Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "They will be here soon. Perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps more." She looked down at me slumped there like a sack of coal and switched on her full power smile. "David, do not shoot until I give you the signal, and David, you must not distract me until they arrive."

  "Signal?" I sat up abruptly. "What signal?"

  "You will know." She said calmly, turned and moved to the centre of the displays.

  The control assembly was arranged in a semi-circle so that she was standing staring at masses of data screens sweeping round her like the inside of a wheel, the walls covered with touch panels to beyond head height. In the very centre was a broad tablelike panel, flat, with thousands of tiny lights wandering across its surface like clouds across the sky. She gazed down at this for some time before slowly placing her fingers delicately on the surface as if she was contemplating a piano recital. Indeed, faint tinkling tones danced across the audio spectrum, rising and falling like unseen waves on a shore of sound. Presently, the tones changed, the cascade of tinkling notes altering to a rapid tattoo of metallic monotony. She bent over the panel, her hands dancing like insect's legs. All the wall screens changed colour, bands of data scrolling down until the whole, huge complex flickered with light.

  It was fascinating, riveting, astounding. She was almost at one with a machine which controlled life or death, she was the centre now and I could only sit and marvel. The scene was compelling and it wasn't just me who thought so because the pressure door opened and Max walked in followed by Selena.

  Mindful of Melanee's instructions, I didn't shoot them to bits immediately, I merely showed them the business end of the rifle and told them silently to sit down and enjoy the show. Strangely, Max didn't look at me, didn't seem to see me at all, he just continued to stroll towards Melanee who was oblivious of her increased audience. I was telling myself that two rounds judiciously placed in his cranium would solve his future problems and not be a real breach of Melanee's rule which didn't take into account a large man approaching her with homicide in mind. The click of the safety catch seemed loud. Selena watched me with a weird placidity, a cold calmness, like a mantis seeing dinner.

  Taking up the slack on the trigger, I was calculating trajectories when Melanee suddenly stood up, the displays stopped moving, the master screen turned black and silence arrived with a thud. She pushed her hair back and turned her head to gaze at Max, her eyes flicking to Selena without expression.

  "Sit down." Her voice was cool with command. "It is irreversible."

  He didn't sit but he stopped, his face still but tension made his hands into fists, his muscles rigid. Those blue eyes, so remote, so glacial, they stared at her like a lizard, inhuman, non-human almost. Melanee didn't move but she was aware of my military nervousness. What signal? A white flag?

  "We have won, we have created a world of beauty and balance, of harmony and peace." Selena broke her silence with an assertion, a confirmation of superiority, so like her old impatience but more, reinforced.

  "You killed everyone, men, women, babies, the old, the sick, lovers, daughters, sons, sailors and fishermen, little girls and little boys." I found I was on my feet, the urge to kill overpowering, the memory of Linda strong, the knowledge that these people had destroyed everything with as much compunction as wiping out an ant's nest was producing a revulsion so strong I didn't think I could control it for much longer.

  Melanee raised her hand, a slow wave which included all the multiple screens and glowing displays around us. "David has taught me more than you implanted in my memories. Oh yes, the knowledge is in my head, physics, chemistry, biology, enhanced memory facilities, many extra talents. You made me." She gazed at Max with fearless intellect. "But he showed me emotions, love, fear, loyalty," she paused. "Hatred." She smiled her slow smile. "You wanted a machine but your programming wasn't good enough, the conflict with my free will implant produced a child who was raised by people who had no choice. They knew I was different and they knew I was waiting. They had to obey." Her smile disappeared. "Now I know the meaning of sin, of evil, of malice. You, who claim to be the tools of God, are the meaning of unrighteousness, you are walking death, not life, your God is false."

  Max stood, towering over her but his hands shook. Selena stood up gracefully, ignored my rifle, and took his hand. Like a child, he allowed himself to be towed back to chairs near the entrance lock where she sat him down and subsided next to him. She patted his hand like a mother soothing her fractious toddler, sat back and regarded us with a thin smile, a mere movement of lips which meant nothing.

