Amalfi Echo (6 page)

After several
weeks with no overtly hostile moves from the ship, and it
was
only a single ship, not a fleet and which couldn’t be
seen with the naked eye, most people shrugged and went about their
business. Comedians and sitcoms incorporated the new material,
turning it into an endless stream of one-line gags. The world
chuckled.

As Marion had
feared, ‘The end is nigh,’ like the bugs, had also been done.
Marion said, “I knew it was a bad idea to include the video
footage. It came across like ‘Revenge of the Gorgons.’”

“I loved
‘Revenge of the Gorgons,’” Tessa said, “so to hell with you.” She
kicked over a chair which promptly disappeared. “What’s the matter
with them? Which part of ‘you’re all going to die’ did they not
get?”

Not everyone
laughed. The Chinese launched a nuclear missle at the ship which
Digby caught and parked a half a mile away from the Chinese space
lab. After that, no one at all laughed.

Not many in the
corridors of power around the world had been laughing anyway and
the many emergency meetings that had been taking place in the
Pentagon, the White House, the Kremlin, in military and political
establishments everywhere, were ratcheted up. Complicating matters
for the United States was that their big advantage in two of the
main players being Americans and whose loyalty was not in question,
was being nullified by the arrest warrants out for them and a
vicious fight erupted in the nation’s capital. Questions began to
be asked about the death of Tessa’s parents, at first quietly, and
then more openly as the fight began to spill over into the public
arena. Some of those who knew the real story began to run for cover
and so it was that Joanne Fleischer was mugged on a trip to her
local grocery store and died on the way to hospital.

Tessa still
cried in Marion’s arms when she heard although she knew she should
have been glad.

-oOo-

In a highly
secure hush room in Washington, D.C., an NSA adviser briefed
President Newman. “We have to assume, Mr. President, that they are
recording our conversation in here—.”

“In here?” the
President said, thunderstruck. “Why did you bring me here? I want
the best!” He thumped his hand on the table.

“This
is
the best, Sir,” his chief White House adviser, Bartholomew Johnson,
said. “We need to go with this one.” He motioned for the NSA
adviser to proceed.

“He’s not short
of a brain cell,” Digby said, referring to Johnson. They were
watching the meeting on one of the many screens in a circle around
the three of them. On a few of the screens it appeared that others
had reached the same conclusion although there were many top-level
meetings in progress where the participants seemed oblivious to the
possibility.

“I’m loving
this,” Tessa said.

“The ship is
carrying out the function it was designed for. Reconnaissance.
Gathering Intelligence,” Digby said. “Let’s leave this for now.”
The screens vanished to be replaced by a view of Arlington Cemetery
and beside it, a view of the General Assembly in progress at the
United Nations. Tessa was instantly sobered by the image of
Arlington Cemetery. Her parents were buried there.

Digby said,
“Sooner or later you will both want to go down to the surface.” He
gestured at the ornament that was Tessa’s Amalfi weapon. “That’s
coming along well and the sooner it’s armed the better.” He looked
at Marion. “It would be good if you also had a side arm.”

“Forget
it.”

Digby ploughed
on, regardless. “Which means I’ll be sending some of these with
you.” A swarm of killer jellyfish darted about in the air. “And if
it proves necessary, the ship will deploy heavier weapons. The fact
is, the people down there won’t know that the jellyfish are running
on automatic. If the jellyfish have to kill anyone, the opposition
will assume that they’re under your control. You don’t come out of
it clean whichever way you look at it so you might as well have the
Amalfi weapons.”

“I’ll know it’s
not me using the jellyfish,” Marion said.

“In the eyes of
everyone you will still be responsible for the deaths.”

“I don’t have
any plans to go down to the surface, just now,” Marion said,
looking at the image of the General Assembly.

Digby indicated
the screen. “You could try this option since you’re not otherwise
getting the message through.” He shrugged. “Unless you’ve given up
on that idea.”

“No, I have not
given up on that idea. But I don’t see why that should mean people
get killed. I won’t have that.”

