When the Dust Fell, page 4
“Sorry,” said Trin. “What you’re looking at is the guide model for this planet. Each one of these graphlets along this line signifies an epoch of time.” He pointed to a series of round, knot-like marks. “These marks indicate the epochal checks, or E-checks, the moments when we monitor the population and guide, or administer the influence needed. Since adaptation only works if it works slowly, this model calls for forty-one E-checks over the course of one hundred and fifty-six thousand orbits. Sorry…years.”
“That’s impossible,” said Wilson. “How can you possibly span that time?”
“In a kind of deep sleep that allows our bodies to skip time. Usually, we don’t Skip for more than ten thousand years. At least not on purpose. Most Skips are planned to be much shorter.” He walked a few paces to his right down a long line in the float. “When the scan alarm woke us, it was supposed to be E Two, six thousand years from the first E-check, and nine thousand years since Delivery. Except that wasn’t what happened.” He followed the line further, curving round the table as he walked, forcing the soldiers to back up and give him room. “Somehow, we overslept. To E Thirty-Seven. To now.”
The red in Henderson’s cheeks had spread to his neck. “You forgot to set your damn alarm clock? That’s the problem?”
“We don’t know what went wrong,” said Argen. “But here we are, and here you are.”
The pale one, Ganet, didn’t like his boss’s answer. “Let me make this simple. You’ve been on your own for a long time. For too long a time. What you’ve become in that time…that’s the problem.”
Sarah looked to Trin. He met her gaze and the sadness in his face made her stomach drop.
Argen nodded solemnly. The words he said next were tinged with resignation, like the lines performed by an actor not quite on board with the script. “The human universe requires consensus of thought. Consensus of belief. That requirement is why there is Guidance, a learning process you were denied. The things you know, the things you think you know, the technology you possess, the gods you worship—all of it was acquired without the benefit of the Plan. So all of it, by definition, is incongruent. Forbidden. You have grown apart from the rest, and that cannot be.”
That word, forbidden, it hit Sarah like a brick. She looked to the other Americans. Everyone’s eyes told the same story.
After a minute, Wilson folded his hands in front of him and put on the face of someone still in control, but Sarah could feel the bouncing of his leg through the vibration of the floor. In the quiet, she could hear the subtle squeak of his shoe.
“Now it’s my turn to make something simple,” he said at last. “Whatever you and your people may think, this is our planet. We’ll decide what can and cannot…be.”
Argen’s jaw clenched. He swallowed hard and when he finally spoke, Sarah felt a sense of desperation in his tone that frightened her more than anything he’d said so far. “The Kalelah has an obligation. And unless we move quickly, my crew won’t abandon it.”
The bounce of Wilson’s leg picked up its pace. “An obligation to whom? To what?”
“To God. To the Plan. To the way things are and have always been. The people on the Kalelah don’t need my orders to know what they are compelled to do. I’ve been buying time for the last few days, but with the chief and I off the ship, preparations for Correction are likely in motion as we speak.”
“Correction?” Wilson pushed back. “You’re going to try and reeducate us? Seven billion of us? Half the world doesn’t even believe in evolution, and you expect us to abandon everything we know and believe in you? In this story?”
Argen’s face was of a man already in mourning. He looked at Wilson for a long time. “No,” he finally said. “A Correction is not education.”
The film in her mind always stopped there, at The End.
4
Sarah spent her mornings on the Kalelah watching the planes and her afternoons attempting to learn the Plan. How else could she possibly even begin to understand the people around her, and the first man she had ever loved? And given its presence on ship, how could she ignore it? By her walking estimation, the ship was four miles long and two miles wide. The biggest thing she’d ever seen, a titanium megalopolis. Yet even within all the impossible scale of the Kalelah, the Plan loomed large. The ship was like a giant Marriott hotel, only instead of The Book of Mormon available in the top drawer of every nightstand, there was a chapel every quarter mile of concourse. The lacework symbol of eighteen interlocking circles, one for each scroll, that served as the signpost for the Plan, was more prominent in the stems and passageways of the ship than the Nike swoosh was at a football stadium.
The trouble, of course, was reading the thing. She could speak Origen reasonably well. Trin had dosed her with a language virus soon after she’d come aboard, mere hours after The First Contact. Her accent, however, had remained an embarrassment, her tongue, lips, and throat never quite willing to perform the gymnastics that might hide what her every strangled word revealed. Aboard the Kalelah, it was she who was the alien. Nevertheless, she could communicate. The written form of Origen, with its arcane syntax and odd poetic cadence, had been an infinitely harder code to crack. It could take her a day to make her way through just one column of text, and it would leave her head spinning and tired. She had kept at it though, and over time, she’d come to an astonishing conclusion.
The Plan may have had its origins galaxies away, but its purpose was as familiar as the testament she’d been forced to study in Catholic school. The names of the characters were decidedly foreign, and the squabbles were tremendously more far flung, stretching across the universe rather than mere fields, deserts and seas, but it professed to answer the same questions about life’s beginnings, the order of the universe, and the nature of God.
