Crucible of Time
Page 14
This was their own history, the stones seemed to want to say, and it was important to know where they came from.
Julie thought it over, and then murmured agreement. /All right,/ she said with a shiver. /Maybe we can find out what’s happened to our friends from the sea./
Chapter 12
Birth of the Ancestors
AWARENESS CAME AND went, but pain endured. For the tortured being trapped in the chamber of the mechs, time was measured by the changes forced upon it, changes that were tested, tested again, changed again. Mechanical elements were stitched and tested; most were cut away. New sensoria were tried, failed, retried, and changed or abandoned. There was an incessant feeling of thirst, unslakable, as though everything that had been taken away was encapsulated in that one sensation: a parched dryness, a longing for the briny deeps, for the water of life that was freedom, joy, and recognition of being; for the water that was gone forever.
That which had been Tzangtzang-Drrllupp no longer knew who or what it was, but it knew it was not alone; there were others like it nearby being similarly tortured with change.
Endless cycles of change . . .
*
There were rare times when that-which-had-been-Tzangtzang-Drrllupp saw the sun and the open air. But only as part of a test, and never for long, never free. So altered was its sensorium that only in a tiny chamber of its mind was it even aware that the sensations streaming in were from the same sun it had, in another life, known as the giver of life.
The mechs now were the giver of life.
And yet, about them was a brooding sense of darkness.
The mechs were creating something new, strange and powerful. But for what purpose?
*
Almost lost, deep within the tangle of alterations and mecho-cybernetic layers, there remained a flickering ember of the original beings, a remnant of the soul. And the barest breath of freedom . . .
***
To study what had gone on here since their first visit, it was necessary to backtrack in time once more. The stones changed the focus pastward, to a point close to their first visit.
The atmosphere of the planet grew huge and misty in Julie’s view. They were coming down over ocean. The progenitor entities they had watched launching futureward of here had come up out of the oceans, or possibly from scattered islands to the west of the continent of their first visit.
*Be aware, there is some uncertainty in our measurement of temporal location. We expect to have to home in by trying and then correcting.*
/Of course,/ Julie answered. As they brought the ghoststream down toward the waters and a small cluster of islands, she felt more vulnerable than was probably realistic; she felt like a wing-walker on a diving airplane.
*Prepare for a snapshot approach.*
They were trying a different method of surveillance this time, in hopes of gaining the most information, while minimizing the chances of being seen by the natives. Instead of hovering and observing, they were going to drop fast, drop close, and pause just long enough to snap up images and data. Then they would jump—place to place, and up and down a little section of the timeline, and try to put together enough dots to construct a picture of this narrow piece of history.
Wrapped in their bubble, they slid down through the clouds. An island blossomed in their view, dancing as the ghoststream made small corrections. The stones and the instruments recorded furiously. Then they sprang up and away, and darted toward the next island, and the next. After a dozen islands, they shifted futureward to another slice of time, and did it again.
Julie felt as though she were riding a small plane on a bumpy approach to a socked-in airport, with only momentary gaps opening in the clouds. It was all too disjointed for her to make sense of what she was seeing, but she held onto her hope that once the data were assembled, it would all come together to form a picture. Beside her, she sensed Ik’s agitation. Was he sharing her feeling, or did he actually make something out? She called: /Ik?/
He started to answer, but more abrupt changes interrupted him. They were suddenly down on the deck over a craggy island landscape, and for the first time in all their searching, they saw scraps of plant life on the surface—a startling evolutionary change. On the next islands, they saw more. They shifted futureward again. Now, on the same islands, they glimpsed populations of furry, quadrupedal creatures bustling in and out of caves, and in and out of the sea. Hints of artificial structures appeared. Were these creatures building a civilization?
A later time: From high overhead, they gazed down on whole clusters of islands, among which boats churned with urgent speed. On the submarine floor of a lagoon, shadows of long, slender shapes seemed to dance beneath the waves, dappled by jittery light beaming down through the shallow sea. The stones gathered images furiously, and then plunged them down into the waters for a closer look. They glimpsed rows of rocket launchers—they could be nothing else—lined up on the bottom of the sea. What was this? How could this be?
They had overshot in time, and missed some history.
Their search for the pieces of the story became frantic. The stones racked them pastward and futureward. They made scores more drop-visits, gathering glimpses: of island wildernesses; of cave-cities; of fishing fleets; of farming on the island slopes. Rockets under construction in caves. But for what?
Finally they pulled away in exhaustion. Julie and Ik slept, or tried to, while the stones worked furiously to put the picture together . . .
***
Deep in the heart of the Once-TzangtzangDrrllupKrilltn, the ember continued to burn, hidden from the mech-things that tore them apart and forced them back together again in a hundred different ways. Alive in that ember was the knowledge of who they were, had been, could never be again. But if they could never be the same, that didn’t mean they couldn’t yet be free.
