I could only guess what their sleeping arrangements had been on Earth; on both Little Mars and ad Astra, each person had individual sleeping quarters. The bunks were large enough for two people to sleep together if they didn’t mind touching. Unless they were both large. In our population, that would only be Namir and Paul, which I didn’t see happening.
In ad Astra everything would be modular. They might choose to have one big bed in one big room. Hamster pile, as they say in college.
Of the three of them, only Namir had a little experience of living in space, but only a little. Of we other four, I had the least, but I’d been off Earth the past eleven years, which incidentally was close to the length of time we seven would be spending together, on the way to Wolf and hopefully back. About six and a half years there, and the same to return.
We would have to become a family of sorts if we were to survive. Tolstoi famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The old Russian didn’t consider triune marriages, though, or families with two nonhuman members—we could presumably be unhappy in ways that he couldn’t have begun to describe. At least none of us was likely to throw herself in front of a train.
For those of us used to life in the Martian colony or this satellite, the living space in ad Astra wouldn’t be too confining. The combination of being isolated from the human race at large, while living in close contact with a few others, was not a novelty.
Our spooks were used to traveling around the world, constantly facing the challenge and attraction of new environments, new people. How well would they get along with this, a sardine tin that also had aspects of a goldfish bowl?
VR would help preserve our sanity, sometimes by providing alternatives to sanity. Both Moonboy and Meryl liked to go random places with the kaleidoscope filter, which provided a controlled degree of synesthesia, the data meant for one sense being interpreted as another. You could do it one sense at a time, or just spin the wheel and hang on. I might do more of it myself, with time on my hands. And on my eyes and nose and so forth.
But I liked the almost endless array of straightforward virtual travelogues, and often did them in tandem with Paul, as a way of getting away from the others. Usually nothing spectacular or culturally interesting, which of course made up most of the library. We’d just stroll down a country lane talking, or sit on a beach or in some woods. A pity we didn’t have the complex porn interfaces, so we could do more than hold hands and talk, but that would be a little hard to get through the Corporation budget review.
Along those lines I had to admit a certain prurient curiosity about our new sister and brothers. If they did all hop into bed together, who did what to whom and with what? It could make for a crowded bed, though I supposed we could jury-rig something. Or just agree to stay out of the galley periodically and let them do it on the table.
I wasn’t really drawn to either of the men in that way, although they were both likable and attractive. It was hard to believe that Namir was fifty. From the moment of our first meeting, I sensed a real physical attraction, though he may project the same kind of interest to any female not too young or old to make a sexual union possible. I know that degree of sexual indiscrimination passes for gallantry with some men in some cultures.
Actually, he didn’t seem to project the same warmth toward Meryl, and she is prettier and sexier than me. Older, but still a decade younger than him.
Who knows? After a few years, we may be swapping partners like minks. Or not be speaking to one another.
Who will be the first to be thrown out of the air lock? Or leave voluntarily?
9
SECRETS
Carmen doesn’t really know how completely she’s being lied to—only by omission, but nevertheless lies. She really has no idea how bad things are on Earth right now, and what a nightmare we’ve been through.
We accept the necessity of total monitoring and censoring of all communication into space, since the Others can receive anything broadcast from Earth, assuming they’re interested.
Maybe it’s silly. A sufficiently weak signal would be so attenuated in twenty-four light-years’ distance that no manner of superscience could separate it from cosmic background noise. But what is “sufficiently weak”? And how badly do you need the signal? If it were important to me as a spook, I could take any smallest signal—a man’s heartbeat through a hotel window a mile away—and amplify and refine it, then pump it through a laser to another spook, or an Other spook, twenty-four light-years away.
So what could the Others do? Maybe they read all our mail. Maybe all our thoughts.
Whatever the reality, the controlling principle is that everything broadcast into space might be overheard by the Others, so everyone who lives in orbit or on Mars will have a systematically distorted view of life on Earth. Carmen was aware of that in regard to defense—she never mentioned the fleet and didn’t expect any reports about it—but when we first talked, I realized that her image of life on Earth was no more realistic than a cube drama.
I caught her alone the second morning, by the sneaky expedient of checking the exercise schedule. At 0400 she was in VR, biking, so I took up the rowing machine and watched her pedal through the streets of a Paris that no longer existed.
We showered separately and met down at the mess for coffee. She brought up Paris, how she remembered it from the year she spent in Europe as a girl.
“I guess the VR crystal’s pretty old,” she said. “They hadn’t started rebuilding the Eiffel Tower, but it was finished when I was there in ’66.”
“Still there,” I said, “but it was damaged in the ’81 riots, a piece of the base melted. They’ve left it that way, closed to the public.”
“There were riots in ’81?”
“Not just in Paris. Though hundreds died there, in the Champ du Mars.”
“Hundreds.” She sat absolutely still. “In the States, too?”
“All over. The States were… worse than most of Europe and the Middle East. Los Angeles and Chicago were especially bad.”
“The East Coast?”
“New York and Washington were already under martial law when Paris exploded. There wasn’t much loss of life.”
“How long did it go on?”
“Well… technically…”
Her eyes got wide. “Still?”
I had an intense desire for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked since Gehenna. “In a way, it is still going on. Not martial law, but a kind of pervasive police state. Which doesn’t call itself that.”
“It’s what they’re calling internationalism?”
“Basically. One big happy police-state family.”
She walked across the room and looked out at the image of the Earth. “Paul and I were talking about that the other day. The picture they project is too perfect; we’ve all known that. But a police state, all over the world?”
“Maybe I’m exaggerating. Many people do just see it as international solidarity against a common enemy. Everybody does have to sacrifice a certain amount of time, a certain amount of comfort. And freedom.”