Qualify (2 page)

As for Gordon, fourteen and sure of himself, he just hums whatever’s playing in his earbuds, and smirks a lot, also quietly, even when he fiddles with his art and woodcrafts stuff. Gordie is convinced he will not Qualify, but he claims he does not care—which is of course crazy, but if it makes it easier for him to deal, then what can be said?

“Have some eggs, George,” Mom says. “Grab a plate.”

“I’m not hungry.” My brother pours himself a glass of cheap apple juice.

“Yes, you are. You’ll need it. You can’t run all day on that sugary swill. And it’s going to be a
very
long day.” Mom turns around and grimaces, looking at the transparent yellowish baby-food liquid that George loves so much. Mom’s skin has an unhealthy grey tint, and at the same time her face is reddened by the heat of the kitchen stove. Both her hands are shaking slightly with the usual tremors. But there is determined focus in her watery blue eyes. I stare at her and see the effort she is making. Margot Lark, my mother, is the strongest person I know.

“You shouldn’t be doing this. You shouldn’t be cooking.” George frowns and gulps down half a glass of juice at once. I watch his Adam’s apple move with each swallow, in tandem with the muscles of his lean neck.

“I am not cooking. You call this cooking?” Mom smiles, throwing me a wink, in an attempt to get me to make my usual sarcastic commentary that indicates I still have a pulse.

“It’s pretty good, actually,” I say, making a show of forking a large piece and chewing and swallowing with enjoyment, even though I am tasting
nothing
and my insides are filled with rocks. “Where’s everyone else?”

“I heard Gee Three flush the toilet.” George reluctantly takes a plate and Mom dumps half a skillet of cheesy yellow eggs onto it.

In case it’s unclear, we’re the Four Gees, in order of birth: George, Gwenevere, Gordon, Grace. I still don’t get it why our parents decided to use names starting with the letter “G” for naming all their kids. Mom says she wanted a neat musical pattern to it, and for us to sound “elegant.” Mom is a classical opera singer—or was, before she got sick—so “elegant” is important to her. Dad says it was an old tradition on his mother’s Italian side of the family to use the same initial letter. Honestly, whatever. But everyone in school now calls us the Four Gees, and we’re stuck with it.

“Gracie still in bed?” Mom continues, without glancing at George.

“You bet. Want me to go drag her out?”

Mom shakes her head, wipes a dot of skillet splatter off her nose with the back of her hand, still holding a greasy spatula. “No, let her sleep a bit longer. Your father will get her when he comes down. Give them another fifteen minutes. And now I want you to eat.”

George shrugs. “Whatever. She’ll make everyone late again.”

“No. You’ll be fine.”

I am still chewing the eggs, swallowing them dutifully like lumps of unknown stuff, and now I feel a familiar pang of fear twist my guts.

We’ll be fine
. Somehow hearing this makes it worse, brings it all home.

Today’s the day.
The day we’ve been prepping ourselves for, emotionally, psychologically, for weeks and months. And when I say “we,” that’s pretty much everyone on this planet. Teens and their parents. And all the people who care about them. And really, everyone else too, since they get to watch. They get to find out—even though they themselves are out of the picture, out of the running—they get to witness us make it or fail.

Today we Qualify for rescue, for Atlantis.

Or we don’t—which means we’ll die together with all the rest of the world when the asteroid hits Earth, in about nineteen months from now. . . .

There’s no way to stop it.

But at least for some of us, there is Atlantis.

Turns out, Atlantis is not a myth. It’s ancient history. There really
was
a great continent by that name in ancient times, somewhere in the middle of what we now call the Atlantic Ocean, spanning the infamous Bermuda Triangle, the Bahamas, and beyond, and it was home to a very advanced high-tech civilization that stretched around the globe. Supposedly, they had computers, the internet, super-medicine, weapons of mass destruction, probably gaming consoles, and all kinds of other incredible or obnoxious stuff even more sophisticated than our own modern equivalents.

