Visions of the Future (28 page)
Read Visions of the Future Online
Authors: David Brin,Greg Bear,Joe Haldeman,Hugh Howey,Ben Bova,Robert Sawyer,Kevin J. Anderson,Ray Kurzweil,Martin Rees
Tags: #Science / Fiction
“So he’s protecting himself?”
“Yes… by creating a role that lets him believe that he controls his own life.” Karl shook his head. “He doesn’t want to actually run Arsia, chief. He just wants to pretend that he does. As long as you allow him this, he’ll be all right. Trust me.”
“Well… all right.” Not that I had much choice in the matter. If I was going to have a crazy person in my colony, at least I could make sure that he wouldn’t endanger anyone. If that meant indulging him until he could be sent back to Earth, then that was what I’d have to do. “I’ll pass the word that His Majesty is to be treated with all due respect.”
“That would be great. Thanks.” Karl smiled. “Y’know, people have been pretty supportive. I haven’t heard of anyone taunting him.”
“You know how it is. People here tend to look out for each other… they have to.” I stood up and started to head for the door, then another thought occurred to me. “Just one thing. Has he ever told you what he’s doing in his room? Like I said, he’s been using a lot of paper and ink.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed the ink stains on his fingers.” Karl shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’ve asked him about that, and the only thing he’s told me is that he’s preparing a gift for his people, and that he’ll allow us to see it when the time comes.”
“A gift?” I raised an eyebrow. “Any idea what it is?”
“Not a clue… but I’m sure we’ll find out.”
I kept my promise to Dr. Rosenfeld and put out the word that Jeff Halbert was heretofore to be known as His Majesty, the Emperor. As I told Karl, people were generally accepting of this. Oh, I heard the occasional report of someone giving Jeff some crap about this—exaggerated bows in the corridors, ill-considered questions about who was going to be his queen, and so forth—but the jokers who did this were usually pulled aside and told to shut up. Everyone at Arsia knew that Jeff was mentally ill, and that the best anyone could do for him was to let him have his fantasy life for as long as he was with us.
By then, Earth was no longer on the other side of the Sun. Once our home world and Mars began moving toward conjunction, a cycleship could begin the trip home. So only a few months remained until Jeff would board a shuttle. Since Karl would be returning as well, I figured he’d be in good hands, or at least till they climbed into zombie tanks to hibernate for the long ride to Earth. Until then, all we had to do was keep His Majesty happy.
That wasn’t hard to do. In fact, Karl and I had a lot of help. Once people got used to the idea that a make-believe emperor lived among them, most of them actually seemed to enjoy the pretense. When he walked through the habs, folks would pause whatever they were doing to nod to him and say “Your Majesty” or “Your Highness.” He was always allowed to go to the front of the serving line in the mess hall, and there was always someone ready to hold his chair for him. And I noticed that he even picked up a couple of consorts, two unattached young women who did everything from trim his hair—it had grown very long by then, with a regal beard to match—to assist him in the Royal Gardens (aka the greenhouse) to accompany him to the Saturday night flicks. As one of the girls told me, the Emperor was the perfect date: always the gentleman, he’d unfailingly treated them with respect and never tried to take advantage of them. Which was more than could be said for some of the single men at Arsia.
After a while, I relaxed the rule about not letting him leave the habs, and allowed him to go outside as long as he was under escort at all times. Jeff remembered how to put on a hardsuit—a sign that he hadn’t completely lost touch with reality—and he never gave any indication that he was on the verge of opening his helmet. But once he walked a few dozen yards from the airlock, he’d often stop and stare into the distance for a very long time, keeping his back to the rest of the base and saying nothing to anyone.
I wondered what he was seeing then. Was it a dry red desert, cold and lifeless, with rocks and boulders strewn across an arid plain beneath a pink sky? Or did he see something no one else could: forests of giant lichen, ancient canals upon which sailing vessels slowly glided, cities as old as time from which John Carter and Tars Tarkas rode to their next adventure or where tyrants called for the head of the outlaw Eric John Stark. Or was he thinking of something else entirely? A mother and a father who’d raised him, a woman he’d once loved, a child whom he’d never see?
I don’t know, for the Emperor seldom spoke to me, even in my role as his Prime Minister. I think I was someone he wanted to avoid, an authority figure who had the power to shatter his illusions. Indeed, in all the time that Jeff was with us, I don’t think he and I said more than a few words to each other. In fact, it wasn’t until the day that he finally left for Earth that he said anything of consequence to me.
