The Coming

by Joe Haldeman

  "Buenas?" No picture, of course.

  "Where are you, darling?"

  "In a cab. Home in two minutes. Where did you think I'd be?"

  "Just making sure."

  "How are you taking it?"

  "Um … not on the phone. Talk to you in two minutes." He pushed the "off" button and rummaged through the drawer under the phone for a joint. It was old and dry. He found a match and lit it. Took one puff and stabbed it out in the sink. Wrong direction. He poured a glass of port and sipped it, waiting, thinking.

  This might not have anything to do with the interview. The FBI might have linked him and Rory to whatever that superweapon was, that may or may not have been an invention of Pepe's.

  The doorknob rattled and Rory knocked. Of course her thumb-print didn't unlock it unless the house was on. He went down the hall and opened the door.

  Aurora

  "What, is the house off?"

  Norm held the door open and shut it behind her. "Yeah. The shit has hit."

  She nodded. "I know. Goddamn governor on top of everything else. But why the house?"

  "The governor?"

  "Yeah. Why's the house off?"

  "The FBI. What did the governor do?"

  Rory rubbed her wet hair with both hands. "The governor got me fired, you know that? Did he call the FBI?"

  "Fired?"

  "You didn't know." Norman opened both hands and made a noise. "The governor leaned on Mal because of an interview I did this morning. So I'm on sabbatical. What does the FBI have to do with it?"

  They were in the breakfast nook. "Sit down. Let me get you something to drink."

  She sat down. "Just water. What's the FBI? The assassination?"

  "Somebody got assassinated?"

  She kneaded her forehead. "Of course. Why would you know? The president and all her cabinet, killed in a bomb blast. The vice-president, too."

  "My God. Bombed! Was it France?"

  "No. Grayson Pauling carried a briefcase full of explosive into a cabinet meeting. Suicide-murder."

  "Pauling."

  "He was serious about changing the agenda. Lunatic, martyr, I don't have it sorted out. What about the FBI now?"

  He got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. "Qabil called."

  "Oh, good. That's all we need."

  "No. That's not it. He found out, as a cop, down at the station, he heard the FBI is coming to get you. Take you to Washington."

  "Oh, shit." She took the water but didn't drink. "They can't do that. I didn't break any law."

  Norm sat across from her with a small glass of wine. "I don't know. Maybe we could talk our way out of it. What Qabil said is they think we're agents for France—"

  "We've never been to France!"

  "Verdad. I think they know that. It's just an excuse."

  "Was it before or after the assassination?"

  "Just now. I think Qabil assumed I knew about the president dying."

  She shook her head. "State of emergency, I guess. But do you really think they can just call us spies and lock us up?"

  "I don't know. That's what Qabil thinks. And he's sort of in their line of work."

  "Oh, hell. Double hell." She slid the water bottle back and forth in a small arc. "Is that port you're drinking?"

  "Get you some?"

  "Ah, no." She threw out the water and went to the refrigerator and squeezed herself a tumblerful of the plonk. "So what does your boyfriend recommend that we do?"

  "He's not my boyfriend. He's just looking out for us."

  "I'm sorry." She sat down and leaned into her hands; her voice was muffled. "It's been such a day."

  "And it's just begun."

  She sipped the wine. "Qabil said?"

  "He said we should disappear. Before night. Stay on local transport so we can pay cash, and make our way to a country that doesn't need a passport."

  "Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean?"

  "You'll do it?"

  "I'd like about thirty seconds to think about it."

  "Go ahead. I'm going to pack some music cubes."

  "Packing? You'd leave without me?"

  "Of course not. I just want to be ready if you decide to go. I can hear the hounds yapping." He found a cheap plastic box that held a hundred cubes, and started at the beginning, Antonini.

  "Oh, hell. Put some jazz in there for me." She stood up. "I'll pack some clothes."

  "I already put out a few things. Warm weather?"

  "Yeah. Canada doesn't really appeal."

