"We did that?"
"Well, our parents did." He shakes his head and pulls the reins. The cart rattles past, both girls pressed against him as if I am dangerous.
"Oh, we were so happy!" my father says, rocking into the memory. "We were like children, you know, so innocent, we didn't even know."
"Know what, Pop?"
"That we had enough."
"Enough what?"
"Oh, everything. We had enough everything. Is that a plane?" he looks at me with watery blue eyes.
"Here, let me help you put your helmet on."
He slaps at it, bruising his fragile hands.
"Quit it, Dad. Stop!"
He fumbles with arthritic fingers to unbuckle the strap but finds he cannot. He weeps into his spotted hands. It drones past.
Now that I look back on how we were that summer, before the tragedy, I get a glimmer of what my father's been trying to say all along. It isn't really about the cakes, and the mail order catalogs, or the air travel they used to take. Even though he uses stuff to describe it that's not what he means. Once there was a different emotion. People used to have a way of feeling and being in the world that is gone, destroyed so thoroughly we inherited only its absence.
"Sometimes," I tell my husband, "I wonder if my happiness is really happiness."
"Of course it's really happiness," he says, "what else would it be?"
We were under attack is how it felt. The Manmensvitzenders with their tears and fear of bread, their strange clothes and stinky goats were children like us and we could not get the town meeting out of our heads, what the adults had considered doing. We climbed trees, chased balls, came home when called, brushed our teeth when told, finished our milk, but we had lost that feeling we'd had before. It is true we didn't understand what had been taken from us, but we knew what we had been given and who had done the giving.
We didn't call a meeting the way they did. Ours just happened on a day so hot we sat in Trina Needles's playhouse fanning ourselves with our hands and complaining about the weather like the grownups. We mentioned house arrest but that seemed impossible to enforce. We discussed things like water balloons, T.P.ing. Someone mentioned dog shit in brown paper bags set on fire. I think that's when the discussion turned the way it did.
You may ask, who locked the door? Who made the stick piles? Who lit the matches? We all did.
And if I am to find solace, twenty-five years after I destroyed all ability to feel that my happiness, or anyone's, really exists, I find it in this. It was all of us.
Maybe there will be no more town meetings. Maybe this plan is like the ones we've made before.But a town meeting is called. The grownups assemble to discuss how we will not be ruled by evil and also, the possibility of widening Main Street. Nobody notices when we children sneak out. We had to leave behind the babies, sucking thumbs or blanket corners and not really part of our plan for redemption. We were children. It wasn't well thought out.
When the police came we were not "careening in some wild imitation of barbaric dance" or having seizures as has been reported. I can still see Bobby, his hair damp against his forehead, the bright red of his cheeks as he danced beneath the white flakes that fell from a sky we never trusted; Trina spinning in circles, her arms stretched wide, and the Manmensvitzender girls with their goats and cart piled high with rocking chairs, riding away from us, the jingle bells ringing, just like in the old song. Once again the world was safe and beautiful. Except by the town hall where the large white flakes rose like ghosts and the flames ate the sky like a hungry monster who could never get enough.
The Great Game
STEPHEN BAXTER.
Stephen Baxter (www.cix.co.uk/~sbradshaw/baxterium/ baxterium.html) is now one of the big names in SF. In 1995 and 1996, he became a major figure internationally in hard SF when his work was first published outside the UK. Not only were his earlier novels reprinted in the U.S., but The Time Ships (1995) was a leading contender in 1996 for the Hugo Award for best novel. In the mid and late 1990s he produced nearly ten short stories a year. He published four books in 2000, including a collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days, and Space: Manifold 2 (titled Manifold: Space in the U.S.), and won the Philip K. Dick Award for his collection, Vacuum Diagrams (1999). Origin: Manifold 3 was published in 2001, as was Icebones, Deep Time, and a collection, Ormegatropic: Non-Fiction & Fiction. His novel Evolution appeared in 2002, and he did two more collaborations with Clarke, Time's Eye and Nova.
"The Great Game" is an anti-war story set in his Xeelee future universe. It is a timely story, and part of the ongoing political dialogue in hard SF between the UK left and the U.S. right.
We were in the blister, waiting for the drop. My marines, fifty of them in their bright orange Yukawa suits, were sitting in untidy rows. They were trying to hide it, but I could see the fear in the way they clutched their static lines, and their unusual reluctance to rib the wetbacks.
Well, when I looked through the transparent walls and out into the sky, I felt it myself.
We had been flung far out of the main disc, and the sparse orange-red stars of the halo were a foreground to the galaxy itself, a pool of curdled light that stretched to right and left as far as you could see. But as the Spline ship threw itself gamely through its complicated evasive maneuvers, that great sheet of light flapped around us like a bird's broken wing. I could see our destination's home sun-it was a dwarf, a pinprick glowing dim red-but even that jiggled around the sky as the Spline bucked and rolled.
