Time, Like a River

Liz stood and walked forward to the bow pulpit. She held onto the rail as she looked up into the sky, while Charley came and settled on Sumner's lap. The pup looked up into his eyes and licked his chin, then the tears that rolled down his face.

He heard Carol running through Hyperion, heard her running up the companionway steps up and into the cockpit...

"He's gone!" she screamed.

Sumner stood. "Who? Ted?"

"Smithfield was down there, and his sister too, and when I came in they all just disappeared!"

"Well, hell," Sumner Collins said as he walked aft, grinning. "Ain't life grand?!"

Then he too turned to the stars – and he laughed at them – while he shook his fist at the night sky.

Then he felt her there, down there in the sea – and he turned and looked at her two scars glowing in the night. He dove off the stern, dove deep – so deep he felt his lungs about to burst – and when he saw her there beside him he knew she would never leave him.

◊◊◊◊◊

Part III: When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul, then nightly sings the staring owl.

Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

Departures I

Ted Sherman and his sister, Hope, as well as a startled Grover Smithfield, blinked into existence on the first Hyperion loading platform, the one attached to 'Moe's' command ship while it was still in Mar's orbit. They made their way into the hastily constructed conference room off Hope's sleeping cabin and sat around an oxygen polisher – that now performed double duty as a table.

"This is your meeting, Grover. What's on your mind?" Hope said as she looked at him closely.

"The final figure is 1.2 million people. That's it. That's all they're able to transport. That means seven billion people are now at risk."

"The terraformed world they've chosen for our people," Hope sighed, "the one that's immediately habitable, is a quarter the size of our moon. Within decades we'll reach it's peak ability to sustain life. Within one hundred years we'll have to be prepared to send out colonists, or our population growth will cause another implosion."

"I understand that," Smithfield sighed. "But do you understand – seven billion people? That many people are going to die if we can't...?"

"I do," Hope said. "What would you have me say?"

"We have to find another world. Another Earth, someplace for these people to go."

She looked at Smithfield, knew what he wanted, but she'd exhausted those possibilities weeks ago. Humanity had exhausted this planet, and even without the Phage it's time here was limited. Population explosion, resource depletion, climate change...earth really was a paradise lost.

And Ted was looking at his sister just then, just as Hope's 'urTed' translator blinked into the room. Ted had never seen his doppelgänger before, though he had almost gotten used to the ur-Jennifer that always seemed to be somewhere close to Sumner; now, seeing his near self in such close proximity was unsettling – and he instinctively pulled away from 'it'.

Hope, of course, smiled at his discomfort, at least until the ur-Ted began speaking.

"The human population on the surface has reduced by 3.4 billion. A religious reaction, but starvation, panic, sudden military interventions have been observed. By the end of this week we project more than 5 billion will have perished. We are authorized to tell you that three new colony ships will arrive, room for twenty million people has been found on a system of synthetic moons. These moons orbit in a system where three planets are being terraformed. It is possible these worlds will be ready for human habitation within ten standard years."

"By Golly," Smithfield said, "that's wonderful news. How can we express our gratitude?"

The urTed looked at Smithfield, his eyes sad, full of pain. "There will be a price," he said, his voice now dull and flat. "We are sorry."

◊◊◊◊◊

[Log entry SailingVessel Gemini: 7 August, 1430 hrs GMT. 

COG: moored, Marseilles, old port;

SOG: na; 

Temp: 107F;

Winds: SSW at 22kts; 

Barometer 29.55 rising; 

GPS:  43°17'38.04"N   5°22'0.21"E.

Still unseasonably hot. Very dry wind coming off North Africa, last night the low temperature was 97F. Almost no food available in the city, but there is power, and we have been able to fill the diesel tanks.]

Sumner Collins had moved Gemini back to the relative safety of the marina in Marseilles' old port, a deeply sheltered harbor almost completely surrounded by the oldest part of the city, yet now he was uneasy, felt like he was being watched all the time. Ted had been gone for weeks now; he had simply disappeared, leaving Carol alone on Hyperion for several days – and then she too had simply vanished. Last week he'd heard what he thought was a thunderclap and gone on deck to check the sky – only to find Hyperion was gone. One minute the boat was there, then clap-boom – she was gone. The event had seriously unsettled him.

