End of the Circle

by Jack McKinney

  Minmei threw herself at Rem, feeling the energy discharges around her, clinging to him, and together they vanished from the starship.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The music plays, and everyone must dance.

  Twentieth-century song lyric

  At the Intersection the Robotech Elders, in their smaller-model sphere ship, shrieked their outrage and despair.

  We had an agreement!

  Haydon answered, THAT MEANS NOTHING TO ME.

  Free us with the Protoculture as you abandon your sphere ships!

  What they said was true; the individual simulacra of Haydon were vanishing from sight. Somewhere beyond, they sensed, the One Haydon was coming into being again. He had no further use for the ships or the Protoculture—indeed, He released them to meet their own discorporation.

  But the Elders’ sphere He kept under his mental control. YOU, I WILL BRING WITH ME INTO MY NEW DOMAIN, AS I SHALL BRING ONE OTHER CONTAINER FROM SPACETIME.

  You struck a bargain with us!

  DID YOU THINK I COULDN’T SEE BEYOND YOUR WORDS? INTO YOUR THOUGHTS?

  Then the Robotech Elders wailed in truest fear; they’d planned to betray Haydon at the earliest juncture if the opportunity arose. Instead, they saw, He had brought them along until he could exact a satisfactory revenge.

  He was immortal but mortal enough to feel that urge.

  The venue known as newspace was empty, the stuff of conventional spacetime banished back to the place from which it had come. Haydon wanted no part of it; that was the entire point of His great effort.

  Instead, He discharged into newspace all the accumulated energies of His crossing, giving Himself unending raw material with which to work. Haydon willed new and utterly alien physical laws into being and set out to explore and shape His new domain.

  Except, that is, for two bubbles of normality. The first among those was the prison of the Robotech Elders. He imprisoned them once more in the hated thrones, in the bondage of systems that would ensure their survival. They perceived that some of the substance forming their bubble was the stuff of their Protoculture cap itself—depleted, reshaped, used in irony by Haydon.

  Then Haydon accelerated the flow of time within the sphere—to ensure its passage there.

  Tens of thousands of years might pass while Haydon’s attention was elsewhere for an instant, but every so often Haydon would look in on them and see how His little experiment was going.

  The Robotech Elders, imprisoned in the hated circle in which they had started, had their Immortality at last.

  Perhaps the best summation of subsequent events is found in Recollections: Peacetime by Admiral Lisa Hayes-Hunter.

  So those glorious old drives brought us home at last in grand style. Some people griped that it was a near thing, pointing out that the drives were about to blow when we came crashing out into Earthspace, but take it from me, they’d have done whatever they needed to, to get the job done.

  Of course by “home,” I mean conventional spacetime; the Sol system wasn’t exactly the old neighborhood for the XT Sentinels, the Zentraedi, and so forth.

  That didn’t matter much at the time.

  The pure joy of getting back to Earthspace was dampened, of course, when we realized that Minmei and Rem had disappeared. This, even though the pilots originally “kidnapped” from Red and Blue teams were miraculously put back aboard SDF-3, Veritechs and all, at the Intersection. As of this writing, there is no indication whatsoever of what happened to them, and all efforts to locate them or establish their fate have been fruitless.

  The second great shock of our arrival was the calculation (by astronomical AIs, from the positions of planets in the Sol system) of the elapsed time since the departure of Peter Pan. Foldspace had played another joke on us.

  More than ten years had passed.

  But that wasn’t enough to dampen our morale, not after what we’d been through. I think that those on board SDF-3 during that moment of Intersection will always be different. We were given a new perspective on life and death and our place in the scheme of things; that left its mark on us.

  And so SDF-3 started for Earth one last time, driven by auxiliary power. Somehow the transit from newspace had drained away all our Second Gen Protoculture, even what was left in the various mecha. We shall not see its like again, as the saying goes.

  There’s no denying the sheer joy of homecoming, though. The Earth below us was the first and best surprise: pristine and beautiful, her surface restored, her ecosystems flourishing with a vitality they hadn’t known in a century and a half and more.

