PARATIME ENCOUNTER by Frej Wasastjerna Deep under Mount Guorboaivi in Finnish Lapland, in the headquarters of the European Paratime Exploration Society, Hannu Haukiniemi logged in on his computer and checked his e-mail.
As expected, there were orders for today's expedition. There was also another message, and when he saw the subject "Suviseurat" his heart beat a little faster for a moment. Then he noticed the sender, and his excitement vanished. It wasn't the e-mail address of anybody in his family. Their refusal to have anything to do with him was apparently still in force.
As he suspected, the message was from the Laestadian Church, inviting him to the annual gathering. They had sneaked the message past his killfile by sending it from a new e-mail address.
He transferred the message to the trash bin, updated his killfile to include the new address, and for good measure emptied the trash, clenching the mouse hard. There was, by damn, no way he would attend anything as fraudulent as a religious gathering!
Not even to re-establish contact with his family. # The turning point in his life had come a beautiful spring day about fifteen months ago. When he had received the phone call to come to the morgue he had initially tried to deny the truth. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. Maybe some other woman had stolen Eine's identity papers and then been run over by a hit-and-run driver. Maybe Eine was still alive, though unable to reach him yet because she had lost her cellphone, car keys, money and credit card and hadn't managed to contact the police yet. Maybe she was lying unconscious after having been mugged but would recover. Maybe they would this very evening settle back in their sofa and thank God that they still at least had each other. A good and omnipotent God just couldn't let Eine die six months after their daughter Anne had died.
Crap.
When he saw Eine's face in the morgue he could no longer conceal the truth from himself. Eine, who was more important to him than anything else, more important than his hopes of salvation, was dead.
Dead.
It hadn't even been a quick and painless death. Even in death her face was contorted into a rictus of pain. Against the advice of the attendant he had insisted on seeing the damage that had killed her. The crushed hip and intact thorax verified his worst fears. It must have taken her several minutes to die, minutes of excruciating pain.
He turned on his heel and walked out of the morgue. Only later did he realize that he had neglected to tell the attendant that, yes, it was Eine Haukiniemi who lay there. His wife, lying there like cold meat.
Someone in the morgue had had enough presence of mind to summon a taxi and bundle him into it. That person deserved credit for averting the traffic accident that might have happened if Hannu had been driving when he broke down and started sobbing. # Half a year earlier Eine had doubted God's existence when Anne had died a painful death of leukemia. Anne, the six-year-old who a year ago had been a bundle of happy energy, climbing over everything like a horde of monkeys and asking more questions than the Internet could have had answers for. Hannu had tried to persuade Eine that she was wrong, that there had to be some divine purpose behind it all, though why that should have involved so much pain was more than he could see.
What a fool he had been. Now he realized that Eine had been right. Now that she too was dead, it dawned on him that she had been wiser than him all along. She just hadn't gone far enough.
Lying face-down on the bed he had shared with Eine, the cover moist with tears, he came to a conclusion. There were only two plausible possibilities. One, there was no god. Two, there was one, but he was one that no self-respecting human being would want to have anything to do with. All his life he had thought otherwise, but why? Only because he had been told that there was a good and loving God. But did it really make sense to think that a divine plan could be so convoluted as to demand that both Anne and Eine die a painful death while still young?
No. It made a hell of a lot more sense to regard the teachings of the whole fucking church as a pack of stinking lies. # Since he didn't want a scene, he had held his peace until Eine was buried, though it meant he had to sit quietly at the service, simmering with anger while listening to speeches full of garbage. After Eine's corpse was in the ground, however, he had left the Laestadian Church and told his father, mother, six brothers and two sisters what he thought of their faith.
Since then his family had refused to have anything to do with him. He suspected that some of them, especially his mother, disagreed with his father's decision to cut all ties with him, but none had gone so far as to defy his father, when the teachings of Laestadius said that the father of a family was the boss.
Still, there was one good thing about losing contact with his family. Hannu had always been interested in paratime exploration, but the EPES accepted only intelligent, well-educated people with no family ties. He fulfilled the first two requirements without difficulty, and now he fulfilled the third as well. He applied for a job as an explorer and got it.
The job was dangerous enough that no insurance company would grant a paratime explorer life insurance. That, however, was no drawback to him. # Having taken care of that message, he went on to today's orders. As usual, they were so vague that they were really pointless. In the chaos of the Multiverse, with universes dividing every time a particle could take any of two or more quantum states and again merging when they were identical, there was no way of going to any particular destination unless one had planted a beacon there beforehand. There were EPES employees whose jobs involved going to timeline skeins where someone had planted a beacon and exploring them further, but that wasn't Hannu's business. He was one of the point scouts whose job it was to go out at random and, if they found anything interesting, to plant a beacon. Consequently his orders were always the same, apart from the time of departure: essentially they just told him to look around.
