“Oh, they’re probably watching and pouting from their stateroom. Yeesh!” Arlene leaned over and asked Ninepin the question that I should have asked minutes before: “Who built this place? Was it human-Resuscitator symbiots?”
“Not symbiots,” said Ninepin. “Human construction. Mission launched nine years before People’s Glorious Revolution, construction begun in year 96 PGL, completed 142 PGL. Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists assigned to PARI lunar base launched year 13 PGL.”
“My God.” This time it wasn’t me; Arlene was the inadvertent petitioner. I was too busy wondering how many other far-flung human bases there were . . . and what terrifying aliens were following them home.
“Wait,” said Arlene, “that’s too long. . . . We’re only 107 light-years from Earth. How come it took the Disrespect, ah, 137 years Earth-time to get here?”
“Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists stopped at following ports of call between Earth and this system, designated PM-220: planetary system designated—”
“Skip it,” she said. The names wouldn’t mean anything to us anyway.
At last, although the moon continued to split apart, we had a clear enough path to the stars. I suggested that Blinky could probably pilot the ship out of lunar orbit, and he decided I wasn’t an idiot and throttled up the engines. I wasn’t sure I liked this system: I’m used to giving and getting orders, not having a philosophical discussion whenever we needed to move. But it had its advantages: every man and woman in the armed forces was capable of acting entirely autonomously—a whole military full of Fly Taggarts and Arlene Sanderses, no matter what silly political ideology they espoused!
There was no hurry. The ship would take many days to ramp up to speed, then an equivalent number to slow down. In between, we had five months of subjective travel time—five months! I thought about complaining, writing a strong letter to the manufacturer. But the weird fact of proxiluminous (“near lightspeed”) travel was that notwithstanding our subjective travel time of five months, vice the seven weeks for the Res-men, both trips would take just about 107 years in Earth-time, with us lagging only about twenty-five minutes behind. If it weren’t for our twenty-nine days of acceleration vice only six days for the Disrespect, we would arrive while they were still maneuvering into orbit.
But with that damned acceleration factor, the Newbies would have a three-week jump on us. I shuddered to think what they could do in twenty-three days to poor abused Earth, still reeling from the three-generation war with the Freds when Tokughavita and his crew left.
There was no hurry, but my heart was pounding, my pulse galloping a klick a minute. It was all I could do to sit in the command chair and act, like, totally nonchalant, like I did this sort of thing every day: jump in my proxiluminous-drive starship and pursue molecular-size aliens who wanted to infect all of Earth and “fix” us!
“Hey, Tofu,” I said. He didn’t notice or didn’t catch the reference. “So when did the Resuscitators find you guys and infect you?”
Tokughavita looked pensive. “Do not know. Been trying to clarify. Were not symbiots when left People’s Planet, sure of that.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No memory. Remember actions, not when infected by Resuscitators—may not have noticed if turned off sensory inputs. Long before landed at PM-220, rebuilt engines en route, went over ship systems with hand of history.”
The overcaptain didn’t know, or the aliens had blocked it from his mind. They left Earth 137 years ago Earth-time, but they had visited many other planetary systems and bases before arriving at this one. The molecular Newbies could have infected the humans at any port of call along the way.
Arlene and I discussed it in private. “So what did happen to them?” I asked. “They left Newbie-prime in a ship, attacked Fredworld—then what? What happened to their ship?”
She shrugged, making a nice effect with the front part of her uniform blouse. “Search me.” (I wouldn’t have minded.) “They must have headed here, but I don’t know why or how . . . Jesus, Fly—maybe they didn’t set out for Skinwalker; maybe they only ended up here later. Remember, it was forty years that the dead Newbie was on Fredworld. . . . Plenty of time for them to meet humans somewhere, change their course, and send out a general Newbie alert to tell all their buds where they were going.” Arlene stood at the porthole, watching us drift slowly toward the crack. She spread her arms wide, stretching and almost touching the bulkhead on either side, so narrow was it.
