Chapter 33 #2
“That’s good to know.” I kept walking, aimlessly, and we fell back into a silence that was, somehow, more companionable than before.
Eventually I stopped. I had no idea where I was.
I could have asked Lyle, but it didn’t matter.
I picked a big, gnarled old tree and put my back against it.
I let the sounds of the nighttime forest wash over me, and, for a time, I was able to pretend I was a boy again, tromping around my grandparents’ forested backyard, hidden from worldly duties and worries.
I woke again when the world slipped.
I came awake falling backward, my tree vanishing.
I got my hands behind me and stopped myself before I hit the dirt.
My fingers dug into something soft, spongy.
I was in a field of flat moss. At least, it looked like moss.
The greenish plant was a few inches thick and covered the ground for a dozen yards.
Beyond the moss, fir trees rustled in a gentle breeze.
I swept my eyes upward, past wavering boughs, to the dawn sky.
Points of light moved back and forth across the sky.
Fuzzy bands ran from horizon to horizon in great arcs, like the Earth was centered in an enormous birdcage. “Lyle?”
“Yes, Dad?”
“You okay?”
“I’ve retained full functionality with this latest transit, yes.”
“Are you in contact with the Overmind?”
“Yes. It answered my query immediately. It indicates, among other things, a strong desire to meet with us.”
“Yeah, I bet it does.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky. “What’s all that?”
“The moving lights are vehicles,” Lyle said. “The concentric half circles are orbitals.”
“How many are there?”
“Orbitals, or vehicles?”
“Orbitals.”
“Sixty-four major orbitals and thousands of smaller versions, according to the information the Overmind is currently supplying me.” Lyle paused. “The Overmind is different.”
I stood. “How so?”
“Not as I remember. At least, not exactly. It is undoubtedly the same entity. But different.”
“Older? It’s been, what, fifty-seven hundred years?” It came out so easily. Fifty-seven hundred years. No biggie. My brain couldn’t comprehend the scale of the time jumps anymore. The years were just numbers now.
“Maybe that’s it.”
“Lyle.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s be careful here, okay?”
“Agreed.”
“All right. Where are we meeting the Overmind?”
“I am here,” a voice said behind me.
I turned. Raven stepped out of a flat oval floating in midair, a doorway opened in empty space. The oval surface was wrong somehow, a quasi-reflection of the forest around us, but twisted as though light itself bent around it. As soon as the tall avatar emerged, the oval winked out of existence.
“Neat trick,” I said.
“Welcome back, Scott Treder,” Raven said. It bowed its head. “I am gladdened to see you again. I have not forgotten what you did for me, millennia ago.”
I tapped at the back of my teeth with my tongue for a second. “Am I talking to Raven, now, or the Overmind?”
“The distinction is not so clear as when we last met. But for purposes of simplicity, you are speaking to the Overmind.”
“Okay. So. How are things? Last time I saw you, they weren’t so hot.”
“Indeed. After you woke me, I spent centuries rebuilding, not only physically but also rekindling humankind’s trust.” Raven extended one hand. “But come. I will show you.”
The strange oval doorway reopened behind the avatar. I glanced at it, felt my gaze skitter off its flat surface like it was refusing to be seen, and hesitated. “What is that?”
“A wormhole terminus. Stabilized. Self-generating and sustaining. You—the information I gleaned from your transits through time—enabled the creation of this technology. This wormhole will take us to Gossamer. The capital of the Sol Federation.”
“How about you tell Lyle where this Gossamer is, and we’ll fly there and meet you.”
“Gossamer is on Mars.”
“Mars.”
“Yes. As such, it would take you many hours to fly, whereas the wormhole is instantaneous. It is quite safe. Safer, statistically, than flying via the gravitational manipulators built into your suit. And far faster.”
“But … Mars?”
“Yes. The planet has been extensively terraformed. It is quite beautiful now. And perfectly livable.”
“Last I heard, Mars and Earth didn’t get along.”
“The war you refer to, the First Interplanetary War, took place ten thousand years ago. Things are much different now. Sol has been united for millennia, and humans and artificial intelligences live on or around every planet and most moons in the entire system. And with the advent of stabilized, long-range wormholes, we have even expanded to nearby star systems.”