And, leaving aside the vertigo, what deepened my own fear was the glimpses I got of the craft that swarmed like moths around that dwarf star. Beautiful swooping ships with sycamore-seed wings, they were unmistakable. They were Xeelee nightfighters.
The Xeelee were the captain's responsibility, not mine. But I couldn't stop my over-active mind speculating on what had lured such a dense concentration of them so far out of the Galactic core that is their usual stamping ground.
Given the tension, it was almost a relief when Lian threw up.
Those Yukawa suits are heavy and stiff, meant for protection rather than flexibility, but she managed to lean far enough forward that her bright yellow puke mostly hit the floor. Her buddies reacted as you'd imagine, but I handed her a wipe. "Sorry, Lieutenant." She was the youngest of the troop, at seventeen ten years younger than me.
I forced a grin. "I've seen worse, marine. Anyhow you've given the wetbacks something to do when we've gone."
"Yes, sir...."
What you definitively don't want at such moments is a visit from the brass. Which, of course, is what we got.
Admiral Kard came stalking through the drop blister, muttering to the loadmaster, nodding at marines. At Kard's side was a Commissary-you could tell that at a glance-a woman, tall, ageless, in the classic costume of the Commission for Historical Truth, a floor-sweeping gown and shaved-bald head. She looked as cold and lifeless as every Commissary I ever met.
I stood up, brushing vomit off my suit. I could see how the troops were tensing up. But I couldn't have stopped an admiral; this was his flag.
They reached my station just as the destination planet, at last, swam into view.
We grunts knew it only by a number. That eerie sun was too dim to cast much light, and despite low-orbiting sunsats much of the land and sea was dark velvet. But great orange rivers of fire coursed across the black ground. This was a suffering world.
Admiral Kard was watching me. "Lieutenant Neer. Correct?"
"Sir."
"Welcome to Shade," he said evenly. "You know the setup here. The Expansion reached this region five hundred years ago. We haven't been much in contact since. But when our people down there called for help, the Navy responded." He had cold artificial Eyes, and I sensed he was testing me.
"We're ready to drop, sir."
The Commissary was peering out at the tilted landscape, hands folded behind her back.
"Remarkable. It's like a geology demonstrator. Look at the lines of volcanoes and ravines. Every one of this world's tectonic faults has given way, all at once."
Admiral Kard eyed me. "You must forgive Commissary Xera. She does think of the universe as a textbook."
He was rewarded for that with a glare.
I kept silent, uncomfortable. Everybody knows about the tension between Navy, the fighting arm of mankind's Third Expansion, and Commission, implementer of political will. Maybe that structural rivalry was the reason for this impromptu walk-through, as the Commissary jostled for influence over events, and the admiral tried to score points with a display of his fighting troops.
Except that right now they were my troops, not his.
To her credit, Xera seemed to perceive something of my resentment. "Don't worry, Lieutenant. It's just that Kard and I have something of a history. Two centuries of it, in fact, since our first encounter on a world called Home, thousands of light years from here."
I could see Lian look up at that. According to the book, nobody was supposed to live so long. I guess at seventeen you still think everybody follows the rules.
Kard nodded. "And you've always had a way of drawing subordinates into our personal conflicts, Xera. Well, we may be making history today. Neer, look at the home sun, the frozen star."
I frowned. "What's a frozen star? "
The Commissary made to answer, but Kard cut across her. "Skip the science. Those Xeelee units are swarming like rats. We don't know why the Xeelee are here. But we do know what they are doing to this human world."
"That's not proven," Xera snapped.
Despite that caveat I could see my people stir. None of us had ever heard of a direct attack by the Xeelee on human positions.
Lian said boldly, "Admiral, sir-"
"Yes, rating?"
"Does that mean we are at war?"
Admiral Kard sniffed up a lungful of ozone-laden air. "After today, perhaps we will be. How doesthat make you feel, rating?"
Lian, and the others, looked to me for guidance.
I looked into my heart.
Across seven thousand years humans had spread out in a great swarm through the galaxy, even spreading out into the halo beyond the main disc, overwhelming and assimilating other life forms as we encountered them. We had faced no opponent capable of systematic resistance since the collapse of the Silver Ghosts five thousand years before-none but the Xeelee, the galaxy's other great power, who sat in their great concentrations at the core, silent, aloof. For my whole life, and for centuries before, all of mankind had been united in a single purpose: to confront the Xeelee, and claim our rightful dominion.
And now-perhaps-here I was at the start of it all.
