Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

  Cavendish looked surprised. “Not us! But that would add to the irritant factor.”

  “I’ve noticed a few outages,” Adrian said, “but I thought—”

  “It was normal,” Frances concluded. “Right. But Makepeace doesn’t.”

  “Makepeace?”

  “He’s working for the Energy Board now. He wanted me to find you. He says there’s a lot of unusual activity going on that nobody notices because of the good times.”

  “Shouldn’t you introduce me to your companion?” Adrian said. “What’s she doing here?”

  Jessie stepped from behind Frances looking a bit sheepish. “I’m Jessie.”

  Adrian raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “Jessica Buhler.”

  “Who is Jessica Buhler?” Adrian asked.

  Frances turned accusingly toward Jessie, but before she could say anything they heard the roar of jets outside.

  The distant entrance to the Vehicle Assembly Building was filled with tiny black figures. Frances looked around. The coveralled space-nuts had disappeared and so had Cavendish.

  “Why did you do it?” Frances asked Jessie.

  “Why blame me?” Jessie said defiantly. “Maybe that man—Makepeace—put a tracer on you!”

  “You’re the plant,” Frances said. “Why?”

  Jessie looked contrite. “All right, I might as well admit it. When I started, it was just another job, and by the time I got involved it was too late.”

  “Involved?” Frances said. “If I’d known—” Jessie said. “If I’d known you—and Adrian and what was at stake—”

  “You set the fire?” Frances said accusingly.

  “Not me,” Jessie protested. “Maybe somebody else.” She took a ragged breath. “What I found out is that I’d like to build a spaceship. I wish I could be one of you,” she said softly. “I know it’s too late, but that’s what I’d like.”

  Frances noted the way Jessie looked at Adrian and felt a pang of jealousy. There was something attractive about a man who cared more about an idea than about relationships.

  Adrian had been looking back and forth between the two of them. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. He motioned toward where the black figures had turned into people, men and women, in form-fitting gray uniforms. They were approaching rapidly, spread out across the broad aisle like a military outfit, trotting.

  Frances shook her head. “That never works,” she said. “In the movies and the TV shows, the pursuers always catch up. Sometimes the culprits get away temporarily, but they get caught in the end, and that’s when people get hurt.”

  “This isn’t the movies, Frances,” Adrian said.

  “I know, Adrian, but movies are a lot easier to understand. A lot of wisdom has been written and filmed, and you might as well take advantage of other people’s analyses. Anyway, your friends or kidnappers—Cavendish and his crew—ought to have a chance to escape.”

  “That’s true,” Adrian admitted. “But what about—?” He nodded in the direction of Jessie.

  “I’ve done all the betraying I’m going to do,” Jessie said.

  “Good,” Frances said.

  The people in the gray uniforms, looking like clones of the ill-matched twins who had sprung into Frances’ store the day before, surrounded them. There were eight of them. Even as young and athletic as they seemed, they were breathing hard.

  “Welcome to the Vehicle Assembly Building,” Frances said. “May I show you around? Those are bridge cranes, those big ones up there, and over there, that is an external tank mated to a pair of solid-rocket boosters but without, I am sorry to say, the orbiter—”

  “Which one of you is Adrian Mast?” one of the women asked.

  “I’m Adrian Mast,” Adrian said.

  “You’ll come with us,” the woman said. She was tall and slender but she held herself like an acrobat.

  “By whose authority?” Adrian asked.

  “By the authority of the Energy Board.”

  “The Energy Board has no police powers.”

  “This is an administrative action taken to prevent an interruption in service.”

  Adrian looked at Frances. “Shall we go?”

  Frances stepped forward. “You’ll have to take me, too,” she said.

  “I have no orders—” the woman began.

  “Me, too,” Jessie said.

  The woman shrugged. “Come with us.” She turned and the three of them followed her out down the long, broad aisle toward the entrance, the other uniformed personnel slightly behind them like an honor guard.

  A jet helicopter stood outside the VAB, its rotors idling. It was painted Energy Board gray with a silver lightning bolt on the nose. So was a small jet airplane parked beside the helicopter. The honor guard escorted them to the airplane and their leader motioned them up the lowered stairs. After their brief exposure to Florida sunshine, the interior seemed dark, and even darker after the stairs were raised behind them, closing them into the ship. Almost immediately, it began to taxi.

  As her eyes adjusted to the interior, Frances noticed the skeletal man sitting in a swiveling leather chair a few feet away. “Makepeace,” she said. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Frances,” Makepeace said, “you’d better be seated. We’ll be taking off soon. And Adrian. And Jessica.”

  “You know Jessie?” Frances said, seating herself opposite Makepeace, while Adrian took a seat beside her and Jessie, the one beside Makepeace.

  “She’s one of my best,” Makepeace said.

  Jessie looked embarrassed.

  “Though perhaps no longer,” Makepeace said.

  “I quit,” Jessie said.

  The airplane turned and almost immediately accelerated and within a few hundred yards lifted its nose into the sky. When the cabin had quieted down, Adrian asked, “What is all this about?”

  “The Energy Board wants to speak to you,” Makepeace said.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe they wish to sponsor your spaceship.”

