Asimov's Science Fiction (11 page)

"Hey! My gun!"

All at once he thought he was the stupidest person alive. The aliens had vaporized his rifle. They had vaporized entire
cities.
What was he doing? He had to get out!

Zed bolted back toward the mist, but somehow it had become impassable. Zed beat his fists against it, which was like beating on stone. On the other side of the mist, Isobel screamed.

He thought first that the aliens were hurting her. Then, that the Earther soldiers had grabbed her and her cousins. Finally he realized that her screams were not pain or fear, but fury.

"Let me in too! Let me in, you fucking bastards! I go with Zed! Let me in!"

"Isobel!"

The sound ceased. Zed cried at the ceiling, "Don't hurt her! Don't you dare hurt her!"

"No," the ceiling said back.

A mechanical voice, but it startled Zed so much that for a moment he thought it was the voice of God, answering the prayers his father always directed at the cabin ceiling.

"She is not hurt. But she cannot enter. You may enter."

The far wall dissolved.

Zed blinked. He was on the other side of the wall, and young people stood smiling at him.

"Hi," one of the girls said. "I'm Leah, and this is June and Paul. Welcome to The Resort."

Three ordinary human teenagers, two girls and a boy, dressed in ordinary pants and shirts and leather shoes. Behind them a field stretched to a bright blue sea with the sun rising above it in multi-colored glory. The air smelled of flowers. Zed said, "Let me out!"

Leah frowned. "You just got in."

"I have to go to Isobel."

"Oh." The frown was replaced by compassion. "Your wife?"

Zed looked at them more closely. Not teenagers: older than he thought. Twenties, maybe. He didn't care. "Girlfriend," he said, aware even now, even here, of a ridiculous little hiccup of pride as he said it. "I have to get back! We were supposed to come in together!"

"If she didn't come in with you," Paul said, "there's a reason for that."

"What reason?" Zed rounded on him, fists half-clenched, almost glad to have a target he could understand.

"Easy, big guy," Paul said. "This isn't a place for fighting."

"I have to go back!"

"Well," Leah said reasonably, "if you really want to do that, you can. But—"

"I can?"

"—first you have to see your mentor. Once, at a minimum. Those are the rules. Then if you want, you can go back. June, who's he assigned to?"

June appeared to stare at something invisible. "C7."

"Okay," Leah said. "Come on, I'll take you. What's your name?"

It was a trap. They wanted to get him away from the wall so he couldn't go back to Isobel. But he couldn't go back to Isobel now. If they wanted him dead, he'd be as gone as his.22. Wouldn't he?

Utterly confused, he said, "Zed Larch."

"This way, Zed."

She led him across the field, toward the ocean. As they got closer, Zed halted to stare. He'd never seen any water bigger than a mountain lake. The Atlantic threw up sparkling whitecaps before it broke on rocks. Seagulls wheeled overhead, crying raucously. The wind smelled of salt and freshness.

Leah waited, smiling, while he took it all in. Her smile stayed even after he planted his feet and stared at her. "No farther till you answer some questions!"

"Sure."

"Can I really leave after I see Seeven?"

"C7. Yes. A few do. Most of us stay."

"Why?"

"We're learning things. Or we like it here. Or we were hurt or sick when we came. Or it's a big adventure. Or we understand what's happening. Pick your reason."

"What
is
happening?"

"History."

"I want answers!"

"You're getting them."

He raised his hand and gnawed on his fingernails. "How long have
you
been here?"

"Two years."

"What do the aliens do to you?"

"Do? Do you mean do they torture us or brainwash us or force us into hard labor or eat us? Grow up, Zed. If you were a starfaring race with the technology to remake a planet, would you need slaves? Would you want to eat microbe-ridden mammals whose flesh might kill you?"

Zed didn't know what microbes were, but it didn't sound good. God, he was behaving like his father. The last thing he wanted.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to insult you."

"You didn't. Come on, C7 will answer your questions. Or rather, 'The Question.' That's what you really want to ask."

"I—"

"Come on."

Women were always telling him to do something. Leah, Isobel, Mrs. Bellingham, his mother.
Go, come, go.

