He was alone when I picked up my rum and coke and went over. If he saw me, he gave no sign. “Hello, Mr. Hopkin,” I said.
He nodded without looking up.
“Mind if I sit down?”
He frowned, as if it were a complex matter that had been laid before him. “Sure,” he said finally.
I should mention here that my specialty is economics. And these were exciting times in my field as well. The Grimwell Equations seemed to be accurate, and it now appeared we were finally going to escape the industrial cycles and downturns and rushes of inflation and unemployment that had always undermined prosperity, and which had seemed even more beyond human control than the Scorpions.
“Congratulations, Mr. Hopkin,” I said. “I wonder if I might buy you a drink?” He’d probably already had too many But what the hell.
He nodded, sure, emptied his glass, and signaled for more. “Thanks,” he said. He was drinking Scotch.
“I’m Jerry Logan, I’m an analyst for the The Financial Review.”
“Good.” His eyes met mine. They were gray and bloodshot. “Solid publication.” He had to repeat himself to be heard over the bedlam in the bar. “Stay with it.” Outside, people were embracing and dancing. There was a cacophony of car horns, noisemakers, clapping hands, cheers.
Hopkin was not a handsome man. His features suggested equal parts indifference and arrogance. He showed the signs of too much indulgence: a thick waist, distended veins, a bulbous nose. His hands were not quite steady. And his eyes were preoccupied. Distracted. There was a cynical signature to his demeanor, as there was to his work.
“Big night,” he said, almost offhandedly.
“Yes. The timing wasn’t so good for you. But I think we’ve been very lucky.”
“Yes,” he said. “We have been.” His expression did not change.
In a corner, Ransom McKay was interviewing someone. Woman in the blue Fleet uniform. “They were completely fooled—,” she was saying.
Hopkin stared into his glass. I told him how much I admired his work, his volcanic assaults against politicians, academics, and the religiously inclined, against all those who thought they had a stranglehold on Truth. He nodded and continued to study the bottom of the glass. It would be good, I said, not to have to worry about the Scorpions any more.
“Yes,” he agreed.
A waiter appeared with two scotch and sodas.
“They had their age of steam forty thousand years ago,” observed Hopkin. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Wonder what?”
“How we could have beaten them.”
I nodded, but mentioned Mark Everett’s explanation: “They probably became too rigid. Too old. Can’t respond to a fluid situation.”
“Maybe,” he said.
I was beginning to get irritated. What a son of a bitch he was. The whole world is celebrating, and he was sitting there feeling sorry for himself. I started to get up, because you shouldn’t drink with somebody when you feel that way about him. But he kept me in my seat with a gesture. “Wars are getting shorter as technology gets better,” he said. “The Sikhs took out the Chinese in four days. This one went a day and a half, if we can believe what we hear.”
Outside, the police arrived, probably to try to control traffic, but they seemed to be joining in the celebration.
“I guess it’s inevitable,” I said.
He switched to the second drink and emptied the glass in a single swallow. Good American style. Down the hatch. “War’s that short,” he said, “you can’t find out what’s really going on. I mean, it’s not like the days when we went out with the foot soldiers to see for ourselves. Now the military controls everything. Press conferences, briefings, handouts, holo feeds.” He shrugged. “You’re in the right business, son. Economics. Good. Depressions don’t happen overnight, right? And they happen right out there in the open where everybody can see them.”
The place was beginning to empty out. People and their drinks were headed into the street.
I wasn’t interested in talking about business cycles. Not tonight. Not with Max Hopkin. “Mr. Hopkin,” I said.
“Call me Max.”
“Max. You know, Max, what you say isn’t entirely true. A good reporter can always get the facts. You managed to do that with the Sikhs. Parker and her people did the same thing here over the last twenty-four hours.” I shook my head. “How did you manage it, by the way? What did you do, hire a fishing boat?”
“No,” he said. “We did a lot better.” His eyes lost their glitter, as if he were retreating into a dark place. “We made it up.”
I smiled at him. I know a joke when I hear it.
“Listen,” he said, “the Sikhs wouldn’t let anybody near. They were putting out self-serving statements. Hal Richard was with the Chinese. They were doing the same thing. Nobody liked the media much. The warlords can’t do their little bloodlettings in peace with the rest of the world looking in. So they issue their bulletins and conduct their briefings and in the end nobody has a clue what’s happening.
“We decided hell with it. We did our own war. We made it up as we went along.” A line of sharp white teeth glinted in a shark smile. “We sent in the destroyers and counterattacked with the torpedo boats. We took out the big Chinese cruisers and used the subs where they’d do some damage. We had a damned good time. We even issued communiqués. BREAK OFF IF YOU MUST. WITHDRAW IF YOU WILL. RANJAY WILL STAND WITH THE VISHA.”
I took a deep breath. He was using a tone that suggested he’d told this story many times before. “That was a lie?” I asked incredulously. Ranjay’s challenge had rallied the fleet at the critical moment on the third day. The decisive day.
“Let’s call it imaginative fiction.” He swirled his drink, listened to the ice cubes. “Of the highest order.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
I watched him for a long minute. “How could you possibly have hoped to get away with it?”
