“Uh, July eleventh, 2019. Why?”
“You have any cats?”
She flinched. “Not anymore. I can’t take them getting old and dying.”
He nodded again, wincing himself. “I hear ya. You like vampire movies?”
She made a face. “Just the really old ones. Christopher Lee, Chris Sarandon. Oh, and Frank Langella.”
“What do you think of Vlad’s impalement hobby?”
“I think he spoke the same language as his enemies, only louder. Where are we going with this?”
“Well,” he said, “once I get through with an awful lot of work, quite possibly your place.”
“You think I’m your wife back from the dead? Are you crazy?”
“Of course,” he said. “Is that a problem?”
Alice opened her mouth, paused, and finally said, “I have to think about it.”
XXIII
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
1
As Forge began maneuvering for rendezvous, a powered object approached from Earth. Broadcasts had said China had been assembling something in orbit, and this was it.
It massed a little over twenty tons, but it was small enough that there couldn’t be room for a human inside.
It wasn’t slowing down, either.
As it got closer, it came apart into two sections. Most of the volume was in the section that came ahead of the rest, though the masses were about equal. When that was halfway between Forge and the smaller part, the large part burst open, releasing a fine white powder.
Spectroscopy showed that to be boron trioxide. Barring unforeseen circumstances, it would be deposited along the sunward face of Forge.
Forge immediately directed the silicon exhaust at the small object that was following the powder.
The lesser module detonated with a force of just under a hundred quadrillion joules. The blast was rich in neutrons, and almost a fifth of them were directed in a narrow cone toward Forge. Some of the boron in the dust absorbed neutrons, emitted beta rays, and became carbon. The powder became incandescent and dispersed at great speed. Had the powder been in contact with Forge, and the detonation been closer, it would have caused enough recoil to push the asteroid into an orbit that would make rendezvous impossible.
It would also have destroyed most of their artifacts, and about half of Forge’s population—killing vastly more intelligent life forms than currently lived on Earth.
The entities were seldom in full agreement about any course of action.
On this occasion there was no dispute.
2
There are people who, when the opportunity arises to get a little more sleep, can go back to sleep.
Toby Glyer was not one of those people.
May Wyndham was.
Fortunately, he
was
one of those people who could get around quietly in the morning. If he died and started haunting a house, nobody would ever know it. May, on the other hand, tended to navigate after rising by zero-range sonar: collide, then turn. It worked out, though, at least after Toby started taking the time to move stuff out of the way when he got up.
His phone began slithering across the counter while he was cooking breakfast. He wished he’d been given one with rubber backing; the effect when set to vibrate was downright creepy. Toby checked the caller ID: Yellowhorse. “Hi,” he said quietly. “May’s still asleep. ’Tsup?”
“China fired a twenty-megaton warhead at the asteroid. The bots shot it down. That was last night. In the past seven hours, every vessel of the Chinese Navy has had its stern perforated and propellers destroyed, and aircraft of Chinese registry have had their cockpits shredded. I got curious and checked satellite photos. They show a few thousand small craters laid out in very neat grids in various remote parts of China itself. Both of their orbital-launch facilities have also been restored to a state of nature. I think it was done with hypersonic crowbars. We need to speed things along down here.”
Chilled, Toby said, “My God. They must be using the entire surface of the Rock as a telescope to be able to identify those. How many dead?”
“No comments made yet. I would think there must have been some, but in the case of the planes, at least, there was nobody in the cockpits at the time of impact. I may be the only one who’s noticed that so far—aside from the Chinese, anyway. I can understand why they haven’t said anything about that; entirely aside from making their intended victims look merciful, it is a damn scary accomplishment. —At any rate, the bots are denying China mobility and force. Ships, planes, missiles. I didn’t think to check on their tanks until this minute.… Huh. Now that’s interesting. Satellites show tank columns headed for the Russian border—sensibly enough—but some of the formations appear to be fighting each other.”
“Civil war.”
“I’d say so. —I wish there was another
term
for that. It always sounds like you don’t shoot anyone you haven’t been introduced to.”
“The Chinese are traditionally very formal,” Toby said, feeling a touch of hysteria.
“I find that remark simultaneously surreal and plausible. Brace up, slick. We have to make contact with the bots. They’re ignoring ground-originated communications, they’ve clearly gone well beyond their original programming, and they have at least one good reason to be hostile. We need you to get into orbit and ID yourself to them.”
“
How in the hell
—” Toby lowered his voice. “How are we supposed to do that?”
“JNAIT has a spaceplane almost ready to go. Just finished assembly two days ago, I paid for a rush job. Had the fuel made up and shipped here in April, right after Ecuador recognized us. Being installed as we speak. Suits are roughed out for the three of us, just need tailoring.”
“Three? May?”
“She designed the thing. Can
you
fly a Wyndham 40-V? I know I can’t.”
May shambled into the kitchen like she might have trouble crossing a line of salt. “M’nin,” she said, and yawned hugely. “’Zat?”
“Yellowhorse. He wants you to fly us all up to orbit in a spaceplane to talk to the nanos.”
“Coffee first,” she mumbled, and went to the steamer. As her cup was filling, she made a few odd smacking noises, frowned, and looked at Toby. “What did you say?”
XXIV
Ah, there are no longer any children!
—MOLIÈRE [JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN]
1
The change came literally overnight.
It had been predicted by OB/GYNs months before; but there are ranks within the Brahmanism of doctors, and the baby-deliverers’ status as performers of manual labor places them barely ahead of GPs. When they were not being patronized, they were simply disregarded.
It was first noticed by the rest of the medical profession in hospitals. One day the staff of the delivery rooms would be harried and frantic and making the usual annoyed remarks about conveyor belts; the next, there would be three babies born, hours apart, one of them overdue.
