by Mark Sumner
In the 186,542nd year since the cithians achieved a unified government, the leaders of the government were gathered at a place then called Palakajukal to evaluate the completion of a wide scale irrigation project which would reduce flooding and provide more reliable resources for agriculture. On the day now regarded as the first day of the first year on the cithian calendar, a light appeared in the sky. The light grew brighter until it rivaled the glow of the sun. Of both suns. Finally, the light came to hover over Palakajukal. With great peals of thunder that sent many cithians running in panic, the light descended. It was an alien starship.
The aliens within the starship came out to meet the cithian leaders, bringing with them the fundamentals of electricity, electronics, and the richness of information theory. They brought advanced optics, astronomy, and the history of the universe. They brought a deep understanding of biology, evolution, and a cure for many diseases. They brought the theory of gravitation, of relativity, of quantum states and multiverses. They brought the ability to harness fundamental forces, to transform the planet, and to sail among the stars.
The aliens onboard the ship came in a spirit of friendship. And generosity.
The cithians found that, while the alien technology was radically advanced compared to their own, it was nothing they could not learn with study. So they studied. They found that the alien art and the alien philosophies had aspects that they had never considered. They considered them. The many alien breakthroughs were puzzling when you didn't understand the basics, but if you applied yourself to a few fundamental points, they became obvious. The cithians applied themselves.
Within a generation, the cithians had incorporated almost all the knowledge that the aliens had brought them. And within a generation, almost nothing remained of the cithian civilization. The achievements of their greatest minds were revealed as primitive. The most important events of their past were cataloged and recorded in one, rather slim, volume. Their artworks were digitized. Their philosophies duly noted. The thoughts and lives and the stories that had sustained their people since the beginning, became quaint.
The aliens–the humans–who came in the starship and brought this change to the cithians, were part of a culture that was a bit less than 13,000 years old.
35
Denny watched the last images of the story Athena showed them fade into darkness. He had watched it three times, though holding onto the maton so long had made him ache with tiredness that went down to his bones. During the second showing, he had to sit down. During the third, Sirah put an arm around him to keep him from slumping over on the bench. Denny found it hard to stop even then. Long after the images had disappeared from the air, they were still playing in his mind. The long ramp descending. The humans in their bulky white suits coming down to greet the baffled cithians.
“We found them,” said Sirah. Then again, her voice thick with sad wonder. “We found them.”
On the other side of Denny, across from Sirah, sat Athena. She seemed to be watching the images along with everyone else, though her smile never faltered.
Denny turned toward her. His neck felt hot and stiff. “How did things go so wrong after that?” he asked the artificial woman. “How did Earth end up so polluted we could never go home?”
“It didn't,” Athena said.
Denny felt like he should not be surprised. Everything he thought he knew about the past was turning out to be wrong. “Then, if we could get a shuttle, we could go to Earth?”
Athena nodded. “You could. However, Earth's biosphere was badly damaged by bombing in the thirteenth year of the war. Though recent records are not available to me, it is unlikely that current conditions on that planet are favorable for complex life.”
“Earth...is dead?” It shouldn't hurt to lose a home he'd never visited, a planet he'd always thought was lost anyway. It hurt. “In a war?”
“The war to destroy Earth and all human colonies,” said Athena. “I'm sorry. I do not have presentation materials on this subject.”
Denny guessed that meant there would be no more moving pictures. Or at least, none about this war. He knew the word. There was war in some of his picture books, with missiles and bombs and rays of fire lashing out at evil space ships. “How could they? If the cithians were so far behind humans, how could they beat us?”
Athena stood and appeared to slowly pace around the room. It was a movement Denny had seen before. He wondered if it was built into the memory—designed to make her seem more like a real person. “They didn't,” she said. “Not alone. It was a coalition of several races, working together, that was successful in defeating humanity.”
Denny found that he was actually crying, And he found that he was right back to the question he had asked before. “But why? Why did they do it?”
“Because you were too quick,” said Athena. “Because you were too unpredictable. Because you spread so far, so fast. Because you would not stop looking in the next system, and the next, to see what was there. Because you could not stop confusing kindness and interference. Because you always thought you were right.” She stopped her pacing and turned to face him. “Because you destroyed them first, by trying to make them like you. And because you expected them to be grateful.”
Denny let go of the maton, and Athena disappeared in a blink.
36
Dimsday
On Dimsday, Denny watched the world end. He woke suddenly up out of confused dreams. Dreams about his father and a great jagged sculpture that was as tall as a building. At the other end of the long room, Cousin Haw lay face down on a long bench, his heavy arms dragged on the floor, and grinding snores escaped his mouth as his thick body went up and down in time with his breathing. Cousin Kettle was nearby, sitting with his back to a corner and his arms around his knees. Yulia had taken her jacket off to act as a pillow. Auntie Talla had done the same with her cloak.
Sirah was awake. Denny slowly got to his feet and walked across the darkened room. It was Dimsday, and even the light of the tiny blue sun was blocked by neighboring buildings. The air inside the low building had cooled while they rested until it was more than a little chilly. The streets of the quarter were in all but complete darkness.
