Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  At long last the presenter was able to interject, drawing the scientist into the conversation. Joey cut King Con off and turned up the volume.

  “… famous television series,” the woman was saying, “but what is the significance of making something so obviously inspired by our own entertainment media?”

  “Well maybe that’s just it,” the physicist replied, hands gesticulating in a way that reminded Joey of one of his high school science teachers. “Maybe it’s a gift! Or a promise. Or a bribe. Maybe it’s all three! The point is, we’re staring at an example of incredible technology. How much does that thing weigh? But it just sits there, motionless, exactly five hundred meters above the UN Building.”

  “Anti-gravity,” interjected the Air Force guy.

  “Yes! And some kind of chameleon property, perhaps, allowing it to disappear from sight. Though we’ve confirmed it showed up on radar at about sixty thousand feet, but I think that was just a heads-up. They didn’t want anything colliding with it.”

  “Should we be afraid?” the journalist asked.

  “It’s got weapon mounts,” said the Air Force guy. “Hard-points.”

  “You mean it’s a perfect match for a Bird of Prey,” the physicist interjected. “Do they even work?”

  “I’d rather we not find out.”

  “This is a big waving flag,” the physicist said, leaning back.

  “Isn’t it also property theft?” the journalist asked. “I mean, in terms of copyright and patents?”

  “Patents?” The physicist threw up his hands. “Can you patent technology that hasn’t been invented yet? All those ship designs for the television and movies and games and whatnot—where the propulsion and weapon systems are, they’re just empty boxes with labels! Configurations of a few lines and words like ‘Impulse Drive.’ And then there’s the crystals! Personally, I doubt there are energy crystals powering that thing. No, what’s in those ‘boxes’ on the schematics is—with this thing—technology that actually works!”

  “But the design—”

  “Who knows and really, does it matter? Besides,” the physicist pointed out, “we’re the wrong people for you to ask about that.” And he nodded across at the Air Force guy, who scowled but did not otherwise object.

  “On that note,” segued the presenter, “let’s review all that’s happened so far on this historic day … after this short break.”

  Joey dialed down the volume. He laced his hands behind his head and tilted back in his chair. He felt like whistling.

  King Con’s line was blinking.

  He realized that his camera was still on. “Oh crud!” he laughed. “Anyone out there still watching me twiddle my thumbs? My smiling mug in the corner of your screen? Look, there’s King Con trying to get back. And … hey!” He sat forward and clicked an ‘answer’ request. “Nonny Mouse! Where you at, bro? Still down in Canaveral? What’s the latest on the Handshake Mission? In the toilet I bet, right?”

  “In the toilet, flushed and halfway to the Gulf of Mexico,” Nonny Mouse replied. “It’s weird here right now. Bummed out, but also insane with excitement. I mean, instant obsolescence. Our tin cans—even with the Kepler people handing us space-capable EFFEs and a heavy lifter that blows everything else out of the water … we’re all just, uhm, stunned, I guess. Like bringing a cap-gun to the Siege of Stalingrad.”

  “Yeah. Obscure reference there, bro.”

  “Sorry, was watching Famous Tank Battles last night.”

  “Oh, but hey they do all right with a budget of ten bucks, don’t they?” Joey frowned. “What were we talking about again?”

  “Handshake. Toilet. Bird of Prey, just hanging there.”

  “You mean, no ‘Greetings, Earthlings’ from that thing? C’mon, you can tell us. Somebody’s having a conversation with ET, right? Even as we speak.”

  “Not that I know of,” said Nonny Mouse.

  “What is this, a game of who blinks first?”

  The Head of Security wanted the building evacuated. He was clearly waiting for the death-ray, but Adeleh Bagneri had sent Agnes out to head the man off in the outer office, and when Agnes held her ground nobody ever got past her. Lovely girl, Agnes.

  Panic seemed pointless. The ship was directly overhead for a reason and that reason was pretty obvious, as far as the Secretary General was concerned.

