|
33: Downtime
They seated me in the rear, between the two soldiers, and ordered me to keep my hands in sight at all times and not to make any sudden moves. They allowed the stick, owing to my infirmity, but warned me not to 'get any ideas.'
The transport was narrow and crammed with gear. Unlike the trains, it did not travel directly on the rails, but several feet in the air above them and using an electromagnetic effect that drew on the ambient energy of the interstices. If we crossed paths with a train, we moved out of the way and then quickly back over the tracks.
Inside, the transport was gloomy and utilitarian. The soldiers sat on narrow bucket chairs attached to the walls. Interior lighting was dim, and the air smelled by turns vaguely of machine oil, electronically singed rubber, and old urine in badly drained facilities in back. Tuttle sat up front, up high, in a throne-like compartment with his instruments all around him. He steered the thing by means of two levers, the way most 20th Century heavy tanks were run. Belasso and Voreill sat in the only two decent, wide, soft seats in the middle and supervised idly as several soldiers set up a complex bunch of machinery. It was a mix of Mars and City of En gear, and Tuttle had to stop and explain to the men how to operate it. The key was a simple amber button-light on top, which flickered slowly at about one blink every four seconds.
Belasso came and sat to taunt me. "So, priest, you thought you would return to Mars and astonish us all with your miracles."
"I am only looking for Truth," I said quietly.
He laughed. "Truth. You know what truth is? Truth is what stupid people wish it to be. You tell them what they want to hear," he said, motioning with his fist as if he were snatching a dozen tiny people off the floor, "and they are yours. You can order them to march to their deaths, and they will sing happily as they go off to kill themselves for you."
"Yes," I said quietly, "you are good at that. You are a genius at it, like so many of history's bad leaders. But that isn't truth. That's deception, and it always unravels around liars."
He got a look on him that seemed to turn the skin of his face to steel, and his eyes were like a snake's. "You god-rags are out of your minds. You have a mouth on you, man, that makes me want to stick a gun in there and let loose."
"You may destroy many lives before you run out of options and take your own."
He looked startled. "You really are insane, talking to me that way. Tell me, holy boy, where is the water?"
"The water? On Mars?"
"The water that isn't on Mars, but was long ago."
"Nobody knows. The oceans of Mars boiled off millions of years."
"What if someone could put new water on Mars?"
"There is plenty of water out in the Oort Cloud. Someone dedicated to Truth, or science, could spend his time and energy figuring out how to crash comets made of ice into Mars until we were all waist-deep in water."
He grinned. "Yeah, I like that." He rose and laughed out loud, then walked back to his seat near the front.
The transport moved smoothly at a rapid clip, making that clattering noise that always happens when a vehicle moves up or down time in the Temporale. I could think of many metaphors for this. It is the sound made by atoms of time building up and breaking like ice crystals on the leading edges of the ship. It is the sound of a train, going clickety-clack on the rail-joints of time.
All the while, this array of boxes, pointers, and an aluminum-mesh dish pointed in the direction of Mars, bouncing a signal off that huge metal Anomaly buried deep in the bowels of the Olympus Mons caldera. Every so often, someone would read off the latest chronometer reading, and it was clear we were accelerating through the early age of mammals, backwards throught the end of the dinosaur era (65 million -C) and heading ever deeper into the past. Soon, Tyrannosaurus would rise up from the dust and stalk around the swamps looking for soft green lizards with long necks and sluggish reflexes.
We stayed on the move. Men frequently rose, shook their arms, bicycled their legs, ate or drank, went to the toilet, slept leaning against the bulkhead. I was given antibiotics and other medicines to stabilize my wound and ease the pain. It was a superficial wound, which had grazed some muscles, and I expected to make a full recovery.
The chronometer recitals became more tired, more bored, more infrequent, and bigger. A milestone was 250 million -C but the transport clattered on.
"It has stopped blinking," someone said.
An electricity ran through the atmosphere in the ship. Men nudged each other awake. Balesso and Voreill walked to the machine to confer with technicians. The transport, which had been running on autopilot while Tuttle slept, was brought to a stop. While Balesso and his staff conferred, the doors opened and we were let out for a glimpse of the Temporale in the far past. Even I, with my two watchdog guards, was let out to stretch my legs.
The Temporale in 300 million -C looked very much as it had in 5000 CC. This was as surprising as it was boring. Same featureless sky, raised tracks strewn with grayish ballast gravel—fist-sized chunks of local stone, whatever it might be, from volcanic pumice in some regions to metal-rich meteoritic deposites in other places. Damp swamps with sparse vegetation spread a half mile out on either side, beyond which was the white fog and beyond that nix, nada, nothingness.
But Mars hung red and baleful in the sky like the god that it was. The red planet, with its brownish markings upon lighter-colored rusty deserts and other features, was relatively close to the Time Train tracks here.
"The readings have stopped," Balesso said as he got out of the transport and stepped eagerly down to the rocks. He looked up as Voreill followed him. Balesso said: "This is the time period when the Anomaly was created. It is also the time period when the last of the oceans of Mars disappeared."
"Boiled off?" I said.
Tuttle emerged in the doorway and called down: "I have news for you. My instruments in the transport tell me another story. Mars and space around it are frozen in time for millions of years and miles around."
Balesso stormed toward him. "What do you mean? What are you talking about?"
Tuttle rubbed his hands through his sleep-ruffled hair and yawned. "The Laars, the ancient aliens, they did something before they vanished. They caused the Membrane to lock out part of the region around the Temporale. It's standard procedure, rarely ever evoked. It's a City of En protocol imposed on the Temporale."
"I don't understand your mumbo-jumbo," Balesso raged. "I want the Anomaly fixed so that we can access it in our era and help terraform Mars. What could your readings possibly have to do with anything?"
Tuttle said: "The Laars, the ancient aliens, withdrew as their empire shrank. Probably same thing cousing the retreat of another alien race, the Faraos, around 3000 CC. I have no idea what wars the Laars waged, what disputes ground them down, what they looked like, or anything else. All I know is that they did something illegal and illicit in the Temporale, and the Membrane has reacted with an interdict. The Membrane has isolated and quarantined Mars starting about now, and frozen it into immobility by transferring its energy to the underverse with its go-dots. From the historical record, we understand this continues until well into the Holocene, at which point the freeze area is shrunk to include just the Anomaly itself."
Balesso said: "When I was in my exile, wandering around the Temporale, a medium who said she could communicate with the Laars told me that the key to turning Mars green was through the Anomaly. She wasn't able to tell me how, but she swore it was the key. She also predicted I would be supreme autarch of Mars and that my fingers would make the red deserts green and all hearts love me."
I listened to this, and recalled the cynical discussion at the transfer point between Voreill and Balesso, and nearly gagged.
"There is nothing further I can do for you here," Tuttle said.
"Take us further back!" Balesso cried.
"I can't—we're blocked by the freeze."
"Take us back or I'll have your hide!"
"We'd have to circumnavigate the freeze. It could take months, years!" Tuttle said.
I never found out Tuttle's answer because at that moment, someone pulled me back into the future. I did have time to register the startled looks on the faces of my two soldier guards as my chest seemed to flatten and my body must have looked as though it was turning inside out was it vanished in a heartbeat, with my feet the last thing visible as they followed my rapidly receding torso. One of them, in fact, was sipping from a cup of water. He started, and dropped the cup. Water spilled in a long, twirling arc that caught the light.
|
