James Hogan - Giant's Star

"And the Jevlenese would have repossessed the solar system, which I suspect has always been their first goal," Danchekker said. "I would imagine they have always considered it rightly theirs. And they would no longer have had to play second fiddle to the Ganymeans, a position they clearly have never been able to come to terms with gracefully."

"It all makes sense," Calazar said in a resigned voice. "Why they were so insistent about administering their own, autonomous group of worlds . . . why they needed a system independent of VISAR, controlling its own volume of space." He looked at Showm and nodded. "A lot of things are beginning to make sense now."

He fell silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again his voice was lighter. "If all this is true, then our problem of what to do next could be eased considerably. If the roots of it all lay not so much in the Jevlenese people but in JEVEX, then maybe there is hope for them after all. Distasteful punitive measures may not be necessary."

A distant look came into Showm’s eyes. "Ye-es," she said slowly, and began nodding. "Perhaps, given the right help, they might rebuild their civilization upon a new model and emerge from it all as a mature and benign race. All may not be lost yet."

"It does give us a positive goal to aim at and a task to accomplish," Calazar said, sounding more enthusiastic. "Despite all the setbacks, things might work out to a successful conclusion. As you say, all is not lost."

"Er, at present this is merely a hypothesis, you understand," Danchekker said hastily. "But there might be a way to test it. If the whole thing did in fact begin with JEVEX, it might be possible to trace the origins of some of the things we’ve been talking about back to conceptual subnets of some form buried in JEVEX’s older archives." He looked at Calazar. "I assume that once your people are fully in control of Jevlen, it would be possible to reactivate parts of JEVEX in a controlled fashion and allow VISAR to examine its records thoroughly."

Calazar was already nodding. "I would have thought so. Eesyan is really the person we should talk to about that." He looked across at the view coming from the Command Deck of the Shapieron. "Isn’t he free yet? What’s happening there?"

Consternation was breaking out among the Ganymeans crowded below the main screen in the image. At the same time a chorus of shouts erupted from the other image, showing the view from Earth, in which Hunt and the others were bumping into each other in their haste to get back across the room to the terminal that connected them to the Thurien ship at Uttan. Danchekker, Calazar, and the others with them forgot their conversation of a few moments earlier and stared in astonishment. Hunt was almost incoherent with excitement as he got to the screen. "We’ve found them! ZORAC reprocessed the planet. We know where they went. It’s impossible!"

Danchekker blinked at him. "Vic, what are you babbling about? Kindly calm down, and simply say whatever it is that you’re trying to say."

Hunt recomposed himself with some effort. "The five Jevlenese ships. We know what happened to them." He paused for a second to get his breath back, then turned his head away to call over the people behind him to the terminal connecting them to the Shapieron. "ZORAC, pass that shot over to VISAR, would you? Tell VISAR to display it at Uttan." In the ship where Danchekker was, an image appeared of the final shot of the Jevlenese vessels sent back by the Shapieron’s probe just before the tunnel caved in. "Have you got it?" Hunt asked.

Danchekker nodded. "Yes. What about it?"

"The spot in the upper right-hand corner is a planet," Hunt said. "We asked ZORAC if there was any way it could reprocess that part of the image and enhance it to give us a better look at it. It did. We know what planet it is."

"Well?" Danchekker asked, puzzled, after a second or two. "Where is it?"

"A better question would be when? " Hunt told him.

Danchekker frowned and looked around him only to be met by expressions as confused as his own. "Vic, what are you talking about?" he asked.

"VISAR, show them," Hunt said in reply.

The speck enlarged in an instant to become a full disk occupying the whole frame. It was a world shining brightly against the stars with cloud formations and oceans. The resolution was not good, but there were continental outlines discernible on its surface. Calazar and Showm froze. A split second later, Danchekker realized why.

What he was looking at was not unfamiliar. Like Hunt, he had studied every island, isthmus, estuary, and coastline sandwiched between the two enormous ice caps of that planet many times-at Houston, in the course of the Lunarian investigations over two years earlier. He looked away. Calazar and Showm were still staring in silent awe, and now Caldwell too was wide-eyed with disbelief. Danchekker slowly turned his head to follow their gaze once again. It was still there. He hadn’t imagined it.

The planet was Minerva.

Nobody could say for certain exactly how it had come about in those final few seconds as VISAR and the projector at Uttan fought for control of the same speck of spacetime light-years away, and many believed that nobody ever would. But Hunt was forced at last to accept the truth of the claim that Paul Shelling had made at Houston on the day that Karen Heller and Norman Pacey had come to talk to Caldwell: the Ganymean physical equations that described the possibility of point-to-point transfers through space had solutions that admitted transfers through time too. Or both. For somehow the five Jevlenese ships had been hurled across light-years of space and backward through tens of thousands of years of time to emerge in the solar system when Minerva was still in existence. In fact, by careful measurement of the positions of background stars, the Ganymean scientists determined to a high degree of accuracy when; it came out to be about two hundred years before the final Lunarian war.

And that, of course, explained where the superbreed of Lambians, who had emerged seemingly overnight with a technology far in advance of anything else anywhere on the planet, had come from. And it explained why a planet that had, by and large, mended its warlike ways and commenced working constructively and cooperatively toward an eventual migration to Earth became divided into the two rival factions that in the end had destroyed each other. The Cerians were native, having evolved from the terrestrial primates transported to Minerva twenty-five million years earlier by the Ganymeans, while the Lambians were from Jevlen and fifty thousand years in the future. The Lambians never emerged at all; they arrived.

There were more than enough riddles in this for the scientists to argue over for many years to come. How, for example, could the Lambians have been the descendants of their own descendants? Their greed and power lust were seen at last as characteristic of them as a group rather than of the human race as a whole, but that being so, where had those characteristics originated? The Jevlenese had inherited them from the Lambians, who had inherited them from the Jevlenese that had landed on Minerva. So where and when had it started? Danchekker speculated that their passage through the zone of dislocated spacetime might have induced some form of psychological aberration that had started the whole thing off, but the suggestion was not very satisfying since the meaning of the word "started" in this context was obscure to say the least.

Another enigma arose from the knowledge of subsequent events that the Jevlenese would presumably have taken back to Minerva with them. If they knew about the next two hundred years, the war, the millennia after that with the Thuriens, and their own eventual defeat at the hands of VISAR, why would they have allowed those very things to happen? Had they been powerless to change the sequence? Surely not. Had a whole new history somehow been written into the timeloop to erase and replace something else that had existed there "before," whatever that meant? Or had they perhaps taken few hard records with them in their haste and suffered some kind of stress-induced amnesia such that they arrived not knowing who they were or where they had come from, thus dooming themselves to launch again into an endless, unaltering cycle?