There was nothing orderly, however, in what had become of Natasha Subramanian. Her disappearance, in the circumstances in which it had occurred, was simply impossible. And all of that was very bad for everyone concerned, and then it got worse.
For the next thirty-six hours the whole remaining Subramanian family was gathered in their kitchen, maid and cook as well. When Robert woke up from his nap, the crying spell was over, though he didn’t seem able to tell his parents what it had been about—until they asked him if it had something to do with his sister and he replied, “’Atasha ’appy asleep.”
When dinner arrived, he ate with a good appetite, although no one else did. They didn’t sleep much, either, drowsing in their chairs or stretching out for half an hour or so on the couch under the kitchen’s windows. But none of the adults dared walk away from the news screens for more than a couple of minutes, lest some explanation of what had happened might suddenly be announced.
None was.
Oh, there was news, all right. One worrying bulletin came from the searchers in low earth orbit to say that now they were being escorted by several dozen of those little copper-colored flying things that had given the world its first solid indication that flying saucers, or something like flying saucers, were real. Why were they there? What did they want? Speculation was intense, but no explanation emerged, and so the world’s attention turned to other matters. Attention turned to that spot in the Oort where astronomers had seen something that looked a little like, but wasn’t, a supernova. Now the longer photographic exposures, with more powerful clusters of telescopes hooked together, showed that there was indeed some low-level radiation going on that positively had not been there in earlier studies of the same area. Attention turned to the tugs that were gradually herding all seven of the racing yachts into safe orbits—the six that were unharmed as well as the ball of crumpled fabric that had been Natasha’s Diana. Attention turned to all the world’s capitals and major cities, not one of which lacked a collection of “experts” capable of endlessly discussing what was going on—without ever increasing anyone’s understanding of it.
And then the phone started ringing. It got no better the next day, nor the day after that.
The last thing Myra Subramanian wanted to do was let her one remaining child out of her sight, but when she and Ranjit talked it over, they agreed that it would be even worse to upset Robert any more than he had been upset already. That next day was a Sunday. On Sundays, Robert went to Sunday school. This Sunday was no different—though Myra sat in an empty room nearby during the whole time that Robert, like the other handicapped children in the church’s special group, listened politely as the woman who was the assistant pastor read them Bible stories and they colored the line drawings of what the little girl next to Robert called “Jesus Christ on a crisscross.” And on Monday there was the workshop that one of their advisers had thought Robert would enjoy. There, Robert Subramanian—the boy who had discovered hexominoes for himself!—patiently and apparently pleasurably learned how to fill a decorative pencil box with one of each color of crayon, for sale in the workshop’s little gift store.
At least Robert’s crying was over. The worry, the puzzlement, the terrible pain of loss, however—they weren’t over for either Myra or Ranjit. The calls never stopped coming in, either, from everyone they knew, and from an unbelievable number of people they didn’t know at all. Some were actual pests. Ronaldinho Olsos, for instance, begging their forgiveness in case they felt he was in any way responsible; T. Orion Bledsoe, from Pasadena, to offer cursory sympathy but mostly to ask if Ranjit had any idea, any idea at all that for any reason he hadn’t already communicated to the authorities, of what might have happened to his daughter.
Then there were the reporters.
Ranjit had believed that the absolute maximum invasion of his privacy had taken place after Nature had published his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. He was wrong about that. What happened now was much worse. Although President-Elect Bandara had arranged for police to guard the approaches to the Subramanian home, they were effective only there and nowhere else. Once Ranjit got onto his bike to leave, he was fair game. So he didn’t go into his university any more often than was unavoidable. After dinner he left Myra studying her journal reports and Robert stacking marbles on the floor beside her and retreated to the master bedroom to plan his next seminar.
That was when it happened.
Myra looked up from her screen, frowning. She had heard something—a distant electronic squeal, perhaps—and at the same moment had seen a flash of golden light coming under the door.
The next thing she heard was her husband’s voice, his tone a mixture of joy and terror. “My God!” he cried. “Tashy, is that really you?”
After that there was nothing that could have kept Myra de Soyza Subramanian out of that room. When she flung the door open, she saw her husband staring at someone standing by the window. It was a young woman. What she wore was the bare minimum that any girl might wear who knew perfectly well that no outside party was going to see her.
It was a costume Myra had often enough seen her daughter wear around the house. She echoed her husband’s cry—“Tashy!”—and did what any mother might have done in these preposterous circumstances, threw herself at the girl, trying to wrap her arms around her.
That, it turned out, was impossible.
A meter from the figure of the girl something slowed Myra down, a dozen centimeters later it stopped her cold. It wasn’t anything like a wall. It wasn’t anything tangible at all. Perhaps one could say that it was something like a warm and irresistible breeze.
Whatever it was, Myra was stopped cold, right there, at arm’s length from any part of this figure that wore the face of the child she had borne, and raised, and loved.
