Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

  June 17, 1917.

  If he caught the significance of that date, he gave no sign.

  But he never again read a newspaper, and he deliberately lost track of time.

  A cornet, stabbing out the melody.

  A trombone, sliding and stomping, backing it up.

  A clarinet, a lyric clarinet, weaving around them, singing.

  Three rhythm, propelling it, giving it a base to walk on: drums, string bass, guitar. (Sure, they had used a banjo in those days—but dreams are better.)

  Living music, music from the heart, music to blow your blues away. Living music, by men who once had lived. Living music that could not die, but could never come again.

  Heaven, Utopia, Paradise. It had many names. It was different for every man. To Theodore Pearsall, raised in an easy world of certainties and automation, this was It: everything he yearned for, all the people he wanted, all the happiness and the laughter and the sorrow. He had heard the music once in a museum, and it had called him.

  He had answered.

  It took money, time, engineering genius. A tiny planetoid between Mars and Jupiter, with a bubble to hold in the air. Artificial gravity, so a man could walk. And a rebuilt Storyville: not all of it, but enough.

  The music was real, you couldn’t fake it. It had been played by real men, long ago, and caught on records. Then it had been remastered, built into tapes. You couldn’t even see the tapes in the horns.

  And Louis and Kid and Jelly Roll, all the great ones?

  Robots, of course—or androids, to give them their proper names. Brilliant ones. You couldn’t tell the difference unless you looked too close. And who would look too close, with all the music, all the booze, all the laughter?

  Only some of the girls were real.

  No robot was that good.

  Men build different monuments. There were some, Pearsall knew, who would have been shocked by what he had done with his money. Most would not understand. But here he had found what he wanted: peace and love and music and good times to remember all the days of his life.

  He was an old man.

  He knew what was important, and what wasn’t. A man always knew, looking back.

  Others could go conquer the stars, and doubtless it was all worth the effort.

  He strolled out of his room, a graceful gal on each arm, a black cigar in his mouth. He moved toward the lights and the music.

  Somewhere out on the river, a steamboat whistled.

  Pearsall quickened his steps.

  It was the Fourth of July, and that was a very important day.

  Everybody knew what had happened on the Fourth of July. Back in the year 1900, it was.

  Yes, sir.

  Louis Armstrong’s birthday.

  Ted Pearsall sought him out. He was still a kid, still in his teens, but he could already stand up, with that handkerchief in his hand, and the power in his horn was something to hear.

  Pearsall dined on a Poor Boy sandwich: half a loaf of French bread sliced down the middle, stuffed with barbecued ham. He tried to take Satch to Antoine’s for a real meal, but the kid stuck to red beans and rice.

  The evening got rolling.

  I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate….

  I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say ….

  Oh, it was all there.

  Basin Street. Canal Street. Burgundy Street.

  And all the great old places: Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, Countess Willie’s, Josie Arlington’s Five Dollar House. You could look them all up in Tom Anderson’s Blue Book, which sold for two bits and listed all the more reputable houses of ill repute—all two hundred of them.

  If you get a good man and don’t want him taken from you,

  Don’t ever tell your gal friend what your man can do….

  And it was all on the house—or, rather, houses.

  He loved it all, the balconies on the houses, the hot evenings as the sun went down, the palm tree in the vacant lot.

  He even got a kick out of the smartly uniformed Patrolmen when they came to town. They always dropped in when they were in the vicinity. Sure, they were square as a block of cement, and bone-headed to boot. But it was nice to know that even a Space Cadet had glands.

  They all thought he was crazy.

  Pearsall sort of had them figured the same way.

  August, September, October.

  I gotta momma, she live right back o’ the jail.

  I gotta sweet momma …

  Mister Jelly Lord, playing his solo piano like an orchestra, beating out “King Porter” in a bar. Brass bands in the streets, swinging by “In Gloryland.”

  Pearsall stayed up as late as he could, slept when he could, drunk on music.

  And then it was November.

  November, 1917.

  He was sitting in Tom Anderson’s when it happened.

  He had felt the change all day, without knowing what it was. There was a tension in the air, a waiting. Girls leaning out of windows, looking for something. A dog howling down by the river. A horn sobbing out the blues, somewhere, far away.

  He sat at his table. He felt the sweat in the palms of his hands.

  Don’t let this be the day. Please don’t let this be the day.

  But it was.

  A Patrol officer walked into Tom’s, looked around. He was big brass. He nailed something on the wall, something white.

  A notice.

  Pearsall didn’t have to read it. He knew what it said.

  It was in November, 1917, that Storyville had been shut down, killed off by the Navy. That had been the end, the time when the houses had to auction off their furniture and Countess Willie got only a buck and a quarter for her famous white piano, the time when the musicians had to pack up and leave, go to Chicago, go to Los Angeles, go up the river, go anywhere.

  Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans….

  And it was happening again. The Patrol was the Navy now, and they were putting the old padlock on the Land of Dreams.

  Pearsall wasn’t afraid, but he knew what was coming.

