by Joe Haldeman
Everybody but Moonboy was there, including both Martians. Rare to see them together outside of their tub. I guess if you bathed with someone twenty hours a day, you might avoid him the rest of the time.
Spy came in exactly on time and stood in the door. He was wearing his space suit, holding the helmet. “Other-prime has decided that we should precede you to Wolf 25. We have learned enough about you to help the Others there deal with the problem. So we will leave this iceberg and speed on to our mutual destination. We should arrive about eight months before you.”
I didn’t know whether to feel relieved. We wouldn’t have them looking over our shoulders, but then we wouldn’t learn anything more about them, either.
“We are going to impose something upon you that may be unpleasant, but Other-prime feels it is necessary. Your group is unstable in various ways, and there is a real possibility that not all of you, or perhaps none of you, will survive the rest of your trip.
“To keep this from happening, we will cause you to travel the way we do. The time it takes you to go the twelve light-years will not be affected, but the duration of the trip will be negligible. I just explained this to Carmen.”
“You did, but it made no sense.”
“Do you remember about the elevator and the bird?”
I looked around at everybody and shook my head. “You said that describing it would be like telling a bird how an elevator works.”
“Yes. How you can get to the top of a building without flapping wings. It would never understand. But that would not affect reality.”
“Of course not.”
“What would happen if you put the bird into the elevator and took it to the roof?”
“It wouldn’t like it,” Paul said.
“No,” Spy said, still looking at me. “But it would get to the rooftop.”
It turned to Paul. “It will happen tomorrow morning. I will call you a half hour ahead of time. People should be strapped in, including Moonboy.”
“Will I be shutting the engine down?”
“Not for another twelve years. Objective time. That would be about three years and three months in your decelerating frame of reference. Seconds, in your new one. It will all be clear.”
Clear to whom, I wondered. To Paul? “Spy, I don’t understand. You and I were sitting down in the garden, talking about, I don’t know, marriage…”
“Social connections. Friendships.”
“And now suddenly we’re going to be the birds in your elevator, flapping around and going crazy, I assume. What happened?”
“The Other-prime contacted me and said it was ready.”
“What if we aren’t ready?” Paul said, tense. “This is a pretty big deal.”
“Just have them strapped in, Paul. You will find it an interesting ride.”
“Wait,” Namir said, and it was like a command. “Suppose we don’t want to take your shortcut? Maybe we’d rather continue as planned and have those years to prepare for meeting your people.”
“They aren’t mine, and they aren’t people,” Spy said. “If all of you would prefer the old slow way, tell me now. I will ask the Other-prime.”
Meryl spoke up first. “Not me. The sooner the better.”
Dustin nodded slowly. “Me, too.”
“Paul?” I said.
He tugged on his ear, a sign that he was conflicted. “Spy… we know our technology has worked this far. I can understand Namir’s reluctance to try something new and untested. Just on your say-so.”
“I won’t argue with you.” It was looking at Namir. “But technology is not involved at all. It’s just that the way you experience time is connected to the way you think about time, and that is flawed.”
“And you can change that?” I said. “The way we think about time?”
“No, no, no. The bird does not have to build the elevator to ride in it.”
He moved his gaze to Paul. “What it is… Let me put this as simply as possible. We are—or you and the Other-prime are—here together in a definite place in space and time. In a simple Einsteinian way. Twelve years from now, you will again share a place in the space-time continuum. Share a point. So what connects those two points?”
I remembered that from school. “A geodesic,” I said, simultaneously with Paul and Namir.
“Exactly,” it said, and looked at the two Martians. “A geodesic in space-time is something like a line drawn between two points on a map.”
Fly-in-Amber sketched a line with his finger. “The shortest natural distance.”
Spy nodded. “True and not true. There’s only one shortest line between the two points, but there are many geodesics. It gets complicated if you have gravity and acceleration.”
“But there’s no magic wand,” Paul said. “You’re talking about going from here to there, a really long distance, with no time elapsing. That’s not possible, no matter how fast you go.”
I think that was the only time I ever saw Spy laugh. “Tell that to a photon. Or tell it to me tomorrow. Which will be twelve years from now, after a trip of no duration.”
“Unless we refuse your offer,” Namir said.
“Like the bird refusing to enter the elevator? I’m afraid you’re already in the net. As I said, I could ask the Other-prime to set you free, but at least two of you do want to take the shortcut. How about you, Carmen?”
“Wait. What if something goes wrong en route? The hydroponics spring a leak or the ship’s guidance system lets a pebble through? We won’t be able to deal with it.”
“Nothing will happen—literally nothing, because with no duration there are no events. If there were two independent events, there would be a measurable time between them.”
My head was spinning. “There’s no hurry, is there? I want to hear Paul’s take on it, and Namir’s.”
“Paul’s argument is based on ignorance and Namir’s is just fear of losing control. But no, there is no hurry. Just let me know when you’ve made up your mind.”
“Whereupon you will do whatever you want,” Namir said. Spy smiled and turned to go. “Won’t you?”
