She nodded.
“Do you know why we put zoo animals behind bars?”
“Why?”
“The bars are the only things that keep us from shooting the poor stupid beasts.”
WAR OF THE WORLDS
Whatever is inevitable becomes common.
Fire is inevitable. The universe is filled with fuel and with sparks. Chemicals create cold temporary fires and stars burn for luxurious spans, while annihilating matter and insulting deep reality, resulting in the most spectacular blazes.
Life is inevitable. Indeed, life is an elaborate, self-aware flame that begins cold but often becomes fiercely hot. Life is a fire that can think and then act on its passionate ideas. Life wants fuel and it wants reasons to burn, and this is why selfishness is the first right of the honest mind. But three hundred billion suns and a million trillion worlds are not enough fuel. Life emerges too often and too easily, and a galaxy full of wild suns and cold wet worlds is too tempting. What if one living fire consumed one little world, freely and without interference? Not much has been harmed, so where is the danger?
The danger, corrupting and remorseless, is that a second fire will notice that conquest and then leap toward another easy world, and a thousand more fires will do the same, and then no fire will want to be excluded, a singularly awful inferno igniting the galaxy.
Morality should be inevitable too. Every intelligence clings to an ethical code. Any two fires must have common assumptions about right and about evil. And first among the codes is the law that no solitary flame can claim the heavens, and if only to protect the peace, even the simplest and coldest examples of life must be held in safe places and declared sacred.
The city was exhausted, but it was far from quiet. The ground still rumbled, though the pitch was changing in subtle ways. Mice were squeaking and an owl told the world that she was brave, and endless human voices were talking in the darkness, discussing small matters and old regrets. Several couples were making spirited love. A few prayed, though without much hope behind the words. A senile woman spoke nonsense. And then her husband said that he was tired of her noise and was heading outside to wait for the sunrise.
Bloch was standing in the middle of Pender when the man emerged. This was the same old fellow who saw his brave oak stop the rolling spaceship. Cranes and a National Guard truck had carried away the useless egg case. Extra fragments and local dust had been swept into important buckets, waiting for studies that would never come about. But the human vehicles were left where they crashed, and Bloch saw every tire mark, every drop of vigorous blood, and he studied a blond Barbie, loved deeply by a little girl and now covered with dried, half-frozen pieces of her brother’s brain.
The old man came out on his porch and looked at the apparition, and after taking careful stock of everything said, “Huh.”
Nobody was hunting Bloch anymore. The initial panic and search for the monster had spread across the city and then dissolved, new and much larger panics taking hold. One monster was nothing compared to what was approaching, and the army had been dispatched to the east—Guard soldiers and policemen and a few self- appointed militia hunkering down in roadside ditches, ready to aim insults and useless guns at the coming onslaught.
The old man considered retreating into his house again. But he was too worn down to be afraid, and he didn’t relish more time with his wife. So he came down the stairs and across the lawn, leaning his scrawny body against the gouged trunk. Pulling off a stocking cap, he rubbed his bald head a couple times, and using a dry slow voice explained, “I know about you. You were that kid who climbed inside first.”
Bloch looked at him and looked East too. Dawn should be a smudged brightness pushing up from a point southeast. But there was no trace of the sun. The light was purple and steady, covering the eastern horizon.
“Do you know what’s happening to you?” the old man asked.
“Maybe,” Bloch said. Then he lifted one hand, a golden light brightening his entire arm. “A machine got inside me and shouldn’t have. It started to rebuild me, but then it realized that I was alive and so it quit.”
“Why did it quit?”
“Life is precious. The machine isn’t supposed to build a weapon using a sentient organism.”
“So you’re what? Half-done?”
“More like three percent finished.”
The old man moved to where Bloch’s heat felt comfortable. Looking up at the gray face, he asked, “Are you just going to stand here?”
“This is a fine place to watch the battle, yes.”
The man looked east and then back at Bloch. He seemed puzzled and a little curious, a thin smile showing more in his eyes than his mouth.
“But you won’t be safe outside,” the boy cautioned, new instincts using his mouth. “You’ll survive longer if you get into your basement.”
“How long is longer?”
“Twenty or thirty seconds, I would think.”
The man tried to laugh, and then he tried to curse. Neither worked, which was when he looked down the hill, saying, “If it’s all the same, I’ll just stay outside and watch the show.”
The purple line was taller and brighter, and the first trace of a new wind started nudging at the highest oak limbs.
“Here comes something,” the man said.
There was quite a lot to see, yes. But following the man’s eyes, Bloch found nothing but empty air.
“That soldier might be hunting you,” the man said.
“What soldier?”
“Or maybe he’s a deserter. I don’t see a gun.” This time the laugh worked—a sour giggle accompanied by some hard shaking of the head. “Of course you can’t blame the fellow for running. All things considered.”
“Who is he?” Bloch asked.
“You don’t see him? The old grunt walking up the middle of the road?”
Nothing else was alive on Pender.
“Well, I’m not imagining this. And I wasn’t crazy three minutes ago, so I doubt if I am now.”
Bloch couldn’t find anybody, but he felt movement, something massive and impressive that was suddenly close, and his next instinct touched him coldly, informing him that a cloaked warrior had him dead in its sights.
“What’s our soldier look like?”
“A little like you,” the old man said.
But there was no second gray monster, which made the moment deliciously peculiar.
“And now he’s calling to you,” the man said.
“Calling me what?”
“‘Kid,’ it sounds like.”
And that was the moment when Bloch saw his brother standing in front of him.
Matt always looked like their father, but never so much as now. He was suddenly grown. This wasn’t the shaved-head, beer-belching boy who came home on leave last summer. This wasn’t even the tough-talking soldier on Skype last week. Nothing about him was worn down or wrinkled, yet the apparition carried himself like their father did in the videos—a short thick fellow with stubby legs churning, shoulders squared up and ready to suffer any load. He was decked out in the uniform that he wore in Yemen, except it was too pressed and too clean. There was a sleepless, pained quality to the face, and that’s where he most resembled Dad. But those big eyes had seen worse than what they were seeing now, and despite cares and burdens that a little brother could never measure, the man before him still knew how to smile.
“How you doing, kid?” Matt asked.
With the doll-voice, Bloch said, “You’re not my brother.”
“Think not?”
