Lights in the Deep (21 page)

I stared—via proxy eyes—at the space around me. The layout of the station. The unfinished spars and beams poking out at different angles. Then my eyes hit something I’d not considered before. And as I watched the limb of the Earth drop away and disappear, I suddenly realized what I had to do.

• • •

After training was over, it took Chesty and I few sorties to really get the hang of things. Even with the many, many hours logged in simulation, the real thing took just that much more adjustment, before we began to feel proficient. After that, it was very much a lunch bucket job.

“They used to make people with Doctorates do this,” I said to no one in particular as Chesty and I—our proxies—maneuver a collapsible strut out of the yawning cargo bay of a Centurion rocket’s third stage. Our feet were identical to our hands, and we “walked” our way up and down the slowly-growing superstructure of Ride Platform.

“Did they get paid any better?” said one of the team, a Navy chief petty officer designated as Skips.

“I dunno,” I said. “But it just seems hilarious to me. This is hard-hat stuff. We’re a construction crew, y’all.”

“If anyone ever saw a construction crew in robot form,” Chesty said.

“Quick, someone scratch his robot crotch.”

“Is it break time yet?”

“I forgot my lunch box!”

“How about a beer instead?”

“No beer in space.”

“No beer? I want to talk to the union!”

The one-liners continued to reel from all lips, and pretty soon we’d all been reduced to painful laughter, our proxies emulating us as we hunched, our torsos and heads bobbing—letting it out.

“Okay kids,” Valkyrie’s firm, maternal voice said in our ears. “Play time is over. That will do. You’ve still got a lot of stuff to unload from that Centurion before the sortie is over. And your batteries are draining every second you waste hamming it up.”

The lot of us
yesma’ammed
and shut up, though snickers could still be heard here and there.

Having affixed our collapsed strut to its designated hard point, Chesty and I went back to the Centurion and began taking out another.

I noticed there was a rudimentary control board up near the nose cone, tucked just inside the cowling.

“Mind if I take this thing for a test drive, boss?”

If Valkyrie couldn’t see what I saw, she at least inferred what I meant.

“Sure,” she said. “There’s plenty of orbital burn fuel in the tanks, if you want to use it. Take the nose cone off and the third stage has a hard dock that allows us to mate it with the Platforms and boost their orbits, when it’s necessary. Usually we run it from ground, but the Centurion has a manual backup system—just in case.”

“Just in case,” I said, thinking how fun it would be to get behind the “wheel” of a rocket ship in orbit.

• • •

The Chinese had all but ignored the Centurion.

Its clamshell bay doors hung open, inviting.

“Chesty,” I said. “One of us has to get to the third stage. If we can’t take the Platform away from them, maybe we can take it
down
with them still aboard.”

“What?” Chesty said, breathing heavily. “I’m a little damned busy right now, Chopper.”

“Hold them off—I’m going for it!”

“Chopper—” but Valkyrie’s words were swept from my ears as I sprang across the Platform, covering meters with every move. I think the Chinese might have suddenly figured me out, because Chesty announced that they’d turned her loose. She was coming up after them as they came up after me.

I made it to the Centurion’s open bay, found the manual control panel, and began pushing buttons.

After the first time I saw the manual controls—while working on Ride Platform—I got curious, and pleaded with Valkyrie to let me see the Centurion’s operational specs. No sense holding back. Otherwise what was the exchange officer program for? I wanted the full skinny, nuts and bolts and nozzles and gears.

She had reluctantly agreed.

And now I believed this knowledge was our best, last hope.

The control panel lit up and announced via flashing LCD screen that the fuel pumps were being primed. Precious seconds ticked away as the Chinese came on. Wherever they thought they were taking the Grissom Platform via its own RCS, I was about to ruin their day.

Just when the Chinese—and Chesty—had almost reached me, I stabbed at the cheerful orange IGNITE button, and latched onto the control panel’s protective rails with both hands and feet.

