-CHAPTER 2-
The environment suit didn't fit very well. Too big in some places, too small in others.
But the view was spectacular.
The gaseous remnants of the system's star formed a patchwork nebula in the black sky above. The mix of colors reminded me of paint washing off a canvas, being readied for a new work of art.
The fine powder on the surface made walking difficult at first. I couldn't be sure of my footing in the stuff. I stopped a moment to kneel down, running my gloved fingers through the dust. It gave more resistance than I'd expected.
We all entered the facility the advance team had set up half a kilometer from the landing site, and shed our environment suits.
Lorente spoke to the others just out of my hearing, but after a few minutes, approached me.
"It appears we have work for you already."
He led me through a maze of quickly constructed corridors, though the plain gray panels covered a much older structure. This was confirmed when we stopped in front of a black metal wall.
My heart beat so rapidly in my chest I thought I might actually pass out. This definitely matched the Ancient Progenitor structures I'd seen before. Getting past the excitement of new discovery, I withdrew my ultraviolet emitter from my backpack. I pointed the small device at the dark metal.
"Are you sure that's wise?" Lorente asked. "Shouldn't you examine the wall first?"
"You didn't bring me here to stare at walls all day. What's important is whatever is behind this."
As I expected, a section of the wall glowed under the emitter's scrutiny. I placed my hand on the cool surface.
Several lines of the curved text of the Ancient Progenitor language glowed to life on the wall.
Lorente smiled. "It seems bringing you was the right choice after all."
I read the message left behind some five billion years ago. "Within are all the answers you seek."
I stepped back. "I don't like this."
"Why?"
"This isn't like them." I realized I was near hyperventilating. I felt a sudden urge to run, not knowing why.
"It sounds quite promising to me."
"How many archaeological sites have you been to where something like that is written on the entrance to a secret chamber?"
"Well... none, but there has to be some logical reason they would leave it here for us."
"That's what bothers me," I said, taking another step back. "They wanted us here, and me specifically, somehow knowing of my existence billions of years after they all died. But if they could look into the future, wouldn't they have found another way to stop their enemies rather than dying off on Hel'yra?"
"I had gotten the impression they felt they had no choice."
I turned to Lorente. "With the knowledge you have of time travel would you have simply given up like that?"
He stood silent a moment. "Yes, if my only other option was to change the timeline. It's fraught with too many unknowns which are often worse than the peril you seek to avoid."
"I don't trust them."
"Given what I've heard about your discoveries, I'm not surprised," he said. "Many societies often are a mixture of the best and worst possibilities. Expecting the Progenitors to be any different..."
"No, this isn't about their past. They're doing something here... and now." I knew how insane that sounded, but the feeling only grew as I stood there. "We should leave until we have better sensor readings of this site."
"I'm afraid we can't do that, Dr. Lau." He appeared almost angry with me. "My superiors expect us to learn the secrets locked away in this place, and we are going to find them."
I shook my head.
"However..." His features softened. "Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to settle in for a day."
"Thank you."
Just as I was about to turn to go, the text on the wall changed. A flood of multiple lines of writing appeared, flashing from one set to the next. I quickly pulled out a tricorder to capture it.
"Then again, if you want to stay."
I smiled. "I can't very well walk away from data like this."
He gave me a nod. "I'll send someone to keep you company. I have things I must attend to."
As he walked back up the way we'd come, fear welled up in my soul again and I almost called out to him, but I bit my tongue.
What the hell's the matter with me?
***
After some fifteen minutes, I was convinced the flashing text had begun repeating itself, and decided to take what I had to the lab. I couldn't help trying to gauge the reaction of the others, wondering if Lorente had mentioned my hysterics back in the cave to them.
I've probably convinced him I'm nothing but a frightened child.
I let the data from my tricorder enter the computer. For once I was happy for the busy work. I needed it to distract me from the feeling something had been peeling my skin off, inch by inch, back at that door.
I laughed at myself as the data started to display on the computer screen. Maybe it's not this place. Maybe it's him.
The "him" my mind was focused on walked into the lab. He stopped next to one of the empty racks set up to hold whatever artifacts we might find on this dead world.
"Are you okay?" Lorente asked.
"I'm fine," I said, not looking up from the computer.
"You seemed a little..."
"Jumpy?"
He smiled. "It appeared more than that."
"It was nothing."