That morning, I drove him and Dr. Rosenfeld out to the landing field, where a shuttle was waiting to transport them up to the cycleship. Jeff was unusually quiet; I couldn’t easily see his expression through his helmet faceplate, but the few glimpses I had told me that he wasn’t happy. His Majesty knew that he was leaving his empire. Karl hadn’t softened the blow by telling him a convenient lie, but instead had given him the truth: they were returning to Earth, and he’d probably never see Mars again.
Their belongings had already been loaded aboard the shuttle when we arrived, and the handful of other passengers were waiting to climb aboard. I parked the rover at the edge of the landing field and escorted Jeff and Karl to the spacecraft. I shook hands with Karl and wished him well, then turned to Jeff.
“Your Majesty…” I began.
“You don’t have to call me that,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
Jeff stepped closer to me. “I know I’m not really an emperor. That was something I got over a while ago… I just didn’t want to tell anyone.”
I glanced at Karl. His eyes were wide, and within his helmet he shook his head. This was news to him, too. “Then… you know who you really are?”
A brief flicker of a smile. “I’m Jeff Halbert. There’s something wrong with me, and I don’t really know what it is… but I know that I’m Jeff Halbert and that I’m going home.” He hesitated, then went on. “I know we haven’t talked much, but I… well, Dr. Rosenfeld has told me what you’ve done for me, and I just wanted to thank you. For putting up with me all this time, and for letting me be the Emperor of Mars. I hope I haven’t been too much trouble.”
I slowly let out my breath. My first thought was that he’d been playing me and everyone else for fools, but then I realized that his megalomania had probably been real, at least for a time. In any case, it didn’t matter now; he was on his way back to Earth, the first steps on the long road to recovery.
Indeed, many months later, I received a letter from Karl. Shortly after he returned to Earth, Jeff was admitted to a private clinic in southern Vermont, where he began a program of psychiatric treatment. The process had been painful; as Karl had deduced, Jeff’s mind had repressed the knowledge of his family’s deaths, papering over the memory with fantastical delusions he’d derived from the stories he’d been reading. The clinic psychologists agreed with Dr. Rosenfeld: it was probably the retreat into fantasy that saved Jeff’s life, by providing him with a place to which he was able to escape when his mind was no longer able to cope with a tragic reality. And in the end, when he no longer needed that illusion, Jeff returned from madness. He’d never see a Martian princess again, or believe himself to be the ruling monarch of the red planet.
But that was yet to come. I bit my tongue and offered him my hand. “No trouble, Jeff. I just hope everything works out for you.”
“Thanks.” Jeff shook my hand, then turned away to follow Karl to the ladder. Then he stopped and looked back at me again. “One more thing…”
“Yes?”
“There’s something in my room I think you’d like to see. I disabled the lock just before I left, so you won’t need the password to get in there.” A brief pause. “It was `Thuvia,’ just in case you need it anyway.”
“Thank you.” I peered at him. “So… what is it?”
“Call it a gift from the emperor,” he said.
I walked back to the rover and waited until the shuttle lifted off, then I drove to Hab 2. When I reached Jeff’s room, though, I discovered that I wasn’t the first person to arrive. Several of his friends—his fellow monkeys, the emperor’s consorts, a couple of others—had already opened the door and gone in. I heard their astonished murmurs as I walked down the hall, but it wasn’t until I pushed entered the room that I saw what amazed them.
Jeff’s quarters were small, but he’d done a lot with it over the last year and a half. The wall above his bed was covered with sheets of paper that he’d taped together, upon which he’d drawn an elaborate mural. Here was the Mars over which the Emperor had reigned: boat-like aircraft hovering above great domed cities, monstrous creatures prowling red wastelands, bare-chested heroes defending beautiful women with rapiers and radium pistols, all beneath twin moons that looked nothing like the Phobos and Deimos we knew. The mural was crude, yet it had been rendered with painstaking care, and was nothing like anything we’d ever seen before.
That wasn’t all. On the desk next to the comp was the original Phoenix disk, yet Jeff hadn’t been satisfied just to leave it behind. A wire-frame bookcase had been built beside the desk, and neatly stacked upon its shelves were dozens of sheaves of paper, some thick and some thin, each carefully bound with hemp twine. Books, handwritten and handmade.
