Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound (53 page)

I unbuckled the harness and looked back down the aisle. Familiar faces contorted with all-consuming grief.

Except for two. Moonboy’s expression was blank, catatonia.

So was Namir’s.

Elza’s face kept swimming out of darkness, into focus, then I would fade back to Tel Aviv, reliving the worst time of my life in every dreadful detail. It seemed like weeks of nightmares, but it was less than a day.

I was in my room, surrounded by images from the Louvre. Watteau’s
Jupiter and Antiope
, Regnault’s
The Three Graces
, Corot’s
Woman with a Pearl
, and Gericault’s terrible
The Raft of the Medusa
. That one persisted, all the dead and dying.

Elza had just given me a shot, and she was cutting away a tape that bound my left wrist. My right one was sore.

“You’ll be all right now?”

“What’s . . . the wrists?”

“You were hurting yourself. Pulling out hair.”

My hand went to my head. Almost bald, sore in places.

“All that loose hair in zero gravity. It was a mess; I used the vacuum razor. You’re a little bit tranquilized. I didn’t think you wanted to sleep anymore, though.”

“No. Please.” I felt my head. “The razor with the vacuum attachment?”

“It looks nice. Evened up.”

“Was everybody . . . no. Other people can’t have been affected as strongly as I was.”

“Nobody. Well, you can’t tell about Moonboy. But nobody else passed out. It could be your age.” She caressed my head. “Spy supposedly didn’t know what caused it, but it wasn’t just a human thing. Both the Martians were uncomfortable.”

I took a squeeze from her water bottle. “Memories. I felt trapped inside memories.”

“You have some sad ones. Worse than the rest of us.”

“Not sadness.” I had to be honest with her, of all people. “It was guilt. Murder.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You mustn’t feel guilt for being a soldier. We’ve gone over that pretty well.”

“Not that. Long after that. I . . . never told you.” I hesitated, aware that the drugs were loosening my tongue. Then it came out in a rush.

“It was right after Gehenna; right after I found my mother dead. I raced back into Tel Aviv, putting a list together in my mind.

“My Working Group Seven had been formed in response to a persistent rumor that a large-scale act of terrorism was imminent, one that couldn’t be traced to a single political or geographical entity because it was not centralized at all. We had a couple of chemically induced confessions that indicated the group was large but divided into small independent cells.

“Anti-Semitism doesn’t have borders, and in fact some of the people we were looking at were Jews themselves, with strong opposition to the current power structure. Current at that time, liberal.

“I privately suspected that two or even three of the people in my office were moles, making sure that we were distracted by false leads. The one woman in whom I had confided this was the first person I saw die, a few minutes after we heard the bombs that were the second phase of the poisoning.

“As I raced down alleys and bumped across playgrounds and parks—none of the regular roads were passable—I was making a list of people I had to talk to
that day
.

“Because anyone who was not stunned that day was guilty. Ipso facto. And . . . there were so many dead bodies lying around that a few more would not raise any suspicions.”

She was behind me, rubbing my shoulders. “How many, Namir?”

“Eleven that day. I tracked them down one by one, along with seven or eight I looked at and spared.”

“You just shot them in cold blood?”

“No. Bullets would look suspicious. I got them alone and strangled them. Then they looked pretty much like all the other corpses.”

“There were more than those eleven? Other days?”

“Six had flown out that morning, including three from my office. To London, Cairo, and New York. In London and Cairo I used my hands. The ones in New York I did shoot, with a pickup gun I’d had for years. Then tossed it in the Hudson.”

“Like the .357 in the shoe box at home?”

“Yeah, behind the drywall. You are such a snoop.”

“It’s in the job description.” Holding on to my shoulder, she floated around in front of me. “Cold-blooded murder isn’t.”

“My blood was not cold that day. Those days.”

“Do you still think they were guilty?”

“I think now that two, at least, were not. But since we have never been able to pin down the organization responsible, I can’t ever know for sure.”

