Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound by Joe Haldeman
Authors: Joe Haldeman
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, adventure, Fantasy, Space Opera, Interplanetary voyages, Science fiction; American, Angels, Married People, Human-alien encounters, Mars (Planet), Martians, Space colonies
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except Dr. Porter.
We spent a lot of time sitting around in small groups talking, some about Mars but mostly about who we were and where we came from.
Most of us were from the States, Canada, and Great Britain, because the lottery was based on the amount of funding each country had put into the Mars Project. There were families from Russia and France. The flight following ours, in eighteen months, would have German, Australian, and Japanese families. A regular United Nations, except that everybody spoke English.
My mother talked to the French family in French, to stay in practice; I think some disapproved, as if it was a conspiracy. But they were fast friends by the time we got to the ship. The mother, Jac, was back-up pilot as well as a chemical engineer. I didn't have much to do with their boy Auguste, a little younger than Card. His dad Greg was amusing, though. He'd brought a small guitar along, which he played softly, expertly.
The Russians kept to themselves but were easy enough to get along with. The boy, Yuri, was also a musician. He had a folding keyboard but evidently was shy about playing for others. He would put on earphones and play for hours, from memory or improvising, or reading off the screen. Only a little younger than me, but not too social.
Our doctor on the way to Mars would be Alphonzo Jefferson, who was also a scientist specializing in the immune system; his wife Mary was also a life scientist. Their daughter Belle was about ten, son Oscar maybe two years older.
The Manchester family were from Toronto, the parents both areologists. The kids, Michael and Susan, were ten-year-old twins I hadn't gotten to know. I didn't know Murray and Roberta Parienza well, either, Californians about our age (Murray the younger) whose parents came from Mexico, an astronomer and a chemist.
So our little UN among the younger generation was two Latins, a Russian, two African-Americans, two Israelis, and a Chinese-American, slightly outnumbering us plain white-bread Americans.
We'd all be going to school via VR and e-mail during the six-month flight, though we started going on different days and of course would have class at different times, spread out over eleven time zones. If Yuri had a class at nine in the morning, that would be ten for Davina and Elspeth, eleven for Auguste, five in the afternoon for us Floridians, and eight at night for the Californians. It was going to make the social calendar a little complicated. As if there was anything to do.
Meanwhile, we could enjoy the extra elbow room we got from dumping off the nine tourists. I moved upstairs to sit next to Elspeth, which put Roberta on my right. Dr. Porter rolled her eyes at three teenage females in a row, and told us to keep the noise down or she'd split us up. That wasn't exactly fair, since the little kids were the real noisemakers, and besides, most of our parents were on the second level, too.
But you had to have some sympathy for her. The littlest ones were always testing her to see how far they could go before she applied the ultimate punishment: locked in the seat next to your parents with the VR turned off for X hours. She couldn't hit them—some parents wouldn't mind, but others would have a fit—and she couldn't exactly make them go outside to play, though if she did that once, the others might calm down.
(It was no small trick to get a recalcitrant child back to its place in zero-gee. They'd push off and fly away giggling while she stalked after them with her gecko slippers. Hard to corner somebody in a round room. The parents or other adults usually had to help.)
What finally worked was escalating punishment. Each time she had to strap a kid in, she added fifteen minutes’ VR deprivation to everyone's next punishment, no exceptions. At ten, they were old enough to do the math and started policing themselves—and behaving themselves, a small miracle.
We went a little faster on the second half, and it would've taken only four and a
We spent a lot of time sitting around in small groups talking, some about Mars but mostly about who we were and where we came from.
Most of us were from the States, Canada, and Great Britain, because the lottery was based on the amount of funding each country had put into the Mars Project. There were families from Russia and France. The flight following ours, in eighteen months, would have German, Australian, and Japanese families. A regular United Nations, except that everybody spoke English.
My mother talked to the French family in French, to stay in practice; I think some disapproved, as if it was a conspiracy. But they were fast friends by the time we got to the ship. The mother, Jac, was back-up pilot as well as a chemical engineer. I didn't have much to do with their boy Auguste, a little younger than Card. His dad Greg was amusing, though. He'd brought a small guitar along, which he played softly, expertly.
The Russians kept to themselves but were easy enough to get along with. The boy, Yuri, was also a musician. He had a folding keyboard but evidently was shy about playing for others. He would put on earphones and play for hours, from memory or improvising, or reading off the screen. Only a little younger than me, but not too social.
Our doctor on the way to Mars would be Alphonzo Jefferson, who was also a scientist specializing in the immune system; his wife Mary was also a life scientist. Their daughter Belle was about ten, son Oscar maybe two years older.
The Manchester family were from Toronto, the parents both areologists. The kids, Michael and Susan, were ten-year-old twins I hadn't gotten to know. I didn't know Murray and Roberta Parienza well, either, Californians about our age (Murray the younger) whose parents came from Mexico, an astronomer and a chemist.
So our little UN among the younger generation was two Latins, a Russian, two African-Americans, two Israelis, and a Chinese-American, slightly outnumbering us plain white-bread Americans.
We'd all be going to school via VR and e-mail during the six-month flight, though we started going on different days and of course would have class at different times, spread out over eleven time zones. If Yuri had a class at nine in the morning, that would be ten for Davina and Elspeth, eleven for Auguste, five in the afternoon for us Floridians, and eight at night for the Californians. It was going to make the social calendar a little complicated. As if there was anything to do.
Meanwhile, we could enjoy the extra elbow room we got from dumping off the nine tourists. I moved upstairs to sit next to Elspeth, which put Roberta on my right. Dr. Porter rolled her eyes at three teenage females in a row, and told us to keep the noise down or she'd split us up. That wasn't exactly fair, since the little kids were the real noisemakers, and besides, most of our parents were on the second level, too.
But you had to have some sympathy for her. The littlest ones were always testing her to see how far they could go before she applied the ultimate punishment: locked in the seat next to your parents with the VR turned off for X hours. She couldn't hit them—some parents wouldn't mind, but others would have a fit—and she couldn't exactly make them go outside to play, though if she did that once, the others might calm down.
(It was no small trick to get a recalcitrant child back to its place in zero-gee. They'd push off and fly away giggling while she stalked after them with her gecko slippers. Hard to corner somebody in a round room. The parents or other adults usually had to help.)
What finally worked was escalating punishment. Each time she had to strap a kid in, she added fifteen minutes’ VR deprivation to everyone's next punishment, no exceptions. At ten, they were old enough to do the math and started policing themselves—and behaving themselves, a small miracle.
We went a little faster on the second half, and it would've taken only four and a
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