Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  It made looking at a child so very hard, knowing that it had, finally, taken someone else to step in to clean things up, to set it all right again, to offer up a future for the generation to come, a future better than the present, better than the past.

  “Finally,” he said, under his breath.

  Jurgen sighed beside him. “Yup. Makes me feel like a kid all over again.”

  Annie had forgotten what it was like to be free. To have choices. She’d forgotten what it was like to be relaxed, about anything. There had always been something hanging in the background, a promise in the shadows. Darkness to come. Joy had edges and those edges could cut, and usually did.

  Even Jeff’s love for his daughter had a way of drawing blood. The father resenting the mother for the child they’d produced, for the deep ties that he saw between the mother and the child that he felt kept him outside, blocked, denied, refused. He’d used punches, slaps and kicks to level the playing field. But he couldn’t do that anymore.

  She in turn had wanted to level that playing field, too, with a pan full of sizzling bacon fat. A face melted away, a mistake burned down to the bone. These were evil thoughts, evil desires, but she couldn’t back away from them. That night still hovered between her and Jeff.

  Her husband, broken, fragile, weak, stood in the doorway to the living room, watching the woman talking on the television. Annie sat on the sofa, smelling the faint remnants of puke from when Jeff had been crying so hard into a pillow he gagged and spewed up runny gruel.

  Sally was still at school, but Annie would have to go soon to pick her up. Annie had been sent home early from work. The day had become a day off for everyone who could take it. And where they couldn’t, they’d stopped whatever they were doing so they could watch.

  Aliens. Giant spaceships. Venus made into another Earth. All incredible. And that woman, talking as if this was something that happened every day.

  “… obvious by now that we have received help in the area of human health. Diseases are vanishing. Malnutrition is coming to an end. Even spinal and other neurological trauma is being reversed, and people who thought they would never again walk, or sit up, or make love, are returning to full functionality.

  “Alcoholism is now a thing of the past. Opiate addiction is gone. As beneficial as this all sounds, there is also something alarming to all of this. There are strangers in our bodies, phase-shifting nanites running a maintenance program, maximizing our efficiency. Chemical imbalances, hormonal imbalances, psychological dysfunctions, all mitigated, corrected. Schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, psychoses—including sociopathy—all gone.” She paused, and then said, “You’ve seen all the reports. Maybe you’ve experienced this for yourself or your loved ones—the elderly suffering all forms of dementia, so many of them suddenly returning to full functionality. Proof that memories are not bound to physical components in the brain, but exist in a liminal state—and how amazing is that?”

  The woman then went on, stuff all technical and baffling to Annie. She glanced over at Jeff.

  He managed a weak smile. “Alcoholism,” he said in a croak. “Gone.”

  Annie nodded.

  “But I’m still angry.”

  Not long ago and she would have frozen up at that admission, adrenaline surging through her. Now, she just shrugged.

  “At myself, mostly,” he added. “For being so useless … for not standing up to my old man. For taking all the shit he dumped on me and making it my own shit, which I then dumped on you, Annie.”

  She glanced back at the television. “We all do that,” she said. “Children are sponges. Even when it’s piss and blood that they’re soaking up.”

  “God,” Jeff whispered, then hacked a cough and bent over as if he was about to collapse. A moment later and he slowly straightened again. “The things I said to our daughter, the things I made her believe.”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “Fix that.”

  “Are we finished? You and me?”

  She looked up at him again. “I knew who you were,” she said, “but I don’t know who you now are. So, I don’t know, Jeff. Either way, you’ve got a daughter who needs your love.”

  “And you? Do you need my love?”

  Annie thought about it, and then said, “No, I don’t think so. But … that doesn’t mean I won’t take it.”

  “Can I sit beside you, Annie?”

  “The sofa smells bad.”

  “My fault,” he said, still waiting for her.

  Annie sighed. “Come over, then.”

