Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  Their last invitee arrived at that moment, seating herself down with a sigh. Not long ago, the Vice President would have been accompanied by the usual Secret Service, and the bar would have been vetted beforehand. Now, she came alone, unescorted, and earned only mild attention from patrons at other tables. “Gentlemen, I see you started without me. Good plan. I was held up discussing the invasion of Canada.”

  “Like that’s going to work,” Esterholm said, somewhat loosely as he was showing the effects of the bourbon, although not as much as one might expect.

  “It took some time to reach that conclusion. And we just received word that our buy-out angle is finished, since Canada has appropriated the land from the owners.”

  “That’s rather bold,” Esterholm said.

  “Well, it’s a legal move, mostly, as the PM then said they had no plans on ousting the Bowans, or even making them give up their ranching. But clearly Carboneau has some decent people around her, and knowing that we coveted the site, they took the means to block us.”

  A waiter appeared and D. K. Prentice ordered a glass of rioja. As soon as the waiter left, Esterholm shifted to face her.

  “Diana, what’s really going on at UN?”

  “They’re hiring.”

  “Like they have an unlimited budget—did we finally pay them our dues?”

  “Of course not,” she replied. “But they are positioning themselves for something much bigger.”

  “Like what?”

  The Spanish rioja arrived. “Well,” Diana said a moment later, “like being the official government of Planet Earth.”

  The Director of the CIA choked on his bourbon. But not fatally so.

  “I never considered myself a demagogue.” Konstantine Milnikov stared out the tinted window of the presidential train, gaze tracking the decrepit farms and a meandering swath of deciduous trees marking a small river’s path through the otherwise flat landscape. “But there is a seduction at the core of power.”

  They were seated at the dinner table, the dishes and remains of the meal removed, and now only a bottle of vodka was between them. Anatoli Petrov sat in silence, nursing his first shot, while the President of Russia tried to get drunk.

  It was, all things considered, not too surprising. The clout of a boisterous personality only went so far, and while in this country cleverness was admired (unlike in America), when everything else was stripped away—the security apparatus, the silent threats, the brutal promise of a grisly death with radioactive venom coursing through the veins—one man’s self-righteous claim to lead millions quickly found itself on the thinnest ice.

  Anatoli had never held much interest in economics. He’d led a privileged life, and rambling discussions and arguments on the ills of capitalism, socialism, and all the rest invariably left him bored and distracted. The poor never went away. They just labored under whatever regime held sway, their daily lives unchanged and unchanging.

  He’d seen photographs in history books: the peasant clothing and the bent backs, the sturdy women and the scrawny men staring into the camera’s immortal promise, faces blank and eyes hidden in shadows, as if saying to the future: there is nothing you can give us that we have not already lost.

  Since those long-ago times, little had changed. While men walked on the moon and virtually everyone could now talk to each other across an entire planet, still the peasants labored on, in country after country. Some on the land, some in factories, others at the fringes of spoil heaps and mountains made of discarded computer monitors. They lived tribal lives, because humans were meant to live tribal lives. The rest was just pretense.

  The man seated opposite the cosmonaut had been living the greatest pretense of all, riding his chariot in the sky like some cosmic archangel. Downward rained the blessings, the gifts of momentary recognition, and the endless promises of a better world to come.

  What peasant hadn’t heard it all before?

  The attempted annexation of Latvia and Estonia had been a shambles. Entire armies parked on the highways on the Russian side of the border and paratroopers being laughed out of every village, town, and city. And in the wake of this, all the inner workings were revealed, the raw motivations behind this endless look to the horizons.

  The core was rotten through and through. Even before ET’s arrival, Russia’s economy had been rife with holes, worm-ridden, corrupt, poisoned by cynicism and graft. It had existed to serve the criminals running it. A castle built on a foundation of sticks and mud. Every territorial land grab had been a desperate effort at misdirection, to keep the gasping machine rolling forward for a bit longer.

  Most might have pronounced this unique to Russia, product of a dark, permanent smudge on the Slavic soul. Perhaps, Anatoli reflected, there were aspects, characteristics, found here and nowhere else. But these were incidental. America was in similar throes: the world’s wealthiest country with its sunken coastal cities and starving homeless, its cold-hearted contempt for whoever could not keep in step on that unceasing march called Progress or, for the less philosophically inclined, the Good Life. They didn’t shelter their own, didn’t feed their own, didn’t heal their own, and yet, in the midst of all this inhumanity, they held themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization.

  Then again, compared to the man sitting on this armored train, crossing a vast country that didn’t know what century this was and barely cared besides (he was thinking of the peasants, always the peasants), even America’s quick succession of neo-Fascist presidents (bought and paid for by the Kremlin) still seemed capable of leading the world with one bold gesture of unswerving self-belief.

  They were days from the launch. Hours counting down at Cape Canaveral. Poised to lift skyward on a pillar of … flame? Possibly not. Well, whatever the EFFE lifter’s thrust would look like. No matter. They would, once again, be the first among all nations to make so bold as to confront the alien visitors. Like a brash salesman with a pearlescent smile jamming one foot in the door and then striding through with one hand outstretched. Handshake, howdy-do? Nice to meetcha and let’s sit ourselves down and do some business!

