The Unkillables (22 page)

Veela looked at the communicator dubiously. “You just whipped that up?” she said. “Cyber-centric linguistic analysis has always been one of the more challenging programming fields. I didn’t know you had a strong background in artificial intelligence.”

“Well, anyone can read a few books on the subject, Veela.”

“Kind of my point.”

Dak was annoyed. “Excuse me, but I think I can handle making a communicator that understands the most primitive known human language. Did I not save us from a zombie apocalypse and bring us back through time forty-five thousand years? Do you think making a communicator is likely to be more complicated than that?”

Actually, Veela was certain it was. Physics, as far as she could tell, was vastly simpler than linguistics, regardless of which field she personally understood better. Physics’ relative simplicity was what allowed one to make predictions about the behavior of physical objects—try making such precise and detailed predictions of linguistic events, and see how far you got. A star was a much simpler phenomenon than a haiku, and translating a haiku from Japanese into French was a more complex operation than traveling back in time. It was just that traveling back in time required vast shitloads more money and energy.

She didn’t mention any of this to Dak, though. For one thing, he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. For another, maybe he really was the genius he thought he was, and the communicator would work fine. To Dak and Chert, she said, “This nut, translate Dak’s words, it will.”

Dak flicked a toggle on the communicator, took a white fold-out tray from a compartment hidden in the wall, set the tray up beside the Jaw, and put the communicator on top of it. Chert and the Jaw were much more astounded and intrigued by the fold-out tray than they were by the communicator. “There!” said Dak, clapping his hands together in pleasure and smiling at the captives. “Now you’ll understand me.”

In the People’s tongue, the communicator said, “Now under me you shall stand.”

Chert and the Jaw glared fiercely at Dak. They already knew they were his prisoners and subject to his will, but did he have to gloat? Veela frowned at the communicator. There had been something wrong with its translation, but she didn’t speak the People’s tongue well enough yet to be sure what it was.

“My name is Dak,” Dak explained.

The communicator said, “Dak is mine to be naming.”

Now the captive men’s faces went from anger back to confusion. Veela knelt between them and began murmuring translations of Dak’s speech as best she could; Dak seemed oblivious to her aid.

He continued talking, and she tried to keep up: “In the future, about forty-five thousand years from now—or ‘winters,’ I think you people call them—anyway, in the future, there was a zombie plague that swept across the Earth and all its possessions, and which wiped out all human life except for myself. And Veela, of course, whom I rescued.

“How did the plague come about, you ask? It sprang originally from a noble intention—that eternal human desire to extend one’s span and influence. In fact, when you think of it objectively, the so-called zombie plague represents a huge advance for the biological sciences, and for all mankind. For does it not seem to have accomplished the primary goal of the project directors: personal, individual immortality? There are some deeply unfortunate side-effects, obviously. But I’m confident that my colleagues would have overcome those hurdles, if only they’d had the chance to proceed with their research in a professional, orthodox fashion.”

Veela had quickly given up trying to translate exactly what Dak said and was simply murmuring her own account to the men. That was confusing enough. She intended her words for both paleolithics, but unconsciously favored the Jaw, so Chert heard less of the explanation. The nonsense issuing from the communicator was distracting; its rendering of “a professional, orthodox fashion” was particularly Dada-esque. Things would have been easier if the communicator had been switched off, but Veela knew Dak would take offense at the suggestion.

He kept talking: “My colleagues in the biological sciences had managed to produce a serum that did indeed cause immortality in mice, rats, and then primates. Of course, it was a zombie immortality, such as you’ve seen. The subjects, while potentially never susceptible to death, wander through a dim world, seeing everything through a black haze of hunger, devoid of thought, devoid of emotion, devoid of personality. Though the body lives on, the mind is in such shambles it scarcely deserves the designation ‘mind’ at all, and in fact the mind possessed by the subject prior to his or her ingestion of the serum genuinely has ceased to exist. All that having been said, you have to admit that it was a very impressive start!

