End of an Era (11 page)

"Ah," said the brachiator. "This we can do."

"Really?" Klicks was practically jumping up and down.

"Now hold on a minute," I said.

"Seize time? No link."

"Klicks, we can’t go up in that thing."

"Why the hell not?"

"Well, look at it. It’s alive, for God’s sake. We’d have to go inside it."

"Hey, man, if Jonah could hack it in the whale, I’m all set to try my luck in a breathing spaceship. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

I shook my head. "Have you ever noticed how many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities come at the end of a person’s life? Count me out."

Klicks shrugged. "Fine. But I’m going." He turned to the brachiator. "Can we do it now?"

"Our business here is concluded. Now is fine."

Klicks jogged alongside the brachiator, over to the gray tongue entrance-ramp. I cringed as he stepped on it, but, although it yielded slightly, he didn’t seem to stick to it as I was afraid he might. The ship continued to breathe, expanding and contracting slowly. Klicks made it to the top of the ramp before I shouted out, "I’m coming!
Wait up
!"

I ran up the tongue and into the mouth.

I came in the front door of our house, pulled off my Totes, and placed them on the Rubbermaid mat. When I was a child in the 1970s, February in Toronto had been a month full of snow. But recent Februarys had been quite mild, with the spring rains starting before Valentine’s Day. I hung my trench coat and umbrella in the closet and made my way through the front hall and up the five steps to the living room. Tess was sitting on the couch, reading a magazine on her datapad.

"Hi, honey." I sat down next to her, brushed aside her red hair, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Howdy, stranger." Her husky voice, so unlikely given her tiny frame, carried no hint of sarcasm, so I ignored the little dig about the long hours I’d been keeping.

"How was work?" I said.

"Okay." Tess was a pension and benefits counselor for Deloitte Touche. She made more money than I did. "I think we’re going to get that contract with the provincial government."

"Good," I said. "That’s good."

The left window on her datapad was showing an article about mergers amongst American advertising firms. The other window was filled with an ad from the Franklin Mint for a collectible chess set, with pieces shaped like classic sitcom stars from the twentieth century. I read the ad.

"Tess," I said at last, "I’m going out of town for a few days."

"Again?" She pouted slightly, her full lips curving downward, her green eyes studying the carpet. It was an expression I always loved. "I thought you were through traveling for a while, now that the Chinese thing is over." The Second Canada-China Dinosaur Project had taken me away from her — something neither of us enjoyed — for four months last year.

"I’m sorry, Lambchop. This is important."

Sarcasm did tinge the throaty tones this time. "It always is. Where are you going?"

"To Vancouver."

"What’s happening out there?"

"Nothing, really. I — I just have to do some research at one of the university libraries."

"Can’t they E-mail you what you need?" She indicated her datapad, the ubiquitous window on the world.

"Nobody seems to be able to find the information I want," I said. "I’m afraid I’m going to have to do some digging for it." I paused for a moment. "Say, do you want to come along?"

Tess laughed her throaty laugh. "Vancouver in February? No, thank you. I can get all the freezing rain I want right here." She touched the bookmark button on her datapad. Her freckled arm reached out to slip around my neck. "Can’t you do your research in Orlando? Or Freeport?" Her eyes danced, twin emerald flames. "It’s been years since we had a proper vacation."

"I wish I could."

She ran her fingers through what was left of my hair. "Maybe I shouldn’t let you go. There are a lot of lovely Japanese ladies out in British Columbia. I’ve seen the way you glue your eyes to
Canada a.m.
every morning. You’ve got the hots for Kelly Hamasaki."

Was it that obvious? Kelly, queen of the radiant smile, was the most gorgeous newscaster North American television had ever seen. "Very funny."

"Seriously," she said, with a tone that made clear that her intention was anything but, "how do I know I can trust you with all those west-coast beauties?"

I felt something snap deep in my chest. "Christ, Tess, I’m the one who’s leaving you here alone. How do
I
know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t jump in the sack with — with God knows who while I’m gone?"

She pulled away from me. "What’s gotten into you?"

"Nothing." I looked at her, her narrow face, the high cheekbones, the mane of orange hair. God, I didn’t want to lose her. She was my whole life. But if what the diary said was true, I was
nothing
to her. I knew I should apologize, recant before it was too late, before the words became part of the immutable past, the foundation for a wall between us, but I couldn’t bring myself to take them back. I was hurt by — by what? By what she might do? By what she might have done if things had been different? Finally I looked away from her astonished green eyes and got up from the couch. "I’m going upstairs to pack for my trip," I said.

