The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  It was Bosson who spoke to her, jumping up from his chair with a laugh. “So what was your job? What kind of good did you wage?”

  Sitta offered a lean, unfriendly smile. “I ran a hospital.”

  Varner came closer. “What kind of hospital?”

  “Prefabricated,” she began.

  Then Bosson added, “The Martians built them by the thousands, just in case we ever invaded the earth. Portable units. Automated. Never needed.” He winked at Sitta, congratulating himself. “Am I right?”

  She said nothing.

  “Anyway, some Plow thought they could be used anyway.” He shook his head, not quite laughing. “I’m not a fan of the Plows, in case you haven’t noticed.” With a soft, plaintive voice, Icenice whispered, “Darling?”

  To whom? Sitta looked at the man, finding no reason to be intimidated. “That’s not exactly a unique opinion.”

  “I’m a harsh person,” he said, in explanation. “I believe in a harsh, cold universe. Psychology isn’t my field, but maybe it has to do with surviving one of the last big Terran attacks. Not that my parents did. Or my brothers.” A complex, shifting smile appeared, vanished. “In fact, I watched most of them expire. The cumulative miseries of hard radiation . . .”

  Using her most reasonable voice, Sitta remarked, “The people who killed them have also died. Years ago.”

  He said, “Good.”

  He grinned and said, “The real good of the Plows, I think, is that they help prolong the general misery. People like you give hope, and what good is hope?” His opinions weren’t new, but the others appeared horrified.

  “Things are getting better!” Icenice argued. “I just heard . . . I don’t remember where . . . that lifespans are almost twenty percent longer than a few years ago.”

  “The average earthly lifespan is eleven years,” Sitta said.

  The house itself seemed to hold its breath. Then Pony, of all people, said, “That’s sad.” She seemed to mean it, hugging herself and shaking her head, repeating the words. “That’s sad. That’s sad.”

  “But you got your hospital,” Varner offered. “Didn’t it help?”

  “In some ways.” Sitta explained, “It didn’t weather its storage well. Some systems never worked. Autodocs failed without warning. Of course, all the biosynthesizing gear had been ripped out on Mars. And of course I had no real medical training, which meant I did a lot of guessing when there was no other choice . . . guessing wrong, more than not . . .”

  Now she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. Nobody liked the topic, save Bosson. Yet no one knew how to talk about anything else.

  The Mercurian approached, hands reaching for her belly, then having the good sense to hesitate. “Why carry the baby yourself? Your hospital must have had wombs.”

  “They were stolen.”

  Which he must have realized for himself.

  “Before the hospital arrived, they were removed,” she said.

  Icenice asked, “Why?”

  “Terrans breed as they live,” Bosson said. “Like rats.”

  Incandescent rage was building inside Sitta, and she enjoyed that emotion, relishing the clarity it afforded her. Almost smiling, she told them, “Biosynthetic machinery could do wonders for them. But of course we won’t let them have anything sophisticated, since they might try to hurt us. And that means that if you want descendants, you’ve got to make as many babies as possible, as fast as possible, hoping some fraction will have the right combinations of genes for whatever happens in their unpredictable lives.”

  “Let them die,” was Bosson’s verdict.

  Sitta didn’t care about him. He was just another child of the war, unremarkable, virtually insignificant. What drew her rage were the innocent faces of the others. What made her want to explode was Varner’s remote, schoolboy logic. With his most pragmatic voice, he said, “The provisional government is temporary. When it leaves, the earth can elect its own representatives, then make its own laws.”

  “Never,” Bosson promised. “Not in ten thousand years.”

  Sitta took a breath, held it, then slowly exhaled.

  “What else did you do?” asked Icenice, desperate for good news. “Did you travel? You must have seen famous places.”

  As if she’d been on vacation.

  “Besides the hospital, what did you do?”

  “I was picked as a jurist,” Sitta offered. “Many times. And being a jurist is a considerable honor.”

  “For trials?” asked Pony.

