Atlantis Endgame (17 page)

Waving sea life indicated turbulent currents; here and there eyes peered out between fronds. The underwater world was so very strange, like another planet, she thought, looking around. Even one's sense of time altered.

But anxiety still remained: that sense of impending disaster, of events about to overtake them.
Get busy and search,
she scolded herself.
Explore later.

She faced downward, her hand hovering over her forehead, when the sled's steady progress slowed, then stopped. Had he found it already? They both flicked on their lights. And then gazed in surprise.

No device: what they'd found was a great cavern. Kosta swept a hand toward it, an ironic
Shall we?

In answer Eveleen let go of the sled and swam forward, scanning methodically as she drifted. Kosta joined her; they anchored the sled, and with a few short gestures they divided the territory.

It didn't help that they had no idea what they were looking for. Large? Small? Camouflaged? Out in the open? Eveleen had expected to see something sticking out, some sort of futuristic tech nestled among the weird plants and mossy rocks, right in the open. Stavros had said that the signal was strong, and that meant they had to be right near whatever it was.

But although the variety of rocks, fish, and plants was both rich and amazing, nothing futuristic or tech-made was in sight.

Kosta's entire body was expressive of frustration. He gave one great kick and lunged back to the mouth of the cavern, and then he began feeling over the rock.

Eveleen floated up to the other side and did the same, looking past her bubbles. She had to be careful. There were several kinds of coral, brilliant in color, but sharp and deadly; she did not need a cut in her gloves.

They felt over the rock, and she bent close and examined some of the weirder sea plants. They all looked real enough, but if the aliens were clever enough, she might be fooled. She wasn't any kind of an expert on undersea life, especially in the Mediterranean.

Slowly they worked their way inward, and after a time gave up the tactile exploration. Kosta dove down to sift through the fine sand at the bottom of the cavern. Eveleen kept looking at the vast dark hole. Just how deep was this cave, anyway?

She was strongly tempted to go exploring but forced herself to join Kosta and work over the seafloor.

They'd kicked up quite a bit of sand when Kosta finally sat back, his hands clenched into fists.

Eveleen gestured toward the inner part of the cave. He shrugged:
Why not?
It took him only minutes to cross back to the opening of the cavern and return with the sled.

So they pushed off, relieved to be doing something, at least. Eveleen could feel the coarser hum of the sled's engine, now at its lowest speed.

The lancing blue and yellow sunbeams from the surface very swiftly vanished. They could still see the cave mouth behind them, but light did not penetrate far. Eveleen reached over and turned up the intensity on the sled's headlamp, then turned her own down a bit; her battery power was now reading just above half. She knew there was an emergency supply, but she didn't want to have to rely on that if they had to do another search by feel.

The cave bent suddenly and angled up. Strange. Was the rock smoother?

She turned to Kosta at the same moment he faced her, and pointed. There were no sea plants here, just smooth rock. It was a slab. Could it have been made by a great shifting of land, a quake?

They proceeded at a slow pace, Eveleen watching to her side and Kosta to his, with the sled illumining the way ahead to give maximum visibility.

On and on, and then another sharp turn. The sled banged against the rock as Kosta maneuvered it around.

And then they stopped, staring.

The cave widened; there, settled on the seafloor, rested one of the great globe ships.

CHAPTER 15

DOWN IN THE cave with the machinery, the two Kayu faced the Time Agents. One of them manipulated the computer, or whatever that egg thing was. Ross noted sourly that if his attempt to crash it had been successful, there was no sign of it.

One of the Fur Faces signed something to the other, adding a low comment in its clicking, trilling language, and then from the machine came a voice—in English.

"Our previous study indicates that you respond to this tongue."

Neither man moved.

"We use it in preference to the style of Greek the traders bring here because the vocabulary is easier to adapt to what must be discussed. But first we must reveal to you the fact that we have been waiting for you to appear, that everything is in readiness; it remains for you to make the decision what must occur next."

Who can resist an opening like that?

Ross knew that if he were alone, he'd ride with the wave and see what happened, but he deferred to Ashe, the more senior agent—and the one who made fewer mistakes.

Ashe looked up at Ross, his head canted in question.

If you're asking me,
Ross thought,
I say let's go for it.

Besides, trying to interrogate someone in a language he understood as superficially as he did Ancient Greek was no picnic.

Ashe said, in English, "Proceed."

The Kayu responded with a swift exchange in their own tongue. Though it's usually a mistake to ascribe human emotions to nonhumans, Ross suspected they were excited. And why not? It wasn't just a matter of guessing the right language. These furry guys now had a vector on not just where but when Ross and Ashe had really come from.

"There are devices in place at crucial locations in the volcanic caldera," the machine-translation went on, in a perfectly enunciated, dispassionate tone.

"These devices are not ours but belong to the °°"—" The machine failed to translate here, instead giving a name in a humming sort of language. "That is their name for themselves; we call them the !!!."

This time the machine provided some trills and whistles.

Ross, giving in to impulse, said, "If you mean the guys in the blue suits, we call 'em Baldies."

"Baldies." The machine repeated the word in English and then in the clicking tongue, and the two Kayu looked at each other, one of them making asthmatic noises that might have been laughter.

The other touched a control and trilled something.

The machine said, "It is a most appropriate term, for it differentiates between us, does it not?"

A
little alien humor there?
Ross thought.

