Voyagers III - Star Brothers

“I know who that is!” blurted the young man sitting beside Kruppmann.

Hsen replied mildly, “I should think that you do. It is Dr. Keith Stoner, former astronaut, former astrophysicist. The man who first made contact with the alien starship some thirty years ago.”

“He was frozen for eighteen years and then revived in the Hawaii laboratories of Vanguard Industries,” said the intelligence director. “That was fifteen years ago.”

“You are certain that he’s the one?” Kruppmann sounded unconvinced. “A former scientist is our master conniver?”

“He is the one,” answered Hsen…. “He is no longer a scientist…. One might say that he is retired. And he is married, very interestingly, to the president of Vanguard Industries, and has been so almost since the very day he was revived from freezing.”

Kruppmann’s mouth flapped open and closed several times. Finally he gasped, “Married to Jo Camerata?…We should eliminate them both!”

But Hsen held up one finger. “A moment of consideration, if you please. Consider: Stoner is undoubtedly the thorn in our flesh. Also: Jo Camerata, his wife, has undoubtedly been helping him all these years…. Finally, Stoner is the only man to survive cryonic freezing.”

The room went absolutely silent.

Hsen took a breath and said, “I suggest that Dr. Stoner is worth much more to us alive than dead. The secret of immortality seems to be hidden within his body.”

PROLOGUE

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

BOOK II

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

BOOK III

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

BOOK IV

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

BOOK V

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LATE in the afternoon of the longest day of the year a solitary man drove a sleek electrically-powered sports car southward from the city of Lima. Once past the growling snarl of urban traffic the car lifted off its four wheels and began skimming across the glass-smooth road surface on a layer of invisible energy that held it suspended a few centimeters above the ceramic-coated concrete highway.

A cruel joke of nature had placed the Earth’s driest desert between the surging expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the snowcapped peaks of the Andes. The car sped down the curving coast road past the high sand dunes that heaped along the restless ocean shore, a shining silver projectile alone on the empty road. A late springtime mist clung to the huge ridges of sand, cold gray tendrils sliding in among the rugged seaside cliffs like the ghosts of long-forgotten ancestors.

The man, middle-aged, balding, plump, wore a strange expression on his round, mustachioed face: as the slanting light of the afternoon sun flickered in through the fog he seemed at one moment to be utterly serene, completely at ease with himself, yet a moment later totally intense, concentrating with almost superhuman determination upon a task that he alone could understand.

Hour after hour he drove, the speeding car tearing through the clinging fog as a bullet tears through living flesh. The car’s motor was as silent as death itself; the only sound the driver heard in all his long journey was the whisper of the wind rushing by. The road swung inland and the dunes dwindled behind him. The car climbed through passes carved into bare rock, higher, always moving higher as deep gorges of river valleys fell away from the twisting road’s edge. The sky cleared into a perfectly cloudless cobalt blue. Past fields already green he sped; past long irrigation canals dug a thousand years earlier.

Up onto the
altiplano
the car surged, into a barren flat world where fields of bare pebbles stretched endlessly out to the dimly-seen masses of the mighty Andes, their great bulk a hazy violet in the distance, their snow peaks shimmering on the horizon as if floating disconnected from the world.

The stony desert of reddish brown seemed utterly lifeless. Completely barren. Not a blade of grass, not a hint of green. Like the planet Mars, nothing but stones and pebbles and the empty sky overhead. For kilometer after kilometer. For eternity, it seemed.

Finally the man brought the car to a stop near the foot of a steep bare rocky hill. Its wheels came down crunching on the stony ground. Then silence, except for the eternal keening wind.

He got out, shivering slightly as he realized that the breeze was cold; the night was coming on. Zippering up the light windbreaker he wore over his corduroy slacks and thin cotton shirt, he slowly, patiently began to climb the hill. The loose scrabble of dark pebbles slipped and clattered beneath his suede boots. He dropped to all fours and doggedly made his way to the crest, some sixty meters above the roadway.

At the top he straightened and looked out across the waterless plain. Despite himself, his breath caught in his throat. As far as the eye could see stretched the lines and figures, hundreds of them, thousands of them, extending in every direction across the stark plain of Nazca. Animals, birds, triangles, circles, an enormous rectangle, all crisscrossed by lines as straight as any modern surveyor could draw. The work of countless centuries ago, the only sign that life had ever existed beneath this empty copper sky.

With eyes that went beyond normal human vision the man saw the drawings with perfect clarity in the last rays of the dying sun. The giant spider, the monkey, the frigate bird with its puffed-up throat, the killer whale.

He sought one particular line, as straight as the division between good and evil. In the dying golden light of sunset he found it, bright as silver against the darker rocky desert. It stretched out toward the flat emptiness of the western horizon.

The man felt his pulse racing as he waited. Slowly, with the dignity of a god, the sun came down and touched the horizon. Exactly where the line touched it.

The man breathed a long sigh of contentment. Midsummer’s day. He could sense two of his brothers, each of them half a world away, sharing this moment of serenity and cosmic understanding. We have done well, my brothers, he said silently. And he felt their answering smiles in his soul.

It was hard to believe that only a year ago he had never heard of the man Stoner. Only a year ago he had been an ordinary human being, no better or worse than billions of others. But then Stoner had changed him. And the whole world.

THE sudden heat was like a sodden, muffling blanket that weighed so heavily he could hardly breathe.

