Aurora (25 page)

Sand spurted on all sides as she skidded across red desert, now below the dust cloud. If the land remained flat, she might just be able to come to a safe landing....

The ship rocked and juddered as it ploughed a furrow in the sand, grating on bedrock. It jerked almost to a stop. Then it tipped on end, bounced on rock several times, and began to fall. Down, down. Through the canopy, dimly seen through a shower of falling sand, was a canyon wall, passing rapidly upward. The altimeter showed negative numbers.

There was a rending crash, and Anela was thrown across the control board, unconscious.

* * * *

When she came to, Anela heard a rumbling roar. The lower half of the canopy was obscured by reddish sand, and more was cascading down on the timeship in a landslide which she must have precipitated.

Quickly she left the control cabin and tried to activate the outer hatch. It would not open, no doubt because of the pressure of sand around it. She felt a wave of panic. Then she opened the door into the bay which had housed the scoutship. Air whistled out, but she was safe in her spacesuit. The babies were secure in their capsules.

The crash of the timeship had damaged this section most, and the edges of the bay were curled back and ragged. The teeth of rocks protruded into the ship. But at least this was a way out.

She dashed back into the cabin and removed the psibot from its recess. If the ship was buried, she would make sure that its Beacon would function, so she could find the ship and its precious cargo again. And so could any rescuers—though she knew how unlikely that was.

She pushed the psibot through the serrated gap and crawled through after it, even remembering to close the door behind her. The avalanche of sand was abating now, but it had left a delta-shaped slope leading up to the curved bite made by the craft in the rim of the canyon into which she had fallen. Through it, a single beam of amber sunlight pierced the retreating dust cloud and spotlit the almost-buried ship.

She placed the psibot on a flat rock that stood clear of the debris, extended its supports, and mentally activated it. Then she stood, hands on hips, staring around—and, finally, upwards.

Where was she going to go? Was there any point in going anywhere? Human survival characteristics had been passed down the millennia—and, so, perhaps, had wishful thinking. Anela searched her implanted memories.

They were scarce, and untrustworthy, for this period, but there was a record that for some tens of years a small colony had existed on this part of Mars, housed under domes. It was some decades ahead of her present time, if the readout in the timeship could be trusted. But suppose it had been wrong—wrong by only so much as a century? A century was a mere tick of the clock compared to the millennia they had travelled back.

She had to do all she could to save their uniquely talented children. And she would still be in time to warn the people of this age, should she find any, about the comet which was heading their way, perhaps only decades from now, should Themor fail in his own mission.

The whole affair seemed wholly misconceived and ill-fated now, but still she had to try....

She climbed the slope of detritus, pausing frequently for breath. Physical activity of this sort was unknown to her, and the sensation and the smell of sweat—running down her face, dampening her hair, trickling down her neck inside her spacesuit—were new and unpleasant.

At last she reached the rim. The dust storm had diminished, and only a few twisting dust devils chased each other across the sands.

Which way to go? She searched for any sign of mental activity, but found none. She activated the unfamiliar controls of the black box on the chest of her suit—a receiver and transmitter of the radio waves believed to have been used in this primitive period.

There was no response.

She began to stumble along the long furrow made in the desert by the timeship as it had skidded towards the canyon. Twice she tripped and fell, once twisting awkwardly and hitting her backpack on a rock. There was a hissing sound somewhere inside her suit. A crystal flashed red inside her helmet.

Again she fell, and this time she did not get up.

She clutched at her throat, unable to breathe. Her mouth opened, gasping for air. Her eyes bulged. Her vision reddened.

The last object she saw before her sight failed forever was a bright, blue-white star, quite close to the Sun. It was a double star, for it had a close, grey companion.

Not a double star at all. A double
planet
.

Anela sent a final mental prayer towards the Earth.

ARRIVAL

Themor felt a sense of failure. He had never imagined that he would arrive in such a nightmare world—could hardly believe that such a world even existed, that humans would voluntarily inflict such violence and suffering upon humans, and in which innocent old people and children suffered and died needlessly and in great pain.

He had hoped to be able to search for someone in authority, someone to warn. But in his small craft he had no power left to do more than hover over a small area of the night hemisphere. Still, old habits die hard, and he could not ignore the cries for help that he heard in his mind.