And who now did not even look at her. Its eyes were fixed on Ranjit. When it spoke, it said, “It is not of interest to discuss who I am, Dr. Subramanian. What is important is that I must ask you many questions, all of which you must answer.”
And then, without waiting for a response from Ranjit, without any explanations or even simple courtesy, the questioning began.
“Many” questions?
Yes, that was definitely the right word. They went on forever—for, by actual clock time, nearly four hours—and they covered, well, everything. “Why are many of your tribes destroying their weapons?” “Has your species ever lived at peace?” “What is the meaning of ‘proof’ as applied to your earlier researches on the Fermat theorem?” And even stranger ones: “Why do your males and females often copulate even when the female cannot conceive?” And “Have you not calculated an optimal population for your planet?” And “Why do your actual numbers so greatly exceed it?” And, “There are areas of many square kilometers on your planet that have very small human populations. Why have you not resettled some of your people there from crowded urban areas?”
Through it all, Myra stood there, frozen. She could see everything. She couldn’t move. She saw, and yearned to help, her husband’s struggles to deal with the interrogation in spite of his own helpless bafflement.
And such questions! “Sometimes,” she—or it—was asking, in that uninflected voice that might have come from a reanimated corpse, “the word you use for an assemblage of humans is ‘country’ and sometimes ‘nation.’ Are the two concepts differentiated by, perhaps, size?”
The figure’s putative father shook his head. “Not at all. There are some countries with as few as some hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and some—China, for instance—with nearly two billion. But they’re both sovereign states—nations, that is,” he corrected himself.
The figure was silent for a moment. Then, “How was the decision made to annihilate the electronic capabilities of the nations, countries, or sovereign states of North Korea, Colombia, Venezuela, and others?”
Ranjit sighed. “By the council of Pax per Fidem, I suppose. You’d probably have to ask one of them for a more reliable answer—Gami
ni Bandara, say, or his father.” When the figure was silent again, he added nervously, “Of course, I can speculate. Would you like me to do that?”
The eyes that were not Natasha’s eyes regarded him for a long moment. Then the figure said, “No.” There was an ear-piercing electronic squeal, and a quick stir in the air, and the figure was gone.
Myra could move again, and did. She ran to her husband’s side and threw her arms around him. They sat silent, hugging each other, until a banging at the front door startled everyone. When the maid answered it, at least a dozen police came racing in, looking for something to arrest. The captain, out of breath, panted, “Sorry. The duty constable saw what was happening through a window and alerted us, but when we got here, we just couldn’t get close to the house. Couldn’t even touch the wall—Excuse me.” He lifted his own screen to his ear, while Myra was assuring the police, diligently searching every part of the house, that none of them had been harmed.
Then the police captain replaced his pocket screen on his belt. “Dr. Subramanian? Did you mention Gamini Bandara, the president-elect’s son, in your conversation with that—” He stopped, searching for the right noun to complete the sentence and not finding it. “With that,” he finished.
Ranjit nodded. “Yes, I think I did.”
“I thought so,” the cop said heavily. “Now he’s getting the same kind of questioning you were, from the same person.”
All of that news went out to every human being who owned or had access to a screen. It did not give much understanding to anyone, though. Not to what was left of the Subramanian family, nor to the rest of the human race. Not even to the horde of One Point Fives who hung trapped in their troop transports, drifting through the Oort cloud.
Those beings had concerns much more immediate than those of the human race. To the One Point Fives it was all very well to be ordered to postpone their annihilation of the human race, but the orders the Grand Galactics had handed down did not seem to take full cognizance of what obeying those orders entailed.
It was a question of numbers. Some 140,000 One Point Fives had originally boarded the transports. That number had not changed for more than a dozen years. But then, unwilling to die without descendants to carry on their genetic line, the One Point Fives had given themselves the luxury of that brief and violent flurry of sexuality.
The results of that orgy had already been born. Indeed, they now were nearly fully adult….
But the armada had not been equipped to keep so large a number alive for a prolonged period.
The mechanical replenishers that had been built to supply air, water, and food for 140,000 One Point Fives had been forced to cope with nearly twice that number. Now they were beginning to crumble under that stress. Soon there would be shortages. Soon after that, deaths.
And what were the Grand Galactics going to do about that?
39
THE INTERROGATIONS
There wasn’t much sleep that night for the Subramanian family—for anybody, really, whatever their time zone, because most of the world sat enthralled before their screens regardless of the hour. What they saw at first was Gamini Bandara, wearing only a huge bath towel, sitting on the edge of a tub and being questioned by that same close copy of Natasha Subramanian who had interrogated her father. There was no immediate explanation of how this event came to be.
