Earthbound

by Joe Haldeman

She laughed. “No one is, technically. It’s a paradise of democratic anarchy. But I was elected Primus this year, ‘first among equals.’ I get to listen to everybody and suggest who’s wrong.”

  “Do you have any friends left?”

  “A few. Life became simpler here when the whole world decided to join us in anarchy. We just chased all the strangers off and blew down two bridges. People can get to us, but it’s not easy.”

  “That’s why there wasn’t anybody on the highway, the autoway?”

  “Right. Takes a plane, and who knows how to fly one without satellites? You guys surprised us.”

  “Glad you didn’t shoot us down.”

  “Two people asked for permission. By the time I could respond, you were gone.”

  “What would you have said?”

  “Bring me their heads and save the bodies for the stewpot.” She smiled. “It was pretty obvious where you’d be landing. There was a lookout party in the woods with the GEV, so I called them and had them go take a look.”

  “You’re pretty well-equipped for a bunch of Earthers.”

  “Well, some of us are practical. But it’s back to nature for everybody Wednesday, right?”

  “That’s what the Others say. Not like they’ve never lied.”

  “Wait, now . . . the Mars Girl? You’ve actually met the Others?”

  “Yes and no. They were behind glass, two-hundred-some degrees below zero. They talked to us through their intermediary, Spy, but it was like a pre-recorded message. Always is.”

  “On the cube they look like big lobsters.”

  “Kind of.” A lobster is a close cousin in comparison.

  “Must’ve been terrifying.”

  “We were scared.” But in a sense we weren’t, not in any familiar way. Helpless and in mortal danger, but it was so unreal that normal emotions were suspended, confused. I remembered smelling peanuts on Paul’s breath and wondering what the aliens would smell like, if we could smell them, but there was nothing else in the frosty air, just peanuts.

  How can you tell when you’re kissing an elephant? went the joke when I was a girl. You can smell the peanuts on his breath.

  “Do you have cube here, in case they send another message?” Elza said.

  She nodded. “Somebody’s watching all the time. Fucking depressing, twenty-four-hour news. But nothing’s new.”

  A young man walked over from the group at the door. “Two of them on their way, Roz.” We followed him back.

  Paul and Dustin were carrying laser rifles. When they were about twenty feet away, they set them on the ground, and warily continued.

  I stepped into the doorway, and Paul rushed to me. “You all right?”

  “Fine. Namir seems okay, just sedated.”

  “Police-issue tranquilizer dart,” Roz said from behind me, and held out her hand. “Oralee Roswell. They call me Roz.”

  He looked through the door at all the people, nodding, counting. “So I guess it’s your move, Roz. What do we do now?”

  She squinted up at the sun. “Too early for dinner. Come in for a drink?” The big gray-bearded guy, Rico, watched this exchange with a blank expression. He came along when we followed her, though.

  The dining hall was a few decades past its prime, fading peeling green paint on warped plywood walls. It reminded me of the way the cafeteria smelled when I was a little girl. Layers of old stale food. We went through the dining hall, though, to a screened-in porch with clean blue plastic furniture and a nice rich farm smell from the pastures that surrounded it.

  We made introductions on the way. It turned out that Dustin’s story was familiar to them; people at the Farm had been following our fortunes since we left the earth. The fact that his parents had left Fruit Farm as dissenting rebels had been forgotten. He was the Farm’s only famous alumnus.

  Two other elders joined us, pulling together two of the plastic tables. One, probably male, was wraithlike, pale, tall, and thin, with a wispy halo of white hair.

  “This building was new when we left,” Dustin said. “We kids helped paint the outside. It was dark red then, like a barn.”

  “I remember it being red,” Rico said thoughtfully. “They painted it white when I was about ten.”

  “Green after you left Earth,” the pale one said. “In the nineties sometime. Thanks, Analese.” A girl of about ten had brought in a tray of cups of steaming brown liquid with a mild aroma.

  “We can’t grow coffee or tea here, of course, so we get used to this stuff. Yerba Buena.”