They walked a long way along the shoreline to a low white building, gracefully curved. It blended with the white sand between it and the sea. Behind, dunes rose to woods and fields, where the low buildings were brown or green or gray. A rabbit dashed across the path.

A young woman passed them, walking beside a low cart that floated above the ground. In the cart lay two infants. Zed gaped at the floating cart, the babies, the cart again. The young woman said, "Hi, Leah."

"Hi, Mary. How are the twins?"

"Off to J4. We're late."

She hurried off, the floating cart keeping pace. Zed said, "How—"

"The usual way, of course. Their father is Tim, my brother. Come on inside."

An ordinary room; chairs and a table and wide, open doors facing the sea. Beside the doors, something unordinary.

"Hello," the thing said.

As a child, Zed had gathered stones by the mountain stream. His mother had even paused in her endless chores long enough to tell him the names of the ones she knew: granite and shale and mica and quartz. C7 looked like a thigh-high piece of quartz shot through with mica and then overlaid with patchy slime. The slime was gray and oozy. The quartz was cut into hundreds of precise, diamond-shaped facets like those on his mother's tiny wedding ring.

This
had destroyed civilization?

To Leah he whispered, "Is it alive?"

"Sort of. This is his remote. C7, this is Zed Larch."

"Welcome," said a rich, deep voice, nothing like the mechanical one in the wall. "I'm happy to meet you, Zed."

Zed blurted, "What are you?"

Leah looked sideways at him, but C7 merely chuckled. "I look strange to you, I know. You will become accustomed."

"I don't think so," Zed said, so dazed that the words just tumbled out, grain from a ripped sack, without volition or manners.

Leah said, "I'll leave you two."

C7 said, "As Leah said, this is my remote. It is alive, an extension of myself, like an arm would be for you. The rest is aboard our ship in orbit around the moon. What you humans perceive as 'slime' is an organic compound functioning to control moisture levels and pH. Do you understand?"

"No. You're an arm? What if I... what if you have an accident? Does the part of you aboard the ship lose an arm? With pain and... and armlessness?" He hardly knew what he said.

"Yes. With pain and the equivalent of armlessness. But I know you aren't going to cause me an accident, Zed. Your brain waves were measured when you came through the wall. You are not intending destruction."

"The wall wouldn't let Isobel through!"

"She was so intending."

"That's a lie! We were going to get jobs here, work together! And I'm going back out to her!"

"You are free to do so. But first there's a question you want to ask, isn't there?"

Zed stared steadily at the thing that was an arm, or a rock covered with slime, or a pack of dirty lies. Leah, June, Paul—they could be all brainwashed, in which case the Earthers had been right all along. Maybe Zed himself was already brainwashed. But he just felt like himself. He asked the question.

"Why did you do it?"

"You mean, why did my race destroy Earth's cities and half its population?"

"Yes."

"Everyone who comes here asks the same question, and each receives the same answer. I will show you."

Silently the wide door facing the seashore swung shut, and the room darkened. Zed cried out. The room had disappeared and he stood on a road, but unlike any road he had ever seen: crowded, jammed, dense with people and cars and bicycles and carts pulled by large, strange animals. Buildings crowded him, lights flashed, people shouted in a strange language, smells assaulted his nose. A child fell and the wheels of a cart rolled over him. People screamed. More lights flashed. Sirens sounded. Sudden smoke clogged the air.

"This was a city in 2014," C7 said. "It is Karachi, but it could be any of very many. Here is another."

Karachi disappeared. Before Zed could draw a normal breath, tall buildings— taller than trees, as tall as the sky—dwarfed him. Lights blinked incessantly, red and green and blue and blinding white. People thronged close to him, so that he flinched away, until one walked right through him. Even more cars, trucks, buses, bicycles... panic rose in him and he tried to run toward the door. Stopped himself. It wasn't real. It was an illusion, like a picture in a book....

"New York in 2014," C7 said. "Stay still, Zed. This is New York as it would have been in 2050, if it still existed."

Howling winds knocked Zed off his feet. He lay on the floor as wind and rain pelted him. Buildings sagged and one collapsed. Through the bars of a cellar window he saw a woman's face looking at him, nothing but skin stretched over skull, her eyes sunken, her hair patchy. Zed had found deer with that look, starving after a hard winter. Another building toppled.