  Balls. Pure, glaring-shiny American brass balls. Again and again, Anatoli’s contempt for a culture that only pretended to know itself was swept aside and in flooded the bright flow of sincere admiration. The Americans and their guileless ways.

  “T-shirts,” said the President. “Busts in the markets. Tattoos of me in profile. I am a worshipped man. Idolized even beyond my borders. They like the manly pose. It speaks to them. It voices a solemn promise better than any words, any press statement. See me, a man at ease. A man of natural strength. Confident, powerful, influential. Who else can lead us? Who else should?”

  Anatoli noted, with a start, that the bottle stood with only a third left in it. It was said that getting truly drunk was now impossible. So what state of mind took its place? He contemplated conducting his own experiment on the matter but then, he knew that alcohol weakened a man, both physically and in spirit. Too often, it was the first and last choice in mortal surrender to the fates.

  But fate was never kind. Ask the peasant, when he’s not falling down drunk.

  No, Anatoli was never much of a drinker, though when needed he could fake it alongside his fellow pilots and all the other hard men of his profession.

  But now, that sliding escape into dull-wittedness had ceased its blessed magic. Sober heads were lifting, blinking away the cobwebs, and it seemed that something vast was stirring, until the bedrock beneath every continent trembled.

  The People.

  Karl Marx would sleep well tonight in his grave, and for many more nights to come. But every demagogue of the world now shook in his boots.

  “I see it now,” Konstantine said. “How I believed that I owned it all. Russia as my own fiefdom. And this world stage. I played it like a game, with the lives of millions to be gambled, squandered. My frail house of cards, this economy of the Twenty-First Century tottering on its Nineteenth Century foundations.” He grunt
ed sour amusement and then raised his glass. “Anatoli, this is why we travel by train, to remind ourselves of this steel seam, the threads that stitched together our entire country. Yes of course a plane would have been quicker, but we have time now, don’t we?” He laughed. “We have nothing but time.”

  The Russian army was disbanding. No order had come down to do so. Entire regiments were simply packing up and going home. The seams that Milnikov had just mentioned were coming apart. Local governance was now the only effective option. The dismantling of empires, one village at a time. It wasn’t Nineteenth Century: it was Medieval.

  “Nightly they pray for me, did you know that, Anatoli?”

  The cosmonaut nodded, risking a faint smile. The Church was once again on the rise. The Unknown was no longer so ephemeral. Now it hovered high above the planet, still hidden but undeniably there. This made faith seem merely … expedient.

  Something about that was refreshing, even for an old atheist like Anatoli Petrov. Of course, in the absence of what could be known, the Church would make do with presumptions, and everyone still went home happy. There was much to be said for that, especially as the country itself slowly fell apart. Some forms of continuity could outlive even nations.

  The train had begun a long, sweeping turn that angled the carriage ever so slightly, tilting their view of the world beyond the now rain-sleeted windows. Legs stretching out, Konstantine Milnikov sprawled lower in his chair, scowling down at his shot glass. “What value the vice,” he murmured, “when its savage bite never comes?”

  They were journeying to Kazakhstan, once part of the Soviet Union, then nominally independent, now a vague protectorate. The primary Russian launch site was located there, but Baikonur Cosmodrome was not their destination. Instead, they were heading toward the alien construct eight kilometers from Aral, the city that once stood on the shores of the Aral Sea before the waters retreated. Local government claimed the site and Russian bullying could not contest that claim. This was the new world, after all, this toothless age where the only weapon left between nations was economics.

  That had delivered some pressure, however, sufficient to permit this Russian delegation to visit the new construction site. The President wanted to see the miracle for himself.

  Konstantine Milnikov seemed to shudder in his chair. He looked up, fixed Anatoli with bleak eyes, his famous face suddenly old. “But it’s true,” he said. “I was once a demagogue.”

  Anatoli found that he had no reply to that. But after a few moments of silence, he concluded that it was the saddest confession he had ever heard.

  STAGE FOUR: REBIRTH

  (Resurrection)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “The greatest potential roadblock to space exploration by humans isn’t physical risk, but psychological risk. Can we handle being away from our home planet? What happens to our bodies and our minds when we’re no longer in sync with the rhythms of our native world? Space could well be an invitation to madness.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  “Potential,” said Adam, “is a curious force. It hovers in the future, almost formless. It refuses the easy description. Among all sentient species this is the same, Samantha August. A promise, there on the very edge of the mind’s sense of self. And in society, a multitude of such promises reach out, blend together, inviting something profound and blessed. It is the belief of many Sentients that ‘potential’ is God’s primary gift, for the very fact that it is an invitation to become something greater than what existed beforehand. Have you stopped listening?”