  He heard her opening and closing drawers, slamming them. "How about Mexico?"

  "Cuba's closer," she said. "Some stuff I wanted to check there, too."

  He pulled a couple of handfuls of cubes from her jazz collection, totally random. "Cuba it is." They would have to avoid the Orlando-Miami monorail, unfortunately; that was ticketed like a plane. Have to zigzag their way down.

  He took the cube box and a small player into the bedroom and put them in his bag. Rory was almost packed, rattling around in the bathroom. "You have the sunscreen?" she said.

  "Both kinds, yeah. Though I guess we could buy it in Cuba."

  Rory came out with a plastic bag of toiletries, put it in the travel bag, and zipped it closed. "So. You ready?"

  "Yes." He held out a hand. "I'll take your bag.

  "I can—"

  "On my bicycle. We can't risk a cab."

  "Oh, joy." She handed him the bag. "Mother said if I married you I was in for a rough ride. But bicycling through the rain in December?"

  "Fleeing the FBI. Sort of strains your sense of humor, doesn't it."

  It wasn't too bad, though. The rain was a cool mist, and they only had to go a mile, to the Oaks substation.

  They left the bicycles unlocked, trusting that it wouldn't take long for thieves to remove that particular bit of evidence of their flight, and walked into the venerable, not to say crumbling, mall.

  It had seen better days, most of them more than a half century before. A whole block of stores had been demolished, their walls knocked down, to make space for a huge flea market, and that drew more customers than the low-rent purveyors of cheap imported clothing and sexual paraphernalia.

  There was a weird youth subculture that had taken over one part—the beatniks, who dressed in century-old fashion and smoked incessantly while listening to century-old music. Rory liked the sound of it as they walked by, but it made Norman cringe. They had to go through there to get to the ATMs.

  They thumbed two machines to get the maximum from different accounts, four thousand dollars each. The machines didn't hold any denomination larger than one hundred, though, so they wound up with a conspicuously large wad of bills.

  Rory looked around. "Uh-oh." She turned back to the machine. "There's a guy staring at us. From the café."

  Norm glanced sideways. "Yeah, I see him in Nick's sometimes. Always writing in that notebook."

  "Yeah. Now that you mention it."

  The historian

  They don't look like the kind of people who come down to the Oaks, he thought, familiar from somewhere. The Greek restaurant. He drank off the rest of his strong sweet coffee while it was still warm. He snapped his fingers twice to get the waitress's attention—a very local custom—and shook a pseudo-Camel out of its package. He lit it with a wooden match and got a sudden rush of THC. Real tobacco must have been something.

  He had been staring for a half hour at the image of .the Gainesville Sun for 24 November 1963, the last time a president had been assassinated. Maybe getting back to work would cut through the feelings of despair and helplessness. He had gotten up to the year before the year he was born.

  He tried to ignore the old-fashioned but seductive Dave Brubeck chordings and rhythms, and toggled through the two old newspaper articles that were relevant to this part:

  Local government found itself in a condition beyond chaos when, in the fall of 2022, the mayor, two city commissioners, and the entire county commission wound up in jail for vio
lating a cluster of real-estate laws, mostly about zoning and eminent domain—but really about bribery on a stunning scale. The result of their machinations, the Alachua/Archer monorail, changed Gainesville irreversibly, in ways that not everybody agreed were bad.

  City revenues declined as industries moved north to Alachua and south to Archer, for cheap real estate and tax relief. But the net result was to give the city back to the university, making it again the college town it had been for most of the twentieth century.

  There was a short but intense crime wave in 2023, which led to a five-year suspension of the fraternity system at UF, when it was discovered that four of the fraternities had aligned themselves with individual street gangs. They would pinpoint lucrative robbing sites and then help the boys hide and "fence" the stolen goods. In exchange, they took a percentage of the ill-gotten gains, and bought alcohol for the boys (at the time, the drinking age in Florida was twenty-one), as well as illegal ammunition, which is what led to the discovery. The federal program of "tagging" ammunition had begun secretly, and the so-called Gunfight at the Gainesville Garage was one of the first times it had been used as evidence.

