Earth

by Ben Bova

  Nodding, Kell answered, “Indeed he does. He’s an incredibly wealthy man. Half the metals and minerals that the rock rats pry out of the Asteroid Belt are part of his wealth.”

  “Wow.”

  Para spoke up. “I can give you his exact monetary worth as of this moment, if you like.”

  Kell shook his head. “No, thank you. It’s quite considerable, I’m sure.”

  “Indeed,” said Para.

  Kell turned away from the spacecraft and started toward the elevator that would bring them back to Earth’s surface.

  “He’s awfully generous,” Tray said as he followed Kell. “This spacecraft must cost hundreds of millions.”

  “Many hundreds,” Kell acknowledged. “Probably more like a billion or two.”

  Tray shook his head, goggling at the idea of such wealth.

  “And he’s—”

  Kell laid a hand on Tray’s shoulder, silencing him. With a grim smile he said softly, “Wait ’til we’re back in my office.”

  Tray blinked, puzzled, but went silent.

  They reached the elevator doors, which slid open as they approached. The cab resembled a comfortable sitting room, with cushioned benches lining its walls. A man-tall refrigerator stood in one corner, with a small service bar next to it.

  Para went straight to the service bar. “Can I offer you some refreshment?” it asked.

  Tray tried not to frown. Para had become his constant companion over the past months, yet its inherent instinct was to act as a servant, automatically.

  “Sit down here with us, Para,” he said, patting the bench. The android obeyed instantly.

  Kell smiled. “You find it just as hard as I do to accept the android’s inbuilt reflexes,” he said.

  “Para’s an equal, not a servant,” Tray said tightly.

  Kell sighed. “We’ve had robotic helpers for more than a millennium, yet the average human still thinks of them as servants.”

  “I don’t,” Tray snapped.

  “You’re not average,” Kell said, tapping Tray’s thigh with a forefinger.

  Eventually they raided the refrigerator for a brief snack as the elevator plunged back toward Earth. Orbital towers studded the planet’s equator, reaching upward from the ground (or ocean-anchored bases) to the altitude of geosynchronous orbit, nearly 40,000 kilometers high, and beyond. They reduced the cost of going into space enormously.

  Once on the ground, the three of them boarded a shuttle flight that took them back to Denver and the capital of the Interplanetary Council.

  As they entered Kell’s office, Tray asked the question he’d been thinking about since they’d been in orbit.

  “Why did you stop me from asking about President Balsam’s generosity, when we were looking at his ship?”

  Kell stood by his desk and shrugged. “I’m just a little superstitious, I suppose.”

  “Superstitious?”

  “No, not really that,” Kell replied. “It’s just an ancient piece of advice that’s wedged itself in my mind.”

  “Advice?” Tray asked.

  “About Balsam’s generosity.”

  “What about it?”

  Kell hesitated, then quoted, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

  DARK AGE

  Tray stared at Jordan Kell, who sank down in his dark desk chair and leaned back tiredly. The chair seemed to enfold him protectively.

  “You don’t trust President Balsam?” Tray asked.

  “Not completely, no,” Kell replied. With a smile that had a bitter tinge, he added, “In politics, it’s difficult to give your complete trust to anyone.”

  Tray thought that over for a silent moment. Then he asked, “You don’t completely trust me, then?”

  Kell’s face eased into an almost fatherly smile. “Let me put it this way, Trayvon: I trust you more than Harold Balsam.”

  And who do I trust? Tray asked himself silently. Who can I trust?

  The answer came to him immediately: Para, of course. Tray trusted the android implicitly. But humans? He looked at Jordan Kell, sitting behind his desk. Yes, I think I can trust Mr. Kell, Tray told himself. I’m sure I can. Almost.

  As if he understood the turmoil in Tray’s mind, Kell gestured toward the room’s single, sweeping window.

  “Look out at this city we’ve built, Trayvon. Look out at our global civilization … our interplanetary civilization. What do you see?”

