Sunset of the Gods

by Steve White

  Rutherford’s face took on a compassionate expression he would never have permitted himself if Jason had been looking. “I understand. Up till now, you have taken understandable pride in never having lost a single member of any expedition you have led. And this time you returned from the past alone. But that was due to extraordinary and utterly unforeseeable circumstances. No one dreamed you would encounter what you did in the remote past. And no one blames you.”

  “But aside from that, aren’t you afraid I might be just a little too . . . close to this?” Once again, Jason clenched his fist to prevent his hand from straying to his pocket.

  Rutherford smiled, noticing the gesture. “If anything, I should think that what you know of Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez’s fate would make you even more interested.”

  Deirdre, thought Jason, recalling his last glimpse of those green eyes as she had faded into the past. Deirdre, from whom it is practically a statistical certainty that I myself am descended.

  He turned back to face Rutherford. “Well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm to meet the other people you have lined up.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Seven decades earlier, Aaron Weintraub had held the key.

  Before that, time travel had been merely a fictional device. That it could never be anything more than that had been as certain as any negative can ever be. Over and above its seemingly preposterous physics, the concept self-evidently violated the very logic of causality. The classic statement was the “Grandfather Paradox”: what was to prevent a time traveler from killing his own young, childless grandfather? In which case, how could the time traveler have been born? And who, therefore, had killed the grandfather? No; this was one case in which the dread word impossible was pronounced without hesitation or doubt. Physicists and philosophers were at one about that. Reality protected itself.

  Then Weintraub had embarked on a series of experiments to verify the existence of the temporal energy potential which he had postulated (to the near-unanimous hoots of his colleagues) as a necessary anchor to hold matter in time. If it existed, theory predicted that it could be manipulated. And Weintraub had proceeded to do precisely that. Subatomic particles had appeared in his device a few microseconds before the power was turned on and remained for a certain number of nanoseconds, and then vanished for the same number of nanoseconds after the switch was thrown. And nothing would ever be the same again.

  But temporal energy potential had proven to be very resistant to manipulation. Subatomic particles sent back microseconds in time were the limit—and they only tolerated such unnatural treatment for nanoseconds before indignantly snapping back to their proper time. The physicists had heaved a qualified sigh of relief, the philosophers an unqualified one; Weintraub’s discovery, however revolutionary in theory, was clearly devoid of practical applications, including the murder of grandfathers-to-be. Reality still protected itself.

  Or so it had seemed for twenty years. Then Mariko Fujiwara had persuaded the by-then aged Weintraub that he had been traveling a dead-end road. Their joint experiments had confirmed her intuition: no energy expenditure could manipulate temporal energy potential to any significant degree; but a tremendous yet finite one, properly applied, could cancel it altogether, breaking the anchor chain, as it were, and setting an object adrift in time. That terrific energy surge sent the object three hundred years into the past before it became controllable. But beyond that it was controllable, and the object, living or otherwise, could be sent to a predetermined temporal point in the past. (Not the future, for temporal energy potential was in an absolute sense nonexistent beyond the constantly advancing wave-front known as “the present.”) There the object would remain until its temporal energy potential was restored—very easy to do, for reasons relating to its already-known stubbornness. A temporal retrieval device that could be so miniaturized as to be easily surgically implantable, and that drew an insignificant amount of energy, sufficed to bring the object back to the location (relative to the planetary gravity field in question) from which it had been displaced, after a total elapsed time identical to that which it had spent in the past.

  Neither Weintraub nor Fujiwara had been the kind of sociopath common in the fiction of the twentieth century, when science had first become scary: the “mad scientist” who would pursue his reckless experiments to the bitter end with fanatical if not suicidal perseverance, heedless of the consequences to himself or the world. They had recognized, and been duly terrified by, the mind-numbing potentialities of what they were doing. Moreover, they had been products of a society which had recoiled from the Transhumanist madness just as Europe had once recoiled from the seventeenth century’s savage religious wars into the eighteenth century’s mannered ancien regime. True to the twenty-fourth century’s almost Confucian-like ethos, they had concluded that if reality no longer protected itself, someone else had to—preferably the bureaucratized intellectual elite committed to safeguarding the integrity of the human heritage that had almost been lost.

