Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

“… should be plain by now. I’m not here to offer any solutions to how we get from all that we’ve known and believed, to this new age of enlightenment, deep-space exploration, and maybe even a war out there among the stars. And I do not think we can expect specific instructions or guidance from our Benefactors. Not in the protocol. Even my contact with ET has been via an Artificial Intelligence. I’ve met no one, seen no one.

  “But one thing should be obvious by now. It is up to us how this will proceed. Not specific governments, not leaders of countries, not hidden cabals sitting atop their hoards of secret knowledge. But all of us. Our every act now, beginning with how each of you engages with the people around you, with loved ones, estranged ones, neighbors and friends and enemies, will either serve or reject the new future awaiting us. And it may well be the case that if enough of us reject the future, if enough of us fail in recognizing that what we do—right now, the rest of today, and tomorrow and in the weeks to come—is important and has meaning, we may end up having no future at all.”

  “Holy Mary Mother of God,” whispered Jimmy’s mother.

  But Anthony could see: Jimmy’s grandmother was smiling.

  Two de-throned gods sat broken and slumped in their high-backed chairs. The Adonai were done and finally, at last, they knew it.

  Lois Stanton put the cap back onto her ballpoint pen and settled back in her lesser chair, now the lone witness to this sordid, sad collapse. Samantha August continued speaking on the board-room’s giant flat-screen. Every now and then the camera trembled slightly. In the packed theater of the UN assembly hall, no one was speaking, not even whispering as far as Lois could tell. Just silence, until it seemed that the woman at the podium was speaking to an empty room.

  “… resetting our value system won’t be easy, and it will take the greatest minds of our time to find a way through to the other side. The key element, I believe, is the notion of post-scarcity. This is the rug pulled out from under capitalism. When we cease to have to pay for what we need, we need something to take the place of that, something that rewards us in other ways. Something that gives us reasons to go on, to continue to achieve, innovate, and work. Perhaps it’s not as much of a stretch as it may seem right now. After all, who hasn’t gone to work to provide security and stability for their family, for their loved ones, their children? We already do that. We even do jobs we hate to maintain that security, and we do it from love, and a sense of responsibility, and when we do all of that, we feel pride. So, extend that notion outward. Your family is humanity. Take it from there.”

  “Bitch,” said James. “Crushing our lives.”

  “Can’t touch her,” Jonathan added, shaking his head. “Money. It’s dead. New paradigm, a bloody mess if you ask me.”

  “People who can, tell people who can’t what to do,” said James. “Always been that way. The strong and the weak. The worthy and the damn-near useless. Expertise and talent and good breeding on one side, ignorance, cluelessness and mongrels on the other.”

  “Not equal. Never equal.”

  “Every game can be played,” James then said, but the assertion was so feeble the voice uttering it trembled. “We can play this one too. Find a way in. These training centers. Get our people in there. First ones out into space. Asteroids to claim. Minerals. Water. Need industry, won’t happen by itself. We get in, we buy our rocks and we set up operations.”

  “That’s a plan,” agreed Jonathan.

  “Lois,” said James, “run it back. Hear what we just missed.”

  She collected up the remote control and rewound.

  “… technical data now populating sites all over the world. This is free, to be used for our betterment, and to help maintain the health of our home-world. As some of you have noted, Venus is being terraformed. This will create an Earth-like world for our species to colonize. We need to relieve the population pressure here on Earth. There are too many of us. The timescale for Venus is five years before self-contained settlements are possible, and ten years before the surface can be walked on without the need for space-suits and air-supply.

  “Obviously,” and here the woman offered a faint smile, “we will need colony ships, and volunteers. I don’t think the latter will prove a problem. As for the former, well, we are about to given one more gift …”

  “Fuck gifts,” said James in something close to a snarl. “Lose all worth. Get given something for nothing and you can’t appreciate it. Don’t value it. Haven’t earned it.”

