Voyagers IV - The Return Page 12

  “Close display,” he said, and the holographic image dissolved. “Answer phone.”

  Keith Stoner’s strong features took shape, his beard dark, his eyes somber, a solid three-dimensional bust hanging in the air above Stavenger’s desk.

  “The star man!” Stavenger gasped.

  “You recognize me,” said Stoner.

  “I saw your original message, the one you transmitted to our Farside Observatory.”

  With the slightest shake of his head, Stoner said, “You never answered my message.”

  Stavenger pushed himself up from his desk chair and went to the sofa, past a wall screen displaying a real-time view of the crater floor outside, with a fat crescent of Earth hanging in the dark sky above it.

  “We passed it on to the United Nations scientific council, in New York. Our board decided to act in concert with Earth on this.” Then he added, “But some of our younger astronomers are champing at the bit, really giving the council a hard time. They want to answer your message and see what happens.”

  “Good for them.”

  “It’s hard to keep them in check, you know,” Stavenger said almost ruefully.

  Stoner’s image turned to keep facing Stavenger. “But on Earth they’ve decided to stick their heads in the sand and ignore it.”

  Settling himself slowly on the sofa, Stavenger replied, “I’m not surprised. That’s their first reaction to anything new or troubling: ignore it and hope it goes away.”

  Stoner smiled minimally. “Actually, the New Morality is investigating my message. They’d like to believe it’s a hoax.”

  Stavenger puffed out a mild grunt. “I bet they would. And the others? The Islamic League, the Europeans, the Asians?”

  “I haven’t contacted them directly. Not yet. I’m an American, after all; I went to my own first.”

  “I’ve asked the governing council here in Selene to prod them,” Stavenger went on, “but so far I haven’t seen any movement on their part.”

  “As I said, their first assumption is that my message is a hoax,” said Stoner. “I’ve had to convince them otherwise. It’s shaken some of them rather badly.”

  “I can imagine. But what about the imagery of your spacecraft, when it entered the solar system? They think that’s a hoax, as well?”

  “That’s from twenty-two years ago. They weren’t sure that it was connected to my message.”

  “But it is, and you’re real.” The enormity of it began to sink into Stavenger emotionally. Suddenly he thought to ask, “Where are you now? On the Moon? In Selene?”

  “Among other places.”

  “What?”

  “I could join you in your living room, if you like.”

  “You mean, right now?”

  “Right now.” And Stoner appeared in the room, standing by the desk.

  Stavenger rocked back on the sofa slightly, his eyes staring. Stoner recognized the struggle going on inside the man. It’s a lot to accept, he realized. But he’s handling it much better than most of the others.

  Stavenger puffed out a breath, then grinned. “You don’t have to knock, do you?”

  Stoner stepped to the slingback chair next to the sofa and sat down. “Your body is teeming with nanomachines.”

  “How . . .? Can you see inside me?”

  With a shrug, Stoner said, “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s true. They’ve saved my life more than once. They keep me youthful and healthy.”

  “But you can never return to Earth. They’ve banned nanotechnology in all its forms everywhere on Earth.”

  “Selene is my home,” Stavenger said tightly.

  “I see.”

  “You see quite a bit. You really are a star traveler, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Can you accept that?”

  Stavenger leaned forward slightly, hands flat on his knees, as he asked, “Are you really human? Or are you an alien in human disguise? A machine, maybe, or a biological construct? What do they call it? An android?”

  “I was born on Earth,” said Stoner.

  “And?”

  Stoner smiled at him. “You’re a lot more flexible mentally than most of the others. You’re a lot better balanced emotionally, too.”

  With a spread of his hands, Stavenger replied, “I’ve lived a long time and I’ve seen a lot.”

  “You’re not frightened of a star voyager.”

  “Look, let’s stop the fencing around. Our research shows that a Dr. Keith Stoner—”

  “Died in an auto wreck in your year 1985. I know.”

  “So how do you account for yourself?”

  “In the world I was born to, I left Earth in that same 1985 in a starship that we built from information we learned from a visiting alien vessel. The extraterrestrial’s ship was a sarcophagus; the alien inside it was dead.”

  “A mummy?”

  “Right. He’d sent his remains out on a journey to the stars, in an automated ship programmed to seek out the signatures of intelligent life. He wanted to show any civilization that the ship ran across that the universe isn’t lifeless, isn’t without intelligence.”

  Stoner heard Jo warning, You’re not telling him the whole truth.

  Not yet, he replied silently. It’s too soon. He’s taken everything well enough so far, but I don’t want to push him too fast.

  Stavenger was saying, “So you used the alien’s technology to go off to the stars yourself.”

  “Myself, my wife, and my two children.”

  “But . . . our records show that you died in 1985. There wasn’t any starship. You were married, but you’d been divorced.”

  “That’s your worldline,” Stoner said. “Mine was different.”

  Shaking his head, Stavenger said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, not completely. Apparently, when you travel close to the speed of light, everything changes. There’s more than one universe, and somehow they interconnect. Some of them are very similar to one another. Others . . .”

