeing death—but Rackham had just been finishing high school during Desert Storm. Sure, as a test pilot, he’d watched colleagues die in crashes, but he’d never actually seen the bodies. And when his mother passed on, she’d had a closed casket. His choice, that, made without hesitation the moment the funeral director had asked him—his father, still in a nursing home, had been in no condition to make the arrangements.
Rackham was wearing liquid-cooling long johns beneath his spacesuit, tubes circulating water around him to remove excess body heat. He shuddered, and the tubes moved in unison, like a hundred serpents writhing.
He checked the barometer, saw that the lock’s pressure had dropped below 0.2 psi—just a trace of atmosphere left. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm himself, then reached out a gloved hand and turned the actuator that opened the outer circular hatch. “I’m leaving the airlock,” he said. He was wearing the standard “Snoopy Ears” communications carrier, which covered most of his head beneath the space helmet. Two thin microphones protruded in front of his mouth.
“Copy that, Paul,” said McGovern, up in the shuttle’s cockpit. “Good luck.”
Rackham pushed the left MMU armrest control forward. Puffs of nitrogen propelled him out into the cargo bay. The long space doors that normally formed the bay’s roof were already open, and overhead he saw Earth in all its blue-and-white glory. He adjusted his pitch with his right hand control, then began rising up. As soon as he’d cleared the top of the cargo bay, the Russian space station Mir was visible, hanging a hundred meters away, a giant metal crucifix. Rackham brought his hand up to cross himself.
“I have Mir in sight,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. “I’m going over.”
Rackham remembered when the station had gone up, twenty years ago in 1986. He first saw its name in his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World Herald. Mir, the Russian word for peace—as if peace had had anything to do with its being built. Reagan had been hemorrhaging money into the Strategic Defense Initiative back then. If the Cold War turned hot, the high ground would be in orbit.
Even then, even in grade eight, Rackham had been dying to go into space. No price was too much. “Whatever it takes,” he’d told Dave—his sometimes friend, sometimes rival—over lunch. “One of these days, I’ll be floating right by that damned Mir. Give the Russians the finger.” He’d pronounced Mir as if it rhymed with sir.
Dave had looked at him for a moment, as if he were crazy. Then, dismissing all of it except the way Paul had spoken, he smiled a patronizing smile and said, “It’s meer, actually. Rhymes with fear.”
Rhymes with fear.
Paul’s gaze was still fixed on the giant cross, spikes of sunlight glinting off it. He shut his eyes and let the nitrogen exhaust push against the small of his back, propelling him into the darkness.