Across A Billion Years

SIX

September 6, 2375

Higby V

Mirrik has fool’s luck. That caper yesterday afternoon should have finished him. Instead it made a hero out of him, in a zooby way, because everyone is now forgiving past sins.

It looked like disaster when he burst into the lab. The lab’s a smallish bubble to start with, and it’s set up for work, not to accommodate the leapings of a drunken Dinamonian. When I got there, Mirrik was trying to prance, which is a lost cause for a creature built like a rhinoceros, and with each clumsy bound he was knocking things off tables and breaking them. Dr. Horkkk had scrambled to the top of the bubble and was clinging there in terror. 408b was sitting on top of the computer; Dr. Schein had picked up one of the little lasers and was holding it like a dangerous weapon; and Pilazinool was hastily screwing his legs back in place and getting ready to defend himself. Mirrik loudly tried to explain that he had had a profound spiritual experience in the frostflower grove. “I have seen true wisdom!” he cried. “I have known revelation!”

He swung around and his rump knocked my High Ones globe to the floor.

It bounced. It gave off a sickening ringing sound.

And it turned on. Mirrik had loosened a jammed control.

We didn’t know that, at first. We couldn’t imagine what was happening. Mirrik’s immense haunch was suddenly green instead of its usual blue, and figures appeared to be moving on his skin. That made no sense at all; but a moment later I began to see that he was serving as a screen for projected images, and that the images were coming out of the globe.

Then the field of projection widened to fill the entire lab. Strange, bizarre shapes flowed and coalesced along the walls. Nightmare scenes glistened in the air.

“Out of here!” Dr. Schein ordered. “Everyone out! Fast!”

The way he said it, I got the impression that something was going to explode. Mirrik must have thought so too, because he turned and fled at full gallop; the rest of us followed, all but Dr. Schein, Dr. Horkkk, and Pilazinool, who slammed the lab door shut behind us. Outside, we formed a stunned little group and tried to understand what had happened. Even Mirrik was sobered by it. He tottered off and plumped dismally to the ground, shaking his head and tapping his tusks.

An hour later we were allowed back into the lab.

“Here he is,” Dr. Schein called out, as I entered. “The discoverer himself!” Then Mirrik came in, looking around a little sheepishly. “And here’s the one who switched it on!”

So at last I was getting a little credit. And was forgiven, I guess, for the breathless way I got the globe out of the ground. Mirrik, too, had won amnesty for his chimpo behavior. At a time like this, who could hold grudges?

The globe was sitting on the workbench in the part of the lab where they had stacked up the inscription nodes. It was perfectly round, and looked more like some kind of sculpture than a machine, except for the control dials on one side. In the smooth parts between the raised strips and the buttons and knobs I could see my own reflection, with my face drawn out and narrowed like something in a funhouse mirror.

Dr. Schein had summoned everybody to the viewing. He had a This-Is-Something-BIG look on his face; fussy little Dr. Horkkk seemed positively aglow. Pilazinool had not only taken himself apart, as he usually did in moments of stress, but had absentmindedly put himself back together the wrong way, with his left hand on his right arm, and so on. It took me a moment to figure out why he looked so strange.

408b ambled forward at a signal from Dr. Schein. Its eyes were blinking rapidly in groups of three, which meant that things must really have been fissioning inside the Bellatrician’s brain. It nodded jerkily, opened and closed its beak a few times, and finally said, “I have very little to explain, since I understand very little. The device you see before you functions as a projector but has no visible lenses or optical outlets. Nor does it require a screen for reception of its image. We also are unaware of its power source. It is controlled by this lever” — it tapped a little stud — “which we discovered only through accident. Darken the room, please.” 408b picked up a movie camera and used several of its tentacles to focus and start it. “Since we do not know how long the globe will continue to function, nor whether we will be able to induce it to repeat any of the scenes it plays for us, we are making a complete film record each time we use it.”

It touched the stud.

Greenish light blossomed from the globe. The zone of light expanded until it became a sphere more than twenty meters in diameter, practically filling our section of the lab. Suddenly we saw figures moving along the surface of the sphere of light.

High Ones.

What we were getting was a 360-degree movie, with ourselves inside the projection field. The globe was showing us five or six different sequences, each blurring imperceptibly into its neighbor. As we turned, certain sequences vanished and were replaced by others; but a few remained constant. It was a struggle to take in anything, because so much was going on. In the first few minutes I went spinning round and round in my place, trying to scan everything at once, and unhappy because one scene was vanishing even while I was trying to figure out what another one was all about. I didn’t envy the scholars who would have to make sense out of all this. At least there was a camera with a fisheye lens stationed right next to the globe, filming the whole giboo in all 360 degrees. The only way to deal with an information glut, you know, is to make a record of all incoming data and then cope with each item, bit by bit, at your own data-handling speed.