And then
something
happened. Maybe they did it to themselves—basically ruined the planet, kind of like what we’re doing now with the environment and other species, the out-of-control pollution, carbon dioxide imbalance and resulting cascade of climate change. Or maybe it was Mother Nature, at least in part.

Because at some point more than twelve thousand years ago, something huge and terrible took place—a mega-cataclysm on such a scale that it caused a whole continent to disappear without a trace, in earthquakes and floods and who knows what—and wiped the high-level civilization off the face of the planet. To escape this global disaster—we are told—the people of Atlantis used their advanced technology to leave Earth and flee to the stars. They eventually established a human colony on a habitable planet.

They called this colony planet “Atlantis,” or whatever’s the equivalent in their language, in memory of their own ancient roots on Earth, to honor their native civilization and the terrestrial continent of their birth that started it all.

And now, after all these thousands of years, they’re back. They returned to Earth, their ancient home world, and they are here to help. That is, the distant descendants of the original Atlantean colonists are here to help. They claim to be one hundred percent human and supposedly
not all that different from ourselves
—if you don’t count the thousands of generations of separate evolution and branching off to live in an alien environment. Yeah, right.

Anyway, the Atlanteans share our DNA and they’re our cousins. And, just like cousins, it makes them either weird or welcome guests.

Right now, they are desperately welcome and desperately needed. The asteroid brought them here—or, like some paranoid people in the media say, maybe “they brought the asteroid.”

Whichever it is, at this point, Atlantis is all we’ve got.

When the news of the lethal asteroid first broke, months ago, almost simultaneously the Atlantean spaceships appeared in the skies all over the world. It’s as if they’ve been watching us, and waiting to make first contact. The asteroid just gave them the excuse.

Okay, at first it was a huge global mess. World governments going into panic mode and military overdrive, people on the streets screaming about alien invasions, religious fundamentalists having a field day, scientists having aneurisms, stock markets crashing worldwide, to the tune of billions.

But once the Atlantean shuttles landed, and we saw them to be human and not little green men or big green lizards, it was okay. They met with representatives of governments, the United Nations, and were received with caution and eventually with open arms. “We are you,” they told us in various languages of Earth. How they knew our languages is unclear, but it’s probably some kind of advanced tech, or they’ve been listening in on us for far longer than we know. They explained who they were—which is kind of insane if you think about it, all that mythic stuff that Plato wrote about is mostly true—and demonstrated some of their amazing technology.

Only it wasn’t all that amazing when it came to the asteroid.

Yes, they tried moving it and changing the path of its trajectory, and all kinds of other advanced science stuff, in conjunction with global space agencies and the three International Space Stations we currently have—the largest one in Earth orbit, a second small one on the surface of the Moon, and the barely functional newest one on Mars. They even landed on the asteroid’s surface and drilled and took samples. But nothing worked, at least not enough to make a difference. The asteroid is going to hit Earth and it is going to cause nuclear winter at best. And at worst—well, let’s just say there may not be much of this planet left after the impact. . . .

However, not all is lost. Because the Atlanteans are going to save as many of us as possible and take us back with them—back to the colony planet Atlantis, a fertile blue-green world that’s supposed to be beautiful beyond belief, with a golden-white sun and not one but three moons.

To that effect, they have brought enough spaceships to carry millions of people—ten million, to be precise. It sounds great but means they can only rescue a very small portion of the general Earth population of eight point five billion—no more than can fill their present fleet of monolith silver ships, since there is no time for multiple trips between Earth and Atlantis before the asteroid strikes.

There is only one condition for rescue. Those lucky few that get to board the Atlantis ships have to be young people between the ages of eleven and twenty—teenagers.

Capable, talented, special teenagers.

The best of the best on Earth.

And the only way to determine who these teens will be is to make them pass Qualification. . . .

Qualify or die.

The smart wall in the living room is playing TV snippets of a canned interview with the President. Later tonight she will address the nation live. . . . But for now it’s old footage. President Katherine Donahue is speaking in her usual droning and soothing voice that’s powerful and at the same time conciliatory, in that nasty mixture that only politicians manage. “Our children and we must be brave together, but rest assured, no one’s giving up” and “we hold them in our prayers as Qualification looms” and “the ultimate survival and benefit of humanity might ultimately depend on well-orchestrated air strikes” are some of the phrases heard.