  Two policemen and five members of a gang called the Hairballs died in the altercation, and the gang's ammunition was traced to a member of the Kappa Kappa Psi fraternity, who, under interrogation, detailed the depth and breadth of the fraternity's involvement with the gang, and implicated the three other fraternities…

  in December

  An unprecedented heat wave scorched Australia and New Zealand, thousands of people and millions of cattle and sheep dying in the heat and drought. Canada and Alaska and northern Europe all suffered protracted blizzard conditions, which took hundreds of lives.

  The war in Europe entered into an uneasy truce, the peace talks moving from Warsaw to sunny Rome, as troops on various borders scraped ice and snow off their war machines, and then went back to huddle around fires. The peace was partly due to logistics—no one was really prepared to fight in an unrelenting blizzard—and partly due to apocalyptic suspense as the calendar counted down to the Coming.

  Preachers and priests and even a cautious pope saw a connection between the hellish weather and the Coming. The aliens had not denied a connection with God and Jesus, and there were appropriate prophecies in the Bible, as well as a lesser authority, Nostradamus. In his prophetic quatrains, the farthest in the future where he had predicted a specific year was 2055, the year the aliens were going to land. Writing in 1555, he said:

  For five hundred years more one will take notice of him

  Who was the ornament of his time:

  Then suddenly a great revelation will be made,

  Which will make the people of that century well pleased.

  One "ornament of his time" was Nostradamus's contemporary Thomas More ("for five hundred years more…"), who wrote Utopia. To some, this was proof positive that the aliens were going to bring about a heaven on earth. Of course that word "more" doesn't appear in the French—"De cinq cents ans plus compte l'on tiendre"—but the people who write for the tabloids probably didn't know about that, and certainly didn't care.

  A musical group that had renamed itself 55 Alive went to the top of the charts with a convoluted song, "We're Coming," that used all of the words of the Nostradamus message recombined into a message of hope, which could be interpreted in either secular or religious terms.

  The survival stores came back, and merchants who didn't overstock for the two-week wonder made a quick and large profit. It did take a pessimistic kind of optimism, or vice versa, to assume that the aliens would leave humanity alone, but humanity would turn on itself.

  The United States launched its killer satellite in a state of total secrecy, which lasted less than a day. An international coalition of scientists and engineers came forth with absolute proof that the deed had been done. They demanded that the weapon be destroyed in place. President Davis called their documents "a bucket of bullshit," saying it was just a weather satellite, and God knows we could use a few.

  A gallup showed that 62 percent of French citizens considered the launch an act of war. In America, only 18 percent believed the president was telling the truth, but 32 percent "stood behind his actions."

  During the month of December, the leading cause of death in the United States was suicide.

  Aurora and Norman felt conspicuous in their flight; almost all of the trains were nearly empty, most of the nation staying home glued to the cube. There were plenty on the Miami-to-Key West "Havana Special," though; people hoping to lose themselves in that island's peculiar attractions.

  Of all possible points of exit from the United States, Key West was probably the best one for people who didn't want to be identified. The same fine old Italian families who controlled gambling and prostitution in Havana owned the boats that made the ninety-mile trip, as well as the dock where people stepped aboard the boats, in total anonymity, safe even from overhead orbital surveillance. Some patrons bragged about their "Havana weekends"; others claimed to have had a great time at Disney World.

  Aurora and Norman bypassed the fleshpots of the capital city and found a modest apartment in the nearby fishing village Cojímar. Norman rented a keyboard and MIDI recorder and continued to refine his composition. Aurora had her own research project, which took her all over the island. Fortunately, travel was dirt cheap compared to America.

