Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “My tenure was denied, actually. I'm moving on.”

  “What?” He looks shocked. “You're a great teacher, one of the best I've had.”

  “Teaching, sadly, is not a highly-ranked merit at a research institution such as this one.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  I hesitate. How do I tell him, or anyone, what I have done? “I have accepted another position elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  I'm not ready to lie to him, though I've managed to lie to Jim, my parents, and my colleagues. I hedge: “I've joined the Starpath Syndicate.” A code, known only to other traitors.

  His face flushes and his eyes brighten. “Me too!” he cries. I sit back in my desk chair with a thump.

  “I'm going,” he says. “I couldn't ... I needed to know what they're doing. So, I will.”

  “Your position?”

  He shrugs. “Entry level. I have to take a placement test. I don't have enough education to be an expert, but I've got the smarts and the drive they want.” He sounds like he's quoting.

  “How did they find you?”

  He shuffles his feet, before admitting, “I found them.”

  “How?” I am fascinated, and perhaps relieved, to have found someone, anyone, to share the experience with.

  “I heard the rumors. Most often from the homeless guy who stands out by the psych building. You know, ‘Spare any change, my good, good friend? All right, have a blesséd day.'” His imitation is spot on, capturing the husky lilt of the man's voice perfectly. “That guy. Only, now he doesn't ask for money, he just stands there muttering. You have to get close to hear that he's saying he knows the way out, that he can hook you up, that there's an alternative.”

  “An alternative?”

  Gregory finally sits in my guest chair, and pulls out a battered lab notebook. He flips to the middle and cracks it open on my desk. “A chart. Suicide attempts in the months prior to the alien arrival, and suicide attempts post-arrival. You can see the drop—it's statistically significant.”

  “But the death rate from suicide hasn't dropped any.” It's all there, charted in black, white, and red.

  “Suicide attempts—the kind with a dramatic failure rate—have different psychological motivations than the guaranteed methods. The aliens are poaching the personalities that want to make the gesture but don't want to die.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Psych minor!” He points at himself, managing to be both apologetic and smug, then flips to another page where the calculations are too dense for me to grasp at once. “Okay, and this. I determined that the disappearances are too well-coordinated to be done with anything other than an instantaneous sort of beaming device, like in Star Trek or whatever. It takes a lot of time to move a million bodies. Not every nation, state or municipality has good statistics on how many went missing—after all, a million is merely a guess, an extrapolated average, and there were wild variances in the reporting.... But, for convenience's sake, I worked with a million. Anyway, everyone disappeared at night—sometime between midnight and six am, local time, and the timing was different in different time zones. The aliens were working with the rotation of the Earth. The sweep—”

  “Right, I get it. What does this all mean?”

  “It means,” and he fairly bubbles over with enthusiasm, “that they moved about seven hundred people a minute. If they did it all in twenty-four hours. But I think they did it in several days, not twenty-four hours, and moved less than a hundred people a minute, so I figured out that they have a max capacity up there ... anyway! I explained all of this to the homeless guy, and he didn't say anything, but I got a phone call in the middle of the night.”

  I nod thoughtfully, uncertain of how to respond.

  Gregory says, “They have an efficient bureaucracy.” This redefines understatement for me.

  “I'm aware. I'll shortly be an assessor in the Consulate for Cultural Preservation of Conquered Nations.”

  Gregory frowns. “What does the Consulate for Cultural Preservation of Conquered Nations do?”

  “Loot and pillage,” I say, far more lightly than I should.

  * * * *

  On July seventh, a penumbral lunar eclipse will be visible in most of Australia and the Americas, and the aliens will take over two thousand acres of the Sahara Desert to build a space port.

  I will take the month of July to say farewell to my life on Earth.

  Jim and I meet one last time to divide up our things. When I refuse to take most of it, Jim snaps, “Stop being a martyr, El.”

