Calendrical Regression

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  I nodded. It made sense. The Svenkali who had helped me talk to my dead aunt had been banished by his people; none of them would ever invoke him once he died. It didn’t take much imagination to think that such a race wouldn’t appreciate competition, regardless of whether or not it impinged on them.

  Nikos waved my comprehension away with a sweep of his hand. “You think you understand, Mr. Conroy, but you do not. Humans have a singular view of consciousness, but there are other options. The Svenkali experience consciousness in series. Each living being can invoke any who has come before, benefiting from their lives and wisdom. My people approach it in yet another way. Thirty times each day the Uary all reconnect and share. Our experience is unitary, each individual is simply an outward manifestation of a larger whole. In many ways, the system is quite superior to the Svenkali ability.”

  “So, they want you dead because they resent you?”

  “Remember how I said they believe themselves to be perfect?” Nicole had moved to the other side of the gate and waved impatiently for us to follow. “The Uary threatens that belief just by existing. That, and our need to understand and categorize all things. You might find it simpler to think of us as a race of galactic librarians. What we learn, we share with other races; it defines who we are. The Svenkali, on the other hand, have had billions of years to perfect behaving like spoiled children. Their toys are for them alone.”

  “Okay, that explains why they want to kill you. But what does any of that have to do with me?” Nicole had reached the hatch; she ignored me and boarded the plane. I turned to Nikos, who shrugged.

  “As Nicole said, we will tell you everything. But now that Lorsca knows we are on Earth, time is critical. We need to leave for Veracruz at once.” Nikos moved to follow her aboard.

  “Hold on! I am not going to Mexico!”

  He paused and turned back to face me. “Mr. Conroy, I assume you want the opportunity to regain your buffalito, yes?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then one of two things has to happen. Either you must find Lorsca, or it must find you.”

  “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “We cannot. The Svenkali do not travel amidst other races so we can assume Lorsca had a vessel somewhere nearby. Killing the Uary is not enough. It must flay us, body and mind, and there is only one weapon to accomplish that. It will need to return to its craft and fashion a new peeler.”

  “That doesn’t help me to find Reggie,” I said.

  “There is no need to find him. Lorsca will bring your buffalito with it when it comes to kill us. To ensure your reunion with your creature you need only wait until the assassin appears.”

  “You’re saying I have to go with you, because the Svenkali will track down you and Nicole and have Reggie with it when it does.”

  “Precisely. And we are going to Veracruz, where Mr. Sho is waiting for us. Now, are you coming?” He turned his back to me and followed Nicole onto the plane.

  I didn’t have any real choice, not if I wanted to get Reggie back. I ran after the Uary and up the steps.

  Except, it wasn’t really a plane. Sure, it had wings and a fuselage, and all those other plane-shaped parts that pilots and other air-travel aficionados know the names of, everything you’d expect to find on a plane when viewing it from the outside. Inside though, once I stepped past the entryway — which could be seen by someone outside — it was all plasma-walls and gel-beds and interactive foofaraw that highly advanced aliens used when traveling with speed and comfort. In space.

  “Why do you have a space yacht disguised as an airplane?”

  Nicole had already settled in the pilot’s couch well forward of the entryway and her hands danced across some elaborate holographic control interface, laying in the course or maybe just programming the thing to record her favorite soaps on some local midwestern vid channel.

  Nearer the rear of the vessel, Nikos reclined on one of the gel-beds and waved me to another. The faintest of quivers in the bed’s surface revealed that we had already taken off.

  “The Uary has always found it best to blend in wherever we go. It… simplifies things. Thus, when visiting Earth, we present as human and reconfigure our vessel to a local analogue.”

  Imagine an overly friendly chaise longue and you’ll have a reasonable idea of how it feels to lie on a gel-bed. I may not know much about spacecraft, but the only reason to have acceleration furniture was if you had the capability and intention of engaging in some high-gee maneuvers over and above what could be readily absorbed by the technological wizardry that created a spacecraft’s gravity in the first place.

  “Just how fast are you planning to fly to Veracruz?” It was a question better asked of Nicole, given that she was piloting, but I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter which of them I spoke to, and Nikos was right there.

  “We’re not actually flying there, Mr. Conroy. That might draw too much attention and could alert Lorsca to our destination. He is, of a certainty, monitoring local air traffic communications. Instead we will employ a translocational slippage using your world’s own magnetic field.”

  “Trans-what?”

  “It’s a technology for moving between two points on a planet that share the same longitude. It has only limited application, which is why it went out of vogue millions of years ago.”

  “Then why are you using it?”

  “Two reasons: First, because Omaha and Veracruz share approximately the same longitude. And second, because it is so obscure that a Svenkali hunter-drone would never think to scan for it.”

  “And you just happened to have this obsolete hardware on your ship?”

  “Not at all,” said Nicole from the front of the vessel. “We acquired it from a consultant.”

  “A consultant?”

  “This is the first time the Uary has come to your world. We required the assistance of a data-broker to locate both Mr. Sho and you. Since your experience with Kwarum on Hesnarj we have followed your career from a distance. But you are only half of the equation. Finding someone with Mr. Sho’s pedigree was much harder. He is the direct, patrilineal descendant of a Mayan priest born four thousand years ago.”