  “The brane theory,” Stavenger muttered. “The idea that there are multiple universes that exist in other dimensions.”

  Stoner nodded. “It’s not exactly correct, but they’re on the right track.”

  “So when you traveled among the stars at nearly the speed of light you left your universe and entered ours.”

  “We thought we were coming back to our own worldline, the Earth that we’d left in 1985.”

  “But it’s different.”

  “Different in some ways. Very similar in others.”

  “Why did you return?”

  Stoner hesitated, his face clouding darkly.

  “It’s about the war that’s brewing down there, isn’t it?” Stavenger asked.

  “You know about it?”

  “We have our intelligence sources.”

  Stoner said nothing.

  “You came back to warn them against starting a nuclear war?”

  “No,” said Stoner. But then he corrected himself, “Yes, in a way. But there’s more to it than that.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Stavenger looked at him disbelievingly. “More to it? What more can there be to the threat of a global nuclear war? They’re going to destroy themselves!”

  “And you, very possibly,” Stoner added bleakly.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Stavenger snapped, almost snarling.

  “Then what are you doing about it?”

  Stavenger shook his head. “What can we do? We can’t ram peace down their throats. There’s more than twelve billion people on Earth. The planet’s bursting at its seams! They’re devouring their resources so furiously that they’ll start dying off from starvation and disease even without a war.”

  “Once, I thought that opening up the space frontier would add enormous new sources of raw materials and energy for Earth,” Stoner said.

  “Only if they control their population growth,” Stavenger countered heatedly. “All they’ve done by importin
g resources from space is allow their population to boom faster, bigger.”

  Stoner saw the agitation on his face, the bitterness in his tone.

  “So now they blame us for their troubles,” Stavenger went on. “They claim that corporations like Humphries Space Systems and Astro have ruined the metals markets on Earth. They’re talking about an embargo on imports from space, a move that could wipe out the rock rats out in the Asteroid Belt and even hurt Selene economically.”

  “But they use the power satellites,” Stoner said. “They couldn’t get along without them.”

  Bobbing his head in agreement, Stavenger replied, “Sure, they need the power satellites. But they don’t want to let any of their people emigrate from Earth and they’ve cut travel from anywhere off-Earth back to home almost down to zero. They don’t want to have any contact with us.”

  “They’re frightened of people who’ve been off-Earth,” Stoner said. “They’re afraid that people who’ve lived in different worlds will contaminate them with new ideas.”

  “And show the flaws in their own societies,” Stavenger added.

  “So they close their doors to you.”

  “And their minds.”

  “And their situation grows more desperate each year,” Stoner muttered.

  “It’s worse than that,” Stavenger said. “They’re separating themselves from us. Isolating themselves. If they continue along the path they’re following now, the human race will split into two subspecies: those who live off-Earth and those who remain on Earth.”

  Stoner understood the consequences. “Earth will sink into poverty and ignorance—if they don’t blow themselves to hell first.”

  “They’re building nuclear weapons again,” Stavenger agreed.

  “A nuclear war could kill them all,” Stoner said. “It could scour Earth clean of all life.”

  “No,” Stavenger said. “Not everything, not—”

  “Everything!” Stoner insisted. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen worlds that destroyed themselves. Civilizations that blew themselves apart. Intelligent species that died because they outproduced their natural resources. Planet after planet, world after world . . . they kill themselves, one way or another. Intelligence is very clever about finding ways to commit suicide.”

  “And you think that’s what we’re going to do?”

  “That’s where you’re heading.”

  “Extinction,” Stavenger muttered.

  “But you can survive here on the Moon. You’re already dug in. Even if they throw missiles at you, you can shoot them down before they get here.”

  “But could we survive without Earth?” Stavenger asked. “Our economy depends on exporting Clipperships and glassteel to Earth. And we import biological products, plant products for pharmaceuticals, feedstock to replenish our hydroponic farms.”

  Stoner asked, “Can your gene pool survive without fresh inputs from Earth?”

  Stavenger hesitated, then replied, “I don’t know,” his voice low, almost frightened.

  “Neither do I. You’ve got about almost a hundred thousand people living in your various lunar communities. A few thousand miners and prospectors scattered through the Asteroid Belt. A few hundred scientists on Mars. Construction teams at Mercury. Research stations around Venus and Jupiter.”

  “And the habitat at Saturn,” Stavenger added. “Ten thousand people there.”

  “Is it enough? If Earth self-destructs, will that be enough to keep the human race going?”

  “It was during the Stone Age,” Stavenger said. “The human race was only a handful of people then.”

  “But they had the whole planet available to them.”

  Stavenger looked into Stoner’s eyes. “You really think they’ll kill everything? Down to the bacteria?”

  Stoner nodded. “It’ll be billions of years before complex life-forms evolve again. Even at that, there’s no guarantee that intelligence will arise again. Maybe it’d be better if it doesn’t.”

