The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “In fact,” the older DTI man went on, “it reminds me of the setting where the Rhea first discovered the obelisk.”

  Dulmur nodded. They’d both studied the sensor scans extensively during their long trip escorting the artifact back to Eris. Yet something in the sky caught his eye. He looked up to see a bright, narrow strip arcing overhead, a slim ribbon with perfectly straight sides. The sunlight it reflected down on them was their main source of illumination. “Well, it can’t be the same planet, even twenty million years later. That one didn’t have a moon, so there’d be nothing to break up into a ring.”

  “That’s no ring,” Noi said. “At least not the kind you mean. Look closer, about thirty degrees from zenith.” She moved up alongside him to point.

  Dulmur squinted at the indicated area. “Something tells me your vision’s a lot sharper than mine,” he said. But he noticed something, an unusually bright glint off an irregular area. “What is that?”

  “There are more,” Lucsly said. “I’m not sure how many.”

  “Quite a few,” Noi replied. “They’re oceans.”

  Dulmur stared at her. “Come again?”

  She was grinning now. “We’re on an orbital torus!”

  “A what?”

  “A kind of megastructure. A constructed ring a few million kilometers in diameter, orbiting a star, spinning for gravity and a day-night cycle. It’s night for us because the local sun is below us. But the torus is tilted just enough that it doesn’t block the sunlight on the other side.” She sounded very impressed. “They have dozens, even hundreds of times the surface area of a planet, but use far less material. They’re a solution to population pressure in eras where the galactic population is so dense that colonizing planets alone won’t cut it.”

  Lucsly peered at her. “I thought you’d never been to a time this distant.”

  “No, but I’ve met others who have.” She smiled. “You’re part of a much larger fraternity than you realize, Agents.”

  Dulmur wanted to contemplate that, but he was too distracted by the here and now. “So we’re on an artificial world built to ease population pressure—but we’re standing in the middle of an empty wilderness.”

  The exotic temporal agent tilted her head. “Well, orbitals often contain simulated natural environments for recreation . . . but also for preserving biodiversity. I see what you’re getting at, Dulmur. The obelisk was placed in a setting like this, and it brought us to a setting like this.” Dulmur hadn’t actually been getting at that, but he nodded sagely anyway.

  “Tell me,” Noi went on, “were there any interesting animals living in the area where you found this thing?”

  “Not many at the time,” Lucsly said. “The planet was in the throes of a mass extinction. But a herd of one of the last surviving species of megafauna was days away from passing through the area. That’s why we removed the obelisk: We weren’t sure it could handle being trampled.”

  “Oh, it could have, Lucsly. I think it was—”

  The environment around them suddenly brightened, though Dulmur could not spot the source of illumination. A clap of displaced air heralded the instantaneous arrival of a collection of beings as bizarre as any Dulmur had ever seen, surrounding the obelisk and the temporal agents. Each of the nine creatures surrounding them had a blue-gray, eggplant-shaped body about three-quarters of a meter in height and half a meter in diameter, topped with four diaphanous triangular fins at the compass points. A faint glow seemed to emanate from within, as though they were living Japanese lanterns. Four thick tentacles over a meter in length descended from the base of each body but did not reach the ground; the creatures simply hovered in midair. Around the “waist” of each one was a skirt of overlapping fins of some metallic or composite material, reminding Dulmur of nothing so much as a far more intricate, inverted version of the steamer basket in his mother’s kitchen. The hovering mechanism, perhaps? In any case, the overlapping-plate design reminded him of the obelisk’s technology. Underneath each skirt was a harness partly encasing a rounded pyramidal protrusion on the underside of the body; Dulmur was reminded of a squid’s beak at first, but then he thought he could spy some sort of eyes, one on each face of the pyramid. None of the eyes looked directly his way, but he had a palpable sense of being under intense scrutiny.

