Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (43 page)

The planet is a ball of mostly-blue from pole to pole, with fantastic archipelagos and island chains wrapping and re-wrapping the planet from east to west, and back again. As if all the world has become Indonesia. But unspoiled. Pure. Each small land mass covered in lush, green vegetation. Mountains and valleys, rivers and river deltas, masses of white clouds and broiling storms and, yes, there in the southern hemisphere, the tell-tale whorl of a typhoon.

Room enough for ten thousand nations, I thought.

Give people enough time …

But will we get it right? I mean, any more right than we got it the
first
time, back home on Earth?

Wait, this
is
home now. Or rather, it will be.

I must admit to being surprised I made it this far.

My health is fragile and my bones are thin and my hands and face are covered with spots. There’s no hair on my head, and I’ve got to use a cane I built from a piece of mill stock in the maintenance bay.

Whole generations of crew have passed through the bowels of the
Osprey,
one after the next, and I’m the only one to have seen and experienced them all. I am like the biblical Methuselah: the living hourglass by which the entire mission has been measured. Can I hold out for just one more year? What will it be like to actually stretch my toes out into the sand on those new beaches? Of which there will doubtless be an endless variety.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 29,199

We’re in orbit, by God.

500 miles up, and doing fine. Not a single fleck of space debris—nor any artificial satellites. A clean slate in space, as well as on the ground. The new planet has a moon about the size of Callisto. Much bigger than Earth’s moon. But roughly about as dense. We’re seeing evidence of active volcanism on that moon, as well as on the planet below. Which doesn’t necessarily mesh with our expectations, given the estimated age of the Delta Pavonis system. But then, that’s part of the fun, right? To come all this way and have assumptions overturned?

Magical.

With everyone being woken up and the aerospace shuttles officially unpacked from their bulbous conformal cocoons amidships, the
Osprey
is suddenly alive with chattering and laughter and arguments—both civil and not-so-civil.

I have retreated to the room just underneath the bow shield.

Where Leah and I used to come.

I haven’t had the heart to find or talk to her yet. I’ve mostly kept out of the way and let the kids do all of the work. This is their party, not mine.

Li found me sulking.

If she was mad at me for putting her back into stasis against her wishes, she didn’t show it. She simply ran a finger along my chin and over my jaw, then leaned in and gave me a very gentle kiss on the lips. Before tears pooled at the corners of her eyes and she floated away from me, back towards the IST that would take her down to where the action was.

It wasn’t the kind of steamy kiss I’d last gotten from her, but it was sufficient to get my blood moving. I sat there for a long time, remembering how things had been when she’d still held out hope that my stasis instability syndrome could be cured. She’d wanted so many things for us then. Things we’d now never get to have, despite having made it to the new star.

My mother and father found me next.

It was like seeing ghosts.

Their smiles faltered when they saw how decrepit I’d become.

“What have we done to you?” Mama said, tears fluttering from her eyes.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I told her. “Neither of you had any idea this would happen to me. Come now, there’s work to be done. A new life to be lived. You and Papa are still young. You have plenty of time for a new son. Go. Down to the new planet. Be happy.”

Papa braced my shoulders with his manly, strong hands, and squeezed tightly.

He understood.

He was crying too, but he understand.

I hugged him close to me, then hugged my mother.

I didn’t watch them go as they left me to my silence.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 29,235

They’ve started a fresh calendar down on the new world. The days are much longer: by about six Earth hours. Perhaps a blessing, or perhaps a curse? I’m pretty sure the tradition of
siesta
will be alive and well on this, the official second home of humanity in the galaxy.

When all but a few of the landing craft departed the ship, and there was barely anyone left onboard the
Osprey
, Leah came and asked me to come down.

Molly, and Kroger too.

And Ben and Laura. And Chris. And Kevin and Cassie.

I’m older now than all of them.

We packed up all of my belongings, to include an ancient kite which had been under my bunk for almost eight decades. The plastic had become brittle. I wasn’t sure it would fly. But I figured I would give it a shot.

Everyone ushered me to the precipice—the docking tunnel that would take me over to the aerospace shuttle, which sat fully-fueled and ready to streak down towards the planet’s surface.

I stopped there, considering.

It would be hard, the new world. So much work to do. If I’d hated the gee exerted on the ship during downthrusting, I’d hate the real gravity twice as much. My old body might last a week or two in such an environment, but probably no more than that. I’d have a stroke, or my heart would give out, or I’d fall and bust a hip. That was no way to go. Not when they still needed the
Osprey
to remain functional in orbit. As a satellite relay, both for on-world communication and for pitching messages back towards Sol System—our far away brothers and sisters on the old world.

“No,” I finally said to my friends. “I can’t go down. But you can do one thing for me. Take Janicka’s body and bury it in a sunny place, with the others who died. Where the trees grow tall and the noise of the ocean is in the wind.”

I gave them my kite.

“Make sure one of the children gets to fly this too.”

There was, of course, much protest.

But I waived them off.

“Are you going to argue with your senior?” I said, half-joking. “I will stay here. It’ll be just the
Osprey
and me. Together. She’s my woman now. We are the only ones old enough to understand each other.”

Their faces showed concern and sorrow, but they ultimately left me in peace.

Audio Journal Transcript: Final Entry

And here onboard the
Osprey
I remain.

The ship is all but empty. Nobody comes up anymore, though occasionally I do send something down when they need it—in one of the numerous emergency re-entry pods. Eventually I’ll run out of those, but not before the ship has been stripped of virtually every usable piece of technology that can be put to work below. There’s only enough left onboard these days to keep the power, the air, and the hydroponics farm running.