Liz had grown increasingly despondent after the urJenn's announcement the Phage were coming much sooner than expected, yet she rallied for a time – after Ted left. She assumed if there was room for older people she might find a way off-world, she might survive the coming of the Phage...and then Carol had vanished. Liz fell back into a downward spiral after that, and was sleeping into mid-afternoon most days now, and rarely eating. She helped when she could but the sense of onrushing doom left her paralyzed more often than not most days.

Then Liz watched as Sumner grew increasingly disenchanted with the idea leaving, of living anywhere but Earth. He said there was no room 'for people like me' out among the stars, and when she'd asked him about this, about what exactly he meant by that, he'd grown sullen and withdrawn – and walked away. But he'd fallen into spells like this ever since he'd come back from Israel, and while she didn't understand – she couldn't get him to talk about it, either.

By this point, only Charley seemed to exercise any sort of hold on Sumner, and their unique bond only seemed to grow stronger – even as Liz's hold on Sumner seemed to diminish – after Hyperion vanished. She didn't truly understand Charley or what the pup meant to Sumner, or how he would – in effect – choose a dog to confide in over her, yet that's what it felt like to her. She grew more distant and depressed – causing further withdrawal – and the cycle spiraled beyond their ability to control.

Food became harder to find, farmer's markets were overrun as fuel dependent transportation and distribution networks broke down. Pelagic sea life had all but disappeared, but he soon found shellfish and after that they were feasting on crab and oysters almost every meal – and an occasional lobster could be had with patience – but even that diet grew stale after a week.  On top of it all, he had to run the engine to make water, and as that bit into their fuel reserves it meant they had to find fuel. And this was getting harder to do...

So, the zero-sum end game that the urJenn had laid out for them was slowing rearing it's ugly head, coming to pass. Collins listened to the world's death throes on his single side band radio night after night; stories of heroism filled the airwaves – but he saw little evidence of that on the streets. Tens of millions of people on their knees, overwhelming helplessness the order of the day, and yet, of all the nations of the earth, only one seemed to soldier on almost completely unaffected by the peculiar fatalism sweeping through the remaining people of the Earth. America, and to a lesser extent Canada, had proven more resilient to the religious fatalism sweeping the eurasian landmass, but only just.

One day Collins walked along the waterfront until he came to the Cathédral de Major, the city's main cathedral, and he looked at it's odd mishmash of styles, then at the hundreds of uncollected bodies on the plaza surrounding the building. He heard singing inside and walked past the dead and the dying until he gained the entry, and at the door he pulled a woman's bloated body from the door and walked inside.

There were no people inside, no one sitting in the pews – not one soul taking in the music. He walked inward between rows of pews to the transept – where he paused and looked up – then he walked deeper into the building, to the choir. He watched an immaculately dressed choir of men and women singing, saw a string ensemble nearby accompanying the organ, and found a place in the shadows to sit and listen.

He drifted within the music, sat and fell into the arms of that spirit which is ultimately most human, and he found he almost felt like crying as the music washed over his parched soul. He knew the music, music somewhere from his past, a piece the Jennifer had loved, perhaps. It was Duruflé's Requiem, and the choir was moving into the Paradisium, those final few moments of the piece long regarded as the most intimate ever scored, the composer's intent to unleash the music of heaven – on those clinging fast to life.

As Sumner Collins drifted, he wondered when he'd lost his faith – indeed – if he'd ever possessed anything resembling faith. He'd spent his entire life hurting people – killing so many, torturing more than a few – and now, listening to this music he wanted to know why he'd done those things. Why he'd turned away from beauty, from love. Why he'd embraced such infinite darkness – in the name of –? What? A Father? His country? He didn't feel like a murderer, but he was, and in the worst possible way. He'd never found enjoyment in his actions, only a sort of grim satisfaction when the ends proved the means justified, and he'd marched right along to the anthems of his chosen life like any good soldier.

