A Separate War and Other Stories (8 page)

A curious thing happened at the second rehearsal, which was a dress rehearsal. Gladys was all smiles and flirting, with me and the students, but especially with Harold. He himself wore a kind of stunned honeymooner look. Their marriage was obviously off the rocks, and the consort responded to that with more than relief; their playing was superbly controlled and had a new emotional depth.

There was another emotional aspect. After the tea break, I played a couple of pieces, a solo of “Twa Corbies” and a duet of “Lord Randal” with a young man who harmonized with a doom-laden tenor recorder. Neither is exactly romantic, plucking eyes and poisoning your lover with eel-broth, but the students paired up while they listened, mostly boy-girl but also a pair of men who leaned together, touching each other shoulder to knee, and two women who held hands and whispered quietly.

It wasn't my singing, which a critic once neatly pinned as “accurate,” but some quality of the chitarrone's sound. The damned thing was aphrodisiac, at least in that setting, the old musty Victorian parlor with everyone dressed up for a passion play. The passion was so thick you could bottle it and sell it online.

The Medieval Faire was the killer, though. I was prepared to endure it—thee-ing and thou-ing everyone, wearing a quarter inch of beard and the woolen houppelande, not exactly made for Florida spring—but I did wind up enjoying the phony ambience, not just because the concert tent was next to the mead tent. I've never played to a more appreciative audience.

The pattern of the gig settled down to this: we would rotate among three sets of period music, during which I would play lute parts with my regular classical guitar. That would be about forty minutes' worth. Then I would pick up the chitarrone, holding it like a mandolin on steroids, and play a couple of tunes with light accompaniment.

Crowds would form in those last ten minutes, crowds that filled the tent and spilled out into the muddy mess outside. The crowd was composed completely of pairs, doing body language as if it were an Olympic sport.

Two successful CDs later, I shouldn't complain, but I will. Laura left me with a magical gift, and a hole in my heart that grows deeper every time I use it. Not just because I miss her, though I miss her like a wounded soldier must miss his lost limb.

I watch people while I play; I watch them go all soft and fall in love. But never with the player. Never with me.

(2004)

I hope you already know all this. I hope it's nothing but a redundant, overly dramatic gesture. But in case there's nothing left tomorrow, in case the ones in orbit don't survive, there will at least be this record, buried beneath the rubble, sending out radio beeps for about a million years, until the power source decays away.

This is how it came about.

When we bred the first ghosts—giza, as they came to call themselves—there was a predictable outcry from conservative folk all over the world. Playing God, making monsters, yammer yammer. They do seem to have turned into monsters, after all, of a certain kind. Though they started out fairly human.

Nobody could argue with the practical aspect then, almost eighty years ago. If we were going to proceed with space industrialization, we needed people in space—lots of people, even though the physical work was done by machines.

Back then, you didn't normally keep people in orbit for more than eighteen months at a time. Even with mandatory exercise and diet supplements, most started to weaken and waste away before a year had gone by. But when we started mining the earthgrazing asteroids, the most accessible source of metals for space manufacturing, a merely yearlong tour was out of the question. The rocks do come close to the Earth's orbit, by definition, but they spend most of their orbits far away, and distance means time, and money.

We needed people who could live in space permanently. So we made some.

Biological engineering was perfectly legal and routine by 2050. Almost nobody in the most prosperous half of the world was born without some degree of intervention. Who would take a chance on having children mentally or physically crippled from birth? There were limits, in most of the world—you couldn't have a child born with four arms, in hopes of selling him to the circus, any more than you could today.

Unless you lived in Spain. Their starting-from-scratch revolution in 2042 left a huge loophole in local laws controlling how profoundly parents could manipulate the genetic makeup of their potential children. The Basques, forever proud of their difference from the rest of the world, took advantage of the law with a vengeance, first with children capable of superhuman athletic prowess, and then stranger talents. By the time the loophole was forced shut in 2063, there were Basques with wings and gills and tentacles, who could breed true if they could find mates. Most of them did.

