–Is this why some D’shanna live downtime?
=Not some but most, living between the boundary of now and the terminus of the spindle. In the far downtime the spindle is undisturbed. It demands less of them and offers freedom to construct a self of such form and dimension that could never exist here.
–But you choose to be here.
=It is the only place where your world and mine can touch.
They soon reached a point where Thackery could look out on a populated world astir with activity, and did so without Thackery requiring further reinforcement from Gabriel.
–Let me go on alone, Thackery said, his confidence restored.
=I cannot make you see what is not there, nor stop you from seeing what is.
–I am not finished.
=Time passes both here and in the matter-matrix.= The thought was tinted gray by Gabriel’s ill ease.
–I will not be long.
The old woman in the chair was dead, her face a cold blue and drawn tight in the rictus of rigor. Except for the light from the video screen, the room was dark, the environmental system having noted the lack of movement and followed its energy-conserving instincts. On the top of a nearby bureau, a photograph of a boy and the boy-as-man gathered dust.
–Andra…
But he could not complete even the namepattern, because he did not know its shape or details. He no longer saw her with the clarity the ideograms demanded, and she could no longer remind him of what he had forgotten or never known.
Mourning without tears, he drifted downtime until the body was discovered, then followed it through autopsy and cremation in the hope of learning where she rested. It was a shock to discover there was no marker, no memorial, because nothing but energy proceeded from the combustion chamber, energy to brighten hallway lamps and power the lifts that brought the next cargo of bodies to the processing center.
Anguished, he scrambled uptime until he found her alive. Watching her eat a meal, then fall asleep watching the NET in the chair where she would die, brought paltry comfort. And so he crawled still farther uptime, until he found her standing in a field of Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed, and wild wheat, gazing up at the sky with an expression that was both wistful and peaceful. That was when he constructed the namepattern to which he would cling, and that was where he left her for the last time.
Withdrawing from all but the most superficial contact with the matter-matrix, Thackery drifted downtime, past the departure of Tycho, past the death of his mother, watching the comings and goings of the packets serving A-Cyg. Presently he drew in closer as the packet Audubon docked at Unity and disgorged its human cargo. Hovering over the proceedings, Thackery watched as a tall, raven-haired woman led a buoyant, gap-toothed eight-year-old girl by the hand down the walkway.
–Diana… Andra…
Suddenly it was not enough to watch. With a fury fueled by anguish, Thackery drove himself downward against the barrier, meaning not only to draw close but to cross, to leave the spindle and enter the scene presented so vividly before him. He drove himself down again and again, summoning not only his own energies, but momentarily marshaling the currents of the aster itself against the obstacle, reaching out with both love and guilt to take the girl and her mother in his arms.
But the only result of the effort was to weaken him. Failure slowly but patiently taught him that Diana and Andra were in a place that he could not reach, that he was seeing not reality, each microsecond frozen and preserved in an infinitude of Universes, but waves of causality—that what propagated across the barrier to the spindle was not a reflection of a substance still existing, but an echo of energies past. That which could be seen from Gabriel’s spindle was true but not real. Only the present, from which Thackery had come, was both true and real. And realizing that, he had a sudden hunger to be finished and return there..
–Gabriel,—he called out in despair.—I am ready. Show me what you must. = I am here, = Gabriel said, gliding out of the colorclasm toward him. = We must go farther back.
The planet he looked down on was Earth, but it was not Thackery’s Earth. It was the Earth of the geologists and paleontologists, the Earth of first chapters and prehistories. A heavy cloak of ice and snow covered its surface well into what Thackery had learned to call the temperate latitudes.
On the face of the great glacier were the cities of the FC.
They were not cities as Thackery conceived them, with spires of steel and roads of stone. They were cities the way a sponge is an organism, thousands of small structures conjoined to form a greater whole, but each still capable of existing apart.
The cities of the open ice were carried along southward by its inexorable but fitful advance, reforming and reconnecting as fissures and ridges spoiled the neat tickweave pattern. The heart of each city was comprised of hundreds of domed storehouses, containing the harvests of the past held for the hunger of the future. Of the cells surrounding the core, some held the tools of their artisans, some the creations of their artists. The remainder of the shells were home to the city’s inhabitants. From them came the people who manned the hunting sledges and snowboats, who kept the great articulated infrastructure of the city in repair, who bore children, laughed, and drank wine over the dead.
The cities of the mountains were anchored to the rock side walls of their valleys with cables of tantalum, each shell gliding in place on its runners and clinging to those around it as the glacier slid by underneath. By that means they held station with the honeycomb of mines from which one city extracted coal, another tantalite, and a third ortholite. Gasified, the coal provided the energy to warm the shells and run the myriad engines. The tantalite and ortholite together had built the cities, the former yielding the metals used where stress or heat was greatest, the latter the catalyst for the icesteel used everywhere else.
Seeing them, he could no longer think of them as the FC. The name was hollow and faceless, a linguistic convenience inadequate to their humanity. What did you call yourselves? he asked, but his seeing was too unskilled for him to have an answer. The Weichsel was the last of the Pleistocene glaciations—the name belongs to your time, at least, if not to you. You are the Weichsel.
