Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

Klicks was smiling, but it made sense to me. “Right!” I said. “The bloody Martian asked us about the fifth planet, then seemed surprised when I told it about Jupiter. In this time, Jupiter’s the sixth planet.” My head was spinning. “Good Christ. And that explains why they’re here on Earth.”

The microwave beeped. “You’ve lost me, Sherlock,” said Klicks.

“Earth would be strategic in such a war,” I said. “When Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from the—the belt planet, but Earth is on the same side as it, Earth could be a great platform for launching attacks.”

“The ‘belt planet’, eh?” Klicks laughed. “It needs a better name than that.”

“Okay. How about—”

“Not so fast. You got to name Earth’s second moon. It’s my turn.”

He had a point there. “Okay.”

Klicks scratched his head. “How about…”

“How about what?”

His grin had slipped away. “Nothing,” he said, making a show of sifting decaf coffee crystals into his steaming cup. “I—I want to sleep on it.”

He wished to name it Tess, of course. That was fine with me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Klicks continued: “That would be one hell of a war, Brandy. Mars laid waste. The other side’s home world reduced to rubble.”

“So you can see that we can’t bring the Hets forward.”

Klicks shook his head. “I’m not sure about that. I’m still not convinced by your virus theory—”

“It’s not my theory, dammit. It’s what the Het told me.”

“And, besides, if fighting wars was enough to disqualify a species from being otherwise decent, you’d have to kiss humanity good-bye, too. Plus, they’ve voluntarily left our bodies twice now.”

“They have to do that,” I said. “They get claustrophobic if they inhabit the same body for too long; they need to constantly conquer new creatures.” Klicks rolled his eyes. “It’s true,” I said. “The Het told me. Look, they knew it would be over three full days until we headed back; sticking around inside our bodies that long would be the viral equivalent of waiting endlessly at the airport. Of course they exited us; they knew they could always reenter just by having a swarm of troodons overpower us, if no other way worked out.”

“You’re putting the worst possible spin on everything,” said Klicks.

My turn to roll eyes. “Look, these creatures can dissociate into components small enough that you’d need an electron microscope to see them. Once they’re loose on Earth in the twenty-first century, there would be no putting the genie back in the bottle. Bringing them forward in time would be an irrevocable decision, a real-life Pandora’s box.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors,” said Klicks. “Besides, leaving them back here would be an irreversible decision, too. We’re the one opportunity the Hets have to be saved.”

“We can’t risk that.” I set my jaw. “I’m convinced— convinced —that they’re, well, evil.”

Klicks sipped his coffee. “Well,” he said at last, “we all know how reliable your conclusions are.”

I felt a knotting in my stomach. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He took another sip. “Nothing.”

My voice had taken on a little shakiness at the edges. “I want to know what you meant by that crack.”

“It’s nothing, really.” He forced a smile. “Forget about it.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed, then spread his hands. “Well, look—all this nonsense about me and Tess.” He met my eyes briefly, then looked away. “You stand there all high-and-mighty, both judge and jury, condemning me for something I didn’t do.” His voice had gotten small. “I just don’t like it, that’s all.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Something you didn’t do?” I sneered the words. “Are you denying you’re having an affair with her?”

His eyes swung back to mine, and this time they held their lock. “Get this through your thick head, Thackeray. Tess is single. Divorced. And so am I.” He paused. “Two single people together does not constitute an affair.”

I waved my hand. “Semantics. Besides, you were fooling around with her even before Tess and my marriage was over.”

Klicks’s voice was ripe with indignation. “I never touched her—not even once—until you and she were as extinct as your bloody dinosaurs.”

“Bull.” I put my hand down on the lab table—really, I’d just intended to gently place it there, but all the instruments clacked together. “Tess got her divorce on July third, 2011. You were boffing her long before that.”

“That date was just a formality, and you know it,” Klicks said. “Your marriage had been over for months by then.”

“Its end hastened no doubt by your constant flirting with her.”

“Flirting?” There was now a hint of derision in his lilting tones. “I’m not sixteen, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, yeah? What did you say to her that night the three of us went out to see the new Star Wars film?”

“How the hell should I remember what I said?"—but the slight change in his vocal tone told me that he did indeed remember very well.

“She’d just gotten new glasses that day,” I said. “The ones with the purply-pink wire frames. You looked right at her and said, ‘You certainly have a lovely pair, Tess.’” I could see that Klicks was fighting not to smile, and that made me even more furious. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to another man’s wife.”

He drained his remaining coffee in a single gulp. “Come on, Bran. It was a joke. Tess and I are old friends; we kid around. It didn’t mean anything.”

“You stole her right out from under me.”

He absently broke a piece of Envirofoam off the cup’s rim. “Maybe if she had been under you a little more often, it never would have happened.”

“Fuck you.”

“Why not?” he said, lifting his eyes. “You certainly weren’t fucking her.”

I was quaking with anger. “You son of a bitch. We did it once a week.”

Klicks nodded knowingly. “Sunday mornings, like clockwork. Right after This Week with Peter Jennings . Pretty poor excuse for foreplay.”

“She told you that?”

“We talk a lot, sure. And about more than just the latest find reported in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology . Face it, Brandy. You were a lousy husband. You lost her all on your own. You can’t blame me for recognizing a good thing when I saw it. Tess deserved better than you.”

I tasted bile in my throat. I wanted to lunge at the man, to make him take back every one of those cruel lies. My hands, sitting on the lab table, clenched into fists. Klicks must have noticed that. “Just try it,” he said, ever so softly.

“But you didn’t even give us a chance to work things out,” I said, forcing a semblance of calm back into my voice.

“There wasn’t any hope of that.”

“But if Tess had only said something to me … This—this is the first I’ve heard of any of this.”

Klicks sighed, a long, weary exhalation, then shook his head again. “Tess had been screaming it at you for months—with every glance she made, with the look on her face, with body language that everyone but you could read.” He spread his arms. “Christ, she couldn’t have been much more obvious about her unhappiness if she’d had the words ‘I am miserable’ tattooed on her forehead.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know. I didn’t see any of that.”

The long sigh again. “That was apparent.”

“But you—you were supposed to be my friend. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I tried, Brandy. What do you think I was getting at that night in that bar on Keele Street? I said you were working too hard on the new galleries, that it was crazy not to get home till ten o’clock each night when you’ve got a lovely wife waiting for you. You told me that Tess understood.” He frowned and shook his head. “Well, she didn’t. Not at all.”