Alien Abduction, page 33
“Where are we going?” I asked him, when the vessel set off. It had no portholes, and I didn’t feel any sensation of acceleration, as I would have if it had been heading out of the Earth’s gravity-well, but I knew we were moving without quite knowing how I knew. It was as if some sixth sense, which I’d never had occasion to use before, had suddenly come into play—and as if my brain, even though it had no previous experience of the exercise of that sense, was pre-adapted by evolution to recognize its input.
“Three and a half billion years downstream,” Poe told me. “Where no time-traveler from our era has been before—not, at least, any who returned to tell the tale. So far as I know, no ordinary tourist or business-traveler from any other era known to us has ever been that far downstream, until now.”
“How come it’s possible to go now, if it’s never been possible before?” I asked.”
“The darktimers only had to open the way, apparently. We didn’t know that, although we always suspected. We could never tell whether the asymmetry in the boomerang effect was an aspect of the laws of physics or an aspect of the darktimers’ interference—assuming there’s any meaningful difference between the two. I’m afraid your language and your understanding have built-in limitations that are making this attempted explanation very confusing. Darktimers isn’t actually a helpful term—but then, even before and now, not to mention then and but, have their inconveniences in this particular context.”
“I can see how the reality of time travel would throw terms like now, then and before into a certain confusion,” I admitted. “Once the future has to be redefined as downstream, the implication inevitably arises that the whole river has its own simultaneous pseudopresence, while time-ships move back and forth along it through the infinite sequence of individual moments.”
“Spoken like a practiced schoolteacher,” Poe said, not meaning it entirely as a insult. “If you’re lucky, that talent for jargon-mongering might stand you in good stead wherever—or whenever—we’re going.”
“But the fact that the time-ships can move back and forth, even within whatever limits you’re trying to imply by speaking of a boomerang effect, carries all sorts of further implications,” I said. “Popular physics in the twenty-first century had begun to think of time travel in a slightly different way, with every jump instituting a new history, contained in its own alternative universe, avoiding paradoxes by reckless multiplication of new realities. The idea that time-travelers can move back and forth within a single time-stream suggests that the stream must be protected in some way against history-changing actions—-that there must be some kind of mechanism for maintaining the integrity of the temporal fabric, whether one envisages it as a natural healing process or as a corps of policemen. Is that what you mean by darktimers?”
“Not exactly—it’s a good deal more complicated than that. Yes, the stream is self-healing, to a degree. Yes, there are time police—so many agencies, in fact, that liaison between them is a bureaucratic nightmare—but the darktimers are an order of magnitude further back in the chain of ultimate causality…or ultimate connectivity, if cause is too loaded a term.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is. The problem is that connectivity’s not much better. Don’t punish yourself too much for being simple-minded—you can’t help it. Humankind was the first in the known sequence, after all: the alpha of self-conscious intelligence. In a sense, of course, the whole pattern must have been innate in the Vendian worms, or the archetypal cyanobacteria, or the geometry of DNA—but in another, you humans were just like those predecessors: alphabet soup, waiting for some higher intelligence to come along and consider you as an anagram.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” I pointed out.
“I know. There’s no other way. I can’t even promise you that what you’ll get to witness is any kind of solution rather than one more layer of complication in the riddle, but it will probably be spectacular, and that’s not to be underestimated. You’ll repress all this at first, of course—that’s the way your defensive mental reflexes are programmed—but you’ll probably recover the memory soon enough. Now that our original plan’s been superseded, I suspect that the experience you’re about to have won’t be the kind that can rest content in Lethean darkness.”
“Will my phobias be cured when it all bubbles up again?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’d hang on to the phobias, if I were you. Flying’s dangerous, and so are sheer drops. Only an idiot crosses bridges every time he comes to one; you should always think twice about that sort of thing. Do you really want to waste time talking about your phobias? When we get to where we’re going I’ll be fearfully busy. Any questions you want answered, you’d better ask now—I probably won’t be able to put the answers into terms you can understand, but if we try hard, we might make a little progress.”
“This ship isn’t really a ship, is it?” I said. “I don’t believe that time travel is a matter of shifting material objects at all. I suspect that the only things you can transmit into the past are hallucinatory experiences—but you are transmitting aspects of those experiences, aren’t you? They’re not entirely spontaneous.”
“If you only want to ask rhetorical questions,” Poe said, “I might as well leave now. Matter is another of those treacherous terms. If matter is the possibility of sensation, this ship is certainly material, and so am I. Give me a lever long enough…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You can’t know much about the kind of relativity theory that accommodates matter as well as space and time, but you know about dark matter. You know that baryonic matter only accounts for a tenth of the mass of the universe, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So you can get some sort of grasp on the analogy of dark time—the notion that the way we baryonic entities perceive time and its transactions is similarly fragmentary. It’s not something your maths can cope with, but that’s a limitation in your maths, not in the fabric of reality. You can attribute some sort of meaning, however shadowy, to the notion of dark time?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good—and you’re familiar with the cosmological anthropic principle?”
