by Ben Bova
“I can’t protect you forever, Keith. There’s no such thing as absolute security.”
“I’m more concerned about you,” he said. “How serious is their move to take over Vanguard?”
She shrugged her naked shoulders. “I don’t know yet. But they’ll get their guts ripped out if they try to take over my corporation.”
Stoner chuckled in the darkness. “That’s my woman! What’d Business World call you: ‘The tigress of the corporate jungle.’”
She laughed too, but there was anxiety behind it. “Keith, I can handle the corporate battles. And I can balance Baker and his Third World friends against the corporate interests on the IIA. It’s you I’m frightened about.”
“I’ll be all right.”
In the darkness her voice took on a sharper, harder note. “Don’t you understand? Hsen’s out to kill you! I’m going to strike first, before he gets the chance…”
“And be just like him? What good would that do?”
“It’ll keep you alive, Keith!”
He shook his head. “Hsen is not the enemy. He’s just acting out of fear.”
“Dammit, Keith! Sometimes you carry this sainthood crap too far!”
Startled, “Sainthood?”
Jo was immediately sorry. More softly she said, “Okay, so I’m a tigress. I know you’re not a tiger, Keith. Not a street fighter. But you’ve got to protect yourself, got to let me protect you.”
Stoner countered, “Look. Even if you could kill Hsen someone else would take his place. So there’d be another assassin coming after me, with the added excuse of avenging Hsen’s murder.”
Jo said nothing, but he could feel her body tensing, like a true jungle cat just before it springs.
“Deliberately killing a human being is the worst thing you can do, Jo. Not because there’s a rule against it written in some book, but because it always leads to more killing. Because the human race hasn’t quite learned yet how to deal with its animal instincts. We’re supposed to be working on the side of life, not death. Life is precious. Human life is the most precious of all.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Keith, if there’s one thing we’ve got too much of on this planet, it’s human beings. And most of them aren’t worth the effort it would take to blow them to hell.”
In a near-whisper Stoner replied, “If you only knew how rare life is, truly rare among all those stars.”
But Jo refused to be drawn in that direction. “What happens if Hsen kills you? What do you expect me to do?”
“Jo, we’re in a race against time. You knew that when we started down this road, fifteen years ago.”
“But the closer we get to the end the more dangerous it becomes.”
He nodded abstractedly, as if his mind were really elsewhere. “The biochips are the next step. If the human race can absorb that technology, then we’re almost finished.”
“I’ve got our lab people working as hard as they can go,” Jo said. “Biochips will be an important product for Vanguard.”
“It’s more than that, Jo. Much more,” Stoner said. “Biochips can help us get around the limits on brain size set by the female’s birth channel, the first chance to expand the capacity of the human brain in hundreds of thousands of years, Jo!”
“You’re blaming women for the limits on brain size?”
He laughed. “All the great religions of the world blame women for humankind’s troubles. Didn’t you know that?”
“All the great religions of the world are schemes by men to keep women down!”
“But they’re right, in a way.”
“Really?” Jo’s voice dripped acid.
“Goes back millions of years,” Stoner said lightly. “Most ape females are in estrus only a couple of days a month. Our ancestors’ females were sexually receptive all the time. That’s how we outpopulated the other apes. It led to our dominance of the planet. But now it’s a problem.”
“Well, I know how to solve that problem.” Jo pushed away from him slightly.
Stoner reached toward her and she let him put his arms around her easily enough.
“Some solutions are worse than the problems,” he said softly.
“That’s better,” she murmured.
“But the biochips are important, Jo. Implanting protein chips in people’s brains will allow them to link themselves directly with any library, any data bank on the planet. And they’ll be able to communicate with each other directly, like…”
Jo interrupted, “I don’t care about that! You’re the only one I’m worried about.”
“And the rest of the human race?”
“Let them all go to hell, what do I care? As long as you and the children are safe.”
Very softly, Stoner said, “None of us will be safe, Jo, unless all of us are.”
“You keep saying that. Is it really true?”
He closed his eyes and saw a different world, a planet that circled a bloated red star that hung in the sky like a huge menacing omen of doom. A world that teemed with delicate birdlike people, human in form except for feathery crests that ran along the tops of their otherwise bald skulls. A world that was dying beneath the weight of its own numbers.
Cities covered almost the entire face of the planet, their soaring towers crammed with people. Harbors were black with boats and rafts where people lived packed literally shoulder to shoulder. What little countryside remained was bare, denuded, while immense factories struggled to produce enough artificial food to feed the ever-growing masses of people. Murder and madness were as commonplace as breathing, and the only parts of the planet that were not covered with people were the waterless deserts that were slowly, inexorably growing larger, and the oceans that were all too quickly becoming polluted.
Despite famine and war and agonizing plagues the highest ethic of this race was the sanctity of life. There was no allowable way for the species to deliberately control its numbers, and as its technology and medical skills grew, billions of babies were born each year to parents who procreated in the blind faith that procreation was the ultimate goal of life.
