Leaping to the Stars Read online

  But the important thing is that Outbeyond can support human life too.

  Of all the planets that have colonies, only a few of them have enough oxygen in their air so that you can go outside. Some of them will, eventually, after they've been terraformed. But most of them don't. Which means that the people on those planets will spend the rest of their lives indoors.

  See—that was the thing. I didn't want to live in a tube-town. Not again. We'd just gotten out of one. And what's the point of going to the stars if the scenery doesn't change? Back in El Paso, when things got too bad, I could always ride my bike up into the hills and get away from everybody. Especially Mom. Especially when she started screaming again. I had to leave when she got like that; it was enough to know that I could—

  No. I wasn't going to live in a tube again. I had to have a place to go. I'd already told Douglas and Mickey that wherever we ended up, it had to be someplace I could go out, and they had agreed. In fact, they'd insisted on it. Doug had said more than once that the only quiet time he ever got was when I went out. Of all the worlds we looked at—even those with Terra-domes—nothing looked as good as Outbeyond.

  On Outbeyond, you could actually go outside without a mask and not fall immediately to the ground, clutching your throat, gasping for breath, with blood pouring out of your ears and nose, and vomit spewing out of your mouth. The planet has enough oxygen in its atmosphere that humans can actually breathe it. The problem is that it has too much oxygen in its atmosphere, which means that things burn a lot faster, so fire is a lot more dangerous. And there are some other problems too, like the kinds of critters that grow in the air. All that oxygen makes a whole different airborne ecology possible. But the important thing is that you can go outside and breathe. You don't have to manufacture an atmosphere—and that takes an enormous industrial burden off the back of the colony in its drive for self-sufficiency. (Ask any Lunatic about the cost of nitrogen or ammonia, for instance.)

  The other good news was that Outbeyond has lots of water. After spending even a short time on Luna, I'd begun to realize how much we take water for granted—and how much we depend on it. If nothing else, Luna teaches you how fragile life is and how dependent it is on so many different things. Like air and water and gravity …

  Outbeyond's oceans aren't as salty as Earth's. Probably because the twice-yearly monsoon season scours right down to the bottom of the seas and dredges them this way and that. The storms push gigatons of ocean sediment and proto-diatoms and just plain old dust into the upper atmosphere, where it all circles around and around until it settles out over the equator where most of it fuels the raging hot dust storms. That also means that a lot of salt ends up in the equatorial regions, making them even less hospitable to life.

  Eventually, after churning it all around in the air for a few weeks or months, the equatorial dust storms start dropping it—all over everywhere, wherever the storms finally run out of energy. A lot of the particles end up back in the oceans, to feed the protoplankton. The proto-plankton is food for the little fish in the seas that the bigger fish eat, and then bigger fish eat them. So the dust storms feed the planet. There are all kinds of things in the ocean, it's a very lively ecology—and almost all of them are constantly migrating with the currents to avoid the seasonal extremes.

  The seas are shallower than on Earth. The pictures on the disc that Boynton gave us showed beautiful green oceans with lazy waves breaking six meters high. If you wanted to learn how to surf, this would be the place to do it. If you didn't mind all the other things swimming in the water with you.

  In fact, Outbeyond has the highest evolved life that humans have ever discovered on any planet. Stalking birds twelve meters tall, flying green monkeys, swarms of midnight insects, shambling mountains with legs like trees, things like saber-toothed cats, and other things like little growly bears. So many different kinds of creatures that there were big arguments that humans had no right to come in and live there when there was so much to learn—except how were you going to learn anything if you didn't live there? So Outbeyond was supposed to be a self-sufficient observation post, which is a fancy way of saying it's not a colony, only it is anyway because the only difference is the name. You still have to plant crops somewhere, because you still have to eat.

  Not that it mattered anyway. Now that everything was collapsing, the folks on Outbeyond were going to do whatever was necessary to survive.