And exactly as Argen had promised, in his kind and soft-spoken way, all the answers were different than the ones she’d grown up on. Not just different the way Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were different, which Sarah had always believed were barely different at all. No, the Plan and everything else she knew anything about were different the way oxygen and carbon monoxide were different. They were similar enough that our bodies happily welcomed them both inside, but one had a nasty habit of killing us.
Instead of gospels or testaments, the Plan was a first-person account, the words of God straight from the source. The original scrolls were, according to Him, written in His own blood. No archangel had been sent as interlocuter. There were no gospels written years after the fact, or witness accounts scribbled in ancient tongues defying translation. It was all Him.
I slew the treacherous Twaithlaw with my own
hands, hurling him into the blue star to be consumed
by the molten, spitting fury of his own false and
intransient creation. His sons and daughters too, all
twelve-hundred and twenty-one thousand, were thusly
destroyed, purifying the Ever-And-All of his sin
for all time.
When those battles were done, and the many more that
needed fighting, I alone had survived to rule. That I do rule is beyond contestation.
Let none forget. Let none dispute.
It didn’t matter if she believed a word of what she’d read, because whether it was really God’s story, or merely a story, it had inspired people to build a kingdom as vast as the universe itself, and to kill anything that might get in the way of it. Which recently, had been planet 07-347-28.
Also known as Earth.
•
All of this had left Sarah caught painfully in the middle, like a halfling of two worlds, both dented and broken by their unimagined collision.
Outside the ship was a world of regrets and people she’d left behind long before the Correction. When she had finally graduated college and left her mother’s house for the Lewis and the south Pacific, she had no calling then other than distance. Geology had meant nothing to her. Getting as far as possible from Lancaster, Ohio had been the sole point. Surely the other side of the world would be far enough.
Except it wasn’t. There had been no getting away from Jack, her stepfather, and the mother and older sister who had looked the other way.
She had their email addresses still, her mother’s and sister’s, and the Kalelah was monitoring the sporadic internet traffic for any sign from either of them. So far, nothing. Email of any kind from the US had mostly stopped. Dependable infrastructure and legitimate business models simply weren’t there anymore. Hackers were able to stand up crude networks and workarounds that sometimes managed a global reach, such as it was, but never for longer than a day or two. Pirates, counter hackers, and gangsters kept things chaotic.
Based on the bits and scraps of information the ship had been able to stitch together from the spasms of signals coughed out from time to time, Sarah could see that the world she’d known most of her life had quickly grown dangerous in all new ways, with virtually no shelter. Places like North America, Scandinavia, and Western Europe, where a person could once have counted on order, norms, and even sometimes the police, had become indistinguishable from the places where corruption, lawlessness, and wanton cruelty had long ruled. The old corporate battles, the ones once fought with innovation, advertising, lobbyists, and lawyers, had given way to real wars waged with dynamite and bullets.
Then there was her world on the Kalelah. The world with Trin. A four-mile by two-mile oasis of impenetrable alloy. Even injured and grounded, the Kalelah was safe from the dangers of the other world around her. So Sarah was often told. The ship had fresh water, food grown and processed onboard, and could still cater to her human occupants in every necessary way.
But the Kalelah was not safe from herself. The loss of her mission and the shame and guilt that had come with it, were already punishing much of the crew. Two members had tried to escape the ship and its life without purpose. They walked the twenty miles through the fine powder of the impact zone, the moat, to the outer rock ring, a ship’s recorder bot capturing every inch of their travel. When they had climbed over the ring, they were greeted by a black UAZ pickup covered in dirt and crowded with six men. Unable to respond to the welcome party in Russian, Polish, or even broken English, the two were beaten with clubs and hockey sticks, chained at their feet to the truck’s back pull-rings and dragged off to the west, their bodies bouncing lifelessly along the pock-marked asphalt.
The recorder hadn’t followed any further. There’d been no point, because there’d be no rescue mission. Not even for the remains. The ship’s new leadership had sworn off hostile contact of any kind, even if it meant the death of crew members. The ship would protect the moat if she truly felt at risk, which would take an awful lot to inspire. Outside the moat, leadership had warned, you were on your own.
Although Sarah had no intention of leaving, she hadn’t yet figured out how she was going to stay.
5
Another day starting with the planes. Sarah watched them as they in turn continued to watch the Kalelah. Like every day, the transparent, three-dimensional air vid floated above the small café table where she sat drinking a cup of tea, its soft light reflected on the polished surface of the table. Miles away, the tiny recorder bots chasing the fighter jets had no trouble keeping up with their subjects. The intimacy they offered Sarah never ceased to amaze her.
She could elect to have the entire scene play out in front of her, real enough to make her want to touch the images hovering above the table. Or she could move in close enough to see what was happening inside an individual cockpit. None of this required any hardware on her end at all. Another endless amazement. Navigation windows that gave users access to data and images simply appeared out of thin air at the command of a few well-practiced gestures. From there she could get whatever her access level allowed.
There were six planes today. Six pilots. She recognized them all. She had given all the pilots ridiculously stereotypical names based on their tail insignias. Carlos, Jürgen, Nigel, Elouise, Greta, and Luca. Not only could Sarah see the pilots well enough to name them, she could listen to them too. In the 1980s, an international standard had set English as the language of aviation the world over. While the international order was gone, the pilots still stuck to their training. The comfort of habit, she guessed. She loved to listen to their voices. To hear the familiarity of an Earthly language spoken by people actually from Earth.
