by Joe Haldeman
We rested, waiting for the scavengers to return. I took a pallet on the floor, tired but not sleepy, glad to have a pillow.
Why had the Others contacted us? Just to make sure we knew they were watching? We would have been surprised if they weren’t. I went over the short exchange with Moonboy in my mind.
They were using us to collect new experiences. Had they ever told us that before? I wished Snowbird was still with us. Or one of the yellow family, ideally. They had more direct contact with the Others, though I wasn’t sure they understood them better.
We should call Snowbird, at Novisibirsk, and fill her in on everything that had happened. Wait until Namir comes back, to handle the Russian phone system.
Other than the stuff about collecting “the new,” what had we learned? Don’t joke with them; that was very useful. Moonboy claimed to experience time differently from us, but that’s probably true of all dead people.
Speaking directly for, or as, the Others, what had he said? With his hand up. That there is a “universe of discourse” connecting us and them. Things that we share. As predator and prey? Then he put his hand down, after warning Namir about joking. Did they say anything else through him?
Of course, there’s no reason to think Moonboy was telling the truth or, even if he was, it was for the purpose of helping us. Even before he died, it was hard to figure out what was going on in that unbalanced head.
I fell asleep and dreamed a memory of him on ad Astra, before he’d snapped. He was composing at the keyboard, which he’d always done silently, with earphones. In the dream he was playing out loud, the same four-note sequence over and over, a look of terrible Beethovenian concentration on his unlined face. The notes never varied in volume or phrasing. Someone once said that was a functional definition of insanity: doing the same thing time and again, always expecting a different outcome.
Dinner was a madhouse of cheerful disorganization. There was a big iron kettle of vegetable stew on an outdoor fire, and a smaller pot of deer-meat chili, peppery enough to make my eyes water. Plates of cornbread and biscuits.
Almost all of the eighty-nine people ate at the same time, mostly out on the porch or spilled onto the weedy lawn behind it. People drank yerba maté or a sugary drink with some citrus flavor. Everyone except the smallest children served themselves.
Eating with lots of people still made me nervous, after years on the cramped starship. But this rambunctious clan was easier than the formal dinners when we first returned, everybody staring at us and speculating.
Here, we were the invaders from outer space, and these folks rarely saw anyone outside their extended family. When the children stared, I just stared back.
I wondered about my own children—not the fifty-four-year-old twins I talked to through the Martian time-lag, just before we landed on Earth—but the youngsters who had grown up hardly knowing their mother. They’d been three and a half—not quite two ares—when I left on ad Astra. Their generation was all raised by professional parenters, so it wasn’t child desertion, no matter what it had felt like at the time to me. I watched these women here, scolding and playing with and fussing over their offspring, and felt an emptiness that couldn’t be there for Elza and Alba. No hole to fill.
But I wasn’t even a biological mother, just a gene donor who had occasionally played with the results. How much greater the lack would be for the woman who carried a person inside her for nine months, had it pulled from her body and then watched it, an actual piece of her own flesh, acquire a separate personality and go out into the world. That would leave a hole.
We would never talk again. Never even breathe the same air, feel the same gravity.
They could read all about Paul and me, and presumably had. Every clinical detail of our stressed hothouse lives aboard the starship was available for inspection. Maybe because anyone could read it, they would leave it alone.
At least I wouldn’t be entertaining observers with the interesting sexual geometries Elza and Meryl had experienced, assuming the public record was also a pubic record. But neither of them had children to be embarrassed by Mother’s example.
The scavengers came back during dinner with the happy news that the plane seemed not to have been touched; it was still locked up unharmed. They brought the rest of the weapons and powder ammunition. (The elder named “Wham-O” was in charge of recycling ammunition, but he had run out of primers, a little metal thing that’s pressed into the rear of the cartridge. Without that, the bullet won’t go anywhere, so primers were at the top of some theoretical wish list. Along with U-235 and the philosopher’s stone.)
Paul had the portable cube in a bright orange Sea Rescue knapsack. They also emptied out the jet’s liquor cabinet, mostly full bottles of whisky, rum, gin, and vodka. Some had obviously sampled a bit on the way home, but had managed not to wreck the floaters.
There was a raucous vote as to whether the devil’s brew ought to be saved, consumed on the spot, or destroyed. Some form of consensus wisdom prevailed, and they measured out one ounce apiece for each adult, and preserved an ounce for each child. The ones in their teens objected, but were somewhat mollified by the attraction of specialness: on their eighteenth birthdays, they would get something no one else could have.
I chose an ounce of rum, but gave it to Paul. Not that I didn’t sort of want it. But it wouldn’t relax me, and it did him.
Dustin had told us about a telescope that Wham-O maintained, an old thing they’d picked up at auction when Dustin was little. He had fond memories of looking through it at the stars and moon and planets. After dinner, we took candles out under the starry sky to the big shed where the machine was kept, on the other side of the cornfield.
