Voyagers IV - The Return Read online

  “I’m certain of it. He said as much himself.”

  “But the devil is the Prince of Lies. How can we trust his word if he’s in league with Satan?”

  “He’s a man,” she insisted. “A very unusual man, that’s obvious, but a human being just like you or me.”

  Craig began to shake his head.

  “He can help us,” she said.

  “Help us?”

  Angelique glanced up at the ceiling. Turning back to the bishop, she whispered, “Is this office safe? Has it been swept today?”

  Bishop Craig nodded mutely.

  Still, Angelique dragged her chair around the desk and next to the bishop’s. Keeping her voice low, “If we play our cards carefully, we can get Stoner to help us.”

  “Help us do what?” Craig whispered.

  “The Archbishop is too old and tired to deal with this . . . opportunity.”

  Craig sat up straighter in his chair. “What do you mean?”

  “Stoner is a visitor from the stars. He has access to technology that is far beyond anything we know of.”

  “He says he’s more than human.”

  “He is using technology that’s beyond human capabilities. But he himself is as human as you or I.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course. And we can use him to help convince the Archbishop to retire and name you as his replacement.”

  Craig blinked at her. Twice. Three times. At last he whispered, “Do you really think . . . ?”

  “If we can gain access to his alien technology there’s no end to what we can accomplish!”

  “But . . . but . . . he said we’re heading for nuclear war. He said we could destroy ourselves. The whole human race!”

  Angelique answered confidently, “Yes, he did say that. But if we make the right moves, we could avert the coming war. With Stoner’s help you could become the savior of the human race.”

  Craig’s dark eyes snapped at her. “That’s blasphemy!” Then he added more softly, “Almost.”

  Looking properly abashed, Angelique quickly amended, “Their temporal savior, I meant to say. You’ll be doing the Lord’s work, and the whole world will bless you for it.”

  Craig’s face softened into a beatific smile that slowly dissolved into a worried frown. “But how do we do this? How do we even start?”

  Sister Angelique did not hesitate for an eyeblink. “We keep a close hold on this man Tavalera. He’s the key to Stoner, and Stoner is the key to everything.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Stoner still found it a little confusing to be in several places at once. Space-time isn’t sequential, he reminded himself. That’s only an illusion because we usually move at such slow velocities. Time flow changes with speed. Even Einstein understood that.

  Still, to be on the Moon yet remain connected with Tavalera’s mind was slightly disconcerting. Stoner saw through Tavalera’s eyes that Sister Angelique was leading him to an apartment in one of the glass towers of the New Morality’s complex in Atlanta.

  “I think you’ll be comfortable here. Don’t you?” Angelique was asking Tavalera as she showed him through the little suite’s sitting room, bedroom, and kitchenette.

  “Comfortable enough.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “How long do I have to stay here?” Tavalera asked, starting to feel uneasy. He realized that the apartment had all the trappings of a fancy, high-priced jail.

  Putting on a face of troubled innocence, Angelique said, “I wish I knew, Raoul. We’re trying to arrange an audience for Dr. Stoner with the Archbishop, but that might take some time.”

  Tavalera didn’t entirely believe her, Stoner knew. But Tavalera said, “I’d like to call my mother, then. Tell her I’m all right.”

  “Certainly,” said Sister Angelique, glancing at the phone console by the sitting room sofa.

  “And Goddard,” he added. “I ought to call Holly Lane and see if—”

  “One thing at a time, Raoul. Call your mother. Make yourself comfortable here. They’re sending up some clothes for you, and the freezer should be full of prepared meals.”

  He realized he was being dismissed. “So I just stay here by myself until you’re ready to talk to me again?”

  Angelique smiled for him. “I could come by this evening, if you wish. We could have dinner together.”

  Tavalera grinned at that. “Okay. Great.”

  She headed for the door, turned back to him, and said, “I might be a little later than you normally eat dinner. I have a very busy schedule.”

