As her vision cleared, Katerina struggled to retrieve her last memory. She'd been waiting for the right time to use the full power the aliens had forced on her, and when it came she—
The young cosmonaut rose awkwardly to her feet. A crumpled figure dressed in red, white, and black lay motionless on its back several meters away. Her heart raced as she stumbled toward the spot where Martin's body sprawled in the orange dirt. His glassy gaze seemed to be looking up at circling Martian buzzards beginning their descent.
"Martin! Are you all right?"
There was no reply as she knelt by his left side. The wide-eyed stare and open mouth he directed at the heavens terrified her. Martin looked as if the last thing he'd seen was Satan's laughing face coming toward him. Katerina did a jaw thrust to open his airway. Her right ear hovered above his lips as she peered down at his chest—hoping to feel his warm breath against her skin. As she waited to see if his life and hers had ended, Katerina prayed for a miracle.
A wisp of air like the fluttering wings of the Holy Spirit caressed her ear. She saw the blood-red shirt Martin wore rise and fall slightly with his shallow breaths. Her fingertips moved to his neck and she gasped with gratitude for the strong pulse there. Katerina reached out to gently touch his mind—
And felt nothing. She sobbed as her miracle was snatched away. Martin's body was still alive—but it was like a dried cocoon left empty by a long-departed butterfly. Katerina stroked the pale forehead of the man she loved—as if her fingers could meld into his flesh and give him the handhold he needed to pull himself up from the abyss he'd stumbled into. Her mind delved deeper into the void within his brain—searching in the darkness for any hint of consciousness that would tell her he wasn't forever lost.
Her thoughts plunged deeper into him. Don't leave me, Martin! Come back to me!
Then Katerina sensed the whisper of another awareness at the boundary of her enhanced senses. Follow me, Martin! Let me help you!
From out of the depths his mind touched hers. Together they rose back into the light—
Martin groaned. He looked up at Katerina's tear-streaked face, touched her lips—and then bewilderment twisted his face. “What happened?"
"I don't know, Martin. It was like something grabbed and squeezed my mind so hard the pain made me black out. I just woke up a few minutes ago."
"The last thing I remember was...” Martin's gaze turned distant and vacant. As he absorbed sights and sounds on distant Earth his face contorted with horror.
He staggered to his feet. “It was like I was asleep all that time having a terrible dream. But my mind must have still been linked to everyone on Earth—and it's all real! Everything I saw in my nightmare—the nuclear war, the suicides and murders, Dr. Stone and everybody at Mission Control going crazy—it really happened!"
Katerina stood up and tried to kiss his lips. Martin ignored her, walking away and shouting, “Why did it happen? What went wrong?"
Katerina reached out to blend with his mind again. The ghastly visions she saw in it sickened her. Either Martin had gone mad—or the world had.
Then he was walking back toward her—his enraged face almost as ruddy as the soil they stood on. “What did you do, Katerina? I remember now I asked you to help me! What did you do?"
"I helped you, Martin. I used my own power to nullify yours."
He stopped ten meters away and stared at her. She wondered if the Savior had looked the same way at Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Martin clenched his fists. “Why did you do that?"
"I couldn't let you enslave everyone on Earth—and I had to prevent them from hurting you! I didn't know there'd be some kind of mental backlash that would make us both lose consciousness when I did it!"
"No, Katerina, you must've done more than that! Just stopping what I was doing wouldn't have caused all that death and destruction! I begged you for help—and you betrayed me! Were you so jealous I was proving you wrong—that despite what you said, my power really was helping people—that you made me fail?"
"No, Martin! I'd never intentionally hurt you or anyone else! I don't know what caused everyone on Earth to go insane! Maybe if we work together we can stop the killing and heal those who are still alive! Look into my mind and see I'm telling the truth!"
Martin's voice held only hatred and contempt. “No, Katerina, you have the same power as I do. You can make the thoughts you let me hear lie to me. I need to know what you did so I can prevent you from doing it again and killing more people! And the only way I can be sure you're really telling me the truth is if I force it out of you!"