“Are you going
to send the jellyfish down with me too?” Tessa said.

“Yes, although
I’d like you to learn how to control them. Be a useful addition to
your weapons’ kit,” Digby said. Immediately both he and Tessa
looked at Marion.

“What?” Marion
said. “Am I always the killjoy here?”

“Yeah,” Tessa
said.

“It was where
Tessa was headed anyway,” Digby said. “USAFA. Jet fighters. I don’t
have to help her to be an Amalfi warrior. That was always going to
happen.”

“I don’t have
anything to say right now,” Marion said.

“So it’s back
to school,” Digby continued, “and this is a good time to talk about
how the learning programs work.”

At this, Tessa
sat up, all bright-eyed, as though it was ‘walkies’ time.

Digby halted,
nonplussed.

“Tessa’s
already spent the zillions she’s going to win on Lotto,” Marion
said.

“Lotto?”

“The Time
Machine!” Tessa said. “The little trick with time? Hello?
Hello?”

“Hmm,” Digby
said. “Sorry, no Time Machines. Never run across any in my travels
which is not surprising when you consider that many species don’t
have the concept, ‘Time’, so they’re not likely to be interested in
developing a Time Machine.”

“Oh, crap,”
Tessa said, slouching down in her seat again. “What a rip-off.”

“Okay,” Digby
said, “what the learning programs do is alter your subjective time.
That’s the time you experience rather than real time as measured by
clocks. Subjective time is like when you’re watching a really
exciting movie and the whole movie goes by in five minutes. Or
you’re waiting in a queue and the time takes forever to go by. It’s
simply this. The learning programs stretch out your subjective time
so that it will seem to you that you have spent a whole day in a
lesson and you’ll learn the equivalent you would have learnt in a
day but when the lesson ends, in real time, only, say, 10 minutes
has passed. Because it will feel like all day you’ll get hungry and
you’ll need to eat because you’ll still be using up the amount of
energy you would have used in a real day. This could cause problems
with the ageing process so that when the lesson has finished you
might find that your body has also aged a day, putting you out of
sync with everyone else but there’s a counter-balancing force. This
is the fact that you are now in an environment free of toxins, and
this will greatly slow down the ageing process in your body. When
we add in a few little critters, to repair and maintain your cells,
you won’t age much at all, and so it won’t matter if your time is
out of sync with the rest of us.” This wasn’t strictly true because
Tessa, especially, would mature emotionally and intellectually,
practically before their eyes. Digby felt it best not to dwell on
this.

Tessa sat bolt
upright, “Are we going to live forever?”

“Critters?”
Marion said. “What critters?”

Digby answered
Tessa first. “Not forever but a lot longer than you do now.” Then
he said, “Did I tell you about the little critters?”

“No, you didn’t
tell us about the little critters, Digby,” Marion said. “Don’t tell
me you’ve got little critters crawling around inside you.”

“Yes. I
have.”

“You said you
were entirely human and now you’ve got alien critters inside you?”
Marion said.

“The critters
are the product of human technology, not your human technology or
even mine but still human technology. Does that make them alien?
Anyway, the human body is full of little critters. What’s a few
more?”

Marion shook
her head in disbelief as though trying to spill out some of the
overload.

“Let’s take a
break for the rest of the day so you can think about this,” Digby
said. “If you think the General Assembly is a good starting point,
maybe you could start working on a presentation to them.”

-oOo-

The alien
attack craft, piloted by Digby, touched gently down on the roof of
the United Nations building, coming to rest on three liquid metal
legs. To the security personnel strung out on the roof, the craft
flowed down from the sky like a ball of mercury, extruding probes
or weapons or fins which were absorbed and re-extruded in a way
that was unsettling.

This was not in
their contract, many of them felt and resolved to hide if things
should go bad. Which they did almost immediately. Marion exited the
craft, accompanied by a swarm of killer jellyfish. The security
personnel recognised these instantly from the drawings and sketches
made from the hijacked passengers’ testimony. Most of the guards
turned and fled. A couple of the more resolute ones, or perhaps
they didn’t watch the news, blocked the doorway into the building
from the helipad.