  "It is time you understood." She said, gazing at the nearest screen. "You are too late. It was never a decision to retake the land. We were to be the instruments. Do you not understand? The Word is given to us, 'All flesh is grass but the grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away,' and we are flowers, thistles in the wind."

  "Jesus Christ." I muttered. "Mania. How did you get past the tests?"

  "The Earth is His and we deface it." Max said, his voice dull, lifeless.

  "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life." Selena smiled a wry smile, as if she had said something clever.

  "New Testament." Melanee said. "Revelations."

  Wondering how she got the time to interrogate Biblical records and why she chose to memorise Jewish Prophesy anyway, I thought it was time we had some rational answers. "Can we tear ourselves away from Israel and concentrate on current affairs? " I began mildly. "You both have a short time to live so make the most of it. Explain why you decided to murder the world. Think of me as the Last Judgement."

  Selena continued to examine Melanee as if she was an alien specimen showing alarming tendencies. "I did not believe it would happen at first." She put her chin on her hands, her elbows resting on the panel in front of her. Her eyes showed no feeling, no compassion, just curiosity. "I did not think it could be done or perhaps..." For a tiny instant a strange expression, a subtle alteration of her features, passed across her face like a cloud silently dimming the sun. It seemed to me that the voices of millions of dead spoke to her but she did not want to listen. It was fanciful to think such thoughts because her lips firmed and her normal empty smile returned. "I knew what had been done but I had not faced the reality..." She gazed at Max as if he was her personal angel. "I had to be helped to see the truth, to jettison emotional prejudice, to find the light. Everything is clear now." Her smile turned to a grin of triumph. "You see, in the modern age of the twenty third century, everything had been discovered, nothing was unexplained, there was no mystery, no celestial presence making things we could never understand. We knew it all and we could do anything we wanted, anything."

  In the short pause after this half confession of long dead scruples, I found myself recalling our conference on the bridge of the ship, long ago, her strangled surprise and shock when we told her the Earth was dead. It was obvious then and it still was, that Selena had not understood, or maybe she had not wanted to understand, just what these people had done. But they needed her, the biology brain, the near genius, and she was certainly a member of that infamous conspiracy. Like many before her, she had not permitted herself to comprehend that blood spilt would be on her hands, that the stain would never go even though she had not fired the gun. Max was the catalyst, he ruled Selena, it was so obvious now, he always had. Maybe she had been a mere disciple in the new religion, but now she was a Messiah, one of the makers of the world.

  "No soul, no future, nothing but chemicals." Max turned that massive head, those intense blue eyes staring at me as if he saw me for the first time. "But each one of us, even you, the ultimate agnostic, we all know that there is something in us that is unique, like a fingerprint of the mind."

  Selena nodded while I gave Melanee a quick glance, wondering when the signal was due to arrive, but she was listening, fascinated, to the outpourings of a human conscience which had died ten thousand years ago. "And so," she continued the story softly. "You decided to give the planet a soul."<
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  Selena leaned back in her chair and reached to run her fingers lightly across Max's arm. "Oh no, we didn't do that. It had a soul already, long before we, the clever apes, thought we ruled the universe, this planet had its own soul, a force, a spirit that kept the living biosphere in harmony, mended the wounds of time and space, kept the flame of life alive in an empty galaxy." She smiled her best smile at Max and watched his face as if he were the God of this world.

  "But we were murdering it. We had altered the natural rhythms, introduced our own artificial requirements. We maintained sunlight from satellite repeaters over parts that should be dark. We wanted to grow crops to feed the bloated population, didn't we?" Max opened his big hands, staring down at them with frowning concentration while he tried to tell us a kiddies fairy story.

  "More than that, we altered the oceans, we tinkered with the atmosphere...you know what we did." Selena shrugged, indifferent to whether we believed her New Religion or not. "It had to be stopped or the planet would descend into a spiral of irreversible damage."