  Frowning with puzzlement, Tray replied, “As you say, we’ve built an interplanetary civilization. We’ve reached out to more than two dozen other star systems. We’ve helped other civilizations to survive the Death Wave.”

  “A magnificent achievement,” said Kell.

  “It certainly is.”

  “And where do we go from here?”

  Tray saw an intensity in Kell’s eyes, an eagerness to hear the answer he wanted to hear.

  “I … I don’t really know,” he replied. “I suppose that’s for the Council to decide.”

  Kell sank farther into his enfolding chair. “The Council. Led by President Harold Balsam.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Half the Council thinks we’ve done enough for our neighboring brethren. They think we should leave them alone and enjoy our survival of the Death Wave. We’ve labored long enough, they claim; now we should relax and enjoy the fruits of our victory.”

  Tray started to reply, but realized that Kell wasn’t finished.

  “The other half of the Council,” Kell went on, “wants us to go out to the civilizations we’ve found and help them, develop their resources, teach them our technology, lead them to our level of refinement. They’re already talking about an interstellar civilization, led by Earth.”

  “Is that possible?”

  Grimly, Kell answered, “It’s been done before, in our own history. The Roman Empire. The Chinese Empire. The European conquest of the Aztecs and Incas and other Native American civilizations. The Japanese co-prosperity sphere. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Pan-Asian federation.”

  “That’s all ancient history,” Tray objected.

  “And history doesn’t repeat itself, eh?” Kell smiled bitterly. “But as some American observer once noted, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

  “Rhymes?”

  “We’re in danger of entering a new Dark Age, Trayvon. That’s what I fear. The human race is on the edge of settling into an interstellar empire, a huge re-run of the Roman and other empires of the past, where one group of intelligent creatures—us—lords it over groups of lesser developed intelligences—the peoples of the star systems we helped to survive the Death Wave.”

  Tray blinked with confusion. “An empire?”

  “Oh, they won’t call it that. They’ll give it some peaceful, cheerful name. But it will be an empire nonetheless, with humankind at the top and all the races we’ve discovered serving us.”

  “That…” Tray hesitated, trying to pull his thoughts together. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “It’s not right,” Kell said, his voice suddenly iron-hard. “It’s a system that leads inevitably to revolt, to war and destruction. That’s what Balsam and his followers are heading for, and that’s what we must prevent them from achieving.”

  “An interstellar empire.”

  “A recipe for disaster.”

  MASTERS AND SLAVES

  “Prevent them?” Tray asked. “How?”

  Kell shrugged his slim shoulders. “If I knew I’d tell you. The only real tool we have is history: the record of our own past. The only technique I can see is jawboning: trying to convince Balsam and his allies through patient, logical argument.”

  Tray sank into one of the capacious chairs in front of Kell’s desk. “Jawboning.”

  “In private conversations with Balsam and his allies. On the floor of the Council meetings. Speeches, meetings … as Jesus said, wherever two or three are gathered.”

  “Will that work?”

  “I wonder,” sa
id Kell. “Balsam can offer the Council a rosy picture of enormous gains for the people of Earth. The wealth of an interstellar empire could be ours—for a while.”

  “That sounds impressive.”

  “Of course it does. But the costs! The human race would become the overlords of all the intelligent civilizations we’ve encountered—for a while. Inevitably, though, those other peoples would gain strength, gain knowledge. Inevitably they would demand their fair share of the empire’s wealth. Inevitably conflict would arise. Perhaps even war.”

  “An interstellar war?”

  “That’s what I fear. Sooner or later.”

  Tray felt his brows knitting in perplexity. “How soon?”

  Again Kell’s slim shoulders lifted in a frustrated shrug. “I’m not sure. A hundred years? A thousand?”

  Tray’s breath whistled from between his lips. “You’re worried about the possibility of an interstellar war a thousand years in the future?”

  “Maybe more. More likely less.”

  “It’s hard to get anyone worked up over something so far in the future. And it might not even happen at all.”

