The Last Theorem

41 HOME AGAIN

By the time Natasha, the real Natasha, was back in her own bed at the Colombo house, one would have expected that the running commentary delivered to the world by the not-Natasha would be long over. Well, it was…sort of. That is, all sixty-two hours of it had been repeated three times and then stopped, but for reasons of their own the Nine-Limbeds gave encore performances every few days.

The human race did not consider this a blessing. The Nine-Limbeds’ voice-over was not delivered in English only. It was repeated in just about every language and dialect used by any group of people large enough to command some broadcast time somewhere. That was a large number, large enough to tie up much of the world’s satellite links to the detriment of human affairs.

The other effect this had was to give young Natasha plenty of time to study her simulated self as it appeared on the screen—skimpy halter top and errant curl over her left ear and all. It never changed. It wasn’t a spectacle Natasha enjoyed watching, either. “Gives me the cold shivers,” she admitted to her parents. “There I am, saying things I know I never said, and it’s me!”

“But it isn’t, hon,” her mother said reasonably. “They just somehow copied you, I guess so that they could have someone to speak for them who didn’t look like a nightmare.”

“But where was I while they were doing that? I don’t remember a thing! I saw Ron Olsos trying to steal my solar wind, and then all of a sudden I was—Well, I don’t know where. Sort of nowhere at all. Only warm and comfortable—possibly the way I was when I was still inside you, Mother.”

Myra shook her head in puzzlement. “Robert told us you were happy.”

“I guess I was. And then the next thing I knew I was sitting at the controls, yelling for help, with Diana all collapsed around me.”

Myra patted her arm. “And you got help, love, because here you are. And speaking of the Olsos boy, there are four more texts that came in from him while you were sleeping. All saying how sorry he was and asking if he can see you to apologize.”

That made Natasha grin at last. “Sure he can,” she said. “Just not right away. And right now, is there any breakfast?”

For most of the human race those senseless repetitions of the alien roll call were a terrible waste of time and communications facilities. Not for all, though. The tiny church of satanists had seen the pre-storage images of the Machine-Stored and immediately decided that the spiky-furred humanoid was indeed the image of the devil—just as a few million other viewers had at once decided—but, they argued, that wasn’t a bad thing. His Satanic Majesty was to be worshipped, not loathed. Scripture proved it, if read with proper understanding, for Lucifer had been driven from heaven because of character assassination by rival angels. “He isn’t our enemy,” said one of their bishops rhapsodically. “He is our king!”

What the church’s scrawny handful of members, mostly in the American Southwest, chose to believe would not have greatly concerned most of the human race—except for two factors. First, there was that worrisome remark about “sterilizing” Earth. That implied that those alien horrors did have the capacity to wipe humanity out if they chose, and that was not a thing easy to forget. And, second, the satanists weren’t just a handful of nutcases anymore. Even a nutcase knew what the sound of opportunity knocking at the door was like. They grasped their chance. Every satanist who had any status in the organization higher than pew-polisher went immediately on every talk program that would have them. Their hope was that the world was full of other nutcases like themselves who just had never been recruited to Satan worship because they had not yet been convinced there actually was a Satan. The satanists hoped these nutcases would be swung into line by the sight of the demonic Machine-Stored.

They were right. By the third showing of the horrid creatures called Machine-Stored, nearly a hundred thousand instant converts were begging for Satan’s sacraments. By the time of the first rerun, the congregation of the church of satanists was already in the high millions, and two competing—that is to say, heretical—satanist churches were already battling them for membership. Other cults and pseudo-religions prospered as well, but none prospered nearly as much as the satanists.

They were all, of course, crazy. “Or the next thing to it,” Ranjit told Gamini Bandara when he called. “Why are you worrying about it?”

“Because even a crazy person can pull a trigger, Ranj. Isn’t it true that Natasha has had death threats?”

Ranjit thought that over for a moment before he answered. His daughter had been very emphatic about not telling anyone about that, but still—“Well, yes,” he admitted. “Stupid stuff. She doesn’t take them seriously.”

“Well, I do,” Gamini informed him, “and so does my father. He’s ordering twenty-four-hour guards around your house and to go with any of you who goes out.”

Ranjit was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s necessary—” he began.