  The more we looked at the pictures, the more we started to think that maybe it wasn't going to be as hard as Boynton suggested. Some of those pictures were awfully tempting. Because the star was so bright, all the colors were more intense; so when they showed the pictures of all the flowers, some of them with blossoms bigger than a person's head, both Mom and Bev gasped. The bad news was that the scientist standing next to the flowers—a guy named Guiltinan—was holding his nose and shaking his head and making a dreadful face. The flowers were pretty enough to look at, but according to the narrator, they made a smell like a dreadful rotting corpse. Springtime was a good time to stay inside, because when whole fields of these plants opened up, the smells could carry on the wind for hundreds of kilometers.

  Even so.

  Maybe.

  I mean …

  So we talked about it.

  We made lists of all the good points. We made lists of all the bad points. We compared the lists with everything we'd seen from all the other colonies and measured everything against everything. We weighed the pros and the cons and the I'm-not-sures. HARLIE constructed a decision table for us and we argued over which was more important, gravity or air or water, industry or food or medical care.

  The more we argued, the more we talked, the more we weighed and measured, the better Outbeyond looked.

  It was the pictures.

  Even the awful videos—the five-kilometer-wide tornadoes, the scouring dust storms, the churning hurricanes, the spewing volcanoes—were exciting. They didn't put us off. Outbeyond had weather satellites in place. Most of the settlements were underground, or retractable. There were heavy-duty robots for the dangerous work. And we already knew how to hunker down in a tube while the winds raged outside. Outbeyond colony was designing itself to be self-sufficient underground as well as aboveground. So if we could make it through the first five years, we could probably make it through anything. Maybe.

  The downside—HARLIE pointed this out—was that Outbeyond wasn't going to get easier with time. If anything the changes that we might introduce to the local ecology might make it nastier. So as pretty as the pictures looked, they were the kind of deceptive lie that could lull us into a false sense of security. Until we had at least three separate settlements, widely separated, each one self-sufficient, we couldn't really assume that we had achieved a threshold of viability.

  Nevertheless …

  By the time we got to dessert, it was obvious we were trying to talk ourselves out of it. Bobby wanted to see the dinosaurs. I didn't blame him. The dinosaur turds were bigger than houses. What nasty little eight-year-old wouldn't want to see one? I could already see him standing next to it, holding his nose and saying, "Yicchh!" I was kind of curious myself. But how badly did he want to see them?

  "Bobby," I asked. "What are you willing to give up?"

  "Huh?" That was his stock answer when he didn't understand the question.

  "Are you willing to go without ice cream? There are no cows on Outbeyond. There might not be cows for a long time. There might not even be industrial udders. No milk, no ice cream. Are you willing to give up ice cream for the rest of your life just to see dinosaurs?"

  Bobby frowned.

  "And roller coasters," said Douglas. "And maybe dogs and cats too. And a lot of other fun stuff."

  Bobby started to shake his head. Then he stopped. "You guys are trying to talk me out of something I want. Just like you always do."

  "No, we're not. We just want to make sure you really want it. Because if you want it that bad, you're going to have to give up a lot
of things."

  "I want to see the dinosaurs," he announced. "I've had ice cream. I haven't had dinosaur."

  "It tastes like chicken," said Mickey.

  "How do you know?" asked Douglas.

  "They brought some back. A whole shipload. They sold it at an ungodly price. They made a fortune. It still tasted like chicken."

  "Everything tastes like chicken," remarked Mom's friend, Bev. She didn't seem to talk much around us, but she was a very good cook.

  "Yeah, everything except little chicken nuggets," I said. Everybody laughed.

  "All right," said Dad. "So Bobby votes for Outbeyond. Chigger?" He looked to me expectantly.

  I nodded. "Of all the planets where you can go outside, Outbeyond looks the most interesting."

  "That's two votes." Dad looked to Douglas and Mickey.

  The two of them looked at each other. Mickey said, "It worries me that they're not signatory to the Covenant. I took a Covenant oath—"

  "Doesn't your Covenant oath say something about a commitment to preserving life?" Douglas asked pointedly.

  "I'm not sure I even want to get into that dilemma," Mickey replied. "How do you measure the value of human life against native life? And what's the value of the knowledge we'll gain when measured against the damage we'll do?"