I carefully pulled down one at random, gazed at its title page:
Edison’s Conquest of Mars
by Garrett P. Serviss. I put it back on the shelf, picked up another:
Omnilingual
by H. Beam Piper. I placed it on the shelf, then pulled down yet another:
The Martian Crown Jewels
by Poul Anderson. And more, dozens more…
This was what Jeff had been doing all this time: transcribing the contents of the Phoenix disk, word by word. Because he knew, in spite of his madness, that he couldn’t stay on Mars forever, and he wanted to leave something behind. A library, so that others could enjoy the same stories that had helped him through a dark and troubled time.
The library is still here. In fact, we’ve improved it quite a bit. I had the bed and dresser removed, and replaced them with armchairs and reading lamps. The mural has been preserved within glass frames, and the books have been rebound inside plastic covers. The Phoenix disk is gone, but its contents have been downloaded into a couple of comps; the disk itself is in the base museum. And we’ve added a lot of books to the shelves; every time a cycleship arrives from Earth, it brings a few more volumes for our collection. It’s become one of the favorite places in Arsia for people to relax. There’s almost always someone there, sitting in a chair with a novel or story in his or her lap.
The sign on the door reads
Imperial Martian Library:
an inside joke that newcomers and tourists don’t get. And, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time there myself. It’s never too late to catch up on the classics.
LUNAR ONE
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“It’s beautiful,” Emily said.
Blake stood behind his daughter, smiling and nodding as she used Lunar One’s telescope to gaze at the mottled blue and green orb shining bright above them. The Moon’s orbit had brought the day side of Earth into full view. It was hard not to marvel at the bold beauty of their world—harder still not to feel a pang of envy for the people living there. Emily turned away from the telescope with wide, bright blue eyes. The look of awe on her face reminded Blake of his own sense of wonder upon reaching the moon base, Lunar One.
“What’s it like up there? On Earth?” Emily asked.
Blake smiled anew.
Up
was a relative term. It certainly
felt
like the Earth was up, thanks to the Moon’s gravity and the seeming amplification of that gravity that their magnetic boots provided. Still, Blake couldn’t help but remember when he’d been a child back on Earth, gazing up at the Moon and wondering the same thing—
what’s it like up there?
Now with his curiosity sated, he was anxious to go back home.
Answering his daughter, he said, “Earth is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. There are vast green forests, creaking in the wind; boundless blue oceans, deeper than the deepest crater on the Moon, and so far across that you can’t see the other side; there’s crystal clear rivers cascading from soaring mountains that are bundled up in green blankets of trees and wearing thick, white caps of snow and ice called glaciers. The atmosphere…” Blake sighed and closed his eyes, remembering. “You don’t know what a wind feels like, but on Earth the air moves about as if it had a life of its own. And then there are the cities, millions of them. Each city is like a lunar base, but much bigger, and each one is completely different, with its own people, food, and sights to see.”
Emily was silent for a long moment. “I can’t wait to see it!”
Blake smiled. “I can’t wait either. You’ve never been, so you don’t know what you’re missing, but I do.” He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. “I think I’ve been up here too long.”
Emily nodded sagely, as if she knew just what he meant.
Blake turned back to the telescope and adjusted the height so that he could look through it more comfortably. Then he made further adjustments, magnifying North America and zooming in as far as he could on the eastern coast of the United States. He tried to imagine his parents down there, in their home in New Jersey, getting ready for Christmas. Knowing his mother, she would be busy running around cleaning and bringing out the Christmas decorations, trying to make everything perfect. His Dad would be outside stringing lights and wrestling their giant Frosty the Snowman into position on the front lawn. This year would be the biggest celebration they’d ever thrown. It wasn’t just Christmas; it was his welcome home party, and a chance for his parents to finally meet their granddaughter. It had been almost eight years since he’d been home. He’d had to wait until Emily was old enough for the return trip.
People weren’t supposed to get pregnant on the Moon, not without a license. Population controls in the colonies were strict; they had to be. A growing population meant that infrastructure had to expand. Things like water and soil for growing food had to be shuttled up from Earth, and that was beyond expensive. But Blake’s girlfriend, Celeste, had defied all of those concerns, as well as the hormonal injections that should have prevented her from getting pregnant in the first place. She’d wanted a child so badly, and somehow that desire had been strong enough for her body to beat all of the odds. Then, just two days after Emily was born, Celeste had died in the medical wing of Lunar One. She’d lived long enough to see her dream come true, but not long enough to live in that dream. Blake often reflected on that irony, wondering if it were somehow axiomatic of life.
“Why would anyone come live down here if the Earth is so great?” Emily asked, interrupting Blake’s thoughts.
