Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  “If you change your mind—”

  “I won’t.”

  She almost thought that Zander looked disappointed. But that was impossible, of course. Disappointment was an emotion. And emotion wasn’t his thing.

  Yet.

  25

  Simple, Ancient, True

  At last, she was alone.

  From the moment she’d returned from Zander’s planet, Violet had been surrounded. Shura insisted on performing a thorough physical exam before she could even get out of the chair, to guarantee there were no lingering effects from the Tether breach. Rez downloaded the numbers proving the updated rate of decay of New Earth’s orbit, and then began work on the coordinates for the new star. Kendall was ravenous to know Zander’s reaction to the Intercept. And Fusion: They wanted details and explanations. More, more, more.

  Violet felt a little bit like a buffet supper. They were elbowing each other out of the way to take what they wanted.

  Yes, the crisis was real, and yes, they would have to begin planning immediately for evacuation to a new planet.

  But there was something she needed to do before she could think about all that lay ahead. To accomplish this task, she had to find a certain book.

  And she had to be alone.

  * * *

  She located it right away.

  It was in the first drawer Violet checked in the spare room of her apartment. She knelt in front of the long row of small blue ovals in the wall and touched the first one. The drawer slid out, revealing the most important elements in her father’s life: His books.

  Ogden Crowley had maintained a vast library. Not the modern kind, with digital versions of every published work in history, but the old-fashioned, paper-and-ink-and-binding kind. When he died, the books became hers. She knew she ought to display them, arrange them in neat rows, organized by author and title and subject, but she hadn’t done that yet. She hadn’t found the time.

  No, that wasn’t the real reason. That was only an excuse.

  The real reason she hadn’t put the books on shelves yet was because the thought of doing it made her too sad. Her father’s death was still too fresh in her mind.

  And now her delay looked like a smart move. She would only be packing them up again now for transport to the new New Earth.

  The volume she was looking for was right on top. She’d expected that.

  The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. A beautiful book. Handsome red leather, raised gold lettering on the cover and spine.

  When Jonetta told her what Ogden Crowley had murmured to the Starbridge director in the final days of his life, it had stirred something in Violet’s memory. The words simple, ancient, true awakened something in the back in her mind, something tucked behind the swirl of her daily activities: her Senate duties, hanging out with her friends, all the things—some important, some trivial—that comprised her life. And after that, of course, they’d taken a definite back seat to her preparations for a voyage to another galaxy.

  Simple, ancient, true.

  The book smelled musty and old, but she didn’t mind. When she opened it, she had a general notion of which gilt-edged page she should turn to. She didn’t need to check the index.

  And there it was. A poem titled “Among the Rocks.” She read it to herself all the way through once, and then a second time; the words were like old friends. When she was a little girl, her father had read this poem aloud to her many, many times. This one, and others, too. That was their favorite thing to do together, especially on rainy nights. Ogden Crowley would settle in his big armchair with a book on his lap, as comfortable as it was possible for him to be with his wounded leg, and Violet would sit cross-legged on the floor next to him. He would read aloud to her in his low, rolling, sonorous tone. Sometimes, if the poem was too long, she fell asleep, but her father never got mad about that.

  The poem was about the fall season on Old Earth. She read the first stanza to herself for a third time:

  Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,

  This autumn morning! How he sets his bones

  To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet

  For the ripple to run over in its mirth;

  Listening the while, where on the heap of stones

  The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

  The three words her father had uttered to the director came in the second stanza:

  That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;

  Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows.

  If you loved only what were worth your love,

  Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you;

  Make the low nature better by your throes!

  Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!

  Violet pondered. What did it mean? Why had he chosen this poem? And how would it help her to find the console?

  Because now she was absolutely certain that that was the point of her father’s seemingly casual remark to the Starbridge director, the one with simple, ancient, true embedded in it. He had totally expected Violet to make inquiries as she tracked down his console. He hadn’t left it in plain sight, where anybody might find it; even though it was password-protected, the authorities had ways of breaking even the most rigorous security system. There was something in his console that he wanted her to discover—but only her. No one else.

  He had known very well that, in tracing his movements and statements in the last few days of his life as she sought the console, Violet would hear the three words, and they would strike a chord with her. She would recognize that the lines were from a Browning poem.

  And she would come here to check it out.

  Here, to this room, to this drawer, to this book.

  But what could it be? What was the clue that he wanted her to—

  She glanced up from the page toward the drawer in which she had found The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. And then she remembered.

  On a day shortly before her father died, he had asked if they could have tea at her apartment. As weak as he was, he wanted to share a final time with her—and not at Starbridge, he’d said, which was comfortable but was also sterile and soulless.

  So they had come here. To her apartment. She had made two cups of tea, one for her father, one for herself, and they’d sat at her kitchen table and had a wonderful conversation. It wasn’t heavy and sad—nothing about death or pain. It was light and loving. They’d talked about Violet’s mother, Lucretia Crowley, who had died when Violet was ten. Her father told Violet how proud Lucretia would have been of the young woman Violet had become.

