In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  Mayor Overton coughed. “Who are you to come here and lecture us about our life?” He sounded more forceful now. “Oh, I get your point well enough, and it may even be true. But as I’ve told you, our grandparents had to land or die with the incoming ship. We earn our right to life here every day.”

  The visitor asked, “And it does not disturb you that you may preempt intelligence here?”

  “Why should it?” a man shouted from the audience.

  “It’s Nathaniel,” Gemma whispered, realizing why she hadn’t seen him coming out of his house late this morning. Then she heard a sound behind her and turned to see Nathaniel’s stepbrother Cyril leaning over the open top half of the kitchen door, smiling at her in his usual, inviting way. Gemma usually tolerated his appearing at her door, as though he had a right to stop by at any time, but was suddenly annoyed with him, and looked away.

  “Yeah,” Cyril said, smoothing back his unruly brown hair. “He should be home helping Nina and me, if he’s so devoted to her, but he had to go. They had an argument this morning. Maybe he should move to town permanently and become a schoolster.”

  “Quiet!” Alan shouted. “I want to hear this.”

  “… but we can offer you a choice,” the offworlder was saying, “so you don’t have to stay here. Even if you were only to affect the development of simpler bioforms here, that would delay or prevent the emergence of intelligence.”

  “Our presence here can’t be worse than the workings of chance,” the Mayor objected. “All life competes with other life.”

  “But shouldn’t each world have the chance to grow in its own way? Something unique may develop here—one way with your presence and another without it. We think you should consider leaving while there is still time. If you stay, you or your descendants may be taking a world away from its people before—”

  “Who do you think you are,” Nathaniel shouted, “coming here and talking to us as if we were children!”

  Gemma glanced at her brother and saw him clench his jaw as he listened to Nathaniel, and she knew that he was thinking of all the work he had put into the farm, of how their parents and grandparents had lived and died to earn every square meter of this land. It was bad enough that she talked about the dangers to the plateau’s geology. Now some intruder was telling him to clear off. For her, the offworlder’s words suddenly offered escape from the past; for Alan, they called for an end to his way of life. She looked over at Cyril, who seemed surprised by Nathaniel’s outburst.

  “Are you threatening us?” the Mayor asked.

  “Not at all,” the visitor said. “Please don’t misunderstand. Our aim is to persuade. To help you decide what you think, we will examine the planet for signs of intelligent life.”

  Gemma heard the Mayor sigh with relief. “Explore all you like. We can’t stop you, obviously, but we would prefer to be left in peace.”

  “What kind of alternative to our life here can you offer us?” a woman asked.

  “Besides the chance to join our habitat,” the visitor said, “we would provide a habitat shell for you to fill in. We would place it in high planetary orbit and ferry people up. You could perfect it at your leisure.”

  “You assume,” Nathaniel said, “that we would want your way of life,” but Gemma had a sudden feeling from the tone of his voice that Nathaniel was curious about the offworlder’s way of life.

  “No,” the offworlder replied, “the habitat would contain your way of life, whatever you would wish to make of it.”

  “I find that hard to believe. How could we think of abandoning our hard-won place here?”

  “Our purpose,” the offworlder continued calmly, “is not to dictate to you. We hope that once you have considered the dilemma, you will let this planet develop in its own way—it’s your entire colony against the future of perhaps more than one intelligent species.”

  “Oh, come now,” the Mayor said. “How do you know that our descendants might not get along just fine with an emerging native life?”

  “It would never get to that point. You’re isolated for now, but the expansion of your population and the pressure of various natural changes will drive you from this plateau, and you will be forced to take what you need to survive.”

  “Your effrontery is unbelievable! You talk as if our staying here were open to debate. It’s not and never will be.”

  “We only present choices and their consequences,” the visitor said. “We do not believe in any absolute system of ethical norms, or their enforcement. There are only laws that rise up to serve the needs of a community, and they are not arbitrary if they accomplish that end, however self-serving they may seem to outsiders. Our laws do not govern you. You can still have your own ways when you leave here, and with greater security and power over your own destiny.”

  “And without any guilt, I suppose,” the Mayor said mockingly. “If you’re so interested in our welfare, then give us the means to leave the plateau before it’s washed away from beneath us.”

  “That,” the offworlder said, “would arm you with the means for a massive assault on the planet’s ecology. Every microorganism and animal that you deemed dangerous to your life would eventually die, and the effects would become irreversible.”

  Gemma noticed that Alan was staring at the radio as if at an enemy. The Mayor had publicly admitted the danger to the plateau, and that the only solution would be to abandon it, something that Alan had never quite believed. She glanced toward Cyril. He also seemed a bit worried, but gave her a puzzled smile, shifting his weight as he leaned on the bottom half of the door.

  “Well,” the Mayor said finally. “Do you have anything else to say to us?”

  “No, but thank you for listening. You may not understand yet, but we are ready to give you all the help you need to remake your lives.”

  “As long as we leave the planet?”