So he had aided the pilot of some kind of winged airship to reach the ground safely when his primitive safety mechanism—a billowing disc full of trapped air—was activated too late. He suspected that the man was one of the perpetrators of destruction on this city, but he had entered the man's mind and found it to be basically good.

To save the man he had used his most precious talents. First, teleportation to prevent the pilot from striking the ground. Then he had had to reach out and somnify the men who were about to attack them both when they landed. The hatred and fear in their minds had horrified and sickened him.

He had helped an incredibly ancient-looking woman in the only way he was able: to find the peace she desired, in her ruined home.

He was left exhausted. Worse, he had been hit by some jagged metal projectile while he was floating high above the ground. He had discarded his spacesuit so as not to draw attention to himself. He did not know if he had the strength to regenerate his damaged internal organs. He was about to move on when he saw more of the air-filled fabric domes descending. From each was suspended not a man but a canister of death.

Two exploded in the large building which he knew to be full of highly volatile and inflammable liquids. Another fell onto the roof of a house without exploding. It was closely followed by the toppling stack which had stood at one end of the large building. Adjusting his visor for night vision, he could see two figures—and a baby—inside the house and obviously in great danger.

He dropped over the blazing building, enveloping the flames with his ship's null-G field. Deprived of gravity, the fire quickly smothered itself in its own waste products. Then he drew up the deadly cylinder in the same field, took it inside the scoutship, and disarmed its primitive but—normally—effective mechanism.

He landed and entered the house. His senses were assailed by the unfamiliar smells and sounds of smoke and explosives. He found the woman and her son half-buried in rubble. He extricated them and performed routine first-aid on the boy. The baby girl he could not help, for she was dead.

A girl child....

His vision blurred, and he lurched. He would surely be condemning his daughter to death; yet she would die anyway if he took no action. He could read in the woman's mind that she was kind and, given a chance, would look after his daughter well. This was the last world he would have chosen in which to have her raised; but what else could he do? He had come on a mission, and in his daughter lay the final, despairing hope of passing on his message. The future of humanity was in the balance. He must not fail.

Themor returned to his ship, taking the tiny body of the dead child with him. His ship's power supply was almost spent. Minutes later, he was back in the wrecked room. He set his own child—the changeling—in place of the dead infant, laying her tenderly on the chair. But not before he had implanted as many of his own memories as he could into his daughter's brain—a matter of moments.

He tried to halt the process before reaching the most recent memories, of horror and destruction and hatred. But he was weak, and unable to stop.

Too late.

He wept.

The memories of this hell of human barbarism might well cripple her mind forever.

There was no way of erasing those memories again, but....

Desperately, he tried to set up a mental block, so that her mind could remain whole.

He did his best. He thought he had succeeded, but couldn't be sure. No time to check....

He stood for a moment, looking down at his newly awakened daughter, and bade her goodbye with a blessing. It was all he could do for her now.

Footsteps were approaching.

He left, silently.

* * * *

Themor looked down on the shattered remnants of what had once been a great city, and felt a great sadness. There was a sense of lost opportunities as he took his last view of the city—a shimmering red glow, seen through shifting clouds of smoke.

Then he activated the self-destruct button which would vaporize his ship; warning the species was one thing, but it would be an unforgivable crime to allow the people of this era to lay their hands on such futuristic technology—especially since, on the current evidence, it seemed they would incapable of turning it to anything but warlike ends.

With a soundless blue flash, the man from the future and his ship vanished.

Below, in a ruined house, a hungry baby cried.

EPILOGUE

Aurora and Bryan Beaumont stood on a hill overlooking the Space Center. The evening sky was a luminous turquoise, brightening to lemon at the horizon. A pale crescent Moon followed the Sun to rest. High above it a ruddy star glowed steadily.

Mars.

Had they really been there?

Aurora proudly held their child—a healthy, robust boy with red hair and pale violet eyes.

Three kilometers away, across the sand, a battery of floodlights suddenly burst into life, starkly exposing the winged shape of the vehicle being readied for launch. It carried the crew of the third Mars mission.

“The technology learned from the crashed timeship we found is already proving invaluable,” said Beaumont. “And perhaps—just perhaps—humankind's now ready to use it in a way of which its makers might have approved. What do you think, darling?”

