Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  No. His task was in some ways ethically easier, but practically much more difficult.

  He had to figure out how to minimize those losses. He had to find ways to improve the yield on the next Pass, to harvest enough food with the equipment they had so that some of the losses below would not be as severe.

  If he had the experience his predecessor had, he might make the right decisions. But Cicoi was new to the job, without training, and fearful of the consequences. He had seen the battles with the creatures from the third planet. He realized now what he had not seen on the last several Passes.

  These were not primitives. These were creatures that had in common with Malmuria a mind and a heart. They too had died defending their lands. They had technology, and with it, a memory. They would do all they could to fight again.

  He could not assume that they would be as easily defeated this time.

  At least the energy screens and panels were working at full efficiency. Malmur was taking all that it could from this sun, storing it, and keeping it so that the planet would survive the dark part of its long orbit.

  Cicoi raised his eyestalks toward the sky. The light that Malmur received in this, its nearest contact to the sun, was thin and pale and extremely weak. Still, the brightness all but overwhelmed him. He pocketed seven of his eyestalks and continued to look above. Strange to think that something so simple as light, something so small as heat, would affect a world like theirs.

  This was the only time in the entire Wakening Cycle that he could stand on the balcony without the warmers being activated. The balcony was usually not used because warmers were a waste of energy.

  He usually valued his time here.

  But not today. Today he knew how much it cost.

  He turned and glided toward the doors. They eased open. His assistants were standing on their circles, working their floating units, attempting to maximize effort. His Second was bent over a representation of the third planet, looking for the lushest region, the place with the fewest creatures and the most food.

  Cicoi was beginning to believe such places did not exist any longer.

  As he glided to his circle in the center of the room, his assistants rose on the tips of their lower tentacles and raised their eyestalks so that all faced him. He waved a careless eye-stalk at them all.

  “I thank you for the honor,” he said. “But continue your work.”

  He would continue his. He unpocketed two more eyestalks and raised a small image of the third planet for his own use when he heard ten soft chimes.

  Irritation made his lower tentacles curl. Only he could ring the chimes, and then only when he had an emergency. He raised all of his eyestalks and bent them in displeasure at his assistants.

  They had flattened themselves on the floor, tentacles covering each other in proper pattern.

  The chimes sounded again, ten times, and as he heard each, he realized that these were not his chimes. They were too high-pitched, too warm.

  Too old.

  A shiver made his eyestalks stand on end. His assistants lowered themselves farther. At first, they had apparently thought, as he had, that the chimes had come from him. But on the second chiming, they realized, as he had, that the chimes had come from a higher authority.

  Indeed, the highest authority.

  The Elders.

  Cicoi let his own lower tentacles slither outward. Nothing was normal about this Awakening. Nothing was going as it should.

  He had never heard of a summoning by the Elders. Not in a hundred Passes.

  The Elders were the survivors, the brains of the Ancients who had first designed Malmur for its journey across interstellar space. When Malmur was knocked out of its orbit around its original sun, it was the Elders who devised the plan that had saved them all. To make sure Malmur survived its centuries-long travels across deep space, the Elders left their bodies and only lived in an energy-free form, almost pure thought, in the center of Malmur. They had not communicated with any leader since the very first cycle of this new star.

  Some even said the Elders had allowed themselves to be recycled long ago, that the Elders no longer watched over the Malmuria, that the Malmuria were on their own.

  And many of the dissenters used as proof the loss of seven ships, and the disaster that lay ahead.

  Again the chimes sounded. Cicoi pocketed all but one of his eyestalks. His lower tentacles were splayed across the floor. He could not cower here, like his assistants. He was a young leader no longer. He was Commander of the South, and those chimes were for him.

  If tradition was to be followed, and it would be, then the series of chimes would ring ten times. If he was not in the Elders Circle by the last of the chimes, he would no longer hold his position as Commander of the South.

  He was tempted. He had lost the arrogance that had made him one of the youngest generals in the fleet. He knew that he had been promoted past his skills, that the tasks laid out for him had defeated a better person.

  But Cicoi was not a coward. Slowly he slid his tentacles beneath him. Then he wrapped his upper tentacles around his body and glided from the room.

  That the Elders had sought him out worried him, but he knew the summons was based on the loss of ships, the destruction that had happened on the third planet. In that, he found comfort. The Malmuria still had their greatest minds to help them solve the problems.

  No. That was not what worried him. What worried him was the fact that the situation had become so grave, the Elders had again taken interest in Malmur. Until now, they had been content to allow the Malmuria to handle their own problems.

  The Elders must have felt that this problem was beyond the Malmuria’s skills. So the situation was as extraordinary as Cicoi feared it was.

  And his worst fear, the one he could barely admit to himself, was that the situation was so extraordinary, not even the Elders would know how to make things right.

  2

  April 26, 2018

  1:13 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time

  171 Days Until Second Harvest

  For two days, Leo Cross had been working in the swirling black dust. His skin still crawled when he thought about where the dust had come from, but he thought about it less often.

  He was standing in the center of what had once been a populated area. He wasn’t familiar enough with Monterey to know exactly what the area was, or who had populated it, and for once, he was glad he didn’t know.

