The Year of the Quiet Sun

by Wilson Tucker

  The old woman spoke with a dry weariness, a long fatigue, and he could listen to her voice and her spirit running down as she talked.

  The wars began just after the Presidential election of 1980, just after the field trials into Joliet. Arthur Saltus had told her of the two Chinese railroad towns blown off the map, and suddenly one day in December the Chinese bombed Darwin, Australia, in long-delayed retaliation. The whole of northern Australia was made uninhabitable by radiation. The public was never told of the first strike against the railroad towns but only of the second: it was painted an act of brutal savagery against an innocent populace. Radioactivity spread across the Arafura Sea to the islands to the north, and drifted toward the Phillipines. Great Britain appealed to the United States for aid.

  The re-elected President and his Congress declared war on the Chinese Peoples’ Republic in the week following his inauguration, after having waged an undeclared war since 1954. The Pentagon had privately assured him the matter could be terminated and the enemy subdued in three weeks. Some months later the President committed massive numbers of troops to the Asian Theater: now involving eleven nations from the Philippine Republic westward to Pakistan, and to the defense of Australia. He was then compelled to send troops to Korea, to counteract renewed hostilities there, but lost them all when the Chinese and the Mongolians overran the peninsula and ended foreign occupation.

  She said tiredly: “The President was re-elected in 1980, and again for a third term in 1984. After Arthur brought back the terrible news from Joliet, the man seemed unable to control himself and unable to do anything right. The third-term prohibition was repealed at his urging, and some time during that third term the Constitution was suspended altogether ‘for the duration of the emergency.’ The emergency never ended. Brian, that man was the last elected President the country ever had. After him there was nothing.”

  Chaney said bitterly: “The meek, the terrible meek. I hope he is still alive to see this!”

  “He isn’t, he wasn’t. He was assassinated and his body thrown into the burning White House. They burned Washington to destroy a symbol of oppression.”

  “Burned it! Wait until I tell him that.”

  She made a little gesture to hush him or contradict him. “All that and more, much more. Those twenty years were a frightful ordeal; the last few years were numbing. Life appeared to stop, to give way to savagery. We missed the little things at first: passenger trains and airliners were forbidden to civilian traffic, mail deliveries were cut back to twice a week and then halted altogether, the news telecasts were restricted to only one a day and then as the war worsened, further restricted, to only local news not of a military nature. We were isolated from the world and nearly isolated from Washington.

  “Our trucks were taken away for use elsewhere; food was not brought in, nor medicines, nor clothing, nor fuel, and we fell back on the supplies stored on station. The military personnel were transferred to other posts or to points overseas, leaving only a token crew to guard this installation.

  “Brian, that guard was compelled to fire on nearby townspeople attempting to raid our stores: the rumor had been spread that enormous stockpiles of food were here, and they were desperately hungry.”

  Katrina looked down at her hands and swallowed painfully. “The twenty years finally ended for us in a shocking civil war.”

  Chaney said: “Ramjets.”

  “They were called that, once they came into the open, once their statement of intent was publicized: Revolution And Morality. Sometimes we would see banners bearing the word RAM, but the name soon became something dirty — something akin to that other name they were called for centuries: it was a very bitter time and you would have suffered if you had remained on station.

  “Brian, people everywhere were starving, dying of disease, rotting in neglect and misery, but those people possessed a leadership we now lacked. Ramjets had efficient leadership. Their leaders used them against us and it was our turn to suffer. There was revolution but little or no morality; whatever morality they may have possessed was quickly lost in the rebellion and we all suffered. The country was caught up in a senseless savagery.”

  “That’s when Moresby came up?”

  A weary nod.

  Major Moresby witnessed the beginning of the civil war when he emerged on his target date. They had chosen the same date for the outbreak of the rebellion — they had selected the Fourth of July as their target in a bid for independence from white America and the bombing of Chicago was intended to be the signal. Ramjet liaison agents in Beijing had arranged that: Chicago — not Atlanta or Memphis or Birmingham — was the object of their greatest hatred after the wall. But the plan went awry.

