Voyagers IV - The Return

by Ben Bova

  “How does that restore New Orleans?” Tavalera wondered.

  “It’ll attract tourists! It’ll show the survivors of the tragedy that God hasn’t forgotten them. It’ll bring money into the region!”

  And who gets the money? Tavalera asked silently. He knew better than to say it aloud.

  “We’re gonna have a big exhibit down there showin’ how man’s evil ways brought on the floods. God’s wrath, y’know. Rampant sex, crime in th’ streets, child abuse, and all that. The New Morality’s puttin’ up half the money for the dome.”

  “And the other half?”

  “Federal government. And the State of Louisiana.”

  “But there isn’t any State of Louisiana anymore,” Tavalera said. “It’s all underwater, isn’t it?”

  “Most of it,” Beauregard admitted cheerfully. “There’s a li’l bitty corner left. Enough to qualify for two seats in the U.S. Senate and one in the House of Representatives.”

  “And federal handouts.”

  “Don’t call ’em handouts, boy!” Beauregard waved a warning finger. “They’re entitlements.”

  “So you want me to work on this . . . project.”

  “That’s right. You been in space, you worked in spacesuits. I figgered workin’ underwater won’t be all that different. You’re used to it, ain’tcha?”

  Tavalera had to swallow hard. Underwater? For the first time since he’d been a child, he wanted to cry.

  Beauregard wasn’t one to waste time. He walked Tavalera down the corridor to a big room filled with mostly empty workstations and handed him over to a quartet of engineers huddled over a wide display table in one corner. They immediately began briefing him on details of the project.

  “You’re going to be our point man,” said one of them, a thin-faced, balding man with a big silver crucifix dangling around his neck. Tavalera thought it looked pretty heavy.

  “You’ll have a lot of responsibility,” said another, younger, his face round and pouchy eyed.

  It took some time before Tavalera tumbled to the fact that what they meant was that he was going down into the water to supervise the dome’s construction while they would be directing his work from the dry safety of a big dredging barge.

  He felt totally depressed by the time the day ended and he rode the nearly silent maglev commuter train back to the suburb where his mother’s house stood. I’ll have to get my own apartment downtown, Tavalera told himself. And some life insurance.

  He scrolled through the channels on the TV screen set into the train’s seat back. The newscasts showed mostly scenes of devastation: a firefight in some dust-blown village, cruise missiles being launched from a warship, twisted burnt bodies of people that the voice-over identified as terrorists. Some of them looked like children to Tavalera. The nets had no listing for the Northern Lights he’d seen the previous night. Guess they don’t think it’s news, Tavalera said to himself. But hell, seeing the Lights down here this far south is really something different. It oughtta be on the news someplace.

  Still, he could find no mention of it on any news show. Not even the science channel mentioned it. They were doing a docudrama about the search for Noah’s Ark.

  Switching to the entertainment channels, Tavalera flicked from one stupefyingly banal show to another. Family comedies, cartoons, historical dramas about saints and sinners, a horror vid about scientists using cloned slaves and nanomachines to destroy the world.

  Nothing about the Northern Lights.

  It was twilight by the time he got off the train and hailed an autocab to drive him home from the station. My credit account’s getting thin, he realized. I’ll have to go to work for them, get some money coming in.

  The cab’s automated guidance system left him precisely at the driveway of his mother’s modest vinyl-paneled Dutch Colonial–style house. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment as the taxi purred away into the lengthening shadows. The street was silent except for the dry rustling of the trees in the warm evening breeze. Not a soul in sight. No kids playing. Nobody walking a dog, even. The neighborhood looked sterile, as if none of the houses were occupied.

  A police car glided by, then stopped a few meters up the street. A black-uniformed police officer stepped out of the car and walked slowly toward Tavalera. Despite her white plastic helmet, he recognized that the officer was a woman, almost petite in stature. But she carried a pistol at her hip, its holster flap unbuttoned.

  “Sir, can I help you?” she asked. Her voice was slightly muffled by the clear plastic face screen of her helmet.

  “I just got home,” Tavalera said.

  The police officer glanced at the house. “You live here, sir?”

  “Yeah. Tem—”

  “We have no record of a person fitting your description in residence at this address, sir.”

  “I just came back a couple of days ago.”

  “That would be entered into our files, sir.”

  “I’m not a permanent resident. I’m visiting.”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Raoul Tavalera.”

  The police officer pulled a slim palmcomp from her shirt pocket.

  “Spell it, please.”

  Tavalera spelled both his names. “This is my mother’s house. I’m visiting her. I’ve been—”

  “Raoul Tavalera,” the officer said. “Yes, you’re a registered visitor.” She looked up at him. “You should be indoors at this time, Mr. Tavalera. There’s an emergency alert in effect.”

  “An emergency? What?”

  She almost smiled at him. “They didn’t give us any details. The orders are to keep everybody indoors from six P.M. until dawn tomorrow.”

  “But why?”

  “Just go into your house like a good citizen, Mr. Tavalera. Don’t make trouble for either one of us.”

