I approached. Stuck out my hand to him. “You are Smoke,” I said. “And I am Silver, and we should have a good, long talk.”
He looked me over, took my hand and shook it, not in the firm, American way, but more reluctantly. As if it were a necessary chore he didn’t relish. He nodded, with a slight south Asian wobble to his nod. His eyes were gray, which was strange for a man so dark. With a gesture to his entourage, he turned and walked off towards the interior of the hangar. As we walked, I pondered him.
He seemed old like me, like Gold. How to tell? Impossible, really, but also, to me, obvious. He is young, kept somewhere near thirty, maybe late twenties. Brown skin, long of limb but not too tall. Thin, but not skinny. Trim. Wiry. Intense. Big ears, with lobes that hung low and looked, maybe, as if pierced with a large bore plug or earring. Eyes like gray fog. Strange eyes, for a man so dark. His gestures, posture, this man had been born rich, or grown up privileged. Used to deference—extreme deference. Taken all together, as a package, it was a strange sum. Unfamiliar.
We entered a side door in an office, which led to a utilitarian elevator. Down still more floors. How deep were we? I knew the Americans had delved deep in Colorado, Virginia, and other places, during the Vietnam era. But this place was new to me in the Southwest. New Mexico, Gold had said. I smiled to myself. As if Mexico wasn’t new, new as Montezuma.
We exited the elevator, and at some signal his entourage stayed behind, save for two who positioned themselves to either side of the sliding doors.
Down a short corridor, Smoke, Gold, and I. The walls were in Army gray below and white above waist height, a bulletin board on the wall with crisp rectangles of text. I glanced at one sheet as we passed. 217th STRATEGIC RESPONSE GROUP and DRILL SCHEDULE. The date was five years old. Disused, then, but kept ready. Gold strode ahead, reached an office door, opened it for Smoke and held it open for me as he passed. BASE COMMANDER stenciled on the glass, but no name. She had stowed her glasses in her breast pocket. Her eyes caught mine as I stepped past.
“I’ll be in the lounge,” she said, pointing farther down the hall. “They’ve got my favorite video game. Missile Command.” Her eyes twinkled. “Shout if you need me.” I nodded, and she closed the door behind me.
Smoke sat behind a desk. There were fat blue binders in a bookcase behind him. I studied a blueprint, framed, of a triangular airplane, all wing and odd angles shown from several perspectives. It was a big plane, with large vents for jets. OBSIDIAN V1, the legend read. I hadn’t seen this model in the press before, but I had heard of such planes, built in secret in small batches. Americans love their secrets.
Smoke was watching me read it. He gestured to a chair opposite him. I sat. “So, this place, are you in charge?” He blinked slowly.
“Nobody is in charge here,” he said. His accent was soft, but it was there. British, maybe? Or colonial India? South Africa? “We are squatting. This place is…decommissioned, I think the word is. Kept ready, just in case.”
“Cold war hangover then?” I said, just to keep him talking.
“Something like that. The rivalry that built it has become friendship, right? Or of secondary importance, perhaps.” He said this absently, looking down at his desk. He looked up. “The Russians and Americans are friends now, correct? This is a…theme in popular discourse. They are like us, correct? All friends? Pals?”
I smiled tightly. “Americans are naïve, but yes, there are a new crop of gangsters in charge in Russia, and they have shed their Soviet uniforms awhile back,” I said. It was true. “But they miss the prestige of the USSR since the world knows, or at least those who look closely at them, what they really are.”
“Isn’t everybody in power a gangster in some form or another? Our human rulers?” he asked, leveling those fog banked eyes at me. Human rulers. His accent nagged at me. I am good at such things, after long experience with listening and talking with people. I speak, or have spoken, most current languages.
It was too dark in the office, so I leaned forward and switched on the desk lamp. “Why are we here?”
“Here? It’s convenient.” He gestured around him. “We have power, lights, heat, some food, although it is disgusting. MREs.” He scowled at the word. “But we’ve all eaten worse at some point or another, I am guessing.”
