by Paul Preuss
“Professor… We’re not alone in here.”
Moments later the Manta was surrounded by creatures as large as Thowintha, blazing like electrical signboards and bombarding our hull with frightening sonic reverberations.
“Are we being attacked?” Walsh asked.
“Maybe we’re under arrest,” Groves said at almost the same moment.
But from the muffled noises I was hearing, I didn’t think so. “Turn on the hydrophones,” I said to Walsh.
She did. The suddenly clear, urgent voices of our “captors” sang in unison over the Manta’s interior speakers.
“What are they saying. Professor?”
“Roughly, We want to help you, Do not interfere.”
“Yeah? Where but where did they come from? Who are they?”
“Help me rig up the translator to the phones. Perhaps I can respond.”
Walsh pulled circuits as I keyed words into the translator, but before we could finish, a new flurry of sounds filled the water. Do not worry.
“We’re moving!” Groves shouted.
All will be well. The aliens were doing something to the outside of the hull. A swarm of tentacles descended over the bubble viewport. There was a pause, then an ominous sound.
Poor Groves screamed when he realized what the aliens were doing, a wailing cry of terror that filled the cramped interior and did not cease.
“My God, they’ve found the emergency hatch release,” Walsh shouted. Her hand had reached for the switches that would fire the Manta’s auxiliary rocket motors, but before she could open the safety covers the hatch split and water shot in through the opening as if from a fire hose.
The force of it propelled me into the polyglas window, and I remembered nothing more.
Thowintha kept his’er grip on Sparta and Blake but made no attempt to evade the brilliant horde of aliens that crowded into the submerged lock with them. The impermeable molecular layers of the giant lock immediately began reassembling themselves, spiraling rapidly inward. Thowintha swam powerfully upward through the glowing caverns and corridors of the immense ship.
The once lonely ship was transformed. All around them swarmed busy aliens on errands of their own, creatures moving so effortlessly through the water that Sparta and Blake were embarrassed by their human helplessness. No matter how adaptable, naked humans, stripped of their tools, are among the most ineffectual of beasts.
It was doubtful that the Amaltheans could have understood their emotions. Thowintha certainly seemed indifferent to their feelings. Sh’he acknowledged only their curiosity, lecturing them as sh’he swam; his’er voice had acquired an eerie resonance, for his’er thoughts were formed simultaneously among the mass of creatures scattered throughout the ship—perhaps with the ship itself—and voiced with all their voices, which filled the surrounding waters.
What sh’he, they, had to say was part theoretic, part fantastic, part inconceivable. Sparta and Blake absorbed what they could of it.
After many minutes of strenuous effort, Thowintha released them. You must explain to them what we have explained to you. There is very little time. Then sh’he was gone.
Blake and Sparta emerged from the water; the world-ship sealed itself behind them. Beside them, the tilted dome was filled with air, still warm, still rich with the rank perfume of Venus. The lock’s metallic tendrils wound themselves gently around the humans and lifted them swiftly into the open cargo bay of the Michael Ventris. They felt their feet on hard metal decking; the tendrils whispered away, leaving them to stand shakily, unsupported by the buoyancy upon which they had come to depend.
The crew module hatch was locked. “Who goes there?” Hawkins’s voice boomed at them over the comm speaker.
“Troy and Redfield,” Sparta said.
“Open up, it’s urgent,” Blake added.
The hatch opened slowly. Hawkins peered at them suspiciously, holding a titanium spanner in plain view. “Where are the others?”
“We’d hoped to find them here,” Sparta said, pushing past him with effort. If he had chosen to resist, she and Blake would have been helpless. They found McNeil and Marianne Mitchell in the wardroom, looking as strained and nervous as Hawkins.
“Walsh and Groves and the Professor went exploring in the Manta, Inspector,” McNeil explained. “They’re overdue.”
“Nemo’s missing,” said Marianne. “The captain says he escaped.”
“We don’t really know,” Hawkins said, “maybe he…”
“Never mind that now,” Sparta cut in. “The world-ship is about to undergo another massive acceleration. It’s imperative we get you into the water.”
Their breath stopped, and the blood drained from their faces. Sparta might have pronounced their death sentences.
Marianne was the first to speak. “This time are we going home?”
“It’s out of our hands,” Sparta said.
The aliens and their gentle machines received the bodies; in the drowning chamber, Walsh and Groves and I were already floating on the artificial tides, seeing nothing, awash in dreams.
Sparta and Blake watched us until all were safe. She turned to him with a flick of her hands, relieved to be in the water again. “You have sucker marks on your tummy,” she said. Her underwater voice had become her accustomed voice, filled with nuance. She looked down at herself. “Me too.”
He didn’t reply. The two humans swam hard through the ship’s warm and swarming waters. “They’re going to fail,” Blake said angrily. “They know it and it’s making them crazy. We’re seeing the disintegration of their society.”
“They have no experience of failure.”
“Not even experience of the unexpected.” He feigned amazement. “Send out an ark, a starship full of pioneers, carrying every species two by two—or whatever the magic number is where they come from—with orders to reproduce the homeworld right down to the last virus. But forget to tell them they might bump into something a little different.”