“How could we not get away with it? You think Ranjay was going to deny his great moment? Don’t look at me like that. Listen, I was assigned to get a story. I got one. The only thing I really had to worry about was making sure we had the finish right.” He gazed out at the street scene. “The details get lost. If anybody notices, they say, hell, fog of war, communications breakdowns. Whatever.”
I was beginning to feel cold. It was the sound of icons breaking apart. “Most people thought the Chinese would win,” I said.
“I’d met Ranjay. And I’d met Chang-li. Chang-li was an idiot. Political appointment. Ranjay, well, Ranjay was something else. I knew he wouldn’t engage unless he was sure of the result. And the Chinese couldn’t force him to fight. Not in the Strait.” He smiled, enjoying himself now. “We knew enough to make it believable. We had the order of battle. We knew the capabilities of the two fleets. We got that from Jane’s.” He got up, looking for more Scotch, but the bartender was gone. His apron had been rolled up and left on a stool. “Maybe he quit,” he said. “What the hell are you drinking, Jerry?”
“Same as you.”
I followed him over to the bar. A long mirror lined the wall behind the counter. He studied his reflection momentarily, shook his head, pulled down a bottle and produced glasses. “On the rocks,” I added.
He nodded and poured.
It didn’t seem possible. I was thinking: Murrow in London. Cronkite in Vietnam. Hopkin at Malacca Strait. And now he was telling me it was all a lie?
He said, “I never left Calcutta. I spent the war at the Hilton. I wrote my dispatches in the bar.” He was turned away from me again, but our eyes had locked in the mirror.
“I’ve told people at luncheons,” he continued. “Nobody cares. Nobody believes it. It’s a joke. An exaggeration. The Grand Old Cynic playing everybody along. But it’s true.” He swung round to face me. “Nobody cares about truth. Not really. It’s theater that counts. Drama. You want to be a good reporter, Jerry, you keep that i
n mind.” He refilled his glass and indicated the rum. “How about another round?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve had enough.” That, at least, was true. I don’t usually tolerate more than two drinks.
“Whatever you say.” His eyes lingered on the lines of bottles behind the bar. “I wonder what they really know,” he said.
“Who?”
“Parker. Mark Everett. The rest of those people out there.” He waved in the general direction of the ceiling. In the street, someone had produced a beamer and was firing it off. A stream of cascading light threw shadows across the floor.
“What do you mean?”
“Jerry, I had to get the result right because if I didn’t I’d be found out.”
“And?”
“Parker and Everett and the rest. Things go wrong, who’s going to be around to fire them?” He raised the glass. “To the WBC news team. Whatever else might happen, they gave us a hell of a show.”
BLACK TO MOVE
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I’m worried.
The roast beef has no taste, and I’m guzzling my coffee. I’m sitting here watching Turner and Pappas working on the little brick house across the avenue with their handpicks. Jenson and McCarthy are standing over near the lander, arguing about something. And Julie Bremmer is about a block away drawing sketches of the blue towers. Everything is exactly as it was yesterday.
Except me.
In about two hours, I will talk to the Captain. I will try to warn him. Odd, but this is the only place in the city where people seem able to speak in normal tones. Elsewhere, voices are hushed. Subdued. It’s like being in a church at midnight. I guess it’s the fountain, with its silvery spray drifting back through the late afternoon sun, windblown, cool. The park glades are a refuge against the wide, still avenues and the empty windows. Leaves and grass are bright gold, but otherwise the vegetation is of a generally familiar cast. Through long, graceful branches, the blue towers glitter in the sunlight.
There is perhaps no sound quite so soothing as the slap of water on stone. (Coulter got the fountain working yesterday, using a generator from the lander.) Listening, seated on one of the benches at the fountain’s edge, I can feel how close we are, the builders of this colossal city and I. And that thought is no comfort.
It’s been a long, dusty, rockbound road from Earth to this park. The old hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence has taken us across a thousand sandy worlds in a quest that became, in time, a search for a blade of grass.
I will remember all my life standing on a beach under red Capella, watching the waves come in. Sky and sea were crystal blue; no gull wheeled through the still air; no strand of green boiled in the surf. It was a beach without a shell.
But here, west of Centauri, after almost two centuries, we have a living world! We looked down, unbelieving, at forests and jungles, and dipped our scoops into a crowded sea. The perpetual bridge game broke up.
On the second day, we saw the City.
A glittering sundisk, it lay in the southern temperate zone, between a mountain chain and the sea. With it came our first mystery: the City was alone. No other habitation existed anywhere on the planet. On the fourth day, Olszewski gave his opinion that the City was deserted.
We went down and looked.
It appeared remarkably human, and might almost have been a modern terrestrial metropolis. But its inhabitants had put their cars in their garages, locked their homes, and gone for a walk.
Mark Conover, riding overhead in the Chicago, speculated that the builders were not native to this world.
They were jointed bipeds, somewhat larger than we are. We can sit in their chairs and those of us who are tall enough to be able to see through their windshields can drive their cars. Our sense of the place was that they’d left the day before we came.
