Heaven's Fall (31 page)

And since humans were always ripping on each other, trying to steal from or kill each other . . . how did anyone expect humans and
aliens
to get along?

“So,” Xavier said to Rachel, “Guam.”

“I know no more about it than you do.”

“The air force had a base there, as I recall,” Xavier said. “I wonder if the Free Nations still own it.”

“Good question,” Rachel said. Her voice betrayed her worry. “Mr. Chang?” The ancient agent worked his way back from the front of the cabin. “I know you and Mr. Edgely and your team have been very careful in arranging our trip, so just reassure me: We aren’t flying into an airport controlled by the Aggregates.”

Before Chang could answer, Edgely joined them. “Ah, that’s difficult to say.”

“Try,” Rachel said. Now Tea was turning toward them, listening from her seat. Pav, too.

“Guam is allied with Free Nation U.S.,” Chang said. “We are sure we can land, refuel, and take off without encountering their customs—”

“And our next stop is Hawaii, which is
definitely
part of Free Nation U.S.”

“Wait a minute, we’re being exposed to the Aggregates twice?”

“It’s geography,” Chang said. “We don’t have access to an aircraft that can fly the Pacific nonstop. Even if we did, we would have been tracked and detected. Going small, as we have, with the transponder turned off, there are only a few places you can refuel. All of them have some interaction with Free Nation U.S.” He blinked. “It would have been possible to take passage on a containership, but that would have required weeks. You wanted to get to Mexico as fast as possible; this is the optimum route.”

“It’s so risky!” Rachel said, sounding shrill—which was unusual for her. Which made Xavier even more uneasy . . . If Rachel was freaking out, what should the rest of the team be feeling?

“Yes,” Chang said. “We could all be arrested. We could all wind up in some Aggregate prison somewhere—”

“Or worse,” Edgely said, with a nervous giggle that made Xavier even more uncomfortable.

Chang stepped close to Rachel and put his hand on her arm. “This is what I always tell myself whenever I’m on a plane and the weather is bad or the flight is rough—”

“You mean, like this one?” Rachel said. There was no humor in her voice.

“Yes,” Chang said, persisting. “I tell myself that the pilot wants to live, too.”

Chang pointed at Edgely. “He’s in this, I’m in this, we’re all sharing the risk.”

Rachel took a step forward and gave Chang a brief hug. If she said something, Xavier couldn’t hear it. But it seemed to defuse things. Rachel went forward with Tea. Yahvi joined them, and even Zeds, his giant form forcing the Sentry to move down the aisle crabwise.

Xavier was alone with Chang. As he kept an eye on the proteus, still slowly sucking in Substance K through a tube, then excreting pieces of the transmitter, Xavier said, “So you guys have made this happen by throwing around a lot of money.”

“Every penny the rights earned,” Chang said.

“How many pennies are we talking? It can’t be a secret, right?”

Chang blinked; he seemed to be performing calculations. “For a package that included an hour exclusive live interview, personal stories both broadcast and print, pictures, a future book . . . twenty million Hong Kong dollars. I don’t know how many pennies that is; I’m a producer, not an accountant.”

“Is that a lot?” Xavier said. “Remember, I last dealt with U.S. dollars around 2019, when a new car cost, say, twenty thousand dollars. Not that I could ever afford one.”

“Currencies were seriously depressed by the Aggregate arrival and the collapse of the world’s economies. The fee the big companies paid to your group is the equivalent of fifty million U.S. dollars of your time, possibly more.”

Xavier couldn’t imagine a figure like that—hell, he had trouble picturing one thousand dollars. How big a wad would fifty million be? “I bet it was tricky to actually collect it—”

“You have no idea.”

“And then move it around in secret.”

Before Chang could respond, the proteus made a coughing sound, then stopped: No fluid moved in, and the piece of material stopped before it could fully emerge.

A foul smell filled the cabin.

“What the fucking hell—?”

“Back to the drawing board, I see.”

Xavier was torn between wanting to punch Chang, just for attitude and possibly distracting him, and wanting to run away. Not that it was possible to leave the plane.

It was just that Xavier had never known a proteus to
fail
.

And he was afraid that when it did, the next event would be spectacular and deadly.

He examined the unit, which was the size of an old-fashioned desktop computer with screen. Nothing appeared to be wrong; it had just stopped working.

But it was emitting wisps of smoke.

Xavier glanced at the pieces of the transmitter. Eleven were required; he had nine.

“How long to Guam?” he said to Chang.

“Four hours. Are we in danger?”

Xavier wasn’t sure, and even if he had been, he was not going to let Chang know. “Tell the pilot to
fly faster
.”

Of all the severe paradigm shifts attributable to the
Destiny-Brahma
encounters with Keanu—the proof of extraterrestrial life, the glimpse of a large galaxy-spanning conflict between two types of alien races, the demonstration of technologies sufficiently advanced from human experience to be totally magical—the one with the greatest impact and most far-ranging effects has been hard evidence that human personalities survive beyond death.

This single revelation, with the evidence of the four so-called Revenants, easily and unquestionably ranks as the most momentous in human history, displacing the discovery of fire or any other pretender to the throne. Entire religions—including those that have served as the most powerful and sustaining political entities in human history—have been founded on much less.

And yet . . . humanity has not been transformed by this knowledge. The established religions still exist, though some of their power and influence has been diminished.

One new movement—Transformational Human Evolution—has arisen, claiming to incorporate the Revenant concept in a new mode of ethics and actions.

But THE is still limited to Free Nation U.S. and a few allied countries. It is inextricably tied to the Aggregate aliens.

If only the human race had been free to truly explore the implications of the Keanu Revenants. But the arrival of the Aggregates has essentially frozen religious-moral inquiry even as it has brought political and technological evolution to a halt.