He had time to check the news on the Internet. Things were much as usual. Skirmishes between European and Turkish troops in the mountains of Cyprus. Rumors that Moslems and Christians were being rounded up by the RSS in India. Accusations by the Black States of America that the US government was backing the gunrunners that had been caught trying to smuggle weapons to whites in South Carolina. Martial law declared in Canada after accusations by the League for Equality of the Sexes that the Feminist Alliance had rigged the election.
He logged out, and after a visit to the restroom, he began walking up the zig-zagging and branching tunnel to Pit 21 where he would board his pod. As usual, he found it irritating that the steel blast doors he passed every now and then opened and closed automatically. He could have used the exercise of opening and closing them himself, since he didn't get much exercise on the job.
Finally he reached the maintenance hall adjoining Pit 21. Erich Speidel was wheeling out the trolley on which Hannu's pod stood.
"Alles in Ordnung?" Hannu asked. Is everything OK? Like most other EPES employees, though unlike Hannu himself, Erich was an expatriate. Hannu thought he might like an opportunity to use his native language once in a while.
"Fix und fertig," Erich replied. Hannu nodded and watched while Erich moved the pod into the pit, centering it carefully in the departure translocator. Then he got into the pod. Since the outside cameras weren't yet activated, he couldn't see Erich close the translocator around it, but he dimly heard the click of the locking mechanism.
While Hannu turned on the pod's equipment, Erich activated the primary and backup return beacons and transmitted their codes to the corresponding return translocators in the pod. Hannu checked carefully that each return translocator was locked on to the corresponding beacon. Unless at least one of the two worked, there was no way he could get home. # Even with the return translocators working perfectly and no accidents happening, there was no guarantee that one Hannu Haukiniemi would return to each timeline from which he set out. In the minutes or hours a scout used to take a look at his destination timeline, there was no reason why that and the home timeline should split or merge the same number of times.
If the home skein split more often than the destination skein, or merged less often, there would be fewer returning scouts than there were timelines for them to return to. That was the usual reason why most of the time nobody returned from an expedition. So the scientists thought. Of course, there was actually no way of knowing.
If the destination skein split more than the home skein, there would be many scouts returning to each home timeline. That was what the scouts really feared.
The return translocator would take a pod to any timeline with an empty pit and an appropriately coded return beacon, so the returning scouts would be spread evenly among the home timelines. Each pit could handle about one pod a minute, and in a pinch the beacons of all 100 pits could be programmed with the same code. That way about a million returning scouts could be taken care of in the week a pod's supplies lasted--theoretically. In practice everybody realized that it was fortunate the greatest number of returning scouts so far had been a mere 3,587, when Giuseppe Sartori returned from an expedition about four months ago. There were still plenty of Giuseppe Sartoris at the base, though many had failed to return from later expeditions.
There was no reason why the mismatch between the number of destination and home timelines couldn't exceed a factor of a million, so the nightmare of all scouts was to be stuck in a pod with no place to return before the supplies ran out.
Hannu had, as he saw it, been fortunate that on none of his previous 18 expeditions had multiple copies of him returned. That, of course, meant that there were probably now zillions of timelines from which he was missing. That was no problem, in his opinion. # Once the beacons were activated, Erich went back to the maintenance hall, closing its heavy steel door behind him. Then he would walk down the same tunnel Hannu had followed, in the opposite direction, and go to the control room.
The blast doors had never yet been needed. Every time a pod departed, it was swapped for an equal volume from the destination timeline. Usually the departure translocator worked in equipotential mode, so that the pod arrived at a place where the gravitational potential was the same as in the pit. That way it was supposed to be impossible to arrive in the interior of a main sequence star. Normally a pod wound up in space at some distance from a star, more rarely in the atmosphere or interior of a planet. It was possible to wind up in a red giant star, and it had actually happened twice to other point scouts, but the outer parts of a red giant were so tenuous and cool that they were nearly harmless. The pods had been recovered on those occasions, though they had had to return prematurely.
Even so, the Council of Ministers had required the EPES base to be located in one of the least densely populated parts of the European Union. The EPES itself insisted on precautions to safeguard its employees.
While waiting for Erich to reach the control room, Hannu busied himself checking everything he could check about the pod. By the time Erich called him, he had finished the job, though there were a few items he couldn't test.
One of them was the big red button under a transparent plastic lid slightly below the middle of the control panel. By its nature, the self-destruct charge couldn't be tested properly.
When he talked with other point scouts, some had said they didn't like looking at or thinking about the self-destruct button. It never bothered Hannu, though. In fact, he rather liked having that in front of him.
Of course he didn't believe that after his death he would be reunited with Anne and Eine. That was part of the bunch of lies that churches used to hook people. However, at least when he was dead he would no longer miss them. # At Hannu's invitation, Erich used German in the countdown. Finally he reached null.
