by Nick Gevers
“Perhaps your own theories about the spatial distribution of the changes will contribute to an ultimate solution, Professor.”
“So I hope. Now, let us focus on these screens. The change is imminent, I believe.”
Agent Narozhylenko moved to magnify the image of Wustner’s Weatherbolt on one display, but even as she did so the planet vanished, to be replaced by an edgeless curving wall bristling with dangerous- looking protrusions.
Avouris could merely gasp and say, “What the—?” before Narozhylenko had moved to step down the scale of the display.
Interposed between the Whispering Shade and the altered planet was a space-going vessel that had appeared from nowhere. So enormous as to render the Okhranka ship a pea next to a prize-winning pumpkin, the alien craft radiated martial prowess and a defiant hostility.
Narozhylenko’s frantic fingers found an active communications channel.
A separate panel showed a being that resembled a bipedal lobster colored fungal white. Its stubby midriff legs wiggled angrily. It occupied a command center bustling with others of its kind.
Avouris had time only to say, “That’s plainly an evolved form of the Ghost Crawdad of Miravalle Caverns.” Then the lobster was speaking.
“You are friends of the World Thinker, or enemies?”
“Who is the World Thinker?” asked Narozhylenko.
“Wrong answer. Now you must die.”
A coruscating sphere of blue-gold energy bloomed from the ship of the Ghost Crawdads, but the Whispering Shade was already curving and jinking away. The ball of destruction missed them and decohered violently but uselessly, flooding space with radiation. On the communications channel, the lobster captain gestured silently with his antennae, audio transmissions temporarily suspended at Narozhylenko’s behest.
Sweating yet composed, Narozhylenko said, “We have to get well beyond the mass of the planet before I dare kick in the superposition drive. Even then it’s extremely dangerous. Stall these angry arthropods somehow! Go!”
She flicked the audio back on, and Avouris began to babble.
“Sweet saltworms to you, my hardshell friends! May all your mates molt most enticingly! You mistake us for enemies? We are not! This World Thinker you mention is unknown to us. Please enlighten us poor, exoskeleton-bereft, leg-deficient beings.”
The lobster captain made no reply, but evidently shut off his own audio to consult with his officers. Narozhylenko evoked a tithe of additional power from the Shade’s engines. Avouris felt his own shirt pasted to his wet armpits.
“That’s it, keep it up! Just another five minutes . . .”
The lobster’s idiosyncratic but intelligible Galglot resumed. “You must know the World Thinker, source of all intelligence. His gift is a poisoned one, though. Admit it! Don’t you wish his destruction, impossible as that might be?”
“Oh, of course! Death to all World Thinkers! Free the sentients!”
The lobster captain performed what could only be interpreted as a disdainful arthropodic glare. “Your protestations are insufficiently sincere. Goodbye.”
Several more deadly rosettes of energy bloomed, converging rapidly and ineluctably on the human ship, just as Narozhylenko shouted, “Now!”
The Whispering Shade juddered, leaped, its metal bones ringing with one tremendous bong! then settled down into easy superposition travel outside the relativistic universe.
Agent Narozhylenko jumped up from the controls and flung herself at Fayard Avouris. He hardly knew how to react, half-expecting chastising corporal punishment for his diplomatic incompetence. But the agent’s kisses and caresses soon allayed that fear. Avouris returned them heartily.
In the interstices, the anthropologist whispered, “Oh, Ina Glinka . . .”
“No,” she whispered lusciously, “call me Rosy. . . .”
The armada amassed around Wangba- Szypyt IX would have caused the Ghost Crawdads to shed their tails and flee. The Okhranka Directorate was taking no chances on the arrival of another belligerent space-faring set of aliens. The human ships were porcupined with weaponry.
On the command deck of the lead cruiser, Rosy and Fayard occupied a rare position of civilian perquisite. Agent Narozhylenko was discussing tactics with a dour silver-haired soldier named Admiral Leppo Brice, while Avouris speculated with a team of academics about which species native to Wangba-Szypyt IX would be the candidate for uplift by the mysterious World Thinker.
