Aurora (22 page)

REVELATIONS

Spirits in the Igloo were low again next evening. Today's work had been as disappointing as yesterday's. There had been not the slightest indication that a great city might once have occupied the slopes of the volcano. Not so much as the smallest artifact.

As Lundquist had pointed out, neither had their research ever found any other trace of life of any kind—no algae or lichen, no microbes, no dormant spores; just a few of those supposed fossil bacteria. No life even in the canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, where water had surely run millions of years ago. Mars seemed entirely barren, and gave every indication that it had always been so.

Beaumont and Aurora had climbed high on the slopes of Uranius, but had abandoned any idea of reaching the summit. It was difficult, though not impossible, yet it no longer seemed worth the effort. “If only we still had the Blimp!” Aurora had said. But Beaumont had pointed out that the air at the top of the volcano was so thin that even the airship would probably not have been able to reach the caldera.

Yet Aurora still felt the volcano, and its larger counterpart to the south, calling to her.

“If there is any place on Mars that I feel I had to come to, it is here,” she told Beaumont. “I know that doesn't really make sense, but what
does
on this crazy expedition?”

He searched his brain for something to lift their spirits. His eyes lit upon his minisynth, left there after their wedding ceremony.

“Why don't you give us a tune, darling? Might cheer us all up a bit!” he said to Aurora.

She was at first almost as reluctant as she had been during her first public performance at the Grotto Club, but the others cheered and forced her to her feet. Finally she succumbed to their encouragement, and adjusted the tone settings on the instrument.

As always seemed to happen when she began to play, there was silence from her little audience within seconds. Beaumont had quite expected to recognize a melody from the Gas Giants' album, but this was something quite new.

He watched her face closely. It changed, became younger, yet—different.

Her eyes closed, and a trancelike expression took over her face....

* * * *

The music was haunting, though not sad. Rather, it was calm, tranquil. It told, without words or the need for words but in clear images, of a world in which there was no war or strife, where weapons had been destroyed long ago and outlawed for centuries—but in which no one would anyway have wished to create or possess a method of destruction or cruelty. Indeed, there were few machines. But this was no static, sterile world, without change. Its people had simply forsaken non-essential technology, keeping only as much as they needed, turning instead to pursuits of the mind.

As Aurora played, the confined space of their pressure dome expanded and became a vast amphitheater, its terraced slopes lined with seats full of people. In the center, gowned musicians played instruments even smaller than her own, which they wore around their necks or as belts. The music they played augmented her own, swelling and soaring to incredible, spiritual heights.

It was night, yet everywhere a radiance shone from invisible sources. Foliage glowed vivid green....

Aurora swayed. The music faltered, the images wavered and shivered.

Lundquist moved towards her, but she shook her head.

The music passed through a series of violent chord-changes, calmed, shifted subtly into a minor key. When the images returned, the floor of the amphitheater was cracked.

Somehow, there was an impression of heat. This was not right, an intrusion. Two suns, one large, one small, rose in a purple sky; but they were in different parts of the sky, not close, as they had been in the “movie”. Clouds closed in rapidly, lightning flickered. A red glow pulsed on the underside of thick, turgescent clouds. The plants drooped and turned brown.

Orlov and Verdet mopped their brows. They were sweating visibly. The others looked uncomfortable too, except Minako, who seemed unaffected aside from a puzzled expression. Lundquist got up and checked the thermostat.

Bright rays of light streamed through cracks in the tattered clouds, which in places were ripped apart. The illumination became unbearable. Even the clouds themselves seemed to glow internally. Now, the other musicians having vanished, Aurora played alone, a plaintive threnody that rose and fell.

A bright spark rose from the horizon, then another. And another. At intervals they arced into the roiling clouds to be swallowed in a brief ripple of light. A few people remained in the amphitheater, watching the ascending fleet. The music was a song of farewell. Soon Aurora and her friends would, likewise, be leaving their world.

The scene became indistinct, as though seen through a haze of smoke. She still played, but the music became faster—whirled, sizzled, grew discordant, dissonant, became a cacophony.

Verdet and Minako put their hands to their ears.

Beaumont's eyes were still on Aurora, half-knowing what to expect, and he caught her when she swayed and fell. He carried her into her compartment and laid her on her cot. Lundquist, following him through, pushed him aside, firmly though not roughly.