  “Of a kind.”

  People fidgeted, recalling Sitta’s trial.

  “Jurists are trusted people who watch friends giving birth.” She waited a moment, then added, “That was my most important job before I had my hospital.”

  “But what does a jurist do?” asked one of the Twins.

  They didn’t know. A glance told her as much, and Sitta enjoyed the suspense, allowing herself a malicious smile before saying, “We used all kinds of parasites in the war. Tailored ones. Some burrowed into fetuses, using them as raw material for whatever purpose the allies could dream up.”

  No one blinked.

  “The parasites are geniuses at hiding. Genetically camouflaged, but swift when the time comes. The jurist’s job is to administer better tests after the birth, and if there’s any problem, she has to kill the baby.”

  There was a soft, profound gasp.

  “Jurists are armed,” she continued, glancing at Bosson and realizing that even he was impressed. “Some parasites can remake the newborn, giving it claws and coordination.”

  The Mercurian showed serene pleasure. “Ever see such a monster?”

  “Several times,” said the retired Plowsharer. “But most of the babies, the infected ones, just sit up and cough, then look at you. The worms are inside their brains, manipulating their motor and speech centers. ‘Give up,’ they say, ‘You can’t win,’ they say. ‘You can’t fight us. Surrender.’”

  She waited for an instant.

  Then it was important to add, “They usually can’t say, ‘Surrender.’ It’s too long, too complicated for their new mouths. And besides, by then they’re being swung against a table or a wall. By the legs. Like this. If you do it right, they’re dead with one good blow.” And now she was weeping, telling Icenice, “Give me one of your old dolls. I’ll show you just how I did it.”

  10

  Sitta expected to leave after her mandatory three years of service. To that end, she fashioned a calendar and counted the sun-starved days, maintaining that ritual until early in her third year, not long after the long-promised hospital arrived. Expectations climbed with the new facility. At first, Sitta imagined that the city’s expectations were what made her work endless hours, patching wounds when the autodocs couldn’t keep up, curing nameless diseases with old, legal medicines, and tinkering with software never before field tested. Then there was a day—she was never certain which day—when she realized that the Terrans were happy for any help, even ineffectual help, and if all she did was sit in the hospital’s cramped office, making shit and keeping the power on, nobody would have complained, and nobody would have thought any less of her.

  She applied for a second term on the stipulation that she remained at her current post. This set off alarms in the provisional capital. Fearing insanity or some involvement in illegal operations, the government sent a representative from Athens. The Martian, a tiny and exhausted woman, made no secret of her suspicions. She inspected the hospital several times, hunting for biosynthetic equipment, for any medicines too new to be legal. Her hatred for Farsiders was blatant. “When I was a girl, I heard about you people,” she reported. “I heard what you did to us, to all your ‘allies’ . . . and for nothing but profit.”

  Sitta remained silent, passive. There was no victory in any argument.

  “I don’t know who I hate worse,” said the woman. “Terran rats, or Farside leeches.”

  In the calmest of voices, Sitta asked, “Will you let this leech stay
with her rats? Please?”

  It was allowed, and the Plowsharers were so pleased that they sent promises of two more hospitals that never materialized. It was Sitta who purchased and imported whatever new medical equipment she could find, most of it legal. The next three years passed in a blink. She slept four hours on the good night, and she managed to lift lifespans in the city to an average of thirteen and half years. With her next reapplication, she asked Athens for permission to remain indefinitely. They sent a new Martian with the same reliable hatreds, but he found reasons to enjoy her circumstances. “Isn’t it ironic?” he asked, laughing aloud. “Here you are, waging war against the monsters that your own parents developed. The monsters that made you rich in the first place. And according to import logs, you’ve been using that wealth to help the victims. Ironies wrapped in ironies, aren’t they?”

  She agreed, pretending that she’d never noticed any of that before.

  “Stay as long as you want,” the government man told her. “This looks like the perfect place for you.”