  This accusation tips the scales of my good humor. I slam the toaster across the table, bouncing it like a basketball. It breaks into three pieces. “Do not accuse me of martyrdom, and don't call me ‘El.’ Only people who love me get to call me ‘El.'”

  Jim stares, shocked. We've never been violent, even towards inanimate objects. But he rallies, coming back with, “Oh, please. You don't want the crystal? You love the crystal. Get down off your cross and take the goddamned crystal!”

  “I loved the crystal because it was our crystal. And I don't love the crystal enough to store it for thirty years, which is the length of my contract with our alien overlords.”

  “Your what?”

  I consider explaining it all to him, but it ends up that I just smile like I was kidding. “You take the crystal. Maybe Shelby will love the crystal because she can pretend she stole it from me, too.” I know this to be untrue, but I owe Shelby nothing.

  I walk away from that scene with Jim and go to my mother's house. I spend a long, lustrous July at the lake. In the evenings, I sit on the porch, letting the cool air relieve my sunburn, watching the colors fade in streaks from the summer sky. I try not to believe it is for the last time.

  On July twenty-second, there will be a total solar eclipse, visible in the land of my ancestors. We won't be able to see it from the lake.

  * * * *

  On August fourteenth, Jupiter will be at opposition, and I will let aliens experiment on my body.

  Well, it won't be the aliens themselves, but their human techs. There'll be about a dozen others in my ward at the space port hospital, where we make jokes about how the aliens are rebuilding us to be better, stronger, faster. But we receive no bionic eyes or legs; we just get a biomechanical chip implanted in our torso to track us, a biomechanical port in our arms so we can interface efficiently with our new PDAs, and a whole lot of gene therapy to extend our lifespans. We all have thirty-year contracts, with a sixty-year guaranteed retirement. Since I'm already pushing forty, this is attractive.

  “Is this really going to work?” Tina, my roommate, asks Dr. Edgars while we're sitting side by side in the lab. “I'm going to live for another ninety years? Healthily?” Tina gives me a significant look, to see if I'm paying attention. We've talked about the health plan before bed every night since we got to the space port.

  “You won't die from old age and you won't die from genetic disease,” Dr. Edgars says. “Death in the line of duty ... hard to say. Resuscitation is mandatory while you're under contract, but you can opt out when you retire.”

  “Mandatory?”

  “Well, we have to try. I don't think even the aliens can bring back someone who's been blown to smithereens.”

  I ask, “How common is it for Syndicate archaeologists to get blown up in the line of duty, anyway?”

  “Don't know. I've only been at this for a few months.” Dr. Edgars smiles blandly. “But I haven't lost an archaeologist yet.”

  * * * *

  In September, Uranus will come to opposition on the seventeenth, and I will not yet have met an alien.

  Xeno-acclimation classes take up the better part of September. We see pictures, then films, then three-dimensional projections of the various aliens in the Starpath Syndicate: the bipedal Lurians, whose neural systems are most like ours, and the squidlike Txike, whose eyeballs and visual perceptions are nearly identical to our own. Similarities emphasized, di
fferences glossed over.

  There's a primer on the corporate structure of the universe. We learn how a species is beholden to the Syndicate for a period of service calculated using the race's base numerical system and their natural generational span, not to exceed a certain factorial of the number of digits on their dominant hand. Using the most important available example: humans will be kept in service for thirty-three hundred years, a period that represents a hundred generations (one hundred being significant in our base ten)—but our service could not exceed five thousand years in any case (digits on one hand: five). The system, as far as I'm able to deduce, is fairly arbitrary, but the point is clear: humanity's servitude will be lengthy. Such is the way of conquest and enslavement.

  After our service is complete, humanity will be eligible for premium membership in the Syndicate, at which time we'll also be free to establish our own syndicate if we can persuade at least two other species to join. Syndicates, of course, don't operate in a vacuum; each syndicate is a member of a consortium, and each consortium reports to some other ruling body—in short, Freemasons rule the universe, just as I always suspected.

