Strickland looked up from his preoccupation with his little pile of misshapen bullets. He stared long at me from the creased rolls of flesh.
“I could use a man like you,” he said as if making an important discovery. “By God if I couldn’t!”
“But by God you won’t,” I said.
“You know the score,” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. As if the matter were already arranged. “Now this is the next step we’ll take…”
His voice trailed off, and his own eyes widened. I hadn’t believed it possible to see so much of them. His own face went slack, and the flesh suddenly sagged. The whole body seemed to slump and overflow the edges of the chair. The head dropped suddenly, as far as fat would allow, toward the chest.
And only then did I become aware that a purple vortex was whirling beside my desk.
I seemed to be past shock, past caring. Perhaps I had been expecting them, prepared for their coming, ready for any kind of form in which they might appear.
“Bex, Dex, Jex, Kex and—ah—Lex,” I said dryly. “I think you’ve given the man a heart attack. Granted that one was long overdue with all that fat around it, this is how you carry out your resolution to harm no one?”
Miller still cradled his head in his arms, his face concealed. He had not yet seen the vortex. Sara was still huddled back in her chair, staring at the purple whirlwind.
“It’s all right, Sara,” I said. “These are our little playmates who just like to have fun. I think this is probably how they really look. All the other he-man stuff was just showmanship. More illusion. You know, same as people?”
She nodded, but out of habit only. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her fingers transcribing it all in shorthand, without the faintest notion of what I was saying.
“Still,” I said to the vortex, “it might be a little chummier if you did take human shapes.” I nodded toward the slumped figure of Miller, who hadn’t yet looked up.
They obliged me. Five, handsome, resplendent young men were standing about the room. At the stir Miller did look up then.
“Your boss is dead,” I said.
His face stiffened, and then he smiled.
He held out his hands, wrists together, toward the nearest Starman.
“They’re not policemen,” I said. “Sara, take him down to first aid. Let the Strickland body be until I see what these slap-happy fly-boys want now. We’ll get around to cleaning up our own mess after I learn why these fellows who come from the stars have created such a bigger one.”
As if she too were If puppet on a string, Sara arose, reached out to Miller, helped him pull himself to his feet, helped him out the door. As they went across the room, I wasn’t sure who was leaning on whom.
“Well?” I asked when Sara had closed the door behind them. I nodded toward the Strickland body again.
I do not know, to this day, whether the Starmen felt emotions in the way we feel them. They portrayed emotions, and I suppose any fife form must have emotions of some kind. Wouldn’t it be a part of awareness, awareness of self, awareness of self in relation to things about us, awareness that things, even though unpersonal and impersonal, can harm or benefit us according to our use of them? These Starmen had at least the courtesy, if nothing else, to look regretful.
“Your criticism of our mistakes is nothing compared to what Galaxy Council will say,” Bex said. I suppose it was Bex.
“I thought you told me yours was a policy of noninterference, of bringing harm to no life form,” I said.
“We have restored everything to its original state.”
“Oh no,” I answered. “You’ve been here. You’ve made yourself known. If nothing else, nothing else at all, we’d never be the same again.”
“That’s the point,” he said. “You will be the same. Because the Vegans were here, thousands of years ago. Prematurely, without authorization. You’ve built up an entire structure of thought based on their appearance. In time, our appearance will come to be just more of the same.”
“But we were progressing out of it,” I said. “Our belief in demons was fading. Compared with what you can do, perhaps we hadn’t made much progress in science, but we were starting off in that direction. Now you’ve set us back at least a thousand years.”
“We miscalculated,” he said, and had the grace to look unhappy about it.
“You sure did,” I agreed fervently.
“It’s still difficult to believe that you’ve made the advances in nuclear physics, other quite commendable advances in other fields…”
“Thanks,” I interrupted dryly.
