Homeward by Night

1.

Clay Gilbert and Rachel Andros stood side by side in a thin rain. They were on a stony pier into a small ocean, one of several on Bluehorse-3, and by now they didn’t notice the slightly weak gravity or the slightly thin air. There were people around them: Captain Ally Schwinn had just finished a short speech, and a priestly sort named Martin Cargil had added a wonderfully pithy prayer for the dead. Now the crowd, 90% colonists and 9% big ship crews, was starting to dissipate. Clay and Rachel and Natasha Kleiner and Vera Santos and Commander Su Park and the rest of the fighter pilots were still standing there gazing out on the water over which the ashes that represented the dead were dissolving into the rain.

Not one of them made a move to leave the wharf and get out of the drizzle. They all wore their vac suits, but their heads were all uncovered and were gradually getting soaked. They said not a word.

The core of this one percent of a crowd was nine small people: Clay and Rachel, Natasha and Vera, Park and her fellow commanders Li Zan and Jane Tremblay, and Timmis Green and Bonnie Bain, the nine surviving members of the fighting wings that had arrived at the system known as Candidate One. Just outside that enchanted core were Lidi Moss and Gemma Izawa, minor leaguers who had survived a suicide mission; Maria Apple, added to Gamma Wing on the loss of its commander; and Jamaica Leith and Aman Singh, who had been added to Beta Wing on the loss of their commander and second. Just outside the larger circle, but still close enough to share its juju and its traditions, stood Antonia Allan and Mizra Aliya and Peri Schmitt, colony ship defenders who had survived losing their fighters in the last battle; and Meena Manan and Anand Ree and Sally Smit, drafted colonists who had gotten into the last of the fights. Smit had wound up with her Ghost practically demolished, while Ree had finished the battle with his feet sticking out the front of his fighter. Now they stood side by side, Smit holding her baby daughter, Ree holding his young son’s hand.

They stood, facing out to sea, the memorial stone at their backs. The memorial had 34 names on it, but they were only thinking of their own—Celeste Bouvier, Agneska Vilya and Gil Rojette, and of course Jana Bluehorse herself, crude, profound, valiant and foolhardy, a believer in fortune.

Rachel squeezed Clay’s hand and he squeezed back: Vera leaned against Natasha, who put an arm around her waist. They were not foolhardy, perhaps they were not valiant, but they were here, eighty light years from the planet of their birth, survivors of half a dozen battles with actual aliens in the cold dark of space.

2.

The Human Horizon Project had left the only planet known to have life on it in March 2334. There were five colony ships carrying a total of over ten thousand colonists, along with five escort ships, three armored freighters as anchors for exploration, five large “box” freighters full of colony supplies, and twenty-two “single crew explorer pods.” Unlike its predecessors, the Centaur Mission to Alpha Centauri and the Venture programs that headed to the star systems Gliese 581 and 667, the Human Horizon Project would get so close to the speed of light that relativistic, Einsteinian time dilation got involved in a serious way. This meant that a journey of thirty light years would take not much over thirty years—and that a journey that appeared to the planet-bound to take thirty years would be perceived by those on the journey, including their bodies and their brains and their clocks, as lasting no more than a few weeks.

And unlike its predecessors, Human Horizon also made allowance for the possibility that the very first star system it visited, which happened to be 55 Cancri, might not be habitable. It was not, and neither was the second (Gliese 370, also known as HD 85512), nor the third (Candidate One, renamed Corsica after a lost anchor freighter). The little fleet, by far the largest group of starships ever launched from merrie olde Earth but still about the size, altogether, of a state college campus, found paydirt on the fourth system it came to, Candidate Two, a. k. a. Bluehorse.

