Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

“It galls us.”

“But—”

Everything went black again. The Het oozed out of my neck. We returned to the ground in silence. I thought about the rosette of lights; about the Hets; about troodons, dinosaurs that might be on the way to developing intelligence of their own. It seemed that humanity had missed the heyday of sapient life in the galaxy by 60 or so million years. It was only because the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions wiped out the great reptiles that the second-string team, the mammals, had an opportunity to rise to the level of conscious thought, but by the time we did, the Milky Way was a much less crowded place. How could the Hets not be thrilled by the mere knowledge of the rosette-makers being out there somewhere?

I guess I’d offended them. Without a further word, they dumped us back at our campsite, now almost completely dark, our campfire having decayed to a few glowing coals. We watched from the ground as their pulsing sphere silently made its way off to the west, then we clambered in the darkness up the crater wall and went back into the Sternberger .

The sky was completely covered with clouds. Probably just as well. Now that we’d seen the heavens from above the obscuring cloak of Earth’s atmosphere, the view from the ground—breathtaking though it had seemed last night—would pale in comparison. My only regret, though, was that the rosette would never be visible in this hemisphere. I’d love to have gotten a picture of it.

“Brandy,” said Klicks, unbuttoning his shirt, “what do you know about how the Huang Effect works?”

I was gathering up my pajamas; I’d wanted to gloat a bit about the discovery that the Chicxulub crater predated the end of the dinosaurs, and wasn’t surprised that Klicks was avoiding the topic, but, now that he mentioned it…

“So you’ve been thinking about that, too?” I said. “Christ, it’s like a stupid commercial jingle. I can’t get it out of my mind either. I keep running over what little I comprehend.”

“Which is?”

“Diddly, really. I’m no physicist. Something to do with the tunnel-diode effect and, uh, tachyons. I think.”

“Hmm,” said Klicks. “That’s more than I knew. Why do you suppose—?”

“Oh, good Christ! I knew those Martians weren’t just being friendly neighbors. Klicks, they took us up, showed us some views of space to keep us preoccupied, then went sorting through our minds, looking for the secret of time travel.”

“I bet they were disappointed when they didn’t find it.”

“I’m not sure anyone besides Ching-Mei understands it completely.”

“Well,” said Klicks, “you can’t blame them, really. Besides, they’ll have plenty of chances to ask her face-to-face once we bring them forward.”

I looked at him, standing there across the room, arms folded across his chest. “Bring them forward?” I said, disbelief in my tone. “Klicks, they tried to steal the secret of time travel from us. And you still want to bring them forward?”

“Well, you seem incapable of making a decision one way or the other. Yes, I still want to bring them forward. Hell, we’ve got to bring them forward. It’s the only reasonable thing to do.”

“But they just tried to steal time travel from us! How can you trust them?”

“They also voluntarily exited our bodies. In fact, they’ve done that twice now. If they really were evil, they would have stayed in us tonight, and simply forced us to take them back to the future.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. They know the Huang Effect won’t reverse states for"—I glanced at my watch—"another, ah, sixty-three hours. Maybe they couldn’t stay that long inside us even if they wanted to.”

“You don’t know that that’s true,” said Klicks.

“You don’t know that that’s not true.” He harrumphed.

“I wish we didn’t have to make this decision,” I said quietly.

“But we do,” said Klicks.

My gaze shifted out the window. “Yes,” I said at last. “I suppose we do.”

Klicks was driving me crazy with his cocksure attitude. Things were always so simple for him. For every political debate, for every moral question, he had a glib, pat answer. Should we legalize devices that directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain? What rights do genetically tinkered apes with the power of speech have? Should female priests be allowed to be surrogate mothers? Ask Klicks. He’ll tell you.

Of course, his opinions on mindbenders are similar to those of the editorial writer for The Calgary Herald . His stance on simps bears a startling resemblance to that of Mike Bullard. And his viewpoint on celibate surrogates comes right out of that article in Playboy .

A deep thinker? Not Klicks. But he’s smooth, oh so smooth. Microsoft mouse. “Miles is so articulate,” Tess had said after the last New Year’s Eve bash we’d given together, the same week that Klicks and I had been named as the crew for this mission. “He could charm the pants right off you.”

And so he did.

I’d known him for years. I was even the one who gave him his nickname. How could he, he of all people, steal Tess from me? We had been friends. Friendship is supposed to mean something.

I found out that Klicks and Tess were together less than a month after I’d moved out of our house. Just when I needed my friends most, my best friend—practically my only friend—was off boffing my ex-wife. A man who would steal another man’s wife doesn’t worry about morality, doesn’t weigh the principles, doesn’t consider the repercussions, doesn’t mull over the larger consequences. Doesn’t give a bloody fuck at all.

And yet here he is, all set to grant a reprieve, to—I will say it again, dammit—to play God for an entire race.

We’d spent a lot of time in mission planning debating whether Klicks and I should always stay together. But since there was so little time and so much to do, it had been agreed that we’d have separate lists of tasks to perform. Each of us was armed and carried a radio, so the risk in separating seemed acceptable. Klicks had gone off after breakfast in our Jeep to find a good spot to take core samples. Now that we knew the asteroid had hit two centuries before the end of the Cretaceous, he wanted to collect some samples to see if the iridium, shocked quartz, and microdiamonds thought to be associated with the impact were indeed already present in Earth’s rocks.

Klicks had set out toward the east. I headed west, ostensibly to examine some hills in that direction, but really just to put as much distance between him and me as possible.

The sun had reached its highest point in the sky, a hot orb that looked perhaps a tad whiter than it did in the twenty-first century. Insects buzzed around me in tiny black swarms. I wore a pith helmet with a cheesecloth rim that kept them away from my face, but their constant droning was giving me a headache.

The air was tormentingly hot; the vegetation lush, with vines hanging between stands of dawn redwood. I must have walked at least five kilometers from the Sternberger , but hadn’t felt the distance in this light gravity. I looked over my shoulder, but trees obscured my view. No matter. I had a Radio Shack homing device to find my way back.

My head was still swimming from Klicks’s insistence that we bring the Hets forward. I hated having to make big decisions. If you avoid them long enough, they go away.

Just like Dad will go away eventually.

Dr. Schroeder’s voice echoed in my head, his Bavarian accent making the words harsher, colder: Failing to act is a decision in and of itself. Then the same words again, but in a lilting Jamaican accent: Failing to act is a decision in and of itself.