Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  He never married.

  But he had companioned a Smilodon, brought back from the deeps of time. It had been like stepping on the moon. He had touched its white, saberlike teeth. And it made him immortal.

  It was enough.

  Elsewhere, Robyn Hitchcock opines that humanity is “an evolutionary leap that's probably not going to work, and unfortunately it knows it's not going to work. That's part of the appeal of the Frankenstein's monster. You know, the look in the monster's eyes—it knows it's this hideous deformed creature that's going to throw little girls in the river, but it would like to be something better. And that's pretty much us.”

  I caught intelligence today:

  Different eyes from the others,

  It thrashed in the sink and I called Renee.

  “Hey, check this out.”

  “How do we handle it?”

  “So it's comfortable and feels nothing when we drain its mind.”

  “Uh-huh”

  So we lay it on the counter

  And sliced into its hypothalamus

  And for a moment it carried on staring as if at a distant timetable and then—it looked at us.

  “Look at Renee,” I willed it, being smart and cowardly.

  It flapped its tail and looked at Renee to oblige me,

  Like a saint under torture;

  Then it reared up towards my face, for a kiss or a bite.

  “Renee,” I yelled. “It's moving. Do something now. Renee?”

  But she looked at me with her eyes adjusted and did nothing.

  So intelligence was inches from my face as its life ebbed on the enamel.

  Its eyes reflected me pitifully, mercilessly:

  A hairy boar with rodent snout and weak sad cruel mean eyes.

  And I knew that only death would ever compensate for my humanity.

  There is no forgiveness but oblivion, I realized:

  Intelligence will change places with us one day and a miracle will occur,

  But not in words that we can speak;

  We are too lethal to resurrect

  Too stupid to continue

  Too dangerous to survive

  And just intelligent enough to know that every word is true, Renee.

  A worthy successor to the grand idea SF of Olaf Stapledon and the philosophically literate Stanislaw Lem, George Zebrowski writes with an uncompromising vision and a firm pen. His early masterpiece, Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia, was included in the Library Journal's list of the best 100 SF novels of all time, while his newest novel, Brute Orbits, won the 1999 John W Campbell Memorial Award. A tireless crusader for excellence in science fiction, George was quoted in Science Fiction Weekly as saying, “Be critical, give warning, but also show constructive possibility. Failures, of course, make for more drama. But the utopian/dystopian pendulum swing of SF since Frankenstein was published is the way to go. It's only when the pendulum stops that we should worry about the health of the field.”

  I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.

  —Leo Tolstoy

  J efferson James sat with the small tactical nuke in his right leg, his mind settled and ready to make the final decision. A year after he had lost his leg to a terrorist bomb he had left field operations and returned to low-level diplomacy, where his leashed tongue was trusted by his superiors and his opposite numbers. It occurred to him as he waited that he was either a fool or the most important man in all history.

  “This is what you get for serving your political criminals,” his fiancée had said one day as she stared at the stump of his leg.

  “Criminals?”

  “Liar! The powerful steal from everyone—and we all connive with them to survive! You work for the thieves—from a desk. God knows what you did before!”

  “It's the leg, isn't it?” he had said. “But I'll wear this dead one only until they grow my own.”

  “Sure they will. You'll never have a truthful leg to stand on until you get a new brain!” She had raged for a week and then left him. For a better thief. How could it be otherwise—if what she said was true?

  Now, as he waited for the meeting to start, he felt unsuited to talk to the aliens. No one was and no one could be, and the impossible moment waited just up ahead in the orderly divisions of time, freeing him to say anything, constructive or not. Talk for effect, agree to nothing, he had been told.

  He tried to believe that he was here on his own, free of the person in his files. It was the only way to care now for a world that was ready to go on without him. How much time did he have to care? He could choose any moment after the meeting started. It was the only freedom left to him outside his thoughts.

  Waiting, he wondered if a sum ever came out differently without errors in the addition. Maybe there was something he had overlooked, that everyone had overlooked. A faraway hope whispered to him that he wanted to live and heal into the new leg grown out of his own cells. They had long delayed that miracle, because life spans doubled by perfect replacement parts would diminish the power of the topmost. A leg had waited for him instead of a bride—but in his present state of mind he would gladly take a leg instead of a bride, and success over his life. She had been right, of course, up to a point, but that was just the way things were, and it was difficult to see how else humankind might have risen out of the subsistence poverty of nature, which was content to let an organism become just healthy enough to reproduce before it died; no wonder that the first few to achieve a surplus made pigs of themselves. One day all the horror of that first human climb would have to be redeemed.