Aurora lay stiffly on the bed, her muscles rigid. “It's like catatonia,” said Lundquist, seemingly to himself. Noticing Beaumont looking at him with worry and inquiry in his eyes, he added: “It's a state sometimes found in schizophrenics. But why? I can't understand it.”

“Can't you
do
anything?”

“Not a lot, here. I think it's best to leave her. Knowing Aurora, she probably has her reasons and will find her own way out of this.”

“But what about the baby? Will it be all right?”

Lundquist checked the instrument he held. “Aurora's vital signs are weak, but not dangerously so. All I can do is keep monitoring her condition.”

He looked haggard. An expedition physician shouldn't be expected to have to cope with a patient like Aurora, his expression said.

* * * *

She lay in a catatonic state all the next day, and the next. Worried, Lundquist explained the position to medical experts at Mission Control. They gave as much advice as they could from that distance.

He had attached a drip feed to Aurora's left arm. Her husband refused to leave her side. They brought Beaumont food and drink, but most of it went untouched.

On the third day, Aurora awoke, stretched, smiled beatifically, kissed Beaumont on the cheek, and made her way to the bathroom.

He went and woke Lundquist, who checked her over medically when she returned.

“You really will have to stop doing this sort of thing!” he said, his mock anger doing little to disguise obvious relief. “OK, you'll do. Go and get some decent food inside you.” He removed the drip tube from her arm and put on a small bandage.

When he had left, Aurora kissed Beaumont more thoroughly, then said calmly: “I have it all now. I can get at it—at last. I have a full set of memories, just as I knew I should have had. But they aren't my
own
memories. They're my father's. He passed them to me moments before he died.

“In the middle of World War Two. The London Blitz.”

HOMECOMING

Everyone had seen the same images, to a lesser or greater extent, except Minako. She had been moved by beautiful music but nothing more. She had seen no landscape, no people, had felt no rise in temperature.

Now Aurora sat in a chair, a video camera focused on her. After much discussion it had been decided that the best way for her to tell of her implanted and released memories was to do so in a single session, if it proved possible, to the whole world. So, now that she felt fit enough, not only her colleagues but everyone on the home planet was waiting avidly to hear her words. More people were believed to be watching and listening than for any other event in history.

“I want it to be just as if I'm telling a story—my own story,” said Aurora by way of preamble. “To me, now, it's as if the memories were my own, anyway. But I need to explain that they are not only my father's memories but those of many other people too, some of whom lived hundreds or thousands of years earlier.

“They were able to access those huge unused portions of the brain which neurologists have known and wondered about for decades; and part of that use was to fill them with precious memories transferred from others. Their family, friends. It was a way of learning, too—instantly. But it tended to make books, tapes, computer data files—recordings of any type really—redundant. They had to rediscover the technology to make that ‘movie' we saw.

“They didn't really expect the ‘movie' ever to be seen. They hoped it would never be needed, because I had all the information—in here.” She tapped her head. Then her face grew sad. “At least, my father and mother did. Yes. That woman astronaut we found in the desert was my mother.

“Her name was Anela.”

For several seconds she could not speak. Then:

“My father passed on his memories to me as a final resort. But, as I was saying, the ‘movie' was intended purely as a back-up—a fortunate back-up for us. It was also available as proof of my words, if needed. But it was never expected that we would find it on
Mars
....”

She paused to take a sip of water.

“I don't know why those memories were blocked from my conscious mind. Perhaps it was the trauma of my arrival on Earth, in the middle of an air raid on London by the Germans. Or of other traumatic events later in my life.

“Why did they return?

“Perhaps because I came to this magical place on Mars. Perhaps it's because I'm in love!”

She turned to Bryan with a smile.

“Or because of the baby, of changes in my bodily chemistry. Or a combination of all those things. I don't know. It doesn't really matter, does it?

“Music has always been the key, of course, and that is because of my father, who was a Musician—a highly respected position in his society. His name was Themor. Somehow, musical chords struck sympathetic chords deep in the recesses of my mind. Perhaps I just found the right note at last—struck the Lost Chord, as it were!”

Aurora drew another deep breath.

“Right. Here goes. You have to realize that I need to start by going back a long, long way; but what you don't know, unless you've managed to guess by now, is that to you it's not
back
at all. It's
forward
.

