David Brin - Senses Three and Six

There is a feeling I used to get quite often when I was young, that I was being watched by omniscient beings.

It wasn’t the same as the shadow I have lived under in recent times. Though powerful, my enemies are not all-seeing.

No. Back then, when I was a boy, it seemed as if the universe possessed a Big Eye, and a distinct taste for drama. Always I felt as if I were the central character in a great play.

To the Big Eye it wasn’t important that you actually did anything. Even standing still watching the seagulls could be dramatic. Noble thoughts and grand unseen gestures were what it valued most of all—the secret unrewarded honesties—the anonymous charities and the unrequited loves.

For a time, when I was a kid, it was very clear to me that the proverbial tree falling in the unpeopled forest was, indeed, heard.

Maybe it was crap like that that got me into this mess. Hell, Freud took the whole thing apart long ago.

But long after I’d dismissed the Big Eye as an ego-displacement dream—a pseudo-Jamesian experience—I found it still beside me, hovering nearby as I agonized over every major decision in my life.

Where has it gone? I wonder. Did it leave me before the Breakout? Or did it follow me to Canaan, and experience with us our lovely doomed joy?

The rumble of the car massages my back as we pull out of the lot and onto the damp streets. I’m feeling sad, but peaceful. Maybe I would go to sleep if only Elise would drive less erratically. She seems to be in a godawful hurry to get home. I sense a shift from green to amber through my closed lids, and the brakes suddenly come on.

I have to put my hand to the dashboard as several items tumble out from beneath my seat.

“Hey! Take it easy!”

She laughs. But there seems to be a new level of panic in her eyes. “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust an expert driver?”

“Ha ha. Just try not to kill us within a mile of home, okay?” I look down at the junk that came out from under the seat. There’s a little stereo playback and headphones, and a small bound notebook. I look up. The light is still red. Elise faces ahead, her face pale.

“What are these?”

She jerks her head, half looking at me. “What are what?”

“This tape player. Is this your deep, dark secret?” I smile, trying to put her at ease.

“N—no. It—it belongs to a friend. She left it in the car when we went to lunch. I’ve got to get them back to her on Monday.”

“What has she got on the tape?”

“Nothing. Just some classical music, I guess. She likes that sort of thing.”

Oh, yeah. Curiouser and curiouser. I look up and see that the light has changed and nod at the road ahead. She turns to start the car rolling again, woodenly staring ahead of her.

As Elise drives I sit there with the incriminating items on my lap. It’s a bit embarrassing. I’m tempted to put the recorder and notebook back under the seat, despite my curiosity.

She’s driving slowly now, concentrating on the road. At this rate it will be a while before we arrive. Elise doesn’t appear to be watching so I slip on the headphones and start the player. There is a feint hissing as the tape leader passes the heads. I settle down and close my eyes. After months of avoiding anything that even vaguely resembles “highbrow” music, it might be nice to hear anything Elise might choose to call classical, even if it’s just a violin rendition of “Yellow Submarine.”

There is the sound of a phonograph needle coming down. Then gently, a piano begins to play. Before the third note is struck my back is a mass of goose bumps and my breath is frozen in my chest… a wave of alienation overwhelms me… I cannot move, even to turn the machine off.

The Fourth Concerto.

Beethoven.

It’s the von Karajan production I’ve listened to a thousand times.

The Fourth Concerto. It was the last piece performed by the group orchestra just before we broke up to board the Arks. Parmin had specifically requested it.

I protested. I was out of practice. But he would have his way, always. And Janie… (Gray eyes laughing over a silver flute…) she insisted as well. During those last two weeks, while we waited for the last ship parts, we practiced.

I can feel them now, the keys. The crafty idiosyncracies of that old Steinway. The loving clarity that could be coaxed from her. And in the orchestra, Janie’s flute was like a soft unjealous wind, forgiving me the infidelity of this other great love…

Out of practice or not, it was like nothing else—that last night on Earth—except, perhaps, the glory of flying.

Parmin was very kind afterward, though I don’t imagine I’ll ever know what our benefactor really thought of the performance. His was the Ark that rose first. The one bound for far Andromeda. The only one, I. think, that got away.

The others? Three I know were tracked and destroyed. Two others They claimed to have found. I believe them.

Did any other survivors make it back here, to hide like rats among people who have no idea what happened in secret in their own skies?

We left after a night of Beethoven, a fleet. We won a battle in space and then I watched the Arks veer off, one by one, like seeds blown free from a stem, scattered by the wind.

I returned alone, like the Ancient Mariner, with a ship filled with corpses and an albatross of terror and guilt dragging at my neck.

“… Human pilot! Surrender, please! We have already killed far more than we can bear! Do not force us to add to the toll! The traitors who aided Parmin have been rounded up. All the other blockade runners are captured or destroyed !”

The voice lists the colonies besides Canaan they have captured. A voice filled with compassion and sensitivity, so similar to Parmin’s that I almost cry …

But the bridge is filled with the stench of burning wiring and decaying bodies… I send the ship into a screaming dive Earthward, evading their best interceptors with tricks that I had learned far too late… My seat buckles underneath me, but somehow I hold on to the controls… My nostrils are filled with the odors of death .

“ We realize that your conspiracy was kept secret from the vast majority of Earthlings. That is good. Can you not agree that, having failed, you don’t want to see your fellows suffer prematurely? They don’t have to find out about their quarantine for another two hundred years! Let them dream on, of an infinite playground in space! Surrender now, and spare the children below their dream !”

So compassionate! The murdering alien hypocrite! Jailor! Zookeeper !

I shout the hateful words and his image on the screen recoils… until the ionization trail of my reentry vaporizes the picture in a cloud of static .

The Ark screams… I scream …

They tried to shoot me down, like They shot down Walter in his modified F-15 that afternoon on Canaan, when I was so late getting the Ark into the air.

There were too many of Them anyway. I told myself that a thousand times as the fight ravelled all the way back to Earth. It took time to get the Ark warmed up, and when They did what we never had expected—bombed the noncombatants in the settlement—I tarried to take on gassed and wounded survivors.

I watched Them fry the house I had just built. Janie had been in the cellar, packing preserves for the winter…

How did they find us so soon? We had counted on more time. How did it happen?

Smoldering wreckage steams within a new crater on an Oregon mountainside. Fires spread through the forest in all directions from a reawakened volcano .

I set charges in what remains and run… and run and run and run, but I cannot outrun the wind. It envelopes me from behind and chokes me with the stench of burning flesh… I run from the smell… I run …