  “Right. And this data-broker just happened to know where you could find such a person?”

  “Yes. And yourself as well. He also provided the translocational slippage unit.”

  “That’s nonsense. Finding me is easy, but how would a human consultant be able to trace someone’s lineage back four thousand years to a specific person? To say nothing of having a spare, working model of ancient extra-terrestrial technology?”

  Nicole glanced over her shoulder, a disapproving expression on her face. “I didn’t say he was human. Yours is not the only race on the planet any more. The data-broker was a Clarkeson.”

  Nikos had somehow rotated his gel-bed around to face me. “Is something wrong, Mr. Conroy? You are becoming upset.”

  I ignored him and continued questioning Nicole. “A Clarkeson? Is that why you were asking me if I’d ever met any?”

  “Indeed. It seemed quite ironic that you would have included the illusion of one in your show.”

  “That’s not ironic, and it’s certainly not coincidental, not with a Clarkeson involved. You said something to the same effect yourself.”

  Nikos shrugged and picked up the conversation. “We had some concerns, but Mr. Sho checked out exactly as the Clarkeson said. And you were right where he told us you would be. It was a mutually beneficial trade of information.”

  I sat up quickly, or would have if the gel-bed didn’t cling and reduce my effort to slow motion. “What information is he getting out of it?”

  “The results of your interaction with Mr. Sho.”

  “What interaction? You still haven’t told me what any of this is about.”

  “It’s really quite simple,” said Nikos. “We want you to hypnotically regress Mr. Sho. Take him back four thousand years to his many times great grandfather.”

&nbs
p; “That’s crazy! What’s the point of that?”

  “We’re after two things, actually, but what we’re hoping to acquire from Mr. Sho’s ancestor is information about the Mayan calendar.”

  I had to pause and rack my brain for a moment. I knew the ancient Mayans had possessed some elaborate calendrical system, but I couldn’t think how it might interest the Uary. When in doubt, ask. “What about it?”

  “The Long Count of the Mayan calendar reached the conclusion of its thirteenth baktun on December 21st of 2012. Does that date mean anything to you?”

  I nodded, still not able to put the pieces together. “Every kid in school knows that date. It was the day of Galactic Contact, when humans discovered we weren’t alone.”

  “Precisely. And it was predicted centuries in advance by the Mayan calendar.”

  “So? What does this have to do with getting me to hypnotically regress a cookbook writer back four millennia to his priestly ancestor?”

  “We want to ask him how they knew.”

  I stared at Nikos for a moment as conflicting responses battled for the right to exit my mouth, both about his misunderstanding of hypnotic regression and the absurdity of the question he intended to ask. Instead I turned to Nicole and inquired, “So, in rough terms that a non-engineer might understand, how does this translocational slippage work?”

  She tapped the board in front of her and an iris opened in the floor to reveal what I assumed was the hardware in question. It looked like a Klein bottle, one of those topological oddities where the inside and the outside are the same surface. It glowed with a faint amber light and deep in its guts I could see a tiny, red, airplane-shaped light.

  “I won’t try to explain the physics, but on a planetary surface a relationship exists between two points of common longitude that at a varying range of altitude makes it possible to achieve translocation. Essentially, once we have ascended to an acceptable verticality the device will engage and project a field of overlap. For a moment, everything within that field will simultaneously exist in both places and then slip from one to the other. The device powers down and we descend to our destination. At which point we— Oh!”

  That was all the warning I had as the not-an-airplane made use of its acceleration couches. Mine flipped up about a hundred degrees, forcing me back into the cushiony embrace of the gel even as I felt like I was leaning over the floor. The floor of course had moved too. We weren’t actually falling, but we’d definitely tumbled.

  “What’s happening?”

  Nicole’s hands flew wildly across the ship’s controls. Closer by, Nikos had likewise been grabbed and held by his gel-bed, but not before losing his sunglasses to the sudden change in orientation. His eyes were a vivid turquoise and he looked to be in a trance, or more likely having some kind of seizure.

  “Nicole, something’s wrong with Nikos.”

  “He’s fine. I’ve made an error in judgement and he is consulting the Uary archive for best-case scenarios.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I cannot know for certain, but my guess would be that we are the victims of our own nature.”

  The ship tumbled again, hard to port. A surprisingly loud clang reverberated through the hull.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Lorsca profiled us. He took into account our likely familiarity and preference with utilizing outmoded technology and set up countermeasures.”

  “Lorsca is here?”

  She slapped a spot on her board and the wall nearest me shimmered into a view screen. The Svenkali hovered outside the ship. It wore something that looked like an EVA suit with wings and a pair of jet engines. It held a gleaming white bazooka with both hands, which probably explained the earlier noise. There was a writhing sack affixed to its chest, bound in place by a series of straps. Reggie had eaten his head clear of the sack, but the straps held his body in place and prevented him from getting his mouth on anything more.

  “It’s trying to blow us up?”

