Prologue

 

Kar-Tur sat on the hard stone watching the flames.  He did not note the sting of smoke in his nostrils, or the black soot darkening his rough dwelling.  Although he hadn't moved for nearly two days, his back and legs rested comfortably from long practice at stillness.  He gazed patiently, waiting for the understanding he knew must come.  He didn't look at the fire, but into it, searching, as he had yesterday and the day before, and last year and the year before.  As he would continue to do until at last he understood.

Or until his tribe lost patience and would no longer share food and water or repair his house and clothes.

This was a good year, better than many.  Meat was plentiful.  His tribe didn't resent his absence on the hunt as they had in some years.

They didn't truly understand his quest.  But his former quests, and things he'd done for them after those long vigils, made them trust in the value of this one.  Especially in times of plenty.  Even now, meat from the great hairy elephants rotted by the cliff, a wastefulness he would have cautioned against had he not been so focused on his task.

The fire danced.  He could see it had Power.  When he looked deep, he could sense its Material.  Power and Material made up all things.  But there must be more to this magical essence that lived and died so differently from human or animal.  With a mere twenty-six cycles of seasons behind him, and being among the pampered of his tribe, he surely had much time yet to search.

Seasons passed, and, one day, insight came to him.  His inner eye found a new and deeper character to the flames, a deeper essence to Power and Material.  As understanding expanded, he realized that this deeper essence was found not only in the flame, but in the great sloths and beetles of the forest.  It was in the spirit that moved the grasses of the prairie in great sweeping waves and in the stones that lay unpresuming on the slopes of the hills.  It was even in his own mind.

It was so clear, so complete!  All things were possible.  The wonder of the new understanding took his breath away and he moved his eyes at last from the familiar flames where they'd rested for so long.  The blue images burned onto his eyes by the comforting fire left him almost blind in his dark room, and he felt a moment of fear brush through his thoughts.

With the fear came a new realization.  All things were possible, but that meant bad as well as good.  Evil could come.  Evil from the stars.  Evil from the past.  Evil from himself or his tribe.  It could overwhelm them.

He must warn them.  Tell them of both the wonder and the terror, of potential and danger.

He rose to leave his fire at last, casting a glance back at this glowing companion who had taught him the secrets of existence, of truth, of knowledge and faith.  His vigil had once again born fruit.  And he must tell his tribe.  But would they bless him or curse him?  Would they even understand?

He left his dwelling, immersed suddenly in the less familiar world with its green woods by the stream and the sweeping expanse of grass stretching forever out to where the empty rock and cold ice began.  He cast his eye upward at the sky, nervous at what might be there, or who, and whether they saw him or cared.  He looked inward again, dwelling on the wonderful, but also testing the terrible, feeling it for what it was, realizing that it would even be possible to...

In that moment, silently and without moving the gentle grass or casting an image that any eye of his tribe could have seen were one looking, Kar-Tur unexpectedly winked from existence.

 

Chapter 1

 

I fussed at my hair instead of working with it, turning this way and that in the mirror and finally choosing to believe it was fine.  Brown could only be brown and straight was only straight.  I pulled my peach sweater over my shoulders.  It was a nice complement to my hair and skin, and I chose to wear it even in the warm southern California air.  It might, after all, get cool tonight at the open-air restaurant Jonathan had invited me to.   In any case, I wasn't entirely at ease in the shoulder-baring evening gown I'd summoned the courage to wear.

A date, for crying out loud.  Why a date?  If we just went out together like graduate school buddies it would be fine.  His quaint insistence on paying my way tonight completely transformed the experience.

I liked Jonathan and felt excited to see him for the first time since he took the faculty position at Burns College.  But he was a friend, nothing more.  I considered whether I should tell him as much tonight but was afraid he might be hurt.  Even more afraid our date really was just buddies reuniting after a time apart, and I'd look ridiculous.

Probing my feeling a bit deeper, I wondered if I resisted telling him because he was an important professional contact for me, having already taken a first job, while I still had a year--hopefully no more--to go on my Ph.D.

I hoped I wasn’t that cynical yet.

But I really didn’t want a date.  I was uncomfortable mixing friendship and romance.  One was sure to end up losing both.

