We find signs of habitation in the clearing of packed damp sand: an empty shelter of sorts, made out of what looks like dried cut plant matter; and a small boat similar to the ones that have transferred us, but much rougher made and showing signs of long hard use. It sits on the ground, bottom-up.
“Two kilometers inland,” Jed tells us, nodding to indicate direction. “Haven. The last of the old world.”
“Your world?” Straker wants to know, but Jed only shrugs again.
“You said this was a place for normal humans,” the Ghaddar presses. “Are there no immortals here?”
He answers by looking at Elias, Straker and me. It’s a sad look, sympathetic. I wonder how voluntary his mission to bring us here was, and what he must expect will happen next. If this place is all vulnerable fragile survivors, and now us and our blades…
“The path will take you there,” Jed gestures to a break in the foliage where the sand slopes upwards over a low rise. Then he goes back to one of his two transfer boats, and slips back across the water to his ship. No further explanations or instructions. No goodbyes.
Straker is already heading in the indicated direction, but waits for the rest of us at the foot of the path as we decide to join her, one-by-one. (Rashid is the most reluctant to leave the shore, even as the Charon’s sails expand and the ship moves slowly away. Murphy puts a comforting hand on his shoulder—I can’t hear what passes between them over the sounds of wind and water, but Rashid finally chooses to join us, still insisting on lugging his triple load.)
Beyond the wet and then soft dry sand, the path becomes firmly packed as it passes through the rich growth, as if by many years of heavy foot traffic. (The path isn’t much more than a meter wide, and shows no sign of use by wheeled vehicles.) It ascends gently as it winds, but that prevents us from seeing too far ahead, other than to catch glimpse of the tops of a few low mountains in the distance.
The going is easy, possibly due to the rich atmosphere. I assume we’re headed in the proper direction for our “mission”, because my blade remains quiet at my side. No… Not quiet. Content? It’s not talking to me, but I realize I’m being flooded with vague feelings of serenity, wellbeing. I try to shake it off, unable to trust my own internal experience.
The Ghaddar finds us samples of fruits and nuts close to the path, mostly familiar from either the surface hybrids we know or from the ETE gardens, but they’re larger and richer than those.
The air also warms as we move away from the Lake, making our layered gear overheating. We all begin to unfasten, open.
“Why aren’t you buying what Jed said about this place?” I decide to pass the time by asking my brother, hoping I sound like I respect his expertise in matters of his specialty.
He chuckles under his breath—probably at the thought that I would even speak to him so—but gives me a thoughtful answer.
“The explanation for the so-called time-splice has been an active theory in quantum physics for well over a hundred years. It’s based on quantum teleportation, which can be used to manipulate matter at distance, but in this case using the relativistic properties of certain sub-atomic particles that can move close to or even faster than light to create effect before causation. The phenomenon has been observed several times, so it is plausible. But only on a particle-by-particle scale. Using quantum teleportation to re-create things as complex as what’s been claimed is unthinkable, assuming you’re using a few sub-atomic particles to somehow manufacture what you need on the other end.”
“I thought they only needed to manufacture a nanotech seed to replicate and create the rest?”
“But the complexity of what’s been created requires data.” He’s being impressively patient with me. “Besides the various tech-making nanites and the immortals’ DNA patches, the immortals have entire memory sets, personalities. It would take quadrillions of years to transfer that much data through a quantum bridge, and probably the energy of a star. So what these ‘people’ claim happened couldn’t have in any plausible way.”
“That’s according to our science,” Straker engages him. “According to what Bel told me, this Yod is infinitely more intelligent and powerful than all of humanity combined ever was, and had mastered operating on a quantum scale. Maybe he re-wrote the rules?”
This seems to cause my brother some vague pain.
“There are some rules…” he tries. “It’s like one of those stories my brother likes so much—science fiction. The author starts with a plausible theory, but then twists it into ridiculousness to fit some contrived tale.”
“Suspension of disbelief,” I follow him.
“But it doesn’t hold up. This place… Yes, there is a popular if controversial theory of multiple parallel universes used to explain any number of waveform paradoxes, including retrograde time travel that appears to alter a timeline. But even that theory—which has never been proven outside of mathematical thought experiments—postulates a necessary lack of future intersection after the origin event: the realities never meet again. You could create a new reality by creating a divergence, you might even be able to quantum teleport between them, but a magical semi-stable wormhole bridge that you need a lake and a bio-nanotech antique sailing vessel to pass through as complete matter? That’s several steps past ridiculous. Plus, he’s claiming we’ve moved in time. While pro-grade time travel is actually more plausible than retrograde, it still requires relativistic acceleration that would cause devastating effects. We would have been atomized. And accelerating anything with our mass close to C would cause a mass dilation effect that would make a black hole seem minor. It would destroy the solar system…”
The way he talks, it sounds like the whole idea is a personal insult to him. I’ve never seen him so animated, so passionate, so angry (at least in terms of expressing it to anyone).
“What if this is a quantum teleport, a splice like the one that made the immortals?” I try. “What if we’re copies, like they are?”
