The Solarians

by Norman Spinrad

  For though he had never seen the Earth, the planet was inextricably a part of him, of his mind, of his way of thinking, of the very language he spoke. “Earth-normal…Earth-like…extraterrestrial…the good earth…brought to earth…unearthly…earthy….”A thousand words and phrases that he had used casually all his life now became pregnant with new meaning in the light of the blue planet.

  As the disc grew larger and larger, Palmer knew that though Man might survive The War, though the human race live a billion years, spreading its seed throughout the Galaxy, even to Andromeda, begetting its kind on a million planets of a million suns, Man could never forget the small third planet of an insignificant yellow sun in the outer boondocks of the Galaxy that had given him birth. As a salmon somehow blindly negotiates a thousand miles of hostile waters to return to the pool where he was born, so men everywhere would always, in their hearts and minds and souls, in their languages, in their criteria of the universe, in the depths of their being, turn to this one small planet.

  For it was home.

  Not a word was spoken as the ship sped straight toward Earth; for no words were needed and none could be adequate.

  In his three decades of life, Palmer had never felt what he was feeling now. He was coming home….

  Now the ship crossed the orbit of Luna, that one moon in all the Galaxy known simply as the Moon. From Luna’s orbit, the sunlit portion of the Earth presented a spectacle that moved Palmer almost to tears.

  The outlines of North and South America were clearly visible; greens and browns softened by the white fleece of cloud cover and surrounded by the luminous blue seas that gave the planet its brilliant sapphire sparkle as seen from Mars, the seas that were the ultimate womb of all life.

  And Palmer knew that across those seas, over those continents, a wind blew that was clean and fresh and somehow right in the way that the wind of no other planet could be, no matter how…how Earthlike.

  Home.

  The ship spiraled Earthward, nearing the fuzzy line of Earth’s atmosphere-blurred terminator as it approached. Apparently, Lingo was going to land the ship somewhere on the night side.

  Soon I’ll be standing on the surf ace of the Earth, Palmer thought, looking up at the stars as the first men must’ve seen them, never dreaming that someday their children would live on hundreds of alien worlds circling those far-off points of cold light.

  The ship crossed the terminator and the night side of the Earth passed beneath them. Soon the jeweled lights of a thousand cities would appear like a terrestrial mirror of the stars.

  But…but….

  Palmer stared numbly at the night side of the Earth in uncomprehending horror. It was dark; it was totally dark, unlit by the light of a single city.

  The lights of Earth’s cities were out.

  And suddenly Palmer realized that Lingo was swinging the ship in a great parabola past Earth. The darkened disc was no longer waxing, it was waning. They were swinging around the Earth and continuing sunward.

  “What…what are you doing? What’s happened to Earth’s cities? Wha…?”

  “Nothing’s happened to Earth’s cities,” Lingo said. “Not yet, anyway. They’ve been evacuated.”

  “Evacuated? But why?”

  “That should be obvious, shouldn’t it, Jay?” Lingo said. “Earth is the prime target. Lighted, inhabited cities would be sitting ducks.”

  “You meanem>expect the Doogs to get through to Earth? You goaded them into an attack knowing you couldn’t stop them short of Earth? Why, that’s…that’s….”

  Lingo laughed humorlessly. “Inhuman?” he suggested. “Sac riligious? Jay, you’ve come a long, long way from the man you were when we left Olympia III, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve come all the way yet. The last step is the biggest and the hardest, because no one can lead you by the hand, no one can tell you. Some things you just have to live. Man or Duglaari will survive The War, one or the other, and not both. The primary goal of the human race,” Lingo said, with cruel emphasis, as if trying to convince not Palmer but himself, “must be to survive. To survive, no matter what, no matter how terrible the price, no matter what must be risked.”

  He stared at Palmer, and, strangely, his eyes seemed to be pleading for approval. “If it was crucial to survival,” Lingo said, “if it meant the outcome of The War, one way or the other, you’d risk Olympia III, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Palmer. “But Olympia III is just another planet, even if it is the capital of the Confederation. This is Earth, you’re talking about, man! Earth….”