As usual, Hannu felt nothing. But the view from the outside cameras changed abruptly--black everywhere, with a sun blazing on his left.
OK, so this was another of those trips where he wound up in space. He had never yet found anything interesting on one of those, and this didn't appear any too promising either. He had to check out this sun and its surroundings, though.
The sun itself was unremarkable. The pod's instruments soon confirmed that it was an ordinary class K main sequence star. He waited for the automatic telescopes to search for planets. # The entity didn't have a name. Even the concept of a name would have seemed quaint to it. Its mode of communication with its fellows would have seemed much like telepathy to a human, but the ideas it transmitted could have been translated as follows: "Attention: an object suddenly turned up in this location [image of a position]. Let's investigate." # After twenty minutes the computer controlling the telescopes delivered its verdict: nothing. At least there were no planets close enough to be detected, which ruled out any Earth-like planets unless there was one hidden behind the sun.
There wasn't much point in waiting longer. The longer he waited, the bigger the mismatch between the number of timelines in this skein and the home skein might grow.
Time to go home, in other words. He started to move his right index finger to the return button... # "Apparently a visitor from another timeline. Let's make contact." # Bong. Some kind of chord from his earphones.
"Mikä se oli?" Hannu blurted out in his native language. What was that?
"Mikä se oli. Mikä oli se. Se oli mikä. Se mikä oli. Oli mikä se. Oli se mikä," came the answer.
This was no mere echo. Something had not just echoed his radio transmission but broken it down into individual words, no easy thing to do if it had to base that on the minute pauses between words, and then arranged them in all possible permutations. There had to be intelligence involved, and probably of a high order.
Now the problem was to establish some kind of meaningful communication. The EPES had anticipated that situations like this might arise. The software of the pod's main computer included a program intended to teach aliens English and help the explorer learn alien languages, even if only radio communication was possible. It started with simple mathematics and then went on, using simple television pictures, to introduce English words, both as ASCII code, as pictures of written text, and as sounds.
Hannu started that program, hoping that his use of Finnish for his first few words wouldn't introduce any confusion. Keying in the appropriate commands was a little difficult, the way his fingers trembled with excitement.
It soon became obvious that the alien or aliens, or their machines, learned very quickly. Also it was, or they were, nearby. The distance couldn't be greater then a few thousand kilometers. The responses were so prompt that there couldn't be any significant transmission lag.
Where were they? The radio signals were coming from somewhere a little upward to his right. Hannu turned the pod to face in that direction, then he activated the automatic telescopes again.
They found nothing. He switched on the pod's radar. It found almost nothing--almost. There were four faint, fuzzy echoes only a few hundred meters distant. He peered through the manual telescope in that direction and still saw nothing, even when he switched on the pod's searchlight. There was only empty space to be seen, with stars shining through the spots where the radar told him there just might be something.
Unable to see the aliens, Hannu decided to concentrate on following the language teaching program. The aliens were making impressive progress, they responded quickly and flawlessly with both spoken words, ASCII code and pictures of text. They also sent back television pictures that were not just echoes of those the pod sent out but modifications of them.
However, these pictures showed no objects that hadn't appeared in the pod's transmissions. There was nothing that seemed to be a picture of an alien or of an alien artifact, of an alien planet or anything alien. Neither did the aliens reply with any words of their own, they used only the English they were so rapidly learning.
This went on for hours. Hannu grew more and more frustrated at the one-sided flow of information. He also began to feel concerned. Why were the aliens so secretive?
Eventually Hannu was so tired that he decided he had to sleep. He still hadn't really learned anything about the aliens, only that either they or their machines were superhumanly intelligent, judging by the ease with which they learned English. He ordered the computer to wake him up when the language instruction program finished or if there was any indication that the aliens might be doing something hostile. Then he deactivated the pod controls, so he wouldn't do anything dangerous if he thrashed about in his sleep.
It took him a long time to fall asleep. Sleeping in free fall had always been difficult for him. The excitement and apprehension of contacting aliens made it even more difficult. # "Good morning, Hannu." The androgynous tenor voice he had chosen for the computer woke him up.
"What is it?" he grumbled, feeling he hadn't got anywhere near enough sleep.
"The language instruction program is finished."
Interspersing his yawns with a few muttered Finnish curses, he took care of his morning ablutions. Then, feeling a little more awake, he activated the controls and switched on the microphone connected to the radio.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," somebody answered. It sounded exactly like the computer's voice. Was the computer pulling a prank? Hardly. Even an intelligent computer wouldn't do anything that silly. Apparently the aliens had not just learned English, they could imitate the computer's voice as well. Of course they might not know which features of a spoken word were really essential to its meaning, so it was natural that they would imitate the words as closely as they could.
