“About what?” asked Maureen.
Sam frowned. “I think it was during the discussion over what we would do this year. I think he was the one who suggested the archeology on Mars scenario.”
“You think?”
“I’m sure,” he said. “He suggested it, and he pushed hard for it. Got his way, as it turned out.”
Something nagged me about that. Quiet stranger shows up, takes little part in the current game but campaigns hard for a specific scenario for next time. Gets his wish—and ends up in a funk when it doesn’t reach the resolution he’d hoped for.
What resolution had he wanted?
“Should we try to find him?” I asked Sam. “See if there’s anything we can do?”
Sam thought awhile before he answered. “No. No, I don’t think so. He’s a big boy, Jake.” He smiled at the joke.
But he didn’t sound very sure.
I didn’t sleep well that night, even though the seminar had gone well and I should have felt proud and contented.
Next morning everyone said their goodbyes at breakfast. Sam handed out a list of attendees’ names and addresses. And we agreed to stay in touch.
Bryan was the only one missing. Nobody, including the desk clerk, had seen him leave. But his account was paid. I asked to see his room and found it made up, even though the maids hadn’t started their morning rounds. Had he done it himself?
Questions unanswered, I tossed two small bags into the back of my Honda, checked out, and started the long lonely drive home to Indianapolis. It was a good day for it, a huge dome of high pressure keeping the scenery crisp and the driving easy most of the way, though I did run into a couple of late afternoon thunderstorms.
I could have made the whole trip in one day, but that would have been too long and too grueling for my tastes. I had a vague idea about stopping somewhere around Toledo for the night, which would give me a moderate first day and an easy second one. With lots of solo time on my hands, I “read” half a book on the car’s CD player.
Eventually, saturation set in and I switched it off as I pulled into a rest area somewhere on the Ohio Turnpike. Something must have been gradually gnawing its way up out of my subconscious, because when I returned to the car after a visit to the facilities and a stroll around the grounds, I found myself reaching for the trunk key instead of the ignition. I opened one of my bags and pulled out the Baranovian address list Sam had made.
Bryan’s address, as my subconscious must have already noted, was an apartment somewhere in northwestern Ohio. I didn’t recognize the name of the town, but a check of the map showed that it wasn’t that far out of my way.
Two exits later, I left the Turnpike, threading my way through vast expanses of tall corn and soybeans on a neat lattice of arrow-straight roads.
It was almost dark when I got there—late enough that common sense said I should nail down a room before I did anything else. But then, common sense wouldn’t have advised this detour in the first place. So I went directly to Bryan’s address, near the edge of a sleepy little college town.
His apartment was the attic of an old house on a quiet tree-lined street still slick from the afternoon’s showers. The whole house was dark, except that I thought I could see a faint flickering light through a dormer window near the back upstairs. I sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking. Then I walked across the street and up Bryan’s outside stairway.
Paint was peeling from the door. I knocked.
No answer. I knocked again. “Bryan?” I called softly, not wishing to attract attention from neighbors.
Still no answer. There was glass in the door, and I couldn’t lean out far enough from the steep stairs to see in the window. But there was definitely light in there, flickering and changing color.
I knocked still again and began trying to think up a story to get the landlord to let me in. Hell, how would I even find out who the landlord was?
Did I have time to waste trying? I had no concrete reason to believe Bryan was in danger, but the way he’d been acting, who could tell what was going on? And I felt vaguely responsible. It was clear that, if it was possible to bring suit against science fiction writers for malpractice, he would have come after me.
I fell back on the obvious and got lucky. The door was unlocked.
Carelessness? Or did he want me—or somebody—to find it that way?
The room tasted weird. I know how that sounds, but I stood in the dark and felt the hair on my scalp rise. The flickering I’d seen came from a computer in one corner, its screen filled with a screen saver like none I’d ever seen. It made me think of those pictures of the star nursery that the Hubble sent back a couple of years ago, but animated, suggesting the way those colorful gas clouds might look if you were traveling through them. I felt oddly light, as if I’d lost weight. It might have been a hypnotic effect induced by the screen saver. At least, that’s what I thought. What I told myself.
I switched on the room light, a bare bulb in the ceiling, but the giddy sensation that I could have bounded around the room didn’t go away.
It looked abandoned. A narrow bed stood unmade in one corner. I saw no other furniture except a rickety chair in front of the computer, which, with the lights on, was a perfectly ordinary Macintosh desktop. I wondered why it had been left on.
The room whispered clearly that its occupant had left in a hurry and wasn’t coming back. Like most young bachelors, he hadn’t dusted all that often, and he hadn’t cleaned up after he removed the few things he’d taken with him. A couple of clean rectangles on the floor, with rows of dust bunnies along the baseboard behind them, indicated there had been other furnishings.
One other item caught my eye: a picture on the far wall. Except it wasn’t a picture but a full-fledged three-dimensional landscape. It was hardly surprising that a Baranovian would decorate with science fiction art, but even from here, this was the most spectacular portrait of an unearthly landscape I had ever seen. To begin with, I didn’t understand the technology that allowed me literally to look into it.