“It’s a nuclear bomber base. A Cold War relic. Planning to bomb anyone?” I said.
He shrugged. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Nuclear weapons draw attention.”
“And you don’t want attention? Like to stay in the background?” A slight tightening around the gray eyes.
He nodded again with the slight wobble of the anterior trapezius muscle. “Not the sort that fusion bombs make,” he said.
“Are there any such here? I didn’t think they just left them lying around when they shut places like this down,” I said.
He gestured with his hands, a cutting off movement, then leaned back and folded them in his lap. “This place was available, it’s hidden, and it’s off the grid by design.” He looked at me. “Why are you here?”
“You brought me here,” I said. “Gold did.”
“You were coming here,” he said. “Clumsily.” It was a challenge.
“Maybe I was. Still, you collected me,” I said. “Also, clumsily.” I raised my eyebrows at him.
He was silent for a few moments. “There is an effort in California, in Mountain View.” He watched me, but I made no move or sign. “To create a…Mind. Yes? You know what I mean?”
A Mind. There it was. Somewhere in the back of my head a song changed pitch.
“New Frontiers?” I said.
He inclined his head. “They are one element, perhaps the most public. Others are less flamboyant. Less interested in publicity. Such Minds would be a new thing. A new thing in this world.”
I was silent for a moment. “This world? Look, how old are you?”
He sighed. “Does this matter?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “yes, yes it does. I’m old, you know this. Older than everyone I’ve ever met except for Gold. She doesn’t know her age, but we guess about thirty thousand years. She remembers several ice cycles. At least two.” I paused. “So yes, it matters. Don’t play games with me. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time and it’s wasted on me. What do you want?”
He smiled, leaning forward. “I may not be old in the way you are. I’m not…from here. I think maybe you have guessed this. Gold has. I’m not from this place, this Earth.” He spoke the last word with emphasis.
I cocked my head. Sincerity. This was new. “So? Where then? And how?”
“Where? Who knows? Oh, I know the name of my planet. Talus, we called it.” Tah-loose, he said. He shrugged. “It means nothing here. Unrelated. Forked long ago, I think.” He spread his hands, smiled wanly. “Cards on the table time. I’m an alien.”
I laughed. “You’re human, if odd to me,” I said. “You talk funny, and I can’t place you. How did you get here?”
“It’s supposed to be a secret,” he said, “but I should probably tell you.”
And so, he did.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I was born on Talus forty-odd years ago, as we measure time there. I am subjectively older than this, perhaps by several factors. I have experienced much, and can only relate a little to you. Talus is like Earth, physically. Same…place, if you take my meaning. Similar enough, anyway, although I can, if you like, show you on a globe some marked differences. Florida, for example, is not on Talus. There is a chain of islands, some of which are large there. Low, flat islands covered with mangrove, maybe how Florida used to be, here.
There are Worlds, you see, and Worlds. Worlds upon end. Some as alike as two peas from the same pod. Symmetrical, we call these. Congruent, is the concept. Close. Others, farther from Talus, for example, are different. There is drift. Change accumulates. This is how things are, though this is unknown to all but philosophers here. It is being guessed at, proposed, but no one knows
how to prove it. I can understand this, as I cannot prove it, though I know it to be true.
No human mind can grasp the mathematics of this. I have tried, as we are all tested, those of my…service. Who do my work. They test us to see if we have aptitude. I must have some aptitude, as they selected and trained me for this. But I could no more tell you how it is done, so to speak, than you might tell me how cells pass their structure from one to another, from ancestor to descendant. Maybe you can tell me this, yes, but it serves as an example. It is complex in ways hard for human minds to grasp.
So naturally you ask how did we of Talus learn this? I am not certain. We are not a historically minded culture, I have learned. Some Minds among us may keep such records. But I was never taught them. Only basic history, traditions, and customs of the society I was born into. What things we did, but never a structured study of the past. This is by design, although this is not a thought I would be comfortable discussing at home. It is seditious among my people to question authority. They punish it.
