I shrugged a little. “Maybe,” I said.
“God,” repeated Susan, placing the concept firmly on the table. “And you’ve got a chance to go see him.” She looked at me, her head tilted to one side. “Are they taking anyone else from Earth?”
“A few, ah, individuals, yes.” I tried to remember the list. “A severely schizophrenic woman from West Virginia. A silverback gorilla from Burundi. A very old man from China.” I shrugged. “They’re some of the people the other aliens have bonded with. All of them immediately agreed to go.”
Susan looked at me, her expression carefully neutral. “Do you want to go?”
Yes, I thought. Yes, with every fiber of my being. Although I longed for more time with Ricky, I’d rather he remembered me as still somewhat healthy, still able to get around on my own, still able to pick him up. I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“You’ve got a son,” Susan said.
“I know,” I said softly.
“And a wife.”
“I know,” I said again.
“We—we don’t want to lose you.”
I said it gently. “But you will. All too soon, you will.”
“But not yet,” said Susan. “Not yet.”
We sat silently. My mind roiled.
Susan and I had known each other at university, back in the 1960s. We’d dated, but I’d left, to go to the States, to pursue my dream. She hadn’t stood in my way then.
And now here was another dream.
But things were different, incalculably so.
We were married now. We had a child.
If that was all there were to the equation, it would be a no-brainer. If I were healthy, if I were well, there was no way I’d have contemplated leaving them—not even as an idle speculation.
But I wasn’t healthy.
I wasn’t well. Surely she understood that.
We’d been married in a church, because that’s what Susan had wanted, and we’d said the traditional vows, including “Till death do us part.” Of course, no one standing there, in a church, affirming those words, ever contemplates cancer; people don’t expect the damned crab to scuttle into their lives, dragging torture and calamity behind it.
“Let’s think about it some more,” I said. “The Merelcas isn’t leaving for three days.”
Susan moved her head slightly, in a tight nod.
“Hollus,” I said, the next day, in my office. “I know you and your shipmates must be terribly busy, but—”
“Indeed we are. There is much preparation to be done before leaving for Betelgeuse. And we are involved in considerable moral debate.”
“About what?”
“We believe you are correct: the beings of Groombridge 1618 III did try to sterilize all of local space. It is not a thought that would have occurred to either a Forhilnor or a Wreed; forgive me for so saying, but it is something so barbarous, only a human—or, apparently, a Groombridge native—would think of it. We are debating whether to send messages to our homeworlds, advising them of what the beings of Groombridge tried to do.”
“That seems like a reasonable thing to do,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you tell them?”
“The Wreeds are a generally nonviolent race, but, as I have told you, my species is—well, passionate would be the kind word. Many Forhilnors would doubtless wish to seek retribution for what was attempted. Groombridge 1618 is thirty-nine light-years from Beta Hydri; we could easily send ships there. Regrettably, the natives left no warning landscape marking their current location—so if we wish to be sure they are exterminated, we might have to destroy their entire world, not just a segment of it. The people of Groombridge never developed the ultra-high-energy fusion technology my race possess; if they had, they surely would have used it to send their bomb to Betelgeuse more quickly. That technology does give us strength enough to destroy a planet.”
“Wow,” I said. “That is a moral dilemma. Are you going to tell your homeworld?”
“We have not decided.”
“The Wreeds are the great ethicists. What do they think you should do?”
Hollus was quiet for a time. “They suggest we should use the Merelcas’s fusion exhaust to wipe out all life on Beta Hydri III.”
“On the Forhilnor homeworld?”
“Yes.”
“Good God. Why?”
“They have not made that clear, but I suspect they are being—what is that word again? Ironic. If we are willing to destroy those who have been, or might be, a threat to ourselves, then we are no better than the Groombridge natives.” Hollus paused. “But I did not mean to burden you with this. You wanted something from me?”
“Well, next to what you’ve just said, it seems pretty small potatoes.”
“Small potatoes?”
“Inconsequential. But, well, I’d like to talk to a Wreed. I’ve got a moral quandary, and I can’t solve it.”
Hollus’s crystal-covered eyes regarded me. “About whether you will come with us to Betelgeuse?”
I nodded.
“Our friend T’kna is currently involved with his daily attempt to contact God, but he should be available in about an hour. If you can take the holoform projector to a larger room then, I will ask him to join us.”
Others, of course, had reached the same conclusion I had: what Donald Chen had neutrally referred to as an “anomaly,” and Peter Mansbridge had discreetly dismissed as simple “luck,” was being heralded as proof of divine intervention by people all over the world. And of course those people put their own spin on it: what I’d called a smoking gun many were referring to as a miracle.
Still, that was a minority opinion: most people knew nothing about supernovae, and many, including a large contingent in the Muslim world, didn’t trust the images supposedly produced by the Merelcas’s telescopes. Others claimed that what we’d seen was the devil’s work: a fiery glimpse of hell, and then an all-encompassing darkness; some Satanists were now claiming vindication.