  Her phone was buzzing around on the polished top of her desk, but she remained propped against the window, blowing the smoke from her Turkish cigarette outside, only to watch it swirl back into her office. The Vape worked most of the time, but every now and then she just wanted that old toxic hit, sweetly kissing death’s face. This pretty much defined one of those needy times.

  After so many years in the UK, she had become used to open windows at night: that cold blast from the elements fended off by a thick comforter, and upon first taking charge of this office she had insisted on proper windows, the kind that could be opened. Fresh air was anathema in the States for some reason. It was likely that, somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been thinking about sneaking a fag every now and then.

  Gradually, something about her buzzing phone snared her attention. It wasn’t her official phone. It was her family one. “Oh, bugger,” she muttered, balancing the cigarette on the sill and leaning over to retrieve the phone. One of her daughters, probably. The worrying one. She picked it up and moved back to the window. Reaching for her cigarette she found it gone. “Really, another one?” She scanned the floor, fearing yet another burn-hole in the carpet. But it was nowhere in sight. Maybe the wind was blowing the smoke in, but it was also blowing the ciggies out. Ridiculous. She held up the phone and then frowned upon seeing the caller ID: Look up. Way up.

  “Oh, darling daughter,” she muttered. She tapped to answer and began speaking immediately. “This is hardly the time to be pissing around even if you are my flesh and blood, Azizeh—”

  “Excuse me,” cut in an unfamiliar woman’s voice. “Is this the Secretary General?”

  “Who is this and how did you get my private number?”

  “It seemed the better option,” the woman replied. Her accent was almost American. “My name is Samantha August, and I am presently occupying the spaceship hovering above you—you are in the UN Headquarters, right?”

  “Well, that’s funny,” Adeleh deadpanned. “Got some Tupperware to sell me then?”

  “Of a sort,” the woman replied and Adeleh heard the smile in her tone. “If you have a computer handy, Google my name. Samantha August. You’ll find that I was abducted in the Spring, in May, from a street in Victoria, BC. That’s Canada. Anyway, you can guess who did the snatching. I’ll wait.”

  “I’m really supposed to buy all this?”

  “It’ll only take a minute, you know.”

  “Fine. Hold on.” Adeleh set the phone down, lit another cigarette, and—feeling momentarily defiant—sat down at her desk. Cigarette dangling from her lips, she typed in the name. Ignoring the standard news reports of the woman—the writer’s—kidnapping, she clicked on the first video on YouTube. A moment later she picked up the phone. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “Convinced?”

  “Not entirely. Just … go on.”

  “I need to talk to the world and I want your microphone.”

  “Uh huh. When?”

  “Oh, say in three hours? Two p.m. local time. Will that give you enough time to put the call out to all members? It’d look good to have a full house, I think. Under the circumstances.”

  “Right. Three hours. Darling, even I couldn’t put together a full emergency assembly in three hours.”

  “Can you try? Otherwise, I hang around up here for another day.”

  “Why don’t you just go away and come back tomorrow?”

  Samantha laughed. “Madame Secretary, the world is watching now. This is your first chance to step up where no others dare to tread. You. Not the leader of any one country. That distinction will become very, very important in the near f
uture.”

  “Is ET with you in that ship?”

  “Not as such. We won’t be meeting them any time soon. Not in the protocol. Look, I get the feeling that you’re sitting there humoring me. Tell you what. Call up a live feed of my ship.”

  “One is already up,” Adeleh replied, after taking a deep drag.

  “I’m about to dip my wings, and no, I’m not talking about a fried chicken takeout.”

  Before Adeleh’s eyes, the spaceship dipped its wings.

  Utter chaos in the outer office, sudden, frantic news reporters shouting into their microphones on every monitor in sight. From the city itself, something like a roar, or a wave of sound, rising up from the crowds gathered below.