As Denny drew up beside her, Sirah turned to him. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“That sound.” Sirah shivered. “It was like... I think it was a person.”
Together they stood by the small window. The street outside was empty. A block away, a small light glowed at the door of the compartment building where both Denny and Sirah lived. Had lived. High above the street, he saw lights in other windows, but no movement.
He was just about to say something more when he heard it–a high, thin noise that cut off abruptly. It might not have been a human at all, but Denny didn't think so. He thought it was Nonni Hacci. Or Auntie Fro. Or maybe Auntie Flash. He didn't know what was causing them to make that sound, but he knew it couldn't be good. “Earth,” he said.
Sirah clutched his arm. “Careful,” she whispered. “Don't wake Kettle.” She touched the window. Circles of fog appeared around her fingertips. “'I've been thinking about the the moving pictures you saw.”
“I thought you saw them too.”
“Not the ship,” said Sirah. “The other pictures that you told me about. The ones you saw at Old Loma's.”
Denny had to think for a moment. “About the disease.”
“Yes,” she said. “I think...I think that’s what they did to us.”
“I don’t understand. What?”
“What they did with the disease,” said Sirah. “The people who destroyed it kept some of it around, just in case it turned out it wasn't really gone.”
“And when they thought that it was–”
“They got rid of the last bits.” Sirah nodded. “That's what they did with us.”
There was a motion behind them. Denny turned and saw Auntie Talla rising. She rubbed at her arms, then gathered up her cloak and pulled it aro
und her. “Can you see anything?” she asked softly.
“No, but–”
“I know,” she said. “I heard it.” Shivering, she took a step closer to the window. “We can't stay here. We all needed a rest, but it's only luck that's kept them from finding us so far. Besides, we don't have any food. We have to go.”
Denny wished he had an answer. “Where can we go?”
“I don't know,” said Talla. “We have to find somewhere they won't think of. Somewhere we can take care of ourselves.”
“Where?”
Talla's face was fixed in the same look of determination that Denny had seen on a hundred nights when she had found a way to feed everyone in the quarter. A way to hold them together. “I don't know,” she said. “We have to find somewhere.”
“I know where,” said a voice from across the room. Yulia raised up off her bench, stretching as she unfolded her jacket and slipped it back on. “Didn't you see it?”
“See what?” asked Denny.
“The place. Where we should go.” Yulia looked around the room. “Where's the maton?”
Denny pointed to where the silver ball had rolled when he had dropped it. “Do you think you should be touching it? You used it a long time yesterday.”
“No longer than you.” Yulia reached under the bench and wrapped her hand around the maton. Denny saw her neck snap back and her body tremble as the pain ran through her. She licked her lips. “Athena, I need to see the moving pictures you were showing before.” The images began to hover in the middle of the room, showing the blue-gray sphere of a planet floating in space. “Not from the beginning. Go to the part where the ship lands.”
The image showed a cithian complex. It was tiny compared to the current city, and the buildings were composed of stone and wood. As the brilliant torch of the approaching ship came down from above, Denny could even make out the tiny figures of cithians scurrying away from the point of landing. The image gradually closed in on the base of the starship as it came to rest on a lightning-scarred plane outside the cithian town.
“There,” said Yulia. “Athena, stop it there.” She walked toward the floating image. “Do you see?”
Denny frowned at the shapes. He could see the shadows from the cithian buildings, the frozen lightning at the ship's base, and the gleaming lower third of the ship itself, but he didn't know what Yulia was talking about.
“There,” she said, running her finger through the image of the ship. “Right there.” She looked at them all. “Don't you recognize it? The human ship? It's the Cataclysm.”
37
They filed out of the building an hour later. Because it was Dimsday, not only the quarter but all of Jukal seemed to be deserted. Most of the cithians in the plex would be in the sleeping stadiums, resting until the next day.
Cousin Kettle argued that they should go into the quarter. They could get food. Find other things they would need. It took Auntie Talla to talk him out of it. “Your mother did what she did for your sake,” she said. “Don't throw it away.”
They shuffled out of the building, staying close to the grimy walls. There was no motion in the quarter. No motion ahead of them. There were a pair of road ferries near the end of the small road leading into the quarter, but there were no cithians or dasiks in sight. It seemed just possible that they could take a transport all the way around the city, to where the great bulk of the Cataclysm waited.
There was a small shelter at the stop. They crowded under and around it as Auntie Talla pressed the button to summon the transport. “When it gets here, I'll set it to go around the outside of the plex, past the market. That way we'll avoid the heart of the cithian areas.” It seemed like a good idea.
As they waited, clouds began to pile up in the west, making the dark day even darker. It rarely rained in Jukal, but when it did water often came in great, greasy downpours. Within a few minutes, the first heavy drops began to fall, splashing down like cups emptied overhead.
Kettle leaned out into the gathering storm and turned toward the heart of the plex. “Where are the pods?” he said. “They should have been here by now.”
Auntie Talla, one of the few humans who regularly traveled outside the quarter, quickly agreed. “You're right. Especially on Dimsday.”
