47 (FINAL CHAPTER)
The ride in the Security Command RibCar was slow-going. There had to be a half million Martians just along the ribbon route before it ended a kilometer short of the Arsia Mons. Even crawling as ploddingly slow as it did, it was a miracle to sensitechnology the RibCar didn’t injure anyone. Along the way, rarely, because that was by how much the Martians outnumbered the humans, a man, woman, or child would be passed. Atilano was counting, however, and when he gave up he was into the hundreds of humans and knew it would end up in the thousands. In fact, of the colony, most of them.
What invitation could they have gotten to inspire such a monumental migration? It couldn’t have been some final religious frenzy over the Apocalypse, because few people knew what the ṺberCollider had wrought.
Dr. Kubacki took over manual control of the RibCar when the ribbon ended, and within fifteen minutes they were at Arsia’s lodestone rock.
“Do you feel it, Mr. President?” Kubacki asked.
“Feel what?” Atilano answered. Friday smiled with three mouths.
“Just feel. That feeling. Like we could be nowhere else but her.” Atilano considered. It was true, but it was not unpleasant; it was mysterious but not obsessive; it was alien, but not really Martian. The three got out of the RibCar.
There were endless crowds centering on the lodestone. Yes, pilgrimage was the right word. What next caught Atilano’s eye in the large crowd was a small child in, of all things, a princess costume. There were many other children with their parents, but that’s how he noticed the Mickals and their daughter, and also Drs. Cooke and Niemann, and General Llorente. They were all standing together.
“Have we missed anything?” Atilano asked Friday.
“No,” Friday answered, then added, “they couldn’t start without me.”
To Atilano’s amazement, Friday gently pushed his way through the throngs until he could lift himself onto the lodestone rock. He stood tall, going into full unlouvered array, but it wasn’t menacing at all. There he held out his akimbo arms to request quiet. The multitudes complied. All was quiet. He raise his eyes to the sky.
The Sun dimmed!
Then it flickered. Winds began to blow softly, and a deep bass Sonotome note brewed, coming from the northwest.
A brightness began around the lodestone rock, then began circling it. The radiant spin completed a loop, encircling the lodestone, and then spun rapidly around it. It was not a color, but its brightness was striking. It began to grow and the crowd fanned out. It was soon nearly fifty meters wide, encircling a space devoid of anyone except Friday atop the rock.
Slowly it rose, spread, and then within a moment covered the entire sky. A deep note, albeit slightly higher pitched than the sustained Sonotome, suddenly sounded, and the bright sky exploded into a burst of the most extraordinary colors, accompanied by a pan-tonal chord of divine musicality.
When the sound faded and the remnants of the skyward upheaval dissipated, everyone saw.
As if in orbit right above Mars sat some unknown world. It was so close the lights of its cities could be seen easily. Almost immediately another orb perched, another world obviously inhabited, by the similar artificial lighting seen on its strange continents. Over to the side appeared a double planet, exhibiting a communing ribbon of commerce between them, a communication bridge. A Bifröst.
Everyone was looking up, this way and that. The impossible parade of these worlds seemed to go on forever. Endless series of inhabited planets, moons, and planetary systems bobbed impossibly right overhead. They overlapped themselves.
“Do you think,” Mare asked her mother, “that there’s one up there just for me?”
“Looks like there could be,” Deniz answered her child sweetly.
“A princess, finally,” she whispered into her mother’s ear.
Beautiful worlds of all colors and sizes hung overhead. There were solid ones, striped ones, calico ones. There were breathtaking ring arrays and dazzling collections of moons. There were ocean planets and worlds dotted with innumerable seas.
The panorama went on and the audience remained speechless. After about an hour, however, a small patch of dark sky appeared, dotted with stars. With a slow start but then a steadily increasing acceleration, the starry sky began to grow. The myriad worlds, each promising the exciting certainty of life and civilization, began to rise higher in the sky and grew smaller until they each had considerable space between them. Soon they disappeared altogether, as if returning to their respective stars that shined so innocently in the Martian sky.
The Martians and humans turned away from this sky and once again looked toward the lodestone rock. There they saw the creature standing next to Friday.
But seeing had nothing to do with it.
There began for the humans an entirely new sense, as different from hearing as sight was, as different from smell as touch was. It was a sense heretofore unknown and for which words had not yet been invented. Humans had always had the capability, but it had awaited a spark.
The spark took, in a long dormant portion of the pineal gland.
And it was with this new sense the humans there were made aware of the visitor sharing the lodestone rock with Friday. In its presence the men, women, and children excreted an entirely new neurotransmitter in their brains. In its presence humans had never before been so much at peace.
And happy.
Back at the hospital wing of the Cultural Psych building, a woman who had been certain she would never, ever be happy again, slowly began a smile that started there but extended to a place and time well beyond her.
Back at the caldera, the being that was beside Friday enjoyed being sensed, and felt the excitement and exhilaration of yet another species being made aware, being allowed to come into the fold.
President Atilano finally fought away the total consummation of his new sense to a point where he could venture a question. He approached the lodestone rock.
“What just happened?” he asked. “Did the chronoton field collapse?”
The mysterious, exquisite being replied in a mysterious, exquisite way, but the humans’ new sense was not yet matured enough to discern any meaning beyond that of vague, ethereal dispatches. Friday answered for the being in tandem, the explanations from both of them simultaneous, but now clear.
“No,” the being answered through Friday. “No collapse. There was never to be a collapse. Not like you expected, anyway.”
