MacRoscope (34 page)

Yet the action was not over. From that capsule spread two Type III technology fields of force: the first encompassed the moon and planet, now forever fused, extending outward twenty thousand miles, permeating every particle of dust, every molecule of gas, every crushed atom of the core. It anchored every atom in place irrevocably, relative to the whole. The second field permeated the first and began a cataclysmic contraction, taking the entire package with it. It fed upon the energies released by that compression, and continued relentlessly.

Neptune shrank, its turbulence abruptly frozen in place. Atmosphere and all, it diminished as though the viewer were retreating from it at a hundred thousand miles per hour — but there was no viewer. It became the size of Earth, of Luna, of Ceres the asteroid. It dwindled to a single mile’s diameter — but its full mass and that of its moon and its moon’s moon remained. It achieved its gravitational radius.

Then it shrank again, so rapidly it seemed to vanish. In a microsecond it was gone.

Five million miles out, tiny Nereid — Neptune’s second moon — became a planet in its own right, circling the sun in Neptune’s erstwhile orbit. Caught on its backswing, it had insufficient velocity even to retreat from Sol, let alone escape it, and fell instead in toward the orbit of Uranus as though looking for a home.

Man’s physical exploration of the cosmos had begun.

The marshes of Glynn: now they were crossed by highways, infringed upon by the welling city that sent its pseudopods of industrial flesh questing outward in a great half-circle. Brunswick — founded in 1771, now more numerously populated than the entire state of Georgia at the date of this city’s inception. The reputed cotton was gone from this area, and the pecans and the peaches, perhaps encouraged in their departure by the advice of the poet who made this region aesthetically renowned. Instead there were shipbuilding yards, the ships not necessarily of the water, and machine shops, the machines not necessarily the servants of man. The old pulp mills, their forest cellulose depleted, had been replaced by more sophisticated refineries, and the canneries by protein-simulatories. There was more to learn about chemistry in Brunswick than any man could ever know.

“Do you have your fix, Ivo? We’re moving into position above the null-G column and it may get a little breezy.”

“Almost, Harold.”

Yet the marshes remained, protected in part by statute of the Empire State of the South, that the live-oak might retain its ancestral home, and perhaps too the Cherokee rose. From the city he flew, disembodied, all observing, passing through obstacles without flinching, seeming to breathe the freer atmosphere of nature. The dusky English sparrows gave way to the red-winged blackbird; the chimney-swift to the belted kingfisher. The ugly cockroach hid, the lovely dragonfly emerged; the bold house rat yielded to the shy cottontail rabbit; the gray park squirrel faded in the face of the gleaming blacksnake.

“Are you about finished, Ivo? We’re descending toward the excavation.”

“Almost, Afra.”

The marshes: and if there were water moccasins and alligators and snapping turtles, were these not more beautiful and less destructive than the stout tourists, the hapless domesticants? From the watery inlets rose the ancient bald cypress trees, magnificently — some would say grotesquely — swollen at the base, their islands of woody “knees” adjacent. Farther along were a rare American elm, several glossy-leaved handsome magnolias, some small sassafras, large sycamore, medium tulip-tree — and finally the aristocrat of the south, the great live-oak, garlanded with hanging Spanish moss.

He came to a halt beneath it, within its somber cathedral of foliage, responding to the massive permanence of it, the solitude.

“Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven / With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven / Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs—”

“What did you say, Ivo?”

“A poem I know, Beatryx. I’m sorry; I did not mean to repeat it aloud.”

“One by Sidney Lanier? But isn’t that poetry
meant
to be spoken aloud? Please go on with it.”

Not really surprised, he obliged. “Emerald twilights — Virginal shy lights / wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, / When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades—”

He broke off, staring at the spreading oak in consternation. It was the poem of Schön’s first message, the one that lead up to the terminal thought. If Afra were to hear it and identify it—

He calmed himself. It was, after all, only a poem; it bore only obliquely on his secret. Why should he hide it? Afra must already have caught on to the truth. Significantly, she had stopped pressing him on the matter of Schön. “It goes on like that. I was looking at a tree, on Earth, and it reminded me.”

“It’s very nice,” Beatryx agreed.

He had his fix: that mighty live-oak in the marshes of Glynn. He keyed the location into the computer as the primary reference point. He was ready for the first jump.

