Further: Beyond the Threshold (7 page)

My aching joints were ready for a rest when the escort finally directed me to transfer to progressively slower slidewalks. We were moving only at the pace of a gradual amble when the escort indicated a concourse intersecting the slidewalk up ahead.

“Now, sir,” the escort said, “if you’ll step off the slidewalk, we have almost reached the accommodations prepared for you.”

The transition from moving sidewalk to solid ground was a little disorienting at first, but after a few steps, I got my land legs back under me. The concourse extended at a right angle from the slidewalk, easily a hundred meters from side to side with medium-height buildings rising up on either side. The escort indicated that our destination lay at the far end of the concourse, but we quickly found our way blocked by an odd assortment of beings crowded in our path.

In the network of virtual worlds in which I played as a kid, players’ alters could take any form. Some of the worlds of the Pentaverse were oriented along “magical” lines, with creatures resembling those from mythology and folklore, while others were highly technological, peopled by cybernetic humans and robots. When I logged in and navigated my alter through the Ein Sof, there were always new classes of beings to see, new hybrids of multiple forms crawling, walking, flying, or swimming along. I think at one point it was estimated that there were more morphologies in the Pentaverse than the number of terrestrial species that had ever existed in reality.

And after a childhood of that, and an adult life spent patrolling the interplanetary gulfs, surrounded by space-adapted humans, cyborg animals, and mutants, I would have thought little could faze me, but the sight that greeted me when I stepped off the slidewalk proved me wrong.

The crowd ahead of us was variegated and strange to behold. Some were clearly human, though with unearthly colorations and strange body modifications. Others appeared to be animal forms, familiar from the zoos of my childhood, but dressed in clothing and carrying themselves with obvious intelligence. Still others were made of metal and glass and gems, artificial beings like the silver eagle on my shoulder, though in a riot of shapes and forms. And many more besides were of uncertain provenance, strange mixtures of organic and inorganic, of human and animal and machine.

When we approached, a ripple ran through the crowd, and fingers and appendages and waldos all pointed in my direction.

“Escort,” I said to the eagle perched on my shoulder, “is there another way around?”

“Certainly, sir,” the escort answered. “But these would likely follow. You see, they have gathered to see
you
.”

“Me?” I stopped a few meters short of the crowd’s leading edge. Halfheartedly raising a hand, I said, “Um, hello?”

A wall of sound erupted as dozens of the beings gathered began talking at once, while others just stared at me intently, as though expecting me to read their thoughts. In the confusion of tongues, widely disparate sounds collided, such that it seemed that no two individuals were speaking the same language. I didn’t feel threatened, necessarily, as the expressions on those around me—at least those that had recognizable faces—seemed open and happy. They seemed excited to see me, and many of them eager to have some question or other answered, but none seemed to mean me any harm.

“Ever since news of your return was released to the infostructure,” the escort explained, “interest in you has increased at a steady rate. There hasn’t been this level of excitement since the arrival of the Exode probe, three hundred and fifty-two years ago. These are just the first to arrive, I would suspect.”

“How many languages is
that
, anyway?” I said in an aside to the eagle, scanning the crowd.

“There are countless languages spoken within the Human Entelechy,” the escort explained. “Some are unique to planets or habitats, others to cultural groups, and still others spoken only by families or small groups of individuals. Translation from any language to the listener’s personal standard can be done by their interlink, if they are biological, or by translation subprocesses, if they are synthetic.”

“What?”

“Well, there
is
a lingua franca of the Entelechy that many citizens of the Entelechy can speak and comprehend, the name for which could very well be translated into English as ‘Common.’ There is a symbolic written form of Common as well, which is ideogrammic. Common Symbolic can be read by most in the Entelechy, even those who can’t speak or comprehend spoken Common, since they learn to associate the ideograms with words in their own languages. Common and Common Symbolic employ fifteen hundred root words. If you like, I can—”

“Enough, please!” I cut the eagle off with a wave of my hand. “That’s all very…fascinating. Really. Now, please, I’m more concerned at the moment what these people
want
.”

“Oh.” The silver eagle averted its eyes. A pause led me to suspect I might have hurt its feelings, if such a thing were possible, but after a moment, it spoke again. “Most represent different interest groups with connections to one or more of the following: the Information Age in particular or primitive man in general, space flight, exploration, early colonization, the First Space Age, biological systems in their natural states, the Anachronism movement, mythopoeic re-creationism, or any number of doctrines whose hypotheses or tenets might be supported by your testimony of life in ancient times.”

The eagle paused and pointed with its beak to a strangely dressed group of humans clustered nearby.

“Those in particular appear to have come with an invitation.”

“To what?” I asked. “Or where?”

The silver eagle waggled its head from side to side in a move that could only have been a shrug. “You would have to ask them, sir.”

I responded with a shrug of my own, and said, “Well, that seems as good an idea as any.”

I straightened the front of my robe and strode toward the group. They began exchanging nervous glances like devout fans unsure what to do now that they’d caught a pop idol’s attention. Which, I suppose in a way, I was, not that I deserved it. All I’d managed to do was not die yet.