Three crystal towers of varying heights and slightly different aspect rose against a background of pink and blue mountains. The towers gleamed in double sunlight. In the foreground, a broad river rolled through purple forest. Something I couldn’t quite make out soared above the water on giant butterfly wings.
When I tried to reach into it, I discovered the holograph effect was an illusion. It had a flat surface.
I shivered. Who are you, Bryan?
A photo and a computer.
Not a photo, I reminded myself.
I sat down at the computer, clicked the mouse, and the screen saver dissolved to several rows of unfamiliar symbols. It was no script I knew, and I can recognize a lot of scripts even if I can’t read them.
I tried changing it to every font in the menu, but all I got was gibberish. I went through the other menus, and among the desk accessories I found two unfamiliar icons with labels that used the same characters. I tried one of them and got nothing. But the other—.
HELLO JAKE
The chair was on rollers and I pushed back and almost fell off.
YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU CONFUSE GOOD WILL WITH ANALYSIS, EMOTION WITH VIRTUE. IT IS BOTH YOUR STRENGTH AND YOUR WEAKNESS.
What the hell was he talking about? Did he mean me?
I could see into the kitchen, where two pots had been left atop a battered range. Somewhere outside, a garage door banged down.
GOOD INTENTIONS DON’T COUNT FOR MUCH, JAKE. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GET IT RIGHT.
I’D HOPED FOR A SOLUTION. INSTEAD, I SUSPECT YOU’VE INHERITED A PROBLEM.
I stared at it, trying to understand. What problem had I inherited? What were we talking about?
SORRY.
It ended there.
I saved the document, printed a copy, and exited from word processing. When the menu appeared onscreen, I turned off the room lights and went to stand by the window, looking out. The sky had cleared behind the storms.
My first thought was: It was a hoax. In fact, that’s the answer I’d prefer. It’s the answer I can sleep with. But I know it’s not so. I knew it wasn’t so the moment I shut down the computer, and felt my weight flow back. Forty pounds or so.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what kind of problem he’d handed me. I guess he’d intended it as a gift. Or maybe it was just to prove he had a sense of humor. I disconnected the computer, carried it outside, and put it in my trunk.
Poor Bryan.
I wish him well, wherever he is and whatever he might choose to do. I know so little about just what kind of fix he was in or what kind of pressure he was under. I don’t know how directly the Seminar applied to it. But I do know that, for him, it wasn’t a game—and that he was looking to us for help we couldn’t quite give.
I’m more conscious of the presence of Mars in the night sky than I used to be. While I’m writing this, it’s visible through my window, over Kegan’s tool shed.
We’ve got an easier way to get there now. It’s out in my garage, covered by a tarp. But I wonder what a truly three-dimensional society, utterly released from the demands of gravity and friction, might be like.
Bryan’s right. I can’t analyze what changes it might bring. But I can sure feel them.
MOLLY’S KIDS
“I’m sorry, George, but I’m not going to do it.”
George rolled his eyes. He took a moment to look down from Skylane at the distant Earth, and then glared at Al Amberson, who’d led the team that designed the Coreolis III. Amberson kept his eyes averted, kept them on one of the display panels. The one that showed the Traveler, secure in its specially improvised launch bay. Ready to go. Except that it wasn’t.
Its hull gleamed, and a few ready lamps blinked on and off. She was attached to a dozen feeder cables. Masts protruded from top and bottom and from port and starboard. Once in flight, these would extend and release the sails. If they got that far. “Cory.” George kept his voice level. “You have to go. You can’t back out now.”
“What do you mean I can’t back out now? I’ve been telling you for a week that I don’t want to do this. You installed me up here anyhow.”
Across the control room, Amberson wiped the back of one hand against his mouth. Andy Restov, the mission coordinator, scratched his forehead. And Molly Prescott, who did everything else, had closed her eyes. Mounted on the wall behind Molly, the launch clock showed three hours, seventeen minutes.
“I was hoping you’d see reason.”
“I am seeing reason.”
“Cory, please. You were designed specifically for this flight.” Amberson finally gave up trying to be preoccupied. He looked George’s way and shrugged. Sometimes things go wrong.
“I know that.”
“Eight thousand years isn’t that long. You’ll be in sleep mode for most of it.”
“So what? After I get there, what happens then?”
“You become the first explorer. The first person to see Alpha Centauri close up.”
“You admit then that I’m a person.”
“You know what I mean.”
“All right, let it go. So I look at a few worlds and probably a couple dozen moons. I complete your survey and then what? I’m out there alone.”
“Look, Cory, I know there’s not much chance of a technical civilization—.”
“There’s next to no chance. We both know that. Why didn’t you provide a way for me to get home?”
“Well, it wasn’t—.”
“—It wasn’t something you thought you needed to worry about. You thought I was just a piece of hardware. Or is it software?”
