Anywhere but Here

8

They were still wide awake half an hour later. Wide awake and hungry. It was about dinnertime by their clock, and the only thing they’d had for lunch had been a sandwich. So they put on fresh clothes, intending to pile into the front of the pickup and drive back downtown to find a likely place to get a burger and a beer, but when Trent opened the passenger door for Donna, he saw all the alien slime still waiting for them.

“Oh, yuck,” Donna said, which pretty much summed up how he felt about it, too. He got a shop towel from under the seat and wiped off what he could until it was soaked, then got two more out of the back and he and Donna both wiped off the rest of the goop as best they could. Trent laid out a tarp anyway, so Donna wouldn’t get any on her clothes from the stitching in the seat.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” he said, helping her up into the cab again. Then he went around to his side and climbed in himself, flipped on the lights, and headed back down the dirt street toward downtown.

There was less activity now than when they had driven through on the way to the hospital, but a couple of bars were still open. They were right across the street from one another, so Trent parked in front of the one on the right since it had an open spot handy. There were maybe half a dozen vehicles on each side of the street, and he noted with satisfaction that all of them were electric. That made a certain amount of sense when he thought about it: you couldn’t very well take a gas rig into space. Every liquid from the fuel to the crankcase oil to the transmission fluid would boil off into vacuum within a few minutes of exposure, and even if you did manage to seal everything up somehow, there wouldn’t be any gas stations where you were going. There weren’t necessarily electric generating stations on every planet, either, but any place with a settlement would have at least a wind turbine or a bank of solar cells. Onnescu obviously had more than that; there were street lights at every corner, and the bars had neon signs in the windows.

Most of the buildings were built of peeled logs, the cracks between them sealed with quarter-rounds of smaller logs nailed into place. They hadn’t been painted, but they looked almost white in the streetlight; evidently the local trees had pretty pale wood. There was a boardwalk alongside the buildings so pedestrians didn’t have to step in the mud. Trent had parked in front of a land office, and there was a hardware store next to that, and then the bar. By the laughter and music coming from inside, someone inside was having quite a party. Trent took Donna’s hand in his and said, “It looks safe enough, but if there’s trouble, we’re gettin’ out fast, okay?”

“Okay.”

Trent pushed open the swinging doors—just like an Old West saloon—and they stepped in. He had half expected the whole place to go quiet, but only a couple of people even noticed them, and they just smiled and waved.

All of the activity seemed to be centered around three or four tables that had been pushed together in the middle of the room, where everyone watched a gray-haired guy with a thin face and a big nose stretch a wide rubber band back toward his chest as if he were about to shoot it at someone. He let fly, but the rubber band didn’t go anywhere. Something about the size of a BB did, though: it bounced off a beer mug across the table from the shooter and ricocheted straight at Trent’s head. Trent ducked just in time, and heard it whack the top of his hat before it rattled off toward the bar.

Now everybody went quiet.

Trent didn’t really like being the center of attention of a bunch of strangers, but he figured since he was already there, he might as well make the most of it. He reeled back a step and said, “I been shot!”

“Lord, call the medic,” said the gray-haired guy.

“He’s busy with a family of aliens,” Trent said. He took off his hat and inspected it for damage, but he couldn’t even find a dent. “Guess I’ll live.”

“Good. I’d hate to have my last night on the planet marred by a murder. Pull up a stump, and have a beer on me.”

Trent glanced at Donna, who shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?” so they snagged a couple of chairs from a vacant table and the gray-haired guy’s friends scooted around so there was room at his table for them. There were seven or eight other men, mostly Trent’s age or younger, five or six women about the same age, and two aliens. They were about a foot taller than the humans, with dark red skin mottled with black, and thin as rails. They had two arms each, though, build pretty much like a person’s, and their heads were close enough to normal that they could probably pass for human on a dark night. They had beer mugs in front of them like everyone else, and nobody seemed to be paying them any special attention, so Trent just nodded to them along with everyone else and sat down. After an evening with Katata and her brood, these guys seemed perfectly normal.

The gray-haired guy hollered something in what sounded like Spanish to the bartender, then held out his hand to Trent and said, “Name’s Nick.”

