The Klaatu Terminus

by Pete Hautman

  “The Klaatu believe that their nonmaterial state means that they should be able to travel backward in time without creating paradoxes. They want my father to build them devices by which they can do so. However, matter is simply an expression of organized information, therefore if one can move information, one can move a particle. Essentially, time travel is simply a matter of altering the history of said particle.”

  “Does that mean that if I travel back in time, I change what will happen to me later on?”

  “No, because there will have been nothing to change. This is why time travel is unlikely. If the information existed in the past, then there is no need to move it there, and if it did not exist, then it follows that it was not moved. History demonstrates that time travel has never occurred at a non-quantum level, and if it has not been done, then it will not be done. The Klaatu offered a theoretical solution, but such theories are no more solid than the Klaatu themselves. My father refused their request. It seems he has changed his mind.”

  Shem turned his back to Tucker and continued up the path. “Apparently, you have inspired him.”

  TREMPEALEAU COUNTY, WISCONSIN

  KOSH WOKE UP TO THE SOUND OF A HEARTBEAT, BUT faster and sharper. Like hands clapping, but deeper. Like castanets, but not so resonant. Clop, clop, clop.

  A creaking of wood on metal. A shifting, jerky vibration. The smell of hay. The smell of horse.

  Clop, clop, clop.

  How many times can I be killed and not be dead? Kosh Feye wondered.

  He opened his eyes. Above, a sky so pure and blue and alive it took his breath away. Or maybe something else had taken his breath away. He was not breathing at all. Maybe he was dead. He had felt no pain when Koan had fired the rifle at his chest. He remembered only sudden pressure, then falling into the abyss, the walls of his life passing by with increasing speed. He had been certain he was dying. It is only fair, he thought, that one should die aware.

  He became conscious of another sensation, a heaviness upon his chest emitting a subsonic thrum, felt more than heard. He tried to move his arm, to grope at whatever was pressing down on him, but his will was not sufficient to activate his muscles.

  A wisp of cirrus came into view, moving slowly from his head to his feet. He watched the cloud until it passed from view. He heard the fluttering exhalation of a horse, the distant cry of a meadowlark, and the hiss of wind passing through dry cornstalks. He pictured himself in a wagon, traveling down a country road.

  Maybe instead of being ferried by boat across the river Styx or carried to heaven in a golden chariot, he was being transported from this life on a hay cart. Serve him right. He had failed to protect Emma. Failed to save himself.

  I cannot move, and I have no heartbeat, he thought. Why am I not afraid?

  More clouds came and went. After a time, the cart stopped. He heard a horse snort, then some soft clanking. A shadow fell upon his face, then the sky was blocked by the head of a man wearing a broad-brimmed black straw hat. The man looked into his eyes, then withdrew. Hands grasped his ankles and dragged him off the cart and onto some other surface. Again, they were moving. He could hear the creak of wheels turning. The sky became a rough plank ceiling. Kosh caught glimpses of the man’s black-hatted head moving in and out of his vision.

  A crackle and buzz filled the room; the light became greenish, then warmed to yellow orange. The buzzing settled to a staticky hum. Kosh could not turn his head to see the source of the sound and light. He didn’t need to; he knew what it was even before he was lifted and cast through the disko.

  The next time Kosh became aware, a silver-haired woman was bending over him, looking into his eyes.

  “Do you know who you are?” asked the woman.

  “Kosh,” said Kosh. He was speaking, therefore he must be breathing. “Kosh Feye.”

  “That is correct.” The woman made a notion on a tablet. “I am Severs Two-Nine-Four. You may call me Severs. I am pleased to meet you, Kosh Feye.”

  Kosh cleared his throat. “Where am I?”

  “Mayo Two.” She raised her eyes from the tablet. “By your reckoning, it is the year twenty-three ten.”

  Kosh took a moment to absorb that. His thoughts moved sluggishly, as if the juices in his brain had thickened.

  “I have to get back,” he said, and tried to sit up. Severs put her hand gently on his chest; the weight of her hand was enough to put him back down.