“Only time will tell,” said Aurora, then neatly evaded a nudge in the ribs from her husband. It was impossible to make a remark like that now without it seeming a pun. “At least it seems there will definitely be a Mars colony very soon. And there's talk of starting to terraform the planet in a few years' time. So the future—or is it the past?—has been changed already, it seems.”

“And they're talking about using a version of that ion-drive to go out to Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Europa—maybe even Titan,” mused Beaumont. “I doubt they'll ever figure out the time-travel aspect though—or the antigravity. It's like giving Galileo a TV set and expecting him to build one.”

“I'm not sure I'd want them to make a time machine, ever,” said Aurora. She suppressed a shudder.

Little Themor, too, shivered, but in his case it was because a cool breeze had riffled his fine, curly hair.

“Yes, it's getting late,” said Aurora, wrapping him tighter. “Nearly your bedtime.”

Beaumont frowned in concentration. “You know, I can't get my head around this time business,” he remarked. “You said just now that it looks as if the past of your people has been changed. If so, they don't know it, because you're still here. You didn't suddenly vanish when your mission was accomplished. Thank God!” He squeezed her waist, now slim again.

Aurora looked sad for a moment. “I know. I wish there was some way of telling if I've really accomplished anything. I must have, mustn't I? The rulers in the Middle East now know that their cities will be destroyed in 2069, and that it will be a natural disaster, not an act of war. In fact, I hear they are already starting to evacuate them, and build new cities in safe locations.”

“And we're looking at the possibility of detecting that comet nucleus while it's still millions of kilometers away and deflecting it—maybe even destroying it—using some of those missiles and warheads that governments around the world weren't supposed to have.”

“Well, just as long as that's
all
they use them for....”

“So we can only hope that the other time theory is right. That the timestream
we
are in will continue, and that those unwanted visitors from space won't have the terrible effects that your memories say they did. I wouldn't put it past the technology of a few thousands of years hence to be able to destroy that white dwarf.”

Arm in arm, they started to walk slowly back down to their apartment. Aurora was still having to act as a guinea pig, for the scientists wanted to know as much as they could about her longevity and her regenerative capability—not to mention her psi abilities. She sighed. It would be a long time before they were allowed to live as a normal family. It was a penalty she was glad to pay. And yet, sometimes....

Her husband was talking, and she brought back her concentration.

“There's something I've been wanting to ask you. When you were telling us—and the whole world—about the memories that had returned, you seemed about to...well, you said something about sensing a paradox,” he said. “I've thought about that a lot since, and I think I know what you were going to say.”

“Oh, Bryan, your poor head!” She smiled, and then her face grew serious again. “Go on.”

“You said that the first conclusive signs of psi powers appeared just about now—as far as you could tell. Now, you were out in that radiation storm on Mars, and Robert said it was almost bound to have affected the genes of our child. He's healthy, thank Heaven—all the tests show that. But, even if the child of a woman from the future and a man from today wouldn't necessarily have, well, ‘unusual' powers, it must be possible that the flare caused some sort of mutation. Mustn't it? And it's not just you: you said yourself that I have some sort of psi ability; well, I've proved it, haven't I?

“A lot of people seem to think that ‘mutant' means some kind of monster.
You're
not a little monster, are you? Well, only sometimes.” He tickled Themor under the chin. The baby chuckled indulgently, then went back to watching a model aircraft that was buzzing high overhead. “They've just seen too many bad movies, I guess. Mutations can often be beneficial—or at the very least...different. And there are more and more men and women going out into space. It's inevitable that they'll receive doses of radiation above the norm. For that matter, the people living in space stations have already been affected to some extent. You see what I'm getting at?”

“I saw it the moment you opened your mouth,” said Aurora. She was not yet sure exactly what active psi talents she possessed herself, other than healing and—well, she was still awaiting an opportunity to tell him how, since soon after her memories had returned, she had often been able to “read” his thoughts. She regretted her lack of training and guidance.

She continued, “At first you thought that
we
would start—had started—this whole psi ball rolling, by getting together. That if I hadn't come back in time, psi would still be a random and unpredictable power.... OK, I admit it: yes, that was going through my mind, too, back on Mars when I made that broadcast.

“But then you just defeated your own argument by suggesting that it's the radiation from solar flares and living in space that have caused psi powers to appear.

“I shouldn't worry about it if I were you. You'll hurt your brain!”

Little Themor certainly wasn't worrying about it. He was too busy making the little airplane loop the loop.