I felt like crying again, even as everyone else was celebrating. I just didn’t get it. I almost thought I’d lost my mind.
“I hope you all saw that,” Balcescu said. I realized it was the first time I’d heard his voice in days. Who would have guessed I’d be hearing it over a comlink from the alien ship? “I humbly submit that I have won the argument.”
“You sure did, you arrogant sonuvabitch!” shouted Chinh-Herrera, but I think the comlink was only working one way.
“What happened?” I asked Doc Swainsea. She seemed more restrained than the others, as if she didn’t quite believe this was the victory everyone else seemed to think it was.
“They’re not real,” she said. “He was right, Rahul.” The doctor is the only person who calls me by my true name.
“Not real? But they blew up our ships! And just now…he pushed one of them!”
“Oh, they’re real enough — they have weight and mass. But they’re constructs. They’re not real people, any more than a child’s toy soldiers are real.” She frowned. She looked very tired, like it was taking all her energy just to keep talking to me. “No, that’s a bad analogy. They’re not that kind of toys, they’re puppets. This was all a show.”
“A show? They killed people! Hundreds of shipmen! What kind of show is that?”
But before she could answer me I heard Balcescu’s voice and turned back.
“This looks like it, don’t you think?” he asked, as if having a conversation with an old friend. “Time to make a little trouble for the local repertory company, I think.” George Sanders, maybe even Cary Grant — I have to admit, the superior bastard did have style. He seemed to be standing in a large chamber, one that was even more intestinal than the passageway, if such a thing was possible. At the center of it floated a huge, shifting transparency, a moving gob of glass-clear gelatin as big as a jumbo jet. Balcescu walked toward it, then stopped and held up his com wand, thumbed it. A deep rasp of sound echoed through the room and the jelly rippled. Then a vast pseudopod abruptly reached out toward Balcescu and engulfed him. I must have cried out, because Chinh-Herrera turned to me and said, “Nah, don’t worry. He was right again, damn him. Look, it understood!”
The pseudopod was lifting him as gently as a mother with her child. Balcescu’s point of view rose up, up, up until he was at the top of the gently swirling jelly, up near the roof of the intestinal, cathedral sized room. He stepped onto a platform that emerged from the bumps and swirls of the wall, then held up his com wand again. A single sound, loud and rough as a tree pulling up its roots as it fell, then Balcescu and the rest of us waited.
Nothing happened.
“Maybe I’m being too polite,” he said. Balcescu still sounded like he was on a day-hike in the hills. Even I had to admire him — me, who’d seen him drunk and feeling sorry for himself. I can’t tell you how annoying that was.
He lifted the com wand and thumbed it again and another wash of sound rolled out, this one harsher and more abrupt. We waited.
The jelly thing abruptly shrank away beneath him like water down a drain. Then the lights faded all though the vast room. Everything was black. A moment later, Balcescu’s helmet light flicked on, but the view now was almost all shadows, the chamber’s far walls a distant, ghostly backdrop.
“Mission accomplished, Captain Watanabe,” he said. “It’s turned off.”
The bridge erupted in cheers, some of them almost hysterical. I still didn’t really understand what I’d just seen, or why I was even there, but when Ping appeared a few moments later with something that looked as near as damnit to champagne, I took a glass. God knows everyone else was having some, even the captain.
I was taking my second sip when I noticed someone standing over me.
“I’ve got something for you, Rahul,” said Doc Swainsea. She showed me her ring with its glowing spot. I let her touch mine so the data could transfer. “He asked me to make sure you got it.”
“He?” I asked, but I knew who she meant. It was just something to say as I watched her walk away and out of the conference room. She was the only one beside me who didn’t seem happy, and I wasn’t sure I understood my own reasons.
I stayed on the bridge a little while, but I wanted to see what he’d left for me. Anyway, I never liked champagne much. Any alcohol, in fact. Too many people over the years have thought it was funny to try to get the little guy drunk, and I used to be stubborn and stupid enough to try to prove them wrong.
“Hello, Mr. Jatt. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye properly, but the last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, getting ready for this thing we’re trying. But I did want to say goodbye. I’m glad I got a chance to know you, even a little bit. I intend no joke, by the way.”
Balcescu was wearing an exosuit. The message looked like it had been recorded just before he left, which explained why he was talking like he wasn’t coming back.
“But I owed you of all people an explanation, because you were the one that gave me the idea. I guess you must know by now whether I was right or not.”
Like you ever really doubted it, you arrogant s.o.b., I thought. But then I wondered, hang on, if he was so sure of himself, why did he leave me this message?
“I should have suspected something right away — or at least as soon as I translated the message,” he went on. The Balcescu of half a day ago was putting on his exosuit gloves. “I mean, really — ‘The Outward-Reaching Murder Army will spit upon the stars that give you life’? ‘Only black ash will show that you ever lived.’ A bit over the top, isn’t it? But I didn’t see it. I took it at face value.
“Then you asked what else I could figure out about the aliens. I began to wonder. As you said, we knew what they’d said — but not why. Were they just roving the universe like Mongol horsemen, conquering and slaughtering? But why? What was the plan? Why leave a ship with immensely superior firepower to defend a Visser ring when they could have wiped out every ship in the vicinity in minutes? But it was the way they talked that really puzzled me. Bloody melodrama, that’s what it was. It was like something out of one of those ancient movies you told me you like so much… ”
“Those aren’t the kind of movies I like,” I told the recording. “Not that John Wayne crap — well, except for ‘Stagecoach’…and maybe ‘The Quiet Man’. I like characters.”
“…but I still couldn’t figure out what was making me itch. Then Diane…Dr. Swainsea…came in with her wide-spectrum audio analysis of the sounds that we hadn’t noticed at first, the ones that were largely out of our hearing range. Think about it. Behind those overly dramatic words they were pumping out a huge range of sounds — higher, lower, faster, slower — not exactly synchronized to the words, but emphasizing them, heightening the effect. What does that sound like?”
It hit me like a blow. “A soundtrack,” I whispered. “Like a movie.”
“Right,” the recording said. “A score — as in an opera. As in Don Giovanni.” The recorded Balcescu had closed all his seals and sat calmly, as if we were in the same room at the same time, having an ordinary conversation. “So I kept thinking, Mr. Jatt — why would someone go to such lengths, write an entire space opera, so to speak, just to kill innocent people? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But then I started thinking that maybe they didn’t know they were killing anyone? But how could that be?” He smiled that infuriating smile of his. “Because maybe they didn’t think there was anyone left to kill. Remember, this thing came to us through the Rainwater Hub, the most compromised wormhole in known space. Who’s to say they even came from our galaxy? Remember, I only found traces of their languages in some of the very oldest civilizations we know out near the galactic rim. Maybe the originals that spoke those languages are long gone — at least in physical form.”