  “Pyramid schemes,” Cora March says, shaking her head while we relax in the commissary after a primer session. “Somehow, I got recruited to sell Amway.”

  Cora, my boss, plays subconsul to my junior assessor in the Consulate for Cultural Preservation of Conquered Nations. I like her straight off, as I also like most of the assessors. We form a clique in the two months of training camp.

  “What is never said,” Julian, my fellow assessor, notes, “is how we should regard the Lurians.”

  “As brothers-in-arms,” Cora says. “They're client members, half-conquered like us. The only difference is that they've been assimilated for so many generations that they can be relied upon not to go xeno-batshit-crazy. Just like my grandchildren will be.”

  We fall silent for a moment, with the women exchanging significant glances. Childless Cora, in her mid-forties, is counting on alien biotech to allow her to bear children into her seventies—in thirty years, since the terms of our contracts specify no pregnancies.

  Somehow, her faith in the future—and in the aliens—makes our choices more real, more hopeful, more terrifying.

  * * * *

  In October, the full moon will occur on the fourth at 06:10 UT. I will only be able to imagine it, as I will have departed Earth.

  While boarding the Consulate shuttle for my new home beyond the sky, I think about Gregory Lin's speculations on beam-me-up-Scotty technology. There's no evidence for such a beam, unless the shuttle trip is just a ruse, a test of our xeno-acclimation: our pilots are Lurian.

  They await us at the shuttle doors, looking taller than their photographs and more alien than expected. Their Syndicate uniforms are strange to us, looking like towels swaddling their hips, and the female's breasts are bared. The people standing behind me in line are a study in human agitation displayed through body language: the Lurians are too different, too strange, too awful to contemplate, and at least one man bolts for the door. Somehow, that reassures me. “The aliens don't have a complete handle on our psyche then,” I say to Cora.

  She's not paying the least attention to the events behind us; her eyes are for the Lurians. “Are you seeing what I'm seeing?” she asks. “Chordates, interior spinal chords. Bipedal. Bilateral symmetry ... but more than that! Breasts. Nipples! Lactation?”

  I see then what she sees, and slowly become amazed too. “They could have evolved on Earth!”

  “I'm beginning to think there's something to the panspermia theory, after all.”

  The man ahead of me in line hyperventilates when he passes the Lurians, but I walk past with Cora behind me, head high and blood pressure low.

  Syndicate ships are named for prime numbers. I live aboard 3491 on a long corridor of junior assessors. Once we settle in, Cora has her assessors to her room for drinks.

  “How did you smuggle alcohol up here?” Julian asks.

  Cora shakes her head. “Not smuggled. The Syndicate tells me that it's my job to promote social bonding within my group. Which means they pay for the alcohol: drink up.”

  We discuss what we've seen of life on 3491 so far. Someone mentions how much they'll miss the sky. Buzzed and not a little homesick already, Cora eagerly shows us the skychamber, where much of our work in the Consulate will take place.

  The skychamber is an empty room spanning nearly the whole width of 3491. The transparent ceiling reveals a magnificent starscape, and we stand beneath it in entranced awe, staring up, grateful for the artificial gravity that makes this scene beautiful instead of nauseating.

  “This is the skychamber. This is where we'll display ... our collection.” Cora hesitates on the last words, and how can she not? What we will undertake in the name of the alien conquest is almost unbearable to talk about.

  To enliven the somber mood, Cora breaks out two gravfield manipulators. We practice with them by picking up our shoes, pulling each other's hair, and finally, tossing each other around in a bizarre game of keep-away, wherein the loser of the match becomes the ball—all without touching anything but the controls on our new tools.

  When the alcohol is finished and the buzz disappears, we wander morosely back to our rooms. Most of us pick someone to spend the night with; I chose Julian. Afterwards, we wonder aloud to each other: was this primal urge to mate some sort of xenophobic reaction?

  “This is why anthropologists shouldn't sleep together,” he says after this speculation. “We suck the romance out of any encounter by wondering what evolutionary drive brought us together at this moment in time.”

