Further: Beyond the Threshold (10 page)

“The migration of sentients of terrestrial origin in the millennia before the first threshold was initiated, linking the worlds of the Entelechy. Contact was lost with many individuals and groups—organics, synthetics, and others of blended provenance—over the millennia. On rare occasions, contact is reestablished with one of these lost groups, as with the Exode, often to the benefit of the Entelechy.”

“So there
is
intelligence out there,” I said, “but only that which we brought with us.”

The silver eagle waggled its head in a shrug.

“That is the prevailing view, sir. But there are those who believe differently. There are theories of older races that spanned the galaxy before the rise of humanity, and which have now disappeared from view. There is no evidence for their existence, of course, but their proponents see inferences everywhere, from the ‘fine-tuning’ of certain cosmological values to the balance of chemical constituents on certain planetary bodies, which some argue is evidence of ancient terraforming. This is known as the Demiurgist Doctrine.”

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the antiscientific theories of creationist design, which helped transform my paternal grandfather’s homeland into a benighted backwater. His landmark novel,
In the Country of the Blind
, warned of the dangers of allowing that sort of antirational thinking to go unchecked, and garnered a Hugo Award for best novel while at the same time earning him few friends among the civic and religious leaders of the country. In the end, the harassment that ensued worsened to the point where he found it easier to leave the country entirely, joining the expatriate community in Bangalore, his wife and young son in tow.

As I was growing up, my father often spoke of his hope that humanity might one day outgrow the need for religion entirely. My mother, a nonpracticing Hindu, saw value in the cultural traditions of her ancestors, and the disagreement led to more than a few vociferous discussions at family meals. That my mother had relatives in the state of Rajasthan who still had not forgiven her for marrying out of caste—a system that had been forever abolished a generation before, largely due to the efforts of my maternal grandfather—and with a Black American, no less, only served to strengthen my father’s argument.

This Demiurgist Doctrine, at least, sounded as though it was based in empirical evidence, but I couldn’t help but wonder.

“Are many of your people religious?” I asked.

The silver eagle shook its head. “There are few, if any, ‘religions’ in the Entelechy, as the term has historically been used. However, there are adherents to hypotheses that have not, or even cannot, be experimentally proven, commonly referred to as ‘doctrines.’ In addition to the Demiurgists, there is the Ordinator Doctrine, which holds that the universe is a computational mechanism, and the related Recursive Doctrine, which contends that all of existence is an historical emulation of some earlier reality. There are any number of such non-falsifiable hypotheses currently in vogue, and a greater number which have passed in and out of fashion in recent years.”

“So none of the religions of my era have survived, then?”

“That would not be a completely accurate statement, sir. But those that have survived have evolved into forms their former adherents likely would not recognize.”

I glanced around me as the slidewalk carried us through pleasure gardens and towering castles of glass, all constructed of matter that once had been the dirt beneath my feet.

“I can’t say that I’d blame them.”

The escort maneuvered us off the slidewalks and back to the grand structure called the Central Axis, the hub of the threshold network of wormholes. From there, reaching the terraformed world of Cronos was a journey of no more than a quarter of an hour as we transited thresholds one after another, each time stepping through the towering metal arch from one axis to another, each smaller and farther from the central hub than the last. Finally, our third transit carried us to the terminus on Cronos itself, and I found myself standing on the surface of another Earth.

Had I not known better, I would have thought I stood in the center of some major metropolitan city in the western hemisphere, sometime in the early 21C, pre-Impact. But a moment’s examination began to reveal the anachronisms, some subtle and some far less so. Skyscrapers rose on all sides of a broad plaza, in the center of which stood the threshold. A few hundred meters away a crowd milled, though little pockets drifted here and there in all directions. Horse-drawn carriages and early 20C roadsters shared the roadways with bicyclers and hovercrafts, and overhead, a zeppelin drifted, tethered to a spire atop a nearby tower, while biplanes and scramjets cut across the sky at varying speeds.

The crowd seemed not yet to have noticed our arrival, though one or two heads began to turn our way. I felt a twisting in my stomach, a familiar fight-or-flight reflex, and had to resist the temptation to flee back through the threshold.

Having been trained in Interdiction Negotiation, I’ve had experience in sizing up the tactical situation of any circumstance and using available resources to my advantage, and I’ve been in more than a few tight spots. I’ve gone ship to ship in complete vacuum wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of pants, I’ve walked unarmed into a hostile mining ship overrun with out-of-control cyborg mining birds, and once I even refused to smoke a bowl with Laurentien Francisca Marcella, princess of Orange-Nassau, queen of the Netherlands Court in exile on Ceres (a mistake I didn’t make twice). But I found myself thinking twice about the situation I found myself in.

