by Ben Bova
The second race’s scientists worked feverishly to develop their own nanotechnology and counter the invading plague. They succeeded. They saved their species. For a while. They found that the nanomachines could be made to preserve the bodies they dwelled in, protect them against disease and cure injuries. Their lifespans lengthened incredibly. They became virtually immortal. But they did not know how to handle such godlike power. They allowed their numbers to grow beyond the ability of the planet to support them. The gift of life was turned into worldwide pollution that destroyed their biosphere. Again, a pitiful few were able to get away on spacecraft, but their race died in its own garbage and excrement.
And so it has gone. For millions of years, from one world to another, across the breadth of the Milky Way galaxy the nanomachines have spread. Over those eons the machines have gained incredible new capabilities as one race after another added different powers to them. Now they can be symbiotes, enhancing not only their hosts’ physical well-being, but the hosts’ mental abilities also. Yet not one race in a thousand has been wise enough to use them well. The race that sent them to Earth was one of those rare exceptions. Virtually every species to attain nanotechnology killed itself within a generation or two.
“The star brethren are a test,” Stoner concluded. “The human race’s ultimate test. Can we join with these symbiotes to move humanity to the next phase of our development, or will we use their powers to destroy ourselves?”
Hsen nodded as if he understood. “That is why this power must be restricted to the very few people who have the understanding and strength to direct all the others.”
“Such as you?” Jo sneered.
“Don’t you understand?” Stoner asked of them. “Don’t any of you understand? We’re talking about an evolutionary step as big as the invention of fire! Bigger! Even the biochips are trivial compared to nanotechnology.”
“Yes,” said Ilona. “I see. I understand.”
Stoner went on, “At first, evolution works at the physical level, changing species over geological spans of time. Once a species achieves intelligence, though, evolution becomes social. Our societies change, and that becomes the driving force in our evolution. Social changes happen over centuries, generations, incredibly faster than physical evolution works. But when the species invents science, the big evolutionary changes come out of technology, and they come so swiftly that it’s hard to keep up with them. The world begins to change in decades instead of generations.”
The others stared at him in silence.
“Two or three decades ago,” Stoner went on, “everybody was scared to death of nuclear weaponry. For the first time people realized that we had developed a technology that could wipe out all life on Earth. Politicians and scientists and diplomats worked out treaties to control nuclear weapons. But while they were doing that, our global technology was spewing out enough pollution to heat up the atmosphere and change the world’s climate.”
“And cutting down the rain forests,” Ilona said.
“And manufacturing poison gas weapons,” added Tomasso.
“That’s just it,” Stoner told them. “Our technology is global in its power. Unless we control it carefully it can destroy us in a thousand ways.”
Jo said, “And nanotechnology is so big a step…”
Looking at her, Stoner said, “Right. Bigger than anything that’s come before it. It’s so big that it could shatter the human race before we learn to deal with it. That’s what we’ve been trying to avoid. That’s why we’ve worked to introduce nanotechnology gradually, carefully, with the least shock and pain to human society as possible.”
He turned back to Baker. “But you’ve made that impossible, Cliff. You’re forcing me to inoculate the world against your Horror. The consequences…god, I don’t know what the consequences will be.”
“That is of no importance at the moment,” Hsen snapped. “You will inoculate me. Now!”
“No,” said Stoner.
Hsen’s thin lips curved upward slightly. “You are in no position to refuse me. Unless, of course, you do not care what happens to your wife.”
Stoner thought swiftly. He’s a strong personality, not like Novotny. And absolutely amoral. Like Vic, he doesn’t feel guilt for anything he’s done. A star brother might open his heart to the rest of humanity; or it might simply reinforce his existing personality. A man of that strength, of that ruthlessness, with a star brother? We can’t take that chance, Stoner’s star brother agreed.
“I won’t do it,” Stoner said.
Hsen let his fury show in his face. He pointed at Jo and said to the black-uniformed men behind him, “Pin her arms behind her back!”
Not a man moved. They stood staring at nothingness, their submachine guns slung over their shoulders.
“Do as I say!” Hsen shouted.
“They can’t hear you,” said Stoner softly. “They can’t even see you.”
His face contorting with rage, Hsen grabbed at the holster on the hip of the commando nearest him. Pulling the heavy black revolver from it, he levelled the gun at Stoner. The others backed away, but Jo clung tightly to her husband.
“You can control them but you can’t control me!” he shouted.
“What makes you believe that?” asked Stoner mildly. “Do you really think that you’re some sort of superior creature? Do you think that your ability to make money, to steal and lie and murder, places you above normal men?”
Hsen squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He brought up his other hand and pulled with both fingers. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead. His lips peeled back in the grimace of a hissing snake.
Ignoring him, Stoner turned to Baker. “Cliff, you’re sick. Maybe you’ve always been this way. Maybe it’s my fault. I don’t know if a star brother can heal the scars in your mind. There’s a chance that if you realize what you’ve done, truly understand the enormity of the evil you’ve unleashed—that realization might kill you. It’s a chance you’ll have to take.”
