CHAPTER 15
It was We that ordained
death among you. Nothing can hinder Us
from replacing you by others like yourselves or transforming you into beings
you know nothing of.
-
Koran 56:56
The
Intelsat 5 telecommunications satellite drifted languidly along with the Earth,
locked in its geo-stationary orbit high above North America. It dutifully kept itself in the same
location above the planet so that the many satellite dishes pointed at it all
across the continent would receive, without interruption, the dozens of signals
which streamed out of the tiny spacecraft every second; feeding a population
incessantly hungry for the latest news, sports, stock prices and sitcoms.
But
now something was tugging at Intelsat 5, pushing at it, trying to nudge it from
its assigned plot in the heavens. It
was not so much that an unseen force was trying to move the satellite, but
rather that the space-time fabric in which it sat was being disrupted, not
unlike how the calm waters of a pond might be disturbed if a fish just below
its surface should suddenly dart away.
Behind the veil of normal space all
around Intelsat, quarks and antiprotons began to deviate from their already
erratic paths. They bandied about in
all directions, falling all over themselves trying to get out of the way, as
something yet unseen pushed insistently from the shadows of subspace, forcing
its way into the light of this reality.
The pressure built up until the matrix of space-time could hold it back
no longer.
In a soundless cacophony of light
and energy, Sarwin's chronoship blared back into existence.
"Normal Space," announced
the computer.
Sarwin fell to the deck with an
unceremonious thump as the synthetic gravity again took control, seizing the
various masses, including his own, that had been splashing haphazardly about
the main cabin during the wild ride through the slipstream. Sarwin stayed flat on the floor and covered
his head with his arms as tools and equipment, which suddenly found themselves
heavy, rained down on his already battered body.
Normally, traversing time was a
relatively smooth affair, but with the chronofield so disrupted, Sarwin had
felt like a forsaken bead in a sadistic child's rattle. It had seemed to go on for hours as he was
slammed from one bulkhead to the next, only to rebound back toward another. With each lunge, he passed through a bruising
hailstorm of jetsam, which had broken free in the turmoil. Now it felt as if every inch of his hide was
one, giant bruise.
When he heard no more items falling
around him, he pulled his head out from under his protecting arms and looked
about at the mess in the cabin. Debris
was lying everywhere and most of the monitors displayed only dancing lines of
static amid a multitude of angry blue warning lights. He slowly and painfully pushed himself off the deck, a wrench and
a fuse box rolling off his back as he rose up.
Kicking a splayed-open toolbox out
of his path, he made his way to a window and looked out. The cheerful blue curve of the World arched
gracefully before him and he gave a slight sigh of relief. He had been sure when he entered the corrupted
slipstream that he would never emerge from it alive, but it seemed it was not
his fate to die. Not just yet,
anyway. His spirits were further
bolstered when the thought passed through his mind that if he could survive
what had just happened, perhaps Siverelle and the others could have also.
He looked closer at the familiar
outlines of the landmass that drifted beneath him. It was clearly the continent of M'Tauba, just as he remembered
it, and he could see the coast of Garath on the horizon. He couldn't be too far from his home time,
as the current position of continental drift seemed to match the World he knew.
"When are we?" Sarwin
asked.
"Chronoleap prime reference
point zero mark zero," answered the computer, "Calendar year 5456,
month of Cartoth, fifth day, seventeenth hour," it continued.
Sarwin breathed in deep and the
aches of his recent thrashing seemed to fade a dim memory, as a bad dream
quickly fades when one awakens. He was
home. Although he had not seen his
World for three weeks, from his own reckoning, he had arrived back at the exact
moment he had left. His family and
friends would not even have missed him for a moment, though to Sarwin a
lifetime's worth of adventure had come and gone. It always felt strange to reacquaint oneself with home after a
lengthy sojourn in another time. Those
who never made the journey could never really appreciate the sensation. Sarwin remembered when one of his students
some years ago had likened the experience to jet lag. Sarwin shook off the relaxing trance the sight of home had
brought upon him and returned his attention to his immediate predicament.
"Report current ship
status," he requested.
"Ship systems functioning at
ninety-eight percent capacity," droned the machine in its usual monotone,
"Stress damage to primary induction coils caused by chronofield
fluctuations exceeding design parameters.
Minor ruptures in outer hull.
Unable to establish link with solar positioning network."
The last item caught Sarwin's
attention most. "Detail of link
problem. Is there damage to our
receivers?"