Ready — to penetrate to the bowels of Triton, to be entombed there, to undertake, while the entire moon decelerated, the melting… and gasifying… and collision with Neptune… and compression… and…

The scene opened on his fix: the magnificent live-oak, extending its rotund branches as though to embrace all the world. The tree was hardly changed, except — yes, it was smaller, more vigorously leafed. Still bearded with Spanish moss, it was a young adult rather than a patriarch. The oval green leaves were more shiny, the acorns seemed richer in their scaly cups.

“When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades, / Of the heavenly woods and glades, / That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within / The wide sea-marshes of Glynn;—”

And, astoundingly, there
were
lovers! A young man in what Ivo took to be a farmer’s outfit and a rather pretty girl, her looks spoiled somewhat for Ivo by the dated cut of her dress. They were just leaving a bower, perhaps having completed their liaison there.

Dated dress? Ivo reproved himself. He was thinking in late twentieth century terms. He cared nothing for fashion, dictated as it was by commercially-minded foreigners, yet somehow anything not contemporary was less attractive than it should be. He suspected that he would have been quite satisfied, had he lived
in
this girl’s time, with her costume. It decorated, after all, the timeless attributes of the sex.

He followed them past a mighty white-oak that had been a rotting stump before and into a swampy glade where two and three foot high red-flowered knotweeds bloomed, and white-flowered arrowhead plants, and bright yellow buttercups. At the edge of an open pond stood yard-high pickerelweeds with glossy spadelike leaves as long as a spread-fingered hand, the blue flowers just forming on the upright spike; and upon the water lay the great green disks of the water-lily, not yet in bloom.

The season was late spring or early summer, Ivo decided. June, perhaps. Late enough for the first pickerel-weed, too early yet for goldenrod.

He left the couple to their silent dialogue and traveled deeper into the swamp. Yes, there was an alligator in pursuit of fish, as graceful a swimmer as any. Emerging near the city, he passed cottontail rabbits and flickers browsing for beetles in the fields. It was amazing how much closer nature came to civilization, here.

He traversed the city, and found a creosoting plant, a box factory, a conventional cannery, shipping wharves, and at last a newspaper with the date: June 5, 1930.

They had jumped fifty light-years from Earth.

And those lovers — in their early seventies, now. It was a wonderful and somewhat painful thought.

Another jump, another fix: the scene differed: The terrain was still marshy, but no trace of either the stately live-oak or huge white-oak remained. Instead it was bright dawn upon white cedars, the average tree perhaps eighty feet tall, crowded together and cutting off much of the light of the sun so that it did not touch the ground directly.

Ivo paused to consider the implications. Cedar preferred freshwater swamps, and the marshes of Glynn were salt. How had this come about?

Either his fix was off or there had been a serious change in the landscape. The computer was responsible for the fix, establishing it by the gravitic and magnetic qualities of the planet: a complex and indirect process, but thorough. The location checked out. Therefore—

How big a jump had they taken?

“Continental drift?” Afra inquired, her voice seeming to emerge from the cedar grove. It was not hard to picture her standing there, just behind a tree.

“Drift?” Back to the stupids again.

“The movement of the continents in the course of geologic time,” she explained. “If the expression on your face means what it surely means, your landscape has changed. You might be a mile or so from where you thought you were, and it wouldn’t be the scope’s fault. The continent itself could have shifted. Or orogeny could have—”

“Could be. I seem to be in a freshwater swamp, inland from where I was, and the fix checks. But how much time — ?”

“Oh, a few million years or so.”

He drew off the goggles and stared at her. She was smiling, as he had suspected. “Such a jump is possible, you know,” he said, nettled.

“Certainly. But not this time. Our stellar configuration establishes our continued residence within the Milky-Way galaxy, so we have to be within seventy thousand light-years or so of Earth. I would judge within ten thousand, actually. And it is also possible for rivers to change course and for beaches to submerge. A few thousand years would be enough to change your flora and fauna perceptibly.”

Ivo replaced the goggles with something less than good grace and sped toward Brunswick. His exploration, he knew now, was confirmatory only; Afra had already worked out the position by astronomical means. The very process of locating Earth established its distance, though only his own investigation could pin it down precisely. The macroscope had a sweep-adjustment that enabled it to select for a certain type of image; that was one of a number of refinements courtesy of galactic broadcasts. Otherwise the problem of locating Earth would be horrendously complicated.

