Time Past (16 page)

“Looks real to me,” I said shortly. For all Grace’s offhandedness, two backpacks with emergency supplies and water containers stood at the back door, ready for her and Will should they need to run.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” Phuong said to me. “We looked for you last night but there were people everywhere.”

Eric grunted and popped the top off a cold beer. As an afterthought, he reached down beside his chair, grabbed another one, and slid it across the table at Murdoch.

“Dangerous in the dark,” Murdoch agreed, and popped the beer. “Anybody seen Levin?”

“Not since yesterday,” said Phuong.

I poured myself a glass of filtered water. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Levin had been part of any unrest leading to the fire. Or, at least, part of the looting afterward.

“Incredible,” breathed Grace. Her eyes, fixed on the Invidi ship, had a glazed look.

“The government’s working out what to do now.” Phuong turned his head to speak to Murdoch. “They’re trying to stop all private communications to the ship in case some crackpot says the wrong thing. Science groups are pissed off, but the gov’ment wants to keep it simple.”

“Can the authorities jam the whole ionosphere?” said Murdoch, raising his eyebrow at me.

“They’ll use satellites to jam the space around the ships.” Which is why, I thought gloomily, using shortwave bands probably won’t work. What am I going to do? Short of physically approaching them. At the moment, I was too tired to move anywhere at all. I leaned on the table beside Murdoch.

A hurried meeting of the Security Council had agreed no military aircraft were to fly within several kilometers of the twelve alien ships hovering at various locations all over the world.

“Who’s talking to them?” said Phuong.

“The heads of governments, I s’pose,” said Grace.

“Is there anything to eat?” said Murdoch.

Grace turned back to the screen. “How can you eat at a time like this?”

Eric proffered a soggy bag of chips. Murdoch took a couple, I refused with a grimace. The televid voices hammered at us.

In the United States, reports from Alabama, Georgia, and New Mexico of mass cult suicides have been confirmed. At least three thousand believers...

“It’s like the terror wars,” said Phuong. “You think it’s never going to happen, then it’s all over the news. Some people can’t take it.”

“Didn’t anyone see them arrive?” I said. “Surely NASA has some probes out there?” If no one registered the Invidi approach, it would support my theory that they had some sort of field dissipation device, presumably in Murdoch’s ship and probably built into
Calypso II
’s engines as well.

“What does it matter?” Grace spread her arms, nearly tipping beer into Phuong’s lap. “They’re here. Shit, they’re really here.”

The screen changed to a collage of images accompanied by a voice-over. Different Invidi ships had appeared in evening, daytime, and morning skies over different cities.

... showed no hostile action. At present they seem to be waiting for our reply. A spokesman for the Eastern States said they are awaiting a go-ahead from the U.N. Security Council...

“Why can’t I get Channel Five?” Grace asked me.

“It’s broken. I told you weeks ago.”

“Shit.” She fiddled with the controls, but the channel stayed the same.

... and the Pentagon says their experts are still considering the evidence.

Eric burped. “They don’t believe it either. I reckon it’s some publicity stunt.”

“They acted pretty quickly to jam communications, then,” I said sourly.

“And what would they publicize?” said Phuong. “It’s gone too far for that.”

The screen cycled rapidly through reports in search of fresh news. I wanted to look at some of the aerospace and astronomy reports, but Grace kept flicking between the two channels we could receive.

“They want to take over completely,” said Eric. He’d been giving the matter some thought. “I reckon they’ll declare a state of emergency and crack down on the unions...”

Murdoch stared at me and I shrugged. Eric never knew quite who “they” might be, but he had definite and often conflicting views on what “they” would do in any situation.

“Tell you what.” Phuong grinned. “They’ll have to change the immigration laws now. ‘Illegal alien’ will take on a whole new meaning.”

They all chuckled. I jiggled my feet and wondered where I’d get a shortwave radio at such a time. No money to buy one—I still owed people for the laser. A trip to the dump might produce one, but how to fix it? My tools had been taken from the Assembly office.