Other knowledge continued to accumulate in them, practical knowledge poured into them in the service of furthering the Mindbody goals—which were still largely unrevealed, except in disjointed pieces. Whatever the goals were, it was evident they were driven by malice. During those periods of being forced open to receive knowledge, a supreme effort was required to conceal their plan to rebel.
***
The stones proposed that they needed to get closer, and Julie and Ik agreed. Moving the endpoint of the ghoststream eastward from the islands, they dropped back down over the coastline where they had first spotted the Mindaru. The land was transformed; it was now a hard surface striated with sparkling circuitry. The Mindaru were growing exponentially, the land itself becoming Mindaru. Inland, across the baked desert, they found the surface ever more cracked and crazed in the sun. Or perhaps it was more deliberate than that. The ground was divided into small squares like sun-cracked clay but precisely regular. Some of the squares trembled visibly, as if on the verge of erupting into the sky. Were they the tops of space vessels preparing to blast off toward the timestream?
That was a scary enough thought. But the story threads remained unclear. Were these things a threat to the islanders? Where had the islanders come from, anyway? What made them want to flee their homeworld? And what had become of the original turtlelike creatures of the coast? Important pieces of the story were still missing.
*We require more data.*
They pulled back and tried other times, other stretches of coastline. Earlier . . . later . . . up and down the timeline. Julie’s head spun; she could no longer keep track of where and when they were.
Image upon image.
Gradually the picture filled out. The coastal creatures had grown into a developed people in the shadow of the Mindaru, with technology and modest infrastructure along the seashore. Somewhere along the line the quadrupeds appeared, and coexisted with the turtlelike swimmers. A mutation? An unrelated species from elsewhere on the continent? Some of them began to venture out to the nearer islands, the first hints of their becoming a seafaring people.
The Mindaru, meanwhile, had developed a host of
machines that moved over the surface of the land, carving and shaping it—and sometimes capturing more of the coastals and carrying them underground. What happened to those captives was not visible.
Futureward up the timestream, however, the captives began to reemerge. They were altered, barely recognizable; they had been transformed into strange and grotesque hybrids of the coastals and the Mindaru.
***
Would there ever be an opportunity to escape? It was hard to see how there could be; they were imprisoned deep in caverns that only the captors knew the ins and outs of, and there was no end to the experimentation on them.
But a time came when they were brought to the surface. Perhaps to test their capabilities in the open. Perhaps to instill fear in the hearts of the unchanged, on the surface. The reason was not revealed, but for now the control over them was as strong as ever.
Perhaps there were tests in mind, tests of the new bodies under the rigors of outdoor life, tests of the autonomous control that would have them roaming independently while doing the will of the captors. Whatever the purpose, their captors remained unaware of the hidden will, the memories and the soul of Once-TzangtzangDrrllupKrilltn and of others that burned, still, deep beneath the layers of programming.
In the field testing came a moment when the mecho-cybernetic control, by design, was withdrawn to allow testing of the bio-autonomy programming in the beleaguered creatures. That was the opening they needed. The long-banked fires emerged; the inner souls sprang forth and found their leverage to wrest internal control back; and the beings fled across the beach and into the sea, headlong deep into the sea.
***
The coastals, perhaps following the escaped hybrids, fled offshore in large numbers—migrating to the islands and abandoning their settlements on land. Julie wondered if there would be war over the escape. But while the hybrids and swimming coastals vanished under the sea, the quadrupeds fled in boats on the surface, evading the Mindaru rather than fighting them. Those that did not escape were captured or destroyed. The Mindaru seemed disinclined to pursue escapees across open ocean. Being electronic, were they afraid of the water? Or did they have more urgent matters on their minds?
Whatever the reason, the coastals were able to establish a foothold on the islands, where they developed with almost frantic haste. Were they driven by fear? By the peril of their forced exile? At times the hybrid fugitives could be seen among them. They were hard to track from the ghoststream view once they reached the islands. Many disappeared into caves—not as captives but as refugees—or back into the sea. What sorts of lives did they then lead? Quiet desperation? Pain? Were they the start of some weird, strangely forced evolution?
The stones called another pause, and pulled back while Ik and Julie rested. The stones did not rest, but churned internally, trying to assemble the story from the pieces—the story of themselves, their ancestors, and who they were.
Julie was staggered by the implications.
*We are stunned also. But this knowledge could be crucial.*
The time travelers moved futureward, close to the time of the Mindaru departure and the flight of the Ancestors. There was fighting now—skirmishes on land and Mindaru raids on the islands. The Mindaru had mobile units, but were largely a weird encrustation of circuitry across all the land, and possibly deep into the crust, as well. They seemed indifferent to the islanders but desired control of the hybrids, who perhaps were regarded as valued stock for future use.
The fighting occurred in fits and starts. During pauses, the islanders and hybrids worked furiously constructing escape vessels beneath the sea. The Mindaru seemed preoccupied with other matters: mastering control of gravitation, and quantum physics. By this time, they had long since ventured off-planet; now they focused on preparing their way into the sparkling rift of the timestream. The first wave of Mindaru explorers went forth to learn more.