There was nothing at the Brunswick location except scrub forest. “It’s pre-1771, anyway.”

He heard the rustle of her leaning forward. How he wished she would do that when his eyes were on her, when there was no technical business at hand. But she belonged to a dead man yet, however the live might yearn for her.

She murmured: “As I make it, the jumps should be gradated sharply. Probably fifty years is the minimum — forty-nine, actually — because you can’t jump from the end of one loop to the middle of the one adjacent, or from place to place within your own. The larger loops should be multiples of these, since they’re made out of looplets, and then there could be multiples of
those
— we don’t know how far it extends. Even a slight change in the angle of our jump could shift us from the smalls to the mediums or worse. If we assume each level is the square of the prior one, first level being roughly fifty years, the second would be two and a half thousand years and the third six and a quarter million — light-years. So just keep calm until you know which level it is.”

“Six and a quarter
million
?” he repeated, comprehending her reason for the private discussion. “That — that could put us in another galaxy!”

“Not likely. Probably in intergalactic space. But as I said, the local light survey places us definitely within a galactic structure, and since you found Earth where it was supposed to be, the odds are it is our own. I conjecture level two, therefore.”

“Two and a half thousand.” It was still appalling — and she wasn’t sure. It was possible, if unlikely, that this was merely an Earthlike planet occupying the same spot in another galaxy or cluster that Earth occupied in the Milky Way. Perhaps every galaxy was laid out on a common plan. Cepheid variables, novas, planets, all fitting into their destined slots…

He abolished it as fantasy. “That’s before the Christian era.”

She made no reply, but he felt her closeness, her excitement. To peer into ancient history! No man had done such a thing so directly before.

“Oh what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? / Somehow my soul seems suddenly free—”

She replied: “Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free / Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!” And she touched his hand.

Thus did she confess to him that she knew of Sidney Lanier and what he signified in Ivo’s life, and perhaps had known from the beginning; and her hand now squeezing his own suggested an added meaning to the words she quoted. Candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free? He dared not hope; it was most likely an intellectual game, for her.

He had tried to emulate the qualities of Lanier the person, to mold his character after that of his adopted ancestor — but it had not worked. Ivo could not create poetry, and he totally lacked Lanier’s winning ways with the ladies. How much better off he would have been to develop a personality truly his own!

“Jump it to Europe,” Afra said.

He jumped it to Europe. The time was noon at Rome — and there was no settlement of man there. “Pre-Roman,” he announced.

“Try Egypt.”

“Nothing at Alexandria,” he said after a moment. “Not even dry land.”

“Naturally not, if it’s pre-Roman. You want Memphis.”

He headed southeast, toward the noncoded location, feeling out of sorts again.

On an eastern channel of the Nile delta he discovered a bustling city, not large by his expectations but with the aura of a capital of some sort. Memphis?

“Doesn’t sound like it,” Afra said. “But
any
city is good news for us. Look for a palace or a temple; see if you can find written records to photograph. We should be able to date those.”

Ivo obliged, descending to street level near a complex of buildings he took to be significant. The street was narrow and filthy, lined by tiny mud-brick dwellings set close together and generally no more than a single story high. He could make out the straw coating of the weathered bricks, and fancied he could almost sniff the surrounding slum offal. Inferior residential districts had not begun with America, certainly!

The natives were human: slender, swarthy Mediterraneans with black hair and brown eyes. A number were naked, and these he presumed were slaves; their racial types were variable, ranging from Nordic blond to full black. Even the clothed ones gained little; they possessed none of the glorious habiliment he had thought of as ancient Egyptian. There were no gold ornaments or bright cloths, and not even shoes or sandals. Barefoot, bareheaded, the men were clad only in the wraparound
schenti
: white cloth held at the waist by a wide leather belt, the outfit reaching only to the knees. The women wore long tight skirts and a number were bare-breasted. The effect would have been delightful, had they been young, healthy and clean; these were not.

At the temple/palace grounds things changed abruptly. There were no women, and the men were much better dressed. They wore wide, short wigs, hairpiece quality a seeming guide to status. They wore full skirts with a short sleeve for the left arm only and overset by a pleated mantle of linen. Evidently the people he had seen on the street were of the lowest class.

Some stone was in evidence, but up close the structures were hardly impressive. The jewelry the personnel wore furnished most of the temple color.