Voyagers III - Star Brothers

by Ben Bova

  Instead Stoner caught fragments of conversation, the mental formulations that produced the sounds of speech. Two of the men were talking about something called the Horror. Something that killed with great pain. A disease. A new plague.

  “We’ll be safe from it on the Moon,” said one of the men.

  “I hope you’re right,” said the other.

  The Moon! We’re going to a lunar settlement, Stoner realized.

  His surprise, though, was quickly smothered as he probed the speakers for information about this plague they called the Horror. Gradually, as the plane droned hour after hour southeastward, Stoner learned about the Horror.

  And was horrified. A plague that strikes without warning. Incredibly painful, quickly fatal. Spreading across the world, particularly in the biggest cities, the megalopolises that had engulfed whole countrysides around them. Spread at supersonic speed by the airliners that jetted across the world. Killing women, mostly. Especially pregnant women. Carried by unsuspecting people flying from one major city to another, carrying death that burned their insides away and killed them in excruciating agony.

  The only way to stop the Horror’s spread was to stop all air traffic. Which would break down the world economy and cause a different kind of plague: hunger, starvation, actual famines in the poorest parts of the world. The kind of thing that Stoner had spent the past fifteen years struggling against.

  And then a new realization broke upon him with all the terror and pain of a tidal wave crushing the life out of him.

  The plague is man-made! Stoner knew it with a certainty that excluded all doubt. And his star brother silently, numbly agreed.

  The world’s medical researchers are looking for a virus, but the Horror is caused by—

  His star brother shuddered within him. The Horror is caused by virus-sized devices that are parasites, rather than symbiotes. Some human being has started to create nanotechnology weapons. The thing we feared most of all is beginning to destroy the human race.

  Stoner sat in shocked, stunned silence as the plane droned on across the Indian Ocean. Someone, somewhere, has discovered nanotechnology. Someone has produced nanometer-sized machines that kill. And there’s no way on Earth for human medical knowledge to stop this Horror.

  No way on Earth.

  Nunzio Palestrina had the dogged patience of a thousand years of southern Italian peasantry bred deep into his bones. His family line stretched back to the days when Naples had been a kingdom, briefly independent, more often under the ironhanded control of Normans or Austrians or Spaniards or French. For generations Nunzio’s peasant forebears had learned to be patient and to forget nothing. For generations they had waited for the darkness of night and the tenacity of blood ties to help them fight enemies too powerful to face in the daylight.

  In a world at peace, where nations no longer fought or invaded one another, there was still work for a man of Nunzio’s background. The family was always there, its bonds of blood and marriage stretching across oceans. La Signora was a distant cousin, born in New England and now living on a tropical island far from Italy. Like many a contessa before her, she had enemies. Her enemies were the enemies of Nunzio, by simple fact of family allegiance.

  She paid well, and Nunzio was able to help his many sons and daughters to build homes of their own in the old country. His family grew stronger, thanks to the generosity of La Signora.

  Now she had sent him to the Moon, of all places, to find un’ pezzo de merde named Tomasso. And do what? Watch him. Nothing more. Simply watch him, without being seen. On the Moon. Watch and wait.

  Nunzio shrugged and obeyed. He checked into the fancy hotel on the Moon, where the names were all diabolical: the hotel itself was called Hell’s Haven; the casino was Dante’s Inferno; even the restaurants had names such as Satan’s Pit and The Devil’s Den.

  Nunzio found it very distasteful, perhaps blasphemous. He did not truly believe in the Church, of course, not the prancing effeminate men who sermonized against sin while they counted their gold in the Vatican. But still, it was not proper to make light of hell and its denizens.

  Yet the hotel was very comfortable. Completely underground, but except for the fact that you had to wear special weighted boots unless you enjoyed hopping around like a fool, the place was not too different from windowless gamblers’ hotels in Europe and America.

