Robert Sawyer: Relativity

Just what I need.

There’s no actual border to the solar system—it just sort of peters out, maybe a light year from the sun, when you find the last cometary nucleus that’s gravitationally bound to Sol. So the official border—the point at which you were considered to be within solar space, for the purpose of Earth’s laws—was a distance of 49.7 AU from the sun, the maximal radius of Pluto’s orbit. Pluto’s orbit was inclined more than 17 degrees to the ecliptic, but I was coming in at an even sharper angle. Still, when the ship’s computer informed me that I’d passed that magic figure—that I was now less than 49.7 times the radius of Earth’s orbit from the sun—I knew I was in the home stretch.

I’d be a hero, no doubt about that (and, no, not a heroine, thank you very much). I’d be a celebrity. I’d be on TV—or whatever had replaced TV in my absence.

But would I still be a wife? A mother?

I looked at the computer-generated map. Getting closer all the time…

You might think the idea of being an old-fashioned astronaut was an oxymoron. But consider history. John Glenn, he was right out of Norman Rockwell’s U. S. of A., and he’d gone into space not once but twice, with a sojourn in Washington in between. As an astronaut, he’d been on the cutting edge. As a man, he was conservative and family-centered; if he’d run for the presidency, he’d probably have won.

Well, I guess I’m an old-fashioned astronaut, too. I mean, sure, Greg had spent months each year away from home, while I raised the kids in Cocoa Beach and worked at the Kennedy Space Center (my whole CV could be reduced to initials: part-time jobs at KFC while going to university, then full-time work at KSC: from finger-lickin’ good to giant leaps for … well, for you know who).

When Greg was in South Africa, he searched for Australopithecus africanus and Homo sterkfonteinensis fossils. Of course, a succession of comely young coeds (one of my favorite Scrabble words—nobody knew it anymore) had accompanied him there. And Greg would argue that it was just human nature, just his genes, that had led him to bed as many of them as possible. Not that he’d ever confessed. But a woman could tell.

Me, I’d never strayed. Even with all the beefcake at the Cape—my cape, not his—I’d always been faithful to him. And he had to know that I’d been alone these last seven—these last thirty—years.

God, I miss him. I miss everything about him: the smell of his sweat, the roughness of his cheek late in the day, the way his eyes had always watched me when I was undressing.

But did he miss me? Did he even remember me?

The ship was decelerating, of course. That meant that what had been my floor up until the journey’s halfway point was now my ceiling—my world turned upside down.

Earth loomed.

I wasn’t going to dock with any of the space stations orbiting Earth. After all, technology kept advancing, and there was no reason for them to keep thirty-year-old adapter technology around just for the benefit of those of us who’d gone on extrasolar missions. No, my ship, the Astarte —“Ah-star-tee,” as I kept having to remind Greg, who found it funny to call it the Ass Tart —had its own planetary lander, the same one that had taken me down to Athena’s surface, four years ago by my calendar.

I’d shut down the ramjet now and had entered radio communication with Houston, although no one was on hand that I knew; they’d all retired. Still, you would have thought someone might have come by especially for this. NASA put Phileas Fogg to shame when it came to keeping on schedule (yeah, I’d had time to read all the classics in addition to watching all those movies). I could have asked about my husband, about my daughter and son, but I didn’t. Landing took all my piloting skills, and all my concentration. If they weren’t going to be waiting for me at Edwards, I didn’t want to know about it until I was safely back on mother Earth.

I fired retros, deorbited, and watched through the lander’s sheet-diamond windows as flames flew past. All of California was still there, I was pleased to see; I’d been worried that a big hunk of it might have slid into the Pacific in my absence.

Just like a big hunk of my life might have—

No! Concentrate, Cathy. Concentrate. You can worry about all that later.

And, at last, I touched down vertically, in the center of the long runway that stretched across Roger’s Dry Lake.

I had landed.

But was I home?

Greg looked old .

I couldn’t believe it. He’d studied ancient man, and now he’d become one.

Seventy-two.

Some men still looked good at that age: youthful, virile. Others—apparently despite all the medical treatments available in what I realized with a start was now the 22nd century—looked like they had one foot in the grave.

Greg was staring at me, and—God help me—I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Welcome back, Cath,” he said.

Cath. He always called me that; the robot probes always referred to me as Cathy . I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the shorter version.

Greg was no idiot. He was aware that he hadn’t aged well, and was looking for a sign from me. But he was still Greg, still putting things front and center, so that we could deal with them however we were going to. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said.

That wasn’t quite true, but, then again, everything is relative.

Einstein had been a man. I remember being a student, trying to wrap my head around his special theory of relativity, which said there was no privileged frame of reference, and so it was equally true to claim that a spaceship was at rest and Earth was moving away from it as it was to hold the more obvious interpretation, that the ship was moving and Earth was stationary.

But for some reason, time always passed slower on the ship, not on Earth.

Einstein had surely assumed it would be the men who would go out into space, and the women who would stay at home, that the men would return hale and youthful, while the women had stooped over and wrinkled up.

Had that been the case, the women would have been tossed aside, just as Einstein had divorced his own first wife, Mileva. She’d been vacationing with their kids—an older girl and a younger boy, just like Greg and I had—in Switzerland when World War I broke out, and had been unable to return to Albert in Berlin. After a few months—only months!—of this forced separation, he divorced her.

But now Greg and my separation was over. And my husband—if indeed he still was my husband; he could have gotten a unilateral divorce while I was away—was an old man.

“How are Sarah and Jacob?” I asked.

“They’re fine,” said Greg. His voice had lost much of its strength. “Sarah—God, there’s so much to tell you. She stayed in Canada, and is running a big hypertronics company up there. She’s been married, and divorced, and married again. She’s got four daughters and two grandsons.”

So I was a great-grandmother. I swallowed. “And Jacob?”

“Married. Two kids. One granddaughter, another due in April. A professor at Harvard—astronautics, if you can believe that. He used to say he could either follow his dad, looking down, or his mom, looking up.” Greg shrugged his bony shoulders. “He chose the latter.”

“I wish they were here,” I said.

“I asked them to stay away. I wanted to see you first, alone. They’ll be here tomorrow.” He reached out, as if to take my hand the way he used to, but I didn’t respond at once, and his hand, liver-spotted, with translucent skin, fell by his side again. “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” he said.