Futures Near and Far

by Dave Smeds

  “They just want to know what you would do if they hadn’t sent me to observe the case.”

  Brendt frowned. “What will I do? Christ, Neil. What can I tell you? It’s a mess.”

  Neil nodded. “I’m just relaying the message. I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s all right if all you do is speculate. As long as you do so sincerely, of course.”

  Brendt bristled at the implied slur, but perhaps he read in Neil’s open gaze that it was meant as helpful advice, not as character assassination. He settled back on the sofa.

  “It was only a matter of time until we had a homicide,” he began. “My hope was that it would be something cleaner. A headline that the majority could read and forget about the next day. After all, we have enough to keep us busy just building this colony. I’ll do what I can to steer things in that direction, try to make it seem routine — not that I like to think of murder as routine. But I have to admit I’m worried. The racial component may keep the whole business alive. The Aussie faction will argue for some sort of leniency. The Indonesians will be outraged at anything less than the death penalty.”

  “No matter what you do, you’ll antagonize somebody,” Neil conceded. He spoke for himself; the Thwaa voice in his head had gone silent, leaving him once more as nothing but their listening post. “It’s a lose-lose.”

  “Yes. God damn it.”

  “So . . . what will you do?” Neil repeated.

  “Stretch things out. Gather every last scrap of evidence. Hear all the appeals. In the end, I’ll have to execute him, but I have to be sure anyone who might be on his side has had their chance to argue that he’s not guilty. We don’t have much of a backlog in our court system” — he tried to chuckle — “but I estimate the whole process will take half a decade. In the meantime, our society will simply have to cope with the turmoil, I guess.”

  Neil saw that it was gnawing Brendt from the pancreas outward to be placed in a position of impotence. The least that Neil could do was cut short the conversation, spare him further embarrassment. A burst of communication told him the Thwaa had learned whatever it was they needed from the night’s conversation.

  “That’s it?” Brendt queried, as soon as Neil had spoken.

  “Apparently so,” Neil said.

  The deep brow wrinkles remained on the governor’s face. His mouth tightened.

  Neil had feared the man would not relax. And why should he? Why should any human on the planet?

  The Thwaa might not have put the issue aside. One of these times, the matters Neil investigated would cause the aliens to alter policy. The Thwaa rarely stirred, but when they did, their actions could go to extremes. As the Eridanin had learned.

  “I’ve set aside a room for you across the patio,” Brendt said. “May we all have a good night.”

  “Thank you. I’ll give my regards to Nadya in the morning, then.”

  “Pleasant dreams, Neil.” The governor glanced away and pretended to sip his wine.

  o0o

  Sleep was the wisest use of the remainder of the night, but Neil was far too keyed up. He made a fire in the room hearth. A real fire, using cordwood salvaged from the scrap of forest removed in order to erect the dwelling. The hearth was rigged to display artificial fire, with or without heat, but could be made to function in the literal way, with filters in the chimney that eliminated air pollution. It would rarely be used so, for per the charter, no living trees on Bjornssen would be cut down solely to provide recreational flame. Making the luxury available was Brendt’s indirect way of letting the Thwaa see how well he treated their representative.

  Neil did not hesitate to strike the match. He had not asked for the job, but as long as he had it, he would accept the perquisites.

  He pulled his palm computer out and attempted to sedate himself with the mundane task of organizing recent email into folders. Scanning the list, he noticed a folder he’d had few entries for lately, only two, sent twenty-seven lightyears ago to coincide with the arrival of the ark at Bjornssen. The folder was labelled FAMILY.

  Thoughts of his niece, Whitney, now his only living relative — older than he now due to his sojourn in hibernation — brought a tender smile to his face. After tucking away her latest letters — gossipy text messages about all that had happened to the clan in the past one hundred fifty years — he was drawn to dip into the archive and open up the special farewell she’d made for him, so long ago.

