Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler (The Living Universe)

by Florian Armas

  “A new one.”

  “Houston! You are back!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why now?”

  “Yesterday I found only drunk people.” Yes, this is Houston.

  “I don’t remember. The old man, drunk too. Ha! I wish I could remember. I know, I am a bad guy. What is this?”

  “A bonus for hard-drinking Travelers: the beginning of Time. Well, almost. Too much instability if we go further back. The Universe is training himself in creating matter; those distant clouds of gases and dust are the embryos of the first galaxies.” My knowledge about this strange environment was close to nothing, but the view ... the view was of a strange, frightening, exciting beauty. As she was speaking, a large cloud in front of us became lighter, sprinkled with vibrant fluorescent colors, for several seconds, before disappearing in complete silence. “A failed experiment; he couldn’t keep the cloud materialized. It escaped from his hands and returned to the energy matrix.” A Universe that makes mistakes... Too much silence around, vivid colors, spectacular explosions, but no sounds, no music; an imperfect Universe. Mistakes, imperfection … is this the message you want me to acknowledge?

  “In the beginning was the Word,” I whispered to myself.

  “You still have no idea how important this saying is.” But my mind was already wandering and I missed an opportunity to ask more. I am in the eye of the universe, and I am learning things. I hope I find out soon what they really are and why they were delivered to me. The clouds vanished and anxiety moved to fill my mind, slowly and steadily, like water filling a bottle. My eyes caught the image of my garden; we were back, and my uneasiness melted away.

  “Was this a simulation or we were really there?”

  “Does it matter?” I acknowledged that it did not.

  Next moment Batranu was teleported into my garden, and she stayed silent for a while. Three days of nightmare. Give us some hope. “No trip to Hell.” Thank you, can we have more? “You tricked The Field.”

  “Me? I have no idea how to access that bloody field.”

  “The Field accessed your mind.” And sent me directly into the ovoid, of course. Such a simple thing, how did I not see it? “Consider it misidentification; he was looking for another entity and found you. You have almost identical genes and mind patterns.”

  “Did you make a copy of me?” Please don’t start again.

  “One of you is more than enough.” That’s why are you using us? Because we are more than enough? “It is something that you already know,” she let me dig further. I shrugged and stayed quiet; I really had no idea. “You name this reincarnation, not really a correct term.”

  “I am a reincarnation of another soul ... come on” She did not answer, waiting patiently. She can be very patient, like a robot. Okay, I know that she is not a robot. Reincarnation... What the hell is this?

  “Sometimes crawlers inadvertently pass information from one subject, dead a long time ago, to a living person.” Passing information ... from dead people. Dead people? I glanced at her. She is not joking. The Travelers were alive; they even jumped after me over the ridge. The ones in the ovoid? They cannot be ghosts, they must be alive, too.

  “Do I match that Observer in the ovoid? I suppose so. He might be the only ascended person there. I guess you don’t count and the black idiots were still alive.” I grinned at her with slight satisfaction.

  “You will go back. The Observer filed no complaint over your intrusion. In fact he guided the crawler to you.” The pawn is played by all of you... They play, I play; I play a little of course. They gain; I gain. I gain more. They can use another pawn, I have no other way to learn and travel without them. Let it be.

  “This Observer will meet you in some future, that past’s future. I am sure he has a reason for this.” Who in the hell is this guy? Was? “I will send you back there. Close to the library.”

  “Any link with Sarmisegetusa?” I asked her.

  “Maybe.” She blinked before disappearing.

  *

  “The entry should be here.” I matched the picture from my encyclopedia with a conglomeration of fallen stones. The site was buried, for preservation, soon after the Baragan civilization started to decline and its location was lost over time. “Too many stones…”

  “We can try a window,” Batranu answered. We checked the three small holes, thirty feet up. The wall was steep, in fact a false wall, built to resemble a natural formation. “And we need a rope to go down.”

  I checked the holes with my binoculars. “There is a small Draco inscription on the left one. Do you know the link with Sarmisegetusa?”

  “Some bits of knowledge. Houston never allowed me to visit Dacia. I wonder why she let you meet Akhenaten.”

  “Why not? He is not related to Dacians.”

  “His great-grandson, Deceneus, became the first high-priest of Dacia. He left Egypt with his brothers Moses and Zoroaster.” Wrong. Burebista and Deceneus were much later. I told him about the simulation with Deceneus. “That’s the second one. The first one spread the monotheism in Dacia. The closest form to what Akhenaten created to help us. Don’t ask me why they have the same name; I don’t know. There are some old links between Earth and this place.”

  “The Other Side of the Mirror?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Houston never answers questions about that mirror.”

  “She must have a reason,” he shrugged. She must have… You must cover… You must be her son. That thought made me smile. Batranu did not see me; he was busy checking the wall again.

  We opened the window as if performing surgery; no savage should be able to spot the entry (books are not meant to nourish fire) and found no signs of tampering in the dust. In the middle of the entrance hall, a large table resembled some sort of counter for dispatching books. We tried to explore other rooms; the darkness stopped us, only the hall had windows.