  Remaining on the earth, by her own choice, might be confused for forgiveness. Yet it wasn’t. Indeed, the dimensions of her hatreds became larger, more worldly. Instead of being betrayed by friends and wrongfully punished, Sitta had begun to think of herself as supremely fortunate. She felt wise and moral, at least in certain dangerous realms. Who else from Farside held pace with her accomplishments? No one she could imagine, that unexpected pride making her smile, in private.

  Free of Farside, Sitta heard every awful story about her homeland Every Martian and Mercurian relished telling about the bombardment of Nearside during those first horrible days, and how convoys of refugees had reached the border, only to be turned away. Farside began as a collection of mining camps and telescopes, and there wasn’t room for everyone. Only the wealthiest could immigrate. That was Sitta’s family story. Every official she came across seemed to have lost some part of his or her family. On Nearside. Mars. Ganymede. Even on Triton. And why? Because Sitta’s repulsive ancestors needed to build mansions and jungles for themselves. “We don’t have room,” Farsiders would complain. And who dared argue the point? During the war, which world would risk offending Farside, losing its portion of the weapons and other essentials?

  None took the chance; yet none would forget.

  The naive, superficial girl who had murdered a helpless beetle was gone. The hardened woman in her stead felt outrage and a burning, potent taste for anything that smacked of justice. Yet never, even in passing, did she think of vengeance. It was impossible to believe that she would escape this battered plain. Some accident, some mutated bug, would destroy her, given time and the proper circumstances.

  Then came an opportunity, a miraculous event in the form of a woman traveling alone. Eight months into a pregnancy that was too perfect, she was discovered by a local health office and brought to the hospital for a mandatory examination. Sitta had help from her own fancy equipment, plus the boy who had once happily collected her morning stool. He was her protégé. He happened to find the telltale cell inside the fetus. In a soft, astonished voice, he said, “God, we’re lucky to have caught it. Picture this one getting free.”

  Sitta heard nothing else that he said, nor the long silence afterward. Then Thomas touched her arm—they were lovers by then—and in a voice that couldn’t have been more calm, Sitta told him, “It’s time, I think. I think I need to go home.”

  11

  Dinner was meat wrapped in luxurious vegetables and meat meant to stand alone, proud and spicy, and there were wines and chilled water from the Central Sea and milk too sweet to be more than sipped, plus wide platters full of cakes and frosted biscuits and sour candies and crimson puddings. A hundred people could have eaten their fill at the long table, but as it turned out, no one except Bosson had an appetite. Partially dismantled carcasses were carried away by the kitchen’s robots; goblets were drained just once in an hour’s time. Perhaps it was related to the stories Sitta told at dinner. Perhaps her friends were a little perturbed by recipes involving rats and spiders and other treasured vermin. For dessert, she described the incident with Thomas and her bodily wastes, adding that they’d become lovers when he was a well worn fourteen. Only Bosson seemed to appreciate her tales, presumably for their portrait of misery; and Sitta discovered a grudging half-fondness for the man, both of them outsiders, both educated in certain hard and uncompromising matters. Looking only at Bosson, Sitta explained how Thomas carelessly inhaled a forty-year-old weapon, its robotic exterior cutting through an artery, allowing its explosive core to circumnavigate his body perhaps a hundred times before it detonated, liquifying his brain.

  That story began with a flat, matter-of-fact voice. The voice cracked once when Thomas collapsed, then again when she described—in precise, professional detail—how she personally harvested the organs worth taking. The boy’s skin was too old and weathered to make quality leather; it was left in place. Then the body was dropped into the day’s grave, sixteen others beneath it, Sitta given the honor of the final words and the ceremonial first gout of splintered rock and sand.

  She was weeping at the end of the story. She wasn’t loud or undignified, and her grief had a manageable, endurable quality. Like any Terran, she knew that outliving your lover was the consequence of living too long. There was no reason for surprise, and there was no course forwards but to endure. Yet even as she dried her face, she noticed the devastation and anger on the other faces. Save Bosson’s. She had ruined the last pretense of a good time for them, and with that she thought: Good. Perfect!