  A picture filled the small screen. Thanks to Whitney’s artistic skill and her computer, the scene appeared to be taken from life, but in fact, she had composed the elements. It showed Neil standing in a vegetable garden, a toddler at his side. He and the boy, a tow-headed lad looking much as Neil had at that age, were examining the intricacies of a web a spider had made during the night. A spider of Earth, just as most of the plants in the garden were Terran. The locale was Bjornssen, however, as Whitney imagined it to be, with some sort of fanleafed trees by the house in the background. The aqua cast to the sky was uncannily close to the actual hue of a Bjornssen morning.

  The spider was sterile, Whitney’s voice recording explained, its reproductive abilities removed so as not to disrupt the planet’s natural checks and balances. Like the food, the arachnid was meant to contribute to the transition from immigrant to native lifestyle. A little bit of the old country, to make an Earth fellow feel at home. Sunlight glinted off the droplets suspended on the web. The child was enraptured. The expression on the face of “Neil” was one of rich contentment, yet full of delight at investigating new things.

  “Bon voyage, Uncle o’ mine,” the message concluded. “I’ll be expecting a picture of the real thing some time before I die.”

  Neil let the audio track play a second time while he pored over the visual. The moisture in the corners of his eyes evaporated. He closed the file with a curt vocal command. The image had steered him unwillingly to recall the Eridanin gallery Dimitri had showed him, and suddenly he was back in the moment, thinking of his job, and how he didn’t want it.

  His memory turned inevitably to the first time he had met Thwaa in person. He had done so as part of the greeting committee giving the aliens a tour of the newly completed ark that they, in their conditional benevolence, had allowed humanity to construct. At one point, by his guests’ insistence, he found himself the lone escort of a Thwaa noble as they examined some of the passenger quarters.

  Neil had seen pictures of Thwaa for the better part of seventy years, but it ill prepared him to navigate in confined spaces with one. He tried to drown his apprehension in his script, but the monologue on the finer points of coldsleep tanks did not distract him from the alien’s proximity. Its appendages floated about, evoking irrational fears of burns like jellyfish should it touch his skin. A brain with strings attached is how one early journalist characterized them. A monster tick with veins extending two meters beyond its body is what he would have said. It was safe to say that their race was a thousand generations removed from a gravity environment. Perhaps that was what made them the proper arbiters of who could, and could not, claim the habitable territory at the bottom of gravity wells.

  Neil couldn’t tell if his companion was bored by his presentation or simply preferred not to comment. He doubted the alien could have had much real interest in chambers meant for beings who required spin or acceleration to maintain health. It certainly would never be able to visit again once the ship became operational.

  Only when they had reached the end of the fifth identical level in the hibernation section did it break silence. The little speaker attached to its knobby “head” startled Neil by announcing in a perfectly synthesized and mellifluous, if androgynous, voice, “You will travel on this vessel?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Safe journey. It is a mighty undertaking.”

  Its tone conveyed nothing impolite, but Neil reasoned that sarcasm would not be part of the translation protocols. “Don’t patronize me,” he said. The Thwaa had travelled between gal
axies, for Christ’s sake.

  “I was simply wishing you well, and stating the truth. It is a mighty undertaking to shape a world, and do it well. The attempt is to be commended.”

  “Yet you’ve only given us one world. You’re allowing very slow emigration. You’re passing down the barest smattering of your technology.”

  “Your species has control of its home star and planets. That is all the edicts require. The colonization of Gamma Leporis A is an experiment. You have chosen your candidates with care. We will see what you make of your opportunity. To claim other stars, you must show you understand the intricacies of cooperation.”

  “And you are the judges,” Neil said.

  “I see that you understand.”

  o0o

  Neil eventually slept. Not well. His mind boiled over with the consequences of that day aboard the empty ark. What had he said that caused the Thwaa to designate him as their consul, to alter him, to change forever the role he had meant to play within the colony?

  Just after dawn a knock rattled his door.

  It was the governor, tousle-haired, obviously having just awakened. “A call came through. Something has happened at the archaeological site. Anything you, ah, can tell me about?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Neil said. “You have the advantage of me.”