  "Crap." I muttered.

  "You forget," Selena smiled again, a smile that boded ill for someone. "I was one of the most eminent biologists on the planet. The Bio-control Council knew that in another century the damage could not be reversed. We were heading for catastrophe, not just us but every living thing. We had raped the world. No oil, vast deserts, climate change, pollution out of control."

  "The Earth was talking to us, but we didn't listen." Max nodded agreement. "We had been given a Received Truth which told us how to live but we ignored it. We had no masters, only wants." He suddenly lifted his chin and I was astonished to see tears running down his cheeks. "You think it was easy?" He shook his head slowly. "There was no other way, no other way."

  "We had to give the planet back its soul." Selena almost whispered it. "We have no souls, we go back to the Earth that made us, we owe it all life."

  Melanee said nothing while I was wondering if they had been like this since childhood. "How did you do it?" I enquired smoothly. "Must have been the biggest con in history."

  "Oh no. It's simple." Max still stared at me, wide eyed. "You did it."

  Melanee stared at me with cold enquiry. Had she been cuddling up to a mass murderer of apocalyptic dimensions? I could see the thoughts flashing through her head. But then her lips moved and her usual stunning smile arrived. "David is not clever enough. Only a superior brain could have contrived the extermination of a complex industrial society without anyone noticing beforehand." Her smile directed itself at Selena. "And you were one of the best brains on the planet. You just told us, didn't you?"

  "What do you know about radiation?" Max seemed to retreat into schoolmaster mode, eager to impart the words of the Gods, while Selena gazed at Melanee as if she had crawled out of a drain. I could see they were going to be buddies, but shook my head at Max, wanting him to tell me the big story while he was still alive. I knew quite a lot about radiation, but he wanted to pour knowledge over us like custard over pudding, you could see it in his eyes. I always believe in letting volunteers do their stuff, I remember mentioning it before, because they always get the first bullet.

  "Well, it wasn't sunburn, was it?" I felt easy in my mind, certain now.

  "Sunburn?" He chuckled. The rumble of his laugh grew to well-remembered depths. "How ingenious! We never thought of that." He started to rub his hands together like Pontius Pilate. "No, back about two hundred years before we left, radar became quite sophisticated. They found how to produce quite precise wavelengths and project them in narrow beams. Then they worked out how to build a transmitter to send out thousands of these beams at once and get a computer to work out what came back." He was enjoying himself now, his face almost animated. "The basic idea has been refined to allow the emission of practically any part of the whole spectrum, right up to neutron radiation."

  A dreadful notion was forming in my head, but Max was recalling past triumphs with pleasure and I wanted to listen to it all before I killed him. "You ought to think before you become energetic." Selena's clipped tones penetrated my attention.

  Max shifted impatiently, she was interrupting the great saga he was spilling out. "You know about the brain detectors? We had the equipment on the ship. If you've got the right receiver you can track every living brain on this planet, providing the computer processing the data is powerful enough."

  "And you had one of only three sentient, organic, quantum computers in the world." Melanee supplied the next item promptly, making me look at her suspiciously. How much had that giant brain already worked out?

  "We did." Selena nodded complacently.

  "We used it to track and label every living human brain. We had limitless computer power and we fed the result into the beam projector system, the phased array. And you know where that was, the beam projector?"

  The terrible notion had been crystallising in my mind. "On the ship." I muttered, hoping that the next revelation wouldn't be true.

  "Yeah." Max breathed, his faint Southern accent becoming more pronounced. "It was a cute system. The ship was the biggest fusion generator ever made and you know what fusion produces, don't you, boy?"

  "Neutrons." I replied hoarsely.

