Andre Norton - [Time Traders (Ross Murdock) 07]

by Atlantis Endgame (epub)

Eveleen floated up to the other side and did the same, looking past her bubbles. She had to be careful. There were several kinds of coral, brilliant in color, but sharp and deadly; she did not need a cut in her gloves.

  They felt over the rock, and she bent close and examined some of the weirder sea plants. They all looked real enough, but if the aliens were clever enough, she might be fooled. She wasn't any kind of an expert on undersea life, especially in the Mediterranean.

  Slowly they worked their way inward, and after a time gave up the tactile exploration. Kosta dove down to sift through the fine sand at the bottom of the cavern. Eveleen kept looking at the vast dark hole. Just how deep was this cave, anyway?

  She was strongly tempted to go exploring but forced herself to join Kosta and work over the seafloor.

  They'd kicked up quite a bit of sand when Kosta finally sat back, his hands clenched into fists.

  Eveleen gestured toward the inner part of the cave. He shrugged:Why not? It took him only minutes to cross back to the opening of the cavern and return with the sled.

  So they pushed off, relieved to be doing something, at least. Eveleen could feel the coarser hum of the sled's engine, now at its lowest speed.

  The lancing blue and yellow sunbeams from the surface very swiftly vanished. They could still see the cave mouth behind them, but light did not penetrate far. Eveleen reached over and turned up the intensity on the sled's headlamp, then turned her own down a bit; her battery power was now reading just above half. She knew there was an emergency supply, but she didn't want to have to rely on that if they had to do another search by feel.

  The cave bent suddenly and angled up. Strange. Was the rock smoother?

  She turned to Kosta at the same moment he faced her, and pointed. There were no sea plants here, just smooth rock. It was a slab. Could it have been made by a great shifting of land, a quake?

  They proceeded at a slow pace, Eveleen watching to her side and Kosta to his, with the sled illumining the way ahead to give maximum visibility.

  On and on, and then another sharp turn. The sled banged against the rock as Kosta maneuvered it around.

  And then they stopped, staring.

  The cave widened; there, settled on the seafloor, rested one of the great globe ships.

  CHAPTER 15

  DOWN IN THE cave with the machinery, the two Kayu faced the Time Agents. One of them manipulated the computer, or whatever that egg thing was. Ross noted sourly that if his attempt to crash it had been successful, there was no sign of it.

  One of the Fur Faces signed something to the other, adding a low comment in its clicking, trilling language, and then from the machine came a voice—in English.

  "Our previous study indicates that you respond to this tongue."

  Neither man moved.

  "We use it in preference to the style of Greek the traders bring here because the vocabulary is easier to adapt to what must be discussed. But first we must reveal to you the fact that we have been waiting for you to appear, that everything is in readiness; it remains for you to make the decision what must occur next."

  Who can resist an opening like that?

  Ross knew that if he were alone, he'd ride with the wave and see what happened, but he deferred to Ashe, the more senior agent—and the one who made fewer mistakes.

  Ashe looked up at Ross, his head canted in question.

  If you're asking me,Ross thought,I say let's go for it.

  Besides, trying to interrogate someone in a language he understood as superficially as he did Ancient Greek was no picnic.

  Ashe said, in English, "Proceed."

  The Kayu responded with a swift exchange in their own tongue. Though it's usually a mistake to ascribe human emotions to nonhumans, Ross suspected they were excited. And why not? It wasn't just a matter of guessing the right language. These furry guys now had a vector on not just where but when Ross and Ashe had really come from.

  "There are devices in place at crucial locations in the volcanic caldera," the machine-translation went on, in a perfectly enunciated, dispassionate tone.

  "These devices are not ours but belong to the °°"—" The machine failed to translate here, instead giving a name in a humming sort of language. "That is their name for themselves; we call them the !!!."

  This time the machine provided some trills and whistles.

  Ross, giving in to impulse, said, "If you mean the guys in the blue suits, we call 'em Baldies."

  "Baldies." The machine repeated the word in English and then in the clicking tongue, and the two Kayu looked at each other, one of them making asthmatic noises that might have been laughter.

  The other touched a control and trilled something.

  The machine said, "It is a most appropriate term, for it differentiates between us, does it not?"

  A little alien humor there? Ross thought.

  He said, feeling weirder by the second, "You definitely aren't bald. And neither am I," he added. "So what's the story on these devices?"

  If humor there had been, it was now gone. "They are . . . even your language does not have the precise concepts, although your physicists could describe them mathematically. Call them . . . 'entropy adjusters,' and you will be close enough."

  "Entropy adjusters," Ross repeated, resisting the impulse to wipe his sweaty palms down the sides of his fake-hide skirt.

  "Yes," the Kayu stated through the machine. "In effect they transform the energy of the rising magma into a massive gravitational knot rather than allowing it to build up as heat. The effect has been to cool the magma, thus preventing the explosion."

  Ross stared, his heart slamming behind his ribs. They were too late? Was the world, now set on a pastoral path of low tech, doomed to Baldy conquest up-time? Then he thought of the found earring ... of Eveleen down somewhere in the city . . . and felt momentary relief, until he realized that if the Baldies managed to change history, Eveleen would never even have existed, and he snapped, "You mean the magma has already cooled off too much?"