“And still know nothing, nothing at all about yourselves. We miscalculated. We believed there must be two life forms. We didn’t see how a man could master science in one area of knowledge and be as ignorant and superstitious as a savage in another. We believed that for some reason the intelligent race must be in hiding. We didn’t then know that this intelligence was being hidden, not only from his own kind, but from himself.
“Otherwise we wouldn’t have made an appearance at all.”
“And having made the appearance… But if you were courting an intelligence, why the guise of—well-—such hero types?”
“We felt there must be some desperate reason why the intelligence was concealed. We fitted the mores of the lesser form, lest our appearance lead to revealment unwittingly.”
“So now,” I said, “you’ve made your tests and done your exploring, and you’ve found that while we can mix together a little of this and that and make a big bang, emotionally and philosophically we’re still ignorant savages. That we’ve made a little progress in the physical sciences, but in the humanic sciences we are still determined not to make any progress, I suppose you’ll—uh—ah—quarantine us? See to it that we don’t get out beyond our solar system?”
“Oh no!” The reply was instant, and shocked. “We wouldn’t have any right to do that. Who are we to say how a life form shall develop? When you get out there, if you do, if your humanists permit your science to develop any farther and that’s unlikely, we’ll cope with you somehow.”
“Our humanists may fool you,” I said. “You hadn’t noticed, because it is such a tiny trace; but here and there we even have a humanist who is willing to admit that his authoritative personal opinion and vested importance as a leader-not-ever-to-be-challenged might not, after all, be the whole and final answer.”
I nodded toward Strickland’s body.
“That guy’s a bumbling amateur compared with some of the humanists we’ve had and what they’ve done to the human race. But don’t count on us failing. That would be another miscalculation.”
TWENTY ONE
The star-sapphire globe, iridescent from pearl to blue, hovered once more in the center of Washington’s Mall. Once more the sad eyes of the Lincoln statue looked out upon it.
The crowd was thinner now, and quiet. The dignitaries were few. Men such as the President had calculated the political disadvantages of appearing too intimate with these Starmen who had given of miracles, and taken them away. No one, this time, seemed eager to challenge my position as; go-between, host speeding the departing guests upon their way.
There were a few officers from the Pentagon, bless ’em, who had shown up; as if to say, right or wrong, the services will stand behind their own. The crowds of the curious had gathered, but they were neither enthusiastic nor hostile. The death of Strickland had left a hole, a deep hole not yet healed, and no one had yet turned public opinion toward the Starmen into hate. Lacking leadership in forming slogans, for this temporary space, the news media were simply reporting events. It was something new for this generation, and no one knew how to respond to it.
We stood, a little lonely group; the five Starmen, somehow less resplendent this morning under a clouded sky, Sara and I, Shirley and Dr. Kibbie and Dr. Gaffee, a handful of lesser Pentagon officers.
We stood by the ramp (no rainbow bridge this time) and gravely shook hands with the five Starmen. T
hey turned and filed up the ramp. There were no cheers from the crowd.
Four of them filed into the blue radiance shining from the interior, an interior our scientists had never got to explore. The fifth, I suppose it was Bex, turned and faced the silent people. So he was going to carry out my suggestion of saving face, after all!
“People of Earth,” he said, and his voice came clearly to all of us. “I reckon you all are disappointed that we hafta go home now. But like your own Peace Corps we came, and we showed you how to turn wasteland into bountiful fertile acres. We done our duty by you, and I reckon now that you know what ought to be done, you’ll go right ahead and do it. We showed you. We done our part.”
He waited.
There was no answering cheer.
“Good-by, now. When you all have figgered out how to sail across space to our shores, you’ll find yourselves just as welcome as the people who come to your shores.”
There was a murmur from one of the officers behind me.
“Why the dirty, hostile sonsofbitches!” he said.
Bex turned then, and walked into the blue radiance. The ramp slid, melted into the side of the ship. The door closed. The globe lifted; slowly at first, then faster and faster.
It melted into the layer of clouds. It was gone.
