“What makes them so shy?” Casper asked.
“They are not shy. But there exists a protocol for First Contact and for Intervention. Besides,” she added, “their primary interests are elsewhere.”
“We’re just a side-project?” the journalist, Viviana, asked, her brows lifting as if in delight.
“Yes. Does this embarrass you?”
Viviana laughed and shook her head. “No, I think it’s hilarious. Shades of Douglas Adams.”
“Often,” said Neela, “despair hides in the celebration of the absurd. That said, the works of the author you have mentioned continue to prove very popular on many other worlds.”
“Because,” said Abdul Irani, “sometimes you just have to laugh.”
Neela smiled. “When born from a well of love, laughter is the sweetest music, Imam.”
“Laughter, dancing, expressions of joy, friendship and love, yes, I believe all these things are God’s greatest gift to us.”
“And yours to your God, Imam.”
“When do the doors open?” Casper asked Neela again.
“Why not now?” she replied. And, taking Kolo’s hand, she led the way. The crowd parted before her.
As they walked, Kolo stumbling every now and then, Neela looked up at him and said, “Be at peace, Kolo. I heal you as well, you know. With each step on our journey, I mend the wounds within you. I strengthen your psyche. To know compassion for others, you must first feel compassion for yourself, for the life you have lived. You must forgive yourself and make peace with your past. This is not absolution. Such things are beyond you and me, Kolo. Nor is this redemption. Every crime remains—as does every act, every choice ever made—and time itself is a liminal state. The past is alive all around us and is bound to us. The past gives us our language of the present.”
Kolo shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Feel first, understand later.”
They continued on, parting the human sea, and before long, voices lifted in song, voices like waves, and there was motion everywhere, as humanity found its feet, for perhaps the very first time.
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, September 14th
Summer was holding on. The sky was mostly clear although a few cottony clouds slowly slid past overhead as John Allaire lit up a cigarette outside his favorite bar on Cook Street. As the traffic rolled past on the street in front of him he looked up at that sky, squinting against the glare.
The sense of wonder just wouldn’t go away. He no longer needed his wheelchair. His legs were alive again and getting stronger every day. The desperate need for booze no longer haunted him. A year ago and he would have been drinking cheap scotch all day. Now he ordered a lone single malt, expensive but heavenly. All he needed.
A man made mistakes in his life. It was just the way it was. He fell into things and couldn’t climb back out. Sometimes he messed up because something in him needed him to mess things up. So, John knew well enough: he wasn’t a good man. For years and years he’d been unreliable, occasionally treacherous, often an utter asshole. He’d been a man surrounded by an army of well-armed excuses, justifications and rationalizations. He’d hated most people and a lot of people had hated him right back. He’d hated life itself, and this failing body of his with its fatal habits, well, that had made him angry, cursing an unjust world while secretly admitting that he only got what he deserved.
It all made sense. Ugly sense, but there it was.
Now, as he peered up at the empty sky, face warmed by the sunlight, he thought about how if he could get a second chance, then dammit, anybody could.
And so he did what he did most days like this, outside the bar, looking up at the sun, remembering that day when she just vanished in a beam of light. He whispered. Once, twice, three times. And it was better than winning any lottery.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
EPILOGUE
Mars Orbit …
Artificial gravity took some of the magic away from this journey between planets. When Simon Gist had first envisioned this moment, hanging suspended above the glorious red planet, he had imagined a scene where he floated in zero-gee, one hand holding onto a rail, as if he had become his very own celestial body in orbit above Mars.
Marc Renard’s voice sounded in his ear-bud, “Almost time to strap in, Simon.”
“We’re landing near the ruins, right?”
“Deja Thoris Zero-Point, yes. Our latest deep scans also identified a two point six meter thick organic layer in the strata to the east of the site, confirmed biological components.”
“Cool. You know, we should’ve brought along an archaeologist.”
“Yes,” Marc replied. “We should have.”
The American astronaut, Gus Riesling, cut in. “Nothing stopping us from taking photos and samples. And with the near real-time feed with Houston, we can run anything by the ground team if needed. Time to strap in, people. It’s all good.”
Simon remained for a moment longer, looking down on the red planet. Another world. He was an immigrant, a man who had learned to call America home, who had grown to love his new country. And now, with billions watching from the Earth, Simon could almost feel that tenuous, stretched link, a distance vast enough to mock the pretensions of borders, and this link belonged not to any one nation, but to humanity itself.
He turned to face one of the wall-mounted cameras. He smiled. “About to begin our descent. There are ruins below, massive ruins. A city. And there is life, too. So far, only microbial, though there is some evidence for multi-cellular subsurface creatures. Invertebrates. Is there more to come? I think so.
“As for those ruins, well, let’s head down, shall we, to see what our old cousins had been up to.”
As he began to make his way back to his cushioned seat, he glanced out a side port and saw, again, the Bird of Prey, still hanging a short distance off. Samantha August was on board (he assumed), but she was keeping back, her vessel blocked from external sensors and apparently shielded from anything but visual detection. She wasn’t here to steal this moment and for that, Simon was thankful.
