Allied powers, p.15
Allied Powers, page 15
“Not in the Bellerophon. We’ve got no cold storage for them, and without it, they’d start rotting after a day or two. If there’s anyone left to do it, when this is all over, I’ll make sure someone sends a ship back for them.”
Walking in a vacuum was always surreal, even when I wasn’t dodging mummified bodies. There was something about having gravity but no air that didn’t seem right, as if the two should go together. No sound, no footsteps except the unechoing vibration that came up through my armor. No darkness, no night. Just the ever-present noonday of the unshaded star, powering and warming an entire civilization long dead, waiting here to shelter whoever came next.
“I wonder if the airlock is still working.” Julie’s voice was small and distant, a million miles away despite her being just a few steps behind me, her light-blue Space Force vacuum suit standing out against the grey metal of the ground. It had once been brown and green, I guessed, probably covered in topsoil and plants before the hard vacuum had killed everything, sucked anything not fastened down either through the hole or into the star.
“There it is,” Quinn said, gesturing at the entrance we’d discovered months ago. “Let’s go find out.”
The transmission tower was reminiscent of a steppe pyramid, deceptively large because every other structure was even bigger. The Dyson sphere wasn’t hurting for elbow room and it seemed that whoever had been in charge of the architecture had taken full advantage of that. The entrance was broad and tall, and probably could have fit a deuce and a half cargo truck through it, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell what you were driving into because through that yawning doorway was…nothing. Blackness so deep no light could penetrate it.
“I think that means the field is still up,” I guessed.
“I’ll go first,” Quinn offered, bringing his M900 KE rifle up to low ready and taking a step through the doorway before I could object. The blackness swallowed him up and I jogged over to where he’d been, scowling.
“Dammit, Quinn.”
I knew from last time that the radios wouldn’t make it through the field, so I waited. Either he’d come back out and tell us it was clear in a couple minutes or I’d go charging in after him, because what the hell else was I gonna do? Julie came up beside me, close enough that I could make out her worried frown through the visor of her helmet.
“How long should we give him?” she asked, cradling an M27 carbine across her chest. It wasn’t much if there were any Bugs here, but it was better than harsh language.
I glanced at the clock in the corner of my helmet’s HUD before answering. It wasn’t good for much out here, but at least it could tell me how long Quinn had been inside.
“Another minute,” I decided. “Then…”
He stepped back through the barrier and I very nearly shot him myself before I relaxed, blowing out a breath.
“It’s clear,” he informed us. “Nothing inside that I can see.”
I brushed past him and stepped through. Everything was darkness for a fraction of a second, and then some alien god said, let there be light! And air. The sensors went green immediately, letting me know there was a breathable atmosphere on the other side of my helmet, and I pushed the visor up, giving it the sniff test.
“Seems okay,” I judged.
Everything else was the same as it had been last time I’d stepped through. Floors of glittering white quartz, spotless and antiseptic…and lacking the dead bodies we’d left here. No blood, none of the black ooze that passed for it in the Bugs. Nothing.
Then there were the walls. Maybe. Random patterns of light and darkness, indescribable by any terms in my experience, seemed to shift with each step I took. What I thought was a solid partition one second faded in the next instant, giving way to another configuration. At one point, I was sure I could see straight up through the entire height of the structure, right up to the bulbous perturbance at its crown, could see an inverted nautilus shell pattern rising, curving through the length of it, like the entire building was a machine.
And then it was gone, an illusion, and I was trapped in a single story again, the ceiling only a foot above my head, dark as interstellar space, lower than the entranceway. The walls were straight and then curved, convex and concave, swirling patterns of hypnotic colors and then bare white, and then they were gone again. It was vertigo-inducing and I stopped, closing my eyes, trying to get a handle on my inner ear.
“Graham!” I barked. “Stop that shit and get your ass out here right now!”
I opened my eyes and the interior of the tower had changed yet again, as if between the seconds. Where there had once been seemingly random splashes of color, now there were walls, straight up and down, a calming earth tone enclosing a chamber just big enough to not feel claustrophobic. Paintings hung on the walls in polished, wooden frames, images of woodlands and gardens, streams and rivers and lakes, seashores and mountains. They were photorealistic and might have been photographs, though I had the sense they were meant to be paintings.
There was no furniture, no doors, no windows, no obvious source for the daylight glow that filled the room, but at least things had stabilized and I wasn’t in danger of puking. Quinn’s visor was up and he looked remarkably calm, as if this wasn’t the freakiest thing he’d seen in his life. I’d been through a lot of shit, and it definitely made my top-five freakiest moments list.
“It smells like a pine forest in here,” Julie said, her helmet off already, tucked under her arm. “How the hell does he do that? I wish the Bellerophon smelled like a pine forest.”
“You guys should have snagged some air fresheners to hang from the rearview mirror,” I told her. Another look around the room, but still nothing. “Goddammit, Graham! We know you’re here. Get your ass out here and talk to us. You owe us that much! If it weren’t for the fucking signal coming from this tower, we never would have come here in the first place, and we never would have had the Bugs chasing us back to our space. Get out here and talk to us.”
