The Lord of the Sands of Time (14 page)

O
ULU A.D.
1943

For their third encounter with the enemy, the Messengers had chosen the height of the twentieth century’s largest and most sprawling armed conflict. The goal was not simply to change the course of history by taking advantage of a vast military buildup that otherwise would have been wasted in intraspecies warfare, but to intervene at a point when humanity’s readiness for armed conflict was at its zenith. Arriving on Earth four decades into the twentieth century, the Messengers succeeded in convincing the world’s nations to set aside their conflicts and prepare to fight the ET. They used everything from pressure tactics to discrete manipulation of public opinion. When the fighting got under way, humanity proved it could defend itself. It seemed certain that total victory would be theirs within a year.

And yet, Orville was not happy. A fellow Messenger, one named Quench stationed in Washington, told him:

“Listen, Orville. I have some bad news. The Americans can only spare four carriers for the recovery operation.”

“They promised six.”

“Right,” said Quench. “And now they’re diverting two of them to South Africa. You’ll have to make do with four.”

Orville felt the frustration rising again. Most of the planes dispatched from Oulu to Kiruna could not carry enough fuel to return. The plan was to have them land on U.S. carriers off the coast of Norway. Six carriers would barely be enough to recover all the planes. With only four, the planes would have to refuel and take off again immediately. Orville doubted that the German and Soviet pilots could manage it. They had neither the aircraft nor the training for carrier operations.

“Why are they doing this to us? Their own fighters are participating in the mission,” said Orville.

“Yes, but the Mustangs have a range advantage. They can make it back on their own. What I’d like to know is, what’s the White House up to? It sounds like they’re planning to grab some of the credit for the British victory.”

“What’s the point of antagonizing Churchill?”

“Our agents in Berlin report that Roosevelt and Hitler have a secret agreement. They’re already looking beyond the end of the war. Our closing of Auschwitz seems to have had some unintended consequences,” said Quench.

Orville sighed. This was becoming a pattern. Behind the façade of global cooperation, multiple conflicts were poised to boil over, conflicts even deeper than those from the original timestream. The Second World War was inevitable given the conditions that preceded it. Now Earth had united against the ET, but the old antagonisms continued to fester beneath the surface.

Cutty Sark had long been pushing for a complete takeover of Earth, but the Messengers no longer had the power to seize the planet. Less than five percent of the Upstreamer Forces that left the twenty-sixth century remained at their disposal.

Orville was deep in thought as he walked toward his quarters in the Allied Air Command Center. Since the arrival of the Upstreamer Forces, a succession of Messengers from alternate timestreams had begun arriving in this era. The Messenger Orville had just finished speaking with was sent by humans of the twenty-fourth century. But the Original Messengers had no record of them; these Descendant Messengers owed their existence to changes the Upstreamer Forces were making to history. With support from these new Messengers, now might be the time to take some bold action. He decided to contact Cutty.

“Can you talk?”

“What is it? I can’t spare much time.”

“Still got your hands full?” He waited.

“Things are very dicey right now, Orville. Can it keep?”

“Talk to you later, then,” he said. The slight delay in Cutty’s response was due to the distance between Earth and the Moon, where her ship was located. ET from the twenty-second century had also reached the Moon and were trying to establish a foothold. Orville terminated the comm. Cutty indeed had her hands full.

The North European Allied Air Command was composed of generals from the four powers, along with officers from countries providing logistical support. When Orville announced the shortage of carriers, the exchange of sour looks began immediately. It was grimly humorous to see the surprise of the American general, who had been kept in the dark by his superiors, but Orville was in no mood to enjoy it.

After a few moments of silence the usual furious arguing broke out. The Soviet and Italian generals criticized the Americans; the U.S. commander reminded them of America’s risky strategic bombing operations from the British Isles and insisted on equal sharing of the burdens of war. The German general pretended to be neutral while discreetly supporting America, as if his superiors had already notified him of the secret German-U.S. deal. The French and Spanish officers, officially just observers, began stoking the argument. Orville pounded the table.

“Wake up, people! We don’t have time for this idiotic squabbling!”

Everyone turned to stare at him, some with hostile expressions that seemed to ask a single question:
Who got us into this mess in the first place?
The American general went on the offensive.

“What about the Upstreamer Forces? You must have some strike capability, or am I wrong? What was all that talk about reinforcements arriving every day? Just propaganda?”

Orville was silent, and let the silence be his answer. In a moment he was forgotten and the generals had gone back to fighting amongst themselves. Earth knew all about the arrival of the Descendant Messengers. As Orville and the Original Messengers pushed the ET back in 1943, history itself changed, increment by increment. People survived who would have died; technology that would have appeared in later eras became possible now. This in turn accelerated the development of AIs. Then mankind looked to its past and upstreamed Messengers to critical eras to provide support.

Logic dictated that the number of Descendant Messengers should keep rising as enemy losses rose. The destruction of a single ET generated a new timestream. Humanity in this new daughter stream would be in a better position to develop AIs and send them into the past. With the enemy’s final defeat, all barriers to technological development would fall, and humanity would be able to create as many AIs as desired. They would seed the past and the future with multitudes of AIs, and their own timestream would be absolutely secure against further attack. This was the true significance of the arrival of the Descendant Messengers. It was also the Upstreamer Forces’ ultimate goal.

