When he returned to the E-room, his mom was seated next to Liana, her arm around the other woman’s shoulders. Used tissues littered the rug around the sofa.
“This is it, Stacy,” Liana sobbed. “He just…he just won’t understand!…”
“I know, Li. It was like that with Doug, before the divorce.”
“But I can’t divorce David, I just can’t. P-pastor Blaine would…”
Liana saw Jack standing uncertainly at the edge of the room. “Oh, hi, Jack,” she said with a sniff and a dab from the wadded-up tissue in her fist. “Don’t…don’t mind me. How are you? How’s school?”
“I’m all done with school, Aunt Li,” he told her. “I was doing Net homeschooling, remember? Got my diploma a couple of months ago. Soon as I turn eighteen, I figure on joining the Marines!”
“Good heavens! Why?”
He was used to the question. “Well, because—”
“Jack doesn’t really know what he wants, Sis,” his mother said. “He’s been on this Marine kick for a couple of years, now.”
“Mom….”
“Why, with his test scores, he won’t have any trouble getting into just about any college he wants.”
“Mom….”
“He’s always been fascinated by space travel, of course. I’ve been telling him he should try to go to CMU, in Pittsburgh, and get into their AI and Cognitive Sciences program.”
“Mom!…”
“Why, as good as he is with computers and Net agents and all of that? I’ll bet he could get a position with the Space Agency, or maybe the Moravec Institute. They need good computer people in orbit, they say….”
Jack rolled his eyes but gave up trying to bull his way through the barrier. Once his mother got going, there was no stopping her, and she would not listen. It was his fascination with space that had led to his determination to join the Marines, and she just didn’t seem to understand that. Marines had gone to Mars, for Pete’s sake! They’d recaptured the International Space Station from UN troops, and now they were on their way to the Moon. As a computer scientist, his chances of getting to go to space were about on a par with winning the lottery, he figured. But as a Marine, he knew he had a chance….
Someday….
“Your mother says you’re really interested in all the news about the aliens, lately,” his aunt said. “I think it’s so exciting, don’t you?”
Uh-oh, he thought. Here it comes. He hated talking to her about this and had a pretty good idea why she wasn’t getting along with his uncle.
“Uh, yeah!” he said, brightly. “Real yatta! Just now, upstairs, I DLed the goods on three new species from the Face. Really shibby stuff. I—”
“Jack! I wish you wouldn’t use those ugly, made-up words!”
“What ugly? Everybody uses ’em!”
“Nonsense. What’s that, that ‘shibby,’ you said?…”
“Oh, you know. Shibby. Like sugoi shibui! It means, I don’t know. Max-slick. Iced. Um, really good.”
“And yatta?”
“That’s a real word, Mom. It’s just Japanese. Means great.”
“Seems like everything Japanese is popular, now,” Liana said with another sniff. “Ever since they left the UN and joined our side in the war. My hairdresser told me that pink-and-green geisha bobs were going to be all the thing this year.” She turned to Jack. “I heard that they’ve discovered the Divine Masters in that Martian cave, but that some people high up are trying to hide it from the rest of us!”
“I, uh, really don’t think that’s what’s—”
“I mean, it’s obvious that they’ve found something up there they don’t want to talk about! It’s obvious! David was the one who found the cave, found out how to open it. He came home with all that data, and all they can do is release a little bit of harmless stuff once in a while, nothing about who built the Face, or why.”
“I think that’s because they don’t know yet, Aunt Li.”
“Nonsense! They know more than they’re telling! David’s been a changed man ever since he came back from Mars! And the Space Agency! All they do is trot him around to one public-relations or fund-raising gig after another. Won’t let him work. And of course they don’t let him talk with his colleagues in Europe and China, with the war and everything. And so he takes it out on me!…”
Jack thought it might be a good idea to deflect the conversation from that particular topic. “They’re not hiding anything, Aunt Li,” he insisted. “I mean, the UN were the ones trying to cover things up. That’s why they grabbed Mars, back at the beginning of the war, ’cause they were afraid the news would cause riots and stuff. That’s why Uncle David arranged to broadcast everything he’d learned on the Net, so that the world would know the truth!”
Liana leaned forward, tapping Jack’s kneecap with her forefinger to emphasize her point. “I think they learned a lot that they’re not telling us, Jack! Maybe they released a little of what they learned, to mess up those other countries and stuff, but I think the real knowledge about the Cosmic Brothers and the Creator Space Gods is being kept secret! I mean, look at how the scientists…and David is among them! Look at how they attack Dr. Caulder’s work! And Sitchen! And von Daniken! All the really great men in the field are just positively vilified, just because they tried to speak the truth! I told David, I said…”
Jack sighed and leaned back in his chair. Once his Aunt Liana got wound up about the ancient astronauts and the cosmic space brothers, there was no way to stop her. As she babbled happily about flying saucers using antigravity to build the pyramids and the stone heads on Easter Island, he thought about that glimpse of a genuine alien world he’d just had upstairs…dark-stone step pyramids against a violet sky, enigmatic beings with green scales and golden eyes, a world, a civilization only eight light-years away.
It made Liana’s twaddle about ancient astronauts and godlike ETs seem like comic-book stuff. No wonder Uncle David didn’t get along with her! He had the scientist’s approach to life and the universe, a rational approach that demanded evidence, data, and proof. Liana was happy to snag any passing bit of fiction wrapped in the guise of wisdom from the ancients or the star gods or whatever and incorporate it whole into her eclectic and uncritical world-view. According to her, the star gods and cosmic brothers would be here any day to stop the war and lead humankind to a new and higher level of evolution.
God, was she actually thinking about staying here long? Jack wasn’t sure he could stand it, not for more than a day or two.
As she kept talking, a growing resolve hardened within him. In two weeks, he would be eighteen and able to enlist in the Marines without a signature from his mother.
If he could just hold out until then….
TWO
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
UN Base, Fra Mauro, The Moon
0435 hours GMT
Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself into the gently loping “kangaroo hop” that Aldrin and Armstrong had discovered, seventy-three years before, to be the most efficient way of maneuvering a space suit about the Lunar surface. Dust exploded in slow motion about her feet and legs as she bounded forward, exhilarated by speed, by strangeness, by the utter silence of her surroundings.
Shadowless hills burned in the arc-brilliant sunshine, mounds and