Further: Beyond the Threshold Page 5

  “Oh.” The silver eagle averted its eyes. A pause led me to suspect I might have hurt its feelings, if such a thing were possible, but after a moment, it spoke again. “Most represent different interest groups with connections to one or more of the following: the Information Age in particular or primitive man in general, space flight, exploration, early colonization, the First Space Age, biological systems in their natural states, the Anachronism movement, mythopoeic re-creationism, or any number of doctrines whose hypotheses or tenets might be supported by your testimony of life in ancient times.”

  The eagle paused and pointed with its beak to a strangely dressed group of humans clustered nearby.

  “Those in particular appear to have come with an invitation.”

  “To what?” I asked. “Or where?”

  The silver eagle waggled its head from side to side in a move that could only have been a shrug. “You would have to ask them, sir.”

  I responded with a shrug of my own, and said, “Well, that seems as good an idea as any.”

  I straightened the front of my robe and strode toward the group. They began exchanging nervous glances like devout fans unsure what to do now that they’d caught a pop idol’s attention. Which, I suppose in a way, I was, not that I deserved it. All I’d managed to do was not die yet.

  As I approached, the group reluctantly separated out from the rest, and I was able to get a better look at them. There were three of them—two men and a woman. If I squinted, the two men might have passed for 20C Americans, but they wouldn’t have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. They wore suits, ties, and hats such as were common in that era, but exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. The result was a sort of stylized zoot suit, such as those worn by lecherous wolves in old Tex Avery cartoons. As I drew near, the look on their faces was so hungry, so near lust, that I almost fancied I could see their hearts pounding out of their ribcages, their tongues rolling out like red carpets.

  The woman, for her part, was dressed in a form-fitting body stocking that left her arms and legs bare, with high flared boots and an elaborate headpiece, all in bright and contrasting primary colors. A cape hung from her shoulders and fluttered slightly in the breeze. I thought she might have been meant to resemble a circus performer, but the geometric design that served as a belt buckle was more suggestive of a logo or shield, and I realized she was dressed as some variety of superheroine.

  “Um, hello again?” I gave a little wave, stopping just in front of the trio.

  They exchanged excited glances, and then all began speaking at once, loudly.

  “Shall I translate?” my escort said in my ear.

  I winced at the volume of their voices, and nodded.

  In the next instant, three voices shouting in English issued from the eagle’s silver beak, the words all blending into one another.

  I held up my hands. “One at a time, one at a time, please!”

  The trio fell briefly silent, exchanged more nervous glances, and nodded. The superwoman took half a step forward and presented me with some sort of salute.

  “We welcome you, O Captain,” came her voice from the eagle’s mouth, after she once more began to speak. “We would be honored if your august person would join us for the evening meal—”

  One of the zoot suits reached over and tapped superwoman on the shoulder, and in strangely accented English, said aloud, “Grub.”

  The superwoman glanced daggers back at him, but nodded. “…would join us for grub,” continued her voice from the eagle, “in the plaza just north of the public threshold terminus on Cronos, at local sunset.”

  I turned my attention to my escort.

  “Is that far from here?” I asked.

  The eagle made a slight noise that, in other circumstances, I might have interpreted as laughter. “No, sir,” it said after a considerable pause. “Nowhere in the Entelechy is what you might classify as ‘far.’ Cronos is a terraformed world in orbit of the star your era named Eighteen Scorpio. Though it is forty-five-point-seven light-years from Sol in flatspace, it requires only three threshold transits. From Central Axis, depending on your walking speed, we could be there in anywhere from two-thousandths to one-thousandths of a day.”

  I looked at the eagle with a blank expression.

  “As you might say, sir, in ‘a matter of moments.’”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “Thanks.” I turned my attention back to the trio, who had been watching the exchange between the escort and me with interest. “Um, is something wrong?”

  The superwoman leaned forward, narrowing her eyes and examining me closely. She began to speak, and the escort translated. “You are receiving vocal translation from the agent you carry, who is also providing glosses and additional context, correct?”