"Negative," came the
reply, "Regression diagnostic indicates all receivers functioning at one
hundred percent. Unable to establish
link with solar positioning network."
Sarwin was troubled. This is the kind of thing that happened
whenever he transgressed into the past, to a time before the positioning
network even existed. There were simply
no signals to detect! So why couldn't
he detect them now?
"Scan surrounding region,"
he commanded, "Are there any other vessels from our expedition
nearby?"
"Negative," answered the
Computer.
"Other vessels then?"
"Detecting several hundred
artificial objects in orbit. Unable to
identify. Objects do not correspond to
any configurations on record."
Sarwin wrinkled his brow in
consternation. This didn't make any
sense. Perhaps he had been thrown into
one bulkhead too many? Perhaps the
computer's processor got thoroughly scrambled during the tempestuous ride home?
"Show me the closest one,"
he asked.
A silent cloud of three-dimensional
static fizzled into existence in the center of the cabin, but quickly coalesced
into a discernible shape. It converged
into what looked like a squat, winged cylinder. Attached to the bottom was a large, concave dish. Sarwin quickly realized the square wings
were solar panels and the dish was an antenna.
The thing looked a lot like a primitive orbital satellite, of the kind
his people had first lobbed into space during the infancy of their space age,
over two hundred years before Sarwin's birth.
He had seen pictures of them in history books and even saw an actual one
in a museum once, during a trip as a child.
But this one seemed somehow a little bit different than any he had seen
before. The design was very strange.
Sarwin looked back out of the
window.
"Re-verify ship time
coordinates" he asked. The
computer had claimed he had returned to the exact moment he started, but from
the looks of this satellite, he had clearly arrived about two hundred years too
early, give or take a few decades.
"Chronoleap prime reference
point zero mark zero," repeated the computer, "Calendar year 5456,
month of Cartoth, fifth day, seventeenth hour."
"Run self diagnostic and review
logs," ordered Sarwin, "re-verify time is correct."
The computer clicked madly as it
scanned its own innards. After a
sixty-five million year trip through a corrupted chronofield, it wouldn't be
surprising for the computer to be off by a couple of centuries or so.
The computer's clicking subsided, then
"Diagnostic complete. No errors
detected. Current ship time is prime
reference point zero mark zero, calendar year 5456, month of Cartoth, fifth
day, seventeenth hour."
Sarwin was confounded. The computer must have been so thoroughly
scrambled that it could not even re-calibrate itself. This might make it very difficult to get back to his true
time. He would have to calibrate the
jump manually. That was assuming his
ship was in good enough order for a jump and that he could find a suitable mass
to leap from. There must be a
near-World asteroid around somewhere, he thought. In order to manually calibrate the jump to his time, with any
reasonable degree of accuracy, he would have to know exactly what time he was
at now.
Fortunately, as this strange
satellite attested, he was in an age that had an accurate measurement of time
and had radio technology he could listen in on to learn when he was.
"Scan all transmissions coming
from the planet," ordered Sarwin,
"Search for any mention of current date on the World."
"Scanning," came the
machine’s reply. Sarwin projected a
quick brainwave and the image of the archaic satellite melted away. He then began to pick up some of the fallen
items from the floor and place them where they where supposed to be stowed.
In less than a minute, the computer
spoke up again.
"Unable to interpret signals
from planet. Transmissions do not
correspond with any known language patterns."
"What?" exclaimed
Sarwin. He was almost getting angry at
the machine now, as if it were deliberately trying to thwart his every effort.
"Put the strongest signal on
speakers. I want to hear it."
Instantly, the cabin was filled with
the most bizarre sounds Sarwin had ever heard.
It sounded like complete nonsense... gibberish. It was definitely an expressive signal
though, as there seemed to be some pattern to it. It sounded like a foreign language that Sarwin had never heard
before, but it was strange beyond that also.
It didn't seem like sounds that could come from saurian throats.
"Turn that noise down a
little," he ordered, "Can you receive anything with a visual
signal?" A picture is worth a
thousand words, thought Sarwin.
"Affirmative. Detecting numerous very high frequency
visual transmissions."
Video... That made Sarwin smirk a little bit. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could find two-dimensional images
to be entertaining.
"Show me the strongest
one," he ordered.