  Maybe it was some kind of payback.

  We arrived to find that Earth had muddled through the multiple crises that had beset her, largely with the help of exotic new technology developed from information brought home by the Angel.

  But largely, it was a matter of humanity’s being sick of war. I’ve heard of old soldiers retiring from the carnage to create and retreat into a beautiful garden somewhere. I guess that’s more or less what happened to the entire species Homo sapiens.

  Water ice had been brought in from offworld, pollution damage cleaned up through bio-remedialism and other newly devised techniques. The drifting space junk from the Robotech wars had all been removed, or burned itself up in atmospheric entry. The planet started getting better simply because people stopped placing impossible demands on it and began giving something back. Too, the population had been drastically, catastrophically reduced.

  Besides, there was aid from the Local Group worlds that had, by that time, reached Earth via the new, non-Protoculture Pseudojaunt drive. (What beautiful starships the new technologies make possible! Earth looked like she had magical treasures in orbit around her when we arrived.) The old government had been swept away; what had replaced it was benign, democratic, and very participatory.

  We weren’t surprised that Louie Nichols and his byte-punchers, in particular, saddled up and threw themselves right into that new ferment.

  I got a sense of how much things had changed when we [the Hunters] went with Scott Bernard and Marlene to catch up with old friends down in one of the Restoration Bureau’s South American reserves. Young Stone Face had by then broken down and faced the fact that he loved Marlene (later, Scott even asked and got a reconciliation with Marlene Rush’s parents, who’d survived on Tirol) and proposed to her.

  But he still felt he needed a little moral support for this mission, I guess.

  His old comrade Lunk had buried his bitterness, however, even though he turned his face away and was shaken by sobs when he saw Marlene. But Lunk gave Scott a sincere handshake and Marlene a heartbreakingly chaste kiss on the cheek. I’d seen old pictures of him, and Lunk had changed a lot, stomach expanded, hair thinned to a gray fringe around his bald head. He looked like a sad old simian.

  Rand and Rook Bartley showed up with little Maria; there was a lot of ribbing about the success of Rand’s Notes on the Run, Rook doubting he could cut it as a Forager anymore. He did seem a little chagrined, especially since his wife still looked like she’d kept her biker edge.

  Still, it was plain that they loved each other, even if Rook wasn’t happy about little Maria’s preoccupation with her word processor.

  Just as things became less formal, we were almost run over by a dinosaur. From what I’d heard of Annie LaBelle, I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was a reckless behemoth driver.

  Rick and I were looking around for guns that we weren’t carrying—since nobody has any on Earth anymore—but Roy II thought that thunder lizard was just the greatest thing since crayons.

  And sitting on a saddle up behind its head was Annie. It was a seismosaurus, she told us later, biggest of the herbiverous heavyweights; it sure impressed me.

  With Annie was her husband, Magruder, the two of them looking—and dressed—like a new-tech Tarzan and Jane. Scott made some comment about how nicely she’d sprouted up and filled out, and Magruder seemed to accept that with grea
t pride.

  At the local Bureau HQ, Annie and Lunk filled us in on all the strides genetic engineering had made since contact with the Local Group—and especially, of course, with the Tirolians.

  Even fossilized genetic models could be revived, and existing ones cloned and varied, differentiation being so important to species survival. Not only were pandas, snow leopards, and whales thriving, so were passenger pigeons, giant sloths, and woolly mammoths.

  And of course, the biggest debate at that time was whether it would be immoral to bring Neanderthals back from extinction (or, to put it another way, leave them extinct). Annie and Magruder—both of whom had advanced degrees in neogenetics—were passionate about opposite sides of the argument, as ready to punch it out as they were to kiss and make up.

  At any rate, Scott and Marlene’s strike-force reunion turned out well, but I had my first real exposure to the fact that an aging SDF skipper wasn’t exactly in demand anymore in this brave new world. I was out of phase, bereft of background data.