“It's all in your
future
....”

She took another drink of water. She looked nervous and very fragile—and young. Her image and the words she had spoken when she started speaking were still travelling towards the Earth at the speed of light.

“When I was born, the method of counting dates had changed—several times. I was born in your equivalent of the year 20,000 AD.”

There was a collective gasp from the people around her.

“So some of the earlier dates I give may not be completely accurate, but they are as close as I, we, can get. For reasons which you will see, many records were wiped out. Especially those that were kept on computers or used other electronic storage methods, and so were vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse....

“We do have an accurate record of this: in the year 2069, there was—there will be? Look, I'm going to have to speak in the past tense. OK? In 2069 there was a series of devastating explosions that wiped out Baghdad and severely damaged Tel Aviv, Beirut, Tehran, and other cities and towns in that area. Unfortunately they did not destroy all the secret underground command posts, or the nuclear missiles which had been stockpiled, contravening all those United Nations treaties. Or the people who then ruled that area, who instantly assumed it to be a nuclear attack on them.

“Here I am augmenting my ‘memories' with what I know of today's political situation, but you all know that, while the world seems to be progressing towards peace, the Middle East remains as ever a flashpoint for trouble, because of its oil. Which is not inexhaustible.

“The fireballs, complete with mushroom clouds, were certainly equivalent to several atomic or even hydrogen bombs, but were in fact caused by a portion of the head of a small, non-periodic comet. It came ‘out of the Sun', which is why it was not detected earlier, and it arrived in full daylight. Its arrival was preceded by a series of detonations high in the atmosphere, during which it broke into a number of smaller pieces. It originally weighed perhaps five thousand tons, and the main mass impacted in the Syrian desert. It could as easily have landed on Washington, or Paris, or Moscow. The direct results would have been much the same. But it could hardly have happened at a worse place or time.

“Just to give you a bit of historical background, a similar object hit Central Siberia—only four thousand kilometers from Moscow—on the thirtieth of June, 1908. It flattened two thousand square kilometers of taiga forest, The name of the place where it fell was Tunguska.

“And in 1947 there was a similar event only four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok. As most of you will know, a comet is composed chiefly of ice, so almost all of it vaporizes on impact, hitting the ground at perhaps thirty kilometers per second and leaving no solid traces. There is a crater over a kilometer in diameter in Arizona, but that was caused by a chunk of iron twenty-five meters across that struck twenty or thirty thousand years ago—‘your' time. So such impacts as the ones in 2069 had not been unexpected. Organizations like Spaceguard had been warning of them for years, but governments had given little heed, even after a comet impacted Jupiter in 1994 and its effects were shown on TV worldwide.

“If I seem to be dwelling on this it's because it is one of the reasons I'm here. To warn you of what is about to happen. I'm sorry, I don't even know if you can do anything about it. After all, to me, to my father's memories, it has already happened. But perhaps a time stream can be diverted? It is your—our—only hope.”

Again she paused, placing the fingers of one hand to her brow for a few seconds. “I don't think I need to go into great detail about what happened next. The gaps can be filled in later—where I can. Other nations became involved. The world dissolved into war and chaos remarkably easily and quickly. Weapons appeared that were supposed to have been destroyed long ago.

“A nuclear winter descended upon the Earth, partly due to the amount of smoke and dust liberated by the initial cometary impact—after all, a similar impact may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago—but exacerbated by the war, in which nuclear weapons were used. There were dark ages during which men and women had no time for anything but survival, when there was only suspicion, fear, brutality, hunger and disease, including radiation sickness....

“I would rather not dwell on this period, because it offends every fiber of my being. Suffice it to say that it was a hundred years or more before sanity regained control, and people began to cooperate and collaborate on building a new world. But there came other collapses—economic, political. Artificial upheavals which to my people seem, frankly, stupid and incomprehensible, but which I, as one of you, can of course understand—as much as any scientist can understand the workings of the Stock Market! I suppose I really have been schizophrenic, in a way, for I have had these other people locked away in my brain for nearly eighty years.

“Where was I? Oh yes. Gradually, a better world was built. It seems that sometime in the first half of this century the first scientifically tested and proven examples of the power of the mind appeared.”

Beaumont's head, which had been bowed as he listened, jerked sharply upward.

