There was nothing you could put in a report, but I agreed that we were transients, that those streets had long run to laughter and song, that they soon would again, and that it would never really be ours.
She squeezed my arm. “It’s magnificent.”
I envied her; this was her first flight. For most of us, there had been too many broken landscapes, too much desert.
“Olszewski thinks,” I said, “that the northern section of the City is almost two thousand years old… They’d been here a while.”
“And they just packed up and left.” She steered us out of the center, angling toward the trees, where I think we both felt less conspicuous.
“It’s ironic,” I said. “No one would have believed first contact would come like this. They’ve been here since the time of Constantine, and we miss them by a few weeks. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
She frowned. “It’s not believable.” She touched one of the trees. “Did you know it’s the second time?” she asked. I must have looked blank. “Twenty-two years ago the Berlin tracked something across the face of Algol and then lost it. Whatever it was, it threw a couple of sharp turns.” We walked silently for several minutes, crossed another avenue, and approached the museum. “Algol,” she said, “isn’t all that far from here.”
“UFO stories,” I said. “They used to be common.”
She shrugged. “It might be that the thing the Berlin saw frightened these people off. Or worse.”
The museum is wheel-shaped. Heavy, curving panels of tinted glass are ribbed by polished black stone that is probably marble. The grounds are a wild tangle of weed and shrub anchored by overgrown hedge. A few flowering bushes survive out near the perimeter.
I laughed. “You don’t suppose the sun is about to nova, do you?”
She smiled and brushed my cheek with a kiss. Jenny is 23 and a graduate of MIT. “It’s going to rain,” she said.
We walked past a turret. The air was cool.
“They seem to have taken their time about leaving,” I said. “There’s no evidence of panic or violence. And most of their personal belongings apparently went with them. Whatever happened, they had time to go home and pack.”
She looked uneasily at the sky. Gray clouds were gathering in the west. “Why did they destroy the computers? And the power plant? Doesn’t that sound like a retreat before an advancing enemy?”
We stood on the rounded stone steps at the entrance, watching the coming storm. Near the horizon, lightning touched the ground. It was delicate, like the trees.
And I knew what had disturbed me about the painting.
Jenny doesn’t play chess. So when we stood again before the portrait and I explained, she listened dutifully and then tried to reassure me. I couldn’t blame her.
I have an appointment to meet the Captain in the gallery after dinner. He doesn’t play chess either. Like all good captains down through the ages, he is a man of courage and hardheaded common sense, so he will also try to reassure me.
Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.
But the position in that game: Black is playing the Benko Gambit. It’s different in detail, of course; the game is different. But Black is about to clear a lane for the queenside rook. One bishop, at the opposite end of the board, is astride the long diagonal, where its terrible power will combine with that of the rook. And White, after the next move or two, when that advanced pawn comes off, will be desperately exposed.
It’s the most advanced of the gambits for Black, still feared after three hundred years.
And I keep thinking: the inhabitants of the City were surely aware of this world’s value. More, they are competitors. They would assume that we would want to take it from them.
“But we wouldn’t,” Jenny had argued.
“Are you sure? Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that does matter is what they believe. And they would expect us to act as they would.
“Now, if they knew in advance that we were coming—.”
“The Berlin sighting—.”
“—Might have done it. Warned them we were in the neighborhood. So they withdraw, and give us the world. And, with it, an enigma.” Rain had begun sliding down the tinted glass. “They’re playing the Benko.”
“You mean they might come back here in force and attack?” She was aghast, not at the possibility, which she dismissed; but at the direction my mind had taken.
“No,” I said. “Not us. The Benko isn’t designed to recover a lost pawn.” I could not look away from the painting. Did I detect a gleam of arrogance in Black’s eyes? “No. It doesn’t fool around with pawns. The idea is to launch a strike into the heart of the enemy position.”
“Earth?” She smiled weakly. “They wouldn’t even know where Earth is.” I didn’t ask whether she thought we might not go home alone.
One more thing about that painting: there’s a shading of light, a chiaroscuro, in the eyes of the onlookers. It’s the joy of battle.
I’m scared.
THE FAR SHORE
The moonlight was bright on Patty’s grave. Rodney Martin felt the moisture in his eyes, threw a final spadeful of earth, and groped for a prayer to a God whose jurisdiction surely ended somewhere south of here. Behind him, in the dark, the surf was a muffled boom.
The wind moved in the trees.
It seemed now he had never known her free of pain. He had worked with her aboard Alexia for almost three years; yet her lifetime, for him, was bracketed between this night and that terrible moment on the dark mined bridge of the stricken starship when he had come upon her, mouth bloody, face pale behind the plexiglass of her helmet.
Grief twisted his features.
He was reluctant to leave, and stood a long time listening to the forest sounds and the ocean. The moon drifted through the night, not the barren pebble of Earth’s skies, but a large blue-green globe of continents and water, its arc softened in the shimmering white clouds.
There was a chill in the air.
After awhile, Martin shouldered the spade and walked slowly back toward the beach. The trees gave way to tough, fibrous plants rooted in stony soil. He looked out at the ocean, on which no ship had ever sailed.
