The Prometheus Project

by Steve White

  "As defined by yourselves."

  The software must have accurately reproduced my tone. Khorat's huge eyes held an unreadable expression. "You've never been altogether comfortable with that, have you?"

  "No, not altogether." Something in those eyes compelled honesty. "Maybe it's just that I grew up in a society which makes something of a fetish of freedom of information." And which takes a dim view of people playing God, I retained enough tact not to add. "But has the possibility ever occurred to you people that you just might be wrong sometimes about what knowledge is 'dangerous' and which paths are 'undesirable'?"

  "As a matter of fact, we are most sensible of our own fallibility. It is for that very reason that we have always observed an inflexible rule: knowledge may be concealed, but it must never be obliterated. We regard ourselves not as the proprietors of knowledge but rather as its custodians, holding it in trust in case later events or discoveries prove us wrong. Thus any mistakes we make need not be permanent in their effects." Khorat paused, as though seeking for words to express something which, for him, required no words. "Whenever any item of knowledge is lost, a potential aspect of the future is foreclosed forever. To do this deliberately would truly be to play God!"

  I blinked in surprise, for without any prompting from me Khorat had come out with a Delkasu phrase the software had translated by that particular English expression. Maybe, I decided, he wasn't as insensitive as I'd supposed to the kind of concerns that had been bothering me.

  "So," I asked quietly, "you're prepared to run the risk of leaving . . . whatever this is lying around?"

  "If you must put it that way. However, the 'risk' is so small as to be ignorable." Serenely: "Nothing can go wrong."

  Why was I even surprised when, the following night, the sanctuary was raided?

  * * *

  By "the following night" I mean the next twenty-four-point-something-hour night of Khemava. For me and for Chloe, it was simply a "day" that, like every fourth one, was dark.

  However, by sheer coincidence, it was our "night" as well—the time period we arbitrarily set aside for sleep. So I was dreaming the disturbing dreams that had troubled me since coming to this place, when the first explosion wrenched me brutally out of them.

  Drilled-in reflexes took over for me. I rolled out of bed, fumbled out of habit for the gun that wasn't there, and simultaneously reviewed all my senses.

  Sight wasn't much use in the dark, and hearing had already been alerted. Feel reported the impact of the hard floor as I fell on it, and taste was irrelevant. But smell . . .

  Gas! shot through my mind.

  I held my breath, stumbled to my washbasin, grabbed a wad of paper towel, soaked it, and clasped it across the lower part of my face before allowing myself to inhale. Then I switched on the light and stumbled to the connecting door to Chloe's room.

  The door opened before I reached it, and Chloe tumbled through.

  "Bob!" she gasped. "What's happening? And . . . what's that smell?"

  The fact that she was still functioning told me a great deal. I flung away my makeshift gas mask and drew a breath. The odor was unabated, but I could perceive no physiological effects. It wasn't until later that I learned the raiders were using a chemical agent effective against the Ekhemasu species but not, fortuitously, humans. At the time I merely assumed some such explanation, and acted accordingly.

  "Come on!" I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her through the door into the corridor, illuminated by dim emergency lights. There the gas was faintly visible and the smell was stronger, but we still felt no ill effects. From the distance came the noise of chaos. I dragged Chloe after me, past the fallen, unconscious form of an Ekhemar. My idea was for us to get outside and sprint into the desert night, where we couldn't be cornered, and worry later about finding our way back.

  I was thinking about it when reality wavered in a curious way. Before I had time to realize that I was passing through an invisibility field from the outside, I crashed into the short wiry form of a Delkar, losing my grip on Chloe's arm as the alien and I went over in a heap.

  He and I grappled clumsily in our private world of blurred shades of gray. He had a paralysis beamer, but it was long-barreled and useless at close quarters. And he obviously knew nothing about human anatomy; he went for my upper chest, where the equivalent of a solar plexus would have been if I'd been a Delkar. I, on the other hand, had a pretty good theoretical grounding in unarmed combat with his species. I used my superior weight and strength to immobilize him and, working one arm free, used the elbow to shove his oddly shaped head sideways, exposing the neck. Having no hand free, I bit him just below one tiny ear—not to break the skin, but to pinch a certain nerve. He went limp.

