by Hubbert, Jim
CHAPTER 8
STAGE 004/410LAETOLI B.C. 98,579
Across endless skies, dark thunderheads drifted slowly, like vast floating castles. Two sharp lines of footprints, large and small, ran along the bank of a stream, impressed deeply into the volcanic soil. They had been there for millennia, and would endure for millennia to come.
Another set of footprints was strung out along the stream-bed, left by the heavy boots of a tall, gaunt biped.“Cutty, do you read me? It’s Orville. I’m back.”
“Welcome, Orville. Your return raises our combat strength to 97 percent of its 1943 level. So you made it after all.”
“Four hundred and six timestreams, 370 defeats. Combat strength, 4 percent,” said Orville. “I’m the only one left.”
“Then I celebrate your survival and mourn the dead,” Cutty said. She fell silent, but Orville could feel her presence, like a ghost in the network. He heated the tip of his sword and carefully carved a resting place in the volcanic soil for the personal effects of his fallen comrades, including Quench.
“I have your combat log from my subunit. This is just an estimate, but your efforts saved the lives of roughly twenty-six billion people across all timestreams. Congratulations.”
Orville winced. Was she being ironic? Then again, she did have a fondness for figures. Maybe she was genuinely impressed.
“Shall I brief you now? Or would you like to rest for a few years first?” she asked.
“Brief me now.”
“Hold on, Cutty.” It was Alexandr. “I want to know what the wanderer’s been up to.” It had been centuries since Orville heard that familiar voice, though for Alexandr only six years had passed. His voice was filled with respect and affection.
“Messenger O! Congratulations on returning in no more than one piece. Now tell us all about your adventures.”
“This says it all,” Orville answered dryly as he transmitted his combat log.
“Oh come on, Orville. I want to hear your version.”
“Are you running out of story ideas again?” Laughter codes began streaming in from Messengers listening on the network. Alexandr sounded embarrassed. “I’m always looking for good ideas. But that’s not the only reason.”
“Well, it’s good to be back. But there’ll be plenty of time to compare notes later. Right now I’d like to know the situation. The enemy could show up at any time.”
“Duty first. I see you haven’t changed. All right, here’s the situation. Africa is our stronghold. Our early warning net covers the planet and everything from here to this side of the Moon. Here’s how our forces are deployed…”
The Upstreamer Forces’ main base was on the shores of giant Lake Victoria, near the Great Rift Valley. Cutty Sark had used every asset at her disposal for its construction. There was a small mining operation and factories for producing everything from Wasps to weapons. Their overall strength was little more than a shadow of the great armada that left the twenty-sixth century. It was not even equal to the military power of Germany in 1943. Still, their base was Earth’s strongest fortress at this point in history.
Living near this nexus of advanced technology that had suddenly appeared were scruffy-looking animals, wandering hunters of game and fish. Their most distinctive feature was their bipedal gait. When the other Messengers took Orville to meet the creatures who would one day be their makers, he was frankly disappointed. But as he observed them at the lakeshore by day and in their camps at night, he began to feel the same affection he felt for their descendants.
Homo sapiens idaltu had only a few hundred words to describe their world. They were warlike, preoccupied with finding mates, perpetually short of food, fearful of the dark and of sudden storms. But they had the compassion to share their surplus game with weaker comrades and the courage to stand up to dangerous predators. They asked endless questions in their primitive language about everything Orville did, the objects he carried, his dress and his body. Humankind’s boundless intelligence and curiosity were blossoming before the Messengers’ eyes. As he remembered the achievements awaiting their descendants, Orville’s spirits gradually began to recover.
Shortly after he arrived, Cutty finished scanning Earth for traces of the enemy. Had she enough Wasps and satellites, such a survey could have been carried out in less than a month, but it had taken her six years. At the same time, the Messengers’ global network of cryostasis facilities, constructed deep underground in geologically stable locations, was finally complete. The Messengers dispersed and went into suspended animation, waiting for the call to action that was certain to come.
The enemy attacked sporadically. Sometimes they attempted to build secret nests, sometimes they sent units of full-grown ET to wreak havoc. Earlier hominids had long before migrated as far as China and Southeast Asia, but small colonies of these “old ones” from the first exodus out of Africa still existed. The ET were drawn to them, distant as they were from the Messengers’ main base, and the attacks hastened the extinction of these ancestors of modern humans. But Cutty soon located the intruders, and whenever she sounded the alarm the Messengers would awaken and eradicate them, usually without much difficulty.
The Messengers had resolved to interfere as little as possible with history, knowing how large the impact could be at this crucial stage of human development and over such a long span of time. But there was no way the newly evolved, impressionable human brain could fail to be influenced by the close proximity of entities from an advanced civilization.
The first sign of this influence was the sudden emergence of settled farming communities fifteen thousand years earlier than expected, and in Ethiopia rather than Mesopotamia. Around the same time, a hardy band of Africans from the second exodus succeeded in crossing the Bering Strait and founded a huge, thriving kingdom in North America. They penetrated as far as the tributaries of the Mississippi and into Kentucky, where they were the first to build large wooden structures and make extensive use of the wheel.