  The rebellion broke out almost a week earlier — quite by accident — when triggered by a riot in the little river town of Cairo, Illinois. A traffic arrest there, followed by a street shooting and then a wholesale jail delivery of black prisoners, upset the schedule: the revolt was quickly out of control. The state militia and the police were helpless, depleted in number, their reserve manpower long since spent overseas; there was no regular army left standing in the United States except for token troops at various posts and stations, and even the ceremonial guards at national monuments had been removed and assigned to foreign duty. There was no remaining force to prevent the rebellion. Major Moresby climbed out of the vehicle and into the middle of the holocaust.

  The agony went on for almost seventeen months.

  The President was assassinated, Congress fled — or died while trying to flee — and Washington burned. They burned many of the cities where they were numerically strong. In their passion they burned themselves out of their homes and destroyed the fields and crops which had fed them.

  The few remaining lines of transportation which were open up to that moment ceased entirely. Trucks were intercepted, looted and burned, their drivers shot. Buses were stopped on interstate highways and white passengers killed. Railroad trains were abandoned wherever they stopped, or wherever the tracks were torn up, engineers and crews were murdered wherever they were caught. Desperate hunger soon followed the stoppage of traffic.

  Katrina said: “Everyone here expected the Chinese to intervene, to invade, and we knew we could not stop them. Brian, our country had lost or abandoned twenty million men overseas; we were helpless before any invader. But they did not come. I thank God they did not come. They were prevented from coming when the Soviet turned on them in a holy war in the name of Communism: that long, long border dispute burst into open warfare and the Russians drove on Lop Nor.” She made a little gesture of futility. “We never learned what happened; we never learned the outcome of anything in Europe. Perhaps they are still fighting, if anyone is left alive to fight. Our contact with the Continent was lost, and has never been restored to our knowledge. We lost contact with that military group in Virginia when the electricity failed. We were alone.”

  He said in wonder: “Israel, Egypt, Australia, Britain, Russia, China — all of them: the world.”

  “All of them,” she repeated with a dull fatigue. “And our troops were wasted in nearly every one of them, thrown away by a man with a monumental ego. Not more than a handful of those troops ever returned. We were done.”

  Chaney said: “I guess the Commander came up at the end — seventeen months later.”

  “Arthur emerged from the TDV on his target date, just past the end of it: the beginning of the second winter after the rebellion. We think the rebellion had ended, spent and exhausted on its own fury. We think the men who assaulted him at the gatehouse were stragglers, survivors who had managed through the first winter. He said those men were as surprised by his appearance, as he was by theirs; they might have fled if he had not cornered them.” Katrina laced her fingers on the tabletop in familiar gesture and looked at him. “We saw a few armed bands roaming the countryside that second winter. We repaired the fence, stood guard, but were not again molested: Arthur put out warnings he had found in the book yo
u gave him. By the following spring, the bands of men had dwindled to a few scavengers prowling the fields for game — but after that we saw no one. Until you came, we saw no one.”

  He said: “So ends the bloody business of the day.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Katrina peered across the table and sought to break the unhappy silence between them.

  “A family, you said? Father, mother, and child? A healthy child? How old was he?”

  “I don’t know: three, maybe four. The kid was having himself a fine time — playing, hollering, picking up things — until I scared off his parents.” Chaney still felt bitter about that encounter. “They all looked healthy enough. They ran healthy.”

  Katrina nodded her satisfaction. “It gives one hope for the future, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  She reprimanded him: “You know so. If those people were healthy, they were eating well and living in some degree of safety. If the man carried no weapon, he thought none was needed. If they had a child and were together, family life has been re-established. And if that child survived his birth and was thriving, it suggests a quiet normalcy has returned to the world, a measure of sanity. All that gives me hope for the future.”

  “A quiet normalcy,” he repeated. “The sun in that sky was quiet. It was cold out there.”