  I laugh. “This is why anthropologists should sleep together. We don't have to suppress our natural urges to wonder these things aloud.”

  But the laughter dies away, and we're just two humans together in the darkness: afraid of the aliens, yes, but also afraid of ourselves.

  * * * *

  In November, the moon will be new on the sixteenth, and we will make our first sacrifices.

  The Consulate for Cultural Preservation of Conquered Nations is the archaeology of consuls writ large. Cora explains and explains, but it falls to each of us to come to grips with the meaning for ourselves. It is not until we are deconstructing Rome itself that I really understand.

  While I stare at a three-dimensional rendering of the internal schematics of Constantine's Arch, measuring stresses on the marble as we take it apart, Cora comes to stand beside me.

  “The Great Trajanic Frieze,” she says in a tone of appropriate reverence. The Frieze moves slowly in midair, suspended by a grav-manipulator piloted by Julian.

  “Indeed.” I look up at the ancient depiction of a Roman triumph. “It doesn't take much effort these days to identify with the fallen barbarian.”

  “I try not to think that way,” Cora says. “I don't think that the Syndicate looks down on us as trampled barbarians ... but rather, they look upon themselves as Winged Victory.”

  “That would make the Lurians the trampling horsemen,” I say with distaste.

  “More the horses than the horsemen,” Cora returns mildly.

  It's fitting to loot Rome first. We are to strip the Earth of its state art, its monumental art—all its artifacts of power—and transport this bounty to the ruling planets of the Consortium, where it will be on display for the length of humanity's service to the Starpath Syndicate. Just like Rome, who led the conquered leaders and the captured wealth of nations through their streets to assert their dominion over the world, so the Syndicate asserts its dominion over our species.

  That night, the meaning of my collaboration becomes fully clear: we are stealing not only the monumental art of current states, but that of states past—the Lincoln Memorial and the Parthenon and the Great Stupa at Sanchi alike will be given to our conquerors, and I will be a key player in this rape of humanity's art. I wander 3491 for hours, shivering and praying for redemption.

  Eventually, I find myself in the
human commissary gorging on chocolate and cheese, wondering how to back out of an irreversible contract. Wondering how to avoid becoming a traitor to my own race.

  Cora's quiet voice intrudes into my frantic consumption. “I wondered when it would hit you.”

  I swallow a mouthful of Havarti. “I had told myself it would be okay. Because most tombs are disallowed. We wouldn't be grave robbers that way.”

  “Did you speak with someone from home?” she asks, drawing up a chair.

  “Hm? No. Why?”

  “Well, that's when I broke down. When my dissertation advisor wrote me a letter, and said, ‘The name of Cora March will go down as the worst sycophant of tyrants, the vilest traitor, the most heinous thief of human culture, the ultimate robber of graves.'”

  I stare at her.

  “And what my mother said was even worse,” she says, her hand hovering over a piece of my chocolate. “May I?”

  I nod. She peels the wrapper carefully, before saying, “In three thousand years, when these treasures are returned intact to the Earth, will our descendants revile my name and the names of my assessors? There are few enough monuments on Earth now that are three thousand years old.”

  “In three thousand years, I probably won't care.”

  “It is the way of humanity to conquer.” She contemplates another chocolate. “There are societies still extant on Earth that never practiced war, and now they scrape out livings on the edges of the habitable world. But for most of us, conquest has long been an ancestral goal. And now it's happened to us, to all of us, all at once. We feel like victims, but it is no more than what we should have expected.

  “And now, for a hundred generations, we have to live with conquest. We'll lose some art—the trappings of conquest, mainly—and we'll lose our right to fight with each other, and we'll lose our right to keep a billion people in poverty, while half a million live like gluttonous kings. And we'll lose our perceived right to a manifest destiny in the stars. But what will we gain?”

  “Isn't this the age-old argument in favor of colonialism? The apologists’ argument?”