The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (72 page)

Of course both claimed they were only keeping the contraband for self-protection, but I figured it was time they learned that Old Fuss and Feathers went by the book. So I invited O’Rourke to consider the fact that these idiots could have cost him all his hard-earned stripes, and suggested he take them to one of the empty compartments for a fatherly chat. When he’d finished, their comrades carried them to the dispensary, where Doc Gannett patched them up. Then I issued them plastic teaspoons and set them to work cleaning out grease traps and stopped-up latrines.

I ran into Gannett a few days later, and he told me the culprits insisted that their injuries resulted from tripping and falling down. “They,” he said with what I assumed was irony, “are the clumsiest guys I’ve ever come across.”

By tipping me off, Cos had probably saved a life or two, and he’d certainly saved me a ton of trouble and embarrassment. So I got in the habit of meeting him for a few beers in the evening, and letting him fill my ears with whatever tidbits he’d picked out of the air that day.

It was addictive, listening in on other peoples’ thoughts, and only the fear of turning into Schlacht II made me stop him from digging into the minds of Marie and Morales. In fact I flatly forbade him to repeat anything he learned from either one, to me or anybody else. I wouldn’t spy on the inner life of a lover or a friend, but aside from that I listened greedily to everything the little snitch had to offer. After we left the Bubble, I was glad I did.

Because we did eventually return to our own universe.

The Bubble had no such thing as time, yet clocks were still running on shipboard, and in due course our eternity of boredom came to an end. Reentry to our own universe was chronometric, and an error of a microsecond could put us almost anyplace, including the center of a star. I for one was seriously anxious, and even Marie showed strain.

“I’ve done this twenty-eight times,” she said one night, seeking comfort in the thicket of chest hair I sprouted back in those days. Somewhat muffled, her voice continued, “But I’ll never get used to it. It’s all up to the computers, and there’s no way for mere humans like us to control our fate.”

“What does the celestial navigator do during reentry?”

“Usually gets drunk. It’s all he can do.”

Actually, when it happened, I found it less distressing than the last time. Similar phenomena occurred, but I was expecting them. The process went fast, and within seconds it was clear that we weren’t in the core, convective zone, or corona of anything hot. After a while Marie’s quiet tones informed the whole ship that we were just about where we were supposed to be. Indeed, reentry had been a smashing success – system H2223 was already visible, its sun appearing to be about the size of Jupiter as seen from Terra, only colored like Mars.

It was wonderful how people brightened at the news. In the upbeat mood of the moment, I took the Dumb Duo off their shit details and instructed O’Rourke that punishment was now over. Everybody was happy, including me. During a session of afternoon love, Marie tied me up and gave me a present so long, slow, and marvelous that I remember it today – remember it as well as you can remember something transcendent.

I was still wearing a silly grin that evening when Cos joined me in the officers’ canteen for our usual session. His face was my first indication that the happy times were over.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Something wrong with the others, then?”

“No. I’ve never felt such good vibes on the
Zhukov.
Everybody’s happy.” For some reason, that seemed to depress him more than anything else.

“Come on, little buddy. Spit it out.”

“I saw that star we’re headed for on a monitor.”

“So?”

“I’ve been getting some . . . I guess I’d say . . . some tremors. From Paradiso. From humans. They’re eerie, coming out of the void like that. Thousands of people must all be feeling basically the same thing, that’s why it reaches so far. That and the fact that telepathy doesn’t seem to be subject to the inverse-square law. Anyway, something terrible’s happening in that system, or maybe is just about to happen, I’m not sure which.”

I looked at his big face and his little hands holding the beer stein and his dark, mournful cuttlefish eyes, and I had a sudden impulse to grab him and push him out through the airlock. Logic or no logic, we all want to kill the messenger of bad news. Especially when he lays it on us just when we’re feeling great.

Instead, after taking a deep breath, I thanked him. He was doing his job, after all. Later on I told Marie about Cos’s singular talent, about the evidence I’d seen that his gift was real, and about his warning. She didn’t take it any better than I had.

“Exactly what do you expect me to do about this dwarfs silly notion?”