“Doesn’t matter what you think,” Gamini said cheerfully. “Dad’s the president now, so he’s the one who gives the orders. Anyway, if it wasn’t the Feds, it’d be somebody else. Your pal Joris Vorhulst is getting threats, too. He’s already got a bunch of armed guards around the Skyhook base. Now he’s talking about putting Skyhook security forces around everybody connected with the project. You included.”

Ranjit opened his mouth to protest—not as much because he couldn’t stand the idea of being guarded twenty-four hours a day as because he anticipated his daughter’s reaction—but Gamini didn’t give him the chance. “So you see, Ranj,” he said reasonably, “it’s going to happen. There’s no sense in fighting it. And, you know, it just might save all your lives.”

Ranjit sighed. “How long?” he asked.

“Well, until those One Point Fives get here, at least,” Gamini said thoughtfully. “After that, who knows?”

And that was a really good question, Ranjit admitted to himself. Leaving only that quite different question of how he was going to tell Myra and Natasha about the plan.

The chance came almost at once. Once off the phone with Gamini, he went looking for his family and found them on the back porch with binoculars in the dark, studying the constellation that held much of the Oort cloud. Passing the glasses to Natasha, Myra said to her husband, “They’re getting close. Tashy? Give your father a look.” And she did. Ranjit had no difficulty in finding the bright splash of light that—so said the experts—was the exhaust of the deceleration rockets of the approaching One Point Five armada. It wasn’t the first time he had seen it. Even before the announcement that these One Point Fives were coming to stay, Earth’s giant telescopes had been providing much brighter and more detailed images for the world’s news screens.

But they were getting closer.

Ranjit lowered the glasses and cleared his throat. “That was Gamini on the phone,” he said, and relayed what had been said. But if he had expected his daughter to object to grown-up interference with her life, he had been mistaken. She listened patiently, but all she said was, “These guards are to protect us against the nut satanists, right? But who”—she waved at the gentle starry patterns overhead—“is going to protect us from them?”

That was the question the whole world was asking—asking itself and even trying to ask of the invaders, as half of the world’s most important people began talking into microphones that beamed their question in the direction of the approaching armada. There were many questions, covering their plans, their intentions, their reasons for coming to Earth in the first place—many, many questions, in many languages, from many people great and small.

They received no answers at all.

This wasn’t easy for the human race to handle. All over planet Earth—and in the lava tubes of the moon, and in orbit, and wherever else human beings had established a foothold—people were showing the strain of what was coming. Even the Subramanian family was not immune. Myra was biting her nails again, as she hadn’t done since her early teens. Ranjit was spending hours on the phone to almost every important person he knew (and that was a lot of important people), on the chance that any of them might have some wisdom to share that hadn’t occurred to himself. (They didn’t.) Meanwhile, Natasha was obsessively trying to teach young Robert how to read Portuguese. And then one morning, while they were all at breakfast, there was a sudden eruption of raised voices from outside. When Ranjit opened the door to look, what he saw was four of their uniformed guards with their guns drawn and pointed at half a dozen strangers. Well, not all strangers. Most of them were young, scowling, their hands in the air, but in their center was someone whom, though somewhat older than the last time he’d seen him, Ranjit recognized at once. “Colonel Bledsoe,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

The situation took a little negotiating. The way it worked out, Lt. Col. Bledsoe (retired) was allowed to come into the house, although only with the captain of the guard standing by with his gun in his hand. Bledsoe’s escort remained outside, sitting on the ground with their hands on their heads, with the rest of the Sri Lankan detail making sure they stayed that way.

One might have supposed that Bledsoe would feel he was at some sort of a disadvantage. He didn’t. “Thanks for letting me come in and talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to turn my boys loose on your guards.”

Ranjit wasn’t sure whether he should be amused or angry but decided not to try to figure that out. He went right to the point. “Talk about what?” he asked.

Bledsoe nodded. “Right, let’s not waste time. I’m here representing the president of the United States, and he has determined that the human race can’t afford to let these alien assassins land on Earth.”

It was Ranjit’s intention to ask how the president of the United States proposed to prevent it, but his wife got in first. “What makes your president think he can speak for the whole human race? Don’t—for instance—Russia and China have something to say about it?”

To Ranjit’s surprise, Bledsoe seemed to expect the question. “You’re living in the past, Mrs. Subramanian. You act like there still was a big three. There isn’t. Russia and China are nothing but paper tigers anymore! They don’t need to be considered.”

