“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.”
11
DEAD WORLD
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.”