Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

He held the computer up to his face. “Can you see the two horizontal bands?” I said.

“Yup.”

“Those are the tracks left by the two moons. But I’m puzzled by the stationary dots above them.” I shrugged. “Maybe they’re geosynchronous satellites put up by the Hets.”

Klicks nodded once as he handed everything back to me. “They’re the gravity-suppressor satellites,” he said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

Klicks reached for the edge of the table, steadying himself. His voice quavered. “How did I know that?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Flatworms,” he said suddenly, but this time it wasn’t one of his little tests. It was a flash of insight. The instant he spoke the word, I knew what he meant. I’d done the Humphries-Jacobsen experiment myself as an undergrad, training a planarian named Karen Black—I called it that because of its cute little cross-eyed face—to contract when exposed to light. The flatworm stored the memory of that training in its RNA. I then chopped K.B. up and fed her to another flatworm, Barbra Streisand. Babs assimilated Karen’s memories and immediately knew how to respond to the light. Klicks had apparently gained some of the dead Het’s memories from the RNA it had left in his head.

“Gravity suppression,” I said. “Fascinating. So the reduced gravity is caused by the Hets—”

“So they can comfortably move around here, yes. They’ve scaled Earth’s gravity down to the same level as Mars’s, cutting it to one Martian g—thirty-eight percent of what we consider normal.”

I shook my head. “Damn, we were stupid. We never felt any movement when we flew in that Het spaceship—nor any weightlessness while we were in orbit, for that matter. They seem to be able to do all kinds of tricks with gravity. Ching-Mei would love these guys: their physics must be extraordinary.”

Klicks frowned. “I don’t think they’re that much ahead of us,” he said. “Yes, they have a better grasp on gravity, but they obviously don’t have time travel. They want the Sternberger something fierce.”

I scratched my beard. “Tell me more about the Hets.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

“Well, let’s try a specific question. Tell me if there’s free-running water on Mars right now.”

He blinked. “Oh, yes. A complete water cycle, with rains and snow.”

“And what else lives on Mars besides the Hets?”

“Nothing lives except us. All other things exist for our subjugation.”

Talk about Manifest Destiny. “You’re going to be in for one hell of a debriefing when we get back, my friend. Tell me: how do the Hets communicate?”

Klicks closed his eyes. “The individual viral units produce impulses like synapses that can travel short distances. All the units in one of those lumps we’ve encountered are acting together, like the cells of one brain. The bigger the conglomeration, the smarter it is.”

“And what about the dinosaurs?”

Klicks’s eyes were still closed, as though he were listening to an internal voice. “Well, without the low gravity caused by the Hets, dinosaurian giantism wouldn’t have occurred. But, beyond that, the Hets have done some direct genetic tinkering recently, fine-tuning existing dinosaurs to be better suited for war. For instance, natural ceratopsians, like Chasmosaurus , had neck frills that were only for bluffing displays. They were just outlined in bone, with skin stretched across. That wasn’t suitable for real battle, so the Hets tweaked them into the genus Triceratops , filling in the open spaces to produce a solid shield of bone.”

“Okay, time for Final Jeopardy: who are the Hets fighting?”

“Good Christ! It is the natives of Tess.” Klicks looked away. “I—I mean of the belt planet.”

“Really? And what’s this garbage about the Martian civilization being a hundred and thirty million years old?”

Klicks looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then his eyes opened wide in astonishment. “The civilization of the viral Martians did arise that long ago, back in what we’d call the early Jurassic. Ten thousand years later—nothing on the scale we’re talking about—they put up the gravity suppressor satellites around Earth. Since the satellites can control gravity, their orbits never decay, and they’re solar-powered, so they never run out of energy. They have indeed been in stationary orbit around Earth for one hundred and thirty million years now.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. The Het technology is clearly more advanced than ours is, but it’s centuries, maybe even tens of centuries, ahead of us, not a hundred-odd million years. I mean, the rosette-makers, whoever they are, they might have a million-plus-year-old civilization, given that they can move stars around, but the Hets aren’t anywhere near that advanced.”

“That’s right,” said Klicks, and then his face clouded. “Oh, shit, of course they left the dinosaurs alone until very recently. The Hets, the Hets died out, almost completely. It’s—” Klicks was shaking slightly. “It’s horrible. God, the destruction.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then staggered toward his crash couch and held onto it for support. “Brandy, you were right. The Martians are inherently violent. They seethe with the need to conquer.”

His breathing was growing ragged; his eyes were haunted, darting. “The original viral globs lived as parasites within different types of Martian animals. But eventually the viruses developed intelligence. They wanted to enslave creatures that had manipulatory appendages. In the Martian seas, there was a creature that looked kind of like a hand—five tubular extensions coming out of one side of a central disk. At the ends of each of their five finger-like tubes, the creatures had circles of extruded iron filaments controlled by sphincter muscles. They’d evolved these appendages to pop open a type of Martian shellfish, but the ancestral Hets enslaved the Hands and used the iron filaments as general manipulators.”

Klicks’s head was shaking back and forth, but he seemed unaware that he was doing it. “Eventually the Hands built spaceships for the Hets, ships that moved by polarizing gravity. The Hets visited Earth and the belt planet. On both, they found animal life that might indeed develop intelligence someday. The belt world was small enough for the Hets and their Hands to move around comfortably, but Earth was much too massive. A project was begun to—to marsiform Earth, to make it Mars-like and habitable. The first step was the installation of the gravity-suppressor satellites; as I said, they went into orbit a hundred and thirty million years ago.

“These early Hets saw, hanging there in their southern sky, the rosette, the cluster of arranged suns—yes, it’s that old. They knew there were other creatures out there, somewhere. And they hated that fact—hated that there were minds that they couldn’t reach, couldn’t enslave. The Hets assumed that any intelligence would be as violent as their own, so they forced the Hands to build war machines, ready to meet the rosette-makers whom they felt were bound to come and try to conquer them.”

Klicks’s arms were trembling as he spoke. His voice had gone hoarse; sweat appeared on his brow.

“The Hands were small creatures, far too puny to accommodate enough viral material to constitute a very astute slaver mind. And the Hand children were far too small to contain any meaningful concentration of Het viruses and therefore couldn’t be controlled at all. At last, the Hand children turned the war machines their parents had been forced to build against the entire planet. The holocaust was incredible. It wiped out almost all life, including every last one of the Hands and most of the proto-Hets. Both Hand child and Hand adult preferred death to a life of enslavement.”