End of an Era

Countdown: 8

The interior of the spherical Het spaceship was dimly lit by what appeared to be strips of bioluminescent dots along the walls. Once Klicks and I were inside the thing, it seemed less like a lifeform. However, it didn’t seem like a spaceship, either. There were no right angles anywhere. Instead, floors gently curved into walls, which in turn melded smoothly into ceilings. Nor were there any corridors. Rather, rooms were honeycombed together, each with passageways to the adjacent ones not just on the same level but also above and below.

Most of the passages were permanently open—I supposed that beings without individuality had no need for privacy. A few chambers did have valve-like coverings; apparently those rooms were used for storage.

We saw dozens of brachiators, some walking, others swinging from stiff hoops that seemed to grow out of the roofs. There were also a couple of troodons on board, and countless Het jelly mounds pulsing about freely. The ship was cooler than anywhere we’d been since we’d arrived in the Mesozoic, and it was filled with a faint odor like wet newsprint.

“It’s tremendous,” Klicks said, gesturing about him. “When do we take off?”

The brachiator, its coppery coils of fur looking almost black in the faint light, made a facial gesture. “We did take off a short time ago,” it said in its thin voice.

“Incredible,” said Klicks. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“Why would you want to feel anything during flight?”

Klicks looked at the creature’s sausage-shaped eyes with their disquieting double pupils. “That’s a very good question,” he said with a grin. “Where are the windows?”

“Windows?”

“Portholes. Glassed-in areas. Places where you can see outside.”

“We have nothing like that.”

“You mean we don’t get to feel anything and we don’t get to see anything?” Klicks sounded sad. “And I thought Virtual Reality World was a rip-off…”

“We can let you look out if you desire so,” said the brachiator.

“How?”

“There are eyes on the surface of the sphere. You merely have to meld with one.”

“Meld?”

“Join minds with the ship. Share what it sees.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Does that mean more jelly in the head?”

“Yes,” said the brachiator, “but not much.”

I shuddered.

“We can enter you much less uncomfortably now,” continued the Het. “We have a rough map of how your brains work. The area for processing visual information is located here.” The brachiator arched its back so that one of its manipulatory appendages could reach me. A pink tentacle tapped the rear of my head near the base of my skull. I jumped at the touch.

“Uh, no thanks,” I said.

“Oh, come on, Brandy,” said Klicks. “It’s not going to kill you.” He turned to the brachiator. “What do I do?”

“Just sit down here. Put your back to the wall. Yes, like that.” Behind Klicks’s head, I saw some blue jelly seeping out of the wall. There must have been Hets throbbing their way throughout the structure of the ship. The jelly touched his nape just below the hairline. That was lower down than the visual cortex—oh, I see. It was going to enter the braincase through the foramen magnum. Clever.

“Are you okay?” I said to Klicks.

“Fine. It feels weird, but it’s not painful. It’s like—my God! That’s beautiful! Brandy, you have to see this!”

“What?”

“We’re kilometers high! It’s breathtaking.”

Against my better judgment, I sat down next to him, my back against the wall. I felt something warm and wet on my neck, but Klicks was right. It wasn’t painful. Then I experienced a strange pressure along my cervical vertebrae. The brain itself has no internal sensors, and I could feel nothing as the tendril passed into it. Everything went black and for a panicky moment I thought that the Het had accidentally wrecked my visual cortex, rendering me blind. But before my panic grew too severe, something else was in my brain, another’s thoughts, feelings, aspirations. They were dim shapes at first, shadowy forms, ghosts from somebody else’s past. Slowly they took on substance. A black man, his face, although contorted by rage, strangely familiar. It was like Klicks’s face, only different. Narrower, the eyes closer together, a scar on the forehead, a sparse beard. It hit me then: George Jordan, Klicks’s father, looking thirty years younger than I’d ever seen him. He had liquor on his breath and he was towering over me, a leather belt in his hand. Oh, God, no! Stop it! Stop it! Please, Daddy…

Blackness again, the connection broken, the Het linking us perhaps realizing that it had made an error. Had Klicks seen into my mind as deeply as I had seen into his? What did he now know about me?

Suddenly I was falling through space, ground over my head, my body plummeting toward the stars. Faster and faster, falling, falling, falling…

The image flipped, the Het, I guess, realizing that the human mind normally inverts what it sees, since images focus upside down in our eyes. I was rising now, the ground receding beneath me, thin clouds rushing by, the sky growing nearer, blacker, clearer, colder.

Space. Christ, the things were taking us right up into orbit. Stars wheeled overhead, the Milky Way a thick band spinning like a bejeweled windmill’s blade across my field of vision. It was magnificent: uncountable points of brightness piercing the dark, red and yellow and white and blue, strings of Christmas-tree lights across the firmament.

