by Ben Bova
“Dr. Kell’s orders. For your own safety, sir.”
“I’m perfectly safe,” Jordan said, taking a step forward.
The robot doing the speaking put a silicone-skinned hand gently on Jordan’s chest. “It is for your own safety, sir. Dr. Kell’s orders.”
The other robot slid to Jordan’s side. Jordan got a flash of a mental impression of the two robots carrying him, struggling and squawking, to his brother’s cot.
Jordan admitted defeat. “Very well. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kell. Have a pleasant day.”
As he walked back toward the tents, Jordan thought that it would be easy enough to duck into the trees somewhere else along the camp’s perimeter and head for the city farther along the trail. I doubt that the robots have been programmed to track down fugitives, he thought.
But instead he headed dutifully back to the barracks tent, straight to his brother’s cubicle. Elyse was not there, he saw. Almost smirking, Jordan thought, The cots aren’t wide enough for two people to sleep comfortably and the cubicles are too small to squeeze in a second cot. They might have sex together, but afterward they both want their rest.
“Wake up, Bran!” he called, clapping his hands together as loudly as he could. “You have some explaining to do.”
Brandon sprang to a sitting position on his cot, his eyes popping. “Jordy! For god’s sake, that’s a lousy way to wake a guy.”
“The guards you set up stopped me from going to the city,” Jordan accused, staring down at his brother.
“What time is it?” Brandon muttered sleepily.
“Time for you to get up and do some explaining.”
Grumbling, Brandon pulled his legs free of the bedsheet and got to his feet. He’s two and a half centimeters taller than I am, Jordan recalled, standing nose to chin with his brother.
“So?” he demanded. “What about those guards?”
“They’re supposed to stop anybody from the city from coming in here while we’re sleeping,” Brandon said, almost truculently.
“They stopped me from leaving.”
“We don’t want anybody wandering off by themselves, Jordy. Not until we’ve figured out what we have to do.”
Jordan glared at his brother. “Well then, you’d better figure out what you have to do. In the meantime, I want to go to the city.”
Brandon almost smiled at him. “Not yet, Jordy. Not yet. Have some breakfast with us. We have a lot of thinking to do.”
GUESTS … OR PRISONERS?
Once they were all seated in the dining area, with their meals before them and the three still aboard the ship on the big display screen at the far end of the table, Brandon got to his feet.
“I hope you all had a good night’s sleep,” he began.
Hazzard’s image on the screen scowled slightly. “Cut the platitudes, Brandon. We have some major decisions to make.”
Nodding tightly, Brandon said, “My brother, here,” he put a hand on Jordan’s shoulder, “wants to go to the city.”
Before anyone could object, Jordan explained, “We have a lot of questions that need to be answered. Adri knows the answers. I want to go to him and have a full and frank discussion.”
“B’god, Jordan,” Thornberry rumbled, “you sound like a stripey-pantsed diplomat.”
Jordan smiled at the Irishman. “I am a diplomat, Mitch, despite my clothing. An ambassador, if you will.”
Meek said, “And you expect Adri to be truthful?”
“He always has been.”
“Up to a point.”
“It’s up to us … to me, actually, to get the entire truth from him. We get along well together and—”
“And you want to see your girlfriend,” Brandon snapped.
Jordan felt as if Bran had slapped his face. Holding back the angry retort that he wanted to make, he answered carefully, “I want to clear up any doubts you have about Adri, and find out what’s behind all this.”
Longyear looked as if he wanted to say something, but he stayed silent. The rest of them glanced uneasily at one another.
“Well,” Jordan challenged, “you want to wring the whole truth out of Adri. Here’s your chance.”
Thornberry said, “I want to know how those energy shield generators work. That’s the biggest invention since the wheel, by damn.”
De Falla wondered, “Did they actually build this whole planet? I mean, from scratch? Or did they just terraform the top layers of the crust?”
