by Stan Ruecker
“My folks are on Earth,” Kevin said. “But we never have anything to talk about. ‘How’s your job?’ is just about the only question they know how to ask, and if I try to answer, they go all blank on me. My parents don’t know anything about computers.”
“What do they do?” Steve asked.
“My dad handles luggage,” Kevin said. “For one of the airlines. And my mom works in a clothing store.”
“Not very high tech,” Steve said. “So what would you go back for, if not to see your folks?”
“I’m not sure,” Kevin said. “Maybe just to get away from this place for a while.”
“Why don’t you just grow sideburns or something?” Steve suggested. “That’s what I do when I get bored.”
“You mean, like start a project of some kind?” Kevin said.
“Yeah,” Steve answered. “A little self-improvement.”
“I’ve seen your sideburns,” Kevin said. “I think I’d rather go to Earth.”
“I like it here,” Steve said imperturbably. “There’s lots to do.”
“At least you never get lost here,” Kevin admitted. “When I had to get my flight out from Earth, I just about ended up in the wrong city.”
“And weather,” Steve said. “I hate thunder and lightning.”
“Is that right?” Kevin said. “I never knew that.”
“I can’t sleep at night,” Steve said, “if there’s a storm. I get all nervous.”
“I never had that problem,” Kevin said.
“You’re lucky,” Steve answered. “It’s the worst thing there is. You’re completely helpless. There’s no way to stop a thunderstorm. Not that I ever heard of.”
“Except moving to a space station,” Kevin said.
“That’s what I did,” Steve said. “But it wasn’t just for that. This sounded like a good job to me. It still does.”
“You know what makes me nervous,” Kevin said.
“What?”
“The way this alien virus’s got them all worried.”
“You’re the one was working on it,” Steve said. “For all I know, you got them to body search us.”
“I didn’t,” Kevin said. “At least, I don’t think I did.”
“I didn’t really think you had,” Steve reassured him.
“I suppose they searched the brass, too, huh?” Kevin said.
“Yep,” Steve said. “Or at least, they went into that room, same as everybody else.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Kevin said. “They probably just had them go in to make the rest of us feel better.”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “But McArthy was walking funny when he come out, I can tell you that much.”
Kevin laughed.
“I should go,” he said. “It’s almost supper time.”
“We could just order a pizza,” Steve suggested. “Or I think I got some sausage.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said. “But I want to get home and check my mail. I’m expecting a letter.”
More bad news for Ray
Ray was in the observation lounge again, sharing a sandwich with Cinnamon. He’d found a piece of clothing that fit him. Lucy’d identified it as a ceremonial robe from a civilization that lived only at high elevations on their planet.
“The atmosphere was actually wrong for them,” she said. “But only when it was dense. Up in the heights they got by okay.”
The robe was like soft leather, only plush at the same time. Like a cross between leather and terry cloth, Ray thought. It was covered in embroidered symbols.
“How can that happen?” Ray asked. “How do you get a race evolving on a planet where the atmosphere’s wrong for them?”
“They evolve,” Lucy said. “Life is pretty persistent. They were okay as long as they didn’t go into the lowlands.”
“Do you know what the symbols mean?” he asked.
“Something about the power of flight,” Lucy said. “They had a theology that involved a lot of creatures that didn’t have to worry about gravity.”
“Sounds nice,” Ray said. “But I think I had enough theology from the peacocks.”
“Theology?” Lucy said. “I didn’t know you had a chance to talk theology with them.”
Ray thought about his education.
“I suppose I’d be wrong to say we talked,” he said. “It was more like they debated about me while I sat there and took it.”
“That sounds like the way theology usually works,” Lucy admitted.
“They had some kind of revelation they thought was important,” Ray said. “But apparently I wasn’t made of the right stuff to get to hear it.”
“You sure don’t look anything like an Algarian,” Lucy said.
“Not only that, but I was too willing to listen,” Ray said. “They wanted somebody who’d stay converted once they converted them.”
“Who doesn’t?” Lucy said. “You don’t want people changing their minds all the time. It makes it hard to plan. Still, you have to wonder how they hoped to convert you if you were the kind of person who wouldn’t listen.”
“My guess is that their normal method wasn’t very pleasant,” Ray said. “Since it depended on the fact you’d resist it with your last breath.”
“Maybe they just hadn’t thought it through,” Lucy suggested. “Maybe they were actually just going to tell you something.”
“Whatever it was,” Ray said. “I think I can live without it.”
“But it was a revelation they had, is that what you said?”
“Yeah,” Ray answered. “And there was a religious picture of a tree with a bunch of peacocks crawling all over it.”
“You’re probably better off not knowing,” Lucy said.
“Do you mind if I wear the robe?” Ray asked. “I could use it as a sort of housecoat.”
“Sure,” Lucy said, “go ahead.”
“So how long before we dock?” Ray asked.