  After three days of avoiding the casino and the women who smiled enticingly even at gray-haired old Italians, Nunzio began to think that Tomasso was never going to leave this place called Hell.

  It was a total surprise when a baby-faced bellboy brought a complimentary breakfast into his room on the morning of his fourth day in the hotel and shot him with an air pistol that fired a lethally poisonous dart into his neck. Nunzio did not even have time to raise a hand. He slumped over in his chair by the TV wall, dead within seconds.

  The bellboy stabbed at the telephone keyboard with the end of the teaspoon he had carried on the breakfast tray. He made two calls. One to Hsen’s chief of security, to tell the woman that his task had been completed. The second was to the hotel’s doctor, to tell him that an elderly Italian gentleman had apparently been taken by a heart attack.

  The dart had melted away and its tiny puncture wound had closed by the time the puffing red-faced doctor arrived in the room.

  Cliff Baker stayed semi-drunk all the way to the Moon. It was not too difficult to do, especially during the enforced layover at the Earth-orbiting space station. Everyone had to wait there twenty-four hours, the grisly incubation time of the Horror.

  Acting more swiftly than Baker had ever thought they could, the World Health Organization’s researchers had determined that it took no more than twenty-four hours between the time a person contracted the plague and the time when the Horror ripped out its victim’s guts. Twenty-four hours from first contact to screaming excruciating death throes.

  So everyone heading Moonward was detained for twenty-four hours at one of the space stations. Perfunctory medical exams were made by the largely automated diagnostic systems, and then the traveler waited.

  The space stations took on a macabre holiday air. Their corridors and shopping arcades and restaurants were filled with brittle laughter and talk of “Eat, drink, and be merry…” It was like Halloween night, continuously. Sales of Edgar Allan Poe tapes skyrocketed. One enterprising shopkeeper even organized a bizarre party for all the tourists aboard the station based on “The Masque of the Red Death.”

  The station’s supply of antihistamines was bought out immediately, no matter how quickly it was replenished by cargo shuttles from Earth. A single sneeze was enough to terrify everyone. Anyone who sneezed in public was immediately locked away in solitary confinement for twenty-four hours.

  Baker walked uncertainly through the long sloping corridors of the space station, never fully sober, never entirely drunk. Just a pleasant haze, a crooked grin on his fleshy face.

  What do they do when somebody comes down with the Horror? he asked himself. Pop ’em out an airlock? Wrap the body in plastic and ship it home? What happens to all the other people who’re aboard the bloody station when the Horror strikes? They’re all sent back Earthside, of course. Can’t contaminate our space habitats. They’ve gotta be kept pristine pure. Safe havens in case the whole fucking world gets its guts ripped out by the Horror.

  Baker laughed to himself, out loud. No one around him noticed or cared. They were all cloaked in their own forced gaiety, their own unavailing antidotes for terror.

  I’ve got the answer to all the world’s problems, Baker shouted at them silently. He weaved through the human traffic that constantly streamed along the station’s main corridor, peering blearily into their faces.

  I’m the savior of the human race, he said to himself, and they don’t even know it.

  It had all been so simple. The human race’s big problem was overproduction. Population growth. Everybody and his brother was working furiously to reduce the birthrate. For years. For decad
es. Baker suspected that even Jo Camerata and her weird, alien husband were trying to do that—he more than she, he knew. Jo would help her fellow human beings only after she had helped herself. Long after.

  But reducing the birthrate was a long, slow process that might not work, in the final account. How much easier to increase the death rate!

  He giggled to himself as he reached for the flask at the belt of his coveralls and brought it to his lips. Pure unblended whisky. Those kilted sonsofbitches certainly knew how to get the best out of their barley.

  Increase the death rate. And not among the poor, the hungry, the people at the bottom of the ladder. Kill the rich! Baker savored the idea once again. Slaughter the guilty, not the innocents. Strike down the ones who can travel by jet airliners. Use the jets as a vector for the disease. Kill the bitches who make the babies; get them first of all. Make them scream at just the thought of motherhood!