  "Ten out of ten. So you get the picture, boy. Here we are sitting in the biggest generator of neutrons ever constructed and we had the most powerful computer ever built all ready to direct the neutron beams through the phased array. It was a work of genius, a giant directory of all human life. You remember those near sentient tracking machines they gave us? They could track an ant, so the computer knew where every man, woman and child was and five billion is a small number for any computer. We only had to orbit ten times and it was done."

  "Neutrons are deadly." Selena told me with her even smile. She folded her hands round her knees and sat back in lecturing posture. "Highly penetrative and it only takes a small but intense dose to bring all mental processes to a stop. All sentience would be gone within a microsecond." She bestowed a knowing smile on us. "It was immediate and merciful."

  "But you see the joke, don't you?" Max added cheerfully. "Who started up the main engines before we left for Centauri? Whose duty was it to monitor the fusion thrust and balance? You recall that?" His laugh boomed over us.

  But I wasn't laughing. I did remember. It was me. The memories flooded back of running the programs, watching for the rising power. When it was all in the green we went to the hibernation pods, Max and me, his lingering smile still with me. "My God." I felt the colour drain from my face. "We did it ourselves. The natives are right. We killed the world."

  Chapter 30

  CURTAINS

  It was the silence that made me slowly return from a trip to insanity. There was no more talk. Melanee had a face which looked like a marble statue of the Madonna, her eyes set and staring at Selena and Max as if she couldn't have heard them right. Her hands were clasped together, the knuckles white, small beads of perspiration glistening on her brow. She was rigid, unmoving, sitting as if turned to stone.

  Me? I had blackness in my head, a terrible depth of eternity that gaped at me, voices echoing, screams of dead children calling to me. Nearly ten thousand years ago, I had committed the biggest act of genocide conceivable, a crime so vast no contrition could ever touch the fringe of such a sin, a mortal sin. Marie would tell me all about the peril to my soul. She was a catholic, she knew all about such things, but did she know or guess what they had done, what they made me do? The ship, our ship, the construction of which we had been so proud, the biggest moving object ever made by man, it had been a deception from the first day. Clever men and women with money, power and mania, had made it a giant neutron machine gun, every bullet of radiation specially targeted on a single being, a unit of organic chemicals which Selena, Max, Mark and the rest, regarded as a blasphemy against the God they worshipped. They called me devious but truly, not even in my most depraved mood could I have thought up a scheme like this - and boasted about it afterwards.
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  Max and Selena were feeling good, watching the devastation in my head with a placid approval. They expected it, they had looked forward to their moment of revelation. But what about the time scale? Why so long? Wearily, with a feeling of deadness sweeping over me, I regarded my fellow travellers, my companions on a journey they must have found extremely boring.

  "Why ten millennia?" Melanee, as ever, beat my slow brain to the punch. "Why did you tell all your people it was four hundred years?"

  "Ah." Max started rubbing his hands together again. "Yes, a flaw in the plan. We fed the computer with the data, Mark was the program genius, he told it to monitor Earth and insert a false parameter." He stopped his dry hand washing motions and glared at me. "I should have shot him. We had to alter the navigation programs but we couldn't ask our navigator and Mark simply ballsed it up. He forgot that the ship wouldn't be using the beacons. He reset the whole thing and told the machine to return us according to Nativity, but he overrode the warnings, he just entered the data we had been given from the group in Montana. They gave us the raw data and told us when to enter it. They assumed he would set the beacon stars before the program uplinks were set but he didn't so the upshot was that the computer found itself with instructions to return us to Earth when Altair, Deneb and the rest were in a configuration that wasn't going to appear for damned nearly ten thousand years."

  The whole story seemed highly unlikely to me but on the other hand, why not? No study of history could remove the proof that the most expensive, elaborate, well researched operation could be and often was reduced to rubble because someone put in a minus instead of a plus and no-one noticed. I recalled the first orbiting telescope, sent up centuries before we left, and it wasn't until it was up there that they found out that a minor mistake no one had checked made the complete project nearly worthless. And it happened again. Mark had fed in his date of birth by the sound of it. Did it matter? They were still smirking.