Different, yes. We forked, our Worlds, long ago. Once, perhaps, we shared a common thread, but then somewhere in our history, a forking occurred. Why, I do not know. I know only the practical elements of this, not the hows and whys. There is a tapestry of Worlds, and it binds each to another by an infinity of threads, but sometimes Worlds split. Perhaps they are always splitting, infinitely, as every particle down to the smallest of the small can split into its constituent parts. It might be so. I do not know. But practically, there is there, and there is here. And other places similar to this, to Talus, yet distinctly their own too. An infinity of Worlds, shadows or reflections of each other. Endless, Worlds upon Worlds.
We are, on Talus…not ruled, perhaps this is too strong a word, but rather governed by Minds that are not human. As a child, I thought them like kings, or somewhat like you might view friendly police officers. They lived among us, some of them humanlike in form, appearance, and manner. Some different, bred to a different purpose. Antlike, some of them, moving always about my feet, is an early memory I have. Silver ants, busily doing some antlike, inscrutable task. Tiny, so tiny. Hard to see, even. And sometimes, similar fliers. Or crablike creatures, scuttling darkly through the underbrush or forest trees, pruning and tending. They were many sorts, but as I learned, they were no more these Minds than a drone is a human mind. Lawnmowers. Tools only. The Minds are elsewhere, apart from their tools.
I never saw one, but our custom is that they exist and protect us. From what, they never told me. But as I grew, they shared other stories with me around our village hearth. Men, and women too, are not bad, but contain the seed of bad inside us. Unchecked, this can lead to many bad things. Men hurting men, being one example. Too many children, being another. War as you know they kept from us, so as a young person these concepts are hard to understand. Even for your feral children here, it is hard for them to grasp. But they learn quickly. On Talus, they taught us that the silver men, those with silvery eyes like mine, were our friends, to help us and guide us. And keep us safe, mostly from each other.
It was, as Gold says, a dreamtime. This word is apt. Not caused by natural ignorance of the world, as the dreamtimes she remembers, but by the interference of the Minds. Curation is a popular word here these days. Like in a museum or a zoo. I am, while not physically old like you, or like Gold, I am old. I have lived close to four hundred years in many places. I am experienced, and I have thought long on this subject. This is how Talus was and knowing about it may help explain me to you. We lived in a dream.
Dreamtime is a good word for it. Without history. Oh, things happened to individuals, and we told stories and I heard many of what my grandfather or father did, or where our family came from in our wanderings, for we were semi-nomadic. But never history. Things my grandfather lived through were probably much the same as the things his grandfather did. There was a lack of change, a permanence built of a long tradition, and I recognize why, now.
We knew, for example, that there were places our Guides did not want us to go, and steered us gently away from. Mostly through tradition. Our people didn’t go to the west, over a certain line of hills in what is probably Georgia, the US Georgia. I grew up in the northern Florida islands, for example, and we traveled throughout the Southeast a lot when I was younger. On foot, but sometimes in white boats we would find waiting for us on the beaches. We lived by hunting small game, gathering, and fishing. It was a good life, but there were few of us. Here? It is amazing there are so many! This is one thing the Guides warned us against. Too many children are a dangerous sin. Children were a rare gift, for us, and precious because of it. They encouraged us to love and pleasure each other, once we were old enough, but we considered having many children crass.
It did not seem possible. I see, here, families of large size. Five or six or even more children. This was impossible where I grew up. Perhaps we moved too much, or the Guides prevented it somehow. I do not know. But they kept us, I recognize that now, and cared for us. They managed us. Humanely, but, all the same, domesticated.
They took me early for this work. Once, when I was probably thirteen and just beginning to feel the stirrings of manhood, the Guides came to my tribe, three, each with gray eyes. Eyes like mine. They were people like us, it was clear. Not machines, but not just people either. Augments, is the way I would describe it. More than people. They spoke with our elders, and they decided that I would come with them and be given special knowledge for a great work. It was a great honor, and I recall my family’s pride that they had selected me. We had stories, naturally, of this happening, but it was rare, happening every few generations. The last had been in my grandfather’s father’s time.