  In her heart, Violet doubted that—she was a screwup, right?—but she hadn’t corrected her father.

  They talked about the Intercept, which had seemed like such a splendid idea in the beginning but had ended up being a very bad idea. In turning emotions into weapons, it became another way for the government to control the citizens.

  Her father, though, had had more to say about the Intercept. He told Violet that he’d begun to believe that the idea behind it was right, after all. Emotions contained an important power, a power all their own, a power that human beings had yet to even come close to appreciating. Someday, he said, they would understand emotions better. Emotions were part of the vast mysterious forces in the universe.

  They might even be the force.

  And that, Violet recalled as she knelt on the floor in front of the open drawer, was the seed of the idea she had passed along to Zander: Emotions were the lost link between the forces that ruled the quantum universe and the forces that controlled large things like galaxies.

  Still facing the drawer, something caught her eye. She smiled. Why hadn’t she noticed it when she first pulled out the book?

  Because I was so damned eager to read that poem.

  There, atop the next volume in the closely packed drawer, was her father’s console. He must have placed it there the day he’d come for tea. Maybe it was when she left
the kitchen to go to the bathroom or to take a call from a member of her Senate staff. Whatever. He had slipped it into the drawer and then put The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning on top of it, knowing she would follow the trail of words and end up here. Right here.

  * * *

  The override feature was keyed to Violet’s DNA. Other than her father, nobody else could open the console. When she touched the rising green jewel, it automatically unlocked.

  She listened for the soft click that would tell her that the message was ready. All she had to do was initiate playback.

  She hesitated. Did she really want to do this? What if her father had been hiding a terrible secret?

  Yeah. I want to do this. Because I have to know.

  Fleetingly, she wondered if this was how Shura felt when she pushed toward a breakthrough in her lab, one that might have cataclysmic consequences. Or Kendall in his lab. Or Rez in his. They had to discover the truth, even if the truth was hard to live with.

  Maybe, Violet thought, this is what courage really meant: not fighting great battles with terrifying weapons or going to a strange planet on a Consciousness Tether. It meant searching for the truth and, once you found it, dealing with it. Either kind of truth: a scientific one or an emotional one.

  She took a deep breath.

  She activated the playback function.

  Another jewel rose from the face of the console. It was a soft coral color, which surprised her; she’d assumed that her father’s last message would be embedded in a primary-color jewel. A bold red, say, or a deep blue, or a brassy yellow.

  But no. It was a pastel, the color of the delicate whorled interior of a seashell or of the last sunset of your life.

  She touched the jewel.

  * * *

  Ogden Crowley clears his throat. His breathing is a rhythmic rasp. The low, pleasing baritone of those long-ago rainy nights is long gone; old age has replaced it with a clotted, reluctant bramble of sound.

  He clears his throat a second time, and then he begins:

  My darling girl. If you are listening to this now, it means that I have died and you have found my console. I knew you would figure out where I hid it—you, and you alone. What I have to say is only for you.

  Of course, if you choose to share it, that is fine. I know you have good friends, and maybe you will need to tell them what you are about to find out. Once I reveal the truth, it no longer belongs to me. You may do with it what you choose.

  I know that New Earth’s orbit is decaying much faster than even our best scientific minds have predicted. Until my retirement, I controlled the data. Afterward, it was too late; they were using incomplete information. I kept the essential numbers—the correct numbers—from them so that they would not piece together the truth.

  New Earth does not work.

  My dream of creating a world that lives above the known world is a false dream. I was wrong. I should have listened to my opponents in the first place—the ones who advised that we should relocate to an entirely new planet.

  But I was too attached to Old Earth. I could not leave it behind. I wanted to keep it in sight, even as we built the new world on top of its bones.

  I have lacked the courage to admit my mistake.

  I discovered my fatal error several years ago, when a manuscript was found on Mars by one of our mineral trawlers. According to this document, written by a long-dead Mars citizen named Scaptur, the civilization on that planet was once much like ours. And their solution was the same as mine: construct a New Mars, high atop the old. A gleaming new world. Most of the citizens relocated there, with only a few remaining on the planet’s surface.

  First gradually, and then suddenly, the New Mars orbit failed.

  It crashed onto the surface of Old Mars, and both civilizations—New and Old—were destroyed.

  That will eventually happen to New Earth as well. I knew it, but I could not bring myself to divulge it. I am the founder of New Earth. The father of New Earth. People trust and respect me.

  Before my discovery of the Tablet of Scaptur, I put the Intercept in place to make New Earth perfect. To keep it safe and beautiful. When the Intercept did not work, I could not confess to yet another mistake. Two mistakes—two unforgivable errors in judgment—would destroy whatever authority I had left. My legacy would be in ruins. My life’s work exposed as a lie.

  I could not leave New Earth unprotected. I could not admit my mistake during my lifetime—but I could make amends in my own way. I began stockpiling the materials that can be used to transfer the population of New Earth to a new planet. Energy, specialized pods, technical apparatus—I have heaped them up in a secret location for the day they will be needed.

