Earth

by Ben Bova

  Outward the new society moved. Out toward the stars. On the planet circling the major star of the Sirius system they encountered a completely human race. Only gradually did they learn that these humans had been created by the Predecessors, a race of machine intelligences that had spread through much of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  The Predecessors told the visitors from Earth that all life in the Milky Way was imperiled by a Death Wave that had erupted in the galaxy’s core, some thirty thousand light-years away. This wave of incredibly energetic gamma radiation was surging through the galaxy, killing every living thing it touched.

  The Death Wave would reach Earth’s vicinity in two thousand years. The Predecessors had the technology to shield Earth and the rest of the solar system from the gamma radiation’s deadly effects. In return for that shielding, the Predecessors asked humankind to help them in their mission, assist them in their quest to reach out to other intelligent species scattered among the stars and aid them to survive the Death Wave.

  Humankind rose to the challenge. With the help of the Predecessors’ greatly advanced technology, human expeditions went to the stars and saved fledgling civilizations from annihilation.

  Tray’s eyes misted over as he saw one of those missions of mercy, the starship Saviour, destroyed by a swarm of asteroids that shredded the ship and killed everyone aboard it.

  Everyone except for one young man: Trayvon Alexander Williamson.

  Tray was blubbering unashamedly as the history display ended and Mance Bricknell’s office lit up again. Through tear-filled eyes he saw that it was now evening outside. The sun had set. Streetlights illuminated the campus complex.

  Loris reach out and gently touched his arm. “Are you all right?” she asked, her voice low, concerned.

  Tray nodded and pulled in a deep, steadying breath. “It’s a lot to take in, all at once.”

  “Yes, I imagine it is,” she said, turning a glare toward Bricknell.

  The historian sat back in his cushioned desk chair and touched his fingertips together. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have given you the entire scenario in one shot,” he said.

  Pawing at his eyes, Tray admitted, “It’s … it’s pretty powerful.”

  “It’s the history of our species,” Bricknell said, almost defensively, “as accurately as I could put it together.”

  Her sapphire eyes turned accusingly on Bricknell, Loris snapped, “You didn’t have to pour it over him in one continuous blast.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have,” Bricknell conceded.

  “No,” said Tray, regaining his self-control. “It’s better this way. Get it all out on the table.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Bricknell said.

  “It was cruel,” Loris insisted. “Sadistic.”

  Tray shook his head. “No. It’s all right. I’m sorry I broke down like that. I should be able to control myself better.”

  Bricknell almost smiled. “In a way, I guess your reaction is an honor to my presentation’s power.”

  Tray didn’t trust himself to do more than nod.

  Loris studied his face for a moment. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Tray choked out.

  “Good,” said Bricknell.

  Loris still looked unconvinced.

  “The question now,” Tray heard himself say, “is where do we go from here?”

  NEXT STEP

  Bricknell broke into a wide grin. Gesturing to the deepening shadows of evening outside his office window, he answered, “I’d say the first place we should go to is dinner.” Peering at Tray, he added, “If you feel up to it, of course.”

  Tray glanced at Loris, then said, “I’m fine. Dinner’s a good idea.”

  Bricknell silently made a reservation as Loris studied Tray’s face.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked once more.

  With a confidence he didn’t really feel, Tray replied, “I’m all right. It was kind of overwhelming, though.”

  Bricknell took it as a compliment. “It’s a powerful presentation, true enough.”

  As the three of them got to their feet Bricknell said, “I’ve ordered an aircar. We’re going to my favorite restaurant, the Mile High. Dinner’s on me.”

  Loris shot him a skeptical glance. “On you? Or on your department?”

  Bricknell’s grin dimmed slightly. “Well, I do have an expense account. One of the privileges of my rank.”

  Loris smiled back at him. “Good. Then we can order whatever we want.”

  * * *

  The Mile High Restaurant revolved slowly atop a slim silver tower that rose above all the other buildings in Denver. Tray could see the bare rock peaks of the Rockies rising in the west and the seemingly endless expanse of the Midwestern prairie to the east, a careful green and yellow gridwork of food crops.

  Tray, Loris, and Bricknell were seated by a robot waiter at the outer rim of the rotating restaurant, next to the tall windows that circled the establishment. Tray found himself mentally counting how long it took to revolve all the way around and see the rising Moon again.

  “Your presentation,” Loris asked Bricknell, “is it finished? Completed?”

  From his chair beside Loris and across the table from Tray, Bricknell said, “It will never be completed. I add new information to it every day.”

  “Really?”

  Bricknell jabbed a forkful of salad as he replied, “Oh, it’s in good enough shape to show it to interested individuals. The Council’s education division wants to use it in their history classes, of course. And several Council members have asked for private showings.”

  Tray looked up from his own salad. “It’s a powerful presentation. I’m sure it will have quite an impact on whoever sees it.”

  Bricknell looked pleased. “That’s because it directly impacts the brain’s receptor centers. You didn’t merely see and hear a presentation. The central reception areas of your brain were directly stimulated.”

  “That’s why it has such an emotional effect,” Loris guessed.