  “No chance of finding anything,” I told Batranu. “We need torches.”

  “I hope there are no traps for uninvited people,” he answered back.

  “Tutankhamen’s curse,” I muttered. “Are you sure?”

  “Better be unsure than dead. Let’s come tomorrow with torches.”

  On the arch was written in big red letters: Rare Books. The sturdy door had an iron locking mechanism, with two snakes engraved on it.

  “A sign for poison? I asked.

  “I don’t know. The same thing can have different meanings in different cultures.”

  “Doesn’t look like something new added to protect this room,” I reluctantly said. We have to choose. Easy to say. Easy, not easy... “It should be part of the door from before the catastrophe.” I hit one of the snakes. A chilling ‘clack’ pushed us back, followed by a long metallic noise digging directly into our brains; the door opened like a dark mouth. When silence cleared our minds, we gathered the courage to enter. We found no poison, no trap, no danger, only books, old rare books. These people were too peaceful for us to understand their mentality.

  “Be careful,” he whispered when my torch got too close to the old dust-covered objects, “I don’t want to burn like a rat.” We brushed off the dust with handkerchiefs, coughing badly, trying to read titles on the spines – in the low light, dancing patches of dust were bringing magic shadows to life.

  “We need to find the Compendium,” I whispered, still coughing. That was the local version of ‘Ab urbe condita’, the Baragan Compendium of History, a huge historical composition in four volumes, one thousand years and twenty kilos of written past.

  “It’s here.” His stumbling coughing words made me smile, but the smile went away with my next lung eruption. Keep the smile for better times; I castigated myself. Why? My inner-self answered, a good mood always helps. We took some other technical and literary books too, and left the next day, hiding again the entrance with rocks, earth and old branches.

  *

  There are no clouds, there is no relief, and the sun seems forever bound
to the horizon – the hardest part of our road toward the volcanic valley. At noon, we are on the wrong side of the wall. Mile after mile of road, suspended between blue and yellow – sky and sand. The thin, sinuous line is carrying us towards the north, decrepit and dangerous remnants of an old road. The sun, over the zenith, is burning every drop of life. A second, invisible sun on our right is turning the stones into embers and the world into a giant stove. When night comes, the land is dark and the moon is the only candle in the sky, a kingdom of shadows is born. The invisible sun is the travelers’ friend against the howling, chilling wind when misery hovers over land and souls. We sit with our backs firmly against the warm stones; the dry taste of thirst is whispering its grit into our mouth; water is scarce.

  The small fire was more for our peace of mind than for our bodies, the cold would came later when the walls began to lose their day heat; at dusk, the wind died with the rebirth of life. I found some pleasure in following the shadows dancing on the rocks, logs, insects, our hands. A small something appeared from nowhere, attracted by the light; it looked like a miniature dog with six long legs. The thing walked reluctantly, like a drunken man, and a picture from the past, Earth’s past, came into my mind: a walking robot dog, the same uneasy and hilarious steps.

  “Would be nice to have some robots to carry us,” I said to Batranu while poking the fire for more light. “Like this thing,” I pointed to the insect moving here and there, deciding whether to come closer to the light.

  “Be happy that we can still use our horses.”

  “There will be no progress with such enthusiasm for technology.”

  “A pessimist is an optimist with experience.” Experience ... old people are always scared by new things. “Robots ... their day will come; but not now, not here.”

  “With robots, life will change completely.” The stylized movements of the insect were pushing me into a reverie. “When unemployment rises, too much, they have to react. I would like to work only four days a week. Or three…”

  “I doubt it.” He stirred the fire before talking again. “Calhoun’s rats.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “An old social experiment. In fact it was about mice, but rats have more influence on the human psyche so the reporters changed the name to get a bigger audience.”

  “Rats, mice, they are not humans.”

  “They are social mammals not very different from us. Calhoun created a mouse heaven, with plenty of food and no enemies. Everybody expected good things and got only bad ones. He coined the phrase, ‘In Calhoun’s heaven, hell was other mice.’ Not far from ‘homo homini lupus est’.”

  “What changed mice behavior?”

  “Alienation.”

  “And what created that alienation?” His laconic answer had changed my mood more than I wanted.

  He stirred the fire again as though pondering how far to go. “Overpopulation followed by social disorganization. Think of mice mega-cities and you can see parallels.”

  “They could reduce the numbers.”

  “Their population went down naturally but their ‘culture’ disappeared, and the new generation was lost. If scientists are able to resurrect dinosaurs they will ... behave differently. You cannot resurrect cultural traits.” He stopped for a while as though searching for more words. “Once people become socially redundant; violence and disruption of the social fabric will follow. All the mice died.”

  “I don’t see any contradiction with my ‘dream’. If we reduce the number of working days more positions will be free for others to pick.”

  “Smart machines will reduce the demand for people, and there is a big political agenda for Malthusianism these days. Some people think that alienation, wars and genetic manipulations are the perfect tools for population reduction. If you are still alive, then maybe you can have your four-day working week and a ghetto for poor people in a world where the well tamed middle class puppies disappeared together with their white collars, ID numbers and leashes.”

