Tomorrow’s Heritage

by Juanita Coulson

  He hurt his throat to no purpose. Everyone was talking at once. Carissa begging them to discuss things calmly. Jael raving, supporting Pat, yet stepping on the heels of his words, turning his arguments into gibberish. Mari screaming at them both. Dian hopelessly trying, as Todd had, to spell out logic.

  Unexpectedly, Mariette rounded on Todd, slapping him so hard his head jerked from the blow. “Damn you! Oh, damn you! You knew about this when you were up at Goddard! Why didn’t you tell me, tell us? You let me come down here, and all the time you knew, you . . . you bastard!”

  Her hand went back again. Todd lunged, pinning her. Nose to nose with her, he used his superior strength, anticipating she would knee him, yelling into her face. “Yes, we knew! What difference does that make? What could you have done? We’re in this together. All of us. I wanted to start straight with everyone.” She hadn’t lashed out yet. His face burned where she had connected. Mari didn’t pull her punches. She was sniffling, angry tears gathering in her pale eyes. Todd found himself begging for comprehension in spite of his anger. “All of us, Mari. The whole species.”

  “We could have been out there already, to Mars and beyond. We should have been!” The tears spilled over. She twisted this way and that, trying to wrench free. Todd released her, gauging she wasn’t going to strike out at him any more. “We . . , we could have met them halfway . . .”

  “Met them?” Pat was a man walking in a nightmare. He grabbed Mariette and shoved her toward a chair, throwing her down into it. He stood back out of range of her fists and feet, pointing warningly, impaling her with his stare. “Meet the aliens to do what? Betray us? Ride off with them into some . . . some interstellar paradise? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and McKelvey and all the rest of those crazy Spacers—split off and let some alien beings make us slaves, while you—”

  “You stupid, contemptible paranoid.” Mariette made the word sound worse than the rudest obscenity. “Invasion? Is that what you’re thinking? Yes, you would. It’s the only way you think. Everybody’s out to get you, and you’ve got to be king and beat everybody down before you’ll feel safe. Do you know what? You won’t feel safe even then. You’ll still be worrying that somebody’s going to try to take that precious Chairmanship away from you. Well, you won’t be able to beat this, and you won’t be able to hide from it. You think if something doesn’t suit your plans, you can lock it away or destroy it. You’ve got some waking up to do—a lot of it!”

  “You’re both paranoid!” Todd managed to yell. He was certain his throat must resemble butchered meat, but he had made them listen. “You’re mad, aren’t you, Mari? The alien messenger stole your piece of dessert. It’s going to get here before Goddard can launch that Mars lander.”

  “It’s Pat’s fault, him and Earth First cutting off our funds—”

  “Don’t you start in on me again!”

  Jael rushed into the next narrow opening in the verbal violence. “Pat may be right, Todd. Admit it. This alien thing probably is hostile. We’ve got to do something . . .”

  “It’s possible.” Silence enveloped them. Dian eyed Todd sharply while the others gasped. “This is a first contact. We can’t predict outcomes.”

  “You see?” Pat was maliciously triumphant.

  Todd didn’t let him go on. “It can be either friendly or hostile. My logic says any probe that sophisticated wasn’t built by a species looking for new worlds to conquer. It could conquer them, anyway. It’s looking for new trade outlets, maybe. Or just curious. And if it’s this intelligent and powerful, we aren’t going to be able to do much to resist the species that built it—unless we can talk to their probe and find out as much as we can about its creators.”

  He was flying in circles, covering the same ground, increasingly frustrated. He had gotten too used to Dian, to his techs, to delegating explanations to his media experts. He was getting a depressing sample of what the Global Science Council presentation was going to be like, how some of the members were going to react. Was the whole damned planet becoming paranoid? Todd didn’t want to claim the credit any more. Or make the presentation. Maybe he would turn the whole thing over to Dian and Beth. No, that was the coward’s way out. He would have to take the good with the bad.

  He hadn’t reached Pat, the one person he most needed to reach. He tried once more. “Pat, they can be our friends. They can open up the whole universe to us. This is the start of a new era in human history, and you can go down in the books as the Chairman who greeted the alien messenger when it arrived.”