  “You are weak,” she said.

  “How did I get here?”

  “You arrived through a portal.”

  “Portal . . . is that the same as a disko?”

  “Portal, disko, Gate — it is all one. Your body was severely injured. The damage has been repaired, though you will require time to regain your former strength.”

  “How much time?” He was thinking of Emma.

  Severs consulted her tablet. “We estimate twenty-three days to reach ninety percent of your estimated former strength and endurance.”

  “I can’t wait that long.”

  “You are agitated. Do you want to be sedated?” She displayed a small handheld device and made as if to apply it to his neck. Kosh waved it away. It took a tremendous effort just to raise his hand.

  “Sedation may augment the healing process,” Severs said. “This is a relatively primitive point in our technological development. We do not yet have the nanotech required to accelerate the process. In my time, you would be healed in a matter of days.”

  “What do you mean, in your time?”

  “I will not be born for another seventy-three years. Like you, I have been displaced.”

  “I have to get back to where I came from.”

  “You must enter a portal to do so,” Severs said. “There is no reason to hurry. Wherever the portal takes you, there you will be. What was your point of origin?”

  “You wouldn’t know it. A place called Hopewell, back in the twenty-first century.”

  “Mayo was once called Hopewell.”

  Kosh let that sink in, then said, “I never liked the name Hopewell, anyways.”

  “I think we have an acquaintance in common,” Severs said. “Do you know the Yar Lia?”

  Kosh nodded. “I just saw her about a week ago, in Hopewell, kicking butt on some priests.”

  “I am certain we are talking about the same person,” Severs said. “She spoke of you on several occasions. Was she well?”

  “Last time I saw her she was jumping into a disko. She didn’t show up here, did she?”

  “I have not seen her since the Terminus. She was searching for Tucker Feye. Do you know him as well?”

  “Tucker is my nephew.”

  “I treated him once, after he stumbled into one of our recycling centers.”

  “Kind of a coincidence, you and me being here.”

  “It is no coincidence. I am assigned to Mayo Two because this is where the portal is kept. I am a specialist, you might say. A fellow traveler. This is why I was assigned to you.”

  Kosh felt something cool touch the side of his neck. A wave of tranquility moved down his spine. “I don’ wanna be sedated,” he said, his tongue growing thick.

  “Heal,” said Severs.

  HOPEWELL, 1997 CE

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” EMILY RYAN SAID. “LAST WEEK you said you wanted to see it. It’s about aliens, I think.”

  “Well now I don’t,” Kosh said. “I gotta go.” He hung up the phone and sat staring at it, waiting for his breathing to go back to normal. Last Sunday, Emily had asked him if he wanted to go see Contact with her. It was playing at the multiplex in Rochester. He’d said yes, because he could not say no to her. Not to her face. But now he didn’t think he could stand it, sitting next to her for two hours. Smelling her hair. Feeling the heat of her body. It was best to simply not see her at all, because it hurt too much to know he could never have her.

  The phone rang. He let it ring five times before picking up.

  “Hello.” He made his voice go dead.

&n
bsp; “Kosh, are you mad at me?” It was Emily again.

  “No. I’ve just got. . . . Look, I’m really busy, okay?”

  “That’s fine, I understand. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t something I’d done.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” Kosh said.

  “We can go see it another time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are we still cooking next weekend?”

  “I might be busy.”

  Emily didn’t speak for a moment. “I think you’re mad at me,” she said at last.

  “I’m not mad.” Kosh was squeezing the handset so hard his fingers hurt. He forced his hand to relax.

  “Well . . . I was thinking about doing a pot roast Sunday, so, call me if you want to.”

  “Okay. Good-bye.” Kosh set the handset back on the phone cradle with exaggerated delicacy, as if presenting a perfect soufflé.

