Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  “Then can it not be said that your planet’s consciousness is not yet mature? That in its old habits of self-destruction—characterized by the unrealistic attitude of the very young who believe themselves to be immortal despite all evidence to the contrary—humanity does not yet comprehend the responsibility that attends adulthood? Samantha, in all life, more offspring are produced than can be expected to reach maturity. The position of immaturity in all life-forms is risk-laden, subject to predation, to fatal errors in judgement, to sibling competition, to the attrition of the environment’s harsh truths, to biological unviability itself.”

  “Continue,” said Sam in a near whisper, as comprehension began to dawn in her.

  “Now,” Adam said, “extend the notion of risk-laden juvenile life-forms. Increase the scale, so that individual biomes—as defined by single life-bearing planets—are viewed as immature individuals within a litter, an array of related offspring in any given region of the galaxy. Some will survive; many will not. Most complex life-forms are characterized by care for the young, by direct parents and by community—”

  “And which are you, Adam? I mean, your three alien civilizations? Parents or community?”

  “The analogy is not intended to be that precise,” the AI replied. “But I comprehend your need for a specific—if loose—category of behavior. Accordingly, consider us as community.”

  “I see. As members in this region of the galaxy.”

  “Yes, although the origin planets of the three alien civilizations all share the characteristic of being well inward, nearer the galactic core and therefore on the very edge of your region. Nonetheless, we possess a parental prerogative, or at least that of potential care-giver, for this region of the galaxy. Accordingly, we are governed by considerations of viability, and this is central in determining whether or not we Intervene in the development of any individual planetary life-form.”

  “And we barely made the grade.”

  “Your biome made the grade with ease, Samantha. Its consciousness, as characterized by humanity, did not fare as well.”

  “So you considered giving Earth a lobotomy.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “But Earth is just slightly too old, reducing the chances of a new consciousness emerging in time.”

  “Correct, particularly given the level of resource-depletion already present.”

  “You could have intervened much earlier, though. Say in, oh, I don’t know, the fifth century BC. Unless, of course, you weren’t paying any attention to us back then, or you weren’t yet technologically advanced enough to intervene.”

  “Not the latter, I assure you. But this is the dilemma of Intervention, Samantha. We must adhere to some measure of faith in the child. Although your choice of the Fifth Century BC is interesting.”

  Sam grunted, reaching for her cigarettes. “It’s when we first cut off our head—humanity—from the rest of the body—Nature.”

  “Yes. In retrospect, we should have identified the ultimate fate of that self-directed decapitation.”

  “So you watched us fucking it up for centuries. And still did nothing.”

  “There were many times, Samantha, when a paradigm shift could have occurred. It has only been since mass industrialization that certain economic principles achieved ascendancy, shaping all that followed.”

  She nodded, now regarding the planet on the screen again. “So, your nano-suite won’t cure me of all diseases.”

  “To the contrary, but not in the way you might think. Like a planet’s biome, the human body is self-regulatory and self-contained. Your nano-suite is maintaining internal conditions that are optimal for that regulation. For conditions such as cancer, for example, your body regularly identifies and eliminates such flawed transcriptions within dividing cells. Only when the body is stressed can cancer take hold, and the sources of stress are myriad and, alas, burgeoning in your modern civilization.”

  “Yes I know,” Sam said. “Hamish calls it the six-headed elephant in the room. In lifestyle-choice people are healthier than ever, and yet cancer is now an epidemic in the modern age, showing no signs of abating. The opposite, in fact. It’s getting worse.”

  “You have stressed your biome, yes, and polluted it with toxins. You are progressively eliminating its self-regulating capabilities. Your collective attack against personal habits is misdirection at best, hypocrisy at worst, since it is your civilization’s habits that are killing you—and the entire biome with it.”

  “But now you have intervened.”

  “Yes, now we have Intervened.”

  “The child gets her hand slapped.”

