by Stuart Gibbs
The base immediately erupted into chaos. Everyone spoke at once, insisting that they couldn’t believe anyone would have done such a thing—and then quickly professing their innocence.
I understood exactly why they felt the need to do this. Every single one of them had probably wished Lars Sjoberg dead at some point. Lots of them had even said it out loud in public. (I know that I had. Plenty of times.) The man had been absolutely horrible to every one of us. He had insulted, berated, tormented, and threatened us. In the most loathsome and vile family I had ever encountered, he was the most loathsome and vile by far.
So it wasn’t too hard to imagine that, faced with the prospect of being cooped up with the king of all jerkwads for another few months, someone had decided to simply bump him off instead.
And everyone else seemed to be thinking the exact same thing.
So Nina moved quickly to restore order. Once the cyanide in Lars’s system was counteracted, she left Dad and Chang to keep an eye on him and exited the medical bay to speak to all of us.
“Although Lars has been poisoned by cyanide,” she announced, “that does not mean someone actively poisoned him.”
“Yeah, right,” Roddy muttered beside me.
“There are many ways in which Lars might have been exposed to cyanide other than a murder attempt,” Nina continued.
“Like what?” Dr. Balnikov asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez agreed. “Are there any environmental hazards that we need to be aware of at the base?”
A murmur of concern rippled through the crowd.
“There is no cause for alarm,” Nina insisted. “As you know, NASA is constantly monitoring our habitat, and they haven’t seen anything to be concerned about.”
“Today, at least,” grumbled Dr. Alvarez.
His wife, Dr. Kim, gave him an angry elbow in the ribs. “Shenzu!” she hissed, then glanced toward Roddy, Kira, and me, as though worried we’d overheard him.
It occurred to me that I had gotten a lot of worried glances that morning.
“We all have a very busy day tomorrow,” Nina informed us. “Your residences are safe to return to, so please go home and try to get some sleep. Perpetuating rumors like this is childish and counterproductive.” Then she spun around and returned to the medical bay, confident that we would all dutifully obey her after she had just insulted our behavior.
Of course, no one obeyed her. Everyone acted as if they were obeying her, making a show of heading back to their residences, but instead of going inside and returning to bed, they all simply lowered their voices so Nina couldn’t hear them from the medical bay. It was kind of like being at camp, after the counselors inform a cabin full of amped-up kids that it’s bedtime, but no one wants to sleep.
Even Violet was wide awake, given the early hour. “Why would someone poison Lars Sjoberg?” she asked Mom.
“No one poisoned Lars,” Mom told her. “Didn’t you hear Nina?”
“Yes, but why would someone do it? To kill him?”
“It’s very late,” Mom said, looking uncomfortable. “You ought to get back to bed.”
“Would you be happy if Lars died?” Violet asked. “I know Dad would.”
“Violet!” Mom gasped, glancing around to see if anyone had overheard. Of course, plenty of people had. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Because Dad said he wanted to kill Lars the other day. After Lars threatened Dash.”
“Let’s go,” Mom said, taking Violet by the hand. “Back to bed right now.”
“But I’m not sleepy!” Violet protested. “No one else is going to bed! I still don’t even know what cyanide is!”
Mom started to rush Violet up the stairs, then paused as she passed me. A look of regret washed over her face as something occurred to her. “Dash, I know this isn’t what we’d hoped for on your birthday. . . .”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. In truth, with all the commotion, I’d briefly forgotten about my birthday. Then I lowered my voice so no one else would hear. “Thanks for letting me go outside. It was amazing.”
“I’m sorry it got interrupted like this.”
“I think Chang wanted to kill Lars too,” Violet said. “I heard him say it a bunch of times.”
Mom sighed, exasperated, then dragged Violet toward our room. In her haste—or maybe because she felt bad for me—she didn’t insist that I return to bed myself.
Not that I would have anyhow. Because Zan Perfonic had just appeared to me.
Even though Zan communicated with me via thought, she still projected an image of herself into my mind to make our communication seem more like a normal conversation. Furthermore, she projected herself as a human being, rather than what she actually looked like. The human form she had chosen was that of an extremely beautiful woman, with olive skin and blazing blue eyes.
I had no idea what Zan really looked like. She hadn’t shared that with me yet, despite my begging her to. But I was quite certain that she didn’t look anything like a human being.
Zan tried to make her arrivals seem as normal as possible to me. She wouldn’t simply pop into existence all of a sudden, as that tended to startle me. (We had learned this through experience. The last time Zan had appeared too quickly, I had yelped in surprise in front of the entire mess hall, and then I’d had to blame my strange behavior on accidentally biting my tongue.) Now she made it seem as though she had walked around the corner from the gym and waved at me through the crowd.
“Hey,” Kira said to me, unaware that Zan was there. “I almost forgot: Happy birthday.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“That was almost a heck of a present someone got you: Lars Sjoberg dead.”
Across the room, Zan frowned at this. Even though she was projecting herself as being several yards away, she was aware of everything I was thinking, so now she had just learned about Lars.