Denny looked around. Something was wrong. Very wrong. He thought he heard a sound in the distance, a noise that was like a whole mass of cithians clanging an alarm against their shells. “They're coming,” he said. “They know we're here.” He stepped away from the shelter. Fat drops of rain splashed over his head and shoulders. The air rumbled with distant thunder, but over that sound he could still hear the alarm. It was coming closer.
“Come on!” he shouted, then he began to run back toward the quarter.
“Where are you going?” Sirah called after him.
“The ferries!”
Denny reached the first road ferry. The control to open it was in the same place as the one he had ridden in with the skynx, and one touch was enough to flip back the curved top. The rain made popping sounds as it struck the seats.
The other humans arrived a second later. “Do you know how to make this move?” asked Talla.
“I think so. Get in.”
The ferry was larger than most, big enough to hold two adult cithians comfortably, but fitting six humans inside was still difficult. Denny found himself sharing the front seat with Kettle in the middle and Sirah on the other side. Talla and Yulia squeezed into the back with Cousin Haw. When everyone was in, Denny touched the entry panel again and the top swung back into position. Now the rain drummed on the top of the ferry. The approaching alarm was much louder, and from close at hand Denny could hear the voices of cithians.
He looked across the front of the ferry. There were two short rods at each side of the space, and a flat pad in the center. Denny stretched to touch the pad. Nothing happened. “Yulia!”
“Already doing it,” she said from the back. The whole ferry shook as Yulia jerked from touching the maton. “Athena, get us going,” she said. Then after a moment. “The Cataclysm.” The ferry started to move.
Denny craned his neck. He could see figures coming toward them from out of the quarter, and from the direction of the nearest sleeping dome, but the ferry was rapidly picking up speed. In a few seconds, the entrance to the quarter was left behind, invisible through the increasing rain. Denny drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. In a road ferry it should take only a few minutes to get to the huge spaceship.
The ferry rounded the curve past the transport stop. It turned left at the next inbound spoke, then turned right again at the first opportunity. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?”
Yulia nodded. “Athena says she’s picking the fastest way. We should be there ...uh oh.” The sound of the ferry changed and they glided to a stop in the rain.
“What’s wrong?” asked Sirah.
Yulia held up a hand for silence. “Yes... Yes... There has to be something.”
Denny wondered where in the crowded ferry Yulia was seeing Athena. “What's wrong?”
“It's the maton that runs the traffic for the plex. It's shut down the ferry. Athena is trying to get it running again.”
Denny twisted round in his seat. There were shapes back there in the rain. Shapes that were coming fast. He looked back at the front of the ferry. “Can she turn it off?”
“Turn off the ferry?”
“Turn off the maton's control. Make the ferry drive on its own.” He pushed the short bar on his side of the car back and forth. “I mean, make it so we can make the ferry go.”
“I don't... okay. Yes,” said Yulia. “She can do that.”
Talla spoke up from the rear. “Then do it now. There's another ferry just a block away, and it's coming toward us.”
“Done,” said Yulia. “Go!”
Denny bit his lip and reached for the bar in front of him. Kettle reached for it at the same time. The bar moved with surprising ease, and together they slammed it har
d forward. The ferry spun sickeningly around quickly to the right. In moments they were facing completely back the way they had come–directly at the approaching ferry. Denny tried pulling on the bar. Kettle was still pushing.
“Let go!”
Kettle let go. The ferry spun back to its original position, but didn't move forward.
“Let me try the other one.” Sirah grabbed for the bar on her side and pushed. The ferry spun left.
A dark shape loomed up behind them. The other ferry was right next to them. From the corner of his eye Denny saw the shape of a dasik no more than a step away.
“Keep pushing!” He shoved at his bar again. With both bars shoved forward the ferry lurched ahead. As Denny and Sirah struggled with the controls, the ferry gathered speed as it swerved left, right, left again. The ferry bounced up from the street, hurtled over the sidewalk, brushed against the side of a building, and banked back into the street. There was a heavy thud and a bump as the ferry rolled over something. Lightning cracked directly overhead, and for a moment the street ahead was lit in stark light, then the light was gone and the ferry plunged ahead in darkness.
“What are you doing?” Talla shouted from the rear seat.
“It's harder than it looks,” said Denny.
“Slow down, or we're not going to need the cithians to kill us.”
“Left!” Yulia shouted suddenly from the back seat. “Turn left,”
Denny, still dazzled by the lightning, couldn't see the road, or the buildings or anything. He pressed forward, then thought again and pulled back. He couldn't see what Sirah did on her controls, but suddenly the ferry spun in place so quickly that Denny's head cracked against the side. He saw shadows through the glass beside his face, enough to see that they were passing close to a sleeping stadium. Then they were moving forward again, speeding not across a street, but in the rough ground between the stadium and a storage dome. A work block loomed up on the left, and Denny pressed forward just in time to avoid its mass. Another storage dome appeared on the right. Denny tugged back on the stick. The right side of the ferry actually swerved part way up the wall of the dome before crashing back to the ground. Denny glanced over just long enough to see Sirah furiously working the bar on her side back and forth. And to see that Kettle was looking sort of green.