But that hadn't always been the case, had it? He thought back to Smithfield's wife, to her easy capitulation over the Atlantic, and he contrasted that experience with hundreds of others in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each human disintegration had been burned into his soul, each broken body was superimposed over his own, and there were times now when he lost track of himself, when he felt his own decomposing body atop piles of his victims. Was this, he wondered, what it felt like to take another's life – in the name of some greater good?

The last chords of the requiem washed through the cathedral, broke over his soul, cast him adrift as the voices drifted off into evening aires. He felt all his tears just then, the tears he'd held in check for so many years. First Jennifer, then Charley and Deborah, and now he could feel Liz falling away, falling into his own peculiar darkness – only now he felt completely powerless to watch his life unfolding in the twilight. He'd done everything he could to help Jennifer, everything to save her life, then when that was not enough he'd been content to ease her suffering. Nothing. Nothing he did mattered, and in the end death came for her. And Deborah's hallucinogenic passing, with something akin to Debussy at her side, with Lennon beckoning from the shadows? What did it mean?

He stood after a while, saw the choir had already left and he wondered how long he'd been sitting in the darkness. He thought of Phoebe, lost up there on the Norman coast with that lip smacking psychiatrist...and he wanted to see her again, hold her when the time came...but no, she'd finally found someone to hold as her own night came. He'd talked to them last week, heard her playing the Orgeron piece once again while he talked to Mann. He knew she couldn't ever say goodbye. They were too close for such expressions, so thoroughly conjoined words would never suffice.

Why, he wondered as he looked up at the vaulted ceiling, was it irrational to believe in something greater than ourselves? Why had the visitor's ships descended upon and hovered over humanity's symbols of mystery, the home of all her irrational imaginations? Had those alien minds known that earth's people had already reached a tipping point of dissolution, that humanity had arrived at that point where faith doubted so long simply snapped? Had those distant minds known that the human spirit was, in the end, only so strong?

◊◊◊◊◊

And why was it was that not one of their huge ships had settled over an American city?

Was it that the people of the Americas were isolated in other ways – by their oceans, perhaps, or the relative newness of their civilizations. The people of North America, in particular, had seemed to grow ever more resilient when they looked at the ships above Rome and Jerusalem, Mecca and the Himalayan foothills. Their faith, the 'Vulcans' sensed, seemed rooted more in themselves, more in the material world than in something so nebulous as God, and the 'Vulcans' realized they were looking at perhaps the most utterly human of all the races they'd observed on this planet.

And yet they looked down on these Americans with understanding. They'd been like that too, once, and they knew from their own troubled experience all the outcomes that might have been – had these Americans been allowed to move off into the stars. But they were too much a threat, their unique fusion of the rational and the mystical. Their fatalism was far too dangerous to simply cast loose among the stars, and so only a few would be taken aboard the colony ships.

Because most of all the 'Vulcans' remembered a time when the Phage had very nearly found them. When they'd first achieved a level of technological expertise that permitted spaceflight, before the time when population pressure and resource depletion had very nearly caused a complete collapse of their world.

And yet, these 'Vulcans' thought, the people of this planet had absolutely no idea what was coming their way. Or why. Now the 'Vulcans' wondered what they might have done, once upon a time, if they had been so ignorant of the reality closing in around them. If they'd looked with wonder and awe upon the vast fields of stars around their Homeworld – until it was too late to act.

And then, after weeks of silence, after burning days and nights while the people of the earth stared up at huge, silent spacecraft, each of the eight ships moved away silently – in the light of day – and hours later settled over spots seemingly in the middle of nowhere, far, far away from land and in the middle of the seven seas. The ships settled into the waters of the earth's oceans – and disappeared. Lost in frantic despair, the remaining people of the earth looked at broadcasts of the ships moving out to sea, watched them sink into the seas – and those still living wondered what it all meant. When the ships did not reappear there was a sudden collapse of the human spirit.