Baker backed away, one hand sliding along the railing of the catwalk. “No you don’t! You’re not sticking those alien monsters in me!”
“Stop speaking!” Hsen screamed. “I’ll kill you all!”
Without moving his arm from Jo’s shoulders Stoner told him, “Be quiet, little man. Cliff is a psychopath, and he needs our help. But you are a deliberate, calculating murderer. You are a carrier of death; you belong with the dead.”
“I’ll kill you!”
Stoner’s voice became as soft as the sweep of an angel’s hovering wings. “There is only one person here that you can kill.”
For a long moment Hsen stood absolutely still, holding the heavy revolver rigidly in both hands, pointed at Stoner’s chest. Then his arms began to tremble and slowly, painfully, his hands turned the pistol inch by agonizing inch until it pointed at his own face. Hsen’s entire body shook with the exertion. Rivulets of sweat ran down his face. His eyes were wide with horror as he stared directly into the yawning black depths of the gun’s muzzle.
“Now,” whispered Stoner, “if you truly want to kill someone, now you can pull the trigger.”
Hsen screamed an incoherent animal screech. The gun went off with a shattering roar and the upper half of his head disappeared in an explosion of blood and bone and brain. His nearly headless body slammed against the catwalk railing, vaulted over it and fell slowly twisting to the steel flooring fifteen stories below. It finally hit with a sickening wet thump.
Jo’s fingers tore into Stoner’s flesh. She screamed, and so did Ilona. Baker stared, goggle-eyed. Tomasso and Janos stood frozen in slack-jawed shock. Behind him Stoner heard Paulino gag and retch in the corridor outside the doorway. Jo was clutching at his bare torso. He could feel her gulping for breath, her whole body wire-taut.
The six black-clad commandos still stood as if they had turned to statues.
“How does revenge feel, Jo?” he asked.
She swallowed hard. “Numb,” she gasped. �
�I feel numb all over.”
“You would have felt worse if you had killed him yourself. Vengeance is always bitter, Jo. Always.”
Janos, his eyes nearly popping from their sockets, stuttered, “P-please…don’t…don’t kill me!”
Stoner stared at him.
“I didn’t know…I didn’t realize…”
“You knew,” Stoner said calmly. Extending his left hand with its stump where a finger should have been, “You knew exactly what you were doing. You just never thought that you’d have to face the consequences.”
The Hungarian fell to his knees and clutched Stoner’s legs. “Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
Stoner reached out and grasped his quaking shoulder with his four-fingered hand. “Don’t you think that I know the terror that lies deep in your heart? I feel it too, the terror of death, the fear that I will cease to be.”
Janos raised his tear-streaked face.
“Hsen killed himself,” said Stoner, “because he didn’t have the courage to face a world in which he would be powerless. I simply allowed him to do it. I can’t kill you—even if you deserved it.”
“Thank you!” Janos blubbered. “Thank you!”
But Stoner raised his hand. “I’m going to do something to you that might be much worse. I’m going to give you a star brother. You saw what it did to your president. What it does to you will depend on your own inner strength, your own ability to expand your consciousness to envelop the entire human race.”
“It’ll protect us against the Horror?” Jo asked.
“Yes. And it will change the way you see the world, for as long as you live.”
“What about me?” Tomasso asked, all in a rush. Stoner could see that it took every ounce of his courage to ask Jo the question. The muscles beneath the skin of his face were so rigid that he seemed to be wearing a mask of pain.
Jo looked up at her husband and then back at the traitor. “Just get out of my sight, Vic,” she said wearily. “Go away and never let me see you again.”
“Can…” Tomasso shifted his fearful eyes to Stoner. “Can I get it too, a star brother?”
Stoner nodded. “Will you share it with others? Will you return to Earth and help to inoculate your human brothers and sisters?”
“Ten billion people?” Tomasso’s voice was slightly hollow with the challenge.
“Everyone,” said Stoner.
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Good.”
“You’ll never do it in time,” Baker said, almost snarling. “They’re already starting to tear themselves apart down there. The human race is going to self-destruct!”
“You’re wrong, Cliff,” Stoner replied. “You’ve been wrong about almost everything.”
“Everybody dies!” Baker nearly shouted it.
“Not anymore,” Stoner said softly. “You almost had it right when you said that only those of us off-planet can survive the Horror. Space flight, the ability to live elsewhere than on the Earth, that’s what guarantees the immortality of the human race. Even if we fail to beat the Horror, the human race can survive here on the Moon and in the Lagrange habitats. Our fate is no longer tied to the fate of the Earth.”
“And star flight,” Jo said, the realization of it filling her voice with wonder. “With star flight the human race can outlive the Sun!”
Stoner smiled at her and pointed to the enormous vat beyond the catwalk’s railing. It had stopped bubbling. The steam was gone. Within its cylindrical glassteel walls they saw the graceful crystalline lines of the starship’s propulsion and guidance section.
“It glitters like a diamond!” Ilona exclaimed. “An enormous diamond!”
Stoner said, “A lot of it is diamond, especially the structural segments and the hull. Nothing but carbon atoms, properly arranged by nanomachines.”
