Earthbound Read online

  “It won’t be 300 million,” Paul said. “It won’t even be 100 million.”

  The bureaucrat’s face didn’t change. “You understand what we’re facing. It will be a disaster of biblical scope no matter what we do. We do want to maximize the number who survive, but we also want to preserve a semblance of the American way of life.”

  Paul nodded. “That will be interesting. I’ll call you next from the airplane.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me. “Cheeseburgers and idiotic television? I wonder what the American way of life is nowadays.”

  “If they really want maximum survival,” Namir said, “they’re aiming for a totally protective welfare state that’s also a police state. Which identifies the ones chosen to survive, and lets the rest go find some way to die. Or is there some humane alternative?”

  “We have plenty of time to talk about it en route. We’ll be in the air most of the day.”

  “Slow plane?” Alba said.

  Namir nodded slowly. “We’ll be going by way of Russia, of course. They’d never allow us to take Snowbird there if we went to Camp David first.”

  “Of course. Over the Pole,” I said. Hoping the Others don’t decide to turn off the power prematurely.

  We loaded the bus in a hurry, deciding to hold on to all the food and weapons. We could use up the perishables on the way to Camp David, and the rest might come in handy next week.

  Alba did the driving; she knew the way, and nobody else but Card had driven during this century. Leaving the place, we passed a sight I could have lived without, a trio of buzzards tearing up the body on the sidewalk. Paul winced at the sight but didn’t say anything.

  The guards at the airfield gate knew Alba, of course, and waved us through. There were a couple of dozen planes parked around, but she followed a line painted on the tarmac that led to Runway 4, where a woman was standing by a small passenger plane.

  One problem was immediately manifest: you got into the plane by climbing a narrow set of stairs that led to a narrow door—not wide enough for a Martian. Fortunately, the baggage compartment was pressurized, and the bay was a couple of meters wide. The ramp going up to it was a conveyor belt; she gave a thumping Martian laugh as she rolled up.

  Paul was talking to the woman while this was going on. She was a flight controller who also flew, but she’d never piloted one this big, and she’d never flown without GPS. Paul hadn’t either, in a real-life situation, but in Space Force training he’d flown everything from gliders to spaceships. By the seat of his pants, as they say.

  They went up into the cockpit and checked out the emergency navigation system, which could work by compass headings and a VR cube that showed what the ground looked like from any altitude over any place on Earth. Goggles that could see through clouds.

  It only took a few minutes to load up our provisions and weaponry. “Well,” Alba said, “I guess I’ll be leaving you now.”

  “Not if you don’t want to,” Paul said, looking down the aisle of the plane. “This is an alien planet to us; you and Card are our native guides. You know modern weapons, and the riot gun doesn’t work for anyone else.”

  Everybody murmured or nodded assent, even me. Though I didn’t care for the way he carefully didn’t look at her when he knew I was watching.

  Well, we’ve always given each other that freedom. But neither of us had exercised it in some years. Not to mention light-years.

  The plane started taxiing, and there was some discussion over the radio when Paul turned left. For some reason, they thought we were going east. We took off headed for the North Pole.

  In retrospect, I suppose they had the ability and authority to shoot us down. I’m glad I didn’t think of that until later.

  The ride was pretty bumpy and loud until we got to cruising altitude. Then it was just a mild vibration, with the noise from the wind and engine canceled out.

  Alba came up the aisle and sat next to me, offering to share a packet of nuts and dried fruit.

  “This may seem funny,” she said, “but I’m not quite clear on what you and Paul actually did. I mean, I was never good at history. That was like forty years before I was born.”

  Fair enough. What did I know about 2014, forty years before I was born? Had they started building the space elevator yet? I’d have to look it up.

  6

  “It kind of started with the space elevator. Our family—Card and me and our parents—won a sort of lottery. There was a small colony on Mars, mostly single scientists, that wanted to start accepting families.

  “So we took the space elevator up to orbit—two pretty boring weeks—and then got on an old-fashioned spaceship to Mars. That was most of a year, but it wasn’t boring. I started college, VR to the University of Maryland, and met Paul, and we fell in love.”

  “He was a lot older than you?”

  “Well, yeah, I’d just turned nineteen and he was thirty-one. But it worked out.”

  “I can see.”

  How sweet. “Well, it caused no end of trouble with the administration of Mars, namely one walking disaster, Dargo Solingen. She clearly disapproved, and did everything she could to keep us apart.”

  “Which had the opposite effect, I suppose.”

  “That’s for sure. Well, we’d been in Mars, as they say, for little more than a year, and she caught me in an unforgivable situation, swimming with a bunch of other kids in a new water tank. Since I was the oldest, she rained all kinds of shit on me. Including barring me from the surface.

  “Well, that didn’t last. I snuck out after midnight, planning to walk a couple of kilometers and come straight back—Card had figured out how to disable the alarm on the air lock.

  “But I had an accident. Crossed a place where the crust was eggshell-thin and fell some distance to the floor of a lava tube.

  “I broke my ankle, and that should’ve been the end of it. Nobody knew where I was, and the radio didn’t work.”