  “Yes.”

  Alan got up from the table, opened the bottom part of the kitchen door, and pushed past Cyril. Gemma got up, went after him, and sat down at his left on the back steps. Without a word, Cyril came over and sat down next to her.

  Alan said, “They just show up out of nowhere and tell us to leave the planet. Are they insane?”

  “They’re concerned about us,” Gemma said.

  “It’s not their business what we do here. All life struggles, and there’s no way to know what will survive. An asteroid might strike tomorrow and wipe us all out. We have as much right to be here as anywhere else.”

  “But shouldn’t we look ahead?”

  “You want to believe there’s something to all this,” he said, “because you never cared about our place here. I don’t care what happens a million years from now.”

  She tried to ignore his reproach. But he was right, as far as it went. What could she look forward to here? If Alan married Nina, then Nina would move into this house. Gemma liked Cyril well enough but it was not love and Nathaniel had never shown any interest in her. Marriage to either of them would only mean trading places with Nina. Alan wanted her to find someone she could bring here and have children with, to benefit the farm. It would have to be someone who did not have a farm. And she suspected that he wanted her to stay with him for as long as possible, but was hiding the attachment he felt, which had grown stronger after the influenza that had killed their parents.

  She took his arm and asked, “But what if it’s much sooner than that? What if there is intelligent life here now?”

  He pushed her arm away. “No one has a right to tell me where to live. Let them look. They won’t find anything. We’re the only ones here.”

  “I’ll see you folks later,” Cyril said as he stood up, looking pale and uneasy. “Got work to do.” He walked away and started down the road toward his farm.

  “Sorry!” Alan called out after him. “Tell Nina I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

 
“You’d better!” Cyril shouted without looking back, then raised a hand in farewell and kept walking.

  Puzzled for a moment by Cyril’s behavior, Gemma held Alan’s arm in silence, then said, “Don’t you see that we live here in a kind of deliberate backwardness?”

  “Backwardness?” he asked, looking at the ground.

  “We could have so much more if we had not rejected so much of the past.”

  “It was a betterment,” Alan said.

  “No, no,” she replied, taking his arm again. “We’re hiding here, living within narrow, precarious limits.”

  “Earth died,” he replied bitterly, but without pushing her away this time, “by breaking all natural limits. I never want my life to change, or that of my children. I want it whole, as it is. We should have destroyed those old readers a long time ago.” His voice broke as he was overcome by his feelings, and she realized how deeply he felt that any change was his enemy.

  “I sometimes go and look out at the forests,” she said softly, “and I can’t help feeling that we’re hiding up here. Did you ever wonder why we don’t go exploring?”

  “It’s dangerous to our health.”

  “Yes, so we burned the life here to make a place for ourselves. It’s not our world, Alan, because we had to do that. We came here to be free, but we’re still afraid, and we cling to each other.” And you cling too much to me, she had almost said.

  He turned and looked at her. “You don’t even sound like one of us. We’re all a problem to you. I’m a problem to you, it’s as if you grew up elsewhere.”

  She let go of his arm. “I’ve read and I’ve thought for myself, Alan. I’m not blind.”

  “And I am?”

  “You feel a lot, but you refuse to think.”

  “What’s there to think about? We’re here, on land we paid for with two generations, and continue to pay for with our work, with our whole lives.”

  “And that gives us the right to expand?”

  “Yes, when the time comes!”

  “Even if it means preventing the intelligent life that might grow here one day? Alan, don’t you see? We might prevent it without ever knowing!”

  He looked at her with dismay, and for the first time she saw hatred crowding out the fear in his brown eyes. “I don’t care. We can’t be responsible for mere possibilities. It’s only a lot of talk going on as if it were real.”

  “We should be thinking,” she said softly, “about what we’ve been avoiding for a long time. It was understandable when we had to live here, but now we have a choice.”

  He stood up and glared down at her, then marched away toward the tractor in the north field. She watched him for a while, feeling numb, then got up and went back into the kitchen.

  As she washed the dishes from lunch, she looked out the window and tried to understand her brother’s feelings. Alan cared more about the farm than she did, and everything he had said was based on his feelings for the place. He had imagined himself secure here on the plateau until the facts about the coming erosion had started coming out; but he had been able to set that aside, as a problem that was at least a century or more away. The whole colony was like Alan, she realized, afraid of the silent questions posed by the world around it. The mobile was only the voice of deeply held fears and doubts reminding the colony of how much it had failed.

  She wondered what Nathaniel must be feeling now. He had dreamed of exploring this world one day. “It will all be ours,” he had once told her confidently.

  She dried her hands and sat down again at the table determined to make things clear to herself. The new thoughts brought by the offworlders mobile faced the colony with a frightening choice, greater than any of its old problems, and she was suddenly glad that the colony had not looked for heavy metals in the mountains and developed industrial skills, or pursued biomedical research, because then it would have forgotten its fear of the past, abandoned its modest way of life, and invaded the forest.