  I tasted it. Maybe I wouldn’t get used to it. “You said you blew down two bridges what, yesterday?”

  “A few hours after the power went out. We had some early-morning customers we had to escort out, first.”

  “You just happened to have lots of high explosives lying around?” Dustin said, “And you knew how to use them?”

  “We’ve been ready for a long time, since before I was born. The elders called it Code Red. It goes back to Lazlo’s Rebellion, when a total breakdown outside seemed possible, probable.”

  “I was one of the bridge team,” Rico said. “Four of us trained by elders, where to set the charges and what to do. They’d been trained by their elders, and so on.”

  “Lucky the charges still worked.”

  “Yes. The alternative directions seemed more wishful thinking than sound engineering. But the antique explosives worked fine.”

  “It was pretty loud even here,” Roz said.

  Namir appeared at the door, walking unsteadily, a young woman supporting his elbow.

  “The sleeper wakes,” Paul said.

  “I walked right into a set-up,” he said. “As soon as you were out of sight, they popped me with a dart.”

  “Our good luck and your bad,” the woman said. “I tried to aim for your shoulder, but you moved too fast. Wouldn’t hurt so much.”

  He patted her on the back in mock affection. “My assailant, Miche Onadato. Glad you missed my eyes.”

  I touched him. “You’re feeling all right now?”

  He smiled at me. “Better than all right. What was in that shot you just gave me?”

  “Epinephrine. You’ll feel great until you don’t.”

  Roz brought over a chair for him. “So does your group have a plan?”

  Dustin spoke first. “I guess our plan was to see whether you had a plan.”

  Roz shook her head slowly. “It’s a farm. The calendar and the weather make our plans for us.”

  “We know a lot about agriculture,” I said, “if you need help maintaining starship hydroponics.”

  “You can grow a lot on twenty square meters, if you don’t have anything else to do,” Dustin said.

  “When I was young, I did a lot of dirt farming on the kibbutz,” Namir said. “I could probably still control a shovel.”

  Rico was studying him. “I think we’d rather have you on patrol, for the time being. You have military experience?”

  “Of a kind.” Before he surrendered his commission, he was a colonel in the Mossad.

  “Unlike us, he’s been shot at,” Dustin said. “Elza and I were intelligence officers, too, for the US. But I never shot at anything any more dangerous than a target.”

  “Me neither,” Elza said, “until the other day.”

  “I heard about that on the news,” Roz said. “You lost one of your number.”

  “Stray round.” My voice caught. “She was just standing in the kitchen.”

  Roz shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “Probably be a lot of shooting,” Rico said, “before everybody runs out of ammo. Not many of us gonna be dying of old age.”

  Roz gave him a tired look. “Maybe here.”

  “You’ve been watching the news,” Elza said. “Is it all bad?”

  Rico said yes, but Roz shook her head no. “There are other places like this, where they’re self-sufficient and well defended. Eugene, Oregon, is the closest.”

  “You’re in contact with them?” I asked.


  “Just by cell. Till Wednesday. I talked to their town manager, Benjie what’s-his-name?”

  “Sweeney,” Rico supplied.

  “Benjamin Sweeney.”

  “We decided to have a meeting, a physical meeting, the first of every month. Starting a month from now, June first.”

  “What were you going to meet about?” Paul asked.

  She shrugged. “First off, a damage appraisal. See what we have and how we might help each other.”

  “They have something you don’t?”

  “Books, mainly. Non-electronic, printed paper books. Tens of thousands of them.”

  “Why on Earth?” Elza said. “Is it a museum?”

  “I guess it will be, and a library. Right now it’s a huge antique bookstore. There was a cube special about it, a couple of weeks ago. When it was just a curiosity.”

  “Probably one in every big city,” Rico said. “Burned to the ground by now. So Eugene’s is special.”

  I remembered Dad taking us to a huge paper bookstore in St. Petersburg, when I was little. Rare even then, I did a report on it for school. The owner had died of a mosquito bite in Africa, I suppose looking for books.

