Voyagers IV - The Return Page 16

  Tavalera smiled lazily at her. Stoner had told him that she’d drugged him when she’d come to his apartment for dinner, and now he trusted her about as far as he could throw the planet Jupiter. While the surveillance cameras showed him spending hour after hour watching the wall screens, in actuality—thanks to Stoner—he spent a good deal of his time talking to Holly in the Goddard habitat at Saturn.

  And he studied. Fascinated by Stoner, Tavalera had begun searching history webs and delving into physics and astronomy tutorials. He found that he enjoyed learning about how the universe worked. It wasn’t a perfect world for Tavalera, but he considered that things were a good deal better than Sister Angelique knew. He was a prisoner, he knew, but he was using his imprisonment to expand his mind.

  “Tomorrow, huh?” he asked, forking up a few leaves of salad. The restaurant was busy but almost eerily quiet, filled with employees of the New Morality’s many agencies. Its customers spoke in whispers, as if they were afraid of disturbing anyone. Or afraid of being overheard. Tavalera almost laughed at his own voice, pitched low and soft like all the others.

  Angelique studied his eyes. “Can you get Stoner to come?”

  Nodding, Tavalera said, “He’ll be there.”

  “Will he just . . . appear?”

  With a shrug, “That’s up to him. Might be the best way to convince the Archbishop that he’s for real.”

  “I don’t know,” Angelique said slowly. “The Archbishop is an old man. A sudden shock like that wouldn’t be good for him.”

  “I’ll tell Stoner.”

  “No need to,” said Keith Stoner. He was standing to one side of their table.

  Tavalera dropped his fork clattering to the tiled floor. Angelique gaped up at Stoner.

  “H . . . how long . . . ?” she stammered.

  Stoner pulled up a chair and sat between them. He was wearing a soft gray velour pullover and light blue slacks.

  Smiling at her, he said, “Whatever you say to Raoul, here, you’re also saying to me.”

  She murmured, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there also.”

  “I’m not a god,” Stoner said gently.

  “Is there a god?” Tavalera asked.

  Stoner’s bearded face grew more serious. “That’s a question you’ll have to answer for yourself, Raoul.”

  Recovering her composure, Angelique asked, “Will you meet with Archbishop Overmire tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “Without the theatrics?”

  “Theatri . . . Oh, you mean the way I enter a room.”

  “You don’t want to give the old Archbishop a heart attack,” Tavalera said, grinning.

  Stoner smiled back at him, but when he turned to Angelique his expression grew more serious. “Is that true?” he asked.

  She felt a shock, as if a jolt of electricity had just raced through her body. “Of course it’s true!” she snapped, then felt guilty for being so abrupt. He can see through me! Angelique realized. He can see right into my soul.

  Tavalera seemed to be blissfully unaware of their interplay. “I’m looking forward to meeting the Archbishop,” he said easily. “Maybe he can get me back to Goddard.”

  “In due time, Raoul,” Stoner said, still focused on Angelique. “In due time.”

  But Angelique was thinking, He can see through to my very soul. If he’s not a god, he’s something very close to it.

  APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

  BY YOLANDA VASQUEZ

  It’s sad to see people turn into sheep. It’s sadder still when you realize that nobody forced them into it; they’ve done it to themselves.

  It was the Day of the Bridges that broke the camel’s back. I suppose that’s a poor metaphor, but what I mean is that when the terrorists struck so hard, so brutally, the people yelled bloody murder. They wanted vengeance. They wanted to make sure terrorists could never, never hurt us so badly again.

  The Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida. Terrorists blew up all three on the same day, the same hour, almost at the same minute. Killed nearly a thousand innocent people. It had been almost fifty years since the first big terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center towers, back in 2001. People were shocked out of their wits.

  You see, two entire generations had grown up without worrying about terrorism. They thought it was a thing of the past. Suddenly they were frightened. Suddenly they realized that they weren’t safe.