  The dark eyes peered at him. “Have you ever admitted to yourself that you could be wrong, Brian? Have you even thought of your translations today? You were a stubborn man; you came close to mocking Major Moresby.”

  Chaney failed to answer: it was not easy to reassess the Eschatos scroll in a day. A piece of his mind insisted that ancient Hebrew fiction was only fiction.

  They sat in the heavy silence of the briefing room, looking at each other in the lantern light and knowing this was coming to an end. Chaney was uneasy. There had been a hundred — a thousand — questions he’d wanted to ask when he first walked into the room, when he first discovered her, but now he could think of little to say. Here was Katrina, the once youthful, radiant Katrina of the swimming pool — and outside was Katrina’s family waiting for him to leave.

  He wanted desperately to ask one more question but at the same time he was afraid to ask: what happened to him after his return, after the completion of the probe? What had happened to him? He wanted to know where he had gone, what he had done, how he had survived the perilous years — he wanted to know if he had survived those years. Chaney was long convinced that he was not on station in 1980, not there at the time of the field trials, but where was he then? She might have some knowledge of him after he’d finished the mission and left; she might have kept .in touch. He was afraid to ask. Pindar’s advice stopped his tongue.

  He got up suddenly from his chair. “Katrina, will you walk downstairs with me?”

  She gave him a strange look, an almost frightened look, but said: “Yes, sir.”

  Katrina left her chair and came around the table to him. Age had slowed her graceful walk and he was acutely distressed to see her move with difficulty. Chaney picked up a lantern, and offered her his free arm. He felt a flush of excitement as she neared him, touched him.

  They descended the stairs without speaking. Chaney slowed his pace to accommodate her and they went down slowly, one cautious step at a time. Kathryn van Hise held on to the rail and moved with the hesitant pace of the aged.

  They stopped at the opened door to the operations room. Chaney held the lantern high to inspect the vehicle: the hatch was open and the hull of the craft covered by dust; the concrete cradle seemed dirty with age.

  He asked suddenly: “How much did I report, Katrina? Did I tell them about you? Your family? Did I tell them about that family on the railroad tracks? What did I say?”

  “Nothing.” She wouldn’t look up at him.

  “What?”

  “You reported nothing.”

  He thought her voice was strained. “I had to say something. Gilbert Seabrooke will demand something.”

  “Brian—” She stopped, swallowed hard, and then began again. “You reported nothing, Mr. Chaney. You did not return from your probe. We knew you were lost to us when the vehicle failed to return at sixty-one seconds: you were wholly lost to us.”

  Brian Chaney very carefully put the lantern down and then turned her around and pulled her head up. He wanted to see her face, wanted to see why she was lying. Her eyes were wet with threatened tears but there was no lie there.

  Stiffly: “Why not, Katrina?”

  “We have no power, Mr. Chaney. The vehicle is helpless, immobile.”

  Chaney swung his head to stare at the TDV and as quickly swung back to the woman. He wasn’t aware that he was holding her in a painful grip.

  “The engineers can pull me back.”

  “No. They can do nothing for you: they lost you when that device stopped tracking, when the computer went silent, when the power failed here and you overshot the failure date. They lost you; they lost the vehicle.” She pulled away from his hard grasp, and her wavering gaze fell. “You didn’t come back to the laboratory, Mr. Chaney. No one saw you again after the launch; no one saw you again until you appeared here, today.”

  Almost shouting: “Stop calling me Mr. Chaney!”

  “I am… I am terribly sorry. You were as lost to us as Major Moresby. We thought…”

  He turned his back on the woman and deliberately walked into the operations room. Brian Chaney climbed up on the polywater tank and thrust a leg through the open hatch of the TDV. He didn’t bother to undress or remove the heavy boots. Wriggling downward through the hatch, he slammed it shut over his head and looked for the blinking green light. There was none. Chaney stretched out full length on the web sling and thrust his heels against the kickbar at the bottom. No red light answered him.