  By December 21, orbital telescopes were able to form an image of the approaching spacecraft. It looked like a cross with a gamma-ray star in the center, which made some people rejoice, but their joy was premature. The next day it was obvious that the image was of four tail fins surrounding the exhaust of a very hot engine. The aliens were coming in tail first, braking, the way a human spaceship would.

  The gamma-ray beacon disappeared on the twenty-fourth, as the ship abruptly changed course, detouring toward Mars with a profligate waste of fuel. It swung around the red planet, as promised, and cracked Phobos in two. Hubble III gave a tiny image of the ship passing close, and a bright flare. Then the two halves of the small moon tumbled apart.

  No word of warning or welcome. They just kept coming, decelerating.

  On the morning of the thirty-first, when they were about a half-million miles away—twice the distance to the Moon—four large satellites were disintegrated in the course of one second. One of them was Davis's weapon. The aliens broke silence long enough to apologize, saying they couldn't tell which one it was, hoping none of them were inhabited.

  Rory saw the news when she got off the Mafia boat in Key West. She was about to retrace their circuitous route. Norm had obeyed her request that he stay in Cuba for the time being.

  There were things she had to know.

  January 1

  Pepe

  He had slept through the early evening, and dropped by Lisa Marie's party long enough to have one glass of champagne and watch the ball drop over Times Square. He had kissed her good-bye and gone to the office.

  He snapped on the lights and was going through his top drawer, looking for the stimulants that would keep him sharp for the next couple of days, when there was a light knock on the open door.

  He looked up. "Aurora?"

  She nodded and sat down in a chair by the door.

  "Where have you been? We've—"

  "Cabo de Cristobal. Cojímar, Holguín, Havana."

  "¿Y?"

  "I want to know who you are."

  He didn't blink. "I am who I am."

  "Who you are, who you work for, and how you managed to wind up in charge of this enterprise, whatever it actually is. You might explain the spaceship part, too."

  "Or what? What will you do?"

  "What we used to say was 'I'll blow the whistle on you.' Expose you."

  "But you say you don't know what I am."

  "What you aren't is Pepe Parker. There is no such animal. Birth records stolen from Cabo de Cristobal. Grade school burned to the ground. High school records destroyed in the Outage of thirt
y-nine—"

  "Everybody's were."

  "Most of them were restored. There's no actual record of your existence until you began graduate work at the University of Havana. After your doctorate, you got a blue card and came here."

  Pepe realized he was sweating. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. This couldn't be happening.

  "So tell me what's going on. Or I'll blow the whole thing up."

  "You can't do that."

  "I can indeed. And if something happens to me, Norman—"

  "No, no. I wasn't threatening you. What I mean is you mustn't."

  "I'm willing to be convinced. You could start by telling me who you work for."

  "Humanity. I work for all humanity."

  "That's no answer."

  The phone buzzed and he pushed the button. A dim gray picture of a man in NASA fatigues who spoke over the low thrum of a helicopter. "Dr. Parker? We're closing on Gainesville. Be on your roof in four or five minutes?"

  "Gracias. I'll be waiting."

  They signed off. "So you're going to the Cape," Rory said.

  "As you would have. I'm sorry I can't invite you along."

  "I'm still a wanted woman?"

  "They call about once a week, the FBI. They've never explained anything." He found the pills and popped one, crunching down on its bitterness. "All-nighter, I'm afraid."

  "I guess I could go to the FBI. Tell them what I know, what I don't know."

  "No! Please!" He snapped open his attaché case and checked its contents. "Let's make a deal."

  "I'm listening."

  "Just watch what happens today. Afterward, we can talk forever about it. If you want to blow your whistle then, I won't stop you." He closed the case. "Right now I have to catch that helicopter and go join the festivities." He reached in his pocket and pulled out a key ring. "Here—stay at my place. You know where it is?"

  "Still over at Creekside?"

  "Yes, 203. Your place might not be safe."

  "Okay. You've got a deal. But tell me this … do you know who they are? The aliens?"