Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “Why?” Green fell to his hands and knees, his question unanswered; as did the two guards by the door, coughing, blood pouring from every orifice.

  “Call it a ‘necessary sacrifice.’”

  The man called Drexel stepped out onto the observation platform behind the observatory dome. The 130-year-old structure had been abandoned for decades. The ivy slowly claiming the flaking concrete was dried and brown in the August dryness. He could smell the salt tang of the sea in the morning breeze, even at this distance. Walking around behind the dome, all of the Los Angeles basin lay stretched before him: from the nearly silent Cahuenga Canyon freeway to the Hollywood Hills canyons slowly returning to their natural state to Santa Monica Bay stretching inward nearly as far as Century and Culver Cities, then down to the green and blue smudge that was Palos Verdes Island, and the Long Beach Channel. In the faint ocean haze he could barely make out where the Magic Kingdom towers still stood in Anaheim, far beyond the empty and falling towers of the old downtown.

  “They tell me it’s the world’s largest ghost town,” a voice from behind him said. Drexel turned to look at the person who had joined him. A tall man, with short, dark hair, blue eyes, mixed background, and a normally friendly, lively face, prematurely aged by five years’ exposure to the postwar world. He was clearly stressed.

  Thankfully the weather-control satellites were finally getting the ozone layer regenerated. Now if they could just get the temperatures back up.

  “It was a ghost town before Hermosa, trying to cope with a century and a half of destroyed lives and false façades,” Drexel replied.

  The Net was already killing what was left of film and television production anyway. The earthquake just put the place out of its misery.

  Drexel stuck out his hand. The other man took it in his, almost desperately, his fingers taking the ancient ritual positions. “Ellison, why did you call for this meeting?”

  “Sir…” The younger man’s voice seemed to relax somewhat, though tension still filled his voice. “There’s been an…accident.”

  “Serious?”

  “Oh God, yes.” Ellison shuddered.

  “Tell me about it.” Drexel already knew the particulars—Rayna had seen to that, but he found that when you gave people rein to speak, it not only helped them, but they often shared unexpected information.

  “We were testing to see if a larger distortion field could be generated. You know we had a problem with that test on the moon some time back…” He hesitated.

  Drexel nodded patiently. A hole had been blown in the moon’s surface earlier in the year, and the Phoenix Project had almost been shut down.

  We still can’t feed the population, but the spaceports are up and running.

  Thankfully Green hadn’t heard about the project when he’d had Doctor Cochrane and his bunch shipped off to the coal mines two years ago. Cochrane and his assistants, of which Ellison was one of the more important, were back at work in Bozeman.

  “Well, we set up a network of Continuum Distortion generators on the Lagrange Habitats.”

  “Why there?” the older man asked.

  “We figured that the earlier accident might have had something to do with not only the Earth’s gravity, but also the Moon’s mass, so we thought we’d try it as far out as we could get and still be easily reached. The Habitats were willing to run the tests. There should have been nothing that could have gone wrong.”

  “And?”

  “They flipped the switch, and…well, they’re gone. And not just them, but every space platform outside the Earth’s geomagnetic field: All six O’Neill habitats, a whole slew of satellites in high orbit including most of the asteroid defense network. The outer debris field is just…gone. Five thousand people.”

  Drexel shrugged inwardly

  And half of Rayna’s eyes in the sky. On the plus side, the weather and communications satellite networks are in lower orbits than that, and this does eliminate the remaining orbital weapons platforms. No loss there.

  “So who knows about this?”

  “Right now, just the people up in Bozeman. Zefram’s too shaken to do more than crawl into his bottle and threaten to quit. Jacob, Lily, Rance, and the others are all doing their stoic thing, but it’s obvious they’re about to crumble. They all think I’ve gone south to talk to the president about this.” The assistant was shifting his weight nervously.

  “And so you shall, but you were right to contact me. We’ll need to spin this.”

  “How? I mean we’re talking five thousand people. Communications may be iffy and the country is still mostly held by local warlords, but eventually someone’s going to notice that they aren’t up there anymore. Even if Zefram doesn’t quit, they are going to shut us down this time. We killed five thousand people!”

  How did the song go? “Somos cinco mil aquí, en esta pequeña parte de la ciudad…”

  “Did you?”

  Ellison froze. “What do you mean?”

  “They may have died, certainly. But let’s learn from history for a moment, shall we? I’m certain that you recall the Odyssey star launches back in the thirties. The manned attempt to travel beyond the solar system? I should hope so since Odyssey Eight and Nine are still out there.” At twenty percent of the speed of light it would take Odyssey Eight, the Telemachus, until 2062 to reach Alpha Centauri. “The Telemachus, under Chuck Clement, discovered a permanent magnetic storm at the leading edge of the heliopause. Clement reported that this appeared to be generating random, spontaneous momentary wormholes. It’s probable that something similar destroyed the Odyssey Ten, the Charybdis.”

  Not to mention several of the Voyager, Pioneer, and Nomad probes.