  Yet her dear friends remained at the table. No one slunk away. Not even the strangers invented excuses or appointments, begging to escape. Instead, Varner decided to take control to the best of his ability, coughing into a trembling fist, then whispering, “So.” Another cough felt essential. “So,” he began, “now that you’re back, and safe . . . any ideas . . . ?”

  What could he possibly mean by that?

  Reading Sitta’s expression, he said, “What I was thinking. We all were, actually . . . thinking of asking if you’d like to come in with us . . . in making an investment, or two . . .”

  Sitta sat back, hearing the delicious creak of old wood. With a careful, unmeasurable voice, she said, “What investment?”

  Pony blurted, “There’s fortunes to be made.”

  “If you have capital,” said a stranger, shooing away a begging monkey.

  Another stranger muttered something about courage, though the word he used was “balls.”

  Varner quieted them with a look, a gesture. Then staring at Sitta, he attempted charm that fell miserably short. “It’s just . . . as it happens, just now . . . love, we have a possibility—”

  “A dream opportunity,” someone interrupted.

  Sitta said, “It must be.”

  She fell silent, and nobody spoke.

  Then she added, “Considering all the trouble that you’ve gone through, it must seem like a wondrous opportunity.”

  Blank, uncertain faces. Then Varner said, “I know this is fast. I know, and we aren’t happy about that. We’d love to give you time to rest, to unwind . . . but it’s such a tremendous undertaking—”

  “Quick profits!” barked a Twin.

  “—and you know, just now, listening to your stories . . . it occurred to me that you could put your future profits back into that city where you were living, or back into the Plowsharers in general—”

  “Hey, that’s a great idea!” said another stranger.

  “A fucking waste,” was Bosson’s opinion.

  “You could do all sorts of good,” Varner promised, visibly pleased with his inspiration. “You could buy medicines. Machinery. You could drop a thousand robots down there.”

  “Robots are illegal,” said Bosson. “Too easy to misuse.”

  “Then hire people. Workers. Anyone you need!” Varner rose to his feet, eyes pleading with her. “What do you think, Sitta? You’re back, but that doesn’t me
an you can’t keep helping your friends.”

  “Yeah,” said Pony, “what do you think?”

  Sitta waited for an age, or an instant. Then with a calm slow voice, she asked, “Exactly how much do you need?”

  Varner held the number inside his mouth, which was kept shut.

  One of the Twins blurted an amount, then added, “Per share. This new corporation is going to sell shares. In just a few weeks.”

  “You came at the perfect time,” said his brother, fingers tapping on the tabletop.

  A stranger called out, “And there’s more!”

  Varner nodded, then admitted, “The deal is still sweeter. Loan us enough to purchase some of our own shares, then we pay it back to you. How does twice the normal interest sound?”

  Bosson whispered, “Desperate.”

  Icenice was bending at the waist, gasping for breath. “You can make enough to help millions.”

  Varner offered a watery smile. “And we’ll make that possible.”

  Sitta crossed her legs, then asked, “What does a share buy?”

  Silence.

  “What does this corporation do?”

  Pony said, “They’ve got a wonderful scheme.”

  “They want to build big new lasers,” said a Twin. “Similar to the old weapons, only safe.”

  Safe? Safe how?

  “We’ll build them at the earth’s Lagrange points,” Varner explained. “Enormous solar arrays will feed the lasers, millions of square kilometers absorbing sunlight—”

  “Artificial suns,” someone blurted.

  “And we’ll be able to warm every cold world. For a substantial fee, of course.” Varner grinned, his joy boyish. Fragile. “Those old war technologies and our factories can be put to perfect use.”

  “At last!” shouted the Twins, in one voice.

  Bosson began to laugh, and Icenice, sitting opposite her husband, seemed to be willing herself to vanish.

  “Whose scheme is this?” Sitta asked Varner. “Yours?”

  “I wish it was,” he responded.