Ripple finally walked away from the other creature and shortened its hind legs so that it could look up at Skyra. “I see that you may need my help. English is the language I have taught you, and you are perfectly capable of talking to these people. Just speak to them the way you speak to me.”
Lincoln Woodhouse said, “You taught her to speak English?”
Ripple swiveled toward him. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“No, none of this is obvious! Did I send you back to this time and place?”
Ripple looked up at Lincoln Woodhouse for several long breaths without speaking. “Yes, you did.”
Skyra decided she needed to speak up. “Ripple, you know these bolups, and these bolups know you. They will help us.” She turned to Lincoln Woodhouse. “You are skinny, and you look weak, but you are alive. So, you must know how to hunt and fight. You will help me take back my birthmate. She is Veenah-Una-Loto, and she will die if I do not take her back.”
Lincoln Woodhouse and the other strangers turned and looked at each other, an odd habit Skyra had seen in bolups before.
6
Decision
47,659 years ago - Day 1
Lincoln studied the strange woman—Skyra. She was short, maybe slightly taller than five feet, but her arms and legs were muscular and intimidating. Despite her diminutive stature, she was probably as heavy as Lincoln. Her large eyes were strangely captivating, with greenish irises and thick brows that made it seem like she was staring with intense interest. Small freckles dotted the smooth, parchment-colored skin of her face. Her nose and lips, although much thicker than Lincoln’s, were perfectly proportioned for her face. Her reddish-brown hair, somewhat unkempt but not tangled, was swept back, exposing her ears. Two white, inch-long canine teeth adorned each of her ears, one penetrating the cartilage about midway up, the other through the earlobe. Her left wrist was wrapped in an elaborate leather sheath holding two knives with bone handles and stone blades.
Lincoln was reasonably sure the woman before him was not human, but Homo neanderthalensis. In fact, he had every reason to believe this was the same Neanderthal woman whose remains had been found near this spot over 47,000 years in the future.
Surprisingly, Skyra didn’t emit an unpleasant odor. Lincoln detected a slight muskiness, but he was pretty sure it was from the animal furs she was wearing.
“You will help me now,” she said. “Please, you will help me.”
Lincoln was still struggling to make the transition from complete confusion to comprehending that this woman was asking his team to help her do something. He glanced at Virgil, then Jazzlyn, then Derek. They offered little more than blank stares. “I’m not sure how much help we can be,” he replied to Skyra. “We came here because… well, it’s hard to explain.”
“Perhaps I can help,” said the drone Skyra had called Ripple. “I suspect you came to this time and place because you were alerted to a message that endured the passing of many thousands of years.”
“That’s correct,” Lincoln said. “Did you create the message?”
“Not yet, I haven’t, but it has been my intention to do so when the proper moment arrives. Please tell me, in what form and medium was this message?”
“It was words in English and some numbers, etched into the shell of a drone. The same words and numbers were also etched into a femur.” Lincoln shot a wary glance at Skyra. “The femur of a female Neanderthal, twenty to twenty-one years of age.”
The drone’s ring of red lights pulsed a few times, indicating contemplation. It was a visual display Lincoln himself had conceptualized and coded into his drones.
“Now I understand why you have come to this particular time and place,” the drone said. “I must have requested it in my message. There is only one reason I would request this particular time and place—to prevent a tragedy.” The drone scuttled its legs, turning to look up at the Neanderthal woman. “Skyra, your life has been saved by the arrival of Lincoln and his team.”
“You are wrong, Ripple,” she said. “I saved their lives. They have no weapons, and they do not look like fighters.”
“Nevertheless, their arrival has saved your life.”
Maddy moved forward until her vision lens was only centimeters from the other drone’s lens. “If my overly-polite human companions will not ask it, I sure as thunder will. Why did you teach this woman to speak English? Like all of Lincoln’s drones, you were sent here to gather data. Influencing the indigenous flora and fauna is a blatant violation of your coded ideology. Explain your roguish behavior.”