I arrived in Vancouver on a Tuesday. Dr. Huang ignored my calls until late Wednesday afternoon, when I managed to get her to answer at her office. She was all set to hang up on me again, when I broke into Chinese. That shocked the hell out of her, but I’d learned more than enough to get by while participating in the Canada-China Dinosaur Project. She finally agreed to see me but insisted it be during the day, not the evening, and at her office, not her home. That meant running up an extra night’s stay at the Holiday Inn, but given that I didn’t have much of a bargaining position, I agreed.

Driving up to TRIUMF, at the edge of a beautiful pine forest on the outskirts of the University of British Columbia campus, I was greeted by two signs. The one on the right, made of seven three-meter-long boards of prime B.C. lumber, told me in both English and French that I’d arrived at Canada’s national meson center, operated by four universities under a contribution from the National Research Council. The one on the left, in government-issue red and white, reminded me that my tax dollars were hard at work here.

There were dozens of buildings spread around the grounds, including a bunch of temporary structures, and it took me a while to find the main entrance. None of the brochures I picked up at the desk wanted to tell me what TRIUMF stood for, but I had a vague memory from a trivia game I’d played once that it was "Tri-University Meson Facility." That meant, I guessed, that one of the four institutions sponsoring it had been a Johnny-come-lately, and the acronym had been deemed too clever to change. I knew next to nothing about physics, but apparently this place boasted the world’s largest cyclotron. Although I wasn’t exactly sure what a cyclotron did, it certainly sounded like the kind of thing one might find quite handy while trying to invent a time machine.

Besides the brochures, the ancient man at the desk also gave me a clip-on dosimeter which looked like an old-fashioned car fuse. I told him I was there to see Dr. Huang but before he got around to phoning to ask her to come and get me, a nerdy-looking fellow in a navy-blue lab coat said, "I’ll take him back, Sam." He led me through a warren of corridors to an unmarked door. I took a moment to gather my thoughts, then knocked.

I was glad to see that physicists enjoyed no more glamour than did paleontologists. Ching-Mei Huang’s office wasn’t much more than an oversized closet. Still, it provided plenty of room for its diminutive occupant. Huang looked to be about sixty, with a small amount of gray streaking her close-cropped black hair. Her clothes were plain, almost frumpy. She wore no makeup or jewelry. Her eyes were darting, haunted; her movements quick and nervous.

"Dr. Huang, I presume."

"Mr. Thackeray."

"It’s ‘Doctor,’ Doctor, but please call me Brandy."

She made no move to invite me into her office. Indeed, she seemed to be blocking the doorway as best she could with her small body. "We can’t talk in here," she said. "Come with me to the cafeteria."

"What I have to say is private, Dr. Huang. Can’t we use your office?"

"No." She looked up at me and, for a brief moment, her eyes stopped darting long enough to hold mine. "Please."

I shrugged. Hell, I’m never going to see any of the potential eavesdroppers again. So what if they think I’m a loon?

It was early enough in the morning that the cafeteria was mostly empty. I caught snatches of conversation as we moved to a table at the far end of the room: a knot of people discussing something to do with Higgs bosons, whatever they were; two guys arguing about the Thunderbirds, which I gathered were the campus football team; and three women discussing in locker-room detail the physique of a new male coworker.

We found a table and sat down. I looked at the person seated opposite me, nervous and small. "Did you ever teach at Dalhousie?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, looking surprised at the question, "but I lost my job there — what? — sixteen years ago." She smiled for the first time, one academic to another sharing the universal lament. "Budget cuts."

She’d broken a police officer’s shin there, the Canadian Press story had said. She looked too timid to do anything like that now. I wondered what had happened in the interim to take the fight out of her. "I’m sorry," I said.

Her voice was wistful. "So was I, Dr. Thackeray. Now, whal can I do for you?"

Well, if she was uncomfortable with the intimacy of first names, I wasn’t going to push it. "I’ve got a manuscript I’d like you to read. It’s — it’s my diary. Except I didn’t write it. I — I don’t know where it came from. I found it in my computer." I swallowed hard, then said it all in one breath. "It describes a journey back to the end of the Mesozoic Era, made possible by a device called a Huang temporal phase-shift habitat module." I saw her eyes widen, just for an instant. "The creator of that device is specifically referred to as Ching-Mei Huang." I pulled a sheaf of papers out of my briefcase. For a moment, I hesitated about handing the printout to her. There was so much in there that was personal to me — things about Tess, about Klicks, about myself. It was my diary, for Christ’s sake! This was the first time I’d ever made a printout of anything from that memory wafer. I placed the papers on the tablecloth, laser-printed sheets in eleven-point Optima, the Royal Ontario Museum’s official correspondence font. "Please keep this confidential."