  Lingo turned and stared stonily at the waning disc of the Earth. “It’s just another planet too, Jay,” he said over-sharply, obviously not quite believing it himself. “Just another planet. Man is more important than any planet, even this one. But I can’t expect you to feel that, not now. You think you’ve come a long way, Jay, and you have. But the final step is the biggest, and the most painful. And you’ll have to take it all at once, whether you like it or not. They’ll be no considering, no weighing, no….”

  Lingo laughed bitterly. “I was going to say I pity you, Jay, but I really don’t. In a way, I envy you.”

  “But…but why aren’t we landing on Earth?” Palmer muttered.

  “Because our mission is elsewhere,” Lingo said, suddenly distant. “We’re going to Mercury.”

  Although the lens of the viewscreen camera was covered with a heavy filter, the image was still blurred and overexposed, for Sol was a great ball of fire, completely dominating the sky of Mercury.

  Why land here? Palmer knew that there had always been an outpost station or two in Mercury’s twilight zone, ever since the early days of interplanetary travel, but no one had ever thought seriously of colonizing Mercury. It was a half-molten ball of slag on the sunside, space-cold on the dark-side, totally devoid of atmosphere, bathed constantly in solar radiation—just about as useless a piece of real estate as a planet could possibly be.

  Then Palmer saw that Lingo apparently had no intention of landing on Mercury. After much maneuvering, he put the ship into a low, precise polar orbit so that it would remain in the twilight zone throughout its orbital period.

  “Lock us in on the station, Fran,” he said.

  Fran Shannon busied herself with the radio. After a few minutes, s e looked up. “I’ve locked us in on the beacon,” she said. “We’re in range now, Dirk. Start broadcasting.”

  Lingo activated his microphone.

  “Phoenix…phoenix…phoenix…” he said, repeating the word over and over again.

  Finally, a signal came in, blurred by the intense solar static, but readable. “Acknowledged…acknowledged…acknowledged…” droned a patently mechanical voice.

  Lingo nodded and shut off the radio.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Too hot for comfort. Raul, start dropping tell-tales.”

  Lingo broke orbit, and set the ship on a strange course, not outward but upward, perpendicular to the ecliptic. As the ship accelerated faster and faster, further away from the ecliptic, Palmer could see something small and metallic being dropped astern.

  ‘Tell-tale?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Ortega. “Just a camera and a transmitter. I think Dirk told you we’ve got them scattered throughout the system. Just dropping a few more for good measure. They can all be fed directly into the main viewscreen, so we can get close-ups of just about any location in the Sol system we want.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “Nowhere” Lingo replied, “absolutely nowhere.”

  For hours, the ship kept accelerating, farther and farther above the ecliptic, pushed to near-light velocity by the Resolution Drive.

  Finally, when Sol no longer showed a disc, when it was merely a bright star, Fran Shannon said: “We’re far enough now, Dirk. We could safely go into Stasis-Space any time.”

  “Stasis-Space?” exclaimed Palmer. “Where are we going? Back to Olympia?”

  “
I told you,” said Lingo, “we’re not going anywhere.”

  Instead of punching the Stasis-Space generator button, Lingo cut the Resolution Drive and locked the controls.

  The ship floated dead in interstellar space.

  “End of the line,” Lingo said. “We’ll wait here.”

  “For what?” asked Palmer.

  “What else?” replied Lingo. “For the Doogs, of course.”

  Chapter XII

  “DAMN IT, Dirk, why won’t any of you tell me what’s going on?” Palmer said, pounding his fist on the bartop. “We’ve been sitting out here in the middle of nowhere for over two weeks now, and no one will tell me a thing. Why, man, why?“

  Lingo sighed and drummed his fingers in a little puddle of liquid that had been spilled on the bartop.

  “Jay,” he said, slowly and hesitantly, as if groping for words, “we didn’t tell you what we were doing before we went before the Kor, and as you later learned, we had a good reason. We needed a certain reaction from you, and we wanted you to learn certain things in certain ways….”

