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"Oh, there are perks," the aging pilot mused. He wasn't bored, but he had had this conversation in a bar on Earth far too often. As always, though, for the young crewmember the details of hyperspace travel were new and important.
"I mean," he continued, "We're just truckers in outer space. We take things from here to there. We are the bridges in the universe. The only difference is the time element. Hyperspace travel lets us jump around the universe, but the days we spend traveling are years or centuries on the planets we left behind. We can return after a few of our minutes, and the people we left are much older and barely remember us."
"Are we all loners then, outsiders or misfits by choice? Maybe, but I think we live out each experience more passionately than the groundhogs. We interact with all kinds of creatures at every stage of development spread out over a distance of some 10 billion light years. I would claim that the bonds we forge are more intense, since we know how unique and fleeting they are. The memories of the people I have encountered are stored permanently in my cranial neurons. I keep their memories alive."
"Tell you a story? Sure; I've got thousands of them ― literally. Back in my younger days I did both short hops and long hauls. Can't do the long hops any more though. They take too much out of you; you end up having your internal nanobots replaced every other week."
"Anyway, I was doing some intergalactic jumps when I met Ann here on Earth, which happened to be one of the transit hubs I ended up at fairly often. She was a schoolteacher, and a little hellion, aggressive, feisty, a determined kid who knew what she wanted. She brought her class to tour my hyperspace ship, and it was like having the ship infested with fleas. She let the kids run up and down the walls, get into everything, open doors and flaps, press all the buttons."
"If I didn't have to do these community-service gigs to get reduced rental rates at the space harbor, I would have turned on the ship's defense system and blown them all out onto the tarmac. Fortunately, they didn't damage anything, other than my nerves. Ann did notice that, because once she shooed the kids home, she invited me for a drink to make up for the hellish afternoon she had caused me."
"Of course I said yes. She wasn't what you'd call a sex bombshell, but she was good looking, and I thought, why not. For an hour or so I even thought I had a chance with her."
"She told me how she had made a career mistake by becoming a primary school teacher. This was the most extreme bovine excrement I had ever heard. If there was ever a born teacher, it was this crazy little bundle of energy. Of course I didn't contradict her, just asked what she would prefer to do. She said she sometimes wished she had become a doctor so she could join spacefleet's corps of medical personnel and dart around the universe fixing people up after accidents."
"At first I thought she wanted to travel, and hey, I would have offered her a job on my crew no questions asked. But no, she had this wacko idea about helping people, fixing broken bones, saving lives, whatever."
"I gently tried to point out to her that hands-on medical work gets done by robots. They are more accurate and can sterilize their extremities before they go to work. The human doctors end up being health care managers, who coordinate budgets, allotments, and travel expenses. Plus, the really bad accidents in space, like plowing into an uncharted star when you exit hyperspace, don't leave enough body tissue to repair."
"As it turned out, she was just indulging in a temporary, little fantasy. Her future was planned out in excruciating detail. She had a fiancé, some kind of podiatrist or something, and was planning a traditional partnership ceremony to be followed by a monogamous relationship raising, as many offspring as she could get government permission for."
"Since she planned to give up her profession to raise her children, she said it didn't really matter what she did until then. She said she was relieved to have found a boyfriend who shared the same values as she did, whatever that meant."
"I met the boyfriend later, pleasant enough fellow, didn't seem particularly enamored of her, but since he had agreed to all her plans, I figured she had probably made a good choice. Besides, her pride in staying sexually inexperienced for her future husband was a definite turn-off. Funny, she wasn't wacko religious or anything, just determined to do what was proper."
"Pure coincidence made me take a hop back to Earth not much later to deliver some secret software. That stuff is always sent by private courier anymore; you can't trust any kind of electronic transmission. If one nerd can invent an algorithm for perfect secrecy, it's only a matter of hours until the next nerd breaks the code."
"Anyway, there I was, hanging around to see if I could scrounge up some kind of business to make my trip to my next customer profitable, when this scruffy-looking, skinny kid named Randy ran up and asked if I would give him a lift."
"He was a programmer and felt like taking a break. He wanted to return to his dream of being a rock singer. So, guitar in hand, he was off to hit some new bars and clubs."
"I assumed he was smuggling out software he developed for his previous employer to sell somewhere else, but hey, that was no epidermis off my proboscis. I said I would appreciate the company."
"It turned out that I was wrong; he was just what he seemed, a happy-go-lucky, spontaneous, friendly, little critter. Further conversation revealed him to be a genius of a programmer who had to beat off headhunters at every turn as well as a devout hedonist who felt you should take the pleasure life offers you at every opportunity."
"Randy did programming for companies until he felt like taking off with his guitar and singing. Eventually some headhunter would make him a new monetary offer he couldn't refuse, and then he'd go back to a day job."
"I dropped him off at the center of the city and tried to hustle up more contracts. Unfortunately, I had a slow couple of weeks. I got so desperate that I started hitting local social events in the hopes of drumming up business."
"We free-lance spaceship pilots were always getting invited places. Damned if I know why; I always felt like I was the newest addition to the zoo the way the groundhogs gaped at me. One high-on-the-hog hoedown was a convention dinner for teachers, and I saw Ann there without her podiatrist."
"Damned if Randy wasn't up on the stage singing his heart out. Maybe I just don't appreciate music, but I remember thinking it was a good thing that he had his programmer's ability. His music was crap. However, since these two were the only people I knew there, as a joke, I introduced them to each other, figuring that there were no two people on Earth who had less in common."