She began reading.
"Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby—"

"Not out loud, please."

"Sorry." She read in silence for a few minutes, then looked up, her face puzzled. "How did you know I’m an atheist?"

I thought back to what the diary said.
I was sure that little reference to God was for the sake of the network cameras. Ching-Mei was an atheist. She only had faith in empirical data, in experimental results.

"I didn’t know it, until I read it there."

She went back to reading, her brow furrowed. I occasionally looked over, reading upside down to see what part she was at. How I wished I had a technical document from — from whatever place this came from — instead of something that, almost incidentally, laid my soul bare.

I got up, crossed the room, and fed a five-dollar coin into a vending machine, which in return dispensed a couple of prepackaged donuts. When I returned, Ching-Mei was still reading, engrossed. At last, when she got to the end of the part about the twilight visit by the goose-stepping tyrannosaurs, she looked up, scanned the cafeteria, and saw that we were now alone in it, all the others having trickled out while she was reading. "I can’t stay here any longer," she said, her voice nervous again.

"What about the diary?"

"I’ll finish reading it tonight."

"Can I come by your house, then?"

"No. Meet me here tomorrow." And, before I knew what was happening, she had scurried out of the cafeteria like a frightened animal.

The interior of the spherical Het spaceship was dimly lit by what appeared to be strips of bioluminescent dots along the walls. Once Klicks and I were inside the thing, it seemed less like a lifeform. However, it didn’t seem like a spaceship, either. There were no right angles anywhere. Instead, floors gently curved into walls, which in turn melded smoothly into ceilings. Nor were there any corridors. Rather, rooms were honeycombed together, each with passageways to the adjacent ones not just on the same level but also above and below.

Most of the passages were permanently open — I supposed that beings without individuality had no need for privacy. A few chambers did have valve-like coverings; apparently those rooms were used for storage.

We saw dozens of brachiators, some walking, others swinging from stiff hoops that seemed to grow out of the roofs. There were also a couple of troodons on board, and countless Het jelly mounds pulsing about freely. The ship was cooler than anywhere we’d been since we’d arrived in the Mesozoic, and it was filled with a faint odor like wet newsprint.

"It’s tremendous," Klicks said, gesturing about him. "When do we take off?"

The brachiator, its coppery coils of fur looking almost black in the faint light, made a facial gesture. "We did take off a short time ago," it said in its thin voice.

"Incredible," said Klicks. "I didn’t feel a thing."

"Why would you want to feel anything during flight?"

Klicks looked at the creature’s sausage-shaped eyes with their disquieting double pupils. "That’s a very good question," he said with a grin. "Where are the windows?"

"Windows?"

"Portholes. Glassed-in areas. Places where you can see outside."

"We have nothing like that."

"You mean we don’t get to feel anything and we don’t get to see anything?" Klicks sounded sad. "And I thought Virtual Reality World was a rip-off…"

"We can let you look out if you desire so," said the brachiator.

"How?"

"There are eyes on the surface of the sphere. You merely have to meld with one."

"Meld?"

"Join minds with the ship. Share what it sees."

"Hold on," I said. "Does that mean more jelly in the head?"

"Yes," said the brachiator, "but not much."

I shuddered.

"We can enter you much less uncomfortably now," continued the Het. "We have a rough map of how your brains work. The area for processing visual information is located here." The brachiator arched its back so that one of its manipulatory appendages could reach me. A pink tentacle tapped the rear of my head near the base of my skull. I jumped at the touch.

"Uh, no thanks," I said.

"Oh, come on, Brandy," said Klicks. "It’s not going to kill you." He turned to the brachiator. "What do I do?"

"Just sit down here. Put your back to the wall. Yes, like that." Behind Klicks’s head, I saw some blue jelly seeping out of the wall. There must have been Hets throbbing their way throughout the structure of the ship. The jelly touched his nape just below the hairline. That was lower down than the visual cortex — oh, I see. It was going to enter the braincase through the foramen magnum. Clever.

"Are you okay?" I said to Klicks.

"Fine. It feels weird, but it’s not painful. It’s like — my God! That’s beautiful! Brandy, you
have
to see this!"

"What?"

"We’re kilometers high! It’s breathtaking."

