Mission to Minerva

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Gate controller recited the by now familiar line.

"Sequencing out… Transferring."

But this time it was the real thing. The huge disks of the Gate projection bells went to blue, from blue to blue-indigo, and then were gone. A different starfield surrounded the ship.

Hunt's first time aboard the Shapieron had been shortly after it made its appearance at Ganymede. He and Danchekker had been at an exploration base there, set up to investigate the wreck of an old Ganymean spacecraft discovered beneath the ice. A signal from a a piece of equipment reactivated by UNSA engineers had been picked up by the Shapieron and brought it to that location. The Shapieron then had been virtually a self-contained small town, crammed with Ganymeans of all ages, from those numbered among its original mission, down to the youngest of the children born in the course of its strange exile. Its interior then had shown the wear and tiredness of serving as the only abode its occupants had known for twenty years. When Hunt walked around the familiar corridors and galleries some days previously, all gleaming and new after the ship's refit, it had seemed like a deserted cathedral. Just Garuth, his senior officers, and a skeleton crew were manning the half-mile-long starship. It was being used for its ability to operate autonomously, not because of its size.

The Terran contingent comprised the original group with the exception of Mildred, back on Earth writing her book, and Sonnebrandt, whose affairs had detained him in Europe. They followed the event from the vessel's Command Deck, which at least had almost the normal complement of crew at their stations and felt something like old times. This was Hunt's first time back aboard since the expedition to Jevlen, when they had mounted the Pseudowar. It was strange how events had led to this circle. The revelation that Broghuilio's ships had somehow been thrown back to ancient Minerva was what had inspired the whole project of Multiverse research, which now culminated in their going back to that same place and time.

Well, not quite the same. The hope of the mission was to create a new reality from which would spring an entire family of futures in the Multiverse that so far didn't exist. The new world view challenged the formerly held belief, which had been derived purely from physical considerations, that everything which could happen did happen "somewhere." The newer line that Danchekker was developing with the Thurien philosophers held that consciousness was able to alter quantum probabilities. With consciousness now intervening to initiate changes across universes, the suggestion that new realities could be created was gaining currency. It had certainly provided the main inspiration for the mission.

The hope was to bring into being a variation of the past in which Minerva was saved: a new twig amid the immensity of the Multiverse's diverging branches that would grow and bear fruit as all the histories of humans and Ganymeans that might follow. Some still insisted that this was impossible. Others argued that, on the contrary, it was the very reason for the Multiverse's existence; that surely, being able to bring about morally meaningful change was what consciousness was for. But two things could be said with certainty. First, nobody knew. And second, now that their vision and sense of a purpose had been inspired, the likes of Calazar, Showm, Caldwell, and just about everyone else involved in the project, were not going to wait for the philosophers to come to a consensus. In any case, philosophers of both races had done that too many times on innumerable occasions before, and then changed their minds.

The object, then, was to appear at Minerva before the calamitous war had ever happened. Yet, despite all the effort expended on discussions and planning, exactly what was supposed to happen then was far from resolved. It wasn't that the Thuriens and Terrans were unable to agree on goals or a strategy for attaining them. It was simply that surprisingly little was known about the war and its times, and even less about events over the years leading up to it.

Practically all of Minerva's libraries and records had been destroyed with the planet. Probably influenced by the guilt they still felt aeons later over their disastrous attempts to depopulate the Earth of predators, the Thuriens had adopted a policy of staying out of Lunarian affairs and developing their own part of the Galaxy centered on Gistar. Only in the war's final days, when monitors that they had left on the fringes of the Solar System registered the explosion that signaled Minerva's end, did they throw together a hasty mission to investigate-so hasty that they ignored their normal rule of not projecting gravitationally disruptive transfer ports into planetary systems. The upheaval caused by the port created for the rescue mission launched Minerva's orphaned moon on the trajectory that eventually brought it to Earth. It also impelled the largest intact piece of Minerva outward to become Pluto.

Miraculously, some Lunarians survived on pieces of what had been Minerva; but unsurprisingly, there had been very few. They were recovered from niches they had found in proto-Pluto and other fragments; as bands scattered across the lunar surface-itself a devastated waste from the conflict; and from assorted craft and orbiting stations left adrift amid all the wreckage. Preserving political texts and historical records had not been high among the priorities the survivors had been concerned with at the time. It was only much later that accounts were obtained from the Lambians brought back to Thurien, who would later give rise to the Jevlenese. Those accounts had been almost entirely verbal and reproduced from memory. The people they came from were disproportionately from such groups as soldiers, space crew, mining and construction workers, farmers, hunters, villagers, and other from areas remote from the war zones, rather than urban dwellers, scholars, or professionals likely to have studied such matters.

The tactic adopted for the Minerva mission, therefore, was the straightforward one of aiming somewhere "downstream"-i.e., a time following the war-as best as could be gauged, and working back "up" in a series of reconnaissance from which it was hoped to glean enough information to determine a more propitious intervention point.

VISAR had sent the beacons into the appropriate region accordingly-two beacons was now the norm, although there had been no failures. Preliminary readings indicated the time period to be about right. The astronomical fixes had located Jupiter and Saturn but not Minerva, but that didn't mean a lot, since it could have been on the far side of the Sun. There was some electronic chatter, but it couldn't be interpreted because the Lunarian communications procedures of the period were unknown. The only way to find out more would be for the Shapieron to go there and have a look around.