Martin strode toward her like an executioner. His mind whipped out and squeezed hers in a mailed fist. Katerina screamed with skull-splitting agony at his brutal psychic assault. She reflexively raised her mental barriers again—barely able to defend herself from Martin's relentless telepathic attempt to rip through her brain searching for an admission of guilt that didn't exist.
Last night she'd faced death and expired with quiet dignity, with only fleeting doubts and fears clouding final resignation to her fate. Today she saw Death walking toward her wearing the face of the man she loved—and this time she was very afraid.
* * * *
On Earth, Nature responded to the rage in Martin's mind and joined humanity in going mad.
Calm winds suddenly whipped up into hurricanes and tornadoes. In the Missouri Ozarks a three-year-old girl whimpered in her bed. In the next room her reunited parents screamed at and attacked each other—obsessed with revenge for every disagreement in their marriage.
Then a revived tornado slammed into their house and passed on, searching for more victims. In its wake the tornado left a crumpled pile of wood and metal with nothing alive inside.
In a city on the West Coast a mother and her newly healed young son vacantly hugged each other and wept over all the pain and loss they'd endured. The hospital they sat in trembled as tectonic plates kilometers away shifted. As the earthquake rocketed up the Richter scale their building and hundreds of others crumbled, leaving mangled bodies inside the wreckage.
In southern Africa the gentle raindrops nourishing accelerated crops suddenly grew and froze into deadly baseball-sized hail. Rampaging flash floods washed away plants, animals, and whole villages. Elsewhere ocean waves churned to skyscraper heights, capsizing ships and ferries. Tsunamis struck costal regions, leveling towns and cities. Lightning flashed and struck, turning acres of forests and jungles into infernos. Every minute air, water, fire, and earth slaughtered thousands more people.
* * * *
On Mars, Nature also joined Martin's side in a deadly personal battle. The peaceful garden beside its two combatants tore itself apart. Green bean bushes, cornstalks, and wheat uprooted themselves and rocketed toward Katerina's face like shrapnel. They were too light to hurt her directly—but the distraction of deflecting them with arms and mind weakened her defenses against Martin's continuous telepathic attack.
She stumbled backward—battered by mental blasts like a tornado's winds. All around her, Martian dirt swirled up and enveloped Katerina in a miniature dust storm. A barrage of pebbles stung her face like a swarm of hornets. She winced as small rocks flew up and pummeled her blue jumpsuit.
Coughing and choking from the dust infiltrating her nose and throat, with a desperate burst of telekinetic power Katerina repelled the soil and winds around her. For seconds she stood in the clear eye of a hurricane. As the frustrated Martian dirt and air raged furiously in an opaque fog a meter away from her, their attack barely held back by the force of her mind, she concentrated the remainder of her mental energy on repelling Martin's unceasing attempts to seize and viciously probe her brain.
Suddenly Katerina saw a pair of bare hairy arms reach out toward her from that dense reddish-orange cloud. She didn't notice the maniacally swirling dust nearby collapse back onto the ground as Martin grabbed hold of her shoulders. Katerina cringed at the savage face staring back at her from centimeters away. Her
mind reverberated with deafening words.
"It's your fault everything went wrong, Katerina! What did you do? Confess! Tell me what you did to sabotage me!"
Katerina jerked back from Martin's brutal grip and struggled to break free. He shook her until she tripped over her feet and tumbled backward. She gasped as her back struck the hard Martian soil and Martin fell down on top of her. He pinned her arms against the dirt before she could try pushing him away. Katerina writhed helplessly beneath his heavy body as he tore away the last thin layers of fading will-power she had protecting her from his assault.
With his attack on the verge of consummation there was only one way to stop him and heal the sickness inside his mind. There wasn't enough time to convince him of her innocence or even to pray. Through the maelstrom of fury assaulting her consciousness she hoped he'd hear her last words to him and understand.
