Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound

by Joe Haldeman

  “For the time being,” the pale one said.

  A little girl walked onto the porch, looking apprehensive. She silently raised her hand.

  “What is it, Bits?” Roz said tiredly.

  “Someone wants to talk to this lady.” She pointed at me. “The Mars lady?”

  “Weren’t you told not to answer the phone?”

  “He isn’t on the phone, Primus. He’s on the cube.”

  “What does he look like?” I said.

  “I think he’s a zombie. He don’t look real.”

  “Doesn’t,” Roz said. She took the child by the hand, and we followed them through the cafeteria smells into a dark room with high windows and a central cube. In it, the image of Spy.

  “Kid here says you look like a zombie,” Paul said.

  “How perceptive. I’m not exactly alive.”

  “You’re nearby,” I said. No lag in his reply.

  “Close enough. Cable. Did you have a nice flight?”

  “It was eventful. As you must know.”

  He nodded. “You went to Russia and came back to the US, threatened to murder the president, and escaped to this bucolic paradise. Do you want to know whether the president’s security people are after you?”

  “Would you tell us the truth?” Paul said.

  “Ask Epimenides. They are not after you. Things are somewhat confused back at Camp David, not to mention Washington, but if you went back, they might give you a medal.”

  “What about the president?” I said.

  “Under house arrest, in a manner of speaking. The soldiers are negotiating via cell with their erstwhile enemies. It’s all very chummy, democracy in action.”

  “Are we still going to lose power on Wednesday?” Roz said.

  “As far as I know. Would you rather it be sooner?”

  “Later would be nice,” I said. “Like not lose it at all. If there’s a lesson, we’ve learned it.”

  “ ‘Don’t fuck with the aliens’? I suppose you have learned that. But I don’t think it’s actually a lesson. Someone wants to talk with you.”

  His image faded and was replaced with one I didn’t at first recognize; he looked sort of like the pale elder, but with more hair, streaming in thick white Medusa locks. Then he spoke, without moving his lips: Moonboy, gaunt.

  “You’re looking well,” he said.

  While I was doing a sort of goldfish imitation, Namir found his voice: “Moonboy. You were frozen solid. You can’t be alive.”

  The Others had chosen Moonboy to represent the human race in their deep-freeze zoo, even though he was not mentally or emotionally competent by our standards.

  “I am more alive than any of you are, in terms of intellectual growth. I synapse faster, and my memory is not limited by organic considerations. I don’t lose my temper anymore.”

  He still had a scar on his forehead from where Dustin had whacked him with a pool cue after Moonboy had broken his wife’s nose.

  “How are you any different from Spy? You’re hooked up to the Others like him, and exist at their convenience.”

  “Our shared history makes me different. Your group once had a person who loved me.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Namir said. “The fact that Meryl is dead.”

  His eyes blinked slowly. I don’t think he used them for seeing. “How could I feel things, Namir? As you pointed out, I’m long dead myself.”

  Not as dead as Meryl, I thought. My palms still stung with blisters from the shovel we used for her grave.

  “I’m not just a mouthpiece for the Others,” he said. “I can communicate with you in real time. When I’m speaking for them, I’ll hold my hand up, like this.”

  He raised his right hand and left it up. “You present an interesting problem, the five of you whom we have met physically.”

  “How nice that we’re interesting,” Namir said.

  “Along with what I, Moonboy, remember, there is a context”—he shook his head, frowning—“a universe of discourse? Between humans and the Others. That is not simply predator and prey.”

  “You can eat us?” Namir said. “That clears up a few things.”

  “I know that is just humor. I caution you against using it. You don’t want me to misunderstand you.”

  Moonboy put his hand back down. “I can say whatever I want to you, but of course they overhear. Do you have any questions?”

  “An obvious one,” Paul said. “When the Others captured and froze you, we were all almost twenty-five light-years away from here. When they sent us back, it was as if no time had elapsed at all, but twenty-five years had passed on Earth.”

  Moonboy nodded. “Twice twenty-five, there and back.”

  “Was the transfer instantaneous to you? Or have you been thinking about things for a quarter of a century?”

  “There is no plain answer. It did just take an instant, in the way you’re measuring time. But I thought a lot while that was going on, in a way that I perceive time. I’m sorry that’s not clear. Time itself is not what you think it is.”

  Actually, that was about as clear as he had been when he was last alive. But he had started to lose it after a couple of years aboard ship. Then he broke Elza’s nose while they were having sex, and things went downhill fast from there.

  In a way, that seemed like a couple of weeks ago. But I guess time is not what I think it is. “In what sense are the Others predators?” I asked. “How are we prey?”

  “You offer the new,” he said. “Any new organism does. But social creatures, who can communicate about their surroundings, add another dimension.”