  “No! I can’t believe that.”

  Stoner shrugged. “The question is, can the human race survive if Earth is sterilized? Are your communities here on the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system enough to sustain the species?”

  “If they aren’t . . .”

  Stoner grunted. “If they aren’t, then the human race joins all those others in extinction.”

  “Extinction,” Stavenger repeated.

  “Extinction is the natural fate of species,” Stoner said as if reciting a school lesson. “Most species live for a couple of million years and then disappear or evolve into something new.”

  “Humankind isn’t even a million years old,” Stavenger said. “Not Homo sapiens, at least. Our species only appeared a few hundred thousand years ago, at most.”

  “Maybe we’ll break the universe’s speed record for self-annihilation,” said Stoner with a bitter grimace.

  “We could emigrate to the stars,” Stavenger said, brightening. “We could move out of the solar system altogether. There are other Earth-like planets out there.”

  “True enough,” said Stoner.

  “It would be costly, though. Enormously expensive.”

  “How many could afford to immigrate? Enough to preserve the species?”

  “Maybe. With your help.” Stavenger brightened a little. “That’s why you’ve come back, isn’t it?”

  “No,” said Stoner.

  “No? But then . . . why . . . ?”

  Stoner looked up at the wall screen view of Earth hanging above the barren surface of the Moon: Earth, shining blue oceans and swaths of glowing white clouds sweeping across it.

  “There’s more than twelve billion people living there. I don’t intend to write them off. They deserve better. We’ve got to do what we can to save them.”

  “You can’t. Nobody can,” Stavenger insisted.

  “But we’ve got to try,” said Stoner.

  “Why? Why bother?”

  Without an eyeblink’s hesitation Stoner replied, “Because life is precious. Because intelligence is the rarest gift in the universe.”

  “And where does it lead?”

  “That depends.”

  “Depends? Depends on what?”

  “On what we do.”

  Stavenger stared at Stoner for a long, wordless moment.

  “Or what we fail to do,” Stoner added.

  At last Stavenger nodded. “I see. I think I understand. I suppose you’re right. We’ve got to try, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  Sitting up straighter, his fists resting on his thighs, Stavenger asked, “So what do we do? What can we do?”

  “We’ve got to stop this war before it begins.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to see the head of the New Morality movement. They seem to have control of the United States government.”

  Nodding, Stavenger said, “There’s the Islamic leaders, too. They’re not as cohesive as the Western nations. You’ll have to deal with Shiites and Sunnis and other sects.”

  “And the Chinese,” Stoner added.

  Stavenger broke into a rueful grin. “Now there it’s much easier. Ling Po is not only chairman of China’s National Assembly; he’s also head of the New Dao movement. He’s got all the reins of authority in his grubby little fists.”

  “And they’re building nuclear weapons, too, aren’t they?”

  “In an industrial complex in western Xinjiang Province. It’s a pretty remote area.” Stavenger pursed his lips, then added, “Our intelligence people believe that the American military has recommended hitting their center with a missile attack.”

  “Nuclear?”

  “The recommendation is on the President’s desk.”

  “That means that the Americans already have operational nuclear warheads,” Stoner said.

  Nodding, “And missiles.”

  “I’ll have to disable them.”

  Stavenger’s b
rows hiked up. “Disable their warheads? How?”

  “It can be done,” Stoner said. “But only as a last resort.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His face grim, Stoner said, “I could make those warheads malfunction. But what good does that do? I can’t spend the rest of my life acting as some sort of fairy godfather, protecting the world from its own lunacy.”

  Stavenger, who had spent most of his life living on the Moon, smiled slightly at the word “lunacy.”

  “What we need to do is change the mind-sets of the people who launch those missiles,” Stoner said. “The machines aren’t to blame for the disaster that’s coming; the people who launch them are.”

  “You’ve got to get the leaders to change their minds,” Stavenger mused.

  “That’s easy. I can convince individuals to do pretty much what I want them to, so long as it’s not self-destructive. What of it? I convince a person to refuse to launch a missile attack. Once he or she is no longer in command, I’d have to convince the next one in power.”

  “Endless,” Stavenger murmured. “I see.”

  “We’ve got to change the mind-sets of the all the people, everywhere. Turn them against war, against violence. Show them the way to lasting peace.”

  “My god,” Stavenger said, seeing where Stoner was heading. “You’re talking about starting a new religion.”

  Stoner nodded reluctantly. He could see in Stavenger’s mind an image of the crucified Christ. That’s what happens to men who start new religions, he thought.

  CHAPTER 11

  Raoul Tavalera had spent more than an hour talking with Holly Lane. In real time. Despite the billion-plus kilometers between Atlanta and the Goddard habitat, he and Holly chattered away as if they were in the same room. All during their happy, warm conversation a part of Tavalera’s mind wondered at Stoner’s ability to erase the time lag of normal communications.

  How does he do that? Tavalera wondered, realizing that instant communications could make life much easier for the various human settlements scattered across the solar system’s planets and asteroids.