Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 23

When he was gone, Nick pulled himself down in the chair, strapped in and relaxed, scanning the CRT screens and LED readouts, making sure G.o.d was in his Heaven and all was right with the world. Okay.

Then he sat back to stare out the window and daydream.

Jupiter, for Christ's sake...

But this room, here, now, was filled with soft, ruddy light, light reflected from the surface of a dull red world rolling slowly by below. Okay, coming up on it....

Valles Marineris slid over the horizon, an enormous gash in the side of Mars, as if some giant rock had struck the planet a glancing blow, cutting it open, threatening to spill its guts into the void, looking for all the world like an unsutured wound.

And in forty-eight hours I'll be down there. b.u.t.terflies fluttered briefly, exploring the far reaches of his intestines. Day after tomorrow and we'll be setting down on the north rim of Coprates. Me, Jake, and Amy making the first manned touchdown. Then. Then. Ares carried five additional disposable aeroshields, enough fuel for the lander to set down six times, at six different sites. And each crew member would get one landing, until all eighteen of them had been down.

And me, Mission Commander. Piloting the first lander, climbing down the ladder first.

I guess, he thought, watching the terminator come up, watching a Martian sunset come over the horizon, I better start thinking about what I'm going to say.

Though the late winter and early spring of 1993 had been incredibly wet, what with the Big Snow, then one rainstorm band after another sweeping across the country, west to east, on toward summer the weather stabilized, blue skies dominating the southeast, Florida warming up nicely. And, on a fine, sunny June morning, Nick Jensen stood atop the VAB with his binoculars, watching and waiting.Sitting on the pad, it didn't look like much after a decade and more of the big 5Ms and Ns, but here it was, the Saturn 5R and its... payload? Well, not quite, but the term did sort of fit the new second stage.

Inspecting it through the binoculars, he couldn't help but feel a resurgence of the anger that had boiled in him for the past couple of years.

Just on the losing side, that's all. Regroup, get on to the next thing. The worst mistake we can all make is to continue an argument after one side has claimed victory. Bad enough having all those fights in front of President Jackson, whose support for the s.p.a.ce program seemed tepid at best after eight years of Brown telling us, "Go for it."

But we should've built the SSTO, the demonstrator at least.... Built it up out of the old S-IVB stages we've got sitting around in storage because there're no more Saturn 5As for them to ride. Aerospike engine, gas-layer reentry shield, a real s.p.a.ceship at last...

But we did lose the argument.

And they built this thing instead.

So, good idea or bad, there it is.

Out on refurbished Pad 39A, the Saturn 5R was a highly modified S-I stage, the so-called S-IG, with those redesigned 90/110 throttlable F-IR engines, slightly lengthened tankage because the... second stage... was a lot lighter than the S-II/S-IVB/Apollo combination had been... and wings. Big b.u.mps delta wings and vertical stabilizer. Big b.u.mps on the fourth side, pods where the landing skids folded away.

A reusable S-I stage, radio-controlled glide-back booster...

Waste of time, we said. Waste of money. Spend the five billion dollars designing something new, something with up-to-date hardware: Dammit, this thing is based on 1950's technology!

But its designers just laughed, then turned to a puzzled President Jackson and said, 1930's, really; this thing's not so much more than a giant V-2, after all. Getting our money's worth, all right.

And, on top of it, something that looked like a cross between an X-15 and a fat-bodied cargo plane, Max f.a.get's long-championed "straight-wing orbiter," white-painted bird, Star Spear in sleek black letters down the side, NASA meatball logo on the tail empennage.

Twenty thousand pounds payload seems like nothing compared to the seven hundred thousand-plus you can loft with a 5M. On the other hand, it's two hundred dollars a pound compared to fifteen hundred...

There.

Out on the pad, the vapor stopped drifting, the count went down, and the engines lit, boil of black smoke, red-orange flame down the deflector channels, and the first element of the s.p.a.ce Transportation System lifted off, twenty-four years after it'd first been proposed, seventeen years behind schedule.

Long yellow-white flame licking around the launch tower, kerosene fire, lifting six crew and a cargo of consumables up to the s.p.a.ce station, because old Max knew his ship would fly. Nick took the binoculars away from his eyes and watched it go, s.p.a.ceship turning into a bright speck far out over the ocean.

Flicker-flash. Staging. Bright white fleck of the orbiter, running on its two hydrogen-powered M-1 engines, separating, headed for orbit. In a little while, if everything went okay, the first stage would come sc.r.a.ping down on the new runway. Then we'll see who's gotten their money's worth.... Christ. It's up, it's flying, forget about it. Plenty of politicking to be done. h.e.l.l, I'm only fifty-two. I'll have to get busy if I want to go... someplace.

