My Favorites

by Ben Bova

  “What is it?” Elverda asked. “What did you see?”

  Dorn lowered him to the ground gently. Sterling’s feet scrabbled against the rock as if he were trying to run away. Sweat covered his face, soaked his shirt.

  “It’s . . . beyond . . .” he babbled. “More . . . than anyone can . . . nobody could stand it . . .”

  Elverda sank to her knees beside him. “What has happened to him?” She looked up at Dorn, who knelt on Sterling’s other side.

  “The artifact.”

  Sterling suddenly ranted, “They’ll find out about me! Everyone will know! It’s got to be destroyed! Nuke it! Blast it to bits!” His fists windmilled in the air, his eyes were wild.

  “I tried to warn him,” Dorn said as he held Sterling’s shoulders down, the man’s head in his lap. “I tried to prepare him for it.”

  “What did he see?” Elverda’s heart was pounding; she could hear it thundering in her ears. “What is it? What did you see?”

  Dorn shook his head slowly. “I cannot describe it. I doubt that anyone could describe it—except, perhaps, an artist: a person who has trained herself to see the truth.”

  “The prospectors—they saw it. Even their children saw it.”

  “Yes. When I arrived here, they had spent eighteen days in the chamber. They left it only when the chamber closed itself. They ate and slept and returned here, as if hypnotized.”

  “It did not hurt them, did it?”

  “They were emaciated, dehydrated. It took a dozen of my strongest men to remove them to my ship. Even the children fought us.”

  “But—how could . . .” Elverda’s voice faded into silence. She looked at the brightly lit tunnel. Her breath caught in her throat.

  “Destroy it,” Sterling mumbled. “Destroy it before it destroys us! Don’t let them find out. They’ll know, they’ll know, they’ll all know.” He began to sob uncontrollably.

  “You do not have to see it,” Dorn said to Elverda. “You can return to your ship and leave this place.”

  Leave, urged a voice inside her head. Run away. Live out what’s left of your life and let it go.

  Then she heard her own voice say, as if from a far distance, “I’ve come such a long way.”

  “It will change you,” he warned.

  “Will it release me from life?”

  Dorn glanced down at Sterling, still muttering darkly, then returned his gaze to Elverda.

  “It will change you,” he repeated.

  Elverda forced herself to her feet. Leaning one hand against the warm rock wall to steady herself, she said, “I will see it. I must.”

  “Yes,” said Dorn. “I understand.”

  She looked down at him, still kneeling with Sterling’s head resting in his lap. Dorn’s electronic eye glowed red in the shadows. His human eye was hidden in darkness.

  He said, “I believe your people say, vaya con Dios.”

  Elverda smiled at him. She had not heard that phrase in forty years. “Yes. You too. Vaya con Dios.” She turned and stepped across the faint groove where the metal door had met the floor.

  The tunnel sloped downward only slightly. It turned sharply to the right, Elverda saw, just as Dorn had told them. The light seemed brighter beyond the turn, pulsating almost, like a living heart.

  She hesitated a moment before making that final turn. What lay beyond? What difference, she answered herself. You have lived so long that you have emptied life of all its purpose. But she knew she was lying to herself. Her life was devoid of purpose because she herself had made it that way. She had spurned love; she had even rejected friendship when it had been offered. Still, she realized that she wanted to live. Desperately, she wanted to continue living no matter what.

  Yet she could not resist the lure. Straightening her spine, she stepped boldly around the bend in the tunnel.

  The light was so bright it hurt her eyes. She raised a hand to her brow to shield them, and the intensity seemed to decrease slightly, enough to make out the faint outline of a form, a shape, a person.

  Elverda gasped with recognition. A few meters before her, close enough to reach and touch, her mother sat on the sweet grass beneath the warm summer sun, gently rocking her baby and crooning softly to it.

  Mama! she cried silently. Mama. The baby—Elverda herself—looked up into her mother’s face and smiled.

  And the mother was Elverda, a young and radiant Elverda, smiling down at the baby she had never had, tender and loving as she had never been.

  Something gave way inside her. There was no pain: rather, it was as if a pain that had throbbed sullenly within her for too many years to count suddenly faded away. As if a wall of implacable ice finally melted and let the warm waters of life flow through her.

  Elverda sank to the floor, crying, gushing tears of understanding and relief and gratitude. Her mother smiled at her.

  “I love you, Mama,” she whispered. “I love you.” Her mother nodded and became Elverda herself once more. Her baby made a gurgling laugh of pure happiness, fat little feet waving in the air.

  The image wavered, dimmed, and slowly faded into emptiness. Elverda sat on the bare rock floor in utter darkness, feeling a strange serenity and understanding warming her soul.

  “Are you all right?”

  Dorn’s voice did not startle her. She had been expecting him to come to her.

  “The chamber will close itself in another few minutes,” he said. “We will have to leave.”

  Elverda took his offered hand and rose to her feet. She felt strong, fully in control of herself.

  The tunnel outside the chamber was empty.

  “Where is Sterling?”

