Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Cluny thought of the quandary the Russian’s death had placed Dan Brighton in: he had become the sole witness to the start of a new era. Brighton and Cluny’s father must have gone through the same endless arguing that Sid and Murray and Zach, others, had gone through more recently, and in the end Brighton had died before they had a chance to resolve it. Had he been on his way to retrieve the message on that last mission? No one would ever know, of course, but it seemed likely now. And his father’s role in it all? He would never know that either, but he had been mixed up in it, of that Cluny was certain. He must have known, without proof, without knowing where it was, and when Brighton had died, he had been left with little more than a rumor of contact, and had destroyed evidence that might have existed concerning it. Why? Finally he must not have believed in it. Brighton had been a trickster, the boy who cried wolf. Cluny imagined his father trying to believe in it, succeeding for a time, even sending Brighton back to retrieve the message. But then Brighton had died and the belief that had been possible when shared became untenable, too fragile to withstand the doubts and questions. Vehemently he had denied it then, or else why had he destroyed so many papers with such urgency? Or maybe Klyuchevsky had found it, hidden it again, and Brighton had tried desperately to refind it. . . . Cluny shook his head hard. He had gone over this ground too many times for it not to have become almost a ritual, with each thought preceded and followed by cues that determined the entire sequence, and none of it had meaning any longer.

  “Even if we never find another one,” Alex said suddenly, breaking into Cluny’s thoughts, and yet not speaking directly to him either, but in a low halting voice, rather as if he were voicing a thought to himself, “the first one has served its purpose, if indeed its purpose was to make us prepare for an alien contact.”

  “And how long do you suppose that kind of peaceful cooperation is going to last without another piece of the puzzle?”

  “Long enough, perhaps. Who knows? Every day is an unexpected plus, and we’ve had ten months no one expected to have. Who knows?”

  Cluny looked at his friend curiously. Alex had not lowered his voice and the corridor was filled with other men and women; any of them might have heard. The corridors might still be bugged, probably were still bugged.

  Alex smiled his peculiar crooked smile and added, “Within a year we will have accomplished a five years’ schedule of space construction, Cluny. That’s a lot of money committed. Few people are willing to abandon that kind of commitment, especially since it’s made your economy and mine start to climb so precipitously. Who would have predicted the trade agreements your country and China have made? Farm equipment today in exchange for products when harvested. It’s easier to start the avalanche than to stop it or avoid it, once begun.”

  “Catalytic effect,” Cluny said. “It’s like a marriage broker who brings together the strangest people and then steps back to let whatever happens begin.”

  Alex stopped walking for a moment, his hand on Cluny’s arm. “The marriage broker never marries—isn’t that part of the system?”

  For a second they regarded each other, neither adding anything, and then they walked again, no longer speaking. Cluny felt a flash of panic that was like the wave of anxiety at the moment the dentist first touches a drill to a tooth.

  Murray and Jean sat facing each other in her one-room studio apartment in New York. The room reminded her of Corinne Duland’s room at East Lansing. That seemed too far in the past to be her past, she thought, examining the memory of the room, of Corinne, the other memories that were attached to that one. She wondered briefly where Walter was now, how many women had come and gone in the intervening time, nearly two years. She could look at it now because she was not that same person, but someone made up of all the pieces of her past, and that piece was, after all, a very small one.

  “You know I want to talk to you,” Murray said finally. “Yeah, you know.”

  Through dinner they had talked about her book on the Warm Springs Indians, due out in four days now. The advance reviews were respectable, no more than that, she had told him. It had been enough for Dr. Schmidt to put her name forward for her doctorate. That would come about, he had promised her. Of course, it really was for her work with the message, but until that was made public they pretended her Indian book was the reason.

  “Why haven’t you gathered reporters around, spilled it all?” Murray asked.

  She shrugged. “They’d think it was for publicity. No one would believe it.”

  “They’d grab it and run,” he said. “They’ve been looking for something to account for the speed of the construction, for the new focus of our efforts and the Russians’, and for a reason for suddenly inviting everyone else who can use a calculator to become our partners. They’d accept it all right.”

  She waited. She always had to remind herself that Murray was Cluny’s age; he looked so much older, so much more tired. It was not merely that he was overweight, but rather that he was burdened by a mission. He had the same absolute devotion and need for the space satellite to work as her father had had. She recognized the same distant look when he talked about it, the same unwillingness to speculate about its failure, the same relentless drive to accomplish this first baby step into the universe of stars. She recognized it without sharing it, without feeling any real empathy for it. He could have been this devoted to the worship of a strange god, or to a steadily increasing gross national product, or any other abstract she could think of. The drive she recognized in him was obsessive, unrelated to human needs, interpreted human needs as weaknesses to be purged. Another dichotomy, she thought with amusement; she had always hated things easily dichotomized. There were those whose need was for something unattainable, far removed from self; and there were others who felt an equally desperate need for the exploration of self, of humanness; the two were separate. No Conestoga wagons, but a wagon train for all that, one that would lead eventually to another solar system, other stars, other civilizations, wagons peopled by obsessed travelers who could never be satisfied because when one goal became attainable, it was immediately replaced by another, more distant one. But they were so few, she thought, and there were so many who would never go although they might want to, and even more who did not want to go out at all, who had no need for space and its elusive goals. Obsessed people didn’t really care what they trampled, what they destroyed to get where they were driven. But they had to care! They had to leave something behind for those whose needs were different.