  “… the Company agrees to provide, supply, and maintain said Project … until such a time as said Project can no longer be of any use to the Purchaser….”

  They had known that he was dying. The doctors knew everything.

  Well, hell.

  It was nice and artistic the way they were doing it.

  He had no regrets.

  The road to the cemetery was lined with people.

  There was a lot of crying and wailing, but the people were listening, too. That was as it should be, for there had never been a band like this before.

  Louis was there, and Bix, and Bunk. Ory’s trombone, and Teagarden’s. Bechet and Dodds and Fazola on clarinets. Minor Hall, his drum muffled with a handkerchief.

  They played the plaintive “Flee As A Bird” all the way to the graveyard, where the bearers lowered the body into the ground. The preacher said the words.

  Minor Hall took the handkerchief out of his snare.

  He hit the march beat, the happy beat, and the band fell into line.

  That was the way it was in New Orleans: sadness that a man had died, then joy that he was marching with the saints.

  What did they play?

  They blew “Didn’t He Ramble.”

  First Louis had the lead, then Bix, then Bunk.

  Oh, didn’t he ramble!

  He rambled round the town

  Till the Butcher cut him down….

  They played it with all their hearts, played it for the last time, marching back to Storyville, back to the already-emptying land of dreams.

  And as they marched, as the clarinets soared, the Company might, or might not, have been surprised to hear Louis turn to Bix and say, “Old Pops went out in style.”

  Bix nodded. “It was good to play again,” he said, and lifted his cornet toward the river.

  SECOND NATURE

  The rain came down, hard. It was an earthlike rain, a tropical rain: fa
t and heavy drops that fell almost in solid sheets, splashing into the muddy ground and forming shallow puddle, and sudden, tiny streams. The rain was warm, if you monitored it from the ship and believed your instruments.

  Paul Edmondson stood outside in that rain, his hands on his hips, and he didn’t like it. His screen protected him but the water poured down the edges of his field and he could feel the damp chill. His boots were thick with mud.

  Behind him towered the ship, an immense metallic cylinder that thrust with featureless precision upward into the gloom. The ship was a gigantic thing, dwarfing the rain-soaked plain on which it stood. Even shielded as it was, with only bright yellow beams of floodlights stabbing from its glistening hide, it hummed with power. There was more available energy in that ship, Paul knew, than could be mustered by the entire planet that provided its temporary resting place.

  Ahead of him, caught between the lights and the gray backdrop of the rain, the scene was very different. It was as though, in the space of a few hundred yards, time itself had slipped and become unjointed. Familiar as it was to him from many seedings on many worlds, Paul had never gotten used to the stark contrast. On the one hand, the ship—a monument to the technological creativity that had carried men to the stars. And on the other—

  Animals?

  No, something more and something less …

  They stood there uncertainly, naked in the driving rain. There were fifty of them, half males and half females. They huddled together, wet and miserable. There was nothing about them that suggested intelligence or purpose. They did not speak, of course. They did not move. They simply stood there in the mud, facing the lights, waiting.

  Two legs, two arms, one head. Wetly gleaming skin that had never known the sun. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Hands that clenched, feet that balanced and supported. A generous forehead masked by plastered hair. Cold and naked, they all looked alike unless you studied them closely; even the sex differences didn’t amount to much without personality and individuality. They were all young—all precisely seventeen years, two months, and six days old. They were all equally unmarked by experience.

  Human?

  Well, maybe. Paul Edmondson tried to think of them that way. He was not always successful. They had human bodies, human brains. They could hunger and hurt. They could die. If you cut them open, they were human enough—bone for bone, organ for organ.

  The trouble was, they were empty.

  Blanks.

  Potentially human, certainly. Born of man and woman, or at least grown from their fertilized sex cells. But then different. Nurtured in fluid-filled tanks, developing in mechanical wombs. Meat in a vat. Exercised electronically, watched by instruments, fed, cleaned. Stimulated, after a fashion. Asleep much of the time. The rest of the time—call it non-sleep.

  The blanks were good at waiting. It was all they had ever known.

  Paul stared at them. Impatiently, he dug out his pipe and fired it up. He was not built for waiting. He turned and looked back at the ship.

  “Let’s get on with it,” he muttered.

  As if on cue, the ship became active. There was no increase in the subdued humming sound that pulsed from somewhere within it, but its shining metallic flanks blurred in several places. What had been smooth and unbroken was suddenly pocked by fuzzy spots that seemed to swirl and flow in the rain. Circles of color appeared, indistinct at first and then strong and firm. Green, red, yellow—living tubes of color telescoped from the sides of the ship and bonded themselves to the muddy ground.

  “It’s about time,” Paul said. Actually, the tubes were right on schedule.

  The tubes of color blurred at their bottom ends and men and equipment moved out into the rain. Paul waved to Tino Sandoval and splashed across to him.

  “Hey,” Tino said. “This is a swamp. How are they doing?”

  Paul clamped down on the stem of his pipe. “They love it. Soupy. Just like their little private fishbowls.”