  “Can’t take chances,” Pat said. He glared at the holomode Dian was lifting out of the projector as if he wanted to grab it and smash the terrifying evidence. The fatal proof. Disaster coming. An element beyond his control. “I . . . I have to prepare my listeners, consult the party. We have to get ready . . .”

  “For what? Mass suicide?” Mari asked, shaking her head pityingly. She was pouting, a precocious child robbed of a chance to show off her special talent. Only her withering scorn for Pat was preventing another tantrum. “If they can build that, what the hell do you think you can do to get ready for them, except roll out a welcome mat? If you had any sense, you silly son of a bitch—”

  “Don’t talk to your brother that way!” Jael cried, advancing on Mari in maternal wrath. “I won’t have it!”

  Old resentment flared within Todd. She’ll defend Pat, but Mari can call me names and slap me and it’s okay.

  Mariette stood her ground. “You can’t order me around now, Mother, or tell me to clean up my language. I’m not a baby any more, and neither is Pat. Though he’s acting like one, like a baby scared of the dark.”

  To Todd’s amazement, Pat turned his back on both women, going to Carissa. She had been sitting very still, saying nothing much at all, not seeming afraid, even while Pat and Jael were flirting with hysteria. Carissa reached out to Pat, offering him some unseen strength he badly wanted. The scene diverted Jael’s anger. She faltered, watching the pair as they shared and shut everyone else outside themselves. “I’m thinking of our baby, of all Earth’s children . . .” Pat said softly.

  “But not of those who choose to go into space,” Mari retorted bitterly.

  “If they desert us, they’ll have to take the consequences.”

  “What consequences?” Todd asked. He was hoarse from shouting. At this rate, Dian would have to make the presentation to the Science Council. “You don’t even know what the consequences are going to be. They may be wonderful. What’s this family all about? Mother? Pat? Mari? What would Dad think of us right now? You know what he’d think. He never backed off from a new idea, no matter how risky. Never! And he wasn’t ashamed to shake a rival’s hand, either. We’ve got to try. He never stopped trying. He’d embrace this first contact—and you know it!”

  They were a wall. Mariette, wrapping her Goddard loyalties about herself like a flag, sulking at the disappointment that the alien had put them in the shadow. Jael, empty-faced with terror, more frightened than Todd had ever seen her, unreachable in that fear. Pat, thinking hard along political lines, converting the discovery of the ages into a party campaign, organizing his paranoia into world-arousing oratory. Carissa was his comet’s tail, trusting in him to figure a way out of the confusion.

  “Do you know what Dad’s lab motto was?” Todd rasped.

  Jael was ahead of him. She recited mechanically: “ ‘We found a cure for cancer before we knew what was causing it.’ ” She wasn’t there. None of this had meant anything to her at all. His childhood faith had been built on sand instead of rock, and he had never fully understood that until this moment. Ward was gone. And now Jael wasn’t there for him, either. The pain sank deep, ripping out something important from his mind and heart. Incredibly, Jael sensed his loss. She begged forgiveness. “I’m sorry, Todd. It’s just too much. I can’t cope with this.”

  “Mother, there wasn’t any way to break the news gradually. We weren’t sure ourselves until just a few weeks ago. I’ve been tryin
g to decide how to tell you. I thought the family should know first.” Todd swallowed a surge of nausea. “This is . . . this is the most important thing that’s ever happened. Can’t you see that? It’s harnessing fire. It’s being Columbus and Neil Armstrong and Ward Saunder all in one.”

  “Maybe we can hold it back, buy some time,” Pat muttered, talking to himself under the guise of discussing it privately with Carissa. She nodded, agreeing to anything he said.