  “… this gift has a responsibility attached to it, however. We’ve all seen the revelations about the Greys. Alien entities engaged in psychic rape and torture. Earth is not the only world they prey on. Humanity is not their only victim. We have neighbors, and they need our help.

  “This offer is, if you will, ET’s greatest act of faith. In us. They are pacifists. They are advanced enough to be able to defend themselves against anyone and everyone. They could defend us. They could defend our neighbors, but this would make children of us all, and keep us there. We need the room to mature as a sentient species. And in our contact with those neighbors, we need to take the lead in driving out the Greys. We need to become the Neighborhood Watch.”

  “Other systems to exploit,” said James, nodding at the screen. “Ignorant aliens, oh so thankful that we arrived. I see opportunities.”

  “Opportunities,” Jonathan agreed.

  These two men—and their world—were dying before Lois’s eyes. They’d tried to discover the secret of eternal youth, ET’s cure-all to mortality. They’d failed. Healing was selective. It responded according to need, and growing old didn’t qualify. If this was Jesus walking down a line of people, reaching out with his healing touch, he’d walked right past James and Jonathan Adonis.

  Maybe that pretentious last name had offended him. God knows, it offended her. How many Greek tales hammered home the message of hubris?

  She was planning on writing a book. A story somewhere between Citizen Kane and Mephistopheles. But her research wasn’t quite done yet.

  “… precedent for this. Our entertainment industry has taken us there, and I have followed that theme with the spaceship I requested, the one now hovering over this building. It was a simple sales pitch: in the future we will be better than we are now.

  “What awaits us at this moment is finding a way across that bridge, to our better selves. Our Benefactors will be observing, and likely calculating. They will assist where they deem it useful, and ignore everything else. Either we show them that we can do this, or we’re probably finished as a species.”

  “Gun to the head,” James said in a growl. “Be good or else.”

  “Do what you’re told or else,” his brother elaborated. “ET’s speaking our kind of language.”

  “But there’s a difference,” James said. “Big difference. ET’s got all the power. And us, we have …” He couldn’t finish the admission.

  So in her head Lois finished it for him. Nothing. You have nothing, boys.

  “… our first fleet is even now moving into orbit around the Earth. Eight vessels of a class you should recognize. Twelve smaller vessels, and two dreadnoughts. Regarding one named ship of the eight, there are a few actors who by all rights should be the first to step onto the bridge. No doubt we can arrange that sometime soon.”

  And behind Samantha August, on a huge projection screen behind her, an image appeared. The writer turned slightly and nodded. “And here they are. This is a live feed, by the way. Now then, isn’t that a lovely sight?”

  “New tech,” said Jonathan. “We take what we need and build our own. We do one better, always one better. We outclass them. Private fleet—we can find plenty of partners for this.”

  “This fleet belongs to the people of Earth,” Samantha said once the shouting and spontaneous applause had died down. “Assembling the administrative elements of running something like a space-fleet should probably fall under the UN’s umbrella, at least to begin with. Now, ET is not naïve and neither am I. I can a
lready picture the political jockeying about to begin when it comes to this. I can already hear the arguments as nations fight for power within the hierarchy of this new fleet. But guess what? If we don’t sort this out peacefully, reasonably, and most of all, fairly, why, that fleet sails away without us, never to return.

  “Granted, we can build our own, eventually. But it will take a few years at the very least. And nations will fall back into the mess of competing with one another, and secrecy will return—or, rather, under normal circumstances, it would return. But ET won’t let it—not one nation can hide anything from any other. We are now an open book to one another and we had better get used to it.”

  “Fuck her,” James said. “Fuck that bitch.”

  Jonathan sighed. “At least she’s white.”

  Lois uncapped her pen and wrote in her notebook: Yeah, figured as much.

  The Caribbean was doing its Caribbean thing. Hot, hot wind, the taste of salt in the air, the turquoise waters being turquoise and four pelicans gliding into the bay to land and bob above the reef. Fronds rustled and the faint hiss of sand blowing across the beach reached Maxwell Murdo as he sat perched in a canvas chair set up well above the tide-line, iPad in his lap.

