by Greg Bear
“Marty asked this morning…”
“I thought I’d made that clear.”
“I just need to be told again.”
“Yes. We’re staying together. I’m taking you both with me, wherever I go.”
“Good,” she said.
Francine finally slept, but Arthur did not. He was haunted by his “memory” — Lehrman’s, actually — of the expression on the President’s face.
Do you believe in God?
I believe in punishment.
PERSPECTIVE
The Los Angeles Electronic Times, unsigned editorial in the Opinion Track, January 10, 1997:
The news of the Death Valley anomaly’s destruction has spread around the world like a shock wave. At first, we have exulted — a blow struck against the enemy. But the bullets still rumble through the Earth’s interior. The anomaly in Australia is still intact. Rumors of a Russian anomaly are rampant. The Earth is still besieged. The opinion of a well-known science fiction writer, expressed on a late night talk show, has rapidly become public dogma; that these “bullets” are superdense capsules of neutron matter and antimatter, destined to meet at the Earth’s center and destroy us all .We have no way of knowing the truth of this. It seems clear, however, that there is little we can do, and however irrationally, our hope fades fast.
50
January 15
Walt Samshow took his sandwich out on the starboard wing of the bridge of the Glomar Discoverer and stared down at the bow wave and the sullen blue-black ocean as he ate. They had left Pearl Harbor the morning of the day before, zigzagging across the ocean in search of atmospheric oxygen concentrations above the Molokai Fracture.
Occasionally an insignificant crumb of white bread would drift down from his meal into wet oblivion. He imagined some wandering zooplankton would soon know where it was, and partake of it. Nothing was ever truly lost, if you only had access to all the eyes and senses in the universe, as he sometimes imagined God did. God himself had no eyes; He made eyes and put living things in charge of them, that He might witness the majesty of creation from an objective viewpoint.
David Sand came up the stairs and leaned on the railing beside Samshow, eyes red from lack of sleep. “We’re twelve hours from the fracture,” he said. “Captain’s turned in and Chao’s going to stand deck watch from here on.”
Samshow nodded and chewed.
“Not much enthusiasm, is there?” Sand asked.
“We’re working, at least,” Samshow said after swallowing.
“Fanning in the radio room says the Navy has three ships out here, just cruising back and forth…” He made two doubled-back sweeps with his hand. “Back and forth. Looking.”
“Has the House voted for impeachment yet?” Sam-show asked, straightening, legs expertly compensating for the gentle sway. He crumpled his sandwich wrapper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, behind pens and pencils.
“Not that I know of,” Sand said.
“I sometimes think we deserve to die, we’re all so goddamned stupid.” Samshow’s tone was unperturbed, mild. He might have been making an observation about a seabird.
Sand smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. “Voice of experience,” was all he managed to say.
“Yeah. I’ve kept up with the news and I’ve read books and I’ve worked with all sorts of people for sixty-odd years, and I’ve seen one kind of stupid, and another. We all bump into each other every day of our lives, by guess and by golly, and we render our opinions whether we know anything or not, and if anybody catches us out we lie…Ah, shit on it.” He shook his head. “I’m just feeling uncommonly sour today.”
“Right.” Sand brushed his sun-dried hair from his eyes.
“They’ve got us, you know that? We’re down and we’re weak and there’s not a goddamn thing we can do now except go out and look…” — he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips — “and say, ‘yep, by golly, there it is. We’re bleeding to death.’ They knew exactly what to do. They used their decoys, and we fell for them. It’s like they know stupidity from generations back, thousands of years back. Maybe they’ve found stupid hayseed worlds all across the galaxy. So now they have us confused and on our backs kicking and they’ve got the knife at our throats, like slaughtering a goddamned pig.” He gripped the railing and rocked on his heels gently. “I have never in my life felt so useless.”
Sand cocked his head to one side. “It still seems theoretical to me,” he said. “I can’t believe anything’s really happening.”
“It’s been raining for two days in Montana, and they still can’t put out the fires,” Samshow said. “Now there’s a grass fire in central Asia that’s burned half a million acres. They can’t control it, needless to say. And the fire in Tokyo. We’re not only stupid, all our crazy folks are going to burn us out before the world goes kablooey. All our sins hang around our necks.”
Fanning, barely twenty, a graduate student from the University of California at Berkeley, came onto the bridge and stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders in excitement. “I’ve just figured it out. Some of the Navy’s coded messages,” he said. “They’re not working real hard to hide anything. They have a deep submersible somewhere out there.” He removed a hand from one pocket and swept the horizon. “I think it’s one of their biggies, a nuclear. With treads. They say it’s crawling along the bottom.”
“Anything else?” Sand asked facetiously. “Or is it a secret?”