  “Oh, for—where have you been for the past hour?” Mari slapped her forehead in helpless disgust. “I can’t believe you’re Dad’s son, Pat. Don’t you ever think about anything but propaganda? That signal is tracking us as we orbit, all us little solar children—Earth, Moon, Goddard. There is no way you can suppress it. None. Not even if you get to be dictator of Earth and imprison or freeze every scientist who might detect that signal. Because you damned well won’t suppress Goddard! We’re going to be listening and talking to it on our own. Don’t worry, Todd. We’re not going to cross your circuits. We’ll pick up on your data and follow your patterns. But we’ll cteate our own signals.” She smiled thinly at Todd. “I don’t imagine Pat could suppress you, could he? And there are other telescopes, other listeners in orbit above us. As Todd says, not good ears, but good enough. In a few months, that signal will be bombing in, by his data. Face it, Pat! It’s coming, like it or not!”

  Tears flowed again, and Mari broke off her tirade. Conflicting emotions battered her. She crawled out of her chair, clinging to the back, blindly beating with her fists and repeating a litany. “Dammit, dammit, they beat us, Kevin. They beat us. Dammit, dammit, dammit . . .”

  “You shouldn’t have meddled, Todd,” Jael said distractedly. “None of us should have. Maybe we tried to go too far. We should have quit while we were ahead.”

  “Mother, you can’t stay ahead if you stand still. We’ve got to keep trying, even if the possibilities are scary.” Todd laughed, and the sound was hollow in his ears.

  Dian suddenly spoke up. “I remember something about your dad, Todd. I read it in an article. I think it must have been true. It sounded like something he would have said. The critics were questioning him about one of his inventions, the viral inhibitor, I believe. They claimed he was messing with nature, that maybe it wouldn’t stop the plague but would wipe us all out, that he was going too fast. Ward Saunder said even the old Club of Rome used computers to plot out their doomsaying when they predicted Earth’s civilization would collapse in thirty or forty years. He thought that was ironic. An old-fashioned bunch of analysts, worrying about mankind on a non-stop slide through too much growth and progress, and they used the latest technology to make their points.”

  “They were right in many respects,” Pat said emphatically. She had touched an area he knew well. “The famines, the plagues, the wars—they came true. We’re a long way from being out of that bunch of disasters even now.”

  “And who knows when the next one will hit?” Pat hadn’t perceived that steel in Dian’s personality. He pulled up short, staring at her. “You want to talk disaster, Mr. Saunder? I cut my baby teeth on it. So, will it be a disaster? You tell me. Guarantee it. Bet your life on it. I’ve been there, and I’m not going to hide and scream and say the aliens are coming to eat us. Maybe that means that knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve seen all those disasters, and I say we’ve got to talk to that messenger. Maybe it’ll bring us a present, a solution, cures to our diseases, genuine immortality, the secrets of the universe. How do you know? You don’t! Neither do we. But if you can’t stop it, you’d better count on rolling with it, or finding a new friend.”

  Todd jumped in to help her out. “The next disaster to hit us from within could be the worst yet, Pat. We just might need the help of intelligent aliens to get us out of it. Pat?”

  “I want all your data, your decryption, as soon as your people get them.”

  Dian dropped the holo-mode into its case. Nobody wanted to see the backup stats. They believed. That hadn’t been the problem. So much for secrecy, Todd thought. They might as well have put it on ComLink. At least that would have spread the panic around generally.

  “Is that an order, Pat?” Todd asked softly.

  “Of course it is!” Mari pulled herself together and marched toward the elevator. “Watch out for him. He’s so typical. When you turn this loose, the Earth Firsters will hit you with everything they’ve got, Todd.”

  “Mariette, where are you going?” Jael demanded, starting to follow her.

  Mariette sidestepped Jael’s grab at her arm. “I’m leaving. I’ll rent a flier from Orleans and have it come out and pick me up if you won’t let someone take me to the mainland. Then I’m grabbing the first transport heading out and up. It was a mistake to come here at all.”

  Jael persisted, boring in, blocking Mari’s way. Surprisingly, she resorted to a caress, stroking Mariette’s face. “Don’t do this. You mustn’t. We can work it out. We’ve been separated from one another for so long—that’s why we quarrel.”