  Something burst into his mind, a powerful sensory overload—no, more a perceptual overload, for it had nothing to do with his senses. He reeled under it. Noi stepped forward as if to shield him and Lucsly, standing more firmly. A moment later, the mental noise subsided.

  “They’re telepaths,” she said. “Trying to communicate, but it’s so alien . . .”

  “Explain your interference with our instrument,” came a voice that was not a voice. Apparently they—or perhaps Noi—had found a way to bridge the mental gap.

  “Our interference?” Lucsly challenged. “If you’re the ones responsible for leaving dangerously powerful temporal displacement devices unattended in the past, then you’re the ones with some explaining to do, whoever you are.”

  “You should not be here,” another mental voice declared, as a second creature—presumably the one “speaking”—raised a tentacle to gesture at them. “Where are the hexapedal endothermic grazing animals the instrument was positioned to collect?”

  Noi was nodding as if her suspicions had been confirmed. “You’re conservationists, aren’t you? You send these probes back to collect life-forms from the distant past.”

  The first creature, evidently the leader or spokesbeing, moved slightly closer. “You are correct,” came its mind-voice. “We are the Collectors. We rescue dead species from extinction.”

  “So this was supposed to be the habitat for those animals,” Dulmur said. “You terraformed it to match their environment.”

  A third Collector moved over to examine the obelisk. “As closely as we could extrapolate from paleontological evidence and temporal probing,” he sensed it saying. One of its tentacles moved under its body to retrieve an instrument from its harness. Dulmur saw that the tentacle subdivided into four slimmer ones near the tip, though, now that he looked closer, it seemed each of the large tentacles could be a bundle of connected ones. “But the biome samples collected by the instrument would have allowed us to perfect the simulation. Why have no samples come through?”

  “Did you remove the instrument from the sample area?” the leader queried.

  “We did,” Lucsly told the Collectors. “I’m Agent Lucsly and this is my partner, Agent Dulmur. We represent the Department of Temporal Investigations of the United Federation of Planets, a civilization from the era to which you delivered your probe. We regulate hazardous temporal technologies. This is Agent Jena Noi of the Federation Temporal Agency, one of our partners in the Temporal Accords. Your instrument was found unsupervised on an uninhabited planet, posing a safety hazard, so we confiscated it.”

  “Fools!” said the second Collector. “The instrument posed no hazard if left in situ. It should have been triggered by the arrival of the grazing animals to deliver a sample of the herd here as a breeding colony. There would have been no disruption to any other population, and the collection should have had no impact on the timestream, since it was timed to occur near the point of extinction.”

  “Why these animals?” Dulmur asked. “What’s so special about them that you needed to bring them here?”

  The head Collector drifted closer to him, its steamer-basket skirt closing slightly and pulsing open again. The wispy fins on its head moved too, perhaps aiding in its navigation. “They are special as all creatures are special. All forms of life deserve to be known, remembered, preserved. Come. You will see.”

  It gestured, and a vehicle blink-materialized before them. It had the same kind of hoverskirt but bore a railed platform large enough to hold the three humanoids. They traded a look, wordlessly agreeing that there was no sense in resisting. They
needed to learn more about these Collectors, and hopefully gain their cooperation in getting home.

  Once they were aboard, the hover platform rose into the air, flanked by four of the Collectors; the other five stayed behind to examine the obelisk. The platform accelerated to high speed, but Dulmur felt no g-forces or wind. As it rose above the surrounding hills, he was able to see the vast, flat landscape stretching out on all sides, with no horizons save the edges of the orbital torus, which even in the dark were only vaguely discernible through the atmospheric haze. They must have been hundreds of kilometers away. Ahead and behind, though, there was no sign of an edge, just land stretching to the vanishing point and, in the incomprehensible distance, the slim, bright ribbon of the ring rising overhead. They were so close to the surface here that he could not see its curvature.

  “I wonder,” Dulmur said. “I’ve heard of a race called the Preservers that transplanted endangered civilizations. They couldn’t be . . .”

