It was more of the same as we followed the corridor forward through the ship. Things like bedrooms, dining rooms, kitchens, laboratories with honest to gosh glassware, like they'd gone on a shopping trip to the 1950s or something, things that looked like medical facilities, even something that might have been an operating theater.
The forward end of the corridor opened on a control room, complete with big blank viewscreens and little bucket seats embedded among horseshoe banks of controls.
Strapped in one of them was a small humanoid mummy, arms raised and stiffened in the last place where they'd floated free in front of his face. It was a perfectly formed human being, eighteen inches tall, brown skin leathery and desiccated, shriveled face twisted into a look as of agony, though I suppose it was only the drying process that made it so, and visibly male.
He was dressed in something like a leather parachute harness, straps encrusted with a glitter of tiny jewels, diamonds, I guessed, with a thin leavening of what looked like emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. He wore a tiny dagger with a jeweled hilt on his left hip, and a headdress of some kind. The curled pastel tufts looked like they might have been feathers, once upon a time.
Ylva said, “There's absolutely no humidity in this atmosphere. He could have been sitting here a year or an eon."
I leaned close to the little face, trying to read I don't know what, but it was too far gone, skin turned to leather, eyes sunken in. Nice teeth though. Nice and white, incisors and bicuspids showing past the drawn-up lips.
I said, “Well. Don't that take the cake."
Ylva said, “Yes. At least the firefox was decently alien."
Maybe so, although to me it had looked disturbingly terrestrial, despite the extra pair of legs. It'd had that foxface, those mammalian teeth, that external reproductive organ ... even the ears-evolved-to-arms are something you could imagine natural selection developing on Earth.
I said, “Two unrelated artifacts left in one solar system for us to find as soon as we had the wherewithal to do so suggests space may be crowded with civilizations."
"Maybe not,” said Ylva. “Depends on how widely separated in time they were."
The Body Double said, “Or left here on purpose for us to find."
Exploring the rest of the ship, we found a second little mummy in a room that looked like a physics lab of some kind, full of obvious electronics, with dials and flatscreens everywhere, including what I swore was a miniature example of a twentieth-century scanning electron microscope. The mummy was stuck to the floor by a patch of skin, but had otherwise floated up a bit, one leg raised high, blatantly showing us it was female, though where the breasts ought to have been, the skin was so puckered it could have been anything.
When I leaned in for a closer look, Ylva made a wry, sly grin, and said, “If you wait until we get back aboard Benthodyne, I'm sure the Body Double can do better than that."
I rolled my eyes. Sometimes I feel like I'm being teased half to death by a computer. Then again, that “human CNS tissue..."
We found something like a work of art, a crystalline cube with a tableau of statuary inside. There were four perfectly human men, dressed into those same bejeweled harnesses and feathered headdresses, men armed with swords and spears, surrounding a ... well, a thing. It kind of looked like a giant head, a head maybe two feet tall, if those men were the same eighteen inches as the mummified corpses here, a head walking on eight crablegs, brandishing two huge chelae, with which it menaced the spearmen.
Funny looking face, too. Great, big bulging eyes, two vertical slits for a nose, mouth like a sphincter ... I snickered despite myself, drawing a puzzled look from the Body Double.
A kaldane? And what would the little men be then, Minunians?
Ylva's cameo said, “So which Burroughs are you thinking of, William S. or Edgar Rice?” I'd forgotten about that anal typewriter, but Ylva doesn't forget, can't forget, anything.
One room we found aft was empty but for a thing that looked like a free-standing bronze mirror, mounted on a universal joint so it could be twisted this way and that. It had a heavy-looking base, and the frame had several panels of controls, inscribed with more of the same presumptive writing we'd seen elsewhere.
When we stepped into the room, Ylva's cameo suddenly buzzed with dense static, almost obliterating her image, her voice breaking up. Stepping back into the hallway, I said, “So...?"
Ylva said, “Well, the room seems very heavily shielded."
The Body Double said, “The link bandwidth between us got very narrow for a moment."
