The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  Had I not had the modest wealth I took as my commission on the extra Theseus shots, of course, I could not have been one of the survivors of the Crash. Had it not been for my brokerage of Project Astolpho, I could not have been, by the time that Dennis Mountjoy came to call, one of the oldest men in the world: the founder of a prolific dynasty. I, too, would have been nothing but ash, without even a tombstone, when the New Apollonians decided that it was time to reassert the glory and the godhood of the human race by duplicating its most magnificent folly: the Great Adventure.

  I had never had any part in the first Adventure, and I wanted no part in the second. I had worked alongside men who had launched rockets into outer space, but the only things I ever helped to land on the Moon were the cargoes provided by the Pharaohs of Capitalism: the twenty-first century’s answer to Pyramids.

  I was companion to Astolpho, not Apollo: whenever I raised my eyes to the night sky, I saw nothing in the face of the Moon but the wastes of Earthly dreams and Earthly dreamers.

  “None of that is relevant,” Dennis Mountjoy told me, when I had explained it to him—or had tried to (the account just now set down has, of course, taken fUll advantage of I’espirt de lescalier). He sat in an armchair waving his hands in the air. I had almost begun to wish that I’d offered him a cup of tea and a slice of cake, so that at least a few of his gestures would have been stifled.

  “It’s relevant to me,” I told him, although I was fully cognizant by then of the fact that he had not the least interest in what was relevant to me.

  “None of it’s ever going to come out,” he assured me. “You can forget it. You may be two-hundred-and-some years old, but that doesn’t mean that you have to live in the past. We have to think of the future now. You should try to forget. That’s what a good memory is, when all’s said and done: one that can forget all the things it doesn’t need to retain. There’s no need for you to be hung up on the differences between Apollo and Astolpho in a world which can no longer tell them apart. As you said yourself, ninety percent of the people alive today are under forty. To them, it’s all ancient history, and the names are just sounds. Apollo, Ariane, Theseus—it’s all merged into a single mythical mishmash, including all the sidelines, official and unofficial. From the point of view of the people who believe in the New Adventure, and the people who will believe, once we’ve captured their imagination, it’s all part of the same story, the one we’re starting over. Your presence at the launch will confirm that. All that anyone will see when they look at you is a miracle: the last survivor of Project Theseus; the envoy of the First Space Age, extending his blessing to the Second.”

  “Do you know why Project Theseus was called by that name?” I asked him.

  “Of course I do,” he replied. “I know my history, even though I refuse to be bogged down by it. Ariane was the rocket used in the first European Space Program, named for the French version of Ariadne, daughter of Minos of Crete. Theseus was one of seven young men delivered to Minos as a tribute by the Athenians, along with seven young women; they were to be sacrificed to the minotaur—a monster that lived in the heart of a maze called the labyrinth. Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and gave him a thread which allowed him to keep track of his route through the maze. When he had killed the minotaur, he was able to find his way out again. Theseus was the name given to Ariane’s successor in order to signify that it was the heroic project which would secure humankind’s escape from the minotaur in the maze: the killer asteroid that might one day wipe out civilization.”

  “That’s the official decoding,” I admitted. “But Theseus was also the betrayer of Ariane. He abandoned her. According to some sources, she committed suicide or died of grief—but others suggested that she was saved by Dionysus, the antithesis of Apollo.”

  “So what?” said Mountjoy, making yet another expansive gesture. “Whatever you and your crazy pals might have read into that back in 2080, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Crazy pals?” I queried, remembering his earlier reference to the Astolpho launches as “crazy shots.” Now I was beginning to wish that I had a cup of tea; my own hands were beginning to stir as if in answer to his.

  “The guys who gave you the money to shoot their ashes to the Moon,” the young man said. “The Syndicate. The Captains of Industry. The Hardinist Cartel. Pick your cliché. They were crazy, weren’t they? Paying you to drop those payloads in Endymion was only the tip of the iceberg. I mean, they were the people with the power—the people who had steered the world straight into the Crash. That has to be reckoned as causing death by dangerous driving—manslaughter on a massive scale. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, wouldn’t you say?”

  “They didn’t see it that way themselves,” I pointed out mildly.

  “They certainly didn’t,” he agreed. “But you’re older and wiser, and you have the aid of hindsight, too. So give me your considered judgment, Professor Neal. Were they or were they not prime candidates for the straitjacket?”

  I granted him a small laugh, but kept my hands still. “Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe so. Can I get you a drink, by the way?”

  He beamed, thinking that he’d won. One crack in the facade was all it needed to convince him.

  “No thanks. We know how bad things were back then, and we don’t blame you at all for what you did. The world is new again, and its newness is something for us all to celebrate. I understand why you’ve tried so hard to hide yourself away, and why you’ve built a maze of misinformation around your past. I understand how the thought of coming out of your shell after all these years must terrify you—but we will look after you. We need you, Professor Neal, to play Theseus in our own heroic drama. We need you to play the part of the man who slew the minotaur of despair and found the way out of the maze of human misery. I understand that you don’t see yourself that way, that you don’t feel like that kind of a hero, but in our eyes, that’s what you are. In our eyes, and in the eyes of the world, you’re the last living representative of early humanity’s greatest adventure—the Adventure we’re now taking up. We need you at the launch. We really can’t do without you. Anything you want, just ask—but I’m here to make a deal, and I have to make it. No threats, of course, just honest persuasion—but I really do have to persuade you. You’ll be in the news whether you like it or not—why not let us doctor the spin for you? If you’re aboard, you have input; if not . . . you might end up with all the shit and none of the roses.”

