Authors: David Langford
“Present company excepted, surely? You and I have done better than I ever dared to hope—which reminds me! I’ve been putting this off for too long.” She unclasped the heavy armband, hefted it and threw it after the pebble but a damn sight harder. It arced a few meters out over the water, and vanished with a white plop. (The day before I’d felt her send our final report, or final warning, into the dark between the stars—whether or not anyone was still listening.) Now the last of the ice seemed to have melted out of her face.
“Got a point there. You said ‘welcome back to the human race’ a while ago, a bit too soon—well, thanks. I reckon I’m back now. All the way back.”
“What convinces you at last? Have you a vast and uncontainable bulging in the trousers?” She looked at me very earnestly as she said that.
“No ... Well, yes, some of the time, but it was what happened out there. You know I pissed my pants with fright? That never ever happened to me before, not since I was just a kid. It was new, knowing I really cared in my guts about something—even if it was only myself. Funny to get tagged a hero after that.”
The salt wind came off the sea, over us both and up into the solid wall of blue-green not-quite-trees where, I guessed, a guard or two would be keeping an eye on us. Rossa put her hand gently on mine, which had its tendons pulled tight with the strain of propping me upright.
“...God knows what they’d have done to us if it hadn’t been for the hero business,” I said. “In the sickbay I was wondering—if
they’d
thought faster they could have found their own suicide candidate to ride down into the DEVOURER. Keeb would’ve loved it. They could, you know. Some sort of laser rig, signals,
something
like that to contact whoever it was.”
“It surely wouldn’t have been as reliable as our magical selves ... No, the meaty part of our offering was the notion of using a human being as the cybernetics of that dreadful birdcage—instead of the machine brains they use for everything, until Winkel couldn’t even think of substituting a person. The Talent just tipped the balance and helped them swallow
our
solution. Had they saved themselves any other way you might not be a hero now. We might be war criminals ... for bringing the DEVOURER. Surely I said all this when we’d decided?”
I shifted, trying to seat myself comfortably on the lumpy beach. “You didn’t spell it out. So call me stupid
... I had a few other things on my mind just then. Dying. And you.”
There was a smell of sea and seaweed in the air; it was already getting hard to imagine seaweed that would smell any different. Over the sea and around the world, some people were holed up with nullbombs; and StraProgCom, or maybe the Archipelago government, was still negotiating about them in New Africa. It was too early to tell what was going to happen: but everyone was so afraid of MT now that you could be hopeful that they’d keep from ever using MT bombs, the way they’d never used nukes in their damn silly war. I still didn’t know which side was in the right; the odds were I could listen to them both for ten years and still not be sure. In Military Philosophy II, I’d heard a line about how the really painful clash wasn’t good against bad, it was good against good. And we’d shoved in new factors ... But command responsibility had shifted now. Rossa and I had taken our turn at the wheel.
“You can’t ever go back,” I said aloud but not too loud.
“—Not, thank heavens, along the road we came,” said Rossa.
That was final. 100 percent final, or nearly so. They’d never found the minigate again. I must have drifted out of
Birdcage
while I was still blacked out, mustn’t I? Funny thing, they’d located the black hole again: it had been flipped umpteen million kilometers out of the ecliptic and was falling back in again. They guessed it would end going around Beta Corvi in a tighter orbit than Pallas, something nice for Winkel’s merry men to study when and if they pushed a ship out there. No hurry—it would be hanging around for another something times 10^13 years. And Fusco, more practical than Winkel, had deduced a second DEVOURER out there somewhere—she insisted they had to have tested the effect once beforehand.
And Winkel had looked at her and muttered almost wistfully about the very, very remote chance of DEVOURERS One and Two crashing together in space and coalescing, an event which he reckoned could release the energy of hundreds of millions of nullbomb explosions in one appalling flash. If it happened it would erase life from the Corvus system, he cheerfully explained. I didn’t believe a word of it.
If I’d really wanted to worry, what I’d have worried about until the day before would have been Corvus Station. The comp system there might just have had programmed plans for building more MT nasties, maybe even another 1.9-centimeter gate. It had been well protected, though. They’d played the satellite pics over the comm network and we’d caught them in the whitewashed house on Port Island where we’d been filed for reference, looked after by an old fellow called Tappen. Same thing: a sudden growing and fading circle of pure white, so perfect it looked more like a machine simulation than anything that could possibly be real. The voice-over had kept quiet about whether Corvus Station had just got tired of hanging around, or whether a team had gone in to ferret for secrets...
