Paul laughed, and said to me, “He was my history prof at Boulder. You met him.”
Subtract fifty years and the beard. He’d come to Little Earth with some government agency and talked with Paul for hours through the quarantine window.
“Amazing,” Gold said. “You don’t look a day older. You’ll be hearing that a lot, I suppose.”
And from really old people, I thought.
“The Others did some trick with time.”
The old man nodded. “I saw your transmission from turnaround. Some people thought it was all a trick, you know. If they’d prevailed, you wouldn’t have made it to Earth.”
I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Just as well.
“I’m glad you didn’t listen to them.”
“Oh, I listen to everyone; comes with the job. But I don’t have to obey anyone.” He shuffled some papers, an everyday gesture that we hadn’t seen in some time. “First, let me tell you that you will come to Earth, not New Mars. The quarantine was lifted, oh, about twelve years ago.”
“That’ll be great.”
How many years since I’d actually been on Earth? I was not quite nineteen when I stepped aboard the Space Elevator. Thirty- four when ad Astra left. Fifteen years plus about four, subjective, that we spent going to the Others’ Home and back.
Exactly half my life—thirty-eight actual years. Whatever “actual” means.
The president and Paul were chatting about our return. “We could take you down on the Space Elevator, which would be more comfortable than using the lander. But the lander, an actual landing, would be really good for public morale.”
“Propaganda.” Paul said.
“I wouldn’t deny it. Do you think it would be safe?”
“Well, it’s never been used, so it’s brand-new in a way. It’s been sitting around for years, which isn’t good for any machine. But that is what it was designed to do.”
I wished telepathy would work. Space Elevator Space Elevator Space Elevator. I’d had my fill of atmospheric braking.
“If you’re uncertain,” the president said, “we have two qualified pilots waiting at the Hilton.”
I guess you don’t get to be president without a knack for psychology. “Oh, there’s no question I can do it. No question at all. I’ve done seven Mars landings and a hundred on Earth, in flight training.”
“And one on the Moon, I recall.” The one that saved the Earth. Paul smiled. Score one for the prez.
“So when do you want me to bring her down? Where?”
“They still have the landing strip in the Mojave Desert. Um…” He looked to his right. “They say they have the old software to guide you in, but want to test it out with a duplicate. Anytime tomorrow would be fine. Daylight, California time?”
“No problem. We came on board with one suitcase apiece. Won’t take us long to pack.”
“Good, good. Will you accept our hospitality at the White House?” Another glance to the right. “Once the medics let you loose, that is.”
“An honor, sir. Professor.”
“See you tomorrow in California.” He looked at his watch. “Would you mind debriefing with my science and policy advisors, say, an hour from now?”
“No problem, sir.” He let out a big breath after the cube went dark. “Let’s move this circus back downstairs. Get Snowbird out of the heat.”
“Paul,” Namir said, “be careful what you say to them.”
“Sure. Careful.”
“If they don’t like what they hear… if they don’t want the public to hear what we say… this is their last and best chance to silence us.” He looked around at everybody. “There could be a tragic accident.”
“That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said.
He nodded, smiling. “You know us spies. We come by it naturally.”
The cabinet members who talked with us were urbane and friendly, not at all threatening. If they were planning to have us all murdered, they hid it pretty well. They mostly worked from a transcript of our long transmission from turnaround, asking us to clarify and broaden various things.
I actually knew one of them, Media Minister Davie Lewitt, now a dignified white-haired lady. She had been the brassy cube commentator who gave me the name “The Mars Girl.” She remembered and apologized to me for that.
After the cabinet people thanked us and signed off, they were replaced by a couple who introduced themselves as Dor and Sam, both pretty old and probably female. Dor was muscular and outdoorsy and had about a half inch of trim white hair. Sam was feminine and had beautiful long hair dyed lavender.
“We wanted to help you prepare for returning to Earth,” Dor said. “We were both in our early thirties when you left, so we were born about the same time as most of you.”
“Twenty years after me,” Namir said. “I suppose the first thing most of us would like to know is whether we have living family. I doubt that I do; my father would be over 140.”
“Rare, but possible,” Sam said. She unrolled what looked like a featureless sheet of metal, obviously a notebook, and ran her fingers over it. “No, I’m afraid he died a few years after you left.” She stroked her neck, an odd gesture. “I think it would be best if we mailed this information to each of you privately?”
I nodded, curious but patient. I looked around and nobody objected.
“Which brings up a big thing,” Dor said. “This is kind of like the Others, or like your poor friend Moonboy. We do have people, many thousands, whose legal status is ambiguous, because it is not clear whether they are dead or alive.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Dor,” Sam said. “This was just starting back when you were alive—shit! I mean before you left, sorry.”
“No offense taken,” Dustin said. “We really are like ghosts from the dead past.”
“Cranach versus the State of California, 2112,” Dor said. “Cranach was a lawyer. He was dying, and needed more and more profound life-support equipment, which in his case—he was very wealthy—eventually included a complete computer backup for his brain and associated nervous system.
“Because of the way California defined ‘brain death,’ Cranach deliberately let his body die, but first essentially willed everything to himself—the computer image of his brain, which was technically indistinguishable from the original organic one.”
“When his body died,” Sam said, “nobody noticed for weeks, because the computer image had long been in complete charge of his complex business affairs and investments. And it was a person; it had a corporate identity independent of Cranach himself.
“What you’re saying,” Paul said, “is that this guy Cranach, dead as a doornail, could be legally immortal, at least in California, as long as his brain is not brain-dead. Even though it’s a machine.”
“Exactly,” Dor said. “And people like him, like it, are only the most extreme examples of, well, they call themselves ‘realists’ in North America.”
“As opposed to ‘humanists,’ ” Sam said. “It had started when we, and you, were young, in the mid-twenty-first. People who spent most of their waking hours in virtual reality.”
“Robonerds,” Meryl said. “Some of them even worked there, jobs piped in from the outside world.”
“We didn’t have much of that on Mars,” I said. “Except for school.”
“There still isn’t,” Sam said. “Mars is a hotbed of humanists.”
“But even on Earth,” Dor said, “most people are somewhere in the middle, using VR sometimes at play or work or study. Depends on where you live, too—lots of realists in Japan and China; lots of humanists in Latin America and Africa.”