"I was right, but it was love at first sight for both of them, encouraged perhaps by their mutual appreciation of a popular, illegal, hallucinogenic substance, one of the few vices Ann allowed herself. Randy was more open to better living through chemistry."
"It turned out that Ann's podiatrist was off on a long internship somewhere, and Randy's girlfriend didn't expect him back at any definite point in time since they each taken a vow of spontaneity. I never in my life saw two people connect so suddenly and so completely as Ann and Randy. They were immediately inseparable."
"I doubt that Ann's moral steadfastness allowed her to indulge in the sexual activity with her new soulmate that she denied her fiancé. They just found themselves in a passionate, mutual admiration society, obviously and publicly rejoicing in each other's company. They were so completely happy in each other's presence that outsiders couldn't even be jealous. All of us spectators just felt amazed."
"Shortly thereafter I got a few solar-system gigs, transporting information to the Oort Cloud and back, which meant a short time of work for me but an absence from Earth of many years. When I got back, I ran into Ann. She and the podiatrist were legally and religiously partnered, living in a cramped apartment, working hard and saving money to buy a house and start a family."
"She seemed content, but not exuberantly happy. I asked about Randy, and she spoke fondly of him, calling him the sweet reminder of her youthful past. She said that she had invited him to the wedding, but he hadn't come. She honestly couldn't understand why he had never answered any letters, but figured he had forgotten her along the way."
"Eventually I also ran into Randy, and he was devastated. He had assumed until the very end that Ann would end her engagement, quit her job, and join him in his nomadic existence, since they were so completely compatible. Randy had even contemplated giving up his promiscuous lifestyle and trying monogamy, at least for a short time."
"He never understood how Ann could stick so stubbornly to her plans of a life with the podiatrist when she had a better offer. I of course have never understood the course of love, true or otherwise. So I couldn't help him."
"Then I was off on longer gigs, out to the research station around Proxima Centauri. There were fun times, encounters with pleasant sentient life forms, a few dangerous situations. Still I never forgot Randy and Ann, and always wondered ..."
"Back on Earth, after 15 of their years had gone by, I discovered Randy was in business for himself, doing damn well and taking off half of the time to sing in local clubs. His voice hadn't improved, but he bribed the clubs generously, so he had his choice of audiences."
"I forget how many children Ann had, more than I expected, but government policy didn't make money the only criterion when determining who should be allowed to reproduce repeatedly. I think she even named one of her sons Randy."
"By now the podiatrist only showed up at irregular intervals; he had other women in his life and other interests besides his children. Ann had returned to teaching. She was proud of her own children and puzzled that her podiatrist hadn't been satisfied with their life."
"Then I was off again; I forget how many different sectors of the universe I visited. They had just invented a new hyperspace accelerator, and I was one of the first guinea pigs to try it out. You could travel farther and faster, which meant that you weren't away from your home base as long."
"The next time I returned, Ann was old and bitter. Financial problems had kept her from giving her children the advantages she had dreamed of. It had been difficult to get a teaching job after being out of the workforce for many years, and she never really wanted to teach anyway. The kids in her classes loved her, but she thought her whole life was a failure."
"The podiatrist was already on his fourth wife and had very little interest left for the first. I offered her a ride around the planet on my new flyer, and she readily agreed. Because I am a hopeless romantic and a blithering idiot, we ended up at the club where I knew Randy was going to sing that night."
"Ann insists he never recognized her from the stage, but I caught the gazes, doubt, hurt, and then crazed happiness. After the first show, he rushed down to our table and I felt the time warp opening up. The three of us were back when and where they first met. Oh, the bodies were older and the minds more cynical, but their feelings were rejuvenated."
"They joked and laughed, and started talking about a search for that certain, illegal, hallucinogenic substance when an extraterrestrial patron lumbered up to Randy. Most places on the planet were trying to attract off-planet tourists, since the galactic currency was overvalued. However, there were problems people should have expected with culture shock and inadequate translation."
"Anyway, this extraterrestrial pulled out a weapon I recognized from the Centauri system, but before I could knock it out of his hand, he fired at Randy, causing him irreparable nerve damage that spread rapidly."
"I yanked the emergency doc off the wall, and the robot worked like crazy, infusing Randy with all kinds of industrious little nanobots to clean up the mess, but they couldn't catch up. The nerves were self-destructing faster and faster. Ann held Randy's hand, and they continued to talk and laugh, oblivious to the rest of us, until he died."
"It turned out that the alien thought Randy's songs insulted his family, a simple mistake in translation. The case was referred to the local galactic jurisdiction, but I never bothered to find out what came of it."
"I flew Ann home, but the next day I got a sudden commission taking me out of the local supercluster. By the time I returned, Ann's youngest daughter was now an old woman. She showed me the recordings Ann had managed to collect of Randy's songs and said they were a great comfort to her mother while she was dying of the weird disease that hit her a few years after Randy died."
"The doctors suspected that the illegal, hallucinogenic substance she had been so fond of in her youth had made permanent changes at the cellular level which hampered the internal nanobots once her disease was discovered. They couldn't get the nanobots reprogrammed fast enough to battle her disease. Ann had said wryly, if only Randy had still been alive, he was the one programmer who might have managed the feat."
"A sad and pathetic story you say? I disagree. I could tell you many stories about life forms I have had the privilege to meet. The saddest ones are about the entities who live and die without having made a difference or an impression on anyone. Randy and Ann had something special between them, though brief, and they only made a difference to each other. That's enough for me. The time I was with them was well-spent, and the time they spent together was beyond price."
"Buy me a drink, and I'll tell you another story."