  “Yes, that’s what gave Zefram the idea how to manipulate subspace…”

  “Precisely. Isn’t it reasonable to assume then that a distortion field that is not balanced correctly can create spontaneous momentary wormholes?”

  Ellison nodded slowly.

  “Tell the president that the test was a success, but that one of the generators wasn’t in synch with the others, and that some sort of wormhole effect happened. Make it clear you couldn’t control this since the actual generators were out of your hands.”

  “But that’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? Can you say for a certainty what actually happened?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It certainly sounds more plausible to me than that you managed to generate enough of a distortion field to inadvertently vaporize even one O’Neill habitat. Not to mention things a quarter of a million miles, er, four hundred thousand kilometers away. Particularly since if you can do that it means that you’ve just built the most powerful weapon in history.”

  Time seemed to slow as Ellison digested that.

  “So who do we say screwed up?”

  “Brynner was up there with you at, what does Cochrane call it? Ground Station Bozeman?”

  “Yes. I think he’s heading back to San Francisco now.”

  “Fine, tell the president that you think it was Brynner’s habitat. Maybe there was a real malfunction and no one actually did anything wrong, but stress that it was a million-to-one accident.”

  “What about Brynner?”

  “I’ll square things with him.”

  The man called Drexel stood by the edge of the clearing with a taller, elderly man. Across the clearing, by the clapped-together saloon, a party was going on, a celebration. The Phoenix Project had been a success. The old man was rubbing his hands together, complaining.

  “It’s freezing out here. Why didn’t we leave after Cochrane landed? We could be back in Bozeman by now.”

  Drexel smiled and looked at the other man.

  Christopher Brynner, the Net’s first trillionaire, founder of Brynner Information Systems and Interface Operations corporation, and the Interface’s Channel 90, member of the boards of more conglomerates and zaibatsu s than Carter’s had little liver pills, was quite a sight in a heavy coat and cloth cap. He l
ooked to be nearly ninety, although he was only seventy.

  Drexel thought back to the bright, young man he had met in the first decade of the millennium. Drexel had been working with the Iraqi museum, trying to identify looted artifacts, and Brynner had been a battle-scarred lieutenant serving in the American forces. The full-body Maori tattoo was long gone now, inappropriate for a man in high finance, but that same bright-eyed young man was still there, trapped in an aging body.

  “We’re waiting,” Drexel said, turning back to watch the festivities.

  “For what?”

  “First contact,” Drexel said simply.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “This morning, when Cochrane broke the warp barrier, it was detected by an alien scout ship near Neptune. They should be landing here any minute.”

  “Rayna tell you that?”

  “Some of it. See that group over there, looking as discrete as a tramp at a church social?” Drexel nodded in the direction of a group of people huddling around an older, bald man in a long coat.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m fairly certain they’re not from around here,” Drexel said wryly.

  “What do you mean?” Brynner asked.

  “Last night, when we lost contact with the launch site? The story they are spreading is that one of the weapons platforms reacted to the powering up of the Phoenix and fired on the site.”

  “But there aren’t any weapons platforms up there.”

  “Most people don’t know that, though.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t have a clue.” Drexel frowned. Not really true. After listening to Rayna’s reports from her eyes in the sky of temporal events, unusual spacecraft fighting it out, and matter transmission profiles resembling those from time travelers she had encountered in 1968, it seemed fairly obvious that someone, possibly from the future, had come to Earth to stop Cochrane’s flight, and someone else came to set things right.

  “When I got up here first thing this morning, these people were already hard at work repairing the Phoenix, almost as if they’d had some sort of investment in it. Two of them even took the ride with Cochrane, in place of Ellison and Sloane.”

  “But Lily’s right there.”

  “I gather she was injured in the attack last night. This morning she was somewhere else getting treatment. Ellison was killed.”

  “They told you this?”

  “No. But I’ve had most of the day to piece together what was going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if we never see them again. We’ll probably want to forget they were ever here.”

  After all, they are doing me an unasked-for favor, it would be rude not to reciprocate.

  “So now these aliens are coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is a good thing?” Drexel’s companion asked sarcastically.

  “They are Vulcans, so it’s better than it could be.”

  “You’ve met these aliens—Vulcans?—before?”

  “I’ve met one before. Nice enough fellow, if a bit too stiff and dull. He was stranded here in the nineteen-fifties.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in over twenty years. He was living in New York then, writing science fiction novels.”

  Brynner tucked his hands under his arms, and thought for a moment.

  “Aliens. How cool is that? I’ve always wanted to meet an alien.”

  “I suppose. I’ve encountered a number of aliens over the years.” The Gods, the Sandarans, Q, Mestral, Gary Seven…“Most weren’t really that pleasant to deal with.” Drexel shrugged. “But who knows? Maybe the public existence of aliens will help bring people together. Nothing makes you clean up your house better than knowing the neighbors are coming to visit. Although even that will still take decades.”

  “All the things you’ve seen. You know, I really envy you sometimes.”

  “I envy you, too.” Drexel’s voice was filled with emotion as he made the comment.

