When Mula’s Association gave him word that a ship lay in degrading orbit off Banola, threatening to vanquish itself, threatening to vanquish that small container full of artifacts from that long-deceased home world, Earth, he knew he had to go. The payoff would be huge, especially if there were genomes aboard.
The star cruiser wreckage orbited Banola in a disjointed cluster, revolving against the planet as if frozen in mid-explosion. Despite the dangers, Flint convinced his crew to strike out anyway. An impact, one their instruments didn’t predict, hurled the piece his crew was on into a degrading orbit. He made it back to the Lune, Reel’s voice berating him for help. “I’ve made it back. I’m descending.” But he already knew any rescue would be impossible. He descended as near as he could, turned off his speakers, and watched as the wreckage flamed into the atmosphere of Banola, carrying his crew down into the gas giant’s twisting hydrogen storms.
Tears fell to the floor from his face, his neck twisted up as the Ancio projected the loss of his crew. He let his face rest against the Lune’s floor.
When he returned to Pril, his crew dead, Mula was gone, disappeared, and Flint was left with no buyer for the little artifacts he did manage to salvage. Mula’s whole association and anyone who knew anything about him were also gone.
Flint had found canary DNA, and the genome of the carnivorous plant, Dionaea muscipula, and desperately wanted to sell them, but no one would buy. His whole crew dead, and he had nothing to show for it.
Not being able to pay his docking fee, the Pril authorities impounded the Lune and threw Flint into a detention center, where he ate off the floor for five years and worked in an Ancio manufacturing plant, repairing tiny robotic builders. When they released him, he haggled and stole, risking further imprisonment until he earned enough to retrieve the Lune. He vowed he’d kill Mula if he ever found him again.
Flint searched for years, thirty or forty of his own life, years known as personal years, all the while the years of objective time passed in the thousands as Flint lay in preservation sleep between star systems.
Why had this man disappeared? Where was he?
He aged poorly. And he kept the Ancio turned on. It was the only thing they couldn’t take away from him. Once he did get his ship back, he never retained a new crew, instead he kept watching the Ancio’s impressions of the previous one.
The ability to live among the best impressions of your life—the Ancio put them back into your world, letting you relive these lost moments. It drew on the brain’s memory and knew how to seek the right emotional chords, playing your brain like an instrument of reflection. The fleeting déjà vu, thinking you see someone out of the corner of your eye—the Ancio capitalized on such fragments, turning them into a reality. It was the perfect device for people of a galactic scattering, who spent eons sleeping in preservation tanks, so when they did return to their home worlds, all would be different, changed. The Ancio helped one remember, helped one place the world that once was over the new one.
The Ancio also did another thing. It made its creator, Victor Mula, wealthy and gave him the resources to employ thousands of rakers to seek out Earth artifacts.
He searched for years. Hunted down rumors. Questioned many a traveler. Finally, he found where Mula was hiding, and the information was so outrageous that he barely believed it. Mula had built a sphere around a planet called Eno, where he was attempting to resurrect Earth.
* * *
When Flint neared the debris field orbiting Eno, what once looked like glass shards now looked like discarded and complex shapes the size of asteroids, all much larger than the Lune, like a moon made of cream-metal had exploded and scattered around the planet. Broken arrays, mountainous truss segments, broken modules that could’ve housed thousands, all towered around the Lune, forcing Flint to navigate carefully, using their gravitational wells to help save engine thrusts.
Endless metallic sheets flapped and twirled as if unspooled from some galactic roller, and small figures twisted tranquilly in the distance, caught in the gravity wells of broken compartments and split nodes; they resembled mannequins—the frozen bodies of the unlucky ones caught at the breaking points of whatever this used to be. Now it was orbital garbage and would occupy the planet’s gravity well for who knew how long.
No spacecraft drifted among the flotsam. But a large, mostly intact structure drifted in equatorial orbit. The segment looked like a broken diamond, shards sticking out at odd angles, solar panels still gently rotating on the sun’s side. Portions of it spun with centrifugal force, others lay deadly still—a possible haven for survivors, for Mula, to hide.
Flint commanded the Lune to dock with it, and then he descended the ladder to the airlock, where he suited up and donned a helmet and oxygen reserve pack. He fitted magnetic boots over his feet.
Soon, the Lune’s airlock shook around him as the automatic docking took place. Flint felt the vibration of connecting to the airlock on the other side. Then the door shut behind him, barring any retreat back into the ship.
In front of him, the Lune’s airlock door slid up, revealing a transparent door on the other side. So thick was it, that shapes from the corridor beyond twisted and curved in optical distortion. The door reflected the eight green lights on the Lune’s ceiling, and these lights spread out as the door parted like an unfurling blossom, four distinct petals folding into the floor before him. He stepped forward cautiously, followed by his crew, who still hovered around him. He considered switching off the Ancio again, but shuddered under the fear of being alone.
The tubular walkway’s ceiling provided a transparent view: Debris flew around everywhere and Flint felt adrenaline surge through him. Before him, down the walkway’s center, grass grew, green and thick. He treaded down the grassy path into the structure.