“Now, these unfortunate side-effects were, of course, kept on a need-to-know basis. For one thing, if the state of the newly-immortalized subjects had gotten out, it might have created a certain nervousness among less daring segments of the population. Also, there were funding issues to be considered. And then, of course, the project as a whole had to be kept secret, because, even once the immortality serum had been perfected, obviously they would not have been able to administer it to everyone. Even with off-world immigration, the Earth was already over-crowded—only a carefully selected elite would have been eligible for immortality.

“At the same time, rumors made their rounds. In the end, the secrecy served only to garble what information
was
leaking out. People knew there was an immortality serum that seemed to work—they didn’t realize it changed you into a zombie. One enterprising lab employee, a rather low-level one, managed to nab a vial of the serum. By the time lab security realized what had happened, the young man was already at the New York Mega-Terminal, a major transportation hub. He drank the serum and flew into something of a rage, biting people left and right. But, with the early strain of the plague, it took more than a day after being bitten for the victims to change into zombies themselves. Meaning at least a dozen of them were able to get on airplanes and go to their far-flung destinations. And that, as the expression puts it, was all she wrote.”

As Veela murmured her own account in the People’s tongue, she remembered all the times she’d been annoyed that Dak was safely back on the ship, and reflected that now she was glad he’d been separated from the guys. He showed an almost psychotic lack of awareness that the two paleolithic-era men might need more context than this. He would have made a shitty ambassador, just as he made a shitty linguist. She had managed to catch his big miraculous revolutionary translation program’s version of “vial of serum”: it came out as “cupped-hands of spirit.” Jesus Christ. Though that was better than its rendering of “all she wrote” into a pre-literate language.

The other thing that bugged her was that Dak spoke as if he’d been on the inside of all these developments. But he’d had nothing to do with it—he was a physicist, a scholar of an unrelated discipline—he’d been at a totally different university than the one at which the zombie plague had been concocted. What he was telling the guys was a mixture of public knowledge, public rumor, and stuff they’d pieced together during their long weeks in space. Yet listening to him now, Veela grew more and more certain that he was remembering himself as having been, if not actually on the team that had been researching immortality, then one of its close advisers.

Dak had paused, and seemed to be thinking of what to say. While he was quiet, Veela murmured to the Jaw, in the People’s tongue, “Not all he says, exact truth. Later, explain I will.”

Veela had no fear that Dak would understand anything she said in the People’s tongue. However, it had not occurred to her that, once he himself had stopped talking, his translator would focus on her, the quieter, secondary speaker, and try to render speech back the other way. But as soon as she’d finished speaking, it said, “He lies. I’ll explain later.”

Dak froze. So did Veela. His eyes drifted over to catch hold of hers. After a long moment, he smiled strangely.

“I lie, do I?” he said.

“I told you,” said Veela, angry because she was frightened. “Your translator doesn’t work.”

She was about to go into a list of its errors and their philosophical and sociolinguistic roots, but Dak waved his hand in dismissal. “Never mind, never mind,” he said, “it means less than nothing.”

She could feel the anger trying to scratch its way out from behind her face. Somehow she hadn’t been angry like this even when Chert had left her to fend off that zombie on her own, in the hopes she would die—at least she could understand that from Chert’s point of view, she was an alien invader. Dak was supposed to have been her partner, though. “Since the communicator’s garbling everything,” she said, “maybe we should turn it off and concentrate on me translating for them....”

“Yes, but I don’t know what you’re saying, do I?” he snapped.

He paused a moment, pacing, collecting himself. Then he stopped before the two captives, hands behind his back.

He said, “Of course, our escape into the past incurred its own unintended side-effects.”

He began pacing again.

He paused, and his eyes darted back and forth between Chert and the Jaw. “Tell me,” he said. “Have either of you ever wondered why you’ve never met a time traveler from the future, until us?”