"Based on all you've been through, I don't think you can be blamed for being a little apprehensive at the beginning of a new mission."
Maybe I'm afraid of what I'll discover this time and how it will disrupt the happy lives of people throughout the galaxy.
I fell into a chair and stared at the data streaming past on the computer.
Lorente pulled a chair over and sat across from me. "You want to talk about this?"
"I hardly know you."
"Perhaps that makes me the best person to talk to."
"There's nothing you can do."
"I heard about Falanis Seven."
I did my best not to react, but the way his expression softened told me I'd failed.
"You weren't responsible for their suicides."
"If I hadn't unearthed all I did about the Ancient Progenitors, they'd still be alive," I said. "I destroyed their reality."
"They were a colony of religious extremists. If it hadn't been the Progenitors, it would have been something else."
"They what?"
"You didn't know?"
"No..." I wanted to give myself absolution for this, but in the end, I knew it wasn't going to be. "It doesn't make any difference. The entire Federation knows they did this because of the information I discovered." I stood. "Anything else is me lying to myself so I can feel better."
"Sometimes people lie to themselves so they can feel worse."
"You think I want to feel like this?!"
"I think blaming yourself is how you take control of things in your life." He made his way to the door. "You'd rather feel bad than feel out of control."
***
I pulled the blankets tight around myself, but the cold forced itself past the covers, causing me to shiver.
I checked the chronometer next to the bed: 0200.
"Damn it."
I thrashed, tossing the blankets off, and marched over to the climate control. The heat was on, but obviously not working.
I grabbed a robe and after securing it over my shorts and t-shirt, marched out my door.
***
"Can I help you, Dr. Lau?" Carlos Lorente asked, rubbing the sleep from his barely open eyes.
"The heat is off in my quarters."
He waved me into his own. "I'll check it."
Lorente sat down at a terminal and activated the display. Images flashed past.
"Seems you are not the only one." He touched several controls. "I have reactivated the system. You should have heat in about fifteen minutes."
"Thank you," I said, my initial anger having been tempered by the immediacy of his response. "Sorry to barge in on you this late."
"My apologies for the problem. We certainly would not have wanted to have found you frozen in the morning."
"I've been through worse."
He turned and walked over to a couch in the small room. "In the meantime, would you like something to drink?" He pulled out two glasses.
"I should probably get back. It's late."
He poured a dark red liquid from an ornate flask. "No point in sitting in the cold, and as you woke me, the least you could do is give me the pleasure of your company for the next ten minutes. I so hate to drink alone."
I smiled and sat next to him as he offered a glass. I took a cautious sip.
"Very nice," I said. "What is it?"
"My father's finest 2349."
"Your family makes wine?"
Lorente gave a nod as he drank from his own glass.
Despite the lateness of the hour, his eyes were alive like none I'd seen before. I could fall for him so easily...
"What of your parents?" he asked.
"My father teaches Cultural History at the Academy and my mother is a physicist at Cal Tech."
"And rather than teach, you do field work. Interesting."
"I like field work."
"Is that the only reason?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "None that I'm aware of."
We sat in silence for nearly a minute.
"I want to apologize for my behavior," I said, looking down at my glass. "It wasn't very professional."
"We are all confronted by mysteries which shake our world-view. Perhaps this journey is one you were not prepared for."
"It's just another mission."
"But you said it yourself. The Ancient Progenitors appear to be doing something here. Being a part of something five billion years in the making would be difficult for even the most well-grounded of people."
"I'm not well-grounded?" I asked with a grin.
"You are someone who is proud of their accomplishments and their intellect, but rarely feel comfortable in your life."
"I don't think..."
"What comforts you?"
"What the hell does that mean?" I asked, about ready to walk out. I didn't like this way this conversation had shifted.
"When you face something outside your experience, when the universe unfolds differently than you expected, what do you turn to? What reassures you that things are as they should be?"
"I..." I had never thought about that before. Things just happened to me and I did my best to get through them. Though there had been one thing.
"I used to think my husband... ex-husband did that for me."
"But he turned out to be only human." Lorente set his glass down. "It is never fair to put that kind of burden on another person, let alone someone you claim to love."
"I did love him."
Lorente smiled. "I've never seen true love that was temporally bound, spoken of in the past tense."
My frustration intensified. What the hell was he trying to get at? "Sometimes things happen in a relationship."
"A relationship is a way of defining how two people interact. But how can love ever die?"