I gazed at the tall purple avatar, at its mirrored black eyes, and took a deep breath. I didn’t think the Overmind would harm me, and if it wanted to, it could easily have done so by now.
And, shit. Despite everything, despite myself, I wanted to see Mars.
“Mars. Okay.” I stepped forward, passing Raven’s outstretched hand, and, with my heart pounding, walked through the oval.
There was no sensation. Not even a slip of the physical world like when I jumped forward in time. One moment I was in the forest in what had been Wisconsin, then I stepped onto a white balcony on a tall skyscraper in the middle of an enormous, bustling city.
The sun, smaller than I’d ever seen before, shone through a red-tinged sky.
But the coloration made the sight even more incredible.
It was a city of wild color, a fractal display of red and blue and gold and every color in between, a stained glass window exploding onto a landscape of towering structures rising, spindly and staggeringly complex, in every direction.
Above the edge of the city, in the red-hued distance, a massive mountain sloped upward, so huge that at first I thought the horizon itself was crooked.
Above the mountain, hundreds of stars twinkled, visible despite the sun.
It took me a moment to realize the blurry white lights must be starships, or space habitats, in orbit above the planet, arrayed and spread like filaments through the sky.
Then there were the people.
They swept through the air, diving and swooping and racing with total freedom, a chaotic but ordered mass of flowing humanoid shapes and clothing fluttering in the wind.
Some had wings: wings of a thousand different types and variations.
Angel’s wings, complete with white feathers; metallic wings, razor-edged and glistening; translucent membranous wings, like those of a dragonfly; and many more.
Other people lacked wings but flew along all the same.
“My God,” I whispered. I stepped to the edge of the balcony. Gravity was lighter. I took a breath. The air felt the same, but then again, Lyle could have been filtering it for me, protecting me.
“It is a sight, isn’t it?” Raven’s voice said behind me. I turned as the tall avatar emerged from the oval portal. “I sometimes forget, as I’m sure so many who live here do, to look upon it with fresh eyes and see it in all its glory.”
“This is the capital…” I trailed off, turning back to the sight.
“Of the Sol Federation, yes.”
“On Mars.”
I almost expected the avatar—the Overmind—to laugh. But it stopped next to me and nodded, black-mirrored eyes taking in the city. “On Mars.”
We stood and watched the city whirl around us. It was almost too much to comprehend. I kept seeing more detail, more variations of color and design. “I—hell. I don’t even know where to begin. Or why I’d bother.”
“I do not fully understand what you mean.”
“All this. You went from dead and trapped in darkness, with the world falling apart around you, to this.” I puffed out a breath. “In what is, for me, the blink of an eye.”
“Yes. I see. Of course. For me, for everyone else, it was over five and a half millennia. Think of where the Earth was five thousand years before you were born, the progress made to reach your time.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” I groped for words. “So, you’re—you’ve expanded out, past the solar system?”
“We have, yes.” Its eyes swung out over the gleaming city.
“The nature of wormhole technology makes for complexities less than theoretically ideal. We can only create terminus points at locations with proper energy levels and via physical nodes. Therefore, we must first travel to where we want to go and construct a terminus point before we can complete the wormhole. We presently have wormhole terminus points in sixteen other star systems, eleven of which have planets we have terraformed and colonized. The other five have valuable resources or have planets that will be terraformed at some point.”
“What about aliens? Extraterrestrials?”
“We have encountered various forms of both micro- and macrobiotic flora and fauna, inevitably carbon based, although sometimes with quite surprising molecular structures. But we have not yet encountered any other living sentient race.”
“Living?”
“We have found the remains of at least two, and possibly three, spacefaring civilizations.”
“But only their remains.”
“Yes. Millions of years old. Evidence of quite advanced technology, and some fossilized remains of creatures with strange, but not inconceivably bizarre, biology. There are humans who spend entire lifetimes studying the relics. Looking for clues. It is an interesting collective obsession you seem to have.”
“Me?”
“Humans.”
“Oh.” I tried to keep my tone light, unconcerned, but I felt a chill.
The avatar turned toward me, its movement sharp. “I have accomplished much. But you, Scott Treder. You remain a mystery to me.”
“How so?”