  “I don’t quarrel with Todd like I do with you and Pat. He, at least, is willing to admit I might have some right on my side. But you and Pat won’t let me breathe. It’s got to be your way or not at all. You’re stagnating, smothering yourselves on this planet, and you’re trying to smother me, too.” Mari giggled, and Jael’s jaw dropped. “That’s amazing!” Mariette exclaimed. “Do you know where I heard that? Do you remember? No, I suppose you’ve conveniently wiped it out of your memory. Grandfather Hartman. I was about ten, and he dropped in, unannounced. Big, noisy argument! Him saying we were living like animals in that crater and how could you turn your back on all the fine, cultural things the Hartmans had labored for, throw away their money and name and dignity—all for a crazy inventor.”

  Jael’s face froze, the earlier tenderness gone. Merciless, Mari struck her to the bone. “I remember your slicing him up, too. I burned it in my mind, because I never wanted to forget the way you were then. ‘Ward Saunder’s name will eclipse everything the Hartmans ever did or ever will do,’ you said with pride. ‘I won’t go back to that decadent stagnation. I was smothering there. Here, with Ward, I’m free.’ ”

  Mari was eight centimeters taller than Jael, dark, thin, and long-boned, as Ward had been and as Jael was not. But they might have been identical twins confronting each other with awesome, feminine cold rage across the generations. Too different. And too much the same, because too much time had passed since Jael’s rebellion against her own parents. She couldn’t see the same thing happening between Mariette and herself.

  Neither woman lowered her eyes, but Mari turned away. It wasn’t a defeat. She continued toward the elevator, cueing the servo, hurrying inside.

  Carissa tried to break the shock with trite, consoling words. No one reacted, and she gave up. At last Pat straightened up and appealed to his brother. “You must give me everything you get, Todd, please.”

  “This can’t be political. And I’m not going to feed your campaign with data you’ll twist into paranoia. Look, you’ll get all you need from the public sources. Even if you dropped this holo-mode in the sea, there are ten others just like it. And if you destroy those, in a few weeks, a month, two, the media are going to be flooded with alien messenger speculation. Project Search has the honor of being first, but it won’t be the last.”

  “But you have the decoders,” Pat said, looking searchingly at Dian.

  “That’s right,” she agreed. “I’m a scientist, Mr. Saunder. What I puzzle out won’t be classified. But I’m not going to let it go public piecemeal. It’s going to come in batches, and I don’t hand it just to you or even just to Todd. It’s knowledge. It belongs to the whole world, and to Goddard.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Pat was combing his hair with his fingers. He wasn’t showing off for the cameras, for once. The gesture was completely unconscious.

  Todd saved Dian further trouble. “We go to the Science Council conference directly from here. After that, the facts are availab
le to the world. You’ll have to get in line along with everybody else.”

  “You don’t have an exclusive.” Pat looked mean and dangerous. “Earth First has pull, and some military contacts. There are other decoders . . .”

  “And you’re the one who worries about wasting money and resources!” Todd laughed weakly. “Sure. Go ahead. Duplicate our efforts. I happen to think I’ve got the best team in the world. Dian and Beth and Wu Mim and Anatole have been on top of this for months. If you want to make it a race, be my guest.”

  “You can be hurt,” Pat warned. “You’ve got stock in SE Consolidated and SE Trans Co, not to mention all your ground-based ComLink installations.”

  “Are you going to shoot up my satellites and people with missiles, too?”

  Pat recoiled in shock. “I didn’t mean that . . .”

  “Didn’t you? Mari wasn’t exaggerating. I was almost killed by someone who has a grudge against a Saunder supported project—the Colony. Now you threaten Project Search—and me. Just what am I supposed to think you meant? What is Mari supposed to think?”

  “It was a financial threat. I didn’t say anything about missiles. I don’t have any goddamned missiles!” Pat shouted.

  Dian offered the holo-mode case to Todd, who said, “You’re getting good at undercutting your siblings financially. But you’d better check and see if you can carry through before you threaten me. I’m diversified. A lot. I won’t say you can’t make a dent. But you can’t cut off my lifeline like Earth First is cutting off Goddard’s funds in the Protectors of Earth committees. Unlike Goddard, I won’t talk secession. I’ll fight you, Pat. If you want a Saunder civil war, you’ll get it.”

  Visibly shaken, Pat backpedaled. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . don’t, kid! Not us. Not you and me. We’ve got so much between us.”