by Jason Stoddard

excerpt from Panverse Three


The moment Michael Hughes set foot on Earth, representatives of International Unity arrested him. They wore heavy white radiation suits with mirror-glass visors, dazzling against the Nevada Launch Center's sun-bleached expanses of concrete.

“The lander isn't nuclear,” Michael said.

Two of them grabbed his arms. Michael resisted the urge to sag into them. His legs quivered. All the training in the New Phoenix's weight room had done nothing to prepare him for Earth’s gravity.

One of the white-suits stepped forward. “Are you Michael Hughes?”

“Yes.”

“Who else is in the ship?”

“Nobody.”

A wave. “Search it.” White-suits scurried up the ladder into the thin fuselage of the lander.

The lead-suit turned back to Michael. “You are under arrest for violating Statute One of the Paradise in Our Place Initiative. You have the right to counsel before you speak.”

“What is counsel?”

For several moments, the white-suit said nothing. Michael's own distorted reflection bobbed and weaved in his mirrored visor. Michael wanted to reach out and tear the man's headpiece off. He wanted to see a human face. He glanced briefly at the blue sky, impossibly bright and clear, and the yellow sandstone cliffs of the Nevada desert beyond. Not so different from Mars. Except he was standing there, breathing, without a spacesuit. The air smelled strange and stony, like a new-minted cavern.

Finally: “Counsel is provided for your defense.”

“Defense? I have no weapons.”

Another pause. The lead white-suit turned to look back at the rest of the men.

“What am I charged with?” Michael asked.

“Violating Statute One of the Paradise in Our Place Initiative—”

“What is that?”

A sigh. “There shall be no commerce between the International Unity of Earth and any space-based faction. This shall be enforced by—”

More words. Michael felt light-headed. Images floated in front of him, almost real: rail-thin children volunteering for work in the salmon farms for the chance to grab a bite or two more of stunted, deformed fish.

The white-suits came out of the ship. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the ship,” one of them said. He waved a tiny device, too small to be a Geiger counter. “Radiation’s on the high side, but safe for short exposure.”

Michael stifled a laugh. He knew all the counts. And the chemical-rocket lander was cold enough to be a luxury apartment on Mars.

“I need to talk to someone,” he told them. “Someone in authority.”

Front-suit laughed. “Take me to your leader?”

“I need . . . to talk to someone in power.”

“And they’ll change everything, just like that.” Front-suit held up his fingers and tried to snap them. They made no noise.

“To listen, at least.”

Crossed arms. “You people had your chance.”

Michael saw the Russian Marsbase, disappearing in a fireball hotter than the sun. He wondered if any fragments had reached escape velocity, to land on Earth.

Michael’s head swam. He lost his footing and stumbled against one of his captors, who forced him upright. “Can I . . . can I sit down?”

The lead white-suit made a disgusted noise, turned and walked away. The men dragged him to a white-painted van that carried the globe-and-dove crest of the International Unity. Farther off, dun-painted military vehicles sat. Dark shapes hid within, clutching long guns. The vehicles looked a little like Jeeps in the old movies they played in New San Diego, but wider and squatter. Updated for the brave new year 2000, he thought. Farther off were other vans, bearing bright-colored logos. People stood behind tripods on top of them. Michael saw the glint of sunlight on glass. They were filming him. He might be on television, right now. He resisted the urge to raise a hand and wave.

They put him in a van that was ridiculously clean and new. The paint was perfect and unmarred. He sank into the bench seat thankfully, sighing. The van even smelled new, a mixture of metal and clean plastic. Two of the white-suits sat down on either side of him, and four others took the bench opposite him.

“Where are you taking me?” Michael asked.

“Las Vegas IU Base,” one of them said. Michael recognized the voice as the lead white-suit. “Look, you realize we're recording all of this?” He pointed to a silver dome set in the middle of the van's roof.

“Does it matter?”

“Anything you say, they can use against you.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

A sigh and a head-shake. The van roared to life and accelerated quickly, bumping over the rutted concrete. Michael saw the slim delta-winged shape of his lander through the tinted windows of the van's doors, and felt a momentary pang of fear.

You'll never go back. They'll never let you go back.

No. They had to listen to him. If they had any shred of humanity in them, they had to. And, according to their broadcasts, International Unity prized humanity above all.

The former leader leaned forward and pulled off his headpiece. Long blonde hair tumbled out. He looked up at Michael, and Michael realized he was a girl. A very pretty one at that. She looked like someone from an old movie, impossibly healthy and well-fed. Michael suddenly knew what he must look like to her, scarecrow-thin from the low gravity, his legs bowed outward from malnutrition, his hands covered in scars from old radiation burns, his sunken eyes, his hollow cheeks. He had to hold his hands rigidly in his lap, to keep them from covering his face.