Marion stopped
well back from them. “Probably you won’t believe me but I don’t
control these creatures. I’m going to go through that doorway and
if you try to stop me they will kill you. I very much don’t want
that to happen. Giving your lives here will change nothing.”

She stepped
forward. The remaining security personnel melted away.

It was a story
repeated throughout the complex as she went to the General Assembly
Hall. When she got there, as she had anticipated, it had been
cleared of the world’s representatives. Instead she was met by news
crews. It had been Marion’s plan to occupy the General Assembly
Hall, sending a message through the news crews that she wanted to
meet with the Secretary General or his representatives.
Unfortunately, the reporters backed her up against a wall, hemming
her in, trapping her, as reporters do. Perhaps they too assumed
that the jellyfish were under her control and safety lay in the
live feeds that were going out to the world. This meant nothing to
the jellyfish. They killed every single person within 10 metres of
Marion. Shocked beyond belief she returned to the craft. Digby said
nothing and Marion was unable to speak. Back on the spaceship, she
created a wall around her quarters and shut herself away for the
rest of the day.

-oOo-

“You haven’t
asked me how I’m feeling,” Marion said. The three of them were
sitting, or sprawled in Tessa’s case, on deck furniture arranged
along the veranda of a quaint little cottage, perched in the leafy
boughs of an enormous tree.

“Like you said,
I’m not much of a counsellor,” Digby replied. “You could access
counselling resources if you wished.”

Marion
exploded. “You put them there! You knew that would happen. They had
families, Digby.” She started crying again, pillowing her head in
her arms on her knees. “I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for
this.”

“No way I’d go
back,” Tessa said. “I wouldn’t swap this life for my old life in a
million years.”

Marion looked
up and said coldly, “You want the Earth to be destroyed?”

“Well I didn’t
say it was ideal,” Tessa said.

“Tessa,” Digby
said, “find something to do.”

Tessa went over
and kissed Marion on the forehead and said, “I would be a crap
counsellor too, but, you know, if you want to talk…I’ll be around.”
She bounced up and headed for the outer wall, creating a spacesuit
on the way and, without pausing, went through the wall to the hard
vacuum outside the ship.

It gave both
Digby and Marion a jolt because she hadn’t done that before.

Tessa floated
away from the ship for a few metres, astonished at her own bravery.
Or stupidity as her initial momentum carried her quickly away from
the ship. Stifling the beginnings of a panic attack, she created a
jet pack and, once in control, nonchalantly floated motionless high
above the Earth, the ship a few reassuring metres behind her.
Below, heart-stopping beautiful, the Americas were etched in blue
and green.

Inside the
ship, Digby was saying to Marion, “The jellyfish saved you from a
prison cell. If I had to dig you out of prison, probably a lot more
people would have died. As harsh as it may seem, only a few died
here and you will have sent them a message that might make your job
a lot easier from now on because they will treat you with a lot
more respect.”

“Maybe it would
be better if I
was
in a prison cell.”

“And then they
would all definitely die. Is that what you want? To watch them die
knowing you did nothing about it?”

“It’s all been
a bit much, Digby,” Marion said.

Digby produced
a green lozenge. “The ship could do much more than this.”

“I don’t want
it screwing with my mind.” She took the lozenge and pressed it to
her forehead. It helped only a little. That more than anything told
her that maybe she did need some serious attention. “Help,” she
said to the ship. Digby and the room faded away and she drifted in
a soft green light. She could hear her mother’s heartbeat and
curled up in a foetal position. Time passed.

-oOo-

A few days
later Marion sought out Digby. He was floating in a spherical room,
upside down, surrounded by a myriad of crimson lines radiating out
from the inside wall of the sphere and crisscrossing as they went
from side to side. At least, he was floating upside down from her
perspective, but when she joined him in the centre of the room,
they were both the same way up. She didn’t ask what he was doing
because, likely, she wouldn’t understand the explanation.