Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  The digital readout indicated one-way delay time of 1.496 seconds. She would soon be closer to the Earth than the Moon was.

  “I was saying,” Kollert repeated, something like triumph in his tone, “that you are a very young woman, with very young ideas—like a child leveling a loaded pistol at her parents. You may or may not be a fanatic. But you aren’t seeing things clearly. We have no evidence here on Earth regarding your accusations, and we won’t have evidence—nothing will be solved—if the asteroid collides with us. That’s obvious. But if it veers aside, goes into a wide Earth orbit, then—”

  “That’s not one of my options,” Turco said.

  “—an investigating team could reexamine the crew quarters,” Kollert continued, not to be interrupted for a few seconds. “They could perform a more detailed search. Your accusations might be verified.”

  “I can’t go into Earth orbit without turning around, and this is a one-way rock, Ser Kollert. Remember that. My only other option is to swing around the Earth, be deflected a couple of degrees, and go into a solar orbit. By the time any investigating team reached me, I’d be on the other side of the sun, and dead. I’m the daughter of a Geshel, Ser Kollert. I have a good technical education, and my training under Hexamon auspices makes me a competent pilot and spacefarer. Too bad there’s so little long-range work for my type, just Earth-Moon runs. But don’t try to fool me or kid me. I’m far more expert than you are. Though I’m sure you have Geshel people on your staff.” She paused. “Geshels! I can’t call you traitors—you in the background—because you might be thinking I’m crazy, out to destroy all of you. But do you understand what these men have done to our hopes and dreams? I’ve never seen a finished asteroid starship, of course—Psyche was to have been the first. But I’ve seen good simulations. It would have been like seven Shangri-las inside, hollowed out of solid rock and metal—seven chambers separated by walls four kilometers high, each self-contained, connected with the others by tube trains. The chambers would be like deep valleys, their floors stretching up to the sky, everything wonderfully topsy-turvy. And quiet—so much insulation none of the engine sounds would be heard inside.”

  She was crying again.

  “Psyche would consume herself on the way to the stars. By the time she arrived, there’d remain a cylinder thirty kilometers wide and two hundred ninety long. Like the core of an apple, and the passengers would be luxurious worms—star travelers. Now ask why, why did these men sabotage such a marvelous thing? Because they are blind, blind unto pure evil—ugly-minded, weak men who hate greatness and exploration, who hate all great ideas …” She paused. “I don’t know what you think of me and what I’ve done, but remember, they stole something magnificent from us all. I know. I’ve seen the evidence here. Sabotage and murder.” She pressed the button and waited wearily for a reply.

  “Ser Turco,” Kollert said, “you have ten hours to make an effective course correction. We estimate you have enough reaction mass left to extend your orbit and miss the Earth by about four thousand kilometers. There is nothing we can do here but try to convince you—”

  She stopped listening, trying to figure out what was happening behind the scenes. Earth wouldn’t take such a threat without exploring a large number of alternatives. Kollert’s voice droned on as she tried to think of the most likely action, and the most effective.

  She picked up her helmet and sent a short message, paying no attention to the transmission from Earth. “I’m going outside for a few minutes.”

  The large cargo transport was fully loaded with extra fuel—and a substantial bulk William Porter was reluctant to contemplate.

  His acceleration had been steady for two hours, but now the weightlessness was just as oppressive. With the ship reversed for course correction, he could see a hair-thin silvery crescent—the Moon, its inner shadow relieved by light from Earth.

  He had about half an hour to relax before the real work began, and he was using it to read an excerpt from a novel by Anthony Burgess. He’d been a heavy reader all his memorable life, and now he allowed himself a possible last taste of pleasure.

