“You’ve lost me,” he told Raiff, and ground his heels into the dirt to stop his swing.
Raiff stopped alongside him. “We had a haves-and-have-nots problem in our world too, but a different one than yours. Thanks to the measures that we enacted ourselves—at least the haves did—we didn’t have enough have-nots to power our civilization. They’d essentially been bred out of existence. But there were these several planets we’d seeded in order to claim their resources or turn their worlds into foreign outposts. Planets like yours packed with have-nots.”
“Oh, man,” Alex managed to say, shaking his head.
“That’s what all this is about, why your planet was seeded in the first place,” Raiff told him, his breathing gone shallow between his words. “To create a crop of slaves for the taking.”
86
FIFTH COLUMN
“AND RESOURCES AS WELL,” Raiff said, when Alex finally looked at him again from his swing.
“Resources?”
“Finite in any world. No matter how infinite knowledge may be, the growth, progress, and very existence of any race is limited to the resources they’re able to mine around them. And we vastly exceeded those limitations to the point where the survival of our species was threatened. Air, water—everything.”
“So Earth isn’t just a breeding ground for slaves, it was also a great big environmental bank where your world could withdraw anything and everything it wanted.”
“My world, Alex, but not my doing. The doing of the ruling class that owns and controls everything, and what you were sent here to stop,” Raiff continued. “That’s why it was so vital eighteen years ago that we get you through the tunnel with whatever it is you know.”
“But I don’t know anything. I’d tell you if I did, Raiff.”
“You do—you just don’t realize it.”
“I draw things sometimes,” Alex said softly. “I have this sketchbook. Never shown it to anybody, not even my parents.” Or Sam, Alex almost added.
“What kind of things?”
“Stuff that doesn’t make any sense, stuff that just pops into my head.”
“Machines?”
“And buildings,” Alex added. “Structures so strange I can’t begin to describe them.”
“Sounds like the world I came from, both of us came from.”
“Except you remember it. This, everything about us, this is all I know. All I’ve ever known and ever want to know.”
“I need to see these pictures.”
“Why?”
“Because they may hold the clue as to this knowledge you have but don’t realize you’ve got. They may form some kind of pattern or message, like the pieces of a puzzle. We just have to put them all together.”
“I told you, they don’t make any sense.”
“Maybe not to you. But they must be in your head for a reason.”
“Like what?” Alex persisted. “Tell me more about this thing I’m supposed to know. What’s coming when that wormhole opens again?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Doesn’t seem like I’ve got much choice right now, does it?”
Raiff nodded grudgingly, turning to see if Sam was anywhere about. “Our world’s a lot like this one, only millions of years more advanced … and older. Cursed by those declining resources with a predicament exacerbated by a longtime disregard for the environment and taking the planet for granted. Sound familiar?”
“I don’t know what ‘exacerbated’ means.”
“Made worse or more prominent.”
“How do you know so much shit?”
“I read a lot. For eighteen years now.”
“While you’ve been protecting me, even though you have no idea why.”
“I know enough. This isn’t the first world they’ve seeded, only to plunder and enslave.”
“We may not be the pushovers you think we are, Raiff.”
Raiff started to smile, then stopped and started to shake his head, stopping that motion swiftly as well. His expression flattened, all the edges and ridges seeming to melt into a single, processed form.
“Oh, no? You think they come with rockets and ray guns? You think this is like some movie where the world mounts a brave resistance and ultimately triumphs? Maybe until the lights go out and the faucets get turned off and the food supply is contaminated, and all of a sudden the civilized world finds itself losing everything it’s always taken for granted. The forces coming across the space bridge don’t need to kill, only to control. They fight wars that are won before they’re even fought. You can’t beat them because they know every move you’re going to make before you make it.”
“And they know about me.”
“The wild card in all this. I think you’re finally getting the point. You scare them, because they fear you’re the only one capable of stopping them from taking this world. They have the same knowledge I do. And, just like me, they may not know everything but they know enough.”