  Tavalera stood there for an uncertain moment. The officer’s hand slid to the butt of her gun. He’d heard that they used nonlethal tranquilizer darts instead of bullets, but Tavalera decided he didn’t want to test the officer’s patience any further.

  “Okay,” he said, feeling defeated. “I’m going in.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tavalera. Thanks for being a cooperative citizen. Have a pleasant evening.”

  As he started up the walk to the house’s front door, Tavalera glanced back over his shoulder. The policewoman hadn’t moved. She was entering something into her palmcomp, he realized.

  Then he looked up and saw that the darkening sky was gleaming with the Northern Lights again: long shimmering ribbons of ethereal color, dancing silently across the bowl of the heavens.

  Two nights in a row.

  The police officer took no notice of the Lights. She watched Tavalera until he opened his front door and stepped into the house.

  STARSHIP

  It wasn’t a spacecraft in the sense that any engineer of Earth would recognize. Part organic, part pure energy, the starship had entered the solar system more than twenty years earlier, carrying Keith Stoner, his wife, Jo, and their two grown children. Humans, born of Earth, but more than human now.

  “They’ve got to reply,” Stoner told his wife. “They’ve got to answer me.”

  Jo gazed at the blue sphere of Earth, flecked with clouds of purist white, and pictured in her mind an ant heap teeming with scurrying mindless fools.

  If any of them realize we’ve returned, she thought, they’re doing their best to ignore our presence among them.

  Jo understood the frustration that her husband felt. His son and daughter, though, wondered why their father was bothering with these primitives.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tavalera opened the front door of his house and stepped inside. He closed the door and peered through its window until the police officer returned to her car and drove away. Then he went back toward the kitchen, where he knew his mother would be.

  She was a sweet-faced woman, round and snowy white. She seemed almost totally unchanged in the years he’d been away, except for dyeing her hai
r. That bothered Tavalera, but he didn’t know why. Now that he looked at her more closely, he saw lines in her face that he didn’t remember from earlier. And her eyes looked . . . guarded. He didn’t see the warmth he remembered from childhood.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, watching the news on the wall screen over the microwave oven. Something about a celebration in some big church. Up in the corner above the screen was that damned red eye of the security camera, watching him.

  A row of medication bottles was lined up in perfect order to one side of the microwave, each blue- and red-lettered label facing outward. That was different, Tavalera realized. Ma didn’t take any pills when I left for my public service duty. Aspirin, maybe, now and then.

  At the end of the row of pill bottles was a tiny gray electronics box, with what looked like a pair of headphones connected to it by a hair-thin fiber-optic wire.

  Tavalera went to the headphones and picked them up. “What’s this, Ma? You into music now?”

  “Put them down!” she said sharply, jumping up from her chair. She looked almost frightened.

  Holding them in his hand, he asked, “What are these, anyway?”

  “They’re not for you. Put them down. You might damage them.”

  “Damage them? What’re you talking about?”

  Impatiently his mother snatched the headphones from his hand and placed them back on the shelf alongside the row of pill bottles.

  “They’re for treating my depression,” she said almost sullenly.

  “Depression?”

  “It’s just a mild case. I use the headphones to make me feel better.”

  Tavalera stared at her. “A doctor prescribed this?”

  “Of course. Lots of people use them. Brain stimulators, they’re called.”

  “You’ve been diagnosed with depression?”

  She cast an annoyed look at him, then changed the subject as she sat down again. “How did your job interview go?”

  “Not good,” he said, pulling up the chair next to hers. “They want me to work down in Louisiana.”

  “Louisiana?” She frowned, puzzled. “But it’s all underwater.”

  He decided not to tell her everything; it would only worry her. Depression, he kept thinking. Ma’s taking electrical stimulation for depression.

  “Isn’t Louisiana underwater?” she repeated.

  He nodded. “I’m going to appeal the assignment. First thing tomorrow.”

  She looked uneasy. “Don’t make trouble, Son. It’s best to do what they tell you, like a good boy.”

  “I’ve got a right to appeal a work assignment, Ma. That’s not making trouble for anybody.”

  “They’ll mark it against you; don’t think they won’t. It’s best just to accept what they give you. After all, they wouldn’t give you the assignment if they didn’t need you there.”

  Tavalera didn’t want to get into an argument with his mother. Instead, he asked, “You seen anything on the news about the aurora?”

  “The what?”

  “The Northern Lights. They’re shining in the sky again tonight. Right now.” He pointed toward the curtained kitchen window.

  “There’s nothing in the news about it. Are you sure—”

  He got up and went to the kitchen door. “Come on; I’ll show you.”

  “Don’t go outside! There’s some sort of emergency and they don’t want us to go outside.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “The police. The announcement came over the TV about an hour ago. Nobody’s to go outside until dawn tomorrow.”

  She didn’t seem afraid. Just compliant.

  “Why not? What’s the emergency?”

  “Probably some terrorist threat,” his mother said. “They’re always making threats, but we always catch them.”

  “Ma, there hasn’t been a terrorist attack since the Day of the Bridges, back before I was born.”