The Platform lurched and shoved, the sudden thrust from the Centurion causing it to begin spinning on a new axis as the Platform’s own RCS went out of whack. Chesty just barely had time to grab hold of a support beam before the Chinese tumbled away and hung like cat toys on the ends of spongy strings. They flailed and kicked, but it was no good. The torque was too much for them.

But my proxy held fast, and I—safely on the ground—felt none of the deleterious effects of the spin.

“What are you doing??” Valkyrie demanded.

“I’m taking the Platform out,” I said.

“By whose authorization, Chopper?”

“Ma’am,” I said, “if I can’t have an auto-destruct, it’s up to me to effect a
manual
destruct. I’m going to try and push us down into the atmosphere. The Platform, the proxies, the Chinese, all of us.”

Silence.

I suddenly imagined my boss being the chief witness at my court-martial.

“It’s the only way,” I said.

“He’s probably right,” Chesty said, agreeing. “We don’t have any weapons, and the proxy batteries will run out sooner or later. And then the Platform belongs to the Chinese. Would you rather tell your bosses at the Pentagon we sank the ship and took the enemy with us? Or let them have it without a serious struggle?”

More silence.

Then, with a reluctant sigh, “Go.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

The manual controls were difficult to finagle, with the Platform’s own RCS mucking up the trajectory. But I could already tell it was working. We were spiraling in. Faster and faster. And while the proxy had what it took to withstand the centripetal gee, I could tell just by looking that the Chinese were in no position to stop me.

The Earth grew steadily larger as we went down, the Centurion’s fuel gradually bleeding to fumes.

“Got any last words, Marine?” I said to my partner.

“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” she said, half-mocking.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

I began to wonder what it would be like to re-enter in proxy form.

• • •

The news called it an unfortunate accident. The fireball had streaked across the skies of one ocean and two continents, before what remained splashed down a hundred miles off the Hawaiian coast.

The Chinese never said a word, other than to offer some back-handed condolences for the loss of the hardware.

Chesty and me?

Well, we didn’t get court-martialed.

Valkyrie did have to report to the Pentagon and she did have to do some rather extensive explaining—thank goodness for the proxy recordings giving the generals a front-row seat to the action—but in the end, the spiking of the Grissom Platform was deemed not only necessary, but valorous.

Though, Chesty and I both felt a bit sheepish receiving awards for a thing which had not, technically, placed either of our lives in danger.

But then, war had become more and more like that. The machines were doing the fighting, as well as the labor. I wondered what someone like Kipling might have thought of that? And decided I wasn’t entirely sure.

When the dust ultimately settled, Valkyrie put us back to work.

“You broke it,” she told us. “You build another one in its place.”

Our exchange officer tours were extended.

The work was, well,
work.
But satisfying work. And the Chinese didn’t try another stunt on our watch, so thank goodness for small miracles.

The true surprise showed up six months after Chesty and I left Hill.

It was a manila envelope, delivered certified USPS, from the Navy offices in Florida—where they still trained
real
astronauts.

Inside was a formal memo informing me that, if I chose to accept it, the Navy would gratefully accept me for another exchange officer tour. This time as part of the next year’s class of astronaut candidates. I scanned the list of names who’d already accepted, and saw MAVELINE STODDARD.

Well hell, who am I to let that Marine show me up?

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

Larry Niven once wrote a story called “The Return of William Proxmire”, in which an alternative reality NASA has its assets remanded to the custody of the U.S. Navy, under the aegis of one Admiral Robert A. Heinlein. Speaking as a member of the military, the idea does have a certain irresistible appeal to it: mated to the defense budget, and with a sufficiently enthusiastic set of military leaders, what might NASA be capable of doing?

Which is not to say NASA has not already done some amazing things. It’s just that the agency—in 2013—appears to have fallen prey to Jerry Pournelle’s “Iron Law.” The program that once put men on the moon, now contents itself with an eternally contracting pocketbook and purchasing rides on Russian rockets for American astronauts.

Consider “The Exchanges Officers” to be my singular literary complaint that there’s just something basically gawtdamned wrong with that!