“Of course, powers of ESP have been claimed for centuries, but it has always seemed impossible to prove the existence of such extrasensory powers—or to use them at will, in such a way that there could be no doubt of their effectiveness. If it was some sort of human mutation, it was a very elusive one. But, as I said, the first incontrovertible proof appeared—well,
will
appear—any time now.”

She frowned. “Ah. I think I'm beginning to see a paradox.”

This time she paused for so long that her audience began to wonder if she were feeling ill. Then she straightened. “I think I'd better get back to my ‘future history'. It's safer ground.

“It seems that a portion of the human race has always possessed some type of psi talent. Could it be that some part of humanity is descended not from Cro-Magnon Man but from some other branch of the anthropoid family? I'm not qualified to say. Just maybe, many tens of thousands of years ago, we used these faculties much more widely, but with the advance of technology they became atrophied. However, some people still have them—my husband for one, with his dowsing ability.” She looked over at him fondly, and again smiled, though with an obvious effort.

“The fact that some people don't have the slightest trace of these abilities may explain why, though always most of my audiences were affected by my musical performances, a few were not.” She did not look at Minako. “Those who were affected received powerful mental images from my mind, released in this case by the music.

“Mental powers are not exactly as most people seemed to expect. And they re-developed very slowly. During the Black Ages I told you about they were suppressed almost completely, and when they did reappear it took literally thousands of years before they were fully understood and mature, so that it became possible to train children in their use as a commonplace part of education. Training is essential, by the way, for the abilities to be used consciously, and I was far too young ever to receive any—which is no doubt why my own talents are so...unpredictable.

“Reverting to my father's time, the future, talents like teleportation and telekinesis of actual objects are still very rare—and highly prized, and interbred. Oh, yes, I'll come to the genetic experiments later. Telepathy is common, but most mental powers are used almost exclusively for healing, therapeutics, the care and treatment of the body and mind. And for education. Medicine, as you know it, is almost unknown.

“My people have almost completely forsaken technology and science—again, as you know them. But this didn't come about because of some sort of conscious or even unconscious backlash against the forces which almost destroyed your—our—world. We use technology wherever it is essential—for transportation, for instance, by land or air, and occasionally by water. Oh, sometimes for pleasure too—people still enjoy flying, and sailing.... And of course it's used for providing services such as electrical power and the pumping of water. Well, you can imagine others, I'm sure.

“But a form of telekinesis is commonly used on a sub-molecular level. The controls of the...vehicle we found in Noctis Labyrinthus operate mentally. The mind is able to operate submicroscopic switches and servos, and even affect power outputs directly. Again, even in the twentieth century limited experiments were carried out on influencing, with the mind alone, such tiny quantities as the particles in random radiation counts.

“In about two thousand years from today, science will concentrate on modifying the human body. This will be done partly by using mental powers, again at a microscopic level, but also by a form of what I suppose you'd call genetic engineering combined with nanotechnology, but using the most sophisticated and beautifully tuned microsurgical techniques, of which you have as yet barely an inkling. A type of—serum?—will also be developed. Actually it's a meld of drugs and hormones.... No, that's not right. I don't think I can explain it now, but the information can probably be accessed....”

The child of two worlds took another sip of water. She was beginning to look wan.

“The end result will be that in my time the majority of humanity customarily live to an age of four or five hundred years, often even more. Virtual immortality is the ultimate aim, but seems elusive; some sort of entropy appears to be built into the human system, and degeneration occurs quite rapidly during the last few years of life. We have Old People's villages, where most elderly citizens end their days happily without reminding the rest of the populace of their
own
inevitable end. But this is quite voluntary; and most families, with their children, visit older members frequently and joyously.

“Most people, but not all, have automatic self-defenses against almost every disease, bacterial or viral, and can regenerate limbs or organs when those are accidentally damaged. Those who cannot—and they seem to be the ones who themselves have little or no psi ability—can almost always be helped by mental physicians.

“You will have noticed that our toes have been allowed to atrophy. After all, we no longer need fingers on our feet! I'm sure, too, that you have all wondered—as I did myself—why the people of mine we have seen look so similar, especially in hair and eye coloring.”

At this point Orlov, who was standing at the video camera, deliberately zoomed in on Aurora so that her dark oval face with its violet eyes, framed by long blonde hair, filled the screen dramatically.