  He wore an environmental suit provided by the Army, but instead of a gas mask, he wore a simple doctor’s mask over his mouth and nose. His eyes were covered with welder’s goggles, and he had a hat with flaps that covered his ears. The dust still got into everything—his clothing, his shoes, even under his fingernails—but not in the quantity he had first feared. Even though he knew the short-term effects of this stuff were negligible, he was worried about the long term.

  If the human race had a long term coming to it.

  Jamison was working about a block away. They had discovered that, if they worked side by side, the dust cloud was almost unmanageable. Because the wands hadn’t been designed for work in such fine material, the slight pressure with which the wands sorted through the dust created a cloud. Cross discovered that, unless he shut off his wand for nearly five minutes, the dust wouldn’t settle. Even though the days had been sunny, he had felt as if he were working in twilight. What light he did get was filtered through the blackness and felt ominous. The times in the day when the ocean breeze picked up and cleared the dust clouds faster were the best.

  It didn’t help that the wand jammed a lot. Large items like snaps and zippers from clothing, pins that had once been in someone’s hip, or even—God help him—dental fillings jammed the machine hourly. He actually began making a pile of the stuff on the first day and quit when the pile had become a mound.

  He didn’t like to think about what it symbolized. All those lives lost. So many that the U.S. government was now saying it doubted it could account for all of them. There
were no bodies left to identify. Whenever people were reported missing from that particular area, they were considered dead. It was the only way the government could deal with the numbers. It also prevented a ton of lawsuits that survivors were going to file against the insurance industry.

  Although Cross knew those lawsuits would get filed, no self-respecting insurance company covered its clients for “death resulting from alien attack.”

  He shook his head. His humor had become mordant, probably due to a lack of sleep. He quit at sundown, just as Jamison did, but every time he closed his eyes, he could hear the clinking and then silence that resulted whenever something got stuck in the wand. That first night, he had slept and dreamed of finding fingers, or bones, or eyes when he went to clear the jam.

  He had awakened, a scream buried in his throat, and found it difficult to sleep soundly again. It didn’t surprise him to see Jamison up as well. The two of them were now trading a stack of quarters back and forth from their penny-ante midnight poker games, neither of them wanting to admit that anything was better than sleep.

  Cross’s shoulders hurt, and so did the small of his back, but he kept working. Neither he nor Jamison had found one of the nanomachines yet, but he knew they would.

  A hand touched Cross’s shoulder and he jerked. He turned to see Jamison, dust covering his mask and goggles, indicating with his head that it was time for lunch.

  Eating lunch was almost as difficult as sleeping, but Cross knew he had to do at least one. If he went without food and sleep he would be of no use to anyone.

  He shut off the wand and let the dust settle. It floated around him like ash on the air. If he breathed just right, he could keep some of the flakes airborne. The entire scenario freaked him out.

  He waited until the flakes settled slightly, blown on a slight breeze to his right, revealing the blue sky above him and the miles of blackness in front of him. Somewhere in all of that, a single nanomachine, smaller than anything he could imagine himself making, waited. Maybe more than a single one.

  He had to find it.

  He turned, felt the dust swirl around his feet, and looked at the ocean. Its blueness met the blueness of the sky at the horizon. Even if the aliens came and harvested again, destroying any possibility for mankind to continue on the Earth, the ocean would still be here, reflecting beautifully toward the sky.

  He found comfort in that.

  “Come on, Leo!” Jamison shouted.

  One of the trucks had arrived with the afternoon grub. Usually Jamison and Cross had to slog to the nearest base. But this time, Jamison was eating a burger from the side of the truck, looking like a chimney sweep at a tailgate party.

  The image made Cross smile. He walked carefully through the gunk until he reached the edge of the road. Then he waited for the dust to settle again. No sense in getting it on Jamison’s food.

  Cross’s stomach was growling. He’d only had a banana for breakfast, and only because he knew he had to eat something. He barely remembered dinner the night before. Some spaghetti-like thing in the mess hall. Mostly he hadn’t eaten. He had pushed the food around pretending to eat.

  A burger actually sounded good.

  It sounded normal.

  An Army officer sat inside the truck with the door open. He was eating, too. The burgers were wrapped in aluminum with a fast-food logo on the side. He took a bacon cheeseburger, still warm, from the bag, and some soggy French fries. They tasted like a bit of salted heaven.

  The officer, a blond man in his early twenties, handed Cross a Coke.

  Cross took it and drank. The lemony sweetness tasted good, too. He had to take better care of himself.

  He was halfway through the cheeseburger when the officer spoke.

  “Dr. Cross?”

  “Mmm?” Cross hated answering when his mouth was full.

  “That’s him,” Jamison said, reaching around him for another burger. “Damn, this is fine food.”

  Cross swallowed. “Is this what football players consider gourmet?”

  “Only if it has catsup,” Jamison said, unwrapping the burger and taking a huge bite.

  Cross wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did you need me for something?” he asked the officer.

