by Neil Clarke
“We live in a zoo,” Bloch said.
“And ‘zoo’ is a pretty lousy word too. But it works for now.” Matt turned at the next intersection, taking a different route than Bloch usually walked to school. “Rules and regulations, that’s how everything is put together. There’s organizations older than the scum under our rocks. There’s these systems that have kept the Earth safe from invaders, mostly. But not always. I’m telling you, this isn’t the first time the Earth has been grabbed hard. You think the dinosaurs died from a meteor attack? Not possible. If a comet is going to be trouble, it’s gently nudged and made safe again. Which is another blessing of living inside a zoo, and I guess we should have been thankful. If we knew about it before, that is.”
“What killed them?”
“The T. rexes? Well, that depends on how you tell the story. A ship came out of deep space and got lucky enough to evade the defensive networks—networks that are never as fancy or new as is possible, by the way. Isn’t that the way it always works? Dinosaurs got infected with aspects, and the aspects gave them big minds and new skills. But then defenders were sent down here to put up a fight. A worldwide battle went pretty well for the defenders, but not well enough. For a little while it looked as if maybe, just maybe the Earth could be rebuilt into something powerful enough to survive every one of the counterattacks.”
“But the machines above us managed one hard cleansing attack. Cleansings are a miserable desperate tactic. Flares are woven on the sun and then focused on the planet, stripping its crust clean. But cleansing was the easy trick. Too much had to be rebuilt afterwards, and a believable scenario had to be impressed into the rock, and dinosaurs were compromised and unsafe. That’s why the impact craters. That’s why the iridium layer. And that’s why a pack of little animals got their chance, which is you and me, and the next peace lasted for about sixty-five million years.”
Small houses and leafless trees lined a road that ended with at tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
“This war has two sides,” said Matt. “Every kind of good is here, and there is no evil. Forget evil. A starship carrying possibilities struck the earth, and it claimed half of the planet in a matter of minutes. Not that that part of the war has been easy. There’s a hundred trillion mines sitting in our dirt, hiding. Each one is a microscopic machine that waits, waits, waits for this kind of assault. I’ve been fighting booby traps ever since. In my new state, this war has gone on a hundred years. I’ve seen and done things and had things done to me, and I’ve met creatures you can’t imagine, and machines that I can’t comprehend, and nothing has been won easily for me, and now I’m back to my big question: Do you know what adventure is?”
“I think I know.”
“You don’t, kid. Not quite yet, you don’t know.”
The fence marked the zoo’s eastern border. Guardsmen had cut through the chain-link, allowing equipment too big for the service entrance to be brought onto the grounds. Inside the nearest cage, a single Bactrian camel stood in the open, in the violet morning light, shaggy and calm and imbecilic.
Bloch stepped through the hole, but his brother remained outside.
The boy grew brighter and his voice sounded deeper. “So okay, tell me. What is an adventure?”
“You go through your life, and stuff happens. Some of that stuff is wild, but most of it is boring. That’s the way it has to be. Like with me, for instance. The last hundred years of my life have been exciting and ordinary and treacherous and downright dull, depending on circumstances. I’ve given a lot to this fight, and I believe it’s what I want to do. And we’ve got a lot of advantages on our side: surprise; an underfunded enemy; and invading a target that is the eighth or ninth best among the candidates.”
“What is best?” Bloch asked.
“Jupiter is the prize. Because of its size, sure, but also because it’s biosphere is a thousand times more interesting than ours.” Matt stood before the gaping hole, hands on hips. “Yeah, my side has its advantages and the momentum, but it probably will fall short of its goal. We’ll defeat the booby traps, sure, and beat the defenders inside their redoubts, but we probably won’t be ready for the big cleansing attack. But what is happening, if you care . . . this is pretty much how the Permian came to an awful end. In four days, the Earth became something mighty, and then most everything went extinct. That’s probably what happens here. And you know the worst of it? Humans will probably accept the villain’s role in whatever the false fossil says. We killed our world from pollution and heat, and that’s why the fence lizards and cockroaches are going to get their chance.”