Though banned from professional sports, there were other niches where the engineered Basques had no competition. Barrel-chested giants with uncanny balance carried girders in high steel. Thousands of arrain, the fat, gilled ones, took over sectors of marine engineering and the fishing industries. And of course the ghosts took over space.

A normal human of average size needs eighteen hundred kilocalories of energy every day just to lie in bed. That's about a loaf of bread. If you're up and working all day, you need twice as much. Working in null gee, inside an asteroid, doesn't take as much energy as working on Earth, but you can't get around that 1800-k-calorie minimum. Unless you're very small.

The giza were not just bred small; they were bred weak. Spindly muscle and porous bone, so they needed only meager amounts of protein and calcium and phosphorous. They look like translucent skinny six-year-olds with adult faces on adult-sized heads, but ten of them use the same mass of food and water and air as one of you.

The first ghosts had mothers born on Earth, of course, but the first generation was born in low-Earth orbit, in a small hospital-and-nursery satellite run by Hispania Interspacial. For consenting to such extreme genetic engineering, the families were paid one hundred thousand eurams per child, half in cash and half in a trust fund in the child's name.

It was not a lot of money at the time, in prosperous Spain—a down payment on a decent city flat—but the Basques didn't do it for the money, and they didn't want the city. They did want space, to conquer space, and they almost succeeded.

H.I. guaranteed each child a technical education, at their orbital university, if they qualified. If they didn't, or flunked out, there was room in orbit for people to do other kinds of work. The only thing they couldn't do was go back to Earth, against whose gravity they could hardly breathe, let alone walk. Even lunar gravity would be dangerous to their flimsy bones.

They lived fairly well, though, in the hive they carved inside the ferrous asteroid Quetzalcoatl. A small city was in place when the first ones arrived, and it expanded naturally, as the mining machines ground their automatic way through the iron and nickel.

It was spartan in many ways, but the Earth sent much of their required carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in the form of food. They ate well. When it costs a thousand eurams to send a kilo of food, it might as well be caviar as beans. They had closed-cycle agriculture, too, so those kilos of caviar and pâté and artichoke hearts became soil for less exotic fare.

The ghosts were able to bear children at the age of ten, and large families were rewarded, since H.I. needed workers, and it was expensive to orbit pregnant women from Earth. Their population doubled and redoubled. They doubled and quadrupled the number of machines, though, and honeycombed the asteroid, making interior real estate as well as profit for H.I.

Giza culture diverged from Earth's, most strikingly in religion: their terrestrial parents had mostly been agnostic or Nuevo Catolico, but the giza regressed to (or rediscovered) the Neolithic Basque worship of the Goddess, Mari, who, like them, lived in caves.

The discovery of warm fusion revolutionized ghost society; cheap spaceflight brought tourism into their otherwise closed economy. Earthling tourists brought money, of course, but they were also required to bring food, water, and air enough to support them during their stay—which resources of course remained within the asteroid's recirculating biome.

The stranger the ghosts appeared, the more interesting they were to tourists, and what started as a more or less cynical exploitation of this became a jarringly swift transformation of their culture into a kind of juvenile primitivism. A female could have six or seven children before she was eighteen, and many did. So you had children being led and taught by children, more or less supervised by a small core of technologically elite, who prospered from the display of the children's charming and strange naïveté, set against their high-tech environment.

And then it stopped. The ninth generation was sterile. Every single one of them.

To the giza, it was obvious that the whole thing had been set up from the time the first one of them had been delivered custom-made into space. They bred true down to the very last manufactured gene, and that last gene was a time bomb that doomed them as a species.

They had been invented, they said, to spend a century setting up a comfortable civilization in space. And then die off and get out of your way. You have always hated the Basques, anyway.

Ridiculous, the Spanish authorities said. Nobody could be so malicious and heartless. It had been an extreme experiment in an inexact science, and a mistake was made.

