by Joe Haldeman
“I’m certain of it,” he said.
“So the dust is moving away from the celestial pole,” Paul said, “toward the equator?”
“It looks that way to me.”
“So we’re going to wind up with a ring, like Saturn?” Dustin said.
“I don’t know that much about astronomy. I just know how to use the telescope.”
“Paul?” I said. He had a fresh Ph. D. in astrophysics.
“I didn’t study the solar system much. But my instinct says it would take a lot longer. Millions of years, at least.
“The Earth might have had rings when it was younger; might have had them and lost them several times. They weren’t gravitationally stable, not with the Sun and Moon pulling at them.”
“Saturn has moons with its ring,” Dustin said.
“But they’re not large compared to Saturn itself. The Moon was a quarter as big as the Earth.”
“So now that it’s not there,” Wham-O said, “maybe the Earth can have a ring?”
“Worth keeping an eye on.”
“So we could leave, right?” There was a spark of excitement in his voice. “Speaking as a space pilot . . . if all that crap was in a ring, you could just avoid it, couldn’t you?”
“I guess in theory you could just power in or out. Aim your spaceship somewhere and go there. But in fact, you can’t not be in Earth orbit. That orbit defines a plane that goes through the center of the Earth and would cut through the ring in two places.”
“Can’t you just, like, get on the North Pole and shoot straight up?”
“Sure, if you could get to the North Pole with a hell of a lot of fuel. Trade your horses and cows for some good sled dogs.”
“I’ll take it up with Roz.”
Paul was lost in thought for a minute. “You could do it, you know. Spaceports are near the equator for economy; use the planet’s rotation to add to launch speed. But if you had to launch from a pole, you could.”
“You’d want electricity, though.”
He shrugged. “Thought experiment. Big chemical fireworks, like Jules Verne. Besides, the power might come back.”
“Once the Others are through playing with us,” I said, which was the way a lot of conversations ended.
We lit a couple of the candles and walked back to the main house, quiet now with the children asleep. The adults were sitting around talking, drinking wine in the candlelight, rustic and romantic.
With a few unsubtle hints, Paul and I were allowed a bit of privacy in the cabin before the others came to bed.
I hadn’t had time to think about how much I missed that part of him, being alone with him. He felt that, too. We joke about men’s sexuality as if it were just stimulus and response and hydraulics. But Paul has always been gentle and sweet with me, maybe too gentle.
Not for the first time, I felt a little jealous of Elza, with her two men. Not so much Dustin—I guess I already have a philosopher. Namir was the big unknown, capable of who knows what. Strong, cabled arms; deep, troubled eyes.
11
The next morning, over breakfast of eggs and French-toast cornbread, Roz made a proposition. “First, I’ve asked around, and everybody’s in favor of asking you to join us.” The two elders with her nodded in unison, like white-plumed birds.
“Rico must’ve taken some arm-twisting,” I said.
“Not once he saw the riot gun. With the riot gun, he had to take you, Alba, and with you everybody else.”
“Nice to be useful,” she said.
“Speaking of useful . . . while the plane still flies, you have plans for it?”
“There are pluses and minuses for every possibility,” Paul said. “I’d like to reconnoiter a big city, like LA, but we’d be vulnerable to ground fire. And I wouldn’t want to leave it parked at an airport.”
“We were talking about using it for resupply,” Namir said. “Is there anything you have in abundance that you could trade in exchange for something you lack?”
“Most of the things we lack are luxuries, or rarities. Luxuries, forget it, but there are sophisticated medical supplies and equipment we would like to have on hand. If somebody wants to trade them for cider or jerky.”
“Maybe in a few months,” Namir said.
“We do have that strange offer,” she said, “for books. Printed paper books.”
“Far enough to fly?” Paul said.
“Eugene, Oregon. About 180 miles. I called them as part of this call-your-neighbor thing?”
“A long hike.”
“I talked to them again last night, and they got all excited about your being so close.
“There’s a funny guy there who has a big store called Lanny’s Lending Library. Thousands, tens of thousands of paper books. He lends them out or sells them. They’re suddenly worth a lot.”
“Priceless,” I said. How many books would just disappear once the cloud shut down?
“Lanny really wants to talk to you guys, about the Others and all. For an afternoon, with him, we can have all the books we can carry out. The seven of you and three of us.”
“Couple of hundred books,” Namir said. “Is it worth tying up the plane? When we could go raid a hospital or something?”
“The hospitals are probably all empty by now,” I said. “The ones that aren’t under armed guard.”
“Besides,” Alba said, “an old-fashioned medical book is going to be a lot more valuable than some diagnostic machine that has to be plugged in.”
