Cole was even getting used to Lee’s L.L.Bean safari jacket, which somehow didn’t look so silly on the Moon. Perhaps the one-sixth gravity made it drape better.
Zoe had never heard of Hong Kong time, so Lee plotted them on the stars. They were somewhere (anywhere) between one and 1.3 million years in the future. For some reason, this knowledge was as liberating to Cole as the one-sixth gravity. He felt like a ghost. Zoe took them for a walk outside. No space suits were needed; they wore a sheath of “sticky air” that was good, she said, for six or seven hours. Cole got cold after two, and there was nothing to see outside but gray ash and dull stones, unpolished by air or water. The Moon had an unfinished air, like an abandoned construction site.
Zoe brought them back in and they all undressed, quite unselfconsciously, and slipped into the hot tub and had more coffee. Cole was usually rather shy, or perhaps reserved is the word, but somehow nakedness felt natural in the lower gravity of the Moon; perhaps, he thought, our bodies remember a simpler time, when we were smaller – hominids, or children. They sat in the warm water under the dome looking down on the sea-blue Earth, the Pacific, streaked with white, like a boy’s favorite marble; his taw. A million years! Our planet looked like a single bright idea in a dead universe.
Lee sat on the edge of the tub with his feet in the water. He rechecked his numbers. He seemed exhilarated.
“A million years is only the beginning, in the life of a successful species,” he said. “The dinosaurs lasted hundreds of millions. We also could live that long. We are infants still.”
Infants? Cole’s hand found Zoe’s under the water. She was old and he was even older. “We at least survive our own madness,” he said. “Does that mean we don’t need Dear Abbey?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee. “Maybe we survived because of Dear Abbey. Because it was used.”
“Maybe from here it doesn’t matter,” Cole said.
“What is Dear Abbey?” Zoe asked.
After a million years, they could tell her. So they did.
“That’s pretty harsh. Were things really that bad?”
“They looked that bad,” said Cole, and Lee nodded gravely, in agreement.
“So Dear Abbey was designed to save the Earth, not humanity.”
“You might say that,” Cole said.
“The one depends on the other,” said Lee.
“Well, don’t expect ARD to thank you,” Zoe said. She pointed down – or was it up? – at the blue planet spinning slowly in space. “ARD is so cold, so uncaring. Rover is different.” She touched the air beside her ear. “I think the Moon would be very lonely without him. Wouldn’t the universe be very lonely without you, Rover?”
Unlike Amadou, Zoe loved to talk. Cole wondered if she talked to RVR when she was alone; and RVR told him, without his asking, that she did. Lee kept his own counsel, while Zoe and Cole drank a sort of sweet Moon grappa, and she told him her story. She had been born in Iceland almost a hundred years before. “That’s not our normal life span,” she said. “In low gravity, perhaps. Plus, sorrow has made me – enduring.” She had buried three children and three husbands. The barren plains, the gray ash overlooked by blue: it was the bleakness of it all that appealed to her. It reminded her of home.
Lee left them for the plants. He wandered through the aisles, touching the leaves and smelling the big flowers on their narrow low-grav stalks. Many of the plants were new species, brought forth on the moon. Although Zoe cared for them, in a way, she had little interest in them. It was RVR who talked of the plants with Lee, while Zoe and Cole listened in, laying back in the slow moving water that seemed, in that thin gravity, as thick and silvery as mercury.
The Moon base didn’t (as Cole realized he had hoped) mark a revival of interest in space travel. “There was never a call to space,” Zoe said. “Space is just a hole. The Earth is just a stone falling through a universe of hole. Once we knew we were alone, that there was just us, there was no reason to go exploring.”
No shining alien cities, she explained; no galactic empires to enslave, or befriend, or even notice us. No towering intellects or evil hive-beings. No fairies, no angels, no gods: for wasn’t it all the same childish dream? “And no surprise,” she said, pointing up. “Look at the Earth. Old Home. It literally teems with life. Nothing we could do even slowed it down. Life grows in every nook and cranny. It is the ideal environment, warm, wet, nurturing, and yet . . .”
