After The Golden Age: A Science Fiction Short Story Read online

  AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE

  By

  Chad Corman

  Copyright © 2014 by Chad Corman

  All Rights Reserved

  After the Goldar arrived, we had peace. After the Goldar arrived, we had prosperity. After the Goldar arrived, we had everything we ever wanted.

  After the Goldar arrived, I was out of a job. No need to go out searching the solar system for anyone. They had come to us. No need to mine the asteroid belt or search the nearby planets for precious resources. They gave us the O-glos, sources of unlimited, renewable power.

  I dreamed of the stars. I’d trained for seven years to be an astronaut. Put in over two thousand flying hours on the fastest, most dangerous aircraft ever built. Crashed four times. The metal in my left leg still gets cranky when the weather changes.

  I flew to the moon, walked in Armstrong’s footsteps. And when our best scientists built the ion drive, I was going to be the one to take it out across the light years.

  My kids were proud of me – mostly because I did some guest spots on their favorite computer vids. They really didn’t know or care about the space program.

  My wife was happy because if I was gone a couple of years, I wouldn’t be driving her crazy sitting on my super-recliner, drinking USA-brand beer and watching replays of my crashes in 3D. She even cooked for me once or twice. Although I think the second time, she brought home leftovers from her lunch with some big client and made it look new on one of her plates. She never cooked that good. And she spent way too much time with those clients.

  Then the Goldar came in their golden saucers, flitting down real quiet, like an electric car. None of the roaring and throttling and screeching that I loved so much with my planes. Silent saucers. But huge. One of them was as big as all of Central Park in New York. They said they landed there first because of some old movie – said we’d be reassured by that. Well no one watches old movies. We all watch each other: we’re all vid stars of our own reality shows. I like to watch my cousin Calhoun trying to fix the plumbing at his house. Funniest damn thing ever. Course I’d turned off all the webcams in my house once the space program was over – no one wanted to watch a show about a has-been. Well they might, but I wasn’t going to let them.

  So we were all pretty startled by the Goldar. Especially when they got out of the saucers and were somewhere around ten meters tall. They had to wear special suits because our gravity was too much for ‘em. Suits made them look like huge, saggy chickens. Later, when they figured out how to survive without the suits, we saw them in all their smooth, golden splendor. That’s why we called them the Goldar. Their word for their race was a couple kilometers long with a lot of clicks and grunts in it. They were sort of humanoid, with weird multi-globe eyes and three legs. Big legs.

  Took them a while to visit California, where I lived and trained. Nobody came to California any more, since the state infrastructure got sold to China, along with the entertainment industry. We watched the Goldar on the 3D and my kids suddenly got awful interested in space. Bizzy’s a smart girl and she started making maps of the galaxy, highlighting the Goldar’s flight path. She liked to wear her pink triangular glasses and pore over the maps, her red curls hanging in her eyes. Little Clem wrapped gold foil around himself and imitated their stiff-legged strut. Course then he spent too much time out in the sun and damn near baked himself.

  Finally one of the Goldar decided to take a tour of historical landmarks. He was some kind of earth historian, they said on the feeds. So we drove on down to old LA to see him. I’d grown up there and used to sneak into the abandoned amusement parks, then bungee off the top of the rotted coasters. That’s where my love of zero-gee and danger started. And the Goldar had to check out the famous old parks. Those parks were all dead since that vid-company built the software so you could miniaturize yourself into an Avatar and design your own virtual amusements in your home – in a space about the size of a small dog – that killed them. But they declared ‘em all national monuments and left ‘em there. The real estate wasn’t worth a busted Susan B. Anthony anyway.

  We pulled in past a decrepit, scary-looking building called an I-Hop. Don’t know what kind of hopping you could do in that thing. The wall to the park was right behind. Easy to break through. Me and Bizzy and Clem clawed through some dead bushes, getting ourselves scratched up good. No surprise, but the wife didn’t join us, on account of some clients she needed to spend the weekend with.

