My mother, father and brother sat in a corner of the lounge, near a broad window overlooking the port. Blunt white shuttie noses poked up through half-open silo hatches. Red flopsand formed smooth streaks across the white pavement. Arbeiters engaged in perpetual cleanup roamed the field.
We spoke in bursts, with long moments of silence in between: Martian reserve. My mother and father tried not to show their pride and sadness. Stan simply smiled. Stan always smiled, in good times or bad. Some misjudged him because of that, but due to the shape of his face, it was easier for him to smile than not.
Father took me by both shoulders and said, “You’re going to do great.”
“Of course she will,” my mother said.
“We’ll have to adopt someone while you’re gone,” Father continued. “We can’t stand an empty house.”
“The hell we will,” Mother said. “Stan will leave in a few months — ”
“I will?” Stan said. His protest carried an odd note; surprise beyond the jest.
“And we’ll have the warren to ourselves for the first time in ten years. What should we do?”
“Replace the carpets,” Father said. “They don’t groom themselves as well as they used to.”
I listened with a mix of embarrassment and grief. What I wanted, right now, was to retreat and cry, but that was not possible.
“You will make us proud,” Father said, and then, to make his point, in a louder voice, he said it again.
“I’ll try,” I murmured, searching his face. Father and I had never quite communicated; his love had always been obvious, and he had never slighted me, but he often seemed a cipher. Mother I thought I knew; yet it was Father who never surprised me, and Mother who never failed to.
“We won’t drag this out,” Mother said firmly, taking my father’s elbow for emphasis. Mother and I hugged. I squeezed her hard, feeling like a little girl, wanting her to sit me on her lap and rock me. She pulled back, smiling, tears in her eyes, and actually pushed me away, gently but firmly. Father gripped my hand with both of his and shook it. He had tears in his eyes, as well. They turned abruptly and left.
Stan stayed longer. We stood apart from the crowd, saying little, until he cocked his head to one side, and whispered, “They’re going to miss you.”
“I know,” I said.
“So will I.”
“It’ll flash,” I said.
“I’m going lawbond,” he said, sticking his jaw out pugnaciously.
“What?”
“To Jane Wolper.”
“From Cailetet?”
“Yeah.”
“Stan, Father hates Cailetet. They’re pushy and Lunar. We’ve never been able to share with them.”
“Maybe that’s why I love her.”
I stared at him in astonishment. “You’re amazing,” I said.
“Yeah.” He seemed pleased with himself.
“You’re going over to their family… ?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad I’m leaving now.”
“I’ll keep you informed,” he said. “If Dad says nothing about me, you’ll know it went badly. I’ll give you the details when the dust settles.”
I specked him running down the tunnel between our rooms when he was five and I was two and a half and adored him. He could leap like a kangaroo and wore rubber pads to bounce hands and feet down the tunnels. Athletic, calm, always-knows-where-to-go Stan. Never said boo to our parents, never gave them pause. Now it was his turn to aggravate and provoke.
We hugged. “Don’t let her push you around.”
Stan made a petulant face, wiped it with his hand like a clown, and smiled sunnily. “I’m proud you made it, Casseia,” he said. He hugged me quickly, shook my hand, gave me a small package, and left.
I sat in a corner and opened the wrapper. Inside was a cartridge of all our blood family docs and vids. Stan had paid extra for the weight clearance of one hundred grams; the box was marked with a cargo stamp. I felt even more empty and alone.
I faced the crowded lounge with a kind of luxurious dread. The shuttle would depart in two hours. I’d be aboard the Tuamotu in less than six hours. We would rise from Mars orbit and inject Solar in less than twenty hours…
I pocketed Stan’s gift, squared my shoulders, and entered the crowd with a big, false smile.
Even at its most opulent, space travel was never comfortable. The shuttle to orbit was a rude introduction to the necessary economies of leaving a planet: shot out of your planetary goldfish bowl on a pillar of flaming hydrogen or methane, in a cylindrical cabin less than ten meters wide, everyone arranged in stacked circles with feet pointing outward, seventy passengers and two shuttle crew, losing Mars’s reassuring gentle grip and dropping endlessly…
Temp bichemistry helped. Those passengers who had installed permanent bichemistries to adapt to micro-g conditions spent the first hour in orbit asleep while the boat swung carefully to mate with Tuamotu. I had refused such a radical procedure — how often would I travel between worlds? — and chosen temp. I spent the whole time awake, feeling my body smooth over the deep uncertainty of always falling.
Some things I didn’t expect. The quick adjustments of temp bichemistry caused a kind of euphoria that was pleasant and disturbing at once. For several minutes I was incredibly randy. That passed, however, and all I felt was a steady tingle throughout my body.
Bithras and Pak-Lee had arrived at Atwood after I was seated, and were in the shuttle somewhere below me. Alice Two was in the hold in a special thinker berth.
Being away from net links was like sensory deprivation for a thinker; less than a tenth of Alice Two’s capacity would be engaged while we were in space. The bandwidth of space communication was too narrow to keep her fully linked and employed. She would not sleep, of course, but she would spend much of the journey correlating events in Earth and Martian history drawn from her large data store.
Thinkers had been known to create massive and authoritative LitVid works while in machine dream. Some said the best historians were no longer human, but I disagreed. Alice One and Alice Two seemed quite human to me. Alice even called her copy a “daughter.” I’d never worked closely with thinkers before, and I was charmed.
Sitting on my cramped couch in the dark, a projection of Mars’s orange and red surface scrolling above me, I wondered what Charles was doing now. Unlike Charles, I hadn’t yet found anyone to seriously occupy my free time. The day before launch, I had spoken with Diane, and she had asked if I looked forward to a shipboard romance. “Dust that,” I’d answered. “I’ll be a busy rabbit.”
The trip would take eight Terrestrial months, one way. Each passenger chose from three options: warm sleep with mind embedded in a sophisticated sim environment (sometimes crudely called cybernation), realtime journey, or a pre-scheduled mix of the two. Most Martians chose realtime. Most Terrestrials returning to Earth chose sims and warm sleep.
The Mars scene cut suddenly to a view of the Tuamotu in space. Booms furled, passenger cylinders hugged tightly to the hull, our home for the next eight months looked tiny against the stars. Tugs fastened helium-three fuel and water and methane mass tanks to the bow. The drive funnels flexed experimentally at the stern.
A small voice provided running commentary in one ear. Tuamotu was fifteen Earth years old, built in Earth orbit, nano maintained, veteran of five crossings, refitted before her trip to Mars, well-regarded by travel guides on Earth and Mars. She carried a crew of five: three humans, a dedicated thinker, and a slaved thinker backup.
I had a touch of tunnel fever at the thought of being shut up for so long. I had studied the ship’s layout a few hours before boarding, learning my way around the passenger cylinder, previewing shipboard routine. But I would have to overcome the conviction that there was no way out. Despite spending most of my life in tunnels and enclosed spaces, I always knew there was another tunnel, another warren, and as a last resort, I could suit and pop through a lock and go Up… luxuries not available on the Tuamotu.