End of an Era

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Rather than look at me as I spoke, the thing kept its head facing forward, one of its two-centimeter-long vertical ear slits toward me. "I do not have the words to explain," it said at last.

  "Come now. I’m a trained biologist and you have my vocabulary. Let’s take a stab at it, shall we? You’re obviously not based on cells like those that make up life on Earth. You must consist of much smaller units, or you wouldn’t be able to slip through our skin."

  The thing bobbed its head. "A reasonable assumption."

  "Well, then, what are you? I know a fair bit about Mars. Chemically, it’s similar enough to Earth that I can’t believe you are completely different from us. And besides, you survive unprotected under terrestrial conditions."

  "True."

  The creature infuriated me. "Damn it, then. What are you? Tell me what makes you tick."

  "Tick? We are not bombs."

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but what I said was, "I know what you aren’t. I want to know what you are."

  The creature looked down at the ground, as if searching for the right words to express the concept. Finally it turned to face me and said, "We are very small and yet very large."

  I stared into those giant yellow eyes, even though I knew that they were the poetic windows to the troodon’s reptilian soul, not the Het’s. It was a Delphic proclamation, and yet, somehow, I saw what the Het was getting at, perhaps because I’d already started to suspect as much based on what I’d felt during my two brief mind contacts with Martians. "You’re made of microscopic units but in fact you are one big creature," I said. I thought about the beach-ball-sized Het I’d seen ooze out of the half-headless triceratops. "You can lump together into large groupings, or form smaller concentrations. But you’re a colonial creature, like coral without the reefs, able to break apart into your tiny constituents — each smaller than a cell — to percolate through other living matter." I’d never have submitted such wild speculation to a scientific journal, but I felt I was on the correct path. "I’m right, aren’t I?"

  "Yess. Rightish, anyway."

  I decided to start with basics. "Life on Earth is based on self-replicating macromolecules called nucleic acids."

  "This we know."

  "Are you based on a nucleic acid?"

  "Yess, we are nucleic acids."

  A funny way to phrase it. "Which one? DNA?"

  "That is the one in the nuclei of your cells? The double helix? Yess, some of our individual components are DNA."

  "And the rest of your components?"

  "Nondeoxy."

  I had to replay the beast’s response in my head a few times before it made sense to me. "Oh. RNA, you mean. Ribonucleic acid."

  The reptilian mouth hung open, showing dagger-like teeth, then the jaws drew together and, more simple hiss than English word, the thing said, "Yess."

  "Anything else?"

  "Protein."

  I was silent for a time, digesting this. We are nucleic acids, it had said. I thought about that, and I thought about RNA. A nucleotide chain found in the cytoplasm of cells, it’s also associated with the storage of long-term memory and — of course! — with viruses. "You’re a virus," I said.

  "Virus?" It seemed to be trying the word on for size. "Yess, virus."

  It all made sense. Viruses are orders of magnitude smaller than cells, only one hundred to two thousand angstroms wide. A viral lifeform could easily slip through the cracks between cells, percolating through skin, muscle, and organs. But … but… "But viruses aren’t really alive," I said.

  The troodon looked at me, golden eyes catching the sunlight. "What mean you?"

  "I mean, a virus isn’t complete until it enters a host."

  "Host?"

  "A true lifeform. Viruses consist of stored instructions in DNA and RNA, and coats of protein, and that’s it. They can’t grow and don’t have any way to reproduce on their own; that’s why we say they’re not alive. They have to…"

  The troodon blinked innocently. "Yess?"

  I fell silent. Viruses have to take over, to seize, to invade the cellular machinery of an animal or plant. Then they force the cell to reproduce the virus’s own nucleic acids and make copies of its protein coat. I tried and tried to think of an example of a beneficial virus, but there are none. Viruses are, by definition, pathogenic, dangerous to cellular life, causing everything from influenza and poliomyelitis through measles and the common cold to the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, because of AIDS, virus research had become quite the hot topic in Western science, the way Star Wars weapons technology had been earlier. At least this time the money had been well spent: a cure for AIDS had been approved for human use in 2010. In fact, this new drug — Deliverance, as it was aptly called — was able to neutralize just about any virus, using a process called adaptive fractal bonding; it was now used to cure everything from colds and flus to Ebola infections.

  But if the Hets were viral, then they had to … to conquer … other forms of life.

  There were those who said humanity was inherently violent because of its carnivorous ancestors. How would the need to literally enslave cell-based life affect the psychology of the Hets? Would they be bent on conquest, driven to control living things? That could explain why they don’t like retaining the same animal bodies for any length of time. The drive to enslave could only be satiated by constantly taking over different creatures -

  Hold on a minute, Brandy. Just hold on. Don’t go overboard.

  But … viruses.

  Come on, Brandy. You’re a scientist. Nothing wrong with a wild hypothesis, but you have to test it, prove it.

  The Hets are a hive mind; they have no individuality. Maybe they don’t know anything about lying or deception.

  So why not just ask the thing?

  "You take over other lifeforms, don’t you?" I said. "So that you can use them."

  A double blink. "Of course."

  "And even if they’re intelligent life?"