After a little while I stopped rotating and concentrated on viewing each sequence at length, despite the frustration of having to miss all the rest of what was going on. I’ll try to describe some of the pictures I saw.

One scene took place in a city of the High Ones. I think so, anyhow. I saw figures moving around, the dome-headed, six-limbed humanoids familiar to us from the plaque designs. Their skins were a deep, rich green in color and were covered by shining overlapping scales, hinting at some kind of reptilian ancestry, perhaps. They glided rather than walked, seemed almost to float; I can’t explain why they looked so graceful.

Their city consisted of sky-high pillars set perhaps fifty meters apart — I had no way of judging scale. High overhead, a kind of netting was strung to connect the tops of all the pillars. Buildings dangled from the netting like spiders from a spiderweb, each swaying gently at the end of a long cable, each at a different distance from the web above and each far from the ground. These suspended buildings mainly had a teardrop shape, although there were spherical, octagonal, and cubical ones too. Smaller cables provided transport from one dangling building to another; the air was full of High Ones riding up, down, or sideways, clinging to cables that appeared to move of their own will. A golden-green sunlight filtered through the top of the web, giving everything an undersea look. As I watched, night came; and suddenly the light of a thousand stars blazed down, and the buildings themselves began to move, sliding upward or downward on their cables, while High Ones in great numbers passed from one to another. I have seen alien scenes, Lorie, but nothing so alien as this. Those huge, graceful beings (somehow I think of them as much bigger than humans), those dangling houses, that eerie daylight and that dazzling starlight, all blended into something immensely strange.

The camera angles added to the effect. I would have thought that just about every way of filming a scene has already been used in the four centuries or so since Edison rigged up his first movie camera. But whoever had taken this billion-year-old flick had not seen things remotely the way a modern cameraman would; and so we had a constantly shifting viewpoint, now from above, now from underneath, now from within, the camera drifting around that weird city so freely that I had to grab the edge of the lab bench to keep from falling over in dizziness.

For a long while I watched as though in a dream as these beings went about their unimaginable business, gliding up and down on their cables, bowing to one another, gracefully touching hands, exchanging gifts (I saw some inscription nodes being handed out), and engaging in conversations that I could not hear, for there was no sound accompanying the projection. Then I turned to face the next sequence.

It showed a scene inside one of the dangling houses: a large red-lit room whose walls appeared covered with a living substance, something soft and rippling that swelled and shrank in an unpredictable cycle, now puffing up and becoming tight as a drumhead, now deflating, now writhing like sheets of flesh.

There were nine High Ones in the room. Two, clutching cables mounted in the ceiling, were lost in trances, or, for all I could tell, were dead and stuffed. (The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?) Three of the High Ones stood in a far corner, taking part in what might have been a quaint folk dance or perhaps some kind of sex: they had formed a circle, facing inward, with their arms interlaced and their heads pressed cheek-to-cheek, and they were sliding around and around and around in a slow, determined way. You figure it out. Another High One was crouched over a miniature model of a globe much like the one that was entertaining us; it was projecting a tiny image, but we weren’t able to see it clearly. The remaining three High Ones sat in a pit in the floor, passing a flask of some colored fluid back and forth, and now and then dipping the tips of their fingers into it.

The adjoining sequence showed a building under construction. First a cable descended from the web-work. Then machines at ground level sent spurts of — plastic? — into the air. Midway between ground and web the spurted stuff collected around the cable as if pulled to it by a magnetic field, and shaped itself into a neat eight-sided structure. Everything was done automatically, and it took about six minutes.

The fourth sequence was a purely abstract pattern, a coiling and uncoiling of green and red shapes that was so unsettling and disturbing that I don’t feel like talking about it.

The fifth sequence revealed an empty landscape, no trees, no grass, ice-covered boulders scattered about, sky copper-red, ground iron-gray, the sun pale and feeble. In the middle distance was another group of three High Ones, heads inward, arms interlaced, cheeks touching, doing that same slow dance.