“Because…” How could he explain to a six-year-old the necessity of establishing colonies on the Moon when the Earth was clearly the more habitable of the two? How could he explain the novelty of it, the research opportunities, the increased access to space, the bragging rights it gave one country over another… After eight years, the reasons all seemed petty and pointless, and maybe they were. Maybe it was just pure hubris that had driven humanity to colonize the Moon, something humans did just to say that they could. Blake shook his head. “I think people come up here in order to appreciate the Earth more.”
“That doesn’t make
any
sense.” Emily folded her arms over her chest, and she gave him that skeptical look of hers, the same one her mother had practiced to perfection.
Blake smiled and tousled her hair. “No, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s human nature to appreciate things better when they’re not there.”
“You must appreciate Earth a lot, then.”
Blake chuckled. “Yes, I do. More than you’ll ever know.” He twitched the telescope by just the slightest fraction of a degree, and he went from looking at New Jersey to New York. A lack of clouds over the city gave him a clear view, straight down to the metropolis. The magnification wasn’t strong enough to see individual buildings, but it was close. He could see the cityscape, a corrugated gray. Central park was a solid green square. The ocean all around Manhattan was a brilliant blue. Blake couldn’t wait to show his daughter around the city. What would she make of it? All she had ever known were the narrow corridors of Lunar One. She got to see the hydroponic gardens almost daily, so she knew what plants looked like, but she’d never seen miles and miles of civilization—crowded city streets, cars, people, restaurants, stores… She didn’t even know what
shopping
was. On the Moon, the colony provided people with all of their needs, but only the most basic ones were met. The rest… Emily just had no idea. A lump rose in Blake’s throat and he found himself trembling with excitement.
“I wish Mom could have gone back with us.”
That dulled his excitement. “So do I, Em.” He turned from the telescope to squeeze her shoulder and offer a reassuring smile.
“What are you looking at now?”
Grateful for the change of topic, Blake said, “I’m looking at the places we’re going to visit. The United States, New York City, New Jersey—that was my home before I moved up here.”
“Don’t you mean
down
here?” Emily asked.
“That depends which planet you’re standing on.”
“Well, we’re standing on the Moon.”
“True.”
“So Earth is up.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Can I see?” Emily asked, looking up at the telescope.
“Sure.” Blake adjusted the height of the viewing apparatus once more, giving his daughter a chance to see where they would be going. “You see the green spot? That’s a giant park in New York City called Central Park.”
“It doesn’t look very big.”
“No, it doesn’t, not from here, but it’s almost the size of Lunar One.”
“Wow. What’s all the gray stuff around it? It looks like the Moon. I thought you said there were forests and rivers and mountains everywhere…”
Blake laughed. “Those gray parts are skyscrapers. Tall buildings where people live and work.”
“Taller than the control tower?” Emily asked.
“Much taller.” The fifteen story landing control and communications tower of Lunar One would be dwarfed by even a small apartment building in New York.
“Ow!” Emily backed away from the telescope, rubbing her eye.
Blake frowned. “What happened?”
“It’s too bright! It hurt my eye.”
“Bright?” Blake shook his head and adjusted the telescope one more time so that he could see. What he saw was a giant, blurry cloud over the city. “Where did that come from?” he wondered aloud. “You didn’t move the telescope, did you?” he asked even though could see that the settings were all the same.
“No,” Emily replied.
Blake withdrew from the hands-on viewing apparatus and walked over to the computer console behind it. He needed finer control over the telescope, and some real hard data to understand what he was seeing. He eased into the chair and booted up the computer. Moments later the scene from the optical viewing apparatus reappeared for both of them to look at, now reproduced on the computer screen. The giant white cloud still hovered over New York, but now other details were coming clear. Around the edges of the cloud, black wisps of smoke were swirling, and thousands of small, bright orange pinpricks of fire raged. Blake’s insides turned to ice, and he gasped.
“What is it, Dad?”
He just shook his head. The uniform gray of skyscrapers and city streets was now a blurry, molten mess. Add to that the sudden appearance of the white, mushroom-shaped cloud, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Blake reached for the communicator in his ear. Tower Control answered.
“Lunar One Control, Lieutenant Rogan here.”
“Control, this is Blake Evans. I’m in the observatory. We need to contact Earth immediately! Something terrible has happened.”
“One moment, please.”
There came a pause, and then the gruff voice of Commander Thales growled at him, “What’s going on Evans?”
