Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  The first man said, “Note that you are speaking freely.”

  “Easy to be tolerant,” Jefferson said, “since we cannot harm you.”

  “You do not speak to us as equals,” said Hugo.

  “That,” said the first man, “will not affect our ways toward you.”

  “Heaven help us,” Jefferson muttered, then saw that Eve was smiling at him, her large eyes unblinking in her unlined face.

  “We have been here for some years now,” the man continued, “and know that you are not a cowardly people.”

  Just thieves, he thought, as silence shouted the truth of inequality, and Jefferson felt the strain of his own leashed anger.

  “But you do know,” the man continued, “the difference between lesser and advanced states of mind, since you have treated many of your regions accordingly. Imperfectly, with gain in mind, but with the hope, in some of you, that your advancement would be of help, later.”

  Some of us, Jefferson thought.

  “I know well,” said Ke. “A wall…a line has to be drawn or all may be lost to the horde.”

  “That line will not be a wall between us,” said the man. “Unavoidably, some may cross it sooner than others.”

  Jefferson's thoughts danced on slippery slopes. Tangled motives and confused treasons shouted at him from deep pits.

  “Your climb,” Eve said to him, “will be up to you.”

  The man continued, “Raise the many and remove the burdens of power from the few. Restraint of the many slows progress and also harms privilege. You destroy only to build up again, to keep the many down by busying them with rebuilding, recruiting a few for their ability. Wealth's power weakens you, passing to progeny like a disease. A disease to the many who cannot have it and a diseased fear in those who cling to it.”

  Jefferson had heard too much of this from thinkers with too many answers, and had grown immune to pointed arguments, living as he had among people who believed in their immunity and would have cast him out if he had spoken out. A raised bottom would do as well or badly as the topmost who had ever held power—that much was true, but not enough to say that there was no other way. Had not a desert god offered one?

  “Distribute power's burden everywhere,” the man from the stars continued, “but let backwardness run through its own fevers.”

  Jefferson gave him an amused look and asked, “Do you know how backward they are…below us?” It was a stupid question, he realized. Of course they knew.

  Eve nodded at him. “But we hope, those of us who still feel for this place, or we would have let you fail.”

  They are fools, he told himself, and fools can take them out. I can take them out.

  “You're interfering with our necessary fever,” he said, turning their angelic logic against them. But what was logic and truth spoken to power? When had anything changed except under the pressure of catastrophe?

  “So how shall we settle all this?” asked Hugo. “If we fail here, the world will become an endless insurgency, and we will have let it happen!”

  “A patient must not be left to fall out of his bed,” Eve said to Hugo's suddenly tearing eyes. “There is no freedom from merit and truth, and only slavery for those held back from decisions.”

  They were going to dictate, Jefferson realized, but would it be with Jove's thunderbolts or Jehovah's commandments?

  “You will disarm,” Eve said.

  Jefferson thought of declawed cats and wondered whether there would be any body parts left after the incineration? His implant was silent.

  “You will be inspected,” Eve said.

  “Or what?” he asked, seeing sides of beef hanging in a freezer.

  “Better your world,” she said. “Those of you who have the power to better it do not because you fear the rise of new powers. That is also why you have not opened the way to your sun system's resources.”

  He stood up and was unable to speak as he realized what he would have to do.

  He sat down again and felt small.

  “No need,” the four said in unison, “to keep climbing over the deaths of generations, hating yourselves in a universe rich enough for all.”

  “But,” he stammered, “you will…police us,” racing with his fear, straining to hear what his implant would offer.

  “Yes,” said the foursome from the stars, and he knew that there would be those who would happily join the choir of the new hegemony, and sing as they had with the previous congregation before new masters, rejoicing that they were no longer alone, that kindred souls now sang with them in the big dark, that they were in fact not the universe's only children, even though he had sometimes wished it for himself when he had felt his brother's weight, to have been born alone; but there was a difference, he realized; solitary was not the same as alone in an empty universe. The quarantine of light-years bestowed a time to grow and learn, and should not be lifted too soon….

  He struggled past himself, recalling Arthur C. Clarke's claim that “if the decades and centuries pass, with no indication of intelligent life elsewhere…the long-term effects on human philosophy will be profound, and may be disastrous. Better to have neighbors we don't like than to be utterly alone.”

  Well, now we have them, he told himself, invading our cradle, and we don't like them. And he wished that this were a dream or a story, where nothing is proven—and he rebelled against the parenting universe that had brought these well-meaning, gently violent intruders to break a natural quarantine and crush human pride for its own good. They were the imaginary god of that Bronze Age tribal library called the Bible, tampering too effectively with human history. If somehow this was a story, then nothing could be learned from it, nothing decided; but it was not a story; it was a reality to be stopped because we “cannot bear too much reality,” said the poet.

  So invent your own and be damned….

  Self-hatred filled him, and rage at being found out and judged, exposed to the gaze of outsiders who claimed kinship, spoke plausible truths, and turned love on and off with a glance. Exposed also to his own gaze, as one who needed no instruction from strangers to know that there had never been a human day when someone was not bending a knee to power and receiving a medal for failure, being executed or quietly murdered in some dark place. In all of humankind's serial wars against itself, he thought, we have never defeated ourselves….