The silent crowd shuffled a little, and slowly began to disperse.
They had come from space, and Earth would start its long road to recovery.
I looked at Sara, Shirley, Gaffee, Kibbie.
“Well, boys and girls,” I said. “We’re still the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Psychology. Maybe some of the obscure research departments of some of the universities will still want some information from us.”
“We may have to hoard that two billion and stretch it out for quite a while,” Dr. Kibbie answered.
The three of them turned then, and started walking toward our staff cars, ahead of Sara and me.
“I wonder if Old Stone Face might hire back a couple of wandering personnel people,” I mused.
Sara grabbed me by the arm and halted me. She spoke intensely.
“Look, boss,” she said firmly. “Everybody’s shocked now. After that they’re going to be mad. They’ll be as mad as hornets for a while. And then they’re going to start thinking. Now that we know that outside our solar system, now that we know it is there; how long do you think it’s going to be before we grit our teeth, dig in, and determine to go out there, ourselves? Come hell or high water!”
Shirley, Gaffee, Kibbie had stopped when we did, and now they drifted back.
“Why, sure,” Kibbie began to bubble again. “And that two billion will be just a drop in the bucket, why it’ll be like pissin’ in the ocean compared to the money we can promote for that kind of program. ’Scuse me, girls.”
“Dr. Kennedy, I’m going to need much more scientific help than I’ve got if I’m to carry my share,” Gaffee said, and began to look far away into a dream.
“And, Admiral,” Shirley said, “I think we ought to use this lull to get reorganized for the big push. Oh, ah, I’ve been invited to join the Women’s Executive Club of Washington. Do you think I should?”
“Okay, kids,” I said. “You’re right. We’re not licked. We’re just starting.”
The Space Cadet chauffeurs saw us turn and start walking briskly toward them. Even at that distance they began to catch the sudden enthusiasm our strides and faces revealed. They straightened up, pulled their space helmets into ready, climbed jauntily into the cockpits of the automobiles, and when we had slammed the ports behind us, they blasted off down Pennsylvania Avenue.
1 This isn’t really what I said, but our United States Post Office Department, itself far gone in the syndrome of self-righteousness, has determined that the American public is much too young to be told how people really talk and behave, not if we expect to use their post offices for distributing our horrid books.
THE SEALED SKY, by Cynthia Ward
Cautiously, Lantry Stiller pulls back a fold of curtain to expose a gray afternoon. A low, dull cloud rests on the rim of the wooded hilltops, a pewter pot-lid covering the isolated valley. The cloud is a familiar sight; in the Northwest, the sky is overcast almost every day. Lantry doesn’t mind. He doesn’t want to see the sky.
It is safe to go out. Lantry gulps brandy-laced coffee and ventures onto the redwood deck. Shivering in the damp autumn air, he looks around. There is little risk of a break in the cloud cover; no risk of seeing stars. But he doesn’t look up.
Lantry drops the mug. He barely hears the porcelain shatter. His house has changed.
He stalks inside and pounds furiously on the door of his son’s bedroom.
The door opens fractionally. A wary brown eye peers out and up. “What?” Kyle asks.
“What do you think?” Lantry says. “You turned the damned house into an observatory. Again.”
“Dad, my softutor’s teaching an astronomy mod. How can I learn astronomy if--”
“Don’t give me that,” Lantry says. “Your education software includes a virtual-space package. Now, put the house back to normal.”
Kyle opens the door a few inches. He is a short, slim boy, with fine dark features and heavy black hair. “How about if I get rid of the dome and keep the telescope--”
“The whole observatory,” Lantry snaps. “Now.”
Kyle tugs nervously on his tunic, garish plaid shot through with nano-spun gold and ruby thread, this week’s kid fashion. “But, Dad, I want to be an astronomer--”
“Never!” Lantry raises his hand.