It was all very neat. You could say it was too neat. All the problems on Pallas were still around except the one they hadn’t known was a problem, the MT research—catch anyone doing
that
now when it might open the road for another DEVOURER! It was
Earth’s
problem that had been nicely sorted out with “minimum loss of life” ... Something reddish-brown with wide furry wings swooped from behind, shrieking, which jolted me off that line of thought for a second. The flying thing came to within a meter of the shingle and swerved off parallel to the ground and the shoreline, giving us a chance to admire its long and evilly hooked beak.
“I think that’s the beastie which attacks people,” Rossa said calmly. “Especially small children; it carries them off for its young. Gobble gobble.”
“Hear the safety catch click in the bush back there? I might have imagined it—but I expect someone’s watching over us very carefully ... Let’s shock them,” I suggested, trying to put my arms around her. The other hand complained and I had to go back to propping myself with both arms.
“On the ground, like
this
? It would certainly be an experience, Ken, but can we welcome you formally back to the human race a little later on?” For just a second she stroked what she’d chosen to call my vast and uncontainable bulging, and I trembled all over. “...Yes. You have changed.” And she laughed suddenly.
“You too. You didn’t used to laugh—not for real.”
I laughed myself, for no reason at all, and freed my right arm long enough to throw a stone out there where that armband from the torture chamber had sunk. Then I caught hold again of what I’d been thinking—
“I was thinking,” I said. “I was thinking that maybe Central Comp had it all sorted out from the start.
Minimum-loss-of-life strategy,
you
remember, and all that yap in Tunnel about hawk-and-dove compromises. And you know Winkel said what a convenient DEVOURER it was—how if it’d been much smaller the radiation would have killed the scheme, and if it’d been much larger the gravity would have done it. The way it all worked out ... well, the thing did take enough time coming for us to do what we did. So maybe it could have been what Fusco thought for a while. A final warning instead of a complete wipeout. God, they’re all scared of MT
now
, and hardly any lives lost...”
Rossa laughed again. “You’re pulling my leg, you must be—though it
would
be rather comforting to think all their ludicrous contingency plans made some sort of sense. No, but there’s no proof that they could choose what size of black hole they conjured up in their magic circle. Surely nobody could have predicted, possibly, what’s happened to us both—never in ten years of crystal-gazing...”
“Maybe. I’d like to think even Central wouldn’t waste a whole planet to tidy away its problems.
Anyway, we’ll never know, will we?”
“No,” she said. “We never will.”
My hands had got tired and I let myself down to the pebbly ground, flat on my back and staring up into a greeny-blue sky that looked more and more the way a sky ought to be. When it was just a sky and not a strange greenish sky, I’d belong to this place and not to Earth anymore.
I heard more pebbles shifting and squeaking. A fine needle of pain ran into a finger of mine that was curled up safe in my fist, and at the same time Rossa said, “Ow.”
“I didn’t feel a thing,” I said to the sky, without moving. “It’s worn off, remember?”
“Evan Keeb said everything I’d ever find on these beaches was harmless. I shall be having a word with that man ... See, it’s like an orange slug with a wavy fringe—oak-leaf border.”
I wasn’t wild about heaving myself upright just to gape at an orange slug. Instead: “You know, we’ll have to keep together, so when I jump suddenly there’s a good reason—like I’m rushing to find just why you squealed.”
“Spurious,” she said with a twist of the voice that might as well have been an outright laugh. “A very, very spurious argument...”
I shut my eyes; the light was starting to hurt them. Rossa scratched my belly gently through the cloth, and that was nice. She was lovely in the sun and wind, something I was noticing more and more now the old world had come to an end. Here we stayed, without any tanks to make you a zombie ready to fight and die again. No one now was going to wreck the universe and let it unravel around us, we hoped, unless perhaps there was some other place where something with scaly or slimy fingers was making its own first experiments with MT ... Never mind
that
. What we had waiting was the strange experience of ordinary life, together or not, and I still hadn’t any idea of what that was like.
I remembered one of the odder sights we’d seen in these last few days, a sundial of all things, a sundial that old Tappen had shown us outside “our” whitewashed house. Rossa had peered at the writing on the face and said, “How
corny
... I mean, how completely out of place...” But privately, I’d rather liked it—
As sande in the Phiall
Men tumble to Duste:
Time moves on my Dyall
And dy-all ye must.
To die in your own sweet time, and only once ... you can’t ask much more than that.
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