  Adeleh took another quick drag and then stubbed out the cigarette on the window-sill, idly watching the wind quickly pluck the butt away, and said into the phone. “Three hours. Tell me what you need, Ms. August.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “All things considered, science is the best means of understanding almost everything around us. It works well on the human scale and stands as a stark counter-point to beliefs that by their very nature refute the notion of evidence. And I would be the last person to attack people encouraging the rest of us to use our ability to be rational, thereby defending the value and the necessity of science. But I will lift a querying hand when the notion of ‘science’ is held to be immutable, because ‘science’ as such does not exist. Science is a process to be sure, a way of thinking, but what science is above all is that which scientists do, and alas, scientists are people, too. As potentially fallible, irrational, biased, greedy, in short, as flawed, as the rest of us. So, by all means defend science as a process. But don’t confuse it with the very human endeavor of science as a profession. Because they’re not the same thing. And this is why when some guy in a white lab-coat says ‘you can trust me, I’m a scientist,’ best take it with a big bucket of salt, and then say ‘Fine, now show me the evidence and more to the point, show me how you got to it.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  “That’s my air-space! Someone do something about it!”

  “I’m sorry, Mister President,” replied the Air Force general, glancing nervously at the others at the table: Daniel Prester, the Head of Homeland Security, old Esterholm from the CIA, that guy from the NSA whom he personally despised, and Ben Mellyk, who seemed to be fighting a smile. The general cleared his throat and tried again. “We have no intercept capability. Our craft are being warned off at a half mile by some woman’s voice, and every drone we bring too close gets hijacked and pushed away. We’re being told that there is a forcefield around the craft.”

  “Like in the movie? So someone stick a virus in ET’s computer, dammit! Shut it down!”

  Ben Mellyk leaned forward. “Sir, we’re not calling the shots here. It is as simple as that. Yes, our airspace has been compromised. Yes, that vessel is a dead ringer for a Bird of Prey and accordingly it has weapon mounts, or at least what are supposed to be weapon mounts.”

  “It dipped its wings,” observed the NSA man. “What was that all about?”

  “That’s usually a friendly greeting gesture,” explained the Air Force general.

  “Anyone tried talking to them?” Raine Kent demanded, looking around with a glower, his face unnaturally red.

  “All frequencies,” Ben replied. “All met with silence.”

  “But that woman’s voice on the pilot radios?”

  “Just the warning to stand off,” the general explained.

  “Accent?” asked the NSA man. “Russian? Chinese?”

  “No. If anything, I’d say Midwestern.”

  “Definitely Midwestern,” added Kenneth Esterholm. “We’ve analyzed the recordings, matched the modulations. There’s a hint of Canadian in it, in fact.”

  “Canadians again!”

  “But it repeats, suggesting that it’s also a recording. Basically, we think it’s an accent intended to put us at ease.”

  The President thumped the tabletop. “At ease? Do I look at ease? If it blows up the UN Building we’ll get blamed. Hell, about fifty countries will declare war on us!”

  “Sir,” pointed out Esterholm, “those would be pointless declarations.”

  “Not if they all call in their loans,” Kent said in a low growl. He paused, looked around. “It’s all falling apart. I keep firing my press secretary but nothing changes. How many reporters attended my last presidential statement? Three. And two of them I told to be there or else. I’m tweeting into dead silence—nobody cares anymore!” He looked around. “Someone fire me. I’m sick of this, sick of all of it.”

  “Sir,” ventured Ben Mellyk—who’d been showing more balls of late—“this year will be noted as the most important year in the history of humanity. All of our names—everyone here in the room for certain—will be remembered, and what we do, what we say, will be pored over for generations.”

  “What we do and say?” Raine Kent’s expression was incredulous. “ET’s not listening to us! ET’s ignoring us! Every world leader—ignored! NASA, ignored! Where’s our black helicopters flying here and there? Where’s our men with dark sunglasses and briefcases? Where’s our people in hazmat suits? Arc lights and military camps, MPs at every gate? Where’s our movie? I want our goddamned movie!”

  The door to the conference room opened and in strode the Vice President. “I’ve just been on the phone with Adeleh Bagneri, and—”

  “Who?” Raine Kent asked. “Who the hell is Adele Bag—is that the pop star with those songs I can’t get out of my head?”

  “No, Mister President,” Diana K. Prentice said, without a hint of exasperation, “Adeleh Bagneri is the Secretary General of the United Nations.”