  “Exactly,” said Bricknell. Leaning closer and lowering his voice, he added, “President Balsam has asked me to prepare briefing sessions for key members of the Council. President Balsam! Himself! He called me to his office and asked me to work up sessions for key Council members.”

  Tray heard himself ask, “Won’t that be going too far? Sort of like brainwashing?”

  Bricknell’s face twisted into an angry frown. “What do you mean, ‘brainwashing’? I’ll be showing them history, not propaganda!”

  “History that you’ve selected. You’ll be showing them what you’ve decided they should see.”

  With a shake of his head, Bricknell retorted, “My presentation has been reviewed by the university’s History Department and the whole board of deans. They’ve approved it.”

  “Without any objections?” Tray probed. “Without any requests for changes, additions, deletions?”

  Hotly, Bricknell snapped, “They voted to accept the presentation as I showed it to them.”

  “No objections at all?” Tray asked again.

  “Oh, there were a few nitpicks, but they got voted down.”

  Tray nodded. After a glance at Loris, he admitted, “Well, it certainly is a powerful presentation.”

  “Thank you,” said Bricknell. Without a trace of appreciation in his voice.

  RECIPE FOR DISASTER

  Para was waiting for Tray when he returned to his apartment in the medical complex.

  “Would you like a refreshment?” the android asked as Tray closed the door behind him.

  “No thanks,” said Tray. He went to the sofa and sank into it. “I had a big dinner.”

  “Perhaps an after-dinner libation?”

  Tray simply shook his head.

  Standing by the bar that separated the apartment’s living room from its kitchen, Para said, “You had quite an experience with Dr. Bricknell’s presentation.”

  Tray stared up at the a
ndroid’s humanform face and realized, If I didn’t know it was a machine, I could easily mistake it for a real human being.

  “It was powerful,” he agreed. “Like being put through a wringer.”

  Para hesitated a split-second, then asked, “A device for ringing bells?”

  Tray laughed and shook his head. “No, no, no. A device for squeezing the water out of wet clothes.”

  “Ah,” the android said. “Now I understand.”

  More seriously, Tray asked, “Did you see Bricknell’s presentation?”

  “I received it from your implanted communicator.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  For a moment, Para didn’t answer. But before Tray could repeat his question, the android replied, “It is a very clever condensation of a crucial period in human history: the transition from nation-states to a single, unified interplanetary political structure.”

  “Yes,” Tray agreed slowly, realizing that the emotional impact that brought him to tears had no emotional effect whatsoever on the android.

  Without moving from where it stood, Para asked, “I wonder if Councilman Kell has seen Dr. Bricknell’s presentation.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Perhaps you should tell him about it. It might be helpful for you to get his reaction to it.”

  Tray stared up at Para for a long moment. At last he said, “You might be right.”

  * * *

  Jordan Kell’s tightly sculpted face looked quite serious, concerned, as Tray told him of his experience with Bricknell’s history presentation.

  Kell appeared to be sitting at his desk in the middle of Tray’s living room, although actually he was halfway across the city, in his own office.

  “I’ve heard rumbles about Dr. Bricknell’s history,” Kell muttered. “He’s shown it to quite a few people at the university.”

  “But not to you?” Tray asked, from his chair by the window of his apartment.

  “Not to me,” Kell replied.

  “Isn’t that…” Tray fumbled for a word. “Curious?” he finally said. “I mean, he’s apparently shown it to President Balsam and several other Council members.”

  Kell broke into an icy smile. “I’m not one of Balsam’s pets. I’m the leader of the opposition.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  “The Interplanetary Council isn’t a band of sweetly harmonious individuals, Trayvon,” Kell said. “There are differences of opinion, sometimes rather sharp differences.”

  “I didn’t realize…”

  Kell’s smile turned warmer. “No reason why you should. We do try to keep our differences among ourselves. Everything is very civil. Very polite. If I want to call a fellow Council member an underhanded, sneaking thief, I state it in the politest form possible.”

  “Really?”

  His smile widening even more, Kell went on, “Fortunately, it very rarely gets to that point. Still, there are differences of opinion among the Council members. Quite natural, of course. But some of them are troubling.”

  “Troubling?”

  Kell hesitated a long moment. At last he said, “The basic difference between President Balsam’s outlook and my own are over where we should be heading in the immediate future.”

  Tray nodded.

  “Balsam and his cohorts,” Kell went on, “feel that we’ve survived the Death Wave, and we’ve helped other intelligent species to survive. Now, they feel, we should relax and enjoy the fruits of our labors.”

  “The fruits of our labors?”

  “We should take control of the intelligent species we’ve saved from the Death Wave. We should establish an interstellar empire, with Earth at the top of the ladder.”

  Tray blinked with surprise. “An interstellar empire? Among star systems that are hundreds, even thousands of light-years apart? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Not as ridiculous as you might think,” said Kell. “The Predecessors have shown us how to communicate at superluminal speeds. Physical objects can’t move faster than light, but information can.”