Fanning shrugged. “Maybe we’re going to do something,” he said. “Maybe we’re going to try again. Knock out something important, not just a rock. Up the President, man,” he said, and lifted an expressive finger.
January 30
Edward stood in the parking lot of the Little America Restaurant and Motel, motor home idling nearby, and scanned the smoky northern horizon. The fire had been burning for five days now and was completely out of control. The orange and brown cloud stretched to the limits of east and west, turning the sun an apocalyptic flame red. Tendrils of gray smoke had passed over the highway and motel, dropping ghostly flakes of fine white ash. From what he had heard on the radio, there was no way he could go any farther north; two hundred thousand acres of Montana were ablaze, and yesterday the flames had stretched hungrily into Canada.
Seated at the RV’s dining table, he charted a southwesterly route on an auto club map with a yellow marker, then climbed into the driver’s seat and strapped himself in.
The cold northern air was delicious, even thickened by the smell of burning timber. He had never known air so invigorating.
Edward pulled out of the parking lot and headed west.
He hoped Yosemite would still be there when he arrived.
PERSPECTIVE
Sky and Telescope On-line, February 4, 1997: Today, Venus is at superior conjunction, behind the sun and out of sight. Today is also the projected date of the impact of a huge chunk of ice, allegedly from Europa. What this will do to Venus is a fascinating question. The impact will cause enormous seismic disruption, perhaps even deep-mantle cracking and a rearrangement of the planet’s internal structure. Venus has virtually no water; with the trillions of tons of water provided by the ice ball, and the renewed geologic activity, the planet could, in a few tens of thousands of years, become a garden of Eden…
51
February 19
“About a third of the kids have been taken out of school,” Francine said, putting the phone down. She had just phoned to tell the attendance office that Marty would be vacationing with them. Arthur carried a box of camping gear and — for no particular reason — the Astroscan through the living room to the station wagon in the garage.
“Not surprising,” he said.
“Jim and Hilary called to say Gauge is doing fine.”
“Why can’t we take Gauge with us?” Marty called from the garage.
“We talked about that last night,” Arthur said.
“He could sit on my lap,” Marty offered, squatting beside th
e station wagon and sorting toys.
“Not for long,” Arthur predicted. “He’s got kids to play with, good people to look after him.”
“Yeah. But I don’t have him.”
There was nothing Arthur could say to that.
“I called the auto club,” Francine said, “and asked what traffic was like between here and Seattle, and down the coast. They say it’s really light. That’s surprising. You’d think everybody would be off playing hooky, off to Disneyland or the parks.”
“Lucky for us,” Arthur said from the garage. He rearranged the crammed boxes in the back of the wagon. Marty sat on the concrete, continuing to pick halfheartedly through his toys.
“This is hard,” he said.
“You think you have problems, fellah,” Arthur said. “What about my books?”
“Are we just going to lock up?” Francine asked, standing in the door from the garage to the house. She carried a box filled with disks and papers- — the notes she had made for her book.
“Just like we’re going on vacation,” Arthur said. “So we’re atypical.”
“It is strange, isn’t it, that everybody’s staying home, now of all times?” She crammed the box into a spare corner of the station wagon.
“How many people really understand what’s happening?” he asked.
“That’s a point.”
“The kids at school understand,” Marty said. “They know the world’s going to end.”
“Maybe,” Arthur said. Again, trying to reassure them hurt him. The world is going to end. You know it, and they know it.
“Maybe everybody wants to be together,” Francine said, returning to the kitchen. She brought out a box of canned and dried food. “They want to be someplace familiar.”
“We don’t need that, do we?” Marty asked, shoving aside a pile of unwanted metal and plastic robots and spacecraft.
“All we need is each other,” Arthur agreed.
In the office, he reached into the back of the closet’s upper shelf and took out the wooden box containing the spiders. It felt peculiarly light. He opened the box. It was empty. For a moment, he stood with the box in his hand, and for some reason he could not understand he smiled. They had more work to do. He glanced at his watch. Wednesday. Ten a.m.
Time to be on the road.
“All packed?” he asked.
Marty surveyed the pile of rejected toys and clutched a single White Owl cigar box filled with the chosen. The cigar box had come down from Arthur’s father, who had had it from his father. It was tattered and reinforced with tape and represented continuity. Marty treasured the box in and of itself.
“Ready,” the boy said, climbing into the back seat. “Are we going to sleep in a lot of motels?”
“You got it,” Arthur said.
“Can I buy some toys where we go?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And some pretty rocks? If I find them, I mean.”
“Nothing over a ton,” Francine said.
“The boulder that broke the Buick’s back,” Arthur said, going into the house for a final check.