I took a long drink from my glass.
"More wine?" he asked.
"Please."
He poured, giving me a respite from our conversation, one I decided to take advantage of.
"So what comforts you?" I asked.
"Considering your background, I doubt you would understand."
"People tell me I'm fairly smart."
"Intelligence isn't the issue."
"Try me."
He poured more wine into his own glass. "My faith in God."
I couldn't help rolling my eyes in response.
He grinned. "I told you."
"It's not that I don't understand..."
"Without the experience, how could you?"
"Actually I find it rather humorous that an agent for Temporal Investigations would believe in any kind of god."
"I believe my work is a calling from God."
I tried to drown a laugh in another drink of wine.
"You don't believe God can call someone to a certain path in life?" He watched me a moment. "Or is it belief in God that is the problem?"
"With all you've seen how can you believe in a single intelligence that directs the course of the universe?"
"It is because of what I've seen that I believe."
I shook my head, but pressed on to keep the conversation off of me. "Were you raised in a religious home?"
"My mother made certain the Church was an important part of my upbringing."
"Most people who mention 'the Church' are usually Catholic," I said. "The only question is Universalist or Plures Vox Vocis?"
"Universalist," he said. "I find it difficult to see how one can claim to be Catholic and stand against the Pope."
"Back in the mid twenty-first century the question was which Pope."
"The truth won out."
"I suppose that's one way to look at it." I felt more at ease now, glad we had turned from my beliefs to his religion. Odd that I'd actually felt at ease discussing someone's religion. "Aside from the question of who sits in Rome, how can you be so sure that what you're doing is a calling from God?"
He smiled, resting back in the couch. "The happiest day of my life was the first time I took holy communion. I remember it as clearly as this moment we're sharing. There was a clarity, a perfection I experienced."
"So from that moment you knew you wanted to be a Temporal Investigator?"
"No," he said. "At first I believed my life was to be that of a priest."
"I can't picture you..."
"I get a lot of that."
"I assume something happened to change the course of your life."
"At the age of twelve, my mother, against my father's wishes, had me sent to a school on Clongowes Nine to begin my studies. Despite my father's boisterous protestations, I wanted to go there more than live life itself.
"But my third month, my theology professor, a man very much dedicated to tradition for its own sake, decided I needed to be punished for not having that morning's assignment ready. I had explained how I had been deathly ill the previous evening, a high fever, the emptying of my bowels..."
I frowned.
"Sorry."
"No please, go on."
Lorente continued, "Father Balbus insisted I hold out my hand. I knew full well his favorite method of punishment stood ready, a flat piece of wood covered in hard leather. I'd seen him apply it to my fellow classmates on various occasions, and had I truly been lazy as he insisted, I would have gladly submitted to the punishment."
"Monstrous."
"I saw it that way, but for a very different reason. The unfairness of it seemed to fly in the face of everything I believed. How could this man, who before then I had respected without question as a holy man of God, how could he be so unjust? How could he punish me for something beyond my control?"
"So what happened?"
"I refused to hold out my hand. He hauled me up out of my desk, and tried to pull my hand out. He ordered me to stand still, which I did. Then pulled again at my hand, his own rising into the air, the dreaded staff in motion to inflict misplaced justice." He turned from me. "I don't know what possessed me, but I lashed out, shoving him away. He flew backwards, slamming into the window, shattering it, and falling three stories to the ground below outside."
"Did he..."
"No, but his back was broken and took three weeks to heal," Lorente said with a look of pain in his eyes. "My parents were called, discussions upon discussions. Father Balbus from his hospital bed insisted I stay so that he might teach me the need for obedience, but my father would have none of that. He spoke of legal action against the school for their methods of discipline. The school countered with threats of assault charges against me. In the end, I was sent to a psychological hospital for a year, then back to my home on Earth."
"That must have been hard for you."
"At the time it was, but looking back, I knew it was how my life was to be." He laughed. "How our perspective so informs our perception."
"But to lose your life's dream must have been devastating."
"For a year or so, yes. But back at school on Earth, I found I had an aptitude for mathematics, and a keen interest in temporal mechanics. My third year at Cornell, I was approached by an agent from Temporal Investigations, and here I sit."
"I didn't know they recruited from universities."
"Some of the greatest physicists you've never heard of are in Temporal Investigations, their work shrouded in the necessary secrecy of protecting the timeline."