Bloch was crying.
“Adventure,” said Matt. “No, that’s not the crazy stupid heroic shit you do in your life. Adventure is the story you tell afterwards. It’s those moments you pick out of everything that was boring and ordinary, and then put them on a string and give to another person as a gift. Your story.”
Bloch felt sick inside.
“Feel scared, kid?”
“No.”
“Good,” his brother said, pulling a string necklace out of his shirt pocket and handing it to him. “Now go. You’ve got a job to do.”
BLOCH’S ADVENTURE
The camel was chewing, except it wasn’t. The mouth was frozen and the dark dumb eyes held half-closed, and a breath that began in some past age had ceased before the lungs were happy. The animal was a statue. The animal was some kind of dead, inert and without temperature, immune to rot and the tug of gravity while standing in the middle of a pen decorated with camel hoof prints and camel shit and the shit-colored feed that was destined for a camel’s fine belly—the emperor resplendent in his great little realm.
Bloch turned back to his brother, wanting explanations. But Matt had vanished, or never was. So he completed one slow circle, discerning how the world was locked into a moment that seemed in no particular hurry to move to the next moment. But time must be moving, however slowly. Otherwise how could an eye see anything? The light reflected off every surface would be fixed in space, and frozen light was as good as no light, and wasn’t it funny how quickly this new mind of his played with the possibilities?
The pale, broad hand of a boy came into his face, holding the white string of the necklace just given to him. Little candy beads looked real and felt real as his fingers made them dance. “Neat,” he said, his newest voice flat and simple, like the tone from a cheap bell. But the hands and body were back where they began, just ten million times quicker, and the fiberglass garb was replaced with the old jeans and Cornell sweatshirt. This is nuts, he thought. And fun. Then for no particular reason, he touched the greenest candy against his tongue, finding a sweetness that made it impossible not to shove all of the beads into his mouth, along with the thick rough string.
Each candy was an aspect, and the string was ten aspects woven together, and Bloch let them slide deep while waiting for whatever the magic would do to him next.
But nothing seemed to change, inside him or without.
The camel was a little deeper into its breath and its happiness when the boy moved on. He did not walk. He thought of moving and was immediately some distance down the concrete path, and he thought of moving faster and then stood at the zoo’s west side. His school was a big steel building camouflaged behind a fake fire station and a half-sized red caboose. He knew where he needed to be, and he didn’t go there. Instead he rose to the classroom where Mr. Rightly and his mother shared a little bed made of lost clothes. They were sitting up on the folded coats, a single camping lamp shining at their feet. Mom was talking and holding the teacher’s hand. Mr. Rightly had always looked as old as his mother, but he wasn’t. He was a young man who went gray young, sitting beside a careworn woman ten years his senior. Bloch leaned close to his mother and told her about seeing Matt just now. He said that his brother was alive and strong, and he explained a little something about what her youngest son
was doing now, and finally enough time passed for that despairing face to change, maybe recognizing the face before, or at least startled by the shadow that Bloch cast.
Several people shared the dim room. The girl who had recently faced down the wild leopard was sitting across from Bloch’s mother, bright tears frozen on the pretty face. In her lap were an old National Geographic and a half-page letter that began with “Dear Teddy” and ended with “Love” written several times with an increasingly unsteady hand. Bloch studied the girl’s sorrow, wishing he could give her confidence. But none of the aspects inside could do that. Then he turned back to his mother’s slow surprise and poor Mr. Rightly who hadn’t slept in days and would never sleep again. That’s what Bloch was thinking as he used his most delicate touch, one finger easing the sloppy glasses back up near the eyes.
He moved again, no time left to waste.
