Dead birds falling out of a poisonous brown sky. A shoreline choked with the rotting carcasses of sea animals. Decaying jungles of dead vegetation. Mobs of refugees, their golden fur gone all mangy and falling out in patches to reveal angry pink skin, fleeing a series of dead cities under ominous black-and-brown thunderheads.
Darkness. Sheets of dirty gray rain. Howling blizzards. Great glaciers creeping out of their mountain strongholds and onto the plain in time-lapse majesty. Snowdrifts piling up to hide the corpses of cities, jungles, savannas, shoreline marshes, animals, Barnards, a whole formerly living world.
Cut to the opening shot, the fourth planet of Barnard’s star, verdant and vital, as it floats in the blackness of space, looking very much like a second Earth.
The fleecy white cloud cover slowly turns an ugly chemical brown that diffuses out to enrobe the planet in a mist of foul choking smog. Brilliant balls of light explode on the surface, one, two, three, then dozens, scores, hundreds, as dark black fountains pour radioactive soot into the atmosphere. Whole swatches of continents are set ablaze. The atmosphere darkens, turns a uniform gray, begins to blacken.
Then it suddenly clears as if the special-effects department has just turned off the smoke machine, and we see the planet below with a sudden new clarity. Continents gleam a skeletal white. Great icebergs drift in the equatorial seas. Jagged ranges of cold gray mountaintops peak up out of the endless ice sheets.
A series of low helicopter shots. Nothing but snowdrifts and ice sheets at first, but then, here and there, huge metal domes dug like enormous igloos into the snow, few, and scattered, and pathetic in all that dead white immensity.
A series of quickly cut shots of the interiors of the domes, grim corridors full of mangy, diseased-looking Barnards, huge chemical vats, Barnards eating what looks like slices of gray plastic, a family of Barnards crowded into a tiny steel-colored cubicle, Barnards unmistakably defecating into the recycling vats.
Cut to two Barnards standing hand-in-hand-in-hand-in-hand, staring at the camera, their fur falling out now, ugly sores along their trunks, their eyes watery with rheum.
Slowly, without taking their eyes off the camera, they let go of each other’s hands, get down on their knees, hang their heads in an unmistakable gesture of shame.
Then they hold all their arms out before them, turn up their fleshy palms as if to catch something falling from the heavens. Slowly they raise their gaze skyward, and lift up their trunks imploringly, like elephants reaching for the peanut held by a small child just beyond their grasp.
The camera follows the line of their eyes, the line of their trunks, upward, into a brilliant starry night. The angle reverses, and now we are looking down at two lorn golden creatures kneeling on an endless sheet of ice, gazing up longingly out of the desolation at us, their scabrous trunks reaching out desperately for whatever we have to give.
FADE TO BLACK
* * * *
A GRIM WARNING
Moscow. The opinion in the world scientific community is all but unanimous. The Barnard civilization followed an evolution quite similar to our own until they reached the point where we are now, with industrial pollution at the point of poisoning the atmosphere and killing off the biosphere, and nuclear weapons proliferating beyond control. Then they had a nuclear war which altered their planet’s albedo and brought on a Nuclear Winter and what appears to be a permanent worldwide ice age.
We have been shown the future we are making. If we do not cease polluting our atmosphere, we will destroy its ability to support a biosphere. If we stumble into nuclear war, we will bring on a Nuclear Winter.
The message that the few pathetic survivors of the Barnard catastrophe have sent us is all too clear—we must mend our ways or die.
—Pravda
* * * *
POPE CHIDES WORLD SELFISHNESS
Vatican City. The Holy Father today chastised the world for its selfish response to the tragic message from Barnard’s star. “To take this message as merely a warning sent for our own benefit betrays a lack of Christian charity,” John XXV declared. “It is clearly a desperate plea for help. And if we fail to hold out a helping hand, we will have proven ourselves unworthy of survival. We must do whatever we can to aid our suffering fellow creatures on the fourth planet of Barnard’s star.”
—L ‘Osservatore Romano
* * * *
BRAZIL BANS ALL AMAZON EXPLOITATION
Rio de Janeiro. President Antonio Da Silva today issued an emergency edict banning all further burning, logging, mining, clear-cutting, and industrial activity in the entire Amazon Basin. “This will require great economic sacrifices on the part of the Brazilian people,” he said, “but we now know that we have no choice. The trees of our great national patrimony provide the air that we breathe too.”
—Jomal do Brasil
* * * *
NUCLEAR WINTER REVERSIBLE?
London. “The effects of nuclear winter can be reversed,” Dr. Gareth Wilson suggested today. “Finely divided carbon dusted on the ice sheets would increase absorption of sunlight and melt them over time. Once enough ice is melted, albedo will be decreased to the point where the melting process will become self-sustaining.”
