Lightship Read online

  Lightship

  By

  Stephan Besik

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All characters are over the age of eighteen. This book is intended for readers eighteen years of age and older.

  ISBN 978-1-7331365-2-5

  Copyright July 2021

  Artiplex Publications

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Art by 17StudioBookDesign.com

  Tales of the Near and Far Future

  The Old Man- Living a long time may not be all that much fun.

  Long Shot- After a nuclear war, it’s unlikely that vengeance will be left to the Lord.

  Damage Report- Technology makes everything easier. Or does it?

  Lightship- Space is expensive. Or is it that we’re not looking for cheap?

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Old Man

  Damage Report

  Long Shot

  Lightship

  The Old Man

  The Golden Goose looked the same as always. Nothing much had changed in eight years. It was quiet; there were a few people talking in booths. No one sat at the bar.

  He felt bad that he hadn’t come back sooner, but it was easy to lose track of time. Time used to be valuable, more so as a person aged and the sands of time ran out. Now it was easy to waste it. Humanity had put a stopper in the hourglass.

  His eyes had to adjust to the low light. Grem still kept the place in great shape- every piece of wood polished, the bar and all the tables in the alcoves along the wall gleamed. The style predated Bob himself and he was no youngster. Low light, dark wood, dark leather in the booths. After all the years that Grem had taken care of it, the Goose still felt as homey as any bar Bob had ever been to.

  Even Grem looked the same. But of course, he would.

  Grem looked at him for only a second, instantly recognizing the walk and the slightly grayed hair. He polished the bar in front of him and smiled as Bob walked up to the bar.

  “Hello, Bob. Haven’t seen you in a while. Glad to have you back. How are you?”

  Bob smiled and took a seat on a barstool. “Same as always. No older and no younger. How are you? How’s the Goose?”

  “Same old same old. Still keeping the old girl running. It’s getting a little harder to pay the bills though. Not too many into well-maintained antiques any longer.”

  Bob grimaced at the irony in Grem’s words. “Yeah. In more ways than one.”

  Grem looked embarrassed. “Hey, I didn’t mean…”

  Bob waved him off. “Forget it. After all these years I can tell a slip from a dig.”

  “Yeah, I imagine so. What’ll you have?”

  “Just a beer. Whatever you have on tap is fine.”

  “Coming right up.” Grem pulled a glass out of the rack, slid it under the tap and pulled the handle. “What brings you here?” He smiled again, and set the glass in front of Bob. “Other than the beer, I mean.”

  “I got a call from Gary. Gary Thompson. You remember him, right? Said he wanted to meet someplace where we could talk for a while. I thought he might like to meet at one of our old haunts.”

  “Do you two keep in touch?”

  Bob looked at his beer. “No, not really. I lost track of time and he moves around a lot. We were in the Corps of Engineers together, you know. We started when it was still part of the U.S. Army. They’ve needed every hand for decades now, and every time he thought about leaving they’d give him some big, juicy project to manage. Hadn’t really even thought about him for quite a while. Kind of embarrassing, really. We’re actually pretty good friends. Or we were, I guess.” Bob hesitated, looking at his glass. “They retired me out when my wife died. Medical retirement. Probably for the best.” He took a sip of his beer. “This is really good.”

  “Thanks. One of the new brews. Some pre-warming archeologists found some old recipes in Europe and brewed them up. They ran the results through an analyzer and added a few tweaks. Came up with a half dozen great beers. Amazing what you can do with a little information and a smart machine.”

  “Whatever they did, it worked. Think they’ll go into distribution?”

  Grem shrugged. “Hard to tell. Those things move so fast. One day you’re a hit, the next you’re an old fad.”

  Bob nodded. “Don’t I know it. Hard to keep up with all the things going on nowadays. Especially with the AIs. I heard a group of them did some experiments that showed there’s a way to circumvent Einstein’s barrier.”

  Grem looked astonished. “Wow. Hadn’t heard that. Guess I should get on the net once in a while. The speed of light’s been the limit for so long it looked like the Kuiper belt was going to be as far as anyone was ever going to go. I don’t think even the AIs thought sublight starships would ever be practical.”

  “It is sort of a big deal. With a little luck, we'll both be around when they launch the first FTL ship.”

  Grem smiled. “Wouldn't that be something? I might consider migrating if it happens. I could probably use a change. Or maybe just take the bar and move it to Alpha Centauri.” Grem hesitated. “What about you?”

  Bob shrugged. “Might be fun. It's getting a little stale here.”

  Grem hesitated. The silence got longer. “Have you heard anything new? Medically, I mean.”

  Bob frowned. “No, nothing new. It's been a long time and there are fewer researchers interested in my situation.” He shrugged. “I'm a dead end. Doesn't make sense to invest time and resources in a problem that no longer exists. Except for me, of course. And Gary. And a few others.” He swirled his beer. “And getting fewer every day.” He took another sip from his glass.

