Portals

by Ann Christy

  And it looks intelligent to me. The way the eyes flit over the area is calculating, canny. Suddenly the mouth clacks shut, and it dives so abruptly I can barely follow the motion. It hits the water like a bullet, though it doesn’t dive so much as simply stab the water before rising again. Water beads fly from it like shiny jewels as it slaps its wings and carries a struggling fish-like creature toward shore.

  I follow it—of course, I do. It lands near a messy bowl of dried mud and sticks that must be a nest. The structure is partially roofed, with the back half under a dome woven from thin tree whips or reeds. The front is open and when it waddles with a chuckle-producing lack of grace toward the nest, two extremely unattractive heads pop out. They immediately begin a screeching cacophony that would drive me insane if I had to listen to it for long.

  As soon as the wriggling fish drops by the nest, a larger head appears from under the dome and the two adults clack their beaks at each other. I can almost see the trade-off. You take the kids, honey. I’m out of here. They switch places and the exiting bird stretches its wings and wiggles its head violently on a long, supple neck. A wake-up stretch, maybe?

  By the time that one has waddled a few feet away from the nest, the other is doing its best to pluck out pieces of fish and get them into gaping beaks, each of the chicks doing its best to push aside the other. I can see the exhaustion in that almost-dinosaur’s face. Exhaustion and patience.

  It is in this crazy, unbelievable moment that I realize I am in love.

  I’m in love with all this life, this wild, rampant, glorious life that once covered my own planet. This is more than we humans could have ever imagined, a raw beauty almost too big to comprehend. Tears stream down my face as I watch this same tableau play out at nests along the shore. Tired parents and hungry offspring. I know what this is, what this planet is, but I need to confirm it.

  “Hub, is this what the dinosaurs would have become if the asteroid hadn’t hit Earth?”

  “Yes. Or to be more precise, it’s as close as can be. This planet isn’t an exact match to Earth. Not even I can do that. But it had a good base compatibility, and was altered to make it as close as can be done.”

  “Are they all like this? Did they ever evolve beyond this?” I ask, watching another set of weary parents trade duties, pausing to slide their beaks together, first to one side, then the other. It’s done with the muted affection of those who have been together a long time, like the kiss a married couple might exchange after years of saying goodbye each morning.

  “Oh yes, Lysa, they have. Even here, all is not what it first appears. The ones you saw at your landing spot are warm-blooded and live in herds. They are close-knit, and their friendships often life-long. They stay under the care of their parents and extended family for many years.

  “These avians migrate almost nine thousand miles each year—though the year here is a little different from original Earth’s. The exception is if anyone in their small migrating group is too ill or old to make the trip. Then that group stays. They build a nest like this, except much larger, with an entirely enclosed roof and a doorway. In this group house, they will huddle for warmth through the winter, tending to the weakest in their own way. The strongest members fish for food when the first freeze occurs and bury it in the softer earth away from shore to keep for the winter. They also bury their dead up there, on that mountain, covering them with rocks so that nothing can eat them, but where they will have a view of the world, even in death.”

  While Hub speaks in its soothing voice, I watch as the original bird I followed uses its wings to nudge the pair of chicks close, tucking one under each wing and enfolding them with long, bony fingers extending from the wings. The other adult shares a look with its mate and in their eyes, I see intelligence and affection. The newly liberated adult then flaps its strange wings and takes to the air.

  I hear a hum from the nest and draw closer to listen. The adult’s eyes are half-closed, the lids fluttering a little, and the strange hum-like purr is coming from it. I can see its chest vibrating with the power of the sound. The chicks are at first restless under the wings, their small ugly feet tapping about. Then the taps slow and I see the rounding of their chests as they settle down.

  As they are sung to sleep.

  “They’re sentient. Like us,” I say, looking at the calm, sleepy eyes of the adult, drawing so near it’s a wonder it doesn’t feel me. Then its eye widens, and the orangey-brown iris grows as the pupil contracts. We are looking at each other.

  With a gasp, I pull back even as the big beak opens. I make it away by the skin of my teeth.

  “It saw me!”

  I think I hear humor in Hub’s voice when it says, “It saw the vessel on the planet, the drone. That’s how you’re seeing. A very small device, perhaps an inch square, that we call a cube. I think you annoyed the avian.”

  The grin on my face is so wide it hurts. “I’m the first human to interact with a dinosaur, aren’t I?”

  There is definitely humor this time. “Yes, in fact you are. The very first.”

  “Yes!” I hiss and pump my fist, which serves to skew me to the side in an alarming way. I straighten and bring myself up higher. “Show me. Show me what they’ve become. Can you?”

  I lose control of the cube and Hub speeds us over the planet’s surface, passing over lush forests, then over wide plains dotted with irregular lines of trees. Mirror-like ribbons of water snake through it. A range of mountains so high they look unreal lies ahead of us, a line of black smoke rising from part of it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Volcanoes. Two continents are merging, and those mountains are rising where they meet. Volcanism is common in such situations.”

