Authors: Nancy Kress
General Yang Lee’s provisional military government fell within a week. Kaufman gathered from the broadcasts that Lee, although firmly in command of the navy, had neither the army support nor a sufficient political base to hold onto power. Mars had controlled the Solar System because she controlled the space tunnels. Without the tunnels, Earth’s enormously greater population asserted its force. That force, however, was two months away from Mars. Fighting broke out in Lowell City, in Tharsis, in Arcadia, in N’sanga, in Pomeroy, in Kepler City, in Shangsitsu. A triumvirate was formed and struggled to organize a popular election on two planets, two moons, space stations that were declaring themselves separate political entities, and the Belt. The effort failed.
Businesses declared bankruptcy. Others were suddenly privatized, sometimes with opposition and sometimes without. Out of the chaos the Martian utilities emerged as popular heroes. Against great odds, and pretty much without choice, they kept operational the domes, the farms, the transportation infrastructure. Would-be dictators began to cultivate ties with leading civil servants, who had accomplished practical miracles far exceeding their authority. Since no one could define that authority anyway, the people of Mars began to pledge support for engineers and transport czars.
In this confused time, communications were disrupted, restored, disrupted again. The data packets that Kaufman viewed sometimes contradicted each other. Trying to sort through them all, Kaufman began to sense something else underlying the political hysteria, the military maneuvering, even the endless tearful interviews with people whose families had been cut off forever by the closings of the space tunnels.
“The Lost,” the broadcasts were calling those souls. But it was more than individuals, Kaufman saw, that had been lost. More than colonies or warships or business empires. Humanity as a whole had lost something large in its conception of itself.
Sol System’s expansive optimism had come from the space tunnels, even in wartime. We travel to the stars! We are in conflict with aliens! The galaxy is at stake! We have potential control of spacetime itself!
No more. Gone, all of it, severed like some healthy limb amputated by mistake: an arm, a leg. Even though the Solar System believed it was the Fallers who had closed the tunnels despite Admiral Pierce’s heroic fight to stop them, the tunnels were still amputated. Humanity was in systemic shock. It was also diminished.
Mankind had lost the stars.
No one believed that current human technology could build ships to span the huge distances between star systems. No one had needed to even begin to develop such technology; there were the tunnels, handed to humans by gods so long gone that no one felt the human godship threatened. Now that Space Tunnel #1 was a floating solid invisible wall, all that was left was the Solar System. Once it had seemed a huge unknowable ocean of space. But in contrast to what had been lost, it was a puddle.
From the observation deck Kaufman traced the familiar constellations in the black sky. In the direction of Draco lay Artemis System. Han System was not far from Betelgeuse, in Orion. Virgo “held” Gemini System. Inhabited, all three of them. Visible but unreachable from Sol. Nor could their human colonies reach the mother world. It was a shared loss among systems that would never share anything else again.
Kaufman tried to express some of this to Tom Capelo. The physicist was unsympathetic.
“Lyle, the alternative was to put spacetime through a flop transition. Compared to that, this isn’t such a bad outcome.”
“I know. But what we’ve lost—”
“Look at what we gained,” Capelo said impatiently. “The new equations—not that I’m boasting, of course—shed tremendous light on the physics of large-scale flop transitions. Plus losing Hell-Bent-On-Destruction Pierce. Not that this new string of would-be rulers looks any better.”
“They might be.”
“No evidence of it so far,” Capelo said, and moved gingerly away to check his messages again. With the superb medical care on the
Golden Diamond
, he was healing rapidly. But he still moved carefully, and his stress over his family was not helping. Carol and Sudie were safe on Earth. It had been a great joy to Capelo to learn that Amanda was with his sister Kristen and her husband. But since this message had come through, from a third party on an official channel (another unexplained mystery), Capelo had heard nothing of their whereabouts. The broadcasts reported fighting in Tharsis.
To Kaufman’s surprise, Marbet didn’t share his sense of loss over the space tunnels any more than Capelo had. “We should never have been trusted with those tunnels in the first place,” she said.
“‘Should’? ‘Been trusted with’? Those are moral judgments, Marbet. History isn’t morality.”