  "No, there is still time, but we are approaching a point of no return. To complete the process, the devices must discharge the energy harmlessly, in one burst of temporal distortion. That is what brought us here; it is detectable across many centuries."

  Something tickled at the back of Ross's mind, but before he could grasp it the other alien trilled something. The first one hesitated.

  "My companion would note that this distortion, which affects suitably sensitive minds across a wide span of time, may account for the prevalence of prophecy on your world; I would merely add that this is but one way . . . you might say 'Nemesis’ . . . speaks to sentient beings."

  Ross felt momentarily disoriented by the strangeness of the situation. Here he and Ashe were, standing on top of a volcano that was about to blow up with a force that would make a hydrogen bomb look like a mere special effect, and having a metaphysical discussion with aliens.

  The alien continued. "The adjusters are still building toward discharge, and if they are destroyed before they complete the discharge, the energy will be released all at once as heat, creating an explosion equivalent to what would have happened without interference."

  Ross whistled under his breath—or started to. Remembering the whistling language spoken by the others, he didn't want to inadvertently be saying something he'd get into trouble for.

  So the brain boys at home had been right!

  Ashe said, "Why have you not acted to destroy these devices? Or don't you know where they are?"

  "We know the location of each," one of the Kayu replied. "But we cannot act. It is not our mandate. We have been here, in place, observing, and waiting until you should appear. 'You' being, in this context, someone of your somewhat mysterious people, who appear and then vanish again after violent encounters."

  Well, that about sums us up, Ross thought.

  Ashe said, "So our guesses are correct, then, that if this volcano does not go off, then up the time-line our civilization will not have advanc
ed much past what it is now?"

  "This is correct."

  "Thus rendering it easier for someone, like the Baldies, say, to take over," Ross stated. He didn't say out loud, but mentally he added: Or you.

  The second Kayu said, "It is a logical surmise, but it is not correct. The !!!—the Furless Ones, as you would say— are committed to maximizing the biodiversity of the galaxy by protecting aboriginal life-forms."

  "Protecting!" Ross's expostulation was almost a snort. "These are the same friendly types who shoot on sight? Don't we count as aboriginal?"

  "They protect life, not lives," replied the Kayu. "When they find a space-traveling culture, such as yours is becoming, they locate the original world and search its past for critical points. Then they intervene as necessary to eliminate space flight, so as to contain that life-form and prevent it from contaminating the biosphere of other planets."

  "So they are self-constituted galactic ecologists, then?" Ashe asked, brows aslant.

  "It is a close enough designation, yes."

  Silence.

  Ross chewed on that, and Ashe said, "So let's get this straight, then. If we don't mess with their devices, the volcano doesn't blast, things are fine, and we never reach space in our future."

  "It is so."

  Ross burst out, "But if it hadn't gone off, then we wouldn't exist—and how would you know? For that matter, you said you detected the time explosion, or whatever you would call it, but it hasn't happened yet. And if we decide to destroy the devices, it won't, so how could you detect it?"

  The two Kayu held a discussion that intensified into trills, with gestures and quick exchanges. Ross glanced over at Ashe to see him frowning. It was fairly clear that the Kayu, however much they looked alike, did not think alike: one seemed to want to say one thing, and the other something else.

  At last one stepped back, permitting the other to address the machine, which stated in its precise English, "This choice you will make creates a major bifurcation in the probability wave that represents your world-line. Two futures so different that it is easy to detect the two states, both of which exist until your decision is carried out. In one, a pastoral planet, little or no EM emissions, the major pollutant being methane from cows; in the other, a technological civilization, heavy EM emissions detectable light years away, with heavy pollution from fossil carbon combustion. Those are but two ways of detecting the two states."

  "Schrödinger’s cat," said Ashe. "Alive and dead at the same time."

  There was a long pause. One of the Kayu did something to the machine, and then both exclaimed softly. Looking up Schrödinger, and his cat? The Kayu trilled, and the machine stated: "Yes, according to your physics texts. You would say, superposition."

  "But we've already decided," said Ross. "If we don't stop the explosion, we'll cease to exist—cease to ever have existed. And you still haven't explained how you could detect the time explosion if we prevent it. Or will detect it. . ."

  "There are still courses of action open to the Baldies," replied the Kayu. "Only when these are all eliminated—or carried out—will the waveform collapse and seal your reality. At that point, one way or the other, the result will not be reversible. But all our actions will have been part of that reality, including the detection of the superposition that includes the time explosion. That is always pastward from your decision, and thus always exists."

  "My head hurts," muttered Ross.

  Perhaps the alien heard him. "Your people have not had time travel long enough to develop the language and concepts to deal with it—although there are hints in various of your. . . philosophical texts, one might say, and among some cultures, of the proper approach."

  "So what do we do? Destroy the machines?"

  "No. Not only would that be almost impossible—they are not entirely material—since their mode of operation is time-like, but even if it were, the consequences would be catastrophic. The uncontrolled release of the energy they contain might unravel space-time itself, unmaking your world and all within it."