  And they were angry. Enraged at the shadowy, menacing terrorists and the robed and turbaned people in other lands who danced in the streets at our disaster. Furious with the so-called Homeland Security Department, which had obviously failed to protect our homeland’s security. I remember one Congressman who had been loudly attacking the Transportation Security Administration for making it so inconvenient to get through an airport. Apparently his six-year-old granddaughter had set off an alarm when she’d gone through the screening procedure and they had to strip-search the little girl. Enraged, the Congressman threatened to sponsor legislation that would shut down the TSA altogether.

  But after the Day of the Bridges he screamed even louder that the government “has to do something to protect us from these vicious killers!”

  The President declared a day of mourning and a state of emergency. The Congress passed a war powers resolution by a huge margin. The American flag flew from every household, every automobile, every church and school and public building.

  The New Morality stepped in and accepted a contract from Washington to take over the duties of the Homeland Security Department. Some people objected that a faith-based organization shouldn’t be receiving federal funding, not even for such an obviously nonreligious policing task. But the New Morality declared that the objectors were terrorist sympathizers, and they were quickly rounded up and put in jails or internment camps.

  “You’re either for us or against us,” the New Morality said, drumming the slogan into the public’s mind with endless TV interviews, newscasts, and advertisements.

  Most people were for them. They wanted security, and that’s what the New Morality gave them: hard and fast. The New Morality clamped down on terrorists, real or suspected. In the name of security, the people gave away their liberties. When the Supreme Court tried to close the faith-based internment centers that the New Morality supervised, the White House invoked the President’s war powers to maintain and even enlarge the camps.

  And the Congress passed a Constitutional amendment that ended the lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices and replaced them with mandated retirement. Within less than a year the amendment was ratified by the states almost unanimously. Half the Supreme Court were forcibly retired, replaced by men handpicked by the New Morality.

  So the New Morality not only saved the nation, the whole of North America, from the calamity caused by the climate changes; they also protected the people from the ever-present threat of terrorist attacks. Similar faith-based movements had arisen all over the world: the Holy Disciples in Europe, the Light of Allah (terrorism was a much bigger problem in the Middle East than elsewhere, actually), the New Dao and Red Chrysanthemum in Asia. Everywhere, people chose order and safety over their own individual liberties. Of course, in most parts of the world the people had never known much in the way of individual liberties. They just went the way they were told to go. It was sad to see Americans going that way, too.

  The years rolled on, one after another. Even though much of the United States was gripped in a decades-long drought and many seacoast cities had been flooded, all became peaceful. Even though there had not been a terrorist attack in the United States since the Day of the Bridges, the War on Terror raged on in Latin America, Africa, Indonesia, and the Muslim strongholds in the mountains of central Asia. In America, thanks to the New Morality, governments from the national level down to neighborhood associations were firm in their pursuit of peace and safety and order. The corruption, the vice
, the godlessness that had brought on the greenhouse disaster had been replaced by sanctity, discipline, and obedience. The terrorists who threatened attack were rounded up and put away before they could spill blood. Dissidents who protested about individual rights and the due process of law were swiftly silenced, sent to labor camps and re-education centers. Some were even permanently exiled from Earth.

  A team of scientists trying to study the way the brain works invented a deep brain stimulator. It used tiny electrical currents to activate sections of the brain. Or deactivate them. With DBS you could turn a homicidal maniac into a peaceful, smiling zombie. Or a placard-waving dissident into a placid couch potato. The government latched onto DBS, oh yes they did. That was one form of secularist science that the New Morality blessed and promoted. Vigorously.

  Yes, there was talk of international tensions. There’s always talk of international tensions. The war to root out terrorist regimes wherever they existed simmered on. As did the fruitless, frustrating war against drugs. Some American politicians wanted to annex Canada for its wheat belt and abundant resources of freshwater. Some feared that the fragile détente with Greater Iran and its dominions in the Middle East would inevitably break down and the bloodletting of a half century earlier would resume.