“Yes. If any of the fundamental constants—the empirical content of the laws of physics—were slightly different, then the universe of baryonic matter wouldn’t be able to give rise to life. Some people interpret that to mean that the universe of baryonic matter must have been designed to accommodate life. Others think it’s a trivial observation, because if the universe weren’t able to contain life, there’d be no one around to make the observation. You’re making a point about the darktimers, aren’t you? Some of you think that there are intelligent entities in the dark matter sector of the universe, who designed the universe of baryonic matter actively and purposively, and some of you don’t—and dark time just adds a further dimension to the problem.”
“There’s the schoolteacher again. Do you have any questions that aren’t rhetorical, or have you made up your mind about everything?”
“Is the human race really going to become extinct by the end of the twenty-first century?”
“No. A few scattered groups will hang on until the twenty-second, along with the rats and mice. But yes, you’re doomed. So are the hundreds of other intelligent species that future adaptive radiations will produce, though, including all the ones that acquire the ability to travel in time, all the ones that develop technologies of emortality and all the ecosystems that contrive to cultivate holistic intelligence. We’re all in the same boat, existentially speaking—but we don’t die alone. Even the species that don’t develop time-travel are contactees. We’re all in the same boat, dreaming the same fundamental dream of the eternal Phoenix. We’re all connected. We all contribute.”
“What about the species that develop space travel?” I asked. “They don’t need to die. They can go on forever, at least in theory.”
“Space travel is impractical,” he told me. “Not impossible, just impractical. It’s really a plant-intelligence thing rather than an animal one, although it requires collaboration—we have the hands, but they have the patience. While the stream runs in its present course, communication across interstellar distances is problematic. Yes, in a manner of speaking, starfaring species don’t have to die out—but they do have to change, and profoundly. Maybe the dream we’re all dreaming extends much further than anyone can tell, but while we can’t tell, how meaningful can the extension be? If space travel’s a matter of particular interest to you, watch out for the big guns—but you’ll have to watch, now, and make up your own mind. I’ve got a strong suspicion as to what it is you’ll see, but I don’t know anything for sure, and I don’t know how long it will take. At any rate, I have to go. We all have to answer to the call, except for accidental passengers like you. I can’t honestly say that you’ve used your conversational opportunities as wisely as you might have, but you know your own interests best, and you are only human. Good luck.”
He vanished then, without bothering to use a door—but he opened a window before he left, so that I could witness the task that all the time-machines ever manufactured, in three and a half billion years of my future history, had been summoned to that juncture in the time-stream to accomplish.
It goes without saying, I suppose, that when Edgar Allan Poe opened the window, I froze with absolute terror. “Panic attack” doesn’t even begin to describe it. If he hadn’t switched off the simulated gravity as he left, I’d have collapsed on the floor, but I wasn’t able to do that: I had no alternative but to float, motionless, unable even to turn away.
I was looking down at the Earth’s surface through hundreds of miles of empty space, from orbit; I could see an entire hemisphere, three-quarters sunlit, albeit dimly.
The terror never went away, although it ebbed slightly as I grew more accustomed to the perspective. Everything I saw was filtered through that emotional veil, saturated with panic. And yet, there was nothing actually terrifying in what I saw; that dreadful vertigo was in me, a product of my viewpoint, and there was no real reason for it at all. Cosmonauts looking down from Mir don’t feel it. They find the view exhilarating and inspiring. I ought to have been able to do the same, but in order to describe it to you now I have to make an effort not to remember, to concentrate on the words and not the memory itself. That’s where being a schoolteacher comes in handy.
I wouldn’t have recognized the Earth if I hadn’t known that’s what it was. There was no blue ocean, no white clouds. The surface seemed entirely solid, mottled in various dark hues, unblurred by any intervening atmosphere. It looked lifeless, although I know now that it wasn’t. I know now that millions of laborers recruited from various past eras had been pressed into service to transplant the greater part of its surviving ecosphere into artificially-lit subterranean caverns.
At first, I thought that there was some kind of vaporous shell surrounding the planet, blocking out some of the sunlight. While I watched, it grew thicker, darkening the plant’ surface even further. I realized gradually that the specks making up the shell weren’t as tiny as I’d first thought. They were spaceships—or, to be strictly accurate, time-ships. There were billions of them, and more were arriving with every second that passed. The shell never became solid, because the ships never came close enough together to form an uninterrupted mass, but the far side of it seemed quite opaque from where I was floating.
I couldn’t see the tractor beams come into play; they were invisible. I was conscious of their engagement, though, thanks to that sixth sense which registers travel through time. Tractor beams aren’t just invisible ropes, you see; they don’t only operate in space. They’re temporal technology themselves; they move things by exploiting the relativity of matter and time, which Poe hadn’t even tried to explain to me. They weren’t actually pulling the Earth out of its orbit in any simple sense; they were using the combined force of the engines that gave them ability to travel through time to modify Earth’s mass in such a way that it began to draw away of its own accord, and to accelerate as it did so.