  I blinked a few times before answering, I suspect. “Yes,” I said slowly.

  The woman clapped her hands together, like a kid first tearing the wrapping from a gift. “Oh, what a delightfully authentic primitive experience!”

  “Perhaps it would be more historically appropriate if we translated vocally as well?” said one of the zoot suits.

  “Or we could learn the archaic tongues ourselves, hombre,” the other volunteered excitedly.

  I reached up to scratch my nose and, behind my hand, whispered to the eagle. “Who are these guys, anyway?”

  “They are Anachronists,” the escort answered, its voice pitched so low I could barely hear him myself. I was glad that it had begun to pick up cues so quickly. “The Anachronists are a nonlocal organization of historical re-creationists. They have terraformed Cronos into an idealized re-creation of Original Earth, with different time periods re-created in different regions.”

  “And they want to have me over for the ‘evening meal’?”

  “So it would appear, sir.”

  The Anachronists, if the buzz of conversation translated by the escort was any indication, had fallen to a disagreement about whether it would be better to learn English to converse with me directly or to employ external translators, as I’d done, to capture a more authentic primitive experience.

  I clapped my hands together, trying to catch their eyes.

  “Thank you for your very generous offer. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to accept, but I’ll certainly do what I can.”

  “Please do,” one of the zoot suits said.

  “Yes,” said the other zoot suit, excitedly. “We’ve even fabricated a live cow, whose flesh we’ll marinate and sear in your honor.”

  I struggled to fix something like a smile on my face. “How delightful,” I managed.

  ELEVEN

  My flagging reserves of energy were almost spent, so the escort requested that the crowd disperse enough to let us through. As we continued up the concourse, though, we were trailed by an entourage of the curious and starstruck—at a suitably polite distance, though, I noted—and here and there were pockets of other onlookers in our path, eager to see the unfrozen caveman for themselves.

  “We are very nearly there, sir,” the escort said in my ear, perhaps noticing the strain on my face or my somewhat labored breathing. I was in fairly good shape, considering how long I’d slept, but even so, my body was that of a man in his seventies, and there were limits to my endurance.

  Before we’d gone another dozen steps, our way was blocked again. This time it wasn’t a crowd, but only a pair of individuals. But even if they hadn’t been standing in our path, I likely would have slowed down anyway, to get a better look at them myself.

  The first was an elephant. An elephant with the body of a man, to be more precise. Or a man with the head of an elephant. It hardly mattered which. He loomed over me, easily 2.75 meters tall, his skin gray and wrinkled, his massive tusks tipped with gold ornaments. He was bare to the waist, with billowing yellow trousers, gold bangles on his wrists and ankles, and a string of pearls worn over his shoulder like a sash.

  At his side was a woman only a few centimeters taller than me, her skin a bright shade of blue, with an extra
pair of arms emerging from her ribcage, with two arms on each side. She wore a skirt of silver and gold, her chest bare, her bright-orange areolas standing in stark contrast to the surrounding blue. Hair the shade of a setting sun hung like a nimbus around her head, and her eyes were flashing yellow.

  For a moment, my mind reeled. Before me stood the form of Ganesh and a female Vishnu, as though they’d stepped off a temple painting from my childhood.

  The Ganesh began to speak, and I recognized it as an archaic form of Hindi. The syntax was strange, and much of the vocabulary escaped me, and so as the escort provided its translation, I had dual meanings echoing in my ears.

  “Sri Rama, your arrow returned at last to Earth, we bear greetings from those who have awaited you. I am Vinayaka, and this”—the Ganesh indicated the blue-skinned woman at his side—“is Sarasvati. We represent the keepers of knowledge, the Veda.”

  The elephant pressed his massive hands together, and the woman placed her hands in pairs, one above the other, and they inclined their heads.

  “Namaste,” each of them said, as their voices echoed in English from the eagle’s mouth, “I bow to the light in you.”