Kyle shrinks back. Lantry stops, appalled. Would he really have hit Kyle? Kyle, who looks so much like Maria that Lantry’s anger fades before helpless love, and the old, fresh, rending pain. Kyle has the same hair, the same eyes, the same stubborn jaw as his mother.
Lantry lowers his hand. He’ll never hurt their son. Rare and priceless treasure. Nobody as young as Lantry and Maria had been is allowed a child. Unless they’ve been chosen for a starship.
“I’m replacing your education software,” Lantry tells his son. Astronomy is a profession practiced exclusively off Earth. “That module’s giving you dangerous ideas about going to space.”
Kyle speaks quietly, sounding far older than his eleven years. “Dad, space is safe as Earth, almost. Mom died in a freak accident.”
Lantry slaps his son across the face.
“Don’t you ever try using your mother’s death to get your way! Now, unmake the observatory!”
Kyle turns away, stabs a keyboard fiercely. Lantry makes himself look up. The slot in the observatory disappears; the telescope melts into the dome as the dome sinks and alters. The heat of transformation washes over Lantry’s face as the nanomachines revert metal and concrete to redwood planks and beams.
“I know you think I’m being mean, Kyle,” Lantry says. “But I’m doing this for your own good.”
Kyle mutters, “You can’t keep me here forever.”
“No?” Lantry’s heart roars like the engine of an Earth-to-L5 cargo rocket. “Did you forget I’m a medical technician? I can change your nanodocs, boy, to keep you eleven years old! You would always have a child’s biology, a child’s temperament, and in the eyes of the law you would always be a minor. You wouldn’t be able to cancel the growth suppression without my permission. You wouldn’t be able to go to space without my permission. And you would never receive my permission.”
Kyle turns to Lantry, his expression horrified.
“You’ve got to understand, son. Death is real. It’s not a myth, or something confined to the bad old pre-nanodoc days of age and disease. I love you, and I won’t let you die.”
There is no mark on Kyle’s face, but he rubs his cheek where his father struck him. Lantry knows this is pure manipulation--the nanodocs would have quickly numbed the pain--but he feels sick. How could he strike his son? Maria’s son?
To save his life.
“I’m sorry I hit you, Kyle,” Lantry says. “But I can’t
let anything happen to you.”
Lantry walks away. He needs a drink. Needs to drown the memories flooding in. His wife. Her dream of reaching the stars. The starship taking shape outside the L5 habitat. The fatal shuttle. Maria didn’t need to leave L5 to do her job--data from the orbital and Lunar Farside telescopes were transmitted to astrophysicists--but she loved looking naked-eye at the stars, so she insisted on accompanying him when his work took him to other habitats. He didn’t need to see patients in the flesh, but he found telemedicine and virtual examinations too impersonal, and knew they could miss subtle but important behavioral changes, so he traveled occasionally.
Maria was beside him, in the window seat, when a meteor struck the shuttle from Clarke Colony. They were both killed, yet they survived. Everyone on board survived, their nano-rich clothes converting to vacuum suits and the nanodocs in their bloodstreams healing injuries and restoring life. Lantry regained consciousness to find Maria still strapped in beside him, her body broken and bloody, her skull crushed but rising, reforming under the new glassteel helmet. The brain too was being rebuilt. Uselessly.
Lantry remembers an archaic theory that nanodocs would copy minds into hardware storage and download a copy into a clone when a person’s body or brain were destroyed. He suppresses a bitter laugh. Pre-nanotech naivete. The mind isn’t software that runs on the brain. Hell, the mind isn’t even confined to the brain. He glances at his hands, discovers them clenched in fists. Every muscle and nerve, every hormone and enzyme, is part of the mind. But destroy the brain and you destroy the mind. The person.
Maria was as dead as Hippocrates. And nothing Dr. Lantry Stiller could do would change it.
He could only euthanize her healthy body.
Lantry mixes a strong stinger. Maria was already dead, he knows, but that doesn’t matter. He killed the woman he loved. He killed her; and the stars led her to her death.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 52