Ripple’s red ring pulsed once. “You have the voice of a human female. In later models like myself, Lincoln provided a neutral voice, so as to avoid—”
“Avoiding is precisely what you are doing at this moment,” Maddy interjected. “Explain your behavior.”
“Skyra is important,” the drone said. “Her genetically-identical twin Veenah is also important. I do not wish to explain further at this moment.”
Jazzlyn spoke up. “Skyra called you Ripple. Is that your name?”
“Yes, I am Ripple.”
“Ripple, we gave up everything to come here. You know why? Because your message said entire civilization at risk. Well, we’re here. What are we supposed to do?”
Again, Ripple’s red ring pulsed. “That is interesting. I must have been traumatized at the time. Fortunately, now I will not have to experience whatever caused such trauma.”
“You’re freakin’ kidding me,” Jazzlyn muttered.
“The message was not an exaggeration,” Ripple said. “Such is the importance of Skyra and Veenah.” The drone looked at Lincoln. “Thank you for coming, Lincoln. Your presence here is needed. These others need not have come.”
Lincoln gave his frowning team members an apologetic shake of his head before turning back to Ripple. “Why is my presence here so important?”
“Now is not the proper time for a full explanation. My companion Skyra has requested your assistance in saving her twin sister. Should you agree to help—and I strongly encourage you to do so—I believe your companions may prove to be useful after all. The task will be difficult and will likely require violence.”
Skyra spoke up again. “I do not know some of the words you speak, but you will please help me now. The bolups may move their camp, especially after what they have seen today.”
“I got one question,” Derek said in his confident, booming voice. “We came here to save our civilization. Will saving Skyra’s sister help us accomplish that?”
“Yes,” Ripple replied without a delay.
Derek clapped his hands together. “That’s enough for me. Lincoln, you’re the boss, but this is what we came for, right? Even if it involves kickin’ ass and taking names.”
Lincoln took a deep breath and gazed at Skyra. Her eyes were noticeably larger than a human’s, and he found it oddly soothing to stare into them at such close proximity. “Those men took your sister?”
“Yes, they took Veenah. They will kill her.”
“Do you think she’s still alive now?”
She pointed to the hills in the distance. “I saw Veenah. I talked to her. I could not take her back, though.”
Lincoln looked down at Ripple again. “What do these two sisters have to do with our civilization being at risk?”
“You must trust me. I have carefully considered hundreds of different parameters, which necessarily involve the sequence and timing of explanations. Providing explanations at the improper time, and in the improper order, will increase the likelihood of failure, which indeed puts all of civilization at risk. I know you, Lincoln, perhaps far better than you realize. You believe I am correct, because you coded my consciousness. Furthermore, you know you coded my consciousness when you were years beyond your current age. Fourteen years beyond, if you care to know. You were fourteen years wiser, with fourteen years of additional experience and knowledge. You know I am correct, do you not?”
Lincoln stared beyond the river a
t the distant hills. The drone had made an impressive argument, which was a result of impressive coding. If there was one thing Lincoln trusted, it was his own coding. Which also meant he trusted his own technology, including his drones. Apparently, more explanation would have to wait until the proper time.
“So, what are we talking about here?” Virgil said. “Are we talking about raiding a camp of those men? We’re not soldiers, Lincoln, and we weren’t allowed to bring weapons, remember? I don’t think Derek’s lighter is going to—”
Lincoln held up a hand, silencing him. “I know this isn’t what we expected.”
“Hell, it’s what I expected,” Derek said. “We’re 47,000 years in the past—nothing but brutality here, folks. Let’s save Skyra’s sister, get our asses back to the T3, then jump back to where we belong.”
Skyra grabbed the two stone hatchets she had dropped and held them up. “Weapons. We can make more. If you do not know how, I will show you.” She started walking toward one of the scrubby trees. “Come, I will show you.”
To avoid Virgil’s gaze, Lincoln tapped his watch and checked the screen. His team had been here less than an hour, and they were already planning to raid a camp of savage warriors.
