Further: Beyond the Threshold (5 page)

Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward, and as I passed beneath the frame, my bare feet fell on cool, soft grass.

There was a slight, warm breeze, and off to my right I saw a cluster of strangely shaped buildings rise above a swell of land. They resembled organic growth more than architecture, bulbs balanced delicately atop narrow stalks. Overhead shone a yellow main sequence star, only slightly larger in the sky than the sun seen from Earth’s surface, a close cousin to Sol.

I had joined the UNSA to explore, to expand the frontiers of the human experience. Like the rest of the crew of
Wayfarer One
, I had happily sacrificed anything like a normal existence to strike out for a new world, a possible new home for humanity. Now I had learned that while I slept long millennia, humanity had already expanded far beyond my wildest imaginings, and I found myself left with one question: What would I do now? I felt a dull ache deep within, realizing that the frontier had long ago retreated far beyond my reach.

“What is the name of this planet?” I asked, my eyes tracking the horizon.

“The closest approximation in Information Age English is Haven, but the first settlers here in the Second Space Age called it Ramachandra’s World.”

It took a moment for that to sink in.

“What did you say?”

“It’s only natural, sir,” the silver eagle said. “Yours is one of the best known voyages of exploration in human history, ranked with that of the Polynesian mariners or of James Cook or Yuri Gagarin. That you didn’t reach your mission’s destination does not detract from the attempt itself.”

I turned my head, looking directly into the smooth eyes of the metal bird. “Except I
have
reached my destination now, haven’t I?”

The escort nodded slowly, and I fancied I saw something like amusement in its metal expression.

“A journey of light-years, no more difficult than moving an alter from one world to another.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.”

I turned and stepped back through the threshold.

My hand didn’t make the inventory control gesture, but only because I consciously suppressed the reflex. Still, I said aloud, “I hope I didn’t leave anything behind I’ll need,” patting the sides of my robe, feeling naked and exposed.

“You needn’t worry, sir. The only things that can’t be transported through a threshold are cosmic string fragments themselves. The negative energy of the fragments collapses the wormhole so that thresholds have to be dragged into place at sublight speeds.”

“Well,” I said, and then stopped, again at a loss for words. “I suppose I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Shall we go to the quarters prepared for you, sir? There may be more suitable attire for you there.”

“Why not?” I said, and honestly couldn’t think of anything else I might do.

It took a few moments to thread our way through the concentric circles of thresholds, toward the nearest wall and an exit to the outside. The exit was a more traditional door, meters tall and immense, but with panels that slid open and closed. As we approached the opening doors, a small crowd gathered, most of them seeming to be normal varieties of human, but with an odd mixture of man, machine, and animal scattered here and there. My head was so full of wormholes that I scarcely noticed them, and I absently assumed them to be some sort of commuters, but I noticed after a moment that many had begun pointing in my direction, staring and whispering quietly to one another in strange languages.

Finally, we passed through the open doors and into the bright daylight beyond. And I almost collapsed onto the ground, struck by an overwhelming disorientation.

Overhead, past a sky of startling blue, I saw the indistinct image of curving farmland and cities, and high over the horizon were towering mountains topped with snow, pointing in my direction like accusing fingers. I was not standing on a planet’s surface, but seemed instead to be on the inside of a hollow sphere, looking up at the opposite interior.

“
Madar chowd
,” I swore.

“Well, sir,” the escort chimed in my ear, “after all, I
did
say that Earth isn’t quite the world you remember.”

In 2145 CE, right around the time I was joining the Bharat Scouts, the movie
Destroyer
was released to theaters. It was a slightly fictionalized account of the Impact, which killed millions, destroyed entire cities, toppled at least one nation, and sent dozens of others into decades-long economic depressions, and ravaged Earth’s environment for a century or more.

In the movie’s opening scenes, computer-generated models of old and long-dead Hollywood and Bollywood stars portrayed the three scientists at the NASA-funded University of Hawaii Asteroid Survey from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona who, on June 19, 2004, were the first to learn of the asteroid’s existence. An avatar of Raoul Bova was cast as Fabrizio Bernardi, a young Roy Scheider was selected to portray David J. Thoel, and the recently departed Joos Diamond Fortunate assayed the role of Roy A. Tucker. In a dramatic moment, having just looked up from the data scrolling across their monitors, the three scientists name the newly discovered asteroid after a mythology figure depicted in an illustrated encyclopedia lying open on a nearby desk.

It’s all terrifically portentous and “important,” but sadly, it’s complete fiction. In real life, they reportedly borrowed the name from the villain on a second-rate science fiction television program.

Apophis was originally the Greek name of the Egyptian god Apep, the Destroyer, who dwelt in the eternal darkness of the underworld of the Duat, from which he came forth nightly in an attempt to destroy the sun. The asteroid, then, was classified Asteroid 99942 Apophis, or Asteroid Apophis, or just plain Apophis. Or, as it came to be known by the whole world a few short years later, the Destroyer.

