It also solved the question for Myfair why there had been regular surveys of this remote, largely undeveloped and unimportant planet in the middle of nowhere. The actual Skidians wanted to keep a good eye out in case they needed more spare bodies.
Of everyone, including himself, Bruce felt sorriest for the two Skidians. In some ways their lives had been nothing more than elaborate fraud. He had never seen anybody fall apart in front of his eyes the way Myfair seemed to before something appeared to slam shut behind his eyes and he gathered himself. In contrast, Leaf seemed to be taking the revelations in her stride.
Sue’s response was interesting – Bruce watched her join the dots as it dawned on her this meant the foundations of her own belief system were based on a bunch of aliens and not the word of a god as she had always believed.
“You mean a lot of our scriptures are based on these Transcendents coming to Earth in order to harvest bodies as part of some Skidian Business Continuity Plan?” she asked. “I don’t believe a word of it,” she added as an afterthought, dismissing the idea outright because it was in total opposition to her own unshakeable world view. It seemed to Bruce she found it preferable to continue to believe a lie than to deal with the truth of the situation.
“That’s about it; they took people from all over the world at different times depending on the local level of population density on the planet at the time.”
This comment started a furious debate among his audience who started to speculate how the Skidians, the real ones, had impacted the development of religion and technological development on Earth. After all, many religions had belief systems related to visits by various celestial beings. Did they build the pyramids? Were they responsible for the development of language and reading and writing? Bruce found himself bombarded with questions he had no answers to, and the Transcendent was no help.
Alternatively, he was confident he could make a decent guess, despite the Transcendent assuring him their impact had been minimal in the development of mankind. Sending those people back down to Earth, who had failed the selection process, who then created symbols and stories to explain their experiences, who had been exposed to a race with far greater technology than they had ever imagined – wasn’t that interference of a sort?
“They reckon they didn’t, but I wouldn’t necessarily trust them.”
The questions continued to come thick and fast.
“How did they make their selections?”
“Did they seed us with intelligence?”
“Did they select based on some kind of IQ test?”
“They reckon they didn’t,” Bruce repeated. “They selected based on fertility and other physical characteristics. But an unintended consequence of this selection process was that it left behind a greater concentration of brighter minds. Most of these people had been exposed one way or another to new experiences on the patrol ships and later the wormhole termini, once the selection processes had been held off the Earth on asteroids purposely positioned – like Automedon will be soon – as the Transcendents improved their wormhole technology.
“People had seen the Skidians or how they had chosen to represent themselves at the time. It seems to me our view of what aliens might look like, or angels and the various gods for that matter, might be based on their previous visits. I think this is how a lot of creation myths and the stories of super beings with superpowers started, you know. Remember the Skidians didn’t take everyone who turned up at the assembly points.”
“Wormhole termini?”
“Yes, what do you think that asteroid up there is? For some reason, the wormhole stretching from Skid to here can’t open directly on this planet, so they set up a terminal on an asteroid, which they nudge into orbit around the planet. The Skidians then hoover people up and process them in the terminal and return the ones they don’t want to the planet surface.”
“Why hasn’t anyone worked this out before?”
“I think basically because they haven’t been here for a while, or at least anywhere with any degree of sophistication and the technology to detect them.” Bruce paused while the Transcendent did some calculations and then passed them onto Bruce.
“Eighteen hundred years or so since they were here last, they seem to have targeted Polynesia, remote parts of Australia and the Americas – the rest of the world was getting too densely populated for them to act without being noticed.” Not that it would have mattered much, he thought.
“Is there any way we can stop them?”
“No, we can’t. Their level of technological development is just far enough ahead of our own they can act against us with virtual impunity.”
“We don’t want to stop them,” Shelly began. “This is a fantastic opportunity to ensure the survival of the human species; we can use Skid as a lifeboat. We need to work with them and influence them somehow.”
“A what boat?”
“A species lifeboat?”
“But aren’t there more suitable species in the universe they could use, and how come, if they are so clever, they haven’t come up with some kind of cloning process? Why take our bodies?”
“Well, for two reasons. The first being we have the best physically structured bodies for their requirements, and the second, despite the universe being a really big place, the Skidians haven’t come across any other sentient beings but us and them. They have found faint traces of life and technology and the odd ambiguity that can’t easily be explained. Other than that, as far as they have experienced, it is just us and them – in this part of the universe at least. Their cloning processes haven’t got a high degree of repeatability, and they stopped cloning development once they transcended.”
“You seem very well informed, Bruce.”
“I have a direct feed to all this information,” Bruce replied without elaborating. He had his own questions like ‘how did the Skidians develop the ability to transcend when they couldn’t successfully clone a decent replacement body?’ It seemed to him it would be easier to clone a new body than transcend as an entity of pure matter. Something didn’t really add up there – possibly the Transcendent was being sparing with the truth or didn’t have all the information. Or wanted to keep something back. Or maybe they had stumbled on the remnant of a much more sophisticated technology from a long-gone race and somehow worked out how to turn it on.