  There, he told himself, that was settled, as he thought of 2029, the first year of his prosthetic, a number obscuring numberless and differently noted histories, as the many still struggled in the grip of the few (who had learned well from the insurgencies of the many), and the year in which the alien breadboxes had appeared. Three in North Africa, where they were taken for a new form of impregnable American base; one in Germany, whose zealots hailed it as the long-awaited return of the wonder-weaponed Fourth Reich and demanded the dissolution of the government; near Colorado's NORAD-Space Command, where they were declared to be inflatable confusions raised by protestors; three around Shanghai, where a bitter old architect insisted that they were his very own mental projections; three around Moscow, which wisely said nothing; and one in the Australian outback, to which frenzied citizens rushed with the hope of buying tickets to an apotheosis, or at least to an extravaganza of happy revelations.

  White rectangular boxes a thousand meters long and half that across. No comings and goings. No communications, despite officious government lies about being “directly in touch,” while people within a hundred kilometers or more insisted that they heard a soft starsong calling for them to “gather ‘round.”

  “Once they get a toehold, we won't be able to drive them out,” Jefferson was told.

  “Can we now?” he asked. More of a foothold than a toehold, it was an insult to the power of the world's hierarchies, whose client states began to doubt their allegiances as they called their anxious masters on secure lines from undisclosed locations for their usual daily instructions and were told to do nothing. Bunkered high officials took their calls in panic and anger, but gave no advice except to wait. Were the major states ready to collaborate, even surrender if it meant retaining their positions? asked the lesser states. Ballets of fearful ifs danced through the houses of power, and the word came down that no collaboration would be tolerated.

  Wounded but doggedly loyal, doubts had wandered into Jefferson James as climate change slowed, diseases died, sterile oceanic zones filled again with life, and a large asteroid missed the Earth. The sway of the fossil fuel families weakened as alternatives surged into a truly free market. Adam Smith and Karl Marx smiled in their graves as officialdom denied that the alien presence had anything to do with these long-plann
ed improvements, but seized the various black boxes into which anything electrical might be plugged with no limits on amperage or voltage output—and found empty “quantum vacuum wells” that unnerved older physicists and happily awed younger ones. Several smaller nations claimed these innovations to be the result of their own secret efforts.

  The topmost fewest whispered amongst themselves that they were no longer the masters of the many. Too much “peace and plenty” withered power. More for the many, less for the few undermined the very meanings of “more” or “less.”

  “We won't let it happen!” they had cried in secret conclave, trembling before the likely loss of domains so carefully interlocked with other topmosts—and had declared the alien structures to be illegal settlements.

  There was no choice left but to safely bomb from on high.

  But the wondrous boxes were not breached by even the cleanest of clean bombs in the most acute angular strikes. The humiliation of the fewest festered as their bottom-feeding clients awaited a new master. In desperation, the fewest of the few hand-carried a message to the domes on large posters, in every language:

  CAN WE TALK?

  “Of course,” answered a female voice, heard everywhere.

  “Where?” asked the startled UN secretary-general, addressing the air in front of his newly renovated glass building. Buried strategists had pushed him forward to carry a sign for the planet. “Where?” he had asked again.

  “Anywhere. All will hear.”

  “Couldn't we…keep this…private?”

  “We are being heard everywhere in the world's commons. But if you like, come to the Central Park Zoo Cafeteria in New York City.”

  Three need-not-to-know delegates were sent with the nuke in Jefferson's leg. If you can't beat an enemy's weapons, you must defeat the occupiers face-to-face and not count the cost. We must do what they least expect, he was told as they readied him for this sacrifice of one for the many, including the topmost, however one felt about the mass of humankind, his lost bride included.

  He looked up as four figures walked into the bright, windowed daylight of the cafeteria—tall, healthy-looking humanoids with olive skin and short brown hair, two men and two women, it seemed to Jefferson James. They glided in with an irritating arrogance, sat down on the other side of the large wooden picnic table, and smiled.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “And by what right have you built…put these things on our homelands?” asked Hugo Herbert, the pale German at his right.

  “Please realize,” said John Ke, the tall Chinese delegate whom everyone also knew as an acceptable Russian double agent, “that we feel strongly about your uninvited presence.”

  “There was no need to use weapons against us,” said one female, and they all smiled like sophisticated children.

  We won't apologize for anything we do, Jefferson wanted to say but restrained himself. “Who are you?” he demanded again. “And where have you come from?”

  The second, plainer-faced female said, “From here, half a million years ago.”

  “Impossible!” cried Hugo after a silence.

  The Chinese speaker said, “We are the oldest.”

  “The evidence is beneath the domes,” said one of the males. “But we offer our genome for examination, if you wish. We would not be able to converse easily if we were not from here.”

  Still startled, Jefferson asked, “But why would you want to come back?”

  “Sentiment,” said the second male.

  “Our roots,” said the first woman.

  Jefferson labored to laugh. “With all your obvious advances, you are moved by…sentiment?”

  The woman smiled and said, “Some of us, but sentiment and sympathy are the basis of ethics, as you may well know.”

  “Well, it's one theory,” Jefferson said, and felt useless; the aliens had already enforced their will and were capable of much more even if a few of them died here.