... amateur astronomers informed this site that...

“Hang on.” I shot forward and stopped Grace’s hand on the controls.

... at two twenty-five eastern standard time. This larger mass is in a geosynchronous orbit at twenty kilometers and appears to be of a different configuration to the smaller ships.

So they’d found the main vessel.

I’d have to keep watching to find out the coordinates of the ships’ first appearance. Since I knew where the jump point from Earth to Central had always opened, this information would confirm whether or not the Invidi came from Central.

NASA believes information from their deep-space probes may have been blocked. It is now available.

They all looked at each other, the beginnings of real fear in their eyes.

“D’you think we should get out?” said Phuong softly.

Silence for a moment. Then Eric laughed. “Where to?”

“They said they came in peace,” said Grace dubiously. “Besides”—she took a swig—“if they are a threat, there’s fuck-all any of us can do about it. But I reckon Eric’s got a point too. If we’re not careful, the government’ll use this as an excuse to crack down on us.”

“Why?” said Murdoch, genuinely curious.

“I dunno.” Grace looked embarrassed. “Keeping their act clean in front of the aliens, that kind of thing. Making sure we don’t complain to them about what shits the government are.”

“Maybe it’ll force the government to give the out-towns better services, to prove to the aliens they are humane. Or they might be so busy with the aliens they’ll leave us alone,” said Murdoch.

The others guffawed good-naturedly. “Better services, sure,” sniffed Grace.

Phuong wriggled into a more comfortable position. “All over the world people will be doing this. Watching and wondering what’s going to happen.”

I thought of my great-grandmother in her village. “You mean the fifteen percent of the world who can afford vidscreens.”

I left them for the illusory peace of the street outside. Come to think of it, my great-grandmother had always seemed quite calm about the Invidi arrival—perhaps she didn’t find out until later. Something to be said for living in the country.

“What’s eating her...” Phuong’s voice faded.

The house emptied and filled throughout the night with neighbors, Grace’s ex-workmates, Will’s friends, and finally some distant relatives of Grace’s who had trekked from a different out-town. Some believed the aliens were real, some didn’t, but they talked, ate, drank, slept in front of the vidscreen, woke, and talked again. Levin came back with a group of men and they spent hours talking in the inside room. Murdoch went to sleep on the floor next to four small children. I sat and nursed a headache through news reports and a thousand eager speculations about whether the aliens were real or a hoax, what they might look like, and what they wanted. A hundred years later we still haven’t figured out that last one.

Some of the news reports grew increasingly hysterical. Army reserves were called out. The air force flew patrols beside no-fly zones around the Invidi ships. Presidents of at least four nation-states assured their populaces that their defense networks were intact. The head of state here appealed for calm and exhorted everyone to stay at home and not to stockpile goods. It hardly applied to the out-town. What goods? And where could we go?

Before dawn, I walked around the back of the house and out into the street. It was still full of people. Nobody wanted to go inside, to shut themselves off from the reassurance of other people, the reassurance that we, at least, had not changed.

In the small circle of light outside the house opposite, several dark figures pointed upward. A tiny point of coruscating color hovered in the murky glow above the city. It must be the Invidi ship, higher than it had been during the day and lit so as to be visible to human eyes. Obliging of them. The display should convert many of those who still thought it was a hoax.

A chorus of excited voices rose inside the house. A scrum of Grace’s relatives burst out and left, waving.

“What now?” I asked Grace, who emerged last.

She yawned. “They’re going to land.”

“Here?” I looked up stupidly, half expecting to see the green glow of Invidi levitation fields above my head.

“Yeah, ’coz the U.N.’s here and all. I reckon it’ll be the biggest party since the millennium.”

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow, they said.” She put her arm around my shoulders, and after a moment, I slipped mine around her waist. We stood and watched the one bright point in the starless sky.

“It’s like someone dying,” she said finally. “Pulls you out of yerself. Things you thought was important aren’t anymore.”

A bereavement—the death of humanity’s loneliness. Of its independence, some would say.