“I like the odds on the Golden Dog-Snails. They already exhibit complex herd behaviors. . . .”
After their safe return from the Sockeye system, Rosy and Fayard had been thoroughly debriefed by the Okhranka. The telemetric records of their encounter with the Ghost Crawdads and the transformation of their planet had proven illuminating. Physicists were still analyzing the instantaneous phase-change the planet had undergone, but no final theories about the methodologies or technics employed by the enigmatic prime mover referenced by the Ghost Crawdads were forthcoming as yet. Of course, researches among the more placid alien races also continued apace.
The success of Fayard’s prediction and the strategic resourcefulness of Agent Narozhylenko naturally ensured that both would be invited to witness the next eruption of sentience.
As for their personal affairs—well, Fayard often caught himself whistling tunelessly and wearing the broadest of grins. All his old anomie derived from Mirror Sickness had been dispelled like mist before a tornado. Such was the power of Rosy’s affections.
Additionally, Mirror Sickness itself seemed to be abating as a cultural wavefront. The arrival of these new sophonts into the formerly homogenous galactic milieu was having a stimulating positive effect.
Avouris had taken this change into account in his calculations, redoing his astromesh polling to reflect the changed gradients of Mirror Sickness. His old predictions, in fact, had nominated the world of Bricklebank as the next candidate for change after Wustner’s Weatherbolt. But the new dynamics had brought them here instead.
And now the predicted moment was nearly at hand.
Hemmed in by taut-nerved military personnel, Fayard and Rosy intently observed the big screen dominated by a view of the mottled sapphire that was Wangba-Szypyt IX.
The anticipated moment came—
—passed—
—and passed again, with no evident change. Admiral Brice demanded, “Status groundside!” “No alterations, sir!”
Avouris began to feel sick. “What of Bricklebank?”
The communications officer reported no relevant news from that world, then hesitated at fresh data.
“Admiral Brice, a mining colony in the Furbini system reports an uplift outbreak there!”
“Belligerents?”
“No, sir. The new aliens appear to be vegetative in origin.”
A grim-faced Rosy clasped the hand of her lover in support. His voice weakly solicitous, Fayard Avouris contributed: “That would probably be the Hardaway Pitcher Plants. They already employ their vines like tentacles. . . .”
Admiral Brice glared at the hapless anthropologist. “Luckily, Professor, your incompetence has resulted in no harm to any innocents.”
“I assure you, Admiral, the next time—”
But the next predicted occurrence likewise failed to meet Avouris’s specifications.
And after that, his services were no longer valued at a premium.
What damnable factor had thrown off his careful plot of the contingent uplift instances? Avouris sensed that the errors were down to a faulty map of the Mirror Sickness. But his polling techniques and data-mining were watertight, as evidenced by his success at Wustner’s Weatherbolt.
Therefore, he must be getting bad inputs. Could some cultural force manifesting only in the portion of the galaxy currently under examination be responsible?
Avouris began a mental tour of his restored virtual topography of human culture.
The Leatherheads of Xyella would speak truth only to fellow clansmen, but his polling of t
hem had enlisted such informers.
The Mudmen of Bitterfields offered the reverse of what they believed. A transparent fix.
The Pingpanks of Stellwagen V radically modified all their speech with a complex vocabulary of mudras. Trivial to interpolate those gestures.
The Perciasepians of Troutfalls—
Some trained intuition made Avouris re-examine what he knew about this culture.
Six months ago, unknown to an otherwise preoccupied Avouris, a prophet named Hardesty had manifested among the Perciasepians. Hardesty’s rubric? Simplicity itself!
Optimism trumped reality!
Archived news reports revealed that the faddish ethos had spread like a plague, to the point that no Perciasepian nowadays would ever admit to any despair.