  And, again, a blink. "We are the only true intelligence."

  I shuddered. "I saw dinosaurs fighting mechanical tanks back there."

  The troodon tilted its head. "Oh."

  "Those were war games, weren’t they?"

  "What is game?"

  I shook my head. "’Game’ is the wrong word, anyway. I mean they were practice sessions for a conflict."

  "Yess."

  "A conflict between your kind and some other intelligent life."

  "We are the only true intelligence," the Het said again.

  "All right, then: a conflict between your kind and those who made the mechanical tanks."

  "Yess."

  "Who started the conflict?"

  "I don’t understand," said the Het.

  "What are you fighting over?"

  "Over the ground."

  "No, I mean, what is the central issue in your conflict?"

  "Oh, that." The troodon scratched its lean belly. "They don’t want us to invade their bodies. They don’t want to be our slaves."

  "Shit."

  The Het looked at me through the troodon’s giant golden eyes. "I thought you required privacy for that activity," it said.

  Countdown: 3

  And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

  —John 8:32

  When the Het and I arrived at the mud plain near the Sternberger, Klicks was nowhere to be seen. Judging by the position of the sun it was late afternoon, and I didn’t expect him to return before dinner. I could call him on the radio and tell him to hightail it back here, but there seemed no point in that. I couldn’t talk freely until after the Het left — and it gave no sign of wanting to do so. The troodon hopped from one foot to the other, its long tail held stiffly. After a moment, it tipped its drawn-out head up at the crater wall. Perched high above was our timeship.

  "Take me inside," it said suddenly.

  It was bad enough being near the troodon, but to be near it inside a confined space… "I’d
rather not," I said.

  The troodon turned its giant eyes on me, fixing me with a steady gaze. "Reciprocate, Brandon/Brandy. We allowed you to come inside our ship. Must now you allow us to come inside yours."

  Fancy that, I thought: my manners being corrected by a dinosaur. "But look at where the Sternberger is located," I said, pointing up. "See how it juts out over the crater rim? I know you can make it up the crater wall, but that’s a big jump up to our hatchway. I doubt you can do it."

  The troodon was off like a shot, clambering up the crumbling crater wall, using its long, dangling arms to help it climb. "Is no problem for me," it called once it had reached the top.

  From the outside, our main door was painted electric blue, with a bright red trim — the mandrill’s mouth, one of the engineers had dubbed it. I had no doubt that the dinosaur could see that, since all living reptiles and birds have color vision. The loss of the ability to see color by dogs and many other mammals was a recent evolutionary occurrence, a trade-off to provide better sight in the dark. The troodon accomplished the same thing simply by having huge eyes. "In I go," it called.

  There was a vertical gap of a little less than a meter between the crumbling edge of the crater and the bottom of our main doorway, but the troodon had no trouble hopping up high enough to grab hold of the door handle. It then braced its feet against the blue door panel, lifted the latch, and swung inside with the door. Next, it let go, dropping to the deck inside the accessway. It couldn’t turn around in there — there wasn’t enough clearance for its stiff tail — but it swung its neck back to look down at me and waved.

  Well, I was damned if I was going to let that thing go inside unsupervised. I climbed up the crater wall myself. Although the dirt was dry now, it had apparently rained briefly last night, and all the tyrannosaur tracks from before had been washed away. The troodon had already gone up the ramp that led to interior door number one and had made its way through into the cramped confines of our semicircular habitat. I hurried after it.

  It was slowly circumnavigating the small room, looking at the food refrigerator and storage lockers, peering through the window in door number two at the garage, opening the medicine fridge — and quickly closing it when a blast of cold air hit its face — swinging open door number three to have a look at the tiny washroom, then coming along the curving outer wall past the kidney-shaped worktable, the radio console, and, at last, the mini-lab. Despite its protestation earlier, the troodon’s sickle claws did indeed sound like the ticks of a bomb on the steel floor.

  "This controls your time machine?" it hissed, pointing at one of Klicks’s lab instruments.

  I wasn’t about to move away from the access ramp to the outside door; I wanted to be able to escape in a hurry if the troodon tried anything funny. "No, that’s just a mineral analyzer. As I said before, all the working parts for time travel are up the timestream some sixty-five million years."

  The troodon stepped in front of the radio console and eyed it suspiciously. "What about this?"

  "It’s just a fancy radio."

  "Radio?"

  "Umm, electromagnetic telecommunications."

  The troodon tapped the console with a curved claw. It seemed fascinated by the fake plastic woodgrain that ran around the edges of the unit. "Yes, we have such communications. But who can you call? Does your radio operate across time?"

  "No, no. It’s just regular radio gear. Our timeship was dumped from a helicopter — a flying vehicle. The radio let us communicate with the copter pilot, and with Ching-Mei — that’s the person who invented the time machine — at the ground base. The base was many kilometers away, at the Tyrrell Field Station. We also use the radio to relay signals from our walkie-talkies — portable transceivers — and for our homing devices to lock onto. Oh, and the radio used satellite signals to determine our exact position at the time of the drop from the helicopter, crucial for the Throwback to work. It can even send signals to search-and-rescue satellites, in case we return at other than our expected location. Highly unlikely, or so we’re told, but it could happen." I gestured at the gleaming panel. "Anyway, it’s far more sophisticated than what we needed, but the corporate sponsor — Ward-Beck in this case — wanted to showcase this particular piece of equipment. Our actual needs were pretty irrelevant."