I closed my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you, burdened you with it. I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Not even Dustin?”

“No. He knows I’ve done some wet work that was not formally sanctioned. He doesn’t know how many, or the fact that I was on a rampage.”

“I won’t tell him. Or anyone. They killed your mother. And four million others. Including the seventeen they killed using you as an intermediary.”

“That’s about the way I rationalize it. But it is a rationalization. Deep down, I know I’ve committed the one sin that can’t be reversed. Or forgiven.”

“God would forgive you. If there were a God.”

I smiled at her. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”

She held me to her softness for a warm moment, her cheek against mine. “There’s another problem,” she whispered. “We seem to be at the wrong planet.”

“Wrong what?”

“Show you.” She pushed away from me gently and floated down to the bed, as I rose to the ceiling. She pushed a couple of buttons on the wall there, and the paintings faded, replaced by a huge dun circle, a planet that resembled Mars. Clear atmosphere, a wisp of cloud here and there. No obvious craters, though; I wasn’t sure what that meant scientifically. Weathering, I supposed.

“We aren’t at Wolf 25?”

“We are, apparently—just not at the planet of the Others. Another one in the same system. Much closer in.”

“Why?”

“Spy said we’re going down tomorrow. Until then, we’re free to speculate.”

Some of the humans, like Paul and Namir, were disappointed or apprehensive when they learned that we were not going down to the planet’s surface in our own lander, carried twenty-four light-years for that purpose, but instead were to go down in Spy’s “starfish” spaceship. I was relieved. Going to and from a planetary surface in a rocket is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it is “the devil we know,” as Carmen put it. We had no idea how the starfish worked, but the Others had probably been using them for a long time.

We had to cross over to their ship holding on to a cable, as before, and Snowbird did not enjoy the experience any more than I had the first time. This wasn’t in cool starlight, either. We had the huge disc of the ashen planet looming beneath us and the brilliant glare of Wolf 25 moving overhead.

Moonboy was not able to cross by himself. Paul and Namir carried him over like a deadweight.

Spy had told us that we couldn’t pronounce the name of the planet in any Martian or human languages, but that it translated to “Earth” pretty accurately. We might call it “Home” to reduce confusion.

“Whose home?” Carmen asked.

“Allow me to be mysterious,” Spy said, though the answer was obvious, if the details were not.

The air inside the ship was oppressively hot and humid, probably comfortable for humans. When we took off, though, the gravity was light, about normal for Mars.

It was not acceleration-induced “gravity,” either. It didn’t change direction or strength when the ship took off.

A circle opened in the floor of the craft, like a large window. We got an interesting view of the engine side of the iceberg/asteroid, which seemed to have diminished by about a third, in regular concentric grooves where the automatic ice- mining machines had gnawed their way around.

The landing was as smooth as the humans say their space elevator is, no lurching or vibration. As we approached the ground, though, the gravity increased to about that of Earth. Spy apologized to the two of us but said there was no way around it.

We approached the ground very fast. Snowbird and a few others reacted, but I assumed the Others hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to smash us into a planet. It was too fast, though, to get a good idea of what surrounded the landing site. Just a hint of regular architectural structure, and we were on the ground, and the floor window irised shut.

“The abrupt landing was necessary because of the physics involved,” Spy said. “We will observe from low altitude later.”

It had warned us that we would have to “suit up” before we left the ship, so Snowbird and I had not removed our footgear, and it was only a matter of donning four gloves and letting the protective cloaks form around our bodies. So we were the first two out the air lock, the human crew following by a few minutes.

Carmen would later say that it was “beautiful in a horrible tragic way,” which juxtaposes three contradictory ideas in what I realize is a standard human ironic frame. About beauty I have no opinion, and horribleness and tragedy are just dramatic observations about the fact that the universe runs downhill.

This is what I saw: on a plain that extended to the horizon in every direction, there were regularly spaced objects that we were told had once been space vehicles. The outer shells had mostly been eroded or corroded away; a lacy framework of some more durable metal remained, a gleaming cage for more corrosion within.