  No threats, he’d said. Funnily enough, he meant it. He wouldn’t breathe a word to a living soul—but if he’d found out about Astolpho, others could, and once the Great Adventure was all over the news, the incentive to dig would be there. Expert webwalkers researching Theseus would be bound to stumble over Astolpho eventually. The only smoke screen I could put up now was the smoke screen he was offering to lend me. If I didn’t take it, I hadn’t a hope of keeping the secret within the secret.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” I asked tiredly. His semaphoring arms had begun to make my newly-reconditioned eyes feel dizzy.

  He beamed again and almost said, “Perhaps I will,” but then his eyes narrowed slightly. “What kind of drink?” he said.

  “I make it myself,” I told him teasingly.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. “I’ve nothing against happy juice, but this isn’t the time or the place—not for me. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I could trust the homegrown stuff. You said yourself that it’s been subject to generations of mutation and selection, and you know how delicate hybrid gentemplates are. Meaning no offense, but that garden is infested—and not everything that came out of Cade Maclaine’s souped-up Trojan Cockroaches was a pretty pollen-carrier.”

  “Why should I help out in your Adventure,” I asked him lightly, “if you won’t help out in mine?”

  He looked at me long and hard. It didn’t need a trained mathematician to see the calculating clicking over in his mind. Whatever it took, he’d said. Anyt
hing I wanted, just ask.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I take your point. Are we talking about a deal here, or what? Are we talking about coming to an understanding? Sealing a compact?”

  “Just the launch,” I said. “One day only. You can make as much noise as you like—the more the merrier—but I only come out for one day. And everything you put out is Theseus, Theseus, and more Theseus. What’s lost stays lost, from here to eternity.”

  “If that’s what you want,” he said. “One day only—and we’ll give them so much Theseus they’ll drown in it. Astolpho stays under wraps —nobodysays a word about it. Not now, not ever. The records are ours, and we have no interest in letting the cat escape the bag. If we thought anyone would blow the whistle, we wouldn’t want you waving us off. This is the Adventure, after all: the greatest moment so far in the history of the new human race. So far as we’re concerned, the ashes of Endymion can stay buried for another two hundred years—or another two million. It doesn’t matter; come the day when somebody stumbles over the tombstones, they’ll just be an archaeological find: a nine day wonder. By then, we’ll be out among the stars. Earth will be just our cradle.”

  I had thought when he first confronted me that he didn’t have anything I wanted, just something he could threaten me with. I realized now that he had both—but he didn’t know it. He and his crazy pals thought that they needed me at their launch, to give the blessing of the old human race to the new, and I needed them to be perfectly content with what they thought they had, to dig just so far and no farther. It had been foolish of me to refuse to return his calls, without even knowing what he had to say, and exactly how much he might have discovered.

  “All right,” I said, with all the fake weariness that a 40 percent synthetic man of two hundred and eighteen can muster. “You’ve worn me down. I give in. I do the launch, and the rest is silence. I appear, smile, disappear. Remembered for one brief moment, forgotten forever. Once I’m out of the way, your guys are the only heroes. Okay?”

  “There might be other inquiries from TV,” he said guardedly, “but as far as we’re concerned, it’s just the one symbolic gesture. That’s all we need. I can’t imagine that there’ll be anything else that you can’t reasonably turn down. You’re two hundred and eighteen years old, after all. Nobody will get suspicious if you plead exhaustion.”

  “If you’re so utterly convinced that you need it,” I said, “who am I to deny you? And you’re right—whatever other calls come in, I can be forgiven for refusing to answer on the grounds of creeping senility. I’ll program my answer-phone to imply that I really couldn’t be trusted not to wet myself if I were face-to-face with a famous chat show host. Now do you want a drink? Nothing homemade, if you insist—for you I’ll make an exception. I’ll even break the seal in front of you, if you like.”

  “There’s no need,” he said, with an airy wave of his right hand. His voice was redolent with relief and triumph. “I trust you.”

  Theseus betrayed Ariadne; of that much the voice of myth is as certain as the voice of myth can ever be. If she did not die, she was thrust into the arms of Dionysus, the god of intoxication. If grief did not kill her, she gave herself over to the mind-blowing passion of the Bacchae.

  “Ashes and tombstones” were the names that the Pharaohs of Capitalism gave to the payloads which they paid my associates to deposit in Endymion, near the north pole of the Moon. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . but the remnants of their flesh that they sent to Endymion, actual vases to be placed within a symbolic vase, were not the remains of their dead. The “ashes” were actually frozen embryos: not their dead, but their multitudinous unborn children.