Here was the blot in his calculations! The Perciasepians had denied any Mirror Sickness among them.
Hastily, Avouris took his Perciasepian datapoints from half a year ago, prior to Hardesty’s advent, added in some compensatory factors, and reformulated his maps.
Eureka!
The office of Ina Glinka Narozhylenko had never witnessed such an intemperate visitor. Bursting into Rosy’s inner sanctum, Avouris found the agent occupied with the minor and semi-humiliating tasks she had been assigned since the debacle of sponsoring Avouris.
“Bofoellesskaber! Bofoellesskaber!”
“Fayard, please. What does that nonsense mean?”
“It’s the place where the next uplift outbreak will happen! You’ve got to tell the Directorate!”
“They want no part of you or me.”
“Then we’ll just have to go alone to prove we’re right.”
“I cannot secure a ship from the Okhranka this time.”
“We’ll rent one! What good are my savings now? Are you with me?”
Rosy sighed. “Who would take care of you otherwise?”
Once more, Rosy kicked at a plant resembling a green hassock. The vegetable furniture emitted a squeak from its punctured bladders, and collapsed fractionally into itself.
“Damn that cheating shipyard! And damn me for trusting them!”
Sitting on another living ottoman, Fayard nursed his contusions and sighed. “Please, Rosy, no more self-recriminations. Your skills are the only reason we are still alive.”
Some yards distant, the crumpled hulk of an old Pryton’s Nebulaskimmer still exuded vital fluids into the lush turf of Bofoellesskaber, at the terminus of a mile-long gouge in the planet’s rich soil. The rental craft would never journey from star to star again.
Rosy plopped down beside Fayard. “Granted. But I should have done a better pre-flight inspection. It’s just that we were in such a hurry—”
“My fault entirely. But look at the bright side. We’re unharmed for the moment. When the uplift happens, chances are good that the new aliens will be benevolent. Their presence will register on the Directorate’s desktop, an expedition will arrive, and we’ll soon be safely home.”
“I suppose . . .”
“Let’s brace ourselves now. We can expect the change soon.”
Fayard and Rosy hugged each other as they tried to anticipate what the uplift experience would feel like from planetside. Would the unknown phenomenon have any effect on their own constitutions? Might they be mutated in fast-forward fashion?
A subliminal shiver like the kiss of a ghost resonated through them. The moment must have come! But outwardly, nothing had changed.
“We must be distant from any new alien settlement on this world . . .” ventured Avouris.
“Fayard, look!”
Rosy was pointing skyward.
Bofoellesskaber’s single sun had been replaced by three.
A voice spoke in their heads: Welcome to your future. I am the World Thinker, humanity’s final heir.
As the World Thinker patiently explained things to his accidental visitors, his work was practically child’s play, here in a period some two billion years removed from Fayard and Rosy’s time.
Viewing the past and selecting a planet with the best potential for uplift, and in a galactic location where it would subsequently do the most good to mitigate Mirror Sickness, this demiurge would abstract the world entire from its native era. Brought forward to the far future and installed in this artificial star system whose three suns could be modulated to provide just the right spectrum that would mimic the original stellar environment, the world was ready for development.
The World Thinker next approached the species chosen for uplift treatment, tinkered with its genome to foster sentience, and then simply allowed Darwinian evolution to take its course over a few hundred or thousand millennia. No acceleration necessary. The alien culture would develop naturally in situ. When judged ripe, the whole world would be translated back to Fayard and Rosy’s era without more than a single unit of Planck time having ticked by in the eyes of the human observers in the past, thus making a whole race appear to arise instantaneously out of nowhere.
“But why?” asked Avouris. Despite receiving no visible sign of the World Thinker, Fayard had conceived an image of the being from its mental projections, an image which consorted nicely with a fussy old neurotic and knowledge-heavy librarian from his own undergraduate days.