  She gave him a superior expression. “You see? The Homeland Security people know what they’re doing. And if they want us to stay indoors, that’s what we’ve got to do.”

  Tavalera forced down a feeling of impatient frustration. “Well, okay, just take a look through the window, then. I think you can see—”

  “Raoul, get away from the window!” She said it in the tone of voice he remembered from childhood.

  “We can look out our own goddamned windows, for god’s sake!”

  “Don’t use that kind of language in this house! I didn’t bring you up to be a foulmouthed blasphemer.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. Blasphemer? he asked silently. What’s gotten into you, Ma? Since when did you become a religious nut?

  She softened. “If they want us to stay indoors it’s for our own good. They know what they’re doing. Just do what you’re told and don’t make trouble for yourself.”

  He sat down beside her again. “Ma, they’re the ones making trouble. They want me to work in New Orleans, for Chri . . . for crying out loud.”

  “New Orleans?”

  “Underwater. I’ll be working underwater.”

  “You’ll be safe, won’t you?”

  “Sure. I guess so.”

  “I mean, you worked in space and that was safe enough, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure, Ma, sure.” Except for the time I damned near got killed, he added silently.

  They sat side by side for several moments, neither speaking but both of their minds churning.

  “You want to go back there, don’t you?” His mother’s voice turned dark, not quite angry, not quite hurt, but a combination of both, plus more.

  He didn’t answer for some while. At last he admitted, “Yeah, I do.”

  “Why’d you come home?” Now her tone was cold with accusation.

  Tavalera was shocked at her question. He blurted, “For you, Ma. I wanted to come back home. After six years, I wanted to see my old friends, see you and Andy and everybody.”

  “But now you want to go back there and live in outer space.”

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He couldn’t tell his mother that coming back home had been a mistake. This wasn’t his home anymore. Not now. His true home was a billion kilometers away, circling the ringed planet, Saturn.

  “You want to leave me,” his mother said, her voice low, bitter.

  “I could send for you once I got back to the habitat. You’d like it there, Ma. It’s big, lots of room, lots of freedom. . . .”

  “And leave all my friends, all the people I’ve lived with all my life?”

  “Most of ’em are dead, Ma.”

  “Like your father.”

  Oh Christ, he thought, she’s going to throw that at me again.

  “You were off in space when your father died. You should have been here. This is where I needed you.”

  “Ma, I couldn’t leave. They wouldn’t let me. They didn’t even tell me that Pop had died until weeks afterward!”

  “I had to deal with it all alone,” his mother continued, tears filling her eyes. “You should have been here. No wonder I came down with depression. No wonder I need the brain stimulator.”

  And it went on that way for several hours more, while the Northern Lights weaved and glimmered in the darkening sky.

  Tavalera bore his mother’s tears and recriminations without reply, without argument. She’s right, in her own way, he thought. I should have been here to help her when she needed me. But the bastards never even told me about Pop until it was all over, and even then they wouldn’t let me go back home.

  He felt anger simmering inside him. Anger at them, the nameless, faceless people who had been running his life since he’d graduated from school. They sent him all the way to Jupiter. They damned near got him killed out there. Now they were going to dunk him into the goddamned Gulf of Mexico and make a construction jock out of him.

  His mother finally ran out of tears and indignation. He went with her upstairs, saw her to her bedroom, and then stepped across the hallway to the room that had bee
n his for as long as he could remember.

  He closed the door and went to the window. Outside, the Northern Lights still flickered and shimmered in the dark night sky. What’s making them do that? Tavalera wondered.

  Then the thought suddenly struck him: Is this why they want us indoors all night? They don’t want us to see the Lights?

  CHAPTER 5

  The Appeals Board was in the same building as the Office of Employment Allocation, which made some sense to Tavalera, since the Board was there to straighten out problems that arose in the OEA’s assignments. So instead of reporting for work the next morning, Tavalera informed Beauregard’s cheerful redheaded assistant that he was putting in an appeal, then spent the morning working his way through the layers of bureaucracy that made up the Appeals Board, trying to get them to cancel his assignment to the New Orleans Restoration Project.

  No dice.

  “You should fall on your knees and thank the good Lord that you’re being allowed to contribute to this blessed program!” That was the kindest response he got.

  “The army needs men with your technical training,” said one, a flinty-eyed old graybeard. “When I was your age I did three tours in the Sudan, kid.”

  Everyone else gave him a variation of, “That’s your assignment and you’re stuck with it. Be grateful we don’t send you to some inner-city slum or a swamp-clearing project in Haiti.”

  One self-important desk jockey gave Tavalera a crafty look as he warned, “Troublemakers get troubles, young man.”

  Feeling frustrated and getting truculent, Tavalera grumbled, “I can handle troubles.”

  “Can you? I see from your file that your mother is on medical assistance. How would you like to see her prescriptions for medications canceled? Her stimulator taken away from her?”

  “You can’t do that!”

  With a shrug and a reptilian smile, the bureaucrat replied, “Of course I can’t. That would be illegal. And immoral. But . . .”

  “But what?”