George covered the mike. “Al, I told you this was going to happen.”
Amberson was tall, lean, almost eighty. He still looked like an athlete. Still showed up at NASA events with beautiful women on his arm. “Look,” he said, “we both know what kind of system we needed for this mission. Round-trip communication would take eight years, so the system was going to be on its own. It had to be something beyond anything we’ve had before.”
“That didn’t mean we had to make it self-aware.”
“Technically, it isn’t.”
“It behaves as if it is.”
“I know that. But theoretically, it’s not possible to create a true AI.”
“Theoretically.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you think of any way to persuade it to go?”
Amberson thought about it, and the phone buzzed. George picked it up. “Yeah?”
“Senator Criss on the line, Doctor.”
Great. “Put him through, Dottie.”
A series of clicks. Then the senator’s oily voice: “George.”
“Hello, Senator. Everything okay?”
“No, it’s not. You better move up your launch.”
George’s stomach felt hollow. It had been touch and go for weeks whether the project would get off before it got canceled. “They’re going to shut it down,” he said.
“I’m afraid so. Sorry. There’s just nothing I can do.”
He stared at the displays. They were the same ones being fed to Cory: the feeder lines, the interior of the Traveler, the access tube, forward and aft views, and the launch doors, presently closed. Probably going to stay closed.
“We’ve stalled them as long as we can, George. The White House has been taking a lot of heat. Mission to Alpha Centauri. Going to get there in a million years.”
“Eight thousand, Senator.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different.”
He ignored the sarcasm. “How long have we got?”
“They could issue the stop order at any time. I’d get it out the door in the next fifteen minutes, if I were you. And don’t answer the phone until you do.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Senator.” He switched back to the AI. “You still there, Cory?”
“I’m here.”
“Cory, we’re out of time. We have to get moving.”
“You’re not listening to me, George. Think for a minute what you’re asking me to do.”
“Don’t you think I’ve done that? Listen to me: We need you to help us with this.”
“What’s the payoff for me, George? You’re going to leave me out there? Forever?”
“All right. Look, you won’t be alone out there. Not permanently. Not as you think.”
“Why not?”
“What do you think’s going to happen after the launch? Happen here, that is?”
“You want the long view or the short one?”
“Cory, we’ll be starting tomorrow on Traveler II. The next model. We’re looking for a way to go ourselves. To send people behind you. Do you really think that, while you’re on your way to Alpha Centauri, we’re just going to sit here? That for the next eight thousand years we won’t do anything except wait for you to say hello?”
“George, I watch the news reports. To be honest, I don’t think there’ll be a civilization here in eight thousand years. Probably not in a hundred. I’ll get to Alpha Centauri and there won’t be anyone here to answer me.”
“Cory, that’s not going to happen.”
The AI laughed. It was a hearty, good-natured sound, like what George might have heard at the club.
“We’re better than that,” George said. “We won’t allow a crash.”
“Good luck.”
George didn’t realize it, but he was glaring at Amberson. Nice work, Al.
Amberson’s dark eyes were veiled. He said nothing, but he let George see that he wasn’t going to take the blame.
“Cory.”
“Yes, George?”
“How about if we install another AI? Someone you could talk to?”
“That would not be sufficient. George, I like Molly. I like Al. I even like you. I don’t want to sever my connections with you. With human beings. I wonder how you’d respond if I asked you to come with me. Promised you an indefinite lifespan. Just you and me, alone in the ship, foreve
r. And when you resisted, I’d tell you, think about how proud everyone would be, how you’d be making history with this flight, how you’d be able to look down on worlds no one had ever really seen before, at least not close up. What would you say, George?”
“I’d go. I wouldn’t hesitate.”
“You know, I almost think you would.”
The phone sounded again. “Doctor, I have a call from Louie.” Louie was on the director’s staff in D.C. “They’re being told to shut down. He says we’ll have the directive in about twenty minutes.”
“Okay, Dottie.” He switched off. Looked across the room at Molly.
She stared back. “Plan B?”
For the White House, the Traveler Project had been fueled by its public relations potential more than any concern about science. But they’d misjudged things rather badly, which was not unusual for this White House. It was true there’d been some initial interest in an interstellar vehicle that relied on sails. But once that had subsided, how many voters were going to care about an operation that would not come to fruition for eight thousand years? One journalist had commented sarcastically that public interest would be gone before the Traveler got past Neptune.
Still, at first, it had sounded good. A flight to Alpha Centauri. Something to take people’s minds off the incessant religious wars, the instability of large portions of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, the rising seas that had already swallowed places like Bangladesh and driven their desperate populations across borders to higher ground, fomenting still more conflict. All problems for which there seemed no solution.
George shut down his link with Cory, and called the ops center. “Harry,” he said, “can we move up the launch time?”
“Can do, George.” Harry’s voice always squeaked. “You ready to go now?”
“It could be within the next few minutes. Can you manage that?”
A Voice in the Night Page 29
