The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (40 page)

“Suspension of disbelief,” I follow him.

“But it doesn’t hold up. This place… Yes, there is a
popular if controversial theory of multiple parallel universes used
to explain any number of waveform paradoxes, including retrograde
time travel that appears to alter a timeline. But even that
theory—which has never been proven outside of mathematical thought
experiments—postulates a necessary lack of future intersection
after the origin event: the realities never meet again. You could
create a new reality by creating a divergence, you might even be
able to quantum teleport between them, but a magical semi-stable
wormhole bridge that you need a lake and a bio-nanotech antique
sailing vessel to pass through as complete matter? That’s several
steps past ridiculous. Plus, he’s claiming we’ve moved in
time
. While pro-grade time travel is actually more plausible
than retrograde, it still requires relativistic acceleration that
would cause devastating effects. We would have been atomized. And
accelerating anything with our mass close to C would cause a mass
dilation effect that would make a black hole seem minor. It would
destroy the solar system…”

The way he talks, it sounds like the whole idea is a
personal insult to him. I’ve never seen him so animated, so
passionate, so angry (at least in terms of expressing it to
anyone).

“What if
this
is a quantum teleport, a splice
like the one that made the immortals?” I try. “What if we’re
copies, like they are?”

“And this whole boat trip is just an illusion to
maintain the illusion that we’re still us?” Straker follows.

“Then we’d be in their
intact
origin universe,
not some arbitrarily-bounded ‘bubble’. Or some other alternate
universe. But it would be a
complete
universe.”

“It might explain why we can see this world beyond
its so-called borders,” Straker points out.

“But why even concoct a story like that?” Elias
strikes down. “The time-splice tale is ridiculously implausible.
This
is just stupid.”

“Then why even…?” I start to wonder, when I notice
the Ghaddar’s stopped at the front of our group, signaling us to
hold. She’d taken point with Murphy while the three of us were busy
arguing theoretical physics. Bly, Terina and Rashid are bringing up
our rear, and stop right behind us as we stop.

My hand reflexively goes to my sword. Straker and
Elias have matched me. I remember Jed’s assurance that there are no
immortals here, only Normals. But I have no reason at all to
believe Jed.

My sword sings through me. Hungry.

I hear feet on gravel, multiple pairs, not trying to
be stealthy at all. Seconds later, a trio of figures comes walking
over a rise in the path just ahead of us. They’re lugging large
plastic containers, but still manage to move with a lazy, loping
grace. They’re dressed in light clothing that looks handmade like
the Pax and Katar, in a variety of pale earth tones and pastels.
They look like adolescents or very young adults—two female and one
male. Short hair. Mixed racial characteristics. Slim and
long-limbed like the Katar, but without the enlarged ribcages.

They don’t see us immediately, don’t look like
they’re practicing any kind of situational awareness, like they
have absolutely no reason to expect meeting anyone (or anything) on
whatever errand they’re on. But when they do see us, they stop
dead, silent and wide-eyed. I realize they have no weapons, no
armor (one of the girls has a small utility knife on her woven
belt).

Murphy and the Ghaddar don’t move, don’t draw on
them, and neither do we. I step forward, show empty hands, try to
reassure:

“We don’t mean you any harm.”

No response. They’re frozen, probably terrified.

“We’re going to Haven,” Straker tries gently.
“We…”

The boy and one of the girls drop their loads and run
back the way they came (the boy tugs at the one who remains, but
still runs when she doesn’t). Their containers sound hollow when
they hit the ground. (Were they going to the Lake for water? The
containers seem like they’d be hard to impossible for them to lift
when filled. Maybe to gather food?)

“We came across the Lake,” Straker finishes her
explanation to the last one. “Captain Jed brought us.”

That sends her fleeing after her friends (though she
doesn’t drop her containers).

“That could have gone better,” Elias snarks in their
dust.

“It could have gone
worse
,” the Ghaddar
corrects him. She’s right, of course: Usually people we meet in our
world try to kill us, or at least say hello by pointing
weapons.