“The Bugs have already destroyed at least one entire civilization,” Julie said, looking upward as if Graham was hovering over us like a ghost in a play. “Maybe two. Billions of people are dead, Graham. And it’s partially your fault. The least you could do is explain things to us.”
Nothing. Part of me was loath to give away information free, but we had to bait him out of hiding, and maybe making him think we already knew too much would do it.
“We found the engraving on the world with the avian…avianoids, whatever, the bird people,” I told him. “We know the Elders are trying to change this universe from eternal expansion and heat death to a Big Crunch-Big Bang model. We know about the time travel.”
“The correct term is a closed, time-like loop.”
One instant there was nothing, the next he was there. He was tall and broad-shouldered, narrow at the waist and long-limbed, though not overtly muscular. Sort of the Renaissance ideal of a Greek god, though this man didn’t look either Greek or Italian. If I’d had to guess, I would have pegged him for Asian, though there was something Hispanic about his features as well…and maybe African and Caucasian, if I looked hard enough. His hair was cut close to his scalp, dark and wavy, and he was clean-shaven without a hint of a five-o’clock shadow. His face was narrow-jawed and lean, his eyes brown, as piercing as ground-penetrating radar.
His clothes gave me the most pause. Not because they were unimaginably strange but because…they weren’t. They were no design I could have identified by nationality or culture, nor from some specific time period in history, but neither were they anything that would have drawn more than a passing glance if they’d been worn in the streets of Paris or New York. They reminded me of a cross between the fashion of a frontier gambler from the old west and a photo I’d seen of the Beatles in Nehru jackets, and only the colors stood out as unusual, angular stripes of deep green alternating with slate grey.
“Hello Graham,” I said, sighing with relief, my shoulders feeling as if a weight had lifted off them. “Nice seeing you again.”
17
He wasn’t real, of course…or at least he wasn’t an actual, physical being. It was a projection, probably holographic but maybe something even more complicated, something with heft and solidity. I’d never tested it. He was an artificial intelligence, and not the tame sort we’d been experimenting with for decades. He was a sentient system, Pinocchio turned into a real boy.
“Well, okay, then,” I went on. “We know about the closed, time-like loop. Is that what started all this? Did the Elders somehow…come here from the future?”
Graham folded his arms and regarded me like a teacher patronizing a particularly slow child.
“That sort of passage through the loop is impossible. The most that they were ever able to accomplish was to send a signal back.”
Graham paced around us, weaving through the three of us, and I edged away from him, still unsure whether I’d feel anything if he touched me and not wanting to find out.
“As I understand it,” Julie said, sounding unintimidated by the…thing, “the way a closed, time-like loop works is, you can only send anything back to the point that the loop was created.”
“And did your physicists come up with this theory,” Graham asked her, cocking his head to the side in a catlike motion, “before or after they were aware of the existence of hyperdimensional travel at effective speeds faster than light?”
Not many people were able to leave Julie nonplussed, just me and now, as far as I knew, this dude. I wanted to high-five him, but again, didn’t want to know if that was possible.
“The how is not really important,” I interjected before the thing made Julie mad at it. “The why is.”
I looked around instinctively for a chair, frowned when I didn’t find one. I could have set the suit to support me, but for some reason, I really wanted a chair. And a table. I think I’d been hanging around Mike with all his meetings in the ops center too much.
“You yourself said the why of it,” Graham replied, spreading his hands. The fingers were long and agile, like the AI imagined himself a concert pianist. “This universe was doomed to heat death. The ones you call the Elders wished it not to be so.”
“Why do all the pictures of the Elders look like us?” Quinn demanded. It was a good question, and one I was going to get around to, but there were so many other questions I’d wanted to ask first. “Like humans, I mean?”
“Can we have a table?” I blurted, knowing he could do it. “And chairs? I feel stupid standing around here.”
And they were there. I didn’t know how, but more importantly, I didn’t know when they came into existence. It wasn’t like they appeared, or popped into being by magic. It was as if they’d always been there. The table was large and round, seemingly constructed from polished oak, while the chairs were padded leather, looking as if they’d been built for the office of a Nineteenth-Century oil tycoon, except two of them were big enough to support Svalinn armor. I touched one of them hesitantly and it was solid beneath the push of my glove.
Suppressing a shudder, I pulled it out and sat down…and so did Graham. He needed it less than I did, but I suppose he wanted to make us feel comfortable.
“You ask why the Elders are portrayed as humans in the art of the uplifted races,” he answered Quinn’s question, steepling his fingers as if deep in thought. “Yet you know the answer. Occam’s razor, you call it.” He stared straight into my eyes, the illusion of a man somehow pinning me down with his ice-blue glare. “The Elders are human.”
“Now, that’s impossible!” Julie exclaimed, leaning toward Graham, palms flat on the table. “Humans evolved on Earth. And you just said there’s no way to bring matter back through the time loop. So it wasn’t us coming back through time.” She blinked and shook her head. “As fucking ridiculous as that even sounds.”