  Brendt stared. “You really don’t know?”

  “I told you I didn’t.” The Thwaa presence echoed through the chambers of his mind, but passive as usual, monitoring only.

  The governor looked as though he wanted to smile, but knew it was inappropriate to do so. “You may want to catch another transport, then. I’m sure your superiors will be interested in your observations. It seems that our hot-headed Aussie has turned up dead.”

  o0o

  A curiosity-piquing flight later, Neil landed at the caldera to find Dimitri already there with an expanded team of assistants, including a few specialists who rarely had reason to be part of a death investigation.

  “You’ll want to wear this,” said a woman standing beside Dimitri. She offered Neil an oxygen mask and small tank to place on his belt.

  “This is Natalie Lommond,” Dimitri said. “She’s an atmospheric chemist.”

  When Neil had donned the apparatus, they led him to the pit where Barry Radner had been imprisoned.

  Radner, or what was left of him, lay beside the rim, cushioned by a sheet of plastic and shielded from the sun by a tarp. The corpse was twisted into a configuration determined by whichever muscles had been the strongest, demonstrating how thoroughly he had been wracked by seizure. The fingertips were bloodied from his attempts to claw his way up the smooth, hardpan walls of the septic tank. The face wore a rictus of agony. He had died hard. Neil turned away after the thorough glance demanded by official duty, glad the oxygen mask obscured his expression, and let the medical examiner and forensics experts continue to document their findings.

  “We brought him up as soon as we could,” Vereshchagin said. “We made the standard resuscitation efforts, but his brain had been deprived of oxygen too long.”

  Neil turned to Lommond. “Carbon dioxide poisoning?”

  “Yes.” She stepped away, putting some distance between them and the Reaper’s harvest. “Not at all like carbon monoxide — that would have been as peaceful a way to die as I can think of.” She waved her hand out over the terrain, pausing to point at the pool of brine. “It came from there.”

  “And still is,” Neil noted. The waters were bubbling.

  “That’s just the dregs,” she explained. “We don’t even really need these anymore.” She fingered her own breathing apparatus. “But sometime during the night a giant pocket of CO2 burst free. The outgassing filled the basin we’re standing in. CO2 is heavier than the regular atmosphere. It hugged the ground as it spread, displacing the good air. Look at the number it did on the wildlife.”

  The ancient lakebed, superficially as benign and picturesque as ever, contained innumerable small signs of death. A drift of prairie wrigglers lay in the lee of a stout cactus. To the left of that, the sun beat down on the lifeless husk of some sort of hairy snakelike creature, twisted into a helix by its final paroxysms. No twittering or scuttling or buzzing noises reached their ears — only the susurrus of wind through the sparse clumps of grass, the murmur of voices in the background muffled by masks, and, once, the screech of a hugin.

  The latter noise prompted Neil to look over at the pinnacle. His bird — he assumed it was the same one — was still ensconced, maintaining whatever vigil its bright, native consciousness seemed to find necessary.

  “That loudmouth is well above the toxic layer,” Lommond volunteered. She went on to indicate the other avians cruising the thermals like Terran carrion eaters. “Notice how few are trying to take advantage of this sudden supply of meat? They’re aware of the contamination. The smart ones may soon realize they’re safe as long as they don’t remain on the valley floor. They can dive down, grab something, and retreat to a higher elevation, without coming to harm.”

  For the next quarter hour, Neil listened to a summary of the night’s events from a gathering of key individuals. The surge of CO2 had never reached as far as the city where the majority of the excavators slept. None of them knew what was happening until too late for Radner. The only other people who had been poisoned were the guards. Dimitri had ordered them to spend the night at the top of the bluff, where they had an unobstructed view of not only the pit, but of the landscape leading from the ruins. That way they would be able to spot any team members sneaking out of camp to play vigilante.