My lovely farm.

Where I grow just enough for me to eat, which isn’t much.

And where I suppose someday I’ll lay down and let the universe take me.

To be totally honest, it’s not been a bad life. I’ve had responsibilities and I’ve taken lovers and I’ve made amends for my wrongs. I’ve also helped bring a miracle to fruition. There’s a new civilization going on down there, on that new world. I think they named it something lofty-sounding, but I can’t remember what. A pretty name. Doesn’t really matter. They’re doing what needs to be done. And I am fully confident that a thousand years from now, this place will be vibrant and alive with people. Maybe launching their own ships towards still more distant stars? Maybe cracking the light-speed barrier altogether, and turning voyages like mine into a question of months, weeks, or even days.

Who knows?

I’ve got the
Osprey’s
long-range radio dishes fine-tuned for communication traffic with Earth. Broadcasts back to Sol System take a long time. I let them know that the
Osprey
has arrived, and that her mission is officially accomplished to satisfaction.

I don’t expect anything in return. I won’t be alive to listen to their reply.

One thing, though.

Today Leah sent me a high-resolution image of Janicka’s grave, where the four bodies of our fallen starfarers now rest.

It’s a monument, actually. A huge stone obelisk twenty meters high watches over a gorgeous bluff that looks out across an amazing, endless, wave-tumbled sea.

The plants look a bit strange. Not like Earth plants.

But green is still green.

And the clouds are bright white.

And the sky is true blue.

NOTE: to date, no
Analog
story has gotten me as much kind mail as “Life Flight” has gotten me. By a country mile. All of it overwhelmingly complimentary. Well, save for one letter. What follows is my magazine-printed response, to an astute reader comment received by the Brass Tacks column, which has run in the back of Analog magazine since long before I was born. Trevor Quachri was nice enough to give me space for a pleasant rejoinder. In short? Oops. Even us “Hard SF” guys don’t always get it right.

January 2014

Steve Gray is correct to complain that my math in “Life Flight” was not precise. As a devotee (and collaborator) of Larry Niven, I take my “hard” science fiction very seriously. Still, even Larry himself was not perfect. There’s a filk song about Larry’s most famous example:
oh, the Ringworld is unstable, the Ringworld is unstable, did the best that he was able, and that’s good enough for me!

For my short works, I usually don’t invest the kind of calculating time one might log on a full novel. And if ever I do novelize “Life Flight” I will absolutely be taking Steve’s notes and using them to refine the specifics of the
Osprey’s
journey. Just as Larry used criticism of the first
Ringworld
novel to greatly inform the descriptions and events of the second. To that franchise’s credit.

Suffice to say that for “Life Flight” the novelette, I was satisfied with what I call back-of-the-creative-envelope educated guesses. Which are reasonably informed by the realities of the physics in question, without dwelling so much on the physics that the human aspect of the story gets swamped by the equations.

I imagined the
Osprey
as a thick, super-skyscraper-sized fuel tank filled with slush hydrogen isotope. The crew module is a very long, insulated, relatively thin cylinder running centerline through the slush. At one end of the
Osprey
is the bow shield, to protect against induced cosmic rays and other interstellar debris. At the other end is a pusher/shield plate punctured by the exhaust nozzle of a supremely efficient, yet necessarily very-low-thrust fusion drive. A drive that consumes reaction mass and reactor fuel at an amazingly miserly rate. So, it takes a
long
time for such a drive to push the
Osprey
up the relative acceleration curve, and then brake accordingly on the other end of the journey. How long—precisely?—was something I didn’t feel the story needed to worry about. Nor did I factor in total time spent at one gee, in a per-second-per-second cumulative sense. Just that the ship would never, ever come close to reaching truly relativistic speeds.

Again, all back-of-the-creative-envelope guesswork. Sorry if the way I described the action rang too many physics alarm bells, for those with better arithmetic skills than myself. Hopefully Steve (and anyone else who noticed my imprecision) will forgive me.

Steve, for what it’s worth, if the novelization does reach fruition, you can expect a nice credit for having done my homework for me. Where the
Osprey’s
journey is concerned. Thank you, sir.

Now, to the instability syndrome that keeps our hero from being able to sleep out the trip to his new world. For this plot point, I made a single, key assumption: even well-funded, highly engineered operations sometimes can’t plan for all possible contingencies.

In the body of the story I dropped the hint that the syndrome is fantastically rare and cannot reasonably be tested for. Why not? Well, maybe it takes different lengths of time for the problem to manifest in different people? Time the pre-mission planners didn’t have? Or maybe the testing is prohibitively expensive? So much so that it wasn’t in the mission budget? Or maybe medical science assumes that if the parents don’t have it, their kids won’t either? But the science got it wrong in our hero’s case? Or maybe our hero just didn’t have the problem when he boarded, but later grew into the problem post-puberty? I left it as a mental puzzle for readers to invent (using their own imaginations) why this problem would have gone unchecked before the
Osprey’s
launch.

As with the math surrounding the
Osprey’s
journey, I didn’t dwell so much on the technical details of the instability syndrome so much as I dwelt on its human impact: the way such a discovery would virtually destroy a young man, and condemn him to a life not of his own choosing. How would any of us, faced with such a thing, react? What might our choices entail? How would we derive meaning from living out our days on a ship in a proverbial bottle? I found these questions much more engaging than the actual question of why the syndrome went undetected. And again, I hope Steve (and anyone else who wrinkled his or her brow at the issue) will forgive me.