New Decameron Eighty: Emmet A. O'Brien (Patreon)

Vega

by Emmet A. O'Brien

When I returned to active duty after the Rossem inquiry I volunteered for the Eisenhower contact mission because Eisenhower was a very straightforward terrestrial planet, mostly ocean like a hundred others, and I wanted something simple.  Half an hour after I arrived there the universe changed.

"I've got gengineered maize, lots of it," I said.  "Looks like a runaway, ten times what those little villages need to eat."  We'd have to get that under control before it overran any more indigenous biota.  Depressingly, the people of Eisenhower probably thought of it as prosperity.

Creve was squinting at a different set of results.  "I see three active fusion reactors, matching the profiles _Shosuke_ recorded.  One in each continent and one in the islands."  Locations popped up on a map in front of me.  Beneath us, the land fell away, and we passed into night over open ocean.  "Bussard 7a, all three of them, staggering along on their last legs.  Looks like they've been going a hundred years without tuning.  You reckon there's any higher tech surviving, or are the locals just sacrificing goats to them?"

I didn't reply; he didn't expect me to.  We were both in foul moods about the idiotic new minimal-impact contact protocols.  Four people for a whole new planet is tight enough without insisting we handle the initial evaluation in independent pairs, as if there was any possible accident that could _both_ take two of us out _and_ leave the ship and the others intact enough to salvage the mission.  At least there'd been no argument about who paired up with whom: Nakhti Creve's been one of my best friends since I was four years old, and we'd worked several other contact situations together.  But we were still left skimming through a huge volume of input, and constantly verifying it against the feed from the other cabin.  Massive amounts to take in without a moment to figure out which bits were important.  I swore to myself, and composing scathing reviews of the new protocol in the tiny corner of my mind that wasn't overwhelmed.

Creve sighed and I turned my attention back to the ocean below.  In our low fast orbit, sunrise came soon enough, and shortly after, the western end of the equatorial continent.  We knew what the initial Explorer mission to the Eisenhower system had seen on long-range scan, and waited half in dread for confirmation; and there it was, a lump of rock like a misplaced hill in the middle of the alkaline desert, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, bracketed by weapon installations that could have blown us out of the sky.

"Ralkhuri nesthive," I said formally, for the logs.  "No indication of activity at this time."  Ralkhuri have wings; even humans raised in zero-gee don't think in three dimensions as naturally.  This far out on the fringes of human exploration, the location of Ralkhuri ships and stations is a very partial guide to which volumes of space they consider _theirs_.  A single nesthive on Eisenhower probably meant only an investigative presence and that they did not intend to claim the world outright.  Probably.

It was at that point that the high shrill of a crash-priority message cut across the cabin, as the frame we had come here through appeared above our horizon again, a tumbling metallic tetrahedron.  A drone had just emerged from it, barely a metre long.  Transfer speed between frames depends largely on the mass of the craft being transferred; this drone was about as small as frames can handle, which meant someone wanted us to have this message _now_.

Creve confirmed our location and identity, and the drone downloaded its message via tight-beamed comms laser.  "I've never seen most-urgent codes like this before."  He flipped them into the Grid for the rest of us to see.  Neither had I, not even in immediate life-or-death situations.  I ran a nervous doublecheck, but there were no unexpected supernovas or imminent gamma-ray bursts nearby.

Creve had gone ahead with the message, and his voice when he spoke again was low and serious.  "Corin, you need to see this.  It's about Rossem."

I plunged deeper into ship Grid, feeling slightly sick.  I'd only just finished giving evidence at the Rossem inquiry, an ordeal almost as gruelling as the Rossem mission itself, and the thought of being dragged back into that _now_ made my stomach hurt.  But when I saw who it was I knew this was an entirely different scale of bad.  Valentine Glass was the Compact's senior ambassador to the Hegemony, a thin woman with pale spotted skin and tightly frizzled red hair.  She had not made an announcement for general release in the century since the Arachne Treaty; generally the better her work was going the less we heard from her.  Her face was not made for smiling, and she was not smiling now.

"Sixteen hours ago, human warships in the Rossem system violated Compact space and killed a number of Compact citizens."  Her Latin was crisp and emotionless.  "The Compact have responded with a minimal-force defensive intervention in accordance with the provisions of the Arachne Treaty, taking effect thirty-eight years in the past.  The engines of the colony ships that brought humans to the Rossem system have been disabled just before beginning deceleration.  No lives were lost in this action.  Both ships remain intact and have proceeded into interstellar space undisturbed - "

They'd redacted history.  In the new universe, no human being had ever set foot on the planet Rossem.  Which meant that most of the last three years of my life had, abruptly, no longer happened.

"What does she mean, they changed the past?" said Creve, incredulous.  "You're still here."

The message popped up a visual of the blobby, roughly spherical volume of human space.  Overlaid on it was a precise sphere centred around Rossem, out on the fringe a hundred and fifty lights from Vega.  Thirty-eight Vega years was one hundred and twenty Earth years, which meant that the redacted history, expanding from the point of their intervention at the speed of light, now covered a sphere a hundred and twenty lights in radius.  I was outside that volume for the moment, but the wavefront would continue to advance.