  “Why should they do that? Why now? Why in person?”

  Makepeace folded his hands together over his stomach. It may have been a gesture left over from the days when he had an ample belly on which to rest them. “The Energy Board gets nervous when something unpredictable happens. There have been outages, outbreaks, violence, your disappearance. What if they are linked?”

  “In what way?”

  Makepeace shrugged. “The Energy Board may have other sources of information. Maybe not. Maybe they hope you will be able to provide some. Maybe they hope you will give them wise counsel.”

  Adrian laughed. Frances was proud of him.

  When the plane was over the African coastline, the engines suddenly cut off.

  Frances clenched the arms of her seat as her body attempted to fly. The gentle vibration that had become a part of their existence was gone. “What’s going on?” she said, trying to steady her voice.

  “One of those outages Makepeace mentioned,” Adrian said.

  The compartment was eerily silent. “You mean,” Frances said, “this plane operates by broadcast power?”

  Adrian nodded. “And steam. But there must be a backup—”

  Just then the engines sputtered and caught, cut out, and caught again. The airplane steadied, pressing them back into their seats, and began climbing toward its lost altitude.

  Adrian pointed out the window toward the right-hand engine. “The exhaust isn’t steam anymore. We’re flying on fuel reserves.”

  A woman’s voice came over the speaker. “Everybody okay back there?”

  “Okay,” Makepeace said.

  “Sorry about the power loss,” the voice said. “We’re shifting back to broadcast power. We should be at our destination in half an hour.”

  Frances looked down into the dark continent below. The moon was full, but the land was still only scantily visible. If the sun had been shining she could have seen the green of West Africa, restored in only a few year
s to nearly its virgin state before the rape of European empire builders. If she had been able to see farther, she might have observed modern cities rising to the north and south, and if she had been able to see beneath the jungle canopies, villages with air-conditioned huts, multi-channeled television sets, and modern schools.

  The blessings of alien technology had been bestowed with a lavish and indiscriminate hand. Half an hour later the plane swiveled its engines and lowered itself, in the night, onto a landing pad on top of Kilimanjaro.

  They were ushered through corridors and anterooms into a large office. One wall flamed with the disk of the sun. Frances had to turn her head to shut down the glare until the man at the clean, transparent desk waved his hand and the image dimmed. How appropriate, Frances thought, that this structure, raised to the sun, should display on its office wall the source of its power, which this man could control like Apollo scattering largess to mere mortals.

  The man at the desk introduced himself as the Energy Board Chair for Africa. His office was large and eclectic. His desk, fashioned from clear plastic, occupied one corner, and old-fashioned maroon-leather chairs surrounded a clear-plastic conference table. But the floors were covered with multi-colored African throw rugs, and spears and a bark shield hung upon the wall opposite the mural. The anomaly was the absence of windows as if what happened inside the room was more important than anything outside.

  “You think of me as powerful,” the Chairman said from behind his bare desk, which itself symbolized his ability to command service, “but I am a mere functionary, no more important than a conduit.” He was a large man with big shoulders and a torso spreading around the middle; he wasn’t a man that anyone would call a “functionary.”

  “More like a switch,” Frances said, “that can be turned on or off, as during our flight.”

  “That was not our doing,” the Chairman said.

  “For someone without power,” Adrian said, “having people summoned from halfway around the world displays real persuasion.”

  “You are not here of your own free will?” the Chairman asked. “You felt coerced?”

  Adrian looked at Frances and then at Jessie standing a foot or two behind. “It didn’t seem wise to refuse.”

  “I must speak to my emissaries,” the Chairman said. “I apologize for any intimidation you may have felt, but the matter seemed urgent.” He waved a black hand at them. He seemed good at that, as if he was used to waving a hand and accomplishing miracles. “But first, let me say that you should be pleased with what you accomplished a decade ago.”

  “It worked out okay, didn’t it?” Adrian said cautiously.

  “Better than it had any right,” the Chairman said. “Your instincts were correct, and those who feared that cheap power would upset the world’s precarious political balance were wrong.”

  “As they often are,” Frances said.

  The Chairman sighed. “True. Responsibility shrivels the imagination and enfeebles the will.”

  “While we who have little to lose can dream wildly and act boldly,” Adrian said.

  “Just so. Won’t you sit?” The Chairman waved a hand at the conference table. “Join me in some refreshments?”

  “Coffee, perhaps,” Frances said. She sank into a chair facing the muraled wall, expecting to see black moths encircling the sun and maybe the outline of a shark. Cups of coffee appeared almost instantly, served by silent young men and women in gray uniforms. “It’s been a long day.”

  Adrian sat next to her; Jessie sat opposite. Jessie had been silent since the first moments on the airplane, contemplating her sins, perhaps, and how she might atone. Makepeace had been left behind in the anteroom, but Jessie, for some reason, had been allowed to accompany them.

  The Chairman eased his large body into the chair at the head of the table, like a tribal chief into a throne. He inclined his head. “We want you to understand that we recognize you as the architects of this world.”

  “We?” Frances echoed.

  “The other chairs and I.”

