Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

Forming each word carefully in my mind, I asked Where are you taking me? It didn’t answer, but communicated a desire for me to be patient.

We passed through a sort of invisible wall, a soap bubble of resistance, and we were suddenly in an arctic waste. My bare feet burned and curled on the ice; my skin raised up in gooseflesh. An instant later I was warm again.

The creature slid off me with a slurping noise like a silly sex joke, taking my robe along with it, inside out over my head. It floated in front of me and dropped the sodden robe, which froze solid before it hit the ice. Are you comfortable?

I said I was and looked around. Epsilon squatted low on the horizon, a red ball that looked too large, the sky blue-violet, cloudless, three dim stars showing. There were fantastic ice mountains with ragged razor edges like primitive chipped flint tools. A constant wind keened at the upper limit of audibility and granules of hardened snow rattled along the ice. It smelled like metal.

Behind me, the collapsed remains of a small hut. A corroded machine stood next to it; atop a five-meter pole, a thing with eccentric vanes spun madly, clicking, squeaking. On the door to the hut was a faded stencil:

This is Earth? I asked.

Yes. I wanted someplace on Earth where you had never been, so you would know it was not taken from your memory; and a place where there were no people around to be confused by our sudden appearance .

You can travel to Earth? Anyplace on Earth?

Many planets. Step forward .

I took one step forward and popped through the bubble again, onto the metal ramp, and then another step into warmth and darkness. The creature was still in front of me, slightly luminescent. The darkness was silent. It smelled like we were in a forest. I asked whether this was Earth.

No, we are back home. Not far from where you live. Sit down .

I patted the spongy moss and nothing crawled. I sat down carefully, feeling helpless, anus clenching. I asked if this were telepathy.

There is no such thing, to my knowledge. We are physically joined . I reached up and touched a silken thread. Don’t pull on it. That would damage you .

I asked What’s going on? Are you going to hurt me?

Not yet . Then there was an overwhelmingly complex montage of thoughts, indecipherable, chilling. Sorry. There are many others listening. I will keep them from intruding .

I said that they didn’t sound friendly.

Why should they? You represent the alien species that has invaded this planet. They are tired of your actions and angry at having to deal with the moral complexity of the problem you have caused .

I said that we wouldn’t have killed his people—people?—if we had known them to be sentient.

Maybe you would not have. That was our decision; we assumed from first contact that some would die if we kept our nature secret. That’s not the problem .

The problem is whether to allow you to continue existing .

I felt the dimension of that “you.” I asked whether they would kill everybody.

On this planet and in the starship and on Earth and in orbit about the Earth, every person and every cell of preserved genetic material .

I said that that was genocide. Why kill the people on Earth?

Genocide, pest control, it depends on your point of view. If we didn’t destroy them, they would come again in time .

I was glad to know that there are people still alive in orbit about the Earth. I said that we thought they might have been destroyed.

More alive in orbit than on Earth or here. Whether they continue to live will be decided by us and by you .

I asked whether I had been chosen, or was it just chance?

We interrogated three people. All three identified you as best for our purposes .

I asked why.

It can’t be expressed exactly in ways that a human would understand. An obvious part of it is having been many places, known many people, done many things, compared to the others; giving what you would call a large database. Part of it is trust, or reliability, combined with egotism. This makes it easier for us to communicate with you .

I also sense that the stress of our liaison is not going to motivate you to destroy yourself as happened with one of the others, and may happen with the second male. Although it cannot be pleasant for you, knowing that I am inside you .

I said that it was very unpleasant. I supposed that it was equally unpleasant to be inside an alien’s brain.

Unspeakable. This union is normally used for times a human would call sacred . The specific word came through, echoing. You yourself would not employ that word .

I said that I would not use it in a religious sense; that gods were the inventions of men, sometimes women. I tried to communicate that I was nevertheless capable of appreciating transcendence, numinism.

Let me show you something godlike. Rise and follow .

I stood up and stepped into blinding light. Orange with ripples of yellow and red. We seemed suspended, no gravity.

You are seeing heat, not light. We are in the center of your planet Earth. If it were desirable, or necessary; I could open a passage from here to the surface. Within hours, the planet would be a dead ruin .

I asked What could cause you to do that?

You .

Though I personally wouldn’t have to do it . We were suddenly back in the forest’s humid darkness. Any of us could do it, as an expression of will, if you cause it to be necessary .

I told it that I did not want the responsibility.

It must be an individual. You may suggest another .

I thought about that and said No, as well me as anyone. If this is a test, I have some talent for that.

The first thing we want you to do is simple. Stop them from killing us. You have one day .

The tendril slid out of my head, trailing wetly on my brow for a moment. The creature disappeared, then reappeared with my robe and dropped it at my feet. It was stiff as cardstock, so cold it stuck to the skin of my fingers.

I would wait for it to thaw. There was a faint yellow light, three or four kilometers away, that I assumed was Hilltop, but I didn’t want to go crashing through the woods in the dark. Sunrise in an hour or so, and I had some thinking to do. Some feelings to get under control. I touched the icy fabric again, to reassure myself that this had really happened.

When the gown was as warm as it was going to get, I put it on, despite the clamminess, for protection against thorny twigs and vines. I started walking as soon as I could see individual trees, while I could still barely follow the yellow light. It did turn out to be Hilltop—not some floating spider shopping mall—but I bypassed it and went straight to my house. On the way, I shucked the damp gown and rinsed off in the swimming pool. Alien mucus, how picturesque.

After living with him for thirty-four long years and two short ones, I knew better than to wake Dan immediately. I heated some water and put a cup of coffee on the table next to him. I sipped on mine while waiting for the smell of it to work through to his subconscious and ring a quiet bell.

He grunted, rose on one elbow, nibbed his eyes. “What the hell time is it?”

“Later than you think, dear.” I laughed. “I just came from a meeting.”

Raleigh Dennison was infuriating. He didn’t deny that I had been “attacked” by one of the creatures, not out loud, though he did wonder why, this time, it didn’t pull any hair out. Doc Bishop went over my scalp with a magnifying glass and did find a tiny dot, but he couldn’t be sure that’s what it was without using the axial tomography equipment in orbit. He pointed out that I was due to go on the next shuttle, two days hence, as part of my regular schedule. I could come back with real proof.