Black Sun

The president went silent. He seemed to be mulling this over. And then he offered the drowning man an unexpected branch.

“I’m guessing you think these stones were sent back here to prevent that?”

Moore perked up. “Yes, Mr. President. Seeing this data, I would come to that conclusion.”

Stecker scowled. “Oh, Arnold, you are naïve. After all this, you think these things are a blessing?”

He pulled out a printed sheet of paper. “From your own man’s translation: ‘The children won’t learn so they must be punished. War of man and man, food no more shall grow, blood shall endless flow, disease shall take the most. The day of the Black Sun has brought the doom of man. Five Katuns, a hundred years, of endless killing, Fifty Katuns, a thousand years of disease and dying. To stop it there must be sacrifice for all.’”

Stecker dropped the paper. “Millions killed in war, billions from disease and starvation. These things are weapons, Arnold, bombs sent to destroy us quick and clean before we do it in a way that will ruin the world for them.”

Moore fumed. “It’s patently illogical to think you can go to the past, destroy a huge section of society, and not have it affect you down the line. Your argument makes no sense, Stecker, and if you were actually smart enough to understand what you are saying, you’d see that.”

Stecker bristled but he didn’t back down. “If these things are supposed to help us, then why’d they hide them?” Stecker asked. “You ever hide a first-aid kit? A fire extinguisher? Of course not, but you hide mines and booby traps and bombs. Hell, if this thing were meant to help us they would’ve dropped it in our laps, not buried it in some ancient temple three thousand years ago.”

With that statement all hell broke loose. In a minute Moore was shouting at Stecker, the two scientists were arguing, and the president was repeatedly demanding calm, like a judge in a courtroom gone wild.

“This is goddamned ridiculous!” Moore shouted. “The most incredible journey in the history of mankind, quite possibly the single greatest achievement of all time, and you think they did it to destroy their ancestors?”

“Stop deceiving yourself,” Stecker retorted. “Man’s greatest achievements are the efforts put forth in war. Countries, continents, and religions mobilize everything they have, every ounce of physical, mental, and spiritual energy in the struggle for survival.”

Moore felt himself on the defensive, wanting to shout back but having nothing intelligent to say. In the absence of any defense, Stecker pressed the case.

“And yet you have these people of yours from the future, sending something back to our time, something that seems to be affecting us negatively, and you believe they come in peace? If they wanted to help us why not just send the stones to our time? I’ll tell you why: because these things needed time to load themselves up. They sent them to a time before ours so that they can gather energy unto themselves, store it in this four-dimensional loop you keep talking about, and then unleash it on us all at once. To teach us the error of our ways.”

Moore burned with the temper of his youth, but restrained himself from physically striking out at Stecker.

He turned to the screen. “Mr. President, we’re not talking Arnold Schwarzenegger, H. G. Wells, or Star Trek here. We’re talking about an act of supreme effort, one that taxed and debilitated and mutated the men and women who undertook it. One that eventually left them here to die on what is essentially a foreign shore.”

“Suicide mission,” Stecker interjected blithely. “You ever hear of the kamikazes?”

“This isn’t a damn joke,” Moore said.

“No, and it’s not a puzzle, either,” Stecker said. “That thing is a danger. It’s a ticking bomb that we don’t know how to defuse. And your messing around with it is going to get us all killed.”

A quick study of the president’s gaze told Moore that he was losing the argument. And yet he couldn’t throttle back. He found himself railing further at the director of the CIA despite the president’s urging, despite his own realization that he must have looked like a lunatic by now.

He turned to his own scientist and then the screen with the president’s image and then across the room to where Nathanial Ahiga sat quietly, watching the whole thing like a spectator, drinking a grape soda through a straw.

“You!” Moore shouted. “Say something, damn you. The president sent you here to share your opinion, to decide who’s right. Well, it’d be nice if you opened up your goddamned mouth once in a while.”

As Moore lashed out at anyone in reach, he realized that he was now attacking the referee. He didn’t care anymore; he was beyond exhaustion, and in his current state it was all he could do to recognize his self-implosion. He was powerless to stop it.

Ahiga looked at him curiously and the whole room went quiet. Even the White House feed only buzzed with static. Perhaps realizing that the spotlight was on him, the old Gallup, New Mexico, resident took another sip from his grape soda.

“You want me to speak,” he asked, rhetorically. His voice was soft and gravelly, like smooth-sided stones rumbling together. “Of course. I can do that, as long as all the yelling and shouting is done.”

He cleared his throat, and put the soda bottle down. “In my opinion,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and looking straight at Moore, “you’re wrong.”

It seemed as if he’d just decided randomly, a flip of a mental coin. Or perhaps it was because Moore had yelled at him. Could the man take his job any less seriously?

“That’s it?” Moore said. “That’s all you have?”

“No,” Ahiga said, nodding toward Stecker. “He’s wrong, too. You’re both ru

As Moore stared at Ahiga, he shrugged again. “Do I know what the answer is? No,” he said. “I don’t know. But I know enough to see where you’ve gone wrong.”

“And where’s that?”

“Both of you are trying to decide what to do based on what these men of the future have done. Based on their actions and what they’ve sent you and whatever record they left of it. And by doing that, you’re missing the whole point.”

Moore struggled to follow the logic.

“You’re mixing up cause and effect,” Ahiga elaborated. “When they made their decision a thousand years from now, all of this—the finding of the stones, this argument, whatever results from it, if anything—it was already done and gone. Ancient history, so to speak. And that means they made their decision based on what we did. They didn’t send these stones here to make us do one thing or another. They sent them here because in some way, we asked them to.”

In his polite way, Ahiga looked around at them.

“We’re the cause, and their actions are the effect. Our choice is their destiny, not the other way around. If they live in misery because our warlike nature finally got the best of us, then it’s our choices that caused it, regardless of these stones. And if they live in paradise, then we should get the credit for that, too.”

“So you’re saying we don’t have a choice?” the president asked.

“No, I’m not saying that at all,” Ahiga said. “Of course we have a choice, but whatever we eventually choose, it will lead them to send these stones our way, be it for destruction or for salvation.”

Moore sat down and exhaled. Even Stecker had been stu

“Well, that kind of circular logic doesn’t help us much,” Moore mumbled.

“I know,” Ahiga said, sitting back down and grabbing the soda bottle for another sip. “That’s why I was keeping it to myself.”