  Chrystal had come down to join him but was watching from her phone. The old man was back in the house. He didn’t want company.

  Maxwell had also brought down a cooler filled with ice and bottles of Belikan beer. It seemed a fittingly modest gesture to celebrate the end of the world.

  “It’s like the TV show,” Chrystal said. “Those ships, I mean.”

  “Yup,” said Maxwell, “and sooner or later, some team of lawyers is going to fly up to take possession of those things.”

  “What?”

  He waved a hand. “Trademark infringement, copyright infringement, every infringement you can think of. Then again, how does one go about suing ET?”

  “They’ll go for her,” said Chrystal. “That woman.”

  “Well, she as much as admitted it was her idea. For the symbolism. So, they clean her out. Then what? If the UN takes these things—this fleet—do they turn around and try suing the UN? You know, the more I think about it, the pettier it sounds. But hey, we’re a species that delights in pettiness.”

  Chrystal sniffed from where she reclined on her beach towel. “That’s because we’re weak.”

  He glanced over at her, surprised. And pleased. “You keep laying low, Chrystal,” he now said. “He won’t live forever, and besides, he’s going gaga.”

  “I know. He keeps calling me by his first wife’s name.”

  “Ah. Another blonde. Old Da loves his blondes.”

  “I’m rewinding, Max, see what we missed.”

  “Beer?”

  “Makes me fat, so … yes please!”

  The woman kept on talking, her voice filling the spacious living room behind Douglas Murdo as he stood looking down on the son that was useless and the wife who’d defied his express order to not drink beer.

  Barb stopped listening to him pretty soon after they’d married. She’d started doing whatever the hell she pleased. He thought he’d divorced her. Nice, fair settlement to keep her mouth shut. So what was she doing down there, on the beach, on his island? But damn, she still looked good. Almost made him feel young again.

  There would be plenty to attack in this damned speech. He’d order his people to go after the woman first. Samantha August. Destroy her integrity—or at least keep asking enough questions until people believed that those questions hid ugly truths about the woman. It wasn’t hard. It didn’t matter how flimsy the connections, how elaborate the chain of whatever conspiracy or corruption they’d invent for her, it would do its work in the end.

  Because people believing the worst in others was a favorite pastime, a habit as addictive as whacking off to porn. It made them feel good. Made them feel superior. Made them want to hurt other people. Human nature, in other words.

  And a bunch of shiny new spaceships in orbit wasn’t going to change that.

  They’d destroy this Samantha August. Then they’d tear apart her speech. Line by line, showing all the hidden messages—and if there weren’t any hidden messages, they’d make them up. He had smart people working for him. Talented people.

  They’d re-interpret everything she said, make it clear that ET was the enemy to humanity. Our jailers. Cleaning up the planet in preparation for wiping humans out and moving in. Everything else was false promises, smoke screens.

  Barb had lost weight. She was looking good. That beer wouldn’t help, though.

  Maxwell’s feet were red with sunburn—he’d forgotten to cover them. Idiot.

  Where was his other son? Oh right, still at Eton. They’d all meet up at Christmas break.

  This wasn’t over. He wasn’t finished yet. He was going to rip this whole thing to pieces. And if ET went and scorched the planet because of it, well, he only had a few years left anyway, so who the fuck cared?

  Drifting in from the living room, Samantha August’s voice: “… and if truth is your enemy, you’re in trouble …”

  He needed to call his lawyers. Barb needed to go. Divorce. No wife of his could do whatever the hell she pleased. “Go on, drink another beer, you fat bitch.”

  Sudden confusion, and with it, fear. Abruptly, he began to cry.

  He’d left Ev and Mark and Susan to hear the woman out. Something had driven Dave away, into the yard, and then out across the stubbled stretch of unbroken prairie. Beyond that, in shear drops of old run-off channels, was the valley he no longer owned. He found himself on the edge in the hot wind, staring down into its once-managed wilderness, this subtle contradiction that he used to find poetic. He could see a half-dozen elk in the high grasses of the old oxbow, and on the far side, a coyote or a wolf tracking them from the slope.

