I came to my house, where my bitter mother waited, and the rest of my life.
I had erased the picture on the wall. I feared it would not be enough, for I had broken my promise to the Sky Hunters. The future was dark, unknowable.
I longed for my nest in the trees. But I could never go back.
That was my punishment, and I knew it would never end.
It was like coming out of a deep sleep.
I was still in Rennie’s laboratory. It was still night, I saw through the window, though dawn light was gathering. Antique-looking floor lamps burned.
Rennie helped me off the couch, led me back to the living room, sat me down. I felt groggy. Now I accepted a tumbler of his Burgundy. In another room a TV murmured, and I saw flickering images reflected on the wall.
Light flared, beyond the window.
“What was that? The moon?”
“No, the moon has set. Perhaps an Earth-orbit satellite being taken out. The war seems to be—well, hotting up. Just in the last few hours. They are bringing it home.” He reached for a remote, leaned over, and shut off the TV.
I imagined a warrior in an armoured spacesuit, up on the moon, displaying the severed head of a Neanderthal woman.
“I wondered if that flaring light was another new star.” I seemed to see it hanging over the caves of the Neanderthals, as if Rennie’s house was a thinner reality altogether.
“A what? Tell me all you saw. Where did you go?”
“A long way. Like my father . . . ”
In broken fragments, I told him all I could remember. He had no recorder, nothing like a camera; he made handwritten notes in a thick leather-bound book.
“A supernova,” he said.
“What?”
“Your new star. Has to be. Look—like your father you seem to have been drawn back to the age of the Neanderthals—or its closing, as they died out. It sounds as if you landed up some time later than your father’s visit, after the last glacial maximum. The last archaeological traces of Neanderthals are on Gibraltar, dated to around twenty-four thousand years ago. Surely there were hold-out pockets elsewhere. But that new star—naked-eye supernovas aren’t that common. Of course there was nobody around to make a record, but perhaps the cosmologists can figure out a precise date from relic traces.”
I didn’t care about the star. Or rather, it wasn’t its cosmological aspect that interested me. “The Neanderthals. If that’s what they were.”
“Yes?”
“They looked like humans. Like muscle-bound, fair-skinned, blond, humans.”
“Interbreeding. Genetic studies show that there was a long spell of it, from between eighty to fifty thousand years ago. We thoroughly mixed up our DNA with theirs. As for the fair skin and the hair, those are obvious northern latitude adaptations. Nobody believed me, when your father reported these aspects as he observed them. The evidence of speech too. Yet now the DNA has confirmed them.” He regarded me. “How did it feel to meet them?”
It was the first question he’d asked that made any sense to me. “Oddly familiar. Like meeting a cousin for the first time, an uncle. Family, but new. And later when I glimpsed those other ages, through the child—I saw landscapes full of, of—”
“Of different hominid species.”
“I felt at home.” I looked at him. He had a kindly face, I thought for the first time. Like a tired grandfather. “Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense. We’re unique among mammals in being alone as a species, we humans. There are several kinds of dolphins, chimps. We’re a pathology. I sometimes think that’s why we feel so lonely. Why we seek God, or the alien. We know something is missing from our world, but we don’t know what.”
“We got rid of all those others.”
“No,” he said sternly. “Don’t think that. Don’t take guilt away from this experience. Oh, we may have knocked the very last old man on the head, in some cave in Gibraltar. But it was rapid climate fluctuations and habitat fragmentation that did for the Neanderthals. At worst we were just another factor in a changing landscape.”
Another flare of light beyond the window, and I thought I heard a distant boom, like thunder. We both flinched.
Rennie raised his glass. “Here’s to extinction.”
“Yes.” I drank deeply.
He said gently, “And this child you found—was he the Jesus of the Neanderthals?”
“I—I didn’t know. I will never know. He offered consolation.”
“Yes,” Rennie said, almost eagerly, and he leaned forward. “Yes! Consolation. That’s what I think this is all about.”