“I know that,” she said, her chin hardening as she looked at him. Things hadn’t been easy between her and Kaufman since Marbet had concocted the elaborate public lie about Pierce’s heroism and their own passive role as observers. The lie had, as Capelo acidly pointed out, saved their lives. But it had also bound them, including Kaufman, to live the lie for the rest of their lives. Kaufman didn’t like it.
“History might not be moral,” Marbet continued, “but whatever beings made the tunnels and artifacts were intensely moral. They set it up so that any species who didn’t respect the limits of the artifacts and tunnels didn’t get to use them anymore.”
“You make it sound as if we’re naughty children-who have been sent to their room:”
“We are. We were never ready for the space tunnels. Think of Essa.”
Kaufman never thought of Essa. He said, “To you, she’s some sort of symbol, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Reckless, adventurous, totally undisciplined. Like humanity. Even though she wasn’t human, she came from the same DNA seed. And where is Essa now? If she’s lucky, she’s been confined again to World. If she wasn’t lucky, she’s dead. We were lucky, Lyle. We got home. Ann and Dieter were lucky, too—they got confined to where they wanted to be anyway. The unlucky ones are trapped in systems that can’t support them without supplies from Sol. We caused that—the bigger we, humanity—with our recklessness and undiscipline. Until we can do better, we should stay in our own star system.”
He looked at her bleakly. So beautiful, so perceptive, so tender. And he had never before realized how far apart their thinking was.
She read him accurately, of course. Marbet said quietly, “You don’t agree, I know. You’re thinking we two really don’t belong together, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked away from him, out at the stars. “That’s your decision, of course.”
“And yours.”
“No,” she said. “It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.”
To that there was no answer. He moved away, but Marbet caught his arm. “Lyle … don’t.…” But what he wasn’t supposed to do took her a while to get out.
Finally she said, “Listen, dear heart. It’s a hard truth, but truth nonetheless. Let me borrow an image from Tom. From his physics.”
She stopped again, and Kaufman saw in the working of the smooth brown skin at her throat how much this mattered to her.
“In Tom’s quantum universe, as I understand it, everything is probable.
Everything
, even the existence of matter. Things like mass and energy can change form but can’t ever get lost. Time can flow forward or backward. Nothing is completely irreversible. But that’s just not true in the human universe we live in. Some actions—some choices!—are irreversible. The tunnels closed. Ann and Dieter chose World. Tom’s first wife died. At the human scale, many things happen forever, and all we can do is live with the consequences.”
He said stiffly, “I don’t understand the significance of your trite little homily.”
“Yes, you do,” she said, dropping his arm. “I told a lie you didn’t like. It can’t be undone. I don’t even want to undo it, although it wouldn’t have been your choice for yourself. You either accept that it happened and we go on together, or we don’t. But not this polite, half-together-half-not stance you’ve taken. I don’t accept that. So choose, Lyle, and accept the irreversible consequences.”
He said nothing. Marbet said, “I won’t wait forever.” Still Kaufman didn’t reply. A ripple ran through the crowd of passengers at the other end of the observation deck, and Kaufman turned to see what had happened. It was Tom Capelo, barreling heedlessly toward them, elbowing people aside. “Lyle! Marbet!”
“Tom,” she said, “don’t crack your cast against—”
Too late. Capelo winced. The elderly woman rubbed her own arm and glared at Capelo, who remained oblivious. “I heard from Kristen!”
“Wonderful. Where are—”
“On Thera Station, in orbit around Mars. I don’t know what they’re doing there, the message was short, but she and Martin have Amanda with them and they’re all safe!” Capelo’s thin dark face glowed. His hair needed cutting; it gave him the wild look of a happy drunk.
“I’m so glad,” Marbet said warmly.
“Come with me to convince our paranoid captain that the ship can make a brief docking at Thera Station without being vaporized into quantum particles.”
Marbet and Capelo left. Kaufman keyed data into his handheld, which connected him to ship’s library. Thera Station was owned by Ouranis Enterprises, a huge business complex with heavy military contracts, extensive presence throughout the Solar System, and a reputation for maneuvering somewhat outside interstellar law. A large Ouranis facility might be a player in the political chaos on Mars; the station would certainly be heavily defended against any bellicose results of that chaos. But Kaufman couldn’t see how Tom’s sister would have ended up at Thera Station.