We kicked the idea around a bit, but really there was no way to settle it. Some questions must remain forever unanswered.
I returned to the bridge when we approached the edge and forced myself to sit still and not bounce up and down like an orangutan in a banana factory. Blinky Abumaha piloted the ship about like I fly a plane: we didn’t actually crash into anything, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. By the time we finally found a big-enough hole that Blinky could make it through without scraping the sides—about seventy kilometers—my jaw ached from clenching it, and my lips were like rubber from the frozen half smile I had maintained. I was surprised my armrests didn’t have finger marks on them. But we finally, by God, made it out of the PARI moon—intact.
Blinky slowly burned the engine up to 104 percent, the highest it was rated, and Sears and Roebuck entered in the relative coordinates, direction and distance, to Earth. We kicked the puppy into overdrive, and the huge boot of massive acceleration slammed us all back against the aft bulkheads. Suddenly, I wasn’t sitting in my chair; I was lying back, like in a dentist’s office. . . .
* * *
I skip five months.
Oh, all right, I can’t completely skip it. We spent the coasting time training in every tactic of the Light Drop that Arlene and I could remember, plus anything we missed that the Glorious People’s Army had developed . . . some pretty hairy tactics involving scanning lasers and enemy eyeballs, life-stasis projectors, crap like that.
Sears and Roebuck had nothing to offer. Either the Klave had long ago given up actual physical fighting—which I doubted after hearing Arlene describe their performance among the Res-men—or else they just weren’t very personally creative in the mayhem department. In any event, they sealed themselves into their stateroom again, and I didn’t dare force it open for fear I’d find the walls papered with everything from nude pictures of Janice De’Souza to a Chatty Cathy doll. “Go to away!” they shouted in response to determined knocking.
“Skip it this time,” Arlene suggested. “What do they have to offer anyway?”
So we did. It was all right. We humans were plenty ingenious enough for the entire Hyperrealist side.
In five months, I was unable to instill a sense of cohesion among the apostles; they just didn’t get it. They were the most mixed-up mob I’d ever seen in vaguely uniform uniforms. Somehow, they had a perfect fusion of utter individuality and total communalism: they assumed that naturally the State would provide everything that its citizens could need or want, but they refused to accept the concept of duty to others even in theory! It didn’t wash. They kept yammering about something called a “post-economic society,” which I figured meant they had so much of everything that material goods were literally worthless; even a beggar could pick discarded diamonds off the streets and dine on caviar every night.
I have no idea what to call that system: Communist? Capitalist?
Heaven? It was a chilling thought: maybe the Charismatics were right, and the Rapture had come. Maybe when I got back, Jesus would be sitting there on His throne, wondering where we’d got to all these years.
This continued off and on every day for five long months . . . so I’m just going to skip it, if that’s all right with everyone. Satisfied?
* * *
We followed our course to the sixth decimal place and decelerated to match velocities with Earth at about six hundred kilometers low orbit . . . and finally, the damned Klave appeared! They pushed into the bridge as if nothing had hap
pened, slapping everyone on the back in congratulations and pouring around a seemingly endless bottle of some queer liqueur that tasted like head cheese. The rest of us were being dead serious—and here were Sears and Roebuck tripping happily through the low-g bridge, talking a klick a second! “Shut up, you idiots,” I snapped. “Can’t you see we’re at general quarters here? Where are the damned Resuscitators?”
Where indeed? Blinky and Tokughavita, along with a weapons sergeant named Morihatma Morirama Morirama, had figured out how to work the particle beam cannons, which basically were human versions of the Fred ray. They sat, one in each cockpit, waiting tensely for first sight of the Resuscitator ship, the Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists.
They waited a long time. Arlene and I sweated a liter each standing in the control room with the artificial gravity set to 0.3 g, 0.1 g in the crawlways: just enough to avoid total vertigo, but still allow for rapid movement across the ship using our special low-grav combat tactics. We waited a long time, too.
