Katerina's hazel eyes softened. “None of us will ever be perfect or without pain. Though we delay it for as long as the Old Testament patriarchs are said to have lived, we all eventually die. But whatever measure of paradise we create on Earth, Mars, or other worlds will be one we earned—not something given as a ‘gift.’ If we make life better it'll be because we used science to make Nature less dangerous and relieve human suffering. If we choose to be kind and care about others, we can claim credit for doing it.
"He showed us what we could do with our own human abilities. It's up to us to freely accept His challenge and imitate Him."
Martin grunted. “Are you finished? I was afraid you were going to make a speech longer than John Galt's in Atlas Shrugged. I admit you can weave a pretty bouquet of ivory tower ideas together like a Jesuit. But even the nicest words can only accomplish so much. What I'm doing is actually helping people and not just making rhetorical noise!"
"Is it, Martin? Maybe you're right that I should use my own power more. So far I've just been inside your mind seeing what you've done to Earth. Let's both go there to see everything you've done."
"Challenge accepted!"
* * * *
Katerina closed her eyes and extended her consciousness outward. She sensed Martin's mind accompanying her as she seemed to float up through the inverted bowl above them and move sunward through space.
Then a cacophony of sights and sounds on faraway Earth flooded Katerina's brain. With a neurosurgeon's finesse she separated images and sounds, thoughts and emotions like threads in the intricate tapestry of humanity's entire experience. Instantly she absorbed countless stories of terror turned to joy, suffering changed to health, and hunger relieved. Based on what she sensed and felt across the continents, Martin's actions had indeed brought justice to the innocent and guilty.
But like sunspots scattered across Sol's face, the young cosmonaut also found instances of pain and savagery caused by the changes he'd thrust on unwilling hearts. Some of those whose sinful deeds he'd laid bare or stopped were now battered and bleeding—others killed by those they'd threatened or hurt. Whether those people had truly received justice or greater punishment than they deserved was now moot.
Katerina's attention returned to her fellow watcher standing nearby. The stunned look on his face showed he too had seen the horrors he'd caused.
"Are you proud of everything you've done, Martin?"
"What I did wasn't enough to prevent violence. I thought it was enough to begin by stopping people who'd committed or were about to commit the worst kinds of crimes. I should've known those I affected weren't the only ones capable of hatred and murder."
"That's because it's easier to hate than to love—to seek revenge than to forgive. Do you think you can change human nature, Martin?"
"I can try!"
* * * *
Lieutenant Sergei Kijé shivered as his boots trudged across the frigid ground. He stopped and placed both hands in the pockets of his brown army jacket, then glanced up at a slate-colored afternoon sky promising snow soon. Behind him voices murmured from the two parked open-backed troop transport trucks where the twenty men he commanded sat bunched together. His soldiers, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, were trying to keep warm by bragging about their latest exploits on leave. Those inflated accounts of how much vodka they'd drunk and how many women they'd satisfied helped relieve their boredom.
The young lieutenant raised the image-stabilized high-power binoculars suspended from his neck and peered at the border three kilometers away. After studying the empty landscape he lowered the binoculars and sighed. It was rare for anything to actually happen on one of these routine patrols. He hoped the negotiations between his government and the Chinese were going well today. If they didn't, Moscow might send orders for another token incident. Perhaps a quick incursion of his soldiers across the border, or a barrage of artillery to make craters on the foreign land to the south—just enough to let the other side know that their northern neighbor was displeased.
A faint whistling crescendoed into a terrifying shriek. Three hundred meters to his right a geyser of soil erupted as the mortar shell hit. His men leapt out of the trucks, scattering and stretching prone along the ground. The lieutenant unsnapped a transceiver from his belt and tried to contact field headquarters for orders. Hopefully they'd be told to retreat instead of retaliate—
He winced as another blast rocked the earth two hundred meters to his left. The fact only one mortar seemed to be firing instead of multiple weapons blanketing them implied the Chinese weren't very motivated to wipe them out. They might not even know his troops were here and were just creating a token political incident of their own. But an unintentionally lucky shot would be just as deadly to him and his men as a deliberate one.
A deafening third explosion close behind him drowned out the reply spluttering from the transceiver. He sent a signal back to repeat that message and groaned when he heard it. His men cursed when they heard their orders. They rapidly removed their long-range mortars from the back of the trucks and started setting up to return fire.
As he supervised their work Sergei prayed that today wouldn't be the start of a real war—and that he and his contingent wouldn't be its first casualties. In the lull following that third explosion the lieutenant listened for the screaming descent of a final shell aimed directly at him. But his men's weapons were ready before it came. Though they'd be firing blind, at least they'd let the other side know he and his troops weren't defenseless. Unfortunately it'd also let the Chinese know they had a living target—
But as he started to give the order to return fire, he stopped. Sergei and his men stood frozen—their minds seized by an overpowering force. Thoughts not their own repeated in their brains like the incessant rumble of a distant drum. The same command pressed down on each man's consciousness—trying to crush his will.
