by Ben Bova
He watched her picking at the eggs and sausages she had selected, then asked, “Do you want to get off the stimulation?”
“Off the juice?” Ilona’s expression showed mild amusement. She had expected this. “Why should I want to get off it?”
“It’s an addiction, isn’t it?”
“It has no harmful side effects.”
“None?”
She spread her hands. “None at all.”
Stoner leaned back in his chair and realized that she had spent the entire night in electrical ecstasy. The glow of it was still in her face. But she had no appetite for food.
“Do you program the input yourself?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How long do you stay plugged in?”
She looked away without answering.
“How long was it when you first started?” he asked. “How long was it a week ago?”
Ilona refused to meet his gaze.
“It gets a little longer every night, doesn’t it? You turn those dials just a bit higher every time. Just a little longer each time. Just a little more current.”
“This is really none of your business, Dr. Stoner,” she said, her tawny eyes snapping. “I can take care of myself.”
He jabbed his fork into the thin, cream-covered pancake on his plate. “Sure, you can take care of yourself. Until one morning you don’t get out of bed. Until they break down the door of your apartment and find that you haven’t eaten in three or four days. Find you in the midst of your own shit, dehydrated and starving. Maybe they won’t find you until you’re dead.”
Her nostrils flared angrily. But she controlled herself immediately and said, “I can handle the juice. I always check the cut-off time before I put on the electrodes.”
Stoner made up his mind. “You want me to go to Budapest with you?”
Startled by the abrupt change of subject, “Yes, of course. That is why I came here.”
“I’ll do it only if you allow me to help you get off the stimulation.”
She tried to laugh. “Really, Dr. Stoner, that is rather ridiculous.”
“That’s my deal. Take it or leave it.”
Those lioness’s eyes took on a sly, almost smirking look. “Very well. If that is what it takes to bring you to Budapest, I accept your terms.”
“We can leave this afternoon, as soon as I finish making the arrangements for the funeral and the reading of Professor Markov’s will.”
“Fine.”
She had no intention of letting him or anyone else take away her pleasure machine. She regarded him with the amused contempt that the young have always shown when their elders throw morality at them. Stoner knew this.
He also knew that somewhere in Budapest, Ilona Lucacs had a friend who had deliberately started her on her addiction, a friend who was moving toward the kind of nanotechnology that his star brother represented. And for some reason, his alien symbiote desperately feared that development. It was a strange sensation. Stoner had never felt fear in his star brother before.
Despite his little cache of Moondust, Paulino Alvarado was miserably sick all the long hours he was in space. He had travelled from Peru to the Brazilian spaceport at Belém aboard a Panavia jet, forged papers and money for bribing customs officials in his wallet. With a fresh hit of Moondust bolstering him, he had walked through the spaceport’s boring routine of a perfunctory physical examination and the endless signing of liability waivers. The medics did not detect the Moondust in his blood; it was designed to be untraceable. Only its absence created metabolic imbalances.
Then he had joined two dozen other men and women in the spare, stripped-down passenger compartment of a Pacific Commerce spaceplane. This was no tourist flight; most of the sleek rocketplane’s interior space was devoted to cargo for the Vanguard Industries base on the Moon. The passengers were mostly new hires; no comforts were wasted on them beyond the minimum required for safety. Their compartment was strictly utilitarian, windowless, scuffed and stained by years of ferrying men and women into space.
The instant the plane’s engines cut off, Paulino felt his guts drop away and he became thoroughly, wretchedly sick. He felt as if he were falling, and even though he gripped the armrests of his narrow seat with white-knuckled desperation, a primitive voice inside his brain told him he was plummeting madly toward infinity. He swallowed another pill dry, but instead of helping, it enhanced every physical sensation to the point where Paulino felt like screaming. He barely controlled himself.
For only a few moments, when the ship’s payload pod was detached from the spaceplane and boosted on a high-energy trajectory toward the Moon by an orbital tug, did the panic of falling disappear. To be replaced by a bellowing surge of thrust that crushed Paulino into his seat with the weight of demons on his chest.
Then it was weightlessness again, and Paulino retched into the bags they had given him until he thought he would puke up all his guts. How many thousands of Yankee dollars was he vomiting up? The contents of the paper bags were worth a small fortune.
Others were puking too. The cabin stank of vomit, and it only took one miserable person’s sickening noise to start everyone upchucking all over again.
Finally the pod touched down on the dusty surface of the Moon. Not that Paulino could see anything in the windowless compartment. But he felt a jarring thump and then the sense of weight returned. Not like home, but suddenly his stomach returned to where it should be (sore from the hours of retching) and the screaming panic in his mind went away. Even the stench seemed less acrid, less sickening.
It was easy to tell the new hires from the veterans as the passengers got up from their seats and made their shaky way toward the hatch. Paulino and his fellow newcomers were ashen faced, their legs were wobbly, their hands trembling. Even though they lunged desperately at the hand grips set into each seat back along the plane’s narrow aisle the low lunar gravity made them stumble and stagger. They looked awful, and the veterans grinned at them and joked to one another.