  Douglas leaned over and whispered something in Mickey's ear. I was close enough to hear. "What does your heart say?"

  Mickey glanced at him, surprised. Maybe he hadn't expected Douglas to think that way. Maybe he didn't realize the effect he'd had on Douglas. "My heart says we have to save the lives of the people who are already there."

  Douglas turned to Dad. "Two more votes for Outbeyond."

  Dad said, "Well, that decides it then. It doesn't matter what the other three votes are—"

  "Wait a minute!" snapped Mom. "You can't seriously be thinking that Bobby gets a full vote—"

  And Douglas replied, very calmly, "In our family, he does!"

  And then Mom said, "I'm part of this family too—"

  And that's when I said, "Not according to Judge Griffith. You get to come with us because we say so. Not because you say so. And if you don't want to—"

  "And where am I going to go without you—?"

  And so on. That was good for ten or fifteen minutes of excitement.

  Finally, Dad said, "I vote for Outbeyond. That makes it five to two, or four to two if you don't count Bobby."

  "I do too count—" He shrieked it nice and loud too.

  "Yes, you do," said Douglas, pulling the devil-child into his lap.

  Mom was already screaming, "You're just doing that to side with them. You said you didn't want to go to Outbeyond! We don't dare risk going to a colony with such a low life expectancy! Not with my children!"

  And that's when Bev stood up and said quietly, "Would both of you please shut up? You're acting like babies. I expected that from the children, not from the grown-ups. It's no wonder Judge Griffith ruled against you two. She didn't have a choice."

  "You're a fine one to talk," Mom snapped at her. "After what you said to the Judge, you didn't help my case any."

  "Yes, I was stupid. And I already apologized for that! I'd have gone back down the Line, if the elevators had been running. But I couldn't and I didn't and we're all in this together now. So let's resolve this. Maggie, where do you want to go?"

  "Anywhere but Outbeyond," Mom said. "Someplace safe."

  "Thank you," said Bev. "And if everybody else chooses Outbeyond, where will you go?"

  Mom stopped. She looked frustrated. She looked worse than frustrated. She looked trapped. "I don't want to go to Outbeyond—" she started to say.

  "That wasn't the question, Maggie. What if the boys choose Outbeyond? Will you go with them or not?"

  Mom sagged. I knew that sag. Resignation. She was about to give in. Just one last little desperate whine. "But I don't want to go to Outbeyond. Don't my feelings count for anything here … ?"

  "Your feelings count for a lot," said Dad, going to her. He put a hand on her shoulder. "But so do everyone else's. And if we're going to make this work—like we promised—then we're going to have to respect each other's feelings."

  "I want someone to respect mine. I don't want to go to Outbeyond."

  "You're outvoted, honey."

  "Don't call me honey," she waved his hand away. But it was a half-hearted rebuke.

  Bev interrupted again. She said to Dad. "I vote for Outbeyond."

  "Huh?" Mom looked at her, betrayed. "I was counting on you for support in this."

  "I am supporting you, Maggie."

  "How? By voting against me?"

  "By voting to keep your family together. You've come this far already. Are you willing to go the distance?"

  "We're going to die there," Mom said bitterly.

  "Yes," agreed Bev. "But how soon depends on us."

  Mom didn't say anything for a long time. I knew Mom. She wouldn't accept this decision until five years after Bobby's second grandchild was born. She'd go, but she'd complain every step of the way. She'd do her share of the work, and six other people's too. And she'd make sure that the rest of us knew that this wasn't her idea, that she hadn't voted for this, that she wasn't having a good time, and that she was only doing this for her children. And we should all appreciate her sacrifice. That was the way she was and we weren't going to change her.

  The important thing was that it was the first time us kids had ever won an argument with Mom and Dad—and with both of them in the same room at the same time.

  It was a pretty good feeling.

  CAPTURED

  But it didn't last very long.

  Dad glanced at his PITA.*[Personal Information Telecommunications Assistant] "It's getting late. If no one else has anything to say, I'll make the call."