We decide to follow, but not chase, even though
they’ll certainly have alerted whatever defenders they have by the
time we reach their colony. Bly stops and picks up a pair of the
dropped containers. Elias grabs another, as does Rashid. A friendly
gesture: the least we can do is return lost property.

Half a kilometer further, we find what looks like an
old sign, but isn’t exactly. There are some kind of sensors in the
half-toppled post, but they look like they haven’t worked in
decades. The sign is written in multiple languages, but battering
makes it hard to read. It’s clearly a warning, saying something
about a “Preserve Zone” and threatening penalties for violations of
unexplained codes.

The Ghaddar gestures ahead of us: someone’s watching
us from a hundred meters up the path, crouched low in the brush,
but hiding poorly. There are two of them. They see that they’re
seen, break cover and run. I still see no sign of weapons.

A few hundred meters further on, we find the
discarded containers of the braver girl. Straker habitually checks
them for some kind of booby trap, and finding none, picks them up
to carry back to Haven with the rest.

We come to the colony about where Jed said it would
be. It’s nestled in a canyon formed by what look like partial
crater ridges on each side, rising like curtain walls several
hundred meters on either side of a bowl almost a kilometer across.
These curtains have been left behind after significant erosion—I’m
not enough of an expert to tell if I’m looking at an old impact
site or small volcano. Vines climb up the shear rocky cliffs, and
scrub grows out of the crevices, reminding me of old Chinese
landscape paintings. The effect is shockingly beautiful.

More shocking: there are no defensive walls in our
way, no gates, no obvious battlements. The path simply leads into
the valley, and structures are built up on either side. What does
block our way is people: hundreds of them, come out to crowd the
entrance to the colony. Most are adults ranging from smooth-skinned
adolescence to gray-haired and wrinkled. They are most definitely
apprehensive as they watch us come, but I still see not a single
weapon. (I consider that no conventional weapon would be effective
against the immortals of this supposed world. Perhaps they relied
on other defenses, something related to the damaged sign we
passed.)

We slow up as we come close, show our empty hands.
Those that have been carrying them, step forward and set down the
dropped containers like an offering, then step back. No one speaks
for an uncomfortably long time. The colonists just stare like
they’re looking at something out of myth, impossible. I suppose we
may be.

“My name is Erickson,” I take the lead, even though
we have an ambassador in our company. “Erickson Carter. We mean you
no harm. We came across the Lake. On a ship. Captain Jed brought
us.”

I hear a stifled but collective pair of gasps when I
mention the ship and Jed, followed by more silence. Then an adult
female, with dark hair and tanned skin, steps forward from the
line.

“Are you Modded?” she asks like answering yes would
be a crime.

“Not as I think you understand,” I try. “Four of us
are Normal. Four have nanotechnology similar but inferior to what
you probably know. We come from across the Lake, from another
reality, if you can believe that.”

“There’s
nothing
across the Lake,” she quickly
insists, but she sounds like she’s reciting ingrained dogma, dogma
that’s apparently shaken now, just by us being here. There’s more
than a crack of doubt in what’s she’s probably been certain of all
of her life. I can see her trembling. “Those worlds are lost. Earth
and Mars. There’s just here.”

“For how long?” I ask what I hope is a meaningful
question.

She hesitates, looks to some of her fellows, then
answers:

“Thirty six Mars Years. Since the Event.”

Sixty-nine Earth Standard years.

“What’s the calendar year?” Straker asks. “Earth
Standard, Common Era?”

She doesn’t seem to know. Someone else comes forward
and whispers to her.

“It would be Twenty-One Ninety-Eight by the old Earth
calendar.”

I hear Elias sigh, exasperated, as if these people
are part of Jed’s deception.

“It was Common Era Twenty-One
Eighteen
in our
world,” I risk offering. It digests with the nervous shuffling of
feet. Then I make it worse: “The Event, if we’re talking about the
same thing, changed the course of our history, created a new
timeline. That was its intention: to forestall mankind’s
development of what you call Modding technology. We don’t know what
happened to the original timeline. Captain Jed told us this place
is somehow all that’s left.”

