The Ragged World

Book 486: Gateway Essentials

by Judith Moffett

Genres: Science Fiction; Dystopian

Synopsis

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Earth teetered on the brink of ecological destruction. Then the alien Hefn came, determined to save the dying Earth - and to the Hefn, the ends always justified the means. Humans were given nine years to correct their mistakes - alone, with no recourse to the Hefn's advanced technology. If by then the Earth's ecology had not stabilized, the Hefn would solve the problem for good . . . by eliminating humans entirely. But slowly, against their will, some of the Hefn became deeply involved with their human counterparts. And to the handful of people who came to know them, the Hefn made a great difference: as mentors, researchers, rulers . . . and saviors. But could those few friendships sway the Hefn to help save a despoiled planet - and the human race?

Release date: February 27, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

23 February 2023

MY name is Nancy Sandford. I’m a plant breeder, magazine editor, and sometime college botany teacher; and I’ve been drafted by Godfrey—the Hefn observer to the Rodale Research Center in Maxatawny, Pennsylvania, and to assorted Amish communities scattered throughout northern Ohio—to write an introductory background essay for this book.

There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for Godfrey. A number of years ago he intervened, at some cost to himself, to save my life. Since only Hefn intervention could have saved me, this pretty well compromises my objectivity about the Hefn. The irresistible pun of my title—a real groaner, I grant you—does no more than reflect that simple truth, from my (admittedly rather special) point of view.

Not that I’d go so far as to claim that the Hefn have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, or even that ultimately they’ll succeed in doing that; but let’s be clear. I’m “for” the takeover and the attempt, okay? That’s my position. Those who think I’m acting as a tool of an alien PR effort by writing this essay are entitled to their opinion, but I couldn’t do otherwise if I wanted to, and I don’t.

See, it isn’t only that I was dying and they saved me. It’s also that for such a long time I was myself so thoroughly alienated from the human race, the human viewpoint—that for so many years the life I had to lead was other than, and less than, a truly human life. For a person with my background, adopting the Hefn point of view is actually easier in some ways than identifying with the general human point of view.

If we’ve all got that straight, we can proceed.

Godfrey has asked for a brief history of the past seventeen years, a history of the world since the beginning of the Hefn presence here. Most of you will be familiar with most or all of the story, but he wants me to summarize the main points anyway: to recount how the aliens came, left, came back to stay—not to save the life of one obscure breeder of cantaloupes but to save the world’s life; and how they’ve nearly done it, too, though at fearful cost to many of us who lived here before they arrived.

This, then, is what happened:

The Hefn—hairy, gnomelike humanoids, or dwarfoids—first returned to Earth in the spring of 2006. They departed that same year, after collecting what evidence they could of the comrades they had left behind a very long time ago, and for whose sake they had finally come back.

Four years later, following a change of command aboard their ship, the Hefn turned up again. They arrived, as it happened, at a moment of crisis; and their first act was to demonstrate that if they wished to, they could blast the whole surface of the Earth to flinders. To most people it was almost more terrifying that they also possessed the means of examining, and of erasing, the contents of the human mind.

(Let me jump ahead of my story for a moment and point out that the Hefn used the threat of mindwipe in order to control us without being forced to destroy us, with or without destroying Earth’s biosphere at the same time. It’s important to remember that. I don’t think there’s much doubt that they could have exterminated the human race and left the rest of the ecosystem, or the part not dependent on human life, undamaged. No one knows the extent of their ability to control by the power of suggestion. If universal infertility lay within their scope, why not a universal death wish?

Some of you are thinking that for all we know they have as good as exterminated us, that the ban on conceiving is just another version of humanity’s fate in Childhood’s End, that we have only their say-so that the ban will ever be lifted. All right, it’s customary to think in terms of what the aliens have done to us, or for us; what I’m saying is that perhaps we would all do well to remember occasionally what they might have done, even threatened to do—yet have so far refrained from doing.)