  Kell shook his head. “It will happen. I’ve gone down every pathway our future analysts have forecast. They all end up in conflict. War. Destruction.”

  “But … if it’s not going to happen for a thousand years, it’ll be just about impossible to get anyone concerned about it now. People just don’t think in such long time spans.”

  “Tell me about that!” Kell burst out. “I haven’t been able to get anyone to listen to me—starting with Balsam. He’s all aglow with visions of an interstellar empire, with himself at its head.”

  Tray sank back in the luxurious chair. “I can see why you’re worried. It’s like someone trying to warn the Roman emperor Tiberius that the Huns will sweep across Europe in a few hundred years.”

  “Worse,” said Kell gloomily. “Balsam and his followers think that the human race will always keep a technological superiority over the other races scattered among the stars. Yet our own technology isn’t developing much at all.”

  His expression hardening, Kell went on, “We were handed the technology for interstellar flight by the Predecessors. Our own scientific studies have dwindled to repetitions of work done centuries ago. There are actually so-called scientific leaders who claim we’ve reached a peak of development and there’s not much more we can learn about the universe.”

  Tray saw anguish on Kell’s face.

  Gesturing toward the room’s sweeping window, the older man said with some heat, “Look at our city out there! Most of the buildings are copies of older monuments. Our so-called leaders are looking more toward the past than the future.

  “We’re not making progress anymore! Professors are telling their students that we’ve reached a plateau of knowledge where the best we can hope for is to add a few decimal places here and there to what we already know! It’s a recipe for disaster.”

  “But that’s all far in the future, isn’t it?”

  “The future starts now!” Kell insisted. “What we do now, today, shapes what we can accomplish tomorrow.”

  Tray tensed in his plushly comfortable chair, his mind spinning.

  “What we’re heading for,” Kell went on, “is an interstellar empire where the human race will have to work very hard to prevent those other races from developing their own civilizations. Masters and slaves, that’s what they’re heading for.”

  “Masters and slaves,” Tray repeated, in a whisper.

  Wearily, Kell uttered, “It’s a recipe for disaster. A formula that leads to ultimate collapse.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  Kell smiled bitterly. “Trayvon, my lad, if I knew I would happily tell you.”

  LORIS DE MAYNE

  Utterly depressed, Tray left Kell’s office—accompanied by Para, of course. On the street the android summoned an automated cab that took them back toward Tray’s quarters at the medical center.

  Once they were settled on the cab’s comfortable rear seats, Para announced, “You have received a message from Loris De Mayne.”

  Tray felt his eyebrows shoot up. “From Loris De Mayne? Really?”

  Flatly, emotionlessly, Para replied, “Really.”

  “What did she say?”

  Para focused on the cab’s front seat and Loris De Mayne’s beautiful image took shape there—several sizes smaller than life, but stunning nonetheless.

  “Trayvon, this is Loris. I wonder if you could come to my apartment this evening? I’m having a few friends here for dinner, and they’d all love to meet you.”

  Tray blinked at the young woman’s image. They’d love to meet me, he thought. Meet the sole survivor of the Saviour disaster, he realized. I’m an object of curiosity because I’m still alive and all the others are all dead.

  Yet even while his mind ran those bitter thoughts past his consciousness, he heard his mouth saying, “Yes, thank you! I’d love to meet your friends!”

  It was a lie and he knew it.

  * * *

  “Trayvon! Welcome!” With a sweeping gesture of her slim arm, Loris De Mayne ushered Tray into her apartment. She was wearing a sleek floor-length gown of dazzling white, decked with glittering asteroidal jewels at her throat, wrists, and earlobes; her lovely arms bare, the slim skirt slit to her hip, her midnight hair tumbling to her bare shoulders and sparkling with metallic chips.

  “I’m delighted you could come,” she said as she led Tray through her foyer and into a sizable living room already crowded with glittering young women also in jewels and long evening dresses and equally young men in dark, formal suits. Tray felt instantly shabby, out of place, in his comfortable slacks and nubby sports coat.