The planet-girdling society became schizophrenic, rewarding fruitful parents with honors and blessings on the one hand, while tacitly condoning genocidal wars and mass murders on the other. Laws prohibited birth control while exacting the death penalty for minor theft. Scientists produced medical miracles for prolonging life and nerve poisons that could wipe out a city overnight.
The entire species was insane. Yet it continued to grow, continued to enlarge its numbers, spread across the surface of its world like a crawling, writhing cancer until it covered even the barren wastelands with cities bursting with overcrowded buildings where murder was as commonplace as birth.
And then the planet itself exacted its revenge. The air became poisonous, the oceans too fouled to support life. Glaciers crept down from the mountains to cover the land in glittering sterile ice. Life ended. The planet waited for eons before the first faint stirrings of protoplasm could begin again in a sea that had at last cleansed itself of the last traces of those who had come before.
Stoner shuddered in the darkness. He knew that the world he had just seen was real; it existed somewhere out among the starry deeps. His star brother had been there.
“Jo, we’re in a race against time. We’ve got to learn how to control our population growth. Sooner or later somebody’s going to stumble onto the technology that the starship carried, discover it independently. The biochips are only the first step in that direction. Somebody’s going to move on into nanotechnology, you know they will. If we haven’t curbed our population growth by then…”
Jo leaned back on the pillows without replying.
“If we fail, the human race dies. Not tomorrow. Not even in the next decade or two. But we’ll kill ourselves off eventually and that will be the end of humanity.”
Jo said to herself, Maybe we’d be better off dead. Most of the human race is despicable scum. What difference does it make if we surv
ive or disappear?
But she did not voice the thought.
Turning on his side to face her, Stoner urged, “We’re close, Jo. Very close. It’s all coming to a climax. The biochips are the big test. If we can absorb that technology, use it to help the human race instead of harm it, then we’ll be ready for the final step.”
Even though his face was shadowed in darkness, Jo could feel the intensity of purpose blazing in him. She wondered if the we he spoke of referred to her, or to the others.
She tried to see his eyes in the moonlit shadows, tried to peer into his soul. Keith had worked so hard since being revived, since coming back to life after being on the alien star ship. Like a man possessed, like a saint or a holy man who saw a vision beyond what ordinary human eyes could see.
“It’s almost finished,” he repeated, in a whisper that held regret as well as anticipation. “All the threads are coming together, the task is almost complete.”
“Almost,” Jo echoed.
BANGKOK
SHE was in such excruciating pain. It was necessary to sedate her so heavily that her labor stopped altogether. The delivery team performed a caesarian section, something they had done countless times before. But once they had exposed the baby the surgical nurse gagged and slumped to the floor. The two assistants stared as if unable to turn away.
The baby was already dead, and the mother died minutes later.
Now Dr. Sarit Damrong paced nervously along the roof of the hospital, the cigarette in his shaking fingers making a small coal-red glow in the predawn darkness.
The baby had been a bloody, pulpy mess, already half eaten from within. The mother also; her abdominal cavity was an oozing hollow of half-digested organs. It was the agony of having her innards eaten alive that had racked the poor woman, not the pain of labor.
The woman had been one of the millions of lower class workers who lived on barges in the khlongs, the canals that crisscrossed Bangkok. Dr. Damrong had immediately performed an autopsy, right there in the delivery room, and sent scraps of tissue samples to the university laboratory for analysis.
Now he stood at the parapet at the roof’s edge, leaning heavily on his thin arms and staring out at the tower of the Temple of the Dawn, across the river, as it caught the first rays of the golden sunlight.
The first time he had seen a patient with her innards eaten away, a month earlier, he had been curious. It reminded him of something from one of his biology classes, years ago, about a certain species of spider that laid its eggs inside the paralyzed body of a living wasp. When the eggs hatched, the baby spiders ate their way through their host to enter the world.
How grisly, he had thought as a student. Now he had seen three such cases. And these were human beings, mothers dying in the attempt to give birth, destroyed from within.
Dr. Damrong watched the sunlight slowly extend across the teeming city. Cooking fires rose from the canals and the crowded houses and apartment blocks. He could hardly see the curving river, there were so many barges clustered on it. Another day was starting. The darkness of the night had been dispersed.
But still his hands trembled. Three women eaten away from within their own wombs. As if the fetuses within them had turned to murderous acid.
For the first time since he had been a child, Dr. Damrong felt afraid.
CHAPTER 7
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”
Stoner tried his best to look surprised, but everyone knew he wasn’t, and he knew that they knew.
But it did not matter.
That morning Jo had begged him to stay up in his office, on the top floor of the spacious stucco house, as far away from the pool and patio as could be. Stoner spent the hours there speaking with people in Brazil and India and Thailand on the videophone. He read a few reports and tried to ignore the cars and limos that pulled up to the front door and discharged men, women, and children laden with brightly-wrapped packages.
Household robots buzzed and bumped up and down the front steps repeatedly, discreetly scanning each new arrival for weapons as they accepted suitcases and garment bags.