The penguin’s new pond was empty of water but partly filled with machines, most of them dead and useless. A yellow crane was fixed in place, reaching to the treetops, and one steel cable dangled down to a point ten feet above the concrete deck. Flanking cherry pickers were filled with soldiers working furiously to arm what was tethered to the cable’s end: a small atomic warhead designed to be flung against tank columns in the Fulda Gap. The soldiers were trying to make the bomb accept their commands. It was a useless activity; for endless reasons, the plutonium would never become angry. But Bloch was willing himself into the air, having a long penetrating look at what might be the most destructive cannonball the human species would ever devise.
At the edge of the pond, the terrified physicist and the equally traumatized colonel were arguing. The intricacies of their respective viewpoints were lost, but they were obviously exhausted, shouting wildly, cold fingers caught in mid-thrust and the chests pumped up, neither combatant noticing the boy who slipped between them before leaping into the waterless pond, tucking those big arms against his chest, pointing his toes as he fell into the deep, deep hole.
Damaged aspects returned to the nub on occasion, begging for repairs or death. Death was the standard solution, but sometimes the attached soldier could be healed and sent out again. There weren’t enough soldiers, and the first assault hadn’t begun. But the defender had to be relentlessly careful. Infiltrators moved among the wounded. Sabotage was licking at the edges and the soft places, at the less-than-pivotal functions, and worse were the lies and wild thoughts that would begin in one place and flow everywhere, doing their damage by cultivating confidence, by convincing some routine that it was strong—one little portion of the defender believing itself a bold rock-solid savior of the redoubt, shrugging aside ten microseconds of lucid doubt as it did what was less than ideal.
Among the mangled and failed was an aspect carried inside a sack of water. Tiny in endless ways, the aspect managed to escape notice until it had arrived—a dull fleck of material that would never accomplish any mission or accidentally hinder even the smallest task. Ignoring such debris was best, but some little reflex took charge eventually. The defender told that aspect to be still and wait, and it was very still and very patient while tools of considerable precision were brought to bear on what had never worked properly. The aspect was removed from its surroundings. The aspect was destroyed. And different tools reached for what seemed like common water, ready to harvest a drop or two of new fuel.
But then flourishes and little organs appeared on the wetness, or maybe they were always there, and one of the organs spoke.
I’m not here to fight,” Bloch said to the darkness.
It was his original voice, mostly. There was gravel at the edges, and it felt a little quick, but he liked how the words sounded in his head. And it was his head again, and his big old comfortable, clunky body. Time was again running at its proper speed, and the air was like a sauna, no oxygen to be found. “I’m not here to fight,” he said, and then his head began to spin. One moment he was standing in some imprecise volume never intended to be a room, and then he was on his knees, gasping.
The uneven floor flattened. New air rushed in, and light came from everywhere while the floor rose around him, creating a bright bubble that isolated him from everything else.
The boy breathed until he could remember what felt normal, and he got up on his knees, wiping his mouth with the gray sleeve of his sweatshirt.
“Better,” he said.
Then, “Thanks.”
Nothing changed.
“I’m not here to fight,” Bloch repeated. “I’m just delivering a message, and the other side went through a lot of trouble to put me here, which means maybe you should be careful and kill me now.”
Then he paused, waiting.
Anticipating this moment, Bloch imagined a creature similar to what he found inside the spaceship. It would be larger and more menacing, but the monster of his daydreams always sported green eyes that glared down at the crafty little human. Except there were no eyes and nothing like a face, and the only presence inside the bubble room was Bloch.
He laughed and said, “I thought I might get scared. But nope, I’m not.”
Then he sat, stretching his legs out before him.
“Maybe this sounds smug,” he said. “But for the last half day or so, I’ve been telling myself that I was always part of some big plan. Your aspect gets loose. The leopard picks it up with his front paw. Some careful scheme puts the cat where he can find me, and he cuts me, and I get infected, and after running wild and getting strong, I find my brother. Then Matt gives me a heads-up and points me on my way.