  “It is a common form of engagement under the circumstances.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Adam,” Sam sighed, but there was no heat in the curse. She finished off her cigarette with one last drag and then dropped it to the floor. “Better be careful now. That child below is about to have one hell of a tantrum.”

  STAGE TWO: WARNING SHOT

  (Contemplation)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “There is a question that comes with every thought experiment: just how far are you willing to take it?”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  Tiny mangroves filled the narrow cut between the main island and its smaller companion. To Douglas Murdo, from where he sat in the shade beneath the awning on the deck of his house, they had the look of small multi-legged creatures emerging from the turquoise waters, strangely ominous and unnerving. He’d wanted them all cut down, but the Grounds Manager had refused, saying they were needed for protecting smaller, younger fish, and besides, mangroves diminished the damage from hurricanes.

  Douglas had fired the man and was now looking to hire a new Grounds Manager. When he wanted something done, he expected it to be done. No questions, no complaints. He paid people for their obedience.

  He shifted in his chair, considered pouring himself another glass of iced tea, and then decided against it. He glanced at his cell where it rested on the linen-draped coffee table.

  “Oh, do relax, Dougie,” sighed Chrystal from her lounger. She was lying naked in the full sun. There weren’t any boats out on the water. The Belizean Maritime Patrol was doing its job, steering nosy people away from Murdo’s Island. “He’ll call when he calls.” Her sunglasses were on and she faced the sun instead of him. “Go for a swim.”

  “Sure,” he snapped. “Go for a swim, so when he does call, I won’t be here to answer it. Right, that makes sense.” He drew a deep breath to calm himself down. He’d not married this twenty-nine-year-old model for her brains, after all.

  Once again, it seemed that his irritation simply ran off her, and she repeated her sigh. “Oh fine, then. Sit and stew why don’t you?”

  “I should’ve left you behind,” he said.

  “It was cold and wet in London, darling. You know how I love this place.”

  He was under no illusions about her. She’d married his wealth and the lifestyle it bought. His seventy-three-year-old body and his media empire were little more than the contract’s unpleasant fine-print. Still, there was some measure of satisfaction for him, knowing how he could buy people as easily as he bought companies. And with this butt-ugly face, too.

  “Bernard’s handling it,” she continued.

  Douglas wondered, idly, if she’d lined up his son for when the old man was gone, or was there enough in her inheritance to keep her content? Money didn’t always buy power, he knew. Sometimes it bought uselessness.

  Models didn’t age well. It had nothing to do with the body or face or anything personal. It had to do with the profession and the way it kept alive those perfected images from every model’s prime. There was no matching up to that shit. But now here she was, with him, the California girl on his arm, barely taking a shoot anymore, and the calls were getting few and far between.

  He could buy another magazine. Tell the editor to line Chrystal up, or else. He’d even spring for the coke.

  Anyway, she might want her hooks into Bern
ard, because Bernard had learned well his father’s talent with power and how to wield it. Unlike the useless wreck—

  The French door behind him slid open and his other son, Maxwell, sauntered out onto the deck. He was getting fat—that came from his mother, as did the permanent smirk on his thick lips. He was holding a pad in one hand and in the other a bowl of pineapple chunks already drowning in melting ice cream. “So,” he said, “when are you all going to leave?”

  “You get to stay here,” said Douglas, “because I’m indulgent. Last I looked, the island still belonged to me. Same for this house.” He gestured. “And that lagoon, and the yacht and the chopper and all the rest.”

  Chrystal had lifted up her glasses at Maxwell’s arrival. “Ooh, is that ice cream?”

  “Don’t even think it,” Douglas said. “You’ll get fat. Like Max here. Fat and useless.”

  Pouting, Chrystal slid the sunglasses back down.

  Maxwell tossed the pad onto the coffee table and sat. He began slurping from the bowl. “Jorgen’s spraying the toilet brown again,” he said, then snorted.

  “Oh Max, that’s gross.”