  “Hey, don't get discouraged. Who knows, maybe some AI will find an answer for you.”

  Bob smiled sadly and shook his head. “Probably not. Too busy working on FTL drives.”

  Grem looked unhappy and discouraged. It wasn't a look Bob saw very often any longer. There was a lot of optimism now. The Cyclone Decades were long gone, famines were reduced to occasional events in the locations where recovery was still under way, the Great Cleanup and the global ecology laws had worked, and the bad times were gradually fading away. Space was opening up, too. Not fast enough to move much of the world’s population off-planet yet, although between the population crash during the famines and effective population planning there wasn’t as much need to move. The New Frontier of space was beginning to feel like an option people wanted to try, rather than a last desperate refuge for a few survivors.

  There was a lot of hope out there.

  Bob shook it off and brightened his smile. Didn't make sense to dump his problems on someone else. “Hey, no worries. You're right. I've got a lot of time and there are a lot of smart people and machines out there. Somebody will figure it out.” He held up his glass. “In the meantime, I’ve still got my slot at the University. And now there's some mighty fine beer.”

  As he took another drink two men came through the door and took stools down the bar from Bob. Grem stepped back a bit. “Gotta work. I’ll be back in a few.”

  As Grem moved away Bob looked into the mirror behind the bar. He saw a gray-haired old man, face wrinkled with age and experience. He looked at the hand holding the glass of beer; it looked about right for seventy. A healthy seventy, and right for the rest of his body. The package as a whole looked aged but he thought he should be grateful. He was rather young looking considering how old he was. Unchanged for years. Two hundred years, give or take.

  The eyes and face in the mirror hardened,
and he looked away. He knew what the view was like.

  Looking seventy in a world where almost everyone looked thirty or younger was not the best of circumstances. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a few more people in the same situation. There hadn’t been a lot in the first groups, though, and even the few that there were had slowly disappeared. Some had made it through the bad times and gone into space. Some just hadn’t made it. A few hundred years of famines and accidents hadn’t left a lot of survivors even with the longevity treatments. Then there were the people who made the decision, the ones who couldn’t take being lonely old people in the land of the young. He just didn’t like to think about them.

  He thought about Meg. They had both had the stabilizing treatment. The first ones to get it had been those who were both valuable and threatened by old age. It was nearly experimental when they started the treatment. It had worked, of course, but for the old ones like Meg and him there had been a major drawback. The old ones who were treated stopped aging, but they stopped at the age they were at. At first it was an easy price to pay to help rebuild, especially since the expertise they had acquired over the years was critically needed. It wasn’t until the young ones started getting the treatment, with ages stabilized at twenty-five to perhaps ten years older, that things went sour. Over time, the world Meg and he knew became younger and the original “old ones” became rarities. Not just rarities, but oddities.

  They had made it through most of the bad times. He had served his country all over the world during the Water Wars, when people began to realize that there wasn’t enough fresh water to go around. He had been in combat, and done a lot of riot control, but mostly he spent his time building desalination plants, preserving water sources in places that were drying out, building levees and trying to restore flooded areas, and generally trying to save humanity wherever the Corps of Engineers sent him.

  The really tough times were the Cyclone Decades, when a dozen hurricanes in the Gulf every year had turned the entire southern United States into a swamp, and even Baja and American California had to deal with a hurricane or two every year. That was a time when food and fresh water got really scarce, and the Corps spent its time trying to shore up the American coastline and building places where people could live without fear of being blown away. Baja and southern California got too much water, and right about at San Francisco the rain just stopped. Nothing came down from the north, and much of the western U.S. had turned to desert.

  Thank God they had both gotten in to the experimental group. He didn’t know what he would have done if she had died in her nineties (or younger) like most people they had known. For sure he wouldn’t have made it through the bad times without her. It had been good to have her with him for all those years, too. They had grown old together, and they had stopped aging together. They each had someone to talk to who knew about the old days, and knew about their new problem.

  He had come apart completely when he heard about the accident. They had made one hundred and fifty years together, much of it through really tough times. They had held each other together through some of the toughest. They had been survivors at a time when humanity was at risk everywhere.

  Then suddenly she was gone. A diplomatic team was returning from Europe in an SST when an engine exploded at sixty thousand feet, tearing the whole aircraft apart. A once-in-a-century accident, they’d said, as if the safety record meant anything to the people who lost loved ones.

  The wreckage had been spread over hundreds of square miles of ocean, and no bodies were ever found. As far as he knew no one ever tried to recover them. At Meg’s service he buried a small box with a few of her awards for meritorious service in it. Shortly after the funeral he’d lost it.

  The University psych people had fought to bring him back from his breakdown for four solid years. He was mentally healthy now, sort of. Healthy enough to be something other than suicidal. He still wondered whether all the time and effort of the psych people had been worth it. He was still an old man in a world where everyone else was young. The relationship that had kept him going was gone, too.

