The Long Road to Gaia Read online

  She hadn't been there a moment before, but he knew who she was. He'd needed a Casa Guide to come here with, and they had met for the first time the day before.

  "I just had the strangest vision, I guess you’d call it."

  "Oh? What was it?"

  I whispered to him.

  "It was like I was standing right here, but in a completely different time. Everything here was gone."

  "The past?"

  I whispered to him again.

  "No, it felt like the future. There was a girl there, dressed very strangely. And a sort of a ship in the distance."

  "Weird."

  "You're telling me!"

  She handed him a small token. The only thing on it he recognized was '1st'. She led him over to a seat, where they joined other members of the group, and they waited.

  There was a lot of amplified talk in Portuguese. It went on and on. Occasionally there was a break, with someone else talking accented English.

  People formed into lines, and vanished inside. The group members dwindled.

  "This is you," said the Guide suddenly, who could speak Portuguese.

  As he joined the line, he heard "first time line" spoken in English. The line vanished inside.

  The Guide was waiting inside when the line took him to the Entity, and waiting again when he came out.

  "He said 'Intervention'", the Guide said. "You're done for this morning. Be back here at one thirty, and you'll be on the first line in for your spiritual operation. I’d suggest you spend some more time on the grounds and soak in the energy here."

  He could feel the energy. It rose up out of the ground, and made his palms tingle.

  He nodded, and headed away from the main building, where he found some large wooded seats. He sat. The sign said 'Silencio'. He had no reason to talk.

  When he came out again early that afternoon, he was light headed, and weak. He felt like he'd been opened up from heart to hip, after someone slipped a sleeping draft into his drink.

  The Guide walked him to a window, where he paid for a bottle of herb capsules. Then down to an eating area, where the local vegetable soup revolted him, but he made an effort to eat half of it. From there to a taxi, and back to his room.

  "Go straight to bed," the Guide had said.

  "Go directly to bed," I said. "Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred Reals."

  He chuckled at what he thought was his own joke. But he went to bed. His dinner was brought to him, interrupting his sleep, but he couldn’t eat. He went back to sleep. In the morning, breakfast being brought to him, woke him up. He bolted it down and went back to bed. Late in the morning, he awoke again, and got up. He felt sluggish, like he'd been in hospital for a week. He pulled out a book, and sat reading until his lunch arrived, which he also wolfed down. Midafternoon, the Guide knocked on his door, and told him he could come out now. His twenty four hours of isolation was up. He thanked her, and went back to his book.

  Four

  Three weeks later, after a further two Interventions, and what felt like a third when he visited the Waterfall, he was almost ready to leave. He was mainly packed, but his taxi to the airport wasn’t due until late afternoon. Breakfast had come and gone, but it was still very early.

  Crash! Thump. Crash. His room shook. Dust came down from the gaps between the boards of the ceiling. The thumping continued.

  He poked his head out the door. Furniture filled the area. The door to the next room was open, so he poked his head around it.

  A workman was using some sort of crow bar ram thingy to smash the ceiling boards. He went back to his room and began to cringe at the noise and vibration.

  I politely suggested to the workman he should stop, but he wasn’t listening.

  After a while, the noise stopped. Reading was more pleasant again.

  Crash! The noise and vibration started up again in the room on the other side.

  It didn’t take more than a nudge to get him to go and complain formally. But no, there was no other room available on the ground level. And there was no way he wanted to carry his cases upstairs for just a few hours. I whispered to him again, and he played the 'I can't cope' card. It didn’t seem to work.

  He went back to his room and continued trying to read, while cringing. I went back, and whispered into the receptionist's ear.

  A short time later, she showed up at his room, and he was moved. The room was larger, and the bathroom was huge. But like he'd seen in India a few years earlier, there was no shower surround at all. A much nicer room than he had been in, but the beds were both rock hard, and it obviously wasn’t ready for an occupant. He expressed his thanks.

  The day passed. When he idly wondered what all the destruction had been about and why they hadn't waited for him to be gone before beginning, I whispered the answer to him.

  "It represents your past life being torn away, to make room for the new life to begin."

  2040

  One

  The old man shuffled along. The corridor was long, and seemingly endless. He wheezed and puffed, but he continued on. No-one actually knew where he was. He'd made sure of that. He was so sick of being told what he could, and could not do.

  I followed after him. He'd refused to take a wheeled method of transport. Not that he knew I'd asked him to. The trouble was, he wasn’t as well as he thought he was.

  For eighty years old, he certainly was in good condition. His mind was still sharp, and his body, while deteriorating once again, still managed to get him about. His trip to the Casa, all those years ago, had done the trick. While not completely curing his medical issues, they had been much reduced in nature, so that instead of an early medical discharge, he'd retired on schedule.

  He still had a few years left in him, and Twelve had been congratulating me on getting him where he wanted, and needed, to be.

