‘You must have made this journey many times. In the flesh, I mean—’
‘I always meant for the best, you know. I do know what people think of me. Given that the Qax Occupation was imposed on mankind over a century before I was even born, and given that I discovered I had certain diplomatic skills that spanned both communities, human and Qax, I thought I could find a way to do some good through negotiation. Mediation.’
Tasqer asked, ‘And do you think you succeeded? Look down there. That is not a human landscape.’
‘Maybe not,’ Mara felt compelled to put in. ‘But it could surely have been a lot worse. They say the Squeem occupation was more brutal, in some ways. Yes, there was a war; yes, we lost cities. The Qax forced their own food production system on us, as you can see from here. But since the Occupation was imposed, the Qax have allowed us to preserve our cultural treasures – the ancient heart of Mellborn, for instance. And much of this continent remains wild, green.’ Mara was proud of this aspect of her own people’s legacy. ‘The wild is there because humans brought it back, long before the Qax ever came. We reversed extinctions using genetic traces; we reconstructed ecologies lost when humans allowed themselves to overcrowd their world.’
Tasqer snorted. ‘The Qax only allowed all that to be preserved because they mine it for export. Exotic biochemistries sold to their alien markets, out there among the stars somewhere. They are more sophisticated than the Squeem, I’ll give them that. But they are conquerors just the same.’
Parz put in, ‘The Qax are essentially traders, you know; that’s their motivation for conquest.’
The Engineer laughed. ‘They trade in Earth’s riches while humans eat slop from the coastal farms. Once we built starships. Once a kid like Tiel would have been training up on hyperdrive, rather than crawling through sewers sifting garbage.’
Parz said sharply, ‘Well, Tiel is getting his chance now, isn’t he? And you Engineers seem to have long memories.’
‘Should we not? Somebody must remember, now the old ones are dying off . . .’
Mara had heard that was true. After two centuries, and with their AS treatment long ago curtailed, the last survivors of the pre-Qax era, the last to remember Earth as it had been before the alien Occupation, were being lost one by one.
‘We stayed independent,’ Tasqer said now. ‘We Engineers. I myself was born between planets. My ancestors fled Earth at the time of the Occupation war. With no place to land, the refugees ganged together their spacecraft and found ways to live, through trading, piloting, even a little mercenary soldiering.’
‘And banditry, when you dare,’ Parz said.
‘But you yourself are no longer free,’ Mara pointed out.
Tasqer shrugged. ‘I dared once too often. After my capture I parlayed imprisonment into service for the Qax. And here I am, building a GUTship for them.’
‘Just so,’ Parz said. ‘The Qax can be . . . benign.’
‘Maybe you people need to get out of your golden cages more often,’ Tasqer said. ‘To the Qax we are probably more valuable as sacks of exotic chemicals than as thinking beings.’
Mara shuddered at that.
‘Enough,’ snapped Parz. ‘You don’t have a monopoly on conscience, Tasqer. And after all, this is a moment of human triumph, against all the odds: we are travelling to see the great machinery that Mara’s son is assembling on the Moon – and all of it prompted by the return of Michael Poole’s starship from the past.’
Mara said, ‘I admit I don’t understand what the purpose of that flight was, what Poole hoped to achieve – a great circle in interstellar space?’
Parz smiled. ‘I’m no physicist myself. But as I understand it, Mara, what Poole was aiming for, having spent decades building wormhole bridges between the planets, was to build a bridge to the future . . .’
Poole’s peculiar time machine was built on a combination of two extraordinary physical phenomena.
The first was wormholes, flaws in space and time that connected points separated perhaps by light years with near-instantaneous passages of curved space. And the second was time dilation. As a ship accelerated close to the speed of light, its clocks slowed compared to those observed from its planet of origin. Its crew would age more slowly, as would any equipment they carried – such as a wormhole Interface.
Poole’s GUTship Cauchy had been dispatched on a long, near-light-speed jaunt in the direction of Sagittarius, towards the centre of the Galaxy. It had carried one terminus of a wormhole, whose other end remained in Jupiter orbit. The Cauchy was to return after a subjective century of flight but, thanks to time dilation effects, to a Solar System fifteen centuries older.
And that was the purpose of the project. When, after a century of subjective time, the Cauchy completed its circular tour, its hundred-year-old wormhole portal, delivered to the fifteen-hundred-years-hence date of AD 5274, would be linked to its hundred-year-old sibling, in Jovian orbit, back in the year AD 3829, a century after the ship’s launch. And then it would be possible, using the wormhole, to step in a few hours across fifteen centuries of time, forward or back.
Mara was astonished. ‘What audacity.’
‘What an experiment!’ Parz said with a grin.
‘Well, now the Cauchy is back. Has anybody tried using it yet? Either going back fifteen centuries – or has anybody come forward, from Poole’s era? And I would like to understand why the Qax’s response to this bizarre arrival has been to build another wormhole of their own.’
The Engineer and the Ambassador exchanged a glance.
‘Very well,’ Jasoft Parz said. ‘The immediate cause of the Qax’s action is that it is a response to – well, a rebellion. A minor one, but effective. I can speak openly of this because the event was visible to human observers, suitably equipped—’
‘I’ll say,’ the Engineer said with a grin. ‘It was a rogue craft, assembled in secret—’
‘Under a cultural monument,’ Parz said disapprovingly.
Tasqer said, ‘We don’t know who they were. But, yes, somebody managed to reach the Poole wormhole. They got off the Earth and out of the Solar System and through that time bridge, to the past. What do you think of that, lady? If they made it through, if it all worked as Poole designed, what will they be doing now, back there in history? What will they be saying of the Qax, or of you, Ambassador, to an independent mankind? What wave of new history is rolling towards us even now?’
Parz sniffed. ‘Their belief system struck me as so insane that I doubt they’ll make any difference at all.’
Mara frowned. ‘If they made it to the past, shouldn’t that show up in the records, in our histories?’
Parz said hesitantly, ‘There are some mentions of a great disruption at the time, which people called the Emergency. But our knowledge of history has been badly damaged, by the Starfall war, by the Squeem occupation – by the activities of the Qax too, though I’m convinced they aren’t trying to disrupt our knowledge of that era specifically. Anyhow, there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? All we can do—’
‘Is carry out the orders of the Qax,’ the Engineer finished sourly.
Mara said cautiously, ‘And exactly what are those orders? You still haven’t told me it all, have you?’
Tasqer glanced at Parz, as if for approval. Then he said, ‘The Qax want to do what Michael Poole did, Mara. Just as Poole built a wormhole bridge to his future – our present – so the Qax want to build another bridge, with the wormhole built by your sons and towed by this new ship, the Endurance – a bridge to their own future.’