  Looking up, he gestured to the four and asked, “Is there a God?”

  Eve said softly, “Not the extreme, eternal, all-powerful being above all others.”

  A Jesuit had once told him that faith's insistence was about something else that was yet to be understood—a state toward which humanity was striving, somewhere ahead in cosmic history's hyperpersonal noosphere.

  “What do you mean?” he asked as his unfeeling leg longed for its ghost, still alive somewhere in the quantum dream, questioning his new leg inside his stem cells about whether he would live to knit back into himself. Would killing these four in the Central Park Zoo Cafeteria do anything but set back the clock?

  What had they not told us?

  They had been gone too long, his pride cried, past any historical rights of return. What else were they not telling? That maybe we weren't from here at all, but something like Plato's souls come from afar in a ten-thousand-year cycle of swirling reincarnation? What further humiliations awaited his kind?

  He asked the question.

  “Oh, no,” Eve said. “You are from here. We all are.”

  “And God?” he asked her softly.

  “God is the best in us,” Eve said.

  “No more?” he asked.

  “What else do you need?” she answered.

  “That…that God is there,” he said, and can overpower us, he thought madly, exhausted at a picnic table by a struggle with angels!

  “A principle is there,” she said, “and has always existed because a true nothing, a zero-field, is impossible. Being is always full, always has been, and needs no beginning. That's just the way it i
s observed to be. You don't ask beginnings of a god, so why demand it of being? But that is all beside the point—because you don't need authority to choose right from wrong. A godless infinity leaves us responsible to one another, to choose our own way. Anything else would be a tyranny. Would you wish anything less than this freedom? It is the best possible universe, until we learn enough to make another. If anything made it, it was wise beyond imagination to have left us alone.”

  “So there is no God?” he said. And we may do as we please, he thought. Dostoyevsky's non sequitur still damned.

  Eve said, “Do not succumb to confusions. Ideas coincide with experiences. Superstition arises from an experience hooked by imaginings, refuted only by evidence. Wishful insistence offers the invincible but false comfort of certainty in an uncertain quantum. Pascal's Wager, for example, was his superstition. He would have won his wager only if he had encountered his god after death—and never known if he had lost.”

  “And you approve of uncertainty?” he asked. All his old student fears and loves and longings lay nakedly answered.

  As if binding a wound, she said to his dismay, “Faith is a brute alliance of culture and physiology to support needed ways, which are feared to be arbitrary if they can be chosen or rejected, and so have to be given a plausible pedigree. But right and wrong have their own authority, free of divine insistence.”

  “And you came here,” Jefferson said, “to disabuse us of…faith?”

  “No,” she said, “faith's insistence flows harmlessly away when you see the needs it was meant to serve.”

  “Then why are you here?” he asked, holding his anger, praying for his implant to speak.

  “There are those among us who know where intelligent life grows and perishes, and regret that some distant contribution might be lost.”

  “What contribution?” demanded Hugo. “You know too much to learn anything from us.”

  “A distant contribution,” Eve repeated. “Insights still to come, about what it is that we find ourselves in, where we have come from, and where our creativity might take us. At the edge of knowledge waits a greater beyond.”

  “And your others,” Jefferson said to her purblind hopes, “do they care?”

  “They do not,” she said. “That's what it's like out there. Freedom sometimes chooses not to care, even when answers are clear.”

  And suddenly he felt that all the gifts the visitors had brought and the harm humanity had done to itself was nothing before the need to resist being occupied and subsumed. He felt its nameless pull—the same immunity that rejected transplants but would embrace his own cells when his new leg was grown and he might not be here to claim it. His kind would go back to its fevered ways, free of strangers, he insisted to himself even as Eve's face revealed to him that they had come to tire humankind of its past….

  Wordlessly he said back to her, against all reason, that here is mine, my land, and no one will have it even if I have only one leg with which to stand on it, though God himself wanted it back from the creatures who had perished in evolution's slaughterhouse to make it their own….

  He glanced at his German and Chinese colleagues; mercifully, they did not know that he had come here to die for humankind, for the many and for the unjust masters of the Earth, by obliterating the topmost who had come to pale humankind….

  Might they also claim that humanity's time had been arranged a million years ago, that Clarke's mythic sowers in the field of stars were engaged in a patronizing dialogue with their harvest here at this table? That we would not be permitted to stumble into oblivion because intelligent life was too precious to let stumble, that there was no other way except to lead it past stumbling? He wanted to be ashamed of the bomb in his leg, of the hurting pride in his brain that might choose personal extinction to the humiliation of helpful occupation. Nature was survivalist, but its cruelty, bemoaned even by Darwin, would be bypassed—but not as a gift, he told himself, not as a gift. We won't deserve it unless we get there on our own, or not at all, the horror of the survivalist mill whispered to him. Natural selection or bust, even in the jungle of civilizations.