55 Cancri turned out to be where they first met alien life (a form of algae living in a layer of ice). It was also where they realized that the lead colony ship, the France, with 2000 colonists, had disappeared without a trace. Gliese 370 was where they first met alien life forms who wanted to hurt them: the mouthholes, blobs of iron and carbon that chewed on spaceships. It was where Jana Bluehorse, the valiant, perhaps the foolhardy, got eaten. Corsica became the place where the Earthlings finally got the upper hand on the mouthholes. It was also the place where the Earthlings first met a definitely sentient alien race, the so-called Primoids. Contact did not go well.

First, Natasha and Rachel had warning shots fired at them from aliens on the ground. Then Agneska Vilya, and her wing second Gil Rojette, got in a tussle with similar aliens, but far out at the edge of the system, and were lost in Humanity’s first actual fighter battle in space.

But it turned out that the Primoids had a rebellion on. The Primoids entrenched on the fifth planet communicated (using prime numbers) with the human fighters and helped them figure out how to fight the Primoids in space. They were rebels, and Humanity found itself on their side.

The Humans also never did figure out what the Primoids called themselves, if anything: they didn’t seem to have a spoken language. They had, however, developed space technology on their own in much the same way Humans had developed it.

The Human Horizon Project decamped twelve more light years to Candidate Two, renamed the Bluehorse System. In the space just outside the orbit of Bluehorse-3, the Earthlings managed to defeat a significantly larger Primoid fleet. The four remaining colony ships landed, four colonies of two thousand humans each began setting up to feed themselves, and Clay Gilbert and Rachel Andros were designated to report back to Mother Earth, eighty light years away.

They looked at each other, he a mere 151 centimeters to her 149, standing in the rain. She smiled at him. “You okay, handsome?” she asked.

“I’m more than okay,” he replied. “I’m ready for a trip back to the old homestead.”

3.

There was a party after the ceremony, and Clay and Rachel danced and got drunk with their colleagues, a little knot of short skinny pilots in one corner of the plaza outside the colony ship Canada, surrounded by much bigger people. Vera and Natasha, both of whom had had flings with Clay during the long journey from Earth, were slow dancing and kissing; Timmis and Li had excused themselves for the night together; Captain Alfred Kalkar and Commander Su Park were joking around and very drunk; Bonnie Bain and Jamaica Leith, having had a fight during their third glasses of wine, were now on their fifth and making out; Lidi Moss and Gemma Izawa, Anand Ree and his engineer wife, and Susan Smit and her colonist husband were slow dancing; Maria Apple and a dozen trainee fighter pilots were dancing loosely and giggling a lot.

“I’m hot,” said Rachel, poking Clay. “Fancy a walk?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

It was cool, not cold, outside in the light of the little moon. They wandered down to that wharf, then turned, into each other’s arms. The waves washed against the stone. The little moon drifted in a thinning scud of cumulus. They kissed, and kissed again, and giggled. He ran his hand through her shoulder-length mess of black hair. They kissed.

“Pretty world,” said Clay.

“Made for us, you might say,” said Rachel.

“Convenient,” said Clay, “how most of the local life forms stayed in the water.”

“Natasha’s hypothesis,” said Rachel, “is that the civilization that was here, and it was here at the very least a hundred million years ago, did a number on its environment, and just like at Corsica, the seas recovered and the land didn’t.”

“Well, at Corsica the civilization decided to try a nuclear war. The decay products are still there. Granted, that was just eight million years, I suppose that extra factor of ten or twelve might wipe out even the last of the decay products.”

“Well, she says whoever was on Bluehorse, and whatever they did to themselves, it wasn’t nuclear. What it was, who knows. Apparently there’s some evidence of pollution, it must have been bad if you can detect anything at all after a hundred million years plus, and on top of that, well, hate to say it, but, kind of an elderly planet, losing its air pressure. Especially on the highlands.”

“Yeah,” said Clay, “we’re not going to be planting crops up there. Down here, though, especially as we get our plants to spread a little, we should be able to get the O2 levels up a bit.” They gazed out over the Parallelogram Sea, calm and restless. “Hope we don’t hurt the local stuff.”

