The Two Worlds (47 page)

19 Hoover, initially in trust over the South, urges progress (7)

20 Argon beam matrix (5)

22 Deposit nothing in the smaller amount (5)

TO

ELEANOR WOOD,
WHOSE IDEA IT WAS

—and because a good agent deserves
to be mentioned in the final
product.

It had taken until the fourth decade of the twenty-first century for humanity to get its act together and learn to resolve or live with its differences, and begin the migration outward as one species toward the stars. In the process, many of the prejudices and irrationalities that had underlain the strife of ages at last withered or were swept away. The core of beliefs that survived would form a solid foundation for the continuing expansion of human knowledge—for surely with the wealth of modern observational data and the sophistication of experimental method, the universe had little left to offer in the way of further reserves of facts to seriously challenge them.

Or so, for a short, comforting while, it seemed.

And then a series of unforeseen and utterly unprecedented events not only added a new dimension to the history of the solar system, but forced a complete rewriting of the origins of humankind itself.

When Man, under the thrust of the revitalized, international space program that arose from redirection of defense industries, finally reached the regions of the outer planets, he discovered that others had been there before him and had surpassed all that he had achieved. Twenty-five million years in the past, a civilization of eight-foot-tall, benevolently disposed giants—called the Ganymeans, after the first traces of them came to light on Ganymede, largest of the Jovian moons—had flourished on a planet Minerva, occupying the position between Mars and Jupiter.

And more astonishing still, while generations of work by anthropologists, geneticists, comparative anatomists, and others had correctly reconstructed the abrupt transformation responsible for the emergence of Homo sapiens from an arena of early-hominid contenders, it turned out that—understandably, in the circumstances—they had assigned the event to the wrong place. Modern Man hadn't evolved on Earth at all!

Despite Minerva's greater distance from the Sun, an effective natural greenhouse mechanism had maintained generally cool but Earthlike conditions there. But by the time the Ganymean civilization reached its advanced stage, the climate was altering in a direction that their constitution would have been unable to tolerate. As was to be expected, their own voyages of discovery across the early solar system brought them to Earth, and from there they transported back to Minerva numerous plant and animal forms representative of life on late-Oligocene, early-Miocene Earth in connection with large-scale bioengineering researches aimed at combating the problem. These efforts were in vain, however, and the Ganymeans migrated to what later came to be called the Giants' Star, some twenty light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Taurus.

In the millions of years that followed, the imported terrestrial animals eclipsed and replaced the native Minervan forms, which, owing to a peculiarity of early Minervan biology that had precluded the emergence of land-dwelling carnivores, had evolved no prey-predator adaptations and were unable to compete. These terrestrial types included a population of genetically modified primates as advanced as anything that existed on Earth at the time. Almost twenty-five million years later, fifty thousand years before the present, while the various hominid lines that had been developing on Earth were just yielding the first crude beginnings of stone-using cultures, a second advanced, spacegoing race had already developed on Minerva: the first version of modern Man, subsequently given the name Lunarians when the first evidence of their existence was found in the course of early twenty-first-century exploration of Earth's moon.

At the time of the Lunarians' emergence, the solar system was entering the most recent ice age. Conditions on Minerva were deteriorating, and the Lunarian sciences and industrial technologies developed rapidly as part of a long-term stratagem to move their civilization to the warmer and more hospitable world of Earth.

But such was not to be.

When the Lunarians were practically within reach of the goal toward which they had been working constructively for generations, they embarked on a course of ruinous military rivalries that culminated in a cataclysmic war between two superpowers, Cerios and Lambia, in the course of which the planet Minerva was destroyed.