In any event, and for whatever reasons, the faction commanding the ship in 2010 claimed to be deeply interested in trying to fix what was wrong with the Earth. While the Hefn still cared intensely about the eventual fates of their mutinous crew members, marooned in Sweden and northern England back in the mid-seventeenth century, their leaders had a new and more urgent interest now as well. So there they all sat parked on the moon, bristling with implacable power and potential menace, and sent their observers—like so many imitations of the Seven Dwarves—among the people.

At the end of several months’ intent hands-off observing, the Hefn requisitioned some scribes and dictated their Directive. This they conveyed to the Secretary General of the United Nations, to be translated and published in all the languages of the world.

When the document issued from the mechanical translators, cries of protest and distress rose up at once from every nation on Earth, for the measures called for by the aliens left nobody untouched by immediate hardship, and many would ultimately be ruined.

A complicated, detailed document, the Directive’s essential principles boiled down to this: we Earthlings were to be given nine years to mend our ways completely. Nine years was all we would get. If by the year 2020 we still had not managed to meet the Hefn demands, the Earth would be sterilized of human life—no appeals and no exceptions. Nothing was said about how this would be done, but it was difficult to doubt that the aliens were capable of carrying out their threat. (It was easier, of course, for human nature to deny that the threat would ever be carried out. Denying, the Hefn tell us, is one of the things we do best.)

Humanity must cease its ecosystem-altering behavior at once, that was the gist of the Directive—whatever the cost, whatever suffering, famines, or economic collapses might come of this. The tenth-measures briefly taken in response to environmental concerns that had surfaced in the West around 1970—the half-measures following upon a more serious and widespread alarm raised in the late eighties—the millennial panic of the year 2000—all these paroxysms had been opposed by vested interests and had ultimately come to little. Political gains had been made, then lost as denial set in, then abandoned in despair as things worsened to the point where the problems seemed overwhelming. The laws still in effect were far too weak.

For all organisms evolved to live in a planetary system suitable to human life, the situation was acutely critical when the Hefn came—bad in 2006, worse in 2010. Nevertheless, the aliens decided to make a last-ditch effort to keep the Earth from moving at once into an entirely new phase of its own evolution, with conditions as disagreeable to Hefn physiological processes as to human ones.

Anybody who didn’t like this knew what they could do about it. The aliens weren’t asking, they were telling, and they weren’t bothering to be polite.

Here’s what the Directive said:

All fossil fuels, and all nuclear power plants, would be phased out. Only renewable fuels, wood or alcohol or oils made from plants, could be burned; only water, wind, and sunlight could be used to generate electricity, and the great hydroelectric dams would no longer be maintained. Detroit and its ilk were given nine years to perfect an automobile that would run on either photovoltaic cells or hydrogen fuel produced from water by photolysis; in nine years’ time, vehicles on major highways around the world would travel on friction-reducing rails.

Old refrigerators and air conditioners containing chlorofluorocarbons would no longer be repaired when they broke down. The few countries still making and using CFCs were to cease production immediately.

No manufacturing process would be permitted to produce toxic wastes.

Plastics had to be degradable—that is, not made from petroleum. All plastics.

Reforestation had to be speeded up dramatically, and not one single additional square meter of the tiny bit of remaining rain forest was to be destroyed. (Some Tanzanian farmers found out fast what violating that proviso meant.)

The waterways and aquifers of the world had to be spared any further pollution from solvents, or oil-based substances, or phosphates, or nitrates.

Further dumping of trash at sea was forbidden.

Concerned people had been saying for thirty years that the practices of agribusiness were ruinous and could not continue, but they had. Not any longer: all over the planet, farmers great and small were commanded to educate themselves in the principles of sustainable agriculture and integrated pest management, for chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides were to be entirely replaced by botanicals and animal and green manures. To reduce the erosion of topsoil the Directive mandated cover crops and no-till cultivation. Monocultural farming was to end; thousand-acre fields of corn and soybeans stretching beyond the horizon would be seen no more, even in places like Kansas and the Ukraine. In keeping with this, farm machinery powered by fossil fuels would no longer be permitted to operate. And land held in production by aquifer-draining and soil-salifying irrigation could not continue to be farmed.

