Sometime in your near future, humanity will find itself following a section of highway that splits our species. The survivors will be taken down a wormhole off-ramp that loops sublight time. The rest of humanity will blindly follow a stretch of road that leads to a dead-end… the end of our species.
The Popol Vuh ’s Creation Myth tells of the Hero Twins’ presence in Xibalba, an event that already happened.
Correct.
Father, if it already happened, then why are we reliving it?
The Popol Vuh tells of what we hope will come to pass, but the myth is not accurate. The truth is, you and your brother failed in your first attempt.
We failed?
Yes. Fortunately, humanity was granted a second chance when the Guardian took the Balam back through the wormhole and ended up at Earth, 65 million years in the past.
And what’s to prevent us from failing again? Manny’s not even Hunahpu. I don’t see how we can win over this Abomination.
You’ll win this time because I’m going to help you. I can be your eyes, advising you which road to take. I can prepare you in much the same way the Guardian tried to prepare me.
Then do it, teach me! Tell me what happened to you after you entered the serpent’s mouth and disappeared.
I didn’t disappear, Jacob. I entered the Guardian’s pod and moved beyond light speed. As the stars passed by like taser fire, I realized the reality of my decision. What seemed like seconds to me would be decades to everyone on Earth. You, your brother, your mother-everyone of my era would be long dead by the time I arrived on Xibalba, wherever that hellish world might lie.
I panicked. I screamed. I ordered the Guardian to return me to Earth.
But it was too late. The highway I was traveling on could only move forward-and it was a dark road that led to the origin of man’s evil.
The Guardian promised they would never abandon me. Those were the last words I remembered hearing before I lost consciousness.
When I awoke, I was shocked to find myself aboard an Earth shuttle, bound for Mars.
I don’t understand? Were you remote-viewing the scene, still unconscious aboard the Guardian’s transport pod, or was it real?
The event was real, only I was living it as someone else, someone from my past but your future. Let me tell my tale, and you’ll understand.
What clued me in to the time period was the space vehicle itself. It was not a shuttle like those NASA had designed and flown during my teen years. This vessel was infinitely larger, with private berths to accommodate fifty-two passengers and a year’s worth of supplies. Nor were we alone on our voyage. There were eleven other shuttles accompanying us, twelve in all, like the twelve tribes of Israel-all crossing the great desert of space on our journey to the Promised Land
… Mars.
You were on a scientific expedition?
No, I’d say it was more like a pilgrimage. The great holocaust I told you of had just overwhelmed humanity. Billions had perished, and billions more were destined to die. Something horrible had happened back on Earth… a cataclysm that caught the general population by complete surprise. But the upper echelons of the government knew, and that’s why we were aboard those space shuttles.
They kept it a secret?
A secret shared only by a privileged few. Years from your present time, clues about the coming cataclysm will be discovered. It will be kept from the public. Only those in power will know, and they will create a secret coven-in essence, an Earth evacuation plan, concealed behind an aggressive program to colonize Mars. Humanity, at least a certain privileged segment of it, would go on. Thousands had already arrived on the Red Planet. Our twelve shuttles would be the last to join our fellow survivors.
As we began our perilous four-month journey and Earth disappeared from our viewports, we cried and prayed and cried some more. Our salvation was Mars Colony, but we would never arrive, for what lay ahead was an off-ramp-the entrance to a wormhole.
There was no way to avoid it, no way for our pilots to even see it. A sudden surge of the shuttle’s gravity-wave detectors and whoosh – we found ourselves hurtling through the conduit’s funnel of energy, time and space distorting as we plunged through our Galaxy’s version of a rabbit hole.
Imagine falling from a thirty thousand-foot precipice, knowing your life is about to be extinguished, your screams squelched by the length of the drop. In those final minutes everything becomes clear, and you realize how much time you wasted on petty nonsense.
As frightened as I was, I could not tear myself away from my viewport, my mind mesmerized. We passed through gray interstellar gas clouds whose cosmic glow brightened into visible light, drenching us in pastels of crimson and yellow and blue before yielding to a hydrogen field of fluorescent pink.
Voices cried out in the darkened cabin, some identifying the gas cloud as the Orion Nebula. If accurate, then we had traveled some fifteen hundred light-years from Earth in the blink of an eye.
And then the cabin pressure increased and the spacecraft shook violently, and I closed my eyes to die.
How much time passed, I cannot say, but when I awoke, I was still on board the Mars shuttle, only the stars had stopped moving. We were through the wormhole, all twelve of our ships-and somehow we had survived.
I say ‘we’ yet I still had no idea who I was or what I was doing on board the vessel, but the sheer delight at merely being alive… it was too overwhelming to question.
In the distance I could see a red supergiant-a star so large that had it been Earth’s sun its girth would have stretched across the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. In close proximity to this monster was a planetary nebula, its fluorescent-style ring of gases appearing in shades of violets and blues.
I heard voices in the dark debate the red supergiant’s identity, the consensus agreeing it was Betelgeuse, a star over three hundred times the diameter of our sun and ten thousand times as luminous. If correct, then we had been transported to another section of the Orion spiral arm.
And then one of my cabin mates turned to me and addressed me as Bill.
So now I had an identity. The consciousness that had been Michael Gabriel had hitched a ride in the body and mind of William C. Raby. I
… or should I say we, were a marine geneticist, selected for Mars Colony, not by merit, but by extensive international private bank dealings that had helped fund the journey.
Like many of the other passengers, Bill Raby had known the right people to bribe and had the means and political clout to save himself.
But you weren’t really this Bill Raby, were you?
That’s just it, son, in every sense, I had become him. My consciousness dominated his, I felt his fears as if they were my own. I had his memories, and his overwhelming sense of guilt, for like me, Bill Raby had also left a loved one back on Earth, and it was tearing him up inside.
The desperateness of our situation quickly spread throughout the cabin. Our trip through the space tunnel had destroyed most of our ship’s electronics, damaging our outer hull, crippling our engines. Like the rest of the fleet, we were hurtling through space, out of control, being reeled in along powerful gravitational forces that our damaged sensors could not identify.
Another wormhole?
No, it was a planet, its atmosphere vermilion, its appearance in many ways similar to that of Mars, though closer to Earth in size. Like the Red Planet, the alien world possessed two barren moons, one the size of Earth’s lone satellite, the second-a smaller potato-shaped body, perhaps fourteen miles in diameter.
Panic levels rose as our twelve vessels plummeted through this alien world’s atmosphere. With our heat shield damaged, our cabin began heating up like a furnace. Children screamed. Passengers held one another, hoping and praying for another miracle all of us knew in our hearts we didn’t deserve.