It’s a city of domes and minarets. The homes are spacious, with courtyards and gardens now run to weed. And they were fond of games and sports. We found gymnasiums and parks and pools everywhere. There was a magnificent oceanfront stadium, and every private home seemed filled with playing cards and dice and geometrical puzzles and 81-square checkerboards.
They had apparently not discovered photography; nor, as far as we could determine, were they given to the plastic arts. There were no statues. Even the fountain lacked the usual boys on dolphins or winged women. It was instead a study in wet geometry, a complex of leaning slabs, balanced spheres, and odd-angled pyramids.
Consequently, we’d been there quite a while before we found out what the inhabitants looked like. That happened when we walked into a small home on the north side, and found some charcoal etchings.
Cats, someone said.
Maybe. The following day we came across an art museum and found several hundred watercolors, oils, tapestries, crystals, and so on.
They are felines, without doubt, but the eyes are chilling. The creatures in the paintings have nevertheless a human dimension. They are bundled against storms; they gaze across plowed fields at sunset; they smile benevolently (or pompously) out of portraits. In one particularly striking watercolor, four females cower beneath an angry sky. Between heaving clouds, a pair of full moons illuminate the scene.
This world has no satellite.
Virtually everyone crowded into the museum. It was a day of sighs and grunts and exclamations, but it brought us no closer to an answer to the central question: where had they gone?
“Just as well they’re not here,” Turner said, standing in front of the watercolor. “This is the only living world anyone has seen. It’s one hell of a valuable piece of real estate. Nice of them to give it to us.”
I was at the time standing across the gallery in front of a wall-sized oil. It was done in impressionistic style, reminiscent of Degas: a group of the creatures was gathered about a game of chess. Two were seated at the table, hunched over the pieces in the classic pose of the dedicated player. Several more, half in shadow, watched.
Their expressions were remarkably human. If one allowed for the ears and the fangs, the scene might easily have been a New York coffeehouse.
The table was set under a hanging lamp; its hazy illumination fell squarely on the board.
The game was not actually chess, of course. For one thing, the board had 81 squares. There was no queen. Instead, the king was flanked by a pair of pieces that vaguely resembled shields. Stylized hemispheres at the extremes of the position must have been rooks. (Where else but on the flank would one reasonably place a rook?)
The other pieces, too, were familiar. The left-hand Black bishop had been fianchettoed: a one-square angular move onto the long diagonal, from where it would exercise withering power. All four knights had been moved, and their twisted tracks betrayed their identity.
The game was still in its opening stages. White was two pawns up, temporarily. It appeared to be Black’s move, and he would, I suspected, seize a White pawn which had strayed deep into what we would consider his queenside.
I stood before that painting, feeling the stirrings of kinship and affection for these people and wondering what immutable laws of psychology, mathematics, and aesthetics ordained the creation of chess in cultures so distant from each other. I wondered whether the game might not prove a rite of passage of some sort.
I was about to leave when I detected a wrongness somewhere in the painting, as if a piece were misplaced, or the kibitzers were surreptitiously watching me. Whatever it was, I grew conscious of my breathing.
There was nothing.
I backed away, turned, and hurried out of the building.
I’m a symbologist, with a specialty in linguistics. If we ever do actually find someone out here to talk to, I’m the one who will be expected to say hello. That’s an honor, I suppose; but I can’t get Captain Cook entirely out of my mind.
By the end of the first week, we had not turned up any written material (and, in fact, still haven’t) other than a few undecipherable inscriptions on the sides of buildings. They were e
ven more computerized than we are, and we assumed everything went into the data banks, which we also haven’t found. The computers themselves are wrecked. Slagged. So, by the way, is the central power core for the City. Another mystery.
Anyhow, I had little to do, so yesterday I went for a walk in the twilight with Jennifer East, a navigator and the pilot of the other lander. She’s lovely, with bright hazel eyes and a quick smile. Her long tawny hair was radiant in the setting sun. The atmosphere here has a moderately high oxygen content, which affects her the way some women are affected by martinis. She clung to my arm, and I was breathlessly aware of her long-legged stride.
We might have been walking through the streets of an idealized, mystical Baghdad: the towers were gold and purple in the failing light. Flights of brightly-colored birds scattered before us. I half-expected to hear the somber cry of a ram’s horn, calling the faithful to prayer.
The avenue is lined with delicate, graybarked trees. Their broad, filamented leaves sighed in the wind, which was constant off the western mountains. Out at sea, thunder rumbled.
Behind the trees are the empty homes, no two alike, and other structures that we have not yet begun to analyze. Only the towers exceed three stories. The buildings are all beveled and curved; right angles do not exist. I wonder what the psychologists will make of that.
“I wonder how long they’ve been gone?” she said. Her eyes were luminous with excitement, directed (I’m sorry to say) at the architecture.
That had been a point of considerable debate. Many of the interiors revealed a degree of dust that suggested it could not have been more than a few weeks since someone had occupied them. But much of the pavement was in a state of disrepair, and on the City’s inland side, forest was beginning to push through.
I told her I thought they’d been around quite recently. “Mark,” she said, staying close, “I wonder whether they’ve really left.”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 32