  All the same, long treks down endless passageways at his age, showed more stubbornness than sense.

  At last, he came to a window. The view outside was breathtaking. He had paused at every window he had come across since arriving, and each view was still breathtaking for him.

  He'd never made it into the Space Shuttle program. Never joined the crews of the International Space Stations. Never even been able to pilot one of the civilian space orbiters. It had been a never ending disappointment for him. He'd been born too early, and been too old by the time space really became available, and simply not been the best of the best, no matter how hard he'd strived all his life.

  But now he was here, looking down on the planet Earth from orbit. He'd made it anyway. At least he was in space at last. And he'd damned well be sticking it out until they made it to the nearest stars, as he'd known he would as a kid.

  He gathered up his strength and continued shuffling forward.

  "Captain to Jon Hunter, respond please."

  The voice came through a speaker some way ahead of him. He smiled as he realized the whole ship must have heard it. He shuffled forward until he reached the speaker, and touched a button on the wall. In all likelihood, his hand was the first to press it for real use. The ship was so new, it still had a paint smell to it. The button isolated the conversation.

  "What is it Richard?"

  "Where are you?"

  "I don’t know. Somewhere on the left flight pod, I think. It's got windows, if that helps you."

  "Not really. Stay where you are, I'm sending someone with a trolley to get you."

  "Why?"

  "It's almost time. Had you forgotten?"

  "Time for what?"

  "To launch, Dad."

  The exasperation in his voice made me smile to myself. Jon might still have a sharp mind, but his short term memory had been slipping lately.

  "It's that time already?"

  The sigh at the other end was almost inaudible, but then, my hearing is better than anyone's. My smile grew bigger.

  "Almost. Just wait there until someone picks you up."

  "Okay."

  There wa
s a snick sound as the connection was turned off.

  He turned and started shuffling the way he'd been going.

  Two

  The Bridge of Galactica was bustling with activity. At the center of all the activity, was a small island of calm.

  Richard Hunter, the captain, sat in his chair, observing the activity with some satisfaction. After all, he'd made it to the top at last. No longer a young man at sixty, he should have been put out to pasture long ago. But the Navy is not the Air Force, and his choice of which service to join had paid off. All his years in Submarines had made him the number one choice for this post. Galactica was a space ship, but the nature of it was more submarine, than aircraft.

  His father shuffled in, and took the seat which had been set aside for him, out of the way. Richard felt a moment of sadness that his mother was no longer with them, but was comforted by the thought he now had grandchildren of his own, albeit still very young, and that the whole family was heading out into space.

  He nodded to his father, whose vision of this day had never wavered. He looked to the helm position, and nodded to his son James, who'd won the coveted position on his own merits. Like his grandfather, he'd joined the Air Force, but had chosen to fly the biggest planes ever built, thus giving himself the experience to fly the biggest ship ever built. Like his father, he shared his grandfather's dream of this day, and where they were headed.

  Richard shook off thoughts of family, and brought himself completely into the now.

  The launch was going to be a media circus, but he'd managed to convince the brass to not allow any on the ship itself, other than those who'd taken up the challenge of going into space with the rest of them. Even then, they had their own media center, and could monitor the cameras on the Bridge and other areas, as long as he allowed them the feeds.

  This was a military ship, even though more than three quarters of the people aboard were civilians. Most of the crew had chosen to bring their families, and there were more civilian specialists than military crew, plus their families.

  It had been made very clear to everyone who'd applied to join the ship on her maiden flight. This might be a one way trip into the future. While assured the engines did not generate relativistic effects, who actually knew? And when they arrived at the first of the anomalies discovered five years earlier? What then? No-one knew. Guesses abounded. The ship had a pool running about what they would find. But whatever it was, it might prevent them ever returning home.

  Six years before, one of many probes sent out testing new space engines, had detected an anomaly out near the Oort cloud. Months later, a second one had been detected on the other side of the system. No-one knew what they were. Neither probe had enough control left to alter their courses to investigate.

  Richard had made a leap of intuition these might be a way to other star systems, and I'd 'encouraged' him to make a proposal for a manned explorer ship, which could also double as a colony seed ship. He'd brought his father in to help him with the proposal, and even allowed his son to contribute.

  The governments of the time all rejected not only his, but every proposal to build an exploration vessel. Not giving up, he'd pushed every private resource he could, and in the end, a consortium of Australian, American Indian, Malaysian Buddhist, and several other groups who wanted to remain unknown; was formed to fund and build both a ship construction platform in orbit, and a true explorer ship.

  It took a lot of effort on my part to make sure Richard was appointed to command the new ship. He'd been with it since the beginning. He wanted to be with it to the end. Little did he know where the end was.

  I stood there on the Bridge, while the checklists were run, double checked, and triple checked.