  Shrugging, he said, “That’s okay. I’ll wait for you. I got no place to go.”

  She turned and left the apartment, closing the door softly behind her. Tavalera tried the knob. Sure enough, the door was locked.

  Stoner felt the waves of emotion that surged through Tavalera. Anger. Frustration. More than a little fear. But there was curiosity there, as well. All to the good, Stoner thought. Curiosity is one of our strongest assets.

  Tavalera moseyed through the apartment, opening drawers in the bedroom, glancing into the immaculate bathroom, poking his head into the fully stocked cabinets in the kitchenette. Finally, with nothing else to do, he sat on the sofa and looked around for a remote control to turn on the wall screen.

  “It’s voice activated,” Stoner told him.

  Tavalera jerked with shock.

  “I’m sorry,” Stoner apologized. “I suppose you’ll need some time to get used to the fact that I can be inside your head.”

  “Yeah,” Tavalera said shakily.

  “Just say ‘screen on.’ ”

  “Screen on,” Tavalera called out.

  The entire wall dissolved to show a three-dimensional view of a family sitting around a dining room table, saying grace before dinner. They all looked so relentlessly cheerful and wholesome.

  Tavalera flicked through two dozen channels: family comedies, sports, news shows about the wars overseas, an ancient dramatic presentation of Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Then Stoner appeared, fully three-dimensional, bigger than life, looking like an Old Testament prophet in a sport shirt.

  “How d’you do that?” Tavalera demanded of the image.

  Stoner smiled slightly and answered, “It’s a gift.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you’d find it easier to talk with me this way.”

  “They’ll be watching us, y’know. This whole place must be rigged with cameras and snoopers six ways from Tuesday.”

  Shaking his head slightly, Stoner said, “All they’ll see and hear is you watching that family comedy, like a good, law-abiding citizen.”

  Tavalera thought about that for a few seconds and decided that Stoner could get away with that.

  “So what am I supposed to do now?”

  “I thought you might like to talk to your friend on Goddard— without your communication being censored.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yes.” Stoner hesitated, then added, “And in real time, if you like.”

  Tavalera’s eyes went round. “You mean, no lag time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How d’you— Oh, never mind! Lemme talk to Holly!”

  Feeling slightly guilty, Stoner watched Tavalera for a few minutes more as he talked with Holly Lane, out on the Goddard habitat. The young man seemed stunned, at first, that they could speak to each other without the hours-long time lag caused by the distance between Saturn and Earth.

  “I don’t know how he does it,” Tavalera was saying with a bemused grin on his long-jawed face. “But it works.”

  Holly’s light brown eyes sparkled with interest. “Raoul, if you could find out how he does it . . . poosh! What a discovery that’d be! Real-time communications through the whole twirling solar system! Cosmic!”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Tavalera replied unenthusiastically.

  “F’sure!” Holly insisted.

  “Look, Holly, we got real worries he
re Earthside. This guy Stoner says we might have a nuclear war.”

  “What? That’s screwy! Nukes have been banned since before you and I were born.”

  “That doesn’t mean people can’t make new ones,” said Tavalera gloomily.

  Holly fell silent for a few heartbeats, then, “Well, that means we’ve gotta get you back here to Goddard right away. You’ll be safe here.”

  Tavalera nodded absently, but he muttered, “Really safe? I mean, if Earth blows itself up, if we wipe ourselves out here on Earth, how long could Goddard last?”

  “We’re self-sufficient,” Holly said immediately. “We don’t need supplies from Earth and we don’t take orders from Earth. We govern ourselves.”

  “Yeah, but there’s only ten thousand or so people on Goddard.”

  “We could grow. We could build new habitats, keep the human race going.”

  “Could you? If Earth wipes itself out, how will the people on Goddard react?”

  Holly insisted, “It wouldn’t be the end of the human race, Raoul. There’s Selene and the other settlements on the Moon.”

  “They might get sucked into the war.”

  She grew more serious. “Okay, whatever. All this means is that we’ve got to get you back here soon’s we can.”

