Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  His Second and Third both raised their upper tentacles in a gesture of respect, and turned away. Then Cicoi left his workstation and went into the antechamber. He did not like having conversations with the Elder in public. It felt too revealing.

  “If you think we will die, then tell me what those things are,” he said.

  I do not know, the Elder’s strange voice was inside his head yet again. Cicoi hated this method of communication. But we have underestimated these creatures too much. We cannot let the cylinders get close.

  “What do you propose we do?”

  Send ships to intercept. Rob them of their energy as you have done with other space debris.

  Cicoi remembered the vision ball. He saw the shapes, but the energy readings beneath were small, at least from a distance.

  “We have the same problem,” he said. “It would use up too many resources. We would not get enough in return.”

  Knowledge is something, the Elder said. Without it, too many mistakes are made.

  “You mean, I make too many mistakes”

  You and all of your young kind, the Elder said. Somewhere along the way you have become dangerously cautious. If we had been so dangerously cautious, our race would be dead now.

  There was a lot of history in those words, some of which Cicoi understood and some he did not. He did know that it had taken courage for the leaders of the South, Center, and North to band together, to get the Malmuria to work together as a species, despite their differences. It had taken a great risk to throw Malmur out of its orbit as its sun went nova instead of building the ships that some had suggested, ships that would have scattered the people among distant stars.

  “What do you think these are?” Cicoi asked.

  You have said yourself they are too big for probes, at least of the kind we have seen, the Elder said. Think strategically. Obviously the creatures of the third planet can. You have sent probes into space to find out all you can of your enemies. If you were to send something else, what would it be?

  “A weapon?” Cicoi felt all of his upper tentacles rise in horror.

  We have thought of them as primitives for too long. And they were, when we first began coming to this planet. But they no longer are. They have space travel and cities and societies. They have reason, and they have obviously found a way to codify their history. They have looked at the record, my young friend, or perhaps they have an oral tradition that warned them. They know we never come for just one Harvest. They know we are going to make another. They are going to strike first. It is a way some creatures have of defending themselves.

  “You sound like you have sympathy for them,” Cicoi said.

  The Elder floated before him. Cicoi hadn’t seen the Elder until then. Where had he been? Behind Cicoi? Or did Elders have a way of being present without being visible?

  I did not have sympathy for them when we first came to the third planet. In those dark days, they were not different from other life-forms on that planet. But they have proven themselves smart and strong, and they have shown that they are worthy opponents. In my day, before we lost our sun, a worthy opponent was all we sought.

  “Going into space at this time would waste energy we cannot afford to lose,” Cicoi said.

  You sound like your compatriots in the North and Center. The Elder’s eyestalks were rotating. Cicoi had learned that was the Elders’ way of expressing disgust. Cautious to the end.

  “Caution has its place,” Cicoi said.

  But not here. Not now. If I am right and you are wrong, we lose more than a bit of energy. We lose lives we cannot afford to give. Perhaps we lose everything.

  “Do you believe the creatures of the third planet have that kind of power?”

  I would not have believed that they had discovered space travel, the Elder said. But they have, and now we must contend with that.

  Cicoi felt his upper tentacles droop. “What if I’m wrong? What if these things are probes?”

  Then absorb their energy as you have done with so many other things. The trip will be worthwhile, just for that.

  The Elder did not understand the kind of waste he was promoting. His time had been so different. He had not been born to limited resources, to long periods of darkness and cold. He did not understand.

  “Every time we do something like this,” Cicoi said, “we jeopardize lives.”

  The Elder wrapped his upper tentacles around his torso. We jeopardize the entire planet whenever we pocket our eyestalks and refuse to see what is around us.

  Cicoi flapped four upper tentacles in distress, but the Elder didn’t seem to notice.

  You will send ships to intercept those cylinders. Warships.

  “But we’ve only gotten a few ready and we need them when we approach the third planet.”

  You will send warships, the Elder said.

  Cicoi pocketed his eyestalks in protest.

  No matter how much you deny, you will listen to me. You may have experience with deprivation, but / have experience with war. We are in danger from those creatures. You must acknowledge this and head it off.

  “I’m not wasting the energy of the South’s warships on this mission,” Cicoi said.

  The other commanders will send ships. They will do as they are told. So will you, the Elder said.

  “This is a mistake,” Cicoi said.

  Yes, your plan is a mistake, the Elder said. I am amazed we did not catch these cylinders sooner. We should have destroyed the probes as I wished. Now we will pay the consequences.

  Cicoi kept his eyestalks pocketed for a long moment, but said nothing. There was nothing else to say. He had lost, and he knew it.

  Finally, he raised a single stalk. The Elder was gone. Cicoi let his tentacles droop. Lost energy, lost resources, and all for a bit of curiosity. Curiosity that could have been satisfied if they only waited.

  But he would do the Elder’s bidding. He would take the five functioning warships into space, and he would examine those cylinders.

  He only hoped he would get enough energy from them to make up for at least half of the waste.

  August 1, 2018

  6:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  101 Days Until Second Harvest

  Mickelson loosened the tie around his neck. The fifteenth formal dinner he’d had to attend in a row. It was beginning to get tiresome. In a day or so, he would call Cross and see if Constance could whip them up something wonderful and old-fashioned, something impossible to get at the fancy restaurants where he had to take other diplomats.