And then it was the fall of 2001, just four days after Nick Jensen's sixty-first birthday.

Sitting bunched together in Discovery's control room, the six of them were suited up, breath hissing in respirator valves, softly, gently, the breathing that you did while you waited, excited, trying to stay calm.

No more voices in the earphones, people just waiting now. Mission Control, over an hour away by radio, wouldn't know whether they lived or died until they were already here or gone.

Our final gasps, maybe, over the link, as we fall and fall and fry.

Up on the big HDTV monitor, Jupiter was a plump orange ball, almost featureless because they had the mag tuned to zero-keep it real, we said, like it was a window-Callisto a bright white ball, not quite full, phase the same as the mother planet's.

It seems, he thought, just as bright as the Moon. Albedo very different, though; nothing to compare it to but Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. Not like looking back a few days after interplanetary injection, on the way to Mars, then an asteroid, then here, Luna just a dim piece of old rock compared to bright white and blue shining Earth.

Not even thirty years since I lay on my back, stuffed into the right-hand seat of that old Apollo capsule, and waited for them to finish counting down, waited for them to send me to the Moon. Now...

He glanced over at Amy Jordan, the ship's other oldster, smiled at her through the faceplate. She reached out and patted the back of his gloved hand, just a movement, unfeelable, and gestured at the display console. "T minus five minutes..."

"Five minutes." One hand on the emergency switch, but the computer would handle everything, had been doing so, working just fine for the eleven months of the voyage out. "Everyone okay?"

Chorus of whispered a.s.sents from the four youngsters in the room. "Challenger?"

From the other ship, Jill Rodriguez's voice crackled over the radio link. "Engine precharge seems to be going well."

Seems. Soft fuzz of static in her voice, picking up interference from Jupiter's outer radiation belts. "Three minutes."

Seems. But if the main engines fail to fire, we'll fall through those radiation belts and die. Be dead just a few minutes from now. And these empty ships will go flying off into s.p.a.ce, whipped by Jupiter's gravity, never to be seen again....

Well, no. That's not right. The ships' electronics will survive the trip. Maybe the engineers on Earth will get things fixed, get us headed on a homeward-bound trajectory, get us back into Earth orbit. And we can be buried beside our friends in only three or four years.

"One minute. Engine precharge complete."

No. I'd rather not go home again, if that happens. Stay out here in the cold and dark...

This is my last flight. I'll be sixty-five by the time we get home. Can't keep cheating the flight surgeon forever...."Three, two, one..."

The engines lit, shoving them all back into their seats, dropping Discovery and Challenger into orbit around Callisto.

Three old men, sitting on a tropical veranda, Indian Ocean breezes blowing in off the grounds, were watching NASA Select, pulling the signal directly from one of the old TDRSS satellites through the little receiver disk on the roof. Jupiter was hanging there in the big HD monitor, crisp orange, more like a view out some magic s.p.a.ceship window than a mere TV image, Callisto hanging in front of it, dull yellow-white.

Time advanced and the image moved, bright face of Callisto narrowing as the ship moved closer, sliding under the pole, then going entirely black, growing very large, eclipsing the Sun. Over in one corner of the veranda, an automatic camera blinked, filming them discreetly. Just in case someone might be interested.

Walter said, "Remember when we covered Apollo 11 together? It seems so long, ago, now."

Wally said, "Yeah. But it's only been thirty-two years. Nod long at all. Barely time for our grandchildren to grow up."

"You ever regret getting out of the program after Apollo 7?"

Wally shrugged, watching the screen carefully, not looking at the camera. "Sometimes. But I was already middle-aged, back then. Time to let the younger guys fly."

"Jensen's in his sixties..."

"Sure. And Al Shepard went to the Moon. We do what we have to do. Make our choices..."

It was pitch-black on the monitor now, nothing visible there, though they knew the dark side of Callisto would be pa.s.sing below as the ship moved on toward its...o...b..tal insertion burn. Walter looked at his watch and said "Any second now..."

Arthur picked up his universal household system remote and hefted it lightly, looking at the TV screen. "I wish," he said, "that I could be there myself, but..." He thumbed one of the contacts and, from somewhere inside the house, Thus Spake Zarathustra began to play. "This, I suppose, will have to do."