—Science
* * * *
FRANCE JOINS BRITAIN IN DESTROYING NUCLEAR WEAPONS
—Le Monde
* * * *
NEW LIFE FOR THE BARNARDS?
Palo Alto. Genentech scientists have formulated a plan to reseed the fourth planet of Barnard’s star with a viable new biosphere from Earth. Terrestrial organisms could be transported as germ plasm, re-engineered on the spot to adapt to local conditions, cloned using existing techniques, and then spread by conventional means. Reviving the entire planet might take centuries, but once the process were started, life could be counted upon to spread itself into every available open ecological niche.
—Time
* * * *
ISRAEL JOINS FORMER NUCLEAR CLUB
—Jerusalem Post
* * * *
RED CROSS ANNOUNCES BARNARD RELIEF FUND
Geneva. The International Red Cross has established a fund to raise the money needed to mount a relief mission to Barnard’s star. Donations will be accepted from governments, corporations, and individual contributors.
—UPI
* * * *
IT CAN BE DONE, NASA DECLARES
Houston. NASA officials admitted today that it would be technologically possible to send a relief expedition to Barnard’s star. A large spaceship could reach Barnard’s star within a century using an interstellar ramscoop drive already on the theoretical drawing boards, though it would push human technology to its limits.
The cost, however, is estimated at at least one trillion dollars.
—Houston Post
* * * *
DENMARK PASSES BARNARD TAX
Copenhagen. The Danish parliament has voted approval of a 5 percent blanket sales tax with the receipts to be turned over to the Barnard Relief Fund. “If it can be done, it must be done,” King Victor declared afterward. “We are a small country, but someone must be prepared to show the way.”
—TASS
* * * *
THE NETHERLANDS, ITALY, NEW ZEALAND,
MALAWI ADOPT BARNARD TAX
—Agence France Presse
* * * *
UNITED STATES COMMITS LONG-TERM MATCHING FUNDS
Washington. President Wolfowitz has signed into law a bill to reduce the Defense budget by 10 percent a year for the next ten years and deposit the savings on a matching basis in the Barnard Relief Fund. The United States has committed itself by this action to financing 17 percent of the Barnard rescue mission.
—CNN
* * * *
SOVIET UNION ANNOUNCES NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT
Moscow. President Gorchenko announced today that the Soviet Union would cease the manufacture of all nuclear weapons and destroy those it now possesses on a unilateral basis. “To use them, e
ven in self-defense, would mean the death of our entire planet,” he pointed out. “We are all dependent on the goodwill of each other for survival. The Barnards have shown us that that has always been true.”
Following the example set by the United States, the money formerly devoted to the production and maintenance of the nuclear deterrent will be deposited in the Barnard Relief Fund.
—Izvestia
* * * *
THE HELPING HAND IS ON ITS WAY!
From Orbit. The starship Helping Hand has at last begun its long voyage, carrying an international crew of two hundred, carbon extraction equipment, and frozen germ plasm for a new biosphere to the fourth planet of Barnard’s star.
Just as the billions of people who contributed what they could to make this moment possible will never live to see the results, neither will the original crew of the Helping Hand. But when their sons and daughters arrive, our sons and daughters will remember that when their ancestors were called upon, we rose to the occasion and did what had to be done.
Today we have proven that the Barnards were not wrong to pin their last hope on the peoples of the Earth.
Or rather, perhaps, today we have at last become a people worthy of that choice.
—The New York Times
* * * *
REPORT TO EARTH #337
The fourth planet of Barnard’s star is an airless cold rock that never held life. There is nothing at all in orbit around it. Our scientists have not discovered so much as organic precursors.
The trillions of dollars contributed to this relief mission by the peoples of the Earth at enormous sacrifice to themselves, the best efforts of a generation of scientists, the entire lives of our mothers and fathers, have all been for naught. We have spent all our own lives in this cramped starship, and we will never live to see the Earth we have never known.
All for nothing.
We have all been victimized by the crudest hoax in history.
But why? And how? And by whom?
—Eduardo Jones
Captain, the Helping Hand
* * * *
REPORT TO EARTH #338
Oh my God, it’s enormous! It just appeared out of nowhere, and now it’s in a matching orbit with us and closing fast, a shimmering globe the size of a small moon! It’s not only impossible to describe, my eyes don’t seem to be able to form a clear image of it, there’s a glow, and things like machinery in constant motion inside, and… and the ship is being drawn toward it!
The engines won’t respond!
There’s… there’s some kind of opening that just appeared on the surface… a hole… a tunnel…
We’re being pulled inside! It’s filled with light, it almost seems alive, it—
—Eduardo Jones
Captain, the Helping Hand
* * * *
REPORT TO EARTH #339
We are children at the feet of the gods, primitive savages who have unwittingly sailed our little canoe into the harbor of a mighty celestial city. And yet, so they have told us, we have become something much more.