Against my better judgment, I sat down next to him, my back against the wall. I felt something warm and wet on my neck, but Klicks was right. It wasn’t painful. Then I experienced a strange pressure along my cervical vertebrae. The brain itself has no internal sensors, and I could feel nothing as the tendril passed into it. Everything went black and for a panicky moment I thought that the Het had accidentally wrecked my visual cortex, rendering me blind. But before my panic grew too severe, something else was in my brain, another’s thoughts, feelings, aspirations. They were dim shapes at first, shadowy forms, ghosts from somebody else’s past. Slowly they took on substance. A black man, his face, although contorted by rage, strangely familiar. It was like Klicks’s face, only different. Narrower, the eyes closer together, a scar on the forehead, a sparse beard. It hit me then: George Jordan, Klicks’s father, looking thirty years younger than I’d ever seen him. He had liquor on his breath and he was towering over me, a leather belt in his hand. Oh, God, no!
Stop it! Stop it! Please, Daddy…

Blackness again, the connection broken, the Het linking us perhaps realizing that it had made an error. Had Klicks seen into my mind as deeply as I had seen into his? What did he now know about me?

Suddenly I was falling through space, ground over my head, my body plummeting toward the stars. Faster and faster, falling, falling, falling…

The image flipped, the Het, I guess, realizing that the human mind normally inverts what it sees, since images focus upside down in our eyes. I was rising now, the ground receding beneath me, thin clouds rushing by, the sky growing nearer, blacker, clearer, colder.

Space. Christ, the things were taking us right up into orbit. Stars wheeled overhead, the Milky Way a thick band spinning like a bejeweled windmill’s blade across my field of vision. It was magnificent: uncountable points of brightness piercing the dark, red and yellow and white and blue, strings of Christmas-tree lights across the firmament.

Rising over the limb of the Earth was the moon, gloriously gibbous, almost too bright to look at. It was still showing us a large part of what would someday be its backside. As we raced ahead, tiny Trick swept into view, too, here, above the atmosphere, cratering clearly visible on its face.

Soon the panorama was cut off from left to right, unbroken blackness swallowing the stars. We were swinging around to look down on Earth’s nightside. But it wasn’t completely dark — flickering lights were visible here and there. Forest fires, probably sparked by lightning storms.

We rushed toward the dawn, a glow clearly defining the sharp curve of the Earth’s surface. Within minutes the sun was up again, a hot fire illuminating the globe.

Broadly speaking, Earth looked much as it did from modern space photos: a blue ball covered with twists of cottony whiteness. My eyes finally got used to the scale of the planet and began to make sense of the partially obscured continents. Their shapes had changed over the millennia, but I knew enough about tectonic drift to easily figure out which was which. There was Antarctica, a tiny white splotch much smaller than it is in the twenty-first century. Just splitting from it was Australia, turned at an odd angle. India was moving freely across the Tethys Ocean on its way toward its inevitable impact with Asia, the event that would push up the Himalayas. South America had only just begun to pull away from Africa, the perfect jigsaw-puzzle fit of their coastlines obscured slightly by a seaway that ran from where the Sahara Desert would one day be to the Gulf of Guinea. Another giant seaway, broken only by a long north-south archipelago, separated Europe from Asia. Between South America and North America was open ocean, thousands of times wider than the Panama Canal would one day be. Still, the Gulf of Mexico was clearly visible, and -

Christ.

Jesus Christ.

"Klicks!" I shouted.

"What?" said his voice.

"Look at the Gulf of Mexico!"

"Yeah?"

"Look at it!"

"I don’t—"

"It’s all on dry land," I said, "not half-submerged as it will be in our time, but, look —
it’s already there
."

"What are you ta — oh. Oh, my God…" Klicks’s voice was full of astonishment.

"Het!" I called out, wishing I had a name to use. "Het! Any Het!"

"Yes?" came the emaciated voice of a brachiator.

"How long has that crater been there?"

"Which crater?"

"The one on the rim of that large gulf at the southern end of the landmass we took off from. See it? It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter…" I wasn’t that good at estimating distances from this high up, but I knew how big it had to be.

"Oh, that crater," said the voice, each word a distinct, separate sound. "It formed about ninety of our years ago — two hundred or so of yours."

"You’re sure?" asked Klicks’s voice.

"We had tracked the asteroid that made that crater. For a brief time we thought it might pass near Mars; as you may know, our two moons were once asteroids, captured by our gravity. But it did not come particularly close to us; instead, it struck your planet. The explosion was visually spectacular."