The Weichsel had not fled south ahead of the ice but had adapted to it. The adaptation had taken two thousand years; the glaciation had now lasted ten thousand. In the face of it, they had retained their culture, their staunch meliorism, and their sense of community. But they had been forced to give up something in exchange: horizons. With the food resources limited, the cities could not grow. With material resources limited, their technology was frozen. It would be that way until the ice retreated.
The one horizon lay overhead, in the night sky. The Weichsel learned of hotter suns and warmer worlds, and yearned for freedom from the bondage of the ice. In time, there came a generation for whom yearning was not enough.
And it was they who built the iceships.
Amy—Derrel—I’m sorry. You were right.
But only partly so, Thackery learned as he watched. The iceships did not go out in clusters attached to a single mother ship. Each iceship was an entity to itself, attached only to a great interstellar bus which was little more than a great block of icesteel encasing the hardware of propulsion.
For what the Weichsel could make, they could also unmake. Using solar heat to begin the process, and chemical catalysis to continue it, the icesteel reaction mass was reduced to hydrogen and oxygen. In perfect proportion, fuel and oxidizer flowed through tantalum tubing to an array of combustion chambers, where pressure switches and spark generators turned them into the explosive pulses which drove the iceships up out of orbit and toward the stars.
But that was not what struck Thackery dumb with awe. That was not what made a mockery of the exploits of the Service and the putative courage of its surveyors.
For the Weichsel had learned not only how to live on the ice, but had been forced to learn how to live through it. Despite their best efforts, over the centuries the
pressure on the population of the cities had continued. A lesser culture might have clamped a firmer public hand on private matters of reproduction, or consigned the excess infants to the glacier. But in their mastery of chemical polymorphism, the Weichsel had found a way to make room for the new young.
In every city, there were dozens of shells which held nothing but bodies—the cold bodies, not of the dead, but of the waiting. The water of their cells, though supercooled, had not frozen. The blood in their veins, though sluggish, had not stopped flowing. Their hearts beat once a minute, their minds dreamed languid dreams. They were fathers, mothers, and just ordinary people, stepping aside in favor of the new generation, and then waiting for the sun to grow warm again.
And it was thus that the Weichsel made their journey. Each crew of twelve chose its own destination star according to its own criteria, then boarded an iceship and settled in for the coldsleep with the gray wolves they regarded not as pets but as companions. It was audacity that powered their ships, Thackery thought, the audacious confidence which allowed them to set off believing that somewhere, sometime, the warmth of another sun would awaken the engines of both the ship and their bodies. And the knowledge that, for many, their journey would end otherwise raised rather than lowered Thackery’s profound esteem for them.
So it was with both shock and horror that Thackery watched the black star enter the solar system and rain death on the cities of the Forefathers.
The moon-sized ebony sphere with the indistinct surface was not a star, and yet he could not find another name by which to describe it. Nor could he name or even categorize the weapon, except by its effect. As though it were tuned to their resonant frequencies, the intruder’s weapon splintered the Weichsel structures, then vaporized the splinters. A filthy gray steam rose in great clouds, and the ground shook as the Weichsel cities fell. One orbit sufficed to destroy that which had survived all challenge for millennia.
On the second orbit, those humans who had not drowned in the sudden floods or been perforated by exploding icesteel found themselves torn apart from inside by energies they could neither feel nor flee. The blood of an entire civilization ran together to tint the newborn rivers red. Nor were the Weichsel the only life affected. Everywhere the great beasts were falling, mastodon and cave lion, megatheroid and dire wolf, glyptodont and short-faced bear. And when the black star left and the clouds vanished, the places which the Weichsel had called home were bare and dead.
–Why?– After witnessing the carnage, even mustering the control to ask that simple, poignant question was an all-consuming effort for Thackery.
=For that answer, we must go elsewhere.
To Thackery’s relief, they began to move uptime again. But the sight of the gallant Weichsel restored to life was hollow and bittersweet, for there was no erasing the memory of what lay in their future.
=That one, Merritt Thackery, Gabriel said, directing Thackery’s attention to a departing iceship. =The answer lies with that one.
Crossing the spindle at an angle that carried them both downtime and across space, the D’shanna and the human followed the tiny Weichsel iceship through the void. As they left Earth behind, the vividness of what Thackery had seen mercifully began to fade as his consciousness edited away the intolerable details. But he could not stop thinking about it or, when he grew stronger, talking about it.—Gabriel—did they all die?
=There was a great dying.
–But not the plants—the sea animals—the equatorial life—
=The sudden changes pressured many. Most survived.
–But none like me.
=No.
–Then how did there come to be people there again? Did one of the iceships return?
=No. Men returned to Earth because, at long last, I ceased only to watch.
–You?– The query was colored by both wonder and gratitude.
=When the colonies were strong enough to give back to their home world. It was a difficult thing for both them and us. Many died, and their deaths created a great disturbance in the spindle, a disturbance which began the migration of the D’shanna into the far uptime and which weakened me greatly. Those who did not die lost coherence and memory. When they weakened I brought more, until in time they bred and survived. They were your Forefathers, not those who lived in the cities of ice.