Various governments were swift to deal with the emergency by imposing useless, and occasionally lethally enforced, news blackouts of varying duration. All eventually dropped them in order to receive the aid money being collected to fix the problem.
Speaking on
The Sunrise Show,
special guest Turner Lexington, chairman of the Gaia Society, declared that it would be better for the world if the human race went extinct, and that the sterility was probably a planetary self-defense mechanism. He was beginning to expand on this theme when show hostess Rebecca Bloom hit him with a chair. Four hundred audience members—mostly women—later unanimously assured police that it looked like Lexington had been reaching for a gun.
Five days into the growing panic, a medical report was posted on the JNAIT Web site. Months earlier, the spike in false conception had attracted prompt attention in a nation whose entire adult population consisted, technically, of immigrants, and interested parties had been studying the matter for months. A statistical oddity had led to tests. These showed that the uterine wall of every woman examined had undergone a small structural change. The capillary-rich tissue that had formerly been sloughed off in menstruation was now resorbed instead, conserving nutrients. One consequence of this change was that the tissue was resistant to implantation of a dividing zygote. However, this resistance was usually—not always—temporarily suspended after a sexual climax. Tests, in which volunteers seeking to get pregnant were treated with the chemicals produced on such occasions, direct stimulus of the pleasure center of the brain, or both, had negative results. It had to happen the old-fashioned way.
And when it did, tissue receptivity lasted less than a day before wearing off.
Since the migration of a fertilized ovum from the fallopian tubes to the uterus could take anywhere from two to five days, the only women who were getting pregnant were the ones with extremely diligent lovers.
Even then, not all were successful. No medical condition was found in common among those who weren’t.
* * *
It was a few more days before a USDA worker in Kansas noticed that there was no perceptible decline in births among the Amish there. Quick checking showed this to be true for the entire U.S. population of Amish.
The Amish, not much interested in the doings of the “English,” had been unaware of the problem.
Once word got to them, they still weren’t much interested.
However, Amish men did start manifesting a tendency, when dealing with outsiders, to suddenly smile for no perceptible reason.
2
The first thing Isobel Ross had done during her three years as president was to make Homeland Security a part of the Department of Justice. John Finch had planned to do it, but a dissecting aneurysm had interrupted his work. Finch’s concern had been that, since its founding, the DHS had been slowly turning into Hoover’s vision of the FBI. (Hoover had wanted the CIA to be part of the FBI, thereby creating an organization with powers of investigation and action at home and abroad. It would have given America its own KGB. Even Lyndon Johnson hadn’t been willing to do that.)
The second thing she had done was have Finch’s autopsy redone by an independent forensic investigator. The timing of President Finch’s death had seemed just a little too convenient for the DHS. Nothing conclusive was found, but she’d replaced the top three levels of the DHS chain-of-command anyway.
The Director of Homeland Security was currently Tom Shake. Like all his predecessors, he was a vigorous supporter of everything about America except its principles.
God only knew how he’d learned about the JNAIT spaceplane; it wasn’t like he read Alice’s reports. At least, he’d made no response to anything else she’d put in them. As soon as he found out, though, he’d called her in the middle of the night to tell her she had to stop it.
“How am I supposed to do that?” she said.
“Any way you can. I’m sure you can think of something,” he said. He was using the tone, instantly recognizable to any judge, that TV prosecutors used when they didn’t want to be recorded authorizing blackmail and extortion when the cops had no grounds for a warrant.
She was already irritable from being awakened. “My grandparents were Kurdish, sir. Not Arab. Kurds have never really been into dynamite belts as a fashion statement.”
“I would never suggest such a thing,” he said indignantly. Now he made her think of a three-year-old whose face was covered in cookie crumbs.
“Then what
do
you suggest? Sir? Staging the suicide of the man in charge? Accusing them of child abuse, shooting whoever they send out to reply, and sending in a flamethrower tank when they shoot back?”
“I suggest you moderate your tone, Agent Johnson.”
“Or what? You’ll fire me and confiscate my pension? It ought to cover the cost of the stamp to mail my severance check. And for future reference, if you want deniability, mysterious phone calls after midnight
attract attention
.”
“I was allowing for you being in another hemisphere,” he said, in the patient tones of someone explaining something very simple.
“The
Southern
Hemisphere,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said.
“You might want to get hold of a globe. Do you recall the one in your office, sir?” she said.
“Of course. There’s nothing wrong with
my
memory.”
That did it. She abandoned what she’d originally intended to say, and exclaimed, “Excellent! Now, do you have any petroleum jelly, sir?”
Even he got that. After a pause, he said, “Agent Johnson, you are recalled to Largo for a disciplinary hearing.”
“Great! It’s a much better venue for the press conference I’ll be holding.”
“Any leak of classified information will be prosecuted as contrary to the public interest.”
“Open review, of the mental competence of the man who’s supposed to be protecting the U.S. from surprise attacks, is certainly in the public interest, and as an agent of Homeland Security, who is being blocked from going through channels by your bottlenecking critical information, I have no other recourse.”
“You’re fired. You will vacate your hotel room and return here to clear out your desk forthwith.”
“If I’m fired, you’re not giving me orders.”
“You’ll do as you’re told if you want to stay healthy.”
“You are now on record threatening the life of an American citizen. That makes you a terrorist.”
“You— I have not given you permission to record me. You can’t use it.”
“You’ve forgotten the rules of the American legal system. You waived all rights and all expectation of privacy when
you
phoned
me
. Not only can I use it in court, but if I find someone silly enough to want to listen to you, I can sell copies and don’t even have to pay you a share of the price.”