“I didn’t want Lars dead,” I said quickly.
“Well, everyone else sure did.” Kira lowered her voice. “Who do you think did it? It could’ve been almost anyone.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can you excuse me? I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Sure. Have a nice birthday poop. I’ll catch you after.”
I quickly slipped through the crowd, trying to avoid a conversation with anyone else. I actually headed for the bathroom, not because I really had to go—or wanted to spend any more time there than I had to—but because there weren’t many options for privacy at MBA. The base wasn’t big to begin with, and now my fellow Moonies were all milling about in most of the public areas, discussing Lars’s potential murder. Dr. Balnikov and Dr. Janke were in the rec room. Dr. Marquez and Dr. Iwanyi had wandered into the mess hall to get coffee. Kira’s father, Dr. Howard, was standing by himself next to the greenhouse, staring at the plants. He might have been thinking about Lars Sjoberg, but it was equally possible that he’d forgotten all about Lars and was now thinking of some new way to produce more tomatoes in low gravity.
So I went to the bathroom, and then I entered one of the three stalls, locked the door, and sat on the space toilet. I kept my pants up, though. I didn’t need to have a conversation with a higher life form while my pants were around my ankles.
Zan appeared in the stall a second later, simply materializing out of thin air this time. There was no point in her making a show of clambering under the locked stall door. “It’s your birthday today,” she said. “The end of your thirteenth earth orbit around the sun?”
“Yes.” Even though there was no one else in the bathroom, I didn’t say this out loud. I only thought the words, wanting to keep the conversation silent. It wasn’t easy—speaking out loud was a tough habit to break—but I’d been getting much better at it over the past few weeks.
“I wasn’t planning on appearing to you this early today,” Zan told me. “But then I sensed you were already awake, and I wanted to wish you a happy anniversary of your emergence from your mother’s
uterus.”
“Um,” I said. “We usually just say ‘happy birthday.’ I don’t suppose you had anything exciting planned for me? Like maybe showing me what you really look like?”
“Actually, I had wanted to do something like that.”
“Really?” I was so excited, I almost said the word out loud. I had been dying to learn more about Zan for months, but she had been very tight-lipped with information, preferring to grill me about humanity instead.
“Yes. I thought you deserved to know some more things about my species.” Zan sighed. “But now I’m afraid I have to ask what happened with Lars. Did someone really try to kill him?”
I frowned, upset for two reasons:
First, learning some things about Zan’s world really would have been a great present, but now Lars’s poisoning had put that on hold.
More importantly, another potential murder at MBA made humans look pretty bad.
There was a great deal at stake in my contact with Zan. Quite likely, the fate of earth hung in the balance.
A few weeks before, Zan had told me that humanity was in grave danger of destroying itself. In a sense this wasn’t a massive surprise, because anyone paying attention could see that we were destroying pretty much every life form on earth: hunting rhinos, elephants, and gorillas to extinction; burning down forests; cranking up the heat on the planet by several degrees; and killing one another by the millions in dozens of wars, genocides, and other conflicts over the last decade. But still, it was unsettling to hear that the end could come soon, rather than at some vague point in the future. Zan had likened humans to an asteroid bearing down on our own planet, capable of wiping out all forms of life.
But there was hope. Zan’s species—and several others in the galaxy—knew of a way to solve many of our problems.
Unfortunately, most of them didn’t want to share it with us.
Their solution had the potential to be dangerous if misused, and they had perceived (correctly, I had to admit) that humans had a disturbing track record of taking new technology and trying to kill people with it: gunpowder, planes, nuclear bombs, and so on. If we tried to weaponize their technology, it could have far-reaching effects across the galaxy that would doom those other civilizations as well. So they had written us off as a lost cause.
Only Zan hadn’t. She saw potential in us that most others didn’t. While our tendency to kill one another was certainly a bad thing, there was good in us as well. We had invented things no other civilization had: Music. Art. Poetry. Love. Some other members of her species were in agreement, but not many. Zan wasn’t supposed to be in contact with me at all—and she was taking a great risk by doing it.
Passing on the technology would be a much greater risk, though. Zan didn’t even have the authority to do it; she’d be breaking the law, which would put her in danger. So she was still trying to figure out what to do.
Which was where I came in.
Essentially, humanity was on trial, and I was the defense lawyer in an uphill battle. In the two months that I had known Zan, there had already been one murder at MBA, as well as many other acts of greed and duplicity. To make matters worse, this was all happening in a group of only twenty-five people, some of whom were among the smartest humans alive.
We also had the Sjobergs, prime examples of the worst that humans could be.
So I already had my work cut out for me. And now I had another potential murder—or attempted murder—to explain.
“I don’t know if someone tried to kill Lars or not,” I told Zan. “Nina says it was probably an accident of some sort.”
“But you don’t believe Nina.” It was a statement, not a question. Zan could read my thoughts and feelings well enough to know the truth.
“I’m not sure what to believe. I don’t really know much about this. It all only happened just now.”