Meanwhile, Christian fundamentalists were scouring the Bible, looking for bits of scripture that could be bent to this occasion. Others were invoking predictions by Nostradamus. A Jewish mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem pointed out that the six-limbed entity was topologically equivalent to a six-pointed Star of David and suggested that what had been seen heralded the arrival of the Messiah. An organization called the Church of Betelgeuse had already set up an elaborate web site. And every bit of pseudoscientific crap about ancient Egyptians and Orion—the constellation in which the supernova happened to have occurred—was being given sensationalist play in the media.
But all that those other people could do was guess.
I had an opportunity to go and see—to find out for sure.
We were back in the conference room on the fifth floor of the Curatorial Centre, but there were no video cameras present this time. It was just me and a tiny alien dodecahedron—and the projections of two extraterrestrial beings.
Hollus stood quietly at one side of the room. T’kna was standing at the other side, the conference table between them. T’kna’s utility belt was green today, rather than yellow, but it still sported the same galaxy-of-blood icon.
“Greetings,” I said, once the Wreed’s projection had stabilized.
The sound of tumbling rocks, then the mechanical voice: “Greetings reciprocated. Of this one you desire something?”
I nodded. “Advice,” I said, tipping my head slightly. “Your counsel.”
The Wreed was motionless, listening.
“Hollus told you I have terminal cancer,” I said.
T’kna touched his belt buckle. “Sorrow expressed again.”
“Thanks. But, look, you guys have offered me a chance to go with you to Betelgeuse—to meet whatever is out there.”
A pebble hitting the ground. “Yes.”
“I will be dead soon. I’m not certain precisely when, but—but surely within a couple of months. Now, should I spend those last few months with my family, or sho
uld I go with you? On the one hand, my family wants every minute they can have with me—and, well, I guess I understand that being with me when I…when I pass on is part of bringing closure to our relationships. And, of course, I love them greatly, and wish to be with them. But, on the other hand, my condition will deteriorate, becoming an increasing burden on them.” I paused. “If we lived in the States, maybe there would be a monetary issue—the last few weeks of one’s life, spent in a hospital, can run up enormous bills down there. But here, in Canada, that doesn’t figure into the equation; the only factors are the emotional toll, on me and on my family.”
I was conscious that I was expressing my problem in mathematical terms—factors, equations, monetary issues but that’s the way the words had come tumbling out, without any pre-planning by me. I hoped I wasn’t completely baffling the Wreed.
“And of me you ask which choice you should make?” said the translator’s voice.
“Yes,” I said.
There was the sound of rocks grinding, followed by a brief silence, and then: “The moral choice is obvious,” said the Wreed. “It always is.”
“And?” I said. “What is the moral choice?”
More sounds of rocks, then: “Morality cannot be handed down from an external source.” And here all four of the Wreed’s hands touched the inverted pear that was its chest. “It must come from within.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
The Wreed wavered and vanished.
That night, while Ricky watched TV in the basement, Susan and I sat again on the couch.
And I told her what I’d decided.
“I’ll always love you,” I said to Susan.
She closed her eyes. “And I will always love you, too.”
No wonder I liked Casablanca so much. Would Ilsa Lund go with Victor Laszlo? Or would she stay with Rick Blaine? Would she follow her husband? Or would she follow her heart?
And were there things bigger than her? Bigger than Rick? Bigger than both of them? Were there other factors to consider, other terms in the equation?
But—let’s be honest—was there anything bigger involved in my case? Sure, God might be at the heart of the matter—but if I went, it wouldn’t change anything, I’m sure…whereas Victor’s continued resistance to the Nazis helped save the world.
Still, I’d made my decision.
As difficult as it was, I’d made my decision.
But I’d never know if it was the right one.
I leaned over and kissed Susan, kissed her as if it were the last time.
* * *
33
H
i, sport,” I said as I came into Ricky’s room.
Ricky was sitting at his desk, which had a world map laminated into its surface. He was drawing something with pencil crayons, his tongue sticking out and up from the corner of his mouth in the quintessential childhood look of concentration. “Dad,” he said, acknowledging me.
I looked around. The room was messy but not a disaster. Some dirty clothes were on the floor; I usually remonstrated him for that, but would not do so today. He had several small plastic dinosaur skeletons that I’d bought for him, and a talking Qui-Gon Jinn action figure he’d received for Christmas. And books, lots of children’s books: our Ricky was going to grow up to be a reader.
“Son,” I said, and I waited patiently for him to give me his full attention. He was completing one of the elements of his drawing—it looked like an airplane. I let him do so; I knew how gnawing unfinished business could be. At last he looked up, seeming surprised that I was still there. He lifted his eyebrows questioningly.
“Son,” I said again, “you know Daddy’s been awfully sick.”
Ricky put down his pencil crayon, realizing we were moving onto serious ground. He nodded.
“And,” I said, “well, I think you know that I’m not going to get better.”
He pursed his lips and nodded bravely. My heart was breaking.
“I’m going to go away,” I said. “I’m going to go away with Hollus.”