“All what?”
“My temporal psycho-displacement. I told you that I believe that all my apparatus does is to release an ability latent in the human mind. An ability which over the few decades before my work even amateur experimenters were able to tap, before I systematised it, brought it into the realms of science. An ability which, given what you saw, the Neanderthals evidently shared. Yet, from the way you described those old women, it was new to them too.” He got up and paced, hand cupped around the bowl of an invisible pipe, and he spoke as if lecturing students. “A consolation! Why should we need that now? And why should it have emerged in the Neanderthals when it did, hmm?”
He expected me to answer, I saw. The academic with the slow student. I thought of the despairing father. “They were finished. No more young women. No more children.”
“Yes! That’s it. Can’t you see? I told you what your father asked me. ‘Why can’t you send me into the future?’ It seems just as logical that one could ride the world lines forward as backward. Well, with careful study and experiment since, I believe I have found the answer, Ms Armand. It is because our world lines have no extension in the future, or none significant. Just as, twenty thousand years ago, your Neanderthals—”
Another crashing detonation somewhere, a pressure wave you could feel in your chest. I heard car alarms sound, and a wail of sirens.
“As to Jesus and His Incarnation, of that I cannot speak. Consolation, though—if we cannot have the promise of the future, at least we are granted the memory of the past. Do you think that’s why we have been given this gift, Ms. Armand? It would seem an act of a merciful superior soul, if not a God. Do you think I should defy the injunctions and release the technique to mankind . . . ?”
I could barely hear him. I looked at him, his grayed hair, his tired eyes. Other faces rose before me. The grieving Neanderthal man. The laughing, robust children on the wooded plain. The kindly, ape-like features of my most distant mother. The round, shining face of the sleeping child. The long remembering, the lingering joy.
I grabbed his arm. “I don’t care about others. I don’t care about the world. Let me go back, Rennie. Oh, let me go back!”
AFTERWORD:
My first real introduction to adult sf was at age twelve, around 1970, when I hoovered up all I could find in my local library and school library. From that beginning, Poul Anderson was always a towering name for me. I suppose works like Tau Zero (1970) have had a more obvious influence on my career as a hard sf writer, but I also responded to his gentler, more intensely emotional stories—like the tale that’s the inspiration for this piece. I was born in the very month “The Long Remembering” was first published, and that’s one reason why it’s among my favourites.
—Stephen Baxter
OPERATION XIBALBA
by Eric Flint
Eric Flint is one of the modern masters of Alternate History science fiction and humorous fantasy adventure. He’s probably best known for the Assiti Shards series, detailing what happens when a part of twentieth-Century-West Virginia is transported to the East Germany of 1632 during the Thirty Year’s War. The series began with the novel 1632, and has carried on through eleven volumes since, both solo novels and novels written in collaboration with David Weber, Andrew Dennis, and Virginia DeMarce. Flint is also the editor of the related six-volume Grantville Gazette anthology series, in which ot
her authors relate the stories of the inhabitants of that West Virginia town. He’s also written the six-volume Belisarius series, with David Drake; the two-volume Rats, Bats and Vats series, with Richard Roach; the two-volume Jao series, with K.D. Wentworth; the two-volume Joe’s World series, with Richard Roach; the two-volume Boundary series, with Ryk E. Spoor; and two posthumous sequels to James H. Schmidt’s The Witches of Karres, with Dave Freer and Mercedes Lackey. Flint has also written the solo novels Mother of Dreams, 1812: The Rivers of War, and 1824: The Arkansas War, as well as other collaborative novels with Dave Freer and Marilyn Kosmatka. His short fiction has been collected in Worlds and The Flood Was Fixed: and Other Stories. He was the editor of the ambitious online magazine Jim Baen’s Universe, and also edited two anthologies drawn from it, The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe and The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe II (with Mike Resnick). His other anthologies include The World Turned Upside Down, edited with Jim Baen and David Drake, Foreign Legions, edited with David Drake and David Weber, and The Dragon Done It and When Diplomacy Fails: An Anthology of Military Science Fiction, both edited with Mike Resnick.