Suddenly, all around Sarwin, on all
the monitors throughout the cabin, there appeared the most appalling creature
Sarwin had ever laid eyes on. Despite
all the weird and wondrous creatures he had seen in his travels, the sight of
this pathetic being made him jump backwards in shocked surprise. Sarwin curled his lip in disgust, trying to
decide if the thing he was looking at was more revolting or more comical in
appearance.
Its hide was unnaturally pale and
thin looking. It looked to Sarwin as if
the creature had been skinned alive and this was some delicate, exposed
under-layer of skin he was seeing. It had
a face, of sorts, and Sarwin realized they were vaguely saurianoid in their
basic elements. It had two eyes, two
nasal passages and a mouth; and they were in the same order from top to bottom
to which he was accustomed. What made
the face seem so strange and tragically comical was how flat it was.
Where in Saurians, the jaw protruded
out in a ruggedly handsome fashion, this creature's jaw lay generally in line
with the rest of its face. It reminded
Sarwin of the simple cartoons his younger children sometimes watched, in which
the hapless hero of the animation would have his face accidentally smashed into
a wall, only to pull it back to reveal his features comically squashed flat.
But this was no cartoon. To the top and sides of its head clung a
strange, flaxen, fibrous substance that dangled down to its shoulders in
cascading ringlets. It looked to Sarwin
a lot like the hair that grew from the horrid mammals he knew from home. Was this thing some sort of overgrown
mammal? The thought brought something
between a laugh and a retch from Sarwin's gullet. The nightmarish mammal creature seemed to be speaking its
unintelligible babble while looking directly into the primitive camera that
must have been capturing its image.
The thing seemed to be wearing
clothing; mostly dark fabric with pleated ruffles of white near its pallid
neck. It appeared to be seated behind a
table of some sort, with its sickly pale hands clasped together in front of it,
resting its forearms upon the tabletop in a manner inexcusably rude in saurian
society.
Sarwin noted with a mixture of
revulsion and amusement how it had five, short fingers on each hand; four in a
line with each other and a fifth opposable thumb. He marked how the fingertips were colored bright red, which seemed
somehow artificial and contrasted sharply and distastefully to the rest of the
thing's natural tones. Sarwin held up
his own gray, lithe hand; flexing its two long fingers and slightly shorter
thumb.
"Holy T'Chen..." he
muttered quietly to himself, half in shock, "I'm watching television from
Scoggast!"
He had been so engrossed in the
bizarre figure itself that he failed to notice what was happening behind
it. There seemed to be all sorts of odd
events flashing unnaturally in the background, as if projected there by some
artificial means. Sarwin saw the image
of what looked like a large building in flames, with graceful arcs of water
aimed at it, no doubt attempting to extinguish the inferno. The scene then quickly shifted to an image
of creatures, like the one speaking in the foreground, running around
haphazardly as other similar creatures, which appeared dressed in some sort of
uniform, chased them down with clubs.
Then the image shifted again; this time to a scene of another mammal
creature standing on a large flight of stone steps, apparently addressing a
large crowd of similar beings who held up signs inscribed with nonsensical
symbols. Before Sarwin could completely
take in the image, it shifted yet again.
The creature in foreground prattled on through it all.
Now the mammal-being caught Sarwin's
attention again as it finally stopped its lengthy discourse and picked up a
thin stack of rectangular papers from the table before it, shuffling them. The outside edges of its alien mouth then curled
upwards, revealing a neat row of white, oddly square teeth. It looked to Sarwin like some sort of
threatening snarl. It then turned to
its left and addressed something off the camera's field of vision. As it spoke, the camera view panned to the right
and revealed the recipient of the snarl; another creature!
This creature was larger than the
first and, to Sarwin, much less hideous.
Sarwin thought it was more attractive, because it was much darker in
color than the first. Hardly a
saurian-like coloring, but much closer than the first! Additionally, this second creature did not
have the horrific, tangled straw-like substance sprouting from its scalp like
the nightmare fountain that sprung from the first one's head. Instead, this creature's head had a much
thinner, more refined, layer of a fuzzy black substance. Much more tasteful, thought Sarwin. There also seemed to be a horizontal strip
of the same dark, fuzzy substance sprouting from the area between its nostrils
and its mouth. Its attire was similar
to the first, except this one had a narrow strip of colored cloth hanging down
its front, affixed at the neck.
It then made the same snarling
expression as the smaller creature and replied to its partner. Its voice was much more baritone than that
of the anemic creature. Naturally,
thought Sarwin, this larger and more powerful being was surely the female. The two creatures went on to exchange a
brief dialog, alternately snarling at each other and at the camera. Sarwin shook his head, trying to decide if
he really wanted to understand what they were saying, or if he should consider
himself blessed that he could not.