A note of resigned sadness filtered into the World Thinker’s speech. To render myself nonexistent.
The native timeline known to the World Thinker had never exhibited any sentience save humanity. The cosmic human civilization had succumbed to wave after wave of Mirror Sickness, resulting in myriad ugly apocalyptic crashes and warped resurgences, an endless cycle of inbred frustration and soul miasma that had culminated in the World Thinker’s own lonely damaged birth at the end of human history.
I am an imperfect thing, half mad and so much less than I could have been. I bear within me the entire record of humanity’s bitter isolation. But it occurred to me that I could remake the past, to engender a better scenario. So I chose your era as the pivotal moment to install change, and began to seed it with alien sentience.
Rosy interrupted. “But if you still exist, then your plan did not work. Your seeding occurred two billion years ago, and yet you remain. You should have vanished instantly upon first conceiving of your scheme.”
A faint sense of laughter seemed to permeate the next words of the World Thinker.
But then how would the scheme ever have been carried out to result in my vanishing? No, the chronal paradoxes are unresolved. Am I operating across multiple timelines, living in one and tinkering with another, or do all my actions occur only in one strand of the multiverse? Maybe I am improving the continuum next door to mine. Is that yours or not? In any case, I have no choice but to continue. Humanity cannot develop in a healthy manner without alien peers. I am testament to that premise.
The three suns of Bofoellesskaber were now setting, and the air grew chill. Fayard and Rosy held each other more tightly.
“What’s to become of us?” Avouris asked.
Your presence will allow me to fulfill one last seeding, the most crucial of all. Don’t worry: I will visit you from time to time with aid.
Realization struck Avouris like a blow. “Surely such a sophisticated entity as yourself will not endorse such a cliché!”
No reply was forthcoming. Instantly their surroundings had altered.
The air, the light, the smells, the sounds—all possessed a primeval rightness, an ancestral gravity.
Rosy laughed with a touch of grimness. “Earth? Would you care to guess the date?”
Avouris sighed, then chuckled. “Far enough back, my dear, that there will be no constraints on our family size whatsoever, I imagine.”
Where Two or Three
Sheila Finch
The charge nurse barely paused in her fast trot down the hospice hallway. “Seventeen needs his water jug refilled. Can you get it?”
“I’ll get it.” Maddie turned back the way she had come. It was her second day as a volunteer—what a joke! she hadn’t volunteered for any
thing—but already she was getting the routine. Here, the charge nurse was boss.
She picked up a full plastic jug of ice water from the kitchen and walked back to room seventeen. Like most of the other rooms, it contained a hospital bed with a white coverlet, a straight-back visitor’s chair, a battered chest of drawers that had hosted too many patients’ belongings. Unlike the others, the occupant or his family hadn’t made an effort to personalize the room with family photos, artwork, or flowering plants. They hadn’t replaced the old 2- D, which probably didn’t work any more, with a newer Tri- D either. The hospice cat, a large orange tabby, jumped off the bed when she came in as if his shift was over once a volunteer showed up.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Maddie. I brought your water.”
The skinny old man on the bed didn’t open his eyes. “Haven’t seen you before.”
“Only my second day.”
He had the most wrinkled skin she’d ever seen, and his face was blotchy as if he’d had a bad sunburn and skinned recently. He had to be at least a hundred, she thought. There was a smell in the room too, not really bad but odd, sort of baby-powdery and musty at the same time. She picked up the empty jug. She definitely did not want to spend time in here.
“Why’re you here if you don’t like it?”
Maddie jumped. “Would I be here if I didn’t?” Lying again, she thought. One of these days she was going to have to break the habit.
He turned his head away from her. The back of his neck was scrawny as a chicken’s, and the skin was patchy here too. “Sit and visit.”
She sat gracelessly on the edge of the chair by the wall and stared at the old man’s neck. “So, what did you used to do?” she asked brightly. Most of the older ones liked to talk about the old days, the younger ones not so much.