The ghosts didn't answer. The only communication Earth got from them was a continuous loop of a long prayer to Mari in an obscure Basque dialect. None of the tourists there got through to Earth, either, and none returned. We've just learned, in a final message, that they were all told to leave at once, and crowded into airlocks. When the warning bell rang and the airlocks opened, there was nothing on the other side but vacuum. They may have gotten off easy.

For months, we heard nothing from Quetzalcoatl but recorded prayer. Then we saw that it was being moved, the giza using warm-fusion steering rockets to bend its orbit. When it became obvious that it was aiming toward Earth collision, we started to take measures.

Ghost psychology was not necessarily the same as human psychology, but the planners had known enough about human nature to allow for extremes. H.I. had a huge bomb capable of diverting the asteroid, in case a maniac got ahold of it and decided humans should go the way of the dinosaurs. The diversion would destroy the asteroid and all its inhabitants, of course; still, the decision to launch was no decision.

But the giza either knew about the defense or had deduced it. When the bomb-carrying missile was halfway there, they sent a vicious farewell message and committed suicide, blowing themselves up.

It was a careful, calculated act. They had prepared the asteroid with their burrows so that rather than blowing apart into random fragments, it cracked into twenty-one pieces, any one of them large enough to doom life on Earth, all continuing along roughly the same path. Our bomb pulverized one piece.

The fragment blew up at nighttime here, and it was quite a sight, as bright as the full moon for some seconds. We can't see its dark companions yet. I suppose the first and last thing people will see of them will be the bright flash of impact.

I'm going down into the basement of this building, turn on the beacon, and lock this record in its safe. Then I'll come back up and wait for the light.

(2001)

When you're in real estate you have to be a people person. Often that means nodding and smiling through people's delusions, waiting to talk them back down into something they can actually afford.

But financial delusions are one thing, and actual nutcases are something else. That's what I thought I was in for the day Baldy walked into my life.

I'd only been an actual broker for a couple of months, though I'd been in real estate for many years part-time, and more than two years full-time, since my husband passed away. So I would have told you by then that nothing could surprise me.

I could usually tell if customers were serious before they even opened their mouths, as soon as they walked through the door. Single males were usually not. So when a balding, portly middle-aged man walked in one hot August day, sweating profusely and fanning himself with a newspaper, I just put on my neutral smile and decided to let him enjoy the air-conditioning for a while.

He didn't respond to my greeting, but just plopped down in the chair in front of me and stared, brow furrowed. He didn't blink, and he seemed not to have any eyebrows.

When he spoke, his lips barely moved. “You deal in the transfer of land.”

“Well, sure. We help landowners—”

“Owners.” He shook his head stiffly. “No one owns anything. You sit on our land and spoil it.”

I looked at him closely. “Are you a Native American?”

He leaned forward, peering. I thought about the pepper spray in my bag in the bottom drawer.

“One of you? No. I just look this way. Just for now.”

“I'm afraid I don't follow.”

He nodded again. “You will follow.” He reached inside his sweat-stained seersucker suit and my hand dropped—casually, I hoped—toward the bottom drawer.

He brought out a cylinder that was actually three rolled-up photographs. When he unrolled them, they somehow snapped as flat and stiff as plastic place mats.

He dealt them out in front of me like three large playing cards. I took one look and my heart actually stopped for a couple of beats.

They were three-dimensional and moving. Not like 3-D movies or comics or any such foolery. Each picture was like a window.

He tapped on the first one, hard. “This is what was here when we first…arranged for the land.” It was a volcanic wasteland, like I saw on a National Geographic special on Hawaii. “When it was first ceded.” Ceded or seeded?

He thumped the second one, which was an edenic forest. “This is here now, a few hundred, maybe one hundred times ago. Just yesterday.”

He pushed the third one toward me.

“This is what you have done.” It was downtown, a couple of blocks from my office, the lunchtime traffic jam. I could almost smell the exhaust.

I picked up the picture and brought it closer to my face. I
could
smell the exhaust! There was a muted sound of traffic. The other two had faint aromas, too, arboreal humus and sharp brimstone.