"We hope you slept well," the voice went on. "We are pleased to meet you and to offer you any help you may desire."
"Say that again?"
"We understand that you are an explorer from another timeline. We can travel from one timeline to another ourselves. Sometimes we encounter other intelligent life, and then we usually try to help them solve their problems."
"Why?"
"Call it a hobby. We wish our existence to have a purpose beyond itself. Our species has solved all the problems that we used to have earlier. That is, of course, well and good, but it leaves us with little useful to do. That has now become a problem in itself. One solution to that problem is to roam the Multiverse, searching for species that can use our help. For instance, we have in some cases been able to teach other species to abolish disease.
"We have also found that intelligent life frequently suffers from another problem. Your language instruction program didn't cover the words we need to express these concepts. Do you have a word for one intelligent being deliberately terminating the life of another?"
"We call that killing or murder."
"Do you have a word for organized killing, where large numbers of beings kill or injure others in pursuit of some political objective?"
"War."
"That is a common problem for intelligent life. We have developed ways to teach other beings to abolish war.
"If your species is suffering from disease, war or starvation, we offer you our help to overcome these problems. All you need do is to return to your own timeline. If you allow it, we can accompany you and then do what we can to improve the conditions under which you live. We ask nothing in return, only the opportunity to relieve our own boredom by helping you."
Hmm. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, Hannu thought.
In the past, European missionaries had offered to help less advanced peoples. Often those offers of help were honestly meant, but even when they were, the new ideas the missionaries brought with them weren't always good. Apart from that, the missionaries were usually sooner or later followed by soldiers, and the natives wound up ruled by foreigners.
Of course his own timeline really could use some help. Just consider this morning's news. That item about the Moslems and Christians in India, for instance. Where were they being taken? The news never made that clear, but there were rumors of death camps. The EU and Turkey weren't really at war, but the relationship couldn't honestly be characterized as a real peace either. Nor could that between the BSA and the USA, and there were dozens of other troublespots all around the world.
Occasionally even nuclear weapons got used. Only a couple of years ago Kisangani had been leveled, though that had quickly brought about an intervention by the great powers to stop the Congolese civil war.
Yes, for sure there was a need for help. But could one trust these aliens? He brushed back his hair with quick, nervous movements.
If the answer was yes, fine. Then all he needed to do was to invite them along and then go back, or so they had said. But what if he decided that he didn't want them along?
Then he couldn't go back. He didn't know how they could accompany a pod from one timeline to another, but, whatever way they did it, it was unlikely that lack of permission would stop them. If he didn't go back, however, it was almost certain that even extremely intelligent or advanced beings had no way of knowing where in the roiling chaos of the Multiverse he had come from. The return translocators would have to be destroyed, though. Otherwise they could be used to find the way back.
That was the kind of situation for which the pod carried a nuclear self-destruct charge, Hannu thought, caressing the transparent plastic cover over the red button. Once the return translocators had been turned into a glowing plasma, along with the rest of the pod, there was no way back to his home skein.
Which should he do? Which button should he push? The green one activating the primary return translocator, or the red one under the protective cover?
It wasn't just his own life that was at stake. That was a trivial matter. What he was about to decide would determine the whole future of the human race. How could he tell what was the right decision?
He noticed that he was sweating and breathing fast. He slowed down his breathing and tried to relax.
"So you just want to help us, do you?" he asked, hoping that something would turn up to help him decide.
"Exactly. We only want a chance to do something useful."
Right, he thought. And the Raippaluoto bridge just happened to be for sale at a bargain price.
Still, the aliens might be honest. The help they offered might turn the Earth of his timeline skein into a paradise.
Or bringing them might bring the human race under the heel of alien tyrants that were so superior that there would be no hope of ever gaining freedom from them.
"It might help me decide if I could see you," he said. "Where are you really?"
"I'm 430 meters in front of your pod, and my three friends are nearby. However, we aren't visible, since we don't consist of the kind of matter you're used to. Would it help if I created a visual image that you could talk to?"
"Yes." Well, an artificial image probably wouldn't really help. But it would hardly hurt either. # "I have encountered beings similar to these "humans", as they call themselves, before. I have learned something about their psychology, so I know an image that should help us gain the trust of this one. Observe." # Right in the middle of the screen showing the forward view, a faint light began to shine. It grew bigger and brighter as if approaching. After a few seconds, Hannu could begin to make out a roughly human-like shape...
There it was. It looked exactly like the pictures of angels he had seen. Wings, halo, white robe, everything.
Of all the...! What kind of a fool did they take him for?!
Without pausing to think, Hannu tore open the transparent cover protecting the self-destruct button, then pushed the button. He didn't have time to feel anything when the 5-kiloton explosion turned him and the whole pod into bare atomic nuclei and electrons. |