“This morning seems a long time ago,” I said.

“I’m glad we went on the march. It was sort of like farewell to everything up to today.”

I nodded.

The sky far beyond the city was lightening, and my spirits lightened with it. The Invidi were here. We’d survived so far, and somehow, we’d be able to contact them.

“Or a new beginning,” said Grace. “What’s it going to be like for Will’s generation now?”

I squeezed Grace’s waist and turned to go back inside. “We’d better get some rest.”

“Sleep?” She laughed. “S’pose we should. Seems weird.”

“We’ll probably find everything’s pretty much the same tomorrow.”

“Dunno if that’s a good thing or not.”

I couldn’t afford for everything to stay the same. The Invidi were here, and I had to ask them how to get home. Tomorrow I would look for a shortwave radio, and when I found one, set it up to send a signal. Somehow I’d have to differentiate the signal from all the other noise the Invidi would be getting from Earth. The day after that, we’d go and watch them land. Even if we couldn’t get near them at first, surely we’d get some clue as to how to go about it.

On Jocasta time was passing too. In twenty-nine days the neutrality vote would be passed and we’d see if the Confederacy trusted one of their “out-towns” to look after itself. I had to get back by then.

Thirteen

“
W
e should’ve stayed at home and watched it on televid,” said the man next to me. He wiped sweat off his upper lip with a disintegrating tissue and glanced at my feet as if debating whether to throw the tissue there. “You can see more.”

“It’s not some football game,” said his companion. “This is history.” He took the last cold beer from his cooler, replaced the lid, and folded his chair, ready.

Murdoch and I were part of a crowd that had come to see the Invidi land, spread for hundreds of meters along the beach that looked across Botany Bay to the airport. I was glad of the break, as I’d spent the previous day and night trying to modify a couple of old radios we found out back of the local electronics shop. With no success. I couldn’t narrow the signal enough. The only reply I got was from a curious gentleman speaking what sounded like a Central Asian language. We were both frustrated to learn that the other wasn’t the Invidi.

From the beach we could see, with the aid of binoculars, the huge expanse of the north-south runway and the cluster of airport buildings behind it. This was blocked off from the public with rolls of wire, troops, and vehicles, including a heavy armored vehicle with treads that Murdoch called a “tank.”

The Invidi would land on the east-west runway, which stuck out into the bay like a long finger. From the point of view of the authorities, this runway was easy to cordon off and keep under surveillance. From our point of view, it was easy to see from the beach. The opposite bank of the bay would be even better, but it was closed off to the public, as were most of the roads leading into Mascot, Rosebery, and Sydenham, suburbs around the airport. We’d have needed a pass to go by bus or train into those areas anyway.

Instead, we’d taken a bus south to Hurstville, trekked through Rockdale, and walked all the way up the beach at Brighton-le-Sands until we couldn’t go any farther due to the press of the crowd and also the police checkpoint on this side of Endeavor Bridge. The army held the other side of the bridge and the control tower.

Grace wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t let us bring Will, either, despite his pleading. Perhaps she still thought it was a hoax, or was worried that the aliens might come and scoop us all up.

She was not alone. Many people were panicking. Even in the out-towns, many shacks had been vacated in the past few days. The rich didn’t need to run—they felt safe in their protected retreats in the north and on the coast. The poor couldn’t run. Those in the middle wavered, not wanting to leave their hard-earned possessions but terrified of the unknown if they stayed. As this was a Sunday, many of them had decided to at least get away from Sydney for the day. Just in case. Roads and trains out of the city were packed.

The Invidi would land on the runway, where they’d be met by a select party of biologists, astronomers, and other specialists deemed suitably impressive but expendable in case anything went wrong. The major political leaders were keeping well back until their security services approved. Major religious leaders were being equally cautious.

“The welcomers will be from around here,” said Murdoch.

I must have looked puzzled, because he explained. “You know, representatives of the original owners of the land. Have to say nice to meet you, welcome to the harbor, our place is yours. That sort of thing.”

“Oh.”