I finished my wine and set the glass down on the table. "I wish I could believe that's all you did. That there aren't things that secrecy hides that have nothing to do with protecting reality."
He leaned forward, looking into my eyes. "You have my word that is all it does in my case. What others may do, I cannot say."
Being that close to him, I could feel my heart pounding, as if something buried deep wanted a life it had never been allowed. "I don't know why, but I believe you."
"You see," he said. "Belief isn't that difficult to come by."
"In some areas of life it isn't. But others..." If I didn't leave soon... I stood. "I should be going."
He rose from the couch as well. "Thank you for the company."
Once out in the corridor, I could breathe again. I hadn't been attracted to a man like this since...
I got my bearings and headed back to my quarters. A portion of rationality returned to my mind, and I realized my trust in Lorente would last only until my professional judgment conflicted with his orders. "Same old story," I whispered to myself.
***
The next morning, I felt none of the apprehension of the previous day when approaching the metal wall where the Ancient Progenitor text had appeared. I caught Lorente watching me closely as I scanned the wall.
No doubt he was worried about the mission. Though I hoped some small part of his attention was a more general interest in me. Probably a false hope.
I pushed that aside as the tricorder confirmed my suspicions. "This is a door."
Lorente nodded. "Can you open..."
I had already touched the spots on the wall which would grant us entrance. An opening formed as Lorente's words faded.
"After you?" I asked.
"I suppose you don't intend to wait until we have a chance to run a sensor sweep of this next chamber."
"There are secrets here, and I intend to find them," I said, walking past him.
We entered a small chamber, twenty feet in diameter, and as best as I could tell, perfectly circular. The walls were the dark bluish metal I had come to expect with Ancient Progenitor sites, but aside from that there were no other doors, control panels, or structures of any kind in the room.
"I can't say I am impressed," Lorente said.
"Don't worry," I said, activating my tricorder. "The Ancient Progenitors always manage to surprise..."
A small tube dropped out of the eight foot high ceiling and emitted a bright blue energy beam in our direction.
Lorente raised a weapon I'd not noticed before.
"No!" I said, advancing through several different frequency ranges on the tricorder. "It's only a scanner."
He lowered his hand, but appeared ready to fight if the need arose.
"Someone is trigger happy."
"As you said, the Ancient Progenitors are up to something here. It is best we be prepared for any eventuality."
The scanning beam narrowed and slid up and down my body. Then as abruptly as it had appeared, it deactivated and retracted back into the ceiling.
"It may have been seeking to protect this place against their enemies," I told him as I returned to my own scanning.
"The Volmvas."
I smiled. "You've been reading my mission reports."
"One has to keep oneself occupied when on long spaceflights."
I felt a low throbbing in the floor and looked about the chamber. In the very center of the room, a circular platform three feet wide rose several inches.
"An entrance to another section?" Lorente asked.
"I don't think so," I told him.
The chamber filled with light from the platform. A figure appeared.
"It's a recording." I adjusted my tricorder to capture everything.
"Mei... Wan..."
My heart raced upon hearing my name spoken by the image of the female Ancient Progenitor.
Again, "Mei... Wan..."
"How could she have known you were here?" Lorente asked.
A thousand explanations crowded into my mind, but I pushed aside the more insane ones. I didn't want to sink into the paranoia creeping just below my thoughts. "The scan... when we entered."
"But that would mean they have information on you."
"That's your department."
He frowned. "But you're the expert on these people."
"That just means I know more than anyone else." I made an adjustment to the tricorder. "In this case that doesn't count for much."
The ghost-like figure waved her hand in the air, urging me forward.
I took a step.
"I wouldn't."
"I know it's a risk, but they wanted me to find this."
"Yesterday that scared you."
"I know." I felt something holding me back. But I was determined to not let my fears get the best of me as they had the previous day. I could learn so much. "What if this is some information transferal system. It might download all their knowledge into my mind."
"What if the system isn't compatible with human physiology?"
"If they expected me, specifically, then they probably know what my brain can and can't handle."
"That's a huge assumption."
"We won't learn anything just standing here. She wants me to come nearer."
I walked toward the holographic projection.
"Let my people check out this device first."
"We don't know if it will work more than once. We have to take the risk."
"Okay," Lorente said. "But at the first sign of trouble, I'm pulling you out of there."
I stepped onto the platform and into the light.