  He longed for this whirlwind to end. But he knew it wouldn’t. Not until the missiles hit the tenth planet.

  He wished he could take the tie off, but he couldn’t. He’d had this meeting scheduled for two days now. The president wanted to touch base with his key advisers, something he’d been doing off and on since the missiles were launched. The first meetings were held in the Oval Office, but Franklin had been inviting more and more of his advisers. So tonight’s was being held in the Roosevelt Room.

  The Roosevelt Room was across the hall from the Oval Office. Lopez had left the door open, and had placed beverages and snacks on the center of the large table. A few advisers were already inside. Mickelson peered in, wished he hadn’t loosened his tie at all, and then crossed the threshold.

  He had loved this room early in the Franklin administration. Then Franklin had gotten the bright idea to restore the room’s original furnishings. When those couldn’t be found, he settled for some mid-twentieth century couches and chairs along the side, a grandfather clock in the back corner, and a plastic-looking conference table that someone said was an antique from the 1960s.

  To Mickelson, the table was an affront. It didn’t go with the fireplace, which was original to the West Wing, or the lovely arched door. Mickelson had complained loudly about the table and the mixed decor as well as the soft orange color of the wall, and the burnt orange color of the rug. He had complained so loudly and so often that Franklin had finally hau
led out a photograph, which dated from the 1970s, of the room, and it looked just like it looked now. Ugly and mismatched and uncomfortable.

  It wasn’t until someone told Mickelson that Franklin’s predecessor had redecorated that Mickelson understood Franklin’s decision to make the room his own.

  Still, Mickelson wished he would have improved it.

  The advisers who were waiting were O’Grady and Bernstein. Lopez was down the hall, but she would join them as well. Mickelson looked at the makeup of the group and already knew tonight’s topic: the state of the world since the declaration of war.

  He suppressed a sigh. His job had actually gotten easier since war was declared. All the usual hot spots had cooled. No one wanted to be fighting among themselves when the aliens arrived. Issues weren’t settled, of course, but that didn’t matter. Right now, issues such as historical boundaries and trade agreements had been made moot. No one knew if they would even have a country three months from now, let alone borders to argue about.

  Bernstein looked up from her conversation with O’Grady and her gaze met Mickelson’s. They hadn’t talked much since the night of the president’s speech. Mostly Mickelson had avoided her. He didn’t really want to talk to her. She intimidated him, attracted him, and made him feel foolish all at the same time.

  It didn’t help that her prediction of civil unrest had come true.

  But not as bad as she had said it was going to be. There had been a march on Washington, peaceniks who didn’t believe in the use of force, such a nonevent that no news station carried it. There had been five bombings, one in Denver, one in Chicago, one in New York, and two in Los Angeles, all government buildings. There were two assaults on military installations. And one attempt, in Washington state, to sink a fleet of ships in Puget Sound.

  The image from those few days after the declaration of war that stuck with Mickelson was of a woman running from a bombed and burning IRS building in Los Angeles.

  He could see it as if he were there. He remembered every detail of it shown on the news.

  The woman’s clothes were on fire, and she carried a child in her arms. He had heard she’d been there visiting friends she worked with, showing them her new baby.

  A news crew was in the street and caught her running from the bombed building.

  The faster she ran, the more the flames engulfed her.

  The image of pain on her face was something Mickelson would never forget. He had thought of it over and over, trying to understand it.

  Pain.

  And intense fear as she tried to save her child.

  Finally, as the flames engulfed her, she had gone down on her knees in the street. A passerby and the news broadcaster had tried to beat out the flames with coats, and as they had, the woman had offered them her child in a burning blanket.

  The newscaster badly burned his hands taking it.

  Neither the woman nor the child survived.

  The unrest had lasted for days, then slowly faded.

  But the memory of that woman and child would never fade for Mickelson.

  Bernstein crossed the room and stopped in front of Mickelson. She touched the loosened knot of his tie. “You know, you should really commit. Either tighten it or take it off.”

  “If I take it off, I fail to show respect for my commander and chief” Mickelson said only partly sarcastically, “and if I tighten it, I swear I’ll choke to death.”

  “Oh, you have room,” she said, and started to tighten the knot.

  He stopped her by placing his hand over hers. Her skin was softer and warmer than he’d expected. “It’s not the room,” he said. “It’s the idea.”

  She smiled a little. Then she moved her hand and dropped her gaze. “I suppose you think I’m an alarmist.”

  He could have lied, but he didn’t see the point. “Yeah.”

  “I was wrong about the reaction to the speech. I thought people would take to the streets. I’m not wrong about the unrest.”

  “We’re at war,” he said to her. “We’ve been attacked as a world. We respond as a world.”

  She shrugged and turned away.

  O’Grady had heard part of that. “If she knew her history, she’d know that people rally after their homes have been violated,” he said.

  “I know my history,” she said, turning back to face O’Grady. “Who was this room named for?”

