¤
Schmidt and Ritter pushed two antigrav hand trucks along a pathway flanked with black stones until they reached the limestone rotunda that held the Lithian High Council Chamber. Precious metals within its masonry sparkled in the Lithian sun, leaving a luminous glow behind in her vision if she let her eyes settle on them. An archway formed from an upturned ribcage marked the entrance. Beyond those bleached bones, a long, unlit hallway led to the council chamber.
“Hold on,” said Schmidt as she found the switch for the hand truck’s headlights.
Schmidt steadied herself against the rough walls and groped her way forward, doing her best to avoid a trail of black stones on the floor. The dusty air and darkness reminded her of the times when the power cut out on those rusty dwarf-star transfer stations. She imagined a red tint to the air and expected a warning siren at any moment. Her past whispered to her: Welcome home.
“Watch out for those rocks,” said Schmidt, realizing she had let a hint of panic slip out in her voice. Ritter chuckled.
The passageway led to a central amphitheater. Once there, Ritter turned on the projector. A diffuse glow filled the Council chamber. One hundred Lithians sat in sphinxlike poses on concentric stone benches. As Ritter set up the equipment, Lithians in priestly robes sprinkled water on the ground at their feet, in what the cultural files described as a purification ritual.
A striped Lithian in the front row stepped forward and turned to face the Council. The translator had assigned the Lithian the identity gloss [8666], but Schmidt found nicknames easier to remember. She called this one Raccoon. Raccoon had spoken for the Lithians in negotiations, had set up informal trade agreements for electronics and medical supplies, and stood out as one of the few locals to own a telephone and transmission tower.
“These are the aliens I told you about,” said Raccoon. “I thank the Council for allowing them to make the case in person.” Raccoon turned to Ritter. “Please proceed.”
Ritter wiped a few stray water droplets off the projector and started it up. A floating image of the SEEK logo, a star within two cupped human hands, filled several dozen cubic meters of the Council Chamber. The Lithians leaned forward for a better look, while Ritter stood in the projector’s glow as if it were a stage light.
“Greetings, People of the Rocks,” said Ritter. “My colleague has already told you about the supernova and the threat it poses for your world. Now it is time to see the danger for yourselves. This is what will happen when the light from that star reaches Lithos.”
Visions of a planet laid waste hovered in the air. The Lithians watched as seas boiled and forests ignited. The Lithians creaked backward in what Schmidt assumed was shock as a desert transformed over the course of a minute into a sea of glass.
“One word from this council could save your people from destruction.”
“These are lies,” said a Lithian with skin like marble, shot through with veins of gray. “They have come from the sky to test our devotion to the Great Streams.” The translator identified the voice as [6851], but Schmidt called this one Jackson.
Jackson raised a forelimb toward the projector.
“You can cower before their tales of exploding suns if you want. I feel solid ground beneath my feet. The Great Streams flow through my veins. My heart is as pure as stone.” The Lithians near Jackson pounded their fists against their benches.
Local governments had been skeptical of SEEK interventions before, but Schmidt read deeper meaning into Jackson’s vehemence. We came from the sky, thought Schmidt. Not space. Not another world. Not Earth. We came from the sky, home of the midday sun that parches their skin and dries the river banks. We came from the sky, entering their dark council chamber and warning of scorching heat and devastation. To the Lithians, thought Schmidt, we must seem like the servants of the supernova, or its heralds.
Cheers from Jackson’s crowd filled the chamber for several minutes. As they died away, a shale-colored Lithian reared up with phlegmatic power, like a shifting tectonic plate. Schmidt had nicknamed this one Balboa.
“Even if this supernova is real,” said Balboa, “we must stay. Are we not the stewards of our world? The Great Streams have sustained us in life and death. We will follow them wherever they lead.”
Ritter rolled his eyes. The translator was mercifully oblivious.