What I felt was awe. Fear, maybe. But that wasn't what the moment required. "I'll tell you what I feel, sir. Relief. Bring them on! "
That won me a predictable hollering, and a slap on the back from Kard. Xera studied me blankly, her face unreadable.
Then there was a flare of plasma around the blister, and the ride got a lot bumpier. I sat before I was thrown down, and the loadmaster hustled away the brass.
"Going in hard," called the loadmaster. "Barf bags at the ready. Ten minutes."
We were skimming under high, thin, icy clouds. The world had become a landscape of burning mountains and rivers of rock that fled beneath me.
All this in an eerie silence, broken only by the shallow breaths of the marines.
The ship lurched up and to the right. To our left now was a mountain; we had come so low already that its peak was above us. According to the century-old survey maps the locals had called it Mount Perfect. And, yes, once it must have been a classic cone shape, I thought, a nice landmark for an earthworm's horizon. But now its profile was spoiled by bulges and gouges, ash had splashed around it, and deeper mud-filled channels had been cut into the landscape, splayed like the fingers of a hand.
Somewhere down there, amid the bleating locals, there was an academician called Tilo, dropped by the Navy a couple of standard days earlier, part of a global network who had been gathering data on the causes of the volcanism. Tilo's job, bluntly, had been to prove that it was all the Xeelee's fault. The academician had somehow got himself cut off from his uplink gear; I was to find and retrieve him. No wonder Xera had been so hostile, I thought; the Commissaries were famously suspicious of the alliance between the Navy and the Academies- Green lights marked out the hatch in the invisible wall.
The loadmaster came along the line. "Stand up! Stand up!" The marines complied clumsily.
"Thirty seconds," the loadmaster told me. He was a burly, scarred veteran, attached to a rail by an umbilical as thick as my arm. "Winds look good."
"Thank you."
"You guys be careful down there. All clear aft. Ten seconds. Five." The green lights began to blink.
We pulled our flexible visors across our faces. "Three, two-"
The hatch dilated, and the sudden roar of the wind made all this real.
The loadmaster was standing by the hatch, screaming. "Go, go, go!" As the marines passed I checked each static line one last time with a sharp tug, before they jumped into blackness. The kid, Lian, was the second last to go-and I was the last of all.
So there I was, falling into the air of a new world.
The static line went taut and ripped free, turning on my suit's Yukawa-force gravity nullifier. That first shock can be hurtful, but to me, after maybe fifty drops in anger, it came as a relief.
I looked up and to my right. I saw a neat line of marines falling starfished through the air. One was a lot closer to me than the rest-Lian, I guessed. Past them I made out our Spline vessel, its hull charred from its hurried entry into the atmosphere. Even now it looked immense, its pocked hull like an inverted landscape above me. It was a magnificent sight, an awe-inspiring display of human power and capability.
But beyond it I saw the hulking majesty of the mountain, dwarfing even the Spline. A dense cloud ofsmoke and ash lingered near its truncated summit, underlit by a fiery glow.
I looked down, to the valley I was aiming for.
The Commission's maps had shown a standard-issue Conurbation surrounded by broad, shining replicator fields, where the ground's organic matter was processed seamlessly into food. But the view now was quite different. I could see the characteristic bubble-cluster shape of a Conurbation, but it looked dark, poorly maintained, while suburbs of blockier buildings had sprouted around it.
You expected a little drift from orthodoxy, out here on the edge of everything.
Still, that Conurbation was our target for the evacuation. I could see the squat cone shape of a heavy-lift shuttle, dropped here on the Spline's last pass through the atmosphere, ready to lift the population. My marines were heading for the Conurbation, just as they should.
But I had a problem, I saw now. There was another cluster of buildings and lights, much smaller, stranded half way up the flank of the mountain. Another village?
I'm not sentimental. You do what you can, what's possible. I wouldn't have gone after that isolated handful-if not for the fact that a pale pink light blinked steadily at me.
It was Tilo's beacon. Kard had made it clear enough that unless I came home with the academician, or at least with his data, next time I made a drop it would be without a Yukawa suit.
I slowed my fall and barked out orders. It was a simple mission; I knew my people would be able to supervise the evacuation of the main township without me. Then I turned and continued my descent, down toward the smaller community.
It was only after I had committed myself that I saw one of my troop had followed me: the kid, Lian.
No time to think about that now. A Yukawa suit is good for one drop, one way. You can't go back and change your mind. Anyhow I was already close. I glimpsed a few ramshackle buildings, upturned faces shining like coins.
Then the barely visible ground raced up to meet me. Feet together, knees bent, back straight, roll when you hit-and then a breath-stealing impact on hard rock.