Yes, I know NASA can only squeeze so much water from a stone.

And of course Washington D.C. is to blame. Aren’t they to blame for everything?

But I’m one of those kids who is bitter about the fact that he was born post-Apollo, and was promised moon colonies by the end of the 1980s, only to see us settle for an orbital laboratory (International Space Station) that travels to nowhere, lands on no planets or moons, and while technologically impressive, lacks the grandeur of achievement that came with the initial race to space in the 1960s.

Of course, “The Exchange Officers” is also a story about the changing face of war. Drones are a hot topic these days. How much more sophisticated will they get, and how many more jobs will we be telling them to do in the future? Moreover, what kind of soldiers will we need to operate these drones, and how will these soldiers fit into our historic models of what it means to be a soldier?

There is a very specific, strongly traditional culture in the U.S. Army and also the U.S. Marine Corps that says if you ain’t infantry, then you ain’t shit.

Such a culture is going to be increasingly challenged by chair jockeys operating robots.

Essay: On the Growth of Fantasy and the Waning of Science Fiction

It may seem a bit ironic for an author who primarily perpetrates Science Fiction to then turn around and talk about how Fantasy is eclipsing its cousin. Nevertheless, the writing (pun intended) is on the wall: the fantastic is outpacing the speculative, both in the written arts, and in television and motion pictures. Whether it’s the explosive popularity of J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter
books, or Stephanie Meyer’s ultra-hot
Twilight
—both of which earned hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars at the box office in 2011, on top of print revenue—or the timeless and enduring power of J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal Middle-Earth saga, as told in
The Hobbit
and the three volumes in
The Lord of the Rings.
Fantasy has come into its own as a phenomenally successful creative and commercial enterprise, while Science Fiction has drifted on the consumer seas—falling back into niche popularity, where it first began.

Granted, the television and motion picture industry does its best to keep Science Fiction afloat. Movies like
Avatar
,
Tron: Legacy
and
Transformers
all performed incredibly well with recent audiences. There have also been prolific small-screen series like
Dr. Who, Stargate,
and
Battlestar Galactica
. Not to mention the time-tested
Star Trek
and
Star Wars
franchises, which so revolutionized both the fantastic and the speculative on big and small screens, that no fantastic or speculative program can emerge in the 21st century without first tipping its hat to these ground-breaking 20th century forerunners.

So how come Science Fiction in print continues to see its sales steadily slipping? Where are the ‘skiffy’ equivalents of Twilight and Harry Potter? Suzanne Collins’s
The Hunger Games
has come forward as a very-strong example of Science Fiction that’s hitting home runs with both readers and—potentially—movie-goers. But
The Hunger Games
is more of an anomaly than a rule. In fact, Science Fiction’s all-time bestselling novel,
Dune
, was written almost half a century ago. Runners-up, such as Orson Scott Card’s
Ender’s Game
were written approximately thirty years ago, and when one does straw polls at writing conferences—to see how many people are doing Science Fiction versus Fantasy—the numbers of hands raised for Fantasy (especially Young Adult Fantasy) are overwhelmingly in the majority.

I think this is a problem.

I’m not proposing that Science Fiction is
dying
or is about to be shuffled off the bookshelves and dumped into the returns bin. It is not. Rather, I’d like to offer a theory or two: as to why Fantasy is so tremendously and energetically embraced, while Science Fiction has to work harder to interest and retain a much smaller segment of the readership, if not always the viewership. At which point I will end with a suggestion for possible remedy.

Firstly, the audience of the Anglosphere—and much of Europe and Asia too—is living in a “science fictional” time. Unlike the 1930s, we enjoy a gadgetized and digitally-instant, globally-interconnected society. Much of what was speculative in the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, is mundane reality for us today, to include wireless cell phone communication, wireless computing, wholesale mass storage and distribution of data, and much else that most First World citizens can take for granted, including rapid and affordable transit, mass production and distribution of consumer goods, not to mention satellite television, the International Space Station, and reliable ground-to-orbit transportation operating in multiple countries.