“Trent Stinson,” Trent said. “This here’s Donna.”

“Pleased to meet you both. This is Glory.” He gave the woman to his left a squeeze. She was maybe half his age, blonde, buxom, and smiling like a lottery winner. Trent guessed she’d had three or four pints of beer besides the half-empty one in front of her.

One of the guys across the table from Trent said, “You’re the Trent and Donna that brought the aliens in to the hospital?”

“That’s right.” His voice sounded familiar. “You’re Greg, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Hey, that was a stand-up thing you did.”

Trent shrugged. “Actually, it was mostly sittin’ down and drivin’. Thanks for talkin’ us in.”

Greg laughed. “Hah! If sittin’ and talkin’ can help people out, I guess we’re in good shape around here! So how’s the kid?”

“Broken bone about halfway down one tentacle,” Trent said. “Doctor Chen put a cast on it, but he wants to keep her overnight to make sure it’ll be okay.”

“Good man,” Nick said. “I’ll miss him.”

“That’s an understatement,” Greg said. “First time you get a broken bone, you’re gonna do more than miss him.”

Donna said, “You’re moving?”

“Yep. Glory and I are going to find a planet of our very own. One that’s not likely to be found by anyone else for a long, long, time. Then we’re going to settle down and do the Adam and Eve thing.”

“The Adam and Eve thing?” Trent asked.

“Live by ourselves,” Nick said. “Raise a family. Start our own civilization from scratch, with our own legends and our own beliefs.”

Donna frowned. “You mean just the two of you?”

“Yep.”

“But… your kids would have to… have kids with each other.”

“Yep,” Nick said. “That ought to give evolution a good kick-start. I bet they’ll adapt to the planet inside a couple dozen generations.”

Trent figured that was just about the stupidest thing he had heard all day, and was trying to figure out a diplomatic way to say so when the bartender came over and set a couple pints of beer in front of him and Donna, plus a big bowl of popcorn.

“Any chance of gettin’ something serious to eat this time of night?” Trent asked.

“Sorry, no hablo inglés,” the bartender said.

“Kitchen’s closed anyway,” said Nick. “But there’s plenty of popcorn.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.” Trent shrugged. They could get some real food when they got back to the camper.

When the bartender left, the woman next to Greg said, “We’ve been trying to talk Nick and Glory out of it all night, but they’re committed.”

“Ought to be committed,” Greg said.

Nick laughed. “You aren’t the first person to say that! My neighbors back on Earth thought so, too, when I told ’em I was coming out here, but now look at this place. I might as well have moved to Los Angeles.”

Trent tried his beer. It was considerably thicker than Bud, but it actually tasted pretty good. He took a handful of popcorn and settled back in his chair, trying not to look too much like he was starving.

“How do you plan to keep from being discovered?” he asked. “From what I hear, about a third of the planets a person can live on are already inhabited. And humans aren’t the only ones lookin’ for new real estate.” He nodded toward the two aliens at their table.

“There are four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone,” Nick said. “Even if every third one is already spoken for, that’s still a lot of places to go. And the Milky Way isn’t the only galaxy, either.”

“You’re going to a completely different galaxy?”

“We might.”

Glory shook her head. “I don’t think so. The velocity difference on that scale is huge. We’d be days just matching speed with the local stars. For that matter there’s the rotation of the galaxy to consider even if we stay right here in the Milky Way. The farther we go, the more the relative difference in velocity.”

“Oh,” Nick said.

Oh indeed, Trent thought. He could almost hear the rush of air as his first impression of Glory flew out the window. “You, uh, know orbital mechanics?” he asked.

“No, we’re just acquaintances,” she said. She winked at Trent, and he felt himself blushing.

Donna said, “How does that work, about things moving faster the farther you go?”

Glory thought about the question for a second, then stuck her finger in her beer and swirled it. “The galaxy spins kind of like that,” she said. “We’re about two-thirds of the way out from the middle, moving along with everything else. If we’re here—” she pointed to a spot near the handle of the mug “—then our vector is aimed toward Greg. But if we jump over here—” she pointed to a spot halfway around the mug “—everything else is moving away from Greg at the same velocity. So we have to kill twice our galactic orbital velocity to match speed with the stars in that region of space. That’s a worst-case scenario, but even if we just jump halfway around, everything’s going sideways. We’d have to change 1.4 times our orbital velocity to match the stars in this region of space.”