  “But…”

  “That means,” Kell went on, “that we could send orders to dozens of star systems almost instantaneously. We could establish commerce, trade, build industries, create an empire. That’s what Balsam and his party want to do.”

  “But the physical goods,” Tray objected, “the trade materials, the products, the people—they’d still be limited to the speed of light.”

  “Exactly,” said Kell. “What they’re really proposing is a network of civilizations linked to Earth, but quite free of direct control from Earth. We could order a planetary system to do this or that, and the order would be received faster than light, almost instantaneously. But the materials involved, the goods and the people, would still be restricted to the speed of light.”

  “It sounds stupid,” Tray said.

  “No,” Kell corrected. “It’s subtle. And pernicious. It means that human overseers can settle on those planetary systems and rule like kings, beyond the control of Earth’s Interplanetary Council. It means that the so-called empire they want to create will really be a hodgepodge of star systems where a handful of humans can live like emperors and the indigenous civilizations will be ruled like slaves.”

  Tray felt shocked. “Slaves?”

  “That might be too strong a term,” Kell admitted. “But the humans would definitely be at the top of the ladder and the natives beneath them.”

  “Like the old Roman Empire.”

  Kell’s lips curved slightly into a bitter smile. “As I’ve quoted before, although history doesn’t actually repeat itself, it rhymes.”

  “Rhymes,” Tray echoed.

  Suddenly Kell pushed his desk chair back and got to his feet. “Look at where we stand,” he said, stepping around his desk. “Balsam and his people claim we’ve reached a plateau in our history, a place where human advancement levels off. We’ve faced the Death Wave and survived. We’ve helped other intelligent species to survive. Now we can lean back and take it easy, enjoy the fruits of our victory over extinction.”

  “It sounds good,” Tray admitted. “Lean back and enjoy the fruits of our victory.”

  “Yes,” said Kell. “It sounds wonderful. Until you realize that what they’re actually saying is that we should make ourselves masters of an interstellar empire and lord it over the other intelligent races that we’ve met.”

  “Lord it over them?”

  “Keep them poor and ignorant, while we take their wealth for ourselves.”

  Tray felt his body tensing as he sat and looked up at Kell, on his feet.

  “It’s a recipe for conflict,” Kell said bitterly. “It’s a recipe for ultimate disaster.”

  MORAL ’SUASION

  Feeling more than a little perplexed, Tray asked, “What can we do about it?”

  Kell hunched his shoulders in a brief shrug. “I’ve tried jawboning, but I’m afraid that the shining vision of an interstellar empire with us at its pinnacle has dazzled too many of the Council members for jawboning to have much effect.”

  “Then what…?”

  Smiling minimally, Kell said, “That’s why I accepted Balsam’s invitation for this Jupiter excursion. It will give me a few days to talk with him, man to man, with no interruptions.”

  Tray considered the possibilities for a few moments. “Do you think that’s why he invited you to go?”

  “I think it’s possible. Balsam can’t be completely indifferent to the slippery slope we’re heading for. Maybe a few days alone, just the two of us talking freely, without interruption, is what he’s really after.”

  Tray fought an instinct to shake his head. Balsam didn’t seem like the kind of person who could be willingly talked away from a goal he wanted to achieve.

  * * *

  “What do you think I should do, Para?”

  Tray and the android were on the rooftop of the building that housed Tray’s apartment. The wind sweeping down from the Rockies felt chill, a real
bite to it, despite the bright sunshine that drenched the city’s myriad towers.

  Para’s facial expressions were limited, Tray knew. The people who had designed and built the android had deliberately limited its ability to show emotions, since the machine was not designed to experience them. Yet Tray felt that Para was not truly the impassive, totally detached logical machine that it appeared to be. Para cared about him, Tray felt.

  But then he remembered that the android’s behavior was designed to resemble human manners as much as possible. It’s a machine, Tray reminded himself. Don’t anthropomorphize it.

  Still, Para stood beside him, looking and acting almost completely human. Almost.

  With as much of a smile as it was capable of showing, Para said mildly, “Your range of options is somewhat limited. Councilman Kell has invited you to accompany him on this journey to Jupiter. You could refuse—as politely as possible—and remain here.”

  “But then I wouldn’t see the Leviathans,” Tray countered. To himself he added, Or be with Loris.

  “If that is important to you, then you should accompany Councilman Kell.”

  Tray thought it over for several silent moments. Then, “Why did he invite me to go with him? I don’t understand that. I’m nothing to him—”

  Para interrupted. “You are his surrogate son.”

  “Son?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Tray.

  “No, it is well within the human suite of behaviors. Councilman Kell has no family. Both his first and second wives are dead. He has no children of his own. He has spent virtually his entire life in civil service. He is alone, as far as family is concerned. You have become his surrogate son.”

  The knowledge rocked Tray. Jordan Kell, one of the most important men on Earth, feels that I’m his son? He realized that he himself had no real family of his own, no one but Para. Perhaps I need a surrogate father as much as Kell needs a son, Tray thought.

  He bounced these thoughts in his mind while they left the rooftop and returned to his apartment. As they entered the pleasantly warm sitting room Para said, “A phone call for you…”