  “Thought we’d talk to them about trading,” Roz said. “We have a lot of books, a couple of hundred. Not many of them useful, though.”

  “Long walk?” I asked.

  “A week or so. Depending on how straight a route we take.”

  “You could fly,” Paul said. “I could get you there in twenty minutes.”

  She cocked her head at him. “How big an operation would that be?”

  “If the plane hasn’t been damaged, just have to turn it around. Five or six people. The autoway’s straight for more than a quarter mile there; I can take off easily. Eugene probably has an airport.”

  “Lot of trouble to go look at some books,” Rico said.

  “Might as well use the plane while we can,” Paul said. “Gonna be scrap metal in a few days.”

  “You think it’s safe?” the pale elder said.

  “No. But what is, nowadays?” He grinned at him. “As a plane, sure, it’s safe enough. It got us to Russia and back, by way of Maryland. It can make it to Oregon. If nobody shoots it down, and the Martian power keeps working.”

  Her brow furrowed. “If the power went off, could you glide to a landing?”

  “Maybe. There are emergency mechanical links to the control surfaces. But you have to find someplace flat, not too far away.” He looked around at the mountains surrounding us. “It would drop really fast.”

  “So you would do it?” Rico said.

  “Sure.” He said that a little too fast. What, me afraid?

  “We might ought to use it for something more useful than books,” the other elder said.

  “I could fly anywhere you want,” Paul said.

  “Not much we need,” the pale one said. “Lead for bullets, primers, powder . . . all for reloads. You know of a place we could walk in and buy some. Or trade?”

  “Not on this planet,” Roz said. “Same with other survival stuff. Even if you could find it, what would you use for money?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t fly anywhere,” Rico said. “Don’t remind people that we’re up here. Self-sufficient and comfortable.”

  “For the time being,” the pale one said.

  A little girl walked onto the porch, looking apprehensive. She silently raised her hand.

  “What is it, Bits?” Roz said tiredly.

  “Someone wants to talk to this lady.” She pointed at me. “The Mars lady?”

  “Weren’t you told not to answer the phone?”

  “He isn’t on the phone, Primus. He’s on the cube.”

  “What does he look like?” I said.

  “I think he’s a zombie. He don’t look real.”

  “Doesn’t,” Roz said. She took the child by the hand, and we followed them through the cafeteria smells into a dark room with high windows and a central cube. In it, the image of Spy.

  “Kid here says you look like a zombie,” Paul said.

  “How perceptive. I’m not exactly alive.”

  “You’re nearby,” I said. No lag in his reply.

  “Close enough. Cable. Did you have a nice flight?”

  “It was eventful. As you must know.”

  He nodded. “You went to Russia and came back to the US, threatened to murder the president, and escaped to this bucolic paradise. Do you want to know whether the president’s security people are after you?”

  “Would you tell us the truth?” Paul said.

  “Ask Epimenides. They are not after you. Things are somewhat confused back at Camp David, not to mention Washington, but if you went back, they might give you a medal.”

  “What about the president?” I said.

  “Under house arrest, in a manner of speaking. The soldiers are negotiating via cell with their erstwhile enemies. It’s all very chummy, democracy in action.”

  “Are we still going to lose power on Wednesday?” Roz said.

  “As far as I know. Would you rather it be sooner?”

  “Later would be nice,” I said. “Like not lose it at all. If there’s a lesson, we’ve learned it.”

  “ ‘Don’t fuck with the aliens’? I suppose you have learned that. But I don’t think it’s actually a lesson. Someone wants to talk with you.”

  His image faded and was replaced with one I didn’t at first recognize; he looked sort of like the pale elder, but with more hair, streaming in thick white Medusa locks. Then he spoke, without moving his lips: Moonboy, gaunt.

  “You’re looking well,” he said.

  While I was doing a sort of goldfish imitation, Namir found his voice: “Moonboy. You were frozen solid. You can’t be alive.”

  The Others had chosen Moonboy to represent the human race in their deep-freeze zoo, even though he was not mentally or emotionally competent by our standards.