A tense but curious silence pervaded the Command Deck as all eyes took in the images from outside being presented on the screens. "The beacons are here," ZORAC reported. "We're at the right place, anyhow. The channel back to home is up and working." Images of Calazar, Caldwell, and anxious faces watching from MP2, the lab at Quelsang, and a location somewhere in the Government Center at Thurios formed a montage on the main screen.

"Well, I guess this is it," Caldwell said. "We'll talk to you again when you check in later." The M-connection from Thurien to the beacons would remain, and the beacons would still be capable of relaying via a regular communications beam. However, the Shapieron would be cut off from regular communications when it activated its main drive, which created an encapsulating manifold of deformed spacetime that electromagnetic signals couldn't penetrate.

"It won't be long," Hunt answered. "When we've just had a quick check around."

"Good fortune be with you all," Calazar said.

"We have no doubts about it," Eesyan replied.

"Take it easy with that thing, Junior," VISAR said-aimed at ZORAC, to amuse the bioforms.

"Junior? I was driving this ship before you were a design spec."

"Report local status," the supervisor requested.

"Wave function consolidated and stabilized," Garuth responded. "Ready to detach."

"Dissolving the bubble."

"Local bubble deactivated," ZORAC advised.

The screens showing he link from Thurien cut out. The Shapieron was a free body, now part of a different universe, as it had existed somewhere around fifty thousand years in the past.

"ZORAC, go to main drive," Garuth instructed. "Take us to the first reference."

This began a series of stops and checks around the Solar System to verify that the Shapieron was operating normally under main drive conditions, and to assess where and when they were. Minerva was not to be found. Its moon was located, already on a course that would carry it inward toward the sun, and nascent Pluto, emerging from the dispersing cloud of planetary debris. A long range view from closer in showed the recently arrived Thurien rescue ships commencing their thankless task. The Shapieron was able to pick up identifiable Thurien crosstalk on the regular local bands and in h-link mode. There was little talk around the Shapieron's Command Deck. Garuth decided that they would not announce themselves. The rescuers out there had enough to think about without the situation being complicated further.

One more thing needed to be verified before they departed. Broghuilio and his Jevlenese were thought to have appeared at Minerva at around the time that the Lambian-Cerian rift was developing. Whether the Jevlenese had actually caused it was unknown. But even if not, the warlike disposition and ambitions of conquest that Broghilio had displayed on Minerva suggested that they would have been involved in escalating tensions to the eventual outbreak of war. Since the Shapieron was witnessing the termination of that war, it had obviously arrived at a point in time that lay after the arrival of the Jevlenese. Exactly how long after, nobody could say. The Thurien interrogators at the time had asked no questions about Jevlenese, for Jevlenese didn't yet exist, while the Lunarian survivors had said nothing about any mysterious aliens showing up at some point in the past. And that was hardly surprising. For if events had indeed followed the course that was surmised, it meant that one side was being aided by an alien intrusion whose existence could only have united the general Lunarian population in opposition had they known about it. Hence, Broghuilio and his cohort, and whatever Lunarian element had thrown its lot in with them, would have every reason to conceal the fact of the new allies' origins-which the fully human form of the Jevlenese would have facilitated greatly.

From the fragments of Lunarian records available at the time of the original "Charlie" investigations, it had been guessed that the Jevlenese arrived at Minerva a century or two before the war. The more recent researches that Duncan and Sandy had helped with now put it at far less. The Lambian leader at the time the war escalated to destroying the planet was a dictator called Xerasky. He had come to power upon the death of his predecessor Zargon, which few at the time doubted Xerasky had engineered. Zargon had been a former military general of the last of the Lambian kings, Freskel-Gar. Zargon was an unknown who came rapidly to the fore in initiating and commanding an advanced militarization program. He later ousted Freskel-Gar and proclaimed a dictatorship, taking charge himself. The suggestion that Zargon might have been Broghuilio was obvious, but it was still speculation. Zargon had appeared abruptly somewhere around twenty years before Minerva's destruction.

When the Jevlenese ships exited from the turmoil of spacetime that had tunneled them from another universe, they had been followed by the probe whose last transmitted image of Minerva had gotten back before the tunnel closed. Hunt, Danchekker, Garuth, and others aboard the Shapieron now had been present when that image came in. The probe was from the Shapieron, which had been pursuing the Jevlenese. Fifty thousand years later, orbiting on the edge of the Solar System and carrying still functional h-band equipment, it would relay the first signals that opened up contact between modern Earth and Thurien. If it had arrived at Minerva twenty years previously with the Jevlenese, that probe should be out there somewhere now. This was the one final thing to check.

ZORAC used the ship's communications gear to scan a circle around the ecliptic, sending out the appropriate call codes. And sure enough the probe returned an acknowledgment and fix from a position not too far from Minerva-it would have fifty thousand years to find its way out to the edge of the Solar System. It meant that, yes, Broghuilio and the Jevlenese had arrived. But they were already a part of Minerva's past. The Shapieron needed to move farther upstream against the flow of events.

"That's all we need to know," Eesyan told Garuth. "There's no more for us to do here."

Garuth brought the Shapieron back to the vicinity of the primary beacon. A call via the beacon when the ship had powered down from main drive reestablished contact with Thurien.

"Lock on to ship's compensator confirmed," the supervisor's voice advised. "Suppressor compensation positive. Stabilizing the bubble… You're set to come home."

"You guys don't seem very talkative," Caldwell commented, back on the circuit. Silence hung heavily for a second or two.

"I guess there's not really a lot you can say, Gregg," Hunt answered finally.