  “My fault,” he said again as he gingerly moved into the room. “All my fault.”

  “I might move to Venus,” said Annie. “In five years. A new world. Clean. Warm. I hate the cold, you know. I hate it.”

  “I know,” he said, and laughed. “I always dreamed of getting posted to Florida.”

  She grunted, then shrugged. “So get posted to Venus instead.”

  “I’ll put in the transfer request tomorrow. EFFE power plants need assembling, fitting into our working infrastructure. Need to do that everywhere I guess. Even Venus.”

  Maybe this could work, Annie decided. She would see, she supposed. One way or another. Either way, she could choose, actually choose.

  Freedom, arriving like a kiss from the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Imagination is like a muscle. It requires exercise. Stay trapped in this world with all its mundane necessities, and it won’t be long before your imagination—the gift you were given in your childhood—atrophies, and when that happens, why, you’ve lost something precious that even nostalgia won’t bring back to you, no matter how much you long for what once was. With the death of your imagination, you lose the sense of wonder. But you need wonder. You need it to stay sane, and you need it to keep your heart from turning to stone.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  Jack Butler sat with his head in his hands. Mary Lamp had been pacing during most of Samantha August’s speech but now she stood with her back to the wall beside the office door, her arms crossed.

  Simon Gist remained at his desk, having cleared a space on it so he could roll his model car back and forth, from one hand to the other. The flat-screen mounted on the wall to his left still showed the woman, and her voice came through and now questions were coming from the floor. The subject for the moment was international law and sovereign rights to self-determination. More often than not, the SF author simply held up her hands and said: ‘work it out.’

  With the arrival of the enormous Bird of Prey over New York City, Simon had ordered the brakes slammed on the Handshake Mission. At around the same time, new data appeared on their computers, file after file of seriously advanced technology, including anti-gravity, discriminating energy fields, quantum linkage. Some of these files were the property of a black US government cabal called Majestic. A few faded blue-print photocopies were stamped property of the Third Reich.

  Go figure. Simon sat, pushing the car back and forth. It didn’t roll quite straight, and increasingly this bothered him. After a moment he slammed his hand down on the toy, halting it, and then picked it up. “Fine. We’re going to Mars. Phobos first, and then Mars.”

  Jack grunted behind his hands and looked up for a moment. “Why not just hitch a ride on that Bird of Prey? We’d probably be at Phobos in twenty minutes.”

  “Granted,” Simon conceded, having flipped the toy car over to examine its wheels. “Our ship will look like a Model T Ford beside a Ferrari, but it will be our Model T Ford. You’ve done the calculations, Jack. We can reach Mars in three weeks. That’s not bad.” He grunted a sour laugh. “Not bad? A year ago and we’d call that insane.”

  “It’s all moving very fast,” said Mary.

  He glanced at her. “Droll, very droll.”

  “Well,” she said, now flustered, “I didn’t mean it quite that way.”

  “An automated shipyard, she said,” Jack sighed. “Out in the asteroid belt. A second one en route
to park itself in orbit around Earth. Our gravity well? Irrelevant.” He sighed a second time. “You know, as an engineer, I’m starting to feel utterly redundant.”

  “Hardly,” Simon replied. “You’re just on a learning curve, Jack. A big one. The biggest one of your life. But you’re not alone, are you?” He gestured with the toy at the flat-screen. “She’s telling us we all need to get on a new learning curve, the one that teaches us to be human, but not just human. Rather, the best of human … if I can even put it that way.”

  “Our finances are in the tank,” Mary said. “Simon, you once hinted at something. You said money was going to become irrelevant. You knew this was coming, didn’t you?”

  “We were complacent. Our economic system was never as robust as we’d told ourselves it was. All predicated on faith, all sustained by the continuance of the illusion.” He shrugged. “America was already a country in turmoil. Ever since the election. We were already seeing an end to something, and it was personal and it hurt.” He replaced the toy on his desk, but this time upside down. “I don’t care if we go belly up. That fleet of ships up there won’t be falling into anyone’s hands soon. This is going to be a brawl.”