  “I sedated him and then called in a medical team to take him back to his ship.”

  “He wants to destroy the artifact,” Elverda said. “That will not be possible.” said Dorn. “I will bring the IAA scientists here from the ship before Sterling awakes and recovers. Once they see the artifact, they will not allow it to be destroyed. Sterling may own the asteroid, but the IAA will exert control over the artifact.”

  “The artifact will affect them—strangely.”

  “No two of them will be affected in the same manner,” said Dorn. “And none of them will permit it to be damaged in any way.”

  “Sterling will not be pleased with you.”

  He gestured up the tunnel, and they began to walk back toward their quarters.

  “Nor with you,” Dorn said. “We both saw him babbling and blubbering like a baby.”

  “What could he have seen?”

  “What he most feared. His whole life had been driven by fear, poor man.”

  “What secrets he must be hiding!”

  “He hid them from himself. The artifact showed him his own true nature.”

  “No wonder he wants it destroyed.”

  “He cannot destroy the artifact, but he will certainly want to destroy us. Once he recovers his composure, he will want to wipe out the witnesses who saw his reaction to it.”

  Elverda knew that Dorn was right. She watched his face as they passed beneath the lights, watched the glint of the etched metal, the warmth of the human flesh.

  “You knew that he would react this way, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “No one could be as rich as he is without having demons driving him. He looked into his own soul and recognized himself for the first time in his life.”

  “You planned it this way!”

  “Perhaps I did,” he said. “Perhaps the artifact did it for me.”

  “How could—”

  “It is a powerful experience. After I had seen it a few times, I felt it was offering me . . .” he hesitated, then spoke the word, “salvation.”

  Elverda saw something in his face that Dorn had not let show before. She stopped in the shadows between overhead lights
. Dorn turned to face her, half machine, standing in the rough tunnel of bare rock.

  “You have had your own encounter with it,” he said. “You understand now how it can transform you.”

  “Yes,” said Elverda. “I understand.”

  “After a few times, I came to the realization that there must be thousands of my fellow mercenaries, killed in engagements all through the asteroid belt, still lying where they fell. Or worse yet, floating forever in space, alone, unattended, ungrieved for.”

  “Thousands of mercenaries?’

  “The corporations do not always settle their differences in Earthly courts of law,” said Dorn. “There have been many battles out here. Wars that we paid for with our blood.”

  “Thousands?” Elverda repeated. “I knew that there had been occasional fights out here—but wars? I don’t think anyone on Earth knows it’s been so brutal.”

  “Men like Sterling know. They start the wars, and people like me fight them. Exiles, never allowed to return to Earth again once we take the mercenary’s pay.”

  “All those men—killed.”

  Dorn nodded. “And women. The artifact made me see that it was my duty to find each of those forgotten bodies and give each one a decent final rite. The artifact seemed to be telling me that this was the path of my atonement.”

  “Your salvation,” she murmured.

  “I see now, however, that I underestimated the situation.”

  “How?”

  “Sterling. While I am out there searching for the bodies of the slain, he will have me killed.”

  “No! That’s wrong!”

  Dorn’s deep voice was empty of regret. “It will be simple for him to send a team after me. In the depths of dark space, they will murder me. What I failed to do for myself, Sterling will do for me. He will be my final atonement.”

  “Never!” Elverda blazed with anger. “I will not permit it to happen.”

  “Your own life is in danger from him,” Dorn said.

  “What of it? I am an old woman, ready for death.”

  “Are you?”

  “I was, until I saw the artifact.”

  “Now life is more precious to you, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t want you to die,” Elverda said. “You have atoned for your sins. You have borne enough pain.”

  He looked away, then started up the tunnel again.

  “You are forgetting one important factor,” Elverda called after him.

  Dorn stopped, his back to her. She realized now that the clothes he wore had been his military uniform. He had torn all the insignias and pockets from it.

  “The artifact. Who created it? And why?”

  Turning back toward her, Dorn answered, “Alien visitors to our solar system created it, unknown ages ago. As to why—you tell me: why does someone create a work of art?”

  “Why would aliens create a work of art that affects human minds?”

  Dorn’s human eye blinked. He rocked a step backward. “How could they create an artifact that is a mirror to our souls?” Elverda asked, stepping toward him. “They must have known something about us. They must have been here long ages ago. They must have studied us—our ancestors.”

  Dorn regarded her silently.

  Coming closer to him, Elverda went on, “They may have placed this artifact here to communicate with us.

  “Communicate?”

  “Perhaps it is a very subtle, very powerful communications device.”

  “Not an artwork at all.”

  “Oh, yes, of course it’s an artwork! All works of art are communications devices, for those who possess the soul to understand.”

  Dorn seemed to ponder this for long moments. Elverda watched his solemn face, searching for some human expression.

  Finally, he said, “That does not change my mission, even if it is true.”

  “Yes, it does,” Elverda said, eager to save him. “Your mission is to preserve and protect this artifact against Sterling and anyone else who would try to destroy it—or pervert it to his own use.”

  “The dead call to me,” Dorn said solemnly. “I hear them in my dreams now.”

