Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  “Amen,” King Con whispered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Is there anything better than sitting in the command chair of an interstellar spaceship?”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  Kolo stood staring at the small television’s screen. The place was more crowded than it had ever been, or so the reporter said. It was said no interpreters were required, but they were there anyway. And yet, for all the people, there was very little noise, no one speaking or shouting anything out as the white woman with the fiery hair walked up to the podium.

  A television had been pulled out from one of the buildings, but most people had their phones and ear-plugs. Kolo had none of that. He’d lost his phone only a few days after the invisible wall had driven him and his people from the camp. He stood in the press of humanity, Neela’s hand tight in his.

  They were on the grounds of the Cobbe Barracks, in Zomba, almost within sight of the massive white-walled building complex that had drawn everyone to this place. The soldier who’d carried the television out had been apologizing to anyone and everyone even before they’d plugged it in and turned it on. The picture was bad, he said. It lost signal all the time, he said. Instead, the image on the screen was so clear that it might as well be a box with small people inside, and the sound was sharp enough that Kolo heard the white woman sigh once she’d settled in behind the podium and had finished adjusting the microphone.

  This was all very strange. The world was strange. People were strange. Kolo saw faces these days and they looked different, and it had been some time before he worked out what had changed. There was no fear in those faces. It had vanished, lifted away like a mask that wasn’t needed anymore. It made people look younger, more beautiful, and above all, more precious.

  The wounded boy inside Kola had been weeping for what seemed like months, but even that endless stream of tears could not wash the blood from his hands. All those frightened faces he remembered—they had been afraid of him. Of Kolo, the murderer, the stealer of children. He had trouble meeting the eyes of anyone now.

  The woman began speaking, and he heard her words in English.

  “Thank you to everyone here in the UN who responded so quickly and effectively to my request to use this venerable site as my venue. Three hours in which to overturn protocol and convention. Not much time and a whole lot of pressure. But I had faith. When it comes to humanity, my faith is absolute, and in a way this is why I am speaking to you now.”

  She paused, and Kolo glanced around. He saw people who did not understand English, standing fixated and intent, and it was clear that they all heard and, somehow, they all understood.

  Kolo himself was nervous. She was an educated woman. She used unfamiliar words and he feared that it would only get worse.

  “I didn’t ask to be abducted. But once it happened, once I found myself in a conversation with an alien entity, my ability to choose was given back to me. The offer was simple: would I speak on behalf of the Intervention? Would I provide the conduit between an alien civilization and the people of Earth?” She paused again, and then said, “It took me some time to decide.”

  Kolo tried to imagine finding himself in her place. Stolen away and then asked to speak to all the humans of the world. A few months ago and he would have laughed, and it wouldn’t have been a nice laugh. Gun in hand, he would have looked for someone to kill, because that had always been the quickest, the cleanest answer. Words were dangerous. Bullets silenced those words. Bullets ended every argument.

  As for the rest of humanity, well, they could go fuck themselves for all he cared.

  So much for the Kolo he’d once been. As for the Kolo he was now, well, he still didn’t know that man.

  “… multiple contacts and engagements with alien species,” she was saying. “We have never been alone. We receive no signals because those signals get blocked. At the same time, we are in a no-fly zone that gets breached time and again. Most space-faring species possess faster than light technology, and part of its functionality relates directly to the manipulation of gravity, electromagnetic field frequencies, and something called phase-shifting. Having said that, most species are not much more advanced than us. With the end of secrecy already underway, it will quickly become evident that we are much more technologically advanced than most of us ever knew. No matter. The revelations may shake us to the core, and might even drive the last nail into the coffin of our beloved leaders and their governments, but to be honest, recrimination won’t get us anywhere. What’s done was done. Time to move on.”

  He’d lost the thread of her statement. It hadn’t taken long.

  Neela squeezed his hand and he looked down at her. “It’s not important,” she said. “It’s not what’s important. Wait.”

  “Three alien civilizations, far more advanced than the squabbling members of our immediate neighborhood, elected to apply a controlled Intervention on planet Earth. Their arrival has sent all the others away. In short, no one wants to mess with these guys, despite them being complete pacifists.” She hesitated and then shrugged. “I have not yet been able to figure out why this is the case. Do I trust this triumvirate of alien civilizations? For what it’s worth, I trust them to do precisely what they say they’re going to do.

  “Now, let’s get to that, shall we? There is something called a Blanket Presence now in place here on Earth. It created the forcefields. It stopped people from hurting one another. It stopped humans from continuing to degrade the planet, and damaging its capacity to sustain life.

  “These initial interventions halted us in our tracks. I need not describe that to any of you. You have lived through it. I have watched it from on high, aboard an orbiting spaceship. I saw and shared your frustration, and like you, I was left wondering what awaited us—what might still be coming. And I wondered, is the answer to that question really to be found in what the aliens do next, or is it to be found in what we do next?

  “Consider the natural world and the disasters that have descended upon us time and again. Hurricanes, tornados, floods, volcanoes. They arrive and for the victims they stop the world, they break the pattern and habits of living. Those who survive then emerge from the wreckage, or are helped from the wreckage, and there is grief and there is loss, and then we begin to build again.

