The Rising(85)

“Remarkable experiment. The most successful the minds behind such pursuits ever encountered by far.”

“Okay, Raiff, why? Why bother seeding the planet in the first place? I mean, for what?”

“Go back to your original question.”

“I don’t remember what my original question was.”

“How can you be human and come from another planet? The human race on this planet was created directly from DNA that came from ours and allowed to develop organically, without intrusion or interference. Totally independent of us, which was deemed crucial by those who devised the project.”

“What’s all that got to do with me, with why those androids and the ash man—Shadow or whatever—killed my parents?”

“They weren’t your parents.”

“Don’t say that. The ash man said that and I cut him in half.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. But it doesn’t matter who your real parents are. What matters is why you were brought here.”

“The fact that they think I know how to stop them.”

“Because you do, somehow,” Raiff told him. “But you’re getting ahead of yourself. We need to go back to why this and other planets were seeded.”

Alex rolled his eyes again. “Fine, why were they seeded?”

“Because at a certain time the human race you grew up among would be needed.”

“Needed for what?”

“To provide things our planet could no longer provide for itself. Back there civilization developed as a single aggregate—no cultural or ethnic disparity. Everyone pretty much the same because of the placement of our landmasses in proportion to our oceans. There, like here, a caste system developed in our ancient times. The difference is we never progressed beyond that two-class system, those who have and those who do not.”

“Owners and workers.”

“Close enough,” Raiff affirmed.

“And a recipe for disaster,” Alex said, recalling the lessons learned from history. Thanks to Sam.

Now Raiff started swinging too, holding Alex’s rhythm. “How so? Tell me why.”

“Well, even a dimwit who needs a tutor like me knows that our history is full of revolutions where the workers, those who see themselves as oppressed, rise up and overthrow the owners.”

“Our world anticipated that. Steps were taken.”

“What kind of steps?”

“Population control, mostly via sterilization. Control the masses by keeping their numbers from overwhelming the ruling class. Makes revolution unthinkable and escape much more preferable.”

Alex nodded, starting to get it. “Escape to Earth, right? That’s what brought you and others here. Refugees.”

“Me and plenty of others, yes. Even though we knew they’d be coming eventually. But not for me, not even for you, necessarily.”

“Who, then?”

“Everyone else.”

Alex felt his hair bouncing about as he swung right next to Raiff. It made him remember his father telling him he needed a haircut, giving him ten dollars to get one when it cost almost five times that in the city.

“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.”