But dammit, how he wanted to finally meet that woman!
Phobos had been a hollowed-out complex, an observation post, a shipyard or hangar complete with vast repair and maintenance facilities. Its construction pre-dated the Greys and most of it was inoperative. Thankfully, there had been no human abductees anywhere in the complex. And the Greys had indeed departed, rather hastily by the evidence left behind.
Simon’s interest in Phobos proved short-lived, as penetrating scans started returning data from the surface of Mars. Why NASA went to all that trouble to hide all the evidence of past civilizations on Mars still baffled Simon. Such revelations could have lured humanity to this planet a decade ago. So much wasted time, so much paranoid fear of religious uproar.
God either existed or didn’t, and neither choice altered the fact of ruins on Mars.
No, ignorance was never a good thing, and people who imposed it, exploited it, or encouraged it, were about as faithless as one could be. As far as Simon was concerned.
But now the world was waking up. Humanity was waking up. It had been a long, troubled sleep.
He strapped himself in, listened to the chatter between the astronauts, the geologists and paleontologists and chemists and engineers, all excited, all eager to set foot on a new world.
Or an old one. Curious that their sidereal clocks had all naturally synched to the Martian day as soon as they left Earth orbit. What was all that about? Perhaps they were about to find out.
Renard’s dulcet Canadian voice announced, “Beginning our descent now, all systems optimal, guidance program locked in. If you’re all expecting to have your bones rattled, well, remember our ascent from Earth—you barely noticed.”
“Damn,” muttered the geologist, Jeff Willem, “no inertial dampeners? But I wanted inertial dampeners!”
Smiling, Simon leaned back and closed his eyes.
&n
bsp; Some dreams seemed too far off to contemplate, and to even consider them often resulted in an internal chastisement. Dragging one back down to the earth. Be reasonable. Be realistic. Not going to happen. Forget it. Get real. Everything the mind said to itself in those moments of fragility, of fear.
If there was a God, then that God’s greatest gift to humanity was the capacity to dream. He thought about Samantha August, that Science Fiction writer who’d never once written about First Contact. Who then ended up experiencing it herself.
“Simon, anything to say for posterity?”
“Hmm. Maybe, but it’s obscure. I mean, even I’m not sure what I mean. But here goes. A strange world awaits below. But there’s no stranger world than our own, the one each of us lives in. Sometimes it traps us. Sometimes it seems terribly small, weak, and delicate. For some, it can be a nightmare.
“But none of these worlds truly stands alone. We all dance around one another, in patterns too intricate to even map. Sometimes our worlds clash. Sometimes the dance is the definition of beauty itself.” He paused at seeing on the array of screens before him, each and every member of the crew—and the pilots as well—all looking at him, all listening. Suddenly self-conscious, he shrugged in his harness. “I think this dance is older than any of us can imagine. And I don’t think it’s going to end any time soon, either.
“So, everyone. All of you back there on Earth, if you can, pause for a moment. Think of your world, your own personal world. How does it look to you? Green and blue, with white clouds? Or red and sparse, barren and almost lifeless?
“ET showed us one truth above all the others. With Venus. With Earth, even. Worlds can change. So, my friends, make your world how you wish it to be. And when at last it pleases you, then step out, and dance.”
Hamish had dozed off in the second chair that had been installed beside her command chair. Smiling, Sam left him to it. Historical moments had a way of slipping past, and usually only attained profundity in the day, months, and years afterward. Besides, she would wake him up moments before Ares One landed.
Athena seemed content to say nothing. Adam too.
They would leave this moment for humanity and that was decent.
She sat in her chair, eyes on the massive screen in front of her, watching the descent of the lander. No sound effects, no stirring music, but her heart pounded nonetheless.
A strange warble reached her ears and she frowned. “Athena? Hang on, that’s not right.”
“Hmm?” the ship AI responded.
“We’ve just been pinged from something on the surface. I don’t think we have anything down there that can do that. Oh, and now … what the hell?”
An extended trilling sound whispered through the ship’s speakers.
Hamish straightened. “Sam? What’s that sound?”
“Uhm …” she stared down at the communications panel that now sprang up to hover below her right hand. “We’re being hailed.”
“From Gist? I thought we were blocking—”
“We are. No, not from Ares One. Origin is, ah, subsurface.”
Adam spoke. “Ah, yes. Now, Samantha August, things will start to get real interesting.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Erikson is a New York Times bestselling author renowned for writing The Malazan Book of the Fallen, a ten-volume series that has sold millions of copies worldwide and is recognized as number two of the top 10 fantasy books by Fantasy Book Review and one of 30 best fantasy series of all time by Paste Magazine. He is a trained archaeologist and anthropologist who has published over twenty books, most of which explore notions of privilege, power hierarchies, and the rise and fall of civilizations, or take the piss out of the same. Erikson has been nominated for the Locus Award four times and the World Fantasy Award twice. He lives in Victoria, BC with his lovely wife Clare.
Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart Page 42