Schmidt thought back to her parents’ last years in the decrepit colony that orbited Rigg’s Forge, a molten inferno world. She remembered the heat, grime and radiation that had drained the life out of them over twenty years. She would never have left her parents to struggle through it alone.
“Wait,” said Schmidt. “How can you be stewards of the Great Streams if you’re gone? What harm is there in seeking shelter for now and returning once the danger has passed, to rebuild your world?”
“We will seek shelter underground,” said Balboa. “The stones of our world will sustain us.”
“They will not help you,” said Ritter. “Even if you survived the burst of radiation, the damage to the atmosphere and ecosystem will make this planet uninhabitable.”
“For how long?” asked Raccoon.
“Maybe forever,” said Ritter. “Long enough anyhow that you’re not going to want to wait around.”
Schmidt glared at Ritter. Any planet was habitable if you spent enough money on it. The exaggeration didn’t bother her so much as what it implied. If the Lithians suspected that Ritter doubted the Great Streams, standing up to Ritter would be a mark of devotion. Schmidt stepped forward to divert the conversation toward a more productive course.
“At least,” she said, “your people deserve to make the choice. Let us offer them a chance to see the colony world for themselves. If it does not suit them, they can return to Lithos when the time comes.”
“We follow the Streams,” said Balboa. “We do not presume to choose their path. However, there are criminals and heretics among us who are unworthy of the Streams. If we offer them to you, will you leave us in peace?”
“You don’t understand,” said Ritter. “We aren’t threatening you. Whether we leave or not, the supernova is coming. We’re here to get you out of the way.”
“Would you accept a compromise?” asked Schmidt. “If you agree to let us establish an encampment outside the city and grant your citizens freedom to talk with us, we’ll stay out of the capital and let you deal with the supernova as you see fit.”
“Captain, I don’t think…” began Ritter, but his voice was no match for a Lithian rumble.
“No true Lithian,” Jackson interrupted, “would even think of appeasing these sky demons. If we give up even a grain of sand to the sky demons, they will use it against us.”
Balboa waited for the cheers to die down.
“The deep desert has always belonged to the sun. Even the streams do not venture there.” After a glacial pause, Balboa turned to Ritter. “Set up your encampment out there if you must. It is no concern of ours. Leave us. We have no further need for discussion.”
¤
“At least we’ll save a few of them,” said Schmidt, as she and Ritter left the Council Chamber. Schmidt’s eyes, used to the darkness, stung at the sight of daylight at the end of the passageway.
“You should have let me handle it,” said Ritter. “The SEEK Board will expect more than just a few criminals and heretics. And what happens when the supernova hits? You just bought us a long-term financial burden, the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish. In case you’ve forgotten, the idea was to move the Lithians out of danger, not set ourselves up in its path.”
“The Lithians told us what they think of our idea,” said Schmidt. “We can’t bully them into accepting our help. We have to make do with what we have. The encampment gives us a second chance. We can leave it behind until the supernova hits, and make sure that Raccoon knows how to use its interstellar transmitter. If Balboa is telling the truth, their underground caves might protect them for a few days or weeks, long enough for them to change their m
inds.”
“And what if they still don’t leave?” said Ritter. “Then the galaxy gets to watch a million people die because their High Council couldn’t face reality. We’ll get the blame, you know.”
“That’s not my problem,” said Schmidt. “Our mandate is to help the local systems, on their terms, not to give the Board good PR. Besides, we still have a month. Akmonos IV will take about a week to clear, and there will be space in the evac queue if we’re quick about relocating the research stations on….”
“We’re not running a taxicab service,” said Ritter. “I know where you came from, Captain, so maybe you need a little reminder about the big picture. The trouble here isn’t fitting them into our timetable. It’s forcing them to take responsibility. These frontier worlds need to be self-reliant, and coddling the Lithians now will only make it that much harder to get the next backwater system to let go of its superstitions.”
“Self-reliant…?” said Schmidt. If you ever had to clean up your own mess, just once, you’d know what self-reliance really means. Out here, we depend on each other because there’s no one else we can count on from one day to the next.