You ever notice how, when somebody has a physical disability, everyone carefully avoids mentioning it until they get mad with him, and then it’s the first thing they bring up?

I said somewhat stiffly, “You’re in command here, and I don’t expect you to do anything. I’m advising you to take this seriously and use full precautions to make sure we carry out our mission. Okay?”

She thought that over, and said, “Pardonnez-moi.” A little later she added, “Of course, it may be the aliens. Le zoo. It’s only reasonable to treat this as a military operation. Before we risk the ship, Lieutenant Morales will lead an armed reconnaissance to check things out.”

I just looked at her. Very unwillingly, she said, “Okay, I can’t let you off the hook just because I sleep with you. You’re the senior, so you’ll lead it. Are you satisfied?”

“No,” I said, “but I hope to be.”

After we’d relaxed a while and had a few shots of five-star brandy, I gave her a little present I’d been planning all day. When we were done, and having a shower in the command suite’s opulent bathroom, I leaned through clouds of steam and whispered in her rosy ear, “Now, don’t say I never did anything for you.”

She smiled. “Oh, I’d never say that.”

Suddenly everybody was in a fever of anticipation. Because we didn’t know what was going on down there,
Zhukov
maintained radio silence until such time as we found out. Janesco spent long days in the Arctic Circle with a crew of combat bots that had been in storage up to this point, but now needed activation and testing and being hooked up to the fire-control computer and so on. He’d been in the Alien War, and had scores to settle. He was an efficient guy, and personally I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the bullseye of any of his missiles, especially the big one in its housing outside on the hull.

For us too the training tempo picked up. A lot of the work was intrinsically boring, but when your life is soon going to depend on your gadgets, you develop a passionate interest in things like nuts and bolts and pins and gauges. There was no end to checking and rechecking our weapons. I remember watching in something like awe as one of our dumber peons, blindfolded, field-stripped and re assembled in about thirty seconds a launcher that by any objective estimate was a lot smarter than he was.

The mainframe computer had to run diagnostic checks on all systems, and that was fine. But when it came to the
Zhukov’s
two SDVs or suborbital descent vehicles (shuttles, if you don’t speak in military acronyms), Morales and I manually made damn sure the airfoils would deploy when needed. I also decided to give each platoon its own symbol. Instead of the Roman or Greek alphabets, which were kind of overused already, I chose the Hebrew and called our platoons Aleph (‘) and Beth (b) and had the symbols stenciled on all the equipment and the shuttles. We planned to use both craft, in case an enemy destroyed one on the way down.

Once we arrived on Paradiso, we needed to be able to exit the little ships fast, fast, fast, in case something mean was waiting for us – and enter them again just as fast, in case we had to get away quick. “Get in, buckle up – buckle off, get out! Move, goddamn it!” O’Rourke explained to our platoon, and emphasized his remarks by whacking laggards with his belt.

Insofar as there’s any secret to training people for battle, endless repetition is it. Soldiers don’t need a lot of brains – they need to be rote-trained and obedient to orders and not have too many nerve endings. Above all, they need to trust their leaders and their comrades and be trustworthy in return. That’s what esprit de corps means, and as we readied for action it was fascinating to watch it develop among our people, including the two who’d recently been ready to knife each other over the favors of a douche.

Morales and I had as many butterflies as anybody else, plus those extra ones a young officer gets before his first action. It’s one thing to face combat and take orders. It’s something else to face combat and give them, knowing you may give the wrong ones and take down a bunch of people besides yourself More than ever, we depended on our sergeants, and they understood and called us sir while quietly telling us what to do next.

Evenings I sat in the canteen and listened to Cos, and the closer we got to our objective the more depressing he became. The local sun had attained about the size of Luna, a dull red Luna newly risen through haze. Across the disc moved a tiny dark object – Paradiso. I’d sit there watching on a monitor the transit of what looked like a cinder, at the same time listening to Cos tell me how those we’d come to save were expecting ruin and desolation.

“They’re running,” he added, “but they’re running from something they know they can’t escape.”

“You can sense all this from way out here?”

