Jigsaw World (18 page)

He went to the others and filled them in.
Everyone was secretly happy to have something positive to do,
instead of just stewing in their own juices. Everyone had their
stuff packed and ready to load in the RV within thirty minutes, and
they were ready. While the others were finding places to put their
gear, Tom went out to fetch the dog. Bailey appeared from the edge
of the woods with the first whistle, and trotted confidently to the
RV. In his mouth he had the possum that he had previously
confronted. It looked to be properly sulled again, and it was
obvious by the proud bearing of the dog that he considered the
possum to be a cherished pet. Tom considered the pros and the cons
of having a wild possum on board the RV, and then he opened the
door to the RV so that the dog could enter with his pet.

A few moments later, they were jostling down
the driveway of the cabin, headed for the open road, and the
ultimate destination of Magnolia, Arkansas. Tom thought that it was
good to be in the country with actual trees, not the sage brush of
Arizona, or the puny saplings of Texas, but actual solid trees. He
thought that, if events and the human population allowed, he might
well consider settling down somewhere in this area. He would
propose that to Karla, after the trials were over.

Karla and Tom were paired up, as were Markus
and Vera. Charla was still alone and frightened, but this time,
Bailey seemed to feel no desire for interspecies sex with her,
avoiding her entirely, but using the possum as an excuse for the
neglect. Even though he was a dog, he still had more sense than
most humans. Not that he was going for that girl, with whatever
that was growing in her belly!

Unlike every other leg of their journey, the
less than one hundred miles to Magnolia really were less than one
hundred miles, possibly much less. If there was any time that
another one thousand mile leg would have been welcomed, it was now,
when the group faced an unknown task with an uncertain outcome. In
barely an hour and a half, they were there.

A cross between a gypsy and a hippie, that is
what the Sage looked like. You would dismiss him as normal, even
perhaps shallow, until you happened to glance into his eyes. They
seemed to go all the way down to some unknown heaven or hell.
Somehow, the eyes, the long hair and the smile seemed to go
together.

The Sage settled them into the curiously
decorated parlor, where odd items which might have come from alien
worlds claimed to be decorative items, although you knew they lied.
He brought them each a bottle of water, a cup of coffee, and a shot
of Absinthe. Everyone drank the shot first, followed by the cup and
the bottle. Finally, the Sage got around to the
briefing.

He told the group that each of the four
originals would have a task in the past. Karla and the dog (and
possum) were not included in the task, but they would act as
emotional anchors to the present for the group. The Sage said that
the present world was unbalanced in terms of the consensus reality
due to some ambiguities in the past, which they would be sent back
to address. After that, they would have to get tools and themselves
to a specific location in order to complete a reset of
reality.

The Sage whispered a short phrase which the
group could not quite hear, and the flames of the candles
decorating his parlor flamed up, threatening to set the house on
fire, before they subsided. He said that he had just activated a
sort of psychic shield about each of them, so that they would be
able to exist in the eras that they found themselves in, and they
would be safe from any native dangers of those times.

“
You four shall each open that
door and go down the hallway behind it. I will send each of you
through at the correct second, and you will be confronted with your
task.” The Sage said. “As soon as you complete the task, you will
be returned.”

He went on to say that modern physicists would
call the hallway a tuned wormhole, in this case restricted to
travel in time, and directed by the mind of the Sage and the mind
of the Cosmos itself. It would find the instants deep in ancestral
time before the alternate world histories branched off, and would
allow the changes that history needed.

Soon enough, the moment had come. They lined
up in front of the door, and the Sage counted down the seconds
using some type of mental clock to find the right time. First, he
placed his hand on Charla shoulder, and before she could protest,
he pushed her toward the door, which she opened with a trembling
hand, and stepped forward. The remaining three saw a flash of light
as the door swung shut, and then it was Tom’s turn. Next it was
Vera’s time, and finally it was time for Markus. Then Karla, the
Sage, Bailey (and the possum) found their selves alone.

******

Charla was blinded by the light as she felt
the sensation of some massive acceleration. She was also almost
overcome by nausea, which she suspected was due to both the
acceleration and the now
third trimester
pregnancy that she was now
enduring. The light finally vanished along with the feeling of
acceleration, and an alien landscape formed around her.

She sees an ocean directly in front of her,
with a rocky beach and gray-toned waves and water. The water was
not open, but had a series of stone structures standing throughout
the local bay. There were no plants or animals on the land, except
for some slightly green slime washing about in the surf on the
beach, and a couple of patches of something that might be a very
primitive form of lichen or even mold on the face of one of the
nearby rocks. There are some soft and plant-like structures that
were washed up on the beach.

What she doesn’t know is that she has been
transported to the Ediacaran period, some 850 million years in her
past. Even the flora that she sees, primitive as it might seem, is
more advanced than the modern theory of her human world would have
credited. The rocks that are defying the wear and tear of the waves
are oxygen producing cyanobacteria stromatolites. Deep in the
ocean, far from the shallow beach are a few primitive and odd
animal forms, more collections of bacteria than actual organisms,
but starting to form various and odd macrostructures that never
quite made it into the fossil record.

The oceans are fecund with fronded and
spiculed sponges of various forms, and a number of fungal analogues
live alongside their multi-bacterial counterparts, but would not
last out the extinction events in the future. Charla did not know
any of these details, but she recognized it as a world that was
totally alien to her. The creature that inhabited her womb did not
find it so alien as her, and it brought a sudden and urgent pain to
Charla.

