by Tad Williams
Ramsey suddenly felt weak in the knees. He reached out for support and found the arm of a chair, then lowered himself onto the seat. "Are you telling me . . . that you're some kind of alien? From space?" Now, as though a lens had changed, he could picture the disturbing texture of Sellars' skin as something far stranger than scar tissue—the mottled pinkish hide of some unknown animal. The scrawny old man with the misshapen head and strange yellow eyes would have made a wonderfully grotesque illustration in a children's book, but at the moment it was hard to tell which sort of supernatural creature he would have been, kindly or cruel. When the door to the adjoining room suddenly popped open, Ramsey flinched badly.
"Kaylene just fixed some sandwiches," said Michael Sorensen. "Ramsey, you should eat something—you look sick."
His wife came through behind him carrying a picnic tray, the too-perfect picture of traditional womanhood from an earlier century. Ramsey could not relax; suddenly everything seemed sinister.
"I was just about to tell Mr. Ramsey my story," Sellars said. "No, thank you, Mrs. Sorensen, I eat very little. Has your husband told you about me yet, Mrs. Sorensen? Surely you have wondered."
"Mike's . . . Mike's told me a bit." He clearly still made her uncomfortable. "Are you sure I can't get you anything. . . ?"
"Come on!" Ramsey's resources had been stretched to the fraying point. "I'm just sitting here, waiting to hear this man tell me he's an outer space alien. Meanwhile, everybody's talking about sandwiches! Sandwiches, for God's sake!"
Kaylene Sorensen frowned and lifted a finger to her lips. "Mr. Ramsey, please—there are two little children sleeping next door."
Ramsey shook his head, subsiding into his chair. "Sorry. Sorry."
Sellars laughed. "Did I say I was an alien, Mr. Ramsey? No, I said that my nickname was the Man from Mars." He held the rag close to his mouth, inhaled, then reached out and dipped it in a cup before bringing it to his mouth again. "It is an interesting story, and might conceivably help you understand a little more of the strange tale I've already given you today."
"Even if you claim you're the Grand Duke of Alpha Centauri," Ramsey said feelingly, "I don't think things could get any weirder than they are."
Sellars smiled gently at him, then smiled also at Kaylene Sorensen, who had settled in next to her husband on the couch. "You've all been through a great deal. I hope you can understand how important it is. . . ."
Ramsey cleared his throat.
"Yes, sorry. I've had little company lately except Cho-Cho—not much practice for adult conversation." He stretched his knotted fingers before him. "First, I will reassure Mr. Ramsey that, whatever may have happened to me since, I started out as human as anyone. Alien has many definitions, but I am decidedly not the outer space sort.
"In fact, for the first thirty or so years of my life, the only interesting thing you could say about me at all was that I was a pilot—a fighter pilot. I flew for the US Navy in the Middle East, and later in the Taiwan action, then in peacetime I trained new pilots. I was not married, was not even particularly close friends with my comrades, although during combat I trusted them with my life every day, and they did the same with me. I was a naval aviator. That was my life, and I was more or less content with it.
"This is before any of you were born, so you may not remember the dying days of what used to be called the manned space program—how the private consortia who funded most of it decided there was a lot more money to be made in satellites and remote mining than actually putting a live human being into a ship and sending him or her somewhere. Also, the world's populations weren't very interested in the whole matter—I think the human race had begun to turn inward, in a way. But the idea of exploration and colonization didn't die completely, and one rather quiet project went forward after the rest of the better-known operations had folded. It had to get private funding, of course, but it was still nominally under United States government control, back in the days when the UN didn't even have a space program.
"Word went around that military fliers with no close family ties, willing to undertake dangerous duty, were being evaluated for something called PEREGRINE. I was bored with training and, looking back on it, a bit bored with my life, so even though I suspected I was past the optimum age—everything I heard suggested it was a very physically-based selection process, which usually meant reflexes—I thought it couldn't hurt to volunteer." Sellars smiled again, self-mockingly this time. "When I found out I was one of the first dozen selectees, I was pretty impressed with myself.
"It's tempting to tell the whole story in proper detail, because it's interesting in itself, and no one but me really knows the truth now. No books, no net documentaries, no records at all to speak of. But everyone here is tired, so I'll try to keep it brief. PEREGRINE turned out to be a novel approach to human space exploration, a program that would permit human crews not only to travel long distances—with cold sleep along the way, but with connections still to the ship—but also to be able to explore likely planets in a more robust way than the old-fashoned astronauts. There were several planets they were interested in—one in 70 Virginis is the only one I remember now. Many of the signals have since proved misleading, and humankind seems to have lost its interest in exploration—a great shame, I think—but at the time it was very exciting. In any case, even back then we had instruments that could survey planets far more elaborately than anything a live human could do, but the people in charge of the program thought that you could never get the same level of funding and public support for exploration unless you were sending a real, live, breathing human whose life was being risked on behalf of the whole human race. You can almost hear the speeches, can't you?
"So, PEREGRINE. We reported to Sand Creek, a secret base in South Dakota. . . ."
"I've heard of that," Ramsey said slowly. "Sand Creek. . . ."