He said, feeling weirder by the second, "You definitely aren't bald. And neither am I," he added. "So what's the story on these devices?"

If humor there had been, it was now gone. "They are . . . even your language does not have the precise concepts, although your physicists could describe them mathematically. Call them . . . 'entropy adjusters,' and you will be close enough."

"Entropy adjusters," Ross repeated, resisting the impulse to wipe his sweaty palms down the sides of his fake-hide skirt.

"Yes," the Kayu stated through the machine. "In effect they transform the energy of the rising magma into a massive gravitational knot rather than allowing it to build up as heat. The effect has been to cool the magma, thus preventing the explosion."

Ross stared, his heart slamming behind his ribs. They were too late? Was the world, now set on a pastoral path of low tech, doomed to Baldy conquest up-time? Then he thought of the found earring ... of Eveleen down somewhere in the city . . . and felt momentary relief, until he realized that if the Baldies managed to change history, Eveleen would never even have existed, and he snapped, "You mean the magma has already cooled off too much?"

"No, there is still time, but we are approaching a point of no return. To complete the process, the devices must discharge the energy harmlessly, in one burst of temporal distortion. That is what brought us here; it is detectable across many centuries."

Something tickled at the back of Ross's mind, but before he could grasp it the other alien trilled something. The first one hesitated.

"My companion would note that this distortion, which affects suitably sensitive minds across a wide span of time, may account for the prevalence of prophecy on your world; I would merely add that this is but one way . . . you might say
'Nemesis . . .
speaks to sentient beings."

Ross felt momentarily disoriented by the strangeness of the situation. Here he and Ashe were, standing on top of a volcano that was about to blow up with a force that would make a hydrogen bomb look like a mere special effect, and having a metaphysical discussion with aliens.

The alien continued. "The adjusters are still building toward discharge, and if they are destroyed before they complete the discharge, the energy will be released all at once as heat, creating an explosion equivalent to what would have happened without interference."

Ross whistled under his breath—or started to. Remembering the whistling language spoken by the others, he didn't want to inadvertently be saying something he'd get into trouble for.

So the brain boys at home had been right!

Ashe said, "Why have you not acted to destroy these devices? Or don't you know where they are?"

"We know the location of each," one of the Kayu replied. "But we cannot act. It is not our mandate. We have been here, in place, observing, and waiting until you should appear. 'You' being, in this context, someone of your somewhat mysterious people, who appear and then vanish again after violent encounters."

Well, that about sums us up,
Ross thought.

Ashe said, "So our guesses are correct, then, that if this volcano does not go off, then up the time-line our civilization will not have advanced much past what it is now?"

"This is correct."

"Thus rendering it easier for someone, like the Baldies, say, to take over," Ross stated. He didn't say out loud, but mentally he added:
Or you.

The second Kayu said, "It is a logical surmise, but it is not correct. The !!!—the Furless Ones, as you would say— are committed to maximizing the biodiversity of the galaxy by protecting aboriginal life-forms."

"Protecting!" Ross's expostulation was almost a snort. "These are the same friendly types who shoot on sight? Don't we count as aboriginal?"

"They protect life, not lives," replied the Kayu. "When they find a space-traveling culture, such as yours is becoming, they locate the original world and search its past for critical points. Then they intervene as necessary to eliminate space flight, so as to contain that life-form and prevent it from contaminating the biosphere of other planets."

"So they are self-constituted galactic ecologists, then?" Ashe asked, brows aslant.

"It is a close enough designation, yes."

Silence.

Ross chewed on that, and Ashe said, "So let's get this straight, then. If we don't mess with their devices, the volcano doesn't blast, things are fine, and we never reach space in our future."

"It is so."

Ross burst out, "But if it hadn't gone off, then we wouldn't exist—and how would you know? For that matter, you said you detected the time explosion, or whatever you would call it, but it hasn't happened yet. And if we decide to destroy the devices, it won't, so how could you detect it?"

The two Kayu held a discussion that intensified into trills, with gestures and quick exchanges. Ross glanced over at Ashe to see him frowning. It was fairly clear that the Kayu, however much they looked alike, did not think alike: one seemed to want to say one thing, and the other something else.

At last one stepped back, permitting the other to address the machine, which stated in its precise English, "This choice you will make creates a major bifurcation in the probability wave that represents your world-line. Two futures so different that it is easy to detect the two states, both of which exist until your decision is carried out. In one, a pastoral planet, little or no EM emissions, the major pollutant being methane from cows; in the other, a technological civilization, heavy EM emissions detectable light years away, with heavy pollution from fossil carbon combustion. Those are but two ways of detecting the two states."

"Schroedinger's cat," said Ashe. "Alive and dead at the same time."

There was a long pause. One of the Kayu did something to the machine, and then both exclaimed softly. Looking up Schroedinger, and his cat? The Kayu trilled, and the machine stated: "Yes, according to your physics texts. You would say, superposition."

"But we've already decided," said Ross. "If we don't stop the explosion, we'll cease to exist—cease to ever have existed. And you still haven't explained how you could detect the time explosion if we prevent it. Or will detect it. . ."

"There are still courses of action open to the Baldies," replied the Kayu. "Only when these are all eliminated—or carried out—will the waveform collapse and seal your reality. At that point, one way or the other, the result will not be reversible. But all our actions will have been part of that reality, including the detection of the superposition that includes the time explosion. That is always pastward from your decision, and thus always exists."