As he progressed out of the airlock tunnel and into the main corridors of the structure, giant ferns grew from the walls and vines hung from the ceiling, decorating the passageways.
He wandered the narrow corridors; saw the guts of walls spilled out with bulky fiber optic cables and organics he didn’t recognize; coolant, water, and other liquids flowed freely down one hall; luggage carriers spilled over with ladies’ dresses and men’s shirts; in a corner by a window, a single child’s toy, blackened and melted on one side, its soft innards dangling out. In other places he found rooms filled with tooth necklaces and claws, rings made of polished, bleached bone, piles of folded soft leathers the likes of which he’d never felt or seen before. Hobs and Drake would’ve stuffed their satchels with the clothing and jewelry.
He entered a dark, frosty room, his helmet lights automatically switching on to cut through the murk. Darkened panels lined the walls and the ceiling, chairs bolted to the ground, switches devoid of activity.
Hours later, he entered a storage bay, and stacked far above his head were transport containers as big as houses, long and rectangular, with slanted sides so when stacked one behind the other, they could lock on to one another in the bays of ships and stay together with no gravity. The crates stretched to the back of the large storage room, high to the ceiling. Flint moved in the spaces between, as though navigating through a valley of symmetrical rock monuments.
Flint’s boots sloshed through puddles of fluid, draining from a wall and flowing under the small spaces between the crates. Fluids moved oddly under centrifugal force.
The whole room shook.
“Hold on!” Flint screamed.
A great sound rocked the station, and briefly its spin must have decreased, for objects lifted from the floor and floated, as did Flint’s body, but after the impact, the structure returned to its regular interval of centrifugal force.
He left the storage room for another cavernous bay.
Click, flick, click—his helmet lights blinked on. Flint moved forward, his helm light washing over large stacks of juicy red plastic packages. He kept his helm light on Reel’s hips, but then the cavernous module distracted him. These packages were at least a
s tall as Reel’s chest.
Flint poked a large package. “Meat?” he murmured.
Then he raised his helm lights, pointing them at the ceiling. Above him dangled giant rib cages the size of the Lune’s whole living space with cool meat on them, the fleshy insides of beasts far larger than he had ever seen before. Giant hooks suspended the meaty cages from the ceiling.
The sides of the bay were lined with doors to lockers holding smaller amounts of meat, freezers preserving it. Robotic arms hung above him, inert in the cold air, cleavers and knives extending from their hydraulic grips.
Beyond the freezers, deeper into the cavernous module, piled high, were the massive bones from these animals. The piles looked as if they had once been stacked neatly, but had now collapsed under the recent impacts. Skulls of beasts bearing teeth, monsters. He knew what they were. Creatures from Earth’s past. He had collected their fossilized bones, even had some on the Lune, but these weren’t fossils.
The area was so large that Flint could not see the ceiling, for the walls of this place rose beyond the tepid mist saturating the space. Beasts hung from a circular plate larger than the Lune, hundreds of them, and below, a zigzagging trough of blood, deep and pestilent, like a pool of curdled milk, dried now, a brownish color. And the beasts dangled upside down by their shackled tails, the circular plate leaning forward so the creatures hung away from its surface and bled into the pool below, their insanely long necks cut open. And on either side of that plate were holding stalls and planks so when the disc rotated, more animals could be shackled and bled out. He knew these giants, too. Brachiosaurus.
He moved on through the low light and out the door, exiting into a hall on the other side. Not long after, he located a map and searched the preservation rooms for survivors. The search took him hours, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to cross to the other side of the massive segment, a journey that might take days and require him to go back to the Lune for provisions before setting out. Flint had no luck with the first seven preservation rooms. They were empty of anyone. He moved on to the second to last.
Flint entered the chamber housing the preservation tanks. Light filtered in from the broken ducts above and shined across the tanks in divided rays.
Flint inspected tank after tank until he found one intact. A man, chubby, squat, looking rested, lay inside the tank.
Victor Mula.
Flint couldn’t believe it. After years of searching worlds and chasing rumors, he’d found Mula. He sat a while staring at the man in the preservation gel. Flint had thought so often about what to do in this moment, but now that he was faced with action, all those plans and vengeful fantasies left him.
Finally, after a long moment, Flint reached forward and aimed his finger at the ROUSE button. The tank’s sides warmed with a glow of light, and the gel, once hard, began to move as it warmed. The man’s eyes opened with panic as the white, ribbed tube snaked from his open mouth and then spooled up and away.
* * *
Eight-year-old Victor Mula wandered the vast network of interlocking passageways in Pril’s Candor Port. He came upon a long line of children and spectators leading up one of the ramps to a quaint, smallish cargo vessel. Spacecraft like this were always coming in and out of the port with cargo from distant worlds. Rakers traded their goods in the nearby Folo Market and took on provisions for their next interstellar journey.
Mula waited in line with the others as they slowly ambled up the ramp. Finally, a pretty woman with obsidian hair asked him for some Melz, Pril digital currency, and Victor, curiosity overflowing, handed over all he had and was allowed on board.