I heard his knock at the door and bounded from my chair, hoping to jump-start my inner enthusiasm with outward buoyancy.  A flash drive containing my day’s calculations lay on the table, and I grabbed it to drop off at my lab in the geology building on the way to the restaurant.  I always kept a non-cloud backup separate from my computer, but I wondered briefly if I really needed to make that extra stop at the geology building or if I used my work as a way to polish the sharp edges off my nervousness.

“Humph” I said aloud to no one but me.  “You’re nervous and should just quit obsessing about it.”  And, listening to myself almost none at all, I met Jonathan at the door.

***

The restaurant he picked truly was delightful and the night lovely.  I found myself seduced to an inner quiet by the bright stars and the susurration of the waves about fifty yards from our table.  Jonathan didn't seem hurried to talk.  I imagined that perhaps the evening would pass in good company and few words.  I relaxed a bit more at the prospect.

His eyes drifted away from the shoreline, which was just making its final disappearance into the gathering gloom of night, and toward a loud and slightly intoxicated group of people at a nearby table.

“Do you ever wonder what other people, ones you don’t know, are happy about?” he asked.

I looked at my friend of four years with new interest.  I did think about such things.  It surprised me that he did.

I smiled and nodded, feeling no need to speak, perhaps a bit afraid that if I encouraged intimate conversation it might stir whatever motives he had for asking me on a date.  I wondered for a moment if I should be interested in him as more than friend.  With his fit 5’10” frame, dark hair and eyes, he wasn't unhandsome, although that seemed rather feeble praise for a friend to grant.  He looked sufficiently distinguished when not wearing his quaint and goofy field hat—the one I teased him about when we did field work together.  And he was certainly intelligent.

But I felt no overwhelming romantic urges.  I wondered if you were supposed to feel some irresistible impulse toward the person you were meant for.

“What do you think about alien visitors?”  He turned his fierce gaze on me, catching my eyes into his.

I smiled at his effort to start a conversation.  He always spoke forthrightly and often abruptly of what he thought, which always made me believe he had no hidden agendas, no secret plots for how to use people.

“Do you mean, aliens, like from outer space?” I raised my brows.

“Sure,” he said noncommittally, inviting me to choose my own interpretation.

“Aha.”  I paused a bit, sipping from the tea I had ordered as we awaited our dinner.

“As a geology professional, I think there must be no other intelligent beings in the universe.”  I grinned, letting him know I was being silly with the geology professional bit.  “Or perhaps it's simply impossible for intelligent beings to travel the stars.  Either way, there are no aliens visiting us here on Earth.  If there were other beings, intelligent beings able to traverse space, the Earth’s rocks would be filled with evidence of their presence here.  A million years is only a moment to the universe, but an eternity to the expansion and advance of a technologically intelligent race.  All the universe should have long since filled up with them.  The Earth would not only bear the mark of their exploration, but of their colonization.  They would be here, and not us.

“And,” I continued, “By the same measure, there will never be time travel.  Otherwise the rocks of the age of dinosaurs would be filled with the petrified refuse from an eternity of time-tourists."

I paused for his response.  This was one of the more enjoyable aspects of graduate school, the expansion of ideas and testing of reasoning that took place in half jesting, half serious intellectual sparring over supper, or in a stairwell, or in a lab late at night.  I wondered if Jonathan missed it.

Jonathan didn't answer immediately.  He seemed rather more sober than he had as grad student when he had been quick to leap into the verbal fray.  He started to speak, but stopped as though unsure what to say or, perhaps, whether he really wanted to say it.  I wondered if my somewhat silly intellectualism had turned him off.

Our meal arrived, and Jonathan turned to it with such delight that I thought he must be relieved at the interruption.

Jonathan relaxed with the meal.  We reminisced about our grad school days.  They were still very present for me, but Jonathan seemed to have already developed a melancholy attachment to their memory, although he'd only finished last spring.  When conversation lapsed, we watched the stars, enjoying each other’s company and the universe we'd chosen to study.

We took a walk along the beach behind the restaurant, finding a few shells tossed up by the recent windstorms, shells that the endless swarms of beachgoers had somehow left untouched for a day or two.  A grove of palms stood near where the restaurant property went down to the sea, and we lingered there for a while.