And yet?
“And yet life arose only once, even there. Only once. All that fecund tangle of beasts and plants and molds and bugs and ponies and birds and germs and slimes – all of it is variations of one life-form. One only, a peculiar replicating carbon twist of DNA. Even on the sweet Earth, Old Home, it happened only once. How could we have ever expected to find it all over the universe?”
They were holding hands. Zoe held their hands up out of the water and they looked at them and at each other tenderly, with astonishment, as one might look at a miracle even as it is happening. Or winding down.
The blue Earth beyond was turned to Africa. Poor Africa, thought Cole. Its outlines were almost unchanged. A million years is only a moment, after all.
He told Zoe what it was like to be African in our day, a million years ago. “Partly it was prejudice, and part truth. Africa was the last to develop.”
Lee, back from his plant safari, sitting with his tiny, bone white feet in the water, shook his head ruefully. “That is a foolish equation,” he said. “Particularly from a million years in the future. It is only in the tiny window of our own small era that Africa appears backward.”
“I beg your pardon,” Cole said. “It was Europe that developed science. It was Europe, in the form of America, that first crossed space. It was Europe that first crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps China could have, but China didn’t. Africa wasn’t even close.”
“Do not be so sure,” Lee said. “There are signs that Africans may have crossed the Atlantic five hundred years before Columbus. The Europeans themselves did but did not notice. It did not count because the world was not ready. When it was ready, human culture burst into the flame of science everywhere. That five hundred years from 1500 to our year 2000 was only a moment in the history of our species. Less than a moment: it was really an instant. Science was certain to flare up somewhere in the tangled overheated pile of human culture. It was ready to happen and it happened to happen in Europe and not China or India or Africa. So what? When you throw a stick on a fire one end will burn first. Which end matters little, because it is the same stick.”
“A fire,” Zoe said, changing the subject. “That’s the only thing I miss, here on the Moon. Fire. I wouldn’t be lonely at all, if I had a fire that I could sit by and stare into.”
“Me too,” said RVR.
Zoe reached up and rubbed him. Cole saw and did the same. It was as if they were touching each other. Lee had set the PalmPC upright so they could all see when the cursor started flashing.
“I think you had better call it off,” said Zoe. “This Dear Abbey. There’s enough grief and catastrophe in every person’s life without adding to it on purpose.”
“I wonder,” Cole said. “Lee, what do you think?”
“I think,” said Lee, “that the history of humanity’s first one hundred and fifty thousand years is so filled with catastrophe and strife and disaster that one more or one less makes little difference. And might make all the difference.”
Cole shivered, even though the water was warm. “What do you think, RVR?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded confused. “Do you want me to know?”
“It is not up to us anyway, Cole,” said Lee. “We are not tourists here, Cole. We are part of an organization.”
“Speak for yourself, Lee. As I told you before . . .”
As if deliberately, to end the discussion, the PalmPC went beep beep.
Lee was already dressed; he was on the glider in an instant, patting the seat beside him. His hand was like the cursor, a r
hythmic signal.
“Okay, okay!” Cole said. He hated to say goodbye to Zoe – it was forever. But it didn’t seem to bother her; she was one of those people who likes goodbyes, and goodbye-forevers best of all.
Lee hit RETURN and you know the rest.
+10,000,000
No matter how far ahead in Time they traveled, the trip always was the same. A light that wasn’t light, a noise that wasn’t noise – it was like the controlled terror of an airliner’s take-off, and like an airline passenger, Cole was getting used to it.
It no longer seemed strange to be traveling through Time. Hadn’t he been doing it all his life? It was a gift, to see humanity’s future. Was that long and peaceful future the result of the gene sequence that they were chasing? Or was that future in spite of it; or even a result of their failure? Surely the Old Ones, Los Viejos, would be able to tell him. Why else would they have sent for them across a million years?
A million years! And so it was that, with his companion, he rode the endlessly cresting, white-capped wave of Time . . .
