“The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”
“Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.
“You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”
“It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”
And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”
“Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”
“Not yet,” Elza said.
“It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”
That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes… energy.
“None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”
I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”
“Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”
Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”
“Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.
“It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.
“This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”
“You’re products of their intelligence.”
She nodded, bobbing. “It’s like a human play, or novel. Öedipus Rex or King Lear—the children can misunderstand their parents in ways that nobody else can.”
“Good examples,” Dustin said. “Happy endings.”
15
CHANGES
Paul and I twice tried to make love during turnaround, but we were too nervous and distracted. Doom-ridden, perhaps.
A couple of hours before we filed into the shuttle, we all together made a long transmission to Earth, explaining everything as well as we could and hoping for the best for all of us. If Spy’s description of the process was accurate, they would get the message less than a year before we arrived.
It might come just after the Others had blown humanity into elementary particles. There was no need to say anything about that.
We weren’t sure exactly where we would arrive. When we went from turnaround to Wolf 25, we were deposited in orbit around the wrong planet, technically, since we’d planned to go to the moon of the gas giant where the Others lived.
So now, we presumably would go wherever in the solar system the Others wanted us to stop. If it was back where the iceberg started, past Mars orbit, we’d have a longish trip back to Earth.
Or maybe Mars, if Earth wasn’t there anymore.
Paul followed the rest of us into the shuttle and helped Snowbird with her harness. Then he floated up the aisle and strapped himself in. He swiveled around partway and looked down at us.
“Does anybody pray?”
After a long silence, Namir whispered, “Shalom.”
“Yeah.” Paul’s finger hovered over a red switch. “Good luck to all of us.”
We were all ready for the transition’s emotional blow, but most of us cried out, anyhow. And then a gasp of relief.
The blue ball of Earth was below us, the Pacific hemisphere. To my left, the Space Elevator, with the Hilton and Little Mars, Little Earth, and several new structures, including three smaller elevators.
I could faintly hear a burst of radio chatter from Paul’s direction.
“One at a time!” he shouted. “This is Paul Collins, pilot of ad Astra. We are safe.” He looked back at us with a grin. “I should have thought up something historic to say.”
“One long trip for a man,” Elza intoned; “one ambiguous stumble for mankind.”
We were quickly surrounded by identical small spaceships that were obviously warcraft. No streamlining, just a jumble of weaponry on top of a drive system, with a little house in between. Probably called a “life-support module,” or something equally homey.
Earth was in a panic because we had inexorably approached, decelerating full blast, without answering any queries or attempting to communicate.
“The explanation is both simple and complicated,” Paul said, echoing what Snowbird had said a couple of days, or six years, ago. “I think it’s reasonable that I start with the highest possible authority.”
The battalion commander identified herself and demanded an explanation. “Of course we know what you are. But we’ve been alongside you for weeks and have gotten no cooperation.”
“I am not under your command,” he pointed out. “This is not anybody’s military expedition. Is there still a United Nations?”
“Not as such, captain. But all nations are united.”
“Well, let me talk to whoever’s in charge. With some science types listening in.”
“This is completely against protocol. You—”
“I don’t think you have a protocol covering how to deal with a half-century-old spaceship returning from a mission to save the planet from destruction. Or does it happen all the time?”
“We have been expecting you, sir, since your message arrived last month. But when the ship did not respond as it approached Earth, we had to expect the worst.”
“The worst did not happen. Now I’m going to break contact and will talk only when I can talk to someone who outranks everyone who outranks you. Out for now.” He cut off the battalion commander in midbluster and spun half around. “Drink?”
I tossed him the squeeze bag of ersatz Bordeaux. “Holding out for champagne, myself. In gravity.”
He took a long drink, two swallows, and passed it to Namir, who had been sitting silent.
“Suit yourself,” Namir said to me, his voice husky. “It might be a long wait.”
I unstrapped and swam up front to visit with Paul and watch the monitor. The wait was less than a minute.
An elderly man with a seamed dark face and white full beard came into the monitor as it pinged. A voice said, “Mervyn Gold, president of the United Americas.”
“Paul?” the old man said. “ ‘Crash’ Collins?”
Paul stabbed a finger at the camera button. “Professor Gold!”
He smiled broadly. “We’ve both come up in the world, Paul.”