Infernal Sky (21 page)

With a little nudge in the right direction, S&R could work wonders. “Justice a minute,” they said. “We learn with going to photogenic memory. Deconstruction is not what we said. We understand the differential.”

It was my turn to whisper in Albert's ear. I wanted to be friendly with the big lug and make sure I was forgiven. “I can't decide if Sears and Roebuck are harder to understand when they think they understand us.”

“Amen,” he said. I was at least half forgiven.

“We know what the Klave are being in the war,” said S&R.

The suspense was killing me, even if Fly's eyes were beginning to get that special bored look right before he started rocking and rolling.

“You are what?” I prompted S&R.

“We are hyperrealists,” they said. “We leave books together.”

“And you leave worlds alone,” Albert finished, pleased at the direction our conversation had taken.

S&R were on a roll. “When your unit is restored, we go to Fred invasion base and continue your part in the war. We will fighting with you.”

It took a moment for me to realize what they were talking about. Our unit included Captain Hidalgo. I'd never thought we'd travel these incredible distances only to pick up two new members for our fire team. I wondered how Hidalgo would deal with this development.

“How far away is this base?” asked Albert.

I almost chided Albert but caught myself. How could we ask the distance to the Freds when we didn't know where the hell we were? I couldn't understand the reluctance of the aliens to give us the straight of it. Could Albert be trying to trick S&R into revealing our location?

Whether intended or not, that was the result. “The Fred base is two hundred bright-years away,” they said.

“Light-years,” Fly corrected them. If he kept this up, he might have a great career ahead of him . . . as an editor!

I figured it was my turn. “That doesn't tell us how far the Freds are from our solar system.”

S&R answered immediately: “Two hundred light-years.”

While I marveled at another passable reply from our hosts, Fly picked up on the content. “Excuse me,” he said in his I-really-can't-take-any-more-surprises voice. “What did you just say?”

S&R said, “Two hundred light-years.”

“That's the distance from
this
base?” Fly asked.
S&R nodded. They'd at least picked up one of our human traits. “The distance from
our
solar system?” he nailed the coffin shut. They nodded again.

Fly sounded so calm and reasonable that I feared for all of our lives. This was worse than when he found out about the month and a half of travel time on the
Bova.

“Just so I'm absolutely clear,” he said, “regarding the location of this galactic base, we are located exactly
where?”

If Sears and Roebuck had seemed like cartoon characters before, the impression was even more pronounced now. There was one word they had apparently missed in their extensive study of the English language: “oops.”

S&R didn't hold back any longer: “We are past the orbit of Pluto-Charon.”

“Why didn't you tell us this before?” I asked.

“Need to know,” they said. “Hidalgo part of your unit will be returned to you soon, and unit completes all.”

“It was getting about time to tell us anyway,” Albert translated helpfully.

“Let me get this straight,” said Fly, oblivious to all other subjects until he was satisfied on this one. “We've been convinced of the relative unimportance of the Earth in the big scheme of things. So it comes as a shock to learn you have this space museum parked just outside our insignificant solar system.”

I thought Fly was laying it on a bit thick. I would have told him to take a stress pill and calm down . . . if we'd had any stress pills. S&R didn't seem clued in to human frustration.

When Fly calmed down, S&R attempted to explain.
One thing I'll say for my pal, when he finds out he's been off the wall on something, he takes his medicine like a trooper. Hell, like a marine.

Naturally, we all believed we'd traveled many light-years to get to this base. Nope. Wrong about that. We thought it a strong possibility that we'd been in transit for many years, Earth standard time. Nope. Wrong again. Several other assumptions were shot down in flames as well. I remembered the director saying there was no way to pinpoint the location of the secret base, and I recall Jill teasing him about that. How desperately Warren Williams wanted to unlock the secrets of the stars.

The poor man would probably be as disappointed as Fly to learn that there is no such thing as faster-than-light travel. Many people have never imagined otherwise, but most of them would not imagine a galactic war with a myriad of alien races either. Up to this moment on the gigantic galactic base—which happened to be parked in our own backyard—I would have thought a galactic war
must
prove the existence of FTL.

I'd grown up reading all of the great SF writers. E. E. Doc Smith and his inertialess drive. John W. Campbell Jr. and a dozen clever ways to get around Einstein's speed limit. Arthur C. Clarke with a bag of tricks the others had missed. The discovery of a galactic war without faster-than-light travel blew my mind more completely than the spider-mind carcass Fly and I had plastered all over Deimos.

S&R finally succeeded in explaining the reality to us. Fly wasn't even all that much of a science-fiction fan, and he took the news really hard. It must have been all those
Star Trek
shows that not even he could
have missed seeing. Or maybe it was just his romantic sense of adventure. We felt as if we'd traveled across the universe, and then we find out we're next door to the old neighborhood. Albert didn't seem bothered at all. There are no articles of faith about FTL outside of science-fiction conventions.

It was hard work extracting facts from S&R, but they were ready and willing if we were. Reality was like this: first of all, there is no such thing as hyperspace. Hyper kids like Jill, yes. Space, no. Everything happens at relativistic velocities. When we went through the Gate on Phobos, the trip took us almost seven and a half hours by Earth standard time, traveling just under light-speed as beams of coherent, self-focusing information.

The galactic chess game stretched out over millennia. We hadn't asked yet, but I was ready to bet the farm that some of these suckers lived a freakin' long time. It almost had to be that way. Otherwise how could individuals maintain interest in their blood-drenched games?

It had taken the Freds more than two hundred of our years to reach Earth in the beginning! This was my idea of long-range planning. This was my idea of an implacable foe.

These guys got off by critiquing twelve-million-year-old books and fighting over which important commentator correctly interpreted them! Jeez, I wondered how many alien races had been exterminated because of a bad review? At times the struggle had erupted into full-scale warfare. It didn't make Fly, Albert, or me feel any better to learn that now was a relatively calm period with only occasional brush wars along the borders.