“Nina has lied to you before. Plenty of times.”
“You’ve lied to me too,” I pointed out.
“I was trying to protect you.”
“So is Nina, I think. She’s trying to protect all of us.”
“How?”
“By keeping us from getting worried.”
“But there could be a killer among you again. Don’t you think all of you should be worried about that?”
“If there is a killer, yes. But we don’t know that for sure yet. This might just have been an accident. Maybe Lars got poisoning from the food.”
“If your food is poisoned, that sounds like something you should be worried about too.”
“Um . . . yes,” I admitted. “The thing is, Nina’s trying to do the right thing. We all are—”
“Except for whoever tried to kill Lars.”
“If someone actually tried to kill him at all. Which there’s no proof of. While plenty of us have been doing very nice things for the Sjobergs. I mean, my Dad and Chang just helped save Lars’s life, and he’s always been awful to them. And Mom and Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez were taking care of Sonja, too.”
“They are,” Zan agreed, then considered this for a while. Eventually, she asked, “Do humans like killing each other?”
“What?” I asked, aghast. “Why would you even think that?”
“You seem to do it so often.”
“Not really,” I said, defensively.
“There are only twenty-five people at this base—and there has already been one murder and one poisoning here. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?”
“Well, like I said, that poisoning might have just been an accident.”
“And I understand that on earth there are thousands of murders every day.”
“That sounds a bit high. . . .”
“Well, you have people dying in wars. There are many of those taking place on earth right now, yes?”
I frowned. Somehow the conversation had grown even worse. “Yes.”
“And there have been hundreds of wars throughout your history. Thousands, maybe. Why would you do this so often if it wasn’t enjoyable?”
“It’s . . . um . . . well, it’s complicated. But no one likes killing people. I swear.”
“A great many of your movies feature people killing one another. And those are made for your enjoyment, yes?”
My frown grew larger. The only way Zan even knew about those movies was because I had shown them to her. “Yes.”
“Millions of people die in Star Wars alone. Garth Schmader blows up an entire planet.”
“Darth Vader,” I corrected. “And he’s the bad guy.”
“But the good people kill too. And they’re supposed to be heroes.”
“I thought you liked Star Wars,” I said, trying to change the subject again. “And all the other movies I showed you too. I thought you said they were one of the great things about humanity. Along with all our other forms of entertainment.”
“The innovation that you employ to amuse one another is certainly unusual. I find it all very fascinating. It’s amazing that you can create such wonderful stories and yet still enjoy killing each other.”
“We don’t enjoy killing each other!”
“Then why do you do it so often? Why do you spend so many billions of dollars on weapons? Why are your armies so big?”
“Now hold on,” I said. “Are you telling me that, on your entire planet, members of your species never kill each other?”
“Yes.”
“Really? You settle all conflicts without wars?”
“Of course.”
I did my best to hide my surprise. Perhaps it was a bad reflection on me as a human, but I had a hard time imagining how that was even possible. “And this applies to all species that you know of across the galaxy?”
“The intelligent ones.”
“So . . . there are some others who kill?”
“Oh yes. But we do our best to avoid them.”
“Look,” I said. “I can’t really explain why people kill each other. I don’t get it myself. But I know we don’t enjoy it. No one wants to d
o it.”
“Then why do so many of your video games involve the simulation of it? Your friend Roddy spends several hours a day playing those.”
“Roddy isn’t my friend. He’s just someone I’m stuck here with.”
“But he’s not an anomaly, is he? You have said yourself that those games are extremely popular.”
I sighed, exasperated. “Zan, it’s my birthday. And I can think of a million ways I’d rather spend it besides having this conversation while seated on the space toilet.”
Zan blinked, startled. “I’m sorry. I’m simply trying to understand your species. . . .”
“Well, there are things about us I just can’t explain. I’m only a kid. I don’t know the reason humans do half the things we do. I don’t have any idea why we kill each other. Or pick our noses. Or say ‘cheese’ when someone takes a picture of us—”
“You name a dairy product during the act of photographic recording?”
“Yes! And I don’t know why! It makes no sense. But we do it anyhow. That’s just the way things are sometimes.”
Zan nodded, then lowered her eyes, looking a bit ashamed. “You have made a good point, Dashiell. There are things about my species that I couldn’t explain either. Sometimes I ask too much of you. I forget how young you are, how quick your revolutions are around your sun.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
Zan returned her attention to me. “Surely you must realize that the time it takes a planet to orbit its star varies greatly throughout the galaxy? In your own solar system, it can take as little as eighty-eight days for the planet you call Mercury, or one hundred sixty-five years for Neptune.”
“Sure, I knew that,” I said, then admitted, “But it never occurred to me that that would make time different for aliens on other planets.”
“Very different.” Zan smiled. “My intention in coming here today wasn’t to interrogate you. It was to share things about myself with you. So perhaps this is a very good place to start. The way you view time, from seconds all the way up to millennia, is very different from the way we view it.”