by Paul Preuss
“An elaborate rescue,” the commander remarks.
“It was more than that,” says Forster. “The settlers had traveled a million years from their home star, searching for a place to exercise their Mandate. The mission to recreate their home world was programmed into their genes. They found our sun and with it Venus, a planet covered with oceans and blessed with clear skies—a stable planet, not wracked by an active geology or a swerving climate, without Earth’s wandering continents and ice ages. What they planted there would persist forever, so they thought…
“For millions of years everything went as planned; they succeeded in virtually reproducing the ecology of their home. Then Nemesis appeared—what they call the Whirlpool. Repeated bombardment by comets created a moist greenhouse, which raised the temperature of the oceans and saturated the atmosphere. When we arrived, water was evaporating, and atmospheric hydrogen was being lost to space. Venus was already on its way to becoming the carbon-dioxide furnace of our era.”
“A tragedy, certainly,” says Jozsef. “But why the … well, ‘political conflict’ is probably not the right phrase…”
“The split was precipitated by evolution. The Amalthean settlers had observed phylogenetic saltations, new adaptive lifeforms unlike anything catalogued in the Mandate, This horrified them. They believed they had only two alternatives—to let nature take its course, and thereby lose everything they had achieved. Or to accept change as inevitable, bend with it, adapt themselves to it—even take charge of it.”
“Take matters into their own tentacles, as it were,” Ari remarks lightly.
Forster allows her a dry grin,
“What if they did take charge?” Jozsef demands. “Why not take charge?”
“For one thing, they would have had to deflect the comets,” replies Forster, “Only the world-ship was capable of that.”
“Yet the medusa-ship you described seemed to defy gravity,” the commander objects. “If it could fly without wings, surely it could travel in space.”
“After years of study I am still fundamentally ignorant of Amalthean technology,” Forster replies, “but I gather that their vessels borrow energy from the vacuum. They are dependent upon a sort of macroscopic analogue of the quantum effect; their range is governed by solutions of the amplitude of possible vector states. The world-ship calculations yield a wide amplitude; thus the world-ship is capable of interstellar journeys at near light-speed. The much smaller medusas, however, have a severely constrained amplitude.”
“Clear as mud.” The commander’s words are hardly a growl.
“Anyway, the little ones couldn’t do the job, and the big one wouldn’t.”
“Why not? From your description, Thowintha seems a flexible sort.” Jozsef still presses for an understanding of policy issues, as if the motives of aliens are no more obscure than the motives of delegates to the Council of Worlds.
“Thowintha’s involvement in this is deep,” says Forster. “Sh’he does not regard his’erself as an individual—none of them do—but it’s clear to me that sh’he is primum inter pares where what we call the Adaptationist faction is concerned. However grudgingly, sh’he, or the group sh’he speaks for, came to accept the evolution of local populations away from the ideal of the Mandate. It must have been hard for them; we may well have witnessed the final break between the parties. Indeed, we may have helped precipitate it.”
“You may even have been recruited to precipitate it,” says the commander.
“That occurred to some of us.”
“Then Nemo was part of this plan, too?” asks Ari.
“I don’t pretend to understand how. For example, how did Thowintha know he would be on Amalthea? How did Thowintha know he would escape? Somehow Nemo understood that Thowintha did not represent the majority of the aliens, that they had left themselves no room to maneuver.”
“I’m confused,” Jozsef interjects. “As long as Thowintha controlled the world-ship, sh’he could go anywhere in space and time sh’he wanted.”
“It wasn’t the only world-ship,” says the commander, gazing through the window at the light-streaked sky. “We know that now.”
“On the contrary, in reality there is only one world-ship,” Forster says sharply.
“I’m even more confused,” Jozsef admits. “Thowintha’s ship—the ship you found at Amalthea—is also the ship they came in on?”
“Yes, but it represents only one possible state of the total system.” Forster nods toward the framed patch of night sky. “Other possible states co-exist with it.”
“But surely the superposition of states described by quantum theory occurs only at the microscopic level,” Ari remarks coolly, “and then only until some observer interferes.”
“According to those who claim to know…”
“Who would that be?”
“McNeil, and I trust his judgment,” Forster replies sharply. “Theories of quantum gravity suggest that linear superpositions of alternative states spontaneously reduce themselves to one … reality … upon encountering significant space-time curvature. Travel into the past introduces a second order of alternative states.” Forster allows himself a smile. “Although I’m not certain we ever convinced poor Bill Hawkins that time travel was actually possible.”
“I’m certain you haven’t convinced me,” the commander growls. “What’s to prove this isn’t some elaborate dream, some programmed hypnotism, begun while you were in—what did you call it?—the drowning chamber?”
Forster fingers his empty glass, and Jozsef quickly takes the hint, filling it with ice and whisky. The professor nods his thanks.
“True,” he says then, “time travel was always considered impossible. But solely on the grounds that messages sent to the past might generate paradoxes. In this case the superposition of alternatives insures that that won’t happen.”
“Nothing you’ve said rules out paradox,” objects the commander.