“They say they’re going to be careful,” said Rachel. “I think these people we brought here are going to treasure it. Nice little planet like this.”

Then hand in hand they made their way down onto the beach. The Earthling land plants that had spilled out with the colonists did not spread far, but the wash of the waves and the slightly different smell of the sea surrounded them and they went at least a kilometer without saying anything. Then they talked lightly, of the colony and its personalities and its future, which they would be back to see in two centuries. They walked a little more, then Rachel stopped, Clay stopped, and they kissed.

“So what about the fighter pilots?” Rachel asked. “Who’s gonna be with who?”

“I don’t know,” said Clay. “Vera and Natasha? That seems solid.”

“Oh, I think so. Think the Bain woman and Jamaica will last?”

“I’m guessing yes,” said Clay. “They argue like they’re married. Who else? Li and Timmis, that’s a done deal. Lidi Moss and Gemma Izawa? Jane Tremblay and her new Ghost 214?”

“Su Park and herself,” said Rachel. “She’s married to her Ghost.”

“Sad,” said Clay. “If anyone deserves to be in love with someone, it’s her. But I don’t see it happening. Tremblay, maybe. You know, Kalkar’s a widower.”

“From back on Earth?”

“Wife of twenty years, died of cancer or something. Very sad.” They walked a little further. “But then I left after my dad died. You sort of feel it’s time to move on. I wonder how many of us came on this because someone died of cancer?” Rachel laughed. They walked.

“Clay,” said Rachel. “What’s it going to be like?”

“Being back on Earth?”

“Just being on our own. No one else with us.”

“Rachel,” said Clay, “you’re still going to be in command.”

“Clay.” He smiled and shut his mouth. “We haven’t ever been in a different star system from Natasha. We have not ever been very far from Commander Su Park. We’ve always had those thousands of colonists to think of. What’s it going to be like to be just us? For, jeez, how long? Three jumps, that’s what Park’s decided we should do.”

“See, she’s still with us,” said Clay. “Why three jumps? I thought two was plenty. It’s only eighty light years, and we’ve done nearly seventy at once.”

“The thinking is that we could explore this one system that’s along the way,” Rachel replied, “and they want us to pay a visit to see if there’s a colony at Gliese 581 or not. So three jumps. Clay.” They stopped and she took both his hands. She looked about to say something, but instead she came into his arms and they smooched. She gave him another long half-smile and said, “You don’t want to get married on Earth, do you? I’m not trying to—!”

“I think it’s a great idea,” he said. “Rachel. Will you marry me?”

“I will marry you,” she said. She kissed him, and then again, more slowly. Then she said, “Of course I will. Will you marry me?”

“I will marry you anywhere and anytime and as often as you want me to.”

They giggled and kissed and then resumed walking along the shore. Presently she said, “Want to make bets on how much Earth has changed?”

“Let’s just hope,” said Clay, “Quebec City is still there. I figure we get married on the promenade by the river, and then go party at the Pub Zoot.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Rachel. They kissed, and wandered on into the night talking of lighter and lighter things under the not yet familiar stars of Bluehorse.

4.

Clay and Rachel woke up in Rachel’s Ghost, and, except for the gravity and the faint smell of the sea, they could have been in space with the screens on sleep mode. There was a sound of pounding on the outside of the fighter. Clay smiled at Rachel and sat halfway up, his head against the inside of the hatch.

Rachel flipped on the outside sensor, and the beach where they had parked the Ghost took over the whole screen. Right above him, not seeing him, were the people responsible for the pounding. It was Natasha and that honorary member of Alpha Wing, Vera Santos, ready for a swim in what was still a deep twilight. The 41-hour day of Bluehorse-3 made one feel rather the early riser. With a sarcastic grunt, Rachel flipped the hatch open. Vera and Natasha were carrying, not wearing, their vac suits. They were fighter pilots: they were used to seeing each other naked, oh, and also to peeing in their vac suits.