  It was all going better than Baker had ever thought it could. The giant cities of the world, the great megalopolises with their proud towers, were starting to die. The plague was only the beginning. Already there was panic over the Horror, riots in the streets. The proud cities were starting to self-destruct.

  And I’ll be on the Moon, friends and neighbors, safe as houses, watching you kill yourselves. How’s that for solving the world’s problems?

  The quarantine made no sense to Jo.

  “It will take more than twenty-four hours to make the trip,” she said impatiently as her captain held the WHO quarantine order in his hand. “If anyone aboard is going to come down with the Horror it will happen before we’re ready to land at Archimedes.”

  The main compartment of the Vanguard spacecraft was fitted out like the interior of a luxurious business jet, except that there were no windows. Jo was buckled into one of the big padded seats, feeling slightly queasy in zero gravity despite the pills she had taken. The captain, who had something of a reputation for zero-gee sexual gymnastics, had strapped himself into the facing chair to talk with her.

  Rickie was in the sleeping compartment, in the rear, enjoying the thrill of weightlessness for the first time in his life. Unlike adults, the boy seemed to suffer no symptoms of space sickness at all. When Jo had last looked in on him Rickie had been happily floating in mid-air, turning somersaults and twisting himself into pretzel shapes.

  “Ma’am, the World Health Organization…”

  Her captain was a young man, very competent, with a video star’s rugged good looks and a record of solid reliability. He wore a Vanguard uniform of midnight blue with the stylized V of the corporate logo on the chest of his tunic. Briefly Jo wondered what it would be like to make love in zero gravity, what he could do once he took the uniform off. She thought of Keith, a pang of sudden guilt mixed with the worry and dread she had carried inside her for nearly two weeks.

  “Captain,” said Jo, making herself smile, “I will not allow my son to be exposed to god knows how many tourists and workers for twenty-four hours at a space station. Any one of them might have the Horror! And then what?”

  The captain’s brows knitted with concern. “We could sit tight inside this craft while parked alongside the station. We wouldn’t even have to dock.”

  “No,” Jo said firmly. “We will make our rendezvous with the transfer rocket as scheduled and go on to Archimedes directly. You will file that flight plan, and if anyone from World Health tries to interfere you will refer them to me.”

  The responsibility lifted from his shoulders, the captain smiled at his boss, unbuckled his seat belt and floated up from the chair.

  Jo leaned her head back on the padded chair. I will not expose Rickie to the slightest chance of contracting the Horror. Never! I’ll keep him on the Moon or in one of the Lagrange habitats until this plague is over. I don’t care if it takes years.

  She would protect her son. And her daughter. In the spacecraft’s cargo hold, the delicate apparatus of an artificial womb was tenderly held in thick shockproof webbing inside heavy radiation shielding. The cloning team was coming up in a separate craft. They had assured Jo that a few days in zero gravity would not affect the fetus that was growing inside the womb, cloned from Cathy’s cells. “It’s effectively in zero gravity inside the womb anyway,” said the chief medic. “It’s floating in the fluid like a little tadpole.”

  Jo had frowned at comparing her daughter to a tadpole, and she frowned now as she recalled the bald medic’s words. But Cathy was with her, and Rickie, and she would see to it that they were safe and beyond all harm.

  But Keith. Where was Keith? When will I be with him again?

  Yet even while she ached for her husband, Jo felt a tiny undercurrent of seething anger. Once on the Moon, she intended to squeeze Vic Tomasso until she learned all that he knew and then execute him for Cathy’s murder. Then she would find Hsen, wherever he was hiding, and broil him over a slow fire. But she knew that Keith would never stand for that. He was too different, too alien, to feel the normal human hatred and thirst for vengeance that Jo felt.

  Keith will try to stop me from killing them. He’ll want to understand them, convert them, allow them to change their lives and their ways. Jo’s fists clenched until the nails bit into her palms. I want them dead. They killed Cathy and I’m going to kill them, no matter what Keith wants.