“How much velocity are we talking about?” Donna asked.

“Quite a bit. The galaxy rotates about once every quarter of a billion years, and we’re about thirty thousand light-years out from the center, so we’re moving about half a million miles per hour. That’s about thirty times the velocity of a satellite in low orbit around a planet.”

Trent hoped she hadn’t just calculated those numbers in her head. He was feeling dumb enough as it was; if she could do math like that on the fly, he didn’t want to know.

Donna seemed to be following her, though. “Holy cow,” Donna said. “No wonder you don’t hear of colonies more than a couple of hundred light-years away.”

“Actually,” said Glory, “It takes a few thousand for the difference to really become a problem. The biggest reason people don’t go farther is because our star maps aren’t that good. Until we got the hyperdrive, we couldn’t measure interstellar distances all that accurately beyond a hundred light-years or so.”

Trent wondered what she did for a living. Astronomer, maybe? Whatever it was, he bet she wouldn’t be doing much of it playing Adam and Eve with Nick.

“How far back to basics do you plan to go when you settle on your hideway planet?” he asked.

“That’ll be part of the experiment,” Nick said. “We’ll take what we can carry in one load—mostly tools and books and stuff—and we’ll teach our kids everything we know, but the tools won’t last forever, or the books, either. It’ll pretty much depend on memory after the first couple of generations.”

“And condoms,” Greg said, and everybody laughed.

Trent looked over at Donna to see if she understood what was so funny, but she shrugged and shook her head. “We’re missing the joke,” Trent said.

“Nick was showing us how to make a slingshot with a wedding ring and a condom when you walked in.”

Nick held up what Trent had thought was a rubber band. Now he could see that it was indeed a condom.

Nick said, “Unlubricated ones work best. What you do is, you poke the open end of the condom through the ring, then fold it back over the ring so you’ve got a stretchy pocket that’s held open in front. Drop a piece of gravel, or in this case a popcorn granny, down inside…” He did that. “Hold the ring tight between your fingers, stretch the end with the granny back to your nose, aim, and fire.” He let go and the condom flapped forward just like a regular slingshot. The granny pinged off the same beer mug as before, and zinged off toward the back of the bar.

“Use a thumb ring and a rock, and you can kill a chicken with it,” Nick said.

“You’re going to teach your kids to hunt chickens with a condom and a ring?” Trent asked.

“I’m going to teach them to hunt chickens with their brains,” Nick replied. “We’ll eventually run out of condoms and rings, but brains will be the one resource that’ll grow exponentially.”

“If you don’t freeze to death the first winter.”

Nick pocketed the condom and slipped the ring on his finger. “We’ll settle in the tropics. We’ve got just as good a chance of making it as anybody. Probably better.”

One of the aliens said something in a soft voice that sounded like it was coming from the other end of a long concrete culvert. A second behind him, a louder synthetic voice spoke from the pendant hanging by a silver chain around his neck. “Nick makes very much sense. He and Glory will provide backup for all of you when other colonies fail.”

It took Trent a second to puzzle out what he meant. “Doesn’t look like this place is in a whole lot of trouble,” he said.

“Not today,” the alien replied. “But war comes soon. Earth likes not uncontrolled colonies. What it can’t control, it will kill.”

“It’s too late for that,” Trent said. “There’s already too many colonies for anybody to stop ’em all.”

“Tell that to the United States,” said Nick. “They’ve been threatening us since day one, and they’re threatening everybody else they can find, too. Any colony that tries to recruit enough people to make a go of it the civilized way winds up on their watch list, and if you let a Frenchman or an Arab or a Korean move in, or if you try a form of government other than a dictatorship under one of their chosen puppets, boom, you’re on their shit list. Economic sanctions, embargoes, shows of force. You haven’t lived until you’ve been buzzed by an F-16. They haven’t started bombing yet, but how long do you suppose that’ll last?”