  I am dying. So I am recording this for you, Violet. By now, your friend Steven Reznik has surely discovered the decay in the orbit. And your other friends—Shura and Kendall and Tin Man—will help you find a new planet. The equipment I have assembled will help you get there.

  I have put the location coordinates for the supplies at the end of this message.

  You and your friends will save the world. I am certain of it. In fact, my remaining silent about New Earth’s sure doom is a perverse tribute to the abilities of you and Rez and Shura and Kendall and Tin Man. You are well able to solve this. I can die knowing that New Earth will survive—somewhere.

  I hope you can forgive me for my weaknesses, Violet. I am an old man, but I have a young soul—a soul too immature to rise above ego and petty arrogance.

  If the Intercept were still operational, and you and Rez were sitting in Protocol Hall, monitoring my Intercept feed, you would see a blend: deep regret and sadness, and also fear, because death is the great unknown. But the most powerful part of that blend, the one that rises above all the rest like a star on the near horizon, is love. Love for New Earth.

  Love for my little girl.

  My Violet.

  * * *

  The recording ended.

  She tapped the coral-colored jewel. It drifted down and then winked out.

  She shut off the console. She slipped it into a trouser pocket.

  Violet was filled with so many emotions that she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to sort them all out. There was anger—her father had withheld the truth from the very people he’d promised to take care of—but there were other feelings, too.

  Pity, for one thing. She pitied him for his vanity and his pride, his unwillingness to admit that he’d made a mistake. Well, two mistakes, if you included installing the Intercept.

  And there was also gratitude, because in the end, he had made preparations for the journey to a new world.

  But mostly there was love. She loved him. He was human—gloriously, ignominiously human, which meant he was both good and bad. It meant he was a thinker and a dreamer at the same time. He had ideas, and he had emotions, too. He was Zander—and he was Sonnet.

  Just like everybody.

  Violet stood up. Time to go. She needed to help her friends organize the mass evacuation from New Earth. And now she had something to contribute.

  26

  Homeward Bound

  DemoRobs were totally different from other kinds of robots. The other varieties—AstroRobs, BioRobs, TechRobs, ReadyRobs—were like siblings, sisters and brothers who had grown up in the same house. They all looked very similar, from the silo of flexible cylinders to the central casing wrapped around their silicon hearts.

  The DemoRob, short for Demolition Robot, was nothing like that.

  Violet stood in the magnificent entrance hall of the observatory. In front of her were four rows of gleaming, seething, can’t-wait-to-get-cracking DemoRobs.

  Prior to this moment, she had never seen one in person. Neither, she suspected, had her friends. They stood alongside her, equally intimidated.

  “Wow,” was all Violet could think of to say, as lame as that was.

  “Yeah,” Kendall said.

  “Yeah,” Shura echoed, rubbing the back of her neck. It was s
ore from staring up, up, up, at the DemoRobs, which were enormous—twenty times larger than a typical robot. The machines had had to disassemble themselves to make it through the doorway and then reconstitute in seconds.

  DemoRobs were rare, being expensive both to manufacture and maintain. And their programming made them nasty and dangerous. No Dumb-Ass Dave would ever have been allowed access to a DemoRob.

  A DemoRob, true to its name, was created to demolish. It was specifically engineered to smash, wallop, crush, shred, rip, wreck, and pulverize.

  And after it had done all those things, the suction/cleanup feature would scoop up the tons of detritus and suck it into a side compartment, whereupon it would be further ground up into ash.

  Thus a DemoRob not only killed. It also removed all evidence of the murder.

  They were a little scary to behold: the ten separate pincers on each one, five to a side, were adorned with razor-sharp blades that could revolve millions of times per second, generating a blur of pure destructiveness. There was no pity in the two slits designed to look like eyes.

  “Are you sure about this?” Kendall asked. He cast a dubious eye across the four rows of what were, essentially, killer robots.

  “Of course,” Rez replied.

  “There’s no other way?”

  Rez glared at him. “If you can think of an alternative, then be my guest.”

  “I just asked.”

  “Well, I’m not thrilled about it, either. I just don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

  “Guys. Come on,” Violet said. “We’re all exhausted. Let’s keep it together, okay?”

  It was late afternoon, and the light tumbled in from the curved glass ceiling. Etched on the glass were calligraphic quotations from the thinkers and visionaries whose work had led to the miracle of New Earth, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.

  There were excerpts from the writings of Newton and Galileo, and from Einstein and Heisenberg and Leavitt and Planck and Atwood, and from Sagan, of course, the observatory’s namesake, and there were lines from the six people who had been immortalized in the names of the cities of New Earth: Stephen Hawking, Michael Faraday, Dmitri Mendeleev, Madeleine L’Engle, Rosalind Franklin. When New Earth was being created, Ogden Crowley had insisted that public spaces be used to honor scientists and writers from long, long ago. Some people had argued for the inclusion of more recent scientists—Melinda Stratton and Penelope Hemlepp, for instance, the discoverers of the jumping virus—but Violet’s father said no.