As I approached, the group reluctantly separated out from the rest, and I was able to get a better look at them. There were three of them—two men and a woman. If I squinted, the two men might have passed for 20C Americans, but they wouldn’t have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. They wore suits, ties, and hats such as were common in that era, but exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. The result was a sort of stylized zoot suit, such as those worn by lecherous wolves in old Tex Avery cartoons. As I drew near, the look on their faces was so hungry, so near lust, that I almost fancied I could see their hearts pounding out of their ribcages, their tongues rolling out like red carpets.

The woman, for her part, was dressed in a form-fitting body stocking that left her arms and legs bare, with high flared boots and an elaborate headpiece, all in bright and contrasting primary colors. A cape hung from her shoulders and fluttered slightly in the breeze. I thought she might have been meant to resemble a circus performer, but the geometric design that served as a belt buckle was more suggestive of a logo or shield, and I realized she was dressed as some variety of superheroine.

“Um, hello again?” I gave a little wave, stopping just in front of the trio.

They exchanged excited glances, and then all began speaking at once, loudly.

“Shall I translate?” my escort said in my ear.

I winced at the volume of their voices, and nodded.

In the next instant, three voices shouting in English issued from the eagle’s silver beak, the words all blending into one another.

I held up my hands. “One at a time, one at a time, please!”

The trio fell briefly silent, exchanged more nervous glances, and nodded. The superwoman took half a step forward and presented me with some sort of salute.

“We welcome you, O Captain,” came her voice from the eagle’s mouth, after she once more began to speak. “We would be honored if your august person would join us for the evening meal—”

One of the zoot suits reached over and tapped superwoman on the shoulder, and in strangely accented English, said aloud, “
Grub.
”

The superwoman glanced daggers back at him, but nodded. “…would join us for
grub
,” continued her voice from the eagle, “in the plaza just north of the public threshold terminus on Cronos, at local sunset.”

I turned my attention to my escort.

“Is that far from here?” I asked.

The eagle made a slight noise that, in other circumstances, I might have interpreted as laughter. “No, sir,” it said after a considerable pause. “Nowhere in the Entelechy is what you might classify as ‘far.’ Cronos is a terraformed world in orbit of the star your era named Eighteen Scorpio. Though it is forty-five-point-seven light-years from Sol in flatspace, it requires only three threshold transits. From Central Axis, depending on your walking speed, we could be there in anywhere from two-thousandths to one-thousandths of a day.”

I looked at the eagle with a blank expression.

“As you might say, sir, in ‘a matter of moments.’”

“Ah.” I nodded. “Thanks.” I turned my attention back to the trio, who had been watching the exchange between the escort and me with interest. “Um, is something wrong?”

The superwoman leaned forward, narrowing her eyes and examining me closely. She began to speak, and the escort translated. “You are receiving vocal translation from the agent you carry, who is also providing glosses and additional context, correct?”

I blinked a few times before answering, I suspect. “Yes,” I said slowly.

The woman clapped her hands together, like a kid first tearing the wrapping from a gift. “Oh, what a delightfully authentic primitive experience!”

“Perhaps it would be more historically appropriate if we translated vocally as well?” said one of the zoot suits.

“Or we could learn the archaic tongues ourselves,
hombre
,” the other volunteered excitedly.

I reached up to scratch my nose and, behind my hand, whispered to the eagle. “Who are these guys, anyway?”

“They are Anachronists,” the escort answered, its voice pitched so low I could barely hear him myself. I was glad that it had begun to pick up cues so quickly. “The Anachronists are a nonlocal organization of historical re-creationists. They have terraformed Cronos into an idealized re-creation of Original Earth, with different time periods re-created in different regions.”

“And they want to have me over for the ‘evening meal’?”

“So it would appear, sir.”

The Anachronists, if the buzz of conversation translated by the escort was any indication, had fallen to a disagreement about whether it would be better to learn English to converse with me directly or to employ external translators, as I’d done, to capture a more authentic primitive experience.

I clapped my hands together, trying to catch their eyes.

“Thank you for your very generous offer. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to accept, but I’ll certainly do what I can.”

“Please do,” one of the zoot suits said.

“Yes,” said the other zoot suit, excitedly. “We’ve even fabricated a live cow, whose flesh we’ll marinate and sear in your honor.”

I struggled to fix something like a smile on my face. “How delightful,” I managed.

My flagging reserves of energy were almost spent, so the escort requested that the crowd disperse enough to let us through. As we continued up the concourse, though, we were trailed by an entourage of the curious and starstruck—at a suitably polite distance, though, I noted—and here and there were pockets of other onlookers in our path, eager to see the unfrozen caveman for themselves.

“We are very nearly there, sir,” the escort said in my ear, perhaps noticing the strain on my face or my somewhat labored breathing. I was in fairly good shape, considering how long I’d slept, but even so, my body was that of a man in his seventies, and there were limits to my endurance.

Before we’d gone another dozen steps, our way was blocked again. This time it wasn’t a crowd, but only a pair of individuals. But even if they
hadn’t
been standing in our path, I likely would have slowed down anyway, to get a better look at them myself.