by Paul Preuss
Briefly I wondered what ship we had been traveling in. But I was distracted by Blake’s dire intimations. “You mean Nemo and the Traditionalists could simply destroy it?” I was aghast.
“Perhaps they already have.”
“Destroyed the world-ship?”
“Perhaps many times,” said Troy.
“But not in this reality,” Blake added—rather complacently, I thought.
“Yes and no,” Troy corrected him. “There are many potential realities. There is only one reality. It’s apparent that Nemo himself has realized this by now—realized that no attempt to change the past can possibly succeed, and that the only path to success is to join us. Despite himself, he has become our conspirator.”
“What can you possibly mean by that?” I asked, all agape.
But just then Diktynna arrived with her acolytes, bringing platters of bread and yogurt and figs. In the morning light she looked less like a goddess than like a woman of thirty who had lived a hard life. All of us must have looked ourselves that morning. We understood each other well enough: without men and women to impersonate them on appropriate occasions, deities would lose all their influence over human affairs…
We left the village of the Hephtiu, the Eteocretans, at midday, our medusa bearing us sedately into the blue sky as the people waved madly from atop their rocky fortress.
In the weeks that followed, our medusa coursed swiftly here and there over the wild and fertile lands of late Bronze-Age Earth—and how clean, how blissfully empty of people they were! How precious, by contrast, the tiny nodes of civilization scattered in these sublime wildernesses!—I became more accustomed to the thinking of Troy and Redfield, my rediscovered friends. I began to appreciate the work they had undertaken and the danger still to be faced…
For Nemo had been to Egypt before us, appearing in the company of ‘veiled god-messengers’ to do honor to Pharaoh, bringing the priest-king gifts of knives made of ‘god-metal’ and intoxicating liquor in clear glass bottles, diagramming for the Egyptian priests precisely where he and his companions had come from. From Crux.
Nemo had been to the land of the Israelites before us. The arrival and departure of his medusa had been noted, by the oracular nabi, who described them in visions of fiery wheels in the sky.
Nemo had been to Ethiopia, and to Arabia, and to Babylon, and to the Indus, and to China before us…
While we were here to collect Bronze Age languages and texts, Nemo was busy creating the Knowledge, the ancient corruptions that would one day justify his existence. And all the horrors upon which his existence floated.
With this realization I comprehended the Amalthean program at last—the program of our Amaltheans, I mean, those who espoused adaptability and had chosen to exercise restraining, flexible, and responsive stewardship—and more significantly I began to grasp Troy’s personal program. It was a program to save the universe as we (or at least she) understood it.
“Nemo meant to catch us here, to wipe us out,” she told me. “He missed.”
“How did he miss? Were we just lucky?”
“There’s little precision in using world-ships for time travel—a minor mistake could cost months or even years to rectify. He may have tried more than once, but sooner or later he realized that our world-ship was there all along, waiting for us around Jupiter. Yet even if he did persuade his friends to destroy it, it would soon have occurred to him that nothing really had changed. As many world-ships as he destroyed, as many more still exist.”
“How is that possible?”
Her answer struck me as surpassingly strange.
“Because we are all still inside the time loop,” she said. “Perhaps I should have seen it sooner. Obviously he has seen it.”
My open mouth, my soundless questions were enough to elicit more from her.
“A wave packet of potential realities has been generated which cannot finally be reduced—not yet.” She hurried on to avoid bogging down in a fuller explanation. “Meanwhile, Nemo understands as well as we do—perhaps better—that his only hope, and our only hope, is to restore the universe as precisely as possible to its former state. We must leave his business to him. He will do it well, I think. We must finish our own task—our own Mandate.”
She left me then, with my mouth still open.