  Like most inhabitants of the Moon, Porter was a Geshel, with a physicist father and a geneticist mother. He’d chosen a career as a pilot rather than a researcher out of romantic predilections established long before he was ten years old. There was something immediately effective and satisfying about piloting, and he’d turned out to be well suited to the work. He’d never expected to take on a mission like this. But then, he’d never paid much attention to politics, either. Even if he had, the last remaining disputes between Geshels and Naderites had been settled, most experts claimed, fifty years before, when Naderites emerged as Earth’s ruling class. Few Geshels still bothered to complain. Responsibility had been lifted from their shoulders.

  Most of the populations of both Earth and Moon were now involved in technical and scientific work, yet the mistakes they made would be blamed on Naderite policies—and the disasters would likewise be absorbed by the leadership. It wasn’t a hard situation to get used to.

  William Porter wasn’t so sure, now, that it was the ideal. He had two options to save Earth, and one of them meant he would die.

  He’d listened to the Psyche-Earth transmissions during acceleration, trying to make sense out of Turco’s position, to form an opinion of her character and sanity, but he was more confused than ever. If she was right—and not a raving lunatic, which didn’t seem to fit the facts—then the Hexamon Nexus had a lot of explaining to do and probably wouldn’t do it under the gun. The size of Turco’s gun was far too imposing to be rational—the destruction of the human race, the wiping of a planet’s surface.

  He played back the computer diagram of what would happen if Psyche hit the Earth. At the angle it would strike, it would speed the rotation of the Earth’s crust and mantle by an appreciable fraction. The asteroid would cut a gouge from Maine to England, several thousand kilometers long and at least a hundred kilometers deep. The impact would vault hundreds of millions of tons of surface material into space, and that would partially counteract the speedup of rotation. The effect would be a monumental jerk, with the energy finally being released as heat. The continents would fracture in several directions, forming new faults, even new plate orientations, which would generate earthquakes on a scale never before seen. The impact basin would be a hell of molten crust and mantle, with water on the perimeter bursting violently into steam, altering weather patterns around the world. Decades would pass before the Earth would cool and again return to a restless sort of stability.

  Turco may not have been raving, but she was coldly suggesting a cataclysm to swat what amounted to a historical fly. That made her a lunatic in anyone’s book, Geshel or Naderite. And his life was well worth the effort to thwart her.

  That didn’t stop him from being angry, though.

  Kollert impatiently let the physician check him over and administer a few injections. He talked to his wife briefly, which left him more nervous than before, then listened to the team leader’s theories on how Turco’s behavior would change in the next few hours. He nodded at only one statement: “She’s going to see she’ll be dead, too, and that’s a major shock for even the most die-hard terrorist.”

  Then Turco was back on the air, and he was on stage again.

  “I’ve seen your ship,” she said. “I went outside and looked in the direction where I thought it would be. There it was—treachery all around. Goddamned hypocrites! Talk friendly to the little girl, but shiv her in the back! Public face cool, private face snarl! Well, just remember, before that ship can kill me, I can destroy the controls to the positioning engines. It would take a week to replace them. You don’t have the time!”

  The beep followed.

  “Giani, we have only one option left, and that’s to do as you say. We’ll admit we played a part in the sabotage of Psyche. It’s confession under pressure, but we’ll do it.” Kollert pressed his button and waited, holding his chin with one hand.r />
  “No way it’s so simple, Kollert. No public admission and then public denial after the danger is over—you’d all come across as heroes. No. There has to be some record-keeping, payrolls if nothing else. I want full disclosure of all records, and I want them transmitted around the world—facsimile, authenticated. I want uninvolved government officials to see them and sign off that they’ve seen them. And I want the actual documents put on display where anyone can look at them—memos, plans, letters, whatever. All of it that’s still available.”

  “That would take weeks,” Kollert said, “even if they existed.”

  “Not in this age of electronic wizardry. I want you to take a lie detector test, authenticated by half a dozen experts with their careers on the line—and while you’re at it, have the other officials take tests, too.”

  “That’s not only impractical, it won’t hold up in a court of law.”

  “I’m not interested in formal courts. I’m not a vengeful person, no matter what I may seem now. I just want the truth. And if I still see that goddamn ship up there in an hour, I’m going to stop negotiations right now and blow myself to pieces.”