“Sir, I’m looking at New York and…” Blake’s voice cracked, and he trailed off.
“Spit it out, Evans! I don’t have all day!”
“The city’s gone, sir,” Blake croaked.
“What do you mean it’s
gone
?”
“I mean there’s a mushroom cloud rising where Manhattan used to be! The whole city is on fire!”
Another pause, this one longer. In the background Blake heard people swearing and yelling at each other. Then came a crackle of static and Commander Thales was back. “I’m sending someone to the observatory now. Stay calm Evans, and keep an eye out for further developments.”
“Yes, sir.”
Blake zoomed out until he could see the whole country.
“What happened, Dad?” Emily asked, tugging on his sleeve.
Blake opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came out, just a strained whisper. He felt like he was suffocating. It was a bad dream. Any minute now he was going to wake up.
“Dad?”
“Nothing, darling. Just… we’re still trying to figure things out.”
Another bright flash of light washed across the screen. This time Blake saw it, too.
“Look! That’s what hurt my eye!” Emily said, pointing to the bulbous white head of another mushroom that was busy sprouting up to the south of the first one.
Blake’s hands began to shake, and his heart thudded painfully in his chest. He let out a strangled sound and his hands flew over the controls to see where the second blast was. He checked the latitude and longitude, and the computer cross-referenced that with the name of a city.
Washington, DC.
Blake stared at the screen, his bottom lip quivering, his eyes unblinking. “This can’t be happening…” he breathed.
An hour later, the observatory was crowded with officers from the control tower. Everyone watched as the twelfth blast hit the twelfth major US city. Not long after that, explosions began to hit other parts of the world. Russia was lit up from top to bottom and from east to west.
It was hard to comprehend the decisions being made on Earth while they were on the Moon, completely cut off from the goings-on. Making the situation worse, Earth wasn’t responding to their hails. They were otherwise occupied, no doubt running home to get their families and get as far as possible from the nearest city center. It was everyone’s worst nightmare, and here they were, watching it play out via a lunar telescope, 284,000 miles from Earth.
“Well, we’re fucked!” someone said. Blake turned to see that it was one of Lunar One’s shuttle pilots. “That’s it! We’re done!”
Blake looked away and busied himself aiming the telescope back at the US. This time they watched not a dozen, but thousands of explosions flowering all across the country. Every city with more than a hundred thousand people got hit.
“Why Russia? Why the
fuck
would they attack us?” the shuttle pilot asked.
“Maybe it wasn’t them,” Commander Thales replied. “Maybe the powers that be just took an educated guess. Maybe they just wanted blood. Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter who started it. It’s already over, and we’re all that’s left.”
“What do you mean?” someone else asked.
“Isn’t it obvious? Earth wasn’t ready for this. The lunar bases are self-sufficient. We have our own spacecraft, mining operations on the surface, hydroponic farms, air and water recyclers. We can live up here, but they sure as hell can’t live down there. There’s going to be a nuclear winter, famine, disease, endless wars of retaliation and squabbles over dwindling resources. If humanity has any chance at all, it’s us. We’re the future now.”
“Are w-we still g-going up to Earth?” Emily asked.
Blake turned to his daughter in a daze. “Going?” he echoed, her words not connecting to sense in his brain.
Emily’s big blue eyes were full of tears. She blinked and they began to dribble down her cheeks. “You promised!”
Blake couldn’t bring himself to reply, he just pulled her into a crushing embrace, and he began to sob. Emily began to wail when she heard him crying, but that was as it should be. It would have been wrong to watch the Earth die and not shed a single tear.
“Sir, we’re receiving a transmission… it’s from Lunar Nine!” Blake heard an officer beside him say.
Thales replied, “That’s the Russian base! What do they want?”
“They received orders from Earth to launch their missiles at us.”
“Is that a threat? If they do, we’ll retaliate, and there’ll be nothing left but two fresh craters on the Moon!”
“It’s not a threat, sir. They’re suggesting we bury the hatchet. They’ve been watching the same thing as us. The commander of Lunar Nine has publicly denounced the Russian government’s actions. It’s all over the news nets. They’ve had trouble reaching us, because there’s no one in the control tower. The Japanese in Lunar Two had to forward their message to my tablet.”
Blake emerged from his daughter’s embrace to see Commander Thales looking pale and shell-shocked. He seemed frozen with indecision. “They started this…” he said slowly, squinting up at the mottled blue, white, and green ball above their heads. “It’s time for us to end it.”