  Bob’s thoughts were interrupted by a slap on the back. “Well, hello, old man. My, my, you don’t look a day over a hundred.”

  Bob turned to see his friend. “Considering I’m supposed to look seventy, that’s not so good.” He stuck out his hand. “You don’t look much younger than a hundred yourself.”

  Gary smiled and shook hands with Bob. “Just stayin’ alive.”

  “Definitely. Come on, pull up a stool. What’ll you have? Grem’s got some really good beer on tap.”

  “Beer sounds good.” He looked around and saw an empty booth. “Would you mind moving to a booth? Easier to chat over there.”

  Bob rose up from his stool. “Sounds good.” He turned and waved at Grem. “Bring another beer for our friend here. We’ll be over there.”

  Grem waved at the newcomer. They moved and slid into the empty booth.

  “How have you been?” asked Gary. “It’s been a long time. I didn’t realize how long until I started thinking about calling you.”

  “Doing all right,” responded Bob. “I had the same reaction when you called. Just didn’t occur to me how long it had been since we last got together.” He took a sip of his beer. “This longevity thing makes it easy to waste a lot of time. Like time is cheap or something.”

  Grem walked up and put a second glass on the table. “Another old timer. Good to see you, Gary. Seems like it’s been forever since you’ve been in. What’s it been, ten years now?”

  “I think ten is about right. We were just talking about that. Now we’ve got time to waste, and it seems like that’s what we do with it.”

  “I know what you mean. I don’t know what it was like in the old days but it’s really easy to let things slide now. You’ve got to have something you want to do to keep moving. Gotta have a life plan or something.” Grem looked at Bob. “Like that thing we talked about. Making a trip to a star.”

  Gary looked curious. “What’s this? A trip to a star?”

  Bob smiled. “A group of AIs have done experiments that seem to confirm that Einstein’s limit can be circumvented. If we hang around long enough we might see the first faster-than-light ship. We might even see humans on a planet around another star. Probably still a long trip, but not centuries like on a sublight ship.”

  His friend frowned. “Hmm. Well, even with FTL a trip to another planet that’s worth going to would be a long one.”

  Bob shook his head. “Time is something we have a lot of. And who knows, maybe with some work even marginal planets might be livable. With all the time we’ve got, maybe a challenge is something we need.”

  “Maybe.” Gary looked doubtful. “I don’t know, though. Humanity made a lot of challenges for itself. Not sure it makes sense to go off into the wilds of space looking for more. Besides, what would we do with a bunch of new territory? Probably just make a mess of it, like we did with Earth. At least here it was a matter of survival to straighten the mess out. If we started on new planets, we might just go around wrecking perfectly good ones because we could leave and forget about what we’d left behind.”

  Bob shook his head and smiled. “You always were a bit of a pessimist. Do you think we’re going to forget all we went through and just walk away after making another mess?”

  “Look around, Bob. They all look the same, but the young ones were never in the mess and don’t think about it. You know, people who are actually in their twenties and thirties, even a lot of the ones who only look it. They’ve got the information in their heads; they don’t have it in their hearts. Not like the ones who came through the bad times. Not like us.”

  “Maybe. We don’t have just humans now, though. The AIs won’t forget. Neither will the enhanced humans. I think it would be hard to backslide.”

  Gary shook his head and frowned. “I don’t know. If humanity goes out pioneering there won’t be a lot of law out there. There will be those who figu
re it’s all right as long as they don’t get caught. It’s not like some enforcer from Earth is likely to take off into interstellar space to chase down rumors of ecological destruction. As for people who have colonized other star systems, interstellar travel will be as slow for them as for us- getting to another start will take years. It might be like that for decades, maybe for centuries. Why burn years to go looking for problems in another star system? They’d have their own problems. Nobody would be interested in hunting down ecological pirates that mess up their own worlds.”

  Bob countered, “I think you’re too pessimistic. You can argue that we might destroy another planet’s ecology, but with what we can do now I’m not sure there’s a rationale for that sort of thing any longer. Why destroy a good planet when the things we need are probably available on uninhabitable planets? Even in our solar system, we can mine the moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Using the tough places might be more expensive initially, but how much did it cost us to fix the damage we did to Earth?”

  Gary looked thoughtful. “I guess you might be right. Nowadays we can put the really bad stuff in places where it doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s the real answer.” He took a drink of his beer. “Wow, this is good. I think I’ve been gone too long.”

  Bob finished his first beer and signaled Grem to bring another round for the both of them. “So what’s on your mind? Probably not interstellar travel.”

  Gary lubricated with another taste of beer. “No, it’s not about interstellar travel.” He remained silent for a moment and then said, “Actually, I came to invite you to a party. A farewell party.”