  These visitors did as they pleased, he reminded himself, so why were they trying to convince us of anything? Maybe, despite all appearances, they were vulnerable, if only in their scruples, and naive enough to place themselves in his hands…because things from elsewhere had no right to his Earth. He lived here, irrational, heaving up from violent origins, uncaring of reason and knowledge, hateful but strong against strangers….

  He closed his eyes and drifted ahead of his own death, but hoping for a reprieve from his implant.

  It spoke, saying, “Do it now.”

  His phantom limb lived as he sought the light of thunder—

  —and the bomb did not go off.

  He opened his eyes, trembling as he looked at his companions and wondered whether they had conspired to stop him. Maybe it was only a delay of some kind in the bomb's mechanism.

  “Settle with yourselves,” Eve said, “and we'll leave.”

  He took a deep breath.

  But we won't settle, so they will never leave. Not anytime soon. They are us, he told himself. That's why they came back. Do we need their tyranny, or that of a god, to cease being “wolves to one another,” as Ben Franklin had put it, not as a question but as a principle stronger than any god?

  Older words had asked, “If not now, then when?”

  “Another time,” Eve said. She looked as if to ask him to tea, and for an instant he was startled by the sympathy in her gaze, and knew that it might all be settled. Only thunderbolts were to be preferred to artillery, and diplomacy to cannon, Napoleon had said, but not in his time, so he had never replaced his artillery.

  “We came too early…,” Eve added.

  “And your…settlements?” Jefferson asked, afraid of what else they could do, would do.

  Eve said, “Accept them as embassies for wiser times.”

  Science fiction author Michael Swanwick once said of Gene Wolfe that he was “the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning.” A 1996 recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, Wolfe was also a frequent contributor to Damon Knight's landmark Orbit anthology series, itself an inspiration for this volume. It is an honor to have him here.

  T iero eyed his vprint with disfavor, then shook his head. Talking into the vprint would indeed be faster. Much faster. It might even be less laborious, though Tiero was not a good talker and knew it; but the manuscript that would sprout from the vprint would be wordy. Diffuse. Difficult to follow, and perhaps impossible to follow.

  No.

  He took up his pen and the little ivory-handled pen knife Mother had given him in the year before her death. He would write his book—the book the President-Protector had suggested—with this. Reading what he had written into the vprint (no doubt with a few additions and corrections) would produce a decent manuscript that might be sent to a publisher.

  For his book would be published. There could be not the slightest doubt of it. Any book suggested by the President-Protector would find an eager publisher. It would be published; and he—Tiero, now called the greatest swordsman alive—would look an arrant fool unless it were insightful and decently written.

  Decent. Decent writing was the key. Decent must be his watchword. He was no literary artist! Any attempt at fine turns of phrase, at thrilling descriptions, would be—

  It had been his father's story. How did it go?

  “The temple in Attenis had a beautiful statue of the goddess, Tiero. Naked, not only her outstretched hands but her whole posture offered blessing and forgiveness to an erring
humankind. The people loved her and wished to make her statue more beautiful still, so they covered her lovely body with a gown of purple silk and put polychrome beads around her neck. For a time her feet puzzled them, since they were one with the block of marble upon which she stood. At last they cut the soles from a pair of black leather pumps and cemented them to the feet of their image of the goddess. When they had added a brown hat with a long scarlet feather, they declared their work at an end. And every visitor to Attenis was shown their beautiful goddess.”

  Recalling his father, Tiero smiled down at the pen-point he was shaping. His father had been a schoolmaster, and a good one. A fine, fine man, who had taught him how to shape a pen—with ten thousand other things. How proud Father would have been to see his son at the President-Protector's court! His son conversing with the President-Protector himself!

  “First tell them what you're going to tell them, Tiero. Then tell them. And when you've told them, tell them what you've told them. That is nine-tenths of teaching.”

  He read over his first, still incomplete, chapter before dipping his pen in the shining black ink his father had favored.

  So it is that we must master the five hours of the sword if we are to be safe in the streets and to make the streets safe for others. Permit me to review them. The Hour of the Sheep is that of relaxation. We are not on guard, and should danger come, we will go down to death as a sheep to slaughter. The Hour of the Sheep we must leave behind before setting our hands upon the door-pull. It is the hour of sleep, and too often of walking sleep.

  The Hour of the Lion is that of watchfulness. When we walk abroad, the lion must pace at our side, invisible but ever-present. We see no danger and have no reason to fear it, yet we look for it everywhere. Are the tall man before us and the small man behind us allied against us? We must consider this, and consider, too, the most effective means of resisting their alliance. Where is the light, and where the shadow? Have they a confederate in a dark doorway?

  The Hour of the Tiger is that of heightened awareness. When it comes, we no longer face merely hypothetical foes. Some action of our foes has betrayed them. Three men, let us say, have crossed the street to intercept us. We have identified them. We are in a position to predict their weapons and tactics, and perhaps to identify their leader. Our hands seek our hilts, and our eyes protection for our backs.