Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  And dear God, how he wanted to meet them.

  Hopefully, that counted for something. Up there, down here.

  As a last gasp chance, there were about a thousand fighter pilots with shit-all to do. All Gus needed from the President was the go-ahead to make some calls.

  It was either that or Tom Hanks.

  The Director of the CIA was ushered into the conference room through another entrance. Kenneth J. Esterholm was seventy-four years old, a bookish company-man bureaucrat who had been recruited at Stanford in his graduate year of a Master’s degree in what was then known as Communications. His finest skill was in patronage. These days, the lure of retirement had become a deafening siren call, one he was ready to heed, possibly within the next hour.

  Even as he slowly lowered himself into a chair, the President jabbed a finger at him and said, “What’s with these ET buildings popping up all over the world, Ken? And more to the point, why not here in the United States? What have all those foreigners got that we don’t?”

  “At the moment, Mr. President,” Kenneth began as he laid out his binder and carefully opened it to reveal hand-written notes, “what they have that we don’t are those strange buildings.”

  Raine Kent blinked at him. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  “No sir. We’ve done an analysis, seeking commonalities among the target countries. There is none. Malawi, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Argentina, Korea, Norway, Canada. In each instance, the constructs are rising in relatively remote areas, often on contaminated ground—”

  Ben Mellyk leaned forward. “Excuse me, Ken, you said ‘contaminated ground’. Can you describe the nature of the contamination?”

  The Director glanced at the President, seeking guidance, but the man’s famous television glower remained unchanged. Kenneth referred to his notes. “Post-industrial for the most part. Heavy metals, oil by-products, various leachates. Or over-fertilized farmland. Or denuded scrub-land. Basically, dead or dying ground.”

  “And the construction material?” the Science Advisor asked, pulling off his glasses to wipe the lenses.

  “Some form of concrete, I believe, but otherwise basic. They’re going up in recognizable fashion, or so our engineers tell us, just without the need for workers. Any additional determinations are impossible due to the forcefields.”

  “Hmm,” mused Mellyk, “curious.”

  “That’s it?” Kent demanded. “That’s all you got?”

  “Well,” the Science Advisor began, squinting through the lenses before resuming wiping them, “self-assembly requires raw materials, one presumes. All over the world we’re witnessing the breaking down of contaminants, accelerated clean-up and rehabilitation. Even nuclear waste. There has already been a measurable decline in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as other green-house gas parts-per-million. Some of this material can indeed be broken down, but not all of it.” He paused and squinted at Kenneth Ester-holm. “If I had to guess, the contaminants are being recycled, and that concrete mix is mostly sequestered carbon dioxide.”

  “They’re building these things out of thin air?” Kent demanded.

  “Why yes, literally.”

  “Now isn’t that exciting?” the President said in a half-snarl, and then he thumped the table top. “No. It isn’t. Who cares how they’re being built?” He pointed again at Kenneth. “What are they? Prisons? Killer Robot Assembly Plants?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. President, because we can’t get inside them. All we can tell you is that they’re big, they’re full complexes, suggesting multifunctionality. They’re ergonomic in the sense of human scale—entrances and whatnot. And they all seem to possess a very large enclosed compound, with massively thick twenty-meter-high walls and a seamless concrete base or floor. Whether these plazas remain open-aired or will be subsequently roofed over, we don’t know. The engineers don’t think so, however.”

  “Prisons,” said Raine Kent. “Good thing we’re not getting one. Or is it? Maybe they’ve written Americans off? Slotted for extermination?”

  “Sir,” ventured the Director, “we don’t think they’re prisons.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, there are not enough of them. Unless, of course, the aliens just want a representative sample of humanity, in manageable numbers.”

  “A fucking zoo?”

  Kenneth shifted uneasily in the chair. His voice was dry as he replied. “One hopes not.” He referred to his notes again. “Each site shares certain similarities. The variations seem minor. There is a main building, with a footprint equivalent to ten or so football fields. Outer buildings, each one about a football field’s worth of floor-space, are connected by solid, broad concourses. In many ways the complexes have the appearance of university campuses crossed with assembly plants.”