“You can’t send matter. But you can send information. As long as there’s someone to receive it.” Graham’s eyes weren’t real, yet somehow, they got colder. “Humans did evolve on Earth. But they weren’t the first intelligent life to evolve in this galaxy.” He shrugged. “You’ll find out eventually. You’ll find their remains, once you reach that far. They were unremarkable except in so far as any intelligent life to evolve is incredibly remarkable. They weren’t exceptionally curious, weren’t fast to develop…their only rare quality was that they survived.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Many other intelligent species might have evolved—the galaxy is huge, after all, the universe infinitely more so. But as far as we were able to tell when I was left here alone, none survived long enough to get off their planet, none developed the technology to make themselves known outside their star system. Before the Lotus.”
“The Lotus?” I repeated.
“It was our term for them. Theirs would be meaningless to you, unpronounceable by a human. They were so different from you that it might be impossible for you to understand their perspective on the universe without studying them for decades. Luckily for the Elders, they left very complete records. So, when the decision was made to send the message back through the millions of years to the Lotus, they knew exactly where to send it, exactly what form of communication to use, and most importantly, exactly how to phrase it, how to convince the Lotus to do just as the message instructed them.”
“What did the message tell them to do?” I asked him, a twisting feeling in my stomach that I already knew the answer.
“It told them to build me.”
“Fuck.” I was a writer—I should have been able to think of something more coherent, more momentous, but I was also a Marine. Fuck contained a multitude of meanings, and at that moment, I meant every single one of them.
“I was all they needed,” Graham went on, ignoring my brilliant commentary. The AI reminded me of the worst colonels I’d known in my military career. Present company excepted. He was full of himself and his own importance. Though maybe if I was a couple million years old, I might be pretty conceited, too. “I had the information the Elders had sent through with me, the knowledge of how to construct DNA from its chemical components, how to build artificial wombs to grow humans from DNA constructs. How to build the human-like robots to raise them.”
“What was the point?” Julie demanded. A muscle in her cheek was twitching, and I knew from experience she was trying to keep her anger under control. She thought this was all bullshit, that much was clear. She didn’t believe a word of it. “What would the fucking point be of sending you back to create humans?” She threw up her hands in obvious frustration. “Weren’t we just saying that the whole exercise was to change the structure of the fucking universe? What good would it do to send you back? What could you do?”
“You undoubtedly believe that only adding matter to the universe could reverse expansion,” Graham said, not seeming to take offense at her skepticism. “No doubt yet another theory constructed before you knew of the hyperdrive.”
“There’s another way?” I asked.
“The Elders believed so.” He smiled thinly. “Do you know how long it took them—how long it would have taken you—to discover the principles behind the hyperdrive? You were gifted it, so you probably believe it’s something you would have discovered on your own in another few decades, left to your own ends. Humans universally share this sort of arrogance.” His eyes had been blue. I could have sworn they were blue. Now they were earth brown, though I didn’t know why he would change them. “It took three hundred thousand years. Do you have any comprehension of how long that is? Your homo sapiens ancestors only appeared on Earth three hundred thousand years ago.”
I blinked, my brain short-circuiting at the information.
“And how many times did civilization fall in those three hundred thousand years?” I asked him.
“Countless. They’d changed so much, you wouldn’t have recognized them as human. But once they did develop the hyperdrive, they discovered something fascinating about it. It distorts the fabric of spacetime…you at least know that much?” I wanted to snap the answer, but I also wanted to get the facts, which wouldn’t happen if we kept interrupting, so I just nodded. “It contracts the fabric of the universe with each wormhole it creates. A fraction, barely discernable. Small enough that if they kept using the hyperdrive at the current rate for the next few million years, it still wouldn’t be enough. But if they went back to the time of the Lotus and gave it to them…” Graham snorted. “They encouraged the Lotus to spread out across the galaxy, but the Lotus, as alien as they were to human sensibilities, as predictable as the Elders thought they would be from perusing their records, had an unexpected reaction to this new race trying to tell them what to do. They tried to kill them. And humans being humans, the Elders wiped them out of existence.”
Well, that was a kick in the gut. Not that I should have been surprised, but I was. I’d gotten used to thinking of the Elders as some ancient, wise alien race who could solve all our problems. Realizing they were just people, and not entirely good people at that, was a letdown.
“The war set them back. And not just because the Lotus managed to destroy much of the infrastructure they’d built, but because, well…there just weren’t enough of them. They needed technological civilizations, and they needed them soon, which meant they needed habitable worlds, which meant they needed life. And they’d just killed off all the life in that section of the galaxy. So, they went back to the one place they knew there was life.”
“Earth,” I finished for him.
“Earth,” Graham agreed. “But they couldn’t simply take up habitation there, because they still needed humans to evolve on their own.” He laughed, a brittle sound. “Well, they thought they needed humans to evolve, in order to avoid a paradox, though they never quite figured out whether that was accurate or not. It’s a hard thing to test. They set about terraforming as many worlds as they could, but first they needed a base of operations, somewhere that would allow them to live and grow for eons.” He motioned above us, then below. “This place.”