The Ganymeans by that time had established a thriving interstellar civilisation centered on the planet Thurien of the Giants' Star system. They had never felt comfortable with what they regarded as their abandonment of a genetic mutant that they expected would have no chance of survival, and they had followed the progress of the Lunarians with a mixture of increasing guilt and awe. But when they saw it all end in catastrophe, the Ganymeans forgot their previous policy of nonintervention and appeared in time to save the last few survivors from the war. Gravitational upheavals caused by the emergency methods used to transport the Ganymean rescue mission threw what remained of Minerva into an eccentric outer orbit to become Pluto, while the smaller debris dispersed under Jupiter's tidal effects as the Asteroids. Minerva's orphaned moon fell inward toward the Sun and was later captured by Earth.

Despite their experience, the surviving Lunarians remained hostile and immiscible. The Lambians went back with the Ganymeans and were installed on a world called Jevlen, eventually to become a fully integrated, human component of the Thurien civilization. The Cerians were returned, at their own request, to the world of their origins: Earth, where they were almost overwhelmed shortly afterward by climatic and tidal upheavals caused by the arrival of Minerva's moon. For thousands of years they reverted to barbarism, struggling on the edge of extinction, and the knowledge of their origins was lost. Only in modern times, when they at last climbed outward once more toward the stars and found the traces of what had gone before, were they able to piece the story together.

The Jevlenese never ceased regarding the people of Earth as Cerians. As part of a plan for one day settling the score with their ancient rivals, they inaugurated a campaign to retard Earth's progress toward rediscovery of the sciences and advanced civilization, while they themselves absorbed Thurien technology and gained autonomy over their own affairs. From its beginnings, they altered the course of Earth's history by infiltrating agents, fully human in form, to spread beliefs in magic and superstition, and to found irrational mass movements that would keep Earth impotent by diverting its energies away from the path by which real knowledge is acquired.

As the confidence and arrogance of the Jevlenese leaders grew, so did their resentment of the restraint to their ambitions posed by the Ganymeans, whose nonviolent ways merely aroused their contempt. Taking advantage of the innate Ganymean inability to suspect motives, the Jevlenese gained control of the surveillance operation set up to keep a watch over Earth's development; while preserving outward appearances of being model protégés of the Ganymeans, they fed the Ganymeans falsified accounts of a militarized Earth about to burst out from the solar system, and used this as a pretext for inducing the Ganymeans to prepare countermeasures. What the Jevlenese planned to do was seize control of the countermeasures themselves, eliminate their Terran rivals and repossess the solar system, and then sweep outward in a wave of acquisition and conquest across the galaxy, unchecked and unopposed.

But the reappearance of a lost starship from the ancient Ganymean civilization on Minerva changed everything.

The Ganymean scientific mission ship
Shapieron
, returning after a twenty-five-million-year time dilation compounded by a fault in the vessel's space-time-distorting drive method, came back to the solar system to find Minerva gone and a new, terrestrial race spacefaring among the planets. The "Giants" remained on Earth for six months and mingled harmoniously. But the most significant outcome of the pooling of the Terran proclivity for intrigue with alien technical ability was the establishing of the first direct contact between Earth and Thurien, bypassing the Jevlenese and the millennia-old surveillance system. The alliance led to a confrontation in which the deceit and scheming of the Jevlenese was exposed, revealing the network of infiltrators by which they had endeavored to subvert modern-day Earth after the attempts to block its technological advancement failed.

The encounter that followed came to be known as the Pseudowar. In it, the supercomputing entity jevex, which managed all of the communications, information handling, and other vital functions of the Jevlenese worlds, was penetrated and defeated by a fictional interstellar attack force consisting entirely of computer-generated imagination. The just-proclaimed "Federation," by which the Jevlenese proposed bringing their plans to fruition, collapsed, jevex was shut down, and Jevlen put on a period of probation. The Ganymeans of the
Shapieron
, displaced from their own home and time and needing an interval of respite to adapt to their new circumstances, were installed on Jevlen to take charge of the rehabilitation. Earth, rid of the corrupt element responsible for practically all of the more sordid side of its turbulent history, looked forward to assuming its rightful place in the interstellar community.

So, once again, after a few more old beliefs had been toppled, what remained was surely fact, resting on solid foundations. The future could be faced with assurance.

