Oblivion (5 page)

When Cicoi awoke on this Pass, he was a general, yes, but a young general. And since then he had been promoted.

He had become, with no special training, Commander of the South. He had known that he was in line for this position. But he had expected ten Passes of instruction, ten Passes of apprenticeship, and ten Passes of guided rule before he ever took over the position from his predecessor.

But his predecessor, and his predecessor’s generals, had all reported to the recycler without having to be instructed to do so. They were no longer useful as living beings. They were killed, their bodies changed to much needed fuel and stored until the long journey into the dark night.

Such was the price of failure.

Cicoi’s tentacles drooped further. The very thought of the losses overwhelmed him.

In all of Cicoi’s memory, indeed in the memory of all Mal-muria, even the Keepers of the Stored Memories, no ship had ever been lost during a harvest. No disaster had ever struck on the third planet. Always, the Sulas had been sent and retrieved. Sometimes the creatures of the third planet had fought, but never in a meaningful way.

This time, the creatures had developed into a stronger people. They had technology, which they had never had before. They were able to destroy seven ships.

It was a disaster of untold proportions. Even now, when he should be examining the losses, trying to compensate for them, Cicoi preferred to stare into the valley below and imagine times long past. For he knew what the losses meant, just as all Malmuria did.

They meant that thousands of his kind would not be able to wake up on the next Pass due to the lack of ships to harvest food. They meant that thousands of his kind on this Pass would have reduced rations, making the long, cold sleep much more dangerous. The birthrate would be reduced for many Passes to come, until a balance was again reached with the number of harvester ships and the population.

He would not make those decisions. He would not decide whose rations would be cut or whose chance at procreation would be denied. Nor would he decide which workers had to forgo rest in order to repair the damage already done, to build more Sulas, and to attempt—since it had not been attempted in a thousand Passes—to build more ships.

No. His task was in some ways ethically easier, but practically much more difficult.

He had to figure out how to minimize those losses. He had to find ways to improve the yield on the next Pass, to harvest enough food with the equipment they had so that some of the losses below would not be as severe.

If he had the experience his predecessor had, he might make the right decisions. But Cicoi was new to the job, without training, and fearful of the consequences. He had seen the battles with the creatures from the third planet. He realized now what he had not seen on the last several Passes.

These were not primitives. These were creatures that had in common with Malmuria a mind and a heart. They too had died defending their lands. They had technology, and with it, a memory. They would do all they could to fight again.

He could not assume that they would be as easily defeated this time.

At least the energy screens and panels were working at full efficiency. Malmur was taking all that it could from this sun, storing it, and keeping it so that the planet would survive the dark part of its long orbit.

Cicoi raised his eyestalks toward the sky. The light that Malmur received in this, its nearest contact to the sun, was thin and pale and extremely weak. Still, the brightness all but overwhelmed him. He pocketed seven of his eyestalks and continued to look above. Strange to think that something so simple as light, something so small as heat, would affect a world like theirs.

This was the only time in the entire Wakening Cycle that he could stand on the balcony without the warmers being activated. The balcony was usually not used because warmers were a waste of energy.

He usually valued his time here.

But not today. Today he knew how much it cost.

He turned and glided toward the doors. They eased open. His assistants were standing on their circles, working their floating units, attempting to maximize effort. His Second was bent over a representation of the third planet, looking for the lushest region, the place with the fewest creatures and the most food.

Cicoi was beginning to believe such places did not exist any longer.

As he glided to his circle in the center of the room, his assistants rose on the tips of their lower tentacles and raised their eyestalks so that all faced him. He waved a careless eye-stalk at them all.

“I thank you for the honor,” he said. “But continue your work.”

He would continue his. He unpocketed two more eyestalks and raised a small image of the third planet for his own use when he heard ten soft chimes.

Irritation made his lower tentacles curl. Only he could ring the chimes, and then only when he had an emergency. He raised all of his eyestalks and bent them in displeasure at his assistants.

They had flattened themselves on the floor, tentacles covering each other in proper pattern.

The chimes sounded again, ten times, and as he heard each, he realized that these were not his chimes. They were too high-pitched, too warm.

Too old.

A shiver made his eyestalks stand on end. His assistants lowered themselves farther. At first, they had apparently thought, as he had, that the chimes had come from him. But on the second chiming, they realized, as he had, that the chimes had come from a higher authority.

Indeed, the highest authority.

The Elders.

Cicoi let his own lower tentacles slither outward. Nothing was normal about this Awakening. Nothing was going as it should.

He had never heard of a summoning by the Elders. Not in a hundred Passes.

The Elders were the survivors, the brains of the Ancients who had first designed Malmur for its journey across interstellar space. When Malmur was knocked out of its orbit around its original sun, it was the Elders who devised the plan that had saved them all. To make sure Malmur survived its centuries-long travels across deep space, the Elders left their bodies and only lived in an energy-free form, almost pure thought, in the center of Malmur. They had not communicated with any leader since the very first cycle of this new star.

Some even said the Elders had allowed themselves to be recycled long ago, that the Elders no longer watched over the Malmuria, that the Malmuria were on their own.

And many of the dissenters used as proof the loss of seven ships, and the disaster that lay ahead.

Again the chimes sounded. Cicoi pocketed all but one of his eyestalks. His lower tentacles were splayed across the floor. He could not cower here, like his assistants. He was a young leader no longer. He was Commander of the South, and those chimes were for him.