Paul stood up. “Let’s just go do it. Before the plane’s a useless relic.” I was a little concerned about being up in the sky when it became a relic. But it wasn’t going to get any safer.
We took two floaters out to the plane. The elders stayed on the ground, in favor of a couple of men to carry lots of books, Rico and a big young fellow called Stack. Paul had them sit in the front and rear of the plane, for balance.
We turned the plane easily with the floaters, which we left there with the elders. The plane rolled a short way and took off into a slight breeze and rose smoothly through the mountain pass.
Paul followed the autoway system east and north, through a few wisps of cloud. The Earthers were transfixed by the scenery. Only Rico had flown before, and that had been as a boy.
We descended after about a half hour, Paul following directions first from the plane’s robot-voiced navigator and then from someone on the cell. He banked down toward a long green rectangle, a recreation area in the exurbs near Lanny’s library.
Coming in from the south, we passed just over our welcoming committee: three military trucks next to a flagpole that had the American flag flying upside-down. Paul landed and then turned around and taxied up to them.
There were two men and a woman in military fatigues, looking pretty dangerous. I saw Paul slip a pistol under his tunic when he got up and slapped the button that dropped the staircase. Namir carried a laser rifle.
The soldiers, if that’s what they were, welcomed us and helped us into the back of one of the trucks, which had two unpadded benches and a lot of dust.
There were spectators, maybe a hundred people on the other side of the fence. They were quiet and didn’t shoot at us.
The truck had a canvas top and thick metal walls, the steel back door open for ventilation. The woman who was our driver said that Lanny’s was only about ten minutes away. We took off between the two other trucks, which had gun turrets.
It was a bumpy fast ride, seven minutes on a straight road that turned twisty at the end.
Lanny’s was one of dozens of identical blocky buildings which looked futuristic to me, shimmering and windowless. Roz dismissed them as “turn-of-the-century.” Our destination had a big whitewashed wooden sign, with LLL stenciled on it in rainbow colors. A man who had to be Lanny was standing in the doorway, broad smile in a dark face framed with wild frizzy white hair. He half bowed and swept an arm to the open door. “Our visitors from outer space, welcome.”
The inside was a kalei
doscopic junk pile of old-fashioned printed books, seemingly stacked in no particular order, the floor actually just a series of cleared walkways among the stacks. Books were shelved floor to ceiling on the walls, serviced by tall ladders on rollers, which looked precarious. Those books had a semblance of order, similarly bound sets stacked together.
The study at Camp David had the lawyer’s obligatory wall-to-wall books, dusted but not opened from one generation to the next. Sometimes you saw the same thing in academic offices, back in my time, symbols of the continuity of scholarship rather than actual tools for learning.
Aboard ad Astra we had a short shelf of actual books, one of which Namir still carried with him, the volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets bound in leather. His new wife had given it to him just before she died in Gehenna.
A sense of order did emerge, in that one area would be dominated by history books, another by cookbooks, or by mathematics or novels. Between chemistry and poetry there was a coffee machine surrounded by upholstered chairs. We settled in.
“I probably don’t have much time to live,” Lanny said, easing into an overstuffed recliner. “I have a heart chip and started having angina pains soon after the power went off.” He waved that off like a mosquito. “But I’ve spent a life and fortune satisfying my curiosity about this and that, and don’t see any reason to stop now.”
An elderly white man in a tuxedo brought out a tray of cups and saucers and served each of us as Lanny talked. “I’m mainly curious about the Others, of course, and what direction you think this thing is going to go.” He was looking at Namir.
“Well, it’s the end of the world, no matter what they do. The old world is irretrievably gone. Even if they were to disappear and never come back.”
“Something we could never know for sure,” I said. “They can go away for ten thousand years, and come back to undo everything we’ve done. Anything we’ve done.”
“In the name of self-protection,” Paul said, “like this time. No defense against it.”
“So we live from day to day,” Lanny said, “as some of us have always done anyhow. Surviving to the next day will be more problematic soon. But that’s always been the human condition.”
“Yeah, but we used to be the masters of creation,” Dustin said. “The pinnacle of evolution, the top of the food chain. Philosophically, that’s the main difference the Others have made.”
“Philosophy may be our big weapon now, Dustin,” Namir said. “We’re counting on you.” And the doctorate he’d never used.
“Physical weapons just seem to annoy them,” Lanny said. “Or do you have any ideas along those lines?”
Namir and Paul exchanged glances. “We never know when we’re being listened to,” Paul said quietly. “Maybe all the time. So you couldn’t take them by surprise.”
“How could they listen to you here?” Lanny said.