The subject matter of these particular questions had mostly to do with the founding of Pax per Fidem, the development of the Silent Thunder weapon, and the command structure of the groups that planned and executed its missions. Gamini answered every question as best he could. For the technical details of Silent Thunder he shook his head and named one of the team of engineers who had built it. For the inside story of who said what to whom to get the project started, he referred the questioning to the UN secretary-general. When the questioning turned to the human race’s eternal propensity for fighting wars with neighboring bodies, Gamini apologized. That went back as far as human history did, he said, but he had failed the one ancient history course he had ever taken. The professor who taught it, however, was still at the London School of Economics.
So she was, though at the moment on sabbatical in the tiny country of Belize. The inquisitor tracked her down at a local collection of ruins called Altun Ha. There, in broad and sweaty daylight, with a hundred anthropologists, tourists, guides, and (finally) Belizean police watching and hearing every word that was spoken but unable to approach the participants, the pseudo-Natasha demanded and got a summary of the military history of the human race. The professor gave her everything she wanted. She started with the first nations on record—Sumerians, Akkadians, Old Babylonians, and Hittites—in those earliest years before what was called “civilization” exploded out of the Fertile Crescent that lay between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates to conquer Egypt, China, Europe, and ultimately the whole world. Wherever human beings went, whatever their neighbors, however rich their lives, yes, they still fought their regular ration of bloody and murderous wars.
Taken all in all the simulacrum of Natasha Subramanian interviewed nearly twenty people. Whatever she asked, they answered—not necessarily on first being asked. The slowest to answer her was a nuclear bomb designer from Amarillo, Texas, who flatly refused to give any details about the design of the nuclear weapon in Silent Thunder. Wouldn’t answer even when he was denied food, water, or the use of a bathroom…until he finally admitted that if the president of the United States gave him permission to talk, he would obey. The interview with the president that followed took less than twenty minutes before the president, grasping the situation and its likely impact on his own life and comfort, said, “Oh, hell, tell her whatever she wants.”
The simulacrum’s nonstop interrogations altogether took some fifty-one hours. Then she simply disappeared. And when Ranjit and Myra compared tapes of the last questioning and the first, they were astonished to see that her curls were still in place. There was no fatigue in her face or in the sound of her voice. Her sketchy garments weren’t stained with the inevitable drop of food (what food? she hadn’t been seen to eat any) or involuntary brushing against a powdery wall. “She just isn’t real,” Ranjit marveled.
His wife said, “No, she isn’t. But where is the real one?”
Because Myra and Ranjit were, after all, merely human, they needed rest. They weren’t getting it. So Myra left strict orders with the servants that they were not to be disturbed before ten A.M. unless the end of the world was at hand.
Then, when Myra opened one eye to see the cook’s worried face bent over hers and discovered it was only a little past seven, she gave her unmoving husband a quick elbow to the ribs. That was just in case the world really was ending, since she didn’t want him to miss that.
And really, who was to say it was not? The news the cook had for them was that the “supernova” in the Oort had come to life again, though at only a tiny fraction of the energy displayed before. As more and more of Earth’s biggest light buckets swung themselves to get a better look, it turned out that there wasn’t a single source for this new radiation, either. There were more than a hundred and fifty sources, and (so the news reader said, sounding both worried and very confused) Doppler analysis showed one more fact about them. They were all moving. And they were moving in the general direction of the inner solar system, indeed in the direction of Earth itself.
Ranjit’s response was typically Ranjit. He stared into space for a long moment. Then he said, “Huh,” and rolled over, presumably to go back to sleep.
Myra thought of trying to do the same, but a brief trial established that that was impossible. Laboriously she went through her morning rituals and wound up in the kitchen to accept a cup of tea, but not a conversation, with the cook. To avoid that she took her tea out on the patio to think.
Thinking was something that Dr. Myra de Soyza Subramanian did quite well. This morning, though, it wasn’t going properly. Perhaps that was because the cook had left the news on in the kitchen, and
even from outside Myra could hear the muffled voices—saying nothing that was of interest, really, because the news services didn’t know anything of interest that they hadn’t said in their first announcement. Perhaps it was because what she really wanted to think about was the puzzle of the inexplicable appearance of what looked so much like her daughter but wasn’t. Perhaps it was just the warmth of the morning sun, taken together with her near exhaustion.
Myra fell asleep.
How long she slept, lying on their all-weather recliner in the bright sun, she could not say. When something woke her, she noticed at once that the sun was markedly higher in the sky, and the cook and the maid were making a ridiculous amount of noise in the kitchen.
Then she heard the faint voice from the news screen that they were making the noise about. It was a broadcast, by chance caught by one of the monitors in low earth orbit, and it came from that orbiting collection of space yachts that once had been the contestants in the first-ever solar-sail race. And the voice was one both Myra and Ranjit knew well.
“Help,” the familiar voice said. “I need someone to get me out of this capsule before the emergency air runs out.” The voice finished with another bit of information quite unnecessary for either Myra or Ranjit: “This is Natasha de Soyza Subramanian, formerly the skipper of the solar yacht Diana, and I have no idea what I’m doing here.”