"But … but…" Klicks was trying to make sense of it. "But the impact that made that crater is what we’d thought had killed off the dinosaurs."

"An incorrect assumption," said the Martian, simply. "After all, the dinosaurs live on."

The best resolution in the geologic record this far back was maybe ten thousand years, and that only under extraordinary circumstances; a hundred thousand was much more common. Events that had occurred centuries or even millennia apart could easily seem simultaneous.

"The impact must have had a big effect on the biosphere, though," said Klicks, a note of desperation in his voice. I felt myself grinning from ear to ear.

"Not really," said the Het. "Those plants and animals at the crater site were destroyed, of course, but the worldwide effect was negligible." It paused. "Your people and mine inhabit the same messy solar system. Impacts happen — surely you know that. But life goes on."

I wished I could see the look on Klicks’s face — but all I could see was the glorious planet below. We were whisking back toward the night, the terminator hurrying toward us. Our view swung back up to look at the stars. There were so many that discerning any pattern, anything that one might call a constellation, seemed impossible. I enjoyed the spectacle; Klicks had been in line to possibly go to Mars, but I’d never dreamed that I would see the stars from space. The sight was magnificent, breathtaking, truly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and -

"What’s that?" Klicks’s voice intruded again from the outside world.

I scanned the heavens, trying to find whatever had caught his eye. There, far down in the southern sky: a tight rosette of brilliant blue points. I watched it as we swung around. The points didn’t shift at all in relation to the background stars as we continued in our orbit, meaning they weren’t nearby.

"What is that?" Klicks said again.

"What" "is" "what?" The reedy voice of the brachiator.

"That cluster of lights," said Klicks. "What is it?"

"We do not speak of it."

"You must know what it is."

"We do not."

"Is it in this solar system?"

"No. It is some three-to-the-fifth light-years away. Clarification: Martian light-years, and two hundred forty-three of them in your counting. About double that in Earth light-years."

"Then what is it?"

"It’s a beacon, isn’t it?" I said, surprising myself. "A visual signal to the rest of the galaxy that there’s intelligent life there." The rosette was beautiful, with mathematically precise construction. "Look at it: the points are arranged in a geodesic. It’d look like a sphere from any angle. It has to be artificial."

I’d read about a similar idea years before, but on a much smaller scale. Some astronomer had suggested planting crops in giant geometric patterns across the face of Africa in hopes of signaling the presence of intelligence to anyone looking at Earth through a telescope. But this was so much more! A civilization that could arrange suns into patterns — it was mind-boggling. The rosette of lights would have been clearly visible from anywhere in Earth’s southern hemisphere, or Mars’s for that matter.

"It must have been wonderful having your society grow up with that in the sky," I said to the brachiator. "Incontrovertible proof that you weren’t alone, that there are other, more advanced civilizations out there." I shook my head, the jelly connection with the wall making a squishy sound as I did so. "God, when I think of all the soul-searching that humans go through wondering if we’re alone in the universe, if there’s anyone else out there, if it’s possible to survive technological adolescence. It must give you great comfort."

"It galls us."

"But—"

Everything went black again. The Het oozed out of my neck. We returned to the ground in silence. I thought about the rosette of lights; about the Hets; about troodons, dinosaurs that might be on the way to developing intelligence of their own. It seemed that humanity had missed the heyday of sapient life in the galaxy by 60 or so million years. It was only because the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions wiped out the great reptiles that the second-string team, the mammals, had an opportunity to rise to the level of conscious thought, but by the time we did, the Milky Way was a much less crowded place. How could the Hets not be thrilled by the mere knowledge of the rosette-makers being out there somewhere?

I guess I’d offended them. Without a further word, they dumped us back at our campsite, now almost completely dark, our campfire having decayed to a few glowing coals. We watched from the ground as their pulsing sphere silently made its way off to the west, then we clambered in the darkness up the crater wall and went back into the
Sternberger
.

The sky was completely covered with clouds. Probably just as well. Now that we’d seen the heavens from above the obscuring cloak of Earth’s atmosphere, the view from the ground — breathtaking though it had seemed last night — would pale in comparison. My only regret, though, was that the rosette would never be visible in this hemisphere. I’d love to have gotten a picture of it.

"Brandy," said Klicks, unbuttoning his shirt, "what do you know about how the Huang Effect works?"

I was gathering up my pajamas; I’d wanted to gloat a bit about the discovery that the Chicxulub crater predated the end of the dinosaurs, and wasn’t surprised that Klicks was avoiding the topic, but, now that he mentioned it…