  She stood before what she had designated the main viewer, a large flat panel or window that dominated the wall of her single room. She smoked, luxuriating in the freedom to do so inside rather than on some windy sidewalk, huddled against the weather. But such freedoms were fast coming to an end. “Do you have a technology that keeps smoke private—not reaching anyone else? Or just wisps it away? I’m heading to America, after all. They shoot smokers there. Canadians, of course, just wrinkle their nose in disgust and mutter under their breath, or cross to the other side of the street. Or call the police. I should’ve lived in the Fifties, or even the Forties. See me, the authoress (as they were known then), posed for her black and white publicity shot, glamorous behind a veil of smoke from the cigarette in one hand. The Century of Grey Haze. Maybe I’ll retire to Austria.”

  “Samantha, you do seem distracted. I was speaking of potential.”

  “I heard you. Tell me, is there a difference between personal potential and cultural potential? Are some nations destined to flower, while others wilt? Or is it all just chemistry, the collective concoction that either turns lead into gold or gold into dross? Are some of us fucked at the start line? People, nations, entire species?”

  “Humanity’s crisis is, it seems, its inability to appreciate gifts freely given.”

  “Early on, before money, we used reciprocity,” Samantha said. “This cemented the notion of implicit justice. The idea of ‘worth’ and ‘fair value.’ You give something and get something in return, with each exchange valued equally. When it wasn’t an equal exchange, then some other service was required, to restore balance.”

  “I still await the completion of the exchange, then. Something from humanity in return for what I am providing.”

  She shrugged. “We did away with reciprocity. Mostly. We complicated things, and not just with money’s arbitrary designation of value. We put labor on one side of the exchange and protection and security on the other. This created a hierarchy, and inequality, until labor was the only option left to the majority of people, while the notion of protection and security offered by our leaders slowly crumbled. Crime, war, betrayal by the very people sworn or elected to protect us and our interests. The implicit justice—the fairness—of the exchange just up and died.”

  “It falls to you, then, to enunciate the ancient rules of reciprocity. To your species.”

  She finished her cigarette and let it fall to be swallowed up by the floor. “I think it’s too late, Adam. Besides, not all your ‘gifts’ are appreciated, or particularly valued. What you offer as salvation has been received as enslavement. What you provide as a technological leg up is seen as an attack on global industry. Even the free food and fuel to the starving ends up hammering the industries of procurement, transportation, and disbursement, making our ridiculous surpluses of produce positively noxious. You well know that we could feed everyone. Now we don’t have to. You will.”

  “Do you have a solution?”

  “You don’t? I thought you’d done all this before!”

  “Each sentient species is unique, specifically related to its silent assumptions, the unspoken rules of expectation. It is, however, commonplace that behavior is manageable through reward or discouragement.”

  “Bark bark, says Pavlov’s dog.”

  “Suicide rates have greatly diminished in the past week.”

  She snorted. “Looking for the silver lining in the mess on the planet below? Well, that’s good news, I suppose. The ones who wanted out got out. Orphans adopted by loving families. Meanwhile, ennui settles its pall across the world.”

  “I see little anger.”

  “No. We’re storing it up. Fuel for the future’s blinding rage.”

  “Against me?”

  “No. No point.” She drew out another cigarette, lit it. “We may be collectively thick, but even we can see that. You’re way out of our league.”

  “The Greys, then.”

  “The Greys. We will descend on them like Hell’s own fury. They won’t know what hit them. But be warned, the psychological profile of the abused is not all peaches and cream. We’ll have issues. We won’t listen to reason.”

  “The Greys do not employ reason.”

  “Well, good. That suits us perfectly. No need for any moral crisis over killing every last one of them. No peaceniks or appeasers, either.”

  “You are hesitating.”

  “I am frightened beyond belief, Adam.�
��

  “So are we.”

  Silence followed. She smoked, staring at the extraordinary personal gift floating in space on the main viewer, its backdrop the dark side of the moon. She wasn’t a fanatic on such matters, but it looked right. It was likely that the specs were exact. In an hour or so, she would board that enormous craft and, somehow, take the controls. She hoped that she’d have plenty of help in that department, or things were going to end badly indeed.

  It was a call-sign. Its subtext was—she hoped—glaringly obvious. It was also the Elder God of lawsuits in the making, one involving blood sacrifices and regiments of legal headhunters. “Never mind Austria,” she muttered. “Switzerland. Or North Korea. Or anywhere I can’t be extradited from.”

  “Samantha,” ventured Adam after a time, “I am assembling personal diagnosis and treatment units for your civilization. They will be ubiquitous.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, in a short time your entire medical profession, barring that of trauma surgeons, will be unemployed.”

  She said nothing for a moment, and then sighed. “Oh, Hamish …”

  “I understand he enjoys fly-fishing.”

  “Sometimes, Adam, your jokes fall seriously flat.”

  “I am also preparing to begin populating the training centers with appropriate technology to effect education, to be followed by the first inductions. I suspect that your return to Earth will precipitate considerable interest in what the future has to offer. Speaking of which, in these matters, don’t you ordinarily prepare a speech beforehand? That is, written text, by way of guidance? After all, you will be addressing all of humanity.”

  She sighed again. “No. I think I’ll wing it.”

  There was a long pause, and then Adam said, “Are you sure, Samantha? This will be an historic speech, its audience vast.”