  He heard footsteps, the hard, worn heels of cowboy boots knocking on exposed bedrock, and a moment later his neighbor, Jurgen Banks, was standing beside him. His neighbor, in the same mess. The man had lost his herd of bison. Every animal paid for, cared for, nurtured. Now they wandered unattended.

  “Heard the news?”

  Dave shook his head. Jorgen always had news to deliver. If the old man didn’t have something to tell, he couldn’t start a conversation. But that was all right. There was always news.

  “The bank’s decided not to decide. On anything.”

  Dave glanced over with a frown. “What does that mean?”

  “Means life as usual. For now.” Jurgen’s lined, angular face wore its weathering with a kind of innocence, as if he’d never quite understood most people. “I admit it, Dave, I never expected them to be that smart about it.”

  “Well, can’t squeeze blood from stone, right?”

  Jurgen’s laugh was dry. “Of course not. Never ever stopped them from trying though, did it? Y’know, most times you beat your head against a wall and it only takes a few knocks before you go ‘hey, that ain’t gonna work.’ Most situations, I mean. But drop in the word ‘money’ and why, that head just keeps hammering the wall. And people nod and say ‘yup, that’s how it is. Money. It makes us stupid.’”

  The elk had moved down to the water’s edge, where the grasses were sweeter. “How come you’re not watching the speech, Jurgen?”

  A shrug. “Heard what I wanted. Ten years, she said.”

  “Ten years?”

  A strangely shy smile. “Venus. Another whole planet. With nobody on it.”

  Dave simply stared at the old man. He was what, sixty? Ten years, and this guy was talking homesteading all over again. “That’d be one raw landscape, Jurgen. Whole forests barely knee-high. The weather systems—they need centuries to settle out, to find a pattern. It’s not the place for—well, I mean, it’ll be brutal. For decades.”

  “It’s a thought, though,” Jurgen replied.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, imagine being buried in the ground on another planet. Most people would find that lonely, I guess. But not me. Me
, I like it.”

  “You want to die on Venus.”

  “The first one, maybe. The first human to die on Venus. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t in any hurry. You know, I got into the bison farming for all the wrong reasons. The Wild West, the time of the Indians, before it was opened up to us Whites. I remember seeing paintings. Buffalo herds. I know, wrong name but so what? Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, covering the plain for as far as the eye could see. It was the romance of that, Dave, that’s what got me. Sure, had to make a living and all that. But for me, just seeing the big beasts out there, well, it was like stepping back in time.”

  “Right. So, Venus, you’d be stepping back to the beginning of a world.”

  “We’ll have to bring livestock with us. Or animals of some kind. To hunt and eat. Bison are tough. Cattle, not so much.”

  Dave hesitated, and then said, “Ev’s been looking into it, to be honest. It’s complicated. What to bring in the first wave, I mean. Insects. Soil biota. Bees, butterflies. Flowering plants. It depends on what ET gets things started with, I suppose. Plankton, algae, mollusks, invertebrates for the seas, rivers, and lakes.”

  “But dying there,” Jurgen said. “It’s like your whole body is a seed from Earth.”

  “Huh. Yeah. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Sure. My way.”

  Dave turned round and squinted at his distant house. “Kids are excited,” he said.

  “Sure,” Jurgen said again. “Got reason to be. Finally.”

  Finally. Now that was a hell of a word to use. But Dave suddenly understood what had been ailing him, what ET had done to his generation, to every damned adult on the planet. It wasn’t his lost livelihood that was the problem. That happened to people all the time, after all. It wasn’t his not knowing how to provide for his family, either. Wasn’t that the universal question plaguing everyone everywhere? Finding that knife-edged balance between need and ability, even as the windows of opportunity kept on closing? No, it wasn’t any of that.

  What burned like fire inside Dave at this moment, was shame.