The sixth sequence presented the interior of some kind of cave whose walls were encrusted with huge uncut gems, great glistening crystals of a hundred different kinds. The camera peered through the floor of the cave, which appeared to be made of glass, and revealed colossal machines throbbing and hammering in an underground chamber: huge green pistons pumping endlessly, sleek black conveyor belts, spinning turbines. High Ones wearing yellow belts (the only clothing I saw on any of them) walked down the aisles between these devices, pausing occasionally to examine control panels.

I had come full circle, for the adjoining sequence was the city scene again, not much changed. But the room with the nine High Ones had vanished, and now I saw a close-up shot of a single High One who held an inscription node in his hands. The camera zoomed in on the inscription and lingered there a long while, long enough for the inscription to change several times.

The sequence next to this no longer showed the construction project; now it depicted —

But why go on? For a full hour I watched these scenes, all of them fascinating, all of them bewildering. I could continue multiplying mysteries by listing everything, but you must have the idea by now of how remote and strange these people were, how advanced their civilization, how little we comprehend them.

Curious thing. The usual effect of archaeology is to discover kinships with the ancients. “How very much like ourselves the early Egyptians were!” an Egyptologist will say. “Lying, cheating, fixing elections, dodging the draft, all our own special little sins, existed back then too! Even as we, the subjects of Pharaoh had foibles and ambitions, hopes and dreams,” etcetera, etcetera. Substitute Sumerians for Egyptians, or Cro-Magnon cave painters for Sumerians, and you will still find the experts telling you that the more closely we get to know them, the clearer it is that these figures out of the remote past were Just Plain Folks.

Zit! Not the case at all with the High Ones! This globe I found told us a million times as much about them as we knew before: the way they looked and moved, the shape of their cities, something of their customs. And they don’t seem like Just Plain Folks at all. They seem tremendously alien, far stranger than Shilamakka or Dinamonians or Thhhians or any of the alien beings we encounter in our own lives. We may have difficulty understanding Dinamonian theology or the Shilamakkan craze for replacing perfectly good limbs with machinery, but we can still get along with them on a business basis. I don’t think we could ever have gotten along with the High Ones, even if they weren’t separated from us by a billion-year gap. Not only because of their immense technological superiority, either. They way they think would always be unintelligible.

Consider the cultures of Earth before communications satellites and rocket transport helped everybody to live just like everybody else. Consider the world-outlooks of Eskimos, Polynesians, Bedouins, Belgian businessmen, Pueblo Indians, and Tibetans. Not a whole lot in common there. Pretty alien to one another, matter of fact, and all native to the same planet. Okay, eventually they all died out or became smoodged together into “Earthmen,” but now we were part of a galaxy full of other intelligent species, each one with its own various cultures, and each one different from us … and so on. Huge gulfs between peoples of the same world, and huger gulfs between peoples of different worlds, yet all these gulfs were bridgeable.

The hugest gulf of all seems to be the one between us and the High Ones. Forget my romantic ideas about finding them still alive somewhere. I don’t want to find them any more. I think it would be pretty frightening if we did.

After an hour of viewing the globe, 408b shut it off and we had a Discussion. The eleven of us sat around trying to interpret what we had just seen. Jan carefully positioned herself as far from Leroy Chang as she could get, but Leroy seemed to be going out of his way not to look at her. He seemed twitchy and ill at ease, more so than usual; I guess he was scared that Jan was going to rise up and denounce him as a rapist. A bungling rapist, at that. (Question: Is a man more loathsome if he succeeds in Having His Way with a woman, or if he’s such a spinless vidj that he botches the job? Don’t bother answering.)

Dr. Schein acted as chairman. He said, “It’s apparent that the whole scope of High Ones archaeology has changed overnight. For the first time we know something of what their living culture was like, as a result of Tom Rice’s fine discovery.”

I glowed nicely and nodded to acknowledge the cheers of a multitude of admirers.

Dr. Horkkk dampened my furnace a little by saying crisply, “Let it be noted that as a result of careless excavation technique this miraculous artifact nearly was destroyed.”

I looked at the floor in shame and counted my toes for lack of anything else to do. Dr. Horkkk tacked on a few more criticisms in his neat Teutonic way and I tried to shrink out of sight. Jan, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “Don’t let him get you quonked. You did find it. And you didn’t damage it.” I should have added that Jan had chosen to sit next to me instead of Saul Shahmoon. Interesting. Is she trying to awaken his slumbering jealousies, or do Jan and I have something going?

When Dr. Horkkk finished flaying me, 408b said, “It is questionable that this instrument represents a view of the living culture of these beings. Perhaps it is an entertainment device, providing pure fantasy.”

“Good point,” said Dr. Schein. “But I don’t go for it.”