“Except that’s not how it works, is it?”
“If there was a fancy plan, it could be discovered. It could be fooled with or a million things could go wrong naturally, or maybe the gains wouldn’t match the hope. And that’s why real intelligence doesn’t bother with plans. You don’t, I bet. You’ve got a set of goals and principles and no end of complications, and everything changes from minute to second, and what the smart mind does is bury itself inside the possibilities and hope for the best.”
Bloch paused, listening to nothing. Maybe the world outside was still shaking, but he felt nothing. Probably nobody was listening, but he had nothing else to do with his day. Pulling his legs in, he crossed them, Indian-style.
“I’m here because I’m here,” he said. “Your enemy didn’t go looking for a mentally defective human who couldn’t feel fear. It’s just chance that you’re not facing down that blond girl or the leopard or maybe a little penguin. Any creature would have worked, and I shouldn’t take this personally.
“But I bring something odd and maybe lucky to this table. I don’t get scared, and that’s an advantage. When everybody else charges around, hands high and voices screaming, I’m this clear-eyed animal watching everything with interest. When you bounced along Pender, I saw people wrestling with every kind of fear. You were dumped into the water, and I studied Mr. Rightly’s face. Then there’s my mother who gets scared on her happiest day, and the government people and the professors trying to deal with you and each other, and everybody and everything else too. I’ve been paying attention. I doubt if anybody else has. The world’s never been this lost or this terrified, and during these last couple days, I’ve learned a great deal about the pissing of pants.”
Bloch paused for a moment. Then he said. “I would make a lousy soldier. Matt told me that more than once. ‘If you don’t get scared, you get your head shot off,’ he said. Which means, Mr. Monster, that you’re probably sick with worry now, aren’t you? A good soldier would have to have some fear. You’re little more than nothing to your enemy. You’re just one grunt-soldier, in his hole and facing down an army. Except that army isn’t the real monster either. From what I’ve been told, the invader is pretty much sure to lose. No, the scary boy in this story is what turns the sun against its planet, scorching all this down to where everything is clean again. Clean but nearly dead. The monster is those laws
and customs trying keep the galaxy from getting consumed by too much life trying to do everything at once. That’s the real beast here. You know it and your enemy would admit as much, I bet, and that’s not the only similarity you two have.
“Yeah, I think you must be shit-in-your-pants scared. Aren’t you?”
Bloch stood again. The message had to be delivered, and he would do that on his feet. That felt best. He straightened and shook his arms, a heart indistinguishable from his original heart beating a little faster now. Then with the gravelly voice, he said, “Your enemy wants you to fight. It expects nothing but your best effort, using every trick and power to try to delay him. But your walls are going to collapse. He will absorb you and push to the Pacific and those next battles, and nothing will be won fast enough, and then the sun is going to wash this world with so much wild raw energy.
“Your enemy doesn’t believe in plans,” Bloch said. “But possibilities are everywhere, and I’m bringing you one of the best. Not that it’s perfect, and maybe you won’t approve. But the pain and terror are going to look a little more worthwhile in the end, if you accept what I am offering you.
“I have a set of aspects inside me. They’re hiding other aspects, and I think they might be inside my stomach.
“You’ll have to cut me open to find them, and sorry, I can’t help you decipher them. But you’re supposed to hold them until you’re beaten, and then you can choose to accept your enemy’s offer. Or refuse it. The decision is going to be yours. But talking for my sake and the survival of most everybody I know and love, I sure hope you can find the courage to push the fear aside.
“Shove the terror where it doesn’t get in the way.
“And make your decision with those eyes open. Would you do that much for me, please?”
Bloch stopped talking.
He wasn’t standing in the bubble anymore. He was floating in a different place, and there was no telling how much time had passed, but the span felt large. Bloch floated at one end of an imprecise volume that was a little real but mostly just a projection—one enormous realm populated by tens of millions of earthly organisms.