  I namasted in response, keeping my eyes on them, confused. “I think there might be some…misunderstanding,” I began uneasily. “I’m not sure who you think I am…”

  “You are Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone of the interstellar exploration vehicle Wayfarer One, correct?” the woman named Sarasvati asked.

  “Yes, but—”

  “It is well known to us,” the elephant-headed Vinayaka interrupted, “that Ramachandra is merely another name for Lord Rama, Prince of Ayodhya, an avatar of Vishnu the Preserver.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle, however a bit nervously.

  “Ah. You see, my name is Ramachandra, but I’m afraid that’s more a function of my mother’s classical taste than anything else. My brother LJ—Lakshman Julian—got off slightly better than I did, I think, but it’s not an accident that both of us ended up using our initials instead of our full names.”

  “Lakshman was the brother of Lord Rama, no?” Sarasvati asked, raising a bright-red eyebrow suggestively.

  “Yes, I suppose he was.”

  “And is it not true,” Vinayaka asked, “that when the great rishi Parasurama presented him with the bow of Vishnu, Lord Rama shot an arrow that flamed into the darkness of the night sky, a shaft of infinite trajectory that arced through the heavens, until it would one day return, and its arrival would mean the end of Earth? And in like manner, did your spear-shaped craft not arrow through the heavens, returning to Earth only once the planet it had been was no more and a new Earth hung in the firmament?”

  As a poetic description of the fate of Wayfarer One, it wasn’t entirely unapt, and the ship was shaped somewhat like an arrow or a spear, with a broad nose faring to deflect dust, micrometeorites, and other particles. But that still didn’t earn me a place in any pantheon, nor suggest that I had any but mundane origins.

  “Look,” I said firmly, chin raised, “I know that you mean well, but I’ve got to tell you—”

  “Forgive our insouciance,” the blue-skinned woman said, interrupting, her gaze averted. “We have given offense, which was not our intention.”

  “Your pardons, Sri Rama.” The Ganesh’s eyes were on the ground, his trunk wrapping around his neck protectively. “So overjoyed are we by your return that we forget our manners.”

  I tried to speak up, to let them know that I wasn’t offended, just that they had the wrong guy, but the woman cut in before I could get a word out.

  “We were sent to inform you that a place has been prepared for you on the sacred wheel, Thousand-petaled Lotus. Your people await you there, Sri Rama, whenever you choose to join us.”

  The elephant-man Vinayaka glanced skyward, and a low sound thrummed from him like a giant clearing his throat. In response, a twinkling light overhead suddenly began to move, growing larger, and in a matter of eyeblinks was revealed as a platform two meters in diameter, with an ornate and bejeweled railing, like a stylized chariot without a team of horses. Speeding toward us, it slowed as it neared, floating down as gracefully as a feather falling to Earth, finally stopping and hovering mere centimeters from the ground.

  “Wait, I just want to—”

  The blue-skinned woman raised one of her four hands as the Ganesh climbed aboard the chariot. “Please accept our apologies for the rudeness of our approach, Sri Rama.” She vaulted to the elephant-man’s side. “We return to Thousand-petaled Lotus to prepare for your arrival.”

  And then the chariot soared off into the blue sky, heading in the direction of Central Axis, and the strange pair was gone.

  When they had gone, the escort said that we had nearly reached our destination. As we walked the remaining meters, it explained that Sahasrara Padma, or “Thousand-petaled Lotus,” was a habitat in the shape of an eight-spoked wheel, in orbit around the star known in my day as Zeta Leporis, and that nearly all of its one hundred thousand inhabitants belonged to the Veda, a group of “mythopoeic re-creationists” who chose to literalize figures from Hindu mythology. What he couldn’t tell me was whether they actually believed that I was a figure from ancient Sanskrit epics come to life or whether it suited their conceit merely to pretend as though they did. Either way, their ardor made me uneasy. Still, the notion of visiting their artificial world and seeing what other mythological wonders they’d made real was a tempting one.

  “Sir, we have arrived,” the escort said at last, pointing to our right with its beak.

