Robert Sawyer: Relativity

You can’t have brothers without being familiar with Planet of the Apes . I’m not talking about the “re-imaging” done by Tim Burton, apparently much ballyhooed in its day, but the Franklin J. Schaffner original—the one that’s stood the test of time, the one that, even a hundred years after it was made, boys still watch.

Of course, one of the reasons boys enjoy it is it’s very much a guy film. Oh, there had been a female astronaut along for the ride with Chuck Heston, but she died during the long space voyage, leaving just three macho men to meet the simians. The woman ended up a hideous corpse when her suspended-animation chamber failed, and even her name—“Stewart”—served to desexualize her.

Me, I liked the old Alien films better. Ellen Ripley was a survivor, a fighter. But, in a way, those movies were a cheat, too. When you got right down to it, Sigourney Weaver was playing a man—and you couldn’t even say, as one of my favorite (female) writers does, that she was playing “a man with tits and hips”—’cause ole Sigourney, she really didn’t have much of either. Me, I’ve got not enough of one and too much of the other.

I’d had time to watch all five Apes films, all four Alien films, and hundreds of other movies during my long voyage out to Athena, and during the year I’d spent exploring that rose-colored world. Never saw an ape, or anything that grabbed onto my face or burst out of my chest—but I did make lots of interesting discoveries that I’m sure I’ll be spending the rest of my life telling the people of Earth about.

And now, I had just about finished the long voyage home. Despite what had happened to Apes ’s Stewart, I envied her her suspended-animation chamber. After all, the voyage back from Athena had taken three long years.

It was an odd thing, being a spacer. My grandfather used to talk about people “going postal” and killing everyone around them. At least the United States Postal Service had lasted long enough to see that term retired, in favor of “going Martian.”

That had been an ugly event. The first manned—why isn’t there a good non-sexist word for that? Why does “crewed” have to be a homonym for “crude"? Anyway, the first manned mission to Mars had ended up being a bloodbath; the ebook about it— The Red Planet —had been the most popular download for over a year.

That little experiment in human psychology finally taught NASA what the reality-television shows of a generation earlier had failed to: that you can’t force a bunch of alpha males—or alpha females, for that matter—together, under high-pressure circumstances, and expect everything to go fine. Ever since then, manned—that damn word again—spaceflight had involved only individual astronauts, a single human to watch over the dumb robotic probes and react to unforeseen circumstances.

When I said “single human” a moment ago, maybe you thought I meant “unmarried.” Sure, it would seem to make sense that they’d pick a loner for this kind of job, some asocial bookworm—hey, do you remember when books were paper and worms weren’t computer viruses?

But that didn’t work, either. Those sorts of people finally went stir-crazy in space, mostly because of overwhelming regret. They’d never been married, never had kids. While on Earth, they could always delude themselves into thinking that someday they might do those things, but, when there’s not another human being for light-years around, they had to face bitter reality.

And so NASA started sending out—well, color me surprised: more sexism! There’s a term “family man” that everyone understands, but there’s no corresponding “family woman,” or a neutral “family person.” But that’s what I was: a family woman—a woman with a husband and children, a woman devoted to her family.

And yet…

And yet my children were grown. Sarah was nineteen when I’d left Earth, and Jacob almost eighteen.

And my husband, Greg? He’d been forty-two, like me. But we’d endured being apart before. Greg was a paleoanthropologist. Three, four months each year, he was in South Africa. I’d gone along once, early in our marriage, but that was before the kids.

Damn ramscoop caused enough radio noise that communication with Earth was impossible. I wondered what kind of greeting I’d get from my family when I finally returned.

“You’re going where ?” Greg always did have a flair for the dramatic.

“Athena,” I said, watching him pace across our living room. “It’s the fourth planet of—”

“I know what it is, for Pete’s sake. How long will the trip take?”

“Total, including time on the planet? Seven years. Three out, one exploring, and three back.”

“Seven years!”

“Yes,” I said. Then, averting my eyes, I added, “From my point of view.”

“What do you mean, ‘From your point … ?’ Oh. Oh, crap. And how long will it be from my point of view?”

“Thirty years.”

“Thirty! Thirty! Thirty…”

“Just think of it, honey,” I said, getting up from the couch. “When I return, you’ll have a trophy wife, twenty-three years your junior.”

I’d hoped he would laugh at that. But he didn’t. Nor did he waste any time getting to the heart of the matter. “You don’t seriously expect me to wait for you, do you?”

I sighed. “I don’t expect anything. All I know is that I can’t turn this down.”

“You’ve got a family. You’ve got kids.”

“Lots of people go years without seeing their kids. Sarah and Jacob will be fine.”

“And what about me?”

I draped my arms around his neck, but his back was as stiff as a rocket. “You’ll be fine, too” I said.

So am I a bad mother? I certainly wasn’t a bad one when I’d been on Earth. I’d been there for every school play, every soccer game. I’d read to Sarah and Jacob, and taught Sarah to cook. Not that she needed to know how: instant food was all most people ever ate. But she liked to cook, and I did, too, and to hell with the fact that it was a traditional female thing to do.

The mission planners thought they were good psychologists. They’d taken holograms of Jacob and Sarah just before I’d left, and had computer-aged them three decades, in hopes of preparing me for how they’d look when we were reunited. But I’d only ever seen such things in association with missing children and their abductors, and looking at them—looking at a Sarah who was older now than I myself was, with a lined face and gray in her hair and angle brackets at the corners of her eyes—made me worry about all the things that could have happened to my kids in my absence.

Jacob might have had to go and fight in some goddamned war. Sarah might have, too—they drafted women for all positions, of course, but she was older than Jacob, and the president always sent the youngest children off to die first.

Sarah could have had any number of kids by now. She’d been going to school in Canada when I left, and the ZPG laws—the zed-pee-gee laws, as they called them up there—didn’t apply in that country. And those kids—

Those kids, my grandkids, could be older now than my own kids had been when I’d left them behind. I’d wanted to have it all: husband, kids, career, the stars. And I’d come darn close—but I’d almost certainly missed out on one of the great pleasures of life, playing with and spoiling grandchildren.

Of course, Sarah and Jacob’s kids might have had kids of their own by now, which would make me their…

Oh, my.

Their great-grandmother . At a biological age of 49 when I return to Earth, maybe that would qualify me for a listing in Guinness eBook of Solar System Records .