“Just let me know,” Spy repeated. Paul followed him, to operate the air lock, and nobody spoke until he came back.
“Spy’s wrong,” Namir said. “It’s not about control. It’s just about understanding what’s going on.”
“Which is apparently impossible for mere humans,” I said.
“What do you think, Paul?” Meryl said.
He sat down heavily and picked up his drink and stared into it. “I think we’d better get ready for an elevator ride.”
Ultimately, even Namir agreed that going along with Spy and the Other-prime would be the wisest course, not only to maximize our own chances for survival, but also to establish a record of cooperation before we met the Others. And abandoned ourselves to their mercy.
We went through the habitat getting things ready for zero gee; Spy had warned us that we would be in orbit, not accelerating, when the “elevator ride” was over.
Paul led us through the seldom- used corridor that connected the lander to the rest of ad Astra, basically two air locks with a silver corridor in between. A handy metaphor for any number of things—birth, rebirth, death. Perhaps robotic excretion, the life-support system that had sustained us for years expelling us with relief.
We got all strapped in and sat in a stew of collective anxiety, thick enough to walk on. Paul fussed with his controls and came back to crouch next to me, holding hands, for a couple of minutes. He was able to smile, but then he’s an official hero figure, and has to.
He returned to his place and strapped in, and in a few minutes said over the intercom, “We should be about a minute away.” Then, “Let’s count down the last ten seconds together. Ten, nine, eight…”
We never got to seven. The ship was suddenly flooded with sunlight, from the right—and on the left, my porthole was filled with a nearby planet, resembling Mars but more gray.
I felt gray.
/> There was no physical sensation as such. Only what you had to describe as deep loss, or longing, or sorrow. Some people were weeping. I bit my lips and kept tears away, and tried to sort out what was happening.
I unbuckled the harness and looked back down the aisle. Familiar faces contorted with all-consuming grief.
Except for two. Moonboy’s expression was blank, catatonia.
So was Namir’s.
10
RAMPAGE
Elza’s face kept swimming out of darkness, into focus, then I would fade back to Tel Aviv, reliving the worst time of my life in every dreadful detail. It seemed like weeks of nightmares, but it was less than a day.
I was in my room, surrounded by images from the Louvre. Watteau’s Jupiter and Antiope, Regnault’s The Three Graces, Corot’s Woman with a Pearl, and Gericault’s terrible The Raft of the Medusa. That one persisted, all the dead and dying.
Elza had just given me a shot, and she was cutting away a tape that bound my left wrist. My right one was sore.
“You’ll be all right now?”
“What’s… the wrists?”
“You were hurting yourself. Pulling out hair.”
My hand went to my head. Almost bald, sore in places.
“All that loose hair in zero gravity. It was a mess; I used the vacuum razor. You’re a little bit tranquilized. I didn’t think you wanted to sleep anymore, though.”
“No. Please.” I felt my head. “The razor with the vacuum attachment?”
“It looks nice. Evened up.”
“Was everybody… no. Other people can’t have been affected as strongly as I was.”
“Nobody. Well, you can’t tell about Moonboy. But nobody else passed out. It could be your age.” She caressed my head. “Spy supposedly didn’t know what caused it, but it wasn’t just a human thing. Both the Martians were uncomfortable.”
I took a squeeze from her water bottle. “Memories. I felt trapped inside memories.”
“You have some sad ones. Worse than the rest of us.”
“Not sadness.” I had to be honest with her, of all people. “It was guilt. Murder.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You mustn’t feel guilt for being a soldier. We’ve gone over that pretty well.”
“Not that. Long after that. I… never told you.” I hesitated, aware that the drugs were loosening my tongue. Then it came out in a rush.
“It was right after Gehenna; right after I found my mother dead. I raced back into Tel Aviv, putting a list together in my mind.
“My Working Group Seven had been formed in response to a persistent rumor that a large-scale act of terrorism was imminent, one that couldn’t be traced to a single political or geographical entity because it was not centralized at all. We had a couple of chemically induced confessions that indicated the group was large but divided into small independent cells.
“Anti-Semitism doesn’t have borders, and in fact some of the people we were looking at were Jews themselves, with strong opposition to the current power structure. Current at that time, liberal.
“I privately suspected that two or even three of the people in my office were moles, making sure that we were distracted by false leads. The one woman in whom I had confided this was the first person I saw die, a few minutes after we heard the bombs that were the second phase of the poisoning.
“As I raced down alleys and bumped across playgrounds and parks—none of the regular roads were passable—I was making a list of people I had to talk to that day.
“Because anyone who was not stunned that day was guilty. Ipso facto. And… there were so many dead bodies lying around that a few more would not raise any suspicions.”
She was behind me, rubbing my shoulders. “How many, Namir?”
“Eleven that day. I tracked them down one by one, along with seven or eight I looked at and spared.”
“You just shot them in cold blood?”
“No. Bullets would look suspicious. I got them alone and strangled them. Then they looked pretty much like all the other corpses.”
