Tenskwatawa’s voice continued in his ear. “But that’s not why I’m calling. Can you get linked right away? There’s news coming in. And I already have my plate full. Got to attend a conference with some aristocracy in Switzerland. One of the big newblesse clans may finally get onboard and join the movement.”
“That’s great news.”
“Yeah, well, we need those rich bastards, so I can’t turn away, even when something more urgent turns up.”
Hamish felt pleasure turn to worry. “Something more urgent than getting support from some First Estate trillionaires?”
“I’m afraid so.” Tenskwatawa paused. “One of our people, Carlos Ventana, just managed to slide a blip to us, past NASA security. He reports that something big is up.”
“Ventana,” Hamish mused. The name was familiar. A rich Latin. Used to own the entire phone company in Brazil or someplace, till they broke his monopoly as part of the Big Deal. Then he moved into fertilizer.
“Did you say NASA? Are they still in business?”
“He’s playing tourist right now on the space station.”
“You mean the old research station. Not the High Hilton or Zheng Ho-tel?” Hamish shook his head, wondering why a bazillionaire would spend good money to go drift in filth for a month.
“That’s right. Wanted an authentic experience, I guess. Anyway, it’s pure luck-or destiny-that we had a friend aboard when it happened.”
“It? What happened?” Hamish barely quashed his irritation.
“The astronauts grabbed or recovered something out there. It’s got them all lathered up.”
“But what could they possibly have found that-”
“Details are sketchy. But it may be a second-order disturber. Perhaps even first-order.”
Hamish himself had come up with the “disturber” nomenclature a decade ago to classify innovations or new technologies that could threaten humanity’s fragile stability. Leaders of the Movement embraced his terminology, but Hamish always had trouble remembering the exact definitions. Of course, with specs on, he might have asked Wriggles for help.
“First order…,” he mulled.
“Oh, Jesus walks in the Andes. Do I have to spell it out, man? Government spacemen haul something in from the deep dark beyond… and it starts talking to them! Apparently, they’re deciphering a series of communications protocols, even as we speak!”
“Talking? You mean…”
“Maybe not real conversation. But enough to send folks running down the halls of the White House and Blue House and Yellow House, looking all sweaty. Even worse, too many pros in the pencil pushers’ guild know about it already-damned civil servants-for us to exert pressure and get a presidential clamp put on. News is gonna get out this time, Hamish.”
“From… space…” He blinked several times. “Either it’s a provocation-or a hoax-maybe some Chinese-”
“We should be so lucky!”
Hamish forged on.
“-or else, it is the real thing. Something alien. Oh man.”
Now it was Tenskwatawa who paused, letting the background beat of drums fill a pause between them. Bridging regular gaps of time, like the pounding of a heart.
“Oh man is right,” the Prophet finally murmured.
“This may be nothing. Or perhaps we can strike another deal with the pencil pushers. Distract the public and keep the lid on, once again.
“Still, it has terrible potential. We could be in real trouble, my friend. All of us. All of humankind.”
What of destruction by devastating war? Shall we admit that our species passed one test, by not plunging into an orgy of atomic destruction?
Millions still live who recall the Soviet-American standoff-the Cold War-when tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs were kept poised in submarines, bombers, and silos. Half a dozen men at any time, some of them certifiably unstable, held the hair trigger to unleash nuclear mega-death. Any of a dozen crises might have ended civilization, or even mammalian life on Earth.
One sage who helped build the first atom bomb put it pungently. “When has man, bloody down to his soul, invented a new weapon and foresworn using it?” Cynics thought it hopeless, given a basic human reflex for rage and convulsive war.
But it didn’t happen. Not even Awfulday or the Pack-It-Ind affair set off the unthinkable. Were we scared back from that brink, sobered to our senses by the warning image of a mushroom cloud? Chastened and thus saved by an engine of death?
Might the cynics have been altogether wrong? There was never any proof that vicious conflict is woven into human DNA. Yes, it was pervasive during the long, dark era of tribes and kings, from Babylon and Egypt to Mongolia, Tahiti, and Peru. Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?
Oh, sure, industry then made war more terrible than ever. No longer a matter of macho glory, it became a death-orgy, desired only by monsters, and fought grimly, by decent men, in order to defeat those monsters.
Then, Europe’s serenity resumed. Descendants of Viking raiders, centurions and Huns transmuted into pacifists. Except for a few brush fires, ethnic ructions, and terror hits, that once-ferocious continent knew peace for a century, becoming the core of a peaceful and growing EU.
One theory holds that democracies seldom war against each other. Nations ruled by aristocracies were more impulsive, spendthrift, and violent. But however you credit this change-to prosperity or education, to growing worldwide contacts or the American Pax-it shattered the notion that war burns, unquenchable and ineradicable in the human character.
The good news? Violent self-destruction isn’t programmed in. Whether or not we tumble into planet-burning war isn’t foreordained. It is a wide-open matter of choice.
The bad news is exactly the same.
It’s a matter of choice.
– Pandora’s Cornucopia
14.
Night had fallen some time ago and now his torch batteries were failing. That, plus sheer exhaustion, forced Peng Xiang Bin, at last, to give up salvaging anything more from the hidden cache that he had found underneath a sunken mansion. Anyway, with the compressed air bottle depleted, his chest now burned from repeated free dives through that narrow opening, made on lung power alone, snatching whatever he could-whatever sparkle caught his eye down there.
You will die if you keep this up, he finally told himself. And someone else will get the treasure. That thought made it firm.
Still, even without any more trips inside, there was work to do. Yanking some decayed boards off the sea floor, Bin dropped them to cover the new entrance that he’d found, gaping underneath the house foundation. And then one final dive through dark shallows to kick sand over it all. Finally, he rested for a while with one arm draped over his makeshift raft, under the dim glow of a quarter moon.
Do not the sages counsel that a wise man must spread ambition, like honey across a bun? Only a greedy fool tries to swallow all of his good fortune in a single bite.
Oh, but wasn’t it a tempting treasure trove? Carefully cloaked by the one-time owner of this former beachfront mansion, who took the secret of a concealed basement with him-perhaps out of spite-all the way to the execution-disassembly room.