“Homeland Security could do it back in our day,” Elza said, “from across the street, maybe from orbit. Bounce a coherent beam of light off the window and analyze the vibrations.”
“No windows here,” I said.
“Clear line of sight to the display window in front,” she said, “so it would just be a matter of getting a signal out of the noise.”
“They don’t even need that, though,” Paul said. “They want us to carry a cube everywhere.” He held up the bright orange knapsack. “It’s not supposed to be a transmitter, any more than the one at Funny Farm was. But they talked with us through that one.”
“And back at the NASA motor pool,” I said. “They managed to turn on a set without touching it. How do you do that?”
“Use a remote,” Card said. “I mean, the circuitry is there. It’s not magic.”
“From orbit? Pretty sophisticated engineering,” Paul said. “We don’t have any idea what their limits are.”
“Like, we know they can’t go faster than the speed of light,” Dustin said. “But they can handle time in ways we don’t understand.
“Our trip back from their planet seemed to take no time at all, though almost twenty-five years passed on Earth. And it wasn’t a subjective perception—the plants in our life-support system didn’t die. If you think of the plant’s physiology—or ours—as a slow clock, well, it barely ticked in those twenty-five years.”
“How do you explain that?” Lanny said.
“That is fucking magic,” Card said. “If you want an accurate name for it.”
Justin laughed. “It’ll be interesting to see what theoretical physicists do with it, mathematical physicists. They’ve only had a week to think about it, though. It might take another century.”
“So in a way, they do go faster than the speed of light,” Lanny said, “or you and your carrots and all did. You spent a quarter of a century and didn’t grow a single gray hair.”
“Maybe not ‘faster’ than light. Wish I’d paid closer attention in physics class,” Paul said. “It seems to me that the only way you can travel at the speed of light is to stop time, somehow.” He shrugged. “Photons don’t age.”
“And if you go faster than light,” Dustin said, “time goes backwards; effect precedes cause.”
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Things happen before they start?”
“Hard to visualize,” he admitted. As if he could draw a picture if he only had a pencil.
“If they can do that, there’s no point in even trying to fight them,” Lanny said.
“Assume they can’t,” Namir said. “Or if they can . . . subvert causality, we know that they don’t use the power. Or haven’t yet.”
“Maybe they have,” Lanny said. “Have they ever made a mistake?”
“Sure,” I said. “They could have destroyed the whole human race, remember? If Paul hadn’t stopped them.”
“No disrespect, Paul, but there’s another way to look at that. You flew their cosmic time bomb to the other side of the Moon, and saved us from that. But then what happened to the Moon? What if they tried it again today?”
“Good point,” Paul conceded. “So they were testing us?”
“Or just scaring the shit out of us. Who knows why they do anything? It’s like asking ‘why did the earthquake hit San Francisco?’ With all those people there.”
“We have to assume they do things for a reason,” Namir said.
“What does that mean?” Lanny said. “We can say ‘the earthquake hit San Francisco because it was built on a fault line,’ or ‘God sent the earthquake to punish them for Chinese food,’ or it happened because of all the gold mining. The reason you prefer depends on the information and prejudices you bring to the question. How much actual information do you have about them?”
“Mostly inference,” Dustin said. “All they’ve actually said to us, you could put on a couple of screens. And some of that was deliberately misleading.”
“Spy is a key, obviously,” Paul said. “Assuming that, with all their powers, they can watch us anywhere, any time, then they don’t really need him for information.”
“He’s a temporal interface,” I said. “It’s convenient for them to talk to us in real time, our time.”
“You did converse with them once,” Lanny said. “When you were out at their star?”
“We had Spy then,” I said. “We’d say something and wait for several minutes while they answered, through him.”
“It would take them a couple of minutes to just say yes or no,” Dustin said. “The more complicated responses wouldn’t take much longer, but they apparently had billions of things pre-recorded, so it was just a matter of hitting the right billion switches.”
“A lot of bases to cover,” Lanny said.
“They think a lot faster than we do,” he said. “Faster than we can imagine thinking, Fly-in-Amber said. He was the other Martian with us when we went to meet them. The resident expert on the Others.”
“He knew next to nothing,” Paul said. “As opposed to nothing.”
“That was frustrating,” I said. �
��Like all the Martians in the yellow family, he was born with an ability to communicate with the Others—”
“Born with the knowledge of their language?”
“Weirder than that. More like being born with a sixth sense, which you’re unaware of until it’s triggered.” I tried to remember how he had described it. “He didn’t make any sense out of the Others’ message himself. He said it was like being able to speak the language perfectly, but only as a mimic. Like a parrot.”
“Are any of the Martians up in Russia in the yellow family?”