“Just?” Yamaguchi asked. “Just terraform the top layers? That’s a helluva ‘just.’”
“You’re all missing the point,” said Meek. “Their technology is interesting, of course—”
“How pale a word, interesting,” murmured Elyse.
“I don’t need vocabulary lessons, Dr. Rudaki,” Meek snapped.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It’s just that … we have so much to learn from these people. To study a white dwarf close up. To learn how they shield the entire planet from radiation bursts, how they built an entire planet. We have the opportunity of a lifetime here, the opportunity of a thousand lifetimes.”
“But why have they done all this?” Meek demanded, getting to his feet, his lanky body unfolding like a carpenter’s ruler. “If what Adri’s told us so far is the truth, there’s a presence—a purpose—behind everything they’ve done. Who are these Predecessors Adri spoke of? What about the other intelligent races they claim they’ve met? Where are they? Why haven’t we met any of their representatives?”
Tanya Verishkova tried to answer. “Because they are not human, and they could not survive on a planet built for humans?”
“Because it’s all a tissue of lies,” Meek insisted. “Because Adri’s telling us what we want to hear, while hiding his real purpose from us.”
“And what might that purpose be, Harmon?” Jordan asked dryly.
“To absorb us. What was the term you used, Dr. Rudaki? Assimilate us. Just as the Europeans assimilated the Native Americans. And they’re getting us—some of us—to help them.”
Brandon asked, “If that’s true, then what should we do about it?”
Meek didn’t hesitate an eyeblink. “Get back aboard our ship and leave. Go back to Earth and warn them. Tell them we’ve got to prepare to defend ourselves against these … these aliens. These invaders.”
Jordan felt a growing anger simmering inside him. Anger at stupidity. Anger at unreasoning fear. If Meek has his way, he thought, we’d greet any visitors from other civilizations with nuclear bombs. And they’d retaliate with technologies so superior to ours that we’d be crushed.
Brandon seemed equally incredulous. “Leave?” he asked Meek. “Just pack up and run away?”
“That’s the best thing we can do,” Meek insisted. “The survival of the human race depends on us.”
“Let me point out something to you all,” said Jordan, feeling like a stern schoolmaster facing a room full of fractious students. “We can’t leave.”
“You mean you don’t want to,” said Meek. “Very well, you can stay behind if you want. The rest of us—”
“You don’t understand, Harmon. We cannot leave. Adri won’t permit us to go.”
“He can’t stop us,” Hazzard growled.
“Can’t he?” Jordan asked.
Thornberry got Jordan’s point. “He can disable the ship’s engines? Like he disabled my rovers?”
“If he wants to,” Jordan said. “If he feels he has to.”
Meek gasped. “You mean we’re his prisoners?”
Almost smiling at the astrobiologist, Jordan replied, “We’re his guests. For the time being.”
“Prisoners,” Meek insisted. Several of the people around the table nodded somberly. On the display screen, Hazzard looked grim, Trish Wanamaker shocked, the astronomer Zadar troubled.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Jordan continued, “I want to go to the city and face Adri with what we know. I’d appreciate it if you’d instruct the r
obots to let me through.”
SATURN ORBIT
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
HABITAT GODDARD
It was originally a prison ship, built at a time when most of Earth’s governments were repressive, authoritarian, in response to the disasters of the first wave of greenhouse floods. It was designed to hold ten thousand dissidents and political undesirables, troublemakers in the eyes of their governments, and carry them into exile far from Earth, to an orbit around the giant ringed planet Saturn, ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. Far enough so that they would no longer cause political unrest at home.
Habitat Goddard was a huge metal cylinder. From afar it looked like a length of sewer pipe incredulously hanging in orbit around gaudy, beringed Saturn. But this “sewer pipe” was twenty kilometers long, nearly the length of Manhattan Island, and four kilometers across. It rotated along its axis every forty-five seconds, which produced a centrifugal force almost exactly equal to normal Earth gravity. Its exterior was studded with air lock hatches, sensor pods, observation bays, photovoltaic solar panels, and long windows that allowed sunlight to brighten its interior and power its farmlands.
