Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

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 more slowly 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.

* * *

“You wanted it all,” Greg said, sitting opposite me in a little cafe near Edwards Air Force Base. “The whole shebang.” He paused, the first syllable of the word perhaps catching his attention as it had mine. “The whole nine yards.”

“So did you,” I said. “You wanted your hominids, and you wanted your family.” I stopped myself before adding, “And more, besides.”

“What do we do now?” Greg asked.

“What did you do while I was gone?” I replied.

Greg looked down, presumably picturing the archeological remains of his own life. “I married again—no one you knew. We were together for fifteen years, and then …” He shrugged. “And then she died. Another one taken away from me.”