"Superstorms," C7 said, "the result of climate change. In 2014 the United States had nine hurricanes and one superstorm. By 2050, twenty 'class-one' hurricanes and ten superstorms, which raged over huge areas at once. This is Seattle."

The same, with fewer buildings left, muddy hills sliding into the sea.

"Wichita."

Almost nothing left but the ceaseless, howling winds over dusty ground.

"The Atlantic Ocean, right here on this beach, by 2070."

Masses of floating garbage, between them greenish algae as far as the eye could see, growth so out of hand that everything underneath was dead. A little boy picked his way through the garbage. He looked as skeletal as the woman in the New York basement, his body bent almost double against the wind. Oozing sores covered his nearly naked body.

"The child's illness," C7 said, "is the result of biowarfare. Now here is New York again, in the year 2200."

The winds had ceased. There were no people, no buildings. Only jungle, plant life thicker than Zed could have imagined, as thick as dirt covering a grave. No animals moved in that thickness; no birds flew. Zed gasped, his lungs burning, he couldn't breathe —

"Carbon dioxide levels up over 3 percent," C7 said. "No mammals left. That future—humanity's future without intervention—is why we did it. For the common good."

The jungle vanished, and Zed was back in the white room with its doors opened to the clean salt air off the Atlantic.

"Not genocide, Zed. Rescue. Sit down, you are hyperventilating."

Zed collapsed into a chair. In the midst of stunned wonder, of anger and fear, he found his question. "Why should I believe you?"

"Because it is the truth."

"I don't know that! Are you saying you could see the future?"

"No. That was a simulation, of course, but based on totally accurate data. No one can see the future. Our problem with humanity is that you do not even try."

"That's not so!"

"Yes, it is. You look no farther ahead than your own short lives. Sometimes, but not often, you consider those of your children. No farther. You want energy and objects and profits so you take them, regardless of the long-term consequences to yourselves, your descendants, your planet."

"So why is that
your
problem?"

"I cannot tell you that yet."

"How do I know you're not just lying? Making up a story to excuse yourself for what you did?"

"You don't know. I cannot go into your skull and make you believe. But if you stay here, you will learn some of the science that the predictions are based on. Good science leads to good far-seeing."

"I don't know enough to even know if the science you'd give me is lies!"

C7 was silent. Mica flecks flickered inside quartz. Finally it said, "No human has ever said that to us before. In the admission of ignorance lies the start of far-seeing. I very much hope you will stay, Zed...."

"Then let Isobel in, too!"

"No."

Zed put his face into his hands, immediately removed it. If he had shown such weakness with his father, there would have been a beating with the belt.

C7 was not his father.

Zed fought for calm. Eventually he managed, "If what you say is true, then why didn't you just
warn
Earth in 2014? Show those... shows of the future, way back then?"

"We did. The United Nations in New York was beamed everything you just saw, plus more. No one believed us. They had not believed humans telling them the same thing, your own scientists, for at least forty years."

"So you wiped out all the cities and just took off in your ship."

"We went home to wait."

"For
what,
for fucking sake?"

"For you. Your generation. We thought that in two or three generations, the survivors—and we knew you would survive; humanity is among the toughest races we know—would understand why we acted as we did. Or, if you did not understand, that the generation who experienced 'June 30th, would mostly be dead, and the new one willing to listen to us. Our knowledge of your history showed us many alliances with former enemies, some of whom had caused just as much local destruction and with much more cruelty." C7 gave something that, if it had been human, would have been a sigh. "We were wrong. The people of Earth did not behave with us as you have with others in the past. And it seems that there is one area of behavior where you do practice far-seeing.

"Revenge."

Zed stayed.

Every day he asked himself why. Not for the science, which was too hard for him. Or maybe he just wasn't interested enough. He listened to C7 or J3 or D1—they all looked alike to Zed, although Leah and Paul and Ruhan could tell them apart—and even during the simulations, three-dimensional and immersing, his thoughts would wander. His mind, imaginative but not analytical, left carbon-dioxide levels or cellular biology or Moore's Law for what did interest him: The Question, or rather The Questions.