  Feeling lonely and conflicted she got up and tried to decide what to cook for dinner. The beans would have to be soaked and then simmered until dark to be ready on time, and she would have to kill a chicken, decide how to cook it, and maybe get some three-bean salad preserves from the pantry. As she started to organize the ingredients, the tractor started with a series of sputtering coughs, and died. Alan would not be able to finish the north field’s plowing today unless he fixed it.

  She sat down again at the table, feeling Alan’s defeat by the tractor merge with his fears about the future and thought about calling Nina on the radio for a talk, but decided against it. Nina might not want to talk after arguing with her brother; Cyril was sure to be after her about when she was going to settle down with Alan. Nina seemed to want Alan for a husband, but something was holding her back. Gemma had often sensed it in the long, listening silences that sometimes passed between them during their radio conversations. Nina had not called at all during the last few weeks, making Gemma feel shy about taking the initiative. Something had been wrong for a long time and getting worse, Gemma felt, but she didn’t have the courage to question her neighbor.

  After a few minutes, she went up to her room, where she lay down and tried to let the tension drain away.

  She started to doze, and dreamed of the forest. Eyes looked up at the plateau with curiosity, and she woke up with a start, imagining that somewhere deep in the forest were creatures who were becoming aware of themselves. What would they think if they knew that their world would be taken from them? Nonsense, she told herself. If it was taken from them, they would never know. There would be no one to care because they would never be born.

  She sat up, looked out her window, and saw Alan working under the tractor’s hood. At least the north field did not have to be planted this year, so he could put in extra time with the harvest army and help his neighbors. He slammed the hood shut and started back toward the house, but three-quarters of the way he turned and went to the family plot and stood there under the trees, head bowed before the stones of their parents and grandparents, and it seemed to her that he was taking an oath.

  Suddenly, he looked toward the house, as if he knew she was watching him. Then he started for the fence, and she knew that he was going to walk around the farm, pacing off its limits. He did this once or twice a month, usually before dinner, as if to reaffirm the land’s reality. He liked the walk, he said, and the fence had to be checked, but he did it too often, and was hours early today.

  She got up and went down into the kitchen, afraid of what he might say to her, doubting herself suddenly, expecting a stranger to come through the door.

  3

  Gemma kept glancing at Alan throughout dinner, but he avoided her eyes.

  Finally, he looked up at her questioningly, his face pale in the harsh electric glare of the naked ceiling bulb. “So there’s no chance for you and Cyril?”

  She said, “He’s not for me.”

  “And there’s no one else? Somebody in town?”

  “You know there isn’t.”

  A stern look came into his face, conflicting with his soft brown eyes, which had so often expressed affection for her but were now imprisoned by his growing bitterness. “Well, what do you want?” he asked, but she felt that the question was What will you ever want? “I know,” he went on before she could answer. “You’d like to run away from everything here if you could. You just don’t care about all the effort that’s gone into this place.” You don’t care for the hard work I’m putting in, or your own, he was saying, and you don’t care that you’re wasting the lives of our parents and grandparents.

  “Try to understand,” she said suddenly. “It’s because our grandparents lost so much in getting here that we’ve been unable to better our lives. We need help right now.”

  He threw up his hands in exasperation. “But the kind of progress you want will only bring disaster.”r />
  “That’s the excuse for our inability,” she answered.

  “Oh, no,” he shot back. “Human beings were meant to live within narrow limits. What happened on Earth proves that. Give them too much or too little and they lose all sense of direction and values.”

  “We don’t really know what happened on Earth. But we’re also facing a disaster here, Alan. To survive we’ll have to leave this plateau, but we don’t have the means … and now there are good reasons why we shouldn’t.”

  Standing up, he said, “I’m going to see Nina. Don’t wait up for me.”

  Gemma started to gather the dishes as he left the kitchen. His bitterness cut into her, and she broke a dish in the sink as he went out the door. She stared at the broken pieces. Maybe he was right. She didn’t care, and had finally convinced herself that there was very little to care about.

  Two days later, after eating lunch alone, Gemma tuned in the radio for the second meeting between Mayor Overton and the emissary from the mobile. Alan was still at Nina’s, since there were no pressing chores to be done before spring planting. Still, he had never been away this long. She wondered if he had decided to marry Nina and bring her home as soon as possible, if only to show his strange sister that he didn’t need her and she should get out.

  “Well,” Mayor Overton said, “what have you come to tell us today?”

  “During our last meeting,” the offworlder’s androgynous voice began, “our exploration teams were already completing their first survey of your planet.”

  “So you’ve been here a while,” the Mayor said, “long before you contacted us.”

  “Yes,” the offworlder replied.

  Sounds of disapproval filled the town hall. “Go on,” the Mayor said as they died down.

  “We’ve discovered that one or two forms of animal life may suddenly achieve self-consciousness.”

  “Suddenly?” the Mayor asked mockingly. “Not in a million years? How convenient for you. Where might they be?”