The shakeup of agriculture was to be complete, and the transition period an assured nightmare for farmers and consumers alike—particularly in light of the restrictions on industry and transportation, which decreed that produce could be moved over long distances only by river barge and rail. The industry would have no choice but to shift from global to local distribution of goods, and yields were certain to plummet. It seemed that the Hefn expected people in a given area to feed and provision themselves—for many, a pure and self-evident impossibility.

The Directive took no account of this. It said nothing, for instance, about how botanical pesticides or vegetable fuels were to be made or distributed under the new law. It did not explain how the catalytic converters necessary to keep wood-burning stoves from themselves becoming a major source of air pollution could be manufactured, or how the stoves and plant-oil burners were to be forged in sufficient numbers to warm the houses of the world, or how they were to be conveyed to the people who needed them. There was a great deal it didn’t say. The Hefn were concerned solely with the what of things; the how they left to the humans to devise (if they could).

In fact, their Directive seemed bent on setting the clock back about three centuries. That the world’s human population had been many times smaller three centuries earlier, that the global village had come into being along with a computer-controlled, computer-dependent global economy, that the changes would have immense adverse implications for all the world’s people and particularly for the most heavily industrialized and the most populous nations, that much hardship and extensive loss of life seemed certain if the Directive were fully complied with, that medical research and treatment could not hope to continue at their present levels—all this appeared not to matter to the Hefn. They showed little interest in human affairs: politics, for instance, or crime. Wars, apart from nuclear wars, were not outlawed, or even discouraged. Governments were left to get on with their own affairs—but these now had to be reoriented toward bringing about the necessary changes in agriculture, industry, transportation, and waste disposal in time to meet the Hefn’s deadline.

There was one more thing, an oddity. The Directive called for setting up a Bureau of Temporal Physics in Washington, D.C. (the training center of the Bureau was later relocated to Santa Barbara, in order to bypass the Hefn hibernation response to cold weather). The aliens, who claimed to understand the true nature of time, had decided to share this knowledge with human scientists—a gift (they said) to compensate humanity, a little, for the staggering deprivations imposed by the Directive.

Naturally this document was widely met with outrage, with resentment, and overwhelmingly with fear. (One clause, anticipating this, stated that anyone guilty of damaging a Hefn in any way would lose his memories, not simply beyond the age of ten—as had happened to the slash-and-burn farmers in Tanzania—but entirely.)

Yet I was not the only human with reason to be glad the Hefn had come back again. A lot of people discovered, after the first shock had worn off, that what they felt was less resentment than relief, and a kind of sneaking gratitude. The planet was in terrible shape. Now that the aliens had in effect assumed governorship of the world, essential environmental reforms haggled over for decades might actually be carried out; and because of this there were more than a few who viewed the aliens as the potential saviors of humankind. But even these people, many of them, were afraid. Nine years seemed very little time to change back, to localize institutions and practices that had long been national or international and make them work, or to find solutions to the immense number of problems posed by the Directive’s restrictions, even with plenty of help from the Hefn.

For the first two years after their return, therefore, the aliens were widely viewed with mixed feelings of guarded hope and open apprehension. Then, in 2012, Earth was informed that all along the Hefn had been acting on orders. Another race, called the Gafr, was actually in command of the alien ship. Hefn and Gafr coexisted in an unexplained state of symbiosis. The thirty Hefn had been put ashore in England and Sweden so long ago as punishment for insubordination against the Gafr. The Hefn Directive was, in fact, the Gafr Directive.

Though it made no practical difference, many people were gripped afresh by anxiety, or outrage, or both, at this reminder of the extent to which matters had been taken out of their control. So the revelation cost the aliens some support.