“And this whole boat trip is just an illusion to maintain the illusion that we’re still us?” Straker follows.
“Then we’d be in their intact origin universe, not some arbitrarily-bounded ‘bubble’. Or some other alternate universe. But it would be a complete universe.”
“It might explain why we can see this world beyond its so-called borders,” Straker points out.
“But why even concoct a story like that?” Elias strikes down. “The time-splice tale is ridiculously implausible. This is just stupid.”
“Then why even…?” I start to wonder, when I notice the Ghaddar’s stopped at the front of our group, signaling us to hold. She’d taken point with Murphy while the three of us were busy arguing theoretical physics. Bly, Terina and Rashid are bringing up our rear, and stop right behind us as we stop.
My hand reflexively goes to my sword. Straker and Elias have matched me. I remember Jed’s assurance that there are no immortals here, only Normals. But I have no reason at all to believe Jed.
My sword sings through me. Hungry.
I hear feet on gravel, multiple pairs, not trying to be stealthy at all. Seconds later, a trio of figures comes walking over a rise in the path just ahead of us. They’re lugging large plastic containers, but still manage to move with a lazy, loping grace. They’re dressed in light clothing that looks handmade like the Pax and Katar, in a variety of pale earth tones and pastels. They look like adolescents or very young adults—two female and one male. Short hair. Mixed racial characteristics. Slim and long-limbed like the Katar, but without the enlarged ribcages.
They don’t see us immediately, don’t look like they’re practicing any kind of situational awareness, like they have absolutely no reason to expect meeting anyone (or anything) on whatever errand they’re on. But when they do see us, they stop dead, silent and wide-eyed. I realize they have no weapons, no armor (one of the girls has a small utility knife on her woven belt).
Murphy and the Ghaddar don’t move, don’t draw on them, and neither do
we. I step forward, show empty hands, try to reassure:
“We don’t mean you any harm.”
No response. They’re frozen, probably terrified.
“We’re going to Haven,” Straker tries gently. “We…”
The boy and one of the girls drop their loads and run back the way they came (the boy tugs at the one who remains, but still runs when she doesn’t). Their containers sound hollow when they hit the ground. (Were they going to the Lake for water? The containers seem like they’d be hard to impossible for them to lift when filled. Maybe to gather food?)
“We came across the Lake,” Straker finishes her explanation to the last one. “Captain Jed brought us.”
That sends her fleeing after her friends (though she doesn’t drop her containers).
“That could have gone better,” Elias snarks in their dust.
“It could have gone worse,” the Ghaddar corrects him. She’s right, of course: Usually people we meet in our world try to kill us, or at least say hello by pointing weapons.
We decide to follow, but not chase, even though they’ll certainly have alerted whatever defenders they have by the time we reach their colony. Bly stops and picks up a pair of the dropped containers. Elias grabs another, as does Rashid. A friendly gesture: the least we can do is return lost property.
Half a kilometer further, we find what looks like an old sign, but isn’t exactly. There are some kind of sensors in the half-toppled post, but they look like they haven’t worked in decades. The sign is written in multiple languages, but battering makes it hard to read. It’s clearly a warning, saying something about a “Preserve Zone” and threatening penalties for violations of unexplained codes.
The Ghaddar gestures ahead of us: someone’s watching us from a hundred meters up the path, crouched low in the brush, but hiding poorly. There are two of them. They see that they’re seen, break cover and run. I still see no sign of weapons.
A few hundred meters further on, we find the discarded containers of the braver girl. Straker habitually checks them for some kind of booby trap, and finding none, picks them up to carry back to Haven with the rest.
We come to the colony about where Jed said it would be. It’s nestled in a canyon formed by what look like partial crater ridges on each side, rising like curtain walls several hundred meters on either side of a bowl almost a kilometer across. These curtains have been left behind after significant erosion—I’m not enough of an expert to tell if I’m looking at an old impact site or small volcano. Vines climb up the shear rocky cliffs, and scrub grows out of the crevices, reminding me of old Chinese landscape paintings. The effect is shockingly beautiful.
More shocking: there are no defensive walls in our way, no gates, no obvious battlements. The path simply leads into the valley, and structures are built up on either side. What does block our way is people: hundreds of them, come out to crowd the entrance to the colony. Most are adults ranging from smooth-skinned adolescence to gray-haired and wrinkled. They are most definitely apprehensive as they watch us come, but I still see not a single weapon. (I consider that no conventional weapon would be effective against the immortals of this supposed world. Perhaps they relied on other defenses, something related to the damaged sign we passed.)
We slow up as we come close, show our empty hands. Those that have been carrying them, step forward and set down the dropped containers like an offering, then step back. No one speaks for an uncomfortably long time. The colonists just stare like they’re looking at something out of myth, impossible. I suppose we may be.
“My name is Erickson,” I take the lead, even though we have an ambassador in our company. “Erickson Carter. We mean you no harm. We came across the Lake. On a ship. Captain Jed brought us.”