  “Which was when the Martians came to the rescue. I remember that.”

  “One Martian, anyhow, the one we called Red. They all look pretty much the same, at least to us, but they wear different colors according to their family. Red was the only one who wore red.”

  “Of course I know about him.”

  “Everyone should. Anyhow, he collected me and flew me back to their underground city, where they used some kind of mumbo-jumbo medical science to fix my ankle.

  “It did occur to me to wonder why these weird-looking aliens should be living in an earthlike environment in a huge pressurized cave under the Martian surface. I asked Red, and he said he didn’t know, and at the time I wondered whether he was holding something back. He wasn’t; it was a mystery to them as well.”

  “They didn’t know they’d been built by the Others,” Alba said.

  “Yes and no. They had a tradition, almost mystical, that the Others had created them and brought them from someplace unimaginably far away. When they first told us about that, it sounded like a creation myth. But it was literally true, and explained a lot.”

  “Like how they had this high-tech life but knew nothing about science.”

  “Right. You know about the Martian pulmonary cysts?”

  “The Martian lung crap, yeah.”

  “That’s what brought us together, Martians and humans. Nobody believed my story about these Martians living in a cave—well, my mother almost believed—but then everybody under about the age of twenty caught the lung crap. I’d brought the spores back with me.”

  “So Red showed up with the cure.”

  “In essence, yes. And the humans and Martians started studying each other.

  “Well, the Martians had been studying us for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.

  “They told us about the Others, but we dismissed it as myth-making, a kind of religion—you know, these almighty beings gave birth to us a jillion years ago.�
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  “And then you found out it was literally true.”

  “That’s right.” The yellow family, the ones who wore only yellow, specialized in memory, and they swore that the memory of the Others was real. It was vague and patchy because it was tens of thousands of years old, but it wasn’t a myth.

  “Then, in 2079, the Others proved it. A signal that triggered strange behavior in the yellow family. They started babbling weird nonsense—but they each said the same nonsense over and over. Turned out to be a binary code that basically told us who the Others were and what their body chemistry was, nitrogen and silicon. They lived in liquid nitrogen, and this one—there was only one in the solar system—lived in a liquid-nitrogen sea on Triton, Neptune’s moon. It had lived there for twenty-seven thousand years.

  “Once we cracked the code and tried to communicate with it, we found out that it spoke English. And Chinese and German and whatever.”

  “But they couldn’t just call and say hello?”

  “No. It was like a series of tests, to see how sophisticated we could be. The first test was contact with the Martians, and in fact was why the Martians were there.”

  “I understand that one. It was like a signal to the Others that we had gone to another planet. Which woke up the one on Triton. But it woke up knowing how to speak Chinese and all?”

  “We don’t think so. We think it absorbed a huge amount of information from the yellow family as soon as it woke up. At least that’s what the Martians say.

  “The last test was playing for keeps. We were in Earth orbit, and Red found out that he was essentially a time bomb. In a couple of days, he would explode, giving out more energy than the Sun. The seas underneath us would boil; the air would be blown away. I guess you know what happened then.”

  She nodded gravely. “Paul took Red to the other side of the Moon, so when he blew up, the earth wasn’t hurt.”

  “That’s right, and perhaps if we had left it at that, everything would be fine. The Other that had been on Triton blew it up and went home to Wolf 25, almost twenty-five light-years from here.”

  “But we had to follow it.”

  “There were various opinions. A lot of people wanted to build a war fleet and go after the bastards, which was not really possible, even with free energy.”

  “It’s always been free for me,” Alba said. I hadn’t thought of that. “Go on?”

  “Well, at the other extreme were people who just wanted to say ‘good riddance,’ and get on with life. I have a lot of sympathy for that idea.

  “There was a lot of arguing that eventually wound up with the compromise that started, I guess, before your parents were born.”

  “My mother was born in 2090.”

  “Two years after we launched. Well, the bright idea was to build one starship, and send it off to Wolf 25 on a peace mission.”

  “But then they also built a fleet here in orbit, supposedly to protect the earth.”

  “Or at least to mollify the hawks,” I said, “the ones who demanded a military response. But it was gnats versus an elephant.”

  “I know a lot of people who thought it was a bad idea,” Alba said. “Almost all my teachers in school.”

  “I can imagine. We had a kind of meeting with one of the Others, who showed us evidence of what they could do, as if a further demonstration was necessary. Did you hear what they did to their own home planet?”

  “Yeah, I saw that on the cube. How they used to be, well, not human but sort of. But they evolved themselves into these ice-cold monsters who lived on a frozen moon. So they came back and destroyed their own home planet?”

  “In self-defense, they pointed out. They showed us the remains of the fleet that the home planet had been building to attack them. Sort of like our fleet here, but a thousand times closer.

  “So we came back and, in essence, brought the eyes and ears of the Others with us. That was the human-looking avatar that was on the cube.

  “And so they blew up the Moon to keep us out of space. We tried anyhow, and so they pulled the plug on civilization.”