For one thing they had their gags on, so obviously they couldn’t answer. For another, the idea that these two paleolithics had spent a lot of time idly wondering why they’d never been visited by time travelers from some distant post-industrial future was clearly absurd. Dak seemed to take none of this into account. He kept looking at them like his question hadn’t been rhetorical, apparently waiting for a reply, and then, when they said nothing, he shrugged and continued his pacing.

“I, too, often wondered about that,” he said. “I had done a lot of research into time travel. It had always fascinated me—I never could understand why I should be bound by the contingent strictures of any particular time or place. It seemed only fair that my body should be just as free to roam as was my spirit.

“Standing upon the shoulders of the giants who had come before me, I began to see a way through the thickets of equations that might lead to total temporal freedom. Excited though I was, I kept my work secret. Partly because I feared it might be stolen. But also because, certain as I was that I was right, I couldn’t discount the possibility I might be wrong. The equations indeed indicated that, given enough energy, I should be able to travel backwards in time. But if that were true, why had the past never been visited by intrepid voyagers from the more technologically developed future? Moreover, why did I keep hitting a theoretical wall when I tried to figure out how to move forward, into the future, instead of only the past?

“I was still grappling with these great questions when the zombie plague hit. Only then did I realize how fortuitous it was that I had followed this particular obsession; never could I have imagined that my quest would prove the key to human survival itself. Suddenly I had, not only the freedom, but the necessity to try out my hypotheses. I took the time to rescue Veela from the Linguistics Department at Luna University, not realizing how easy it would be for me simply to dream up a translation program on my own. We headed out to the Cantor-Gould Collider, which proved itself capable of creating the energy burst necessary to fuel our temporal journey. Through all the long trip to the Collider, and then after our journey back through the eons, I continued to labor over the equations. Until at last, a few days after our arrival in this time, I had it. I hit upon the answer—I knew why no one had ever traveled back from the future to meet us—and I saw why there was an invisible wall preventing us from jumping forward in time, despite all my ingenuity.”

Dak stopped pacing. He faced his audience again, trembling with the enormity of his revelation.

“It turns out that when you force the space-time continuum in this way, when you do it the violence of shoving yourself back in time, you set up a reaction in the other direction. Something like a splash, a destructive wave, spreading into the future, the
entire
future. A destructive wave, crashing through all of the eternity that lies on the other side of your jump point and leaving it ash. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course—there are no ashes lying to the future side of our jump point—there’s nothing at all. Traveling back through time destroys the universe. There is no instant that follows the one in which I used the Collider to travel back to this time. I am the bookend of Creation.”

The two paleolithics stared at him blankly. Even Veela, who understood him, couldn’t muster a reaction. Her soul couldn’t configure itself into an appropriate attitude. But beyond her blank surface, she felt a sad horror. She did believe him about his findings. Now that they had proven time travel into the past was possible, she couldn’t see any other reason why no one had ever met voyagers from a more advanced future. She and Dak had killed that future. According to Dak, they had killed it not merely in the vicinity of Earth—every galaxy was doomed to wink out at exactly the same moment she and Dak traveled back here (whatever “exactly the same moment” might mean, when the phrase was applied to a single event taking place across the possibly infinite reaches of intergalactic space in a relativistic universe).

Dak got impatient, waiting for an appropriately awed reaction. He lifted his hands, and said, “Don’t you understand what this means? The fact that no one else ever destroyed the future by traveling back into the past, means that no one had ever managed it before! Despite all the thousands of billions of intelligent species that, statistically speaking, simply must have existed, I was the first who managed to work out the equations!
I was the first in all of Creation, in all the histories of all the galaxies, only I!”

He rocked back on his heels as if being released by something, gasping as if in the aftermath of a sexual climax. He wiped the sweat off his brow. Veela and the two captives waited for him to recover from his excitement. He sat down in a chair before the console and sighed.