Cronkite and Schirra smiled for the camera, and, on TV, the Sun began rising over Callisto's dark horizon.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is a writer whose literary impact extends far beyond the boundaries of the science fiction field. But her recognition began with such contemporary cla.s.sics of SF as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. In the last three years she has flowered again as a science fiction writer, producing new short fiction work of mature excellence. In 1995 she published at least five stories, all of sufficient quality to be included in this book. In this story, a pleasant and powerful tale about s.e.x, Le Guin returns to the setting of The Left Hand of Darkness, the planet Winter. "Coming of Age in Karhide" appeared in the excellent original anthology edited by Greg Bear, New Legends.

Coming of Age in Karhide.

by Ursula K. Le Guin

SOV THADE TAGE EM EREB, OF RER.

IN KARHIDE, ON GETHEN.

I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city, the marketplace and meeting ground for all the Northeast, the Plains, and Kerm Land. The Fastness of Rer was a center of learning, a refuge, a judgment seat fifteen thousand years ago. Karhide became a nation here, under the Geger kings, who ruled for a thousand years. In the thousandth year Sedern Geger, the Unking, cast the crown into the River Arre from the palace towers, proclaiming an end to dominion. The time they call the Flowering of Rer, the Summer Century, began then. It ended when the Hearth of Harge took power and moved their capital across the mountains to Erhenrang. The Old Palace has been empty for centuries. But it stands. Nothing in Rer falls down. The Arre floods through the street-tunnels every year in the Thaw, winter blizzards may bring thirty feet of snow, but the city stands. n.o.body knows how old the houses are, because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without respect to the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient as hills. The roofed streets and ca.n.a.ls angle about among them. Rer is all corners. We say that the Harges left because they were afraid of what might be around the corner.

Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ek.u.men, and most other people count years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from it. Here it's always Year One. On Getheny Thern, New Year's Day, the Year One becomes one-ago, one-to-come becomes One, and so on. It's like Rer, everything always changing but the city never changing.

When I was fourteen (in the Year One, or fifty-ago) I came of age. I have been thinking about that a good deal recently.

It was a different world. Most of us had never seen an Alien, as we called them then. We might have heard the Mobile talk on the radio, and at school we saw pictures of Aliens-the ones with hair around their mouths were the most pleasingly savage and repulsive. Most of the pictures were disappointing.

They looked too much like us. You couldn't even tell that they were always in kemmer. The female Aliens were supposed to have enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but my Mothersib Dory had bigger b.r.e.a.s.t.s than the ones in the pictures.

When the Defenders of the Faith kicked them out of Orgoreyn, when King Emran got into the Border War and lost Erhenrang, even when their Mobiles were outlawed and forced into hiding at Estre in Kerm, the Ek.u.men did nothing much but wait. They had waited for two hundred years, as patient as Handdara. They did one thing: they took our young king off-world to foil a plot, and then brought the same king back sixty years later to end her wombchild's disastrous reign. Argaven XVII is the only king who ever ruled four years before her heir and forty years after.

The year I was born (the Year One, or sixty-four-ago) was the year Argaven's second reign began. By the time I was noticing anything beyond my own toes, the war was over, the West Fall was part ofKarhide again, the capital was back in Erhenrang, and most of the damage done to Rer during the Overthrow of Emran had been repaired. The old houses had been rebuilt again. The Old Palace had been patched again. Argaven XVII was miraculously back on the throne again. Everything was the way it used to be, ought to be, back to normal, just like the old days-everybody said so.

Indeed those were quiet years, an interval of recovery before Argaven, the first Gethenian who ever left our planet, brought us at last fully into the Ek.u.men; before we, not they, became the Aliens; before we came of age. When I was a child we lived the way people had lived in Rer forever. It is that way, that timeless world, that world around the corner, I have been thinking about, and trying to describe for people who never knew it. Yet as I write I see how also nothing changes, that it is truly the Year One always, for each child that comes of age, each lover who falls in love.

There were a couple of thousand people in the Ereb Hearths, and a hundred and forty of them lived in my Hearth, Ereb Tage. My name is Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, after the old way of naming we still use in Rer. The first thing I remember is a huge dark place full of shouting and shadows, and I am falling upward through a golden light into the darkness. In thrilling terror, I scream. I am caught in my fall, held, held close; I weep; a voice so close to me that it seems to speak through my body says softly, "Sov, Sov, Sov." And then I am given something wonderful to eat, something so sweet, so delicate that never again will I eat anything quite so good....

I imagine that some of my wild elder hearthsibs had been throwing me about, and that my mother comforted me with a bit of festival cake. Later on when I was a wild elder sib we used to play catch with babies for b.a.l.l.s; they always screamed, with terror or with delight, or both. It's the nearest to flying anyone of my generation knew. We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls, floats, descends, glides; blows, for the way clouds move, the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that word. Not yet. And so I don't remember "flying." I remember falling upward through the golden light.