The Directive had been silent on the subject of the size and growth rate of the world’s human population, but those who felt this silence to be more ominous than reassuring were proved correct the following year, 2013, when with much advance fanfare a Hefn appeared on television to make a major announcement. The Gafr were dissatisfied with humanity’s progress (he said) and out of patience with its continual international posturing and blame-casting. The goals of the Directive could not possibly be met by the 2020 deadline at the present rate of change. Apparently people weren’t frightened enough, even by the threat of annihilation, to put their differences aside and work together. Perhaps the problem was denial, on a global scale. The Hefn speaker said that he personally had often been astounded at the human capacity for self-deception—for letting wishful thinking rule reason.

At any rate, the Gafr had no intention of being forced to carry out their threat. They had decided to try another way. As of that moment, the nine-year deadline was revoked. Instead, everyone watching the Broadcast—and that was just about everyone in the world—would thenceforward find him- or herself unable to engender or conceive children. Starting in nine months’ time, and unless and until the goals of the Directive should be accomplished, no more human babies—or too few to be worth mentioning—would be born.

Before the Broadcast, only a few humans had been aware of the Hefn capacity for control by the power of suggestion. Afterwards, everybody knew.

THAT mass posthypnotic suspension of fertility is the closest encounter most people have ever had with either of the alien races. But some humans were more personally affected—people leading busy lives with absorbing problems of their own, for the most part, whose attention was somewhere else when they stumbled into intimate contact with the invaders.

Like me, for one.

Like a few other people I know.

This book is the record of what happened to some of us because the Hefn came.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly …

—William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark”

1990

THAT day at the frayed end of October was another raw, gray day, and I had to mark midterms. We felt that on such days our midget wood stove more than justified all its aggravations: the removing, insulating, and replacing of the oak paneling above the fireplace so the local fire marshal would let us vent the stove into the chimney, the negotiations with chiseling dealers in cordwood, the chronic mess of bark bits on the carpet. The installers had sworn it was the smallest stove they had ever not only put in, but seen. We had to special-order short firewood for it, but it was phenomenally efficient and cute as a toy. Ordinarily my husband and I took turns working on the high-backed sofa in front of it; but whichever of us brought home a set of papers to grade always got the stove. Not only was its coziness a comfort, but the endless tinkerings and adjustings required to keep it cooking along at a flue temperature of 400 degrees were a grateful distraction, broke up the strain of the chore.

So early that October morning I had laid claim to the stove. I’d emptied the ashes, carried in split logs and kindling till the woodbox was heaped full, cleaned the window panel, stoked the firebox, and adjusted the catalytic unit and the baffle; and when there was no further help for it I squared my shoulders and settled down on the sofa with a stack of essay exams from my course in contemporary American poetry, while red flames swirled cheerily behind glass a couple of feet away.

Nothing but grim self-discipline gets you through the first paper or two; after that you sink into a sort of judgmental trance and things go better. Matt left for the day. I poked the coals occasionally, put in wood, fine-tuned the two dampers, wrote things in margins and at the bottoms of last pages. The phone rang only once: a student who hadn’t turned in the take-home half of the exam on Monday needed directions so he could bring it out to the house. The call was my only interruption, and when I finally stopped for a sandwich and a glass of cider I had completed five exams, a quarter of the class and an excellent long morning’s work. Two more, I promised myself, and then you don’t have to do any more till tonight.

But after lunch the first paper I picked up had something wrong with it.

The paper started off in the usual way to address the second of four multiple-choice questions I had given the class on Monday, but the second page veered off weirdly; I found myself skimming over references to nuclear power and some future disaster, and stopped, groaning aloud, at a statement to the effect that alien invaders alone would save us from utter destruction. Alien invaders! I looked at the name on the paper and groaned again. Terry Carpenter was the kid on his way over with the late take-home question.

That didn’t give me a lot of time to figure out what to do.

Flipping back to page one I began to read closely, cursing to myself. It is far from uncommon for undergraduates at a high-pressure university—especially if they happen to be somewhat unstable to start with—to have an “episode” of some sort at the semester’s midpoint, when so many written assignments come due at the same time and so many midterm exams are given. I’d known cases of suicide threats and even attempts (none successful, thank God), of depression, inability to work, inability to cope generally. It’s far from uncommon, but you always hope it won’t happen to anybody in one of your own classes, because midway through the semester professors are as weary as their students and longing every bit as much for the brief Thanksgiving hiatus still three weeks distant. The last thing you want just then is more work, and troubled students create work. You have to investigate, make assessments, do something. You can’t ignore it, and wouldn’t if you could. But you’d love to be spared the whole problem.