  “You have no rights here,” he said calmly, wondering if his superiors would advise him through the implant or rely entirely on his judgment. The matter had been left open.

  “How long will you stay?” asked Hugo.

  “For as long,” said the first male, “as the need sings within us.”

  “Sings?” asked Ke.

  “Sings!” cried Hugo. “Who are you, really, and why did you leave, as you claim?”

  “We were helped,” said the first woman.

  “And our ancestors were left behind?” said Ke.

  “A small population at the time,” she said.

  So there are at least two humanities, Jefferson thought. Maybe more, if all this was true. “Who or what helped you?” he asked.

  “We don't know much about them,” the second woman said.

  “Tell us what you do know,” Jefferson said.

  “Quantum-field trollers, you might call them,” she said, “but they rarely interfere.”

  “More than enough,” whispered Hugo.

  Jefferson said, “And they…helped only a few?”

  “Enough.”

  “What were they?” he asked.

  “We never saw them.”

  “But why did they take you?”

  She said, “To string intermediaries between emerging forms of intelligent life.”

  “And you're here to add us to the string?” Jefferson asked. Or reattach a lost piece, he thought.

  “Perhaps.”

  So there was a purpose, an uncertain one, Jefferson thought as he scratched his phantom limb. The ghost behind the interim prosthetic had not visited him for some time. Cutting free an earlier sample of humankind was a survival strategy, but there might still be another motive beyond stringing neighborhoods across the cosmos.

  “But this is absurd,” he said. “Half a million years invalidates all rights of return.”

  The second man said, “You are getting much better at destroying yourselves.”

  “And you will save us?” Jefferson said.

  “Do we ask permission to aid the injured?” asked the first woman.

  “Please request our help,” said the second man.

  Jefferson looked blankly at him. Odd responses, misunderstanding, stupidity, or a hidden purpose?

  “Request it,” insisted the alien, and Jefferson felt that the powerful-powerless divide would not be bridged; each side could say anything, even nonsense, and it would not matter. Much worse, the help of these alleged cousins would change too much. Worse than any political redistricting in nation states.

  Jefferson asked, “Are you suggesting that we need more help?”

  “You need no help to destroy yourselves,” the first woman said. “Assure us that you will not and we will leave.”

  Jefferson felt suddenly that he wanted them to go and also to stay.

  “Shall we stay?” she asked with a show of sympathy.

  His diplomatic training aimed at a familiar humanity that was not rational but rationalizing, not at beings who seemed to be either the reverse or powerful naifs.

  “But you want to stay,” he said, “to cleanse us of our devils.”

  “You know the need,” she said.

  They see monsters, Jefferson thought, and wondered how survivalist origins might ever be surpassed. Controlled, perhaps, never removed.

  “We are not strangers, we are you,” the second woman said, “and also struggle with ourselves.”

  “But not as badly as we do,” Hugo said skeptically.

  “Tell us more about our mutual past,” Jefferson said, suddenly uncaring of who they were; right or wrong, helpful or harmful, they had no right here. Keep that in mind. A world, like a nation, must control its borders.

  “We have come home,” said the first man.

  Jefferson asked, “Who among you are not…nostalgic? And where are they?”

  “Out there,” he said, glancing upward.

  “Throughout the quantum field's endless histories,” said the first woman.

 
Were they ghosts of some kind? Jefferson asked himself. Quantum spirits, or thoughts?

  He stood up suddenly. “You are unjust!” he shouted, diplomacy be damned. “You can destroy us, but we can't touch you. That is no basis for negotiation.”

  “We will not destroy you,” said the four in unison, and he thought of a porcupine, unapproachable and smug behind its quills.

  “Why not?” he demanded, still standing and half believing that these hard-to-hate naifs might be turned away with words.

  “We are good,” they said in unison.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Surely you have felt…goodness?”

  He sat down into a skewering silence, then said, “We don't want you here, and demand that you leave. You can't just come here and occupy us.”

  “An outrage,” said Hugo. “Your very presence and your help will discourage us from developing as we would have on our own.”

  The first woman, whom Jefferson James had begun to think of as Eve, said, “No culture grows without intrusions and constraints.”

  “Even given your best intentions,” said the Chinese-Russian double agent, “we will not be the light of our world. You will become that light….”

  “Take from us what you like,” she said.

  Light up and lighten up, went through Jefferson's head. “And if we don't?” he asked instead.

  Eve said, “You will harm yourselves.”

  “So you will stay?” he asked, thinking of his unstaying bride.

  “Yes,” she sang to him, and he felt relimbed by the music of her voice.

  “And imprison us in your shadow,” he said. “Can you understand that?”

  “Shadow?” she asked.

  “Your…superiority,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

  “A few may feel humiliated,” said the second woman. “Most will benefit.”

  “Oh, so you do understand the effect,” Jefferson said.

  “Learn from us,” Eve said.

  “We'll drive you out,” he muttered as pride's vise took hold of him.