He went on to explain, his tone scornful, that they were both preoccupied with internal problems they tried to keep secret. “The People’s Republic of China,” he lectured, “has just about lost control of Jilin province to the Falun Gong movement, and they can’t afford that. Oh, sure, you never heard of Jilin province, did you? But it’s where the Chinese government gets a lot of its grain, not to mention a lot of its automobiles and railway cars. You heard me. Agriculture and manufacturing! And Falun Gong’s spreading across the border to Inner Mongolia.”

He shook his head in a manner that might have been sympathetic, if the little grin at the corners of his mouth hadn’t been so obviously gloating. “And what about the Russians?” he asked. “They’re even worse off. Chechnya is a running sore. There are Muslims there, and every Islamic jihadist anywhere in the world who still wants to kill heretics is going to flock to Chechnya to pick up a gun—and there goes some of Russia’s most important oil pipelines. And if Chechnya finally does get loose, there are a bunch of other provinces that would like nothing better than to go the same way.”

Myra commented, “You look happy about it.”

Bledsoe pursed his lips. “Happy? No. What do I care what kind of trouble the Chinks and the Russkis have? But it sure simplifies things when action has to be taken and the president doesn’t have to worry about getting them on board. And that’s where you and your family come in, Subramanian. The president has a plan. And you’re all part of it.”

The mood Ranjit and his family had toward their uninvited guest had never been warmer than tepid. Now it congealed to brittle antarctic ice.

“What do you want?” Ranjit asked, in a tone that suggested that whatever it was, there was small chance he would get it.

“It’s simple,” Bledsoe said. “I want your daughter, Natasha, to go on a broadcast to say that while she was their prisoner, they let her know that ‘sterilizing’ the Earth meant killing every human being so their aliens can take possession of it.”

Natasha spoke up at once. “That never happened, Mr. Bledsoe. I don’t remember anything at all of being a captive.”

Her father raised one hand. “He knows it’s a lie, hon,” he told her. “All right, Bledsoe. Why do you want to whip up the hatred for these creatures?”

“Because sooner or later we’re going to have to wipe them out. What else? Oh, we’ll let them land, all right. But then you go on the air, Subramanian, to say your daughter has confided things in you that you think the world needs to know, and then Natasha comes on and tells her story.”

He was looking actually pleased about the prospect, Ranjit thought. “And then what?” he demanded.

Bledsoe shrugged. “We wipe ’em out,” he said. “Hit them first with a Silent Thunder so they can’t do anything about it. Then we turn the entire American air force on them with every bomb and rocket they can carry, and all the ICBMs, too. Nuclear and all. I guarantee there won’t be anything bigger than the tip of your little finger left when we’re through.”

Myra snorted, but it was Ranjit who spoke. “Bledsoe,” he said, “you’re crazy. Do you think these people don’t have their own weapons? All you’re going to do is get a few thousand air crew killed—and make the aliens mad.”

“Wrong twice,” Bledsoe said scornfully. “Every one of those American planes is fly-by-wire, with all the crews safely on the ground. And it doesn’t matter if those things get mad. We’ve got a saying in the States, Subramanian. ‘Live free or die.’ Or don’t you believe in that?”

Myra opened her mouth to answer for all of them, but Ranjit forestalled her. “What I don’t believe in,” he said, “is telling lies that are going to get people killed, even if they aren’t human people. We aren’t going to do what you want, Bledsoe. What I think we ought to do is get on the screens, all right, but what we ought to do is tell the world what you proposed.”

Bledsoe gave him a poisonous look. “You think that would make any difference? Hell, Subramanian, do you know what ‘deniable’ means? I’m deniable. If this gets out, the president just shakes his head and says, ‘Poor old Colonel Bledsoe. He was doing what he thought was right, but completely on his own initiative. I never authorized any such plan.’ And maybe some reporters pester me for a while, but I just don’t talk to them and pretty soon it all blows over. As leader of the predominant force on this planet, it’s the president’s duty to defend the weaker states, and he has determined that to attack is the best course to follow. I serve at the pleasure of the president. What do you say to that?”

Ranjit stood up. “I want to live free, all right, but that isn’t on offer here, is it? If the choice is between living in a world where people like you are in charge and one run by scaly green monsters from space, why, I just might pick the monsters. And now get out of my house!”