  The gas had filled the pit. The carbon dioxide in Radner’s bloodstream built up while he slept, waking him when it approached a lethal level. By the time his moans and thrashing alerted the guards, the latter had breathed enough themselves to be overtaken by nausea, dizziness, headaches, and muscle spasms. They stumbled to the camp with admirable poise for men being attacked by the very air around them, but by the time they had made clear to the camp residents what was occurring, it was too late to find and unpack oxygen masks and return to save Radner.

  Fortunately the guards, by removing themselves from the lower elevation and inhaling a normal mix of atmosphere, had proceeded to recover. By the time of Neil’s arrival their symptoms consisted only of wooziness and sore muscles. Radner was the only permanent casualty.

  “I bear full responsibility for this,” Vereshchagin said, as the group around Neil shrank to just him and Lommond.

  “It was a freak occurrence,” Lommond assured him. “It’s not your fault, Director.”

  “That does not console me,” the archaeologist replied. “I could have done things to prevent Bilyang’s murder, and then Radner would not have been down here. No one would be dead. I am afraid this locale only reminds me of my failing. I am asking the governor for a transfer. The project will go on without me.”

  Neil merely nodded. The director was not as inastute as Neil had judged him to be. By resigning, he saved himself the black mark of a dismissal.

  “The project can still operate safely, can it not?” Vereshchagin asked the chemist.

  “Certainly,” Lommond replied. “I’ll install metering equipment to warn you if another burst comes out of the vent. As long as workers keep their masks nearby, they can dig without undue risk.”

  Vereshchagin sighed, flexed his fingers, adjusted the filter in front of his nose. Neil wondered if he were biting back tears. “Very well,” he said. “Proceed. I will stay until the current disruption has run its course. Ten days, perhaps. After that, as far as I am concerned, this is one place I wish had never existed.”

  “I can understand that,” Lommond said. Her demeanor implied she would have felt far more comfortable mouthing technical details about gas concentrations or volcanism, but she had inadvertently settled into the role of counsellor.

  Neil walked out into the lakebed a hundred meters or so, ostensibly giving the specialist a chance to tender whatever further sympathy sh
e could muster, but truthfully providing himself with some privacy.

  In due time, as he expected, Dimitri joined him.

  Neil was first to break the silence. “Vereshchagin is taking all this pretty hard.”

  “The man has skills,” Dimitri replied. “I’m sure he’ll find something useful to do, at some level. It’s Radner who won’t get another chance.”

  “True.”

  Dimitri’s brows rose at Neil’s bitter tone. “There is some justice in that. If I thought that someone had done this deliberately, I would tell that someone, ‘Thank you.’”

  Neil gazed back at his old friend steadily. “Surely you don’t think the Thwaa can sway geologic forces to such a precise degree as to arrange what we’ve seen here today?”

  Dimitri paused. “No,” he said, sighing. “No. I suppose not. In any case, my official report will declare the death to have been sheer happenstance. You understand that I was not asking for the record?”

  “I know you weren’t,” Neil said. “Dimitri, sometimes shit happens, and other times you catch a break. Are you going to argue with good luck?”

  The inspector chuckled, and went back to his duties.

  Neil knew others would wonder at the convenience of the death. The point was, no one would be able to prove a thing. The bizarre circumstances might incite comment for years, but that was better than keeping alive a spark of racial disharmony in a fledging colony. The case would close with a minimum of fuss. Such an elegant solution.

  Neil had not expected this. That the Thwaa had done it he was certain. He had told Dimitri otherwise because he was equally confident that his overlords expected his discretion. If they had wanted to eliminate Radner in a public way, they certainly had the means.

  Precisely how they had reached their decision he did not know. He could be sure it was their action not from any direct confession — the Thwaa would never deign to provide one — but from the cumulative intuition he had gained from seeing exactly what they had him investigate, and what they ignored. The implant remained in passive mode, as it usually did. In fact, until it awoke to give him his next assignment, hours or weeks or months from now, he could chose to forget the device was there, and pretend he was as human as any other Terran on Bjornssen.