  The officer nodded. He looked even younger than twenty, with his blond crew cut and his flaming red sunburn. His eyes had shadows beneath them, though, just like everyone else who worked on this project. It was their version of the thousand-yard stare.

  “I wish I could say I was only here to bring you lunch, but you’re wanted in Washington, sir, and I’m not allowed to leave until I take you with me.”

  Jamison shot him a look. Cross took a final bite of his burger, then set the rest of it down. It no longer tasted as good.

  “I’ve already told them I’m staying here,” Cross said.

  “I’m not supposed to take no for an answer. General Maddox’s orders, sir.”

  The officer said General Maddox’s name as if she were God. And maybe to him she was. She was one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and also a representative on the panel that formed the Tenth Planet Project. She had, during the Project’s existence, kept it on track and given it validity throughout the military structure. She had also come up with the only game plan that had allowed them to destroy enemy ships.

  She was justifiably famous.

  She was also an absolute hard-ass whom Cross had tangled with more than once.

  “Did she say why?” Cross asked.

  “Something about you being the vision of the Tenth Planet Project.”

  He blinked. The burger he had eaten sat like a lump in his stomach. He had been the vision behind the Tenth Planet Project. He had been the push to get the world governments to do something, anything, before the tenth planet arrived. It had been his foresight that had enabled them to find the planet in the first place.

  The tenth planet had an elliptical 2006-year orbit that took it into the very depths of space. Unlike other recurring events in the solar system, from Hailey’s comet on down, the tenth planet’s orbit was so long that only archaeological records held its secret. There was no one alive who remembered it, and there were few written records about it—and certainly no written records from anyone who understood it.

  Cross had seen the archaeological record, and had managed to tie it, through astroarchaeology, to something that happened in the sky. He had used his friend Doug Mickelson, the secretary of state, to open doors that would otherwise have remained closed.

  That was why Clarissa Maddox called Cross the vision of the Tenth Planet Project.

  “I think I’m more useful here,” he said.

  “You can argue with the kid all you want,” Jamison said, “but he’s not going to stand up to Maddox for you. You’ll have to fly back to D.C. to do it on your own.”

  Cross shook his head. “I’m not beyond my usefulness here.”

  “We can do this. I can train someone else to use the wand,” Jamison said.

  “Yes, but I am the one familiar with the fossils. I’m the one—•”

  “We’ll know it when we see it,” Jamison said. “If we have any questions, I can always e-mail or call you. Chances are, they need you for some bogus meeting, and you’ll be back here when it’s done. Trust me, going is easier than fighting a member of the Joint Chiefs.”

  Cross sighed. He was just getting tired of meetings in which everyone rehashed all the facts that they didn’t know. He found it even more discouraging than digging through this dust and finding fillings that had, until a few weeks ago, been a part of someone’s mouth.

  “You’re not going to let me off the hook either, are you?” Cross asked.

  Jamison finished his second burger and tossed the wrapper in the bag. “If I’d known this was why you were avoiding your link, I’d’ve been on your butt in an instant. This is a needle-in-a-haystack project no matter how you spin it, Leo. And you don’t know what they’re going to discuss in Washington. They might need yo
u more there than we do here.”

  “I think I know,” Cross said. “It’s just another meeting.” “If it were just another meeting, don’t you think your colleagues would let you stay out here?”

  Cross looked at him. Jamison was probably right.

  This was a meeting of the Tenth Planet Project, and even though Cross had been to a dozen meetings since the aliens left, none of them had been of the original Tenth Planet group. The meetings had been for other things, crisis things, with some or none of the members of the Tenth Planet Project.

  That alone made this coming meeting different.

  He knew it. He was just avoiding it. And he couldn’t any longer. That was what he had been telling his colleagues: no one had time to shut their eyes anymore. And yet he was trying to do it, too.

  It was hard to look clearly at something that could destroy life as he knew it.

  “All right,” he said to Jamison. “But you call me the instant you find something.”

  Jamison mock saluted, a goofy grin on his face. “I’ll call you in a nanosecond, sir.”

  “You know,” Cross said, smiling for the first time in a while, “I believe you will ”

  April 27, 2018

  18:05 Universal Time

  170 Days Until Second Harvest

  Commander Cicoi had only been in Elders Circle once before, several Passes ago, as he got a tour of Command Central. He had just been made general, and it was customary to let all generals know what they were defending.

  He had thought it odd that the Commanders believed the generals were defending buildings. Cicoi had always thought he was defending Malmuria.

  Elders Circle was deep within the bowels of Command Central, ten layers below the tenth public layer. The Waiting Chamber was icy cold, even for Malmur, and the lighting was thin, activated when the first tentacle crossed the threshold. The Waiting Chamber was done in black; the Waiting Circles, dark spots on an already dark floor.

  The Commander of the North was already in the room, on the Waiting Circle that designated his position. The Commander of the North was the oldest of the Commanders, the only one of the main Commanders who did not lose his life after the disaster. He was large, as most elder Malmuria were, but his tentacles were graying at the tips. Someday, his upper tentacles would be gray and useless, his lower nearly solid stumps, and he would lose his position through sheer immobility.