Our casual conversation lapsed occasionally as we listened to the waves.  Several times, Jonathan became sober again, as he'd been before our meal was served, and he seemed about to share something that was weighing heavily on his thoughts.  Each time, something else came out, or he turned his eyes back to the sea and fell quiet, allowing both his sudden intake of air and intense look at me to simply breathe away.  By evening’s end I was quite curious about his behavior.

I felt somewhat awkward, fearing that I knew what he wanted to talk about.  I thought seriously of preempting it, by commenting, perhaps, how glad I was that we were friends with no romantic entanglements with each other.  But I didn’t, hoping that the problem would just go away.

“Jen,” he began as we leaned on a palm tree watching the waves sparkle in the light of the just-risen Moon, “I didn’t bring you here just to socialize or to maintain our friendship, which is certainly valuable to me.  I have an ulterior motive.  I think I need your help, as both a friend and geologist.  Your advice at least, and maybe your collaboration.”

My heart crossed from a mysterious combination of hope and fear to relief as Jonathan spoke.  I especially breathed a sigh of relief that I had not presumed too much and announced uninvited that I was only interested in him as a friend.  I realized with chagrin that I was unsure whether I felt happy or disappointed that my fears of his romantic interest in me proved unfounded.

“What kind of help?” I asked.

“My question earlier about aliens wasn't a casual one.”  He paused for a long moment searching out into the sea for his words.  “I’ve found something.”

“At your field area in Wyoming?”  I knew he was working in Quaternary rock, much too young for my interests.

He nodded.  “Suppose I were to tell you that I’ve found evidence of ancient alien visitation.  Or found something unusual anyway.  Something not ordinary in the rock.

“I haven’t told anyone else yet.  I’m not sure if I’m afraid the CalTech folks will steal my thunder, or if I’m just afraid everyone will think I’m a nut.  But I don’t know what to do with it.  I think I’m even a little scared of it.  Does that make sense?  It’s really not even in my field.  I’m no anthropologist.” 

“What have you found?” I prompted when he said no more.

“I've found something...odd.  A human skeleton in partially lithified shale, in the Atosoka Formation.  I, well, I measured several bones in the skull and found that the dimensions are almost modern.  It’s a woman, apparently quite old when she died.”

“Why is that odd?” I brushed a wayward lock of hair from my eyes. “Late Pleistocene, I'd expect the skeleton to be of modern appearance, at least within the variability common to our species.”

“I found it in the Atosoka Formation.” he repeated. “And the skeleton seems to be buried there, not deposited naturally.  There are—” he paused again, “belongings with it.”

I remembered that the Atosoka Formation was a lake deposit, not a typical place for a burial.  And with an age of nearly forty thousand years, it was also a bit early for humans in North America, especially ones who buried their dead.  My eyes were just beginning to widen with comprehension when he added, clearly delighted with himself, or on the border of hysteria.

“And the old-time radio I found buried with the skeleton was a bit odd too.”

 

Chapter 2

 

Susan was busy (what else was new?) and Cynthia, hesitant to interrupt her, slipped into the windowless room quietly.  She wondered if Susan remembered that they were supposed to meet for lunch today.  In those not-uncommon moments when Susan forgot their dates, she was usually in her office or some other accessible location where Cynthia could find her.  So, she'd never seen her sister’s lab before.

Cynthia looked around.  It was a bit disappointing for a science lab.  She'd expected more chrome, or blinking lights, or whirring sounds.  It looked instead more like, well, like a basement storage room converted temporarily to a laboratory for a new faculty member.

Even Susan's equipment disappointed.    No sleek, shiny surfaces, no blinking lights.  It was mainly wires, and boxes, and computers like some of the old stuff she and Mike had at home.  Her son, Adam, who liked to call himself the science geek, had electronics that looked more impressive.

Cynthia ambled around the room, waiting for Susan to notice her in her own time.  It surely couldn’t be too long.  The room was only about twenty-five-foot square, although the mysterious vertical cylinders towering in the middle hid her from Susan once she stepped away from the doorway.

