End of an Era

melded smoothly into ceilings. Nor were there any corridors. Rather, rooms were honeycombed together, each with passageways to the adjacent ones not just on the same level but also above and below.

Most of the passages were permanently open—I supposed that beings without individuality had no need for privacy. A few chambers did have valve-like coverings; apparently those rooms were used for storage.

We saw dozens of brachiators, some walking, others swinging from stiff hoops that seemed to grow out of the roofs. There were also a couple of troodons on board, and countless Het jelly mounds pulsing about freely. The ship was cooler than anywhere we’d been since we’d arrived in the Mesozoic, and it was filled with a faint odor like wet newsprint.

“It’s tremendous,” Klicks said, gesturing about him. “When do we take off?”

The brachiator, its coppery coils of fur looking almost black in the faint light, made a facial gesture. “We did take off a short time ago,” it said in its thin voice.

“Incredible,” said Klicks. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“Why would you want to feel anything during flight?”

Klicks looked at the creature’s sausage-shaped eyes with their disquieting double pupils. “That’s a very good question,” he said with a grin. “Where are the windows?”

“Windows?”

“Portholes. Glassed-in areas. Places where you can see outside.”

“We have nothing like that.”

“You mean we don’t get to feel anything and we don’t get to see anything?” Klicks sounded sad. “And I thought Virtual Reality World was a rip-off…”

“We can let you look out if you desire so,” said the brachiator.

“How?”

“There are eyes on the surface of the sphere. You merely have to meld with one.”

“Meld?”

“Join minds with the ship. Share what it sees.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Does that mean more jelly in the head?”

“Yes,” said the brachiator, “but not much.”

I shuddered.

“We can enter you much less uncomfortably now,” continued the Het. “We have a rough map of how your brains work. The area for processing visual information is located here.” The brachiator arched its back so that one of its manipulatory appendages could reach me. A pink tentacle tapped the rear of my head near the base of my skull. I jumped at the touch.

“Uh, no thanks,” I said.

“Oh, come on, Brandy,” said Klicks. “It’s not going to kill you.” He turned to the brachiator. “What do I do?”

“Just sit down here. Put your back to the wall. Yes, like that.” Behind Klicks’s head, I saw some blue jelly seeping out of the wall. There must have been Hets throbbing their way throughout the structure of the ship. The jelly touched his nape just below the hairline. That was lower down than the visual cortex—oh, I see. It was going to enter the braincase through the foramen magnum. Clever.

“Are you okay?” I said to Klicks.

“Fine. It feels weird, but it’s not painful. It’s like—my God! That’s beautiful! Brandy, you have to see this!”

“What?”

“We’re kilometers high! It’s breathtaking.”

Against my better judgment, I sat down next to him, my back against the wall. I felt something warm and wet on my neck, but Klicks was right. It wasn’t painful. Then I experienced a strange pressure along my cervical vertebrae. The brain itself has no internal sensors, and I could feel nothing as the tendril passed into it. Everything went black and for a panicky moment I thought that the Het had accidentally wrecked my visual cortex, rendering me blind. But before my panic grew too severe, something else was in my brain, another’s thoughts, feelings, aspirations. They were dim shapes at first, shadowy forms, ghosts from somebody else’s past. Slowly they took on substance. A black man, his face, although contorted by rage, strangely familiar. It was like Klicks’s face, only different. Narrower, the eyes closer together, a scar on the forehead, a sparse beard. It hit me then: George Jordan, Klicks’s father, looking thirty years younger than I’d ever seen him. He had liquor on his breath and he was towering over me, a leather belt in his hand. Oh, God, no! Stop it! Stop it! Please, Daddy…

Blackness again, the connection broken, the Het linking us perhaps realizing that it had made an error. Had Klicks seen into my mind as deeply as I had seen into his? What did he now know about me?

Suddenly I was falling through space, ground over my head, my body plummeting toward the stars. Faster and faster, falling, falling, falling…

The image flipped, the Het, I guess, realizing that the human mind normally inverts what it sees, since images focus upside down in our eyes. I was rising now, the ground receding beneath me, thin clouds rushing by, the sky growing nearer, blacker, clearer, colder.

Space. Christ, the things were taking us right up into orbit. Stars wheeled overhead, the Milky Way a thick band spinning like a bejeweled windmill’s blade across my field of vision. It was magnificent: uncountable points of brightness piercing the dark, red and yellow and white and blue, strings of Christmas-tree lights across the firmament.

Rising over the limb of the Earth was the moon, gloriously gibbous, almost too bright to look at. It was still showing us a large part of what would someday be its backside. As we raced ahead, tiny Trick swept into view, too, here, above the atmosphere, cratering clearly visible on its face.

Soon the panorama was cut off from left to right, unbroken blackness swallowing the stars. We were swinging around to look down on Earth’s nightside. But it wasn’t completely dark—flickering lights were visible here and there. Forest fires, probably sparked by lightning storms.

We rushed toward the dawn, a glow clearly defining the sharp curve of the Earth’s surface. Within minutes the sun was up again, a hot fire illuminating the globe.

Broadly speaking, Earth looked much as it did from modern space photos: a blue ball covered with twists of cottony whiteness. My eyes finally got used to the scale of the planet and began to make sense of the partially obscured continents. Their shapes had changed over the millennia, but I knew enough about tectonic drift to easily figure out which was which. There was Antarctica, a tiny white splotch much smaller than it is in the twenty-first century. Just splitting from it was Australia, turned at an odd angle. India was moving freely across the Tethys Ocean on its way toward its inevitable impact with Asia, the event that would push up the Himalayas. South America had only just begun to pull away from Africa, the perfect jigsaw-puzzle fit of their coastlines obscured slightly by a seaway that ran from where the Sahara Desert would one day be to the Gulf of Guinea. Another giant seaway, broken only by a long north-south archipelago, separated Europe from Asia. Between South America and North America was open ocean, thousands of times wider than the Panama Canal would one day be. Still, the Gulf of Mexico was clearly visible, and—

Christ.

Jesus Christ.

“Klicks!” I shouted.

“What?” said his voice.

“Look at the Gulf of Mexico!”

“Yeah?”

“Look at it!”

“I don’t—”

“It’s all on dry land,” I said, “not half-submerged as it will be in our time, but, look—it’s already there.”

“What are you ta—oh. Oh, my God…” Klicks’s voice was full of astonishment.

“Het!” I called out, wishing I had a name to use. “Het! Any Het!”

“Yes?” came the emaciated voice of a brachiator.

“How long has that crater been there?”