When we stepped back in, Ylva's cameo broke up again and scrolled away. The Body Double said, “Don't worry, she can keep the link to me open enough for essential comm to get through. We'll be all right."
Her face seemed serene enough. As long as the master consciousness is there, I suppose...
And I suppose this big button right here ... when I reached out for it, the Body Double said, “Do you think that's wise, Mr. Zed?"
I grinned. “Most of the risks I've taken have worked out okay.” Most of them. Not all. I pushed the button.
The Body Double said, “The link just broke. We'd better get back in the corridor and see if..."
The surface of the bronze mirror suddenly flashed, was covered with a momentary swirl of rainbows that spilled right out onto the floor, splashed on the walls and went away, mirror transformed into...
I stood transfixed, and said, “You have got to be kidding!"
The bronze mirror, rainbows dissipated, looked like a glowing doorway in the air, an impossible doorway all but hidden in a wreath of pale pink mist, beyond, a 3D vista of gray-green landscape, grass and patchy forest, trees with scaly trunks and ferny fronds. Beyond the trees, I could see bits of yellowish sky, everything blurred by a vague whitish haze.
The Body Double peered through, looking from side to side. “This seems overelaborate for a work of art."
When I stepped closer, I could see perspective shift, like a very good hologram. I reached out, extending my hand toward where the mirror's visible surface had been, and the Body Double snapped, “Mr. Zed! Let me!"
I turned and smiled at her, shook my head. “It's my adventure, sweetie. Ylva knows that."
"But..."
I continued the movement, expecting my hand to meet a solid surface. It went through, of course, spacesuit glove hanging ridiculously on the end of my arm inside the image. I looked down at my suit displays, at the atmosphere constituents. They'd changed a bit from the oxy-nitro-helium mixture, quite a bit more CO2. I lunged forward through the door, and heard my suit's servomotors whine. That worried me. ERSIE technology is good. And those motors were supposed to be silent.
"Mr. Zed! No!” She was already beside me, gloved hand clamping at my elbow, dragging me back through the ... Well, what do you call a door through hyperspace? A hyperdoor?
"Stop it,” I said, and gestured back the way we came. The image of the door was hanging in the air behind us, floating a foot or so above soggy-looking ground, through it, plainly visible, the room in which we'd been standing.
She said, “This is too dangerous. We need to get back through and talk to Ylva before we do anything else.” Even now, I thought, Talk to Ylva? Weird way to look at it when you...
I pulled hard on her hand. “Come on, kiddo. We'll just take a look over the crest of that little hill over there, then skedaddle. What harm can..."
The hyperdoor scrolled away into the air, then my suit shut down with a soft whisper of failing fans and a whine of life support systems going down. I had a momentary view of the Body Double's helmet going opaque, then my own freeze frames went out, leaving me in the dark, listening to the gasp of my own breathing.
Christ, it's black in here!
Red emergency lights clicked on, showing padded suit liner an inch from the end of my nose, then a little freeze frame came up opposite my eyes, the Body Double's Ylva-like cameo floating a short distance away. She said, “The emergency su
it systems are good for two hours. Since the air here is breathable, I'm going to breach and see what I can do. You stay put."
I laughed and kicked my chin down hard on the emergency egress lever, which would have unlocked when we went on battery. The suit made a crackling sound in my ears and then broke open, helmet folding back, breastplate and hypogaster opening down the middle, breeks and greaves splitting down to the ankle so I could step right out.
I'd been wearing white sneakers, shorts and a T-shirt when I suited up for EVA, and the Body Double more or less the same, sports bra substituted for the T-shirt. Voice and eyes full of disappointment and despair, she said, “Oh, Mr. Zed..."
I had a momentary pang of guilt, like I'd hurt the woman I loved. Sometimes, lying in bed with a Body Double, sharing her with Ylva, that's just how it seems, hormones and habits overlaying the brutal facts of harsh reality. Ylva's just a computer, with a little bit of leftover meat from a woman long dead, and a Body Double's just a clone, grown in a retort, to be used up and thrown away. But the computer remembers a woman who once was alive. And the Body Double is that same woman made flesh and bone.
