Starbound by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page A

without turning around midway to slow down, we had enough reaction mass to go more than a hundred thousand light- years. At which point, we’d be twelve years older, while the unimaginably distant Earth would have aged a thousand centuries.
    Our seven cabins were in a north-south line along the hydroponics garden. We checked a couple of them, apparently all the same, but very malleable, with moveable walls and modular furniture. The wall that separated them from the hydroponics area was semipermanent, a lattice for vines.
    The kitchen and dining room were twice the size of their Little Mars counterparts, where we did little actual cooking. Elza volunteered that Namir was an excellent cook, which was good news. I can just about flip a burger or scramble eggs, and we wouldn’t have either of those.
    There was a lounge next to the dining room, with a pool table and keyboard and various places to sit or, I suppose, lounge. I hadn’t touched a piano keyboard in a dozen years. Would boredom drive me back to it?
    Between the lounge and the Martian area was a meeting place that would be maintained at a compromise ambience—a little too cool and dark for humans; a little warm for Martians.
    At the northernmost area, the lounge led into a library and study, with workstations but also wooden panel walls and real paintings. Then there was another air lock and Paul’s control room. He sat down at the console and ran his hands over the knobs and dials, smiling, in his element.
    The spies looked kind of grim. It was understandable. They were losing a whole planet, one the rest of us had written off a long time ago. I did feel sorry for them, especially Namir, shut off from his complex history.
    Which he was also bringing with him.

11

    GOOD-BYES

    After our final briefing in New York, and before we flew out to the Space Elevator, Elza and Dustin and I had been given a few days to settle our affairs on Earth.
    We didn’t have to empty out our New York City apartment. Elza had made a clever deal with Columbia University, where they assumed the mortgage and will maintain the place for the half century we’ll be gone. If we don’t come back, it will be a unique small museum. In the unlikely event that we do return, we can either step back into the old place or leave it as a museum and negotiate an alternative—probably more comfortable—living space with the university.
    I had to go say good-bye to my father, which I could no longer put off. He has two rooms in a Jewish assisted-living complex in Yonkers, which offers free room and board for people in his situation: he was in Israel for the first stage of the Gehenna attack, and so his body is suffused with the nanomachines that comprise half the poison. The second half could await him anyplace in Israel. People die every year when they return and open an old closet or something. I knew a man who went back and lived for years, then, for a reunion, put on his old army uniform and stopped breathing.
    Father had been in New York, staying in my apartment, when the bombs went off in Tel Aviv. I was going to bring my mother back to join him for a tour of the American West.
    Instead I brought her ashes, months later.
    We have had few words since then, and none in Hebrew. When I greeted him with Shalom , he stared at me for a long moment and said, “You should come in. It’s raining.”
    He made a pot of horrible tea, boiling it Australian style, and we sat on the porch and watched the rain come down.
    When I told him what I was about to do, he crept away and came back with a dusty bottle of brandy and tipped a half inch into our tea-cups, which was an improvement.
    “So you come to say good- bye, actually. God is too kind to give me another fifty years of this.”
    “You may outlive me. God can be cruel in his benevolence.”
    “So now you believe in God. Wonders will never cease.”
    “No more than you do. Unless living here has weakened your mind.”
    “Living here has weakened my