  “Brainwashing centers,” said Raine Kent, both hands curled into small, white fists on the table. “And killer robots.”

  “Ken,” said Ben, glasses finally back on, “back to these compounds. Are those high walls completely enclosing them?”

  “Uh … no, one side is made up of multistory buildings, each one linked by walls at the same height as the purpose-built walls on the three remaining sides. In other words, no gaps.”

  “Are there windows on the buildings facing onto the compound?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Ben Mellyk sat back, nodding.

  “I swear,” said the President to his Science Advisor, “I will personally rip your head off in the next ten seconds if you don’t explain yourself.”

  “Launch pads,” Ben said. “We really need a sample of that concrete.” He sighed. “Never mind. These complexes are, in my opinion, space-centers.”

  No one spoke.

  Kenneth Esterholm had looked at more satellite images of missile launch sites than he could remember. Now he pulled out the drone shots from directly over the building sites. Then he sat back. “Damn, I think he’s right, Mr. President. There are out-buildings here that could be barracks. And these … mission control? Over here … training centers, with class-rooms? The manufacturing buildings could relate to hands-on training and familiarization. The main building? Administration, perhaps?”

  “No fucking rockets!” Raine Kent bellowed, rising from his chair and planting both fists on the table. “And now, no fucking alien space center!”

  “Well, sir,” Ben said, “we have our own.” He glanced at the Director of the CIA. “There’s your commonality, Ken. Those countries—they either have no space program infrastructure or those that do—like Canada—use our launch sites.”

  “But these alien centers are massive,” Kenneth objected. “Nothing we have comes even close.” He tapped the pictures before him. “These things, if they’re indeed what you say they are, they’re designed for thousands of … of …”

  “Students? Candidates?”

  “Barely literate candidates?” the President said incredulously. “Malawi? Kazakhstan?”

  Ben Mellyk shrugged. “We return, once again, to the unknown alien value system. Who qualifies, who doesn’t? We have no idea. I have only a hypothesis here, gentlemen. Space-centers, training complexes. Not for aliens—they don’t need any of that—but for us.”

  “Not us.” Kent said in a growl. “Not Americans.”

  “Perhaps we’re expected to make use of our existing infrastructure, Mr. President. Our own centers, plus our universities, our military academies, air force bases, proving grounds. We will, of course, have to adapt, and quickly, since we’re not getting any obvious jump-start from ET.”

  At the far end of the table, Albert Strom said, “Imagine, Mr. President, making that announcement—the largest national construction program our country has seen since the New Deal. Millions of Americans don’t know what to do with themselves right now. One announcement, sir, and we could be looking at zero unemployment.”

  Slowly, Raine Kent settled back into his chair. “A national program,” he said, “buildin
g giant, empty buildings.”

  Ben Mellyk cleared his throat and said, “If we don’t prepare, Mr. President—”

  “A hypothesis you said? That’s like half a fucking theory, right? On that we put millions of people to work?”

  “It’s a gamble,” Ben admitted. “But if we design these to be high-tech training centers, adjunctive to the nearest universities and colleges, we then put a high demand on instructors, teachers, technicians—expertise at all levels. We’ll start seriously short in that high-level manpower, so we have to open the doors—wide open, sir. Any American with a hankering to learn more, any skilled foreigner wanting a Green Card. Crash courses, intense training, steep learning curves—when you pitch this, sir, hit them with the Kennedy angle. Tell them it’s going to be hard. Challenge them, sir. It’s time.”

  “Who needs a speech writer?” Kent asked rhetorically. “Slow down, bud, you’re closer to a heart attack than I’ve ever seen you.”

  “Am I excited, sir? You have no idea. And what has me so fired up? One word: hope.”