"No doubt you have. It's been talked about a lot over the years. But whatever you've heard is almost certainly not true." Sellars closed his eyes. "Where was I? Ah, yes. We began undergoing a very complicated process to make us capable of all kinds of rigors—and, most importantly, to hard-interface our brains with the ship's computer systems. You almost never hear that word 'computer' anymore, do you? They're part of everything now. They used to be boxes with keyboards, you know." He shook his head, so that it looked like a dry sunflower wobbling on its stalk. "Technology wasn't very sophisticated—this was half a century ago, after all. Much of what they did was surgical—actually opened me up and applied microcircuitry directly to my skeleton, implanted various devices, you name it. People take it for granted now that they can connect to the net with a neurocannula, but then the idea that a human being could channel computer information directly into the brain was mostly considered science fiction. Except at Sand Creek, where they were actually doing it.
"So they . . . built me, as it were. Rebuilt me, certainly, strengthened my bones and shielded my skin and various organs to better resist gravitational hardships and radiation, implanted tiny chemical pumps that would add synthesized calcium and other important supplements to my body if I had to go a long time in zero gravity . . . all kinds of things. But even more profound was the way they wired me—head to toe, like a Christmas tree! They used the latest alloys and polymers—although with all the changes in molecular engineering since then, the original stuff they put in me would seem positively antique now. But at the time, we PEREGRINE volunteers were works of art. That's when I first learned to love Yeats—the line about the emperor's mechanical birds in 'Sailing to Byzantium' caught at me:
". . . Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling. . . ."
He paused for a moment, lost in thought. "I cannot tell you what it was like the first time I simply closed my eyes and found myself online. The net was tiny and primitive then, the early days of virtual interfaces, but still
. . . ! Still. . . ! Already, without leaving Earth, we were explorers, flying where others had only crawled. We PEREGRINE volunteers began to talk about the net among ourselves as though it were a place, a universe that others could only visit, like tourists staring through a fence, but which truly belonged to us. When you can swim through information as though it were a physical medium, when access is instantaneous, you begin to see things, learn things. . . ." His voice was getting dry and thin; he stopped and inhaled from the rag. "I promised myself I would not be diverted, didn't I? I apologize. In any case, our ships were built at the same time we ourselves were built—in parallel, as it were—custom-tailored to our particular physiological needs. They were small, sophisticated, using primarily antimatter drives for the long, black distances, but able to use other sources of power as well, including solar wind. There was to be one for each of us, each named for an explorer—the Francis Drake, the Matthew Peary, I cannot remember them all now and it's too sad to try. Mine was the Sally Ride. A lovely name for a ship, and a lovely ship she would have been—my bride, you might say, on a permanent honeymoon. But it did not happen that way.
We only had a few orbital nights, practice runs, before. . . . Oh, dear, am I boring you?"
Michael Sorensen had fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, his head lolling on his wife's shoulder. "He's just exhausted," she said apologetically, as though he had nodded off at some suburban card party. "He must know all this already, doesn't he?"
"All but the fine details," Sellars told her gently. "He's looked through my file a few times since I made contact, I'm sure."
"I think it's fascinating," she assured him, although she looked quite tired herself. "I . . . I had no idea."
"Please go on," Ramsey said.
"Well, you both must know something about what happens when you work for the government, and this was in the early days of the private/public partnership, so-called. The administration in Washington changed. The UN grew snippy about a major project with so little international participation. And the corporate angels began to grumble about how much money was being spent with no returns in the foreseeable future. PEREGRINE was nearly canceled several times.
"There were nights later on, years worth of nights, when I used to wish with all my heart it had been.
"The solution was not really surprising, especially with large defense corporations involved. It was decided to streamline the operation, to get 'more bang for the buck,' I think the phrase of the day was. It would have been very difficult to make the project smaller at that fairly advanced stage, so instead they folded it together with something called HR/CS—Human Robotic Combat Systems. I think that project also had a code name—'Bright Warrior' or 'Bright Spear' or something, but the engineers started calling it HARDCASE and the name stuck. This was straight military, what was probably one of the first attempts to create biomodified soldiers—basically humans who could be plugged into extremely sophisticated combat armor, who could use these systems as extensions of their own bodies, go places even an ordinary armored soldier couldn't go. You get the idea—it was like something out of an old comic book. The military was much more intent on their timeline, so the shared resources—mostly engineers, medical personnel, and supercomputer time—began to flow in their direction. The pace of PEREGRINE slowed dramatically.
"All of which wouldn't have meant all that much, except that HARDCASE had a much different approach, especially to recruiting. Their process was much closer to what I had imagined would be used on PEREGRINE, focusing on reflexes and even more esoteric things, synaptic variations, certain types of chemical and immune system receptivities, and so on. And even psychologically they were looking for a different kind of subject. We were pilots, had been chosen primarily as such—some of the PEREGRINE subjects had never flown a combat mission, but they were all fliers, much like the original astronaut corps. HARDCASE needed soldiers. You might even say that, ultimately, they needed killers. They tried to be more discriminating than that, but that infinitesimal slant shadowed it from the beginning, I think.