  “We may have given it a shove,” Adrian said. “No more. We didn’t design it.”

  “No,” the Chairman said, “what you designed was a spaceship. Like this.” He waved his hand, and the mural on the wall opposite transformed itself into a view screen with a close up of the sun’s surface. It was a scene Frances had viewed before. The black moths that were the alien-designed photon collectors were fluttering in front of the sun and then the outline of a ship ghosted across.

  “Like that, but not that,” Adrian said.

  “You had nothing to do with it?” the Chairman asked.

  “No,” Adrian said, “and you could have found that out without bringing us halfway around the world.”

  “But then,” the Chairman said, “I wouldn’t have been able to look into your faces when you said it.”

  “A dubious pleasure,” Frances said.

  “But maybe you consider yourself a judge of veracity,” Adrian said.

  “Would I be sitting here if I weren’t?” the Chairman asked. “The problem we face is: if not you, who? And how?”

  Frances looked toward Adrian and then back at the Chairman. “I think of it,” she said, “as a reminder. Of a broken promise.”

  “We made no promises,” the Chairman said.

  “The promise was implicit,” Frances said. “We get designs that we could not have developed on our own—”

  “At least at this stage in our technological development,” Adrian added.

  “—And we’ll build a spaceship,” Frances continued. “We’ve taken the designs and applied the energy source to Earth’s problems. They’ve worked better than anyone expected.”

  “The petty squabblings over wealth and its unequal distribution have diminished to almost nothing,” Adrian said. “The age of peace and plenty are at hand.”

  The Chairman looked pained. “Then why do we have these outbreaks of violence, divorce, sabotage . . . ?”

  “Makepeace told me about that,” Frances said, “I didn’t tell him what I thought was behind it: human perversity.”

  “Perversity?”

  “The species didn’t survive by getting fat and happy,” Frances said. “When times get too easy, humanity starts making trouble for itself.”

  “There have hardly been enough fat and happy times in human history to test that hypothesis,” the Chairman said. “In any case, the unrest is not species-wide.”

  “Like talent of any kind,” Adrian said, “it emerges sporadically and unpredictably, but it emerges all the same.”

  “And even with the rest,” Frances said, “let individual lives get too uneventful and people will move, quit jobs, start affairs, get divorced. . . .”

  “Ask them about the aliens,” a voice said from the direction of the wall screen, as if the sun itself had spoken.

  The Chairman moved his magical hand and the sun disappeared to be replaced by a screen segmented into four. In each segment was a different person: a slender Asian woman in a silk gown, a plump white male in a business suit, a youthful-looking man with a brown face, wearing a casual white jacket, and a middle-aged woman in gray slacks and blazer.

  “These are the other Chairs,” the Chairman said. He did not offer to introduce them, and it was an indication of their anonymity in this uneventful world that Frances knew none of them. She knew only that, like the Chair for Africa, they occupied sites on the tops of mountains, where atmospheric losses of power beamed from satellites were minimal and terrestrial broadcast was easiest.

  “Ask them about the aliens,” the Asian woman said again.

  “Are aliens behind these events?” the Chairman asked.

  “That wouldn’t make sense,” Adrian said. “Why would they send us designs for a spaceship if they were already here?”

  “To deceive us?” the man with the brown face suggested.

  “And give us a power system that could fuel a ship to the stars—or a world to peace and plenty?” Ad
rian said. He shook his head.

  “Beware of aliens bearing gifts,” said the plump man in the white suit.

  “Maybe they’re acting from a distance,” the woman in slacks and blazer suggested.

  “At the distance of the stars, even the nearest of them?” Frances said. “No way they could find out what was going on here, much less act in time to be effective.”

  “Agents?” the Asian woman suggested.

  Jessie spoke for the first time. “They do have agents,” she said. Everyone turned toward her in surprise. Even the faces on the wall seemed to look in her direction. “They’re the agents of an idea, and the idea is spaceflight. Freedom. Answering the call. There’s nothing as transforming as an idea.”

  “She’s right,” Adrian said. “What you have is what seems to be a single phenomenon with multiple causes. One of them is the space community that wants to build a spaceship and find out what the aliens want. Another is the restless element of society that can’t stand good times. There may be others. The spaceflight group deleted evidence of my existence. Another group is behind the power outages, probably by computer viruses.”

  “But there is a solution,” Frances said.

  The faces turned back in her direction.

  “You can ride it out,” Frances said, “and maybe that is the least risky option. The space-nuts will get old and die off. The malcontents can be rooted out and punished. But the final result may be a species that has lost its soul.”

  “Humanity can’t go to the stars when it can’t afford it,” Adrian said, “and when it can afford it, humanity has no incentive to go. The apparent paradise on Earth may actually be a dead end. The malcontents may be the true spirit of humanity—always looking for something they haven’t got.”

  “The other option?” the Chairman asked.

  “Let them go!” Jessie said.

  Adrian looked at her, and said with growing enthusiasm, “She’s right. Give the space-nuts the resources to build a ship and offer the malcontents an opportunity to sign on. That’s always worked for humanity, as long as there was another world to discover, another frontier to pioneer.”