And in the emptiness that followed, the remaining few wondered if there had indeed ever been any meaning to human suffering.

And that night, while most of the earth's people slept, the television broadcast began. The program simply crushed all other programming, pushed it aside, moved it away, and for the very first time, the people of earth listened to a voice from the stars.

The President of the United States of America was sitting in his office, in the West Wing of the White House, when the broadcast first started playing. He was not amused, and appeared to be in no mood to listen.

◊◊◊◊◊

Departures II

An owl, and a fairy.

That's what most people thought when the broadcast started. They were looking at an owl, and someone who looked, perhaps, somewhat like the Tinker Bell of their dreams.

But the owl was staring at them. Benevolently, perhaps, but people saw sadness, and perhaps even wisdom in the owl's eyes.

And then the owl spoke.

"Good evening, my name is Hope," the owl began, "and I am speaking with you tonight from a ship in orbit above the earth, 4,000 miles above Antarctica. Tonight I have a story to tell you, a most unhappy story, a story with a sad ending – for most of us – "

And the owl told them of the people in the spaceships, people from another star. She told them of a race of people she'd come to call the Vulcans; because, she said, these beings seemed to be guided by principles of pure logic, and that this race had millennia ago turned away from irrationalism and mysticism. They had become explorers, as once the people of earth had been, and, perhaps, how we might become like them once again.

They were explorers. Seekers. A People willing to reach beyond themselves – into the unknown. As we had been, before we were consumed by fantasy and illusion.

She told the people of earth a little of what she knew about the people who built the ships, the ships that had settled over the earth's religious centers. They were a race that had moved out into the stars tens of millions of years ago, a people who took worlds and remade them when they expanded outward, into the systems beyond their Homeworld. This race, she told the people of the earth, now counted hundreds of planetary systems as their own, and she spoke of the literally hundreds of planets they now traveled between. She spoke of having visited several of these worlds already, and she tried to convey the majesty of the worlds she beheld, and the people who ruled them.

And then she told them of the Phage:

"There is a force in our galaxy," she began, "that appears to exist for no other purpose than to eliminate irrationalism, in whatever form it takes."She paused, let the words sink in. "Religion is one such force," she said, "but the Vulcan's seem to have accepted that this form of thought is self-limiting, that religious cultures always collapse as various contradictory and self-destructive impulses overwhelm other cultural institutions, and the Vulcans have accepted for some time our species now approaches such a fate. The Vulcans do not think we will escape our destiny, but they are prepared to offer a refuge of sorts – for some of us. That said, the Vulcans did not come to our earth to rescue us. There is another species on our planet, one even more irrational than humans, but one which possesses – a power – that the Vulcans want to preserve. They are now taking steps to insure the continuity that species.

"One week from today the Vulcan mission on earth will be at an end. One week and one hour from now those humans whom the Vulcans have chosen will be taken from earth. The final number is not known as even now the Vulcans are gathering resources to save as many humans as they can. Some of you will be resettled on planets the Vulcans have already established, some will be housed in temporary facilities around worlds that are being terraformed, but the vast majority of people alive now will – not – be transported. Those people not chosen next week will remain here on earth, and these people will be here – on earth – when the Phage arrive.

"The Phage will arrive soon after the Vulcan's depart. The exact time of the Phage's arrival is not known, but it could be as soon as a ten days, perhaps as long as two weeks. The Vulcans have observed, from afar, what the Phage do to the worlds they target – and they have taken steps to do so this time. They have advised that there is no chance of survival, that there is no weaponry powerful enough to defeat this force.

"There remains an outside chance that the Vulcans will be able to relocate more of us before the Phage arrive. If this appears likely, there will be one more broadcast after The Departure." 

The owl named Hope looked out at the people she addressed, then said "Goodbye to you all," before the broadcast faded away. Normal broadcasts around the world resumed, and while a curious sense of Hope prevailed, people began to look up into the night sky with more than just curiosity and wonder.