Long waves broke and slid up the beach. Ahead, atop a low slope, the lights from the Monson dome glittered on the water. He’d been careful to turn the lamps on before leaving, but now it seemed distant and cold.
He passed a massive boulder, its lower sides smoothed by the tides. Beyond lay the escape capsule, cool and round and black, an enormous bowling ball in the sand, forming a kind of matched pair with the rock.
He climbed the ridge behind the capsule and was home. The Monson was actually four domes, three smaller ones connected by twelve-foot-long tubes to a primary central bubble. Not exactly a townhouse, but comfortable, designed to withstand extreme temperatures, assaults by giant lizards, corrosive atmosphere, whatever. The ideal survival structure, sufficient to house the entire eight-person crew of Alexia. As things had turned out, he had a lot of room.
And a lot of time. He wondered what had happened on the ship. Screen failure, probably. God knew the shields had blinked out often enough before. So yes, they’d probably gotten corked by a good-sized rock.
Whatever it was, the hull had come apart, and apparently dumped everyone but the two sleepers into the void. During those last frantic minutes, with power and gravity gone, and the star well swirling beneath his feet, he’d searched Alexia’s spaces and found only Patty, whose first fortunate response had been to launch the datapak.
Sleep did not come easily. He tried to read but could not concentrate. Finally he turned out the lights and stared at the ceiling. The bedroom windows were open. The surf thundered and boomed.
It had been two weeks since they’d arrived here in the escape capsule. Patty had been thrown hard into a bulkhead during the event and had never really rallied. She’d grown weaker day by day while he watched helplessly.
In the morning, he was up early. Tired, angry, h
e scrambled an egg for which he had no appetite, added toast and coffee, and went for a swim. The ocean was cool. After a while he came in close to shore and stood knee-deep in the surf, enjoying its inconstant tug, feeling it pull the sand from around his toes. The sea was blue and salty, indistinguishable from the Atlantic. Strands of weed wrapped around his ankles. Things very much like sandcrabs washed in and buried themselves amid tiny fountains of water. The white beach, punctuated with heaps of gray rock, swung in a wide curve for miles, vanishing at last around the edge of a promontory. Inland, wooded hills mounted in successive ridges westward to the foot of a distant mountain chain. A lost floater drifted over the breakers, until it was picked up by the wind and blown back toward the forest. The floaters were green airbags, apparently airborne plants, resembling nothing so much as lopsided leathery balloons, complete with an anchoring tail. He watched until it disappeared inland.
He slept most of the afternoon, and woke feeling better than he had at any time since the accident. He was coming to terms with the loss of Patty. It was painful, and he promised himself if he got home he’d never leave again. But his situation was not desperate. The environment did not seem especially dangerous, and the Momsen could keep him alive indefinitely. He had a transmitter, so he would be able to say hello when help showed up. Survival depended only on his ability to adjust to being alone.
The Institute had nothing between here and home. It was seventy-some parsecs to Earth. Alexia’s distress signal, riding its subspace carrier, would cross that vast ocean in 26 months and some odd days, which meant that he could expect a rescue party in about five years.
Fortunately, food was no problem. Storage lockers on board the SARC, the Sakata-Avery Rescue Chamber, held enough hamburgers and flashlight batteries to maintain eight people for years. He had weapons, though this world so far had revealed nothing dangerous. And he had a pleasant beach home. Rent free, with his pay piling up.
That evening, he dragged a chair outside, called up a novel, and sat watching the sun dip into the mountains. It was whiter than Sol, slightly larger, in reality as well as in appearance. When the leading edge touched the horizon, Martin set his watch at six o’clock. A day here was longer than at home, maybe by two hours. So his watch was useless for its designed purpose. But he would check it tomorrow when the sun touched the horizon again, and it would tell him the precise length of the day. Not that it mattered.
The SARC had come down in the northern hemisphere, and he’d steered for a temperate zone. The planet, which they had named Amity, was entering that portion of its orbit in which his hemisphere would be tilting away from the sun. Autumn was coming.
He would want a calendar. Again, not that he had any real use for one. But it would be something to occupy him. He knew Amity circled its G2 main sequence primary in just over seventeen terrestrial months.
Declination was eleven degrees. That should mean a mild winter.
He thought about supplies. Had he overlooked anything? He had an abundance of solar energy, with backup systems. The shoreline gave no indication of unusual tides, sudden inundations, anything of that nature.
The SARC possessed an extensive film library. Complete runs of the most popular HV shows of the last century. There were quiz and discussion shows, and other programs of an educational nature; and a complete run, ten years worth, of Brandenburg and Scott, a “sociodrama” in which two wisecracking government agents helped people adjust to assorted problems arising from economic dislocation, overpopulation, divergence of religious views, and so on.
He had fifty years of the World Series, and a lot of horse races. And the better part of the Library of Congress.
He also had a radio. There was, of course, nothing to listen to other than the hourly distress call put out by the datapak. The datapak was an orbiting cluster of antennas, receivers, and transmitters, aimed at Earth by an on-board computer, beeping across hyphenated space. Its receivers were designed to pick up stray whispers of signal, electronic sighs to be filtered and dissected, the results channeled for analysis, enhancement, and ultimate restoration. It would, one day, lead his rescuers to him.