In a visit to the bizarre world Anderson explored in his novel, Operation Chaos, Flint shows us that, perhaps unsurprisingly, going to Hell can be a very dangerous thing to do.
1
“Goddamn Matucheks,” Frank Pianessa said wearily. He tossed the report I’d just handed to him onto the desk, without opening it, and reached for his coffee cup. The cup was resting on a pile of other reports in the same bile-green-colored folders the Department of Infernal Affairs had chosen to use for this particular purpose.
Appropriately chosen, if you ask me. The official name for the activity involved was “Unauthorized Incursions Into the Nether Reaches.” Those of us assigned to deal with the ensuing messes called it either the “Darwin Award on Steroids” or “What Will These Idiots Think Of Next?”
Frank slurped at his coffee. “Summarize it for me, would you, Anibal? It’s too early in the morning for me to fight my way through departmentese.”
I couldn’t help but smile. In the short period of its existence since it was created after the Matuchek Expedition, the prose of the DIA had become notorious even among federal agencies. Nobody else could produce something like—I’m not making this up, it’s taken directly from an actual report—the following:
Subject incursee [that’s DIA-speak for the moron involved, and never mind that an “incursee” would presumably refer to the person into whom the incursion was done, not the one who did it—but what do billions of people who speak proper English know?] thereupon attempted to execute an extrapersonal ejection [translation: the moron tried to fire or throw a missile of some sort] intended to inflict uncertifiably mortal results [tried to kill, a dubious prospect given the nature of the time, place and intended killee] upon the demonic personage involved, tentatively classified as a minor fiend, thoracically enhanced variety, clawed ilk, ill-tempered branch.
That last is pointless verbiage, since there’s really no rhyme or reason to the construction—or possibly devolution—of the denizens of the hell universe. Clawed, spiny, bad-humored . . . Gee, a devil. Who would’ve guessed? I ran fingers through my hair. “This one’s a doozy, boss.”
Frank grimaced. “Don’t tell me we’ve got another big game hunter on our hands.”
One of our last cases—the one whose report I just quoted from, in fact—involved a man [tentatively classified as a minor cretin, cranially deprived variety, stupid ilk, suicidal branch] who tried to set himself up in business as a hunting guide. He’d undertake safaris in Hell, for any big game hunter tired of bagging the usual lion, bison, elk, or elephant.
He got three takers for his first and only safari. All of them were very well-armed indeed. Two of the hunters had double-barreled .600-caliber elephant guns, the third had a .50-caliber military-grade sniper rifle, and the guide himself was armed with a grenade launcher.
Fat lot of good it did them, in a universe whose geometry is not even remotely Euclidean. That’s why the Matuchek party never tried to use missile weapons at all, not even with the spirits of Lobachevsky and Bolyai to guide them.
I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid it’s a lot worse than that.”
Frank set down his cup. “Oh, Gawd Almighty. Don’t tell me we’ve got more missionaries on our hands.”
You’d think any religious denomination that went in for proselytizing would understand that, pretty much by definition, the denizens of the hell universe are . . .
Well. Damned. That means “not subject to salvation.”
But every few months we get another bunch of screwballs who hare off to save the unholy. By the time we get alerted and can track them down, it’s usually too late. Since the would-be missionaries are deliberately trying to find demons, which are abundant in the nether regions (as you’d expect), they’ve already been slaughtered by the time we catch up to them. Or “martyred,” to use their own terminology, which I personally consider preposterous. You might as well call a man who throws himself off a cliff to be a “martyr.”
Again, I ran fingers through my hair. “Uh . . . no. It’s a religious expedition of sorts, I suppose you could say. But they’re not actually crazy. They’ve no intention of converting devils. They’re seeking what they call ‘morally neutral allies in the struggle against the Adversary.’”