Lincoln accepted the gnarled, L-shaped piece of wood Skyra handed him. She had used one of the stone hatchets—which she had called a khul—to chop it free from the tree’s twisted, exposed roots. She pointed to the end of the shorter portion. “Make it sharp.”
He stared at the wood. “How do I make it sharp?”
She furled her substantial brows at him. Then she plucked the wood from his hand, moved to one of the numerous large rocks littering the ground, and started rubbing the tip against a flat portion of the rock.
“Okay, I get it,” Lincoln said, embarrassed. He considered himself to be the greatest inventor in history, and he needed instructions on sharpening a stick? He took the piece of wood back.
“Why don’t we make more of these,” Derek asked. He was holding the second khul.
“We do not have time,” Skyra said. “We do not have skin strips to tie blades to handles.” She gestured to the scrubby tree beside her. “These trees do not contain the bajam we need to bind blades to handles.” She seemed to realize she had used a word that was not English. “Bajam is the tree’s blood. These trees do not have the kind of blood we need.” She went back to hacking at the tree’s roots with her khul.
Skyra cut free a total of four suitable L-shaped roots, one for each human. When she handed them out, Jazzlyn accepted hers with her prosthetic hand. Skyra noticed the robotic device for the first time. “El-de-né! What is that?”
Jazzlyn transferred her piece of wood to her right hand then flexed the carbon-fiber fingers of her left, opening and closing her fist. “This? It’s just my hand. I lost my real one when I was a little kid. This is my replacement. Do you like it?”
Skyra stepped closer and touched one of the fingers. “Do you use it to fight?”
Jazzlyn let out one of her signature giggles. “I hit a guy with it once. He left me alone after that.” She made a fist and threw a punch into the air. “It’s strong enough to do some damage.”
Skyra abruptly grabbed the prosthesis with one hand then began pushing up the sleeve of Jazzlyn’s fleece shirt with her other hand.
Jazzlyn’s eyes grew wide. “Um, okay. You want to see the rest of it?” She dropped her piece of wood and helped pull her sleeve up to her elbow.
Skyra stared at the attachment point below the elbow, where flesh fused with carbon fiber polymer. She poked Jazzlyn’s mahogany-colored skin, oblivious to social boundaries that were obviously not part of her world. “This is a good weapon,” she said. Finally, she pulled her eyes away from the arm and gazed at Jazzlyn’s face. “Please, you will show me how to make a weapon like this.”
Jazzlyn giggled again and gently pulled her arm free. “Um, someone else made this for me. I don’t know how to do it, so I can’t show you. I’m sorry.”
“It is a good weapon,” the Neanderthal repeated. She pointed down to the piece of wood Jazzlyn had dropped. “Make it sharp.”
Lincoln had figured out that rougher rocks were better suited for sharpening, so he pointed this out to the others, and soon they had created four wicked-looking weapons, dubbed poor man’s khuls by Derek.
Lincoln found the most comfortable place on the handle to grip his weapon then swung it tentatively. Was he actually capable of striking another person with this thing? A forceful hit to the head or neck could be deadly. Lincoln had been picked on frequently as a kid but had never once fought back. Now he was in good shape—he didn’t think twice about running twenty-five kilometers through the hilly desert around his compound—but he had never physically hurt another person.
He lowered the weapon to his side and watched his team members. They were taking practice swings with their own weapons, their faces etched with grim resignation. They knew this jump would likely result in their own demise, but they had probably assumed it would be some instantly-catastrophic event, such as being atomized by the T3 and scattered throughout the space-time continuum. Now they were probably imagining what it would feel like to be hacked to death by a stone-bladed khul.
He shouldn’t have asked them to make this sacrifice. They had agreed, of course, because they had become a close-knit family. This was the kind of relationship Lincoln established with his staff. Most of his other employees would have accepted the offer also. Maybe he had gone too far in nurturing their trust in him. Was it unethical to encourage them to blindly believe he and his technology could do no wrong?
