*That’s one of our lower-probability paths,* the stones murmured. *There’s a chance we could be over there, instead of here.*
/Wait—you mean we’re not even sure if we’re really in that shadow over there—instead of here, looking at the shadow? What are we, Schrödinger’s cat?/
*Yes, but the probability favors our being here.*
Julie started to press for more detail, but decided that her brain was already rattling with enough quantum quandaries. So instead she asked, /Are we steering around the Mindaru?/
*We have passed them. They are behind us now.*
She looked back. The last of the Mindaru-shadows were disappearing upstream, leaving them once more alone, moving downstream into the past. Far behind them now was the place where the Mindaru were leaving the stream.
/How far in the past are we?/ Even as she asked, she absorbed the readings from the instruments and understood that they were somewhere in the neighborhood of half to three-quarters of a billion years in the past. Their journey had only just begun.
*That was just one flight. We must remain vigilant for others in the stream,* the stones cautioned.
Oh, yeah, Julie thought. Remain vigilant. Oh yes, we will.
***
With or without the heightened vigilance, it was unlikely they would have missed the next group of entities they encountered a few hundred million years farther downstream. At first they assumed it was more Mindaru: a cluster of detection traces floating up the timestream toward them. But these were slower, and in the best magnified view, their sensor tracings looked like soaring birds, sailing along with the movement of time and space. The stones worked intensively, trying to build some information on where the objects had been, and where they were going.
They didn’t look or feel like Mindaru. So what were they?
*Something else. This is strange, and might be important.* The stones throttled back their movement downstream while a comm transmission ground its way back to HQ, describing the new sighting and requesting advice. *These traces echo something the yaantel suspected, but was too unsure of to mention.*
/Can you tell us?/
All the stones remained silent, both Julie’s and Ik’s, waiting for an answer. None of them expected to hear back right away, so they were all surprised to receive almost immediately the first sentence of a reply, sputtering through just a few characters at a time.
*IMPORTANT. Avoid interference with these objects. Yaantel requests more detail.*
Yaantel requests? So the Core Mission team had brought the translator back into the loop? Someone back home knew something about these objects?
The stones busied themselves sending and receiving. While this went on, Julie and Ik could only observe, and what they saw startled and alarmed them. The new contacts began veering from side to side, as though probing the edges of the stream, or perhaps exploring the same quantum wiggle-room that the stones had used earlier. Soon they too began leaving the timestream one by one, much as the Mindaru had, but further back in time. They too seemed to be seeding themselves into the galaxy, but over a longer period in time, and probably space as well. The stones appeared aware of this, but they seemed unalarmed.
*They are giving themselves time to evolve,* the stones said, and Julie thought there was a hint of marveling in their words.
/What are they?/ she asked again, and this time she put more insistence into her voice.
The stream of comm-data was tapering off, and the stones finally had enough information to answer. *This is not certain, but the translator thinks the likelihood is high. These entities may be precursors to the translator itself. To the yaantel. Ancestors to all of the yaantel that ever lived.*
Julie was so stunned she could not reply. She felt her heart thump erratically, and for a second she thought she might go into cardiac arrest. /Please say that again,/ she whispered at last.
The stones hesitated, and there was another communication back to the launch-point, and a long, slow reply. Finally the stones said, *We just asked for confirmation, and our understanding is confirmed. The translator believes these entities might be its own progenitors. Its ancestors.*
Julie’s heart lurched again, but kept beating.
/Hrah, when did it decide this?/ Ik asked.
*It had an intuition, based on your reports from the first mission. The translator suspected then that its own origins traced back to the time and place of the Mindaru. After your meeting, it asked the librarian Amaduse to undertake some research.*
/How could Amaduse research whether objects we saw in the timestream were related to the translator’s origins?/
*He cannot do so directly. But Amaduse has access to historical data going back hundreds of millions of years.*
/Are you serious? Even so—/
*No one knows the history of the yaantel, not even the yaantel themselves. The data become sparser the further back one goes. But Shipworld librarians have been gathering data from across the galaxy since antiquity. Amaduse traced the earliest mention of yaantel-like phenomena back to approximately . . .* The stones paused, calculating.
/Back to when?/ Julie whispered.
*Back approximately to now. To the broad time period we are presently moving through . . . outside this bubble.*
Ik was making throat-rasping noises, and Julie’s pulse was making her ears buzz.
/You mean, we have historical information going back half a billion years? That seems impossible./
*The information is not precise. The dates are highly speculative—somewhere in a range of a hundred million years. Spatial locations are similarly uncertain. But evidence suggests that yaantel, or something like them, first appeared in more than one place, perhaps many places, beginning at times roughly corresponding to this point in history. The records are extremely fragmented, and details uncertain.*
/Hrah,/ Ik said finally. /How uncertain? Can we trust this story, or is it wishful thinking?/
*There are enough points of consistency across multiple sources that the translator and Amaduse both believe it is true.*
Well, I’ll be damned, Julie thought.