Jõao de Sagres gasped and felt sweat streaming from every pore of his body as they struggled through dense jungle foliage. Fronds slapped at his face. Birds cawed and shrilled overhead. The ground was spongy, squelching underfoot. His expensive silk suit was drenched in seconds, stained and ruined. He dared not even to glance at his muddy shoes. Yet the man Stoner seemed perfectly at ease in this dripping, raucous, sweltering tropical forest. Hardly a gleam of perspiration showed in his intense, dark-bearded face.

“Where are we?” de Sagres asked in a whisper.

“Almost there,” said Stoner.

“How did…”

Stoner silenced him with an upraised hand. On a branch high above, a long-tailed monkey stared solemnly at them, then disappeared among the leaves in a blur of motion.

“Get down,” Stoner hissed.

Dazedly, de Sagres did as commanded and dropped to his knees in the bushes. The grass was alive with insects. De Sagres saw ants the size of his thumbs crawling busily across the leaves a few centimeters in front of his face. He shuddered and began to itch all over.

“I don’t understand…”

“Shh!”

He wanted to get up and run away, but to where? What was he doing in this strange dank oven of a jungle? How did this man Stoner bring him here? We should be in my office, speaking politely to each other over a civilized drink, with the air conditioning and ice cubes at hand, with my aides and servants and security guards protecting me.

Yet he was kneeling in the mud of a tropical forest, bedraggled and sticky with sweat, certain that poisonous insects were devouring his flesh, trembling with fear. And totally unable to get away. It was as if he were chained to Stoner, shackled to the man like a prisoner.

Stoner was peering intently through the dense foliage. De Sagres studied the big man carefully. A fierce, uncompromising face, like an Old Testament patriarch. Patrician nose, strong cheekbones, a full dark beard that now showed drops of sweat in it, dark hair trimmed neatly. Powerful body, tall and lean and flat-bellied as an athlete’s beneath the simple khaki jacket and whipcord slacks that he wore.

It was Stoner’s eyes that unsettled de Sagres. They were gray, as gray as a distant thundercloud or the tossing stormy sea. Yet his eyes did not look troubled at all. Rather, they were as serene as any saint’s, and terribly, terribly deep; there were depths in them that seemed infinite. When de Sagres had first looked at Stoner he had been startled by those strangely fathomless eyes; it was like the first time he had peered into a telescope and seen the universe of stars beyond counting.

For all his broad-shouldered build and fierce appearance, it was Stoner’s compelling gray eyes that held de Sagres in an unbreakable grip of steel. The eyes of a madman. Or a mystic. They had fastened onto de Sagres’s soul and they would not release him. De Sagres had received no hint, when he had welcomed Stoner to his private office in the capitol, that he would end up in this rotting infested jungle. Stoner had led and he had followed, as helpless as a lamb.

The forest went suddenly silent.

Stoner turned toward him. “Look. They’re coming.”

Despite himself, de Sagres hunched closer to Stoner and leaned on his strong back as he stared out through the concealing foliage at a sun-dappled clearing in the thick tropical forest. Massive rough-barked trees rose all around the clearing, their boles soaring like the pillars of a cathedral, their canopies a solid green carpet as far as the eyes could see. But this clearing, about the size of a football field, was open to the hazy, searing sunlight.

A line of grotesque dark-skinned men was forming on the farther side of the clearing. Naked except for scraps of dirty cloth covering their groins, each man was elaborately painted in garish designs that covered face and body. Each man carried a long, sharp-tipped spear.

Another line of forty-some men appeared on the opposite side of the clearing. Also naked and painted and armed with spears.

“Where are we?” de Sagres pleaded.

Stoner shook his head. “Does it matter? Watch.”

The two lines of warriors confronted each other, separated by the width of the clearing. They waved their spears and stamped their feet, chanting and yelling back and forth.

“Notice the ground between them,” whispered Stoner.

“It is worn down to bare dirt,” de Sagres saw.

Grimly Stoner nodded. “This isn’t the first time warriors have faced each other at this spot.”

“They’re going to fight?”

“They are from two different villages. One of the men from one village has kidnapped a woman from the other village. Her kinfolk have raised this army to recapture her. And to steal as many of the other village’s women as they can. The kidnapper’s village has brought their own army here to defend themselves. If they kill enough of their enemy they can raid the enemy village itself and steal pigs as well as more women.”

“How do you know all this?”

Stoner merely shook his head slightly and whispered, “Wait…I think—yes. The elders have arrived.”

Half a dozen wizened old men, bent and grizzled with age, stepped into the sunlight between the two armies. Their naked bodies were unpainted; they bore no weapons. They walked slowly, with great dignity, to the middle of the clearing and stood for many minutes, speaking earnestly among themselves.

“What are they doing?”

“Trying to prevent the war,” said Stoner.

One of the white-haired men raised his hands above his head and spoke in a loud quavering voice to the line of warriors at one side of the field. Then he turned and spoke to the other side. The warriors shuffled their feet, looked at the ground, glanced at one another.

Another of the old men spoke to each side. Then a third.

Finally the two groups of warriors turned and disappeared into the jungle as silently as snakes. The old men waited several minutes more, then they broke into two smaller groups and went their separate ways, each group following the path of the warriors.

The birds began to call and whistle once more.

Stoner’s bearded face broke into a broad smile. “They did it! They talked the warriors out of fighting. They prevented the war.”

De Sagres realized his legs were cramping painfully, he had been kneeling for such a long time. He let himself fall back on his buttocks—

—and found himself sitting in his own office chair, behind his imposing, immaculately gleaming desk.