Family houses in Rer are built around a big central hall. Each story has an inner balcony clear round that s.p.a.ce, and we call the whole story, rooms and all, a balcony. My family occupied the whole second balcony of Ereb Tage. There were a lot of us. My grandmother had borne four children, and all of them had children, so I had a bunch of cousins as well as a younger and an older wombsib. "The Thades always kemmer as women and always get pregnant," I heard neighbors say, variously envious, disapproving, admiring. "And they never keep kemmer," somebody would add. The former was an exaggeration, but the latter was true. Not one of us kids had a father. I didn't know for years who my getter was, and never gave it a thought. Clannish, the Thades preferred not to bring outsiders, even other members of our own Hearth, into the family. If young people fell in love and started talking about keeping kemmer or making vows, Grandmother and the mothers were ruthless. "Vowing kemmer, what do you think you are, some kind of n.o.ble? some kind of fancy person? The kemmerhouse was good enough for me and it's good enough for you," the mothers said to their lovelorn children, and sent them away, clear off to the old Ereb Domain in the country, to hoe braties till they got over being in love.

So as a child I was a member of a flock, a school; a swarm, in and out of our warren of rooms, tearing up and down the staircases, working together and learning together and looking after the babies-in our own fashion-and terrorizing quieter hearthmates by our numbers and our noise. As far as I know we did no real harm. Our escapades were well within the rules and limits of the sedate, ancient Hearth, which we felt not as constraints but as protection, the walls that kept us safe. The only time we got punished was when my cousin Sether decided it would be exciting if we tied a long rope we'd found to the second-floor balcony railing, tied a big knot in the rope, held onto the knot, and jumped. "I'll go first,"

Sether said. Another misguided attempt at flight. The railing and Sether's broken leg were mended, and the rest of us had to clean the privies, all the privies of the Hearth, for a month. I think the rest of the Hearth had decided it was time the young Thades observed some discipline.Although I really don't know what I was like as a child, I think that if I'd had any choice I might have been less noisy than my playmates, though just as unruly. I used to love to listen to the radio, and while the rest of them were racketing around the balconies or the centerhall in winter, or out in the streets and gardens in summer, I would crouch for hours in my mother's room behind the bed, playing her old serem-wood radio very softly so that my sibs wouldn't know I was there. I listened to anything, Lays and plays and hearthtales, the Palace news, the a.n.a.lyses of grain harvests and the detailed weather reports; I listened every day all one winter to an ancient saga from the Pering Storm-Border about snowghouls, perfidious traitors, and b.l.o.o.d.y ax-murders, which haunted me at night so that I couldn't sleep and would crawl into bed with my mother for comfort. Often my younger sib was already there in the warm, soft, breathing dark. We would sleep all entangled and curled up together like a nest of Pesthry.

My mother, Guyr Thade Tage em Ereb, was impatient, warm-hearted, and impartial, not exerting much control over us three wombchildren, buy keeping watch. The Thades were all tradespeople working in Ereb shops and masteries, with little or no cash to spend; but when I was ten, Guyr bought me a radio, a new one, and said where my sibs could hear, "You don't have to share it." I treasured it for years and finally shared it with my own wombchild.

So the years went along and I went along in the warmth and density and certainty of a family and a Hearth embedded in tradition, threads on the quick ever-repeating shuttle weaving the timeless web of custom and act and work and relationship, and at this distance I can hardly tell one year from the other or myself from the other children: until I turned fourteen.

The reason most people in my Hearth would remember that year is for the big party known as Dory's Somer-Forever Celebration. My Mothersib Dory had stopped going into kemmer that winter. Some people didn't do anything when they stopped going into kemmer; others went to the Fastness for a ritual; some stayed on at the Fastness for months after, or even moved there. Dory, who wasn't spiritually inclined, said, "If I can't have kids and can't have s.e.x anymore and have to get old and die, at least I can have a party."

I have already had some trouble trying to tell this story in a language that has no somer p.r.o.nouns, only gendered p.r.o.nouns. In their last years of kemmer, as the hormone balance chances, many people tend to go into kemmer as men; Dory's kemmers had been male for over a year, so I'll call Dory "he," although of course the point was that he would never be either he or she again.