The roof of the shed rolled off, squeaking into a rail frame, and there was the old machine, a long brass tube about a foot wide glittering in the candlelight. It was mounted on a heavy black cast-iron thing but was balanced exquisitely; you could move it around with a fingertip. We blew out all the candles, to preserve night vision.
Wham-O used a big brass key to wind a spring-driven clock mechanism that ticked and moved the tube so it would slowly track the stars.
He used a small telescope mounted on the side of the big one to point it. First we looked at Uranus, which he warned would not be too impressive, and that was an understatement. It was a little bluish green ball, shimmering in the dark, along with two faint stars he said were its brightest moons. Neptune wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours, but there wasn’t much to see there anyhow. Years ago, you could’ve seen its largest satellite, Triton, but the Others blew it up back in 2079. Warming up for the main act.
(Wham-O seemed personally offended that the Others had blown up Earth’s Moon. That deprived him of the telescope’s most impressive target.)
We looked at a couple of pairs of galaxies, faint, faraway ovals, and a brilliant double star, Gamma something. Then he pointed it to Mars.
I had to blink away tears. It wasn’t at all like the familiar sight of its globe from orbit—this fuzzy ball was too orange and indistinct. But it was clear enough, the white polar cap and the dark “continent” of Syrtis Major, and the broad Hellas desert, under which the Martians were living. Lying in wait, a trap, though neither they nor we had had any reason to suspect that.
I went back to stare at it some more after the others had looked. Probably the last time I would see my home planet.
I allowed myself to hope that we still had children and grandchildren there; that the Others had let them keep the technology they needed to live and breathe. They had not been humane with us, but not sadistic either, in spite of what the popular press claimed.
More mysterious than mean. If that made any difference to the outcome.
We looked at some more faint fuzzballs, distant galaxies less impressive than we’d seen earlier, and some wisps of interstellar cloud. It wasn’t boring, exactly, but the sky seemed full of bright stars that would be more interesting, and I wanted to see Mars again. I asked him abo
ut that, and he chuckled.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I want you all to be part of an experiment. I didn’t want you to look at anything bright for a few minutes.
“You know how to find Polaris?”
Paul had showed us that; I let Elza answer. Just draw a line from the two stars, the “pointers,” on the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl.
“Look there and tell me what you see.” Not much. Polaris was noticeably blue, but not very bright. The other stars in the Little Dipper were even dimmer, and hardly looked like a dipper at all.
Dustin noticed it first. “It’s darker.”
“That’s right,” Wham-O said. “Not a lot of stars around there. But what else?”
“No moonglow,” he said. “There’s . . . there’s not as much lunar debris in that direction?”
“Not much at all. If you look in that direction with the telescope, the sky is noticeably blacker. It’s been that way for a couple of days.
“Now look up there.” I could just see him pointing. “Up by Gemini and Taurus, the Pleiades.”
“It’s a lot brighter up there,” I said.
“Brighter than it used to be?”
“I’m certain of it,” he said.
“So the dust is moving away from the celestial pole,” Paul said, “toward the equator?”
“It looks that way to me.”
“So we’re going to wind up with a ring, like Saturn?” Dustin said.
“I don’t know that much about astronomy. I just know how to use the telescope.”
“Paul?” I said. He had a fresh Ph. D. in astrophysics.
“I didn’t study the solar system much. But my instinct says it would take a lot longer. Millions of years, at least.
“The Earth might have had rings when it was younger; might have had them and lost them several times. They weren’t gravitationally stable, not with the Sun and Moon pulling at them.”
“Saturn has moons with its ring,” Dustin said.
“But they’re not large compared to Saturn itself. The Moon was a quarter as big as the Earth.”
“So now that it’s not there,” Wham-O said, “maybe the Earth can have a ring?”
“Worth keeping an eye on.”
“So we could leave, right?” There was a spark of excitement in his voice. “Speaking as a space pilot . . . if all that crap was in a ring, you could just avoid it, couldn’t you?”
“I guess in theory you could just power in or out. Aim your spaceship somewhere and go there. But in fact, you can’t not be in Earth orbit. That orbit defines a plane that goes through the center of the Earth and would cut through the ring in two places.”
“Can’t you just, like, get on the North Pole and shoot straight up?”
“Sure, if you could get to the North Pole with a hell of a lot of fuel. Trade your horses and cows for some good sled dogs.”
“I’ll take it up with Roz.”
Paul was lost in thought for a minute. “You could do it, you know. Spaceports are near the equator for economy; use the planet’s rotation to add to launch speed. But if you had to launch from a pole, you could.”
“You’d want electricity, though.”
He shrugged. “Thought experiment. Big chemical fireworks, like Jules Verne. Besides, the power might come back.”
“Once the Others are through playing with us,” I said, which was the way a lot of conversations ended.
We lit a couple of the candles and walked back to the main house, quiet now with the children asleep. The adults were sitting around talking, drinking wine in the candlelight, rustic and romantic.
With a few unsubtle hints, Paul and I were allowed a bit of privacy in the cabin before the others came to bed.
I hadn’t had time to think about how much I missed that part of him, being alone with him. He felt that, too. We joke about men’s sexuality as if it were just stimulus and response and hydraulics. But Paul has always been gentle and sweet with me, maybe too gentle.