And if they had been here before, where were the other asteroid-based wormhole termini? And why did they keep coming back? Why did the populations keep failing?
“They spin the asteroids up and send them on their way and as far as populations failing goes, they’re not good at managing the populations of fleshies. They try to make sure their every need is met but, in the end this doesn’t protect them from their own stupidity and the technology issues. The proto-Skidians relied on synthetic food, and when the system failed – as it did at various times in their history – the fleshies starved and the Transcendents had to come and look for some new bodies. It is a viscous circle I would like to see if we could break.”
Bruce felt the Transcendent flinch and take a big breath. A metaphoric one at least.
“It might be the right thing to do for all of us. The human race, the Skidians, and the fleshies still left on Skid.” Bruce was not sure if he had carried the impromptu speech off particularly well.
Rangi, who had arrived partway through proceedings to see how things were going and to catch up with Cyril, was not convinced. “You could always spin a good yarn, Bruce Harwood. Why I remember …”
“So what’s the plan?” Shelly interjected.
Bruce really had no idea and was a little relieved Shelly seemed to have one. A plan the Transcendents would find acceptable.
Twenty-nine
The population resupply mission of Skid came together remarkably quickly. The whole undertaking was proving to be a lot less painful for Bruce than he could ever have imagined possible when he first started to get his head around the demands of the Transcendents. It seemed to him
he had spent far more time wondering and worrying about how he was going to fulfil the Transcendent’s requirements than the plan actually took to put together and implement.
The combination of Dick and Shelly, an unlikely duo if ever there was one, made a formidable project management team. Who would have thought Dick had it in him? Bruce asked himself. In their previous encounters with Bruce there had been no indication Dick was quite the entrepreneur and had his finger in a number of unlikely enterprises.
When Dick wanted some entertainment he was negotiating with the United States Government regarding the destruction of his bar in Portland. He seemed to have the government running scared, given the size of the compensation sum being talked about, and he wasn’t finished yet. Discovering the bar was in fact Dick’s and not Trev’s had come as a surprise to Bruce and was the first indication there was more to Dick than first met the eye.
Dick and Shelly made the process far less stressful and painful for Bruce and the Transcendent than it would otherwise have been. The Transcendent no longer understood the concepts of pain or frustration, or so it said. However, Bruce wasn’t convinced – it seemed to exhibit some very emotionally charged statements from time to time, especially when Bruce and his team decided to interpret its requirements rather loosely or, more often as time went by, ignored them in favour of developing their own requirements.
The Transcendent was rather old-school in the way it tried to manage its human team. Its requirements were directed with no room for argument, and it seemed to have no mechanism for dealing with any questioning of its mission must-haves and suggestions for improvement. Luckily for both parties, while their views on the execution of the mission were quite divergent, the desired outcome was the same. The humans still struggled to convince the Transcendent that simply hoovering people up and sending the rejects back to Earth was not appropriate in this day and age if it wanted to retain a degree of anonymity and squash any knowledge of its existence.
In the end the Transcendent didn’t seem to be prepared to die in a ditch with its requirements and let the humans get on with it, as long as they supplied him enough fleshies to quickly bootstrap a decent-sized population on Skid. It appeared the Transcendent was easy enough to wear down if you were sufficiently persistent and the validity of the argument was not a key constraint.
The required population requirements had also come back to numbers that would be much easier to satisfy for the team. At Shelly’s suggestion the Transcendents had a poll and discovered they no longer needed hundreds or even tens of millions of bodies to be uploaded. Many Transcendents had either gone off the grid and were not in contact with the main body of Transcendents or had migrated into a higher plane of some kind and had no intention of ever downloading back into a flesh-and-blood body, irrespective of any future calamity. It now seemed that possibly maybe collecting up a group of tens of thousands might be sufficient to kick-start a new Skidian population. This would be a much easier target for the human team to achieve.
However, Bruce still chafed at the speed, or lack of it, in the process. He had convinced himself – was deluding himself, when he really should have known better – once the harvesting of fleshies was over, life would return to normal and he could get on with his life’s work: taking over the farm from his old man.
This is what he tried to tell himself, but it was becoming clearer to him that the very thought of tying himself down to the farm was not how he really wanted to spend the rest of his days. If, in fact, it ever had been. Ever since his older brother had died it had been an unspoken expectation between him and his father that he would take over the farm, and all his life he had prepared for that task in one way or another without really giving it another thought.
Suddenly, there were a number of alternatives now open to him – he had a galaxy, perhaps the entire universe, at his feet to explore. Bruce also realised how he had limited his own horizons in confining them to the farm when there was so much more he could do.
It was not that he wanted to sell the place – this was the furthest thing from his mind. In fact, he thought he would eventually like to settle back on the farm. Just not yet.
