Wireless Read Free Page B

Earth—everybody knows this isn’t Earth anymore. Not the way it used to be.
    “Maybe.” He busies himself for a minute with a chunky film cartridge. “They’ve got oxygen in their atmospheres, we know that. And they’re big enough. But they’re most of a light-year away—far closer than the stars, but still too far for telescopes.”
    “Or moon rockets,” she says, slightly wistfully. “Or sputniks.”
    “If those things worked anymore.” The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the first of the disks, a couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. “Do you remember the moon?”
    Maddy shrugs. “I was just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too.”
    He nods. “Not like some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big spinning sphere, and they look at you like you’re mad.”
    “What do they think the speed of the disks will tell them?” she asks.
    “Whether they’re all as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells us about who it was that made them.” He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs.” He chuckles. “It’s a new world out here.”
    She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: “I guess it is.”

BOLDLY GO
    “So tell me, Comrade Colonel, how did it really feel?”
    The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He’s forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. “I was very busy all the time,” he says with a self-deprecating little shrug. “I didn’t have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes, what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman’s the man to ask. He had more time.”
    “Time.” His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It’s a horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift to some tsar or other, many years before the October Revolution. “What a joke. Ninety minutes, two days, that’s all we got before they changed the rules on us.”
    “‘They,’ Comrade Chairman?” The colonel looked puzzled.
    “Whoever.” The chairman’s vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. “What a joke. Whoever they were, at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita.” He pauses for a moment, then toys with the wineglass that sits, half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past difficulties. “The ‘whoever’ I speak of are, of course, the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here.” He grins humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the water.
    “Brother socialists.” The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it’s a joke, and if so, whether he’s allowed to share it. He’s still unsure why he’s being interviewed by the premier—in his private office, at that. “Do we know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed to—”
    “Never mind.” Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel’s worries. “Yes, you’re cleared to know everything on this topic. The trouble is there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the engine of a greater history at work—but the dialectic is silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event dogma: ‘Any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of course have evolved true Communism, Comrade Premier! Look what they did for us!’ (That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the