  Tavalera shook his head. “They’re not gonna let me go, Holly.”

  “Who’s not?”

  “The government. The New Morality. They’re all tangled up together now. And they won’t let me leave; I’m pretty certain of that.”

  Holly’s square chin went up a notch. “Yeah? Well, we’ll just see about that!”

  Despite himself, Tavalera grinned at her. She’s a fighter, he said to himself. But then he thought, It won’t do her any good, though. Angelique and Bishop Craig and the rest of them won’t let me go.

  It was something of a shock when he realized that he didn’t want to go back to Goddard and Holly. Not yet. Not while he was joined with Stoner. There’s too much going on here for me to run away, Tavalera told himself. I’ve got to stay and help straighten things out.

  Stoner smiled to himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  Magnificent desolation, Stoner thought. That’s what Buzz Aldrin called it when he first stepped out onto the bleak, airless, battered surface of the Moon.

  It’s been nearly a century and a half since Aldrin and Armstrong made the first landing here, Stoner said to himself. The Moon’s surface hasn’t changed much.

  He stood encased in a sphere of energy that held air and warmth, so that he could walk across the Moon’s dusty surface in his shirtsleeves. Hard radiation poured out of the black, star-studded sky, together with an endless infall of microscopic meteors, dust motes drifting in from space. The energy sphere deflected it all.

  Stoner was pacing across the rounded, smooth crest of the slumped mountains that formed the ringwall of the giant crater Alphonsus. Spread across one segment of the crater floor were landing pads for spacecraft and broad swaths of dark circles of solar energy farms, where solarvoltaic cells manufactured out of lunar silicon drank in the Sun’s unfailing energy and produced electricity for the human race’s largest lunar community. Built into the ringwall mountains, Selene was an independent nation, and self-sufficient—almost.

  Yes, they grow their own food and generate their own electrical power, Stoner thought. With a population approaching fifty thousand they probably have a large-enough gene pool to survive without bringing up newcomers from Earth.

  Could Selene and the other lunar communities survive Earth’s suicidal war? Would these people want to survive after watching their home world go up in nuclear flames? Or would the madmen of Earth throw missiles at the Moon and try to complete their self-slaughter?

  We gave them energy shields, he remembered from his previous life. We learned from the star visitor how to make energy shields big enough to protect entire cities from nuclear explosions. But there’s no trace of that now. Their cities are open, naked to attack. They have antimissile systems, but they’re crude and certainly not foolproof.

  Stoner paced carefully along the crest of the ringwall. Down on the crater floor a spacecraft leaped off one of the concrete launchpads and hurtled into the dark sky, silent in the airless vacuum. In the farther distance tractors kicked up puffs of dust as they rolled across the barren ground.

  It’s a different world, Stoner knew. Different from the world we left back in 1985.

  He thought back to the alien starship, the vessel that had changed his life so completely, and his astonishment at finding that it was a sarcophagus, a coffin that bore the dead and lovingly preserved body of an intelligent alien. Stoner understood the message the dead alien symbolized: We exist. You are not alone in the universe. We mean you no harm. Learn from the technology that drives this starship. Come out to the stars and join us.

  Eventually, Stoner did just that. Saddened, disappointed at the primitive, savage attitudes of his fellow human beings, Stoner took his wife and two children and fled to the stars, leaving Earth far behind them. What they found in their journey changed them profoundly and forced them to return to Earth—burdened with a terrible knowledge.

  Tapping into his starship’s mind, Stoner’s vision was flooded with the immensity of space, whirlpools of galaxies spinning in their stately dance of eternity, islands of light and beauty in the empty darkness of infinite space, expanding as far as his mind could encompass. He narrowed his gaze to the Milky Way galaxy, hundreds of billions of stars coalescing out of primordial gas and dust, blazing into light and life, only to gutter and inevitably die. The vision never failed to stir him, to fill him with awe and wonder and the bitter remorse that stems from the knowledge that death is the inescapable counterpart of life. For even at the core of the immense spiral of the Milky Way a titanic black hole was gobbling up stars and spewing lethal radiation outward across the galaxy.