  “So? So what does that have to do with it?”

  “So we had good reasons then,” Lingo said. “We have good reasons now.”

  “That sounds pretty lame to me.”

  Lingo grimaced. “I suppose I can understand that,” he admitted. “But the point is that there are some things which…well, which just are. Things which must be learned, but cannot be taught. You know, the best way to teach someone to swim is still throwing him in the water. You are the future, Jay, and if that future is to be anything but madness, you’ve got to become a bridge between Solarians and the Confederation. But you know all that by now…. You’ve come a long, long way, Jay, and we’re proud of you…and to be honest about it, a little proud of ourselves, too. You’ve proved that a man of the Confederation can at least come to understand Solarians. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to somehow become a real part of our Organic Group, emotionally, viscerally, or the whole thing is pointless.”

  “But what’s that got to do with all this secrecy? For that matter, I’m perfectly willing to become part of the Group right now. Just tell me how.”

  “Jay, Jay,” Lingo sighed. “I can’t tell you how. No one can really tell you how. How do you think a Group is formed in the first place? By drawing lots? By accident of birth? By a Master Computer like the Council of Wisdom? An Organic Group is a bunch of people who have shared enough deep and meaningful experiences so that they come to feel they are a Group. ‘Organic’ is the key word, Jay. It grows, like an organism, in a sense it is an organism. It isn’t formed, like some government. For instance, take us: Max and Linda happened to grow up together, close as only telepaths can be. I once saved Raul’s life. Robin saved mine. Robin and Raul were together in those days, and Raul became my enemy, brieflut that passed, and we became friends. Fran and I worked together in something like a local government, for years before the Group was formed…. Max and Raul…. but it’s pointless to go on. The point is that the formation of a Group is a slow, complex, arbitrary, essentially alogical business, like any other natural process. It involves shared emotions, good and bad, shared moments of fear and….”

  Lingo paused, trying to grope for words which would not come.

  “I just can’t find the words to tell you,” he finally said. “Because the whole concept is essentially non-verbal. All I can do is tell you a long series of half-truths, semi-truths and near-lies. I promise you one thing, Jay—if you do live through this, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I won’t tell you, and neither will anyone else, but you’ll know it because you’ll have lived it.”

  “But why can’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Because…because if I told you, you could never understand. You’d…you’d think we were monsters. You’d be too biased by foreknowledge to learn what you should learn from the experience.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Lingo sighed heavily. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “I guess I can tell you this much, though—even if everything goes exactly as we’ve planned, even if we’ve figured the Doogs’ reactions correctly down to the tenth decimal place, something terrible is going to happen, something more terrible than any wild suspicion you can dream up. That’s why I can’t tell you what it is—because it’s worse than any fantasy secrecy could possibly create in your mind. I know, Jay, and believe me, I’d give almost anything to be able to change places with you.”

  “But if it’s so horrible, then why…?”

  “Why?” snapped Lingo. “Because it has to be done! The Organic Group has given men new levels of awareness, but don’t make the mistake of believing that increased awareness is always pleasant. Sometimes…well, just think of poor Douglas MacDay. He had a choice to make: do nothing, sit tight and live for today, and know that the human race will surely perish. Or plunge a solar system into chaos, into agony, into terror, in the hope that some day, somehow, something would emerge from the madness that might be able to save the human race. MacDay chose, and he chose well. What would you have done had you been Douglas MacDay?”

  “I…I…I honestly don’t know, Dirk,” Palmer said.

  “Nor do I…” said Lingo quietly. “Nor do I. I like to think I would’ve been man enough to do what he did, but maybe I’m just kidding myself…who knows? Who in hell knows…?”

  Palmer eyed Lingo narrowly. “There’something else, isn’t there?” he said. “Something personal.”

  Lingo stared downward at the bartop, not looking at Palmer, and when he spoke his voice was strangely constricted.