  It was not the first time she had faced the realization that if she were actually reunited with her husband, he would try to work against her.

  Maybe it’s better if I don’t find him, Jo thought. Not just yet.

  She tried to bury the guilt she felt over that. And she was successful, except that as she slept on the way to the Moon her dreams were filled with images of roasting her enemies over red-hot coals. And Keith was one of the men she tortured.

  CHAPTER 30

  THEY were getting closer to Koku. Lela sensed that the gorilla was near. No matter how urgently she warned him to flee from these murdering marauders, Koku seemed reluctant to run away.

  As they struggled up the steep slope of a hill, the thick foliage so wet from the night’s rain that they were all soaked through to the skin despite their heavy khaki clothing, Lela desperately tried to make Koku understand that he must run away.

  But she could feel the young gorilla’s confusion. The only humans that Koku had known had been at the university park, where men and women such as herself had lovingly tended the baby gorillas and reared them from infancy with all the care and affection of foster parents. Koku did not know that humans could kill.

  “Take five,” gasped the blond leader. The men flopped to the soaking ground, breathing hard from the punishing climb. The two blacks were up ahead of Lela, leading the way along a trail of flattened foliage so clear that even she could see it in the thick, dripping brush. Behind her was the redhead with the foul mouth and his silent friend. The leader stayed at Lela’s side.

  Her boots were soaked through and she could feel her feet blistering inside them. Sitting on the wet ground, she stared up at the menacing gray sky and wondered hopelessly what was going to happen to her.

  And Koku.

  Closing her eyes, she saw the world as the gorilla did. Koku was very near, she realized with a shock of fear.

  He sniffed the breeze wafting across the steep hillside and smelled the faint tang of gun oil and tobacco. Koku put down the thorny blackberry branch he was nibbling on and hauled himself up on all fours. Lela. Lela afraid. Fear had a smell to it. From the biochip implanted in his brain Koku sensed Lela’s terrible fear. And he vaguely saw men sitting on the ground, heard them speaking, saw one of them puffing on a slim white cigarette.

  Dimly Koku remembered a man who had smoked in the house where he had been reared. Lela had pulled the cigarette from the man’s mouth and shouted angrily at the man.

  Now Lela was afraid. Koku felt her fear inside his own mind as he turned away from the men and from Lela and resumed his climb up to the crest of the ridge, shambling through the thick foliage in the characteristic knuckle-wa
lking gorilla way, mashing the bushes and grass flat beneath his ponderous bulk.

  Koku obeyed Lela’s wordless warning. He moved away from the humans, away from Lela. But slowly, reluctantly.

  The Pacific Commerce shuttle coasted weightlessly through the emptiness between the Earth and the Moon. Zippered into fiber mesh cocoons, the passengers slept and dreamed their separate dreams. All except Stoner, who lay awake, strapped into a sleep cocoon with the burlap hood still over his head and his wrists still cuffed behind his back.

  Four pilots—two humans and two computers—monitored the spacecraft’s flight up in the cockpit. Stoner knew that there was little for them to do in this stage of the journey. The craft was coasting on a trajectory that Isaac Newton could have predicted, as inert as a rock as it glided from one world to another in the frictionless vacuum of space.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, Stoner mused to himself. The human pilots up front think that space is empty, but Stoner could feel the energies that pulsed all around them: particles streaming from the Sun, magnetic fields reverberating like the strings of a stupendous bass viol thrumming notes that no human ear could perceive, cosmic radiation singing of the death of stars and their rebirth.

  Some people see a desert as a barren wasteland; others see life thriving there. Humans believe that space is a vacuum when it’s actually the vibrant plasma of the universe, Stoner thought. How easy it would be to lose yourself eternally in this so-called emptiness; to go on and on forever, looking, listening, tasting the wonders of creation.