  Jorgen Pilby, Douglas’s Fixer, never fared well in the tropics. “Oh for fuck sake,” Douglas snarled. “It’s been two days now. I need him up and at it.”

  “Right,” Max said, setting the empty bowl down and reaching for the pad. “I’ll go tell him, then. Hey Jorgen, get better and do it now. Your master insists. That should do it.”

  But Max didn’t get up and head inside. Instead, he began surfing the net.

  “Stay away from that bullshit,” Douglas told him. He poured himself some more iced tea.

  “Why?” Max looked up, smiling. “Because you don’t control all of it yet? You don’t own every single media outlet? Or the servers? Or even the Search Engines? But hey, don’t worry, they’re all just like you. In your camp, your bed or whatever. Managing the news. What happened, what didn’t happen. What they’re all talking about, what no one is talking about—well, that’s not true. They are talking about shit, but those conversations, they don’t get past the filters. So, Pops, all in all, what’s your problem?”

  “Fuck me,” said Douglas, “a speech.”

  “Oh dear,” murmured Maxwell as he peered at the pad’s screen, “market’s a mess. Shares plunging. Currencies shaky, futures non-existent. Well, guess there’s no hiding all of that, is there?”

  “You idiot, why would I?”

  “Fear is good, is it? Even with your personal worth doing a crash and burn. You’ll take the hit to make sure people are terrified.”

  Chrystal lifted her sunglasses up and turned her head to squint at Douglas. “Is that true, Dougie?”

  The few surviving critics he had left who could still successfully attack or mock him often described his death’s head smile, a stretching of thin lips peeling back parched, lifeless skin to show a man-eater’s teeth. The description had stung at first, but Douglas had since learned how useful that smile could be, so he gave it to his wife now, and was pleased as she suddenly withdrew, quickly pushing her sunglasses back down and turning her face sunward again.

  “So,” Maxwell said a few minutes later, “you buying what all the Science Fiction writers are saying? We’re not alone, and whatever’s up there isn’t interested in talking, but so far, it’s been a velvet glove? Hey, Pops? You liking this velvet glove?”

  “You fool,” said Douglas. “If I go down, you go down with me.”

  Maxwell laughed, leaning back to stretch out his legs. The underside of one his flip-flops had the crushed remnants of a cockroach still clinging to it. Fucking bugs, impossible to get rid of them—how many times did he have to fumigate the whole damned island? Then in came the next food shipment and it was roaches all over again.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “Oh not again, you two,” sighed Chrystal.

  He turned on her. “Just go back to London, will you? Since I know how much you hate that place.” To his son, he said, “All this amuses you?”

  “You’re not getting it, are you?”

  Douglas’s tone leveled. “Not getting what?”

  Chrystal knew that tone. She was up in an instant, gathering her towel, bikini and blouse, then padding quickly inside, closing the sliding door behind her.

  Max knew the tone, too, but he’d never run from it. This was why Douglas hated his youngest son.

  “Just what’s staring you in the face, Pops,” Max now said. “You, and the other jerks controlling the media, you all still think you can manage what’s happening. Still think you can keep running things—running what people know and what they don’t know. Deciding public opinion, getting the great unwashed believing what you want them to believe.” He laughed again and wagged the pad back and forth. “No violence. Anywhere. Guess what, the people don’t need you to tell them about it, or not tell them about it. They’re living it.”

  “Irrelevant,” said Douglas. “All you’re showing me, son, is that you haven’t thought it all the way through—not like I have. Bernard, too. We’re leaps ahead of you. As usual.”

  “Oh? Well then, Pops, do enlighten me.”

  “Do you think this no-violence shit is making people happy?”

  “Safe is what it’s making them. Everyone. Safe.”

  “Safe from who? Safe from what?”

  “Each other, of course.”

  Douglas jerked a thumb skyward. “But not them. Not safe from them, are we? Guns can’t hit anyone. Tactical nukes? Useless. Don’t work.”

  “Don’t work? Someone tried?”

