[Image: a so-called “space colony” consisting of a pair of O’Neill cylinders, courtesy of the NASA Ames Research Center (via Wikipedia). This image has little to do with the story (or the spaceship(s)) discussed in the post, but it felt suitably “epic” (and at least vaguely relevant).]
For a good while now — maybe a year and a half — I’ve been working on a science-fiction novel (working title: 23kpc). The action takes place almost entirely aboard an interstellar space ship, the ISS Tascheter; the protagonists, Guy and Missy Landis, are something like a spacegoing Nick and Nora Charles (cf. Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man stories, especially the films — starring William Powell and Myrna Loy — made from them).About six months before starting 23kpc, I’d actually written a short novella, or long short story, featuring Guy and Missy and the Tascheter. That story sprang from nowhere in particular; I just wanted to try my hand at SF (again), and was at the time too distracted — by real life and the marketing (still in progress) of Seems to Fit — to focus on anything major. In fact, when I began writing it, I didn’t even know it was SF: it took me several sentences to realize it.
In the course of writing “Open and Shut,” as the original story was called, I realized many other things. I realized how little consideration I’d ever given to the practicalities of space travel, particularly from one star system to another. What would the ship have to be like? If it weren’t capable of faster-than-light (FTL) speeds, how could individual humans ever hope to survive such a journey? (I sure as hell didn’t want Guy, Missy, et al. to die en route — requiring the invention of fresh characters over and over and over…) Perhaps humans were somehow different then — evolved with significantly longer lifespans. Or perhaps there were some ways of keeping them inert for long stretches of time, à la “suspended animation”… or… or… And what about where they were going — what could they even hope to know about their destination? Had at least one other generation of humans preceded them into space? How could a “crew” of, say, a few dozen individuals, even hundreds of them, possibly keep going during a trip which might take not just decades but centuries?
And so on.
Well, I took “Open and Shut” through to the story’s end. But all those practical concerns compelled me to tackle the general project correctly, in its own right. Hence, 23kpc. It no doubt comes with its own set of problems, as I’ll realize when I re-read the whole thing (when I’m done writing the whole thing). But it’s backed by much more (read: any) research, and I think I’ve gotten a lot more of it “right.”Still, “Open and Shut” has its virtues, especially as a seat-of-the-pants exercise. It gave me Guy and Missy, and several of the other main characters who’d show up in the novel as well. It gave me the Tascheter — in vastly different form. It gave me some of the underlying themes I’d been thinking about (e.g., the evolution of culture and language). It’s told in the present tense, and the first person (from Guy’s point of view), which makes the action feel more “immediate” (to me, anyhow). Finally, it gave me a certain clipped, smart-alecky tone which seemed well-suited to the characters. And re-reading the first few pages reminded me of how much fun I’d had back then…
What follows: the first few hundred words of that story. Hope you enjoy it, too!
Open and Shut
(copyright © 2015 by, so on and so forth)
It’s Friday night. Not early in the evening but not late-late, either. 9:30 or 10 maybe. We’re in our stateroom, watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers — not the original, but the one from later in the twentieth century, with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams — when the doorbell rings.
Of course Durwood, our Pooch, goes nuts and starts yelping, zooming around in mid-air the way it does, bumping from wall to wall, knocking books and knick-knacks off their upper shelves. At least this time it doesn’t get tangled up in the ceiling fan — good thing, too, since it’s the last ceiling fan on board until we land after the final two weeks of deceleration, and I doubt the Mataburthians even know what a ceiling fan is anyway, let alone how to make one. (It’s the kind of detail the natives tend not to understand, let alone develop, on a planet where the windspeed at ground level averages out to seventy-eighty knots.)
My wife Missy looks at me and I look at her and I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing: Dodd again, from the cabin next door. Gotta be. Friday night, booze-ration ceiling lifted for the next twelve hours. You could set your calendar by Shawn Dodd’s binges.
Missy pauses the film. “I’ll take care of him,” I say. I go to the door and check the peepscope.