  “Spitball fight,” Jack muttered. “They can’t do anything else.”

  “Right,” Simon agreed. “It’s a level playing field in terms of flexing muscle and posturing and all the rest. But there remains a very real currency that will play the central role in organizing this space-fleet administration, and that’s expertise.”

  Jack sat back in his chair and rubbed at the bristle on his chin. “Those remote training centers—they’re there to give countries without the technical wherewithal to present themselves as equal to any other country in terms of expertise—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Seems logical,” Mary said. “Anyone can show up and get upgraded.”

  “Upgraded, an apt description,” Simon said. “Meanwhile, us technological power-houses are looking at all the advanced tech we need, only we have to build the infrastructure ourselves—the training centers, the class-rooms, everything.”

  “What about our crew?” Jack asked, returning at last to the mission. “We’ve got two astronauts hanging around the launch site—must be a glum pair by now. But Simon, you wanted your own team for Mars. Including yourself.”

  “Yes, I’m going. But you’re right, let’s ask them if they want to come along for the ride.”

  “Official requests to the US and Canadian governments?” Mary asked.

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  There was a pause in their conversation and Samantha August’s voice filled it: “… every paradigm shift entails a period of chaos. There will be elements in our society that will resist wherever and however they can. Historically, such movements are doomed to fail. One obvious example would be the Roman Catholic Church following the arrival of cheap and ubiquitous books, including vernacular versions of the Bible. Didn’t matter how many publishers they burned at the stake, they couldn’t stop the rise of literacy, and with literacy came a direct challenge to their monopoly on the pearly gates. From there, Protestantism and the Reformation.” She shrugged. “Historians will be able to tell you what’s coming. None of this is as new as you might think.”

  “Barring the complete collapse of the global economy,” Jack muttered.

  “Our new currency is now knowledge,” Simon said. “What we find on Phobos. What we find on Mars.”

  “Phobos is hollow, based on standard radar returns,” said Jack. “Its collision with Deimos should have further degraded its already degrading orbit. Instead, the damned thing is moving up and out. We can calculate where it will be when we arrive, more or less. But merging with Deimos must have damaged it. Assuming it is what we think it is: an artificial satellite.”

  Mary said, “The Greys were using it.”

  “But maybe they didn’t build it.”

  “And that’s what we’re going to find out,” Simon said. “Mary, inform the investors. We’re all in on a manned mission to Mars, and the payoff is knowledge.”

  “And how will that knowledge pay out in practical terms, Simon?”

  Simon laughed, “I haven’t a fucking clue.”

  “I always operated based on the belief that destabilizing another country—by any means necessary—constitutes an act of self-defense. A weakened opponent is no threat. A weakened opponent turns on itself and ceases to be an external threat. Unless, of course, they paint a target on some foreign enemy. Muslims, Iranians, China …”

  The President of Russia fell silent, his words trailing away.

  They were in the Central Complex at Baikonur, not far from Kazakhstan’s ET-built training center. Its doors were yet to open, but a city of people had grown up around it. Chechens, Georgians, Mongolians, Armenians. Borders had ceased to matter.

  Anatoli Petrov glanced at the frozen image of Samantha August. Milnikov had frozen it during the Q&A session, something he hadn’t been able to do during the speech itself. That mere words could bring down every country on the planet still left Anatoli feeling numb, shell-shocked.

  In the meantime, Konstantine Milnikov rambled, like an old man trying to dictate his memoirs, frustrated at his own feeble rationales for doing the things he had done in his life. “The fact that he was financially in our pocket made it all the more delicious. But now, blackmail doesn’t work anymore. Business interests are paper tigers. All that you own but do not need now becomes a burden.”