  He stammered, “I … I didn’t realize it would be … formal … dress-up.”

  Loris De Mayne smiled glitteringly at him. “Oh, don’t worry about that. We tend to dress up too much. You’re a breath of fresh air.”

  Feeling more like a beggar who’d somehow fallen in among the cream of society, Tray let Loris introduce him to a dozen or so couples, all of them impeccably gowned and suited. He wished Para had come with him; the android would remember each and every name, and even look up their biographies if Tray asked it to.

  Tray forgot the names of the people almost as soon as Loris introduced them to him. Sensory overload, he thought. Too much information piled on too quickly.

  Then he realized that he could quietly contact Para through the communicator that had been implanted in his brain. Tray felt somewhat better for that: He wasn’t alone among this pack of elegant strangers.

  Loris herself was completely at ease among these people. They were her friends; she had probably known them since childhood. Tray felt totally out of place, a stranger in a strange land. His attention focused on Loris herself, smiling, exchanging pleasantries with her friends. The most beautiful and vivacious woman in the room.

  She led Tray to the bar that had been set up in a corner of the big, crowded room. People moved aside to allow them to reach the curving dark faux wood structure. A humanform robot stood behind the bar, its expressionless face focused on them.

  “I’ll have a Martian Blitz,” Loris told the robotic bartender. “What about you, Tray?”

  He saw that her sapphire eyes were radiant, like softly glowing jewels. And also that he didn’t have the faintest idea of what he should ask for.

  “Ginger beer,” Para’s voice whispered in his mind.

  Gratefully, Tray repeated, “Ginger beer.”

  The robot nodded once and repeated, “Ginger beer, coming right up, sir.”

  With their drinks in their hands, Tray and Loris edged their way toward the sweeping windows that looked out on the city. Music thrummed through the air, a few couples had begun to dance.

  Standing beside a potted young tree, Loris asked, “Tray, do you like to dance?”

  He coughed down his mouthful of tart ginger beer and looked at the dancers gyrating athletica
lly in the middle of the room. “Uh … I’ve been in cryosleep for nearly four hundred years, you know…”

  Loris’s eyes went wide. “Of course! Oh, Tray, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Not your fault.” Grinning, he added, “It’s a real honor to have the best-looking woman in the room ask me to dance with her.”

  Loris smiled at him. Through lowered lashes she murmured, “Flatterer.”

  Tray shook his head. “Not flattery. Look around. Nobody here looks half as beautiful as you do.”

  For a long moment they stared at each other, neither one of them certain of what to say next.

  “There you are!”

  Tray looked up and saw a bulky young man standing before Loris and himself with his fists on his hips and a stern look on his face.

  “You invite us to meet the lone survivor of the Saviour disaster, Loris, and then you monopolize him for yourself,” the stranger said in a mock-accusing tone.

  Completely unfazed, Loris replied, “The night is young, Rige.”

  “And you’re so beautiful,” the fellow quickly replied. Turning to Tray, he went on, “That line is from an ancient American popular song. It’s one of my hobbies, ancient popular music.”

  Tray started to tell him that he himself was an amateur musician, but stopped himself before uttering a word.

  Without a shred of enthusiasm, Loris made the introduction: “Tray, this is Rigel Charpentier. Rige, Trayvon Williamson.”

  “Our guest of honor,” said Charpentier as he put out his right hand.

  Tray shook the proffered hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “And I you,” Charpentier said. He looked pleasant enough, Tray thought. Roundish moon of a face, soft and clean-shaven. Light brown hair. Bulky figure. Eats too much and doesn’t exercise enough, Tray thought. His dinner jacket looked expensive; it glittered with tiny flecks of jewels.

  “Rige is an astronomer,” Loris said.

  “Astrophysicist,” Charpentier corrected.

  Her voice dripping acid, Loris said, “Of sorts.”

  “Of sorts?” Rige put on a hurt expression. “Is it my fault that we live in an era where all the big astronomical questions have either been answered or lie beyond the capabilities of our instruments?”