She did more than just listen. Early in her plane-watching days she had tried to explain what happened. Using the ship’s communications tech to break into theirs, she had tried to share with the pilots what she knew to be true. That things were not what they seemed to be. That she was not who they thought she was. She had tried to tell them about the Plan and the guilt over following it to the letter. She had told them, between tears, that she and the others on the ship were just as frightened as the pilots must certainly have been. A hundred times in a hundred different ways she had tried to say how desperately the Kalelah mourned.
It grieved, she’d confessed, for its own losses, for there were plenty. The source of all the trouble, the extended Skip—the time-jumping sleep that had gone wrong by lasting longer than it should have, a full one hundred and twenty thousand years longer than it should have—had taken nearly 10 percent of the crew. Hundreds more had died in The Mutiny. The Kalelah, she had argued, wasn’t taken down by the forces of Earth. It was taken down by a deadly uprising within its own crew. She’d chronicled, in agonizing detail, the entire bloody fight. Including the story of its failure. Yes, she and the others who fought for the people of Earth had managed to stop the Correction, but not before it had started. This, more than anything, was what the ship truly grieved. For Earth’s losses, she’d wept, there were not tears enough to cry.
To make a peace, she had made offers as well. Pledges to help in their recovery. She had described in minute details the marvels of technology aboard the incredible ship. The advances in medical care, communications, and agriculture that could be shared. She had tried to convince them of their connection to the Kalelah, and the ship’s connection to them, a bond of DNA and a shared heritage as deep and wide as the cosmos itself.
None of the pilots had ever responded. Not once.
Maybe the messages had been the wrong messages. Perhaps she had been the wrong messenger. Or maybe the pain for the pilots had simply been too loud to hear another side of things. The scale of the murder too vast to ever believe it wasn’t malicious, greedy, and irredeemable. Or maybe the state of things, of governments, of institutions, of churches, collapsed too quickly for the pilots or their commanders, whoever or whatever they were, to respond in a way that could have made a difference.
After months of pleading with the pilots, and whomever else might have been listening in, she finally gave up her crusade to explain the actions of the ship’s crew. She gave up on the idea of changing hearts.
Her monologues since had devolved into simple greetings of good morning, or good evening, talk of the weather, or what she had for breakfast and how she longed for bacon. Or cold pizza. She thought once that Greta might have been on the verge of a response. The German pilot had smiled briefly at a joke Sarah made about cigarettes. Something about the way the corners of Greta’s mouth had turned slightly upward, for a brief moment, had made Sarah’s heart leap. But the exchange stopped there. Greta had given nothing more. One short-lived half-smile was the only hint Sarah had ever had that the pilots could even hear her.
Recently, the planes encircling the Kalelah had begun to breach their self-imposed fifty-mile barrier more aggressively. Carlos, for example, had suddenly diverted from his usual orbit and raced toward the ship for a mile or so, as if leading an attack. After a few days, one mile became two miles, then three, then ten. The other planes began to follow, Luca being the first. Now all the planes had actually shrunk the circle to thirty miles of the ship, only ten past the outer edge of the moat, the de facto border between the Kalelah and whatever was left of the world beyond her.
Sarah knew the planes were trying to draw the ship’s fire, to learn if it still had any left, an act of sacrifice she couldn’t help but admire. And fear. Not for the safety of the ship or herself, of course. During the Twenty-One-Hour War, when the ship had arisen like a giant, dripping city from the surface of the ocean, the world’s top militaries did nearly everything they could to stop it. Russia had checked its swing, having goals of its own, but all the big guns had brought out their best and worst to bring the monster ship down. All had failed to even make a scratch. In less than five hours, the world’s largest aircraft carriers and their planes were gone. Two days later, Asia and a most of the Russian Federation were gone too. If it hadn’t been for the small war onboard the Kalelah herself, the entire planet would have been charred to diamonds. No, the fear she had was for the planes. For Greta, and Luca, Carlos, Jürgen, Elouise, and Nigel.
Trin had assured her the Kalelah would never fire on the planes. She believed him. She trusted him. She loved him. Despite that, every time the planes had changed their radius, had come closer to the ship, she had worried for days. Anything could go wrong when people were involved. She knew this all too painfully. The whole world did. She couldn’t bear for one of the pilots to die. She couldn’t bear to lose another friend.
Even a friend who greeted her confessions with silence.
She looked through the floating image of the planes to the bustle of the stem traffic beyond her table. The sim sky high above the tree-like metal lace of the concourse canopy was blue and brightened by a red-yellow sun. It was morning and she went about getting some food. She gestured for a new window, brought down a second float, and ordered a crispy bread-like cake called unta. It was salty and only had minor hints of the dreaded seaweed, which seemed to find its way into nearly everything. Apparently, seaweed was a perfect crop for the Kalelah. Nutrient dense, and hard to kill. Unfortunately, Sarah loathed seaweed. Seaweed from another planet proved to be no more likable.