The tiny-ship and its frozen cargo raced on, until it neared a place where five suns whirled in a graceful ballet: greater twins at the center, so close they nearly touched, and orbited by a lesser trio. The iceship’s engines, facing the brightest of the suns, began to slow her, and its crew began to stir.
But before they could even have discerned whether the complex system before them harbored planets, a black star rose up from the neighborhood of the twins to meet it. The encounter was brief, silent, and telling. One moment the iceship was diving toward the system, the engines giving it an orange halo as they contributed their braking force. An eyeblink later it had been reduced to a spreading cloud of disassociated molecules which glittered prettily in the light of the five suns.
Thackery cried out in pain and turned away. Why the loss of a single ship cut him more deeply than the ravaging of all Earth he did not clearly understand even later, except perhaps because it was the second blow. But at that moment, he was consumed by an excruciating dolor.
–They were so close—
=This happened first,= Gabriel said. =This is what led to the greater dying.
–There was no reason, no need…
=You have seen the reason.
–For trespassing?
=For invading. As they did once. As you stood ready to do again.
–Why? Where are they now? Where are the Sterilizers?
=Where they have always been.
–Where is that?
=Look. You know the place.
Compelled despite himself, Thackery dragged himself back uptime and watched again as the Weichsel ship neared its destruction. A double star orbited by a triple—
He drew back along the ship’s line of approach and considered a larger volume of the matter-matrix. Close by was another bright binary, and far beyond a delicate whirlpool of stars. A spiral galaxy, viewed from above, the most spectacular vantage—but there are galaxies in every direction. Have / seen this one before, or does the clarity of seeing deceive me with false familiarity—That’s M101—
–Gabriel—I do know this place. Gabriel, you have to tell them.
=If you have seen, then I have told them.
–You have to stop them.
=How, Merritt Thackery? How can I quell this impulse in your kind, that rises up again and again? After all this time, I still do not understand you, what drives you. You must stop them. If I knew the way, it would be long done. I have done everything I am able to. I stopped the Sennifi. I stopped the Wenlock, too well as you saw. Yet even as I saw to it that there was no danger from the colonies, you came out again from Earth. There are too many of you, and I am much diminished now. You must stop them. I have stayed here amidst the disturbances which I created too long already. I cannot do it. To bring you here and teach you is my last service. Through the spindle, you have the ear of all your kind. You must stop them, Merritt Thackery. It is why I touched you. It is why you came here. You must stop them.
Gabriel’s insistent repetitions battered at Thackery until he was forced to close himself off, to shut down the new senses he had only just learned how to use. There was too much power in the D’shanna’s ideograms, the waves of energy too threatening to his coherence. He turned away and folded himself into a ball of cold light as tenuous and fragile as a soap bubble. But as he huddled there, keenly aware of his mortality, he sensed Gabriel’s resonance enveloping him, cocooning him once more.
And when Thackery at last felt strong enough to unfold again and look around him, it was the inside of Dove’s drive core that he welcomed back with joyful tears.
Chapter 17
* * *
The Horse by the Door
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For a long time, Thackery did nothing but shake inside his E-suit and cling with an iron grip to the reassuring solidity of the drive core bus conduit. His body was numb and unfamiliar, yet his nerves jangled with intense sensory messages.
While he struggled to reassert control over his physical self, Thackery was also fighting wave after wave of unchecked primal emotion. Bound to the spindle, he had had no outlet for the intense feelings evoked by what he had seen and heard there. Without a physical existence through which to cry, shout, strike out, or flee, the normal homeostatic mechanisms were short-circuited.
Now those bottled emotions broke over him in concert, terror and awe, anger and grief. Later, Thackery would wonder if that were not the explanation for what happened to the unprepared who found themselves in Gabriel’s universe. Strong emotions could be debilitating enough in the matter-matrix world. On the spindle, they were a short road to death or madness.
But for the present, Thackery simply clung to his handholds in a state of agitation for which he had no name. He kept seeing the black star and the Earth wearing a deathmask of gray steam, and the glittery remnant of the Weichsel iceship.
Presently the blue glow still dancing over the drive core reminded him of Munin, and he came to understand that the presence of the intrusive energies meant that Gabriel was still in control, slowing Dove and bringing her to a second rendezvous with her sister ship. “Did you get it?” he paged eagerly. “Amy? Gwen? Derrel? Did you see? Did you tear?”
There was no answer, and Thackery’s mercurial spirits fell precipitously. If Munin were not close enough to hear him and answer now, then Dove must have kept her distance throughout Thackery’s time on the spindle. Or did it matter? Would the suit cameras or transceiver have relayed anything of what I experienced?
That line of thought led Thackery to wonder how long his communion with Gabriel had lasted. Subjectively, there had been no reliable indicator of time, and even recalling the sequence of events he could not say how much time they seemed to require. The suit chronometer showed something less than two hours had passed, which jibed with the healthy oxygen and water reserves reported by the environmental monitors. But he could not say how much of that time he had spent cowering after his return, or even be confident his body had stayed behind while his consciousness had crossed over.
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