“Look,” continued Schmidt. “All we’ve done is made them angry. I think we’ve missed our chance to prove that—ow!”
Schmidt felt impact and a dull pain in her left big toe. Out of habit, she inspected the boot for damage. She heard her father’s voice. Always check. And once you’ve checked, check again. On the frontier, damaged equipment could kill.
“Dammit! Why’d they leave these things all over the hallway?”
“Hmmm,” said Ritter. He picked up one of the stones, winced, and tossed it aside.
“It’s hot,” he said.
“But it wouldn’t have warmed up in here,” said Schmidt. “The Lithians must have brought it in from outside.”
Ritter picked up another stone.
“I believe,” said Ritter, “we’ve discovered Lithian solar-powered lighting. Lithian vision must extend into the infrared.”
“But that means that to their eyes, we….”
“We glow like the fires of Hell.”
“Even worse,” said Schmidt, “like the blazing Lithian sun. Now do you see? The Lithians will never accept our help if they think we’re standing between them and the Great Streams.”
“On the contrary,” said Ritter. “Your little discovery gave me an idea. Why don’t you sort out the requisitions and approvals? I’ll talk to a few of my friends in construction and blink that encampment over by the afternoon. I might just be able to work with your plan after all.”
¤
Schmidt spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening back on the ship, sorting through a jumble of paperwork that Ritter had left behind. Requisitions for personnel and supplies poured into headquarters Earthside. The SEEK Board would never question the expenditures while Ritter was working his magic, but sloppy paperwork tended to resurface whenever anything went wrong enough to attract the attention of the auditors, and whenever the Board got around to looking for someone to blame.
Even by Ritter’s standards, the requisitions made no sense. The laundry list of chemicals and earth-moving equipment pointed to a large-scale planetary reclamation effort. Schmidt went along with the requisitions at first, figuring Ritter was letting his construction friends in on the gravy train, but the ship requisition raised too many red flags. Thirty-seven blink capable evacuation craft? Schmidt knew that if you blinked back and forth fast enough, with full planetary cooperation and evac pods loaded in advance, a single blink ship could clear ten million people per day. Thirty-seven of them cost more than the annual operating budget of the entire mission. Even a short-term rental would put them in the red. She wasn’t about to let that slip by, not without making sure the paper trail led squarely to Ritter. She tried to reach him by phone, but the computer couldn’t find a signal.
“Sandstorm activity on the planet may be interfering with the signal,” added the computer. Schmidt glanced down at Lithos through the window and saw a brown smudge above the Lithian capital.
You’ll need more than that to sandbag me, thought Schmidt. Schmidt took a shuttle out that night and paid a visit to the encampment. Sand buffeted the shuttle all the way down to the planet’s surface. Darkness surrounded her, and the wind against the shuttlecraft reminded her of an asteroid strike that had shattered the dome on Franklin’s Folly ten years earlier. She had been there with her team, waiting for the ship to refuel. After the impact, the air had rushed out in an unruly, relentless current. The wind had almost torn St. Jude from her neck as she raced for an air mask.
Welcome home.
Schmidt covered her nose and mouth with the crook of her arm and ran toward the hazy outline of a pre-fab habitat unit, barely visible in the shuttle’s headlights. The habitat was little more than a cargo container with a door, a few windows, and an air-conditioner grafted onto it. Nothing, thought Schmidt, to justify the budget overruns.
An assortment of stones surrounded the camp. After nearly stubbing her toe again, Schmidt stooped to examine one, but before she had the chance, something rumbled behind her. Her translator turned on. She turned to see a Lithian step out from the darkness. As it loomed over her, visceral echoes of screams and alarms awoke in her mind.
If a hull breach had a soul, thought Schmidt, this was its physical form—a silhouette of shadow against the darkness.
“Claim [4863],” said the visitor.
“What?” said Schmidt.