I hear a stifled but collective pair of gasps when I mention the ship and Jed, followed by more silence. Then an adult female, with dark hair and tanned skin, steps forward from the line.
“Are you Modded?” she asks like answering yes would be a crime.
“Not as I think you understand,” I try. “Four of us are Normal. Four have nanotechnology similar but inferior to what you probably know. We come from across the Lake, from another reality, if you can believe that.”
“There’s nothing across the Lake,” she quickly insists, but she sounds like she’s reciting ingrained dogma, dogma that’s apparently shaken now, just by us being here. There’s more than a crack of doubt in what’s she’s probably been certain of all of her life. I can see her trembling. “Those worlds are lost. Earth and Mars. There’s just here.”
“For how long?” I ask what I hope is a meaningful question.
She hesitates, looks to some of her fellows, then answers:
“Thirty six Mars Years. Since the Event.”
Sixty-nine Earth Standard years.
“What’s the calendar year?” Straker asks. “Earth Standard, Common Era?”
She doesn’t seem to know. Someone else comes forward and whispers to her.
“It would be Twenty-One Ninety-Eight by the old Earth calendar.”
I hear Elias sigh, exasperated, as if these people are part of Jed’s deception.
“It was Common Era Twenty-One Eighteen in our world,” I risk offering. It digests with the nervous shuffling of feet. Then I make it worse: “The Event, if we’re talking about the same thing, changed the course of our history, created a new timeline. That was its intention: to forestall mankind’s development of what you call Modding technology. We don’t know what happened to the original timeline. Captain Jed told us this place is somehow all that’s left.”
There’s a lot of muttering down the path from us, flashes of hushed arguments. I definitely get the impression they haven’t seen outsiders in a long time, if at all in their lifetimes. (Or even their parents’ lifetimes, if this place has been isolated for sixty-nine years. Are we Jed’s first passengers in all that time? That’s not what he seemed to imply.)
I don’t need to look at Elias to know that he’s rolling his eyes at this whole absurd situation, and is probably angry at me for humoring it.
“Why are you here?” she asks a good question.
“We…” I realize I don’t know what to say, what would be smart to say at this point. One answer is that we came to bring dangerous technology from this world back where it supposedly came from and leave it here. Another is that we’re tasked with taking (more) dangerous technology from this world into ours. Or we may be risking both worlds by letting the Companions join, sync. “…don’t really know.” But that’s not good enough—I feel like I owe these people some honesty for potentially endangering them. So: “Some of us carry nanotechnology devices that we were told came from this world. Captain Jed said he brought us here to find more such devices. To recover them.”
“What kind of devices?” she asks intently. The idea seems to scare her. (And from the way they all suddenly feel even closer to panic, the dread is unanimous.)
“I think you call them Companions,” Straker takes it. “Obsolete technology by your standards, I’ve been told, but still potentially dangerous. Especially in a world that lacks superior technology.”
Straker was careful, choosing her words to not specify which world she was talking about, but her statement points out that the threat is to either world, or both.
There are more exchanges that we can’t hear—I’m tempted to use my enhanced hearing to try to eavesdrop.
“There’s nothing like that here,” she denies us, as if denying us entry into her home. “This is a Preserve. It’s not allowed. There’s been no nanotechnology here since the Founding, long before the Event, not until… Now. You.” She sounds like she’s hiding something with that last part—she clearly hesitated, her eyes tracking like she’s seeing something, the telltale sign of a lie. But then those eyes lock back on us, me, defiant against her fear.
“We’re stuck here until Jed decides to come back for us,” I lever. “We could find a place to camp. Away from you. But we would
very much appreciate a guide, someone who can tell us about this place.”
“You say Captain Jed brought you?” she challenges, clearly incredulous regarding that particular detail. (More so than anything else she’s being confronted with?)
“On his ship. The Charon. From the south side of the Lake.”
She actually chuckles. A few of her people uneasily join her, like laughing at us is a viable defense.
“Captain Jed is a myth, a story for children. Like Santa Claus.”
“I can only tell you what we’ve seen. Something brought us here.”
“You’re from the Lost World?” the male who gave the date speaks up. “From Outside?”
“We’re from Mars. Valles Marineris. Melas Chasma. Except for Kah-Terina Sher Khan,” I indicate Terina. “She’s from Coprates. Her home is—was—just across the Lake. But there is no Lake in our world.”
“You carry weapons,” the female accuses after another pause, as if the items are deeply offensive, taboo. “Why do you carry weapons?”
“Our world is under threat,” Straker tries when I fail to word a concise explanation. “Different communities have competed for limited resources for decades, left to survive when we were cut off from Earth. Now all of us are caught between the forces of Earth and enemies that claim to have come from this world. Immortals. Modded.”
More stunning news. I imagine we’re telling them the stuff of nightmares.
“How many?” she needs to know. “How many of them still exist?” She sounds terrified at the possibility.
“Only a few,” I tell them. “But a few is enough. Our world has been devastated.” What I don’t say is that Earth is just as much of a threat—if not more—than invincible superhumans.
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 30