  Closing his physical eyes, Stoner saw the long curving arcs of the geodesics that transected space-time, glowing golden and beckoning against the limitless expanse of the universe. No, not the universe, he reminded himself. It’s a multiverse, alive, growing, changing constantly. There are more dimensions than we suspected, he now knew. Space and time are richer and more complex than any human mind understood.

  He reluctantly admitted to himself that star travel was forever a one-way journey. You literally could not return home. The very act of hurtling among the stars at velocities close to the speed of light changed the universe around you. Somewhere in the entangled geodesics of space-time there still existed the world that Stoner had departed from, a world where cities were protected by energy shields and human civilization used the alien technology carried by their dead star visitor to shift the nature of matter and energy as they needed.

  The Earth that he returned to was almost the same but not quite. The Earth of this worldline had never had a star visitor, never received the gift of the dead alien’s technology. The differences between the worldline that Stoner had left and the one he returned to were slight but significant, possibly fatal.

  The Earth of this worldline was rushing toward doom. There are other Earths, other worldlines, Stoner knew. But this was the one he now existed in. This was the one he had to save.

  Could this civilization last long enough to get through the coming crisis? Stoner wondered. Authoritarian governments armed with nuclear and biological weapons could wipe out the human race, perhaps by accident, perhaps by malice, perhaps by the inspired zeal of true believers. No matter how deep the faith, no matter how repressive the government, greed and hate and lust and fear still existed, palpable forces that could drive men and women to terrible, deadly evils.

  And there would be no gifts from the stars to help, not in this worldline. There’s only me, Stoner said to himself.

  “Us,” said his wife. “We’re in this together, Keith: you, me, and our children.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Stoner wondered what his best approach would be to make contact with
Douglas Stavenger. He had scanned the history webs and learned that not only was Stavenger regarded as the founder of Selene, but he also was still crucially important in the lunar nation’s government, although he had not held any formal post for many years.

  Standing atop Mt. Yeager, the tallest mountain in the ringwall girdling the crater Alphonsus, Stoner decided on a conventional approach—of sorts.

  He called Stavenger on the phone. It was a simple matter to tap into Selene’s internal communications net, so while Stoner stood out in the open protected by his bubble of energy he phoned the man.

  Stavenger was at home, in his modest living room in the residential area that ran along the fourth level belowground. He was studying a proposal that Selene’s governing council was considering, a proposal to help finance a robotic space probe that would be sent to the Alpha Centauri star system.

  Good timing, Stoner thought, smiling to himself. I can help them with that. And more.

  He activated Stavenger’s phone.

  Douglas Stavenger was sitting at his desk admiring the three-dimensional view of the proposed star probe that hovered in midair before his eyes. The hologram was crisp and detailed, showing the probe’s wide metallic lightsail connected by buckyball cables to the tiny spacecraft, which bristled with sensors and antennae. The proposal had been submitted to Selene’s governing council by the Yamagata Corporation. Yamagata was building a complex of solar-power satellites in orbit around Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, and was offering to devote some of the energy they generated to power a lightsail ship to the Alpha Centauri star system. Selene would have to build the spacecraft. An unmanned probe, Stoner saw.

  Uncrewed, Jo’s voice sounded in his mind.

  With a sheepish grin, Stoner corrected himself: uncrewed.

  Stavenger was solidly built, with skin just a shade darker than a deeply suntanned Caucasian’s. Wearing a comfortable velour pullover and shapeless denims, he appeared to be no more than thirty, despite his real age.

  A soft tone told him that someone was calling on his private line. Brows knitting with mild annoyance, Stavenger thought briefly about ignoring the interruption and letting the caller leave a message. But curiosity got the better of him, as it usually did. Who’d be calling on my private line? he wondered. It might be important.