In the cargo bay of the vessel, groups of children ran around the many levels and between the holding shelves of artifacts. Victor had never seen so many preserved animals, suspended in hardened gel, stacked one on top of the other with little labels. Raccoon, bear, magpie, centipede…
Although creatures were the collection’s bulk, there was also a strange selection of clothing, games, ancient technologies. Victor eventually came across a case with a tiny creature about the size of his little finger. “Paraponera clavata, Bullet Ant,” read the label.
“That’s a favorite.” The man’s voice resounded from behind and startled Victor. He turned, and a young bearded man stood behind him. “It’s an ant. Perfectly preserved. It could be roused from its preservation at any time.”
“Are all these creatures from different worlds? There are so many…”
“No. All from one world.”
“What world?”
“Earth, of course. But these specimens are nothing. You should see my digital records. I own the genomes to over a thousand creatures. They’re priceless. But if you know anyone who wants to buy, I might be willing to part with a few.”
“I want to buy them,” Victor blurted out. Something welled up in him at that moment. He sensed the value and abruptly wanted them all. He didn’t know why. He only felt the force of the emotion, the strongest he had ever experienced in his young life.
The man shook his head. “You can’t afford them, kid. Bring me someone who can.”
Victor rushed home and begged his grandmother to come back to the cargo vessel with him. She agreed. “But not until tomorrow, grandson.” When they returned to the Candor Port, the vessel was gone, and the porters knew nothing of it. Victor cried, his eyes bleeding tears, and his grandmother could not calm him down. He felt betrayal like he never had before. He beat his fists against the glass, looking out upon the empty dock where the vessel had been.
Over the next few years, his grandmother told him the myths and legends of Earth, and Victor’s interest grew exponentially. Victor poured over the details of Earth life for hours a day. Though the origin of Earth and its disappearance were mysterious and mythical, fodder for tongue-in-cheek stories and mysticism across many worlds, real Earth artifacts had survived as well as real Earth life, like the specimens he’d seen on the ship that day. The remnants of Earth were out there, scattered, just like its humans, waiting to be found.
* * *
Victor Mula took space walks to look over Eno and the mega-structure with its transparent sections and segments interlocking in a sphere around the entire world. He gazed out over the planet’s surface and sometimes closed his eyes. He found it relaxing, more relaxing than anything he’d ever done. It was womb-like, he imagined, hanging out in the reflected surface glow of Eno. It was during a space walk, when he watched segments of the mega-structure drift into place, towed by small robotic craft, the segments coming together around Eno like thinly woven silver hairs, massive compared to a human but tiny in front of the planet.
Then Victor watched as the mega-structure, every year or so, straddled the planet, setting down on it, harvesting it, wiping out species, introducing new viruses, introducing new species. Induced hyper-evolution he called it, coining the term. But was it real evolution? Of course not. They were only engineering the parts of Earth’s evolution that they understood, speeding it up, learning as much as possible, and then skipping to the next evolutionary period. Mula, and many of the researchers, took extended preservation sleeps, thus prolonging their lives for the duration of the experiment.
He watched the recreations of Earth’s evolutionary periods from space, the beginnings of the Jurassic Period making the continents green with new vegetation. And sometimes Mula rode the mega-structure, the spherical cultivator, down to the surface as it collapsed and descended around the planet. During the first single-cell period there wasn’t much to see, although his giddy researchers upheld a state of euphoric ambition around sample jars of this life-infused water swimming with the microorganisms that once shared Earth’s ancient oceans.
The collapse of the mega-structure now was not only for cultivation and evolutionary induction, but for harvesting. Anything and everything that was edible should be harvested, Mula thought, and he ordered as much to the protest of many among his researchers. But for every researcher who protested the destruction of the
life they had created, there were many more who would benefit from the animals and plants being brought on board and dissected and studied.
So when the cultivation sphere was not in a collapse cycle around Eno, the space walks helped him soak it in, helped him feel what he set out to do, which wasn’t so much the science, for Mula was more businessman than researcher, more director than creator, but it was to feel the birth and rigor of life, to experience it visually, to ingest it when possible, and to fill the hole that Earth had left in him even though he’d never set foot on it, even though he had never known it and couldn’t possibly miss it in any nostalgic sense. Yet he did miss it, and more than that, he felt a hole in himself without it. It was for that reason, too, he came on the space walks, to connect with this world, this living imitation, this living altar to Earth he himself had forged, a man basking in his own private religion, filling a spiritual void from the loss of something he’d never had.
Now on such a space walk, as Mula drifted over the cultivator, the mega-structure’s transparent links reaching out over the surface and disappearing around the planet’s spherical curve, he witnessed something curious: escape pods. Millions of tiny flecks, like snowflakes jettisoned from a machine, spread out over the structure as if on an oxygen wind.
Mula’s body jerked, breaking him from his relaxed state, and he turned his suit to face the cultivator’s central hub. Its many segments still spun, but all the starships were exiting the airlocks. He turned again and watched thousands of the snowflake pods rain down on Eno’s atmosphere, transforming into orange specs as they pierced the planet.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 21