A few weeks later there came a moment when I found myself dictating the content of our Bronze Age researches to intelligent machines, watching as they inscribed the strange characters upon tablets of adamantine crystal, alongside their Amalthean equivalents. As the tablets took form I recognized their shapes; on impulse, I added a few key signs. With those terminal characters—an elegant Hebrew aleph, ink-brush style, a few quick wedge-shapes, like Sumerian clay—the Venusian tablets had fully formed themselves in front of my eyes.
I understood Troy at last. We had to create the world we knew. Having recorded the Bronze-Age languages, we must now preserve them. I knew where it would be done; after all, I myself had discovered the Venusian tablets. I was as yet unsure how it could be done…
Then our medusa lifted us straight into starry heaven, where our world-ship—or one of its Doppels—waited. Two days later we were diving into the poisonous sulfur-dioxide Clouds of Venus.
23
Beneath us, coral reefs had once thickened and spread in an uneven plain of branched and knobbed structures, having grown there at a level much deeper than in the oceans of Earth—for while coral loves warm water, in those days the oceans of Venus were near boiling at the surface.
Those days were long ago. Nowadays the air at ground level was as heavy as the sea, and hot enough to melt lead. The atmosphere was dark, ruddy, so thick it bent the horizon like the inside of a bowl, only a few hundred meters ahead of us.
Beyond the ancient coral plantations (burnt lumps, unrecognizable to any but those like us, who had been there) we came upon a shelving beach. It could have been a moonscape, for lava flows and primordial wave action had not fully erased the rims of the craters, many of them overlapping, which gave evidence of continued bombardment by celestial objects of all sizes. Still, certain clues were accessible to the trained and sensitive eye. Here undersea organisms had once fed on bits of detritus that had followed a lazy current seaward; the scouring of the outflow was still faintly visible in the rock.
We were in what had been a submarine canyon, a river channel. Over our heads, waves had surged toward the land in parallel lines of surf, overriding the outflowing current. On either side, uncountable chalky shellfish had clotted the rocks that rose up steeply, forming the base of high cliffs.
I knew these cliffs; I knew them well indeed. With my friend Albers Merck—the same who later tried to murder me—I had crawled into these very mountains in an armored Venusian rover. Here we had been trapped by earthquake and rockfall, and here our lives had almost ended before Troy rescued us. To die then would have suited Merck well, I suppose; the only thing he accomplished in his later attempt on my life was his own death, plus the destruction of a great many valuable records.
Contrary to my expectations, I had restored them. And now I brought them with me in their original form, as forged in the depths of the world-ship.
The medusa in which I rode was not quite like the others I had grown so used to. Its inner walls glowed with ruddy light, the color of salmon roe; downward, through story upon story of what looked like giant foam—an aerosol frozen in place—the mass of the vessel was divided into countless sacs or chambers, a nest of tough-walled bubbles in graduated sizes, and in each chamber, dark shapes against the diffuse light. All different. Each a specimen.
Not all were sea creatures, although there were hundreds of these, some familiar from Earth—jellyfish and nudibranchs and clams and urchins and sponges and corals and worms and snails and a thousand species of fish—but others never seen on Earth, even as vanished fossils. There were land creatures and creatures of the air as well, amphibians and reptiles and a dizzying collection of insects and arthrop
ods, and here and there a leathery winged creature or a tiny thing that, like the medusas of the sea, apparently floated freely upon the rain-soaked winds. And there were mosses and ferns and algae, some big enough for the coal swamps of Earth, others too diminutive to make out clearly…
I had no doubt that our alien ark contained a complete collection of microorganisms as well. Among the immensity of the collection, there were many things that were never seen and never would have been seen on Barth. With one exception. I had seen them before. They had been in the cave—
—the cave the mining robot stumbled upon and that Merck and I had gone to investigate. We had been interested in the tablets, principally. The plants and animals had been a bonus.