In any event, his party was tremendous. He invited everyone in our Hearth and the two neighboring Ereb Hearths, and it went on for three days. It had been a long winter and the spring was late and cold; people were ready for something new, something hot to happen. We cooked for a week, and a whole storeroom was packed full of beer kegs. A lot of people who were in the middle of going out of kemmer, or had already and hadn't done anything about it, came and joined in the ritual. That's what I remember vividly: in the firelit three-story centerhall of our Hearth, a circle of thirty or forty people, all middle-aged or old, singing and dancing, stamping the drumbeats. There was a fierce energy in them, their gray hair was loose and wild, they stamped as if their feet would go through the floor, their voices were deep and strong, they were laughing. The younger people watching them seemed pallid and shadowy. I looked at the dancers and wondered, why are they happy? Aren't they old? Why do they act like they'd got free?

What's it like, then, kemmer?

No, I hadn't thought much about kemmer before. What would be the use? Until we come of age we have no gender and no s.e.xuality, our hormones don't give us any trouble at all. And in a city Hearth we never see adults in kemmer. They kiss and go. Where's Maba? In the kemmerhouse, love, now eat your porridge. When's Maba coming back? Soon, love. And in a couple of days Maba comes back, looking sleepy and shiny and refreshed and exhausted. Is it like having a bath, Maba? Yes, a bit, love, and whathave you been up to while I was away?

Of course we played kemmer, when we were seven or eight. This here's the kemmerhouse and I get to be the woman. No, I do. No, I do, I thought of it! And we rubbed our bodies together and rolled around laughing, and then maybe we stuffed a ball under our shirt and were pregnant, and then we gave birth, and then we played catch with the ball. Children will play whatever adults do; but the kemmer game wasn't much of a game. It often ended in a tickling match. And most children aren't even very ticklish; till they come of age.

After Dory's party, I was on duty in the Hearth creche all through Tuwa, the last month of spring; come summer I began my fast apprenticeship, in a furniture workshop in the Third Ward. I loved getting up early and running across the city on the wayroofs and up on the curbs of the open ways; after the late Thaw some of the ways were still full of water, deep enough for kayaks and poleboats. The air would be still and cold and clear; the sun would come up behind the old towers of the Unpalace, red as blood, and all the waters and the windows of the city would flash scarlet and gold. In the workshop there was the piercing sweet smell of fresh-cut wood and the company of grown people, hard-working, patient, and demanding, taking me seriously. I wasn't a child anymore, I said to myself. I was an adult, a working person.

But why did I want to cry all the time? Why did I want to sleep all the time? Why did I get angry at Sether? Why did Sether keep b.u.mping into me and saying "Oh sorry" in that stupid husky voice? Why was I so clumsy with the big electric lathe that I ruined six chair-legs one after the other? "Get that kid off the lathe," shouted old Marth, and I slunk away in a fury of humiliation. I would never be a carpenter, I would never be adult, who gave a s.h.i.t for chair-legs anyway?

"I want to work in the gardens," I told my mother and grandmother.

"Finish your training and you can work in the gar-dens next summer," Grand said, and Mother nodded.

This sensible counsel appeared to me as a heartless injustice, a failure of love, a condemnation to despair.

I Sulked. I raged.

"What's wrong with the furniture shop?" my elders asked after several days of sulk and rage.

"Why does stupid Sether have to be there!" I shouted. Dory, who was Sether's mother, raised an eyebrow and smiled.

"Are you all right?" my mother asked me as I slouched into the balcony after work, and I snarled, "I'm fine," and rushed to the privies and vomited.

I was sick. My back ached all the time. My head ached and got dizzy and heavy. Something I could not locate anywhere, some part of my soul, hurt with a keen, desolate, ceaseless pain. I was afraid of myself: of my tears, my rage, my sickness, my clumsy body. It did not feel like my body, like me. It felt like something else, an ill-fitting garment, a smelly, heavy overcoat that belonged to some old person, some dead person. It wasn't mine, it wasn't me. Tiny needles of agony shot through my nipples, hot as fire.

When I winced and held my arms across my chest, I knew that everybody could see what was happening. Anybody could smell me. I smelled sour, strong, like blood, tike raw pelts of animals. My c.l.i.top.e.n.i.s was swollen hugely and stuck out from between my l.a.b.i.a, and then shrank nearly to nothing, so that it hurt to p.i.s.s. My l.a.b.i.a itched and reddened as with loathsome insect-bites. Deep in my belly something moved, some monstrous growth. I was utterly ashamed. I was dying.

"Sov," my mother said, sitting down beside me on my bed, with a curious, tender, complicitous smile, "shall we choose your kemmerday?""I'm not in kemmer," I said pa.s.sionately.

"No," Guyr said. "But next month I think you will be."

"I won't!"

My mother stroked my hair and face and arm. We shape each other to be human, old people used to say as they stroked babies or children or one another with those long, slow, soft caresses.