Who am I, what am I, against all that? A creepy old lizard who went on borrowed time around the year 2020, who should already have been mouldering in the grave, lo these fifty years and more.
I often wonder what my sweet, lost Sarah would think of the way I turned out. Disappointed at the easy way I adjusted to the free, happy flesh of the Body Double corps? Maybe not. She always seemed to love me for who I was, rather than who she thought I should have been.
I smiled brightly and said, “Cheer up, sweetie. What's the worst that can happen?” Then I looked around at a yellow sky in misty morning light, and said, “Where the hell you suppose we are? The Permian?"
That was the only time before the Cenozoic when the Earth's air would have been breathable to a human being. During the Mesozoic, there was five times too much C02 and enough extra oxygen to support spontaneous combustion of forests from time to time. Before that, as you go back in time, less and less oxygen, and up to fifteen times the carbon dioxide levels we call “normal."
The Body Double bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, and said, “Not Earth. Gravity seems right around point-eight-gee.” In the distance, the near distance at that, a deep throbbing sound boomed, down in the low double-digit hertz. I turned and walked slowly toward the crest of the hill, the same curious crest that had drawn me incautiously through the hyperdoor in the first place, stopped and stared, mouth falling open in an idiot's gape.
"God damn!” It came out a hoarse whisper as the Body Double came up behind me and placed a delicate hand lightly on my back.
Below us, on an open, gently-rolling yellow plain, was a herd of red, green, and vermilion striped hadrosaurs, a hundred of them, maybe more, walking along, tails held high. And again, one of them lowed, like God's great Tuba of Doom. No, not the Permian at all.
We spent a fruitless hour beating the bushes for some sign of the hyperdoor, while the yellow light around us shifted higher in the sky, as if there were a sun somewhere, climbing away from morning. Every once in a while, looking upward, I thought I could see a silvery glitter right where the light seemed to originate. Glitter, there in the corner of my eye, then gone when I tried to peer more closely. Averted vision, astronomers call it.
It made me remember Venus. Not the real Venus, where no one had ever been, where no one would go until Benthodyne III was ready to take me there, but some imaginary Venus from my childhood. The Venus of Alendar Vex Nem and Riteryon Orrn, of the Dorvos and Yazmen, the omur forests and the Alaphorden.
We widened our search, finally just walking away, off over the crest of the hill in the general direction of the hadrosaur plains, taking note of landmarks and topography so we could find our way back, when and if.
The Body Double seemed downcast, remote, and I wondered what it must be like. But for brief interruptions, she'd had Ylva in her head from the moment she awoke in her birthing vacuole, a fully formed woman with no memories of her own, no childhood but the one Ylva gave her.
I didn't know for a few years afterward, but Ylva liked to give them to me as soon as they were born, drying off the amniotic fluid and walking them straight to my bedroom as soon as her dybbuk was downloaded and in control. I liked the fresh enthusiasm they showed. But every now and again...
This Body Double, downcast or not, remained vigilant, remained dutiful, insisting on walking ahead of me, breaking trail through the trackless wilderness of this faux Venus, “just in case."
God, she's beautiful. Every one of them. But this one ... Walking ahead of me in white shorts and sportsbra, she made me forget where we were, the drift and sway of those hips, the flex of her elegant spine, that mane of ripe wheat hair ... I grimaced. Jesus. I suppose if my ass was on fire, I'd still be thinking ... and, what if she notices I...
On cue, she stopped walking, turned and looked at me. Smiled. Turned again and walked on. I followed along, dividing my awareness between the ferny gray-green wilderness and the Body Double's splendid silhouette, wondering where we were and what the hell she could be thinking. Maybe how alone she is? Or maybe how free.
We were following a low, tree-lined ridge, staying off the plains because we were afraid of tangling with the colorful little herds of great big hadrosaurs, when we went through a gap in the vegetation to the other side of the ridge.