After seventeen orbits, radiation detection sweeps of the stratosphere, infrared examination, every damned thing we could think of, we faced the stunning truth.
There was no Res-man ship, not in orbit, not on the surface. The Disrespect had not made it yet. We were alone orbiting Earth . . . and there wasn’t a trace of our spacefaring technological civilization.
We were home, but nobody had bothered leaving the lights on.
20
We broke into the outer layers of atmosphere. The Great Descent into Maelstrom of Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People’s State—my impossibly ugly compromise between Blinky and Tokughavita—nicknamed the Great Vengeance, to make it at least pronounceable, was a damned good ship. We flew lower and lower, stabilizing fins and the hypersonic air-cushion keeping the ride so steady that it almost seemed like a simulator. We skimmed quickly over Asia Minor and Western Europe, crossed England, and brushed the Arctic en route to Newfoundland. Blinky curved our orbit, blowing fuel like he didn’t care. “Can fill damn quick from ocean—good jolly job!”
Arlene grinned, but I didn’t really like his attitude.
Sears and Roebuck were behaving even stranger. They planted themselves at the perfect viewing port and hogged it utterly, staring down at the planet surface with a longing that I just couldn’t understand. It wasn’t even their planet! They didn’t respond to queries, and we basically just forgot about them while we studied the remains of the Earth.
Still no response from below. There were many cities left, and as we got lower, they didn’t look particularly devastated by war. But everywhere we saw nature encroaching on human habitation . . . like all those creepy movies where the magnificent Indian city with spires and domes is overrun by the jungle—vines and creepers and baboons invading in the Raj’s palace.
Nobody contacted us; no ships flew up to assess us. There was no fire-control radar sweeping the Great Vengeance, not even any ground response. The Earth slumbered like a doped-up giant.
So where the hell were we supposed to go?
Arlene had her own agenda. “Ninepin,” she said, “who was actually with, ah, Gallatin Albert when he died?”
“Lovelace Jill only companion when died in year 31 PGL.”
Arlene frowned. “Didn’t anybody else see the body?”
“Body exhibited in Hall of People’s Heroes 31 PGL to 44 PGL. Body interred beneath rebuilt Tabernacle of People’s Faith of Latter-Day Saints, Salt Lake Grad.”
Arlene gasped. I don’t know why—was she still harboring hope that she would find Albert alive and well?
“A.S.,” I said, “I think you should accept what is. He loved you, but he’s dead. Christ, girl, it’s been something like five hundred years!”
She didn’t look up. “And he was working on life stasis when he died.”
“But there wasn’t even a prototype until seven years after he died. Get ahold of yourself, Lance. Let’s get a little reality check going here.” I walked to the video screen that showed the for’ard view. “Don’t you think if Albert were still around that Earth would have more civilization left than that?” We were currently skimming low over the Big Muddy, north up the Mississippi River at midnight. There were settlements and even lights, but no evidence of high civilization other than electricity.
Tokughavita came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped. It was the first friendly contact from the amazingly solitary humans of the twenty-first century. I guess he had been watching me and Arlene—we had always tended to touch a lot, just as friends. “World is gone,” he said, voice heavy with emotion withheld. “Where are Resuscitators? Expected they at least would be here.”
I smiled grimly. “Maybe Fly and Arlene killed em.
“Maybe they got bored and evolved again,” said my counterpart from across the cabin. “Maybe they evolved into something completely different and forgot all about us.”
“Who knows?”
Tokughavita didn’t seem satisfied with our left-hand, right-hand explanations, but it was the best we could give him. We would never know why the Newbies never arrived—but thank God they didn’t.
The Northeast Corridor was in the same condition as the Mississippi Delta: houses, buildings, roads intact, the power grid still working, but no evidence of anything but habitation. “I want to go to Salt Lake City,” Arlene declared. I snorted in exasperation, but, hell, I didn’t have any better suggestion. We turned west.
“Toku, what was life like when you left?” I asked.