Violence is wrong. War is wrong. You must not hurt others.
A great silence engulfed the whole Earth. On every continent each human being ceased moving and heard that command in his or her own language. Every heart and soul reverberated with that same overwhelming decree. For a few seconds over eight billion people lived without hatred or brutality in a world where only peace reigned.
And then humanity began to destroy itself.
* * * *
Two minutes before the global apocalypse started, Stone woke from a catnap and refocused on the TV screen. A news commentator was describing the public's muted reaction to the day's “miraculous” events. Comparing it to the panic that raged when Mars and Venus began inexplicably moving closer to Earth a decade ago, she suggested people might still be too emotionally exhausted from that previous crisis and the reported existence of aliens to react as violently this time.
Stone groaned. It was more likely people were in denial and suppressing their fears than that they'd been desensitized to this new uncertainty. At least the newswoman didn't make a direct connection between the aliens and what was happening now. That idea might still be the spark to make the public's pent-up terrors explode once again—
The physician's mouth froze in the middle of a yawn. Suddenly his thoughts, feelings, and consciousness were seized by a power and will not his own. It felt like his brain had been plunged into an ice-cold ocean and strong unseen hands were holding his head beneath the surface. Sweat leached from his forehead and he gasped through the terrified pounding of his heart.
A sense of impending doom seized Stone as he struggled to thrust off the vise squeezing his mind. He barely sensed the words about violence being wrong thundering within his head as he fought to retain his own identity. Something alien was stripping and peeling his very reason away like a flaying knife. The sickening dread of what madness might be left behind after that unknown force finished its work made him fight ever more fiercely for the release of freedom—or death.
Stone dimly heard the muffled whimpers and shrieks of everyone around him at Mission Control.
Suddenly, as if a ticking bomb planted in his head exploded, an exhilarating howl burst from his lips. For an instant he felt only relief—freed at last from whatever parasite had invaded his brain. Then the shredded debris of what had been his personality and self-control scattered like dust in a tornado—never to return again.
With an agony beyond human endurance Stone's mind caved in—crushing his finely structured ego. Defenseless now against his own inner demons, he plummeted screaming into the hell he'd created for himself...
* * * *
For the first few of the handful of seconds Martin thought it would take to rid humanity of its own evil, everything went well. Then the smugness on his face faded. The corners of his lips drooped as he felt the inexorably growing reaction to the mental ultimatum he'd delivered to the whole human race. The stunned surprise he'd sensed in all those individual brains when he'd first linked with them unraveled into countless threads of fear, anger, and hatred. He'd seized the minds of over eight billion people and pulled them in the direction he wanted—but now they were pulling away from him—fighting back and attacking him!
Martin's face tensed from an agonizing effort that consumed every bit of his energy and power. His body stiffened as his mental tug-of-war with his fellow humans settled into an unstable stalemate. Standing dumbstruck on the Martian plain, he was assaulted by a combined consciousness far stronger than its individual members. Though each mind was only a spark compared to the stellar radiance of his own, focused together with laser precision at the source of their pain they formed a raging conflagration.
He clenched his fists and tried desperately to end the titanic struggle he'd started. For a moment the tiny corner of his mind still reserved for thought considered giving up. If humanity was too afraid or perverse to be changed—if all those people couldn't understand that eliminating their capacity for violence was for their own good—then they deserved the world they lived in!
But then Martin remembered all the crimes, wars, and other injustices that claimed so many innocent victims in the past and present. If he didn't use the aliens’ gift—if he didn't stop that sordid history from perpetually repeating itself or ending in humanity's self-inflicted extinction—who would?
As his mind wrestled with the unwilling ones of an entire world, Martin sensed another presence standing silently nearby. He felt that other enhanced consciousness inside his brain passively observing—like someone watching a movie—the life-and-death conflict being played out on two planets. She held the balance of power to end this war—and surely the woman he loved wouldn't desert him when he and the entire human race needed her most!
He barely had enough strength to speak. “Help me, Katerina! I can't control them on my own! If you add your power to mine we'll beat them and make them give up violence forever!"
Martin saw her nod.
"Yes, Martin. I'll help you."
He started to smile—and then a blinding light like a supernova seared through his brain. For an instant the rage of an entire world flooded his defenseless mind. A jet-black emptiness swallowed him as his body fell limply to the ground....
* * * *
Millions of people died during the moments Martin waged a one-man war against human nature. Airplane pilots in flight, drivers racing on busy highways, firefighters rescuing people in burning buildings, surgeons performing operations all found their minds ripped away from their surroundings. Those whose bodies were suddenly crushed in coffins of speeding metal never felt the impact. Others, standing paralyzed while individuals they'd been trying to help died, didn't notice their loss.
Then the great force clamping humanity in its unwanted grasp suddenly disappeared. Released from its chains, the human race found itself free again. But that freedom came at a terrible price.
Some, mainly babies and children, lay quiet and catatonic—their minds emptied of any volition or will. The power they'd experienced had rendered them incapable of hurting others. It also destroyed their fragile developing personalities and rendered their minds forever tabula rasa. Only their most primitive neurological functions remained.