  Getting to my knees, I took time to notice details. The Delkar wasn't wearing any sort of gas mask; evidently the stuff the raiders were using didn't affect his species either. He did have, attached to a belt around his black coverall, a device I remembered from an alley in Washington. I switched it off. The world, including Chloe, snapped back into focus and full color. She recovered quickly, being familiar with the field, and moved to my side as I fumbled to get the control pad free.

  I had just about succeeded when the black-clad figures popped soundlessly into sight around us, their invisibility fields ceasing to exist with the suddenness of pricked bubbles.

  Chloe and I froze into immobility, bracing ourselves for the touch of the paralysis beams.

  Instead, to my amazement, one of the Delkasu merely gestured with his weapon, motioning us along the corridor. We felt no inclination to argue.

  They herded us around several corners, deeper into the warren of the Sanctuary. They obviously knew where they were going—probably from interactive contact-lens displays, I imagined—but I soon grew bewildered.

  Then they hustled us around a final corner, and I suddenly knew where we were. Not that I could have found my way back to our quarters unaided, for I'd only seen the monumental doorway looming ahead of us once, and that only in passing. It had been in the course of a quickie tour we'd gotten of the Sanctuary shortly after our arrival. We'd been ushered past it before I could frame a question, with a haste that made pretty clear that it was not a legitimate subject for curiosity.

  But now it stood open, and Delkasu forms were moving in and out of it. Standing amid the litter of equipment that, I supposed, had been used to open it, were more Delkasu . . . and, looming among them, three humans.

  The leader of our captors approached one of the humans, who turned toward us. Renata Novak's face wore as little surprise as I felt.

  "I told them to be on the lookout for humans," she said without preamble. "I had a feeling you two might have been brought here, after that fiasco on Antyova II."

  I was determined to match her coolness. "Who are your friends? The Tosava gevroth again?"

  "Of course. They were as eager as I was—well, almost as eager—to see our mutually beneficial deal come to fruition. Also, while they might possibly have let meddling by the Ekhemasu go unanswered, the involvement of their old enemies of the Osak gevroth made it something they couldn't ignore. So they and I had a mutual interest in a solution."

  Chloe glanced at the motionless form of an Ekhemar. "Yes," she said coldly, "you certainly seemed to have murdered your way to a solution."

  "Don't be ridiculous, Chloe! We haven't murdered anybody. We used a nonlethal nerve agent specific to Ekhemasu body chemistry, which induces unconsciousness. Your friends will be awakening before too long, with no significant ill effects. The Tosava insisted on it."

  "What peachy guys," I observed absently, while I covertly sized up the situation. The Delkasu had moved on. But the two other humans—male, nondescript, unfamiliar to me—both had paralysis beamers trained on us, and looked alert.

  "They insisted on it," Novak continued, ignoring me, "because they don't want to antagonize the Medjavar any more than necessary. They cherish hopes that this whole business can be just written off as quits b
etween them. For the same reason, they also insisted that there be no unnecessary looting of what is in here." She gestured in the direction of the great doors, through which the last of the Delkasu had departed, carrying mysterious burdens. Then she gave us a shrewd look. "You don't know what's in here, do you?"

  "I didn't . . . but I think I do now," said Chloe. "It's the Medjavar's storehouse of knowledge. Their hall of records."

  I stared at her. As usual, she'd succeeded in surprising me.

  Novak nodded. Then, abruptly, she turned on her heel and strode through those doors. After a fractional second's hesitation, we followed her.

  It was hard to believe we were inside a mountain, for this was too vast to be called "cavernous." It stretched away into indefinite distances, under a lofty ceiling upheld by forests of massive columns—rows and rows of them, marching off into the shadows. And everywhere, between those columns, were racks for computer storage media, in various forms from various cultures.