She suspected she shouldn’t touch anything.  Who knew which items might be poisonous or radioactive or something?  But Cynthia couldn’t help herself.  She liked to touch.  She ran her hand over the top of a smooth, metal box with a digital keypad and a couple of lights.  It seemed out of place, looking far too scientific—translate: sleek and shiny--compared to the other gadgets in the room.  She smiled to herself, wondering what Susan would think of her impression.

She continued her exploration until a turn around a table piled high with more stuff--which Cynthia suspected was just empty boxes--brought her up beside her sister.

“You need to keep a cleaner ship, I think Susan,” she said with a smile.

Susan gave a start, apparently having still been unaware of Cynthia even though they stood side by side.  Susan straightened, stiffly, as though she'd been bent over her work for some time.

“I’m sorry.  I forgot.  What time is it?

“It’s a little after noon.”

“I’ll just be a minute more here, I’m almost done.” 

Cynthia nodded and continued her journey around the room’s perimeter.

Big, heavy-duty bus bars clung to the wall on this side of the room.  Cynthia wondered what kind of experiments required such large quantities of direct current.  “What are you working on, Susan?” she asked.

“My research deals with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” Susan answered absently, scarcely glanced up from the instrument she seemed to be adjusting.

Cynthia waited a moment to see if her sister would say more, then responded playfully, “Well, I’m glad to hear that you scientists have some humility after all.  You always seem so arrogant, you know.”

Susan looked up at that.  “What do you mean?” she asked blankly.

“The uncertainly principle,” Cynthia said, smiling.  “I didn’t realize you could do things uncertainly.”

“No, no, Cynth.  Uncertainty Principle, not uncertainly."  Susan's attention went back to her instrument.  “It deals with the prediction that we can’t measure both a particle’s momentum and its location at the same time.  One of them has to be uncertain.”

Cynthia grimaced, knowing Susan couldn’t see, being turned away from her.  She started to explain she was just joking, but then realized Susan would probably think she was trying to cover up for being confused.

Her sister really needed to take herself less seriously.  Maybe get a boyfriend.  Recognize the presence of other people and not treat her own thoughts with such religious solemnity.

Cynthia recalled with a wince the last time she suggested Susan should get married.  “I’m a complete person,” she had said with sudden fury.  “And I don’t need to ride a big dumb ox to get where I’m going!”

“Mike’s not...” Cynthia had begun, but couldn’t finish, simply turning to leave.  Susan had immediately apologized, her anger dissipated by the hurt in Cynthia’s face, calling after her in tears.  But Cynthia had not wanted to hear it, and they hadn't spoken for a month afterward.

Cynthia, glad that misunderstanding was cleared away, wasn’t interested in a repeat performance.  She finished the last quarter of her tour, which took her along a bench supporting a couple of computers connected by cables to the towers in the middle of the room.  With her eyes on the puzzling towers, her foot hit something that skittered across the floor to end with a bump against the wall by the door.  Hoping she hadn’t broken something important, she scampered to retrieve it.  She looked around for a moment before finding a small cell phone behind the door, the flip-phone kind that Cynthia hadn’t seen in years.  So very Susan.

She wiped the dust from it, hoping that action erased any harm her blow did to the electronics, and returned it to the bench by the computers.

Susan came to join her then.  “All done.  What was that sound?”

“I’m afraid I kicked your phone into the wall,” Cynthia replied.  “It must have fallen to the floor.”

Susan picked the phone up and looked at it, obviously puzzled.  “It’s not mine.  I don’t keep one with me, certainly not at work.”

Cynthia raised her eyebrows.  Even Susan, private as she was, needed a cell phone.  “Who else works here in the lab?” Cynthia asked.  "Might they have left it?"

“Well, no one is supposed to, right now.  I have a graduate student, but he’s on vacation in Maine.  Some of the cleaning staff must have left it.”

Despite her words, Susan didn't look convinced by her own argument, proceeding to open the phone and poke at some buttons.  "Requires a pass key," she said.  "Odd." 

"Why odd?"  Cynthia came up beside her.

"No one should be in this lab.  Not without me knowing.  Why would they be here?"  Susan's eyes drifted to the tangle of wires and boxes that housed her research project and held there a moment, considering.

"Well, let's go," Susan said, returning the phone to the bench.  "I am hungry."