  “. . . QUANTUM SCIENCE, OF COURSE, IS NOTHING MORE than an extension of kabbalistic philosophy, as Jonathon Boggs realized, and so applying the numerological constructs of the medieval Kabbalah one must be led to conclude that quantum displacement of matter, reverse or otherwise, is both true and untrue, and therefore without value, which is why Schrodinger’s felicidal inclinations existed purely as a thought experiment. The man did not even own a cat. My father, however, chooses to overlook the self-evident, and sends me on this fool’s errand to —”

  “Do you even know what you’re talking about?” Tucker asked.

  Shem stopped walking and looked back at Tucker. “Why would I talk if I did not know what I was saying?”

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  Shem compressed his lips. Tucker could see that the Boggsian was formulating a scathing and verbose reply. He had become increasingly weary of Shem’s supercilious attitude and nonstop prattle.

  Shem said, “You are as ignorant as the forest savages. I —”

  “You know, we’ve been here before,” Tucker said.

  They were standing at the intersection of two trails.

  “It does look somewhat familiar,” Shem admitted.

  “I think you just led us in a big circle.”

  “The savages have been playing tricks on us.” Earlier, Shem had been going on about the “forest savages” and their ignorant, unclean ways. Tucker had no great love for Marta and her people, but they weren’t nearly so irritating as this Boggsian.

  “I thought you knew how to get to their village.”

  “As I indicated previously, every path is connected to every other path,” Shem said with a haughty wave of his hand. “Er . . . which way did we go last time we were here?”

  “That way.” Tucker pointed.

  “That was incorrect,” Shem said. “Why did you not say something before?” He set off in the opposite direction. Tucker followed, thinking that he would have been better off alone.

  “Now, where was I?” Shem said.

  “You were explaining the gobbledygook of the gibberish,” Tucker said.

  Shem stopped and turned on him. “You are a philistine! I share my most sublime thoughts purely as an act of generosity!”

  “Whatever,” Tucker said.

  Shem sniffed and continued walking, muttering to himself. Shortly thereafter, they reached the collection of huts where Tucker had spent the previous evening. Shem halted at the edge of the open area and cleared his throat.

  “Greetings, savages, I bring you a distinguished visitor with whom you have much in common!”

  In full daylight, the small encampment looked even shabbier than Tucker remembered. The huts were little more than lean-tos, and several of the leaf-frond roofs were falling in. The fire pit at the center of the circle of huts was a mound of ashes and charred pig bones. There were no people.

  “Hah!” said Shem. “They heard us coming and have fled. I am not surprised.”

  “I don’t think it was us.” Tucker pointed. “I think it was that.”

  On the far side of the dead fire, a few inches above the trampled earth, hovered a disko.

  Shem stared at the disko. “My eyes perceive a disk-shaped object.”

  “Your eyes perceive a disko,” Tucker said.

  “Disko?”

  “Disko, Gate, time-travel portal.”

  Shem walked around the fire pit for a closer look.

  “I wouldn’t get too close,” Tucker said.

  Shem reached out with his hand. The disko buzzed and turned orange. Shem snatched his hand away and backed up a few paces. He looked frightened.

  Tucker said, “Or, if you want, you can step into it. It might take you someplace interesting.”

  “No thank you,” Shem said.

  “I wonder if the people that lived here went into it. The woman, their leader, told me they were waiting to be transported. Maybe they decided that this was their transportation.”

  “More likely, they ran off in terror.” Shem recovered his confident demeanor. “Ignorance breeds fear. This”— he gestured at the disko —“is my father’s doing.”

  “How so? It’s only been a few hours since he decided to build a disko. How could he do it so fast?”

  “Is it not clear? Once he made the decision to proceed with his plans, the technology became inevitable. In the same sense, you were conceived in the moment your father first met your mother. Intent is the platform upon which reality teeters. We are dealing with displacement of information in time, therefore events appear to occur out of sequence. No doubt my father is at this moment back in Harmony attempting to build his device. Even if many months pass before he achieves success, the devices already manifest themselves.”

  “A while ago you were saying he would fail, that the diskos were an impossibility.”

  “I adjust my thinking to account for observed realities,” Shem said with a flutter of his fingers. “And now, I will return to Harmony to assist my father.”