But things were not working out as planned. The new Messengers confirmed that humanity in their timestreams had advanced significantly. But for many reasons—social, economic, and political—these timestreams had not reached the point where they could assemble a significant temporal army. This pointed to one conclusion: entire temporal universes were on course to extinction.

But there was something else the Messengers were withholding from mankind.

Several months previously, the number of newly arriving Messengers had started dwindling. At the same time, they were arriving from farther and farther in the future. The most recent arrival came from the year 2680, even later than the Original Messengers. That meant that humanity’s capacity to create AIs was emerging later and later in history. Cutty’s conclusion was that the Upstreamer Forces’ interference in events was becoming counterproductive, actually slowing the progress of the species instead of accelerating it.

Orville had seen nothing wrong with actively changing history. What would be the point of minimizing interference if the result were the loss of humanity itself? He had no desire to create more tragedies like the one that befell Chan and his people. He no longer cared about nations or cultures. All he wanted was to help individuals survive. But painful as it might be, experiences like this demonstrated how wrong he was. Those looks of suspicion! As soon as the ET were mopped up, it was clear that these men would once again divide their world into enemy and friend, creating endless conflict.

Orville turned his back on the bickering officers and stepped outside the command center. He stared vacantly at the vast, snow-covered runway and muttered, “What do they expect us to do?”

“Hey, Orville, got a minute? I want to ask you something.” The cheerful voice on the comm link was Alexandr, his data tag marked Singapore. He was an advisor to the Japanese army at their frontline command center.

“I’m all out of resources, Alex. I shipped the Komet aircraft you requested. I don’t have ground forces to spare. The rest of the French army has to stay put in Algeria,” said Orville.

“No, it’s not that. My bear needs some lackeys to carry out his dirty work. Any ideas?”

“Your bear?” Orville sputtered in bafflement, his emotion translated and carried through the comm. “What’s that, a code name for the Russians?”

Alexandr chuckled. “Come on, don’t play games. You told me to put a bear in my story. You know, for the villain.”

“Yes, maybe I did, but…” Orville recalled that short conversation with Alexandr on the surface of the Moon. It had happened a few years ago in their frame of reference, but it was actually 180 years in the future. A human might have forgotten it, but short of major damage, Messengers retained every microsecond of their experiences.

“You actually decided to use a bear?”

“Of course. Bears are like guardian gods of the forest. So why does this one want to kill the tree? Come on, you gotta find out, right?” said Alexandr.

“Maybe he went crazy.”

“Oh, the motivation isn’t important. I just want to grab the reader’s attention. So how about those lackeys?”

“I don’t know. What about crabs?” It was a shot in the dark. Orville had crab each morning with his Finnish breakfast. Alexandr slapped his thigh.

“Of course, crabs! Crustaceans with bright red shells, crawling around deep in the forest. It’s got impact. Yeah, the bear tells them to crawl out on every branch and snip the leaves off, one by one. It sounds scary. No way can those little caterpillars fight off these crabs, even if they all join forces.”

Orville was silent. “So things are bad, eh?” said Alexandr.

“We’re at a very difficult juncture,” answered Orville.

“I have no idea how we’re going to defeat the ET.”

Orville suddenly felt a nasty foreboding. “Have they come up with something new?”

“This says it all,” said Alexandr. He transmitted an image to Orville’s visual system. It was a black-and-white photo with a superimposed grid, taken from the air. There was a barren plain scattered with boulders, and at the upper right, a tiny white dome resembling a parasite. Judging from the grid scale it might have been five meters across. “A Mitsubishi Ki-46 observation plane took this over Mount Bruce in western Australia.”

Was it an enemy structure? Orville had never seen anything like it. “It’s not a nest,” he said, half to himself. “No hatch, no generator. What is it?”

“I didn’t know either, so I sent Wasps to image it from different angles. Here’s what I got.” Alexandr sounded proud of himself. The next transmission was a false-color thermal image. Orville was stunned. The dome now sat at the center of a series of concentric circles up to a hundred times as large, seemingly floating in the air.

“Geothermal energy transmission. That dome has roots that go fifty klicks straight down, sucking up heat. It can generate four or five hundred times more energy than they need for replication. They could even upstream without relying on antiprotons.”

“Nuke it,” said Orville impatiently. “I’ll send you a warhead from Peenemunde right now. Singapore, right?”

“Now hold on,” said Alexandr. “This is where it gets really interesting. We found 139 of these silos. What you’re looking at is the last one we found. And except for this one, the rest were already empty.” Orville could feel his legs bucking. He leaned against the wall of the command center.

“That’s just in the Southern Hemisphere,” said Alexandr. “I think they’ve been spotted in your half of the globe, too. You could check it out, but it probably doesn’t matter.” He was laughing, a sarcastic, dismal laugh.

The Messengers had always assumed that the ET would rely on solar energy. Now the enemy was almost cleared out of near-Earth space. The rest were planetside, not an ideal place to be dependent on solar energy. The resource war, and thus the initiative, had seemed to favor the Messengers. But if the ET were using geothermal energy, the rules of the game had changed dramatically. The amount of power they could access at any time would be far larger. Aerial detection would be difficult. It was almost as if the ET had switched over to guerilla tactics. If they used the energy they harvested to keep upstreaming, all of mankind’s past would be in danger.

“Why are they doing this?” Orville wailed. After all, the enemy were only machines. Yet their sheer doggedness suggested that they were not just obeying some program. Who or what was behind them?