The water of the Parallelogram Sea was just cold enough and not terribly clear. On Bluehorse-3 there was almost no life on land other than what the colonists had brought, but the waters were full of local life: meetings would occur all over the colonies about how to ensure both the local and imported biota would survive.

Vera and Natasha and Rachel and Clay would miss those meetings; maybe they were missing one right now. Instead they were dunking themselves and each other, splashing and giggling and then floating on their backs, side by side in the shallows, watching the stars disappear.

By the time they were out of the cold water, color had begun to return to the world. The heights of the distant plateaus waxed golden, the sea was turning from indigo to a deep turquoise, and the sandy ground was red and yellow and brown at their feet and climbing the sides of the white colony ship. Brand new shanties around it were already obscuring its boxy outlines. From these, children spilled and smells of food and coffee billowed into the innocent air. Other smells moved about: already pens outside the ship held chickens and goats and small sheep. The pale pink of the three women, palest in freckly Tasha and darkest in light brown Vera, disappeared into vac suits, as did Clay’s somewhat hairier pale skin. They headed toward the shanties.

“Hey pilots,” called several colonists from several places. “Hey, pilots,” a woman not far from them insisted. “You want coffee, right?”

“Sure,” said Rachel. “And your sticky buns?”

“One minute,” said the woman, whose name was Jalis and who had become their barista. The pilots walked up to her little bistro, where she and two teenagers were putting pots and plates out on tables. Out came the coffee, into five cups. Out came real cream, from a cow about fifty meters that-away, munching on a patch of introduced grass. The pilots took seats and chose mugs. Jalis sat down with them, and in a minute the teenagers were serving them sticky buns. “You have a meeting, I think,” said Jalis.

“We do?” said Rachel.

“Yes you do,” said Jalis, taking a thoughtful sip and then jumping up. “More mugs! Here they come!”

“Commander,” said Rachel and Vera, getting up. Natasha and Clay turned in their chairs and saw Su Park and Jane Tremblay coming toward them, with the full-bearded Captain Kalkar of the armored freighter Tasmania, and the navigator Tony Han. Tasha and Clay got up too. Jalis and the teenagers came back with coffee and more rolls.

“As you were,” said Park, sitting.

“Whatever you were,” said Kalkar, taking a seat beside her and pulling his coffee close. “The amazing Su Park. Ahhh, my head does hurt from last night, and you drank as much as me on a much smaller body mass. So,” and he took a long drink of coffee. “Meeting.”

“Well,” said Rachel, “we’re sort of expecting you to tell us our navigation plan.”

“Exactly,” said Park. “Mr. Han?”

Tony Han smiled and pulled out his tablet. With a little flourish, he turned it on. He set it up so the pilots could all see it, Kalkar leaning in from the side; Jalis, who had been a bartender on Earth before her husband died of (yes) cancer, and who was now a bartender on Bluehorse-3 at night, sat back with her coffee and watched them all.

Rachel reached out to the tablet and began sliding and poking. “Three jumps,” she said.

Park replied, “We want you to visit Gliese 581 on the way there, and Gliese 667 on the way back. Just to see if they have colonies. When you get to Earth, you may find out about 667—in fact, if 581 is a going concern, then they may tell you there whether 667 is a going concern, or Alpha C for that matter. At Earth, they will surely know whether Alpha C made it.”

“Okay, 581. We hit 581 on the way to Earth. What’s this other one?”

“Well,” said Tony Han, “it’s almost the exact midpoint of Bluehorse to 581. And we’re pretty sure it has planets in the Goldilocks Zone. So Captain Kalkar and Commander Park both felt it was worth stopping there. But we really know nothing about it except that it’s small and it doesn’t have much planetary mass.”

“Dwarf?” asked Rachel.

“Not quite an actual dwarf.”