“All of…all of…that,” Atilano said, waving his hand at the sky.
“New friends for you,” Friday translated.
“Where—what? Was the field collapse an incorrect prediction?”
“Again, no. Not of itself. It was a prediction for you.”
“And what did it predict? For us?”
“Whether you would join.”
“Join what?”
The being waved at the sky as Atilano had. “This,” Friday said for him.
Atilano turned around to see all of the Martians, as far as he could see, in co-existence with all of the humans there. But the co-existence was appreciated with his new sense. “Are we still in Prime Time?” he asked.
“No, you’re not,” answered the being through Friday. He elaborated. “No Time Prime anymore, no temporal reconciliation, certainly not at the level that is nothing more than child’s play.” Friday looked at Mare, who had a front row place for all of this. “No offense,” he said to her.
“Of course not,” she answered.
“You bring the best your world had to offer other worlds,” Friday said back to Atilano, then, as Friday, turned again to Mare to launch seven perfect smiles, and he said to her, “So you are ready.”
“This was a test?” Atilano asked.
“We do not test. Tests are easy. We search and knowing what we have found is the hard part.”
“And you found us.”
“Yes, even trapped in time like you were. You were trapped in a one-way arrow, but it was not a straight arrow; it was a maze. Navigating this one-way path relies on survival, self-preservation, competition, and domineering ambitions. Condemning such things has always been difficult for you. Some very special persons have pointed the way. You know who they are.”
“Very difficult,” Atilano agreed.
“Difficult, but doable, it seems. You were easy to miss, but we found you.”
“Sure sounds like a test to me,” Atilano argued.
“No. It is simply what you did. What you did was on the path to us, but it was the same as the path to us. What you did is part of your timeline—always having been done, always will have been done. But that is not accurate either. You are off the time line now. What you did—and I err in using the past tense, of course—what you did is intimately connected with your path to joining. Now, you have always been a part.”
“Of what? Joined what?”
“Time Immemorial,” Friday said for the being. “All of the world civilizations you saw just now, just a mere handful of the billions that exist, are your new brothers and sisters in co-existence. All of their time paths have been synchronized into a wealth of coexistence. You are embarking on a fantastic journey for your kind. Soon, when you mature—and you have already started—you will no longer think of this journey as something ongoing, but as something that is, always has been, always will be. In a singularity. With you. As it should be.
“You brought Friday and his kind to your time on Mars. They were not in the past, but living with us, along with all of the other enlightened worlds. The uniqueness of the ferropods, however—their chronotons allowing them to persist from your past to your present, was unusual and interesting, and their rejoining their hosts was the happy accident that allowed you to go forward. It was not until they re-joined their hosts that they could help you go forward. But temporal reconciliation was such a colossal underachievement on your part. We bring you now to all of the cultures that have ever been and that ever will be, previously separated by eons of segregation and unreachable distances of separation. That, my friend, is the collapse. Your new singularity. Consider this your invitation; this time we invite you.” Friday held up one of his akimbo arms as a gesture of emphasis for the being, and the gesture was seen across the expanse of the crowds, extending far away.
“Then,” Atilano surmised, “it was wise that we didn’t turn off the collider.”
“It was fair that you did not. That is how you were found. The fairness of your reason was a beacon for us. Welcome!” He paused, allowing Friday to multi-smile.
Atilano heard the roar of approval among the thousands within earshot which then traveled to the millions beyond them, a rolling communiqué that thundered to the periphery of the multitudes kilometers away. The caldera began echoing the sound until the reflective differentials of the rock faces, crags, cliffs, and precipices syncopated them enough to create a sonotome of its own. After it peaked, it took a long moment for it to fade.
“I didn’t see Earth in the sky above,” Atilano pointed out.
“No, not the one you are from. It is not there,” Friday said. “Not the one you know by your reckoning. Another one—you’ll recognize it soon; another one that finally reaches
Flagrancht.”
“In the future?” Atilano asked, and the Martians around him laughed weirdly in cultural politeness.
“Even the terraformed Venus will be with us before Earth will, and so they are both there now.”
“Venus was one of the worlds we saw?”
“Yes. And other close neighbors—planets, moons.”
“Welcome to the solar system,” Atilano muttered in resignation. “I guess you beat us to it.” Then he asked Friday, “Can people from Earth come to us here on Mars?”
“Once the Earth is in Flagrancht. You did not see the Earth in the sky. Do you think they can any longer see you?”
“You are no longer of Earth,” said the being. Friday’s co-utterances were hardly necessary now, as every Martian and every man, woman and child understood clearly what the mysterious, beautiful being said next. “Your Earth is lost in time and space. Until…”
“You belong here now,” Friday said affectionately. “Mr. President,” Friday spoke as himself, “you have all of those worlds to learn and visit. We will help you.” His large eyes lifted up toward the horizon. He outstretched his akimbo arms. The being next to him began to glow, as if proudly.
“Welcome to the speed of is,” the being proclaimed.
“And people
people
people of Earth,” Friday raised his voices, but he was interrupted.
“People of Mars!” the Princess of Mars shouted. “All of us!”
“Yes, people
people
people of Mars,” Friday corrected himself and looked at Mare in the crowd. She beamed back at him and what they exchanged needed no fiberoptics, superconductivity, or photons. It was impossible to tell where the transition was between Flagrancht and love.
In extravagant harmony the Martian proudly proclaimed, “Welcome
welcome
welcome to the universe
universe
universe
universe
universe
universe
universe!”
♂ The End