Millions of rotting human corpses were almost overlooked. The monsters sent by the Freds to either end or enslave mankind were just one more move in the lit-crit game. As we painfully pieced together the story of life in the galaxy, I had the weird feeling that the Freds took the human race more seriously than any of the “good guys.” Oh, we'd connected with S&R. Maybe the entire Klave operated at their high level of ethics and decency. But even so, the best we could expect from our allies was a chance to be marines again.

The Freds had sent hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of their demonic monsters to clean humanity's clock. Simple human pride made me feel for the first—and I hoped the last—time that the Freds were a worthy foe. They must be scared of us. The deconstructionists thought we might deconstruct them. The hyperrealists were busy with their own shit.

“I
love you.”

Arlene touched my face and said, “You didn't have to do this.”

I thought I'd never get her alone. Then Fly obliged
me by wandering off with Sears and Roebuck. They were still trying to explain to him why we exist in a sub-light Einsteinian universe. Arlene was too depressed to want to hear the details just now.

Besides, I could turn off my Albert-projector right now. It was disconcerting to watch myself. I wasn't all that vain, and I didn't want to watch myself all the time. Of course, I'd had a very good reason for bringing the device. I'd spent time with S&R first and picked up a lot about their peculiarities. I could tell Arlene and Fly about that later. Shop talk. Business. The mission.

Meanwhile, something more important concerned me: my opportunity to be alone with Arlene! Our little spat was forgotten as she held up her gold ring. I think I saw the hint of a tear in a corner of her eye. The ring was attached to a necklace.

“How did you manage this?” she asked. The original ring had vanished along with everything else when we went through the Gate.

“Sears and Roebuck,” I said. “We couldn't ask for better guardian angels.”

She nodded in acknowledgment. “How much time did you spend with them before Fly and I met them?”

“Enough.”

She chuckled. “You don't like giving away the details of your surprise.”

“You can figure it out. Sears and Roebuck have more tricks up their sleeves than only synthesizing food for us. They synthesized the ring when I asked. I only had to give them the details. I didn't ask for a new set of dog tags.”

“I'll live. Tell me, did you make any attempt to distinguish Sears from Roebuck?”

“Didn't seem worth the trouble.”

“I know what you mean. Did you ask them to keep the ring a secret until you could surprise me?”

“No. Once they made the ring, they gave it to me. Now it was my business. Besides, I'm not sure they'd be very good at keeping secrets. They don't seem to have a privacy concept.”

“I was wondering about that. I don't think they understand our concept of individuality, either. The Klave sounds like a collectivist society.”

“Or more than that,” I added.

“Yeah. I wonder how far the collectivism goes. It would be interesting to find out.”

She stopped, waiting for me to say something. I merely regarded her and listened to my heart beat. Then I deliberately looked away. We were standing close together over by the rail next to the floating table. Overhead an aquarium drifted, the sea creatures within swimming lazily. My soul felt a great peace. I was finally witnessing strange things from other worlds, and I didn't have to destroy anything. I didn't have to take out the trash. I didn't need to fire a rocket overhead and spill fish guts all over my lady love.

I was tired of shop talk. I waited for Arlene to bring the subject back to
us.
The ring did it. Her eyes went from mine down to the gold circle in her hand and then back up again.

“This means the world to me,” she said. “The universe.” She said it as if she meant it.

I wished she had long hair instead of a high-and-tight. Hawaii Base had a barber, dammit! With long hair, a strand would occasionally fall into her eye and I could brush it out. She brought out my fatherly side. I wouldn't violate my beliefs for her, but that didn't
make me sexually repressed. Whenever appropriate, I intended to remind her of my proposal.

She didn't make it easy. Fly kept saying she was the bravest man he knew. The comparisons to a man were most appropriate. She had the morality of a typical modern man. My problem. Her problem.

“Albert,” she said huskily, “have you reconsidered my offer?”

“Arlene, have you reconsidered my proposal?”

She started to respond but left her mouth open in mid-response. She looked cute that way. Then she got the words out: “You used the
p-
word.”

“Sure did.”

“Who would marry us?”

“Captain Hidalgo is the captain of our ‘ship.' The medbot says he's recovering.”

“I can just imagine how he'd react if we asked him to tie the knot.”

I disagreed. “The captain has grown a lot on this mission. He's a better man. His horizons have expanded.”

“Be hard not to change out here,” she joked. I didn't laugh. There were times to be serious and this was one of them. “Arlene, will you marry me?”

I could tell she was disappointed in me. We were playing a game where I wasn't supposed to be so direct. It was okay for her to suggest any number of lewd acts, and that was acceptable. There was one rule, actually: I wasn't supposed to use the
p
-word.

She wasn't Fly's tough guy this time, not when she used my least favorite line of modern women: “It wouldn't be fair to you.” I don't think there has been a woman since time began who believed that particular sentiment.

“I don't believe in fair. I believe in promises. You're
a woman of your word. You honor your commitments. We both know that. You're afraid to make a commitment you doubt you can keep.”

“Then why do you keep asking me?”

I shrugged. “We belong together. I feel it in my bones.”

She sighed. “We can't plan for the future.”

I took her by the hand, and she made a fist over the ring. “Arlene, marriage isn't about planning for the future. It's a promise that can last five minutes or fifty years. Be honest. You're not afraid we won't have enough time together. You're afraid we'll have too much.”

She pulled away so quickly the necklace dangling from her fist got caught on my thumb. It looked as if we were attached by an umbilical cord . . . and then we were separated.

She sounded like a little girl when she said, “I love you, Albert, but don't ever tell me how I feel. Or what I'm afraid of.”