  The “tombstones” carried aloft by valiant Astolpho were not inscribed with their epitaphs but with instructions for the resurrection of the human species, so deeply and so cleverly ingrained that they might still be deciphered after a million or a billion years, even by members of a species which had evolved a million or a billion light-years away and had formulated a very different language.

  Like the Pharaohs of old, the Pharaohs of the End Time fully intended to rise again; their pyramids were not built as futile monuments but as fortresses to secure themselves against disaster.

  Against all disaster, that is.

  My “crazy pals” had believed that the world was doomed, and humankind with it. There was nothing remotely crazy in that belief, in 2080. The Earth was dying, and nothing short of a concatenation of miracles could have saved it. Perhaps the Pharaohs of Capitalism had been crazy to have let the world get into such a state, but they were not miracle workers themselves; they were only men. They thought that the only hope for humankind was to slumber for a million or a billion years in the bosom of the Moon, until someone might come who would recognize the Earth for the grave it was, and would search for relics of the race whose grave it was in the one place where such relics might have survived the ravages of decay: hard vacuum.

  The disaster they had feared so much had not, in the end, been absolute. The human race had come through the crisis. Cade Maclaine’s cockroach-borne omnispores and the underground Arks had enabled them to resuscitate the ecosphere and massage the fluttering rhythm of its heart back to steadiness.

  By now, of course, the game had changed. The Repopulation was almost complete, and the Adventure had begun again. The New Human Race believed that its future was secure, and that the tricentennial launch of the mission to the Era of Tranquillity would help to make it secure.

  Well, perhaps.

  And perhaps not.

  I knew that if the new Adventurers found the vases of Endymion, they would be reckoned merely one more Ark: one more seed-deposit, to be drawn on as and when convenient. The children of the Pharaohs would be disembarked at the whim and convenience of men like Dennis Mountjoy, who believed with all his heart that the minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth of fate was dead and gone, and every ancient nightmare with him.

  That, to the crazy men who had paid my prices in order to deposit their heritage in Endymion, would almost certainly have seemed to be a disaster as great as the one that had been avoided. The Pharaohs had not handed down fortunes so that their offspring could be reabsorbed into the teeming millions of the New Human race, but in order that they should become the human race: a unique marvel in their own right.

  Perhaps they were crazy to want that, but that is what they wanted. “Ashes and tombstones” was a smoke screen, intended to conceal a bid for resurrection, immortality, and the privilege of uniqueness in a universe where humankind was utterly forgotten—and nothing less.

  My motives were somewhat different, of course, but I wanted the same result.

  At two hundred and eighteen years of age, and having lived through the Crash, I could never convince myself that it could not happen again—but even if it never did, I wanted the vases of Endymion to rest in peace, not for a hundred years or a thousand, but for a million or a billion, as their deliverers had intended.

  I did not want the “ashes and tombstones” to become an archaeological find and a nine day wonder. I wanted them to remain where they were until they were found by those who had been intended to find them: nonhuman beings, for whom the task of disembArkation would be an act of reCreation. It did not matter to me whether they were the spawn of another star or the remotest descendants of the ecosphere of Earth, remade by countless generations of mutation and selection into something far stranger than the New Human race—but I, too, wanted to leave my mark on the face of eternity. I, too, wanted to have gouged out a scratch on the infinite wall of the future, to have played a part in making something that would last, not for seventy years or two hundred, or even two thousand—which is as long as any man might reasonably expect to live, aided by our superbly clever and monstrously chimerical technologies of self-repair—but for two million or two billion.

  All I had done was to calculate the price, but without me, none of it would have happened. The Moon would have been exactly as Astolpho found
it: a treasury of the lost and the wasted, the futile and the functionless.

  Thanks to me, it is more than that. In a million or a billion years, the time will come for the resurrection, and the new life. I do not want it to be soon: the longer, the better.

  I thoroughly enjoyed the launch. I enjoyed it so tremendously, in fact, that I was glad I had allowed myself to be persuaded to take my place among its architects, to give their bold endeavor the blessing of all the billions of people who had died while I was young.

  I was unworthy, of course. Who among us is not? Nor can I believe, even now, that Dennis Mountjoy was correct in thinking that his heroes needed me to set the seal of history on their endeavor—but the sight of that rocket riding its pillar of fire into the deep blue of the sky brought back so many memories, so many echoes of a self long-buried and half-forgotten, that I almost broke down and wept.

  “I had forgotten what a sight it was,” I admitted to the young man, “and I thought that I had lost the capacity to feel such deep emotions, along with the fleshy tables of my first heart.”

  He did not recognize the quotation, which came from Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians: an epistle, according to the text, “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.” All he had to say in reply was: “I told you that you’d want to be here. This is Apollo reborn, Theseus reborn. This is what all the heroes of the race were made to accomplish. This time, we’ll go all the way to the stars, whatever it costs.”

  Astolpho, your creator had not the least idea what truth he served when he sent you to the Moon, to discern its real nature and its real purpose.

  2001

  Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The final installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear (Grosset and Dunlap), came out in 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas (including one for “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s”), three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’lmaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Lafrwitz Preis (Germany). He has recently completed a mainstream thriller which is now making the rounds. He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week.