  Noi shook her head. “No. There have been a bunch of different groups over history that have done similar things—relocating threatened populations through space, not through time.” Dulmur nodded; he’d known the suggestion was ridiculous the moment he heard himself say it. “I remember from school that some Federation historians used to lump them all together under the ‘Preservers’ label, even though they had clear differences or existed in different eras. Many people even confused them with the Progenitors, the first humanoids who seeded the evolution of all other humanoids, even though they lived billions of years earlier—and created new life-forms rather than preserving existing ones, so the label ‘Preserver’ doesn’t even make sense for them.”

  Lucsly shook his head. “Laypeople. They think everything in the past happened at the same time.”

  “Oh, don’t get me started.” The three temporal professionals traded long-suffering looks. “Anyway, that’s why the term ‘Preservers’ had fallen out of favor by my time. It was just confusing people.”

  Now, although they had leveled out only a few dozen meters in the air, Dulmur could see a day/night terminator sweeping diagonally across the landscape, creeping toward them as they raced toward it. Soon the local sun broke over the rim, and Dulmur could clearly see the landscape around them.

  They had already moved well beyond anything that resembled the scrubland where they had arrived. Now they were flying over the canopy of a rain forest dominated by purple and blue foliage. He spotted brightly colored creatures like broad, flat parasols gliding and twirling above the canopy, riding on updrafts. One descended to latch on to a high branch with a hand at the end of one of its six limbs, then folded its limbs and membranes in some complex way that caused them to collapse in around its body, turning it into a brachiator that climbed deftly along the branch to reach a bundle of fruit. Some moments later, another parasol-thing was snagged by some sort of elongated tongue that shot out of a dense clump of growth. It gave off a distress call like a particularly shrill version of a Starfleet alert klaxon, and two other creatures came to its aid, pelting the unseen predator with branches and fruit pits until it let go.

  “I am the Warden of this prehistoric game preserve,” the head Collector told them. “Here, we resurrect long-extinct species from every era of the galaxy’s past, such as these specimens from the Hot Age of Hunari IV, before runaway glaciation destroyed all surface life there.”

  Next they passed over a narrow arm of an ocean in which Dulmur could see the vague forms of enormous bioluminescent creatures swimming dozens of meters down, followed by a savanna in which a band of reptilian bipeds was stalking a very large, surprisingly fast-moving mollusklike creature. “I know this one,” Noi said. “I saw them in a museum once on a planet in the central Beta Quadrant. An extinct side branch of the line that produced the planet’s civilized species.”

  “The reptiles or the mollusk?” Dulmur asked.

  Noi chuckled. “Both.”

  The savanna gave way to mountains housing aeries for winged, Sphinx-like mammals, followed by a ruddy desert populated by gray-brown, shaggy-maned humanoids with suckerlike mouths and sunken eyes, their bodies loosely draped in some kind of vines or crude textiles. They were attacking a herd of rodentlike creatures the size of golden retrievers, placing their suckered hands on the animals’ heads and apparently draining them of life. Oddly, the rodents seemed unafraid of them, approaching them willingly, as if not recognizing the threat.

  “How many species do you have here?” Dulmur wondered.

  “Our preserve spans a full twelve degrees of this Ring,” the Warden replied, “and we hope to expand in the years ahead.”

  Dulmur whistled. From what Noi had said, a thirtieth of the Ring’s circumference could equal several planets’ worth of territory. This place made the Lactran menagerie look like a petting zoo.

  “Those humanoids were wearing some kind of clothing,” Noi said. “Do you have intelligent species confined here too?”

  “The definition of intelligence is complex,” the Warden replied. “A great many higher organisms possess some degree of awareness and cognition yet are not generally regarded as meeting the criteria for positive rights as members of civilization.”

  “But if they’re capable of technology—” Dulmur began.