  Ashe let out his breath in a short, not quite silent curse.

  I knew I was going to hate this mission,Ross thought.Instinct is right every damn time.

  Ashe said slowly, "So, might the Baldies do that, if they get desperate enough, just to make sure we never become technological?"

  "They would never do such a thing by deliberate action. They value life too highly."

  Ross waved a hand. "So you say. But where does the difference between life and lives lie for them? One, ten, a million?"

  The Kayu trilled and clicked in what seemed to be distress, and Ashe turned to Ross. "Hold on a moment; let's just go with them for now." He turned to the Kayu. "So these devices. We can just turn them off?"

  "No, that would be equally disastrous. But we can introduce chaotic oscillations in the gravitational knot, which will eventually cause the machines to fail. But you must then prevent the Baldies from relinearizing them for at least. . . seven rotations of the sun, at which point the Baldies cannot use them to abort the volcanic explosion without causing the same type of temporal disaster that destroying them would cause."

  "But turning them off will permit the volcano to go off, right?" Ross asked.

  "It is so."

  Ross thought, there's a time for talk, a time for thought, and a time for action. When they hired me on, it was because I took action. And so far I've been right.

  He strolled forward and noted how the Kayu retreated a little. So they were afraid of him. Interesting.

  "So where are the controls to these devices?"

  "The !!! have the controls proper. We know that they have a ship, but its location is unknown to us." The Kayu indicated the two of them. "There were, when we came to this place in your time-line, two more of us. The others we believe had found their ship, but they are no longer in this life." A trill and some dismal-sounding clicks accompanied this statement, which the Kayu did not have the machine translate.

  Ross shook his head. "So my question remains: how many lives?"

  The first Kayu said something in their language; the second one spoke into the machine.

  "You must understand what their history has been," the machine stated.

  "All I need to understand right now is, how do we prevent these—adjusters—from operating?" Ross asked.

  One of the slim fur-covered hands touched a thing that looked like a cell-phone with a single button extruded from the computer. "But there is very little time."

  Ross didn't understand much about superpositions and gravitational theory, but the concept of time running out was definitely in his ballpark. And the Fur Faces had as much as said it would take seven days for the devices to fail.

  He looked at Gordon Ashe, who frowned into the middle distance. Well, it was his job to consider all the angles, to negotiate, to compromise, to find the middle ground.

  Ross saw action as his own mandate.

  And so he reached forward, and before anyone could say anything more, Ross smacked the cell-phone in the middle of those glowing touch pads.

  Its light went out.

  "All right, then," Ross said, breathing hard in his sweaty mask. "What's next?"

  CHAPTER 16

  WHEN THE LIGHT shaft reached the gnarled tree-throne, the chanting women brought their ritual to a close, and the seer stepped once again into her seat.

  The voices of the girls out on the plateau could be heard rising and falling in pleasing treble tones. This day was almost exactly like the one before; Linnea wondered how the priestesses perceived time, if their experiences blended into an indistinguishable run of days and years.

  But she must not be lulled into thinking time did not matter. It did. The smoke burning her eyes and making the back of her throat feel raw was a reminder of that, as were the little tremors that rumbled through the caverns.

  Linnea looked up. Was that crack new? Her thoughts scattered when the newest petitioner sat down and spoke in the old language.
/>   Oh, if only Jonathan were here with us, Linnea thought. She could envision the linguist swathed in robes, pretending to be a woman and hiding a recorder so that he could gather precious words to add to the little known about the language still termed Linear A.

  The thought of poor Jonathan being a linguistic spy brought a sad sort of smile to Linnea's lips; the reason the agent was not along for this trip was his wife having recently been killed in a car wreck. He was now coping with two small children.

  Why couldn't he go ahead in the time machine and then come back?

  Or for that matter, could they use the time machine to go back and save her? Linnea wondered, frowning, as the seer began to writhe, her old woman's form taking on the aspect of the holy serpent. What would it harm? What would it change, besides making a family whole and happy again? Could such an action unravel the world's proper course? What, given the horrors of history, constituted "proper"?

  "Asssssssah!"

  The seer's hiss turned into a long, gargled shout, her eyes wide and blind.

  Everyone stopped, eyes turned toward the seer.

  Her hands snaked out, waving. In that strange, hoarse, wailing cry she shouted words, repeating some phrases over and over.

  The priestesses looked at one another in bewilderment and in fear. Then the oldest one motioned to the others. "Get the girls. Go down the mountain now. Tell everyone that the goddess has spoken at last: the people, all people, are to live now on the blue water, under the blue sky. Now, at once, before the sun sleeps."

  The younger priestesses vanished through the crevasse leading to the plateau.

  Linnea lingered, puzzled, confused. Another tremor shook the mountain, a gentle one, but a cascade of little stones poured down through the skylight crack, some of them falling on her.

  "Go," Ela urged, touching Linnea's arm. "The goddess has spoken to us all. You must go; everyone must go. The fire spirits have been released, and their battle with the earth is to begin. There will be safety only on the water, in the air, away from rock and earth and fire."

  What did that mean?