/Rrmm,/ Ik said, /if the yaantel and Amaduse believe the story, then I am inclined to believe it, too./
Something went off like a flashbulb in Julie’s mind. /And you!/ she said to the stones. /You’re daughters of the translator! It’s your story, too./
The stones did not answer, and Julie fell silent, thinking. The translator came from a race over a billion years old? Was that so hard to believe? Hadn’t it always seemed ageless to her? The harder thing to wrap her mind around was the thought that it came from the same time and place as the Mindaru.
/Julie?/ Ik asked gently.
/Yah,/ she said at last. /But the translator . . . and the Mindaru? Are they connected?/
*That is the key question,* said the stones. *It was the biological forms you saw on the Mindaru world that first gave the translator a deep-level hint. But the truth is . . .*
/You don’t know?/
*We don’t really know,* the stones agreed finally.
***
They moved cautiously downstream toward the remaining entities. Many were still in the stream, despite the departures they had witnessed. If these things really were ancestors of the translator . . . Jesus, Julie thought. This will change everything. Stopping the escape—migration?—of translator precursors would be unthinkable.
/How in the world can we know if they’re translator precursors and not Mindaru?/ Julie asked.
*A difficult problem. We are searching for signatures . . .*
/Hrrm . . . / Ik said.
Julie wished she could look at Ik and read his expression, but the ghoststream bubble did not permit that. /Ik? Do you have a thought?/
/Possibly,/ Ik said. /Are we willing to take a risk?/
*Please define.*
/What if we fly right through the flock?/ Ik said. /I don’t think we would hurt them, hrah? We could see what they do. How they react.
/
*Explain the object of the exercise,* said the stones.
Julie thought she knew. /If they don’t attack—if they’re not hostile—?/
/More than that,/ Ik said. /I believe ancestors of the yaantel might be interested in us, but cautious./
Julie’s mind leapt to follow. /Because it’s in their nature to explore, to try to understand. Not to dominate./
/Yes./
The stones answered with care. *It may be difficult to determine their attitude, or their motivation, from simply flying among them.*
Julie liked Ik’s idea. /True. But it will be impossible if we don’t do something to take a closer look./
In the end, the stones agreed.
***
The approaching cluster of faint, shadowy waveforms showed no reaction at first. The stones steered their bubble on a true course, but remained poised to take action if needed. As before, the stream appeared like a channel of rushing water, but this time they stayed well centered.
As they neared the closest of the entities, the fluttering shadow suddenly swerved away. It didn’t simply evade them in the stream; it veered right through the wall of the timestream and out—vanishing presumably into normal space-time, close to a billion years before the Shipworld present, and several hundred million years before the Mindaru did the same thing.
Julie watched the next one react in much the same way—changing course abruptly, with a frantic exit from the stream.
/Are they running from us?/ Julie asked in surprise, wondering how to interpret this. /Are they afraid of us?/
/Hrah, how can we know?/
*Their behavior is strongly consistent with fear,* the stones said.
/But of us?/ Julie asked. /Or something else?/
*Difficult to be sure. We must be an unknown to them—unless there is an encounter to come, in the past. Let’s try to give them a little more room.*
The stones did something, and the channel blurred, and they pulled slightly to the left. Would this seem less threatening? Would they even be visible to the entities at all?
The answer was not wholly clear. One by one the entities came up the stream toward their bubble. Every one swerved sideways, out of the timestream and into the galaxy of this era. It seemed they were fleeing from something, but perhaps not Julie and Ik and the starstream bubble.
The stones became quietly thoughtful, as though they had just encountered something deeply, dimly, distantly familiar.
***
The mandate to proceed all the way back to the starting point of the Mindaru now seemed questionable. They’d been told to look for signs of Mindaru intrusion resulting from the failed commando raid. But what if the translator’s ancestors really had come from the same place, and a journey up the timestream was a critical part of its past? What if it was not just a journey, but an escape?
Without knowing more, it was impossible for Julie, Ik, and their stones to make a reasonable judgment. If those fleeing entities really were the ancestors of the translator, had they fled from the Mindaru, or from something else altogether—maybe even something the ghoststream travelers themselves had done? If not this team, then perhaps the commando team. Had visitors from Shipworld caused the flight?
Or were they at risk right now of inadvertently doing something to interfere with the flight?
All they could do was continue their journey into the deeps of time, while the stars and galaxy outside the stream evolved backward, a movie in rewind. The journey seemed to take forever—punctuated by another breathless encounter with a cluster of Mindaru, which they steered around. If they needed to confront those Mindaru, they could do it on the way back. The stones flawlessly recalled the earlier navigation to the Mindaru world, both through time and through the slight spatial deviation from a straight path—and with the sureness of a hand sliding into a glove, the stones brought them back to the star and the planet where it all had begun.