  Novak was some distance ahead of us, standing with her hands on her hips and looking around. She radiated an intensity that somehow allowed her to dominate all this giganticism, which should have reduced her to a visual zero.

  "God," she breathed. "I'd love to plunder this place! But for now I have to stay on good terms with Tosava'litan. And she seems to think the Medjavar could be inconvenient people to get seriously mad at you. So we're not allowed to take anything except what we came for."

  "About which," said Chloe, "I suppose you still won't tell us."

  Novak turned to us, looking surprised. "You mean your Ekhemasu friends haven't confided in you?"

  I had a sudden attack of shrewdness. "No. It seems us primitive humans can't handle the knowledge. You know what they told us? They weren't really worried about you getting it. Being a human, you're too stupid to understand it, much less do anything with it." Strictly speaking, of course, this was what the Tosava gevroth had thought—incorrectly, in the opinion of Khorat and his colleagues. But I pressed on, inventing freely. "They said recovering it on Antyova II was just sort of a routine precaution. They were worried that a crummy human like you might screw up and lose it to somebody else—somebody smart enough to be dangerous."

  Novak's face took on a look of tight control, like a mask with festering bitterness oozing out from around the edges. "So they said that, did they?" she asked, very quietly. She looked around. The Delkasu were all gone. We five humans were alone amid the echoing immensity. All at once, her expression cleared. "Well, I don't suppose it can do any harm now, can it?"

  One of her men fidgeted. "We've got to get out of here. Tosava'throvor said—"

  "You take your orders from me, not him! And we've got a few minutes." She turned back to us, and her first words were completely unexpected. "Have you two ever read Orwell's 1984?"

  We both nodded, wondering what the relevance could possibly be.

  "He said that whoever controls the present controls the past . . . and whoever controls the past controls the future. Of course, what he was talking about was the way the Communist regimes of our world falsify history and thus control the perception of the past. The Project's sociological forecasters tell us that he was too pessimistic, and that those Communist regimes are soon going to be living on borrowed time—and not for very long. But in a way he could never have imagined, he was absolutely right. The way to change the future—the dead-end future the human race is looking at—is to change the past. Not the memory of the past, but the past itself."

  "What are you talking about?" I demanded, exasperated.

  "We're in the position we're in because the human race was just a little late—"

  "Yeah, right, we've heard this from you before," I interrupted. "But so what? Nothing can be done about it now."

  "Yes, it can."

  We stared at her, wondering if she'd lost whatever marbles she possessed.

  Novak stared back, then shook her head. "So it really is true, isn't it? The Medjavar haven't told you they have time travel."

  Looking back, I have no recollection of how long the silence lasted. I do recall what finally broke it: a whoop of derisive laughter from me.

  "Time travel!" I finally gasped. "So that's what this is all about? Time travel?" I couldn't continue, for another uncontrollable spasm of laughter took me.

  "Renata," said Chloe, in the carefully reasonable tone one takes when dealing with a borderline nutcase, "time travel is fantasy. The whole concept is a logical absurdity. It would allow for paradoxes like—"

  "I haven't got time to argue the point, Chloe. So I'll just suggest that you ask yourself this question: would a Tonkuztra family take the trouble to steal a fantasy? And if they did, would the Medjavar go to great lengths to get it back?"

  I discovered I'd stopped laughing.

  "I found out about it back in early '63," Novak resumed, talking with the rapidity of someone who's spent years holding a story inside for want of an audience. "It was indirect. I learned of it through one of the legitimate Delkasu commercial contacts that Section Five was dealing with. Her organization—'corporation' as we'd call it—was one of those to which the Tosava had put out feelers. They weren't interested. But they'd been given a list of other potential buyers they were authorized to approach. It's the way the Tonkuztra families do business. Anyway, I was the Project's only point of contact with these people. I was the only one who knew of it. I kept it that way, secretly recruiting a few trustworthy people. In the meantime, I used my contact to get in touch with the Tosava gevroth, through the usual Tonkuztra channels."