  Thus the Temporal Regulatory Authority had been born. The safest course would have been not to use the Fujiwara-Weintraub Temporal Displacer at all, but the temptation to settle history’s controversies and resolve its mysteries by direct observation had been irresistible. So the Authority had been given exclusive jurisdiction of all extratemporal activity. Its legal monopoly had been confirmed by its possession of the only displacer in existence—an exclusiveness that hardly needed to be legislated, given the installation’s colossal expense and power requirements, which placed it beyond the reach of any private individual or group. And even if some other organization had been able to build and operate such a thing, it could never have done so unnoticed, barring some as-yet-elusive breakthrough.

  Then, as experience in time travel had accumulated, two realizations had dawned—the first one staggering in its implications, and the second one seeming to contradict the first.

  The first was that the past could be changed.

  The second was that reality still protected itself.

  “There are no paradoxes,” Jason stated firmly to his new team members. “There are no alternate worlds or branches of time either.”

  They sat in a briefing room deep in the Authority’s town-sized installation in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, northwest of Lake Mackay—as far from population centers as it had been possible to put the displacer and its dedicated power plant, lest the latter’s multiply redundant failsafe systems should ever prove inadequate. (As some wag had put it centuries earlier, “Mister Antimatter is not your friend.”) Rutherford was also there, although he had thus far been uncharacteristically laconic, letting Jason conduct the orientation.

  “But I don’t understand,” said Dr. Bryan Landry, with the thoughtfully perplexed look that came naturally to his mild, rather broad face. That face was gray-eyed and fairly light complexioned, and his straight hair was a prematurely graying brown. In short, he was not going to blend as well as the Authority—and Jason—preferred. But there was no help for it; all the available Mediterranean-looking experts in Classical Greek studies were disqualified by reason of age or health. The Authority sent no one back in time who was not up to the rigors of an extended stay under primitive conditions. Would-be time travelers had to be reasonably young and physically fit, and to pass a course in low-technology survival . . . and, for certain particularly blood-drenched milieus, a course in self-defense. It was a winnowing process that continued to elicit howls of “Discrimination!” from the groves of academe, but the Authority was adamant. When necessary, a cover story would be crafted around a team member’s incongruous appearance. In the present case, their group would supposedly be from Macedon, where coloring and features like Landry’s were less uncommon.

  “You’re not the only one who doesn’t understand,” Jason assured him. “Over the last half century, physicists and philosophers have joined the ranks of occupational groups—lawyers, for example—noted for drinking to excess.”

  Landry ref
used to be put off—Jason had already learned he could be stubborn in his mild-mannered professorial fashion. “Let me put it this way,” he said, while reloading his briar pipe with his favorite brand of gengineered non-carcinogenic tobacco. (It was an indulgence he was going to have to do without in Classical Greece.) “I’ve done some background reading on the Authority’s operations, and I know about your ‘message drops.’”

  “Yes,” Jason nodded. “Putting a message on some very durable medium and concealing it in a prearranged place is the only way time travelers can communicate with the present.”

  “But if what I’ve read is true, such a message isn’t there in its prearranged place before a period of time has passed in the present equal to the elapsed time the time travelers have spent in the past before placing it there.”

  “The ‘linear present,’ we call it,” Jason interjected helpfully.

  Landry looked even more perplexed. He puffed the pipe to life as though fueling his thought processes with tobacco. “Well then, suppose a time traveller, a day after his arrival in the early twentieth century, shot Hitler? By analogy, it would seem that those of us in the present day would continue for a day, until that point in the, uh, linear present, to live in a world whose history included Hitler and World War II and everything that flowed from them, and then suddenly, after that point . . .” He trailed to a bewildered halt.