Rising over the limb of the Earth was the moon, gloriously gibbous, almost too bright to look at. It was still showing us a large part of what would someday be its backside. As we raced ahead, tiny Trick swept into view, too, here, above the atmosphere, cratering clearly visible on its face.

Soon the panorama was cut off from left to right, unbroken blackness swallowing the stars. We were swinging around to look down on Earth’s nightside. But it wasn’t completely dark—flickering lights were visible here and there. Forest fires, probably sparked by lightning storms.

We rushed toward the dawn, a glow clearly defining the sharp curve of the Earth’s surface. Within minutes the sun was up again, a hot fire illuminating the globe.

Broadly speaking, Earth looked much as it did from modern space photos: a blue ball covered with twists of cottony whiteness. My eyes finally got used to the scale of the planet and began to make sense of the partially obscured continents. Their shapes had changed over the millennia, but I knew enough about tectonic drift to easily figure out which was which. There was Antarctica, a tiny white splotch much smaller than it is in the twenty-first century. Just splitting from it was Australia, turned at an odd angle. India was moving freely across the Tethys Ocean on its way toward its inevitable impact with Asia, the event that would push up the Himalayas. South America had only just begun to pull away from Africa, the perfect jigsaw-puzzle fit of their coastlines obscured slightly by a seaway that ran from where the Sahara Desert would one day be to the Gulf of Guinea. Another giant seaway, broken only by a long north-south archipelago, separated Europe from Asia. Between South America and North America was open ocean, thousands of times wider than the Panama Canal would one day be. Still, the Gulf of Mexico was clearly visible, and—

Christ.

Jesus Christ.

“Klicks!” I shouted.

“What?” said his voice.

“Look at the Gulf of Mexico!”

“Yeah?”

“Look at it!”

“I don’t—”

“It’s all on dry land,” I said, “not half-submerged as it will be in our time, but, look—it’s already there.”

“What are you ta—oh. Oh, my God…” Klicks’s voice was full of astonishment.

“Het!” I called out, wishing I had a name to use. “Het! Any Het!”

“Yes?” came the emaciated voice of a brachiator.

“How long has that crater been there?”

“Which crater?”

“The one on the rim of that large gulf at the southern end of the landmass we took off from. See it? It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter…” I wasn’t that good at estimating distances from this high up, but I knew how big it had to be.

“Oh, that crater,” said the voice, each word a distinct, separate sound. “It formed about ninety of our years ago—two hundred or so of yours.”

“You’re sure?” asked Klicks’s voice.

“We had tracked the asteroid that made that crater. For a brief time we thought it might pass near Mars; as you may know, our two moons were once asteroids, captured by our gravity. But it did not come particularly close to us; instead, it struck your planet. The explosion was visually spectacular.”

“But … but…” Klicks was trying to make sense of it. “But the impact that made that crater is what we’d thought had killed off the dinosaurs.”

“An incorrect assumption,” said the Martian, simply. “After all, the dinosaurs live on.”

The best resolution in the geologic record this far back was maybe ten thousand years, and that only under extraordinary circumstances; a hundred thousand was much more common. Events that had occurred centuries or even millennia apart could easily seem simultaneous.

“The impact must have had a big effect on the biosphere, though,” said Klicks, a note of desperation in his voice. I felt myself grinning from ear to ear.

“Not really,” said the Het. “Those plants and animals at the crater site were destroyed, of course, but the worldwide effect was negligible.” It paused. “Your people and mine inhabit the same messy solar system. Impacts happen—surely you know that. But life goes on.”

I wished I could see the look on Klicks’s face—but all I could see was the glorious planet below. We were whisking back toward the night, the terminator hurrying toward us. Our view swung back up to look at the stars. There were so many that discerning any pattern, anything that one might call a constellation, seemed impossible. I enjoyed the spectacle; Klicks had been in line to possibly go to Mars, but I’d never dreamed that I would see the stars from space. The sight was magnificent, breathtaking, truly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and—

“What’s that?” Klicks’s voice intruded again from the outside world.

I scanned the heavens, trying to find whatever had caught his eye. There, far down in the southern sky: a tight rosette of brilliant blue points. I watched it as we swung around. The points didn’t shift at all in relation to the background stars as we continued in our orbit, meaning they weren’t nearby.

“What is that?” Klicks said again.

“What is ‘what’?” The reedy voice of the brachiator.

“That cluster of lights,” said Klicks. “What is it?”

“We do not speak of it.”

“You must know what it is.”

“We do not.”

“Is it in this solar system?”