  She nodded, thoughtful. “They could have just killed us.”

  “I’m sure they still have that option. You have to remember that this was all preplanned. The Others can’t beat the speed of light; it will be almost twenty-five years before they actually know of the fleet, and twenty-five more before they could come back and do something about it. So all of their actions—blowing up the Moon, turning off the free power—have been in place for a long time.”

  “Like booby traps, waiting for us to set them off.”

  “That’s right. And who’s to say they don’t have another one, waiting to blow us off the face of the earth if we misbehave?”

  “Or put everything back the way it was, if we don’t.”

  I laughed. “They’re not putting the Moon back together.”

  “You don’t know. Maybe they could.”

  I started to say something about increasing entropy, but let it go. Hell, maybe they could track down all the pieces and rebuild the Moon. And then turn it into green cheese.

  7

  The landing at Novosibirsk was delayed for an hour while they waited for the afternoon sun to melt the ice off the runway. When we got off the plane finally, there was a small crowd waiting, dozens of people and seven Martians. It wasn’t too cold, about noon, bright sun in a deep blue sky. We hurried inside anyhow.

  Two of the Martians, the ones in blue, wanted to hustle Snowbird away and start working on her injury. She made them wait while she said good-bye and thanked us individually.

  “When I first saw you,” she said to me, “you were also injured, stranded on an alien planet. I hope I do as well as you.” She gestured at one of the blue ones. “We even have the same doctor.”

  The blue one nodded at me. “I fixed your ankle sixty-four years ago.”

  “Don’t do everything he says,” I said to Snowbird. “He’s pretty old.” She favored me with a thumping laugh and was gone.

  The Russians couldn’t let us go without eating. Namir answered their questions about what we knew about the rest of the world while they feasted us on thin pancakes rolled around sour cream and pungent caviar, washed down with icy vodka. The last such meal we would ever have, I assumed. When the power went back off, we would be stranded somewhere, presumably far from caviar.

  We got back on the plane, and Paul tried to raise Camp David. A signal was coming through, but it was unintelligible. We charted a course over the Arctic and took off, slithering a bit on the slush that was forming on the runway.

  While we flew south, Dustin took over a little study carrel in the rear of the plane and tried to find out what had happened to Fruit Farm, the Oregon commune where he’d grown up.

  It was still there physically, if it had survived the Martian abdication. Maybe it was better off than most places, being totally independent of the power and communications grid.

  More than a decade before the Martian free power (the year that Dustin’s family left the commune) they had declared total independence, and shut themselves off from the outside world. They had low-voltage solar power and two wind machines, and an environment that allowed year-round subsistence agriculture.

  Recent satellite photos showed a tall stockade enclosing about eighty acres of orderly plats around a village of about a hundred people. Outside the stockade were fruit orchards and fields of grain.

  One day a year, the vernal equinox, Fruit Farm was open to the public. They sold organic produce and gave tours of their utopian compound. At sundown, they closed the doors for another year. They did maintain an organic produce stand outside the stockade.

  It wasn’t a totally hermetic existence. Individuals and families were allowed to join the commune if they had useful skills, and there always was a waiting list. Dustin’s family had spent eight years there, and he looked forward to visiting. If the place still existed, after the past week’s troubles.

  The twelve passenger se
ats unfolded into lumpy beds, angled like chevrons. Some of us rested or napped. Paul took a pill. The plane was on autopilot, but if the Others turned off the power we’d be on a glider looking for a flat place to land.

  We were over Hudson Bay, after about six hours, when we made contact with the president’s people. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I presumed they were livid. They gave us a plane and we hijacked it to Russia. Paul was grinning broadly as he gave them monosyllabic replies.

  The Northeast was greener than I’d expected. Big cities and crowded exurbs, but a lot of forest, too. Broad superhighways with almost no traffic. Occasional knots of pileups, dozens or even hundreds of abandoned cars.

  When we were a couple of hundred miles from Camp David, we were joined by a pair of military jets that moved in close enough to make eye contact. Paul waved and one of them waved back, and they banked off and sped away.

  Namir noted that the day’s travel had reduced our fuel supply from 0.97 to 0.95. We could go around the world fifty times if we wanted to.

  “Let’s hope this thing is productive,” I said, without high hopes. The president must have been the genius who had authorized the rocket launch through the meteor storm, which had so pissed off the Others. But he presumably was the best person to organize a nationwide response to prepare for the coming dark age.

  We landed without incident, and Paul followed directions, taxiing us to a reviewing stand. A lot of people in suits, squinting into the morning sun. No brass band.

  Spatters of applause as we stepped down in random order. Alba grinned broadly when the applause faltered. Who the hell was she?

  We were seated on folding chairs, and a couple of soldiers armed with boxed lunches came out. Room-temperature tuna-salad sandwiches. Not caviar, but I was hungry.

  I scanned the faces of the dignitaries and was a little disappointed not to see President Gold. Then someone introduced President Boyer. A gaunt man in his fifties approached the microphone.

  “He was vice president,” Alba whispered. “Something must have happened to Gold.”