“There were more than those eleven? Other days?”
“Six had flown out that morning, including three from my office. To London, Cairo, and New York. In London and Cairo I used my hands. The ones in New York I did shoot, with a pickup gun I’d had for years. Then tossed it in the Hudson.”
“Like the .357 in the shoe box at home?”
“Yeah, behind the drywall. You are such a snoop.”
“It’s in the job description.” Holding on to my shoulder, she floated around in front of me. “Cold-blooded murder isn’t.”
“My blood was not cold that day. Those days.”
“Do you still think they were guilty?”
“I think now that two, at least, were not. But since we have never been able to pin down the organization responsible, I can’t ever know for sure.”
I closed my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you, burdened you with it. I’ve never told anyone before.”
“Not even Dustin?”
“No. He knows I’ve done some wet work that was not formally sanctioned. He doesn’t know how many, or the fact that I was on a rampage.”
“I won’t tell him. Or anyone. They killed your mother. And four million others. Including the seventeen they killed using you as an intermediary.”
“That’s about the way I rationalize it. But it is a rationalization. Deep down, I know I’ve committed the one sin that can’t be reversed. Or forgiven.”
“God would forgive you. If there were a God.”
I smiled at her. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”
She held me to her softness for a warm moment, her cheek against mine. “There’s another problem,” she whispered. “We seem to be at the wrong planet.”
“Wrong what?”
“Show you.” She pushed away from me gently and floated down to the bed, as I rose to the ceiling. She pushed a couple of buttons on the wall there, and the paintings faded, replaced by a huge dun circle, a planet that resembled Mars. Clear atmosphere, a wisp of cloud here and there. No obvious craters, though; I wasn’t sure what that meant scientifically. Weathering, I supposed.
“We aren’t at Wolf 25?”
“We are, apparently—just not at the planet of the Others. Another one in the same system. Much closer in.”
“Why?”
“Spy said we’re going down tomorrow. Until then, we’re free to speculate.”
11
DEAD WORLD
Some of the humans, like Paul and Namir, were disappointed or apprehensive when they learned that we were not going down to the planet’s surface in our own lander, carried twenty-four light-years for that purpose, but instead were to go down in Spy’s “starfish” spaceship. I was relieved. Going to and from a planetary surface in a rocket is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it is “the devil we know,” as Carmen put it. We had no idea how the starfish worked, but the Others had probably been using them for a long time.
We had to cross over to their ship holding on to a cable, as before, and Snowbird did not enjoy the experience any more than I had the first time. This wasn’t in cool starlight, either. We had the huge disc of the ashen planet looming beneath us and the brilliant glare of Wolf 25 moving overhead.
Moonboy was not able to cross by himself. Paul and Namir carried him over like a deadweight.
Spy had told us that we couldn’t pronounce the name of the planet in any Martian or human languages, but that it translated to “Earth” pretty accurately. We might call it “Home” to reduce confusion.
“Whose home?” Carmen asked.
“Allow me to be mysterious,” Spy said, though the answer was obvious, if the details were not.
The air inside the ship was oppressively hot and humid, probably comfortable for humans. When we took off, though, the gravity was light, about normal for Mars.
It was not acceleration-induced “gravity,” either. It didn’t change direction or strength when the ship took off.
A circle opened in the floor of the craft, like a large window. We got an interesting view of the engine side of the iceberg/asteroid, which seemed to have diminished by about a third, in regular concentric grooves where the automatic ice- mining machines had gnawed their way around.
The landing was as smooth as the humans say their space elevator is, no lurching or vibration. As we approached the ground, though, the gravity increased to about that of Earth. Spy apologized to the two of us but said there was no way around it.
We approached the ground very fast. Snowbird and a few others reacted, but I assumed the Others hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to smash us into a planet. It was too fast, though, to get a good idea of what surrounded the landing site. Just a hint of regular architectural structure, and we were on the ground, and the floor window irised shut.
“The abrupt landing was necessary because of the physics involved,” Spy said. “We will observe from low altitude later.”
It had warned us that we would have to “suit up” before we left the ship, so Snowbird and I had not removed our footgear, and it was only a matter of donning four gloves and letting the protective cloaks form around our bodies. So we were the first two out the air lock, the human crew following by a few minutes.
Carmen would later say that it was “beautiful in a horrible tragic way,” which juxtaposes three contradictory ideas in what I realize is a standard human ironic frame. About beauty I have no opinion, and horribleness and tragedy are just dramatic observations about the fact that the universe runs downhill.
This is what I saw: on a plain that extended to the horizon in every direction, there were regularly spaced objects that we were told had once been space vehicles. The outer shells had mostly been eroded or corroded away; a lacy framework of some more durable metal remained, a gleaming cage for more corrosion within.
I wondered whether everybody else was thinking what I was thinking: The fleet that humans were building to protect the Earth might as well be paper airplanes.
“This was an invasion fleet,” Spy said. “It was poised to attack the planet of the Others.”