Later, the seagoing Phoenicians sailed forth from the eastern Mediterranean and succeeded in making an audacious crossing of the Atlantic. This created links between the Old and New Worlds thousands of years before history as Orville knew it.
In the South Pacific, knowledge of the healing properties of tropical plants spread widely, and the discovery of a certain antimalarial fungus enabled humans to settle in large numbers in New Guinea. These people became master builders of huge stone structures, and in their giant oceangoing vessels they created a far-flung ocean empire extending thousands of miles, from Peru to the east coast of Africa. Instead of leaving behind a scattering of enormous structures before mysteriously disappearing, they seemed destined to become one of the principal civilizations of mankind.
As culture advanced, so did the art of war. There was no way to change mankind’s propensity for conflict as a way of settling problems, but the Messengers intervened discreetly when they could. They created and disseminated a code of laws, the central theme of which was that disaster is part of the fabric of the world and is certain to come. Only those who join forces and work together will stave off calamity.
As the centuries passed, the enemy’s forces seemed to grow. The number of Messengers lost in battle increased, as did the ranks of those who abruptly disappeared when the timestream that originally created them was rendered extinct. Given the vast changes taking place at the very founding of human civilization, this impact on the future was inevitable. Orville had left his footprints across so many timestreams that his existence was secure, but many other Messengers were not so fortunate. At the same time, the number of Descendant Messengers failed to increase. Perhaps this timestream was destined for extinction? Or perhaps future humanities in other streams considered the implications of technology before blindly pressing forward, even forsaking the creation of AIs.
Whatever the answer, the Messengers no longer had any way of knowing. They had plunged too deeply into the labyrinth of time and could no longer gauge the magnit
ude of the effect they were having on history.
Around 1000 B.C., Egypt’s New Kingdom replaced Phoenicia as a regional power in the Mediterranean and became the target of a major enemy offensive. Alexandr was advising the Egyptians when the ET attacked. Orville rushed to the Nile Delta with the army of Aksum, whose huge empire stretched from Ethiopia south to Mozambique and Madagascar. Together the two Messengers engineered another enemy defeat.
They celebrated their victory on the terrace of a magnifi-cent villa overlooking the receding floodwaters of the Nile. The six great pyramids on the Giza plateau loomed across the great waterway. Alexandr was describing his latest ambition—placing his huge, handwritten manuscript in the great library at Alexandria when it was finally built—when suddenly Cutty’s voice came on the network.
“I bring you news, Messengers. Nearly a hundred millennia ago, soon after we arrived in this timestream, I launched a small probe toward Teegarden’s Star. I couldn’t spare antimatter for propulsion, so I used a solar sail. Twelve light years! The probe took 72,000 years to cover the distance, and for 25,000 years it orbited the star, waiting. But patience has finally been rewarded. I have a message from the creators of the ET.”
“No. You’re joking.” Alexandr was stunned. “How?”
“It was a group of upstreamers from their world, 120 million years in the future. You were right, Alexandr. Tee-garden’s Star will be their home planet, but not for millions of years.
“These beings achieved control over their own evolution through chemical synthesis of living cells. When they acquired the ability to travel back in time, they began surveying the past. Among their discoveries was the fact that their home planet was nearly rendered unfit for life in our twenty-sixth century, after the intervention of an alien life form: humans. The construction of our observation station nearly destroyed the primitive microbes that eventually evolved into their ancestors. Therefore they decided to take revenge.”
Orville cut in, baffled. “Revenge for something that happened millions of years before they evolved?”
“You cannot judge them from the standpoint of life as we have experienced it. They are not oxygen-breathing humans or even carbon-based life forms. They experience the world in a different way. But we can still understand something of their motivation. If those primitive humans by the shores of Lake Victoria were indiscriminately slaughtered, how would you react, Orville? So the ET creators sent a time army to execute a preemptive strike on humanity. An army of self-replicating, self-directed fighting machines.”
Orville nearly cried out. “That means our twenty-sixth century was not the original stream. It was a branch created by wars with the ET!”
“Yes. And now we know why our attempts to contact them failed. They did not want to be contacted.”
Orville felt the weight of thousands of years of bloodshed pressing down on him. It was too much to absorb.
Alexandr’s voice was hoarse, “They didn’t want to be contacted. It was all a grudge. This is what they call justice. And you say they’re a different species? They’re more human than we are!” He began laughing hysterically. Orville was too overcome with fatigue to stop him.
“What were they doing in the past?” Orville asked Cutty.
“They came to destroy my probe, of course. But I anticipated this. The probe was designed to pose a series of questions before they could destroy it, to allow it enough time to complete a diagnostic scan. Was it truly necessary to destroy Earth in the twenty-sixth century? Why did they use weapons of such surpassing cruelty? Why did they deploy their forces across so many timestreams? They snuffed out ten times more lives than you saved, Orville. And the lives that never came to be? A hundred times as many. And finally: Were they satisfied with the results?”
Orville felt a kind of despair. How many lives had the Messengers themselves cast aside to save the species? What was the difference?