“Huh?”
“‘Morally neutral allies,’” I repeated patiently.
“What the hell does that mean?” he demanded.
“You remember how the Matuchek incident ended?”
“Yeah, sure. When all seemed lost, they summoned—called, rather—some enormous and presumably very powerful . . . Oh, dear Lord. You have got to be kidding me.”
I shook my head. “Nope. It seems the head of this new expedition—his name’s Rick Boatright, by the way—got into a conversation in a bar with a couple of the scholars who’ve been studying the data brought back by the Matucheks. They explained to him that they’d been able to tentatively identify the three beings summoned as godlings from an alternate universe. They don’t know their names, but they think two of them have a European origin and the third one came from a pre-discovery New World society.”
From the look of concentration on his face, Frank had been running that part of the Matuchek report through his mind. Now, he grunted. “I presume that’s the weird-looking feathered snake.”
“Yeah, that one. The same scholars think the being came from an analog of one of our own Native American cultures from the southwest or Mexico. And that’s the being this new expedition went looking for. Apparently the logic involved—I’m using the term loosely—is that since Boatright and his party left for Hell from Yuma, that’s the one they’re most likely to run across.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “Which part of ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ do people have trouble with? For Pete’s sake, it doesn’t matter where you leave from, when you set off for Hell.”
I shrugged. “A disregard for basic geometry is pretty much a given with our clientele.”
My boss scowled. “Don’t call them ‘our clientele,’ Anibal. The term’s silly. Clients are what doctors and dentists have.”
“And psychiatrists,” I pointed out. “Including ones who deal with schizophrenics. I’ll say this much for Boatright—at least he had enough sense to take an IPS unit with him.”
Frank’s scowl darkened. “Talk about silly terms! ‘Infernal Positioning System.’ An oxymoron if there ever was one.”
I shrugged again. “Hey, look, they do work. After a fashion. That’s why we use them ourselves.”
The operative phrase was after a fashion, though. IPS units were made by several different companies, each of whom claimed their unit had XYZ special feature or function that enabled—“enabled,” not guaranteed; see fine print below—the user to navigate through the nether regions. We’d tried all of the models and had never found any of them to be all that useful. Granted, they were better t
han nothing, but that was about like saying that a walking stick was better than nothing when you set out to conquer Mount Everest.
The problem was that IPS units only worked in places where the geometry was relatively close to that of our own universe. Such places did exist in the hell universe—quite a few of them, in fact—but the problem is that those aren’t the places in that universe where an expedition is most likely to wind up.
Why? Because such an expedition, or the rescue expedition sent out after them, is looking for the denizens of the hell universe. Or, to put it another way, is looking for evil. And from what our scholars can determine, evil plays roughly the same role in the geometry of the hell universe that gravity plays in our own. Gravity isn’t a “force” as such, it’s the curvature of space-time produced by mass. It seems that wickedness is the analogous quasi-force in determining the geometry of hell.
You can see what that leads to. Mass is pleasantly stable, inert, mindless and without volition. Evil, on the other hand, is chaotic, willful, self-centered, and worst of all, often capricious. So, whenever you find a large enough concentration of devils, or even a single one if it’s powerful enough, you’ll find that the geometry of the hell universe starts flopping around unpredictably. At that point the IPS units give up the ghost, mechanically speaking.
In our experience, the most reliable method for navigating the hell universe is simply hard-won experience—emphasis on “hard-won.” With enough experience, you learned to react based on moral instinct rather than eyesight. Oddly enough, with one exception, the people who turned out to be the best at it were people like me. Agnostics, with a low propensity for being judgmental. People with strong faith systems or rigid moral codes invariably got confused quickly once they entered the hell universe. A grand total of two—count ’em, two—missionaries have ever come back alive from the hell universe. One of them was missing both legs, both ears, all of his hair and—go figure—his appendix. The other was catatonic and has never recovered.