On the ground, they had a change of heart and took a more aggressive interest in the islanders. They began building solid structures out to sea, topping the water surface with their knobbly, glittering masses of circuitry. As the wave-smothering encrustation grew, it swallowed everything in its path. Observation snapshots soon revealed islander settlements burned and scarred and transformed into something that now looked like a continuation of the Mindaru mass. Whatever the Mindaru intended, it included assimilation and scorched earth.
The islanders and the hybrids had no choice but to flee once more.
***
The final stage of their escape was driven by blind urgency, bordering on panic. The mechs were closing in on them. It had always been known that their escape to the sea, and back into the company of beings they once might have called their own kind, was at best a temporary respite. The mechs had allowed them to live, perhaps to gain more knowledge on the outside, but that time was coming to a close. The mechs were on the march with intent to kill or capture, and Once-TzangtzangDrrllupKrilltn and all the others were almost certainly among the targeted. If they were recaptured, there would be no second escape.
The space launchers were ready, but untested. The strange opening into space-time that floated in the sky seemed to offer a promise of escape forever, if the captor-mechs could be avoided, especially the mechs that had gone that way ahead of them. The working knowledge that had been embedded in the refugees included much that was known about the space-time rift, including the key to transformation into quantum flatwave. Apparently their old masters had planned to take them along on their pilgrimage, but under tight control.
It was agony to think of leaving the cradle of life for the utter unknown. But surely it was better than what would come if they stayed. And far better than leaving as slaves.
The time to act was upon them.
***
Julie shuddered with relief when the stones pulled the ghoststream bubble up and away from the planet’s surface. For a time, they hovered above the planet’s atmosphere, as the translator-stones assembled a report to transmit back to home base.
When the first wave of Mindaru rose from the planet, Julie felt an almost overwhelming desire to pursue and destroy them. But it gladdened her heart when at last they watched the fiery escape of the beleaguered islanders from the seabed into the starry blaze of space, and then into the timestream.
Chapter 13
Flight of the Ancestors
THE STONES TRANSMITTED their conclusions back to Base Control, while Julie and Ik listened.
*High probability that the coastal creatures are early precursors to the yaantel. Direct link cannot be established, but high degree of resonance between personal observation and historical information points strongly to a connection.*
Which, coming from daughters of the translator, Julie thought, was pretty good confirmation by anyone else’s standards.
*Coastal creatures arose in close proximity to the Mindaru, but separate from them. A bifurcation point appears where some of their number were imprisoned and radically altered by the M. The resulting life form likely combines elements of the M. with the original coast-dwellers. Those hybrid beings later escaped and rejoined their biological forebears, and as a group fled from their habitat for new homes offshore.
*The modification followed by escape may represent a critical stage for the multimode species that we believe became ancestral to the yaantel. As a matter of nomenclature, therefore, we refer to this group, and those that followed, as the Ancestors.*
Julie stirred from her quiet rest, deeply uncomfortable with the notion that anything good came out of the mutilation of the coastal creatures by the Mindaru.
But the stones continued: *We cannot know why the Ancestors fled only to the islands and not farther from the shore. Nevertheless, that hybrid became a race unto itself—one that escaped from the power that made it, first out to sea, and then away from the planet altogether, and finally into the timestream and the future. We can only speculate on what they felt as they fled their birthplace.*
/With some very pi
ssed Mindaru following,/ Julie murmured.
*Julie’s parenthetical remark is affirmed. But whether the M. were pursuing in anger or simply launching an assault on the galaxy, we cannot say.*
/Hrah, I think we can,/ Ik said, shifting slightly so that he loomed like a shadow next to Julie in the bubble. /I think it was both anger and an assault./ Silence filled the bubble for a moment, before Ik continued, /But what, hrrm, does this mean for our mission? We came here to learn, and to try to protect the future. We have learned. Now, how do we protect the future?/
/We have to protect the Ancestors’ escape,/ Julie said. /Whatever else, we have to do that! We can’t let the Mindaru stop them!/
The transmission circuit went dark, and the stones spoke only to them. *The goal is clear. Protect the timeline. Do not interfere, except to prevent interference. The method, however, is less clear.*
/Protecting the Ancestors is protecting the timeline!/ Julie said. /If we see the Mindaru attacking your ancestors, we need to take action./
/But how?/ Ik asked again.
*Our options seem limited.*
/We were sent to undo whatever damage the last crew left behind,/ Julie insisted. /We can call in a directed energy strike from the launch point, can’t we?/
*That option is available, but risky. A decoherence beam down the ghoststream might be able to close the breach that the last mission caused. But it is not a precision tool. It might kill the Mindaru in the stream, which could be useful. It might also kill the Ancestors, which would not. And it could break the entanglement that makes our own presence possible.* The stones paused. *Thus decreasing the likelihood of our survival.*
/Oh,/ said Julie.
*It could rebound in an uncontrolled fashion, and kill us all on the way back up, as it did the last crew.*
Julie said nothing.