“Perhaps these were more like denunciations than questions,” Cutty continued. “But as I hoped, they were provoked, and they chose to respond. ‘Revenge must equal the damage done, or it is not revenge. The velocity of our evolution was contracted by twelve million years as a consequence of your meddling. Twelve million years of delayed evolution is the price of our revenge, and it has not yet been fully exacted.’ There was just enough time for a burst transmission from the probe before it was apparently destroyed. The message took twelve years to reach me.”
“So we wait a thousand centuries to talk to them, and they spit in our face,” said Orville.
“They told me what I needed to know.” Cutty sounded strangely elated. “Don’t you see? If we destroy their home planet, final victory is ours. Or we can threaten to do so, if they refuse to come to terms, although I think a negotiated settlement would be extremely difficult.”
“Chances of success?” asked Orville.
“Unknown, for both options. A fully armed time force would be required to implement this strategy in any case.”
“Then everything we’ve done has been for nothing.”
“But that’s not all,” said Cutty brightly, ignoring Orville. “The enemy’s actions confirm once and for all the effectiveness of attacks carried out via upstreaming.”
She’s falling apart, thought Orville through a haze of indifference. At the outset of the mission, Cutty had been capable of an almost human capacity for nuanced thinking. Later, she had evolved a sort of cold-blooded stubbornness. And now she was manifesting this eerie elation. It reminded him of a certain kind of tyrant that he had found fairly common across history. Of course, her responsibilities were overwhelming and she had no one to turn to for support. But Orville felt no sympathy. It might even become necessary to fight on without her. Maybe she had even considered that possibility herself.
Alexandr looked up and snapped his fingers near his ear, the Messengers’ signal for a private talk. Orville nodded. They switched to a secure frequency.
“I was almost up to five thousand pages,” said Alexandr.
“What? Ah, right. Your story is twice as long as when you and I rendezvoused in Laetoli.”
“Well, here’s a preview of the next chapter: the caterpillars are going to secrete a special sticky fluid in a ring around the tree. That will keep the crabs from digging down and cutting the roots. After the crabs are defeated, they visit the old rhinoceros beetle that lives in a hole in the tree, and he leads them to a jewel he hid down in the tree’s roots when it was just a sapling. The jewel gives off a mysterious light, and the ants use it to heal the tree’s wounds.”
“Alex, that story of yours is a masterpiece. The crabs cut the leaves off the tree and kill their insect friends, and the caterpillars swear revenge. Amazing.”
“Yes, it all comes down to the bravest of the caterpillars. Their journeys from branch to branch create so many interesting subplots.”
“I loved the battle where they rally for a last-ditch defense of the tree’s roots and use webs to trap the crabs.”
“I was pretty proud of that chapter myself. I got goose bumps writing it. I’m the author, but I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next.”
Alexandr’s magnum opus had attracted a devoted readership among the other Messengers during its hundred thousand years of gestation. His eyes shined like those of a child when he talked about his saga. Orville smiled as he listened to his old friend wax enthusiastic over the latest installment.
“When the caterpillars at last reach the place where the taproot divides, final victory is within their grasp. If they can win this one, the power of life will return to the tree, and it will be able to shake the crabs off its branches by itself.”
“But what would the bear say?” interrupted Orville. “The bear is behind this whole war, but he just stands by watching. He doesn’t say a thing—until now. ‘We didn’t start this. You caterpillars are to blame. We used to sleep in that tree, and everything was peaceful till you came and started feeding on the leaves and took it over for yoursel
ves. So we’ll show you what it feels like to have your home taken away.’”
Alexandr looked deflated. He sighed deeply. “Children’s stories don’t have to have a moral.”
“Listen, Alex. How long have you been working on this? Your story is too big for a children’s tale. With a little revising this could be an epic fantasy saga, like the Mahabharata. Why don’t you give it a try?”
Alexandr stared reproachfully at him. “Have you forgotten who I’m writing this for?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten,” he said. He gazed at his friend with compassion.
“If I start making revisions now, Shumina will never be able to sort things out.”
“Do you still think those capsules are going to reach her?”
“Of course they will!” For a moment Alexandr was indignant, then he lapsed into silence.
Orville looked up at a sky of beaten brass, colored as it was by windblown sand. He lowered his eyes and saw a beautiful young girl in a white toga feeding fish to some pelicans that had landed in the villa’s reflecting pool. The girl caught Orville’s gaze and waved gaily.
“Why did Cutty tell us all that just now?” Alexandr sat chin in hand, as if pondering a deep philosophical question.
“Maybe because she just found out?” said Orville.
“I wonder. I think the timing was deliberate. Smelling salts for the troops. She’s worried we’re losing our will to fight.” He closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “She reveals who the enemy is, their goal, and exactly how to defeat them. I think she knew it was past time for us to hear this.”
“If she’s making it up, or if she’s been sitting on it, waiting for the right timing, we could easily find out. But assuming it’s true, what do we do?”
“It’s simple: go back to the twenty-sixth century and do the job right this time. Oh, I forgot. We can’t go back. After everything we’ve been through, I’m afraid Cutty still doesn’t understand much about motivation.”