No matter how hard Stoner tried to concentrate on his reading, a part of his mind reached out inquisitively to sense the people arriving. That’s my son Douglas, he said to his star brother, with his wife and children. And later, Claude Appert, flown all the way from Paris. Then he recognized his daughter Eleanor and her new husband, whom he had not yet met. His grandchildren were teenagers now, and trying their best to be quiet and secretive. Stoner smiled to himself and went back to his reading.
The world’s fundamental problem was the result of cultural lag. Stoner had decided that fifteen years earlier, but here in his hands was a detailed academic study by a team of researchers from half a dozen universities that came to the same inescapable conclusion—in ten thousand turgid words and computer-generated graphs.
In a world where modern medicine had reduced the age-old agony of infant mortality to negligible proportions, many cultures still drove their people to have large families. The poorer the people, the more children they begat. The higher a nation’s birthrate, the poorer the nation became. There were almost ten billion people living on Earth. Too many of them were hungry, diseased, and ignorant. And with the ability to select the sex of their babies, too many lagging cultures produced an overabundance of males, far too many for the available jobs in their economies. It had been this overabundance of young men, boiling with testosterone, that had led to wars and terrorism in the past several decades.
Most of the world’s experts knew the answer to this problem: Lower your birthrate, they said to the poor, and you will become richer. Balance your male/female ratio. For nearly a century this gospel had been preached to the poor. To little avail. More babies and still more babies—half a million each day—threatened to drown the world in a pool of starving humanity.
Even with the best of intentions, good-hearted but short-sighted people made the problem worse. Feed the starving poor. Give money to help the famine-stricken people of the Third World. The people of the rich industrialized nations opened their hearts and their pocketbooks, and the starving poor survived long enough to produce a new generation of starving poor, even larger than the last. The cycle seemed endless. Yet what could an honest person do when others were dying for lack of food?
Hard-headed analysts pointed out that giving food to the starving without forcing them to control their birthrate was only making the problem worse, accelerating the cycle of poverty and starvation that was threatening to drown the world. Force birth control on them, said these experts. Make the poor control themselves. That led to cries of genocide and the angry blind flailings of terrorism, the one weapon that the poor could use against the rich to satisfy their furious seething hatreds, their sense of injustice, the frustrations that made them feel powerless.
Stoner’s approach was the opposite. Instead of preaching to the poor he worked to make them richer. Instead of demanding that they lower their birthrate, he worked—through Jo, through Vanguard Industries, through the International Investment Agency, Cliff Baker, Nkona, Varahamihara, de Sagres, anyone else he could find—to increase the wealth of the world’s poorest. Raise their standards of living and they will lower their birthrates: that was his gospel.
And it was working. Slowly, at first, but more and more clearly Stoner saw that it could work, it would work. If he were not stopped first. If he did not run out of time.
His greatest fear was that some bright young researcher would hit upon the central idea that would extend human lifetimes indefinitely. The technology that the starship had carried could allow humans to live for centuries, perhaps much longer. If that technology were turned loose in the world before people learned how to control their numbers, human population would start soaring out of control. Strangely, perversely, Keith Stoner—a man of science all his life—dreaded the thought that science would discover the real secret of the starship, the hidden knowledge of his star brother.
At l
ast Jo appeared at his doorway, looking fresh and bright in a sleeveless miniskirted sheath of Mediterranean tangerine. Their fourteen-year-old daughter Cathy stood beside her, a flowered Hawaiian shirt several sizes too big for her slim frame thrown over her bathing suit. She was trying to appear cool and nonchalant, but Stoner could see the excitement bubbling in her.
“Are you in the mood for some lunch?” Jo asked casually.
He looked up from the report he had been reading. “Lunch? I’m not really hungry yet.”
“Come on, Daddy!” Cathy yelped. “Have lunch with us!”
“Now?” he asked, grinning.
“Now,” both women said in unison.
Stoner closed the report and laid it on his desk top, then went with them down the stairs and out to the patio by the swimming pool. Several large round tables had been set out beneath the gently rustling palm trees. He could see no one, but sensed the crowd huddling in the dining room, behind the drapes that were never drawn at this time of the early afternoon.
“Are we eating out here?” he asked.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” roared out two dozen voices as the glass lanai doors of the dining room slid open.
They poured out and surrounded Stoner, shook his hand and pounded his back. Stoner laughed and greeted each one of the guests while his ten-year-old son, Richard, took up the official chore of accepting the gifts they had brought and stacking them up neatly on the long table beneath the big azalea bush in the corner of the patio.
The guests were mainly family, Stoner’s son and daughter from his earlier life, Jo’s only brother and three sisters, and their various children. A few trusted members of Vanguard Industries’ headquarters staff, from the nearby city of Hilo.
Stoner was happy to see the offspring of his first marriage. Deep within him he wanted the opportunity to try to settle their relationships, square their accounts. Almost as if he were afraid he would never see them again.
He felt a puzzled tendril of thought tickling at the back of his mind. Why should I be afraid? he wondered. His star brother wondered, too.