End of an Era (20 page)

"Yes, but only in one frequency at a time, and — damn it. It would take all afternoon to send that binary sequence in even a small sampling of possible radio frequencies." I shook my head, discouraged. It had sounded like such a good idea. "Besides, we don’t even know how long each of the binary pulses should be."

"One time-keeping unit each." Klicks paused, realizing what he’d just said. "That means if we get the right number for the frequency, we’ll automatically have the right length for the pulses." He paused once more, straining to hear that inner voice again. "And don’t bother trying to modulate the bits into the carrier wave. Just send them directly by interrupting the transmission for the zeros."

"Okay." I wished my nose would stop hurting. "I’ll write a little program to try different variables for the length of the time-keeping unit." The cable wasn’t long enough to reach back to my crash couch, so I had to type standing up, my palmtop balanced on the fake woodgrain molding that surrounded the radio console. "Any guess as to what value we should start with?"

Klicks closed his eyes. "Try … try four or five seconds. I don’t know, but that
feels
about right."

The radio console could only accept instructions in CURB, a standard communications-processor language. It’d been ages since I’d programmed anything in that. I hoped I remembered enough; we certainly didn’t have time for me to thumb through the on-line manual. My fingers danced, calling up a little calculator. I worked out three-to-the-thirteenth, the number of cycles per unit of Martian time Klicks had specified, then typed:
Set Frequency = 1594323. Frequency = Frequency + …

Another ceratopsian head smashed against the hull, and this time it ruptured. I heard the roar of water rushing out of the tank beneath our feet. Bet that surprised them.

I decided to start a little lower than Klicks’s guess.
Set Time-unit = 3.000 s. Goto Send…

The ship shook again as a triceratops skull smashed against it. "Can’t you go any faster, Brandy?"

"Do you want to do it, fathead?"

"Sorry." He backed away.

The horns had pierced the hull in enough places now to loosen a large piece of it. Through the glassteel, I could see the ceratopsian lumbering off.

I typed out the program’s final line, then issued the compile command. One, two, three error messages flashed on the screen, along with the corresponding line numbers. "Boolean expression expected." "Type mismatch." "Reserved word."
Damn.

"What’s wrong?" said Klicks.

"Error messages. I made some mistakes."

"Did you want — ?"

"Shut up and let me fix them, please." I switched back to the program editor and hit the key to jump to the first error. Ah, the Boolean problem was simple enough: just a typo, "adn" instead of "and"; serves me right for running with AutoCorrect turned off. I fixed the misspelling.

Crrack!

I swung briefly around. A boneheaded pachycephalosaur was ramming its skull against the perforated hole in the wall. It was now painfully obvious what the Het we had found inside the dissected bonehead had been up to: evaluating the dinosaur’s potential as a living battering ram. How fortunate they’d been able to find an application for it so quickly. "They’re almost through," shouted Klicks.

I tapped out the command that jumped the cursor to the second error.
Type mismatch.
What the hell did that mean in this context? Oh, I see. I’d tried to do a mathematical operation on a text variable. Stupid.

The self-harmonizing notes from the trombone-crested parasaurolophus split the air, presumably calling out for the bonehead to charge again.

The cursor jumped to the third error. Reserved word? That meant the name I’d chosen for a variable — FREQUENCY — was one the program didn’t allow, because it used it exclusively for some other function. Okay, let’s try a different name. Call it SAVE_ASS, and hope that it does. I almost cracked the palmtop’s tiny case with the force with which I bashed out the compile command again.

I held my breath until the message flashed in front of my face: "Compilation successful. No errors."

"Got it!" I said.

"Terrific!" crowed Klicks. "Start transmitting." I highlighted the program file name and held my finger above the Enter key.

"Hit the damn key!" said Klicks.

"I…"

"What’s wrong?"

"You know what’s going to happen/’ I said. "I’m not sure I can…"

"If you don’t want to press it, I will."

I looked at him, held his gaze. "No," I said. "Failing to act is a decision in and of itself." I pressed down on the key. The program started running and the radio began transmitting.