  Imagine that. A river of fire and a new continent with new mountains.

  We veer off course toward the lowering sun. The light is bright, painfully so. I bring my hand up to my face and the brightness dims, a strip of something dark running right across it.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. And here we are. Look ahead, slightly to the right. What do you see?”

  There’s a disturbance in the vast plains, some darker color, and as I try to make it out, I see something even more important; the regular lines of planted land.

  I see farms.

  Twenty

  It feels like we’re sitting in the square of this town doing some people-watching, though no one can see us. Hub has tucked our cube into an out of the way gap in a wall. We’re high enough that we have a good view.

  Hub ordered me some soup and I gave up on the spoon because it’s so disorienting to use it while immersed like this. I can’t see much of my real room, just hints of white near the bed and a vague presence when a dino-person walks through a piece of furniture. I couldn’t even make it to the door without falling and I didn’t want to stop the viewing, so a cabinet-bot brought me my bowl, its screen lit up with a bright happy face, so I could see it to take my bowl.

  And now, I’m slurping down vegetable soup that needs a little salt and watching a mother read her child the riot act. She’s clearly majorly pissed off and the little dino-kid is making a noise that makes me want to cover up my ears.

  “Are they all like that? So loud?” I ask.

  “Hearing has a different priority with different species and their tonal ranges tend to cluster by species, much like on your planet. But yes, they are rather loud compared to humans.”

  “Can you understand them? What they’re saying?”

  “I can. Do you want to know?”

  “Duh,” I say, pausing in my slurp. “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. I mean, you know, you don’t have to give me a word for word, but in general.”

  “The child has misbehaved by eating in the shop without paying for what he ate. This is the second time he’s done it, and she’s very ashamed of him. She’s telling him he’ll wind up without a mate on the plains eating leavings.”

  “
That’s mean.”

  “They have a very strict culture.”

  I ponder that while I drink my soup and watch. They’re interesting and I could watch them all day. I could watch them forever really. They don’t wear clothes, but they do wear aprons with big pockets. Their skin is nubby looking, rough almost, and their skin colors are extraordinary. Bright interspersed with a dull, green-tinged gray. I can tell the mother and child are related simply by the similarity in their coloring.

  They look vaguely saurian, but also strangely unlike them. It’s sort of the way I can see our humanity in the face of an ape; a likeness that isn’t, but is.

  They’re taller than we are and not very advanced if their town is the measure of it. It looks old, like primitive civilizations rebuilt for TV so we can see our earlier times. Yet, it is a town. A town for dinosaurs that have evolved out of being dinosaurs…sort of.

  “Hub, can you show me how you did this?” I ask.

  The view shifts and I know that the planet far below my feet isn’t the one I was just on, but neither is it the Earth I know.

  “Lysa, this is Earth approximately one century before the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction. What I’m showing you is a replay, but this is what happened. Shall I?”

  I nod, looking down at the planet that looks so little like mine. This is what it was? The Earth was so beautiful.

  As before, we shoot down to the surface so quickly that the instinct to brace against impact is too strong to resist. I slosh soup out of my bowl when I hold out my hands, but this time we stop high in the air, well above the treetops. Below me is a massive herd of dinosaurs, but they’re almost exactly as I’ve always thought of them. Well, except in color. That we most definitely got wrong.

  Maiasaura. I know them from the picture books, the bones at the museum, the fascinating fact that they tended their nests. And below me there are hundreds of them. Gray-green, yes, but the red and gold splotchy stripes, the black swoops on their heads. We didn’t imagine any of that.

  Even as I try to take in the sheer spectacle of the vast herd on an ancient plain, we drop. As we do, I see portal flashes at the center of the herd…then more in a rough circle around it.

  “Lysa, the noise here is too much for you to distinguish any one tone, so I’m going to feed you the sound coming from only one of the portals.”

  It’s silly to lean forward, but I do anyway, wanting to hear what it is. Even without knowing what the adults sound like, I’d know the sound coming from the portal anywhere, during any time period. It makes me ache to reach out and comfort whatever it is. That is the sound of young in distress.

  And it works.

  Maiasaurs leap and run for the portals. I can’t hear them, but their mouths and nostrils tell the story of their calls. Not all of them make it through. Some pass portals by, looking back in what can only be confusion. Even so, dozens upon dozens of animals disappear through the portals.

  Then the portals are gone.

  “But—”

  “Wait, Lysa. Watch.”

  Time speeds up as if a film were being fast-forwarded, then it slows again. New portals appear in the gaps between Maiasaurs. Some of the dinosaurs have run back toward the nests, nosing at them as if trying to confirm that it was not their children in distress. From those new portals lumber more Maiasaurs. They are as calm as if there were nothing going on, though a few shake their heads and widen their stances when they emerge.

  I know how they feel.

  “You did this for all of them?”

  “As many as could be gotten. Some needed different types of luring.”

  “How many did you bring? Tens of thousands?”

  “More than that. Too many for the number to matter. The Earth has always been a planet rich in diversity of life. Some might say your planet possesses an embarrassment of riches when it comes to life-forms.”