“You came here by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“From Mars?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody up there in orbit, nobody up there in that whole ship?”

Michael shook his head. Nothing lived in orbit. The International Unity had pulled down the grand spinning space stations of the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Phoenix was as dead as a radioactive hunk of cooling metal could be.

Silence for a time, as the van bumped along.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-two.”

She looked at him a long time. “Jesus in a sidecar,” she said, softly.

~~~

Ted reached out to touch the plants. Hairy-sticky tomatoes, still too young to bear fruit. Spindly things, yellow-green, reaching feebly towards the wan light that was reflected down through the leaded glass from the surface. Mars was the friendliest of the extraterrestrial planets, but they still had to huddle below the ground. If it had a magnetic field, or even a thicker atmosphere . . .

“Good afternoon, Mr. Taylor,” Aaron Fuchs said, behind him.

Ted jumped and turned. Aaron Fuchs was a squat, compact man, an oddity in a world where children grew past six feet before their twelfth birthday, spindly and fragile as sunflowers. His white hair, impossibly thick, was combed to perfection. Ted imagined a hidden stock of Brylcreem, hoarded for all these years. And perhaps a lead blanket, for wrapping himself in at night.

“Mr. Fuchs. Enjoying a stroll in our gardens?”

“Some garden.”

“What we have is what we make of it.”

Aaron looked away, down the long rows of plants. He turned back to Ted and licked his lips. “Your boy is on Earth.”

“He's not my boy. And we don't know that.”

“We know they didn't shoot the New Phoenix out of the sky.”

“That doesn't mean he's on Earth.”

“From the transmissions, I'm willing to bet he is.”

Ted frowned. Earth's transmissions had been getting stranger and stranger of late. Moving up the scale in frequency. Sometimes seeming like nothing more than noise. He wondered how far their technology had progressed.

“They'll never let him go,” Aaron said.

“Our ambassador in exile.” Ted smiled.

Aaron said nothing, but his hands clenched.

At least he can dream, Ted thought.

“We could use this to our advantage,” Aaron said.

“How so?”

“Do you know how many atomic bombs are aboard New Phoenix?”

Ted looked at him. He couldn’t be thinking—

“We could send a stealth ship to Earth,” Aaron continued. “No pulse drive, no boost. Just coast up to the New Phoenix, power it up, and do some real negotiating.”

“No! Absolutely not!” Ted walked away. He needed to get back to his office. He needed to see his photos.

“Why not?” Aaron said, running behind him.

“I won't use nuclear power as a weapon.”

“We may not have to use it. Think of it as leverage.”

“No!”

Ted emerged from the hydroponics labs into the main cavern of Trinity-Under-Mars. Great housing blocks built from rough native brick rose from the vitrified floor. Windows opened onto darkness, or were covered with slate shutters. Small gun-loops framed most of the doorways. Above, more brick sealed the roof of the cavern, except in the places where milky glass allowed sunlight to penetrate, casting razor-sharp beams down through the haze of dust and smoke. Someone had grown their own tomato vines. They twined down from a second-story window, clinging to the brick. It was a charming and homey sight.

This could be a medieval village, seven hundred years ago, Ted thought. Thirty years ago we had Saturn. Now we have this.

“We have to,” Aaron said.

Ted stopped and whirled. People in Trinity-Under turned to look. “Not here.”

Aaron nodded and followed Ted to his office, set at the top of one of the town's oldest buildings. The sound of a baby's wails echoed up from the stone stairwell.

“We have to,” Aaron said again.

“The scientists say—”

“The scientists are terrified of you!” Aaron hissed. “Look at the numbers. Crop yields, hog growth, fish harvest, all down in a straight line. Mutations are getting unmanageable.”

“I can't believe you.”

Aaron smirked. “No. Of course not. I'm just a beancounter, after all. But, you know what? I know numbers. And the numbers say we're slipping out of the self-sufficiency envelope.”

“Numbers don’t tell the whole story.”

“Have you looked at the condition of the machine shops lately?” Aaron said.

Ted sighed, sat down behind his desk, and looked up at his photos.

Two of them, set in original wood frames on the unfinished brick wall. On one side, his daughter. The photo from his last trip to Earth in 1973. She grinned at him, forever preadolescent, forever trusting. On the other side, an aerial photo of downtown Moscow. The city he'd been working to destroy. He remembered coming into work the day after she was born, and thinking, How many people here have children they care about? And deciding, in that moment, I will not build nuclear weapons for war.

“Have you looked at our people?” Aaron said. “Have you looked at your son?”

“He's not my son.”

A frown, flash-quick, from Aaron. “You still believe that?”

Ted looked down at his desk, thinking, It's what I have to believe.


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