Virgil had stopped swinging his weapon and was now kneeling in front of Ripple. “You have blood smears on your shell and around your vision lens,” he said to the drone. “How did that happen?”
The drone replied in its genderless voice. “I had no choice but to defend Skyra. She was outnumbered and surrounded.”
Virgil ran his finger over one of the blood stains then looked at his fingertip. “How did you defend her? Our drones aren’t equipped to fight.”
“Perhaps not, but I am certainly equipped with ingenuity.”
“We will go now, please,” Skyra said. She took the stone blade of her khul in one hand and slid the handle into a sheath hidden among the thick furs hanging over her back. She then picked up the khul Derek had left on the ground.
Lincoln noted that no one seemed to mind Skyra taking both of the more sophisticated weapons. They had just witnessed her kill a man with one of them—clearly she was far more qualified.
Skyra took a few steps toward the river then turned to stare at Lincoln and his team, obviously waiting for them.
“We understand you’re in a hurry, but we need a moment to talk,” Lincoln said to her. “Can you give us a moment?”
The woman pursed her lips but didn’t reply.
Lincoln assumed she understood, so he waved his team closer. They gathered around, each of them holding a sharpened, angled tree root that looked more suitable for firewood than for fighting. Maddy stepped between Virgil and Derek, then Ripple forced its way in beside Maddy.
“Do you mind giving us some privacy?” Lincoln asked Ripple. “I’d like to talk to my team.”
“Certainly,” the drone said. It backed off and moved to Skyra’s side.
Virgil whispered, “You know that drone can probably still hear every word we say, right?”
Lincoln shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. Look, you guys, I know this whole scenario has spiraled from strange to totally insane. If you don’t want to do this, I’m not going to force you into it. You can stay here.”
“Does that mean you’re going regardless of what we do?” Jazzlyn asked.
“I don’t know. I guess. The drone left the message for me, and now here I am. The drone says I should help save Skyra’s sister because it’s important to our future civilization. So….” He shrugged again.
Virgil raised a hand, like he was in a classroom. “But y
ou don’t believe we’re even in the same timeline anymore. We were in an alternate universe the moment we jumped back. Your Temporal Bridge Theorem isn’t flawed, in spite of what was found at the Pomer dig site.” He gestured to Jazzlyn and Derek. “We all know the theorem is correct. It has to be.”
“I don’t actually know that,” Derek muttered. “The damn thing’s pig Latin to me.”
Virgil gave Derek a flustered look. “My point is, Lincoln, that we jumped here because the majority of people decided we should. You and I know there’s nothing we can do that could ever change the world we jumped away from. Thanks to the idiots who couldn’t see the pure perfection of your theorem, the uninformed masses became convinced we could somehow jump back and save the world. The masses became convinced, therefore the politicians became convinced. So, here we are, the sacrificial lambs. We won’t affect the world of our original timeline, so they’ll all come to the conclusion that we must have saved them, and they’ll go back to their lives, thanking their politicians for being wise enough to order us to jump to our deaths.”
“Aren’t you a glowing bundle of enthusiasm,” Derek said to Virgil. “Maybe I don’t understand the math, but I know that drone,” he pointed over at Ripple, “jumped back in time from our world, and it somehow ended up still being in our world 47,000 years later. So, whether Lincoln’s theorem is right or wrong, it’s pretty damn clear we can affect the world we jumped from.”
Jazzlyn put her hands up between Virgil and Derek. “Fellas, we’ve been through this umpteen times. Right now we’re talking about letting Lincoln go off without us to get himself killed.”
Virgil persisted. “That’s what I’m trying to say. No one here has to get killed! We’ve already done what we had to do. We jumped back, never to be seen in our timeline again. Everyone back there should be happy. Rather than committing suicide here, let’s set up the T3 and jump back to our original time. No, of course we can’t jump back to the same world we left, but there’s a reasonable chance it will be a world with technology and compassion and comforts. It’ll be better than this… land of terror.” He gestured to the surrounding landscape.
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