  “Oh. Right! Let me guess, she’s asking for asylum—have they evacuated the building yet? Someone turn on that TV, no that one there. Ken, turn it on, right, good. Shit, that’s one big mob under that thing! What if it lands? People’ll get crushed—the idiots—why aren’t the cops keeping ’em back?”

  Diana Prentice pulled out a chair and sat down. “They’re not evacuating the building. They’re calling an Emergency Session.”

  Raine Kent made a face. “More words. Words and words. Blah blah blah, they haven’t got a clue either.”

  “There’s been contact.”

  That stopped the President.

  Diana drew a breath and then said, “Adeleh got a call on her cell from the woman on board that spaceship. That wing-dip was confirmation, by the way. There’s a human on board. No aliens, just a human. Her name is Samantha August. A Canadian Science Fiction writer who was abducted—”

  “In May,” Kenneth Esterholm cut in, nodding. “We were looking into that. Ongoing.”

  “She’s been a guest on board another spaceship, one hiding in orbit. But now she’s on that new spaceship, and she’s here to address the people of Earth, and will be doing so from the UN. In about an hour and a half.”

  “Like hell she will,” Raine Kent said. “As soon as she lands or beams down or whatever, arrest her. We debrief her first. Then maybe she can talk to everyone else.”

  The Vice President shook her head. “I’m afraid it is not going to happen, Raine. No arrest, no whisking off into a black van. This speech is going to happen, like it or not.”

  The NSA man sat up. “Mister President, we can apply our seven-second delayed feed. In fact, we should be able to control the entire event.”

  “Exactly! Do that! We can edit on the fly. Fuck ET if they don’t like it.”

  “This was anticipated,” said the Vice President. “There will be no delay in the feed. No control of the address. The speech is going to happen. Everybody with a cellphone, laptop, desktop computer or pad, a radio or a television, is going to hear it. Furthermore, each person will hear the speech in their native language. ET will be exploiting pretty much all our hardware, all the servers on the entire planet—”

  “Pull the plug!” the NSA man snapped.

&nb
sp; Diana sighed. “As I said, every response, every effort we make to prevent the full disclosure of this address, will be denied. There is something called a Blanket Presence here on the planet. Source of the forcefields, and the denial of violence.” She glanced at the Science Advisor. “We already know about that, about its agency.”

  Ben Mellyk nodded. “Yes. Blanket Presence. That term certainly fits what we’ve been observing.”

  “It is self-powered,” Diana went on. “Every communication device will turn on in about an hour from now, everywhere on Earth.”

  “Fine,” the NSA man said. “Got it. Now, that woman—”

  “Samantha August.”

  “We got a file on her? She’s a writer. We must have.”

  “No doubt,” murmured Kenneth Esterholm. He rose from his chair. “And of course we can listen in on any cellphone calls she makes to the Secretary General.”

  Diana Prentice snorted. “You can try, I suppose.”

  Esterholm scowled but said nothing to that. “Mister President, by your leave, I need to get us putting together everything we have on—”

  “Samantha August.” The Canadian Prime Minister was sitting, straight-backed and intent, her gaze fixing on that of the Science Fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer. “Tell me about her, please.”

  Alison Pinborough regarded the writer, noting his steady, piercing gaze behind the wire-rimmed glasses. That he was the smartest person in this room was something she already knew, as the Prime Minister was about to find out. Scientists, of course, possessed their own form of self-assurance. Every one of them dragged an invisible library on wheels behind them, the shelves crammed full of esoteric information. A few of them had a talent for communicating what they knew, but many didn’t.

  She assumed it was the same for writers. An old ex had once dragged her to a launch night for a local poet’s latest book. The man had been surrounded by women half his age, and naturally he’d been wearing an expensive sweater, turtle-neck, and he read in that standard (or so she’d discovered by the grisly night’s merciful end) leaden cadence, as if every phrase was gravid with significance. The other guest poets, with only one or two exceptions, pretty much matched that plodding rhythm when perched behind the microphone. It had been interminable.