Others weren't as fortunate. The struggle against the power gripping their minds demolished the well-constructed psychological defense mechanisms they'd constructed to protect their sanity. Now all the fears, anxieties, and regrets buried within their psyches and memories erupted like molten lava—searing away every other thought and feeling. Immersed in guilt, self-pity, terror, and grief, some sat perpetually weeping and screaming—trapped forever in a cocoon of pain.
The stronger-willed chose more directly self-destructive paths. Across the world, people jumped from bridges and tall buildings. Some used knives and guns to end their lives. Fire and water snuffed out the existence of still more.
But for others that abrupt removal of inhibitions shielding them from their true nature or curbing their worst instincts led to destruction and death on a global scale.
* * * *
Sgt. Bahram Bayat shuddered as his mind broke free of the power trying to bind it. He focused again on the crowded Tehran street and found new targets for the rage boiling within him, incited by that nearly successful attempt to enslave his very being. The fear and disgust he felt toward the civilians standing nearby, waking from their own mental struggle, swelled to a murderous level.
Several young men near him suddenly went berserk. They ran toward him screaming curses and threats. But just before their fists reached him, a burst from his AK-47 left the men bleeding and writhing on the ground. Bahram laughed as he emptied his rifle into them until their punctured corpses stopped jerking.
As he reloaded, he ordered his fellow soldiers at the checkpoint to join him. More rifles sprayed bullets into the mostly unresisting crowd. As the sergeant and his men concentrated on mowing down women, children, and any other civilians in range they didn't notice one man slip into the parked truck close to them. The man searched beside the driver slumped dead at the wheel, found the detonator button, and pushed it—
The explosion shattered windows over a block away. A blasted smoking crater, masses of debris, and shredded body parts marked where the truck had sat. Sgt. Bahram Bayat, his soldiers, and more than a hundred other people no longer existed. Most of the wounded farther from ground zero soon joined them in death.
But the casualties on that single street were trivial compared to the millions injured and dying elsewhere.
* * * *
In eastern Russia the force enslaving the minds of Lt. Kijé and his men disappeared. They staggered—shaken out of the stupor that had suddenly seized them. Then a savage hatred devoid of thought erupted within them. The men quickly obeyed their commanding officer's order to launch the mortar barrage they'd prepared.
As the projectiles whistled toward their distant targets, the soldiers gleefully followed their next order to pile back into the trucks and drive south. As they crossed the border into China, each man readied his rifle and hoped the enemy was near. The vision of their bullets ripping through the bodies of those who'd attacked them drove them wild with pleasure. There was no fear within them—only a white-hot obsession to kill without mercy.
Bouncing along the scrubby terrain toward their destiny, they would've rejoiced over what their superiors in Moscow were doing at that moment. The nation's top political and military leaders felt the same berserk bloodlust possessing the occupants of the two trucks now invading the enemy's homeland. Top-secret orders and codes spread throughout Russia's military network. Bombers scrambled into the air and missile silos opened.
Unaware of the massive attack being readied, the lieutenant sat in the cab of one of the two trucks and scanned the horizon for movement. He barely noticed when the other truck, driving several hundred meters in front of him, hit a land mine. By the time his truck reached the site his driver managed to swerve around most of the wreckage and ruptured corpses scattered across the plain.
By luck their remaining truck avoided running over a mine. The lieutenant gri
tted his teeth as he saw several heads bob above a trench half a kilometer ahead. He unholstered his automatic and prepared to bark an order to halt—
He never gave that order. Two rocket-propelled grenades hit the front of the truck and turned it into a fireball of shrapnel and flying chunks of uniformed bodies. But the half-dozen Chinese troops who'd repelled this initial enemy thrust into their country had little time to celebrate. An hour later the first of hundreds of nuclear bombs and missiles rained down on China's population centers and military installations.
Even as Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities with their millions of inhabitants vanished beneath mushroom clouds, an equally massive retaliatory strike was on its way toward Russia. Within several hours Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other former names on the map were graveyards of radioactive rubble.
Smaller nuclear exchanges across the Indian-Pakistani border and in the Middle East killed more millions. Other millions farther away from those firestorms were sentenced to die in hours, days, or weeks from injuries or radiation exposure. Over the next months billions were destined to perish from disease and starvation as the Northern Hemisphere's late calendar winter changed into a nuclear one covering the entire globe.
In areas yet untouched by atomic catastrophe, millions used fists and whatever weapons they could find against family, neighbors, and strangers. Wherever there'd been suppressed resentment and anger against individuals, races, or religions, people divided into passive or unwilling victims and murderers. Explosions, gunfire, and screams deafened the world.
Meanwhile, a great stillness reigned on Mars.
* * * *
The Sun was settling toward the western horizon when Katerina awoke after what seemed hours later. Her head pounded and eyes throbbed as she sat up. She flicked dusty auburn hair back over her shoulders and squinted up at the empty sky.
Analog SFF, December 2009 Page 13