“I’m told that the collapse of the wave-function prevents it,” Forster answers. “We are not faced with multiple realities, only multiple possibilities. There is one reality. If a message sent to the past were to interfere with another message—a contradictory message—one vanishes. It never existed. The wave-function collapses. If one of us interferes with himself or herself, one of us vanishes. If a world-ship interferes with another version of itself, one of them vanishes.”
Ari smiles ruefully. “Were you really in danger of meeting yourselves?”
“It seems that in this century, yes, we might have been, as a matter of fact,” says Forster, his eyes widening at the thought. “And at Venus, Thowintha had that immediate concern. Precisely because, at that moment, not everything approaching Venus was a comet…”
So many hours had passed while the flying medusa explored the seas and jungles and cloudscapes of Venus that Sparta and Blake had almost lost track of the time. Finally the vessel brought them to the great ridge of cliffs where they had first left the ocean; there it once again sank beneath the boiling waves.
The wriggling alien lifeforms poured out of the vessel, pulling the humans along at first but, to their surprise, soon leaving them to swim for themselves. Sparta said, “They may desire consensus, but they’re about to split. If they haven’t already.”
Blake tucked his chin in agreement. “At least two parties. The hail-to-the-Mandate types. And the ones who want to be creative. How the hell we tell them apart—short of a quick course in counterpoint and antiphony—is beyond me.”
Approaching the convocation, they knew something was wrong.
They had left behind a perfect sphere of life, wriggling with energy; what they saw in front of them was like a cell infected with a virus, a misshapen thing seized with waves of distortion, convulsions that rhythmically flattened and puckered it and threatened to split it wide open. Upheavals momentarily dislodged black particles—individual aliens—who struggled desperately to regain contact with their fellows.
The total mass of the c
onglomeration seemed much larger. And the song that came from the massed singers was louder than before, weirdly strident and dissonant.
Threat of dissolution became reality when the huge sphere tore open, spewing out creatures into the dark waters. What had been empty interior space, defined by a disciplined throng of intelligent creatures, was now an inchoate suspension of mindless, struggling animals.
The human eye will make patterns of almost anything it sees, and Blake later reported that he recognized structure in the chaos—that what seemed like a bundle of dark rods, a spindle consisting of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bodies, some streaming one way, some the other, had formed between two wobbling amorphous shapes in the light-streaked water,
Sparta saw it too. “Like a cell dividing,” she said.
They hung motionless in the depths, abandoned by their escort, which had dispersed and fled to join the writhing chaos ahead. “I don’t like the looks of that mess,” Blake said. “I don’t think I want to choose sides.”
She shook her head. “We’ve already chosen sides. Humans can’t be anything but Adapters.” She sounded less than enthusiastic.
“Is that bad?”
“Good or bad, it’s our nature. We get nervous whenever we try to think five years into the future. For us, any institution that keeps the same name a thousand years is unimaginably ancient. Conservation means trying to save the last scrap of something that disappeared before we noticed it.” She was silent a moment, after her angry outburst. Then she said, “Now I’m sure that you and I being here is not accidental.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because we are what we are, Thowintha chose us.” She started to swim toward the boiling remnants of the convocation as if drawn to it by duty.
Blake reluctantly swam after her, thinking that there were lots of unexplored options short of taking sides in an alien free-for-all—in a pinch, one could always blow something up—but he had no intention of leaving her side. Following her, he dived into the chaos.
The crowded aliens were using their siphons to jet through the waters in phenomenal bursts of speed, but even in the midst of upheaval the racing bodies never struck each other or did worse than graze Sparta and Blake. Nevertheless they were buffeted by churning currents. Blake felt he’d been plunged into a cauldron of molten metals—a little more colorful and, he imagined, only a little less warm—as immense mantled-and-tentacled bodies hurtled past them, glowing with ruddy hues that reminded him of quenched iron and burning sodium. The water smelled of acid and copper.
The confusion seemed to abate as the humans drew near the center of the spectacle. The spindle-like bundle of rods of swimming bodies was retreating now, withdrawing from both ends, and the division of what had been a great sphere into two still-wobbly spheroids, one larger than the other, was almost complete.
If Blake hadn’t been breathing with gills he would have choked on what he saw. At the coagulating nucleus of the larger of the “daughter cells” swam a pale apparition, a rag-bundle imitation of a human being shrouded in trailing seaweed. Nemo.
A moment later, they heard the message of the cacophonous chorus: The false Designates are diseased limbs. They must be cut away. Then all will be well.
With these words the living structure of which Nemo was the focus contracted and became better defined. It was like looking into a medusa’s mouth-parts, a devouring hole surrounded by a million writhing tentacles; to Blake—hyper-alert, seeing everything as if time had slowed down—it seemed that the attention of that black eye was focused upon him and Sparta, that every real slit-yellow eye that ringed it and defined it beamed malice, that the whole creature made of creatures was about to convulse around them and swallow them up.
From nowhere, immense fiery wings spread themselves over them, dropping a veil before their sight of the evil heart of the ravening lotus. A single alien only—his’er mantle ablaze with opalescent fire.