There’s a lot of muttering down the path from us,
flashes of hushed arguments. I definitely get the impression they
haven’t seen outsiders in a long time, if at all in their
lifetimes. (Or even their parents’ lifetimes, if this place has
been isolated for sixty-nine years. Are we Jed’s first passengers
in all that time? That’s not what he seemed to imply.)

I don’t need to look at Elias to know that he’s
rolling his eyes at this whole absurd situation, and is probably
angry at me for humoring it.

“
Why
are you here?” she asks a good
question.

“We…” I realize I don’t know what to say, what would
be smart to say at this point. One answer is that we came to bring
dangerous technology from this world back where it supposedly came
from and leave it here. Another is that we’re tasked with taking
(more) dangerous technology from this world into ours. Or we may be
risking both worlds by letting the Companions join, sync. “…don’t
really know.” But that’s not good enough—I feel like I owe these
people some honesty for potentially endangering them. So: “Some of
us carry nanotechnology devices that we were told came from this
world. Captain Jed said he brought us here to find more such
devices. To recover them.”

“What kind of devices?” she asks intently. The idea
seems to scare her. (And from the way they all suddenly feel even
closer to panic, the dread is unanimous.)

“I think you call them Companions,” Straker takes it.
“Obsolete technology by your standards, I’ve been told, but still
potentially dangerous. Especially in a world that lacks superior
technology.”

Straker was careful, choosing her words to not
specify
which
world she was talking about, but her statement
points out that the threat is to either world, or both.

There are more exchanges that we can’t hear—I’m
tempted to use my enhanced hearing to try to eavesdrop.

“There’s nothing like that here,” she denies us, as
if denying us entry into her home. “This is a Preserve. It’s not
allowed. There’s been no nanotechnology here since the Founding,
long before the Event, not until… Now. You.” She sounds like she’s
hiding something with that last part—she clearly hesitated, her
eyes tracking like she’s seeing something, the telltale sign of a
lie. But then those eyes lock back on us, me, defiant against her
fear.

“We’re stuck here until Jed decides to come back for
us,” I lever. “We could find a place to camp. Away from you. But we
would very much appreciate a guide, someone who can tell us about
this place.”

“You say Captain Jed brought you?” she challenges,
clearly incredulous regarding that particular detail. (More so than
anything else she’s being confronted with?)

“On his ship. The Charon. From the south side of the
Lake.”

She actually chuckles. A few of her people uneasily
join her, like laughing at us is a viable defense.

“Captain Jed is a myth, a story for children. Like
Santa Claus.”

“I can only tell you what we’ve seen. Something
brought us here.”

“You’re from the Lost World?” the male who gave the
date speaks up. “From Outside?”

“We’re from Mars. Valles Marineris. Melas Chasma.
Except for Kah-Terina Sher Khan,” I indicate Terina. “She’s from
Coprates. Her home is—was—just across the Lake. But there is no
Lake in our world.”

“You carry
weapons
,” the female accuses after
another pause, as if the items are deeply offensive, taboo.
“
Why
do you carry weapons?”

“Our world is under threat,” Straker tries when I
fail to word a concise explanation. “Different communities have
competed for limited resources for decades, left to survive when we
were cut off from Earth. Now all of us are caught between the
forces of Earth and enemies that claim to have come from
this
world. Immortals. Modded.”

More stunning news. I imagine we’re telling them the
stuff of nightmares.

“How many?” she needs to know. “How many of
them
still exist?” She sounds terrified at the
possibility.

“Only a few,” I tell them. “But a few is enough. Our
world has been devastated.” What I don’t say is that Earth is just
as much of a threat—if not more—than invincible superhumans.

“And you come to seek
more
of that
technology?” she prosecutes.

“We come because a new threat has come into our
world, by what means we don’t yet understand. But we hope to
contain it if we can. I have pledged myself to protect the
innocent, the vulnerable…” But that sounds like an empty pledge. So
I try another tack: “If Jed—or whoever brought us—was telling the
truth, then there
is
dangerous nanotechnology here. AI.
Possibly malevolent. We don’t know why it suddenly appeared in our
world in our time. But if it becomes active here, too… Maybe we can
help you.”