  Kollert looked at the team leader, but the man’s face was blank.

  “Let me talk to her, then,” Porter suggested. “Direct person-to-person. Let me explain the plans. She really can’t change them any, can she? She has no way of making them worse. If she fires her engines or does any positive action, she simply stops the threat. So I’m the one who holds the key to the situation.”

  “We’re not sure that’s advisable, Bill,” Lunar Guidance said.

  “I can transmit to her without permission, you know,” he said testily.

  “Against direct orders, that’s not like you.”

  “Like me, hell,” he said. “Listen, just get me permission. Nobody else seems to be doing anything effective.” There was a few minutes’ silence, then Lunar Guidance returned.

  “Okay, Bill. You have permission. But be very careful what you say. Terrorist team officers on Earth think she’s close to the pit.”

  With that obstacle cleared away, he wondered how wise the idea was in the first place. Still, they were both Geshels—they had something in common compared to the elite Naderites running things on Earth.

  Far away, Earth concurred and transmissions were cleared. They couldn’t censor his direct signal, so Baja Station was unwillingly cut from the circuit.

  “Who’s talking to me now?” Turco asked when the link was made.

  “This is Lieutenant William Porter, from the Moon. I’m a pilot—not a defense pilot usually, either. I understand you’ve had pilot’s training.”

  “Just enough to get by.” The lag was less than a hundredth of a second, not noticeable.

  “You know I’m up here to stop you, one way or another. I’ve got two options. The one I think more highly of is to get in line-of-sight of your bore holes and relay the proper coded signals to the charges in your interior.”

  “Killing me won’t do you any good.”

  “That’s not the plan. The fore end of your rock is bored with a smaller hole by thirty meters. It’ll release the blast wastes more slowly than the aft end. The total explosive force should give the rock enough added velocity to get it clear of the Earth by at least sixty kilometers. The damage would be negligible. Spectacular view from Greenland, too, I understand. But if we’ve miscalculated, or if one or more charges doesn’t go, then I’ll have to impact with your aft crater and release the charge in my cargo hold. I’m one floating megaboom now, enough to boost the rock up and out by a few additional kilometers. But that means I’ll be dead, and not enough left of me to memorialize or pin a medal on. Not too good, hm?”

  “None of my sweat.”

  “No, I suppose not. But listen, sister—”

  “No sister to a lackey.”

  Porter started to snap a retort, but stopped himself. “Listen, they tell me to be soft on you, but I’m under pressure, too, so please reciprocate. I don’t see the sense in all of it. If you get your way, you’ve set back your cause by God knows how many decades—because once you’re out of range and blown your trump, they’ll deny it all, say it was manufactured evidence and testimony under pressure—all that sort of thing. And if they decide to hard-line it, force me to do my dirty work, or God forbid let you do yours—we’ve lost our homeworld. You’ve lost Psyche, which can still be salvaged and finished. Everything will be lost, just because a few men may or may not have done a very wicked thing. Come on, honey. That isn’t the Geshel creed, and you know it.”

  “What is our creed? To let men rule our lives who aren’t competent to read a thermometer? Under the Naderites, most of the leaders on Earth haven’t got the technical expertise to … to … I don’t know what. To tie their goddamn shoes! They’re blind, dedicated to some half-wit belief that progress is the most dangerous thing conceived by man. But they can’t live without technology so we provide it for them. And when they won’t touch our filthy nuclear energy, we get stuck with it—because otherwise we all have to go back four hundred years, and sacrifice half the population. Is that good planning, sound policy? And if they do what I say, Psyche won’t be damaged. All they’ll have to do is fetch it back from orbit around the sun.”

  “I’m not going to argue on their behalf, sister. I’m a Geshel, too, and a Moonman besides. I never have paid attention to Earth politics because it never made much sense to me. But now I’m talking to you one-to-one, and you’re telling me that avenging someone’s irrational system is worth wiping away a planet?”