  There were more shocks waiting for all of us.

  What hit Scott and Marlene hardest, I think, was news of the death of the freedom fighter named Lancer, also known as Yellow Dancer. But something bore them up when they heard how he died flying a disaster relief mission. I think it was the insights of the Intersection, where we all saw the big picture a little more clearly.

  That, plus the fact that his music lives on after him, as popular now as Minmei’s. People started to talk about slipping in ringers of the two—re-creation artists—for “The Concert That Never Was.” The idea was almost universally ignored. Perhaps the slimy-souled people who came up with it would feel differently if they’d gone through the Intersection.

  The effects of that passage and its insights were pointed up electrifyingly when a few of us were flown out for a tour of a big reforestation program in Alaska. It was an especially affecting trip for Rick and me, since we weren’t so far from where the Grand Cannon installation once was.

  We were shown to where people worked, patiently reseeding the restored and prepared slopes with tiny firs. I didn’t notice anything in particular, walking past a bent figure that seemed to be giving all its attention lovingly to what was being done. It was Dana, a few paces behind, who let out a yell.

  Rick and I turned to see the Sterlings and our guide looking on in horror as Dana, hauling at the worker’s faded coverall, prepared to deal him a blow to the side of the temple with the heel of her cocked-back hand. No question about it, she was out to kill.

  Part of our astonishment, too, was the appearance of the worker. I have never seen such a gnarled, pitifully scarred, frightened creature in my life. He’d dropped his little tray of seedlings, and all he could do was cringe and whimper. Yet Dana, eyes bugging from her head, wasn’t deterred a bit.

  Rick and I were revving up, trying to get to her to stop, like cartoon characters having trouble getting into motion. Max and Miriya, who’d been looking the other way, were kind of tangled up with each other.

  But there was someone else to intervene. Not that Dana was overpowered—a tough proposition at any time. Still, when Aurora’s gentle hand came to rest on Dana’s tensed, heel-shot one, the action froze.

  “You don’t want to do that. Sister—”

  And with that, Aurora went up on tiptoes to whisper something into Dana’s ear. The rest of us had stood rooted, and we saw Dana’s hand relax as she released the man cowering in her grip. Dana looked around the reseeded slopes, the life that was coming back to a devastated wasteland, and turned away.

  As Dana walked back toward our shuttle, one of the program supervisors gently got the man back to work, saying reassuring things, calling him “Alf.”

  I ran a check and found out about the assassination of Milicent Edgewick and the disappearance of her familiar. Dana’s instincts were correct, and the brainwiped, hollow wretch she’d been about to kill was Farnham, once known as Senator Alfonse Napoleon Russo, though now he only answered to the name Alf. How he found his way into a custodial rehab program for marginally functional war casualty types, no one was able to say.

  Heaven knows, Dana had good cause to execute him; all of us did. But seeing what he’d come to in the end, we dropped the matter. I’ve never presumed to ask Aurora what it was she whispered into her sister’s ear, but I imagine it was to the effect that there’d been enough death; part of the revivifying process we and the planet are undergoing has to do with putting certain things behind us.

  SDF-3’s returnees scattered to all corners of the world in those weeks. Louie Nichols and his team were quick to start snooping into the Post-Protoculture technologies, and they were welcomed with open arms by the Earth’s top researchers, then castigated for their heretical approach to things. Nothing new there.

  Nevertheless, Louie & Co. became the driving force toward this new grail called Instru-Mentality. Implants that will give every intelligent being powers of teleportation, psychokinesis, telepathy, and the rest would be the next logical step—a new dawn, to be sure—but I can’t help wondering if we’re ready for it.

  But as Cabell pointed out, no one was ready for Robotech, either, when you come right down to it.

  Anyway, the Robotech Age, with its mechamorphosis and Protoculture, has passed away forever, and something else must now come onstage.