  “If it helps, consider the Intervention as a natural disaster. Out of our hands, beyond our control, and with its arrival, everything changes. The world stops, hunkers down, and will soon emerge into a new day. And we will grieve over what’s been lost, and in our new world, with its new rules, we will gather together and we will build again.”

  These words Kolo understood, like a knife to the heart. He felt outside that future. He’d done too much wrong to belong to it. And yet, and yet … deep inside, the child with the tear-stained face slowly looked up.

  “… hope,” Samantha August was saying. “Hope is what we wish for, that gift of yearning for something better. But it goes beyond that. When we wish well for others, we offer hope to ourselves. We raise it up and like any virtue worth its salt, it makes us better than who we were. But if you go the other way, if you kill hope or attack it, or deny it and descend into despair, it’s all downhill. To put it another way: wishing ill upon others is a self-inflicted wound …”

  Casper Brunt sat in the bar with Viviana Castellano, Robbie the journalist from the BBC, and Simon Wensforth. Simon had dumped his lover, leaving him without a cameraman, at least for the moment.

  Viviana had surprised Casper. He had surprised himself. They were still together. They had found something in each other. He glanced at her now—knowing he should be listening to this Samantha August—but somehow the woman sitting beside him had become magnetic, exerting an unseen but undeniable force upon Casper. He was sliding, with nothing to grip, no rope to hold onto, ever closer to her.

  Her eyes were bright and fixed on the bar’s big flat-screen. “… generating the necessary food and clean water, ensuring that no one suffers physically as a r
esult of their displacement. That said, such acts were only necessary because we didn’t step up. I imagine for some of you, this offers up some kind of excuse to stop making an effort when it comes to the well-being of your fellow human beings. Someone else cleans up our mess, so we keep making a mess. Someone else mends all the wounds we deliver, so we keep wounding. Unfortunately, that attitude could see us annihilated.”

  That caught everyone’s attention, even Casper’s. Viviana was leaning forward. Simon Wensforth poured another shot of scotch into his glass, has hand trembling.

  “It was touch and go whether we humans were going to be part of this Intervention,” Samantha August went on. “The primary target for the aliens is the planet itself, its biome. This Intervention is intended to restore the health of this world. We’ve been damaging that health, and worse, we seem trapped inside a cycle of destruction, and virtually every institution we have invented now serves as the machinery for the damage we inflict.” She paused, seemed to hesitate over something, and then shook her head and said, “We were spared. We have been spared. For now.”

  “Oh shit,” muttered Viviana.

  “Recently,” Samantha August said, “my conversations with my, well, my overseer, have taken on a characteristic of me defending humanity despite all evidence to the contrary going on down here on Earth. These aliens have engaged in Interventions before. They’re old hands at this. But every species, while sentient, exists in various stages of sentience. I’m afraid to say, we barely made the grade. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that the less people knew the better. The argument was always the same; tell the citizens too much and they will panic, they will riot, descend into anarchy. Tell them too much and the entire civilization could collapse. It seems to me that the greatest lack of faith on display here has nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with us—with our lack of faith in each other.”

  There was a muted shout from the audience behind the camera and Samantha August held up a hand. “Right, I was expecting that. Fine, let’s go there then. I will make this as plain as I can. There is not one mortal civilization in our galaxy—not one, no matter how advanced or powerful—that can answer to the existence or non-existence of God. Many hold to beliefs similar to ours. Based more often than not on the observation that too many coincidences are necessary for life to exist, anywhere. In each instance where life is to be found—on planets, moons, beneath the ice of frozen worlds, in the heart of asteroids and comets, in the atmosphere of gas giants—too many factors are required for it all to be accidental.

  “Now, when it comes to possessing a personal relationship with God, that is and will always remain a valid choice. But any religion advocating delivering harm to non-believers crosses the line. Faith is a universal feature among sentients. It is not the enemy of science, or progress, or advancement. It is not a valid reason to become divisive. This is something we have yet to learn.”

  “Hallelujah,” mumbled Simon Wensforth, “now get back to that business about wiping us out.”

  As if hearing Simon, Samantha said, “So, is there a sword hanging over our heads? I don’t know, to be honest. I do know that my overseer has been expressing frustration at our antics. I’ve tried to explain that bitching about shit is a universal trait for us, maybe even one of the defining tenets of our species. We breed dissatisfaction. We can sit in paradise and complain about too much shade, or not enough, or over-ripe fruit, or an itchy back, or just deciding that you’ve stopped liking your neighbor’s face. And yet—” the woman leaned forward slightly, “—time and again, when shit really, truly hits the fan, why, we step up.”

  Casper heard the woman beside him quietly sigh. At that moment, he fell in love with her.

  Ruth Moyen sat in the living room of her small flat, the new one she’d rented just up from the Old City. She watched, she listened, and the tears in her eyes did not stop coming. She didn’t even know why she was crying. She couldn’t understand what it was clutching at her heart, or sending waves of grief though her.