  “I’m willing to take that risk.”

  “I don’t think you are. I hope you aren’t. I hope it’s all bluff, and I won’t have to smear myself against your backside.”

  “I hope you won’t, either. I hope they’ve got enough sense down there to do what I want.”

  “I don’t think they have, sister. I don’t put much faith in them, myself. They probably don’t even know what would happen if you hit the Earth with your rock. Think about that. You’re talking about scientific innocents—flat-Earthers almost, naive. Words fail me. But think on it. They may not even know what’s going on.”

  “They know. And remind them that if they set off the charges, it’ll probably break up Psyche and give them a thousand rocks to contend with instead of one. That plan may backfire on them.”

  “What if they—we—don’t have any choice?”

  “I don’t give a damn what choice you have,” Turco said. “I’m not talking for a while. I’ve got more work to do.”

  Porter listened to the final click with a sinking feeling. She was a tough one. How would he outwit her? He smiled grimly at his chutzpah for even thinking he could. She’d committed herself all the way—and now, perhaps, she was feeling the power of her position. One lonely woman, holding the key to a world’s existence. He wondered how it felt.

  Then he shivered, and the sweat in his suit felt very, very cold. If he would have a grave for someone to walk over …

  For the first time, Turco realized they wouldn’t accede to her demands. They were more traitorous than even she could have imagined. Or—the thought was too horrible to accept—she’d misinterpreted the evidence, and they weren’t at fault. Perhaps a madman in the Psyche crew had sought revenge and caused the whole mess. But that didn’t fit the facts. It would have taken at least a dozen people to set all the psychotropic vials and release them at once—a concerted preplanned effort. She shook her head. Besides, she had the confidential reports a friend had accidentally plugged into while troubleshooting a Hexamon computer plex. There was no doubt about who was responsible, just uncertainty about the exact procedure. Her evidence for Farmer Kollert’s guilt was circumstantial but not baseless.

  She sealed her suit and helmet and went outside the bubble again, just to watch the stars for a few minutes. The lead-gray rock under her feet was pocked by eons of micrometeoroids. Rills several kilometers across attested to the rolling impacts of other as
teroids, any one of which would have caused a major disaster on Earth. Earth had been hit before, not often by pieces as big as Psyche, but several times at least, and had survived. Earth would survive Psyche’s impact, and life would start anew. Those plants and animals—even humans—that survived would eventually build back to the present level, and perhaps it would be a better world, more daunted by the power of past evil. She might be a force for positive regeneration.

  The string of bubbles across Psyche’s surface was serenely lovely in the starlight. The illumination brightened slowly as Earth rose above the Vlasseg pole, larger now than the Moon. She had a few more hours to make the optimum correction. Just above the Earth was a tiny moving point of light—Porter in his cargo vessel. He was lining up with the smaller bore hole to send signals, if he had to.

  Again she wanted to cry. She felt like a little child, full of hatred and frustration, but caught now in something so immense and inexorable that all passion was dwarfed. She couldn’t believe she was the controlling factor, that she held so much power. Surely something was behind her, some impersonal, objective force. Alone, she was nothing, and her crime would be unbelievable—just as Porter had said. But with a cosmic justification, the agreeing nod of some vast, all-seeing God, she was just a tool, bereft of responsibility.

  She grasped the guide wires strung between the bubbles and pulled herself back to the airlock hatch. With one gloved hand she pressed the button. Under her palm she felt the metal vibrate for a second, then stop. The hatch was still closed. She pressed again and nothing happened.

  Porter listened carefully for a full minute, trying to pick up the weak signal. It had cut off abruptly a few minutes before, during his final lineup with the Vlasseg pole bore hole. He called his director and asked if any signals had been received from Turco. Since he was out of line-of-sight now, the Moon had to act as a relay.

  “Nothing,” Lunar Guidance said. “She’s been silent for an hour.”