“As I told you, ESP isn’t subject to the inverse-square law. That’s one of the most baffling things about it. You know those ancient drawings by Dürer, where a mountain five miles away is in perfect perspective – tiny, about the size of a thumbnail – and yet just as clear and sharp as the big figures in the foreground? That’s the kind of message I’m getting. It’s small, it’s distant, but it’s perfectly clear. There’s no loss of definition, no fuzzing out. I’m not making this up.”

Goddamn him, I thought, he probably isn’t, either. Cos was an expert on his own singular gift, and I couldn’t argue with him, much as I wanted to.

Every day the sun got bigger and bigger. I checked out a cube from the ship’s library and did some reading – even got interested in Universal History, which used to cause me terminal boredom in school. System H2223 had first been identified as a possible residence for humans by the ancients, meaning those fairly recent ancients who lived only a few centuries back, during the time of the Warring States.

All the wars delayed space exploration, but on the other hand the stimulus of fighting brought tremendous technical advances. Especially working out the nature of dark energy – natural antigravity – and finding in it at last the secret for exceeding the speed of light. So when we finally started star-ward we went better equipped and also had better theoretical understanding of our complicated multiverse. All of which was kind of neat to know, even though it told me absolutely nothing of practical value.

Otherwise I went on with life, doing P T with my guys, checking weapons, and attending formal dinners with the cadre, where Marie sat at the head of the table and I still sat at the foot, because the Table of Ranks had no slot for a commander’s lover. Drinking with Cos in the evenings, listening to him tell me that whatever was threatening Paradiso was drawing closer to it by the day, only he couldn’t tell me what it was, because it was “dark.”

“Think of it as a stealth object,” he suggested over his third beer one night.

“It is an object then?”

“I don’t know what it is. It’s dark.”

“Like an alien ship?”

“Might be. If the Zoo’s inside a nuke-steel egg, I couldn’t pick up their thoughts, you know. The object would be, yeah, dark.”

One night I woke up from a nightmare about a pit full of monsters with human faces – woke with a shuddering cry that brought Marie groggily back to consciousness.

“What’s wrong?” she mumbled.

“The thing that’s threatening Paradiso,” I said, wiping sweat from my face. “Could it be us? I mean, we’re coming to kidnap them and. . .”

“Mon cher, stop brooding. It’s quite pointless. We’ve got our orders and we’re going to obey them, that’s all. There’s no turning back.”

She was right, so I went back to sleep, and a few days later we entered orbit around the world that poor old Innocente had dreamed of turning into a new Eden.

Stepping out the first time on a planet of another star is something few humans have ever done. Or ever will, I guess. The memory of Paradiso remains today one of my life’s unforgettable firsts.

We debarked on an undulating plain covered with long coarse grass, or anyway something slim-leaved that looked like grass. The sun was about 45 degrees above the horizon, looking like the red eye of some cosmic beast that was eyeing us for lunch. The redness tinged and transmuted everything, giving the sky a purplish aura, turning blue-green leaves black, giving a perpetual sundown look to everything from pools of water to reflections in our facemasks.

We weren’t on breathing apparatus, by the way – no need for that. The air had too much oxygen if anything, and inhaling was like downing a flute of champagne. On the other hand, our combat boots suddenly seemed to be made of lead. The ancients had been able to spot Paradiso with their orbital telescopes because it was big – a hard-shelled Earth-type planet, of course, not a gas giant – but big for its kind. Suddenly I weighed something like a 110 kilos instead of my Earthside 87. As we lined up, all of us were moving like divers in weighted suits, and Morales and I agreed on ten minutes rest every hour until we adapted. I ordered the autopilots running the shuttles to close them up and use the lasers on anything that looked threatening, and it was time to start.

Aleph moved first, O’Rourke leading, me at the rear to keep everybody closed up. Morales’s Beth platoon fell in behind us. We topped a low ridge and saw the town founded by Papa Innocente. We didn’t know its name, so we called it O-1, Objective One. It was a pretty place, the small massive houses square-built of white stone with red or brown tile roofs, facing a little bay backed by low ridges that gradually grew higher until they turned into distant violet mountains. No tall buildings in the town, but one broad and deep structure with a shallow white dome, just faintly pink in the light. Through my helmet I heard Morales say, “Behold the temple,” and he turned out to be right.