“Who?”
“Somebody? Or something.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Radiant
The second, smaller Grey Mech swelled above them in the darkness. A dusky presence.
They knew there was no use in going inside so they watched its approach. It hung in the sky, a dark blotch coasting among coalescing rivulets of light.
No bolts, no shock wave.
Their apprehension ebbed as moments slid by and it made no aggressive move. “I suppose that is the one who helped us,” Nikka mused.
Nigel had the eerie impression that it was watching them just as they watched it. They all noticed a small humming, not in their ears but throughout their bodies, as if long acoustic waves were resonating in them, deep notes below hearing.
It glided up and dwindled. Smoothly it veered toward the largest of the luminous constructions and into Nigel’s mind came a single word: Radiant. Somehow he knew that this was a name, the way the Grey Mech thought of the electron-positron life that swarmed in this far future night.
Abruptly, the Grey Mech vanished into the brilliance. A flash, as if it had met the antimatter and been consumed. Seconds later, the humming stopped.
They looked at each other without speaking. Had it died, task completed? Merged with its own form and fate?
The Grey Mech had shown them something, but they were not certain just what.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Tiny Farmers
Their next Transit came soon. The stutter was over at last.
They were dazed and tired and simply slept through Transits as they followed the long arc of the wormhole in space-time.
They did not speak of Ito. Their preserving solutions would hold the body for a long while, but the central question was how much of Ito’s self had been lost before they could record it, to save the structure in his dying brain.
Nigel sat and watched the landscapes outside while the others slept. Parents fear more than anything the loss of their children and now that he had lost at least some of Ito—for no process, he knew, could completely restore the son he had loved, as was—he could not stop remembering the moments with Ito as a little boy, the passing incidents transfigured by time into golden memories. There is no perfection in the world, but one of the functions of memory is to make the past perfect at least in its small ways. He clung to that and knew that this phase would pass, too, but he relished it nevertheless.
Days of relative time passed. They were all in a hurry to return to their era and the random pauses during Transits irritated everyone. They became short-tempered and edgy about small details. Nigel withdrew, growing silent.
Then, during a longer pause, he went for a walk with Angelina into fields beyond their sheared-off farm. It looked like maize and he hungered for something reassuring as he hiked across rumpled fields beneath a warm yellow glow of timestone overhead.
It was indeed a field of maize but at its edge was a black swarm in orderly, marching columns. He squatted in the dust to inspect. Ants. So many they called up sudden apprehension. But they ignored him and Angelina.
Here a line carried a kernel of corn each. Others carried bits of husk and there an entire team coagulated around a chunk of a cob. He followed and found that the streams split. The kernel-carriers went to a ceramic tower, climbed a ramp, and let their burdens rattle down into a sunken vault. They returned dutifully to the field. The other, thicker stream spread into rivulets that left their burdens of scrap at a series of neatly spaced anthills, dun-colored domes with regularly spaced portals.
“Wonderful,” he said.
Angelina caught his meaning, nodded. “So . . . intricate.”
He marveled. These had once been leaf-cutter ants, content to slice up fodder for their own tribe. They still did, pulping the unneeded cobs and stalks and husks, growing fungus on the pulp deep in their warrens. Tiny farmers in their own right. But in the long voyage through humanity’s care, they had been genetically engineered to harvest and sort first.
Faithfully they paid their human masters the tribute of the rich kernels, delivered to storage, no doubt following chemical cues. He thought of robots, clanky things. More subtly, insects were tiny robots engineered by evolution. Why not just co-opt their ingrained programming, then, at the genetic level, and harvest the mechanics from a compliant Nature?
Slowly, as they wandered in nearby fields, he came to see that here the entire biosphere of the esty was shaped with similar craft. Like old Earth, the esty was a machine that kindled life and tuned it to the needs of . . . who? What? Intelligence?
Certainly masterful hands lay behind the esty, something immense and unfathomable. But then, Earth had for nearly all of human evolution been just as mysterious to the growing, still-sluggish minds that lived among its marvelously tuned valleys, thick forests, and salty seas. The esty was a step up in that chain. A place beyond the comprehension of the smart apes who had blundered into this vastness, long on awe and short on table manners.
Somehow this discovery about the esty of the future buoyed him. Angelina felt it, too, a strangeness that was somehow familiar, part of being human in an order beyond their knowing. A silent agreement passed between father and daughter and they held hands crossing the last field.
They trotted back for the next Transit. Later, he found himself paying more attention to the panorama unfolding before them as they slipped and glided along the twisted geometry of the meandering worm.
He saw again and again recurring themes. Sailboats cutting the green waters of great, curved lakes. They dappled cupped bowls of water as they harvested the winds that blew through the Lanes, blunt pressures adjusting thermodynamic truths. Spherical houses that clung to impossible cliffs, imitating hornets’ nests with Euclidean grace. Hot air balloons, inverted teardrops hanging yellow and gold and sunset red amid the cottony chaos of clouds. Only later did he notice that the coasting teardrop shapes were not managed by men at all. They were alive. Great heads swung where gondolas would. Immense eyes surveyed the land below for foraging. His surprise turned to pleasure. One teardrop plunged abruptly, snagged something on the ground, and buoyed
aloft again.
In all these, form fitted so perfectly to function that the marriage recurred in many different societies, cultural worlds divided by immeasurable difference, but united by a deep aesthetic that shaped tools to an obliging hand.
All this he learned during their forays out for provisions, during the pauses which now seemed unbearably long. The esty had all kinds of people, he learned by bargaining with them. Maybe it had to, to work. There were ample numbers of the smoky-minded, the everyday deluded, the types who had to use emotional suction cups to hold on to this place at all. Nothing in nature said life should be easy.
TWENTY-NINE
The Cauchy Horizon
You all realize,” Nikka said to them over the lustrous dining room table, “that we can’t truly get back to where we were?”
She had called a formal little family gathering after supper, no small talk or leftover coffee cups to clutter the mind. Everyone sat upright, properly chastened.
Angelina blinked, shocked. “We can’t?”