  “It’s trying to force us to land,” said Nikos, back from wherever he’d been. “But I believe we will still make it to our destination.” He pried himself from his gel-bed and reached for the translocational slippage engine.

  “You can’t use the slippage thing?”

  Nikos smiled. The look of it was disturbing. “Oh yes, but not as planned.”

  The red representation of our vessel changed position within the device, shifting to the outside of the thing that was all inside anyway. Where it had been a new, smaller image like a insect appeared. Or maybe like a man with a pair of wings.

  “You can’t use that on Lorsca,” I said. “He’s still got Reggie!”

  “Your animal will be fine. I don’t have time for a proper reconfiguring to send him into a mountain, even assuming one exists on our line of longitude; your world is mostly water.”

  “You’re not sending them to Veracruz!”

  “No, that would only prevent us from going there. But I can reverse one of the fields and create an antipodean slippage.”

  “A what?”

  “A destination point on the other side of your world.”

  The Svenkali chose that moment to launch its bazooka again. Nicole dropped and spun the ship with sickening speed but we were too close and the missile struck hard.

  “We’re going to have trouble staying aloft soon,” said Nicole.

  “Powering up,” said Nikos.

  A blurry effect that was half heat shimmer / half oil slick encompassed the Svenkali, its bazooka and wings, and my buffalito. An instant later, the field and all it contained had vanished.

  “Where are they?

  “Your Indian Ocean, roughly midway between South Africa and Australia.”

  “I can’t keep us within the critical altitude much longer,” said Nicole.

  “You won’t have to. We have sufficient charge for another use. A moment while I reconfigure…”

  As Nikos applied himself, the light representing the ship floated back within the belly of the device.

  “Make it half a moment.”

  “Powering now—”

  I had the sudden feeling like I was going to be sick in two places at the same time, and then it passed, only to be replaced by a more familiar nausea as we began to fall out of the sky.

  “Not to worry,” called Nicole. “This is mostly a controlled descent. I’m just getting us down before Mexican Air Traffic Control notices us and starts asking questions. We’re coming in over the heart of the city. I could put us down on highway one-forty if we want.”

  “No need,” said Nikos. “Mr. Sho has arranged a landing spot for us on the dock in front of one of his warehouses.”

  “A bit more difficult, but doable. Hold on tight.”

  We proceeded to fall out of the sky.

  We set down hard between a row of cargo containers. It was still that special dark time after midnight and before dawn, which if you have to make an unannounced landing on a dock at the busiest port in the Mexican state of Veracruz, you couldn’t pick a better time this side of never.

  “I didn’t have time to worry about sound effects or flying in like a plane would,” said Nicole as we peeled ourselves from our respective gel-beds. At her command, the hatch opened. Nikos tumbled the steps out ahead of him as he exited. I followed. Nicole stayed at her board doing some final something or other with the controls.

  “And here is Mr. Sho come to greet us. Ah, and someone else.”

  Nikos’s ‘someone else’ was presumably the woman running towards us with a gun in her hand. She wore what was probably a standard jumpsuit for dock security, a utility belt, and boots. As she ran between the puddles of light cast by the floods mounted on the nearby warehouses I couldn’t make out the actual color of her clothes, but the occasional glint of a badge on her chest — along with the gun — had me pretty confident of her job. She passed Sho, shouting at us in Spanish all the while. Her words roared by too fast for me to follow with my limited command
of the language, but that was fine. I could guess what they meant and besides, the gun spoke clearly enough. I froze just outside the Uary ship, held my hands above my head, and did my best to look innocent of, well, everything.

  “No hay una problema,” said Mr. Sho as he caught up. “Son mis invitados.”

  The security guard stopped but she didn’t lower her weapon. Nikos stepped forward, hand outstretched, all smiles as if he hadn’t noticed the gun aimed at him, either because he was oblivious or that it happened so often he couldn’t be bothered.

  “Señor Sho, thank you. My apologies for any complications our abrupt arrival has caused. May I present Mr. Conroy? He is the hypnotist I told you about.”

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Conroy.”

  The guard holstered her weapon and I took that as my cue to lower my arms and step forward. Although he’d just spoken fluent Spanish to the guard, the man didn’t strike me as a Latino, let alone the descendant of a Mayan priest. If his English had an accent, it was the kind picked up from attending a business school in the American northeast. He was tall and skinny, and moved in that awkward gawky way of the physically self-conscious. Even in the poor light I could tell he was pale. Only the utter blackness of his straight black hair hinted at his heritage, and even that was a bit of conjecture as he wore it in a short businessman’s cut.

  “Likewise, I’m sure. So, um… sorghum?”

  He smiled at me, his teeth gleaming and straight. “All around us. In all of these containers. This species grows only here in Mexico, and has proven resistant to several diseases which have decimated European and American crops. Supply and demand, as they say. But that’s not what brings us all together, eh?”

  “I suppose not, though I still haven’t agreed to anything.”

  Sho just blinked. Nikos nodded. “Nor have we explained everything as we promised to. But come, we have a suite at a nearby hotel and our case will seem more palatable if served with a hot breakfast.”