The question Terry had chosen to write on required him to compare and contrast Elizabeth Bishop’s lovely poem “The Moose,” in which a bus full of people traveling to Boston from Nova Scotia encounters a female moose in the moonlit New Brunswick woods, with William Stafford’s much shorter, pithier poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” about a man who finds a car-killed doe beside a road, her fawn still alive inside her. The class had studied the Bishop piece, but “Traveling Through the Dark” had been sprung on them the day of the exam. The elements common to both poems—driving at night, confrontation between vehicle and animal and human and animal, powerful human responses to the confrontations, and so on—made it natural and easy to view the two in the light of one another, while their differences of length, tone, content, form, and purpose made the qualities of each stand out in relief against those of the other. To me it had seemed at once the easiest and the most interesting of the four questions.

But something about it had disturbed Terry Carpenter mightily, that was clear: “… up the hill all the trees are broken, dead, sick and stunted, the deer were wiped out completely by radiation so there are none for the alien to see on that side of the lens, and when the buck came then I felt sick too to think all that power and beauty would really come to nothing no matter how hard he chases the does now, whatever fawns he makes will all be dead or theirs will be, somewhere down the line every one of them is doomed to be killed by our stupidity, every one, so that he seemed a beautiful sorrowful wasted doomed creature …” For pages it went on like that, the quasi-poetical style, and punctuation by commas only, giving an odd, trancelike quality to the writing. It was not a style I would have expected a student like Terry to use, or even be capable of. My attention kept veering away from the sense of the paper—if it could be said to have a “sense,” exactly—though I read it through three times. Terry certainly had failed to answer the question, but what was it he had done instead?

A glance at the stove made me jump up; while I’d been fretting over Terry’s exam the needle of the round red thermometer had swung back to 275 degrees. Pulling on leather gloves I hastily poked the glowing coals into a flat bed, then threw in a fistful of small sticks and splits to hot it up enough for the chunkier lengths of ash and Osage orange to catch well. Then I closed the little iron door, spun the damper wide open, and waited on my knees while the fire picked up strength, trying anxiously to remember how Terry had sounded on the phone. I hadn’t been struck by anything strange in his voice, but I’d been in such a hurry to get off the line that unless the strangeness had been very evident I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

Actually, beyond acknowledging his perfectly competent classroom performance, I had taken very little notice of Terry Carpenter at all. The only grade I’d recorded for him was a B on a short written poetry explication. He had never come to any office hour of mine, nor (until now) done anything to make a personal impression. At mid-semester one is impressed chiefly with the A students and the disruptive or idiotic ones; distinguishing among the Bs takes longer unless unusual looks or behavior separate them out or they make a point of coming in to confer about something. None of these things was true of Terry. I realized that in fact I knew nothing whatever about the boy.

I stopped fussing with the stove, tossed the gloves into the woodbox, and called my husband’s office: not in. Then I tried the department Chair and was told by her secretary that she would be in a committee meeting all afternoon; and before I could ask the secretary to search the records for Terry Carpenter’s file—in case he should happen to be an English major, with a file there in her office—I heard a car door slam outside.

Ready or not, then, here we went.

Terry and I arrived at our opposite sides of the front door at the same instant. A large, gleaming car, its engine wastefully running, bulked in the drive behind my rust-pocked ten-year-old Toyota. When I pulled the door open Terry said “Hi!” brightly, thrust a manila envelope into my hand, and began at once to sidle away, saying, “Sorry to bother you at home, and sorry this didn’t get in on time.” In spite of these apologies he was grinning in a relieved, if tired and rueful, way—like any student happy to have disburdened himself of a task. He wore jeans and an expensive corduroy coat, unbuttoned, with a dark, plush collar. His hair was mussed and he hadn’t shaved, typical signs of late-paper production. In those circumstances nobody could have looked more normal.