  But we were in. Cracked concrete, towering masses of old rides that were just about completely grown over. The castle still poked out at the top – I think they might have just restored it for the Goldar’s visit. We found a place near the beached riverboat to sit on a dirty bench and have our sandwiches. We waited. Clem kept wanting to play in the dark water, but I told him there were evil monsters with large ears that would come out and fang him. So he mainly whimpered about the monsters while we waited.

  After a few hours, we saw gold sparkling in the afternoon sun. It was him, that Goldar, gliding along on some kind of hover-thing noiselessly. A human guide ran alongside trying to tell him information, but he left her far behind. I figured he’d come by the riverboat in a bit, and he did. He barely noticed us at first. But Clem got extra curious and climbed up on the hover-thing, bumping the Goldar’s three-toed boot. Then he looked down and saw us. I stared at him and saw that his gold skin wasn’t that smooth when you were up next to it – it was pitted and scarred with some little cilia-type things growing out of it. But his eye-globe-area was what really got my attention. It was almost like his multiple pupils were shooting light at me. Communicating, I guessed.

  I felt an image in my mind that I couldn’t identify. But somehow I knew it was their icon for a question. The icon also somehow contained the question in it, which was: what were we doing in a restricted area? So I told him we came to see him, and I wanted to know why he took away my job. I could feel him sucking around inside my mind, seeing what my job had been. After a while, he nodded down at me, then held up the three fingers of his second right arm and waved them at me. Again, I suddenly knew that what he meant was we didn’t need to go out into space any more, that we didn’t need to do anything but stay here.

  I drew myself up to my not inconsiderable human height, which came somewhere near the top of his three thigh-areas. And I firmly told him that we humans liked to do things for ourselves, thank you very much. That we preferred to explore and discover things without their help, thank you again very much. I mean, where would we be if we didn’t have the means to take care of ourselves? While I said that, Clem tried climbing his foot. And Bizzy walked around the hover-thing, using her handheld to viz it from every angle. I saw her scan the Goldar, too.

  Well the Goldar did some strange stuff: it raised its face into the air and blew air out of its beak area, then it lifted the foot that held Clem and brought it over the side of the hoverish-thingy and clomped it hard on the ground three times near me, catapulting Clem over into the dark waters I’d warned him about. So Clem screamed bloody murder and I went to help him, but in my head, I got exactly what the Goldar was up to. He was laughing at me.

  He said, or whatever the equivalent think-speak was, that we were a danger to ourselves, look what we’d done to our world, to our ecology, to our monuments and to each other. Now I realized that we did have thirty-two wars going on, that most of our fish had died and that we had recently sold off the old White House and various DC monuments to the Indian subcontinent so they could build broadband units. But it still made my hackles rise. I turned to give him a real piece of my mind, but he was already floating over to the castle. S
o I dried Clem off best as I could, got Bizzy to put away her handheld, and we snuck on back along our escape route.

  For the next four days, I pretty much stayed in my super-recliner, playing over all the things I’d wished I’d said to the Goldar. Clem made 3D pictures of his idea of the monster with the ears, which looked far more dangerous than anything I’d imagined. Then he made tiny Goldar Avatars and staged battles with them. Bizzy designed her own hover-thingy, trademarked and patented it. The wife was off on a weekend Vegas trip with clients, which was just as well. I wasn’t fit for human interaction.

  Nothing on the web made me feel any better, even when I watched my cousin Calhoun clog his toilet, then slip and fall face first into it. Normally, I’d bust a gut on that. But now, I just seethed. And by seething I mean I kind of laid around and drooled.

  Then the Goldar left, their job done. I watched them go. Got in all their silent saucers and sped off at the same time, after some long speechifying by all the politicos and pundits and scientifiers. They left their renewable energy sources, the O-glos. They left their one-hundred-percent recycling systems. They left their saline-removal system and their food-processing system. They left behind their plans for re-stocking the oceans, the deserts and the plains, along with their plans for replanting the forests and jungles. They must have figured we were all set, all taken care of. Like a parent who thought the kid was old enough to be left on their own for the first time.