“Lookin’ kinda green there, rookie.”
“Don’t worry, kid. A couple minutes out in the sun will give you a nice tan. Right down to your bones.”
It was difficult to walk. He felt so light that he lurched or hopped every time he tried to take a step. The veterans laughed at the newcomers’ clumsiness.
“You’ll get used to it, kids.”
“If ya don’t break yer asses first!”
Again Paulino stood in line and signed the papers put before him. This time, however, there were no human beings on the other side of the desks; only computers with interactive programs on their screens. And no chairs. The desks were chest-high; the newcomers signed and walked along as if they were on an assembly line. Paulino moved cautiously, as though teetering on the edge of a precipice, hardly looking at his surroundings. In truth there was little to see.
Vanguard Industries had established a mining center dug into the outer wall of the eighty-kilometer-wide crater Archimedes, on the shore of the broad Mare Imbrium. The base was almost entirely underground, and for his first few hours on the Moon, Paulino was guided through a maze of tunnels and winding, curving corridors, stumbling and bouncing foolishly with every step he attempted to take.
When at last he was left alone in his quarters, a spare, spartan cell deep underground, he gave no thought to where he was, or what he had seen or failed to see, or to his miserable past or his dubious future as a drug pusher. He swallowed a bit of Moondust, collapsed onto the narrow bunk and fell immediately asleep. He was so exhausted that, for once, he was not tormented by the nightmare visions of his village being destroyed. He did not dream at all.
CHAPTER 14
STONER began to worry when he realized that the government car Ilona Lucacs had obtained was not driving in the direction of the airport.
“We’re not going to Sheremetyevo?” he asked.
Sitting beside him on the rear seat of the black unmarked sedan, Ilona replied easily, “No. To a mil
itary airfield out beyond the ring road.”
He gave her an inquisitive glance.
“When one works for the president of the nation,” she explained with a slight smile, “one does not have to travel by commercial airliner.”
Stoner accepted the explanation, realizing that the Hungarian woman was holding back part of the truth. As usual, he said to himself.
It was late afternoon. Stoner had spent the day making funeral arrangements for Kirill Markov through Rozmenko, the bureaucrat from the Academy of Sciences. There had been some legal holdup about reading the will, and Stoner had decided to go to Budapest with Lucacs rather than stew around Moscow, waiting for the lawyers to sort out the difficulty. Then he had returned to his hotel, stretched out on the sagging bed, and phoned Jo to tell her he was on his way to Budapest.
He could feel the cold of ice in Jo’s voice. “Is it absolutely necessary to traipse out to Budapest? Don’t you think you’re asking for trouble?”
Holding his wrist comm in his hand and keeping it close to his lips, he replied, “There’s something going on at their university that I’ve got to look into, Jo. It’s important.”
She caught the urgency in his tone. “Biochips?” she guessed.
“Clever woman,” said Stoner. “That—and maybe more.”
Jo made a huffing, sighing sound the way she always did when she accepted a situation without liking it. “Stay in constant touch with me,” she said.
“Yes, boss,” he joked.
He put the comm unit back on his wrist, picked up the little bundle of clothing that the hotel had obtained for him, and used the computer terminal built into the room’s TV set to settle his bill and check out.
Now, as he sat beside the young Hungarian scientist, their car passed through several checkpoints where soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders minutely examined their passports and the papers that the driver had tucked in the visor over his seat. Finally the car pulled up on the concrete apron outside a huge hangar. A solitary military transport was parked there, twin jet engine nacelles hanging from swept-back wings. The plane was painted olive drab, and bore the markings of the Hungarian air force.
Almost wordlessly, Stoner followed Ilona Lucacs into the plane, ducking his head in its low, narrow interior. There were twenty seats inside, arranged in five rows, two by two with an aisle up the middle.
The two of them were the only passengers. A woman in military uniform poked her head through the hatch up front and asked in Hungarian:
“Are you ready to leave?”
“Yes,” said Ilona.
“Fasten your safety belts, then. No smoking.”
She closed the hatch and the engines whined to life. Stoner grinned at the brevity of the safety lecture. On a commercial flight they would have gotten a five-minute video that amounted to the same information.
They took off into the setting sun, the engines roaring so loudly that the whole plane rattled. Conversation was virtually impossible over the bellowing howl. The plane vibrated so much that Stoner kept his seat belt tightly fastened as they arrowed high into the air and sped westward.
“The flight should take only about an hour,” Ilona shouted over the din.
Stoner nodded and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep. Instead, he asked his star brother once again why the possibility that Lucacs and her coworkers were developing the beginnings of nanotechnology was so fearful.
We have known, you and I, that our symbiosis is the model for the next step in human evolution. We have worked for fifteen years to set the stage for that step forward, to create the global political and economic conditions for accepting this new concept. Why be afraid of it now?
Silence. Beneath the rattling droning roar of the plane’s engines Stoner heard nothing. No answer from his star brother.