“Impressive.” I stacked them together and put them in the middle of the table. I didn't know what else to say.

“You are an accident. This is not your fault. But this place was clean and perfect, the way we made it. Hundreds of millions of times ago, years ago, when we seeded. It grew green and did oxygen, as we planned. We didn't plan you, though, and you're undoing it.”

“Wait.” This was something out of my husband's pulp magazines. “You mean the whole planet?”

He nodded. “The place, the planet.” He closed his eyes. You could hear the wheels turning in his head. His eyes snapped open again. He still hadn't blinked. “We bought it. We fixed it up. Long before I was born. Now we're ready to move in. But we find
you
here.”

“So you're from another planet.”

He tilted his head. “Another place. Another time and place. Now
you
have to go to another place.”

“I don't get it.” Though I was getting it, and not liking it. “Who are you, anyhow?”

“I am like you; I facilitate the transfer of property.”

“A
real estate
agent?”

“Yes. Perhaps more like a lawyer.” He closed his eyes again, thinking, or maybe translating. “You are undesirable parasites, but you are also sentient creatures. This makes my function more difficult.

“If you were not sentient, we could simply be rid of you. Like you do with bugs. But there are protocols. Laws we have to obey.”

“Wait. You could just…get rid of us, like bugs?”

“Easier, really. Bugs are tough. But, as I say, protocols. We have to allow you to leave. To establish yourselves someplace that is not…here and now. Especially here.”

“Wait. Move to another planet?”

“Sure. You haven't done that?”

I shook my head. “Well,
no
.” This was 1967, the year before the first moon landing.

“I do it all the time. Nothing to it.” He took another cylinder out of his pocket and snapped it flat. “This is the agreement.”

I stared at it. “What is this, Chinese?”

He nodded. “There are 763 million Chinese on your planet. More than any other people. So that is the language of default. Touch the agreement.”

I did, and it suddenly turned to English. “How'd you do that?”

“I don't know.” He stood up. “It's not my concern anymore.” Without even saying good-bye, he started for the door.

I looked at the document. My name was on the bottom line. It gave us fifty years: on August 14, 2017, all humans remaining on Earth would be exterminated.

“Wait!” I said. “Who am I supposed to give this to?”

“I don't care. I just had to give it to you.”

“I want to talk to your boss.” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. “Your supervisor.”

“I don't have a boss.”

I picked up the document.
“Someone gave this to you!”

“Oh. The Council.” He clapped twice.

Two old women and an old man appeared, seven feet tall, skinny, dressed in black robes. Their eyes went up and down instead of sideways. “What is it this time?” one of the women said.

“She doubts the authority of the foreclosure.”

She looked at me very severely. “It is similar to your own laws about land. They were given permission to change its ecology; to develop it. Once developed, they may take possession.”

“What about
us
?”

“Sad. Accidents are often sad.”

“We don't have any rights?”

She looked at the other two, and then back at me. “Why would you have rights? To put it in your terms, you didn't buy the land. You didn't develop it. You have to move off.” The three of them disappeared.

I looked at Baldy. “That's
it
?”

“Simple enough.” He opened the door.

“But I'm just a
real estate
agent!”

“So am I.” He stepped out into the brightness and faded away like vapor. There was nothing but the hot smell of the street.

It might have been a minute later before I looked down at the document again. It was cool to the touch, and not hard or slick like plastic. My name and address were at the bottom, below two other things that might have been signatures, followed by something like Morse code, dots and dashes. The dashes changed in length, though, when I moved my head.

I thought about calling a lawyer. But the language was clear enough, way more clear than a real estate contract. On August 14, 2017, any humans remaining on Earth would be exterminated. That was the word they used, too; no euphemisms. I would probably be around, at seventy-eight; my family was long-lived on both sides.

Call the police? They'd lock me up.

I opened the filing cabinet and took out my husband's old address book. I took it back to my desk, hands shaking, and finally found the number I wanted, under the letter “J”—Jeremiah. Jeremiah Phipps, the science-fiction writer. I'd never actually met him, but he and my husband used to play pool together.