"Even so, if Barrett Keener's problems had been physical—a tumor, say, or a serotonin imbalance, it would have been caught immediately. Both PEREGRINE and HARDCASE subjects were routinely tested for such things, and we spent most of our time hooked up to analytical devices as a matter of course. But in those days pure schizophrenia was still largely a mystery, and Keener was the sort of paranoid who made hiding his growing illness part of the focus of his madness. Although very few people who worked with the man could honestly say they liked him, not a single one of the psychologists or doctors at Sand Creek or any of his HARDCASE co-subjects guessed that he was slowly going insane. Not until it was too late.
"I see the look on your face, Mr. Ramsey. No, you haven't ever heard of Keener. You'll find out why in a moment.
"I can be brief about this, and I would prefer to be. I lost many friends on the day of Keener's rampage. There were plenty of safeguards built into the system, but although the military and its contractors had considered the possibility of sabotage, and had even considered the frightening possibility that one of the HARDCASE subjects might have a breakdown, no one had considered that both might happen. Keener, caught in the grip of a strengthening psychotic delusion, had been preparing for weeks. The HARDCASE complex at Sand Creek was an arsenal—the cybernetic battle-suits themselves each carried the firepower of a Powell tank, and there was a stockpile of other ordnance for combat-testing purposes. But as deadly as the battle-suits were, for someone like Barrett Keener with a background in munitions there was even more damage that could be done. He spent weeks preparing in secret, determined to avenge some incomprehensible insult, or strike some unimaginable blow for delusional freedom, descending deeper and deeper into a black spiral of hatred.
"I have pieced together much of what happened from secret reports. It was night when it began, and most of the personnel on the base were asleep. I happened to be up—I've never needed a lot of sleep—working with the night-shift technicians in the construction bay. We heard the explosions first. We barely had time to wonder what was going on when Keener himself, his battle-suit already in full thermodispersal flare, blew through the walls of the construction hangar. He wasn't singling us out—we were simply on his destructive path from one end of the base to the other. Despite the surprise and the firestorm from the bombs he had already triggered, there had been at least a little resistance before he got to us. Keener had already survived a direct hit from a grenade launcher with only scorch marks and a slow freon leak at one of the suit joints to show for it. With the glow of his heat dispersal units and the cloud of leaking vapor, he looked like an angry god. We didn't have a chance. As he stepped through the wall he opened up with a mini-railgun and the place literally fell apart around us.
"It was horrible. I cannot bear to think about it much. In the early days I tried to imagine things I could have done differently, ways I could have saved my comrades—tortured myself with a thousand different scenarios. Now I know that it was only blind luck that I even survived. I was close enough to one of the ships under construction that I was able to scramble inside the shell when the first of Keener's incendiary ordnance went off. I had time only to see Keener marching out across the rubble of the construction bay, armor blazing like the sun as it struggled to process the additional heat, then the rest of the thermal grenades he was spraying began exploding and everything went away."
Sellars brought a knuckle slowly up to the corner of his dry eye. Ramsey wondered if it were only an old gesture helplessly repeated, or if the man felt tears he could not shed. He wondered which would be worse.
"Two technicians inside the ship and I were the only ones in the bay that survived the attack, and neither of them lasted out the month—they were too badly burned. We all were burned, roasted like meat in an oven, but I had shielded organs and modified skin—the engineers didn't. I was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to survive. Just barely.
"After l
eaving a path of destruction all the way across the base, Keener actually escaped Sand Creek. Through a lucky accident his built-in flight jets were incapacitated by machine gun fire from one of the sentry posts, so he set out on foot. He was headed toward the closest town, a place called Buffalo, I think, and God knows what he would have done when he got there, but they scrambled jets from the nearest air base and caught him within a mile or so of Sand Creek, in open prairie. They lost a plane, but Barrett Keener was finally killed by air-to-ground misiles. To be more precise, even though there were no direct hits on him, the explosions finally pushed his suit past its dispersal limit and it went up like a small-bore thermonuclear device. It took years, I hear, before anything grew on the spot. The soil was virtually turned to glass.
"So . . . a madman committed a very, very expensive suicide, and the rest of us were left behind to deal with it. I was the only surviving test subject of PEREGRINE. Keener had been even more thorough with his HARDCASE comrades, placing shaped charges in the barracks, and every one of them died in their beds when the building went up. The entire Sand Creek base was in ruins—one hundred and eighty-six killed, three times that many wounded. The ships were ruined, billions of dollars worth of work and research gone, so the military-corporate fellows cut their losses and ended the program. HARDCASE was buried too—or at least that was the official story. Of course, Keener had managed to do a very impressive amount of damage with only a single suit, and the less ambitious combat suits that soldiers wear today look very similar to the HARDCASE regalia, so perhaps they simply changed the name of the program and started again somewhere else."
"How . . . how horrible," breathed Kaylene Sorensen.
"I've never seen anything about this," Ramsey said, trying to keep from sounding too doubtful, if nothing else out of respect for the obvious pain on Sellars' ruined face. "Not a whisper."