“Can he fix you?” Ricky said. “He said he couldn’t, but…”
Rick didn’t know that Hollus was female, of course, and I hardly wanted to go off on tangents now. “No. No, there’s nothing he can do for me. But, well, he’s going on a trip, and I want to go with him.” I’d been on numerous trips before—to digs, to conferences. Ricky was used to me traveling.
“When will you be coming back?” he asked. And then, his face all cherubic innocence, “Will you bring me something?”
I closed my eyes for a moment. My stomach was churning.
“I, ah, I won’t be coming back,” I said softly.
Ricky was quiet for a moment, digesting this. “You mean—you mean you’re going off to die?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry to be leaving you.”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“I don’t want to die, either, but…but sometimes we don’t have any choice in things.”
“Can I—I want to go with you.”
I smiled sadly. “You can’t, Ricky. You have to stay here and go to school. You have to stay here and help Mommy.”
“But…”
I waited for him to finish, to complete his objection. But he didn’t. He simply said, “Don’t go, Daddy.”
But I was going to leave him. Whether this month, on Hollus’s starship, or a couple more months down the road, lying in a hospital bed, tubes in my arm and nose and the back of my hand, EKG monitors softly bleeping in the background, nurses and doctors scuttling to and fro. One way or the other, I was going to leave. I had no choice about leaving, but I did have a say in when and how.
“Nothing,” I said, “is harder for me than going.” There was no point in telling him I wanted him to remember me like this, when really I wanted him to remember me as I was a year ago, seventy pounds heavier, with a reasonably full head of hair. But, still, this was better than what I would soon become.
“Then don’t go, Daddy.”
“I’m sorry, sport. Really, I am.”
Ricky was as good as any kid his age at begging and wheedling to get to stay up late, to get a toy he wanted, to get to eat some more candy. But he realized, it seemed, that none of that would work here, and I loved him all the more for his six-year-old wisdom.
“I love you, Daddy,” he said, tears coming now.
I bent down, lifting him from his chair, raising him up to my chest, hugging him to me. “I love you, too, son.”
Hollus’s starship, the Merelcas, looked nothing like what I’d expected. I’d grown used to movie spaceships with all sorts of detailing on their hulls. But this ship had a perfectly smooth surface. It consisted of a rectangular block at one end and a perpendicular disk at the other, joined by two long tubular struts. The whole thing was a soft green. I couldn’t tell which end was the bow. Indeed, it was impossible to get any sense of its scale; there was nothing that I could recognize—not even any windows. The ship could have been only a few meters long, or kilometers.
“How big is it?” I asked Hollus, who was floating weightlessly next to me.
“About a kilometer,” she said. “The block-shaped part is the propulsion module; the struts are crew habitats—one for Forhilnors, the other for Wreeds. And the disk at the end is the common area.”
“Thank you again for taking me along,” I said. My hands were shaking with excitement. Back in the eighties, there had been some brief talk about someday sending a paleontologist to Mars, and I’d daydreamed that it might be me. But of course they’d want an invertebrate specialist; no one seriously believed that vertebrates had ever inhabited the red planet. If Mars did once have an ecosystem, as Hollus contended, it probably lasted only a few hundred million years, ending when too much atmosphere had bled off into space.
Still, there’s a group called the Make-A-Wish Foundation that tries to fulfill final requests of terminally ill children; I don’t know if there’s a comparable
group for terminally ill adults, and, to be honest, I’m not sure what I would have wished for had I been given the chance. But this would do. It would certainly do!
The starship continued to grow on the viewscreen. Hollus had said it had been cloaked, somehow, for more than a year, making it invisible to terrestrial observers, but there was no need for that anymore.
Part of me wished there were windows—both here on the shuttle and on the Merelcas. But apparently there were none on either; both had unbroken hulls. Instead, pictures from outside were conveyed to wall-sized viewscreens. I’d loomed in close at one point and couldn’t discern any pixels or scan lines or flicker. The screens served just as well as real glass windows would—indeed, were better in many ways. There was no glare whatsoever from their surface, and, of course, they could zoom in to give a closeup, show the view from another camera, or indeed display any information one wanted. Perhaps sometimes the simulation is better than the real thing.
We flew closer and closer still. Finally, I could see something on the starship’s green hull: some writing, in yellow. There were two lines of it: one in a system of geometric shapes—triangles and squares and circles, some with dots orbiting them—and the other a squiggle that looked vaguely like Arabic. I’d seen markings like the first set on Hollus’s holoform projector, so I assumed that was the Forhilnor language; the other must have been the script of the Wreeds. “What’s that say?” I asked.
“‘This end up,’” said Hollus.
I looked at her, mouth agape.
“Sorry,” she said. “A little joke. It is the name of the starship.”
“Ah,” I said. “Merelcas, isn’t it? What does that mean?”
“‘Vengeful Beast of Mass Destruction,’” said Hollus.
I swallowed hard. I guess some part of me had been waiting for one of those “It’s a cookbook!” moments. But then Hollus’s eyestalks rippled with laughter. “Sorry,” she said again. “I could not resist. It means, ‘Stellar Voyager,’ or words to that effect.”