Not for the first time, I felt a little jealous of Elza, with her two men. Not so much Dustin—I guess I already have a philosopher. Namir was the big unknown, capable of who knows what. Strong, cabled arms; deep, troubled eyes.
11
The next morning, over breakfast of eggs and French-toast cornbread, Roz made a proposition. “First, I’ve asked around, and everybody’s in favor of asking you to join us.” The two elders with her nodded in unison, like white-plumed birds.
“Rico must’ve taken some arm-twisting,” I said.
“Not once he saw the riot gun. With the riot gun, he had to take you, Alba, and with you everybody else.”
“Nice to be useful,” she said.
“Speaking of useful . . . while the plane still flies, you have plans for it?”
“There are pluses and minuses for every possibility,” Paul said. “I’d like to reconnoiter a big city, like LA, but we’d be vulnerable to ground fire. And I wouldn’t want to leave it parked at an airport.”
“We were talking about using it for resupply,” Namir said. “Is there anything you have in abundance that you could trade in exchange for something you lack?”
“Most of the things we lack are luxuries, or rarities. Luxuries, forget it, but there are sophisticated medical supplies and equipment we would like to have on hand. If somebody wants to trade them for cider or jerky.”
“Maybe in a few months,” Namir said.
“We do have that strange offer,” she said, “for books. Printed paper books.”
“Far enough to fly?” Paul said.
“Eugene, Oregon. About 180 miles. I called them as part of this call-your-neighbor thing?”
“A long hike.”
“I talked to them again last night, and they got all excited about your being so close.
“There’s a funny guy there who has a big store called Lanny’s Lending Library. Thousands, tens of thousands of paper books. He lends them out or sells them. They’re suddenly worth a lot.”
“Priceless,” I said. How many books would just disappear once the cloud shut down?
“Lanny really wants to talk to you guys, about the Others and all. For an afternoon, with him, we can have all the books we can carry out. The seven of you and three of us.”
“Couple of hundred books,” Namir said. “Is it worth tying up the plane? When we could go raid a hospital or something?”
“The hospitals are probably all empty by now,” I said. “The ones that aren’t under armed guard.”
“Besides,” Alba said, “an old-fashioned medical book is going to be a lot more valuable than some diagnostic machine that has to be plugged in.”
Paul stood up. “Let’s just go do it. Before the plane’s a useless relic.” I was a little concerned about being up in the sky when it became a relic. But it wasn’t going to get any safer.
We took two floaters out to the plane. The elders stayed on the ground, in favor of a couple of men to carry lots of books, Rico and a big young fellow called Stack. Paul had them sit in the front and rear of the plane, for balance.
We turned the plane easily with the floaters, which we left there with the elders. The plane rolled a short way and took off into a slight breeze and rose smoothly through the mountain pass.
Paul followed the autoway system east and north, through a few wisps of cloud. The Earthers were transfixed by the scenery. Only Rico had flown before, and that had been as a boy.
We descended after about a half hour, Paul following directions first from the plane’s robot-voiced navigator and then from someone on the cell. He banked down toward a long green rectangle, a recreation area in the exurbs near Lanny’s library.
Coming in from the south, we passed just over our welcoming committee: three military trucks next to a flagpole that had the American flag flying upside-down. Paul landed and then turned around and taxied up to them.
There were two men and a woman in military fatigues, looking pretty dangerous. I saw Paul slip a pistol under hi
s tunic when he got up and slapped the button that dropped the staircase. Namir carried a laser rifle.
The soldiers, if that’s what they were, welcomed us and helped us into the back of one of the trucks, which had two unpadded benches and a lot of dust.
There were spectators, maybe a hundred people on the other side of the fence. They were quiet and didn’t shoot at us.
The truck had a canvas top and thick metal walls, the steel back door open for ventilation. The woman who was our driver said that Lanny’s was only about ten minutes away. We took off between the two other trucks, which had gun turrets.
It was a bumpy fast ride, seven minutes on a straight road that turned twisty at the end.
Lanny’s was one of dozens of identical blocky buildings which looked futuristic to me, shimmering and windowless. Roz dismissed them as “turn-of-the-century.” Our destination had a big whitewashed wooden sign, with LLL stenciled on it in rainbow colors. A man who had to be Lanny was standing in the doorway, broad smile in a dark face framed with wild frizzy white hair. He half bowed and swept an arm to the open door. “Our visitors from outer space, welcome.”
The inside was a kaleidoscopic junk pile of old-fashioned printed books, seemingly stacked in no particular order, the floor actually just a series of cleared walkways among the stacks. Books were shelved floor to ceiling on the walls, serviced by tall ladders on rollers, which looked precarious. Those books had a semblance of order, similarly bound sets stacked together.
The study at Camp David had the lawyer’s obligatory wall-to-wall books, dusted but not opened from one generation to the next. Sometimes you saw the same thing in academic offices, back in my time, symbols of the continuity of scholarship rather than actual tools for learning.