The medusa began slowly to ascend. The skies reddened and dark cliffs rose narrowly on either side, so close the medusa brushed against them. I tried to imagine this place as it might have been three billion years ago, with rain driving against the canopy and numberless waterfalls streaming from the cliffs above. Below there would have been a rushing stream, silvery with the reflected light of blue-white clouds, pouring over coal-black rocks and pooling behind dams of choked vegetation—giant log dams, tangled piles of palm logs and tree ferns and huge fibrous horsetails, dams chinked with black mud and fronds and mosses tom from the flooded walls of the arroyo, the steaming pools behind them silting up with spongy vegetation.
Already the river would have been cutting its way through these vine-draped basalt cliffs for a thousand million years or more, hauling down boulders to do the heavy work, then breaking the boulders to gravel, then grinding the gravel to sand, then pushing the sand out to sea. Already the river would have cut its way down through beds of older organic stuff, coal and dead coral from when the sea had been higher still.
Here, somewhere near. You must show us the place… Staring at the ruined watercourse twisting between narrowing walls of reddish-black rock, gleaming with the slick metallic patina of ancient rainwater, my mind had played me a trick. Now I tried to recall when and where I really was.
“This is the place,” I said. “Beyond that turn, beneath that cliff.”
The Amaltheans did not query me again. The medusa moved swiftly to the spot and stopped there. Beneath us there was vigorous invisible movement—I felt its vibrations, but could see nothing of what was happening.
They were making a cave and putting the specimens into it, and with them the diamond-metal tablets, inscribed with the ancient texts in the forty-three signs of the Amalthean alphabet. They were putting everything where Merck and I would find it, three thousand years from now. The Venusian tablets that I had deciphered, and that I, more than anyone, had been responsible for writing…
Soon I was back aboard the world-ship. Which world-ship? Which me? Of all contesting realities, which would win? We drove at high acceleration through swarms of oncoming comets, toward the singularity. As the presence of the comets suggested, our target was close to the sun, near perihelion. Within two light-months the world-ship dived into the tiny bright sphere of distorted spacetime—
—and instantly re-emerged.
24
“I don’t understand where the world-ship was during these adventures,” the commander says. “At one point you’ve got it orbiting Jupiter, a minute later it’s waiting to pick you up at Earth.” He has joined the others on the rug-strewn floor, around the litter of their picnic supper.
“A fascinating question, one with several answers,” Forster replies. “You see, by now our own world-ship had divided…”
“Divided?” Ari seems amused.
“Doubled, tripled, multiplied itself.”
“Multiplied itself!” Jozsef is astonished.
“Oh, for practical purposes, the world-ship was just where it always was. While we were busy exploring the Dark Ages of the Aegean, one copy was orbiting Barth at the fourth Lagrangian point. But the original ship orbited Jupiter, covered with ice—long since having assumed the identity of Amalthea in which we were to discover it.”
“How could this happen?” Jozsef persists. “This second Doppelganger?”
“Just as it happened before, or so your daughter informed me. Nemesis—the Whirlpool—visits us every twenty-six million years; our era happens to be in the middle of this cycle. Thirteen million years ago we dived into the spinning Whirlpool and came out again—shortly before we had gone in. We went in again, and when we emerged, there were two of us. And then again … well, you can work out the details.”
Already Jozsef has seen the implications. “But the humans! Do you mean to say…?” He cannot put the increasingly awful thought into words.
Forster makes the thought explicit. “We did not meet ourselves when we first explored the world-ship. Perhaps because we had never been to that particular ship, or perhaps only because it is a very large vessel—certainly we did not find the thousands of Amaltheans who inhabited the world-ship when I saw it last. But I’m sure that your daughter, and Blake Redfield as well, understood what was coming. I suspect they planned it with Thowintha—the one or the many versions of him’er—who knew that sh’he, they, would forget almost everything in their long sleep to come. But they would not forget that humans would come again, or that your daughter would be among them.”
Ari shakes her head angrily. “Linda was with you in the Bronze Age. One of her, not a multitude. Your account has become fantastic.”