He opened his eyes when he felt the glider stop. Lee was pulling his hand away.
Not home. That was Cole’s first thought: not home.
They were outside, on a wooden deck, overlooking a wide plain that rose to mountains in the distance. Their outlines were unfamiliar. They were covered with golden or amber grass to a certain height, and above that snow. No rock, no ice, no trees. There seemed to be as little life or diversity here as on the Moon.
“Where the hell are we now, Dr. Lee?”
“You see that I am doing the numbers, Dr. Cole. We have all new numbers now.”
The glider faced a round table big enough for four. One man sat across the table, smiling at them. Cole was becoming used to this gradual fade-in of a world, and knew that the man had probably been there all along, watching them as one might watch a child awaken.
“Hello there,” Cole said.
“Hello,” the man answered. “Welcome. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Perhaps you have coffee?” Lee asked.
“Of course.”
“We both prefer coffee if it is not too much trouble, thank you.”
“No trouble at all.”
Cole had stopped thinking of black and white. The man who had watched them arrive was golden-skinned and Asian in the face, like Lee. He had dark gray hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wore embroidered slippers and his feet made whispering sounds as he brought coffee from inside the house. His name was Hilary and he was about sixty. Cole was no longer shy about asking, but people had stopped keeping exact count.
And he was not one of the Old Ones. Cole knew better, by now, than to ask. But he asked anyway.
It was getting dark outside, first the mountains, then the sky, but it was bright inside the house behind them. Cole could feel the warmth from the door that opened and shut behind Hilary. He could hear music, faint but oddly familiar.
“Perhaps you can tell us who these Old Ones are?” Lee asked. “And where we will find them – or when?”
“Aha!” Hilary said as he set the cups down. “We hoped perhaps you knew!” He explained that the Old Ones had communicated only once, to announce that Cole and Lee would arrive. Hilary and his wife Brin had been selected and sent to this place, which had no name, to welcome them and send them on their way. Brin was in Edminidine for the day, visiting their oldest daughter, Plenty. She would be back for the evening meal.
The door had stayed open behind Hilary, and now Cole recognized the music that was coming from inside the house. He had heard it in Paris as well. It was Miles Davis, the long, slow, sad modalities of Kind of Blue.
He asked about Paris. Hilary had never heard of it. Europe is all forest, RVR said in a voice that was lower even than a whisper. The largest cities are around the South Atlantic and the Pacific Rim. Lagos, Bonaire, Goral.
Had RVR acquired a new power? He seemed to be answering Cole’s questions before they were asked. “Are you reading my mind?” he asked, uneasily.
“No, no,” RVR said. “You must be subvocalizing. But if it bothers you . . .”
No, no. Cole felt comfortable with RVR, and a little bit of nosiness didn’t bother him. He took it as a sort of compliment.
Out on the darkening plain he could see shapes – antelope? Deer? Horses? They would run and then stop, run and then stop, gliding like a shadow across the grass.
While Lee was still calculating the size of their last slice, RVR whispered it into Cole’s ear. They were ten million (10,521,022) years in the future from our “present,” from dreary little Swick; and 10,634,123 from the Crossing, the beginning of human history.
Why didn’t you just give Lee the figures? Cole asked silently. Because Dr. Lee likes to work it out for himself, RVR answered.
The coffee was thick and sweet, served in tiny porcelain cups. Cole’s cup had a design of a dragon emerging from a cloud. To make the coffee hotter, you ran your finger around the rim of the cup, clockwise, and a red flame appeared from the dragon’s mouth. Or you could cool it down.
“Ten million years!” Lee said, closing his PalmPC and pursing his lips to indicate a whistle. Hilary nodded gravely; it was indeed a very long time. Cole realized that he and Lee were, to Hilary, First Men. Exotics, primitives. Cavemen.
He stopped playing with the dragon on his cup. “Ten million years,” he said. “And we are still here, on the Earth!”