Crrack!
The pachycephalosaur skull with its yellow and blue display colors smashed the loosened section of hull inward. A circular piece of metal about a meter and a half across crashed to the floor with an ear-splitting clang. Before we could react, the bonehead was gone and a triceratops face was poking through from outside. Klicks cocked his rifle. This individual had only one eye horn. The other probably had snapped off while it was attacking our ship. In one continuous motion, Klicks flopped to his belly and fired up into the soft tissue on the underside of the beast’s throat. It teetered for a moment, then slumped back, dead. Lucky shot: he must have severed the thing’s spinal cord.

Through the jagged opening in the hull we could see two other ceratopsians shouldering the carcass aside. Klicks fired over and over, but these beasts weren’t about to repeat the same mistake. They kept their heads tipped down, the bony frills shielding them. In short order, the path was cleared and a platoon of troodons danced into view. They waited for Klicks to lower his rile to reload, then charged, a scaly green wave of teeth and claws surging forward -

Klicks tried to rise to his feet, but instead slammed into the deck. My stomach seemed to drop right through my boots. The closest of the troodons slapped onto their bellies, two of them being impaled on the ragged edge of the hole in the
Sternberger
wall, most of the rest tumbling backward out onto the mud flat. Feeling like I weighed a million kilos, I ran as though in slow motion toward the edges of the impromptu doorway, leaning out over the two troodon corpses. Overhead, the great quetzalcoatlus, gliding in a wide circle, crumpled like a paper toy and began plummeting to the earth. Nearby, the sauropod’s twelve meters of neck came crashing to the ground, hitting with a sound like a thunderclap. The tyrannosaurs staggered for a few moments, then, one by one, fell to their knees, their legbones snapping under their own massive weight. The earth vibrated and shook beneath our feet as gravity surged back to a full, normal g. Suddenly the mud flat began to ripple like the Tacoma Narrows bridge, great clouds of brown dust rising into the darkening sky.

I staggered away from the opening and dropped onto my belly near Klicks. The earthquake continued, the roar deafening, the constant heaving of the ground turning my stomach. Wind whipped through the openings in the Sternberger’s hull. There was much lightning, too, strobing through the glassteel, but the thunder was all but lost against the other noises, including a cacophony of animal screams.

On and on, the ground shaking, heaving…

I suspected fissures must be ripping open all across the Earth, spewing out magma rich in iridium and arsenic and antimony. The molten rock would spark countless forest fires and boil water in the seas. In places, clouds of poisonous gas would belch forth, and great tidal waves must be pounding the shores, sloshing ocean water into freshwater shallows, destroying coastal habitats. And, as the Earth compacted slightly under its newfound weight, quartz grains would be shocked and microdiamonds would form — two of the asteroid fans’ favorite pieces of evidence for what they’d thought had been an impact.

My head pounded. I lifted my neck to look up through the opening torn in our hull. The sky had turned a bilious greenish gray, the clouds whipping along with visible speed. The
Sternberger
bounced like an egg frying. Each time it slammed back down, my chest was bruised, metal fittings on my jacket digging into my skin. My teeth rattled. I was afraid to open my mouth, lest it be slammed back closed by an impact, biting off my tongue. My nose bled steadily.

Eventually the screams from outside stopped, but the pounding went on and on and on, the ground heaving. Sheets of rain dropped out of the sky, as though buckets inside the clouds had been overturned all at once.

An hour went by, and another, the earthquake unrelenting. For a time, Klicks was knocked completely unconscious, his head smashing into the deck as we bounced again and again. As the Earth’s gravity increased, I imagined Luna must be reeling in its orbit. By the time it stabilized again, it would be showing the part of its face familiar to human beings. I suspected tiny Trick would never fully re-stabilize in its closer orbit, making its eventual disintegration inevitable.

At last the quaking stopped. We stayed put in the
Sternberger
, anticipating an aftershock. That came about twenty minutes later, and others followed for all the rest of the time we remained in the Mesozoic and perhaps, indeed, for years to come.

During one of the gaps between the quakes, we dared to venture outside. The sky, thick with dust, had cleared enough that we could see the blood-red setting sun.