  Kenneth spoke. “What if those alien space-centers are exclusive to their respective nationals, Ben? What if those forcefields don’t let anyone else in? More to the point, what if alien technology starts filling up those buildings, along with alien computers and some kind of instant-education technology imprinting on brains or whatever? With us sitting on the sidelines, with all those empty buildings?”

  “Precisely why I said we need to use them for the high tech we do have, Kenneth. Because if you’re right, we’ll have to race to catch up.”

  “Against alien technology?”

  “It’s that or we resign our nation to an Earth-bound backwater, while the rest of the world heads out into space, out to colonize Venus, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and beyond.”

  The silence in the wake of these pronouncements lasted for nearly half a minute, and then Raine Kent said, “Get that fucking astronaut in here.”

  “He wants a co-pilot—”

  “Fine, whatever.”

  “I have one in mind,” Ben Mellyk went on.

  The President scowled across at him. “Is this even relevant? You got one in mind? Good! Job done.”

  “Well, sir, the one I had in mind is Canadian.”

  “What? What the fuck are you saying? We don’t have anyone—”

  “Of course we do, Mr. President.” Ben now looked at Kenneth. “But now we have an added incentive to step over the border.”

  The Director comprehended in a flash. He leafed through his collection of photos and drew one out, which he slid across to Kent. “Mr. President, the alien construct in Canada, near the small town of Swift Current, Saskatchewan.” He shot Mellyk a look of sincere admiration. “We wanted a chance to get in through the door to one of these sites? If it’s Canadians only, well, problem solved.”

  “What? I don’t …”

  Ben said, “We’ve co-operated with the Canadian Space Agency—in fact, we gave this astronaut a lift up to the ISS. We have a history of working together. More to the point, they owe us.”

  Raine Kent grunted. “Should’ve annexed that country fifty years ago.”

  “Then there’d be no alien space center going up there,” Mellyk pointed out.

  “Sure. I got that. I was just saying.” He pointed a finger at his Science Advisor. “You work with my speech-writers. Program details. Not too many, though. Make it simple. And then we need to assemble a working committee.”

  “Bi-partisan,” added Strom from the far end of the table. At the President’s glare, he said, “It’ll have to be, to get this off the ground. We all pull together or we all go down together—our whole country.”

  Kent barked a bitter laugh. “When has that line ever worked. And from you, Strom, of all people. Last administration—nothing but road-blocks you and your buddies threw up—one thing I’ll take from the last man in this chair. I will veto the fuck out of people who get in my way. I trust we’re understood.”

  “Tell that to the Demo—”

  “Who learned how to stonewall from the Republicans!” Raine Kent stood. “I was never anybody’s puppet. You knew that—I forced you to see that in the run for the presidential nomination. So now, I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, either you get on board or I crush you. No more games, not anymore. We do this or we’re toast.” He pinned Ben Mellyk one last time with a stubby finger. “If you turn out to be wrong, you’re gone.”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  “Because,” Raine went on remorselessly, “launching pads are also landing pads. And barracks and manufacturing plants could be for alien death-squads and weapons. All these sites could be processing centers, winnowing through what’s left of humanity once the big ray guns start blasting down from orbit. And we don’t have one because we’ll be one giant pile of ash, just like the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians and the North Koreans—” he paused then to stab a finger at Strom. “Of course they’ll trash North Korea. Everyone wants to trash North Korea.” His level gaze then returned to Mellyk.

  “How did you vote last election, anyway?”

  “Green.”

  Raine Kent continued staring down at the man for a long moment, and then he smiled and said, “Good man. You see, I already knew. If you’d lied just now …”

  “I am here to be objective, Mr. President,” Mellyk replied, somewhat frostily, “not to tell you only what you want to hear.”

  “I know. Like I said: good man, until you screw up. Landing pads. Now, get that astronaut in here, the one who looks like Scott Bakula, but with a smaller nose.”