  “Yes…” he mumbled, “I suppose there is…. Jay, sometimes, perhaps more often than not; men must choose, not between good and evil but between two different evils. Even if things work out well, when you make that kind of choice, one way or the other, you know it will haunt you for the rest of your life…. Douglas MacDay had that kind of choice to make, and so did we. MacDay chose, and he chose right, but he never lived to know whether he had been right. We’ve chosen too, but…. Well, there aren’t many Douglas MacDays. Jay, I think one of Man’s most basic and perverse needs is the need to be judged, to have some outside opinion on whether you’ve been right or wrong—whether you end up accepting that judgement or not. And I suppose that’s what we really need you for—to judge us. An unbiased, unprejudiced, un-preinforrried judge….”

  “But not unsympathetic, Dirk,” Palmer said, trying instinctively to console Lingo for he knew not what.

  Lingo looked up and laughed sardonically. “No, not unsympathetic,” he said. “Old homo sapiens has always believed in loading the deck. I suppose….”

  “Dirk! Dirk!” Raul Ortega ran into the common room. “Come on! Come on! Up to the control room! They’re here! The Doogs are here!”

  “I don’t see anything,” Palmer said, as he, Ortega and Lingo burst into the control room, where the other Solarians were already staring transfixedly out at the great vista of stars in the huge hemispherical viewscreen.

  “Over there!” cried Ortega, pointing towards what looked like a miniature comet just approaching the Sol system. “The screen is set at normal view now. We’re seeing what the ship’s own cameras are picking up. Let’s switch over to one of the tell-tale satellites…. There’s one just within the orbit of Pluto.”

  Ortega went over to a large jury-rigged console and threw one of several dozen switches. The image on the great view-screen blurred, flickered out, and was replaced by a closer view, with Sol the brightest thing in the viewscreen and…and….

  “Lord!” gasped Palmer. “I never realized there could be so many ships in one place at one time!”

  What had appeared to be a comet, tail facing away from Sol, in the previous view was now revealed as a monstrous cone-formation of Duglaari warships, hurtling towards Sol, base forward. The eye simply could not encompass the vastness of the Duglaari Fleet. The base of the cone seemed a solid wall of ships, miles in diameter; the apex of the
cone was a good twenty miles behind the base and all the intervening space was packed with warships. The total mass of the gigantic Fleet must’ve exceeded that of a major asteroid.

  “I don’t believe it,” Palmer muttered. “I see it, but I just don’t believe it….”

  “It’s there all right,” said Lingo, his face an impassive mask. “Better than half the strength of the entire Duglaari Empire.”

  Now the Duglaari Fleet was approaching the outskirts of Sol’s minefield. The seven humans stared into the viewscreen, birds transfixed by a cobra.

  The base of the Duglaari formation seemed to blur for a moment, as if the ships had all suddenly begun to fall apart. Flashes of fire seemed to spread throughout the forward wall of ships. Had the forces of Sol somehow already…?

  Then Palmer realized what was happening.

  The flashes of fire were rockets; the “fragments” of Duglaari ships were a gigantic fusillade of missiles, thousands upon thousands of them.

  Adding the acceleration of their rockets to the forward thrust of the great Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field, the formation of missiles shot ahead of the warships and into the Solarian minefield.

  There was a terrible flash of light that momentarily outshone everything else in space combined; a flash of light that could only last for a moment—the deadly brilliance of a titanic thermonuclear explosion. But, incredibly, the explosion did not flare for a moment and then go out. It continued to outshine the rest of the heavens for impossibly long minutes. It elongated, it began to grow Sol-ward, an immense advancing lance of thermonuclear fire, a hell scores of miles in diameter and straight as an arrow.

  “Wha…what is it?” cried Robin.

  “They’re…they’re blasting a ‘tunnel’ through the minefield!” Palmer replied. “It’s…it’s unbelievable! Thousands of thermonuclear missiles, timed to go off one after the other as they cross the orbit of Pluto and pass through the minefield so that the effect is one gigantic, continuous explosion! And each missile must have close to a thousand-megaton warhead, from the look of it…a multi-million-megaton explosion!“