  “So now the Others can leave us alone,” Namir said, “since we’re not new anymore.”

  “How you react to what’s happening is always new. There is plenty left to happen.”

  “And after they’ve learned enough?” I said.

  “When you had biology in school, you dissected a cat.” I remembered talking with him about that, and nodded. “After you had learned enough about the cat, what did you do with it?”

  “It wasn’t a cat anymore.”

  “I suppose not.” He faded away.

  “That was informative,” Namir said.

  Spy appeared again. “This may not be the last time we want to talk to you. Please stay near a cube receiver, or carry a small one. It makes things simpler.”

  “After the power goes out?” Namir’s fists were clenched.

  “We can make do.” He flickered and disappeared.

  “I wonder if that means they’ll eventually just go,” Paul said. “Once they learn enough.”

  “Leaving us in pieces on the dissecting table,” Namir said.

  We waited in the cube room for a few minutes, in case Spy had another afterthought. Then Paul and Namir went with two of the guys on GEVs, to clean up the jet, assuming it hadn’t already been plundered. Paul said he’d scavenge the portable cube from the plane, to carry in case Spy wanted to make a call.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us worked on domestic arrangements. There was a cabin with only one couple in it, and they moved out with more grace than I would’ve displayed. We managed to fit in three pallets and two beds, each large enough for two people who didn’t mind touching. There was a rickety table with four chairs on the porch. The nearest toilet was a hundred meters away, but the room had a sink and three one-gallon jugs for carrying water. Rico found us an assortment of sheets, towels, and pillows.

  We rested, waiting for the scavengers to return. I took a pallet on the floor, tired but not sleepy, glad to have a pillow.

  Why had the Others contacted us? Just to make sure we knew they were watching? We would have been surprised if they weren’t. I went over the short exchange with Moonboy in my mind.

  They were using us to collect new experiences. Had they ever told us that before? I wished Snowbird was still with us. Or one of the yellow family, ideally. They had more direct contact with the Others, though I wasn’t sure they understood them better.

&
nbsp; We should call Snowbird, at Novisibirsk, and fill her in on everything that had happened. Wait until Namir comes back, to handle the Russian phone system.

  Other than the stuff about collecting “the new,” what had we learned? Don’t joke with them; that was very useful. Moonboy claimed to experience time differently from us, but that’s probably true of all dead people.

  Speaking directly for, or as, the Others, what had he said? With his hand up. That there is a “universe of discourse” connecting us and them. Things that we share. As predator and prey? Then he put his hand down, after warning Namir about joking. Did they say anything else through him?

  Of course, there’s no reason to think Moonboy was telling the truth or, even if he was, it was for the purpose of helping us. Even before he died, it was hard to figure out what was going on in that unbalanced head.

  I fell asleep and dreamed a memory of him on ad Astra, before he’d snapped. He was composing at the keyboard, which he’d always done silently, with earphones. In the dream he was playing out loud, the same four-note sequence over and over, a look of terrible Beethovenian concentration on his unlined face. The notes never varied in volume or phrasing. Someone once said that was a functional definition of insanity: doing the same thing time and again, always expecting a different outcome.

  Dinner was a madhouse of cheerful disorganization. There was a big iron kettle of vegetable stew on an outdoor fire, and a smaller pot of deer-meat chili, peppery enough to make my eyes water. Plates of cornbread and biscuits.

  Almost all of the eighty-nine people ate at the same time, mostly out on the porch or spilled onto the weedy lawn behind it. People drank yerba maté or a sugary drink with some citrus flavor. Everyone except the smallest children served themselves.

  Eating with lots of people still made me nervous, after years on the cramped starship. But this rambunctious clan was easier than the formal dinners when we first returned, everybody staring at us and speculating.

  Here, we were the invaders from outer space, and these folks rarely saw anyone outside their extended family. When the children stared, I just stared back.

  I wondered about my own children—not the fifty-four-year-old twins I talked to through the Martian time-lag, just before we landed on Earth—but the youngsters who had grown up hardly knowing their mother. They’d been three and a half—not quite two ares—when I left on ad Astra. Their generation was all raised by professional parenters, so it wasn’t child desertion, no matter what it had felt like at the time to me. I watched these women here, scolding and playing with and fussing over their offspring, and felt an emptiness that couldn’t be there for Elza and Alba. No hole to fill.

  But I wasn’t even a biological mother, just a gene donor who had occasionally played with the results. How much greater the lack would be for the woman who carried a person inside her for nine months, had it pulled from her body and then watched it, an actual piece of her own flesh, acquire a separate personality and go out into the world. That would leave a hole.

  We would never talk again. Never even breathe the same air, feel the same gravity.