"I love you, Martin. Good-bye."
* * * *
Martin grunted triumphantly when he felt the fallen woman crushed beneath him go physically and mentally limp. All resistance to him collapsed and he began to penetrate her innermost depths—
Suddenly he stopped and raised himself to a kneeling position. His mind delved deeper into a blackening void whose final glimmer of light faded and disappeared.
Katerina lay motionless on her back with her eyes closed—as if she were sleeping. Her face was powdered with dust except for scattered lines like a spider's web on her cheeks, where tears had cleaned away the filth he'd flung at her. The blue jumpsuit she wore was ripped where he'd manhandled her, exposing the pale imprints of his fingers on her bare flesh. Her auburn hair was matted and tangled beneath her lolling neck.
"Katerina! Are you all right? I didn't mean to hurt you!"
There was no response. His heart raced as he moved rapidly to her left side and reflexively began the CPR protocol he'd used on her only yesterday. Yes, she was still breathing and the carotid pulse he checked was strong. Her body was still warm and alive.
But her mind was gone—wiped clean as her last act in life. Martin wailed in grief as his consciousness found nothing within her brain but the lowest autonomic activity. Her personality and intelligence, her ability to think and love had vanished—and not even the great power the aliens had given him could bring those things, could bring her back to him. She'd prevented him from becoming her murderer or worse ... by destroying herself first.
Shocked back into a semblance of sanity by her self-sacrifice, Martin bent down over the empty body of the woman he loved and kissed her forehead. His heartbroken sobs slowly subsided. He wanted to die now, he deserved to die—but not yet.
No, first he had to help whoever was still alive on Earth. There might be enough survivors even after this day of Armageddon to eventually rebuild civilization.
Kneeling beside Katerina, Martin raised his lost bride-to-be's upper body enough to embrace her. Then his mind reached out toward a wounded world. He saw the raging winds and other destructive forces of Nature stirred up by his anger and calmed them. Next he directed his power to manipulate matter, energy, and gravity at the radioactive ruins and clouds of dust, soot, and smoke that covered huge swaths of post-World War III Earth. Those death-dealing isotopes and molecules were gripped and flung out into space on high-speed trajectories toward final resting places in the Sun.
Then Martin turned his attention to the physical injuries inflicted by war and smaller-scale violence. Across the world, burns, broken bones, and radiation-induced damage to vital organs were all healed.
Finally a command inspired by a favorite TV episode spanned the distance between him and every other living human being. What remained of humanity was too weak and distracted to resist his order.
Sleep.
Across Earth bodies slumped to the ground and found respite from the torment within their minds. Now there'd be time for him to heal their damaged psyches. Martin's consciousness flitted through the minds of billions of his comatose fellow beings, searching for the means to restore their mental health—
But it was too late. His thoughts touched an emptiness within the remnants of humankind only slightly less than that within Katerina. Whatever personalities they'd possessed—whatever had made them unique individuals—was gone forever. All that remained were crude neurological reflexes or the rage and remorse they'd accumulated over their lives. No hint of rationality remained behind to curb their unfettered emotions or help them become human again.
A terrible pressure grew in Martin's chest. He was the only sane human being left alive.
Then he laughed—realizing his mistake. There were no sane human beings left.
"You were right,” Martin whispered to Katerina's empty body—unable to muster the faith to believe her soul was somewhere she could hear his words. He remembered a line from Byron's Manfred he'd read in a college English Lit class.
I loved her, and destroy'd her!
And not only her—the whole human race too. The fictional Krell destroyed themselves by unwittingly releasing their own inner monsters. His guilt was much greater. He had known the risk. And only he was responsible for using his power to strip his fellow beings of everything that made them human—leaving only their lowest animal impulses and instincts.