Like an earthly squid’s, two of the alien’s tentacles were equipped with prehensile suckered pads; much longer than the others, these elongated still more and wrapped the two humans around their waists. Of the menacing alien song, only a grinding wordless moan was left to vibrate through the waters.
Thowintha had never touched Sparta or Blake before; as sh’he did so now sh’he sang in tones that conveyed immense tenderness and protection—All will be well—and they surrendered their bodies and wills to his’er care.
Water gushed from Thowintha’s siphon. Sh’he jetted away, trailing the human pair—unlike an earthly squid, which swims “backwards”—like streamers from a kite. Their faces distorted into theater masks as they tried to avoid swallowing water. They flattened their arms against their sides and pointed their feet, streamlining themselves.
With the humans in tow and a myriad of fiery miniature squidlings streaking after them like sparks from a bottle rocket, Thowintha soared away from the disintegrating convocation. In moments sh’he was over the reef settlement Blake and Sparta had seen on their journey from the world-ship, its wide canyons and coral caves with their strange artificial structures now wholly abandoned. Blake would have asked why, but his velocity through the water made speech impossible. He rolled slightly in Thowintha’s grip to look backward along their trail. The ocean was thick with bodies, jetting after them in pursuit.
Do not be concerned. It is not too late to avert collapse, Thowintha boomed.
Collapse! Blake wanted to shout questions, but could only ponder the word instead.
During all this, my companions and I were exploring the world-ship. As Walsh had reported to us. Nemo was gone. We could see for ourselves that the drowning chamber was empty. Only the kelp-like trailing membranes that had so recently sustained us all remained.
We hadn’t closely questioned our captain on her motives for coming here before us—that could wait until later, when she was less reticent of the truth—and for the time being we accepted at face value her statement that she’d been giving the Manta a test run. But her news had disturbed us enough to make us nervous about separating. Did Nemo intend another attack on the tug? We had learned not to attribute ordinary motives to the man. We’d left McNeil and Hawkins and Marianne Mitchell very much on their guard inside the Ventris.
But meanwhile Nemo’s escape lent new urgency to our explorations. Walsh and I peered through the forward bubble of the craft’s polyglas pressure chamber; poor Tony rode blind, squeezed into the crawlspace behind us. The Manta left the drowning chamber and beat its way through kilometers-long winding corridors.
Before we’d left Jupiter we’d grown familiar with the path to the Temple of Art, and soon the Manta reached the Temple’s central vault. We saw there what we had never seen before: the lofty vault was alive with living stars.
“Tony, can you get your head up here and look at this?”
“Give me a minute, Jo.” One reason we’d picked him to go with us was because—after myself—he was the smallest of us; even so, it took strenuous slow-motion acrobatics for Groves to get himself forward, his head upside down between our knees, where he could peer upward through the bubble in a position to study the ceiling. “Hmm,” he murmured.
“Yes? Well?” Perhaps I sounded more irritable than I felt—I was more nervous than irritable, really, not because of Nemo but because I’d put myself on the spot. The closer we came to the world-ship’s control center, the less certain I was that anything useful would come of it. How did one begin to decipher the alien mind, even if, after thirty years of hard work, one could claim to comprehend a few thousand words of the alien language?
Groves spoke up, “That pattern’s pretty much identical to the one the Ventris calculated for us with Troy’s input. It’s the way the sky would look three billion years ago—from when we left Jupiter, I mean. Good deal of uncertainty, of course. Couldn’t pay me to trust any computer’s notion of planet positions over that span…” He trailed off inconclusively.
“You were about to say something else,�
� Walsh prompted. Groves was a private man and modest, which made his reputation as a navigator easy to overlook. But he’d managed to land Springer on Pluto when all that famous explorer’s assumptions proved mistaken, and his colleagues had known who deserved the credit.
“Well, Jo, it’s simply that there are a great many lights in this particular sky that don’t show up in Ventris’s reconstruction. If you watch them for a minute or two—which is about how much time I’ve had here, lying on my back—they seem to be following cometary orbits.”
“You can tell, that quickly?”
“Oh yes. They’re moving fast, and they’re very close—which is why their motion shows at all.”
“What does that portend?” I asked.
Groves hummed some more while framing his answer. “Rough guess, you understand.” Upside down he gazed at us. “I’d say one or two of those comets are just about to hit us,” he said. “Maybe next week. Maybe tomorrow.”
“The Amalthean must know about this,” Walsh said.
“That’s what makes…”
“There’s something else,” Tony said, breaking in.
“What?”
“I don’t know what,” the navigator replied. “I’m lying here on my back, looking at it. I don’t even know how this imaging system is made, or where it gets its data. Assuming for the moment that I’m looking at something like a realtime planetarium … well, there’s one object up there which is three times brighter than a typical comet, and it’s incoming at twice a comet’s velocity. Right on top of us.”
“Good Lord,” I said.
Walsh said nothing. Her attention had been attracted by movement in the Temple, well below the glowing ceiling, where bright moving stars, gold and turquoise and ruby, were gathering in the darkness, and among them shadowy shapes, infiltrating the waters around them.