  Douglas spoke up quietly. "We should make the call together, Dad."

  Dad looked at him, surprised. But Douglas was politely letting Dad know that we were still independent. Judge Griffith had let us divorce Mom and Dad, and they were here with us now because we wanted them here—and that was the only reason, because they no longer had any legal authority over us. Both Mom and Dad were having a hard time getting used to that idea. The fact that Dad wasn't as vocal as Mom didn't mean he wasn't churning inside. But this time he just nodded and said, "Good point. All right—everybody come stand in front of the screen. Let's look like a family anyway."

  Douglas said quietly, "Phone. Commander Gary Boynton. Brightliner Cascade."

  The pictures of Outbeyond irised out, replaced by the starship logo. That irised open and we were looking at a head shot of Boynton. He looked grim. Like he had bad news. Probably he had. All the news was bad these days.

  Dad said, "We've made our decision, Commander Boynton."

  He held up a hand. "I have to hear it from the head of the family—"

  Dad looked startled.

  Commander Boynton looked to Douglas. "Douglas Dingillian? How say you?"

  Douglas took a step forward. "We accept your offer, Commander Boynton. We want to go to Outbeyond."

  Boynton nodded. He didn't look pleased, but he didn't look un-happier either. "There's a lot of you," he said. "You'd better be worth it." He nodded to somebody off screen, then turned back to us. "All right, listen up. As of this moment, you're under the protection of the Outbeyond Colony Authority. Pack up your things as fast as you can. I'm sending a team of security agents to transfer you to the Outbeyond processing center. We have to give you six months of training in thirteen days."

  Mom looked annoyed. "Can't this wait until tomorrow morning? It's late, I want to go to bed."

  "I can't guarantee your safety anywhere but the processing center—"

  Abruptly, the monkey leapt out of Bobby's arms and ran around the room, sniffing wildly under tables, under chairs, up the plastic curtains, around the air vents, everywhere, as if it were looking for something—a way out?

  "My monkey—!" Bobby shrieked. "Come back!
"

  "Bobby, stop yelling!" Mom was just as loud. "Charles, what the hell is that damn thing doing?"

  And then the doorbell chimed—

  "Well, that was fast—" Dad said, turning toward the door.

  "Wait—!" cried Boynton. "Don't answer it!"

  But he was too late, Dad was already waving at it—

  Six big men—I mean big—armored in black, all wearing faceless helmets, came barreling in—pushing and leaping like armed balloons. They were carrying ugly black hand-rifles. "EVERYBODY FREEZE! DON'T MOVE! DON'T TALK!"

  If these were Boynton's security people, they weren't any friendlier than he was.

  They were much more skilled in Lunar gravity than we were. They bounced us up against the walls, like a herd of buffalo in a bowling alley—and we were the pins. Everything went flying every which way. And that's when I finally figured out that these guys weren't here to take us to the Outbeyond processing center.

  Everything was happening at once—two of them pointed their guns at the monkey and fired. And suddenly the monkey was webbed in a ball of gunk. It fell slowly from the overhead and bounced lazily across the room. I started after it—someone scooped it up. And then I couldn't move either—no one could. They'd webbed us all. What the hell—? Whose good idea was this?

  Suddenly there were more pouring in the door. They filled the room. There were twelve of them—more! They were doing something with wires out on the balcony—I couldn't see. Someone grabbed me, tossed me over his shoulder. They were throwing us around like so much baggage. Everything was a jumble.

  Bobby was screaming, and so was Mom. She was trying to get to him. She was ferocious. And she was using some pretty impressive language too—until somebody shut her up. I didn't see how, but suddenly there was silence.Out onto the balcony—one after the other, they hooked us to a cable and sent us scaling out into the air. Then they all came down the wire after us—I was facing backward and upside down. Not a great position, but not as bad in Lunar gravity as it would have been on Earth. They leapt out over the railing and sailed spread-eagled through the air after us. They looked like superheroes. And then I bounced around and faced forward for a while. We skimmed like birds above the bowl of the Lunar crater. We were heading too fast over the forest, out to the opposite side of the dome—