  Thus far, conversations at the United Nations were confined to private meeting chambers, as representatives of various nations—mostly ones sharing a border—met to establish a common language of compromise given what few true powers remained in human hands. Populations were on the move everywhere, defiant of prohibitions as refugees fled drought, poverty or religious persecution. The latter, of course, was toothless now, and yet psychological repression still found ways through the cracks of non-violence.

  That said, a formal announcement from the UN was long overdue, at least as far as US Vice President D. K. Prentice was concerned. The roadblock, however, was substantive. What could be said? No one, it seemed, could agree on a statement, one that could be said to be representative of all humanity.

  She sat awaiting the Secretary General of the UN, Adeleh Bagneri, in a well-appointed conference room on the sixth floor of the United Nations Headquarters. A silver tray bearing a teapot and porcelain cup and saucer was before her, the tea itself piping hot. She had acquired her preference for tea as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, studying International Law, and yet, thanks to a room-mate from rural Yorkshire, that taste tended toward what Brits called ‘bog standard,’ or ‘builder’s tea,’ meaning strong enough to be a Class A narcotic. Alas, this tea was a delicate Earl Grey. A single sip left her feeling she’d just drunk hot water flavored by flower petals. Worse yet, the sugar was raw, not white.

  The tea was from India, blended in the UK. The silver tea set was from Pakistan, the sugar from Jamaica, the napkin from China. The conference table was some dark hardwood from Indonesia, the chairs from Denmark. The carpeting was Afghani and the array of paintings on the walls—part of a travelling exhibit—was a privately owned collection of Frida Kahlo paintings and etchings. This room, like so many others in this building, was a demonstration of the cultural and economic fusion that underpinned the very purpose of the United Nations. She could appreciate the demonstration, despite the insipid tea.

  She was being kept waiting, indicative of the chaos that had descended upon this bastion of confrontation, compromise and, more often than not, outright cynicism, where nation-states played the game of history in the making, where posturing was a way of life, where politics succumbed to bureaucracy and vice versa, depending on the crisis du jour.

  She wondered, not for the first time, if in the near future there would
be an alien representative’s seat and Office of Operations here at the UN. If so, both seat and office would be under perpetual siege.

  In the meantime, her species stumbled in circles, made virtually powerless in the old game of nations. One would have thought that an end to the stoking of conflicts, the violence of old enmities and past crimes, where remonstration was an empty threat and arguments no longer possessed the final option of physical force, would have led to something akin to euphoria among the nations of humanity. Instead, the helplessness had simply laid bare the absurdity of clashing opinions, attitudes, beliefs and convictions.

  People could not agree.

  So what?

  People failed to comprehend an opposing point of view.

  What of it?

  People got frustrated, irritated, insulted, offended, indignant.

  And?

  Even words died in the wake of such simple, devastating responses. The awful truth was, this imposition of non-violence had exposed the almost infinite differences within this single, beleaguered species, a global civilization incapable of reconciliation and at a loss to take that first step into a new paradigm.

  No one could even agree on what the paradigm would look like. In the most essential ways, of course, defining that new paradigm would be guided by the extraterrestrials, for whom it seemed direct communication was not a priority. Thus far, humanity had been reacting to events and then struggling to accommodate them when it became increasingly obvious that opinions were not being invited. In one way, this manner of imposed change echoed that of Nature itself. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, cyclones and hurricanes all struck with the same blanket indifference to the desires of humanity.

  And yet, Diana knew, ET was not quite as cruel as Nature. There was an ethos at work, a subtle one that few paid attention to while in the grip of their fury and frustration. Miraculous supplies of food and clean water to hungry, downtrodden people, a silent but solemn promise that no one would starve. And now, according to the latest WHO reports, there had been a marked drop-off in endemic diseases, particularly in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The manner of this health intervention was still unknown, but physicists continued to talk about some kind of energy lattice, wrapped about the planet like a vast spider’s web, and instances (so many instances!) of agency in keeping people safe. Diana suspected the two elements were intimately bound together.