David Brin - Earth

Not in so many words, of course. Their intentions were fine. Under normal circumstances it would be cruel to scrutinize a recent survivor so. But Teresa wasn’t normal. She was an astronaut. A pilot astronaut. And if some all-knowing physician prescribed for her right now, the slip might say — “Surround her with competent people. Keep her busy, useful. That will do more good than a thousand floral gifts or ten million sympathy-grams.”

Certainly she’d been traumatized. That was why she also cooperated with the NASA psychers, letting them guide her through all the stages of catharsis and healing. She wept. She railed against fate and wept again. Though each step in grieving was accomplished efficiently, that didn’t mean she felt it any less than a normal person. She just felt it all faster. Teresa didn’t have time to be normal.

Finally, the technical types had finished sifting her story to the last detail. Other questioners took over then — center chiefs, agency directors, congressional committees. Masters of policy.

Sitting next to Mark at hearing after hearing, Teresa felt waves of ennui as she listened to the same praise, the same lofty sentiments. Oh, not every public servant was posing. Most were intelligent, hardworking people, after their own fashion. But theirs was a realm as alien to her as the bottom of the sea. She was sworn to protect this system, but that didn’t make sitting through it any easier.

“They talk and talk… but they never ask any of the real questions!” she muttered to Mark, sotto voce.

“Just keep smiling,” he whispered back. “It’s what we’re paid for, now.”

Teresa sighed. Anyone in NASA who refused her turn in the public relations barrel was a slacker who did real harm. But why did your smile-burden multiply whenever you did something particularly well? Was that any way to repay initiative? If there were justice, it’d be Colonel Glenn Spivey and the other peepers forced to sit through this, and she’d get the reward she wanted most.

To get back to work.

To help find out what had killed forty people. Including her husband.

Instead, Spivey was probably in the thick of things, helping design a new station, while she had to endure media attention any Hollywood star would swoon for.

As weeks passed, she began suspecting there was more to this than just an awkward overlap of two cultures. They kept urging her to do chat shows and go on lecture circuits. Or, if either she or Mark wanted to take off on a two-month vacation on St. Croix, that would be all right, too.

Tempted by a chance to graduate from astronaut to superstar, Mark succumbed. But not Teresa. She was adamant. And finally she asserted her right to go home.

A domestic service had come by regularly to water the plants. Still, the Clear Lake condo felt cryptlike when she walked through the front door. She went from window to window, letting in the listless, heavy-sweet smells of Texas springtime. Even traffic noise was preferable to the silence.

NASA had forwarded her important messages, providing secretaries to handle fan mail and bills. So she was denied even the solace of busywork during those awkward first hours. Her autosec flashed the queue of her clipping program… a backlog of fifteen thousand headlines culled from news services and Net-zines in every time zone. She flushed everything having to do with the accident, and the tally dropped below a hundred. Those she might scan later, to catch up with what was happening in the world.

Teresa wandered room to room, not exactly avoiding thoughts of Jason, but neither did she go straight to the photo album, shelved between the bound-paper encyclopedia and her husband’s collection of rare comic books. She didn’t need photographs or holo-pages in order to replay moments from her marriage. They were all in her head — the good and not so good — available on ready recall.

All too ready…

She slipped two hours of Vivaldi into the sheet-reader and went out to the patio with a glass of orange juice. (Someone had read her file and left two liters of the real thing in her cooler, fresh squeezed from Oregon oranges.)

Beyond the polarized UV screen, Teresa looked out on the swaying elms sheltering several blocks of low apartment buildings, ending abruptly at the white dikes NASA had erected against the rising Gulf of Mexico. The tracks of a new rapitrans line ran atop the levee. Trains swept past on faintly humming superconducting rails.

A bluebird landed on the balcony and chirped at her, drawing a brief smile. When she was little, bluebirds had been threatened all over North America by competition from starlings and other invaders brought to the continent by prior, careless generations of humans. Worried devotees of native fauna built thousands of shelters to help them survive, but still it seemed touch and go for the longest time.

Now, like the elms, bluebirds were resurgent. Just as no one could have predicted which plants or animals would suffer most from the depleted ozone and dryer climate, nobody seemed to have imagined some might actually benefit. But apparently, in a few cases, it was so.

On the downside, Teresa remembered one awful autumn when she and Jason came home almost daily to find pathetic creatures dying on the lawn. Or worse, hopping about in panic because they could no longer see.

Blind robins. Some threshold had been reached, and within weeks they were all dead. Since then Teresa sometimes wondered — had the extinction been universal? Or was the die-off just a local “adjustment,” restricted to south Texas? A few words to her autosecretary would send a ferret program forth to fetch the truth in milliseconds. But then, what good would knowing do? The Net was such a vast sea of information, sipping from it sometimes felt like trying to slake your thirst from a fire hose.

Besides, she often found the Net tedious. So many people saw it as a great soapbox from which to preach recipes for planetary salvation.

Solutions. Everybody’s got solutions.

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One group wanted to draft the entire space program into an effort to suspend ozone generators in the stratosphere. A preposterous idea, but at least it was bold and assertive, unlike the panacea offered by those calling for the abandonment of technology altogether, and a return to “simpler ways.” As if simpler ways could feed ten billion people.

As if simpler ways hadn’t also done harm. Astronauts suffered few illusions about the so-called “benign pastoral life-style,” having seen from space the deserts spread by earlier civilizations — Sumerians, Chinese, Berbers, Amerinds — armed with little more than sheep, fire, and primitive agriculture.

Teresa had her own ideas about solutions. There were more riches on the moon and asteroids than all the bean counters in all the capitals of the world could add up in their combined lifetimes. Lots of astronauts shared the dream of using space to cure Earth’s ills.

She and Jason had. They had met in training, and at first it had seemed some magical dating service must have intervened on their behalf. It went beyond obvious things, like their shared profession.

No. I just never met anyone who could make me laugh so.

Their consensus had extended to shopping among the pattern-marriage styles currently in vogue. After long discussion, they finally selected a motif drawn up by a consultant recommended by some other couples they knew. And it seemed to work. Jealousy never loomed as a question between them.

Until late last year, that is.

Until that Morgan woman appeared.

Teresa knew she was being unfair. She might as well blame Glenn Spivey. It was also about when Jason started working for that awful man that their troubles began.