  I looked in the direction the eagle’s beak indicated and saw perched among the flowing and organic shapes of the other buildings a structure that would not have seemed out of place in any 22C suburban development. With straight edges, right angles, a peaked roof, and rectangular doorway, complete with beveled glass, hinges, and a doorknob, it was precisely the sort of architecture that had dominated Western culture for centuries—except here, the building appeared to be made out of opaque diamond.

  “It’s been designed to aid in your acclimation, Captain Stone. The Plenum hopes that it suits.”

  I stepped unsteadily from the moving sidewalk, narrowly managing to remain on my feet, and walked the few steps up to the structure. It loomed overhead, a gem standing some three or four stories tall. I’d seen smaller mansions in the wealthiest areas of India and Europe.

  “Yes,” I answered absently, “it suits.”

  TWELVE

  From the ages of twenty-one to twenty-four, just a bit over three years, I served aboard Orbital Patrol Cutter 972, first as an ensign, then a lieutenant. An Aurora ZD-36 manufactured by Winchell-Chung Industries, Cutter 972 was thirty meters, tip to tail, a small Keeper-class vessel intended for nothing more glamorous than the maintenance of navigational buoys in cislunar space. My “quarters,” which stretched the definition of the word, were a cube approximately 2.5 meters to a side. A bit over 15.5 cubic meters, that small space was home for thirty-eight months.

  The finest accommodation I ever enjoyed was the presidential suite at the Starshine, the most expensive room in the most exclusive hotel in Vertical City, the bed in which would not have fit into my room on Cutter 972 without folding it first in half.

  With those experiences at either extreme, I was still ill prepared for what lay inside the residence.

  “The Plenum intended it to be a re-creation of a typical Information Age dwelling, sir.”

  Typical. If anything, the interior was even grander than the outside, which had been constructed out of diamond.

  I was reminded of photos I’d seen of presidential palaces, of the ostentatious homes of celebrity entertainers in the days before all roles went to virtual actors and pop music was recorded by algorithms. The foyer in which I stood, the tiles cold beneath my bare feet, was outfitted with the “typical” furniture of a modest home—chairs, side table, umbrella stand—but at a scale and of such precious materials that no potentate could ever have afforded.
A chair’s legs looked to be solid platinum, a mirror’s frame was inlaid with gold and iridium, the floor seemed to be constructed of an enormous sheet of opal. And the ceiling, nine or ten meters overhead, sparkled like a starry night.

  I felt dwarfed, a small old man out of his time.

  “Captain Stone, is there anything you desire? Would you like to sleep, perhaps?”

  I shivered and wrapped my thin arms around me, feeling my ribs through the thin material of the robe.

  “I wouldn’t mind sitting down for a while, but I’ve slept enough for a hundred lifetimes. But I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a change of clothing, is there?”

  The sleeping quarters were the size of a small hangar, and the closet larger than the cargo hold of the Cutter 972.

  “The Plenum,” the escort said as I surveyed the options, “took the liberty of fabricating a wardrobe for your disposal.”

  I pulled out a suit coat made of something like leather, but as light and supple as silk. The cut was elaborate and baroque, though, the fashion of some other era than mine. “It’s…well, thanks, I suppose.”

  “Am I correct in assuming that the choices are not satisfactory? I am still gaining valuable experience, and while I have the data at my disposal, my interpretations may sometimes be in error.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m sure it’ll be fine. And how old are you, by the way?” I shook out a pair of pants and held them to my waist. Like the rest of the clothing in the wardrobe, it was tailored precisely to my measurements, but these pants had exaggerated flares at the ankles, the waist coming higher than my naval. Many of the options presented to me appeared to have been based on cartoons and caricatures, exaggerations of real-world examples. I could scarcely fault them, though. If historians in my day tried to present a traveler from the tenth millennia BCE with period fashion choices, I doubt they’d have done a fraction as well. “Didn’t you say that you were ‘born’ while I was talking with the man-lion and the Amazon and the chimp?”