  “Why?”

  “Because, Chris, you’ll die someday. That’s something I doubt I’ll ever get to experience.” They fell silent for a few minutes.

  After a while Brynner turned to him. “So, how many lives have you had? How many people have you been?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “That’s a facile answer. I asked you a serious question.”

  “It happens to be the truth. Memory isn’t a lot different for me than it is for you. You know I have an eidetic memory, right? But even the carvings on stone erode into dust in time. I can barely remember what happened to me a thousand years ago. In fact, all I’m working on are memories of memories, and those tend to get jumbled after a time. Occasionally there are flashes of things that happened before, sparked by unpredictable stimuli.” He stopped and looked up at the sky. “Let me think—at least three hundred—relevant lives. The inconsequential short lives that lasted only a day or an evening, easily over a thousand.”

  “That includes Alexander, Solomon, Michelangelo, and so on, right?” Brynner asked.

  “No, not really. Most of them have been people you are unlikely to have ever heard of.” He thought for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Utnapishtim?”

  “Immortal king of Dilmun, the prototype for Noah.”

  Drexel looked at him, an eyebrow raised.

  “What?” Brynner shrugged. “When you told the Circle you were Gilgamesh, I went out and read a book. So you were Utnapishtim?”

  “I’m fairly certain I was. I’ve been keeping a low profile for a long time though; living a new life for a decade or two, then leaving before having to lose people, before the children start looking at me with that growing look of fear in their eyes.” A burst of music and cheering came from the saloon. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m fairly sure I knew those people, Alexander and such. But I find that most people have expectations for immortals. They are more likely to believe you when you tell them that you were Benjamin Franklin than if you tell them you were Georges LeMat. More importantly, they are less likely to burn you at the stake if you claim to be someone they’ve heard of.”

  “Still, all the things you’ve seen—how much have you forgotten?”

  “Most of it. I keep thinking I should try to reproduce some of the great artworks I’ve encountered that have been lost and no longer exist except in my memory. There never seems to be the time.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “I think the real reason I tend to lie about who I was is that people take a while to warm up to one another, to open up, to share. Every time a person gets hurt, loves and loses, the harder that process is. After millennia, that process is really hard. My life is my business and no one else’s. Hell, I’ve known you most of your life. You’re the closest thing to family I have. Well, you and Rayna. And it’s hard enough for me to open up to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll die someday, and I’ll have to deal with that loss. It’s just easier to not get involved.”

  “So no one ever gets to know the real you, never gets to learn all the good you’ve done?” Brynner asked.

  Or the harm.

  “That is correct.”

  “That makes no sense to me.”

  “If I made perfect sense, I’d have to relinquish being human altogether.”

  Silence fell throughout the compound. The cloud cover started to swirl. A multicolored equal-armed Y shape slowly descended.

  “So this is it,” Brynner said. “I feel like I should be covering this.”

  “Well, you are the closest thing to a journalist here. It would be the biggest story of your life.”

  “You going to be okay?” Brynner looked worried.

  Drexel looked at the ship for a long moment.

  “I’ll survive.”

  (Grand Prize)

  Orphans

  R. S. Belcher

  In the times before the treatment murdered his senses, the room would have spoken to him. He would have kno
wn she was still awake before he had even entered their darkened bedroom; her breathing pattern, heart rate, pheromone dispersal, even her body language as she lay on their bed, her back to him, would have been noted, recorded, analyzed. It would have screamed that she feigned sleep in less time than it took to blink, or kill.

  But now his senses were lost in the fog of the medicines. He was completely taken off guard when her voice broke the silence of their bedroom.

  “How was council?”

  The thrill of disorientation, of being surprised, had been alien to him since the war, a vaguely remembered response to stimuli that the doctors and the councillors, the drugs and surgeries, had purged from him a million lifetimes ago. Now the treatment left him blind and vulnerable.

  “Long,” he said as he slipped off his jacket and kicked off his shoes.

  “It’s been that way a lot lately,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, swallowing hard.

  She didn’t turn around to face him. He went to the sink and splashed cold water across his face. As always, the man in the mirror was a stranger. His face was gaunt, more drawn than even during his time in the war. The treatment’s effects had dulled his dark eyes. His black hair was shot through with gray. The only thing he did recognize, the thing that told him that this was his face, was his unit tattoo—a silver triangle whose apex radiated from the corner of his right eye and stretched back to cover his temple.

  Spiderweb-thin lines within the green core of the triangle told his life story in the language of stored chemical data that any chemcomp scanner could read: Roga Danar, rank: subhadar in the armed forces of Angosia III. Served with honor and distinction in the bloody campaigns of the Tarsian War. Twice promoted for his actions upon the field of battle. Relocated to an orbital military prison on Luna V, along with his brothers-in-arms at the close of the war. Sentenced to a lifetime of solitude, shunned by the society he and his fellows had volunteered to defend.

  Then there had been the revolt and the political compromises he and the other veterans had forced upon the Angosian government at gunpoint.