“What about magnetism disrupting electrical systems?”
“That problem has been solved through superconductivity,” Henry said. “That was less complicated than you might think, but a little too complicated to describe in a sentence or two, or even a paragraph.”
“Give it a try, Henry,” said the bellower.
“The equations and the blueprints are available in the archives of the mother ship,” Henry said. “Any member of the crew can access them or anything else in the archives. No doubt Admiral Henderson will arrange fuller briefings so that you all get a better idea how this thing works. The idea of inducing artificial gravity in spacecraft through magnetism isn’t new. It was tried on one of the Apollo flights in the twentieth century, with very minor but observable results. In a laboratory experiment in the same era, a frog was levitated, though not very far, by magnetism. Someone else, please. Microphones are available.”
Many hands were raised. Henry called on half a dozen people. Mostly their questions were versions of those that had already been asked.
The last question was one that I would have liked to ask: “What effect will long-term exposure to the magnetism have on the human body?”
“Less than an MRI scan,” Henry said. “Earth itself is a magnet, and this has done its species no harm over four thousand generations.”
At least a hundred hands were still raised. Henry ignored them. They fell one by one. For another fifteen minutes, he spoke of other matters, as if the simulation of gravity was something that could not possibly bewilder anyone who had, until twenty minutes before, regarded such a thing as impossible.
~ * ~
TWELVE
~ * ~
1
IN THE DARK, HIS FAVORITE place for telling me things
I
did not
wish to hear, Henry confided that he intended to remain on Earth when the mother ship sailed. I tried to change his mind—humanity needed him, he had a duty to be the good shepherd to the crew, did he not understand that if he died, his intelligence would die with him, depriving the future of whatever work remained for it to do? He wouldn’t listen. As a last resort, I even asked him to consider the awful, to him, possibility that the crew of the mother ship might do to him what the Roman senate did to Augustus, and make him a god.
Henry refused to be wheedled. The fact was, he didn’t believe it mattered much what happened to the organism that was himself. It was, after all, just one among billions.
But where did that leave me?
“You should make your own decision,” Henry said.
“About what
?”
“Going or staying.”
“Would you prefer that I go?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to stay.”
“Oh, yes it does,” I said.
Henry didn’t argue. He never did. He squeezed me. He put his lips upon me. I wrapped him in my arms and breathed him in. I might not be able to see his face, but even in the perpetual darkness of one of the twenty-seven moons of Uranus I would have known him by scent and touch and taste and the unmistakable cadence of his breath.
The following morning, Henry called a meeting of the inner circle and asked everyone what his or her wishes were. Would they embark with the crew?
No one answered. No one wanted to speak first.
In the end, Ng Fred was the volunteer. “My wife doesn’t wish to go,” he said. “Gwen thinks it wouldn’t be comfortable to be an outsider among people who have already chosen their friends and for the most part can’t speak Mandarin. Furthermore, the
I Ching
has assured her that her children will be happy grandparents on this planet. I can’t go without her and the children. Besides, it would be awkward for Angus Henderson. The ship doesn’t need two captains.”
Melissa, back in character, said, “How about you, Henry?”
I jumped between him and her question.
“I’m staying,” I said.
Henry said, “We’re staying together.”
“It’s good to know that, Melissa said. “Because I’m not going anywhere, either. For years I planned to save my son and daughter by sending them off as passengers on the mother ship. Now that the moment has arrived, they absolutely refuse to go. They fear boredom. They don’t want to lose their friends or miss the new music. They’re both sexually active now, they tell me. They don’t want to leave that behind in exchange for a life in which everyone else is old, and as my daughter puts it, you can’t even look out a window, and even if you could, what would be the use?”
The vote was unanimous. Garbo had wavered, Amerigo said, but in the end, she was like Ng Fred’s wife and Melissa’s kids. She didn’t want to leave her friends behind and be condescended to by the crew because she didn’t have a doctorate. She didn’t want to wear polyester and eat pap and live in the void of space, and in the absence of art, for the rest of her life.
Not once during this whole process had I thought about the embryos. Now I did. What would those tiny organisms—their cells already possessed of all the data they would need to grow a brain, a heart, limbs, and the stuff that dreams are made on, if centuries from now they were implanted in a womb, any human womb— what would they remember? Not me, not Henry, not anyone like themselves, not the Earth as we had known it.
But then again, why shouldn’t they remember, as we do, events that we cannot possibly have witnessed?
The next morning, Henry handed over command of the mother ship to Angus Henderson. The business was supremely Henryesque—unsentimental, brief, and matter-of-fact. Although the absence of ceremony must have jarred the instincts of a military man like Henderson, there were no salutes, no stirring music played by a brass band, no speeches. Henry handed the captain an envelope containing his instructions for the mission, shook his hand, and wished him Godspeed. Altogether, it was a gloomy moment, like the last day before a world war was going to begin and no one on either side had any idea who was going to win or who was going to come back.