A woman dressed as a 1920s flapper walked arm in arm with an absolutely convincing Abraham Lincoln, while a short distance away a man dressed as a dowager empress of the Ching Dynasty was in close conversation with a woman wearing an exact replica of the pressure suit worn by Neil Armstrong for his first moonwalk. What appeared to be a bipedal tiger, wearing a green suit coat and pants, was in a heated argument with a heavyset man wearing a skintight scarlet suit, gold sash and boots, and white cape, with a lightning bolt emblem on his chest. A woman in a full burka was dancing with a man wearing WWII-era Japanese combat fatigues, a katana sword in an ornate scabbard hanging from his belt.

It was a grab bag of history, myth, and fiction, all blended together.

A tall woman wearing a sweeping dress of green velvet approached, followed by a pair of men dressed in the uniforms of the American Civil War, one in the colors of the Union Army, the other in that of the Confederacy. It took me a moment to recognize them as the superheroine and zoot suiters I’d met earlier in the day.

“Hello?” I said, offering a weak wave.

“O Captain,” said the woman in the lead, “welcome you to eine repast honoring, gathered among us on Cronos here.”

I reached up and tapped at the earplug in my left ear before realizing that I’d been hearing the woman’s voice unaided through my right.

“Um, thanks?” I answered uneasily.

“Yo!” said the Union soldier, giving me an elaborate salute. “Our crib is your crib, mine compadre.”

The Confederate soldier flashed an even more elaborate salute and smiled broadly. “The world of Cronos welcomes you, pal. We are chuffed to lens you.”

“Excuse me, sir,” came the voice of the escort in my left ear, “but at the request of the Anachronists, sent nonvocally via interlink, I’ve neglected to translate their opening address, but on reflection, I think it best you make that determination instead.”

I covered my mouth and whispered to the escort perched on my shoulder. “Is that meant to be English, then?”

“So I am given to understand, sir.”

“Practicing we be,” the woman said proudly, “locution English, all day.”

“That’s extremely flattering,” I said, a bit unsure how to respond, “but I’m afraid that it isn’t necessary to wait for the translation any longer.”

“So everything we say is translated for you instantaneously, then?” the woman said in another language entirely, which was simultaneously translated into crystal-clear English in my left ear.

“Even though you don’t have an interlink installed?” the Union soldier said, his face falling.

“The eagle still translates, and I hear it through this”—I tapped the little silver object in my left ear—“so you can just speak normally.”

The woman looked crestfallen. “But we’d just gotten used to the authentic primitive experience.”

“It is not to worry, lump of sugar,” the Confederate soldier said in fractured English. “Always we can speak the English ourselves, nah?”

“Yep,” the Union soldier agreed. “Mine compadre, his is the truth of it. Leave us continue our English speak, anyway.”

“You two go ahead,” the woman said in her strange language, English in my left ear. “All of that conjugating gave me a headache.”

Just then, something behind me caught her eye in the direction of the threshold.

“Ah, right on time.” She stepped forward and took my elbow. “I’d like to introduce you to our other honored guest.”

I turned around, following her lead. Coming through the threshold was a figure standing some two meters tall, absolutely naked and hairless, covered with skin of a dull metallic sheen. The figure was completely genderless, a smooth expanse of metal between the legs, chest smooth and unmarked. And while the face had no eyes, I couldn’t help but get the impression I was being regarded closely.

“Captain Stone, allow me to introduce the Exode probe, Xerxes 298.47.29A.”

Before relating my meeting with Xerxes, I think it’s instructive to relate a story I was later told, about the first time
anyone
in the Entelechy met Xerxes.

In T8623, 352 years before
Wayfarer One
was found by a crew of dog-men, a communications satellite in orbit around the Entelechy world of Ouroboros received a laser transmission that fell within the Ka-Band frequencies, a little above 30 GHz. Data was found to be encoded in the transmission by pulse position modulation, on the order of 10
²¹
bytes of data—a zettabyte, in other words. The header file of the transmission defined a binary lexicon and a complete periodic table of elements. There followed a series of simple instructions for the creation of long chains of silicate ions in precise configurations. When completed, these proved to be self-assembling molecular machines that began immediately to assemble some sort of mechanism.

Within ten standard days, the assemblers had incorporated and reconfigured one hundred kilograms of raw materials, producing a genderless bipedal robot resembling a baseline anthropoid. A team of the most prestigious scientists of the Entelechy gathered behind protective fields and waited for the first communication from the mechanism.

The probe rose to a sitting position, regarding the scientists with an eyeless gaze.

“Oh,” the probe said with a sigh. “It’s
you
.”

That, in a nutshell, is Xerxes.

“Two great explorers,” sang the voice of the woman in my left ear, strange syllables clashing in my right, “a meeting of titans.”