  Navigation had the course to the nearest of the anomalies. This was defined by where it was detected, and where the Earth currently was in its orbit of the sun.

  The Helm had the course from Navigation, but it was just the last of a series of course changes needed, to get them away from the construction platform, break orbit, and head out into space in the correct direction.

  I could see James was a mixture of cool professionalism, high anxiety about his role in the launch, and the excitement of being a key player in the most important event since the Wright brothers first flew.

  The checklists came to an end and the political and military speeches began. I could see Richard internally cringing. His eye was on the countdown clock. The bigwigs could say what they wanted, he was launching on time, regardless of if he had to cut someone off in mid-sentence. I knew he'd do it too.

  As the timer neared zero, he gave his orders. The access gantries retracted. The docking clamps were released. Station keeping thrusters held them in position. Checks and rechecks to make sure nothing still connected Galactica to the construction platform. We were clear to go.

  Right on zero, with the crew all looking at him, he gave the most important order of any of their lives.

  "Launch."

  The engine section of Galactica exploded. The force of it rippled up the ship, shattering the mid-section. The flight pods were thrown clear, colliding with the construction platform and causing its destruction as well.

  For a moment, those on the Bridge thought the bulkheads would hold, and their part of the ship would survive, but the thoughts lasted mere seconds.

  Thirty seconds after the launch order was given, I was standing alone in space in the middle of a debris field.

  Three

  "No!"

  I stood there in space for a moment, completely shocked.

  Twelve materialized next to me.

  "Don’t say it," I said.

  "I wasn’t."

  "Yes you were."

  He looked at me, and it was obvious he'd been about to.

  "Are you going to just stand here in the debris?"

  "I'm planning a response."

  "Less planning, more action."

  "Thank you for the sage advice. Now bugger off. I've got this."

  Twelve chuckled, while shaking his head. And was gone.

  I wound back time slowly, to the moment after the first explosion. I froze time there, and went in search of the blast origin. It took me a while, but I found it in thruster control, just off the main engine room.

  I wound time back again, milliseconds at a time, until the explosion began. Curious, it was coming from an enclosed module, like a black box. The command to fire thrusters went through it, and came out the other side unchanged. I checked the specifications all the way back, and there it was, included in the original designs. I poked my head inside and examined the contents.

  It was a bomb. And a big one. Not a nuke, but designed to be almost as powerful as a small nuke. It made sense though. Conventional explosives could be masked. But masking a nuke was in itself detectable.

  Who would design a thruster control with its own bomb? Someone a lot cleverer than I'd been considering myself, obviously.

  I wound back time again, following this module back to when it was installed. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. I checked it to see if it was always a bomb, and it was. It was delivered, it was installed, and it was tested. It was on the spec, and it seemed to do its job, although no-one quite seemed to know what its job was, or had any idea what they were actually messing with.

  Time wound back further, now following the module.

  And, there.

  The module had been switched in transit. The two were identical on the outside. The original contained nothing but a wire crossing the internal space.

  I marked that moment, but followed back the original. A man assembled the box, with a wire in the middle of it from a specification, without question. I followed the specification back to the person who designed it.

  "Don’t," said Twelve.

  "Don’t what?"

  "You were about to kill him."

  "What if I was?"

  "Think about it. Killing isn’t necessary."

  I thought about it. He was
right.

  "So you think he should get away with it?"

  "Let me rephrase myself. Killing right now isn’t necessary."

  "Ah."

  I grinned at him. Karma was a bitch, and the man oblivious to our presence was going to find this out.

  Twelve vanished again.

  I returned to the point where the bomb was swapped in. This time I followed the bomb back to where it was made. The same man carefully assembled the bomb into the module.

  I cast around looking for a reason why he was doing this. It wasn’t until I followed him back several weeks, I discovered who was really behind it. The group met in secret. I followed each of them back six years, and finally came to the starting point.

  A woman and a man were watching television. They were alone in what could only be called a mansion. Everything around them simply dripped money.

  The news item declared an anomaly had been discovered on the edge of the solar system, and was followed by several people calling for a manned probe to be sent to investigate.

  "No," said the woman in a cold hard voice.

  "No," said the man, in a high emotional voice.

  The two looked at each other.

  "This cannot happen," she said. "God will not allow it. Do what must be done."

  The man nodded, rose, and left.

  I followed them forward to the moment of the explosion, and found them all in the same place it had started.

  I smiled.

  Four

  Galactica launched without a hitch. Unknown to the crew, at the exact moment the thrusters fired to move her out of the construction platform, a bomb went off in a mansion they'd never heard of, killing the owners, and a large group of people gathered to watch the launch on television. Not only was the house completely destroyed, but the entire property it was on was reduced to a hole in the ground. Local authorities wrote it off to a gas leak.

  Galactica headed out into the solar system.

  The meeting room appeared around me, and I took my chair, triggering the others to come. It was a full meeting.