  “I am more alive than any of you are, in terms of intellectual growth. I synapse faster, and my memory is not limited by organic considerations. I don’t lose my temper anymore.”

  He still had a scar on his forehead from where Dustin had whacked him with a pool cue after Moonboy had broken his wife’s nose.

  “How are you any different from Spy? You’re hooked up to the Others like him, and exist at their convenience.”

  “Our shared history makes me different. Your group once had a person who loved me.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Namir said. “The fact that Meryl is dead.”

  His eyes blinked slowly. I don’t think he used them for seeing. “How could I feel things, Namir? As you pointed out, I’m long dead myself.”

  Not as dead as Meryl, I thought. My palms still stung with blisters from the shovel we used for her grave.

  “I’m not just a mouthpiece for the Others,” he said. “I can communicate with you in real time. When I’m speaking for them, I’ll hold my hand up, like this.”

  He raised his right hand and left it up. “You present an interesting problem, the five of you whom we have met physically.”

  “How nice that we’re interesting,” Namir said.

  “Along with what I, Moonboy, remember, there is a context”—he shook his head, frowning—“a universe of discourse? Between humans and the Others. That is not simply predator and prey.”

  “You can eat us?” Namir said. “That clears up a few things.”

  “I know that is just humor. I caution you against using it. You don’t want me to misunderstand you.”

  Moonboy put his hand back down. “I can say whatever I want to you, but of course they overhear. Do you have any questions?”

  “An obvious one,” Paul said. “When the Others captured and froze you, we were all almost twenty-five light-years away from here. When they sent us back, it was as if no time had elapsed at all, but twenty-five years had passed on Earth.”

  Moonboy nodded. “Twice twenty-five, there and back.”

  “
Was the transfer instantaneous to you? Or have you been thinking about things for a quarter of a century?”

  “There is no plain answer. It did just take an instant, in the way you’re measuring time. But I thought a lot while that was going on, in a way that I perceive time. I’m sorry that’s not clear. Time itself is not what you think it is.”

  Actually, that was about as clear as he had been when he was last alive. But he had started to lose it after a couple of years aboard ship. Then he broke Elza’s nose while they were having sex, and things went downhill fast from there.

  In a way, that seemed like a couple of weeks ago. But I guess time is not what I think it is. “In what sense are the Others predators?” I asked. “How are we prey?”

  “You offer the new,” he said. “Any new organism does. But social creatures, who can communicate about their surroundings, add another dimension.”

  “So now the Others can leave us alone,” Namir said, “since we’re not new anymore.”

  “How you react to what’s happening is always new. There is plenty left to happen.”

  “And after they’ve learned enough?” I said.

  “When you had biology in school, you dissected a cat.” I remembered talking with him about that, and nodded. “After you had learned enough about the cat, what did you do with it?”

  “It wasn’t a cat anymore.”

  “I suppose not.” He faded away.

  “That was informative,” Namir said.

  Spy appeared again. “This may not be the last time we want to talk to you. Please stay near a cube receiver, or carry a small one. It makes things simpler.”

  “After the power goes out?” Namir’s fists were clenched.

  “We can make do.” He flickered and disappeared.

  “I wonder if that means they’ll eventually just go,” Paul said. “Once they learn enough.”

  “Leaving us in pieces on the dissecting table,” Namir said.

  We waited in the cube room for a few minutes, in case Spy had another afterthought. Then Paul and Namir went with two of the guys on GEVs, to clean up the jet, assuming it hadn’t already been plundered. Paul said he’d scavenge the portable cube from the plane, to carry in case Spy wanted to make a call.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us worked on domestic arrangements. There was a cabin with only one couple in it, and they moved out with more grace than I would’ve displayed. We managed to fit in three pallets and two beds, each large enough for two people who didn’t mind touching. There was a rickety table with four chairs on the porch. The nearest toilet was a hundred meters away, but the room had a sink and three one-gallon jugs for carrying water. Rico found us an assortment of sheets, towels, and pillows.