  The experiences of various others have been set down elsewhere, by themselves and third parties. Of the rollicking group (Dana, Sean, Marie, Jack, Karen, and several more) who became the Crazy Eights Exploration and Development Co., Unlimited, much has already been written—a good deal of it on indictments. And why they took on Lunk as their head wrench wrangler and mojo hand, I cannot guess—but it’s probably one of their few sources of good karma.

  Still, they’re young and carefree, and they keep claiming they’ve got the galaxy by the bustle.

  If you’ve been lucky enough to get a seat at Bowie Grant’s Blue Harp Lounge to hear Musica and Allegra sing and play along with him or have caught them on tour, you know how well they’re doing and why.

  One of the tenser moments occurred as Angelo Dante set off to introduce Gnea to his parents. He was so nervous that she offered to change into more conservative Earth garb (and a lot of us were all set to pitch in), but Angle said no; quite an independent move for him. We all heaved a sigh of relief when they fell in love with her.

  The visit was rather hasty, though, since Gnea was being rushed back to New Praxis (Optera) by special courier ship—including the penalty weight of the fruitcake from Angle’s folks—to brief Bela on all that had happened—

  —and, of course, to help take care of all those little Invid they’ve got running around once more.

  Jean Grant once spoke of pieces of the puzzle fitting together, and there’s probably no more prominent example of that than New Praxis.

  For some reason the Regess didn’t suffer the delay in time that we did, and when the altered Shapings permitted her/his Race to return to spacetime, I suppose it’s no surprise, they came full circle—and, from what we can tell, took on the original state in which Zor found them.

  The Second Gen Flowers of Life bloom there now, with hordes of little Pollinators to make sure they bloom. (Dana keeps insisting that one in particular is hers and hers alone, and the critter seems to feel the same way.) Anyhow, everybody’s happy the Pollinators are sacred beasts on New Praxis these days, protected by the brawny arms of warrior women, because the galaxy has had enough of Protoculture.

  Riding herd on all this is a graying Bela, with Gnea taking up the reins bit by bit. And their fighters, women who’ve lost a world, now posting guard over creatures whose only desire is to be left alone: there’s a higher symmetry to that.

  Because, surely, this is the fate we all felt the Regess cry out for back there at the Intersection. We don’t probe into the Invid hive life, but I suspect She lives there someplace inside Optera, more happily now than at any time since Zor came.

  I do not ask,
though, for anyone to pursue these questions.

  And yet there come reports, fourth- and fifthhand, that a new entity is being brought to life down there in the hive. From what little the intel officers—kept conscientiously at bay on the surface—can tell, it is a male who will have the capacity to erase or perhaps refurbish certain chemical/energy memory systems.

  A new and better Regent?

  On another front, Gnea promised to build quarters in Zanshar just for Angle’s parents so that they can visit whenever they please. And feel guilty about not being there. I suspect Gnea’s figuring on a few daughters to keep Angie busy and perhaps give him a new perspective on women.

  The Sentinels see each other infrequently now, not because we’re sedentary but rather because so much more is happening everywhere. The Zentraedi, of course, are based on Fantoma but can be found anywhere heavy-g operations are going on, especially in monopole ore mining. Their numbers increase at a far, far slower rate than in the days of cloning, but from what I hear, they still favor their new—timeless—method of reproducing.

  The survivors are just starting to live—all of us.

  Drannin is looking more and more like Breetai every day. He still shows those glowing eyes, though, as do all the SDF-3 children. Their psi-abilities and other exceptional attributes of strength, speed, and dexterity continue to increase. They can still giggle, but at other times they seem to have their glowing eyes fixed on some far horizon the rest of us can’t see.

  Does the name “Darwin” strike a bell?

  The human race—and others—are ready for a new and different kind of leap across the stars, a peaceful one this time, and these glow-eyed children of ours are proof

  That was part of the reason we went forth, wasn’t it? To find out what we could ultimately become? In any case, Roy II forgets to brush his teeth if Rick or I don’t remind him, even if he can argue spacetime algorithms with Louie Nichols. And bedtime is still bedtime; the kid gets a swat on the landing gear if he’s being too muley.