  “A world full of pessimists,” I answered, involuntarily checking the marks of my old ‘middle-class-leash’. The irony of searching for the physicals marks of an abstract, invisible, slavery effect. After so many years of real life with the Primes, I still feel this nonsense of being a middle class … puppy … conditioned … in his pre-ordained place.

  “Mostly opportunists wanting more space for their exclusive use. Why have just a big house, when you can have a large domain with no dirty annoying plebeians around you? Think of Asimov's Solaria.”

  *

  Recovering at length from the laziness into which the unnatural sun had thrown us, I realized that we were at the end of the desert. From the top of the hill, on each side different conditions held sway. On my left as I faced the sunset, was a far sea of great yellow sand waves rolling gently under a brightly shining sun. On my right was a white glittering vista, clinging on the mountains' peaks, under a blue sky.

  “Let’s go,” I told Batranu, pushed by a sudden enthusiasm, “the road will be easier.”

  “The easiest road is always behind you,” he whispered, so as not to disturb the surrounding calmness. “But at least the heat will subside.” He managed a slight smile, a thin slit on his tired face.

  Deep in the valley, the sun was no longer in sight and the horses paced faster as they felt the water. When the first arrow passed between us, I did not see it; I only heard its long hiss before crashing into the rocks behind; the second hit my stallion and we moved behind the horses. Bastards! I will kill you! Six men hurtled out from behind a large rock between us and the water: “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Four swords and two spears... The spears, I don’t like the spears. I raised my sword; Batranu raised his sword. Thirty feet … twenty… The spears… One spear flew and passed just inches from my head. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” It is not always true that death comes silently, sometimes she make her presence known. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Shouts to bring them courage and freeze our minds; a frozen mind is the first step inside the realm of death. Focus on the swords... The spear … watch the spear… A translucent sphere materialized in front of us, a watery ball standing motionless, two meters above the ground, slowly pulsating in the still light dusk, and all movement stopped altogether. I could see the stunned faces of the attackers through the sphere, and I was as frozen as them. A wave of liquid sprang from that ball, surrounding us with a wall made from the same translucent material. More waves went out, punching the brigands, opening holes in their chests, so large that we could see through them. A gust of morbid excitement rose inside me, waiting for the flow of blood to spring from their bodies. There was none. Like glass, they broke into pieces, then transformed into dust, floating in the air, until the wind dispersed them.

  “I hope that is Houston,” Batranu said. We were able to move again and made the only noise in the valley; nothing else could be heard, no wind, no birds, nothing.

  “The wall is still here. Why is she hiding?”

  “Maybe she foresees new dangers.” He was as puzzled as me. But that was irrelevant now, we were saved and waiting for the liquid wall to retreat. Thank you Houston, a brief smile marked my mouth. The wall moved, giving us more space, then mixed with the sphere, transforming itself into a huge transparent bubble, surrounding us. My horse was standing again, with a dark spot around an arrow still deep inside his foreleg. The flash came from nowhere, a white blistering moment; the landscape was ripped apart, as if somebody took a giant pair of scissors and cut everything in two neat pieces, and there was no sound. A gigantic black globe replaced everything in sight, slowly surrounding the white translucent sphere and us. The sun faded out, all the light coming now from the white orb. “Who is challenging the Second Pillar of the universe?” a voice thundered. Who is what? What’s this? I mimicked the voice. “You broke the rules. You have to pay.” We did nothing. We just… Every few seconds, silent lightning flares discharged between the two unknown things; intermittent and thin in the beginning, they got thicker, gro
wing almost to one foot in diameter and running continuously, huge meandering white snakes. Pillar of the universe… I heard this before.

  “That thing is trying to kill us,” I spat my words. “It must be the other Faction.”

  “This looks bigger than the Factions' capacity for projecting power,” Batranu whispered; his face was weary, and he looked smaller than I remembered. His shoulders were almost round. I shrugged: I probably look the same.

  “How do you know?” My tongue felt like a strip of rough cotton.

  “I don't, it is only a feeling.”

  Our sphere shrank, with us in its center when suddenly, on one side, a bulge appeared, and for the first time we heard a sound, and it was not music, but a long metallic shrill. The sound rose in volume and pitch, drawing the air taut as a bowstring, then faded away in a mad, despairing sobbing. A hole pierced through the bulge and white fog hissed inside; the white sphere was deeply wounded and let out a last, terrible scream. We covered our ears and pressed against each other and against the liquid wall behind us, trembling and mute. One horse went mad and ran; he was caught in the bulge’s advance and shredded into pieces, which disappeared in the same second inside the fog. Houston, help us… Please help… The fog stabilized, in the form of a small tunnel, six feet large, and silence fell again.

  “Get out!” A voice coming from nowhere, so powerful, that we pressed even further against the wall. “Get out, I cannot keep the tunnel open for too long.”

  “These walls are protecting us,” I whispered.

  "Listen to him! The thing wants to kill you. It is a SAT-mine.” Houston’s voice resonated in that silence.

  “What's a SAT-mine?” Even with her voice, I was not sure that I wanted to get out.