  “But why be alone in your mission? Let others help you. There must be other mercenaries who feel as you do.”

  “Perhaps,” he said softly.

  “Your true mission is much greater than you think,” Elverda said, trembling with new understanding. “You have the power to end the wars that have destroyed your comrades, that have almost destroyed your soul.”

  “End the corporate wars?”

  “You will be the priest of this shrine, this sepulcher. I will return to Earth and tell everyone about these wars.”

  “Sterling and others will have you killed”

  “I am a famous artist; they dare not touch me.” Then she laughed. “And I am too old to care if they do.”

  “The scientists—do you think they may actually learn how to communicate with the aliens?”

  “Someday,” Elverda said. “When our souls are pure enough to stand the shock of their presence.”

  The human side of Dorn’s face smiled at her. He extended his arm, and she took it in her own, realizing that she had found her own salvation. Like two kindred souls, like comrades who had shared the sight of death, like mother and son, they walked up the tunnel toward the waiting race of humanity.

  Introduction to

  “The Café Coup”

  Time travel. The ability to move at will into the future—or the past.

  Of all the possibilities that science fiction has tinkered with, time travel seems the most fantastic. Yet the known laws of physics tell us that time travel is not forbidden.

  And what is not forbidden may one day become possible.

  It seems unlikely, a dream of traveling across time to a different age. But once, space flight seemed like a dream. So did skyscrapers and modern medicine and electromagnetic communications systems that link the world almost instantaneously.

  The question, then, is this: who would travel through time? And why?

  Thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

  THE CAFÉ COUP

  Paris was not friendly to Americans in the soft springtime of AD 1922. The French didn’t care much for the English either and they hated the victorious Germans, of course.

  I couldn’t blame them very much. The Great War had been over for more than three years, yet Paris had still not recovered its gaiety, its light and color, despite the hordes of boisterous German tourists who spent so freely on the boulevards. More likely, because of them.

  I sat in one of the crowded sidewalk cafés beneath a splendid warm sun, waiting for my lovely wife to show up. Because of the crowds of Germans, I was forced to share my minuscule round table with a tall, gaunt Frenchman who looked me over with suspicious eyes.

  “You are an American?” he asked, looking down his prominent nose at me. His accent was worse than mine, certainly not Parisian.

  “No,” I answered truthfully. Then I lied, “I’m from New Zealand.” It was as far away in distance as my real birthplace was in time.

  “Ah,” he said with an exhalation of breath that was somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Your countrymen fought well at Gallipoli. Were you there?”

  “No,” I said. “I was too young.”

  That apparently puzzled him. Obviously, I was of an age to have fought in the Great War. But in fact, I hadn’t been born when the British Empire troops were decimated at Gallipoli. I hadn’t been born in the twentieth century at all.

  “Were you in the war?” I asked needlessly.

  “But certainly. To the very last moment, I fought the Boche.”

  “It was a great tragedy.”

  “The Americans betrayed us,” he muttered.

  My brows rose a few millimeters. He was quite tal
l for a Frenchman, but painfully thin. Half-starved. Even his eyes looked hungry. The inflation, of course. It cost a basketful of francs, literally, to buy a loaf of bread. I wondered how he could afford the price of an aperitif. Despite the warm afternoon, he had wrapped himself in a shabby old leather coat, worn shiny at the elbows.

  From what I could see, there were hardly any Frenchmen in the café, mostly raucous Germans roaring with laughter and heartily pounding on the little tables as they bellowed for more beer. To my amazement, the waiters had learned to speak German.

  “Wilson,” my companion continued bitterly. “He had the gall to speak of Lafayette.”

  “I thought that the American president was the one who arranged the armistice.”

  “Yes, with his Fourteen Points. Fourteen daggers plunged into the heart of France.”

  “Really?”

  “The Americans should have entered the war on our side! Instead, they sat idly by and watched us bleed to death while their bankers extorted every gram of gold we possessed.”

  “But the Americans had no reason to go to war,” I protested mildly.

  “France needed them! When their pitiful little colonies rebelled against the British lion, France was the only nation to come to their aid. They owe their very existence to France, yet when we needed them, they turned their backs on us.”

  That was largely my fault, although he didn’t know it. I averted the sinking of the Lusitania by the German U-boat. It took enormous energies, but my darling wife arranged it so that the Lusitania was crawling along at a mere five knots that fateful morning. I convinced Lieutenant Waither Schwieger, skipper of the U-20, that it was safe enough to surface and hold the British liner captive with the deck gun while a boarding party searched for the ammunition that I knew the English had stored aboard her.

  The entire affair was handled with great tact and honor. No shots were fired, no lives were lost, and the one hundred twenty-three American passengers arrived safely in Liverpool with glowing stories of how correct, how chivalrous, the German U-boat sailors had been. America remained neutral throughout the Great War. Indeed, a good deal of anti-British sentiment swept the United States, especially the Midwest, when their newspapers reported that the British were transporting military contraband in secret aboard the liner and thus putting the lives of the American passengers at risk.