It was a different world. Klicks and I were the only large creatures still able to walk around. Dinosaurs were everywhere, flopped on their bellies. Some still clung to life. The hearts of others had already given out under the hours of gravity 2.6 times what they were used to. Those that did survive would eventually starve, unable to move around to forage.

We saw several Hets. They had oozed out of their dead and dying dinosaur vehicles, but were flattened like blue pancakes, barely able to move. They seemed to be having trouble holding together in large, intelligent concentrations. In many places, we saw three or four smaller globs next to each other, unable to join up. Klicks set fire to all the ones we found.

Many of the small animals, including some tiny birds, tortoises, and a few shrew-like mammals, appeared to be doing all right in the full gravity, but broken bones, internal injuries, or cardiac arrest seemed to be killing or have killed almost everything else.

Death was everywhere and I took as much of it as I could. Finally, bone-weary, I sat down amongst the ferns next to a hapless duckbill, the creature whimpering slightly as its life slipped away. The beast’s intricate crest had apparently been staved in when its head had slammed into a rock as the gravity surged on. The animal’s dying breaths were escaping with ragged whistling sounds through its smashed nasal passages, and it regarded me, terrified, with an unintelligent eye.

It was the end of an era.

Stroking the dinosaur’s pebbly flank, I let my tears flow freely.

The oncology ward at the Wellesley Hospital is never a cheery place, but somehow this time it seems less oppressive, less a prison for both me and my father.

I sit in the uncomfortable vinyl chair next to him. It isn’t important that we talk. There isn’t much to say, anyway. Occasionally he does rouse himself enough to speak and I face him, looking as though I am listening. But my mind is thousands of kilometers away and millions of years in the past.

When the Huang Effect reversed, the mathematical string connecting the
Sternberger
to the present was reeled in. As the ship was hauled back up the timeline, the entire last 65 million years of history were rewritten. Reverse engineering: the future making the past what it must have been.

I’d killed the dinosaurs; I’d paved the way for the mammals.

Paved the way for my own present.

And the other Brandy? The other timeline?

Gone. There’s only one timeline now; only one reality.

I suppose there is no reason to mourn. I am him, after all, and with Tess and me still together, perhaps he is content to hand off the timeline to me. Besides, it isn’t as though he had never existed. I have some of his memories now, thanks to that strange swapping of diaries. Whether by quantum flux or deliberate design, I am grateful for those memories, for the small peek they afforded at what my life might have been. The time-traveling Brandy’s diary reminds me of my neighbor Fred’s tabby cat, appearing at his cottage up on Georgian Bay after it had supposedly ceased to exist. Sometimes the universe does care … just a bit.

And the universe has given me something else, too: proof that a future does exist for humankind, or whatever we become, for somehow that future gave Ching-Mei the knowledge needed to make the past what it had to be. The end creates the means.

But I do wonder what happened to the Hets, those bizarre alien conquerors who came and went in the dim past. Their ages-long war with the natives of the belt planet must have escalated into a devastating final battle, as the time-traveling Klicks had suggested, destroying the fifth world and laying waste to Mars.

The time-traveling Brandy didn’t really have to make the moral decision about the Hets. There was only one possible course of action after he learned the truth about them. That’s fitting, in a way, for the Hets themselves were inflexible chemical machines, driven to violence and conquest by their very nature. The other Brandy had no choice because the viral Hets had no choice.

But in the here and now, I do have a choice. We all do. For years, I’ve avoided making decisions. But the act of deciding is what makes us human, what separates the living from things like the Hets that only parody life. My father is experiencing a remission now, but if he asks for my help again, I know how I will answer.

I wonder about those Hets left on Earth after the resurgence of gravity. They apparently lost the ability to clump together into big enough packages to remain intelligent. But you can’t really kill viruses, since they aren’t truly alive. Would they survive somehow as part of Earth’s ecosystem? Would we even recognize them, or their effects, 65 million years later?

It hits me. The Hets did linger on, dissolving into their constituent units. Their intelligence ebbed from them, their civilization reduced to nothing but chemically stored memories in their RNA. Only their hatred for things truly alive survives, their basic biological imperative continuing to drive them.

Influenza. The common cold. Polio. And, yes, the cancer that is killing my father. It seems that the Hets are still here.