  Jason smiled. “Here’s why your example doesn’t apply. Those locations we use for our message drops are obscure ones where nothing is ever known to have happened. Hitler and World War II did happen. You can’t go back and shoot Hitler—a favorite bit of time travel wish-fulfillment, by the way—for the simple reason that we know he didn’t get shot. The past can be changed, but observed history can’t.”

  “But why can’t it?”

  “No one knows. In fact, the question appears to be meaningless. All we do know is that something will prevent you from doing anything that creates any paradoxes.”

  Alexandre Mondrago spoke up. “This makes it seem like you have an awful lot of freedom when you’re in the past, Commander.” (He used Jason’s rank in the Hesperian Colonial Rangers. The Temporal Service had no structured system of rank titles, and seniority was on an ad hoc basis; Jason was simply designated mission leader.) “Do anything you damned well want to do, because as long as you can do it, you know it won’t do any harm.” A white-toothed grin split his swarthy face. “Sounds like it could be a lot of fun.”

  Rutherford gave a pre-expostulation splutter. Jason waved him to silence while studying the Service man he wished he’d had more time to get to know.

  Mondrago was shorter than Jason, lean but wide-shouldered and long-armed, with a nose that belonged on a larger face. People often wondered whether he was French or Italian. In fact, as Jason knew from his file, he was of Corsican descent—heir to a long and violent tradition. He had served as a professional soldier in a variety of capacities, but there was less and less use for his talents on today’s Earth. So he had made himself a master of various styles of low-tech combat, eventually becoming so good that the Temporal Service had accepted his application despite certain reservations. This was to be his first extratemporal expedition. He was on it because what they were going into—while not quite bad enough to require the entire team to be combat trained—might involve a little more than Jason alone could handle, especially given the possibility of Teloi involvement. So, to assure the safety of the academics, Jason had been assigned a second Service man.

  As a theoretical question of detached, intellectual interest, Jason wondered if he could take him.

  “That’s an attitude we don’t encourage,” Jason said. “And I’ll tell you why. Before my last expedition, one of the team members asked me the same kind of question about shooting the young Hitler that Dr. Landry just did.” Deirdre, flashed through his mind, and he stopped himself before he could reach for the little plastic case in his pocket. “I told her that if you tried it, the gun might jam. Or you might find out later that you’d shot the wrong little tramp. But here’s a third possibility: maybe one of the hydrocarbon-burning ground cars they were starting to use in the early twentieth century would run you over while you were drawing a bead on him. You’ve heard that old saw about reality protecting itself? Well, reality doesn’t give a damn how it protects itself. You might not want to be standing nearby when it’s doing so. Clear?”

  “Perfectly, sir.” Mondrago’s tone was more serious, but his eyes met Jason’s unflinchingly.

  “Furthermore,” said Rutherford, no longer to be restrained, “there is the matter of elementary caution. Half a century’s experience of time travel leads us to believe that what Commander Thanou has been telling you is true. But in the absence of absolute proof, we prefer to behave as though it is our responsibility to make it true. One example is the course of treatments you will soon be undergoing to cleanse your bodies of evolved disease microorganisms to which the people of the fifth century b.c. would have no more resistance than the Polynesians did to smallpox. We believe that reality helps those who help themselves. Or, at least, we dare not assume otherwise.”

  Chantal Frey spoke in the diffident, almost timid way Jason had learned was usual for her. “Is that why you’ve ruled out any expeditions to study the Teloi before 1628 b.c.?”