Even his rush to get away was normal. I almost let him go—but I couldn’t quite shrug off the strangeness of what he had written, and a few judicious questions shouldn’t take us long. “Could you come in for a couple of minutes? Something I’d like to ask you about your in-class exam.” I made it more of a command than a request.

“Oh—” Terry said, “okay, I guess,” but his grin disappeared. “But I better go turn off the engine first. My roommate’s car,” he added almost with embarrassment, having probably taken note of the shabby resident Toyota. He certainly bore no resemblance that I could see to a young man on the brink of nervous collapse; for one thing, he seemed insufficiently self-absorbed.

When he came in I shut the door firmly behind him, went to the kitchen sink, and filled and plugged in the electric kettle, saying “Tea?” in a perfunctory way while Terry—seeing he was not about to escape in a hurry—took off his coat and threw it over a chair. “Thanks. Uh, is something wrong with my midterm, or what?”

“Tell you in a minute.” I clattered cups and spoons and things together, filling time. When the kettle boiled I made the tea quickly, popped a cozy over the pot, and carried the laden tray into the living room, my problem trailing uncomfortably after me. “Have a seat.” I dropped onto the other end of the sofa, plucked his paper from the top of the stack, and looked him in the eye. “Okay, Terry. It would be better to tell me the truth: were you high on something while you were writing this?”

“God, no.” He sat up very straight, obviously alarmed—but again, to my practiced eye, no more so than any student might be if challenged thus bluntly, without warning. “That is—just on coffee, I’d been up most of the night trying to do the take-home. Jesus. Why’d you ask me that?”

“Ever drop acid? Sorry to pry, but I need to know.”

“Well—just once. In high school.”

“Bad trip?”

“No, not at all. I just wanted to see what it was like, though, I never did it again.”

“And no recurrences.”

Thoroughly worried now, he leaned back against the sofa’s padded arm, away from me, and shook his head. “Why are we talking about drugs? What’s all this got to do with the midterm?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.” I handed him the paper. He read quickly through the first sheet and flipped to the second; watching narrowly as his eyes ran down the page, I saw him frown and his face get whiter. He went on to the third page, threw a frightened glance at me, began to read the fourth. His breathing had become rapid and shallow.

Abruptly he looked up, letting the pages crumple in his lap. “I don’t know what to say. I just don’t get it.”

“Do you remember writing this?”

“N-no … not actually writing it, no I don’t. I felt very weird on Monday, I’d been up most of the night for two nights running and sort of felt like I might be coming down with something.”

“You did write it, though, didn’t you?” I pressed him; I had to know.

Terry said in agitation, “Well yeah, I wrote it, I mean I must have, it’s my handwriting, but I don’t remember writing it, I swear to God!”

“Well, what’s your explanation then?”

He looked ready to cry. “Well …,” shifting in his seat, “I could’ve been in worse shape than I thought, I guess. I don’t know, maybe I was running a fever or something.”

“But you feel all right now?”

“Before I read this I did. I got a lot of sleep Monday night.”

I thought a minute while Terry hunched tensely beside me and the tea steeped on, ignored. “Well, then. Granted that you don’t remember writing this paper, do you recognize the content of it—that is, is it like anything you might have read sometime in a science fiction novel, say, or seen on the late show?”

“That’s the creepiest part,” he said huskily. “I sort of do recognize it. I had a … dream, I guess. I guess it was a dream, it must’ve been.”

“When was that?”

“Last weekend sometime. Around then. I’d completely forgotten about it till you showed me this thing.”

“Terry, this looks pretty serious to me,” I said. “Maybe you’ve been working a little too hard lately? Or having personal problems?” He made no reply to this, but then why, after all, should he tell me anything? “Whatever the source of the stress, I think it would be smart to talk to somebody at Student Health about it, show them this exam and say you blanked out and wrote it on automatic, if that’s what you think you did.”

I stopped. Terry was no longer listening; he had bent over double, elbows on knee