“They know secrets of nature we humans may never learn for ourselves … that most of us are too impatient to learn.”
“Different histories, different stupidities. You’re the one who said we can’t help being Adapters.“
“Because we’ve short-circuited evolution, replaced slow physical modification and hard-wired behavioral change with fluid culture. We grew up with volcanoes and earthquakes, glaciers that came and went, sea levels that rose and fell. Disaster keeps us on our toes.”
“Whereas their species is hundreds of millions of years old, maybe billions of years old. Certainly they came from some ancient and never-changing place.”
“Even on Earth, some designs change very little over time. Dragonflies. Scorpions. Sharks.”
“Squid,” Blake suggested.
“We can help them,” she said.
“Why? What difference does it make to us if they fail?”
She turned her cool-eyed gaze upon him. “More than their success is at stake here. Thowintha brought us here because sh’he thought we could help them. And for something else.”
“Which would be?”
“I believe it was in order to create our own destiny.”
He blew a stream of bubbles. “What can we do for these characters? I can’t even keep up with them in the water.”
“You already helped. You suggested steering the comets.”
“An idea that got shot down pretty quick—besides, now that I think about it, it’s too late. Even if they could bring themselves to disobey the Mandate.”
“You mean because there’s too much water vapor in the atmosphere of Venus already.”
He nodded. “The greenhouse is irreversible.”
“I agree,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about Venus.”
He looked at her, surprised. “Earth?”
She shook her head sharply. “Mars.”
“That’s impossible,” he said without hesitation. “Mars has a tenth the mass of Earth, a fourth the diameter—a much grea
ter surface-to-volume ratio. It’s the opposite problem from Venus. You couldn’t keep an atmosphere, and if you could, you couldn’t keep it warm.”
“Nevertheless, they did it. As we know from the Martian plaque.”
He looked exasperated. “First of all, if they did it, they did it without our help…”
“Are you sure?”
“And second, they failed.”
“Maybe not this time. It seems to me we’ve been living a different history ever since we flew into that black hole.”
“Mars is the same size no matter what history we’re in,” he retorted. “If you want to help them recreate Crux, Earth is the next logical choice.”
“I would like to persuade them otherwise.” She reached out a supplicant hand and rested it lightly on his shoulder. “I need your help.”
He could not, after all, hold out for long. The prospect of bombing Mars, an entire planet—with comets—was wildly irresistible.
Thowintha hung in the glowing waters of the Temple bridge, surrounded by others of his’er kind. To Sparta and Blake the strong beating of his’er mantle, its steady tempo, suggested deep contemplation. After several minutes of silence, his’er mantle glowed bright red and vibrations erupted around him’er. You command us to do this?
Who are we to command? We suggest this course of action.
We will do as the Designates suggest. We will make the vessels you need. We will even teach you to pilot them. The waters rumbled with his’er amusement.
How will you do that? Blake’s eyes widened in surprise.
We will teach you how to think, said Thowintha.
We know how to think, he said angrily.
But Sparta said. We an eager to learn your methods of control.
Thowintha’s mantle subtly shifted from crimson to purple. Our vessels take their power from the vacuum. We relay that power from our core. As distances increase, losses increase.
Losses?
That is to say, the probability of nonexistence increases. Ratios are easily calculated. For us, these matters are of little consequence. For such as yourselves, individuals, there may be a different weighting.
Sparta looked glumly at Blake, before addressing the alien. We will wish to contemplate the ratios of which you speak, she said, more reasonably than she felt.
No sentient eye had observed the landing of the world-ship; no sentient eye observed its departure. The ocean around its landing place was deserted for many kilometers around. Superheated, that patch of ocean boiled in frenzy, evaporated; a vortex of cloud swirled around the fiery column that the ship left in its wake.
Soon it was high above the clouds; the sphere of the planet became a disk. Venus was left behind, and the gleaming diamond moon fell smoothly toward the sun.
Comets pursued it. Comets—and one other giant diamond moon, exactly like itself…
11
“The fastest incoming object was in fact a world-ship.”
“A world-ship!” Jozsef is astonished.
“…Coming to carry the Amaltheans on Venus to safety—a world-ship piloted by Thowintha his’erself, as sh’he had existed three billion years previously. Our Thowintha intended to be elsewhere when his’er alternative self arrived.”
“You mean that right then, the alien introduced the first fork, the first branching path in space-time,” says the commander.
“That’s a fair assessment,” Forster agrees. “The first of many.” His aquiescence gives him a moment to sip thoughtfully from his glass.
The commander, like a cat worrying a mouse, will not let go. “What will be the effect of all this? That’s what we must know.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to wait to find out, Commander. Right now all I can do is continue my narrative…”
“You said you learned something from what my daughter told you,” says Ari.
“I learned much, although I learned slowly.” Forster sets his glass aside and resumes his tale. “Diving into the Whirlpool, our path could have branched in many ways. Already drowned, most of us had no say in our fate. Only one other could claim to be in control—but how much did Thowintha control his’er own fate…?”