Pilazinool took off one hand and waved it in the other to get the floor. The mechanical man said, “On the basis of a quick analysis, I too doubt that 408b is correct. I feel that we’ve got an authentic look at High Ones life, here. I can’t say what purpose this globe was meant to serve, but I do believe that those were genuine scenes of daily life, as Dr. Schein suggests.”

Dr. Schein beamed. 408b folded his tentacles in irritation. Mirrik, Saul Shahmoon, and Kelly offered opinions, more or less simultaneously. I didn’t have the slice to open my glapper after the things Dr. Horkkk had said about me, but privately I agreed with Pilazinool and Dr. Schein.

“The question is,” Dr. Schein said, “should we ship the globe back to Galaxy Central for detailed study of the content of its images, or should we keep it here to guide us in the remaining period of our excavations?”

“Keep it here,” said Pilazinool.

“Send it to Galaxy Central,” said Dr. Horkkk.

We went around on that for a while. It developed that Dr. Horkkk was so enthralled with the globe that he proposed calling the expedition off at this point, heading back toward civilization, and devoting all our efforts to trying to learn things from the projected scenes. Leroy Chang seconded the motion. I guess Leroy is looking for any excuse to get off Higby V after that fiasco with Jan.

Steen Steen said, “That seems hasty. Why leave now, when we may be on the verge of even more amazing discoveries?”

First sensible thing I ever heard him/her say.

Dr. Horkkk replied, “As long as we stay here with the globe, we run the risk that it may be lost or destroyed. It’s our duty to convey it safely to some more settled world.”

Dr. Schein, who in his mild way can be murderous, smiled sweetly at his Thhhian rival and said, “Perhaps, Dr. Horkkk, you and Professor Chang would be willing to detach yourselves from the expedition and take the globe to a safer planet, while the rest of us proceed with the work?”

Dr. Horkkk made a gargling sound. He wasn’t pleased by that maneuver.

In the end, when all the verbal knifeplay was over, a reasonable decision emerged. All of us, and the globe, will remain on Higby V while we complete our scheduled period of excavation work. For safety’s sake, though, we’ll make several copies of the films of the globe’s projections and ship them out to civilization aboard the monthly transport packets. Jan and I were given the assignment of writing up a press release about the globe which is to be sent out via the TP communications network as soon as possible. We’re supposed to write the release tonight.

The work schedule is going to be revised somewhat. Pilazinool, 408b, and Dr. Horkkk will be relieved of all supervisory work at the excavation and instead will devote themselves pretty much full time to playing the globe and puzzling over the meaning of the scenes it shows. The hope is to get some clue that will lead us to other important discoveries. This means that the burden of overseeing the digging will fall to Dr. Schein and Leroy Chang, since Saul will be busy classifying artifacts in the lab, and that most of the actual grubbing in the pit will be done by our two specialized diggers, Mirrik and Kelly, and by the three apprentices, Steen, Jan, and yours cordially.

Dinnertime now. Nasty rain coming down.

I still feel dazed by the things the globe projected. Those dangling buildings… the weird customs… above all, just seeing the faces of the High Ones. Did I mention their eyes? Three of them, side by side. Cold. Glittering. They look at you out of those projected images and you want to crawl into the ground. That look of chilly intelligence … of having lived a hundred thousand years. It’s terrifying to meet a High One’s stare, coming at you across so much time. What kind of race was this? Where did they learn the skills that let them grow so great before all the other races of the galaxy had begun to evolve? How were they able to keep their civilization intact for all those hundreds of millions of years? (Hundreds of millions of years! Those long-ago Egyptians and Cro-Magnons happened just an eye-blink back, on a scale like that!)

So much for deep philosophical thoughts. Your handsome and profound brother is hungry. Off for now.

Bedtime, five hours later, same night.

Jan and I spent a couple of hours after dinner writing our press release. Actually she wrote the whole thing, though I’m supposed to have verbal skills and so on. I fooled around doing a couple of trial drafts and scrapped them; then she got to work and knocked off a professional-sounding statement with the greatest of ease. This girl has much orbital velocity. Tomorrow morning we go into town to give the release to the TP people, and I trust that that lady dog Marge Hotchkiss will be off duty.

Everybody else spent the evening in the lab. Jan and I went over there when we were finished. Chess is obsolete here; as of today, the only evening activity is going to be watching the scenes that come out of that globe. There were some new ones tonight, as baffling as the earlier ones. The thing seems to have an infinite number of reels, or whatever, inside it. I hope we don’t burn it out.