The Helping Hand was drawn down a long semitranslucent tunnel, through what seemed like some kind of city or machine or organism, towering structures of metal and glass and light that seemed almost organic in their constant flowing motion, and then the ship came to rest, gently suspended about a meter above the floor of a space so enormous that the ceiling disappeared into a shimmering mirage.
It may sound foolish in this report, but you had to be there to understand. We had to all meet this moment together, as the representatives of our species, as the family of man. Nothing else would have been right.
And so I led the entire crew out of the ship, to stand there, dazzled and blinking, in the center of a vast amphitheater.
Tiered high all around us, suspended by immaterial forces, were thousands upon thousands of creatures I cannot even begin to describe. Creatures of flesh and creatures of metal and creatures that appeared to be mobile plants. Creatures so beautiful they brought joy to the spirit and creatures so hideous that they made the skin crawl. Hundreds of different species, thousands perhaps, like a vast United Nations General Assembly of the stars.
The sound that they were making together was thunderous. There were clicks, and groans, and whinings, and buzzes, and whistles, and clackings, but the total effect was unmistakable, and it raised the hair on the back of the neck, and brought tears to the eyes.
It was applause.
Then a huge but somehow intimate voice spoke to us. It spoke to each of us in our own native tongue. It spoke with all the languages of the Earth with the collective voice of all those myriad creatures.
“Welcome, brothers,” it said. “Welcome, people of the Earth,” it said. “You have proven yourselves worthy. We greet you with joy.”
“Worthy?” I stammered. “Worthy of what?”
“Worthy of joining the Interstellar Brotherhood of Sentient Beings. Worthy of joining those who have passed the test.”
“Test? What test?” I demanded, outrage overcoming all sense of awe, for of course I knew the answer even as I shouted the question.
And of course I was right.
Yes, this galaxy-spanning civilization had created the Barnards out of whole cloth, created the false images and the completely fabricated plea for help on the part of a dying people who had never existed.
And of course I demanded of these cruel tricksters what you no doubt are demanding now as you hear this.
“How dare you do such a thing?” I cried in a fearless rage. “Billions of people sacrificed to make this mission possible! Our own planet was half dead itself when we received your lying message, it stretched us to our limits and beyond! Our parents willingly gave their whole lives to save your fictitious Barnards! And so have we! How dare you call us brothers after what you’ve done?”
“All of us have been tested. All of us have been forced to face the best that was in our hearts. And so all of us are brothers in the same true spirit Surely in moving you to join us we have done you no harm.”
“No harm!”
“Have you not put war behind you? Have you not learned to cross the gulfs between the stars and come unto us? And in the process of seeking to bring new life to the people of a dying planet become the true stewards of your own? And become the best that was in you? Is this not the greatest of gifts? And all the greater for being one you were allowed to give to yourselves?”
We all fell silent. For it was true. It was a cruel gift but a great one. It was ruthless and loving. It was very wise.
“So now we welcome you to the Interstellar Brotherhood of Sentient Beings, people of the Earth. We welcome you as equals in the deepest and truest sense. As a people who have earned the right to join us.”
“Earned what?” someone muttered aloud. “What are you really offering us?”
There was a sound, a gesture, a feeling, that passed across all those faces, mouths, arms, tentacles, visages, of all those assembled creatures, a sound, a gesture, an emotional expression, and if it indeed was a kind of laughter, it was a laughter that made us all proud.
“Only what you yourselves offered to the Barnards,” declared the voice of the Brotherhood. “Only that which makes us all brothers of the same sentient spirit. The best that we have at the full stretch of our powers, and perhaps a little beyond. What else do any of us have to offer but an open heart and a helping hand?”
And so now our little canoe begins the long voyage home across the stellar sea, refitted with engines that will take us there in our lifetimes, bearing the vast treasures of knowledge from the celestial city that we have found.
But the greatest treasure we bear home is the one we brought with us. The most precious knowledge we carry is what we knew all along.
—Eduardo Jones
Captain, the Helping Hand
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* * * *
Fondest of Memories
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
T
&
nbsp; HE STARS in the bowshock are blueshifted as the ship soars onward. With each passing moment, the difference between my age and Erica’s becomes smaller. Her newborn/reborn body, still on Earth, continues its second life as I grow farther away in distance, but closer in time. I lean back in the comfortable captain’s lounge. The ship runs by itself, and I am its lone crew member. Time passes much more swiftly for me, thanks to relativistic effects. But it still seems like an eternity until I can return home, until I can have Erica back the way she was.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 38