She kneeled down on the rocky soil under the
intensity of the pain. In the middle of the most distant pasts, on
an early Earth that she should not have been able to breathe on,
she felt the first contractions begin to add to the pain. She
panted, and she writhed, and she could find no reprieve from the
unrelenting pain. She felt a wetness and a tearing, and the thing
that was her spawn began to rip its way out of her body.

The protection that kept her alive was not a
benefit in this. Long past the point where she would have passsed
out, and succumbed to death, she was kept alive and conscious, to
feel the pain, to feel the terror, and to watch in a state of
madness beyond terror as the thing which tore its way out of her
reared up on its array of limbs which included tentacles and
pincers, and legs of sundry sorts, and it showed her a face which
was so unnatural and so terrible that she literally could not see
it!

The Thing that was her spawn grew monstrously,
second by second, with tube-like limbs sucking water and small
organisms out of the surf to feed the creature. Finally, it took a
hold of her paralyzed body with limbs filled with hooks and
pincers, and pulled it toward a great opening in its center, which
was ringed in hundreds of sharp teeth like those of a shark. The
pain redoubled as the creature began to devour its mother
alive.

This is how the first of the Great
Old Ones came to be on the ancient Earth.

Tom was blinded by the bands of intense light,
and was lightly disquieted by the huge acceleration he felt. As the
light dissipated, he saw a landscape out of any child’s book of
prehistoric animals. The land was clothed in a variety of ferns,
including some trees that looked like ferns. There was no grass to
see, but everywhere you would expect it, he saw instead a rich
carpet of mosses. A slight movement in the ferns showed a moist
skinned Tetrapod, a primitive, but large amphibian form that moved
on its mysterious mission a hundred feet away from the nearby
stream that it must have come from.

He focused on the near horizon and one of the
structures that he took to be an oddly formed hill moved in its
place. Looking carefully, he saw that it was a single huge animal,
with a bodily form so chaotic that he could not even define it. It
was far larger than the largest whale or dinosaur that he had ever
heard described. It was even larger than the largest redwood that
he knew of. The creature had hundreds of endlessly roiling limbs of
every description, and although Tom could not have said if it was
an animal or plant, or something else entirely, he knew in his soul
that it was predatory, and that it was cruel, and that it was
entirely
evil
, in every sense of the word.

As he looked further, he saw that the great
and monstrous creature was not alone, indeed, its fellow monsters
were to be seen as far as the eye could see, hundreds if not
thousands of Its Brethren stood about the ancient landscape. Above
the greatest concentration of the creature, a circling and slow
moving Aerial cyclone swirled above them.

He stood and watched them in amazement,
knowing that if the creatures survived, all of the animals that
would evolve on earth would have no chance of existing. As this
thought crossed his mind, the first of the meteors appeared in the
heavens. At first only a few streaks of meteoric light crossed the
sky, and then more appeared as the first ones started impacting the
creatures where they stood as though defying the gods. Soon the
skies were filled with the fire of the falling meteors, and some of
the giant forms are being struck and even destroyed by the
impacts.

******

The heavens begin to glow as the
fiery tails of the meteors blend together to show a heaven of
flame. The creatures have noticed the force from the heavens, and
they are now moving, some are heaving themselves into the waterways
to find sanctuary, some find their way into the ocean deeps, and
some are leaving the planet by more arcane means, some fade until
they are no more, some rise in lighted forms into the skies
themselves, and some sink into the earth as though it were no more
than water. Soon enough, all of the creatures are gone from the
surface.

Tom stands in awe of the events around him.
One more occurs, as a meteor streaks down and stops suddenly in
front of him, hovering about four feet above the ground. He sees
now that it is a large crystalline structure, and somehow he knows
that it is an intelligent structure, and that it is the mortal
enemy of the great creatures. Tom suddenly
knows
that the giant
things were the Great Old Ones, and that the crystalline beings had
driven them away or into hibernation for Eons. He cannot understand
what the crystalline beings are, or where they came from, but he
knows that they are friends, and he knows that this one is supposed
to return to the future with him.

He touches the skin of the being hovering
before him, and the light returns to take him back to the hall of
the Sage, and the crystalline being along with him. The light winks
out, and he sees the door of the hallway from the inner side, and
pushes it open as he staggers back into the parlor.

******

Vera is blinded by all the light around her,
and her stomach feels unsettled by the sensation of huge
acceleration. The light fades about her as the feeling of vast
velocity vanishes. She looks about her and sees a panoramic scene
of savanna all about her position, grasslands meeting clusters of
trees as far as her eyes could see.

She looks about her, and she sees a small
troop of some sort of large monkey that looks like a form of
chimpanzee with a few great ape traits around the face and lower
body. She considers herself to be a fair biologist, but she cannot
place the specie. Just as she is determined to advance closer to
the troop for further study, the bushes closest to her are suddenly
disturbed, and a form darts out of the cover in abject
terror.

It is a female, and a primate, and Vera can
place it as being a form of Homo erectus, probably Homo ergaster,
and it is being chased by a very formidable looking tiger. As the
female rushes past her, Vera interposes herself between them, and
screams as loudly as she can. The tiger collides with her in its
rush, or at least it should have. Somehow, the tiger passes right
through her with no resistance whatsoever.

The tiger could not process the event, she
guesses, because instead of continuing the pursuit, it slinks off
back into the underbrush. The young female is safe for now, and it
was time for Vera to consider her position.