Glancing down at the bloody remains of Hsen, Jo said, “That’s what he wanted. The starship. All the knowledge that the aliens hold.”
“There are no aliens,” Stoner said. “Not anymore. They’re our star brothers and sisters. Our symbiotes. We need each other to live.”
“Like multicellular organisms,” Ilona said. “Single-celled creatures joined together billions of years ago to produce the earliest multicellular organisms. Now we are joining with the star creatures.”
Stoner nodded. “First single cells, then aggregations of cells. Now we move on to a symbiosis that will create a new species, the next step in humankind’s development.”
“You’re not sticking those alien machines in me!” Baker shouted, waving his fists in the air. “You’re not going to turn me into an alien freak!”
Stoner took a step toward him. “Cliff, the symbiotes have made me more human, not less. There’s nothing to fear.”
Baker stared at him wildly.
“Believe me, Cliff,” Stoner soothed, “we’re all going to be more than human. You’ll see.”
The primitive fire in Baker’s eyes calmed. His hands unclenched.
Will he be able to handle a star brother within him? Stoner wondered silently. His own star brother replied, That is a test that every human will have to face, now.
Paulino’s timid voice came from the doorway. “Will we really be safe from the Horror?”
Stoner smiled at him. “And from addictions, too. Chemical and otherwise.” He nodded to Ilona.
“Immortality?” Jo asked. “Will we truly be immortal?”
“Maybe. With the star symbiotes within us, who knows how long a human being can live? Long enough to go star-roving, at least.”
“It frightens me a little,” said Ilona.
“It frightens me a lot,” Stoner admitted. “This is going to change human society completely. The upheavals are going to be tremendous.”
“But the alternative is the Horror,” Jo said.
“Yes. That’s the problem.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” she asked, with newfound strength in her voice. “We’ve got a whole world of work to do. Let’s get started. Now.”
EPILOGUE
JOÃO de Sagres stood at the crest of the bare pebbly hill and watched, breathless in the high altitude of the Nazcan plain, as the Sun touched the horizon exactly at the point where the long straight line arrowed to reach it.
The star brother within him had never seen the figures before, scratched into the bare soil of Nazca so many centuries earlier. Neither had de Sagres. Together they thrilled at the artistry and determination that had covered the empty plain with human purpose.
De Sagres smiled inwardly. How my cabinet members would laugh if they saw me here, alone, in this faded old windbreaker and worn-thin slacks. El Presidente should always have his entourage around him; he should wear hand-tailored suits with razor-edge creases and elegant silk ties. At least, thought the president, they no longer expect their leader to wear a military uniform.
The breeze gusting across the treeless plain from the Andes was chilling. De Sagres knew it would get much colder once the Sun had dipped completely below the barren horizon. Still he waited at the hill’s dusty summit. Waited and watched the sky darken.
Perhaps we should not have come alone, his star brother said to him. It’s a long way to the nearest station on the highway.
I had to get away, he replied silently, away from the crowds and the ceremonies. Away from the work and the pain and the grief. This night of all nights, I must be by myself.
He sensed his star brother’s hurt. Are we not one person? he rebuked mildly.
One person, my brother, admitted de Sagres.
It had been a long, hard year. The Horror was being brought under control, but slowly, ever so slowly. Nearly a quarter billion people had died in Latin America alone. A terrible, agonizing tragedy. De Sagres could feel the awful grief and misery that spanned the world. To him the deaths were not merely statistics; they were brothers and sisters who had perished, his blood, his kin. He had gazed deeply into the well of anguish. A lesser man would have given
up hope and run away to hide.
But it has been only one year, his star brother replied. Less than a full year. And the death rate is dropping fast now.
De Sagres thought of the changes that were already taking place across Latin America and the rest of the world. Humans accepted the “alien” inoculations because they were terrified of the Horror. Then they found that they carried star brothers and star sisters within themselves.
Some went mad. Some seemed completely unchanged. But for most men and women, the star symbiotes seemed to make them more human than they had ever been. They could no longer look at another person as someone separate from themselves. They could not look at an animal or a tree or even a cloud in the sky as something outside their own existence.
Across Latin America, across the entire world, the human race was reaching toward a new level of existence. No one on Earth was untouched by the twin impacts of the Horror and the star symbiotes. There were no isolated human souls anymore. No one could stand alone and aloof, not once he acquired a star brother. Pushed by the Horror, pulled by the star brethren, all of humanity was swiftly becoming one huge interlinked family, brought together by ties of love and caring and—at long last—understanding.
The teachings of Christ are becoming the norm of human behavior, thought de Sagres. He smiled to himself. Even the Church is becoming Christian, at last.
Slowly the Moon rose from behind the sunset-tinged snow-caps of the Andes, enormous and full, pale and slightly sad looking.
De Sagres felt his heart thumping as he strained his eyes to see the lights of human settlements on the lopsided face of the Moon. And then he saw one single incredibly bright light, so brilliant that no one could miss it, rising up from near the edge of the Moon’s disc, heading out into the darkness of the night sky, racing into the depths of black space, stretching into a streak of blazing light that crossed the dome of the heavens and then dwindled swiftly and was gone.