  The platform and the accompanying Collectors veered to the right and sped up. “Technology does not necessarily equate to free will and individual thought. We have an intriguing example of this which you might find edifying.” The Warden was nothing if not proud of its collection.

  But the biosphere enclosure it wished to display filled its humanoid guests with unadulterated horror. It was an unbroken expanse of black and gray geometric constructs, grilles, lattices, and pipes rising dozens of meters into the air, illuminated by sickly green lights. Along catwalks on every level, dark, cumbersome humanoid shapes covered in technological extrusions strode silently, mechanically, giving no sign of recognition or affect. Dulmur clutched the railing, and a moment later he realized Lucsly and Noi were holding him up; his knees had almost given out from sheer terror.

  Noi spoke for all of them. “Borg? You brought back the Borg?! Do you have any idea how insanely dangerous that is?”

  “Do not be alarmed,” the Warden assured them, its mental tenor breezy and confident. “We are equipped to contain the most hazardous life-forms known to prehistory. This exhibit has been one of the prides of our collection for several years now, and not one drone or nanoprobe has managed to escape the containment fields, despite continuous efforts to adapt to them.”

  “You really don’t know what you’re risking here,” Lucsly told them.

  “I see, yes, they are from your era, are they not? An intriguing coincidence; you come from the very period of their extinction. Understandable that you would fear their capabilities. But those capabilities are quite primitive by our standards.”

  “You’d better be right,” Noi muttered through clenched teeth.

  “I apologize for failing to anticipate your distress,” the Warden told them as the platform accelerated in a new direction. “Allow me to make amends. I am informed that we have identified your genetic sequence, Agent Lucsly and Agent Dulmur. We have a biome you may find intriguing.”

  Moments later, the platform slowed over a new territory, a flat plain giving way to a misty, forested landscape, some of whose constituents Dulmur recognized as cycads and small sequoias. Small birds fluttered among the branches and bright flowers, their songs almost but not quite familiar. Trundling along the plain, heading for a river valley, was a herd of large, four-legged animals with very familiar bony shields on their heads. “They’re dinosaurs!” he cried, grinning involuntarily.

  “Mm-hm,” Lucsly agreed. “A variety of Triceratops, I’d say. Between them and the vegetation, I’d estimate the Collectors sampled the Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous, circa 72.1 to 66 million years before our time.”

>   Dulmur’s eyes widened. “And that means that these guys would be prey for—”

  “That’s right,” Noi said. “To your left, in the trees.”

  The platform veered closer, making no sound and drawing no attention from the massive form that lurked below the branches: a bulky, bipedal theropod with massive jaws, its head crested by a mane of fine, downy feathers in muted colors. A coating of shorter, more hairlike feathers ran back along its spine but grew sparser along the rest of the body, save for stunted, winglike fringes extending back from its extremely small, two-clawed arms.

  Dulmur searched for breath. “Lucsly.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I am looking at a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  The most fearsome land predator in Earth’s history was just meters below him, alive and hungry. After the Borg, it looked positively cuddly. Dulmur struggled to get the grin off his face. “This is so wrong.”

  “Wrong?” the Warden challenged. “We are rescuing species from a death that was once permanent. Bringing new scientific understanding of life-forms remembered only in legend or in secondhand paleontology, fragmented records from the ruins of later extinct civilizations that studied them.”

  “You’re sending immensely powerful temporal displacement generators into the distant past without supervision,” Lucsly countered. “Just randomly sending them back and hoping they retrieve the species you want. Haven’t you considered the enormous risk of disruption to the timestream?”

  “We ensure the instruments are sent to eras shortly before the species’ extinction. These organisms, these biospheres, had no future, save what we have restored to them.”

  “What about the risk of accidentally affecting more than just your target species? Say, when explorers from another planet happen across one of your instruments and attempt to study it?”

  “If you had left the instrument well enough alone,” the second Collector repeated, “you would not have been displaced.”