There was a feast, and the Guides provided a clear liquor, just a sip to each. It caused much merriment and euphoria as we didn’t have such things. The Guides told stories long into the night, and there was a general feeling of wellbeing and happiness. The Guides were like gods, the hands of the gods, and we were their children.
So, they took me. After the feast, in the gray dawn while the village lay sleeping deeply, they came for me. I shouldered my little pack of stone tools and took my spear, but they smiled and shook their heads. They gently took them from me and lay them on the ground, and, with soft words and gentle smiles, led me from the camp inland towards a small bluff. There I looked down on my family’s little campsite for the last time.
We walked for many days after that. We visited other families and other camps, gathering boys and girls from each. Finally, we reached the sea and found silver boats waiting for us. They took us to the Center, where we were trained and educated. We were taught the true nature of the Worlds, and how the Center studies them in our great Work.
Yes, I have seen, as I will get to, many civilizations. It is the great work to which they selected me. I will explain. Each of the Worlds in the great tapestry of existence has a path. Isolated from the other existences. Island universes. When life arises, happening as it does out of the normal physical properties of matter, it spreads. It spreads across a world like plague or a disease in an afflicted person. Life spreads. It is the common definition of life.
Given time—and I mean time in the sense of the lifetimes of stars themselves, many billions of years—life can spread between Worlds. Across many Worlds. Your scientists themselves have postulated this. Panspermia, the word is here. Rocks strike Worlds, and these rocks, moving at orbital velocity or ever faster if big enough, will lift bits of the planet into space to escape the gravity of the World. Life, given enough time, will be present as bacteria, microbes, small animalia, all throughout this debris. Given more time, millions of years, perhaps this debris can find another World.
This is the model for how life forms and spreads within a universe. It can arise, given the right conditions, from anywhere, but this is how it spreads. It’s the only diffusion model that makes sense, and that explains the observable universe, which is the one we’re in right now. What we can see is all we can
know, but there is much more.
My work, which they raised me into after leaving my tribe, by the Guides in a school at Center—or the Center, as we called it—is the investigation of these island universes. I come from somewhere else. My cellular program, my DNA as you call it, is much like yours. We share some common ancestry, you and I, in the far reaches of this World’s timeline.
But at some point this World forked from mine. So I may have a different look from you. And my speech patterns are not like those you are familiar with. Gold, too, noticed this. These things do not matter. We are alike, you and I and Gold and all humans on this World, more than we are different. Much more. There are other types of life, which are…different.
I am sent by the Minds at the Center into these places to learn and report back. To help, if I can, in the great work to which they have set us. We do not, we cannot know from the Center, what is happening here. The Minds can sense that this universe exists and is here, and that is it is a good candidate for someone like me to visit. We are congruent, this universe and the Center’s. So we can visit here, but not other Worlds around other stars. And, since people are here, this means there is potential for communication. This potential is rare and precious.
Much to explain, yes, I agree. But before I continue, I must explain one more important thing. Life arises and spreads. Sometimes it is just bacteria. No intellect. No people. Sometimes there are animals, sometimes recognizable animals, but no people. Sometimes there are branches of the tree of life which have deviated so much from what we know that life on those Earths, those shadows, are as alien as anything in one of your movies. How the Center can navigate this tapestry of universes is unknown to me, but they can, as I am here. And I have been other places too, similar places.
Life arises, as I have said. And spreads throughout each universe. Sometimes, and we of the Center think this is exceedingly rare, intelligence arises. Humans have it. We are lucky, perhaps. Although it is a burden. A loaded gun, I have heard this phrase. Or a sharp tool, is a better analogy. There are those, somewhere deep in the past, who were first. Humans in the Center’s universe and here, and all the congruent infinities where humans or semi-humans exist (and there are many, Worlds beyond measurement), were not the First. We of the Center know this.
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