  “It’s a lie, isn’t it?” Murray said finally.

  She turned to look out the window, twenty-two stories above the streets, which were too far away to allow the noise to penetrate. Like a silent film with poor lighting, it was dim down there with the few electric lights, and distance. She could see people as moving shadows only. The government-issued statistics dealt with percentage points, fragmentation; the reality was down there—people moving aimlessly, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no hope, no future. What about them? she wanted to ask.

  “I didn’t lie about anything,” she said then.

  “No. We had our analysts go over those tapes a hundred times, and your voice shows no stress, no lies. But you lied. You knew what we’d believe, what everyone would believe from what you said. You did it so well, so skillfully, and you looked like a kid, innocent, too naive to try to fool experts like you had in that room. Everyone knew you were being tested for truthfulness. God alone knows how many tape recorders were in that room, how many experts have listened to you how many times.‘And they all believed every word. They still believe every word. But you never said it was a message from aliens, did you? I’ve gone over it a dozen times this past week, and you never said that. You led us on until someone else said it, and we all wanted to believe so fucking much! You used that desperate need to believe the way you’d use a life preserver to save a drowning man.”

  So much pain, so much hatred in his voice. She winced. She had not let herself know it would be
this bad. She could not ask him what about them, those living shadows on the street below, because he had no answers. His answer was to leave them behind, let them live and die out of sight.

  “Why did you stop believing?” she asked, still at the window.

  “When I was a kid, nine years old, before the world went to hell, we didn’t have anything. I wanted a bike so much I could smell it when I went to sleep. For a long time I thought I was going to get it for Christmas, but then one day I realized it wasn’t going to happen. No way. And I quit believing in the bike, quit dreaming about it, quit smelling it, quit looking at bikes in windows and parked at curbs.”

  She did not ask if he got the bike.

  “As long as I believed in it,” he said harshly, “I kept finding ways for it to be possible, and as soon as I quit, I found all the ways that made it impossible. As soon as I stopped believing in that goddamn message, I knew it had been a lie from start to finish. I don’t know how, or who else is mixed up in this, but it’s a lie.”

  She heard the refrigerator door open and slam shut. He poured wine and gulped it down. He had brought the wine; she had not been able to afford it. She listened to him return to the center of the room, come closer to her.

  He touched her shoulder, then jerked her around. “Aren’t you going to say anything at all? Deny it? Say you did it? Something?”

  She shook her head.

  “For Christ sake! You pulled it off! It worked. If you didn’t lie about it, all you have to do is say so on a tape, and I’ve made a jackass out of myself.”

  “Not now,” she said. “I didn’t lie before, but I don’t know any more. After tonight I’d be afraid to say anything about it.”

  He stepped back. “You’ve got it planned this far? You knew someone would finally accuse you and you planned even this?” He stared at her in disbelief that slowly faded and left his round face a mask. “Just tell me why. Will you do that much for me? Just a simple answer. Why?”

  She did not flinch or lower her gaze, and finally he turned and walked across the room, opened the door and left, walking like a very old man.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She was shaking as if with a chill, from deep within her. Her face felt feverish, and when she touched her cheek, her hand was ice cold.

  They had needed to believe. They had been conditioned, or had conditioned themselves, so long to believe. UFOs, movies, books, even comic books, had strengthened that belief and when the chance came, when it seemed the fiction had become an actuality, like Pavlov’s dogs, they had accepted without being able to doubt. The aliens would turn on the water, she thought; they would press buttons and turn off war, they would cure diseases, heal sick souls, turn Earth into a land of milk and honey. All that was built into the conditioning, that and more. She turned again to the window. And it was happening, she thought. All of it could happen if they had enough time. All of it.

  Later that night she wrote letters to half a dozen newspapers and television news stations. It was simple: “Ask any of the following people if a message from aliens has been intercepted.” She listed nine names; Murray’s was not there, nor was Cluny’s. She hesitated over his for a few seconds, thinking about him, about him with Murray, and she knew he should not be asked. She mailed the letters before she went to bed, where she fell asleep almost instantly, and dreamed of walking with Serena, wanting her forgiveness without being able to ask for it, or explain why she needed it.

  CHAPTER

  21

  “OF course she did it!” Murray shouted. Cluny sat on a window ledge in Zach’s office, watching, feeling numb. He was concerned for Murray, who was the color of wet putty.

  Zach also continued to study him thoughtfully. “Why?”

  “To get publicity for her book. Have you read the first chapter? She isn’t talking about the first contacts between white men and Indians; she’s talking about aliens coming to Earth. It’s as clear as crystal what she’s up to. She’s talking about Earth as a huge reservation. She dropped her little bombshell, and then excused herself. She had work to do. There were others more qualified to work on the message; she had done all she could with it. Bullshit! She knew she didn’t dare hang around or she’d be tripped in one of her own lies!”