The scene of the two creatures then
faded into darkness and was replaced by a spinning, animated image of the
World, while horizontal lines of nonsensical symbols marched from the bottom of
the screen to the top, in step with strange tones that Sarwin surmised was
somebody's idea of music. After a
moment of this, the spinning globe vanished and was replaced by a scene of
another flaxen creature, similar to the first one he had seen, only this one
was standing and pushing a stick-like thing, as if sweeping the floor. In its free hand, it held up a bottle of
some green colored liquid and began spewing the mammalian twaddle at the camera. Sarwin had seen enough.
"Stop it..." he
groaned, "Stop it... Kill the image."
The blanched, babbling creature
vanished from all the monitors and Sarwin was again alone with his
thoughts. What in T'Chen's name had
happened? Where was he? This looked like his World, yet it clearly
was not. His mind raced through the
possibilities.
Had his trip into the past somehow
distorted the present timeline? That
shouldn't be. They had taken every
conceivable precaution while in the past, making sure that not so much as a
single ancient atom was disturbed by their presence. Anything that they had placed in contact with the ancient
atmosphere was absolutely sterile, so that no foreign germ from the future
could bring a pestilence to the past.
Not even the smallest imprint was left in the soil by their visits,
because they never actually landed, but instead hovered slightly above the
surface, taking liberal advantage of gravity's flexible properties. They took the most painstaking care to be
sure that not even the lowliest protozoa was aggrieved in the slightest by
their passing.
Perhaps they had made some
mistake. Perhaps something had escaped
them. He had no idea. He was so sure they had done everything
right. The only event of the entire
journey that did not go smoothly and according to plan was the jump home. But they were many thousands of miles away
from the World when Etyiam's sabotage shattered the time-stream. He didn't understand how the World could
have been affected by an event so far away across the dead vacuum of space.
Perhaps this was one of those
unknown events which occasionally came up in his jump calculations, where all
the myriad factors boiled down to a remainder divided by zero. When mathematics hit a wall, only conjecture
remained. Some of Sarwin's students had
postulated that such events would lead to some alternate universe altogether
and not just a different age in their own universe. Is that where he was now?
In some alternate universe beyond his own? If so, how would he get back?
Sarwin had no idea. Without even
realizing it, he sank into his chair, staring blankly into his own reflection
in the darkened monitor.
Suddenly, Sarwin felt very
alone. Was he the only one of his band
to end up here? For all he knew, he was
the only saurian in this entire alien universe and he didn't know how to get
back to where he had come from. The
ship's computer was no help, as it was convinced it was already home.
Sarwin slumped in his chair and held
his head in his hands. In the span of
an hour, from his perspective, he had lost his wife, his closest friends and
now himself. Perhaps it would have been
best if he had died in the slipstream, as he had expected.
It would have been an easier fate
for Sarwin had the slipstream spread him evenly across the cosmos, so that each
individual one of his atoms would have emerged separately into a trillion
different universes, rather than collectively in this single, forsaken one.
"Attention," piped up the
computer, "A type-three chronoship has been detected on an intercept
course to this position. Estimated time
of arrival is five kiloseconds."
Sarwin’s heart almost leapt out of
his chest with delight. That could only
be one of his ships!
"Who is it?" Sarwin
shouted, jumping from his chair, gleeful beyond words. "Signal them immediately!"
"Unnecessary," replied the
computer, "Detecting incoming signal from approaching vessel."
"Show me!" commanded
Sarwin, his voice cracking with joy and relief. The darkened monitors that had only minutes earlier displayed the
hideous, talking mammal creatures sprang to life again, but this time they
displayed the comforting image of Sarwin’s best friend and second in command,
Kleesic. Kleesic was smiling broadly
and Sarwin realized he was smiling back at his friend also. But there was something odd about his old
friend's appearance. Kleesic looked...
well... old.
"Welcome home, my friend,"
said Kleesic and Sarwin drank in the familiarity of his voice.
"Kleesic!" he shouted,
"It’s good to see you! What in
T'Chen’s name is going on? What's
happened to the World? What's happened
to you?"
"It’s a long, ugly story,"
came his friend’s reply, "and I’ve been waiting many years to tell it to
you. Stand by to dock, Sarwin. We have to talk."