  Bad move. First thing that happened was several different countries tried to disassemble the energy sources, which promptly blew up in their faces. Then a couple countries started fighting because one used their desalination thingy on someone else’s water.

  But what really got all of our undies twisted was what else the Goldar left behind. Things we didn’t know they were leaving behind. I saw the first one while drooling in my super-recliner. On the vid, it looked like a hairy starfish, maybe two-meters long. It had been lying dormant in a field somewhere, then it suddenly leapt up and started suckering itself onto the nearest humans, vacuuming out their insides and leaving dry husks on the ground. Turned out there were hundreds, thousands of these things all over the world. Took some firepower to take them down, which was a problem because the Goldar had had us dispose of all our weapons, so we had to quickly factory-up and spit out some new ones.

  Then the lightworms appeared. These looked harmless, just maybe 750 millimeters, floating through the air like fireflies. Millions and millions of ‘em. Problem was: when a person walked near one, they promptly launched themselves into that human’s ear, straight through and out the other side, chomping through a great deal of brain matter in the process. And nothing stopped the damn things: fire, bullets, knives – not a damn thing affected them.

  The earth was in turmoil. Protests were mounted, proclaiming the Goldar as devils who promised utopia but delivered devastation. Course the Goldar weren’t around to see the protests, so I’m not sure how much that mattered. Governments met, scientists assembled and cogitated, brain trusts did whatever they did in secret. Nobody had any answers.

  That’s when Bizzy and Clem poked me.

  “Do something, Daddy.”

  “Yeah, Daddy. Make it better.”

  Through the fog of twenty or so USA-beers, I gazed at their smudged faces – I hadn’t been the most attentive of parents for the past few days so they hadn’t been near soap and water for a teensy bit. I choked back a bit of drool and addressed them.

  “Like, er, what?”

  Bizzy rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders like I was the stupidest man in the world and hit me in the nose, pretty hard. Made me sneeze.

  “Fly to the Goldar and tell them to fix this.”

  And it hit me like an asteroid colliding with some dinosaurs in the Yucatan: she was right.

  Took me a few days to pull myself together. But I cleaned up, shaved a few times – and more than just my face. Found my old flight uniform, had it cleaned, then squeezed my somewhat-flabby frame into it.

  Then I did something I swore I’d never do. I turned on the webcams in the house. I said that once I was no longer famous, I would never let the cameras tape us again. Now I had to break that rule.

  So I turned the webcams on and then I hit the panic button. Every house has one: the button that summons police, fire, paramedics, security, militia, boy scouts, weight-loss experts, marriage counselors and lawyers. And if you happen to be doing a web show, that panic button is noticed by viewers around the world, who all always tune in to see a disaster.

  They tuned in. And they saw me in my living room – not in my super-recliner – but in my uniform, looking every inch an astronaut. Maybe a few more inches around the waist than I needed. But still: very official-looking.

  And I told them my plan. I’d take the ion-powered ship. I’d take their O-glo renewable energy source and attach that to the ion-powered ship, which might – hypothetically – give me FTL capabilities. I’d track down those Goldar – thanks to Bizzy’s outer space maps. And I’d make them fix this. Oh, and to finance the whole thing, I’d have webcams on the ship, which would be filled with sponsored items from major corporations. And I’d bring both kids, because nothing gets ratings like kids in danger.

  Within about twenty-two minutes, I had a deal with the corporate sponsors. Now I needed the damn ship. The government took some convincing. They’d mothballed the rocket and said it would take some major expenses to get it shipshape. So I made Clem and Bizzy do the performances of their lives: weeping, crying on camera, asking everyone to contribute to the fix-the-spaceship fund. Had the money within two days.

