I said, “You’ve rebuilt the Red Moon to transport you to the edge of this universe.”
“No. To transport Archie to the adjacent universe.”
I rocked back on Archie’s skin, surrounded by his white corpuscles. The scourge of mankind was telling me that he wanted to cede the field of battle to us after thirty thousand years. Blow town? Catch the 3:10 to Yuma? I shifted my weight and felt the abort remote in the cover-all pocket beneath my armor. Then, inside my helmet, I shook my head. “How dumb do you think I am?”
“Archie does not understand.”
“You’re lying.”
“What is lying, Jason?”
I smirked at the speaker on Jeeb’s carapace. “Okay. I’ll play. Not telling the truth.”
“What is truth?”
“Come off it. You’ve enslaved a galaxy. But you don’t understand truth?”
Archie didn’t answer.
Inside my helmet, I cocked my head. What would Howard Hibble say about this?
Logically, it takes a minimum of two separate identities to lie, the liar and the lie-ee. So Archie didn’t know truth, at least as opposite to untruth. He shouldn’t have developed the capacity to lie. Howard had always said, and it was true, that the Slugs, that this simple-talking monster, didn’t deceive us. The Slugs approached us head-on. Push, they pushed back, harder. Deceive, they bought our deceptions. A liar would have learned.
I said, “Archie, truth is saying what is, instead of what isn’t.”
“There is only what is, Jason.”
Archie had seven minutes to live. I had seven minutes to decide whether to kill the sworn enemy that had consumed my life, or to risk the future of mankind on a conversation so bizarre that it could be a figment of my imagination.
“Come with Archie, Jason.”
“What?”
“Beat feet also. Archie and Jason will immerse together.”
It doesn’t take an orphan long to learn that he wants to be part of a family.
“You don’t understand, Archie. How long is the journey?”
“If Archie knew all of the journey, Archie would not wish to go.”
Ha-ha. I think.
Archie said, “Approximately two hundred thousand jumps.”
“No, Archie.”
“No?” Jeeb’s translator lacked ability to impart inflection, beyond a question, but I heard a sob in the word.
“Archie, I can’t. I’m too fragile. My identity will die long before two hundred thousand jumps.” Then more words tumbled from my lips. “But it sounds great. Really.” If Archie couldn’t tell a lie, he certainly couldn’t recognize a white one when he heard it.
“Jason would die?”
I nodded as if Archie could see me. “Jason would die. Jason does not want to die.”
The timer winked down to three minutes.
“Then Archie must go alone. Jason, Archie also does not want to die.”
SEVENTY-SEVEN
I SAT HERE, tiny, somewhere in some galaxy. I was on my own, obliged to decide the fate of two races, with nothing but the lessons of an accidental soldier’s life to guide me.
I hadn’t realized it until this moment, but suddenly, lonely Archie and I were both, in our own way, orphans. Decades before, I had been the first modern human to encounter this being. Today, one way or the other, I would be the last.
A soldier in a life visits both poles of mankind’s nature. I had seen men enslave other men on Bren and make war incessantly to no purpose. But I had also seen men like Bassin sacrifice to change that for the better. On Tressel, I had seen men commit unspeakable atrocities. But I had seen men like Audace Planck sacrifice everything to change that for the better.
Did all our arrogant cruelty, not just to ourselves but to the world around us, disqualify us from the survival sweepstakes? If Archie were lying, would he be doing this universe a favor by wiping us out?
But what about Archie? The simplicity of voice and outlook that rendered him as charming as a transgalactic sock puppet was just a product of an obsolete translation algorithm. Did it change the reality of what he had done? Without remorse, he had slaughtered and enslaved the only other intelligent race in his universe.
The choice became simple. End the imperfect life of one race to preserve the imperfect life of another? Or risk that both could survive, and become better?
I took a deep breath, popped the seal on my helmet, and stripped off my armor until I could get at the abort remote in my pocket. By the time my fingers closed around the remote, blackness clouded the edges of my vision. I reached for my helmet to try to draw a breath. The timer display numbers read fifteen seconds.
Fourteen.
I fumbled with the remote, then fell forward onto the only other intelligent species in the universe as consciousness vanished.
I closed my eyes.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
I SAID, “I don’t want you to die, Archie. I’m tired of making things die. I’m tired of man making things die.”
“Wander? You’re awake?”
I stared at the ceiling, then at the Space Force lieutenant commander who stood alongside the bed in which I lay. I rasped, “Where the hell am I?”
“In the commander’s cabin aboard the
I rubbed my hand beneath me and felt cool synlon. “What happened?”
“We were hoping you would tell us. We recovered you from a derelict Firewitch, seventy-two hours ago. You disappeared through a jump eight days before that in a Scorpion.”
I rubbed my eyes and sipped water from a plasti he handed me. “Thanks. God, I get tired of waking up in strange beds. Who’re you?”
“Lieutenant Commander Maxim Shaloub.”
He ran his hand through black hair, what military barbering left of it, that curled like steel wool. I eyed his collar brass. “Judge Advocate General’s Corps?”
“I feel morally obliged, though I’m not legally so obliged, to tell you that this interview is being holo’ed.”
“Why?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you were serving as an officer who disobeyed standing orders or you were a civilian stowaway who misappropriated government property. Your status remains unresolved.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Whatever. If you think I’m gonna tell you what happened, the problem is I don’t know half of it.”
He pointed behind me, to the top of my bedframe. Jeeb perched there, diagnostics purring. “Wouldn’t your mechanical have recorded something?”
“You tell me. Your techs have had seventy-two hours to download it.”