“But of course!” said Hilary. Cole’s amazement was that humans still existed, but Hilary thought he was talking about space travel. There was nowhere else to go, Hilary explained. People still occasionally went to the Moon, but hardly ever to Mars, and the colonies on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter had long been abandoned. Asteroid mining had declined long ago; with recycling there was no need for new supplies of heavy metals.
The Universe was mostly emptiness. There was little to see and nothing to do. And even after ten million years, we were still alone . . .
There had been a gradual increase in life span (still less than 100) and a corresponding decrease in the birth rate, and now there were some four billion humans on the planet. (ARD kept exact numbers, RVR told Cole: 3,978,098,356.)
“Here comes one of them now,” Hilary said, his voice brightening. He pointed toward the mountains, where a small flyer was coming over the crest, descending. But Cole and Lee couldn’t keep their eyes on the plane. Instead they watched astonished, as Hilary’s hair arranged itself on his head into long gray cornrows.
Minutes later the little plane landed and Hilary’s wife Brin got out, slipping gracefully through a sort of liquid door, her face all creased with smiles.
The plane’s stubby wings were transparent, and disappeared, like the door, as soon as the big propeller stopped turning. Cole thought of Wonder Woman – and Brin was almost as good-looking. Better, really; better outfit, anyway. She wore an Amelia Earhart-style leather jacket over flowing silk pants.
“Dr. Cole, Dr Lee!” She was younger than Hilary (so that had not changed!) and appeared to be of Indian ancestry, though who knew what ancestry meant anymore? Was there still an India? Cole wondered. (No, RVR told him; though there were several languages of Indian origin.) Brin’s skin was the color of warm ashes. Her hair was coiled on her head in an intricate “do,” and Cole wondered if it had done itself as she landed, like Hilary’s.
“Hilary and I can’t leave together,” she said, as she invited them into the house. “It’s the only problem with this assignment.”
Cole realized that they had been outside on the deck only to wait on her. She was a lot more talkative than Hilary, and he became more talkative when she was around. Cole and Lee’s arrival had been pinned down to plus or minus four months, Brin said as she and Hilary prepared dinner, working together. The wait had been a welcome vacation, an opportunity to spend a few months alone together here in a remote and beautiful area that was closed by ARD to human habitation. That was why it had no name; names were seen as
an encroachment, a mark on the land.
“We just call it ‘house,’ ” said Brin. Houses grew themselves in a few months, according to a multiplicity of plans; this one would decompose swiftly after Brin and Hilary left, like grass.
There is a curious phenomenon in the life of couples, Cole noticed. The fires of young love are sometimes matched by a later fire, after the children are gone, and the body’s beauty has fled, or at least softened. This glow, which he had seen between his Gramma and Grampa in Tennessee (certainly not between his mother and any man), he now saw between Hilary and Brin. Oh, they paid attention to Lee and him; they cooked them a fabulous meal. But they could hardly keep their eyes or their hands off each other as they chopped and stirred. Cole found it touching, but it made him lonely, too.
They had drinks, a peaty single malt. Like Miles Davis, scotch persisted in its original form. Ten million years! There was no stove but a pot that heated itself as Hilary threw in slices of meat (horse, Cole was told) and potatoes and leeks. A Mongolian dish, RVR said, “showing” Cole a map in some limbic area of his brain. It was a new trick, both impressive and disturbing. The continents still had their customary shapes, although North and South America were, as he had seen before, no longer connected. Scotland was an island to itself, and Europe smaller. The Great Lakes were gone. Africa was almost split in two by a large bay where the Congo used to be. The plain they now overlooked was not too far from the old highlands of Tibet, though lower and wetter according to the map.
Cole wanted to “look” at the cities but realized he was being rude, so he returned to the dinner table conversation.
“How was it that your hair got done?” Lee was asking.
“RVR,” Hilary said, reaching up beside his ear to pet him. “He senses my excitement and pleasure that Brin is coming home. He wants me to look good.”
“I mean how, physically,” Lee said.
“Physical? You mean the movement? Some kind of electrical plasma thing. You’ll have to ask RVR. It’s all electrical or something.”
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