  It was vast, this river of sorrow inside her. She felt her own mind flying above it, felt herself caught again and again by its swirling surface, to be tossed around like a cork. Was this sorrow hers? Did it all belong to her and no one else?

  Or was it something bigger, something that could run through the blood of an entire people? When she touched that surface of grief, she felt its antiquity, sensed its wellspring that reached not down through bedrock, but back into the deep past.

  Sorrow seemed such a grim legacy and she’d made the mistake of watching this speech alone. There was no one to look to for reassurance, for understanding. She needed a friend here, right now, someone to meet her eyes and say it’s all right, Ruth, yes there’s sorrow, but look to the other side and you’ll see infinite joy.

  She wanted to believe that.

  The face of the woman on the screen fascinated her, but she didn’t know why. This Samantha August was being brutally honest.

  “… we’re an aggressive species. There’s little doubt about that. And aggression is a complex behavior. It serves to meet many needs. It can both reward and punish. Now, we acknowledge the importance of competition, but may I suggest that there is plenty out there to compete against—the vagaries of existence itself, the need to define our own place—in your family, in your community, or your culture. Mortality itself. But for too long we have viewed competition solely in the realm of our fellow humans. We have devised an economic system that depends on it. We’ve created social hierarchies that are built upon competition. The problem is: for every winner there are a thousand losers. Our system of competition is damaging us, but we’ve lived with the belief in winning and losing for so long that we don’t know any other way to live. For all that, it’s killing us.”

  Ruth felt the words sinking into her. She watched as they sank down into that river of grief. These were old crimes. She had been living a life of old crimes. No different from her mother and father, no different from every ancestor going back to the very beginning.

  Maybe it wasn’t enough to simply grieve, to simply surrender to that vast stream of history. Maybe what this woman was saying was: it’s time for us to do better, to be better, to take all that sorrow and make something new from it.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Startled, Ruth wiped at the tears on her cheeks. She considered not answering, remaining there on her sofa, perfectly still, breath held, waiting for whoever it was to give up and go away.

  The knock came again. With a soft moan, Ruth stood up. She felt momentarily dizzy and then righted herself.

  A year ago and she would have been frightened. Someone had gotten in past the locked gate, or that someone was a neighbor in the block. Either way, a stranger. She had been trained to suspect strangers.

  Now she walked to the door—saw that it was unlocked—and opened it.

  For a long moment she did not recognize the young man standing before her. And then it came to her. The Palestinian waiter from the café. He stood before her now, looking ten years old though he was at least twice that. His eyes were swimming with tears and his face was wet.

  As if of its own volition, she saw her hand reaching out to take his. She stepped back, drawing him into her room.

  He gently pulled his grip free and went to the sofa, his gaze fixing on the television screen.

  Ruth moved to sit down beside him.

  Not speaking, they continued listening, and Ruth knew: it was going to be all right. Everything was going to be all right. This wasn’t just the river of her people’s sorrow and grief. It was this boy’s river, too. In fact, it was humanity’s river.

  Anthony couldn’t believe it. He was sitting in the living room of the Sticks family. The son, Jimmy, had not too long ago been yabbering on about killing himself. Now he sat between his mother and grandmother. The father wasn’t in this picture, hadn’t been for like, ever. That was something he and Jimmy shared.

  Still, the so-cal
led bro who used to call him Bony Tony wasn’t calling him that anymore. The guy’s permanent scowl and tough-man look was gone. All the posturing and the poses, gone. And here, in this beat-up crappy apartment, with his worn-down mother, grandmother, and three little half-wild brothers, Jimmy was looking like a proper man.

  Who could ever have imagined anything like that? What a world!

  The red-haired writer chick was going on, saying amazing things. If this was Invasion of Body Snatchers it was a professional job. She looked like a neighbor. Okay, maybe not a neighbor around here, exactly, since she was white and everything. But still, like a woman you’d see at a grocery store, talking to the checkout girl. Someone relaxed, unafraid, and ready to meet your eyes.

  He didn’t know many women like that. Except for, maybe, his public defender. Yeah, he wished he was sitting in her apartment right now. Holding hands with Angelina Estevez, with this redhaired chick telling them all how all the old shit ways of doing things wasn’t going to work anymore. If they ever did, hah.

  “I’m signing up,” Jimmy said, cutting across the red-head’s speech.

  “Signing up where, bro?” Anthony asked. “Astronaut, man. Space Fleet. I’m signing up. Fucking walk on Mars, man.”

  His mother hushed him then, for reasons of the bad word or she just wanted to hear the red-head chick.

  “… we’re not going to be told everything. There are some huge mysteries waiting for us on Mars, for example. We’ll have to discover those ourselves. I can confirm that other orbiting bodies in our solar system are home to life. Beneath ice, mostly, but also in the upper atmospheres of the gas giants. And we will find that every native life-form we encounter in our system shares a common heritage with us. DNA and carbon-based is the only rule book in use in our solar system. Accordingly, we need to be careful out there.”

  “Martians! I knew it!”

  “Shush, Jimmy!”