Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

She was bristling. “He was fine, thank you very much. Pleasant. Nonargumentative. A damn sight nicer than you’ve been of late.”

“I see. Well, if you prefer his company—”

“I didn’t say that.” She slapped the arm of the couch, air forcing its way out of the plush armrest with a soft whoompf. “Jesus, you’re a frustrating man sometimes. You run off on some junket clear to the other side of the country. You’ve accused me twice now of, of infidelity. What in God’s name is wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.” The same weary tone I’d used to describe the flight from Vancouver.

“The hell there isn’t.” She looked up at me again and this time her eyes locked on mine. Those lovely green eyes, the same two haunting orbs that had fueled my fantasies before I’d worked up the courage to ask her out; the same two compassionate orbs that had helped me through the death of my mother, through the loss of that job in Ottawa, through so many tragedies; the same two intelligent orbs that had danced as we had held real discussions about things that had seemed oh so very important in our youth—war and peace and love and international relations and great moral controversies, she always quick with a point of view, me ponderously weighing the evidence, trying to decide what was right and what was wrong. Physically the eyes had changed only slightly over the years: their color was bluer now and there were fine wrinkles at their corners. But where once they had been great expansive windows for me, and me alone, to peer into her very soul, they now seemed silvered over, mirrored, reflecting back my own doubts and fears and insecurities, while revealing nothing of the mind that dwelt behind them.

“Do you still love me?” she said at last, a slight quaver to the words.

The question hit me with unexpected force. We didn’t speak of love, not openly, not anymore. That was a topic for those who were still young. We lived a peaceful coexistence: old friends who didn’t have to say much to each other; old shoes that grew more comfortable each time you put them on. Did I still love her? Had I ever loved her—the real her, the actual Tess—or had I only loved an image of someone else, someone I’d created in my mind, sculpted in my dreams? I realized, fast enough, fortunately, that this was one of those moments of truth, one of those significant butterflies, one of those decisions that could bend the timeline so severely that I’d never be able to correct its course.

“More than life itself,” I said at last, and it was only when I heard the words free in the room that I realized how right and true they were. “I love you with all my heart.” I swept her tiny body into my arms and squeezed so hard that it hurt us both. Who said that I had to give her up without a fight? “Come on, Lambchop. Let’s go upstairs.” And then I thought, screw that, that’s what old people do. “No, on second thought, let’s stay right here. It’s been years since we gave this couch a proper workout.”

My broken nose throbbed with each beat of my heart. It had taken seemingly forever, but at least for the time being it had stopped bleeding.

I lay back in my crash couch, exhausted. But Ching-Mei’s clock was ticking: we had only twenty-seven hours until the Huang Effect switched states. I had to stay within the Sternberger , waiting to see if poor Klicks would regain consciousness, but I wondered whether there was any useful work I could do in the meantime.

My night-sky photograph. At least I could check on that, see if it had turned out all right.

I got up from the couch, every joint in my body aching, found my palmtop computer, and slipped it into one of the baggy pockets on my khaki jacket. It was pure agony climbing up the ladder to the instrumentation dome.

I removed the electronic camera from the little tripod, then plugged it into the USB port on my palmtop. The night-sky photo blossomed on the color liquid-crystal display. At first I thought that the picture had been ruined by stray light: two curving bands of solid white passed across the lower right corner of the photograph, one thick, the other thin. Of course: the paths of Luna and Trick as they strolled across the night.

Except for these, it looked like all other time-lapse sky photos: a series of hairline concentric arcs, the paths drawn by stars as the heavens wheeled about Earth’s axis. Since I’d left the lens open for about four hours, each arc was approximately one-sixth of a circle (we expected the Mesozoic day to be a little shorter, but not much).

Still, something wasn’t quite right about this photo. There were six white dots in a line about halfway between the zenith and the southern horizon. I used the palmtop’s touch pad to point at each of the dots in turn, then zoomed in for a closer look. The dots showed no movement arcs at all. One or even two could have been photographic glitches—dust on the lens, single-bit errors in the processing—but six in a row had to represent something real.

The only thing I could think of that would show no movement as the Earth rotates was a geostationary satellite orbiting above the equator. Well, I suppose it isn’t surprising that the Hets put satellites up around Earth, although the precisely even spacing seemed strange to me. Perhaps they were for weather forecasting or communications, but there appeared to be more of them than were necessary for either of those jobs. A trio of evenly spaced satellites in the Clarke orbit could provide complete coverage of the entire planet; there were six satellites visible in this photo, meaning there might be twenty or thirty evenly spaced ones in total—

A crash came from downstairs. Rather than taking the time to disengage the camera from my palmtop, I tucked them both into the baggy pocket and hurried down the diagonal ladder. Klicks was standing, supporting himself against the lab bench. He had managed to knock some of his geological instruments to the floor as he’d hauled himself to his feet.

“Brandy,” he said, “I’m…” He tried again. “Look, man. I didn’t mean—” That didn’t seem to cut it either. “It’s just—” Finally he simply fell silent and shrugged. I sympathized with his predicament. After all, how do you tell someone you’re sorry you tried to kill him?

I looked Klicks up and down. One of his ears was caked with dried blood. The gash across his forehead was nasty; it could have used stitches, but at least it had stopped bleeding.

I’d held my own quite well, given how much more muscular he is than me. I felt a smug satisfaction. In retrospect, I guess I’d taken a certain secret pleasure in beating the crap out of him with impunity. “That’s okay,” I said quietly. “You weren’t yourself.”

Klicks nodded and, after a time, looked away. He probably felt just as uncomfortable with the protracted moment between us as I did. “What about the Het?” he said at last.

I told him about the antiviral drugs I’d injected into his carotid artery. He winced at the prospect of a kilogram or two of dead alien still being inside his body. It was an unsettling thought.

He noticed the electronic camera, sticking up out of my jacket’s breast pocket. Probably just to get his mind on something—anything—else, he said, “Is that your night-sky photo? How’d it turn out?”

“Here,” I said, pulling out the camera and the palmtop, which was still attached to it by a USB cable. I flipped up the little computer’s screen and handed it and the camera to him. “Have a look.”