It was almost noon, but the phone obviously woke him up. I don't suppose writers keep bankers' hours, or real estate agents'.

I told him I needed advice about a mysterious object and asked whether I might meet him for lunch and get his opinion. My treat, I said, at Leonardo's, a pretty good Italian restaurant. That got his interest; he agreed to meet me there at one.

I called another agent to come cover for me, and when she showed up at quarter to one, I took the three photographs and contract in a large envelope and went down to Leonardo's. I'd normally walk the seven blocks, but it was a hundred degrees out. I turned the car's air conditioner on high and went back to the office for a few minutes. I guess I was helping to ruin the fellow's atmosphere, but it was evidently too late to worry about that.

I was inside Leonardo's cool, enjoying a Coke in a booth that looked out on the parking lot, when I saw the apparition that was Jeremiah Phipps. He had a shaggy grey beard and a mane of grey hair tied back in a ponytail, riding a rusty old bike, wearing cutoff jeans and a Florida Gators T-shirt. On his way in, he asked the waitress for two Buds.

“Very weird.” I didn't show him the pictures and contract right off, but first told him how the man had walked in and started talking cryptic nonsense. The two mugs of beer came, and I paused while he drained one of them. I ordered a large deluxe pizza, figuring he could take the leftovers home.

“I was getting scared,” I said. “I thought his manner was threatening. But I guess it was just a language thing.”

“He some kind of foreigner?”

“Some kind.” I took out the three pictures and laid them down. “How about
that
?”

He picked up one of them, looked at it closely, held it up to the light, looked at the other side. “Hmm.”

“Ever seen anything like that?”

He looked at the other two and raked his fingers through his beard. “I don't get it. Three sheets of plastic?”

“What? No, look—this is a prehistoric scene, and this is the traffic at Sixth and University, and this…”

He was looking at me in a funny way. “You see that stuff on them?”

“
In
them! They're three-dimensional, moving. You can even
smell
them!” I picked up the prehistoric one and sniffed deeply, and thrust it at him. “Fire and brimstone!”

He sniffed it gingerly and put it down. “Yeah, um, look…I don't want to pry, but is this maybe an acid flashback? I know how—”

“I've never taken drugs in my life!” The nerve.

He held up a placating hand. “Just tryin' to be scientific here.” He handed them back. “Study 'em. They're still the same?”

“Except this one.” I turned it over. “You had it upside down.” I took the contract out of the envelope. It hadn't changed. “How about this?”

He stared at it, both sides, then sighted down it as if looking for dust on the surface. “Another picture?”

“No. This is a contract. It gives the human race fifty years to get off the Earth.”

“Not gonna happen.” He squinted at it and then rubbed his beard, calculating. “Three and a half billon people, that's about two hundred thousand a day, call it eight thousand per hour. You couldn't move 'em across town in a bus in that time. Let alone to Mars or wherever.” He shook his head and sort of laughed through his nose. “Ain't gonna happen.”

“You think I'm crazy.”

He riveted me with his eyes, coal black and bloodshot. “I don't say that about people. We all got different ways with reality.”

The pizza came. I ordered two more beers and grabbed one as soon as they came.

He was a pizza-consuming machine, six slices to my two. He couldn't have weighed a hundred-twenty. Maybe he only ate when somebody else was paying.

“What you want to do,” he said, lingering over the last piece, “is get some scientists interested in this plastic. There can't be any plastic on Earth that does what you say.”

“You believe me.”

“Provisionally, yeah. Why would you lie to me? I don't have any money or prestige. Not gonna get any in this life.”

He touched the middle one, leaving a little smear of grease. “This is Sixth and University.”

“That's right.” I dabbed away the fingerprint.

“What you're seeing is the traffic going by there now?”

“Yes. Or I think so. It could be anytime recent, this time of day.”

He got up. “Order me another beer. I'm gonna bicycle down there and hold up a certain number of fingers. Then I come back and you tell me how many.”