  “What about me?”

  “I have brought you here at great inconvenience to myself. I wish you luck.”

  Shem began to walk away. Out of the corner of his eye, Tucker saw something move within the dark interior of one of the huts.

  “Shem!”

  The Boggsian glanced back at him, annoyed. Tucker pointed toward the hut. Two greenish-yellow eyes were gazing out at them. Shem saw the eyes and went rigid.

  “Get on the other side of the disko,” Tucker said.

  Shem, transfixed, could not move. The jaguar oozed out of the doorway like slowly flowing liquid, taking soft, silent steps with its enormous paws. Tucker had seen housecats stalking birds exactly that same way.

  “Back up slow,” Tucker said. Shem took a step back, fumbling in his pocket with his right hand. The jaguar froze in midstep, its tail twitching.

  “Two more steps,” Tucker said. “Come on, Shem!”

  Shem pulled a metal object from his pocket. Tucker could see the cat was about to leap. He ran to Shem, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him back behind the disko. Startled by Tucker’s speed, the cat hesitated. Tucker watched it through the wavery lens of the disk. Shem was panting loudly.

  Keeping one eye on the jaguar, Tucker grabbed a charred stick from the fire pit. The jaguar’s mouth opened slightly, showing the tip of its pink tongue. Shem raised his arm. The metal object in his hand looked like a small version of a Lah Sept arma.

  The jaguar hunched its back and sprang. Its leap took it straight toward the disko. Shem screamed, and a gout of blue fire erupted from his hand. The jaguar and the flame hit the disko from opposite sides. The disko hissed and flared brilliant orange, swallowing both fire and cat in the same instant.

  In the stillness that followed, Tucker could hear his own heartbeat. The disko returned to its diaphanous, semitransparent state. Shem dropped to his knees and began muttering in the Boggsian language. It sounded like a prayer.

  So much for no religion, Tucker thought. He scanned their surroundings. Every shadow looked as if it might hold another jaguar. A crackli
ng buzz interrupted Shem’s chanting. The disko had turned to green. Tucker grabbed Shem and dragged him away just as a smoking apparition jumped out of the disko and landed in the middle of the fire pit, sending ashes scattering in all directions. For a fraction of a second, Tucker thought the jaguar had returned, then he realized it was a man with a sooty face and wisps of smoke trailing from his collar and hat brim. The man looked a great deal like Shem’s father, Netzah Whorsch-Boggs, only with much of his beard singed off.

  The man’s eyes moved from Tucker to Shem and fastened upon the weapon, still in Shem’s hand.

  “Dummkopf!” he shouted. “Idiot!”

  It was definitely Netzah Whorsch-Boggs. He stepped out of the fire pit, grabbed the weapon from his son, shook it in his face, and threw it to the ground, all the while delivering a stream of Boggsian invective. Tucker didn’t understand any of the words, but the tone was clear. The man was apoplectic.

  He was also, Tucker noticed, considerably older than the Netzah Whorsch-Boggs he had met that morning.

  IT TOOK LIA THE BETTER PART OF THE DAY TO FIND A place to cross the river. Eventually she came upon a bridge. She crossed, then headed downstream. The banks were tangled with roots and brush; in some places she had to veer well away from the river to get around impassable snarls. She kept moving, and by early afternoon she detected the reek of decaying pig offal.

  The pig’s head was gone, along with most of the entrails. Some animal or animals had been at it. Lia looked around nervously, hoping that whatever had eaten the pig was not still around. It took her a few minutes more to find the tree where she had been grabbed. She called Tucker’s name, softly at first, then louder.

  She listened, but heard no response from Tucker. He might be searching for her. He might have been captured by the forest people. He might be injured. He might be dead. The only sounds were the mindless chatter of birds, the scurry of small ground creatures, and a distant rapping noise. Lia at first thought it was a woodpecker, but the tok, tok, tok was too irregular, and not so fast as a woodpecker. It sounded more like someone chopping wood.