“How dangerous have you guys decided this is going to be?” asked Clay.

“As dangerous as staying, no doubt,” said Park.

“Don’t forget,” said Kalkar, “there’s a decent chance Primoids will be back with an even bigger fleet and be sure to stomp us, and we won’t have any of you four.”

“We’re going to actually try and visit the Primoids,” said Vera. “And talk to them. Which no one has yet been able to do.”

“We’re sending them,” said Park, “with Izawa and Moss and the Greenland. We hope to not involve them in a fight. I am going to take my lovely little wing of Bain and Leith and Ree—!”

“The Man of Mister Ree,” said Clay.

“Yes, Mr. Gilbert,” said Park. “We are taking Tasmania with us to explore about a bit.”

“What’s happening with the other wings?” asked Rachel. “What about Singh, she was with Bain and Leith—is this the end of Alpha Wing?”

“Obviously not,” said Park, “but we’re trying to be a bit nimble here, because we find ourselves in a new region of space with new challenges and possible enemies, and we also need to coordinate so that our fighter pilots all get the same deal out of time dilation. That means no one can sit still for very long, but then the trick is to allow someone to keep an eye on Bluehorse and for all of us to come back together every so often in case we need to make new plans or concentrate forces or, you know, for the parties, obviously. I would add that we’ve been drawing up itineraries and trajectories and so on, I and Captain Kalkar and Mr. Han and Captain Nilsstrom and a few others, and moving fleets around at relativistic speeds and interstellar distances is nauseatingly complex. It really is dreadful.”

“Oh, it’s the worst,” said Kalkar.

“But we keep flying, is the point,” said Vera. “Everyone’s going somewhere. Jane’s wing—!”

“We sucked up Maria Apple, the teenage whiz,” said Tremblay. “She looks and talks like she’s about eleven, but that girl can shoot, she’s killed me five times already in simulator.” Clay whistled: he once managed to almost kill Tremblay in the simulator.

“Yes,” said Park, “and we cobbled together a new Delta Wing with Singh and Schmitt and Smit, let’s put those two together in one place, and Allan; they’re off on a four-stop jaunt that should bring them back to Bluehorse at the 90-year mark, which is also when Tasmania and my group are scheduled to be back. We have another jaunt planned after that for everyone, so in 180, when you’re finally back from the Home Planet, we should all be here to celebrate, or whatever is called for.”

“And so,” said Kalkar, “my people will still be full of vigorous life in two hundred years. Assuming we don’t wind up blown to little bits.”

“And assuming that the Primoids don’t return to Bluehorse and blow the colony to little bits,” said Tony Han.

“Hear, hear,” said Jalis. “Let’s definitely assume that.”

“Assume that about all of us,” said Rachel. “You think Clay and I will have a quiet trip? All the way to Earth and back?”

“And you think you can spare us?” said Clay.

“Well,” said Park, “it’s somewhat controversial even sending you, but it didn’t make sense to send anyone less experienced, since it is just the two of you.”

“We’ll be fine,” said Rachel. She looked at Clay. “And you guys aren’t going to be exactly at rest, so we should be seeing you in, oh, a year our time, two hundred years from now.” She looked at Tony Han.

“I’m staying here on the planet,” he said, smiling, “so I should be about 230 years old by then. Give my regards to my great great great grandchildren.”

5.

So they would be going separate ways. Clay and Rachel were headed for Earth. Park, with Bain, Leith and Anand Ree, would take Kalkar and the Tasmania off to explore. Vera and Natasha, and Izawa and Moss and the armored freighter Greenland under Captain Maya Nilsstrom, were assigned to visit the Primoid rebels at Corsica, and then possibly attempt to contact whatever constituted the Primoid leadership at wherever the Primoid leadership might be found. With them would go the logician Jill-Ann Mooney and the linguists Milla Taravo and Art Johans; they were colonists, but they were experts as well, and they, and Natasha Kleiner, knew as much as any human about how to talk to Primoids.