The land was higher here and more level, sloping gently away, blue-green mountains hanging in the misty distance. Somewhere in between was a cluster of low brown buildings, compound surrounded by a wall, complete with obvious guard towers. The largest building, in the center of the complex, was vaguely Hagia Sofia in shape, with a crystalline dome glinting in the yellow light.
Beyond the compound was a tall, upright torpedo shape, like a V-2 with sharply swept-back wings added on. Spaceship, I thought. Big. At least two hundred meters tall, maybe more depending on how far ... Revolt On Venus? That's the one. And that would be Rex Sinclair's plantation, I'm sure. Is the ship Polaris, Tom, Roger, and Astro...?
The Body Double said, “You know we really shouldn't go any closer."
There's a theory about how FTL starships might be made to work, a fanciful theory based on Bohm's Alternative to the Standard Quantum Mechanical Model. The theory says you can only travel faster than light by traveling through time. And since conformal time enforces its limits through paradox, you can only evade paradoxical time travel by ejecting yourself from one universe and inserting yourself into some other, infinitely similar universe at some earlier time.
A universe that, for its own internally consistent reasons, is ready to receive you. It's a theory that works as an open door to the so-called Multiverse. And hyperdoor is as good a name as any. I said, “I know. But we will. Come on.” This time, she followed me.
The misty light of the mostly hidden sun was declining in what I assumed to be the west, and I was increasingly aware of another problem we were going to have to face. Eventually, we'd get back to the suits, where we had sacks of nutrient syrup and water that would hold us for a couple of days.
Sooner or later, if we don't find that damned hyperdoor, we'll be eating hadrosaur or making contact with whoever lives in the compound. Why hadn't we included handguns with the spacesuit equipment? Because we just weren't anticipating a need to be shooting at anyone aboard an obvious derelict.
The Body Double said, “If we start back now, and hurry, we might make it back to the suits and door site before dark."
"No, let's keep on. We can climb a tree or something, if we need to."
We'd covered about half the remaining distance to the spaceship, cutting as close to the compound as we dared, by the time ruddy twilight was turning the sky to blood and coloring the ferntrees black. It was a glorious sight, like nothing I'd ever imagined, every bit as alien as scenes I'd experienced on the truly alien worlds of home, Mars, Titan, Triton, Pluto.
All around us, I could hear t
he trilling squeaks of spring peepers, making me wonder what they really were. Okay, in dinosaur days, there were little frogs, so ... Looking at the Body Double, her face reddened by this gloriously macabre twilight, I said, “Lucky for us no mosquitoes."
She said, “And probably no bacteria that could infect me, no matter where or when we really are."
Oh? I said, “Just you?"
A long look, dark eyes so very serious. “I am far more human than you are, Mr. Zed. You may very well be completely immune to all possible bacteria and viruses by now. The drugs..."
"What would happen if you took the antirad drugs?” I wanted to bite my tongue, but it'd slipped out. God damn it, she's a clone. She'll die sooner, not later.
But she smiled brightly, teeth glossy pink in the deepening light, and said, “I guess my tits would fall off."
I laughed, despite myself. “Ylva..."
She raised a hand, “It's not my name. Not without Her telepresense."
I could hear the capital letter, a line drawn under her.
"My serial number is BD4048, if you'd like to know."
Jesus. Her only identity? But I said, “Surely there haven't been four thousand..."
"Model Four, Number 48."
Is there a model five yet? God knows what other unkind thing would have come out my selfish idiot's mouth, but there was the inevitable rustling in the bushes, and we were surrounded by miniature men dressed in jewel-encrusted leather harnesses topped by waving feather headdresses, all armed with spears and swords, all the spears pointed at us.
One of them, perhaps a little more gaily caparisoned than the others, stepped forward, drew his sword, pointed it more or less at my crotch, well above the level of his head, and shouted sternly at me in a gabble of sing-song syllables not at all like Chinese.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 27