End of an Era Read online

  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…

  "So you’ve been thinking about that, too?" I said. "Christ, it’s like a stupid commercial jingle. I can’t get it out of my mind either. I keep running over what little I comprehend."

  "Which is?"

  "Diddly, really. I’m no physicist. Something to do with the tunnel-diode effect and, uh, tachyons. I think."

  "Hmm," said Klicks. "That’s more than I knew. Why do you suppose — ?"

  "Oh, good Christ! I knew those Martians weren’t just being friendly neighbors. Klicks, they took us up, showed us some views of space to keep us preoccupied, then went sorting through our minds, looking for the secret of time travel."

  "I bet they were disappointed when they didn’t find it."

  "I’m not sure anyone besides Ching-Mei understands it completely."

  "Well," said Klicks, "you can’t blame them, really. Besides, they’ll have plenty of chances to ask her face-to-face once we bring them forward."

  I looked at him, standing there across the room, arms folded across his chest. "Bring them forward?" I said, disbelief in my tone. "Klicks, they tried to steal the secret of time travel from us. And you still want to bring them forward?"

  "Well, you seem incapable of making a decision one way or the other. Yes, I still want to bring them forward. Hell, we’ve got to bring them forward. It’s the only reasonable thing to do."

  "But they just tried to steal time travel from us! How can you trust them?"

  "They also voluntarily exited our bodies. In fact, they’ve done that twice now. If they really were evil, they would have stayed in us tonight, and simply forced us to take them back to the future."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. They know the Huang Effect won’t reverse states for" — I glanced at my watch — "another, ah, sixty-three hours. Maybe they couldn’t stay that long inside us even if they wanted to."

  "You don’t know that that’s true," said Klicks.

  "You don’t know that that’s not true." He harrumphed.

  "I wish we didn’t have to make this decision," I said quietly.

  "But we do," said Klicks.

  My gaze shifted out the window. "Yes," I said at last. "I suppose we do."

  Countdown: 7

  O tempora! O mores!

  Oh, what times! Oh, what morals!

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman orator (106–43 b.c.)

  Klicks was driving me crazy with his cocksure attitude. Things were always so simple for him. For every political debate, for every moral question, he had a glib, pat answer. Should we legalize devices that directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain? What rights do genetically tinkered apes with the power of speech have? Should female priests be allowed to be surrogate mothers? Ask Klicks. He’ll tell you.

  Of course, his opinions on mindbenders are similar to those of the editorial writer for The Calgary Herald. His stance on simps bears a startling resemblance to that of Mike Bullard. And his viewpoint on celibate surrogates comes right out of that article in Playboy.

  A deep thinker? Not Klicks. But he’s smooth, oh so smooth. Microsoft mouse. "Miles is so articulate," Tess had said after the last New Year’s Eve bash we’d given together, the same week that Klicks and I had been named as the crew for this mission. "He could charm the pants right off you."

  And so he did.

  I’d known him for years. I was even the one who gave him his nickname. How could he, he of all people, steal Tess from me? We had been friends. Friendship is supposed to mean something.

  I found out that Klicks and Tess were together less than a month after I’d moved out of our house. Just when I needed my friends most, my best friend — practically my only friend — was off boffing my ex-wife. A man who would steal another man’s wife doesn’t worry about morality, doesn’t weigh the principles, doesn’t consider the repercussions, doesn’t mull over the larger consequences. Doesn’t give a bloody fuck at all.

  And yet here he is, all set to grant a reprieve, to — I will say it again, dammit — to play God for an entire race.

  We’d spent a lot of time in mission planning debating whether Klicks and I should always stay together. But since there was so little time and so much to do, it had been agreed that we’d have separate lists of tasks to perform. Each of us was armed and carried a radio, so the risk in separating seemed acceptable. Klicks had gone off after breakfast in our Jeep to find a good spot to take core samples. Now that we knew the asteroid had hit two centuries before the end of the Cretaceous, he wanted to collect some samples to see if the iridium, shocked quartz, and microdiamonds thought to be associated with the impact were indeed already present in Earth’s rocks.

  Klicks had set out toward the east. I headed west, ostensibly to examine some hills in that direction, but really just to put as much distance between him and me as possible.

  The sun had reached its highest point in the sky, a hot orb that looked perhaps a tad whiter than it did in the twenty-first century. Insects buzzed around me in tiny black swarms. I wore a pith helmet with a cheesecloth rim that kept them away from my face, but their constant droning was giving me a headache.

  The air was tormentingly hot; the vegetation lush, with vines hanging between stands of dawn redwood. I must have walked at least five kilometers from the Sternberger, but hadn’t felt the distance in this light gravity. I looked over my shoulder, but trees obscured my view. No matter. I had a Radio Shack homing device to find my way back.

  My head was still swimming from Klicks’s insistence that we bring the Hets forward. I hated having to make big decisions. If you avoid them long enough, they go away.

  Just like Dad will go away eventually.

  Dr. Schroeder’s voice echoed in my head, his Bavarian accent making the words harsher, colder: Failing to act is a decision in and of itself. Then the same words again, but in a lilting Jamaican accent: Failing to act is a decision in and of itself.

  Screw Schroeder. Screw Klicks. There’s nothing wrong with not liking to make hasty decisions.

  Of course, I always end up buying whatever car the dealer has left on the lot from the previous model year so that I won’t have to make all those choices about color and features. And it’s true that I haven’t voted in years. I’ve never been able to decide between the parties — but hell, who can tell them apart? There’s nothing wrong with any of that, damn it all. One shouldn’t make decisions until one is sure.

  Besides, it’s not as simple as Klicks made it out to be. Mars of our time is almost airless. Oh, we’d known for half a century that water had once run freely there, carving grea
t valleys. The planet’s atmosphere had been thicker, too, and had probably contained much oxygen. Perhaps Mars was quite pleasant during the Mesozoic. Indeed, it might — I thought of the emerald star I had seen the first night as I’d scanned along the ecliptic. Could it have been Mars, a younger, vibrant world alive with growing things? A planet of life, green with chlorophyll, blue with oceans? A sister to Earth, fully as glorious as this planet?

  Perhaps.

  But I was a prophet, able to foretell the future with absolute certainty. Mars was doomed, destined to become a stunted, barren dust bowl, cold and desolate, a realm of alien ghosts, a haunt for the memories of things long dead. Granted, no one had been there yet; the joint U.S.-Russia mission had been canceled when neither of them could come up with its share of the money. So it looked like no human being would make it farther than the moon in — well, in my lifetime, I guess. And more than half of Earth’s population had been born after the last person had set foot there, back in 1972. Still, in a weird way, the moon was more inviting than Mars. Luna was sterile and pristine, but Mars was dead, decaying, an oppressive crypt, with the attenuated screams of chill winds raging across the landscape.

  The two visions of Mars — one green, one red — could not be more different, and yet sometime in the next 60-odd million years one would give way to the other, that planet being laid waste. Mars would fall prey to some catastrophe even greater than the one that would wipe out the dinosaurs. Or perhaps it had been the same catastrophe. Maybe a great belch of radiation had been expelled from the sun on the side that happened to be facing Mars. If Earth had been on the opposite side of the sun, it might have felt comparatively minor effects by the time it passed through the dissipating cloud of charged particles six months later.