If tradition was to be followed, and it would be, then the series of chimes would ring ten times. If he was not in the Elders Circle by the last of the chimes, he would no longer hold his position as Commander of the South.

He was tempted. He had lost the arrogance that had made him one of the youngest generals in the fleet. He knew that he had been promoted past his skills, that the tasks laid out for him had defeated a better person.

But Cicoi was not a coward. Slowly he slid his tentacles beneath him. Then he wrapped his upper tentacles around his body and glided from the room.

That the Elders had sought him out worried him, but he knew the summons was based on the loss of ships, the destruction that had happened on the third planet. In that, he found comfort. The Malmuria still had their greatest minds to help them solve the problems.

No. That was not what worried him. What worried him was the fact that the situation had become so grave, the Elders had again taken interest in Malmur. Until now, they had been content to allow the Malmuria to handle their own problems.

The Elders must have felt that this problem was beyond the Malmuria’s skills. So the situation was as extraordinary as Cicoi feared it was.

And his worst fear, the one he could barely admit to himself, was that the situation was so extraordinary, not even the Elders would know how to make things right.

April 26, 2018
1:13 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time

171 Days Until Second Harvest

For two days, Leo Cross had been working in the swirling black dust. His skin still crawled when he thought about where the dust had come from, but he thought about it less often.

He was standing in the center of what had once been a populated area. He wasn’t familiar enough with Monterey to know exactly what the area was, or who had populated it, and for once, he was glad he didn’t know.

He wore an environmental suit provided by the Army, but instead of a gas mask, he wore a simple doctor’s mask over his mouth and nose. His eyes were covered with welder’s goggles, and he had a hat with flaps that covered his ears. The dust still got into everything—his clothing, his shoes, even under his fingernails—but not in the quantity he had first feared. Even though he knew the short-term effects of this stuff were negligible, he was worried about the long term.

If the human race had a long term coming to it.

Jamison was working about a block away. They had discovered that, if they worked side by side, the dust cloud was almost unmanageable. Because the wands hadn’t been designed for work in such fine material, the slight pressure with which the wands sorted through the dust created a cloud. Cross discovered that, unless he shut off his wand for nearly five minutes, the dust wouldn’t settle. Even though the days had been sunny, he had felt as if he were working in twilight. What light he did get was filtered through the blackness and felt ominous. The times in the day when the ocean breeze picked up and cleared the dust clouds faster were the best.

It didn’t help that the wand jammed a lot. Large items like snaps and zippers from clothing, pins that had once been in someone’s hip, or even—God help him—dental fillings jammed the machine hourly. He actually began making a pile of the stuff on the first day and quit when the pile had become a mound.

He didn’t like to think about what it symbolized. All those lives lost. So many that the U.S. government was now saying it doubted it could account for all of them. There were no bodies left to identify. Whenever people were reported missing from that particular area, they were considered dead. It was the only way the government could deal with the numbers. It also prevented a ton of lawsuits that survivors were going to file against the insurance industry.

Although Cross knew those lawsuits would get filed, no self-respecting insurance company covered its clients for “death resulting from alien attack.”

He shook his head. His humor had become mordant, probably due to a lack of sleep. He quit at sundown, just as Jamison did, but every time he closed his eyes, he could hear the clinking and then silence that resulted whenever something got stuck in the wand. That first night, he had slept and dreamed of finding fingers, or bones, or eyes when he went to clear the jam.

He had awakened, a scream buried in his throat, and found it difficult to sleep soundly again. It didn’t surprise him to see Jamison up as well. The two of them were now trading a stack of quarters back and forth from their penny-ante midnight poker games, neither of them wanting to admit that anything was better than sleep.

Cross’s shoulders hurt, and so did the small of his back, but he kept working. Neither he nor Jamison had found one of the nanomachines yet, but he knew they would.

A hand touched Cross’s shoulder and he jerked. He turned to see Jamison, dust covering his mask and goggles, indicating with his head that it was time for lunch.

Eating lunch was almost as difficult as sleeping, but Cross knew he had to do at least one. If he went without food
and
sleep he would be of no use to anyone.

He shut off the wand and let the dust settle. It floated around him like ash on the air. If he breathed just right, he could keep some of the flakes airborne. The entire scenario freaked him out.

He waited until the flakes settled slightly, blown on a slight breeze to his right, revealing the blue sky above him and the miles of blackness in front of him. Somewhere in all of that, a single nanomachine, smaller than anything he could imagine himself making, waited. Maybe more than a single one.

He had to find it.

He turned, felt the dust swirl around his feet, and looked at the ocean. Its blueness met the blueness of the sky at the horizon. Even if the aliens came and harvested again, destroying any possibility for mankind to continue on the Earth, the ocean would still be here, reflecting beautifully toward the sky.

He found comfort in that.

“Come on, Leo!” Jamison shouted.

One of the trucks had arrived with the afternoon grub. Usually Jamison and Cross had to slog to the nearest base. But this time, Jamison was eating a burger from the side of the truck, looking like a chimney sweep at a tailgate party.

The image made Cross smile. He walked carefully through the gunk until he reached the edge of the road. Then he waited for the dust to settle again. No sense in getting it on Jamison’s food.

Cross’s stomach was growling. He’d only had a banana for breakfast, and only because he knew he had to eat something. He barely remembered dinner the night before. Some spaghetti-like thing in the mess hall. Mostly he hadn’t eaten. He had pushed the food around pretending to eat.