  Jason studied her. The xenologist was a fellow colonial, from Arcadia, Zeta Draconis A II. He recalled that a tidelocked world of that binary system’s red-dwarf secondary component held the enigmatic ruins of a long-dead race, which might help explain her interest in aliens. She was a youngish woman, certainly not a spectacular looker like Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez (again he stopped his hand short of his pocket) but not altogether unattractive in a slender, intellectual-appearing way, with narrow, regular features and smooth dark-brown hair. Jason viewed her presence with a certain skepticism, doubting her ability to stand up under the various stresses of time travel. Granted, the Authority had certified her as up to it, but there was something about her—something besides her seeming physical fragility, a kind of weakness that went beyond that—that bothered him. He also wished she had some secondary skill to contribute, for if they did not encounter the Teloi, and the “Pan” legend proved to be just that, then an expert in alien life forms was going to be fairly useless.

  At least, he thought (although he had no intention of sharing the thought with her), her quiet personality should make her inconspicuous in the profoundly sexist society of Classical Athens, where the only assertive, articulate women were the hetairai—high-end whores/geishas whose unconventionality must have been a tinglingly irresistible turn-on for men accustomed to, and doubtless bored to distraction by, the “respectable” female products of the prevailing purdah.

  “That certainly has something to do with it,” Rutherford acknowledged. “That, and the ruinous expense of sending an expedition of useful size into the really distant past.”

  Landry looked troubled. “We’ve all heard something of these Teloi, and the rumors have been rather sensational, but it’s all been awfully vague.”

  “We have been releasing the information with great caution, because of its revolutionary if not explosive nature. However, the three of you have a legitimate need to know more than the general public. As you recall, the Articles of Agreement you signed contain a clause requiring you to abide by all confidentiality restrictions applicable to information imparted to you. I trust you are clear on this—and on the legal penalties for violation.” Rutherford paused. Jason reflected that Mondrago would be no problem—he understood security classifications. He sensed a hesitancy in the other two, and he understood why: they were academics, committed to the free flow of knowledge, and the whole concept of official secrecy was repugnant to them. But all three heads nodded.

  “Very well. On that understanding, I’ll ask Commander Thanou to give a brief summation of what he learned on his expedition to study the Santorini explosion.”

  “The Teloi,” Jason began without pr
eamble, “were an alien race of unknown origin. I say ‘were’ because we’ve found no trace of them in our present-day interstellar explorations. They were a very ancient race which had sought to genetically engineer itself into gods. They succeeded in making themselves effectively immortal, although not literally so, of course, and they could certainly die by violence. A side effect was a mentality incomprehensible to us—insane by our standards. Their chief drive became a need to find something to fill the eons of their empty, meaningless lives. About a hundred thousand years ago, one group arranged to maroon themselves on Earth, where they had discovered a species—Homo erectus—which by sheer coincidence was of a general physical form that could be molded by genetic engineering into a kind of sub-Teloi, useful as worshipers and as slaves.”

  Jason saw in their eyes that they knew where he was headed.

  “Yes,” he said, as gently as possible. “The Teloi created us. Homo erectus evolved by the natural course into Homo neanderthalensis in northern Eurasia, but the Teloi gengineered it into Homo sapiens in an area to the south, where northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia were then joined, in societies that were vast slave-pens.”

  “Now you understand why we have been reluctant to make this general knowledge,” said Rutherford into the silence.

  “We can be proud of our ancestors,” Jason said firmly. “The Teloi didn’t know what they’d created. The humans soon began to break free of their control, spreading across the planet, wiping out the Neanderthals and differentiating into the various racial stocks we know.”

  “How did you learn all this?” demanded Landry, puffing furiously.

  “We learned it from Oannes, a member of another alien race. The Nagommo were hermaphroditic amphibians, extremely long-lived by our standards, who had been at war with the Teloi for a long time. One of their warships crash-landed in the Persian Gulf in the early fourth millennium b.c. The survivors, with a perseverance foreign to human psychology, continued to follow their basic mission statement, which was to fight the Teloi wherever possible, in any way possible. Stranded on Earth, this meant helping the humans in the area rebel, and teaching them the rudiments of civilization.”