John Barnes - The Last President

When James Hendrix, Leslie Antonowicz, and her dog Wonder stepped down from the pontoon of Bret Duquesne’s seaplane and into the row-taxi, it was a little awkward for James, natural as breathing for Leslie, and time for a joyful jump and bark for Wonder. Wonder wedged himself between them, so they held hands around him as they approached the beautiful little town under its deep blue sky.

“Pretty place,” James said. “Going to have to brush up on those fresh-seafood skills.”

“Looks like there’s space to get some exercise,” Leslie added, practically.

On the pier, he met the local dignitaries, each of whom had to tell him how much they had always appreciated the Jamesgrams, and shook his way through a forest of hands before meeting the two people he most wanted to talk to.

The first of these was Tarantina Highbotham, who seemed more solidly muscled than he had imagined, but even more alert and quick. She gave him a lightning-fast rundown of the arrangements she had made; he would have a week to settle into his new quarters and go over the paperwork before the summer term started at the new academy. There was already an abundance of students sixteen and younger; he would be adding and developing courses for older students, up at least through a bachelor’s degree. They’d have an extension service that would publish newer and better pamphlets than Pueblo had had available, and eventually occupational journals as well.

He’d never met Highbotham in person before, but they seemed to get along very well, and by the end of the conversation, she was cheerfully explaining, “You get knowledge into them, I’ll keep the pirates away from them, and we’ll have ourselves a civilized Caribbean again before you know it. The rest of the world can go through a Dark Age if it wants to; we’re doing a Dim Decade, max. Now, this handsome young man is Whorf Rollings—don’t look so surprised, Whorf, you are handsome, and it’s the privilege of a lady old enough to be your grandma to discuss it in front of you. Whorf was the person who wrote to you, and brought it to my attention that there was good reason to bring you here and employ you. Then after you freshen up a little in your quarters, he’ll be taking you, and you too, Ms. Antonowicz, to hear two gentlemen with a remarkable story.”

Their rooms, on a second floor of the old country club, were pleasant and spacious, and someone had set out fresh fruit on the table. “Headmastering is definitely looking better than librarianing did,” James said, between bites of orange.

“I’ll miss skiing but I have a feeling the swimming and sailing will make up for it.” They each took turns washing in the basin, and then, since Whorf hadn’t knocked yet, they sat down in the wicker chairs facing the big French doors onto the balcony, and looked at the view over the town toward the sea.

“Well, we could definitely have done worse for a place to live,” James said.

When they opened to a discreet tap at the door, Whorf was waiting for them with a slim young red-blond man about his own age, and an older, burly black man with thick dreads. “This is my buddy, Ihor Reshetnyk. He was along on Discovery too, and saved my ass several times. He’s coming along because I trust his judgment. And this is my father, Jamayu Rollings, who is skipper of the good ship Ferengi where Ihor is second mate. Dad is coming along because if he didn’t get to he’d curl up and die.”

They walked the half mile or so down into town to the little house; the three men pointed out many more things than James and Leslie could possibly remember, ranging from the bar with the cheapest beer to the spot where a pirate treasure had been uncovered two hundred years before. Everyone seemed a little nervous.

The two men living in the small brick house were an Iranian robotics engineer, Rezakhani, and a Chinese software engineer, Tang. When everyone was seated and had been served tea, Rezakhani said, “Now, I don’t know how much Mister Whorf Rollings shared with you in his letter.”

“The main thing he did was to explain that the two of you had worked on the Iranian-Chinese industrial expedition to the moon—that test-bed project to see if you could manufacture anything worthwhile there—and that you had some insight into the moon gun. Other than that, everything you say will probably surprise us.”

“Oh, it will do that,” Tang said.

Rezakhani said, “Let me launch directly into the parts that were never released to news media; you can ask about anything that’s unfamiliar as we go, but I’ll assume you know anything that was widely covered.

“All right, then. So as you probably know, what we sent to the moon was actually not a fleet of construction robots so much as they were a demonstration set of mobile rock-sorters with some little drills and saws for cutting bigger samples. Well, shortly after they landed and we activated them, all the little mining units stopped acknowledging control signals from Earth and crawled away—eighty kilometers to the Northwest, right to where the moon gun is, at least if Captain Highbotham and her excellent observatory team are right. But the mining robots could not have built it, any more than a flatworm can play the guitar.

“Well, our bosses were hardly going to come out and admit that anything of this sort had happened. Instead they covered it up and kept monitoring the site from the lunar orbiters. In mid-2023—about eighteen months before Daybreak—the mining robots were seen by a Chinese lunar orbiter to be fleeing the area where they had been working, putting themselves on the far slopes of a number of ridges from an immense flare that appeared on August 1, 2023, with a full moon at midnight right over the Pacific—the time when there would be the fewest observers, with the least ability to see what was happening. The US Naval Observatory reported a possible meteor impact; at that time, only the Chinese orbiter was working, and the government of China was not sharing any information. But Mister Tang eventually became privy to what they had seen: on the next orbit, a large object, something the size of a good-sized warehouse—which I am quite sure was your moon gun, it was the right size, shape, and everything—was standing where the flare had appeared.

“Over the next few days, it disgorged rovers ranging in size from about a shoebox to a small car, and the mining robots came back over the ridges and began to work with the newly arrived rovers.”

Tang took up the story. “We watched it for more than a year afterward. Before the ground link failed irretrievably due to the EMP from the superbomb at Shanghai, the aliens had constructed a strange sort of glass pyramid almost 30 meters tall. We did not know but we were watching them build the re-entry vehicle for their first shot, the one that silenced KP-1 and destroyed so much technology.”

“But who are ‘they’?” James asked.

Rezakhani nodded eagerly. “Well, as you might guess, we were curious about that. No one on Earth had that kind of technology—they had to be from another star system. If you take the generally accepted date that the British radar experiments in 1936 were the first radio to reach outside Earth with a signal that was at least possibly detectible, and if whoever it was took a while to locate us and get ready, and they were advanced enough to build such machines, it did not seem incredible that they might have dispatched ships as long as fifty years ago. And remember, back before, the Priestley satellite had found a dozen planets in habitable zones with free oxygen in their atmospheres.”

“More than that, I thought,” Leslie said. “I was a nerdy pop-science fan, I thought it was like a hundred?”