Surprise: it’s not Dodd but Yolanda Templeton, the twelfth-generation clone who occupies the cabin on the other side of Dodd’s. Her face fills the peepscope. The hell’s she doing here, I wonder. Our doorway’s been off-limits to her since the episode a couple of months ago, back in her gen-5 days, when I caught her and Missy in flagrante if you know what I mean. (Like the saying goes: Under the full moon.)
I say to Missy, “Not expecting Yolanda, are we?” Trying to keep the edge out of my voice. It’s a constant battle, even after thirty or forty dorm-cycles, but I’m working on it.
“No. I’m not, anyhow.” Not quite so much in control of her own voice, see. Apparently Yolanda’s gen-4 experience with me still touches a nerve. (What can I say?)
The doorbell rings again, and Durwood once again erupts. Missy fiddles with its remote to calm it down while I stand there trying to make up my mind about opening the door. Yolanda’s lives tend to be a little too interesting. They have a bad way of sticking to other people’s lives, if you know what I mean, and when you open your cabin door to Yolanda you’ve got to be prepared for more than just loaning her a cup of sugar.
“Mr. and Mrs. Williams?” Yolanda says, her voice thin and nervous through the reinforced plasticine. Ah. Not Guy and Missy, but Mr. and Mrs. She doesn’t remember yet. She must’ve gen’d up the last time we were under.
“Yes?” I say, like we don’t recognize her voice, and wink back over my shoulder at Missy. “Who is it?”
“It’s Yolanda Templeton, from 1117A?”
“Oh, yes. Yolanda. You need something?”
“No, it’s not me. It’s — oh, it’s horrible. It’s Shawn. Mr. Dodd, you know? He—”
She stops and I check the scope again. She’s backed away from the door by now and just sort of stands in the hall, her arms folded across her chest as if in modesty. But it’s pretty hard to be modest, it strikes me, now that I can see she’s not wearing a stitch. She’s crying, and she’s naked. And something has happened. And she can’t talk. And she’s Yolanda. Jeezus. The worst of all possible worlds, which is saying something considering some of the places this starliner — the ISS Tascheter — will dock.
“Hang on,” I say to the door.
I explain the situation to Missy, who’s finally got The Pooch under control. It whirs contentedly in her arms. Some practical words go back and forth between us, and some impractical thoughts too if you know what I mean. We decide that before letting her in we’ll just send Durwood out into the hall, through its little exit door at floor level, dragging one of Missy’s old cotton bathrobes behind it. I explain this plan to Yolanda through the door while Missy goes to her closet and chooses something suitably plain and not so bulky and plush that it won’t fit through The Pooch’s swinging door.
“Here it comes,” I say through the door, and Missy gooses the remote, and Durwood wags and goes out the little exit, robe trailing behind.
A couple of moments later we hear Yolanda’s voice. “Okay,” she says, and giggles. “I’m decent.” I look through the peepscope one more time. She’s wearing the robe, all right, and the neckline and collar are closed, all right, and she’s holding Durwood in her arms and smiling down at it. It wriggles in pleasure.
Why hasn’t somebody just given her a Pooch of her own? I think — imagining, see, that it might preoccupy her enough to keep her out of trouble.
Then I remember: oh right. She had one of her own back during during her gen 2, just a few years after takeoff. And then I remember what happened to it.
Eww, I think, and shake my head to clear it, and open the door…
marta says
I remember this story! It’s fun. And I liked reading that Thin Man tone.
As you know, I’m working on my own space travel story…but I’ve decided to go more space fantasy than science fiction. Mine’s more fairy tale. Realistic science be damned.
John says
Oh that’s right — I did share it (or part of it) with you already. Totally forgot that.
I think I’ve mentioned an SF writer before, a guy named Vernor Vinge. In a series of his books, he supposes a galaxy in which the laws of physics behave differently as you move closer to or farther away from the galactic core. In its article on him, Wikipedia describes them this way:
(“The Singularity” is a concept he first laid out in a non-fiction essay, in which he described it as an upcoming turning point in human history: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”)
These so-called Zones of Thought make it easy for him to do all sorts of wacky stuff beyond the pale of physical laws. Clever guy.