Trent took another swig of his beer. “The Galactic Federation won’t let them bomb—”

“The Galactic Federation won’t do a damned thing. It’s no more able to stop them than the UN could stop them from walking all over the Middle East twenty years ago. There’s at least seventy members in the Federation, and half of them would love to see humanity blow itself up. They’re not going to stop it; hell, they’d probably egg ’em on if they thought they needed to.” He looked at Trent and Donna for a long moment, then said, “Sorry if I’ve offended you, but I was an American, too, until five months ago, and it was the government’s belligerent foreign policy that made me leave. That and the way they lied to us about damn near everything they did.”

Trent felt like he should defend his country, but if what Nick was describing was true, it didn’t sound like there was much defense. And sad as he was to hear it, it fit with what he’d seen back home.

Donna said, “If you left five months ago, then you must have been one of the first ones here.”

Everyone at the table laughed. “The very first,” Nick said. “My full name is Nicholas Onnescu.”

“Oh,” said Donna. “And you’re going to leave the planet that’s named after you?”

Nick nodded solemnly. “Believe me, it’s not a decision I made lightly. I would love to stay here and watch it grow into something wonderful, but I don’t see that happening. Eventually the U.S. is going to decide we’re a threat, and that’ll be the end of it. I don’t want to stay just to watch it all go up in flames when the war starts.”

“What about you guys?” Donna asked the others. “You’re not all bailing out, are you?”

Greg said, “Not me. At least not yet. I haven’t been convinced that it’s hopeless. For one thing, we’re inviting as many aliens to move in as we can, so it’s not just a human conflict. That might move the Federation to intervene if the U.S. tries anything, and with any luck the U.S. won’t risk it in the first place once they realize they’ll be starting a war with more than just other humans.”

Trent looked over at the two aliens. “How do you guys feel about that?”

The same one who had spoken before said, “Exchanges of hostage may work, but even if not, we must do this to repay for damage we did long ago.”

“Damage to who?”

“Humanity.”

Trent laughed. “Can’t have been too long ago. We just got into space a few months back.”

The alien said, “We were in space long before. We traveled the slow way, spending many years between stars. We came to Earth when your species was still young. Very amusing was your science. Anything not understood was work of God. So we became God. Worked miracles, took offerings, then went away. Never thought people would continue to worship us after we left. Now we find you again, and we see how belief grew, how it fights with science, how it makes you fight with each other. We never intended such things. Never understood danger until now, but damage already is.”

These guys were on Earth thousands of years ago? Trent said, “You’re trying to tell me you’re responsible for religion?”

“Belief was already there,” the alien answered. “But we made it stronger.”

Trent took a long pull on his beer. What was he supposed to say to that?

Donna saved him the trouble. “How many other species have religion?” she asked.

The alien shook his head. “No others we meet.”

“None?”

“Zero.”

Nick laughed softly. “None of the hundred or so intelligent races that we’ve discovered so far have religion. Kinda makes you wonder, don’t it? Are we special, or are we just, well, special?”

Trent knew which way he felt at the moment. These aliens’ ancestors must have had quite a laugh when they stumbled across humanity. A whole race that believed in imaginary beings, who fought wars over whose imaginary beings were stronger. The temptation to take advantage of that must have been too strong to resist. He looked at the two aliens sitting at the table with him, with their red skin and gaunt features. Was it just coincidence that they looked like comic-book devils, or had some of the people who passed along the legend to their children known what was going on?

There was a long silence at the table, then Nick snorted and said, “Well, we’ve sure been a ray of sunshine for you two, haven’t we? I never even asked what brings you here. The boundless opportunity of a frontier planet, I assume?”

Trent shrugged. “It’s about half job hunt, half vacation. We were thinkin’ about relocating if we found the right place, but after that little pep talk of yours, I don’t know if that’s such a smart idea.”

“Earth’s no safer than anywhere else,” Nick said. “Maybe less. The U.S. is used to keeping its wars at arm’s length, but this time one’s going to wind up right in their laps. Anybody with a hyperdrive can drop a fast rock on a city, and they’ll do it if the U.S. pushes ’em too far.”

“Yeah.” Trent wondered how many of the terrorist attacks in the last few months had been from colonies trying to shake off the iron fist. The government had blamed them all on the French and the Arabs, who had been fighting U.S. domination for decades, but that wasn’t necessarily the whole story.