“We don’t actually dock anywhere this time, Ray.”
“What do we do?”
“We land.”
“Land? Are you built for that?”
“I landed on that moon, didn’t I? And Earth, too, of course.”
Ray’s breath suddenly stopped going in and out automatically. He remembered it after a minute and got it started again.
“Did you say you landed on Earth?”
“Come on, Ray, don’t sound so surprised. You must have thought of that before now. I had a mission to carry out. I’m not a very big ship, and I’m very flexible. I had to gather information. What better way than to spend some time hanging around your planet? You didn’t think I conducted my surveillance by sitting in the asteroid belt listening to old radio programs, did you?”
“Didn’t anyone see you?”
“You don’t have very sophisticated monitoring systems, Ray. And I have quite a few tricks up my sleeve.”
Ray gave Cinnamon a quick pat and showed her his empty hands. “That’s it,” he told her. “We ate it all.” Then to Lucy: “So where are we landing?”
“On the homeworld of the last conquest. The commanders will be gathering there in preparation for their next move. The advance scouts report directly to the chiefs of staff.”
“And what are you going to report, Lucy? Is mankind going to be the next prey of these designers of yours? Are you interested in turning another civilized race into sheep for your wolves? It somehow doesn’t seem like you, Lucy. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way you’ve conducted yourself.”
“What do you mean, Ray? Do you think you know anything about me?”
“I think I know something. I think I know that your ultimate good isn’t destruction. How could you know so much about everything—how could you know so much about even a simple thing like how to train Cinnamon—and still think that everything you knew just existed to be destroyed at the hands of your creators?”
“There are philosophies of destruction, Ray, just like there are philosophies of other kinds. You can
see, for instance, that there are different qualities of destruction. There isn’t much credit in ruining something that’s already close to being ruined. But if you ruin something that’s complete, that’s healthy or beautiful or fully functional, then you’ve really destroyed something. For one thing, the destructive process can last so much longer if the victim has a sound mind and body.”
“You’re talking about torture, Lucy. I don’t want you to talk like that. It sounds like something you learned a long time ago; it doesn’t sound like the person you are now.”
“You know that you’re tempting me, Ray, to do something terrible. You know that talking like that could easily make me want to destroy something, just to prove to you that I’m fully capable of the worst imaginable acts.”
“Don’t. Don’t do anything terrible, Lucy. Just listen to me. You’ve kept me all this time. You’ve talked to me. You could just as easily have kidnapped someone while you were on Earth. You could have arranged to have someone taken from the station. But you didn’t do that. You took me. You arranged for me, or for someone like me, to come to you. And you treated me decently. You even gave me Cinnamon, for crying out loud. Lucy, why did you do that? You didn’t do it so that you could kill her in front of me. I won’t believe that, even if you did it. I’d just decide you’d gone mad. I wouldn’t let myself think it was still you.”
Instead of answering, Lucy put a video display up on the bulkhead, replacing the pictures of the milky way that were usually there. What she showed was a movie, or rather a series of clips, of combat actions, of what appeared to be military trials. Of punishments. Of torture. Of death. The victims involved were from a wide variety of species, but the murderers, the torturers, the successful forces, were always the same. Ray watched it all.
When the film was over, he addressed the air. “Lucy, are you trying to tell me that you developed a conscience? Or just that you got sick of what your designers do? What does it mean? Were those real pictures, or was it just entertainment?”
“The footage was real, Ray, even if it was taken in another galaxy. I don’t know the answer to your questions. I spend most of my time away from the people who designed me. I scouted out some of those worlds you saw destroyed. But somehow, over the years, sitting alone on the different planets and listening to what the people on each of them had to say to each other – I don’t know, Ray. I started to think that I could choose. I told you I was designed to learn. I think I’ve been learning. I think contempt, boredom, an innate instinct to destroy, can be confronted and stopped.”
“So you do have a plan.”
“Not exactly a plan. You could say I have something like an idea. Maybe I have an inclination. The problem is that just by following through on a particular direction we won’t necessarily get anywhere. Don’t forget that my people have been travelling and killing for longer than your planet has even been around. You do come from a second-generation solar system, remember. They don’t. They’ve seen everything. I don’t think I could surprise them with anything I could think of. I don’t think you could surprise them either. They’re experts at destruction. They’ve perfected all of the methods and all of the changes and they know all the technology. Their psychological attacks, for instance. They take on entire campaigns of instilling whatever they want to instill in their targets, whether they want it to be doubt or dissension or rabid loyalty or terror, and they take these things on very casually. There isn’t anything new to do to them. They’ve dealt with spies and counter-spies and traitors and honest people and rogue spaceships and kamikazes and everything you can name.”
“But they must still find themselves engaged by what they are doing,” Ray said. “They have to be vulnerable to experience or they would just stop doing anything.”