PART
3
THE GARDENS
OF MARS
12
“On Amalthea, at Jupiter, I had had the luxury of limitless time stretching before me,” Forster continues. “My journal entries were sporadic, mere notes. Now, not knowing if each moment would be my last opportunity to record what I had seen, I began to keep careful records, beginning with this account…”
Again we found ourselves dripping wet and choking for air in the overheated interior of the Ventris, floating weightless in the crowded wardroom. This time Troy was not there to ease the transition.
“Nothing to show for our resurrection except a bit of pucker,” McNeil said morosely, grabbing a roll of his belly fat and scrutinizing it. “In my case, quite a bit of pucker. If they’re going to drown a man, they might have had the courtesy to let him lose a few grams in the process.”
“We’ve bloody well escaped from the jaws of death,” Groves said through clenched teeth. The little navigator was shivering uncontrollably.
Walsh eyed him sharply. “Tony, I think you’d better come with me to the clinic.” He protested feebly, but she said, “That’s an order, not a suggestion.” She hooked an arm around his shoulders and pulled him into the corridor.
Hawkins and Marianne Mitchell left for their quarters without a word to McNeil or me. I found McNeil eyeing me speculatively, stroking his chin. “I don’t believe we’ve been under for more than a few days, Professor.” I felt my own chin, and understood what he was driving at; our beards were short. That suggested that, wherever the world-ship had emerged from the Whirlpool, the black hole was still close to the sun. Which further implied…
“There be comets out there. A hornet’s nest of them, with us in the middle.”
We felt the Ventris move. I followed McNeil to the flight deck. Outside, the world-ship’s great lock was opening in front of us, and the tentacles that held us in place now moved us forward. The aliens were thoughtfully positioning the Ventris outside the lock, in space.
There we hovered, tethered to the world-ship by invisibly fine tentacles. To anyone looking on, tiny Ventris would have seemed a hummingbird escorting a Zeppelin.
Captain Walsh joined us on the deck and named what we saw but could not quite acknowledge: “Mars!”
The planet below us was recognizable, barely—a golden shield hanging in the starry sky. But its gleaming north polar cap extended halfway to the equator; its plains and mountains of red and yellow and black were veined with riverine seas of dark blue, reflecting ranks of cloud which sailed across what must have been a crystalline sky; even from space, we could see dark thunderheads crawling over the desert, sending spears of lightning to the ground.
“How’s Tony?”
“His biostats are okay,” she said. But she did not mention his psychostats.
McNeil pointed to the streaked heavens. “Comets again.” Walsh only nodded, but I could hardly contain my excitement, for I thought I knew what we were about to witness.
We didn’t have long to wait; the aliens had timed our resurrections closely. A bubble of intense light flared on the plain below, then another and another. The soundless violence threw shock waves radiating outward through the atmosphere, stunning clouds into existence and almost as quickly blowing them to tatters, throwing concentric rings of shadow onto the desert floor to interfere with each other like ripples in a still pond. In less than a minute, a hundred incandescent holes had opened in the disk of the planet, seemingly breaking through to a universe of unbearable brightness beyond.
And from the driest wastes of Mars, steam began to rise.
The spectacle went on for hours. I stayed glued to the windows while Walsh found other things to do. McNeil went below and, as he told me later, broke out a bottle of medicinal brandy—“Private stock, I
assure you”—and persuaded Groves to join him.
“Tony seemed in despair that we’d found him out. He confessed he has an absolute horror of drowning. It’s why he never went back to Pluto, he says; in the old days it meant going into the tank for four years. He claims what we’ve been through is worse.”
“Then he’s an even braver man than I knew,” I said.
McNeil shook his head. “Not the way he tells it. He claims he was taken by surprise both times—first by Troy’s orders, then when the aliens cracked open the Manta. Says he can’t face it again.”
I found nothing to say in reply.
When Groves appeared on deck we all pretended nothing had happened. The poor man looked pale as a fish; he watched what was happening on the surface of Mars a long while in silence, then turned to me and grinned weakly. “Beyond anything in the wildest imaginings of xeno-archaeology, eh, Professor? Culture X arrives on Mars.”
But I’m afraid I was too absorbed to acknowledge his pleasantry. To see a planet struck by cometary fragments simply awed me.
When at last the bombardment subsided, I broached an idea to Walsh. I pointed out that Mars was less than half again as massive as Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, for which the Michael Ventris had been over-designed. “What’s to prevent us from taking the Ventris down to the surface under its own power? With cooperation from the Amaltheans, we could document the transformation of the planet on the site!”
“What’s to prevent us?” Her reply was tart. “How about the equivalent of nuclear holocaust?” She nodded to the scene below.
I conceded we should have to wait to be sure the bombardment, or at least the worst of it, was really ended, that the atmospheric storms had subsided and the flash floods had run their course. But I persisted, and at last persuaded her.
“All right. Provided the lower atmosphere quiets down and we stay in touch with the world-ship, I’ve no personal objection. But I won’t take a chance on getting stranded. I don’t itch to live out my life on a lifeless planet.”