Nothing more could go wrong, now . . .

Nieru, the god of darkness, was descending in the west after his nightly domination of the sky, his cloak wrapped about him in a glowing purple spiral. Overhead, Cassona, the goddess who created weather, had become the dawn star. The three lesser stars of her daughters, the Cassoneids, which oscillated about her—Peria, Isthucis, and Dometer, the spirits of wind, rain, and cloud—were very close, almost in alignment, which meant that it was early summer. Compared to the splendor that the night sky had once been, the stars were few and feeble.

Cassona had once been capricious and vindictive, liable to cleave mountains with a lightning bolt or send storms to devastate an entire countryside on a whim. Today, however, she was placid. The morning was clear, and the first light revealed that the peaks at the far end of the valley outside Orenash had receded unusually far during the night, with the rooftops within the city walls and the patches of woodland on the slopes beyond noticeably lengthened in proportion. During the night, Gralth, the gods' baker, who kneaded the world as if it were dough, stretched all dimensions in the east-west direction; he would compress them back to their evening minima as the day wore on. But so visible an extension at daybreak presaged an uneventful day ahead.

From an upper window of his uncle's house below the rock upon which stood the temple of Zos, Thrax brooded to himself, confused and afraid with the bemusement of a youth whose world was running down just as he was approaching manhood and thought he had made sense of it.

But these days, everyone was confused and afraid. The old ways were ceasing to work, and the old wisdom had no answers. Priests prayed, seers beseeched, and people redoubled their sacrifices. But the force-currents waned, and life-power ebbed. No signs came; the oracles remained mute. And as the gods died, their stars were going out.

Some thought that a great war had been waged in the sky, that new gods had defeated the old, and different laws were coming into being to rule the world. Mystics spoke of having seen a higher realm that they called Hyperia, beyond the everyday plane of existence, where perpetual serenity reigned and impossible happenings were commonplace.

Perhaps, a few of the more hopeful reasoned, the breaking down of the old laws portended a transition of their world into a phase that would be governed by the new kinds of laws glimpsed in the world beyond. They experimented in unheardof ways to prepare themselves, striving to grasp strange notions and unfamiliar concepts . . .

"Hold it, Thrax. I think it needs a bit more play here." Thrax's uncle Dalgren poked inside the contraption standing on the stone slab in his basement workshop and adjusted a clamp. "And probably this one opposite, too."

It consisted essentially of two pairs of legs, each pair set one behind the other in an arrangement of vertical slides that allowed either pair to protrude below the other. In addition, whichever pair was raised could move lengthwise along a horizontal guide and descend at varying displacements with respect to the lower. Each leg had a foot in the form of a rocker that was tipped at one end by the metal mobilium, which was "apathetic" to most kinds of rock and slid easily over them, and at the other by frictite crystal, which bound when in contact. It was a fact of nature that all materials possessed an affinity for each other to a greater or lesser degree, determining how strongly they were attracted or repelled; thus, depending on the position of the rocker, the foot would either grip the surface or be repulsed. The whole thing was an attempt at artificially mimicking the sliding-planting-lifting-sliding of the leg movements of an animal, such as a
drodhz.

Nobody had ever conceived such an idea before—carts and other vehicles had always been hauled along on skids of mobilium or something similar. The mystics who had seen Hyperia told of indescribable, magical devices capable of performing motions of complexities that defied imagination. They even spoke of constructions that spun.

"There. Try it now, Thrax," Dalgren said, stepping back.

Thrax pushed one of the operating rods projecting from the assembly. While one pair of legs remained anchored to the bench, the other lifted, slid forward one half of a leg-pitch, and then descended in a new position. Then the rocker mechanism operated, locking the legs that had advanced, and releasing the pair that had remained stationary. As Thrax pulled the activating rod back again, the rearmost pair of legs moved past the others in turn, and reanchored themselves to complete the cycle.