Good-bye, bedroom, good-bye, office, good-bye, kitchen. Refrigerator still full of food. Good-bye, knotty-pine paneling, elevated porch, backyard, and wild plum tree. Good-bye, smooth and singing river. He passed Gauge’s wicker bed in the service porch and felt a lump in his throat.
“Good-bye, books,” he whispered, looking at the shelves in the living room. He locked the front door, but did not turn the dead bolt.
52
February 24
Trevor Hicks, his work finished in Washington, D.C., had taken a train to Boston, single suitcase and computer in hand. At the station, he had been met by a middle-aged, brown-haired scattered-looking woman dressed in a black wool skirt and old flower-print blouse. She had taken him to her home in Quincy in a battered Toyota sedan.
There he had rested for two days, watched owlishly by the woman’s five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. The woman had been husbandless for three years, and the old wood-frame house was in severe disrepair — leaky pipes, decrepit wallboard, broken stairs. The children seemed surprised that he did not share her bedroom, which led him to believe she had not lacked for male company. None of this mattered much to Hicks, who had never been judgmental even before his possession. He spent much of his time sitting on the broken-down living room couch, thinking or interacting with the network, helping a dozen other people in the Northeast compile lists of people to be contacted, and/or prepared for removal from the Earth.
All of his life, Hicks had worked with high-powered personalities — bright, knowledgeable, contentious, and often cantankerous men and women. Most of the people he now communicated with in the network fit this description. To his surprise, whatever maintained and governed the network did not discourage high-powered behavior among the network’s members. There was considerable debate, even acrimony, as first the categories of contactees and “saved” were decided, then specific communities, and finally specific individuals.
The Bosses (or Overlords or Secret Masters, all titles applied at one time or another to the anonymous organizers) had apparently decided that humans, with broad supervision, knew best how to choose and plan for their own rescue. Hicks sometimes had Ms doubts.
Over a dinner of macaroni and cheese served on a bare oak table, as the children listened, Hicks asked his hostess about her role in the rescue.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “They got to me about six weeks ago. I took in three people about a week after that, and they stayed here for a few days and then left. Some more people after that, and now you. Maybe I’m a den mother.”
The daughter giggled.
They could have chosen more hospitable lodgings. But he kept that thought to himself.
“What about you?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
“Making up a list,” he said.
“Who’s going, who’s not?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Actually, we’re concentrating more on a list of others to recruit. There’s a lot of work left to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it.”
“I don’t think my kids and I are going,” the woman said. She stared at the table, her face slack, then slowly lifted her eyebrows and stood. “Jenny,” she said, “let’s clear the table.”
“Where ain’t we going, Mama?” the boy asked.
“Hush up, Jason,” the daughter ordered.
“Mama?” Jason persisted.
“Nowhere, and you pay attention to your sister, what she says.”
They had to start somewhere, Hicks thought. She was one of the first. They didn’t know where to begin. The suspicion of her inadequacy — if that was the right word — of her inability to qualify for the migration, did not prevent her from seeing the good they were doing, or the necessity of their work.
If we have any free will at all now.
That question was still unanswerable. Hicks preferred to think they did have free will, which implied that this woman demonstrated a truly admirable human quality: selfless courage.
Two days later, she drove him to the airport, and he boarded an airliner for San Francisco. Only on board the aircraft did he realize that he had heard the names of the woman’s children, but not her own.
High above the Earth, over the deck of obscuring clouds, Hicks napped and typed notes into his computer and realized he was not, for the moment, on call. The network had released him for these few hours and he was not privy to the ordered flow of voices and information. He had time to think, and to ask questions. How did the spiders get through airport security? That seemed easy enough. They had departed his luggage in the scanners, crawled through the mechanisms, and reentered the luggage beyond the sensors’ range. Or they had means of altering their X-ray shadows. Human sensory apparatus had failed completely from the beginning; if the bogeys could land on Earth without being detected, what was so amazing about a spider passing through airport security?
But the pride was largely masked by a sadness. The book dealt with a future. What future was there? Certainly not the one he had envisaged — a future of humans and extraterrestrials interacting on a vast mission of adventure and discovery. In some respects, that now seemed pitifully naive.
Life on Earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization…
And yet…
Somebody out there was thinking altruistically.
Or perhaps not.
Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.
He had written that once in an unpublished article on third-world development. The developed nations could serve their interests best by fostering the growth and development of less privileged, weaker nations…
And perhaps that was what was happening here.
But many experts on strategy had read his article and criticized it severely, citing many historical examples to prove him wrong. “Whose interests does the Soviet Union serve?” one reader had asked him. The Soviet Union, he had acknowledged, was stronger than ever — apparently — but faced enormous problems coordinating the nations and peoples it had absorbed, problems that others thought might prove fatal in the long run. “But not yet — and how many nations last for more than centuries?” the critic had responded.