  That last line startled the cosmonaut. It had, he slowly realized, cut to the heart of what could only be called a new age of enlightenment. But the birth-pangs were difficult, painful, and occasionally sordid. Russians knew about ghosts, after all. Their land and country had known more death than any lone mortal could count. And those ghosts could haunt even a great man like Konstantine Milnikov. When something new was born, it was the ghosts that pushed from behind. Or from below. And what burst from the cold, wet earth was destined to greet the new world with a cry of grief for all that it had lost.

  There was no one else in the room. The technicians, aides, and body-guards had been sent out. It seemed that Milnikov had adopted a new pet: his cosmonaut science advisor.

  “Remorse is not a familiar emotion,” the President now said. “People have died because of the games I played with the citizens of another country, with their leaders, with their pathetically inadequate electoral security. And people have died from the weapons I sold to other countries. People die, and they die, and still we go on, as if this was normal, to be expected, to be factored into our calculations. A million poor people on the run, freezing and starving in border camps. Ancient cities reduced to rubble.” He sighed. “What we hold to be precious bears the stains of our indifference.” He glanced over, one eyebrow lifting. “That confuses you, I see. No matter. I was speaking of our human capacity to blind ourselves to the true cost of all that we do in the name of all that we desire.”

  “The world was as it was,” said Anatoli Petrov.

  “Ah, yes, just so. And now?”

  “I do not know, Mister President. We stand before an open door. What holds us back?”

  “Hmm, a good question, old friend. What holds us back? Whatever holds us back?”

  On the television screen Samantha August remained frozen, hands caught in a gesture not yet completed. As if time itself now stood still. But of course that was an illusion, a trick of electronics. Behind that still image the woman had gone on, given her reply to whatever question had been asked. She was now in their future, in that other world: one that Konstantine Milnikov seemed reluctant to return to.

  Memoirs could be ugly things. The impulse often came from a sudden sense of shorter days, of time running out, of things ending. To write a memoir was itself an act of desperation, no matter how clear-eyed the regard turned back on one’s own past, how honest, how brutal the confessions laid out on the page.

  The last words of dead men, as far as Anatoli was concerned.<
br />
  In this garish light from the room’s fluorescent bulbs, Konstantine Milnikov’s face was almost skull-like.

  After a moment, the President began speaking again. Anatoli shivered and looked away. The dead, it seemed, still had plenty to say.

  For Liu Zhou, it was difficult to tell if Leader Xin Pang was laughing or weeping. There were tears and they flowed freely down the old man’s cheeks, and yet he didn’t look as old as he had been only a day ago. Some light danced in his eyes, and his smile seemed loose, unguarded.

  Perhaps madness. Perhaps hysteria. Governance had dissolved, or rather, it should have by now, and yet people went on as before. They did their tasks, made their commutes, surfed the net, and made weekend sojourns to places of peace. For all this, China tottered on the thinnest edge, with dissolution to either side.

  But then, had it ever been any different? No army could be big enough to truly stop a mass uprising. Not enough jails could be built to house men and women who chose to free their minds, to think and say what was in their hearts. And with the end of violence, the foment had grown, the dissidents had reappeared—now fearless and brazen.

  All things that lived must come to know their limitations, even humans. All humans must bow to the collective necessity, for without co-operation, without mutual support, without a unified belief in the worth of doing things, there was anarchy.

  The aliens had made anarchy toothless, and the secret desire of so many people to see everything brought to ruin was now a quaint affectation. That and nothing more. But not all social change was anarchy. The man sitting opposite Liu Zhou now had absorbed the lessons of every leader who preceded him. That terror of chaos, the frantic need to crush every blossoming flower in the green field that was China: it was deep in the bones of Xin Pang.

  Liu Zhou could not condemn him. The language of fear was powerful, and made victims of everyone who used it. But civil co-operation was all that stood between progress and extinction. The larger the population, the more complex the civilization, and the greater the need for control, or, to use a kinder word, management.