  Then the wife came back. She’d smelled the money and wanted in on it. She demanded it. Said she was the kids’ mother and she had to be part of the show – the anxious spouse and parent waiting at home, peering fearfully at every report. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance on Venus of me letting her get involved in my grand idea. So I let our arguments go out on the webcams. Then I just showed the footage of her with her clients over the past few years. Yeah, I’d collected it all. Because her clients all had money, so they all had big egos and they all had shows about themselves. So I showed the footage, stopped it right before the crucial moments, covered the kids’ eyes, then let it all run. Within an hour the corporate sponsors sent a legal rep who served her with papers to get her off the property and keep her so many kilometers away from us. The kids didn’t notice, because she hadn’t been around much anyway.

  Then came the really hard part. I had to get into physical shape for the flight. Rough for me, great for the camera, with Bizzy and Clem on their home-built hover-thingy following me as I ran all over the dang country – sponsors demanded I run past certain structures, ads and 3D-billboards. But I did it, metal in my leg and all. Passed out on a few occasions and, yeah, once I gorged on fudge cookies and whipped cream. But I did it.

  Blast off was a big deal, only because the corporate sponsors shipped in protestors, fans and religious fanatics. Lots of yelling – some called the Goldars satan, others said they were the god who had abandoned the sinful earth to its rightful desserts.

  But all that stopped when we boarded the ship. The kids looked so damn cute in their little space-suits. Clem had perfected his salute, standing ramrod-straight, facing the crowds, dark eyes shining through his face-plate. Bizzy had designed her own suit, which was pink and flowery, but actually functioned better than my own. The crowd cheered us. I felt something wet in my eye. Must have been something malfunctioning in the breathing apparatus.

  That was all the performing stuff, the fake stuff that the webcams loved. Now was the actual job. I could fly the ship, but we all had no idea what the O-glo energy source and the ion drive would really do to each other. The scientists had tested them – according to a formula Bizzy came up with – and in theory it worked. But if it didn’t, we’d be floating out around Saturn in a month and we’d all be dust before we ever got near the Goldar.

  The kids loved blast-off and the
y took their assignments seriously. Clem watched all the screens carefully for any warning lights, freckled face furrowed with concentration. And Bizzy was my navigator. She charted a map based on particles the Goldar saucers had left, and so I pointed the ship where we wanted it to go, pressed the sequence of buttons and hoped for the best. There was a rumble, a coughing sound – and then it was like when I’d first bungee jumped off the ruined rollercoaster: forces whipping us through space in a blur. I guess I passed out.

  When I woke up, Clem was on my lap, using my hands to slap my own helmet. It worked. I was awake. And Bizzy was at the controls. She showed us where we were, some two light years away in a system I couldn’t identify. But she could. Problem was: the Goldar were long gone. So we pressed the buttons again. And again. And again.

  The Goldar were quite the galactic tourists. It ended up taking us three months to find them. During that time, I grew a long gray beard. Bizzy and Clem used the scanning mechanisms to get us as much info as they could about every planet and sun we passed – in between the times they had to do promos with the latest sponsored products. Sometimes we forgot the promos. But we pleased the heck out of the sponsors by giving each of them a couple of planets and suns, assigning sponsored names to every one we discovered.

  We saw a lot. Stuff I’ll remember forever. We watched a double-star flare into existence. We raced a comet as it streaked across an ice planet, casting a kaleidoscope of reflections on the surface below. We flew over a world of air castles and golden hoverways. We saw a black hole eat a galaxy.

  Finally, far out in Cancri 55, on the fifth planet, we spotted the saucers. Just like they’d done on earth, the Goldar had landed all over. Looked like whatever race lived here was getting the same treatment we got. That got my hackles up again. I felt like smashing our ship right down through one of their saucers, but Bizzy talked me out of it. She ran some scans and found the Goldar that I’d talked to before – she’d kept a record of his DNA from when she’d scanned him.