  “Gosh,” O’Grady said. “I have a fifty-fifty shot here, and the West Wing was finished in the 1920s, so I’m guessing the namesake of the teddy bear, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, our twenty-sixth president.”

  “And what did his cousin, our thirty-second president, call this room?”

  “Hell,” Mickelson said, “if it was decorated like this.” O’Grady looked blank. “How the hell should I know that?” he asked.

  “The Fish Room,” she said. “He called it the Fish Room because he felt stupid calling it the Roosevelt Room.”

  “That’s not history,” O’Grady said, “that’s interior decoration.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I know my history,” she said. “I probably know it better than you. I know that the United States rallied when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. I know that England, when it was bombed in the very same war, came together as a nation. I know that Afghanistan rebels, in their determination to drive the Soviets off their soil, helped destroy an empire. I know all of that. It’s basic stuff.”

  She leaned in closer. “But I also know the history of extremism, and I know that when it’s unchecked, especially in times of war, we’re in trouble.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” O’Grady asked. “Taking all the UFO nuts who appeared over all the years and putting them in internment camps?”

  There was a silence in the room at that moment, and O’Grady’s last comment sounded louder than O’Grady had clearly intended. Over O’Grady’s shoulder, Mickelson saw Franklin in the doorway, his face dark.

  “Internment camps aren’t anything to joke about, Sha-mus,” he said.

  O’Grady flushed a deep red and turned. “I didn’t mean offense, sir.”

  “Yes, you did. You meant to offend Director Bernstein, and I won’t have it. We’re under too much pressure for your normal wry humor.”

  O’Grady nodded. Mickelson wished he could blend into the orange wall. Tempers were short, patience was frayed. These conversations never used to happen with Franklin’s advisers.

  “I take it you’re talking about the lack of dissent,” Franklin said as he approached the head of the table. The others did as well. Mickelson put his hand on the leather upholstered chair, with the brass buttons holding the fabric in place. By the time the meeting was half over, he knew, those buttons would be creating welts in his back.

  “Actually, Mr. President,” Bernstein said, “what prompted Shamus’s remark was my observation that extremism in times of war should not go unchecked.”

  Franklin shot her a withering glance. “Director, you’ve warned me of riots and dissent, which are simply not happening. Except for those small bombs which were, I grant you, distressing, we’ve seen nothing since I made my speech ” “That worries me,” Bernstein said. “The hate mongering has grown, sir, and so has the discontent. I’m afraid that things are actually being planned.”

  “And I am not going to worry about a threat that may or may not be real,” Franklin said, effectively closing the door on that conversation. “What are you seeing in Europe, Doug?”

  Mickelson resisted the urge to bring his hand to his tie knot and tighten it. “It’s about the same, sir,” he said. “No great dissent, a lot of cooperation. There’s been some moaning that the United States has taken the lead, but in Europe at least, no one seems to mind.”

  “In Europe, at least,” O’Grady repeated. “Which means that people mind elsewhere.”

  “Asia mostly,” Mickelson said. “China in particular. But right now they don’t see any way around it. My sense is, from the heads of state I’ve spoken to, that most countries
are relieved that we’re taking the front position.”

  “So that if we fail, they can blame us,” Franklin said.

  “But we won’t fail.” Lopez was in the room. She had pulled the door closed. Mickelson fought a surge of irritation at her comment. Since the speech, she had become Franklin’s greatest cheerleader. Mickelson had never really thought that that had been the position the chief of staff should take.

  Franklin, too, apparently found the comment a tad too obsequious. “We might,” he said. “Nothing is guaranteed until those nukes blow that planet out of the sky.”

  His metaphor was mixed, but that was the only problem with his statement. Mickelson agreed heartily with it, and he’d never considered himself a hawk—that is, not before the tenth planet arrived.

  “What about our borders, Shamus?” Franklin asked. “Axe we having any problems?”

  O’Grady shook his head. “Even the illegals have slowed. Right now, people are sticking close to home. It’s my sense that no one is looking at their own problems. We’re all looking at the heavens, waiting for those nukes to go off.”

  “Yeah,” Lopez said. “I saw in one of the vid chats a kid say that he hoped you could see the explosions with the naked eye.”

  “I doubt we’ll be able to see them with the large telescopes,” Mickelson said. “From what I hear, the only information we’re getting is from the probes.”

  “And it’s good enough,” Franklin said. “Right now, everything is a go. No problems so far. And that’s all that matters.”

  “We’re in the calm before the storm,” Bernstein said. Her pessimism was beginning to grate on Mickelson’s nerves.

  “Maybe,” O’Grady said. “Or maybe we’re catching a break.”

  “I think those aliens have thought of us as easy targets for so long, we’ll whup them with sheer surprise alone,” Lopez said.

  Mickelson let the conversation drift around him. That’s how these meetings had been ending up. Endless discussions of the possibilities of success. It seemed like Franklin needed almost nightly reassurance that he had taken the right course of action. Mickelson thought it was interesting that in all of these meetings he’d attended, Maddox or other members of the Joint Chiefs hadn’t been here, nor had the science advisers. The people who were still working on ways of defeating the tenth planet when it got closer to Earth hadn’t stopped their work, nor did they debate the success of the missiles.