His olds, despite what they might say – who, Bruce reflected, were not that old really – wanted to stick around on the farm and enjoy and active semi-retirement. Given he had probably passed on the little medichines the Transcendent had loaded him up with, Bruce supposed his father was fit enough to carry on physically, if not mentally, for as long as he wanted to now.
So they needed a strategy so both of them could do what they wanted to in the interim. Keeping the old lady happy was the key consideration. Cyril would be quite satisfied if he had someone reliable to give him a hand on a day-to-day basis, whom he could trust to run the place if he wasn’t around. The only kicker was that Cyril was a bit tight about paying someone a decent wage – he was a notorious tight-arse.
In a roundabout way a solution presented itself that both the Harwood men were initially sceptical of but then warmed to quickly.
Myfair had made it abundantly clear in a rare show of emotion he was not about to go back to Skid if he had any say in the matter, and Leaf seemed to be of the same mind. While the Transcendents had intentions of using one or other of the Skidians to head up some kind of puppet Skidian government, the two of them were having none of that. They were intending to stay on Earth and had pleaded with Bruce to use his influence with the Transcendent so they could stay.
Bruce, despite the Transcendent’s intentions, could think of no reason they needed to return to Skid and started to build a very good case for them to stay behind once the replenishment mission was out of the way.
Myfair, in his bumbling, clumsy way, seemed to relish getting out and about on the farm. The simple tasks he was given seemed to provide him a purpose in life he had never experienced before, and as Cyril had mentioned on more than one occasion, although he was almost as useless and accident-prone as Bruce had been as a teenager, at least you could teach him something and he was eager to learn. Bruce and Cyril quickly realised Myfair, far from being clumsy, just looked like he was when attacking a task for the first time – he rarely made the same mistake twice.
Myfair and Cyril also seemed to get on quite well, which helped. The Skidians weren’t needy and even though he could no longer hop across the universe as he pleased in a spaceship, Myfair still seemed to have access to everything he required from Skid or the ship, including a ready supply of funds.
Myfair and Leaf quickly settled into the district and because they made the effort to be involved in local activities they soon became accepted members of the community. Local assimilation was complete in a few short weeks. Myfair made an immediate impact with the local rugby team, although he seemed to play by his own set of rules sometimes. Then once he learned to drive, both the Skidians soon discovered an independence unheard of on in their previous lives on Skid and started to roam far and wide in a nice new ute that turned up on the farm mysteriously one day.
The question remained for Bruce that if he was not going to stick around on the farm, what was he going to do with himself and little Bruce?
When the replenishment mission was complete the Americans, the Chinese and the other major powers would still be sniffing around to see what advantage they could get over each other from the situation, and he guessed it might take a while for them to leave him in peace.
“How do you intend to protect me once the mission is complete?” Bruce asked the Transcendent, worried it would leave him behind, unprotected, once they were all done and dusted.
I’ll leave you the ship and a subroutine to provide protection and support with the defensive measures intact – a response which on one hand satisfied Bruce, in that he had an escape route. On the other, though, his experience with Skidian technology had not always been positive or reliable.
Or you could join us for a while. The Transcendent was keen to get him back up to Skid, but Bruce thought it felt too much like g
oing into forced exile to escape to Skid. With the technology of the Skidians behind him, maybe he didn’t need to. However, if he stayed behind he might be isolated on the farm and the local district, and international travel would likely be out of the question. He would have to consider the offer.
Normal operations on the farm continued, docking on the Harwood and Tauroa properties went off without a hitch with a new pool of people to tap into, some of whom were pressganged into assisting.
But the situation was not completely normal. The local town and the wider district were seething with all kinds of odd bods and observers. These newcomers stood out like sore thumbs, with their various accents and lack of apparent interest in anything except maintaining a high degree of fitness in the local gyms and spending a significant amount of time in the cafés and bars without spending much. They had little interest in the many beaches and local tourist sites, and didn’t appear to have any other business to attend to. More than one of them had been silly enough to attempt to offer insane amounts of cash to the Tauroas in order to set up camp on a block of their farm adjacent to the Harwood property. These agents seemed surprised the amount of cash on offer could not get them their way.
There were also some strange goings-on in the bush block adjacent to the farm until Detective Moore contacted colleagues in the Police Special Tactics Group, who started playing war games in there with the SAS and flushed out a number of interesting characters.
After some discussion and negotiation, the Transcendent opened up a link to Wisneski, Dick and Shelly so they could access the huge resources on tap to help them project manage the programme to repopulate Skid, or the Ark Programme, as they liked to call it. The three of them and the Transcendent still looked to Bruce for direction and guidance, though sometimes he felt they were just seeking him out for form’s sake, not because they felt they had to or he had anything relevant to add. This made life a whole lot easier for him, although it took him a while to get used to the loss of control.
The Lifeboat Page 41