The galactic core was ablaze with a million suns, and marbled with dark lanes of dust and gas. With the light intensity filtered down so they could make out their destination, the core region looked more like the sullen embers of a civilization in ruins. Was that so far off? Was this how the living worlds had looked after the devastating wars that had led to the creation, the annihilation, and the resurrection of the deadly Survivors and their Mindaru warriors? Julie felt a chill deep in her marrow.
Now they had to locate the precise point in history when all the trouble arose. The stones, like a sky observer racking the mechanical focus of a telescope lens in and out, searched the time span following their first visit. The general era wasn’t hard to find; they had only to look for a rift in the boundary between the ghoststream and the outer time, the result of the second crew’s efforts. Where else was the ghoststream boundary alive with an ultraviolet sheen of leaking radiation and the arcing of quantum discharge? The challenge was that the rift extended for at least a thousand years along the timeline—plenty of room for fleeing entities, if properly prepared, to fly right in.
*Let’s start at the far end and work our way forward, and see what’s coming through,* the stones suggested.
***
The earliest departures from the planet, at a point not far into the future from their first visit, looked at first like tracers streaming up out of the atmosphere, little more than sounding rockets. Were these preliminary ventures into space? This was about where the timestream rift began. Had it been noticed?
Not at first, perhaps. But as they moved their viewpoint slightly back toward the future, the rockets got bigger and brighter and longer-burning. More concerning, the rockets began to aim for the boundary layer of the exposed timestream, which had left open a visible rent in the sky, not far above the atmosphere of the planet. /Are they flying right into the timestream just like that?/ Julie wondered aloud, thinking it inconceivable that it should be so easy.
But it wasn’t. The first of the entries disintegrated in a burst of radiation on contact with the timestream. Many more that followed did the same. Dozens more. The failures did not seem to be a deterrent; the probes kept coming, each a little different from the ones before. Gradually their self-immolations came later and later in the process; and there came a time when they learned to enable radical changes in their physical vessels—when they learned to translate their structure into quantum form.
How they were transformed into quantum waveforms when they entered the timestream, Julie didn’t understand, though the stones appeared to have some inkling. The free energy leaking from the tear played some part in their transformation. The how didn’t matter, she supposed; what mattered was where they were going, and what their intentions were. That was not obvious, but at least there was no overt hostility in evidence. One after another, the vessels rode their contrails into the timestream, changing in a flash into little packets of light and shadow.
*We see no way to stop them. Shall we move futureward a little farther?*
They did, and found that after a handful of years, locally, there came a lull in the launching of Mindaru into the timestream. Perhaps they were preoccupied by other matters, down on the planet. The stones shifted the focus slowly futureward. The next series of launches came quite suddenly—objects shooting out of the planet’s atmosphere like fireworks, riding blue-white lancets of fire that boosted them in long arcs upward. Gathered into loose groups of a dozen or more, they sped away from the planet and straight into the timestream rift. Each one flickered a ghostly sapphire and blurred into a brief streak of light as it transited the boundary. More followed from the planet’s surface, riding fiery tails and converting to quantum waveforms in the moment of entry. Now and then one failed to transform properly, and disintegrated with a flash.
/It’s a mass migration,/ Julie said.
/Hrrm, an escape, I think. They are fleeing./
/Are they what I think they are?/
*They are ancestors,* the stones said. *Yaantel ancestors. We can feel them as they pass. Very differ
ent from present-day yaantel, of course. But they have a fingerprint, a marker on the quantum level.* There was an almost wistful tone to the stones’ words. *To us, it unmistakably says “family.” And they have, like the Mindaru, learned the technique of transforming as they enter the stream.*
Julie pondered that. /Do you suppose it’s because the second mission tore open the rift that they were able to escape?/ Had the failed commando raid actually figured somehow in an important early journey for the progenitors? Had those unlucky three warriors bought something very important with their mistake—with their lives?
The migration ended after several dozen of the entities had fled into the timestream. The stones watched a bit longer, and then said, *Let us see what follows.*
Again they moved the focus futureward. They didn’t have to go far. Shortly after the departure of the progenitors, a new Mindaru exodus stormed away. This one was a cloud of angry hornets—large, fast, and furious, diving into the timestream.
/Are the Mindaru chasing them?/ Julie asked, her voice shaking a little.
*Their propulsion is more efficient than the rockets of the Ancestors,* the stones said. *Even so, their energy expenditure suggests haste or . . . anger, if beings of that kind can experience anger.*
/Oh yes,/ Ik said softly. /They can./
Julie gulped. /Then the Ancestors have escaped, and the Mindaru are hard in pursuit. What should we do? Go after them?/
*We believe we can catch up with them on our return trip. Right now, we propose taking a closer look at the planet below. We must understand the relationship of the Ancestors to the Mindaru, and that means learning, if we can, what’s happened down there.*
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