“Which isn’t much,” said Natasha, as she and Vera and Bonnie Bain and Jamaica Leith drank wine with Rachel and Clay, the evening before the two were set to depart for Earth. “We know they can count. We don’t know if they have such things as adverbs.”

“You’d have to have adverbs, wouldn’t you?” asked Bonnie Bain.

“It’s a vexed question,” said Tasha. “I know it’s vexed because it vexes me every time Milla and Art get to arguing about it.”

“So Park is taking you guys,” Rachel said to Leith and Bain, “out exploring with the Tasmania, is that right?”

“The way I have it,” said Bonnie Bain, “we zip out 18 light years, have a look, zip another 18, have a look, then another and another, and then come back and everyone’s ninety years older. And then repeat till you guys come back from Earth.”

“If none of us gets eaten by space worms,” said Jamaica Leith. “Thanks loads for showing us the Star Wars videos. Someone had an active imagination.”

“Someone didn’t imagine mouthholes,” said Vera, “or dudes who talk by sending strings of prime numbers. Bonnie, you do know this is a huge honor, flying with Su Park.”

“Oh, I do,” said Bonnie Bain. “I totally get that. It scares the hell out of me too, but I’m starting to get used to that. Are you, Jams?”

“Yeah,” said Jamaica Leith. “One battle. Lasted about ten seconds. Scared out of my wits for all ten of them.”

“You don’t stop being scared just because dudes are shooting at you,” said Rachel.

“No,” said Vera. “I’m so scared I almost pee myself every time we go fight.”

“Killer,” said Clay.

“You bet,” said Vera. “They should be scared of me.”

“And you end up back here the same time as us?” asked Rachel.

“If not,” said Vera, “we do a quick jaunt to the Whatever System just to pass the time.”

“And let time dilation preserve our youthful skin tone,” said Natasha. “You figure you’ll be the last to arrive back because you think you’re going furthest?”

Rachel and Clay looked at each other. They grabbed a quick kiss. Clay said, “I guess I kind of thought that, yeah, though it doesn’t make any actual sense.”

“What chance do you think 581 has a going colony?” asked Bonnie Bain.

“I’ll go with 25%, said Rachel. “They were a one shot deal. They had enough stuff to set up hydroponics, so I suppose they could build a sustainable colony on some bare rock moon if they had to, but, still, I’d have to say it’s a throw of the dice. And not a nice easy throw of the dice either.”

“What about 667?” asked Bain. “Same?”

“Not knowing anything about either one, I’d have to say the same. What about Alpha C?”

“That was a real long shot,” said Clay. “The Centaur mission was already well on its way when Park and Vilya zipped out there and found out it had no good planets. And they couldn’t have made it to another system. Oh well.”

“So you think they got there and just rolled over and died,” said Natasha. “You think they didn’t have a chance.”

“They had a chance,” said Clay. “They’re humans. They always have a chance.”

“I’m not betting against them,” said Rachel. “It’s got to be tough, but they could possibly make it there even without a decent planet to grow soybeans on or whatever.”

“Guess you’re going to find out,” said Vera.

They all drank. Jamaica Leith shifted her legs, put an arm around Bain, kissed her on the side of the neck, and then took another drink before asking, “What do you think Earth is going to be like? After all this time?”

They all got far-away looks. They all drank.

“Miss it much?” asked Bonnie Bain.

“Sort of,” said Jamaica Leith and Clay Gilbert at the same time. They laughed.

“Miss it a lot, sometimes,” said Rachel. She drank. “But I have never not been glad I went into space. I have never been sorry I came on this mission.”

“Never,” said Bonnie Bain, Vera Santos and Jamaica Leith.

“Anyway,” said Clay, “I don’t expect it’ll be any different. Different people, same crap.” They laughed. “But,” he said, “I bet the beer won’t be as good as I remember.”