Same old junk they’ve been saying for months, as soon as they figured out that nothing substantial could be done to stop the asteroid, and that the Atlanteans are not all-powerful after all, despite what everyone hoped.

Thing is, the governments, the global leaders, the media, the scientists, the talking heads—they all feel the guilt-ridden need to keep talking, keep trying, even up to the last, even as the world goes up in flames or ash clouds or whatever. “Vaporware Hope,” as Dad calls it, is one way to fill up the void between
now
and
the end
.

Sure, there’s Qualification. But for the human spirit that’s just not good enough. To that end, there are also numerous space missions being prepped by the United Nations and private conglomerates, by individual governments and science agencies. Everyone’s building shuttles, rockets and “payload delivery systems,” whatever that means, to see if they can blast the asteroid into manageable bits or move it out of the fatal earth-contact trajectory. Meanwhile, others are building spaceship arks, just to get off the planet—kind of like the ancient Atlanteans themselves did, thousands of years ago. I guess they think, maybe if they can just get far enough away from the blast and resulting atmospheric turbulence, the Atlanteans might guide them the rest of the way?

The Atlanteans observe these various efforts sadly, and have indeed volunteered to assist to the best of their abilities. But the reality remains grim, there’s not all that much that can be done, at least not for the majority of living beings on Earth. The asteroid is huge and supposedly made up of mostly heavy metals and some other newly discovered stuff that makes it pretty much impossible to move or damage—or so they say. And as for escape, there are simply too many people, animal species, and too few ships.

President Donahue’s words are cut off briefly with video-bytes of breaking news, basically public unrest worldwide, demonstrations around school buses that are supposed to take us all to the Qualification sites, various local police forces in riot gear, and people screaming and throwing rocks and demanding justice. “Please! Just save my baby!” a woman somewhere in the Midwest is crying in a crazed voice of despair. “What good are my tax dollars with all your idiot scientists and useless military and failed national defense? Why can’t you nuke that space rock and save us!”

The stairs creak softly under Dad’s familiar steady footsteps. He comes down, fully dressed in his nice beige blazer, black shirt, brown slacks, tweed vest. And he’s wearing a tie, which is a rare thing. My father, Charles Lark, is the epitome of academia, with his rimless spectacles, somewhat tousled, wavy brown hair and greying temples. He is a professor of classics and history at the local University, and is exactly what you might think that means. Smart, and a little eccentric, and living mostly inside his head, his lesson plans, and research, with plenty of oddball stories and trivia to tell to his kids.

“Let’s please turn the awful TV off,” Dad says tiredly. He is bleary-eyed too, and he is immediately looking at Mom.

“Good morning!” Mom throws him a cheerful look and turns her back again. “I thought all of you might want some real breakfast today. Coffee’s ready.”

“How are you feeling? You really shouldn’t be up so early, straining yourself.” Dad goes directly for the coffee maker.

“Are you kidding? This is good for me. Besides, I would never miss seeing all of you off today, of all days.”

“Why, what’s today?” George says grimly.

From the living room now comes the familiar voice of the Atlantean Fleet Commander giving his now famous inspirational speech to the United Nations. The voice is soft, rich and musical. It is pleasant in timbre despite the strange lilting accent, and the Atlantean is speaking perfect English. Which is all kind of amazing. And yet it makes my skin crawl with new pangs of fear. Because there’s all that strange, leashed power in that voice, and it’s held back somehow. How do I know this? I don’t, I have no idea. But Commander Manakteon Resoi (try saying that three times) with his pleasant, sonorous voice, his fixed handsome face, metallic-golden blond hair and contrasting black eyebrows that seems to be typical of his ethnicity, gives me the creeps. Especially when he talks about “humanitarian efforts amid failure of hope” and “technological impetus” and “a new era for Earth and Atlantis.”