Martin’s front yard was humanity’s most remote outpost. It was half again as far as Calamity, on the other side of Sol.
A tree-squatter sat on its hind legs, watching him. It resembled an oversized and overweight squirrel. He tossed it a nut. It advanced with caution, took the nut, glanced briefly at him, and vanished back into the scrub.
The tree-squatter, with its quick black eyes, was around all the time, looking for food. But it would not trust him, and always cleared out if he tried to approach.
There were lots of squirrels and tree-squatters and floaters, but no one had yet found any philosophers or electricians. Consequently, Earth was reassuming its classic Ptolemaic position as center of the universe. The Theological Implications, as people were fond of saying, were obvious. The primordial soup, stirred centuries ago by evolutionists to evict the Creator, had acquired an extra ingredient. The view that people were a direct result of divine intervention was once again respectable. The numerous empty garden worlds, like this one, might almost have been prepared specifically for human use. But if places like this suggested a friendly cosmos to people back home, to Martin the skies were too silent, the forests too empty The Institute was dying. The human race had more real estate than they could use for the foreseeable future. Expeditions were expensive, ships were wearing out, and the government could see no return for its money. Unless something happened that could rekindle the taxpayers’ imaginations, the Great Adventure was drawing to a close. Moreover, it was unlikely that the political power structure wanted any unsettling discoveries. There would probably be a general sigh of relief when the last vessel returned emptyhanded from its last flight.
No new unit had been added to the fleet in thirty years. Equipment was run down, and parts were scarce. In fact, he thought wearily, if the truth were known, the loss of Alexia would probably turn out to be attributable to a broken hose.
He missed Patty.
The place was too quiet. The wind blew and the tides came and went and seabirds flapped past. He was becoming increasingly oppressed by a sense of unease. Somewhere, in the hills, or maybe at sea, he’d have liked to see a light.
He kept the HV on constantly. The voices were reassuring. He listened to them argue politics, philosophy, medicine, religion, and sex. He watched various kinds of dramas, watched comedians, listened to musicals and even started to develop a taste for opera.
He took to bolting the door. It was the beginning of the Greenway Syndrome.
Everett Radcliffe, stranded on the back side of the Moon for six months after a series of improbable accidents had carried off his two colleagues, had heard footsteps behind him the rest of his days. Will Evans had taken his life after four months in a prototype of Martin’s shelter. Myra Greenway, for whom the disorder was named, was adrift for a year in a SARC, never close to a planetary surface. She swore that something had lived outside, trying continually to get at her. Brad Kauffman had spent eight months alone in a crippled cruiser after his partner had died, and had refused, on his return to Earth, to come out of his house at night.
There were other cases.
Something deep in the soul does not like unbroken, intense solitude. Cut whatever it is that ties a man to the rest of his species, plunge him into the outer dark, and you will not get him back whole.
Martin tried not to think about it.
Standard procedure was to embrace whatever entertainment was available, cultivate hobbies, keep occupied. He glanced at the hologram. An aging beauty was swapping mindless chitchat with a comedian.
He could collect rocks.
Martin was not a man easily frightened. He’d intervened in a gang assault, did not fear speaking to large groups of people, and had ridden the great starships into the unknown. Nevertheless, he continued to keep his door locked.
STATUS REPORT 037 ALEXIA 090857 GMT: PATRICIA MASON
DEAD OF INJURIES SEPTEMBER 3.
He thought of Patty’s family, two years from now, receiving this news, and added: PEACEFULLY. He poked in his name, and hit the transmit.
The morning was gray with rain. He played bridge with the computer, got bored, tried a novel. After lunch, he sat down at the terminal and pointed the datapak’s antennas at Sirius. The speakers crackled with static.
Hello from God.
Outside, the trees bent under a stiff wind, and the ocean was choppy. Rain coming. Oblivious to the weather, a groper ambled amiably along the treeline, its oilskin hide glistening. It probed the branches with long, flexible arms for a yellow fruit that had also tested okay for Martin’s consumption.
He’d awakened with a wisp of recollection from his childhood, something not quite remembered, brought back by a dream:
He was a boy, alone in the house in Atlanta. And frightened by the shadows and dark places outside the living room. He’d put on the HV, and looked through the dining room at the gloomy doorway to the kitchen, with its exits opening out back and into the basement. He’d sat awhile, trying to pretend it was not there. Then, he had turned off the unit, taken a book, and crawled behind the sofa. To be safe from whatever might come through that door.
Had it really happened? As he reached back, details took shape. It had happened more than once.
He rotated the orbiter’s antennas randomly, and set the scanner to range over a wide band of frequencies. There was something constructive he could do: intercept an alien signal, a navigational beacon in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, maybe, or a weather report from the Pleiades. Do that, and they’d build a shrine on this spot.
He sat through most of the afternoon, listening to the cosmic racket, wondering whether he would recognize an alien signal if he heard one. Eventually tiring of the game, Martin returned control to the on-board computer, which obediently tracked back across the sky and locked onto its primary target. The signal changed.
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 33