I wondered whether everybody else was thinking what I was thinking: The fleet that humans were building to protect the Earth might as well be paper airplanes.

“This was an invasion fleet,” Spy said. “It was poised to attack the planet of the Others.”

“How long ago?” Paul asked.

“It was about thirty thousand of your years ago. The planet was more hospitable to you then, more like Earth than Mars. A world with plentiful liquid water and oxygen; you could have survived here without protection.”

“We couldn’t now?” Carmen said.

“That’s correct. All the plant life died. Things oxidized and dried out.”

“And how did that happen?” Namir asked.

“Things got very hot for a short time. When it cooled down, it left mostly ash and carbon dioxide.”

“The Others fried the planet,” Namir said.

“I think ‘baked’ would be more accurate. They raised the surface temperature, as I said. I think for only a few minutes.”

“Enough to kill everybody,” Namir said.

“Every thing, I think. There is nothing alive now.”

“This is what they wanted to do to Earth,” Carmen said.

“Not quite as extreme. Though few humans would have survived.”

“The ones on Mars would have,” I said.

“The Others knew that,” Spy said. “And eventually they might have wound up coming here.”

“And met the same fate,” Namir said.

“Who can say? Let’s return to the ship.”

“Wait,” Paul said. “Can’t we look around for a while?”

“First I want you to see something else. Rather, the Others want you to. They suggested that before you meet with them, you have the proper context.”

“If they want to convince us that they can destroy us all, here and on Earth, it isn’t necessary,” Paul said. “We knew that before the plans for
ad Astra
were drawn up.”

“I’m not sure exactly what they want to do. Our communications are necessarily slow and indirect. I do know what they directed me to show you. You may have time for exploration later.”

We filed back through the air lock into the starfish, and it rose slowly and hovered. The engine made noise, a barely audible rushing sound. It had been silent, dropping from orbit.

We rose high enough for the horizon to show a slight curve. The humans all gasped at the sight, though it was not surprising. Thousands of the ruined ships stood in precise ranks. It was an impressive display of destruction, though I was more impressed by the idea that they could raise the temperature of an entire planet enough to cause this to happen.

Before we sped away, I counted 4,983 of the relics, though presumably there were more over the horizon.

“These creatures were of course intelligent,” Spy said, “and they knew that aggression against the Others might result in their extinction. So they left a record nearby.” As it spoke, we descended toward a glittering golden dome.

“One index of their mastery over the physical universe is this hemisphere of absolutely pure gold, more than a meter thick and almost five hundred meters in diameter. Its roundness is mathematically perfect to within a millionth of a meter.”

“I wonder why they would bother to do that,” Paul said.

“To show that they could,” Namir said.

“That’s probably true,” Spy said. “It also gives the structure some resistance to certain weapons. What’s inside is more interesting, though.”

The ship floated down to rest next to the dome, the window closing as we approached the ground. The humans had been told not to remove anything but their helmets, so they put them back on, and we were through the air lock in minutes. They left Moonboy resting behind.

We picked our way over an expanse of weathered rubble. Whatever else had been here was made of less durable stuff than gold.

The dome did not have an air lock; just a door. There were unambiguous symbols incised in the metal, lines of dark dots that pointed toward a dark square. When we approached it, the square opened.

I was second to enter, after Spy, so I knew that it had been dark inside, and lights glowed on as we entered. The light was bright and warm, the same spectrum as Wolf 25.

It was a display, like a museum. There were no words, written or spoken. It was obviously designed for any audience capable of getting here and standing at the door.

In the center was a large globe of a planet that resembled Earth—more water than land, with polar caps and clouds.

“This is what the planet used to look like?” I said unnecessarily. Spy nodded and led us to the first display case.

This must have been the race that built the fleet of spaceships. The exhibits showed what they looked like, inside and out, and demonstrated various aspects of their lives.