Did the scientists know what kind of sympathetic magic they were working when they named a chunk of rock 320 meters in diameter after a demon bent on devouring the sun? Massing out at 4.6 x 10^10 kg, or roughly eight times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza, when the Destroyer struck Earth on April 13, 2036, the impact released energy equivalent to 870 megatons (or 65,500 times the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) as the asteroid struck Los Angeles at a velocity of 12.59 km/s.

Those killed in the initial impact were the lucky ones. As debris from the Destroyer rained back down to Earth over a range of thousands of kilometers, the city of Los Angeles reduced to a crater filled with ash and shocked quartz, the sky was blackened over much of Earth. The asteroid had accomplished what its mythological namesake could not as darkness fell.

The United States of America, unable to recover from the devastation, balkanized in the years following the Impact. The state of Utah withdrew from the union to become the independent nation of Deseret. Northern California, Oregon, and Washington became Pacifica and petitioned to join Canada. Florida became the Archdiocese of Florida, a Catholic Cuban state. The United States continued to exist as a sovereign state and political entity well into the next century, but its borders were much smaller, and it was no longer a player on the world stage. Worse, a sizeable percentage of Americans took the Impact as proof of the wrath of an angry god, punishment for a godless, secular nation. A flight of intellectuals and artists followed in the late 21C as the diminished USA became more and more repressively fundamentalist. Many of the dispossessed settled in New Zealand or Australia, India, or England—any developed nations with large English-speaking populations—my own paternal grandparents among them.

In the rest of the world, the Impact was felt in different ways. Already in the late 20C and early 21C it was felt that Earth itself had turned against humankind somehow, lashing out more and more every year with earthquakes and floods and fires, but now even this fragile environment was no refuge against the dark. Following the Impact, humankind looked to space, not as an abstract source of wonder, something to be gazed at romantically or studied by lab-suited scientists in labs, but as a source of danger, as a looming threat.

The first move was to establish a network of asteroid defense systems, sufficient to deflect any subsequent meteors or asteroids that might draw near Earth. Second, the nations of Earth began a concentrated and coordinated effort to mine the moon, the asteroids, and other celestial bodes of the solar system, to meet the growing energy demands of Earth, which would be long in recovering from the environmental and economic effects of the Impact.

In time, with the consolidation of the United Nations, the chartering of the UNSA, and the gradual colonization of the asteroid belt, Mars, and the Jovian moons, space changed once more, becoming, for the first time, a possible new home for humankind. But still there lingered, in the back of every mind, the thought that, one day, the heavens might again open up and rain down destruction on Earth.

Gazing up at the landscape curving overhead, I thought of Charlton Heston’s Taylor, standing before the ruined Statue of Liberty. The character, seeing the charred remains of a once proud culture, immediately assumes the destruction came at man’s own hand. For contemporary viewers, there was little doubt that Armageddon would be nuclear.

Growing up in the shadow of the Impact, for me death was always expected from above. Fictions about extinction-level events, asteroids the size of moons striking Earth, were common when I was young.

Each culture throughout history, I suppose, has always chosen its own apocalypse, its own end of the world to fear. All of them, as it happens, were wrong. Man was responsible, in the end, but he did it on
purpose
.

“As a site for long-term habitation,” the escort explained, “Earth simply became too erratic.”

We were riding a moving sidewalk down a broad avenue. Buildings rose on either side, in strange and unlikely forms, while oddly configured air-vehicles filled the skies. There were other pedestrians around us, but I was still too distracted to pay them much attention. I felt a deep sense of vertigo, with mountains and oceans looming far overhead, indistinct in the blue sky like a ghostly moon seen by daylight, and had to resist the temptation to wrap my arms around a post or a tree and hold on for dear life.

“Changes to the planet’s environment, resulting from widespread deforestation and urbanization, the introduction of pollutants to the atmosphere, and so on, compounded to unbalance the climatological system, such that Earth’s weather patterns became increasingly unpredictable, the variations swift and violent.”

I’d seen erratic weather and the results of climate change firsthand. Long before I was born, the sea levels rose high enough that the waters swallowed whole nations. When the sea reclaimed the flatlands, the Dutch became homeless. A flotilla of seagoing vessels followed the court of King Pieter on his decommissioned cruise liner for years. In the late 21C, with the death of his father, the heir apparent King Christian had purchased a number of castoff NASA reusable launch vehicles and migrated to Ceres, the largest rock in the asteroid belt, which he claimed as the new Dutch homeland. They were a strange, foul-smelling crew, the Dutch belters, but they always threw the best parties, and always had the best stuff to smoke.

“So then…what?” I asked, shaking my head. “Environmental changes destroyed the planet?”

I glanced at the silver eagle on my shoulder that regarded me with a metallic expression of confusion.

“Destroyed?” it repeated. “Well, no, of course not. The
planet
could have continued to exist quite happily—erratic weather patterns or no. The problem came in that the
inhabitants
of the planet found it increasingly problematic to remain. When continued warming caused the destabilization of methane hydrate deposits at the bottom of the ocean, the gigatons of methane released increased surface temperatures to levels higher than any seen on Earth in four billion years.”

I shuddered. I was a student at the university when the rainforests began to catch fire, but I’d always hoped that we’d somehow be able to reverse the trend. Apparently, I was wrong.