  “How did she get from the message to the orbits, the falling away of the pieces, the whole thing? Everyone who’s studied it thinks that’s exactly what it means.”

  “Her father told her.”

  “When she was twelve, thirteen? Doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  “Okay, I don’t know how. But now she’s got the press and television people on our heels. It’s gone out; people out there believe exactly the way we all did that first day. You can’t put the steam back in the pot.”

  Quietly Zach said, “Some of the greatest cathedrals were built out of belief. The pyramids. Discoveries made, explorations arranged. A few words spoken in the right place at the right time, you’ve got a belief system that nothing can shake, and it can do miracles.”

  “But I know it’s a lie,” Murray whispered.

  “Don’t you think some of the popes knew their saints were frauds? They didn’t expose them, risk more than they could have gained. What would it accomplish if you exposed Jean?”

  “If they find out, what will that do to the program, us, the Russians? It’s a time bomb and the fuse is too short. You can’t sit on something like this. Sooner or later someone will corner that girl and get a straight answer and it’ll all blow.”

  Cluny stood up abruptly. “What are you saying?”

  Zach waved him away. “He’s right, of course. Her name will come into it, probably sooner than any of us anticipates. The dam is breached and the torrent will follow.” He looked at Cluny and said, “We’ll have to keep her under wraps for the time being.”

  “Where?”

  “There must be places,” Zach said vaguely.

  Cluny had a vision of Jean walking across the desert, moving like the moon sailing through the sky. He saw her again riding by his side across the flat wastelands of Idaho, the wind playing with her hair. There would be places, he thought dully. Places where guards locked gates at night, where other guards ate meals with her, cooked for her, filled her orders for her needs, all very polite, very civilized. She would not want, he knew; everything would be provided.

  “When?”

  “We’ll pick her up today. We’ll keep her in the safe apartment where you both stayed when you first got to town. In a week or so we’ll have a better place ready, out in the country somewhere.”

  “You’re not even going to find out for sure first?”

  Zach shook his head. “You don’t understand, Cluny. I believe what she said, what Schmidt confirms. I won’t see her, question her, or have anyone else question her. I haven’t asked you what you believe and I don’t want to know. Your only comment to reporters is no comment. You and Murray both. I take all questions, this office.”

  Cluny looked away from him. Banish the doubt, don’t test faith, he thought, and you were safe. He went to the door. “Can I see her before she vanishes?”

  “Suit yourself. You know where it is. We’ll have her there in a couple of hours.”

  Murray had spread it all out for Cluny the night before. He had stormed, raged, stamped back and forth at the park bench that had become their conference room.

  “The Russians must suspect!” he had said finally, and in exhaustion had dropped to the bench beside Cluny. “I found it without any trouble. Eighteen years ago Klyuchevsky’s brother, Pietr, was tortured and finally killed in Peru. He was accused of smuggling pre-Columbian goodies from the country. He was caught with a few relics, gold relics. They tortured him to try to get information about others he had already got rid of. He died without talking. Klyuchevsky got them somehow, and he knew he couldn’t unload them, or he’d be hauled in. He and Brighton cooked up the glorious idea of a hoax to end them all. Pure Aztec gold, hardened a little, inscribed with an alien message. Pretty!”
He snorted with rage. “Other men dream of getting rich off stuff like that. He played games with it.”

  Some of the Russians suspected, Cluny knew, remembering Alex. He walked through the mobbed streets without seeing the people at all. Many were going back to work, but the effects were not apparent yet, and they would never catch up again with the housing shortage. He seldom saw actual individuals, just mobs, and when one person, several persons did impinge on his consciousness, he hurried to get out of the crowds. At those times he yearned to be back on Alpha, away from the noise, the smells, the press of strange bodies and their hungers and needs. From Alpha the world was calm, serene, beautiful; up there no one had to think about the pain and the despair and hopelessness that was inescapable here. Alex did not believe in the message, he thought clearly, and possibly never had. And Alex did not care. Maybe all over the world people were finding themselves becoming disbelievers, and none of them was saying anything, each one hoping no one else would puncture the balloon either. Someone bumped him hard, and he cursed, but didn’t look around, didn’t care if he bumped back.

  He thought of the detective Lee Cavanaugh Davies had hired, how casually Murray had said that he had suffered a fatal accident. He stopped and was nearly knocked down from behind. He didn’t even curse this time, but staggered slightly, started to walk again. The good guys, he thought bleakly, his side. He remembered what Murray had said once: It would be bad no matter who made the first move, but it would be worse if the Russians did. Relative good and evil: it always came down to that after all. His side, the good guys in pursuit of knowledge, swatting down opposition effortlessly without a twinge of conscience, because their goals were noble. He came to a stop again, and this time realized he had arrived at the apartment house.

  Cluny stared at her furiously. Now that he faced her, there was nothing to say.