  The Maiasaurs are back to doing what they were before, as if nothing had happened.

  “Take me back to the planet. Back to the village. Can you?” I ask.

  The move is so sudden that I almost fall off my bed. There’s no pulling away or landing. I’m just back where I was before, sitting above a shop. The mother and child are walking away, the child’s head hanging low and his wrinkled neck looking quite vulnerable to me.

  I think I already know the answer, but I have to ask anyway. I need Hub to confirm for me what I think it meant me to see when it brought me here.

  “Hub, if the beings here are our dinosaurs, why didn’t you just stop the asteroid from hitting Earth in the first place? You could have left them to do this on their own, on Earth.”

  “Lysa, you know that answer. What killed the dinosaurs on Earth left space for all that came after they were gone. It left space for you.”

  “So, that’s what you mean when you say you can’t interfere. You can save life, but you can’t change the course that a planet will take. You mean that you can save the life we have on Earth now, but you can’t take away the chance for any life that comes after us. That’s why you leave replacements, because you can’t take away what might come next.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And that’s why you can’t talk to Earth and just tell them. Because it will change their course.”

  “That’s also correct.”

  “And it’s not working.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s also correct.”

  A sudden fearful thought strikes me. I almost don’t want to ask, because I’m terrified of the answer. But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t ask, so I do. “You’re going to stop the transfers, aren’t you?”

  The hub may be a machine, but I’d swear I hear sadness when it answers. “I might have no choice. It’s possible that I’m doing more harm than can be allowed. My analysis indicates that I’m very close to changing the future permanently, and in significant ways. I may have already crossed that line. Humans are very difficult to predict.”

  “What will you do instead?”

  “I will instead populate the new system with the transfers already made, but no more. It isn’t ideal.”

  I’ve been curious about that. If the replacements are perfect, right down to their memories, why not just use them to populate the new planet. So, I ask.

  The Hub’s answer is strangely philosophic, as if it truly does understand the nuances of biological existence. “The replacements are suitable, but they lack one thing. They may remember youth, the experience of growing up, their lives and those they love, but they did not live them. They were not born on that planet. They are not original. It isn’t the same.”

  “And that matters to you?” I ask.

  “It does. It won’t be the first time I’ve had to omit a species, but doing that means I’ve not achieved my purpose. When possible, I transfer. Currently, the transferred population is sufficient, but only just. It is unlikely that their course of advancement will continue unchanged.”

  My bowl is empty, and I set it on my lap, closing my eyes to do so, since I can be more certain about what I’m doing using touch. My lap is currently visually occupied by a sign swinging back and forth in a slight breeze above a shop door. Below my dangling feet a harried looking saurian wearing several strands of red beads and a green apron is hurrying into the shop.

  But there’s another reason to close my eyes. Everything is crashing in on me again. I’m overwhelmed again. But this time I’m conflicted.

  This world I’m seeing has created in me a joyful feeling, a feeling so big it might burst out of my chest or make light shoot out of my fingers. The sensation is too difficult and complex to explain in any words I possess. One day, some creature I can’t imagine might be sitting in a room like this and drinking soup, while watching the descendants of humanity with the same wonder I feel looking at the saurians.

  Life, endless and enduring and new and unimaginable.

  At the same time, I’m sad and fearful for humans, b
ecause if Hub stops the transfers, then all who don’t have the opportunity to transfer will not be a part of that new and exciting future. They will live through the pain and death that will come when our world ends. And that will be the end for them. There will be no second chance.

  My eyes are in danger of becoming permanently puffy with all the crying, but this isn’t only sadness anymore and that makes it worth it.

  “Did this help you, Lysa?” Hub asks.

  I nod and the great weight of this knowledge lands on me like a ton of bricks. My bowl slides off my lap to the floor with a thump. I’m a non-transfer, but every thirteen minutes at least some people—maybe hundreds by now—are losing their chance at life. They are losing that chance for themselves and for everyone that comes after them.

  They are missing this possibility of a new world where we can be better. A place where we can evolve and change and become more than we are, knowing we’re safe and watched over by an artificial entity whose only purpose is to preserve life.

  They are missing the galaxy.

  I stand and look up into that strangely perfect sky of theirs, the blue tinged by yellow. “Hub, there has to be a better way. You have to make them understand. You have to save them even if they don’t want to be saved.”

  Twenty-One

  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly a serious person. I’m frequently sarcastic, often flippant, and almost always ready to move away from deep topics to discuss TV or shoes or the latest music. There are exceptions, of course, because everyone has those few subjects that truly fascinate them. For me, my main such topic is art, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

  There are others, though. My mom always says that teenagers are biologically programmed to be easily enchanted…and also to entirely forget what enchanted them just as quickly. Most of the time that saying found its way into conversations when I absolutely needed something to indulge in some new craze. While the saying is annoying, she’s not entirely incorrect. A tower of boxes leans precariously in the back of my closet, each one filled with the debris of something I used to love.