  But at home all was quiet and peaceful, even though food prices and the costs for energy slowly but constantly ramped upward. We were safe in our beds, thanks to the everlasting vigilance of the New Morality.

  And the sheep grazed on.

  CHAPTER 3

  Stoner projected his presence deep into the Asteroid Belt, to the rock that held the artifact.

  It had been moved from its original orbit, he knew. Out in the dark emptiness of the Belt small chunks of rock and metal glided in a broad, intricate pavane, jostling back and forth, their paths constantly changing as their minuscule gravitational forces perturbed each other’s orbits. Sometimes they came close enough to collide in crashes and sideswipes that broke new pebbles and stones off the larger bodies, adding new asteroids to the millions already populating the Belt.

  Human prospectors sought ores in asteroids that were big enough for commercial mining. In their tiny vessels they eagerly combed the Asteroid Belt for its riches. Wars were fought over those resources. Two generations of rock rats made their fortunes in the Belt, or lost their lives.

  That is why, nearly a generation earlier, Stoner had created the artifact inside asteroid 67-046. A sign, a signal, a greeting from the stars. He had thought long and hard about how to announce his return to humankind’s home. He wanted an unmistakable signpost, a signal that clearly told his fellow humans that there was an alien presence among them. Yet he knew that simply announcing his presence would be met by disbelief, fear, xenophobic hatred.

  So he created a work of art, deep inside the rocky asteroid 67-046. Using the alien technology that dwelt within him, Stoner created a mirror that reflected each onlooker’s deepest desire. A combination of light sculpture and digital imagery, the artifact would scan each onlooker’s brain and respond uniquely to that individual as he or she gazed upon it. Stoner placed it inside the asteroid, expecting that by the time humans reached that far into the Belt they might be ready for contact with alien intelligence.

  He was wrong. The artifact was a fiasco. The first humans to discover it were a family of prospectors, a married couple and their two young children who lived aboard their ship as they scouted through the Belt for asteroids valuable enough to claim. They became so enthralled with what they saw in the artifact that they nearly starved to death: the glowing, alluring imagery was hypnotic, its effect on them stronger than any drug.

  Stoner saw to it that they were saved before they died in the womb-like chamber that he had hollowed out. He influenced a patrol vessel belonging to Humphries Space Systems to look into the family’s refusal to answer regular check-in calls. Once the patrol found the ragged, emaciated, enraptured family they sent word back to the top levels of their corporation’s management. Martin Humphries himself soon came racing to see the artifact. Once he did, his exposure to his own inner self unhinged the solar system’s wealthiest man. Humphries suffered an emotional meltdown and was swiftly whisked to a private sanitarium on Earth.

  The asteroid was moved to a new, highly inclined orbit and guarded, so that no one—not even Earth’s scientists—could get to it.

  Stoner watched all this in shocked surprise and with no little disgust. A message from the stars, he told himself, and they try to hide it.

  He thought about the other message that had existed in the solar system for at least a million years: the nanomachines that had created and maintained the brilliant, beautiful rings of Saturn. The solar system had been visited by intelligent aliens when the human race was just beginning to diverge from its apish hominid ancestors. The aliens had built the spectacular rings around Saturn, believing that in time human explorers would be drawn to them by curiosity and awe.

  The aliens were right: humans eventually traveled to Saturn to study its rings. They learned that the rings harbored nanomachines, hardy little mechanisms the size of viruses that busily kept the rings intact and prevented them from collapsing into the giant planet Saturn’s immense churning bulk, as they would have if not artificially maintained.

  Once humans discovered the nanomachines, the alien devices sent a signal pulsing through interstellar space, a signal announcing that a new intelligent species had been discovered. That signal was still expanding through the Milky Way galaxy, a sphere of energy that bore the information of that discovery.