  "Very strange culture have you," said the troodon.

  I forced a laugh. "That it is."

  Klicks drove back into our camp shortly after sunset, parking the Jeep so that it would be in the morning shade of the crater wall. The troodon and I met him down on the mud flat. I held up my A W can so that Klicks could see the intact pull-tab. He opened his jacket’s breast pocket and pulled out the Twinkies. They were slightly squished — hard to avoid that with Twinkies — but certainly showed no sign of having been deliberately flattened.

  The troodon hung around for hours, keeping me from talking candidly to Klicks. The little dinosaur did help us gather bald cypress wood and we built a small fire to cook some steaks. Cow steaks, that is — no more pachycephalosaur for me. The idea of cooked food was new to the Het, and it asked if it could feed some to its vehicle. With one gulp about fifty dollars’ worth of prime sirloin disappeared down the troodon’s throat. It tasted a lot like shrew, according to the Het, insectivores being one of the few mammalian groups well established by this time.

  Even with the sun down, it was still warm. As we sat around the campfire, I watched the flames dance in the dinosaur’s giant eyes. The troodon paid no attention to our theatrical yawns, and at last Klicks simply said, "It’s time for us to go to sleep."

  "Oh," said the Het. Without another word, it stalked away into the darkness. Klicks and I doused the flames and scrambled back up into the Sternberger. As soon as we’d entered the habitat, I turned to him.

  "Klicks," I said, finally able to talk without a Martian eavesdropping, "we can’t bring the Hets forward in time."

  "Why not?"

  "Because they’re evil."

  Klicks looked at me, his jaw kind of slack, the way you’d look at someone who had just said something completely out of left field.

  "I’m serious," I said. "They’re at war."

  "At war?"

  "That’s right. The troodon who came back here with me confirmed it."

  "Who are they fighting?"

  "I don’t know. He didn’t say."

  "What are they fighting about?"

  "The Hets want to enslave the other side."

  "Enslave?"

  "Crawl in their heads; make them do whatever the Hets want."

  "The Het said this to you?"

  "Yes."

  "Why would it tell you that?"

  "Why wouldn’t it tell me? Don’t you see, Klicks, they’re a single entity, a hive mind. Those globs of jelly come together and share memories. The idea of one individual deceiving another is foreign to them. About the only good thing you can say about them is that they’re pathological truth-tellers."

  "They seem harmless enough to me."

  "They’re viruses," I said.

  Klicks looked at me blankly.

  "Viruses? You mean metaphorically…"

  "I mean it literally. They’re viral-based; they consist of nucleic acids, but they can’t grow or breed on their own. They have to infest a living host. Only when they do so are they really alive."

  "Viral," said Klicks slowly. "Well, I guess that would explain how they percolate through living tissue. Certainly viruses are small enough to do that."

  "But don’t you see? Viruses are evil."

  Klicks gave me a what-are-you-on look. "Viruses are just bits of chemistry," he said.

  "Exactly. Bits of programmed instructions, instructions to take over living matter and convert the cells of that matter to producing more viruses. They are always harmful to their hosts."

  "I suppose."

  "They’re harmful to their hosts by definition. What’s good for the virus is never good for the cells it has invaded."

  "An
d you’re saying that if the Hets are viral, they must have a psychology based on this?"

  "I’m not saying it could only have been that way. But in this particular evolutionary case, yes, that’s the way it turned out: the Hets are conquest-driven. You heard what they said about the rosette of stars we saw. ‘It galls us.’ They hate the fact that there’s some life out there that they can’t reach, can’t subjugate."

  "I don’t know, Brandy. You’re going out on a limb."

  "It’s the truth, damn it. The Het told me so."

  "In exactly those words?"

  "No, not exactly."

  "You know, Brandy, you’re picking the wrong guy to tell this to. This viral-nature stuff sounds a lot like you’ve made up your mind that the Hets are inferior, and are trying to use science to justify that belief. That sort of thinking did my people a lot of harm over the years."

  "But, look," I said, "you’re alive."

  "Thank you."

  "I mean you’re a living creature. So am I. Black people, white people, all people, all animals, all plants. We’re all alive."

  "Uh-huh."

  "But viruses aren’t. They’re not alive, not in the scientific sense. They have to conquer if they are to exist at all. That’s their only purpose. It’s not a question of potentials one way or another. It’s what they do. The one and only thing they can do. To be a virus is to be bent on conquest — by definition."

  "It’s an interesting theory, but—"

  "It’s more than a theory. I saw their war games."

  "Whatever you saw, you must be misinterpreting it."

  It was frustrating as hell. I’d recorded the whole thing on my MicroCam, but had no way to play the images back until we returned to the twenty-first century. "I tell you it’s true," I said. "They’re using dinosaurs as armored vehicles and attack machines."