GERALD MCDOW,
INTRODUCTION TO STASIS:
THE HUMAN RACE’S LOST LEGACY POST-2020
,
CONTRACTED TO YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, UNPUBLISHED

For Yahvi, the trip from Bangalore to Darwin had already eclipsed the flight from Keanu as the worst trip in her life.

But now she judged Darwin to Guam to be worse than the first two combined. It was not only bumpier, but when the proteus started spasming, it became terrifying. She decided that she did not like travel and that she would be better off at home in the habitat.

At least there she wouldn’t be doing what she’d been doing for the past three hours, which was wondering how she was going to die. Would it be smoke inhalation? Or would the plane catch on fire, burning her and the others to death?

Or would it just dive into the ocean from an altitude of ten thousand meters? Yahvi knew enough about Earth history to know that all these things had happened to people—choking to death, burning in agony, smashing into the ocean at hundreds of kilometers an hour, breathing one second, the next . . . what? Blackness? Yahvi had fallen on her face once, and it was easy, she thought, to take that shock and pain and multiply it by a hundred or a thousand or infinity.

No, she couldn’t. The horror was beyond her imagining.

And while she knew her grandmother and a handful of other humans had come back from being dead, they hadn’t lived very long—and not very happily, either.

It had been several years since she had confronted this issue. The last time was when she was twelve—

Over the years, the HBs had transformed a small corner of the habitat into a human cemetery. Here, Yahvi knew, was where her grandmother Megan Doyle Stewart was buried, as well as a dozen HBs who had died in accidents or of various ailments since 2019, especially Daksha, the Bangalore engineer everyone loved. Also one of the yavaki, born with a life-limiting condition.

In keeping with Hindu traditions, there were almost no monuments . . . those that existed were small and handmade.

There were monuments to four humans who had perished, but whose remains were not recovered, among them Shane Weldon and Vikram Nayar, lost in space along with the prototype X-38 vehicle. . . . Also the Revenant Camilla and Zack Stewart, both of them vaporized in Keanu’s core during the “restart.”

Several animals had emerged from the Beehive in the early days. There had been cows (cherished by the Bangalores, ultimately butchered by the Houstons, which almost caused a war inside the habitat), and birds, and even a crocodile.

And also a dog named Cowboy, a Revenant, a long-lost pet belonging to Shane Weldon.

Cowboy had lived almost eighteen years in his second life, dying of old age just after Yahvi and her cohort hit the dangerous age of eleven.

The dog was buried in a glade at the opposite end of the habitat from the human cemetery . . . much closer to the Beehive.

Oh, the Beehive—it was the one place in the habitat children were forbidden to enter.

So, naturally, it was the first place Yahvi and her friends went when they began to roam the habitat freely.

It was Nick Barton-Menon who suggested the wicked task of digging up Cowboy.

“God, why?” Yahvi said.

“He wants to see what he looks like,” Rook said.

“Use your imagination!” Yahvi said.

“Don’t be a turd,” Nick said, shoving Rook. “I know what it looks like. I want to try an experiment!”

“You’re not an engineer,” Yahvi said.

“No one’s an engineer for this,” Nick said.

“For what?”

“For doing what the Beehive is for,” Nick said, smiling like a very bad young man. “To bring things back to life.”

Yahvi wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea in practical terms. She knew it wasn’t a good idea in moral terms; her grandmother had become a Revenant. But only for a few tragic days.

“It was all the Architect’s doing,” Rachel had explained, the one time she discussed the matter with Yahvi. “We all think, now, that it was him, or Keanu, or both of them, trying to find a way to communicate with us.”

“Seems cruel.”

“I don’t think they planned for the Revenants to die. I think the whole system was barely functioning.”

Which, now that Yahvi thought about it, was a good reason not to go messing around with it.

She said as much to Nick.

Who had an answer, of course. “We aren’t trying to revive a human being,” he said. “Just a dog.”

So, to Yahvi’s disgust, the three of them, with the help of Ellen Walker-Shanti and Dulari Smith, used “borrowed” shovels and, after much difficulty, managed to uncover the shriveled, barely recognizable remains of Cowboy.

The sight was just sad, more soft bones than anything else. Some fur.

“Shane Weldon would kill us all if he saw this,” Yahvi said.

“Then let’s make sure he doesn’t,” Nick said.

Rook had been ordered to bring a tarp, equipment left over from the original HB recreational vehicle, half of which still occupied a place of honor not far from the Temple. “How the heck did you get this?” Yahvi asked. All of the original HB materials were treated like historical artifacts. Most were kept in a special exhibit inside the Temple.

Not all, apparently. “I swiped it from the RV,” Rook said. “I figured we’d need something kind of rubbery.” It was true that, given the limits on HB manufacturing, blankets were as rare as anything else. And there had been no reason for anyone to fabricate a rubberized sheet like this.

And when Nick actually moved the remains with his bare hands, Yahvi felt like throwing up.

Then Nick and Rook and Ellen, who was taller and stronger than any of them, raised the sheet bearing the dog’s remains and began scuttling toward the Beehive, a couple of hundred meters distant.

“You two cover this over,” Nick told Yahvi and Dulari. That didn’t take long; the soil was light and loose. Of course, even scraping it all back into the grave left an obvious depression.

“This will fool no one,” Yahvi said.

Dulari shrugged. She likely didn’t care. Yahvi was sure she only came along because she had a crush on Nick.

Bringing up the rear, Yahvi and Dulari found that they had to act as lookouts, a post that required no orders or encouragement. Yahvi kept glancing back toward the Temple and the living area, wondering if some adult just happened to be checking on the girls’ quarters.