“I sympathize with your confusion,” Forster says coolly, pondering the last traces of liquid in his glass. “Imagine my own confusion when I realized that realities, for want of a better word, had begun to proliferate uncontrollably. We had made a loop within a loop of time. And we were not the first to do so.”
“Tell me this,” says the commander. “Did Nemo destroy the ship at Amalthea, or did he not?”
“If he did, it was replaced by another. And if that one was destroyed, it was replaced by another. Inside the loop, there is no resolution.”
Forster looks to the commander. The tall man has turned suddenly away and now seems to be ignoring him, busying himself rebuilding the fire. When the last the fresh flames are leaping, he straightens his spare frame almost painfully. “We know what the man you call Nemo did,” says the commander.
Forster smiles. “No doubt there are people in your organization who would place him at the death of Moses, of Siddhartha, of Alexander and Jesus and Lincoln and Gandhi.”
“A very great boon to humanity, in that case,” says Ari sharply. “Who would have paid those people any attention if they had lived out their lives?”
“Sympathy for the devil,” Forster remarks.
The commander keeps his steely gaze focused upon Forster. “Not a rare emotion among the Free Spirit. Or in Salamander. Tell us why you are here, why you survived. Tell us why we should believe that you are … real, as you put it.”
Forster shrugs, feeling no threat. “As for myself, the singular me, even at the climax I still had only the dimmest understanding of those events in which apparently I played an important role. Or roles. I have done my best to reconstruct what actually happened on Earth while we were gone—if I may be permitted to use the word actually under these circumstances…”
PART
5
THE SHINING ONES
25
“And so we approach the present. A hundred world-ships fill the skies. Or a thousand. Or an infinity of world-ships.” Outside the empty library, the pre-dawn sky dazzlingly confirms Forster’s description. “Of all my researches the personal account by the Swiss diving engineer, Herr Klaus Muller, touches me most closely. ‘Don’t call me a diver, please,’ he told me, ‘I hate the name…’”
I’m a deep-sea engineer, and I use diving gear about as often as an airman uses a parachute. Most of my work is done with videolinked, remote-controlled robots. When I do have to go down myself, I’m inside a minisub with external manipulators. We call it the Lobster because of its claws; the standard model works down to seventeen hundred met
ers, but there are special versions that will work at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—which may not be the deepest place in the solar system, if you count some of the watery moons, but certainly makes for the greatest water pressure you’ll find anywhere. Now I’ve never been down there myself, but I’ll be glad to quote you terms if you’re interested. At a rough estimate it will cost you a new dollar a foot, plus a thousand an hour on the job itself. You won’t get a better deal elsewhere. There is no other firm in the world that can live up to our motto: ANY JOB, ANY DEPTH.
So when Goncharov interrupted my holidays, I knew we had a problem with the deep end of the Trincomalee project—even before he told me that the site engineers had reported a complete breakdown.
Our firm was covered, technically, because the client had signed the take-over certificate, thereby admitting that the job was up to specification. However, it was not as simple as that; if negligence on our part was proved, we might be safe from legal action—but it would be very bad for business. Even worse for me, personally, for I had been project supervisor in Trinco Deep.
The morning after my rather melodramatic conversation with Goncharov—complete with ominously repeated deadlines and strangling noises from his end—I was in a helicopter over the Alps, with only a short stop in Bern on the way to La Spezia, where our company kept the heavy stuff.
After settling affairs at Spezia I commandeered the firm’s executive suite there. I had a phonelink conversation with Gertrud and the boys, who were not delighted at my sudden departure, which made me wonder why I hadn’t become a banker or a hotelier or gone into the watch business, like any other sensible Swiss. It was all the fault of Hannes Keller and the Picards, I told myself moodily: why did they have to start this deep-sea tradition, in Switzerland of all countries? Then I shut off the commlinks and settled myself to four hours’ sleep, knowing I would have little enough in the days to come.