  Tino shook his head. “There ought to be a better way. It’s enough of a shock for them to come out of the tanks. Standing around like this—”

  Paul shrugged, hiding his own concern. “They’ve got to get used to it, and the sooner the better. If they can’t handle a little rain they’re in for a short future.”

  “Yeah, and if we don’t start pumping the goodies into them we’re in trouble. Remember that Procyon foul-up. A couple of hours can make a big difference.”

  Paul smiled and knocked his pipe out against the palm of his hand. “I was waiting for you, friend. Let’s go.”

  They got to work, moving with the precision of a well-drilled team. The mechanics of the operation were not complex. All of the tough stuff had been done months ago, before the ship had left the earth. The memory banks were stored and ready. The patterned circuits had been checked and rechecked. The computers were primed. All that remained was hooking up the electrodes and doing a little force-feeding.

  Nothing to it.

  Just a matter of pouring a lifeway into full-grown infants.

  Just a small problem of creating a culture from scratch: language, symbols, dreams, values, experience, know-how.

  Just a minor miracle: turning non-functioning animals into human beings.

  The blanks were perfect subjects. They neither resisted nor tried to help. They stood where they were placed, unmoving, uncaring. Their eyes were empty. The rain pelted their naked bodies and it meant nothing to them.

  Not for the first time, Paul wished that all this could be done aboard the ship. But the experiments done half a century ago, when the seeding program had started, had been conclusive. The conditioning worked better when the blanks were in what was to be their natural environment. The difference was not great but it was significant.

  They needed all the breaks they could get.

  The technicians worked smoothly despite the mud and the rain. The blanks were connected, put to sleep. The bodies were dragged to grassy hillocks and arranged to eliminate the danger of drowning.

  The machines were turned on. The transfer began.

  Not just a culture. A new culture, designed for this world. A variant lifeway, part of the mosaic to enhance the potential of the human animal. A fresh beginning, one of many spread throughout the galaxy.

  It would take many long hours to complete the transfer, of course. After that would come the months of observation, the rechecks, the necessary corrections. There were always bugs, subtle problems, unanticipated conditions …

  The machines had not run five minutes when the alarm siren sounded from the ship. The screeching wail was sudden and overwhelming. The noise cut through the rain like a screaming knife.

  Paul jerked upright, his heart hammering. He felt an icy dread. He knew what to do, they had all been drilled in this countless times. That siren never went off unless the danger was immediate, urgent, and definite.

  Disconnect.

  Abandon project.

  Return to ship and prepare for liftoff.

  Hurry!

  There was no time to think, no opportunity for reflection. That would come later, if they were lucky. The blanks were doomed. They wouldn’t have a chance—

  Murderer.

  Paul pulled the switches, started his machine skimming back. He sprinted toward the green tube, his boots sticking in the mud.

  It was bedlam with the siren screaming and men cursing and equipment locking into place. Still, it was efficiently done. In minutes the tubes of color retracted into the ship. The floodlights went out.

  With a barely perceptible surge of controlled power, the great ship lifted on her anti-gravs. Higher she went through rainy skies, up beyond the clouds—

  A flash of light, a roar of thunder as the drive cut in.

  The ship was gone.

  On the planet’s surface where the ship had been, the deep night shrouded the grassy plain. The blanks slept in terrible isolation, the rain washing their naked bodies.

  They dreamed no dreams.

  Ther
e was only one possibility, and that made that part of it simple. Paul Edmondson knew what had happened; he had known when he had first been jolted by the siren.

  No ship ever abandoned its seed cargo except under precisely specified conditions. It was not a decision that could be lightly made, and the captain’s discretionary powers were severely limited. The choice had to be the ultimate one. Them or us. A shipload of nearly three hundred functioning human beings or fifty blanks. People or bodies.

  The blanks could not be reloaded on the ship. Once they had been removed from their tanks there was no reversing the process. They could not survive out of the tanks on the ship. There was no way to program them for that lifeway.

  And the ship had to be saved; that was basic. Too much was at stake to risk the ship. Too much engineering, too much hard-won knowledge, too many secrets. The balance was delicate.

  Man was strong, but he was not alone. The universe was vast, huge beyond comprehension, and it was not Man’s private playground. There were Others.

  Call them aliens, call them monsters, call them the stuff of nightmares. The names didn’t matter. They were lifeforms so different from men that there was no basis for communication. They were destroyers, their motives unknown and unknowable. They fought and killed and obliterated anything different from themselves. They were tough, powerful, and relentless. Their starships were the equals of any made on Earth.

  They were the Others. In a rational universe, perhaps they would not have existed. But they were there.

  If they caught a ship on the ground, unprotected by the defense systems that ringed the earth and her primary bases, that ship was finished. When the presence of the Others was detected, there was one command that overruled everything else: Get into space.

  There, maybe, you had a chance,

  Paul knew that the odds were no better than even on his own survival now. The ship might make it and it might not. He was faintly surprised to find that he felt no consuming terror. He was afraid, yes, but he had often known fear in space. The thing was somehow too impersonal to create horror; it was as remote and uncaring as the universe itself. And the two ships might maneuver for months before anything happened …