“Your best bet is to look for something farther out, even if you do have to spend a day or two changing velocity,” said Nick. “There’s a limit to how thin the U.S. can stretch itself.”

There was a limit to how thin humanity could stretch itself, too. Trent wasn’t a city boy, but he didn’t want to be a hermit, either. Or a farmer. He wanted to buy his groceries in a store, and when he lost a wheel motor in his truck, he wanted to be able to buy a new one without going halfway across the galaxy to do it. And when it came right down to it, he wanted his neighbors to be human beings.

He didn’t say any of that, not with Nick and Glory headed off to play Adam and Eve, and with two aliens at the table. He just dug another handful of popcorn out of the bowl, washed it down with the last of his beer, and said to Donna, “It’s gettin’ kinda late. You ’bout ready to hit the sack?”

It wasn’t all that late, Rock Springs time, but she got the hint. “Yeah, that sounds pretty good,” she said. She finished up her own beer, and the two of them stood up.

“Well,” Trent said, “It’s been a pleasure meetin’ all of you. Nick, Glory, good luck to you wherever you wind up. And Greg, thanks again for talkin’ us in.”

“Any time,” Greg said. “You going to stick around for a while?”

“Don’t know yet. If the alien kid’s doing okay in the morning, we’ll probably have to take the family back home tomorrow. That’s a long ways into the sticks, and a long ways back if we decide to drive it. We may just take off for another planet once we get out there. We wanted to see as many different places as we could before we have to go home.”

Greg nodded. “I understand. Drop by the dispatch office before you leave. I might have a courier job for you if you’re interested.”

“Carryin’ what?”

“We can talk tomorrow.”

“Right.” He obviously didn’t want to say anything more in a bar full of people. “Where’s the dispatch office?”

“Two blocks down and a block to your left.” He pointed. “It’s the building with the radar dish on top.”

“That ought to be easy enough to spot.”

“It is.”

“See you later, then.” Trent took Donna’s hand in his and they went out into the night.

The air was cooling off. Trent looked up at the starry sky before he got into the pickup. Except for Orion and Cassiopeia, the constellations looked just the same here as they did back home. The Big Dipper wasn’t in the north, though. At least Trent didn’t think it was. Without the sun to help him, he suddenly realized he had no sense of direction here. In more ways than one.

“What next?” he asked.

Donna said, “You know, I actually could just climb into bed and read for a while.”

Reading was a sure-fire way to put Trent to sleep, but he supposed that might not be such a bad idea. Morning would be along in just a few hours, and Katata and her kids would probably be eager to get back to the rest of their family as soon as they could.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. They walked down the boardwalk to their pickup, but when they climbed inside and closed the doors, he laughed and said, “I just realized we don’t have a good place to park for the night.”

“We could just drive out of town a ways.”

“We could, but we’d probably wind up in somebody’s driveway or something.”

Donna thought for a moment, then said, “Actually, the best place is probably right back at the hospital. That way if Katata gets a little jumpy being in a strange place all by herself, she can at least look out the window and see that we haven’t abandoned her.”

“Now that’s smart.” Trent backed out onto the street and headed back the way they had come. Spending the night in a hospital parking lot wasn’t exactly how he’d imagined their first night on Onnescu, but he supposed it could be worse. Given their landing today, they could easily be the ones inside the hospital.

He parked close to the building. While Donna went into the camper to make the bed, he went around to the emergency entrance to see how Talana was doing and find out if he could plug in and recharge the pickup’s batteries, but the lights were out and the door was locked. There was a big red button beside the door with a sign beside it that said “Ring for service” in about a dozen languages, but Trent didn’t think Dr. Chen would like to be dragged out of bed just to say “Sure, you can plug in.”

Trent decided he could pay the hospital a few dollars for the charge if it wasn’t okay, so he went back around the side of the building and searched along the wall until he found a power socket, but it wasn’t shaped right.

“Damn,” he muttered. This was getting ridiculous. Half the people on the planet didn’t speak English, and they didn’t even use standard power plugs. Was this what all the colonies were going to be like?