Admiral Henderson took custody of the apparatus that had been summoned into existence by Henry’s genius and dollars. If Henry’s prophecy of cataclysm was going to be fulfilled—and judging by the expressions on their faces, no one present seriously doubted that it would be—money was about to become worthless, along with just about everything else that had value on Earth simply because the world pretended that it did. What use could there possibly be for currency aboard the mother ship—or for that matter, for whatever and whoever survived on Earth?
Within the hour, Henderson and an advance party of crew members were ferried into orbit aboard one of the Spaceplanes. Two more of these ships were parked on the tarmac. They had returned to Earth all but the one hundred space maidens who had decided to remain aboard—under one condition. Ng Fred, immune to the melancholy that bound the rest of us together, was amused by the message they sent him in this regard.
“They took a vote,” he told us. “They will only fly if we send no men to join them.”
Clementine, who up to this moment had been remarkably still, said, “What about the men you’ve been training for the mission?”
“They stay behind.”
Clementine said, “You mean to say you’ve bowed to the ultimatum?
“What’s the alternative?” Ng Fred asked. “Angus Henderson won’t launch without the women. The ship is their baby. They built it from scratch, on the ground and in orbit. They know it and care about it as nobody else does or possibly can. They’re indispensable.”
“How are the men taking this?”
“They’re disappointed. Men have feelings, too.”
“What about your feelings?”
“Frankly, a load has been lifted from my shoulders,” Ng Fred said. “I’ve always been of two minds about adding the men. They’re unpredictable, especially if they’re Chinese, and they make women unpredictable
.”
Melissa said, “All I have to say is, good move, girls.”
“The girls think so,
too,”
Ng Fred said. “No more loudmouth thugs ordering them to do stupid things and beating them up in one way or another if they don’t obey.”
“Forgive my asking,” Clementine said, “But doesn’t this raise a question about replacing the space maidens through natural increase
?”
“Yes, but it was easy to resolve.”
“Of course—the embryos
.”
Amerigo answered. “The girls vetoed that,” he said. “As a matter of principle, the embryos aren’t sorted by race or ethnicity. You take what you get. The ladies are Han. They want Han babies, not funny-looking kids who are half something else.”
“What an old-fashioned dilemma.”
“Not really. The girls had thought it over. At their suggestion, the men have provided sperm samples. These have been labeled with DNA information and frozen. They will be loaded aboard the mother ship for future use.”
Melissa said, “What a turncoat to your gender you are, Amerigo. You should be proud.”
None of us, not even Henry, visited the mother ship. To me, and I think to most of the others, the ship, as soon as it was assembled in space, had become a concept, rather than an actuality. Even after it became visible as a glittering dot in the sky and an image on television screens, it remained beyond the reach of the mind
一
remote, untouchable, like everything else in the night sky. Yet it was something human beings had made while other human beings watched from five hundred miles below. It was as material, as earthly, and in its own way as familiar as a brick house on a suburban lot. Except that it wasn’t.
~ * ~
2
AS SOON AS THE LAST member of the crew was safely aboard the
mother ship, Henry and I went home. As the desert flowed beneath the wings of the airplane, I felt in my bones that I would never look upon its monotony again. The thought filled me with sorrow. This was a surprise for any number of reasons. Always before, when something came to an end, I had asked, “What next?” and awaited the answer, knowing that it would sooner or later come into being. Not this time. There was no next thing except chaos and darkness. I upbraided myself for yielding to despair, and then absolved myself by blaming Henry for it, unjust and unintelligent as this was. He, too, was silent and withdrawn, and as usual, I caught his mood like a cold. In all our time in Mongolia he had said nothing more about a honeymoon. That was all right with me. After months in the wilderness, I wanted to be in New York—no tropic islands, no deserts, no artificial gravity. I had found out through research that mountains are not so idyllically safe as I had thought. The Rio Grande Rift, where the planet’s crust split apart thirty-five million years ago, ran through the Colorado Rockies. The Andes were nudged by the Nazca Plate just off the coast of South America, the Alps were being pulled asunder by tectonic forces, and the Caucasus, infested with pious bandits and kidnappers, was not a destination for sweethearts.
We returned to Manhattan. For our first anniversary, we went out to dinner, walking to the restaurant inside our ring of chaps. We clinked wineglasses. We smiled into each other’s eyes.
I
touched Henry’s wedding band and for once he got the signal and touched mine, too. He drank his customary dram of champagne. I did rather better by the Oregon pinot noir that came with the three or four mouthfuls of veal and the morel mushrooms and the dab of sauce and the herbal leaf that constituted the entree. The politics of the veal, the cost of it, disturbed me. I could not help but think that there was something deeply wrong about paying so much money for food. I could have bought a hundred cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli for the price of the morsels of veal on each of our plates, and been more pleased with the taste. Alas,
I
had no place to hide the canned goods from Henry, who was as offended by the sight of a Chef Boyardee can as I was put off by the medallion of veal. Nevertheless, I ate it and said how good it was.