It would make very little difference to most people; the vast number of Hegemony citizens who knew of Rossem only from a handful of news articles would barely notice when that background detail went away.  But I'd been there from the beginning.  I'd been there when the frame in orbit around Rossem was disabled, and I'd been stuck in the middle of their civil war for the half-year it took the Ranger _Tianlang_ to reach the system under its own power.  Those experiences had changed me as much as anything in my adult life.  Having them redacted would _erase_ me.

"I'm outside the timewave," I said.  "It's behaving exactly the way we were told the things would.  So long as I stay this side of it, nothing will happen to me."

Creve looked grim.  "If this is right, four or five generations on Rossem have suddenly never been born.  I don't understand.  How could any human weapon possibly harm a Compact citizen?"

I was already digging deeper into the message for the answer.  "A squad of warships from the Plains tapped a buried deposit of organic material on a moon of one of the system's gas giants.  It was made out of... it was sentient beings.  Oh, absent Earth.  The Plainsmen killed their _children_."

"Surely they can't have known," said Creve.

"Rossem Plainsmen are human-supremacists, Creve," I said bitterly.  "And scorching idiots besides.  They might well have known about non-human intelligences, they just wouldn't have _cared_.  Or really believed in aliens no human agency can oppose."  To my mind, Rossem should have been more than enough proof that low-impact contacts don't work; if we'd sent in a Ranger with three thousand people and fifty thousand androids and _enforced_ an end to their nasty little conflict, none of this would have happened. 

"Even the Compact have to obey the law of conservation of energy, don't they?  They can't rewrite the entire universe." 

"Who outside this galaxy would be able to tell?" I said.  "The timewave can dissipate to nothing once it makes no difference."

"Oh, Corin."  Creve reached out, his hand gentle on my upper arm, offering comfort but careful not to presume in such a moment.  "I am so very, very sorry."

I was far from sure how I felt, myself, trying to grasp the scale of the loss.  Any Rossem veterans who had been closer than a hundred and twenty lights to the planet as of - I checked the timestamps - sixteen hours ago were gone.  Almost all my colleagues on Shaoxian Lin's team of ancient-West specialists from Eight Immortals had been inside that boundary, people I had trained with and worked with for much of my career.  Daljit Brezhnev was gone.  Jens Macallan was gone.  Eva Maria Lund was gone.  David - I didn't want to think about David.  In the new history, they probably all still existed, living happy, fulfilling lives in a Hegemony that had never heard of Rossem.  But _my friends_ were gone.  More than half of human space was lost to me, more than half my life on the other side of the timewave.

I picked out the Osiris system.  Creve was from Osiris; it was where we had met, all those years ago, my first fostering and the end of my childhood.  A universe without Rossem was no threat to him, he'd never been within fifty lights of the place.  I tried to be grateful that he was here with me, but could not help thinking that the worst that world's erasure from history could do to _his_ life was wipe out a handful of evenings of me crying on his shoulder.

"Corin?"

I waved him away, looking more closely at the display.  The wave of alteration was sweeping across the heavily populated core of human space.  Eight Immortals was lost to me, St. Patrick's Cascade was gone, the timewave was halfway across the Anziku Reach and by the end of the year that would be gone too.  It was almost easier to count what was left.  My brother Rajendra on Tamoanchan, fifty-two lights outside that surface of existential uncertainty.  The Chandrasekhar lab on Arachne, a hundred and fifteen.  And Eisenhower, where I was right now, was seventy-two lights from the front.  That meant just under twenty-three Vega years until the timewave got here.

"Corin!  We have a chemical rocket signature climbing out of the atmosphere, and it's headed this way."

_What?_  I blinked the Grid away, focusing back on the material world.  "What did you say?" 

"This peaceful world of low-tech subsistence farmers," Creve said, "has just launched a missile at us."

*****************************************

"Oh, exciting," Maya says.

"No food," he says. "But great ideas. I love the idea of the changing the past and the consequences rippling out at light speed, and needing to keep ahead of that time wave."

"I wonder what's up with the planet?" Maya asks.

"You'll have to wait," he says.

"How long?"

"That's not actually scheduled yet, so goodness knows."

'I never heard of Emmet O'Brien. If there are people as good as that that nobody's heard of, there's something wrong with the system." Maya says. The cat yawns, and Maya catches it and yawns.

"Bed time," he says. "Do you want a last piece of cake before we settle down?"

They go upstairs and eat cake in the semi darkness of the library, then wash their hands and settle down to sleep. The cat comes and curls up with Maya and she tries to count how many days they have been there. She has entirely lost count. More than a week, surely, she thinks. Then at last she falls asleep.

In the morning the cat wakes her as he gets up and stalks off, leaving a cold spot on Maya's back. She gets up. There's no sign of him where he had been curled up, but she knows where to find him now. She opens his book and reads "Orsino, Duke of Illyria, is holding the head of a dying mare." She looks up and there he is, a mug of coffee in one hand and his space-pouch of coffee, full, in the other. 

"You went in to get coffee?" she asks, accusingly.

He looks guilty. "It's better than just waiting about hoping to find some. There's always food, sooner or later, but I really need coffee in the morning. I've got that coffee machine all set up now, and so it's easy."

"All right," she says. She doesn't mind now she knows how to get him back. She fills her water glass and settles down. "Shall we read?"

"Yes, we've got a short story from the thriller writer Jon Evans," he says."The End of the Worldcon."

And they read.