“No. It is some three-to-the-fifth light-years away. Clarification: Martian light-years, and two hundred forty-three of them in your counting. About double that in Earth light-years.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a beacon, isn’t it?” I said, surprising myself. “A visual signal to the rest of the galaxy that there’s intelligent life there.” The rosette was beautiful, with mathematically precise construction. “Look at it: the points are arranged in a geodesic. It’d look like a sphere from any angle. It has to be artificial.”

I’d read about a similar idea years before, but on a much smaller scale. Some astronomer had suggested planting crops in giant geometric patterns across the face of Africa in hopes of signaling the presence of intelligence to anyone looking at Earth through a telescope. But this was so much more! A civilization that could arrange suns into patterns—it was mind-boggling. The rosette of lights would have been clearly visible from anywhere in Earth’s southern hemisphere, or Mars’s for that matter.

“It must have been wonderful having your society grow up with that in the sky,” I said to the brachiator. “Incontrovertible proof that you weren’t alone, that there are other, more advanced civilizations out there.” I shook my head, the jelly connection with the wall making a squishy sound as I did so. “God, when I think of all the soul-searching that humans go through wondering if we’re alone in the universe, if there’s anyone else out there, if it’s possible to survive technological adolescence. It must give you great comfort.”

“It galls us.”

“But—”

Everything went black again. The Het oozed out of my neck. We returned to the ground in silence. I thought about the rosette of lights; about the Hets; about troodons, dinosaurs that might be on the way to developing intelligence of their own. It seemed that humanity had missed the heyday of sapient life in the galaxy by 60 or so million years. It was only because the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions wiped out the great reptiles that the second-string team, the mammals, had an opportunity to rise to the level of conscious thought, but by the time we did, the Milky Way was a much less crowded place. How could the Hets not be thrilled by the mere knowledge of the rosette-makers being out there somewhere?

I guess I’d offended them. Without a further word, they dumped us back at our campsite, now almost completely dark, our campfire having decayed to a few glowing coals. We watched from the ground as their pulsing sphere silently made its way off to the west, then we clambered in the darkness up the crater wall and went back into the Sternberger.

The sky was completely covered with clouds. Probably just as well. Now that we’d seen the heavens from above the obscuring cloak of Earth’s atmosphere, the view from the ground—breathtaking though it had seemed last night—would pale in comparison. My only regret, though, was that the rosette would never be visible in this hemisphere. I’d love to have gotten a picture of it.

“Brandy,” said Klicks, unbuttoning his shirt, “what do you know about how the Huang Effect works?”

I was gathering up my pajamas; I’d wanted to gloat a bit about the discovery that the Chicxulub crater predated the end of the dinosaurs, and wasn’t surprised that Klicks was avoiding the topic, but, now that he mentioned it…

“So you’ve been thinking about that, too?” I said. “Christ, it’s like a stupid commercial jingle. I can’t get it out of my mind either. I keep running over what little I comprehend.”

“Which is?”

“Diddly, really. I’m no physicist. Something to do with the tunnel-diode effect and, uh, tachyons. I think.”

“Hmm,” said Klicks. “That’s more than I knew. Why do you suppose—?”

“Oh, good Christ! I knew those Martians weren’t just being friendly neighbors. Klicks, they took us up, showed us some views of space to keep us preoccupied, then went sorting through our minds, looking for the secret of time travel.”

“I bet they were disappointed when they didn’t find it.”

“I’m not sure anyone besides Ching-Mei understands it completely.”

“Well,” said Klicks, “you can’t blame them, really. Besides, they’ll have plenty of chances to ask her face-to-face once we bring them forward.”

I looked at him, standing there across the room, arms folded across his chest. “Bring them forward?” I said, disbelief in my tone. “Klicks, they tried to steal the secret of time travel from us. And you still want to bring them forward?”

“Well, you seem incapable of making a decision one way or the other. Yes, I still want to bring them forward. Hell, we’ve got to bring them forward. It’s the only reasonable thing to do.”

“But they just tried to steal time travel from us! How can you trust them?”

“They also voluntarily exited our bodies. In fact, they’ve done that twice now. If they really were evil, they would have stayed in us tonight, and simply forced us to take them back to the future.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. They know the Huang Effect won’t reverse states for"—I glanced at my watch—"another, ah, sixty-three hours. Maybe they couldn’t stay that long inside us even if they wanted to.”

“You don’t know that that’s true,” said Klicks.

“You don’t know that that’s not true.” He harrumphed.

“I wish we didn’t have to make this decision,” I said quietly.

“But we do,” said Klicks.

My gaze shifted out the window. “Yes,” I said at last. “I suppose we do.”