* * *
As the
Golden Diamond
approached Mars, the disturbing view of lost stars was partly blocked by the dark curve of the planet’s night side. Kaufman watched the curve grow larger and larger. It looked solid, eternal.
The newscasts had introduced a new name into the political struggle going on below: General Tolliver Gordon, SADC. Gordon was the person who had sponsored Kaufman’s initial trip to World, to dig up the Protector Artifact. Without his deft, visionary, practical maneuvering, that expedition would not have happened, nor anything that had followed. Gordon was trying to forge a workable alliance among the military factions and commercial transnationals that contended for control of Mars.
“Tom is everywhere at once,” Marbet said to Kaufman, practically the first words she had spoken to him in days. They stood with Capelo in the shielded reception area of the
Golden Diamond’s
vehicle bay. The ship’s captain hadn’t agreed to dock at Thera Station; he had too many passengers urgently clamoring to get home. But he had agreed to allow a shuttle from the station to pick up the famous Dr. Thomas Capelo. Capelo’s wife and his younger daughter remained on Earth, where Capelo was headed to resume his professorship at Harvard, but in a few minutes Kristen, Martin, and Amanda would be aboard the
Golden Diamond
.
Capelo couldn’t stay still. The reception area, which didn’t depressurize when the vehicle bay did, was no more than ten meters long and three wide: a miniature observation deck of clear tough plastic. Capelo paced it rapidly, bumping into people, his every movement jerky as an armament recoil.
For every action
, Kaufman thought wryly,
is an opposite and equal reaction
. Capelo hadn’t seen his beloved daughter in months. His gleeful impatience infected them all. Even the ship’s tech smiled.
The captain of the
Golden Diamond
, a genemod-handsome man with sharp blue eyes, watched Capelo warily. Kaufman recognized the look. It was how he himself had once regarded Capelo: as an alien to be carefully kept track of before he did something too bizarre to control.
The vehicle bay door slid open. The shuttle, marked with the Ouranis logo, edged inside. Kaufman saw the reception display chart the repressurization. The second the plastic door unlocked, Capelo hurtled through it.
“Amanda!”
The shuttle airlock opened, and Amanda Capelo threw herself into her father’s arms.
Kaufman blinked. He hadn’t seen Tom Capelo’s daughter in—what? Two years? Three? He remembered her as a polite, tall, skinny young girl with straight fair hair. Hugging Capelo now was a young woman with a spectacular figure and short, fashionably-sheared blonde hair drawn back to show wickedly expensive diamond earrings. He said to Marbet, “How old is Amanda?”
“Older than Tom thinks.”
They followed the captain of the
Golden Diamond
into the vehicle area. Three more people emerged from the shuttle airlock. The short thin woman who looked like Tom was undoubtedly his sister. Her husband hung back, smiling quietly, in sharp contrast to a handsome boy who thrust his hand at Capelo the moment he released Amanda.
“Dr. Capelo, I so happy to meet at you! Splendid! Great honor by me!”
Capelo looked at him questioningly. Amanda said, “Daddy, this is Konstantin Ouranis, my … my friend.” And blushed a mottled maroon.
“Oh oh,” Marbet whispered beside Kaufman’s ear.
Capelo shook the boy’s hand, not really seeing him, and turned to embrace his sister. Amanda waited until they had babbled and hugged a few minutes. She then said firmly, “Daddy, Konstantin saved my life. And we’re on Thera Station because of him. He’s coming with us back to Earth.”
Capelo turned slowly toward his daughter.
“I have a lot to tell you,” she said, “and some of it is really incredible!”
Martin Blumberg said quickly, “Tom, we are indeed Konstantin’s guests, and it’s one of his father’s ships that’s going to take us to Earth. Today, if you want. Kristen and I are going with you, at least for now. Mars isn’t the most tranquil environment right now.”
A man with a gift for understatement.
Capelo may or may not have heard him. He had an almost comic expression on his face: surprise and suspicion and joy in unholy mixture. His gaze swept up and down Amanda’s body, dressed in blue shorts and close-fitting tunic. Kaufman had already noticed the girl’s beautiful long legs. Under her father’s scrutiny Amanda suddenly groped for Konstantin’s hand, and Capelo’s expression contorted his features so much more that Kaufman had to suppress a grin.