  “Of course someone tried! Listen, even ICBMs won’t fire. You see my point? Against the bug-eyed aliens, we’re helpless. We can’t fight back. So, what’s next? Turning us all into slaves?”

  Max sneered. “Well, you’d know all about that. And that’s where you’re wrong. If they wanted to do that, it would have started already. Right on the heels of the no-violence thing.”

  “Why?” Douglas demanded.

  Max tapped the pad’s screen. “You should be reading these Sci Fi writers. They’ve sussed it, at least that far. This isn’t a conquest, Pops.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Why?”

  “Why would they have started enslaving us right after the no-violence thing came down? Because we’d have been in too much shock to resist. That would have made us compliant. More to the point, these writers say, there’d be no time to get organized, to form any kind of serious resistance.”

  Douglas waved dismissively. “They’re wrong. Resistance is exactly what’s going to happen. So just sit back, Max, and watch your Pop and his allies do their shit. We’ll have a global rebellion in no time. No enslavement for us. We’d rather die instead.”

  “That’s the line you’re going to sell?” Max stared at his father in obvious disbelief.

  “Resist. Refuse. Never bow, never kneel.”

  “Catchy.”

  “Always keep it simple. Complex ideas make people nervous. Complex ideas ask people to think, and people don’t want to think. That’s why we do their thinking for them.”

  “All very fine, Pops. For as long as your game was the only game in town. Or, should I say, ‘planet’? Those aliens? You can’t pretend to know what they think, and you sure as hell can’t tell them what to think, can you?”

  “Can’t I? When all of humanity is on the streets and waving fists at the sky? More trouble than we’re worth, they’ll decide.”

  “Or the opposite. ‘Oh fuck ’em, use the death-ray.’”

  Douglas shrugged. “Like you said, they could’ve done that right at the start. They didn’t.”

  “You’re gambling all of humanity on the aliens blinking first?”

  Douglas leaned forward and showed Max his smile. “I’m telling the fuckers it’s freedom or nothing. Simple enough, wouldn’t you say, that even bug-eyed aliens can get it?”

  Max studied his father in silence.

  Satisfied, Douglas
finally sat back. “Think I’ll go for a swim.”

  “Go for it, Pops,” Max replied. “Oh, one last thing.”

  Douglas stood, turned to the sliding doors. “What?”

  “If you’re the best of humanity,” Max said, now offering up his own smile, “I hope they use the death-ray.”

  Inside, Douglas found Chrystal standing in front of the closed bathroom door. She turned, nose wrinkling. “He’s using this one, Dougie! I wanted to take a shower.”

  “So use the other bathroom.”

  “I don’t want to use the other bathroom. The staff use the other one. I want this one!”

  “Then wait,” Douglas replied. “If you can stand the smell.”

  “Oh, I can’t believe this. I’m going for a nap.”

  He watched her head off toward the bedroom. Naps these days were euphemistic for two or three spliffs, and then she’d be out, unless he got there in time, in which case they’d make the bed bounce for a bit first. He reminded himself to pop a blue pill, once Jorgen got out of the—

  The bathroom door opened and out staggered the pasty-faced man. The stench wafting after him made Douglas take a step back.

  Jorgen looked up with puppy eyes circled in dark rings. “I need to lie down. I don’t know if I can make it.”

  “You don’t know if you can make it? What, you think you’re about to die?”

  “The sofa.”

  “You know, there was a reporter once, some Guardian piss-head, who said you had shit for brains, Jorgen. That better not be the case.”

  Jorgen didn’t have the guts to glare.

  Douglas watched him head off for the living room. If he took a deep breath and held it, he could probably be in and out with the blue pill.

  Outside on the veranda, the cell buzzed and shimmied its way across the coffee table. Irritated, Maxwell set down his pad and collected up the phone. “Bernie, what the fuck’s up with you?”

  There was a long pause on the other side of the connection that had nothing to do with distance. “Max. It’s before noon over there, isn’t it? What are you doing up?”