The interior was beautifully landscaped, with hills and brooks, compact little villages and neatly tended squares of farmland. A prison ship it might be, but it was a comfortable prison for its ten thousand inhabitants. Trees and flowers bloomed everywhere; the exiles had no reason to complain about their surroundings.
Yet it had taken some time for the inhabitants to get accustomed to living inside a giant cylinder. There was no horizon. The land simply curved up and up, until one could stare directly overhead and see—four kilometers above—more neatly landscaped farmlands and whitewashed villages.
When handed a lemon, make lemonade. The inhabitants of Goddard, permanently exiled by their governments on Earth, worked out their own society. And they worked out a way not merely to survive, but to grow wealthy enough to begin to build new habitats to house their growing population.
They mined comets for their ices and sold the precious water and other volatile chemicals to the burgeoning human settlements on the Moon, among the rock rats of the Asteroid Belt, and the research stations on Mars and in Jupiter orbit. Originally they had started to mine Saturn’s brilliant rings, but soon found that the chunks of ice that composed the rings were strewn with nanomachines: millions of virus-sized machines that maintained the rings, kept them from falling apart—and sent signals into deep space.
No human hands had built the nanos that dwelt in Saturn’s rings. They were alien constructs, left behind by intelligent extraterrestrials who had once visited the solar system.
But none of that interested Pancho Lane at this particular moment. She was striding along one of the habitat’s flower-bordered lanes, muttering a string of choice curses under her breath.
She was a tall, lean, long-legged woman who had once been a daredevil astronaut, then worked her way up the organizational ladder to become head of the vast Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Long since retired, she still had the restless energy and keen intelligence that had carried her across the solar system.
She was a West Texas girl, partly of African American descent. Her years as a corporate executive had not changed her outlook on life very much. With the West Texas twang that still marked her speech, she called a spade a spade. Or more often, a goddamned shovel.
Pancho had come to Goddard not as an exile, but as a VIP visitor, years after the habitat had established itself in orbit around Saturn. She had stayed for more than three decades, married her erstwhile bodyguard, and had a daughter by him. A daughter who was now eight point six light-years away.
“What’s got you so riled up?” asked Jake Wanamaker, striding along beside her. A retired admiral and onetime security chief for Astro Corporation’s CEO, her husband was taller than Pancho by half a dozen centimeters, broad shouldered, thick bodied, his craggy face ruggedly handsome.
Pancho just kept on muttering.
“What is it?” Wanamaker asked again, his gravelly voice taking on an edge.
Pancho gave him a look. “Mark Twain said, ‘When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.’ So I’m swearing.”
“About what?”
“Those pansy-livered paper-pushing brain-dead flatlanders back Earthside.”
Understanding dawned. “The IAA.”
“And the World Council. That damned Chiang and the whole bunch of ’em.”
“And Trish,” Wanamaker added.
Pancho acknowledged the fact with an angry nod. “They’re leaving her and the others hanging out there, on their own. No backup. Twelve people, out there by themselves.”
“Trish knew the risks when she signed on for the mission,” Wanamaker said tightly.
“That’s your navy background talking,” Pancho muttered.
Wanamaker grasped her forearm, gently but firmly enough to stop her single-minded march. With a crooked grin, he asked his wife, “Where’re you heading, lady?”
“Comm center, over in the village.”
“To call who?”
“Whom.”
“Whatever. What’re you up to, Panch?”
“I’m gonna call Doug Stavenger. He’s the only one in this whole twirling solar system whose got two grams of brains in his head.”
“Thank you!”
“Aw, Jake, you know what I mean.”
“What do you intend to tell Stavenger? You can’t expect Selene to go to the expense of building another starship.”
“No, we’re gonna do that.”