Martin's arms were too weary and unwilling to release Katerina to shake his fist at the heavens—and at the aliens who'd tempted him to know more than he should. His bleary eyes watched the setting Sun reach the horizon. Twilight shadows draped the barren plain and the two “gods"—one already dead, the other soon to be—alone on it. He and his lost love would share this final sunset—then they and every human being would go gently into their last good night.
His mind reached out through space one last time. With no hope for recovery, no way to relieve all that endless suffering, Martin willed the heart of every surviving person on Earth to stop. As humanity died peacefully in its sleep, it was time for Katerina and him to do the same.
The late Dr. Stone said during CPR classes that it took only about five seconds for a person to become unconscious after his heart stopped—not long enough for the last man alive to have any second thoughts. Such a simple final action for someone who'd been granted such great power over matter, energy, gravity, and...
* * * *
The noontime Sun was slowly descending from its zenith as two figures confronted each other on the ochre plain.
Martin frowned. “I'll guard myself. And I don't have to stop force with greater force. You've made me think of a better way to stop violence. Let me show you..."
His face froze. For long moments he stood petrified—as if staring at the hissing serpents writhing on Medusa's scalp.
Finally Martin snapped out of his trance and whispered, “Look into my mind, Katerina."
She did—and saw him replay a hellish nightmare. Her alien-enhanced consciousness absorbed horrifying events occurring over what seemed hours compressed into a rapid montage lasting only moments. While devils delighted at the destruction of billions, the world ended in a nuclear inferno and madness untouched by any heavenly intervention.
In that hypnotic vision of humankind's terrible last day Katerina saw herself and Martin standing here locked in a titanic struggle ending in her own self-inflicted death. As the final act of that tragedy played out, he told her what happened next.
Martin said, “Just as I was about to kill myself, I remembered what else the aliens gave us the ability to manipulate—time. I used that power to restore your health last night when you were about to die. But I wasn't sure how else I could manipulate time—or if I could use that power to save the world.
"So I experimented. I found the aliens’ gift didn't let me physically travel back in time. Then I recalled a story I read in an old SF magazine. It was about a musicologist who inadvertently causes a nuclear war that destroys humanity on a parallel Earth. His ‘future’ self goes back in time long enough to tell the ‘earlier’ version of him how to avoid that disaster."
H
e grinned weakly. “Just a silly story by some obscure writer—but remembering it saved us and the world. I discovered the aliens had given me the power to send information into the past. So I sent my memories of that future I created—one that won't happen now—back into my mind moments ago. And now I won't make the mistake of trying to change human nature too much or too soon!"
Katerina said, “Why didn't you send your memories farther back into the past, to before you started changing the weather or healing people?"
"I couldn't bring myself to do that. Maybe you were right about that too and something bad will eventually come out of what I did to help them. But I couldn't let those people suffer and die!"
Martin stepped closer to her. “I learned a humiliating lesson, Katerina. I was so eager to stamp out stupidity, hatred, and evil in others that I forgot they're part of me too. Before I can control others, I have to control myself first.
"I made a terrible mistake—but I've learned from it. The next time I try to improve the way people think I'll be more subtle and test it on only a few of them first—"
"What?"
Katerina looked furious. “I just saw how you and your good intentions exterminated the whole human race! Are you going to risk doing that again?"
"I have to do something to make the world better, Katerina! It's so full of greed, ignorance, and violence that it'll eventually wreck itself if I don't change things. I have a responsibility to use my powers to save the Earth!"
"And do you think that's what the aliens want you to do—or will even let you do? We don't know why the aliens forced their ‘gift’ on us, Martin. We don't know why they chose us to receive it.
"Maybe we're just a sick, depraved form of entertainment to them. Right now they could be waiting to see what you'll do next—hoping that foolish insignificant ant I'm talking to will think up some new way to inadvertently torment and destroy his entire anthill. And when it does happen again—when you've amused them once more with your antics—they'll watch you use the power they gave you to undo all that damage for yet another fruitless try!"
Analog SFF, December 2009 Page 14