  "And the rest, as they say, is history," I concluded. "All right. Let's assume there's some truth to all this. Now that you've finally got what you paid for—paid by selling out everyone who's ever trusted you—what do you intend to do with it?"

  "Isn't it obvious? I'm going to do what the Ekhemasu were too cowardly to do, even though they held the means in their decadent hands. I'm going to change reality itself!"

  Neither Chloe nor I possessed the power of speech.

  "I'm going to go back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution," Novak went on, ignoring us. "I considered earlier periods, like the Renaissance or even Classical Greece. But going that far back isn't really practical. And dealing with those societies would involve a whole new set of problems; I'd have to introduce a whole new mind-set, in addition to leapfrogging too many technological revolutions. But in early-nineteenth-century England they even had the concept of the computer, thanks to Babbage. I'm going to take back the whole compendium of galactic knowledge that Mr. Inconnu brought, and which the Project has been gradually doling out. I'm going to have to be even more gradual . . . but I'll be starting a lot earlier. And even more importantly, I'll bring the knowledge that the Delkasu are coming, and that the human race must prepare.

  "By that time the little vermin arrive in the mid twentieth century, Earth will be ready for them. There'll be no degrading subterfuges, no truckling to alien slime! We'll meet them as equals. No, more than that! With the kind of momentum I'm going to impart to Earth's technological progression, we'll eventually surpass them and take our rightful place as the dominant race of the universe!"

  By this time, Novak's voice had taken on the fiery intensity of a prophet. From the rapt look her two underlings wore as she poured forth her crazy dream, I could see that for them she was precisely that. She'd known just the kind of people to recruit. Unfortunately, they weren't looking rapt enough for me to try anything. These guys might be true believers, but they were also pros.

  "Renata," said Chloe, still superhumanly calm and patient, "if you succeed, what happens to our reality, in which none of this has happened? Does it vanish? And if so, where will you have come from? That's what I meant about paradoxes."

  "There's a difference of opinion on that." With disconcerting abruptness, Novak was back down from Mount Sinai and talking matter-of-factly. "Maybe our timeline will vanish. But if so, there is an excellent probability that those of us who
travel backwards in time and cause the change will be unaffected—we'll exist in a sort of overarching 'super-reality.' Another possibility is that the present reality will continue to exist, working out its own tragic destiny, while a parallel reality will come into being at the point at which I change history. That way, there'll at least be one universe in which events turn out right."

  I could only stare at her. I started to speak, but then realized the pointlessness of anything I could say.

  I also realized that I had nothing to lose.

  "You're mad as a hatter," I said wearily. "And talking to you is a waste of air. Just do what you're going to do and get it over with."

  "Mad? Then don't take my word for any of this. Ask your Ekhemasu friends, when they wake up."

  "You mean you're not going to kill us?" Chloe blurted before Novak's words had fully registered on me.

  "Of course not, Chloe! What do you think I am?" Before I could collapse in a fit of hysterical laughter over that one, she continued. "No, I'm going to leave you here. Why shouldn't I? There's nothing you can do to stop me now."

  One of the guards looked worried. "Shouldn't we . . . ?" He gestured in our direction with his paralysis beamer.

  "No, there's no need. Besides," Novak added, to us, "it's a fairly unpleasant sensation. I don't know if they have insects, or the local equivalent, in this place, but if so you don't want to be lying around, completely immobile but fully conscious, while they crawl over you . . . and into you, through your nose and your mouth, if it was open at the instant the beam hit you. So just behave yourselves until after we leave. And do ask these Ekhemasu if what I've said is true. I think you'll find they haven't been altogether candid with you."

  With that she departed, followed by the two guards, who kept their weapons trained on us as they exited. We were left alone in the midst of the vast chamber, looking at each other and not trusting ourselves to speak.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We didn't have a whole lot to do, waiting for the Ekhemasu to awaken. We couldn't even get breakfast, not knowing how to find our way back to our quarters and their stock of human-type rations. So we spent our time looking for Khorat, examining the features of every unconscious Ekhemasu we encountered.