  They could read all about Paul and me, and presumably had. Every clinical detail of our stressed hothouse lives aboard the starship was available for inspection. Maybe because anyone could read it, they would leave it alone.

  At least I wouldn’t be entertaining observers with the interesting sexual geometries Elza and Meryl had experienced, assuming the public record was also a pubic record. But neither of them had children to be embarrassed by Mother’s example.

  The scavengers came back during dinner with the happy news that the plane seemed not to have been touched; it was still locked up unharmed. They brought the rest of the weapons and powder ammunition. (The elder named “Wham-O” was in charge of recycling ammunition, but he had run out of primers, a little metal thing that’s pressed into the rear of the cartridge. Without that, the bullet won’t go anywhere, so primers were at the top of some theoretical wish list. Along with U-235 and the philosopher’s stone.)

  Paul had the portable cube in a bright orange Sea Rescue knapsack. They also emptied out the jet’s liquor cabinet, mostly full bottles of whisky, rum, gin, and vodka. Some had obviously sampled a bit on the way home, but had managed not to wreck the floaters.

  There was a raucous vote as to whether the devil’s brew ought to be saved, consumed on the spot, or destroyed. Some form of consensus wisdom prevailed, and they measured out one ounce apiece for each adult, and preserved an ounce for each child. The ones in their teens objected, but were somewhat mollified by the attraction of specialness: on their eighteenth birthdays, they would get something no one else could have.

  I chose an ounce of rum, but gave it to Paul. Not that I didn’t sort of want it. But it wouldn’t relax me, and it did him.

  Dustin had told us about a telescope that Wham-O maintained, an old thing they’d picked up at auction when Dustin was little. He had fond memories of looking through it at the stars and moon and planets. After dinner, we took candles out under the starry sky to the big shed where the machine was kept, on the other side of the cornfield.

  The roof of the shed rolled off, squeaking into a rail frame, and there was the old machine, a long brass tube about a foot wide glittering in the candlelight. It was mounted on a heavy black cast-iron thing but was balanced exquisitely; you could move it around with a fingertip. We blew out all the candles, to preserve night vision.

  Wham-O used a big brass key to wind a spring-driven clock mechanism that ticked and moved the tube so it would slowly track the stars.

  He used a small telescope mounted on the side of the big one to point it. First we looked at Uranus, which he warned would not be too impressive, and that was an understatement. It was a little bluish green ball, shimmering in the dark, along with two faint stars he said were its brightest moons. Neptune wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours, but there wasn’t much to see there anyhow. Years ago, you could’ve seen its largest satellite, Triton, but the Others blew it up back in 2079. Warming up for the main act.

  (Wham-O seemed personally offended that the Others had blown up Earth’s Moon. That deprived him of the telescope’s most impressive target.)

  We looked at a couple of pairs of galaxies, faint, faraway ovals, and a brilliant double star, Gamma something. Then he pointed it to Mars.

  I had to blink away tears. It wasn’t at all like the familiar sight of its globe from orbit—this fuzzy ball was too orange and indistinct. But it was clear enough, the white polar cap and the dark “continent” of Syrtis Major, and the broad Hellas desert, under which the Martians were living. Lying in wait, a trap, though neither they nor we had had any reason to suspect that.

  I went back to stare at it some more after the others had looked. Probably the last time I would see my home planet.

  I allowed myself to hope that we still had children and grandchildren there; that the Others had let them keep the technology they needed to live and breathe. They had not been humane with us, but not sadistic either, in spite of what the popular press claimed.

  More mysterious than mean. If that made any difference to the outcome.

  We looked at some more faint fuzzballs, distant galaxies less impressive than we’d seen earlier, and some wisps of interstellar cloud. It wasn’t boring, exactly, but the sky seemed full of bright stars that would be more interesting, and I wanted to see Mars again. I asked him about that, and he chuckled.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I want you all to be part of an experiment. I didn’t want you to look at anything bright for a few minutes.

  “You know how to find Polaris?”

  Paul had showed us that; I let Elza answer. Just draw a line from the two stars, the “pointers,” on the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl.

  “Look there and tell me what you see.” Not much. Polaris was noticeably blue, but not very bright. The other stars in the Little Dipper were even dimmer, and hardly looked like a dipper at all.

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sp; Dustin noticed it first. “It’s darker.”

  “That’s right,” Wham-O said. “Not a lot of stars around there. But what else?”

  “No moonglow,” he said. “There’s . . . there’s not as much lunar debris in that direction?”

  “Not much at all. If you look in that direction with the telescope, the sky is noticeably blacker. It’s been that way for a couple of days.

  “Now look up there.” I could just see him pointing. “Up by Gemini and Taurus, the Pleiades.”

  “It’s a lot brighter up there,” I said.

  “Brighter than it used to be?”