Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

The oncology ward at the Wellesley Hospital is never a cheery place, but somehow this time it seems less oppressive, less a prison for both me and my father.

I sit in the uncomfortable vinyl chair next to him. It isn’t important that we talk. There isn’t much to say, anyway. Occasionally he does rouse himself enough to speak and I face him, looking as though I am listening. But my mind is thousands of kilometers away and millions of years in the past.

When the Huang Effect reversed, the mathematical string connecting the Sternberger to the present was reeled in. As the ship was hauled back up the timeline, the entire last 65 million years of history were rewritten. Reverse engineering: the future making the past what it must have been.

I’d killed the dinosaurs; I’d paved the way for the mammals.

Paved the way for my own present.

And the other Brandy? The other timeline?

Gone. There’s only one timeline now; only one reality.

I suppose there is no reason to mourn. I am him, after all, and with Tess and me still together, perhaps he is content to hand off the timeline to me. Besides, it isn’t as though he had never existed. I have some of his memories now, thanks to that strange swapping of diaries. Whether by quantum flux or deliberate design, I am grateful for those memories, for the small peek they afforded at what my life might have been. The time-traveling Brandy’s diary reminds me of my neighbor Fred’s tabby cat, appearing at his cottage up on Georgian Bay after it had supposedly ceased to exist. Sometimes the universe does care … just a bit.

And the universe has given me something else, too: proof that a future does exist for humankind, or whatever we become, for somehow that future gave Ching-Mei the knowledge needed to make the past what it had to be. The end creates the means.

But I do wonder what happened to the Hets, those bizarre alien conquerors who came and went in the dim past. Their ages-long war with the natives of the belt planet must have escalated into a devastating final battle, as the time-traveling Klicks had suggested, destroying the fifth world and laying waste to Mars.

The time-traveling Brandy didn’t really have to make the moral decision about the Hets. There was only one possible course of action after he learned the truth about them. That’s fitting, in a way, for the Hets themselves were inflexible chemical machines, driven to violence and conquest by their very nature. The other Brandy had no choice because the viral Hets had no choice.

But in the here and now, I do have a choice. We all do. For years, I’ve avoided making decisions. But the act of deciding is what makes us human, what separates the living from things like the Hets that only parody life. My father is experiencing a remission now, but if he asks for my help again, I know how I will answer.

I wonder about those Hets left on Earth after the resurgence of gravity. They apparently lost the ability to clump together into big enough packages to remain intelligent. But you can’t really kill viruses, since they aren’t truly alive. Would they survive somehow as part of Earth’s ecosystem? Would we even recognize them, or their effects, 65 million years later?

It hits me. The Hets did linger on, dissolving into their constituent units. Their intelligence ebbed from them, their civilization reduced to nothing but chemically stored memories in their RNA. Only their hatred for things truly alive survives, their basic biological imperative continuing to drive them.

Influenza. The common cold. Polio. And, yes, the cancer that is killing my father. It seems that the Hets are still here.