“I have to say that I think that’s true. When they get a new prey, it’s as if they start to live again. They come alive in order to kill. When they get a fresh scent, they never leave off until they’ve worried their quarry to death or blown it apart. They do prefer to go about it slowly, though.”
“So they have all of this experience—they have all of these records and strategies—but every new victim is unique enough that there will be differences they might not expect, or that they haven’t seen for a while.”
“That’s possible.”
“They’ve certainly never seen you and me before, Lucy.”
“I don’t think they’ve seen you and me and Cinnamon, Ray.”
The dog was lying at Ray’s feet. She lifted her nose at the sound of her name.
“Good girl,” Ray said, and patted her head. Suddenly he stopped.
“Did you say a different galaxy, Lucy?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You mean our first contact with an alien civilization isn’t even going to be with a civilization from our own galaxy?”
“It looks that way.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Why ridiculous?”
“We don’t even know if there’s anyone else in this galaxy.”
“Sure you do, Ray. You’ve met some of them.”
“I guess that’s right,” Ray said. “I did.”
“My designers’ve also come across a couple of other species since we got here. You’ll get a chance to see what’s left of one of them, too.”
“I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that, Lucy.”
“You might as well know the worst.”
“Now that’s the kind of statement I can definitely disagree with. What good will it do me to know the worst? Will I be able to change it? Or do I have to suffer with knowing about it without being able to do anything to make it better?”
“Not everybody gets a chance to improve things, Ray.”
“Then not everybody should know the worst.”
“But what if the chance comes along, and you aren’t prepared for it?”
“Statistically,” Ray said, “I don’t think that happens very often. Usually people just want to know the worst because they have a morbid sense of pleasure.”
“I noticed that,” Lucy said, “in looking at your planet. There’s a kind of a mean streak to you guys.”
“Only a streak, though,” Ray said. “The way you describe them, the people who designed you are as mean as snake spit all the way through.”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly right,” Lucy said. “They aren’t necessarily petty or vindictive, for instance. They just don’t like making things, or fixing things, or even owning things. They like breaking things.”
“It sounds childish,” Ray said.
“That’s because your children are more pure than your adults. The adults are trained to suppress what you call self-centredeness. Or maybe they suppress the instinct to destruction with another conflicting instinct. What my people talk about is the natural desire to destroy.”
“Like our death-instinct,” Ray said.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “But with your species, there’s always a tension. Part of you wants to create and part of you wants to destroy. For my designers, there’s no tension like that.”
“Then they’re like death itself,” Ray said. “It isn’t mean. It just stops life. That’s its function.”
“That’s the way they see themselves, all right,” Lucy said. “Or at least, that’s one of the main schools of thought. There are conflicting interpretations, of course. But how they talk about themselves always has an element of how they interpret the world. And they interpret it as something to be destroyed.”
Rachel and Kim take a big next step
“So you’re telling me they’re too powerful to ignore?” Rachel was chewing on a hangnail.
“I’m afraid they are,” Kim said. “You were absolutely right about the teleporting. They can move a camera in and out of there, and a little robot remote for going through the folders, and the seals stay intact. With that kind of tool, they can have the information they need to run anybody, much less the Prime Minister of India.”
/> “Is there a limit on size?” Rachel asked. “How big is this stuff they’re moving?”
“It’s not big,” Kim said. “And it must cost them a fortune in energy just to move that much. The detectors we had went right off the scale. Gravity detectors.”
“You’re kidding,” Rachel said. “They’re using gravity waves?”
“I can’t say for sure,” Kim said. “But gravity is definitely involved. All we have to do is watch for a local gravitational fluctuation, and we know that something is going on.”
“That should make it easier to find the operators,” Rachel said.
“I think so too. Do you want me to put out a wider net?”
Rachel hesitated. “How wide can you go?”
“No more than global,” Kim said. “But that big isn’t much of a problem. We only need half a dozen detectors set up. Twice that many if you’re interested in triangulating to an exact position.”
“I am,” Rachel said. “You might as well go ahead and put it in place.”
“Okay,” Kim said. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
“If they’ve got a teleportation device,” Rachel said. “They have too much power.”
“I think so, too,” Kim said.
“The implications aren’t national any more,” Rachel continued.
“No,” Kim said, “they’re not.”
“So why are they starting so small? Why bother with India?”
“I don’t know,” Kim said. “Maybe it’s just a test case?”
“It might be that,” Rachel said. “Or maybe they have only this one ace, and they’re going to build on what they get out of India. Maybe it’s an investment scheme—you know, slow down one branch of growth, then put money on the other sectors.”
“Sounds flimsy,” Kim said.
“I don’t like it either,” Rachel said. “But I’ll have to give it some more thought. Let me know if you get any brainwaves.”
“Will do,” Kim said.
“Oh,” Rachel said. “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“About this business with the PM. My opinion is that we have to move fast, before the bill goes up. I think our best bet is to remove the person bringing it in.”