Lifeline

Clancy snorted. “I wish they’d get it over with. They’ve had a team of guards by his sleepfreeze chamber for the past three years.”

“Mars may be the best thing for all of us,” Wiay answered.

“Not me,” Clancy said. “I had enough dirt between my toes on Clavius Base. But if the Soviets can make a go of anything, it’ll be getting that colony established. Anna Tripolk seems to be fully recovered now, but a lot of people would still be happy to have her a bit farther away. Once she’s got her mind focused on something, I’m not going to get in her way.”

Wiay sounded wistful. “Cliffy, you can’t tell me you didn’t have any fun on the Moon.”

Clancy snorted. “Our daughter is not going to grow up speaking Russian—okay, so call me a throwback to pre-War patriotism. But I don’t want to miss a day of her life, not even in sleepfreeze. She’ll grow up and lead a normal life here on Orbitech 2.”

Wiay stuck out her tongue. “Spoilsport.”

Ramis turned his thoughts back to the Kibalchich. Mars! If he could talk Karen into going …

He said quietly, “I must get back to the Aguinaldo and inform Dobo of my plans. Since Father Magsaysay died, Dobo is the last family I have there.”

Clancy shifted his daughter and placed a hand on Ramis’s shoulder. “You can always come here to visit us.”

“If I go to Mars, it might be fifteen years before I come back—or never.”

Wiay grinned at him and took her daughter from Clancy’s arms. “In fifteen years, Lang Ti will be old enough to make you settle down.”

Ramis blushed and pointedly looked out the viewport as Wiay and Clancy both laughed. Through the transparent sections of the huge enclosed greenhouse dome of Orbitech 2, he saw a tiny dot fluttering in the open volume. The dot grew larger, approaching one of the window sections. Stubby wings flapped gracefully as the sail-creature nymph soared in its zero-G environment.

The nymph flew free with a dozen or so other creatures, unhindered by people or structures in the core. It had no boundaries, room to do what it wanted. Ramis felt a kinship with it.

He had to go to Mars.

“Salamat po, Sarat,” Ramis whispered to himself as he watched the sail-creature gracefully flap away. “Thank you, Timely One!”

Afterword: Lifeline Origins

Doug Beason

It must have been the second or third get-together after Kevin and I first met when we discussed collaborating on a short story. I was in California for the summer of ’85 on sabbatical and had looked up this energetic young writer who had a reputation for churning out short stories like normal people breathed. We hit it off, and as most writers did, we talked incessantly about our craft and what it took to make it big.

At the end of summer we’d hammered out the outline for a story that quickly sold to Full Spectrum, an ’80s version of Dangerous Visions. The story gave Kevin and me near-instant credibility as a writing team. Later that year, Kevin met David Brin, who was putting together an anthology called Project Solar Sail. The idea of using photon pressure from sunlight to accelerate spaceships captured the imagination of SF writers and readers alike. It was an efficient, environmentally-clean propulsion concept that struck a cultural chord.

Brin encouraged Kevin to submit a story to the anthology, and with characteristic excitement, Kevin called me, bubbling with energy over an idea he’d had about collaborating for Brin’s anthology. Our Full Spectrum story had dealt with an intelligent man-made plasma, a living entity that evolved the equivalent of millions of years in mere minutes. For Brin’s anthology, Kevin’s idea was to use a living entity, rather than lightweight, wispy metal sheets, for the sails.

Looking back on it, this was typically how Kevin and I decided to collaborate on a work: one of us would have the germ of an idea, and batting it back and forth, a synergistic result would mature, eventually cascading into a full-blown story.

In the “what if” stage that followed, we thought up reasons why people would use organic sails. We envisioned a not-too-distant future where humans had established a presence in space, living in large space stations that were dependent on Earth for supplies. Solar sails might be used to travel between the stations, but we couldn’t come up with a reason why people would do that. Solar sails are accelerated by light pressure, and it takes too long to get enough speed to make traveling that way practical in Earth’s orbit. (Solar sails are much better suited for interstellar travel, when the ever-increasing velocity from photon pressure would efficiently accelerate the sails to near light speed.) It would be much easier to use chemical propulsion—plain-old rockets—to travel between the space stations.