He probed harder. I know the biochips carry with them the possibilities for abuse. This woman I’m with is a perfect example of that. But they are necessary. They are the first step toward the nanotechnology that will bring the human race its own symbiosis. What is there to fear?
Still no response. For the flash of an instant Stoner felt as if his star brother had gone away, abandoned him, left him as alone and separated as all the rest of the human kind. But the panic passed in less than a heartbeat. He knew his star brother remained within him, they were inseparably linked forever.
But his star brother was afraid, and this made Stoner feel fear—and an overwhelming urge to help his brother, to dig out the roots of this fear and conquer it.
Together we can do it, he said silently. Together we can face it and overcome it.
The drone of the jet engines faded away. The vibrations of the plane’s flight disappeared. Stoner was back on the world of his star brother, walking across a broad field of orange motile grass. The individual leaves flowed away from his boots as he walked, baring the slightly pinkish soil to his tread, then closed again behind him. The white sun shone hot and bright overhead. And once again he saw the tower that reached to the sky.
He stopped in the middle of the field, still so far from the tower that it seemed like a fragile silver thread gleaming in the sunlight, rising from the horizon and climbing up, up, upward until he had to bend slightly backward and crane his neck to see it piercing to the zenith overhead.
The world where my star brother was born, Stoner knew. But the presence in his mind whispered, That is only partially true.
The open field slowly dissolved, like watercolors washing away, melting, flowing. The great silver sky tower wavered and then dissolved from his sight.
Now Stoner stood in the midst of a vast city. Magnificent temples of polished stone rose massively all around him. He was in some sort of municipal plaza, huge smooth flagstones beneath his booted feet, temples of immense dignity on all four sides of the square.
The sky was red. Not like a sunset. Red as blood. Red with darkness rather than light. From somewhere beyond the massive bulk of the temples bright flares flickered, almost like explosions off in the distance. Yet Stoner heard no sound.
Utterly alone, he strode across the great stone plaza in the blood-red light, heading straight for the largest of all the temples, directly in front of him. His footsteps clicking against the flagstones were the only sounds he heard. Not even the sigh of a breeze disturbed the immense empty plaza.
A splendid broad stairway rose before him, topped by rows of gigantic columns. The frieze above depicted creatures who were far from human. With a mounting sense of dread, Stoner climbed those steep stairs while the sky flashed and darkened above.
Slowly he passed through the rows of columns, almost reluctant to enter the temple itself. Something was in there that he did not want to see. Danger. Horror.
The interior was dark, deeply shadowed. Stoner hesitated at the wide entryway, waiting for his vision to adjust, wishing that the darkening red sky were brighter. He shuddered and stepped forward.
A flash of light, like an explosion or a stroke of vengeful lightning, strobe-lit the temple’s interior for the briefest instant. Bodies. Twisted, agonized, horrifying bodies. Faceted eyes staring sightlessly. Alien limbs contorted in death throes. Bodies heaped atop one another as though piled up by a callous bulldozer.
Stoner blinked against the vision and darkness returned. He stood frozen at the temple’s entrance, unwilling to move forward, unable to move back.
Another strobe of brilliant light. There were thousands of dead bodies, mounds of them taller than his own head. All straining in their final moments toward a colossal statue of something not human.
Darkness again. Stoner was gasping for air. He felt sweat trickling down his brow, stinging his eyes. He wanted to leave this place of death. His nostrils flared, waiting for the stench of decay to reach him.
He felt, rather than heard, a distant rumble. A volcano erupting? The ground splitting apart? The red sky glowered and throbbed. The sullen dull light grew enough for Stoner to make out the piles of dead straining toward t
hat enormous statue with their last strength. Their god, their hero, their final desperate chance for salvation. In the blood-red shadows he could not make out much of it, but it was totally nonhuman, bizarre, with strange shape and utterly alien geometry.
Yet it was not grotesque. Somehow Stoner felt the statue had a dignity to it, a grandeur, even. It had been created by a sculptor with loving devotion.
A sculptor who was dead. The city was dead. The entire world was dead.
The intelligent creatures who had created the statues and raised the temples and built the city were all dead. Extinct. Gone forever from the universe. Every form of life on the planet, from the simplest virus to the tallest trees and largest beasts, were all wiped out, killed without mercy and without exception. Their dead bodies could not even decay.
It was a planet of death. It had existed this way for millions of years. It would remain preserved in death until its star collapsed and exploded.
Why show me this? Stoner asked his star brother, while every nerve in his body screamed to be released from this grisly vision.
Because your world could become this, the presence in his mind replied. The human race could destroy itself and every living creature on Earth. Your people have that power in their grasp.
And Stoner realized that the terror he had felt in his star brother was not merely fear. It was shame.
Stoner opened his eyes, groaning, choking, the breath gagging in his throat. He felt perspiration beading his brow, his lip.
“A bad dream?” Ilona Lucacs asked, from the seat beside him.
He was in the jet transport plane. Its noise and vibration seemed comforting now, reassuring.
Gasping, “Yes, a bad dream. A real nightmare.”
“Are you all right?”