He seemed at a loss for words. “People taken control of State from greedy-capitalists, run for good of all.”
He said greedy capitalists as if it were a hyphenated word, a linked concept. “You what—nationalized the industries?”
“Industry run for good of all. But so efficient, paradise continued.”
“For the workers?”
He looked puzzled. “No workers. Work old concept, not modern. Workers abolished before People’s Glorious Revolution.”
Now I was the confused one. “Wait a minute—then who ran the industries?”
Toku looked back at Blinky Abumaha for help. “Good damn system,” Blinky added. “Automated, workers not necessary, just get in the way—jolly good!”
Arlene started to get interested, since the conversation was taking a notably academic tinge. “So wait . . . if there were no workers, then who was being exploited by the greedy capitalists?”
This stymied both Blinky and Tokughavita. “Never thought damn-all about exploitation. Machines, artificial intelligence . . . can greedy-capitalists exploit electronics?”
I turned away. The conversation had veered way over my head. Arlene continued, but I ignored them all. I don’t deal well with academics, as you’ve probably figured out by now.
We were fast approaching Salt Lake City—or Salt Lake Grad, I remembered Ninepin calling it. It must have been winter in the northern hemisphere; we kicked through an overcast sky, and suddenly the rebuilt Cathedral loomed before us. “Jesus freaking Christ!” I yelped, freezing the economics lesson behind me. Arlene and everyone else rushed to the video, then to the actual viewports, evidently not believing the image on the screen.
The new Cathedral of the People’s Faith of Latter-Day Saints rose about six hundred stories into the Utah sky, a veritable Tower of Babel! It had a ball at the very top. An observation deck? A radar system?
“Jeez, Fly, it looks like a huge fist of triumph raised over the Earth.”
“Built after Freds repelled,” Tokughavita confirmed. “Celebrates victory.”
Suddenly, every warning light on the bridge went off at once. The place lit up like a Christmas tree, and about six different kinds of sirens sounded. “Mises!” Blinky swore at the con. He jerked on the stick, and the whole freaking ship swerved violently to the left and up, flinging us all to the deck. I was pressed hard, nine g’s at least! Then the acceleration let up.
I painfully picked myself off the deck,
shaking like a pine needle in a strong wind. “What the hell was that about?”
“Force field,” said our pilot, face pale. “Damn jolly strong. Almost killed—crash, crash!”
We circled Salt Lake Grad for more than forty minutes, mapping the exact extent of the field. One of the crew was a mathematician, a girl named Suzudira Nehsuzuki; she calculated the highest probability that the center of the field was at the Tabernacle. My guess was that it all emanated from the bulb at the top of the structure, more than a kilometer above ground level.
“Fly,” said my lance. “I can’t tell you why . . . but I must get inside that Tabernacle.”
“Criminey, don’t you think I know why? Albert’s buried there, he spent the last years of his life there. Why shouldn’t you want to see it?”
“Fly—I want to contact it.”
“Contact what?”
“The Tabernacle!”
“Arlene, do you feel all right? It’s a building, for Christ’s sake!”
She turned to stare at me; her eyes were filled with the intelligence of fanaticism. I took a step back; I’d never seen her like that! “Fly . . . what was Albert working on just before he died?”
“Um, life stasis.”
“What else did he work on?”
“What else? I don’t remember anything else.”
“Worked on SneakerNet,” Tokughavita said from behind me. I jumped, then was annoyed at being startled. I sat on a chair at the radio station and stared at the video monitor as we endlessly circled the looming Tabernacle.
“He worked on artificial intelligence! Fly, I’ll bet that building has some sort of net, and it’s probably intelligent, and it’s probably been sitting here for five hundred years waiting for me to get back!”
Jesus, talk about your megalomania! Then again, wasn’t that precisely why Albert spent the last years of his life desperately trying to extend his life, so he could see Arlene Sanders again when she returned?
“Go ahead,” I ordered, rising from the chair and offering it to her. “Talk your brains out.”
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