  He knew panic.

  He fought against that and waited for his nerves to rest, waited for a stolid placidity to return. The memory of his first test came back: he’d thought then the vehicle was like a cramped tomb, and he thought so now. Lying on the webbed sling for the first time — and waiting for something spectacular to happen — he had felt an ache in his legs and had stretched them out to relieve the ache. His feet had struck the kickbar, sending him back to the beginning before the engineers were ready; they had been angry with him. And an hour later, in the lecture room, everyone heard and saw the results of his act: the vehicle kicked backward as he thrust out his feet, the sound struck his eardrums and the lights dimmed. The astonished engineers left the room on the run, and Gilbert Seabrooke proposed a new study program to be submitted to Indic. The TDV sucked power from its present, not its past.

  Chaney reached up to snug the hatch. It was snug. The light that should have been blinking green stayed dark. Chaney jut the heavy boots against the bar and pushed. The red light stayed dark. He pushed again, then kicked at the bar. After a moment he twisted around to peer through the plastic bubble into the room. It was dimly lit by the lantern resting on the floor.

  He shouted: “Goddammit, go!” And kicked again.

  The room was dimly lit by lantern light.

  He walked slowly along the corridor in the feeble light of the lantern, walked woodenly in shock tinged with fear. The failure of the vehicle to move under his prodding had stunned him. He wished desperately for Katrina, wished she was standing by with a word or a gesture he might seize for a crutch, but she wasn’t visible in the corridor. She had left him while he struggled with the vehicle, perhaps to return to the briefing room, perhaps to go outside, perhaps to retire to whatever sort of shelter she shared with her son and daughter. He was alone, fighting panic. The door to the engineering laboratory was standing open, as was the door to the storeroom, but she wasn’t waiting for him in either place. Chaney listened for her but heard nothing, and went on after the smallest pause. The dusty corridor ended and a flight of stairs led upward to the operations exit.

  He thought the sign on the door was a bitter mockery — one of the many visited on hi
m since he’d sailed for Israel a century or two ago. He regretted the day he had read and translated those scrolls — but at the same time he wished desperately he knew the identity of that scribe who had amused himself and his fellows by creating the Eschatos document. A single name would be enough: an Amos or a Malachi or an Ibycus.

  He would hoist a glass of water from the Nabataean cistern and salute the unknown genius for his wit and wisdom, for his mockery. He would shout to the freshly scrubbed sky: “Here, damn your eyes, Ibycus! Here, for the lohg-dead dragons and the ruptured fence and the ice on the rivers. Here, for my head of gold, my breast of silver, my legs of iron and my feet of clay. My feet of clay, Ibycus!” And he would hurl the glass at the lifeless TDV.

  Chaney turned the keys in the locks and pushed out into the chill night air. The darkness surprised him; he hadn’t realized he’d spent so many bittersweet hours inside with Katrina. The parking lot was empty but for the cart and his discarded rifle. Katrina’s children hadn’t waited for him, and he was aware of a small hurt.

  He stepped away from the building and then turned back to look at it: a massive white concrete temple in the moonlight. The barbaric legions had failed to bring it down, despite the damage caused elsewhere on the station.

  The sky was the second surprise: he had seen it by day and marveled, but at night it was shockingly beautiful. The stars were bright and hard as carefully polished gems, and there were a hundred or a thousand more than he’d ever seen before; he had never known a sky like that in his lifetime. The entire eastern rim of the heavens was lighted by a rising moon of remarkable brilliance.

  Chaney stood alone in the center of the parking lot searching the face of the moon, searching out the Sea of Vapors and the pit known as Bode’s Crater. The pulsating laser there caught his eye and held it. That one thing had not changed — that one monument not destroyed. The brilliant mote still flashed on the rim of Bode’s Crater, marking the place where two astronauts had fallen in the Seventies, marking their grave and their memorial. One of them had been black. Brian Chaney thought himself lucky: he had air to breathe but those men had none.