I couldn’t judge the trajectory or the velocity of the Earth’s movement very well, but I knew that it was moving away from the sun, and that it was moving through time as well as space in hurrying to its new location. It was hurrying, because time was very much of the essence. There were good reasons why time-traffic into that era had been so severely restricted, and why it still was. The time-ships had only gathered momentarily, and were only able to use their innate technology briefly.
For a moment or two, I wondered whether the time-ships might be converting the Earth into a huge starship, and whether the shell might reformulate itself as some kind of big gun—you’ll remember that Poe had mentioned big guns—to fire the planet out of the system towards a new and younger sun. That wouldn’t have been impossible, but it was impractical, even given the combined power of every time-machine that had ever existed in the sporadic history of Earthly intelligence.
What the armada of timeships actually did, during the brief interval in which it functioned as a coordinated whole, was to maneuver the Earth into a new orbit, somewhere out beyond the present orbit of Saturn—an orbit that wasn’t empty even before they replaced the Earth within it, but became a good deal fuller thereafter.
In subjective and shipboard terms, the whole experience took no longer than a few minutes—maybe far less, allowing for the effects of terror on my subjective perception of duration—but the vessel was traveling through time as well as space, and my guess is that millions or tens of millions of years elapsed outside, while the solar system was reconfigured by the time armada.
They didn’t move much else from the inner reaches of the system—a few hundred asteroids, maybe, and half a dozen Jovian and Saturnian satellites. They left the gas-giants themselves, along with Mercury, Venus and Mars, to be swallowed and digested by the new unimproved sun. There was a lot of traffic in the other direction, though. They left Uranus and Neptune where they were, with all their satellites in tow, but they hastened back and forth between Earth’s new orbit and trans-Neptunian space like huge swarms of bees, transporting iceballs from the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, not just by the hundred but by the thousand, and placing them in the Earth’s new orbit like a vast string of pearls. It took hardly any time at all—as a matter of necessity.
In the early days of the solar system’s formation, before the sun had fully condensed and the planets coalesced, the temperature in its outer reaches had been moderately balmy. I don’t know whether that’s when life actually began, or whether the Arrhenius spores were already there, suspended in the mix of supernoval debris that constituted the heavier elements, but that was when our system’s life first awoke, long before taking up residence on Earth and giving birth to the Vendian worms.
There was a lot of life lying dormant in the iceballs of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, which had been waiting for a long time to have its day. It was nothing complicated—perhaps nothing more sophisticated than a primal bacterium—but it was life nevertheless, ready to be taken over by the Ultimate Worms. The Ultimate Worms were the worms who didn’t know the meaning of the word “can’t”, although they certainly had a keen sense of the practicality of things, and they were perfectly ready to allow that cometary life to begin its own multiple evolutions of self-conscious intelligence.
I saw the Pearly Ring take its place as the next venue in the story of solar evolution. I saw the Earth take pride of place within it, ready to be gifted with a new atmosphere and new oceans, in anticipation of the flowering of the sun.
I saw the sun explode, if that’s the right word for it, and I saw the wreckage of the explosion settle once again as a red giant star: the perfect light-source for the purpose-designed Pearly Ring. I saw the Ultimate Can-Do Worms begin the next phase of their work, extending their mastery of metamorphosis to the limits of their imagination, and stretching those limits all the while. I kept an eye out for the big guns, as Poe had advised me to do, and eventually caught a glimpse of them, although I might have missed them if I hadn’t been on the look-out, given the distance from which I had to watch, the near-blindness of my continuing panic, and the fact that the whole process was over almost as soon as it had begun.
As Poe had said, space travel is, essentially and fundamentally, a plant-intelligence thing. It was the Worldplants, blossoming in some of the meatier ice-balls, forever singing their empathic rhapsodies in anticipation of the climacteric symphony of the vegetal Omega Point, which took on the burden of sending seeds, spores and pupae into the great dark surrounding the system. That ammunition vanished beyond the practicality of further communication almost as soon as they were fired, but it wasn’t wasted. The seeds, spores and chrysalides weren’t equipped with any kind of bio-rocket, because rockets are essentially short-term methods of propulsion. They were given such impulse-velocity as the plants’ big guns could contrive, and left to make their way thereafter with only time-twisting technology to help them on their way. But they were dispatched in millions, now that the solar system finally had biomass to spare, at least for a little while.
My immediate hosts were never called upon to go into the darkness themselves. Our work was done in and around the Pearly Ring, with lightning rapidity. I saw the new worlds of the Ring in birth, but I saw them from a distance, through a veil of dread, and there’s nothing I can say about the societies that were born on the reawakened Earth and its thousand neighbors. I have to suppose that they were Utopian, but I might be wrong about that. It’s possible, I suppose, that they were worlds full of terror, communities entirely motivated by blind, sourceless panic and desperation. It’s possible—but I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it, because the Ultimate Worms didn’t just have the legacy of a lousy six hundred million years of post-Vendian evolution and a few tens of thousands years of human intelligence to draw upon. They had the legacy of four billion years of natural selection, thousands of intelligent species, the great symphony of plant intelligence and all the potential of time-travel technology to draw on—more dreams than we could ever imagine.