“Claim [4863]. No one deserves it more. [4863] has produced several offspring without [MEANING UNKNOWN] and tells the worst sort of lies. [4863] has never made the pilgrimage to the Alabaster Mountain, but brags about it all the time. Nobody likes [4863].”
“I don’t understand,” said Schmidt.
“You will if you meet [4863]. A more loathsome individual has never touched foot to earth.”
“Come closer,” said Schmidt. “I want to talk.”
“May the Great Streams cool my skin, I cast you out. Begone.” The visitor left a lump of rock on the ground and retreated without looking back. Once the Lithian had gone, Schmidt inspected the offering.
Magnesium, she thought. A fire hazard. Schmidt moved the lump a hundred meters from the habitat unit before going inside to meet Ritter. The remains of a chair littered the floor of his office, and the ceiling bore several dents. Stacks of rough books made from woven plant fiber covered Ritter’s desk, along with piles of precious stones.
“Mr. Ritter,” said Schmidt. “Running a mining outfit on the side?”
Or maybe, thought Schmidt, a down payment on the mining rights that your friends are hoping for, once the Lithians abandon the planet.
“Ritter?”
The habitat was empty. Schmidt returned to Ritter’s desk and examined an open tome on top of the nearest stack. Ritter had written “Great Midday” on the top of the page. Underneath, scribbled between lines of stately calligraphy, was the following:
On the day when stone conquers sun
And the waters of this world become the color of [MEANING UNKNOWN]
Shun the radiant sky
Only those who seek the cool stones
Shall have everlasting life
And, in block letters in the margin:
COFFEE?
Schmidt found the communications panel and placed a call to the only active phone in the city.
“Ritter,” she said, but the screen was dark. The sound coming through the speakers sounded like static until the translator kicked in.
“No, this is Raccoon. I cannot talk to you now. Jackson has taken credit for driving you from the capital and is gathering allies to prepare for a confrontation. For us, sandstorms are a time of crisis, when the earth rises up to disrupt the balance between the sun and the streams. Jackson says that you have disrupted the balance, and that now is the time to send you back to the sky.”
On the day when stone conquers sun, thought Schmidt.
“I think Ritter is up to something,” said Schmidt, “but I can’t prove it. If Ritter engineered this storm, or even if he’s exploiting natural weather patterns to incite Jackson, you could make a claim of cultural subversion. SEEK would be responsible for the damage.”
And I would be out of a job, thought Schmidt.
“I have no power to convince the Council of anything. Jackson has Balboa’s ear now. The priests are out in force, cleansing the planet of any traces of your presence. Panicked crowds roam the hillsides. Go, while you can. It is not safe for you here.”
“Wait,” said Schmidt. “Tell me about the Shelter Caves.”
“They are sacred. I cannot say anything about them. Especially not to you.”
“Just tell me how many there are. Thirty-seven?”
“Go,” said Raccoon.
The connection went dead.
He’s out there somewhere, thought Schmidt, and as soon as he’s finished stage-managing the apocalypse, he’ll be gone. If a million Lithians have a change of heart, Ritter’s ships will be ready to blink them out. If they refuse the bait, Ritter heads back to Earth, the blink ships vanish and the real apocalypse becomes Schmidt’s problem all over again.
“Computer,” said Schmidt. “Check the city for any radio signals.”
“None detected.”
Of course, thought Schmidt. He’ll say he couldn’t get through because of the storm and had to make a snap decision without my approval.
Schmidt imagined seeing Ritter a month from now, once again in the glow of the cameras.
“We did our best,” he would say, “but the Lithians couldn’t see past their own superstitions. It happens all the time on the frontier.”
Meanwhile, in a forgotten corner of the galaxy, Lithos burned, its people starved, and its sacred streams boiled away.
Boiled, thought Schmidt, like a pot of coffee.
“Computer,” said Schmidt, “check the requisitions on file for Ritter. Do any of the chemicals he asked for have any unusual spectroscopic properties?”
Stupefying Stories: August 2014 Page 6