“We are? Goddard?” Wanamaker’s surprise was palpable.
Pancho resumed striding toward the nearby village, with its whitewashed buildings that housed government offices and the communications center. Wanamaker hurried to keep pace with her.
“We’ve got another habitat module half built, parked alongside us. Why not convert it into a starship?”
“Convert it…?” Wanamaker looked stunned. “And what do we do, just donate it to those flatlanders?”
“Yup.”
“Our governing council will never go for it, Pancho, you know that. Even if they did, the people would call for a general vote and they’d turn it down flat.”
“Not if there’s a quid pro quo.”
“What’s the quid and what’s the quo?”
“We turn the habitat we’re building into a starship. Outfit it with fusion engines, and offer it to the IAA. A ship that’ll hold hundreds of scientists! Thousands!”
“In return for…?”
“Full official pardons for each and every mother-loving person aboard Goddard. Total exoneration.”
Wanamaker frowned with thought. “But they’ve been living here for more than half a century, Panch. Most of them won’t want to return to Earth. This is their home now.”
Nodding, Pancho said, “I know that. But dontcha think they’d like to have the freedom to return to Earth if they want to? To visit the world they were born on? To have the stigma of exile wiped away, so that their children could go to Earth if they’d like?”
“The way Trish went to Earth,” Wanamaker murmured.
“To build her own life, yeah. The exiles’ kids can’t do that. Not yet.”
Musing aloud, Wanamaker said, “So we offer a completed starship to the IAA.”
“In return for full pardons for each of the exiles.”
“Stavenger and Selene lead the effort to staff a backup mission to Sirius.”
“So Trish won’t be stuck out there for the rest of her life.”
“And the World Council will be too embarrassed to turn down your offer.”
“They know most of the exiles’ll stay here. It’s home for them now. Has been for decades. But their kids will be free to go Earthside.”
Wanamaker rubbed his square jaw as they walked. “Pancho, I’ve got to hand it to you. It might work. It really might work.”
&n
bsp; “It’s a win-win proposition. And we’ll be making sure that Trish gets back okay.”
Her husband broke into a low chuckle.
“What’s funny?” Pancho asked.
“If I were Chiang, I’d look out for my job. You’re going to wind up running the World Council, Panch.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Hell no!” Then a sly grin crept across her lean face. “But I wouldn’t mind takin’ a ride out to Sirius.”
UNDERSTANDING
For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes.… Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.
FRANCIS BACON
BACK TO THE CITY
Jordan found himself whistling as he walked briskly through the woods toward the city. He chuckled to himself at Thornberry’s depiction of diplomats in striped trousers. He was wearing casual pearl gray slacks and an open-necked light blue shirt, and looking forward to returning to the city. To Adri and his enigmatic smiles. To Aditi and her warmth.
The morning was cool, but bright shafts of sunlight filtered through the tall trees rising all around him. The forest seemed alive with buzzing insects and small, furry animals that scampered up the tree trunks or through the bushes at the trees’ bases. Birds cawed as they swooped high above.
He marveled at his cheerful mood.
What are you so chipper about? he asked himself. And answered, I’m going to see Aditi again. Why shouldn’t I be chipper?
But then he thought, Meek is right, you know. We’re in over our heads, involved in some vast interstellar intrigue, whether we like it or not.
Well, I like it. This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me. An interstellar mystery! Fascinating. We have so much to learn, so much to gain.
Then he remembered an old admonition. H. G. Wells, he recalled. Wells was the one who said that when kindly aliens visit Earth and say they’ve come to serve Man, we should ask if they intend to serve us baked or fried.
Nonsense! Jordan scoffed. Xenophobia, pure and simple. Still … I suppose we should be careful. Then he laughed to himself. It doesn’t matter how careful we are, we’re in the hands of a vastly superior civilization. Adri could crush us if he wished, vaporize us, our camp, and the ship up in orbit, to boot.