  But there was no one left to receive the joyous news. The aliens who had created the rings were long gone from the solar system. Stoner knew that on their home world they had fallen into extinction thousands of years earlier. In his mind’s eye he saw their planet once again: a placid, peaceful world of green from pole to pole, except for the slowly decaying cities that held the dead like elaborate tombs, tended over the centuries by automated machines that were inevitably breaking down. Biological warfare had wiped out that intelligent race. The innocents, the aggressors, the would-be peacemakers, they had all died, down to the last one.

  The human race was hurtling toward its own deadly crisis at breakneck speed; Stoner knew he had to prevent them from destroying themselves. Dismayed, almost angry at his fellow humans’ instinctive fear of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, he at last realized that he had to make his presence unmistakably known.

  Determined to help the human race survive its own folly, almost in desperation he announced his return to the solar system in a message he beamed to every major astronomical facility on Earth and the Moon. And received silence in return. He caused the Northern and Southern Lights to glow and pulse night after night after night. Like turtles facing danger, humankind’s leaders pulled in their heads and tried to ignore his signal.

  “I never thought it would be this difficult,” he said to his wife, aboard the safety of their starship.

  Jo shook her head wearily. “They’re xenophobic, Keith. You knew that. Just look at how they treat each other—a slight difference in skin color or the shape of the eyes is enough to terrify them.”

  “And what they fear,” he admitted, “they try to destroy.”

  Jo agreed. “Their first reaction is to lash out and attack what frightens them.”

  Stoner’s shoulders slumped. “And we’re human, just like they are. Imagine what they’d do if real aliens confronted them.”

  “But we’re not really human anymore, are we?” Jo pointed out to him. “They know that, no matter what visible form you take.”

  “We’re trying to save them from extinction, and they busy themselves playing their paranoid games.”

  “That’s who they are,” said Jo. “That’s what they are. Those traits have served them pretty well through the Ice Ages and the early phases of their civilization. They had to be tough, suspicious, wary of outsiders. Those were survival traits.”

  “But now th
ose traits are countersurvival,” Stoner said. “They’ve got to change.”

  Jo smiled sadly. “Good luck, darling. I hope you can make some headway with this Archbishop Overmire.”

  He saw that his wife’s real concern was for her children, exploring the teeming, dangerous world of their origin.

  CATHY

  Cathy stood in the baking sunlight and stared at Hatshepsut’s temple, wavering in the heat currents rising from the bare desert floor.

  “You must realize,” the woman tour guide was saying to her little group, “that Hatshepsut was a true ruler of ancient Egypt, in the eighteenth dynasty. She was not a Queen, not the wife of a King, but Pharaoh in her own right.”

  Nearly thirty-five hundred years ago, Cathy said to herself as she squinted through the blazing sunshine at the shimmering temple. The tour guide held a parasol over her head, as did several of the tourists. Cathy was bareheaded but protected by a shell of energy that enclosed her body.

  The little group proceeded along the roped-off walkway toward the tomb. Not a massive, looming pyramid like the tombs of the male Kings, Cathy thought. Hatshepsut’s temple was a masterpiece of architecture, terraced, colonnaded, graceful, its three-story structure blending with the bare cliffs behind it.

  They moved like a privileged little procession of royalty along the walkway, protected by a squad of private security guards who kept pace on either side, ahead, and behind. The guards wore dark wraparound glasses laden with miniaturized sensors and carried machine pistols in their hands. God knows what other weapons they’ve got under their coats, Cathy mused. Outside their perimeter was the crowd, milling, muttering, sullen-faced locals swathed in long robes and turbans. Vendors of wares, Cathy thought. Hawkers and hagglers, trying to make a living from the rich tourists. And maybe terrorists among them. Maybe murderers and religious fanatics and teenagers filled with hatred for the privileged, protected strangers who had come to gawk at their glorious past and ignore their destitute present.

  It wasn’t until the tour was finished and the sweaty, bedraggled tourists were getting back onto the air-conditioned bus that the guide stopped Cathy. Most of the tourists were middle-aged or older; Cathy recognized English, Dutch, Japanese, and broad Australian accents among them.