End of an Era

said.

“Exactly. Bits of programmed instructions, instructions to take over living matter and convert the cells of that matter to producing more viruses. They are always harmful to their hosts.”

“I suppose.”

“They’re harmful to their hosts by definition. What’s good for the virus is never good for the cells it has invaded.”

“And you’re saying that if the Hets are viral, they must have a psychology based on this?”

“I’m not saying it could only have been that way. But in this particular evolutionary case, yes, that’s the way it turned out: the Hets are conquest-driven. You heard what they said about the rosette of stars we saw. ‘It galls us.’ They hate the fact that there’s some life out there that they can’t reach, can’t subjugate.”

“I don’t know, Brandy. You’re going out on a limb.”

“It’s the truth, damn it. The Het told me so.”

“In exactly those words?”

“No, not exactly.”

“You know, Brandy, you’re picking the wrong guy to tell this to. This viral-nature stuff sounds a lot like you’ve made up your mind that the Hets are inferior, and are trying to use science to justify that belief. That sort of thinking did my people a lot of harm over the years.”

“But, look,” I said, “you’re alive.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean you’re a living creature. So am I. Black people, white people, all people, all animals, all plants. We’re all alive.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But viruses aren’t. They’re not alive, not in the scientific sense. They have to conquer if they are to exist at all. That’s their only purpose. It’s not a question of potentials one way or another. It’s what they do. The one and only thing they can do. To be a virus is to be bent on conquest—by definition.”

“It’s an interesting theory, but—”

“It’s more than a theory. I saw their war games.”

“Whatever you saw, you must be misinterpreting it.”

It was frustrating as hell. I’d recorded the whole thing on my MicroCam, but had no way to play the images back until we returned to the twenty-first century. “I tell you it’s true,” I said. “They’re using dinosaurs as armored vehicles and attack machines.”

“Dinosaur tanks?”

“Think about it: biological tanks are self-repairing, self-replicating, and the slimeballs can operate them by direct mind control.” I swung my crash couch around and sat on it sideways. “You’ve studied dinosaurian physiology: you know they’d make perfect killing machines. They’re incredibly strong—theropod jaws can cut through steel pipe—and their nervous systems are simplistic enough that they wouldn’t even know they’d been mortally wounded until after they’d taken down a few dozen of their opponents. These creatures were bred to kill, born to fight.”

Klicks shook his head. “Who could they possibly be at war with?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s here on Earth. I saw them loading up dinosaur eggs into their spaceships. I think they transfer the eggs to wherever the battle is raging. Somewhere—somewhere with orange and blue vegetation, I think.”

“What?”

“The ceratopsians I saw were patterned in those colors. Camouflage, I suspect.”

Klicks shook his head in wonderment. “But you don’t know who they’re fighting?”

That this was a good question irritated me. “There are lots of possibilities,” I said too quickly, my tone betraying that I didn’t have a real answer. “Maybe a different type of Martian. Or maybe some lifeform on one of the moons of Jupiter.”

“That seems unlikely, Brandy. None of those moons has an environment even remotely like Earth’s, and I find it hard to envision a platoon of tyrannosaurs in giant space suits.”

“Hmm. Hadn’t thought of that.”

We were both silent for a few seconds.

“There is one other possibility,” said Klicks slowly, a hint of gentle teasing in his tone.

“Eh?”

“Well, there could be an Earth-like planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. You know—where the asteroids are in our time. As long as it had a mild greenhouse effect, it could be quite temperate.” He filled an Envirofoam cup with water and placed it in our microwave.

“There’s not enough rubble in the asteroid belt to have ever made up a decent-sized planet,” I said.

“Hey, man, I’m just trying to get into the spirit of your delusion.” His fingers drummed on the microwave’s membrane keyboard, and it beeped in response. “See, in the final battle, the Hets will use a total-conversion weapon, turning three-quarters of the enemy planet’s mass into energy. Or maybe they just pounded the planet until it shattered and the bulk of it fell into Jupiter or the sun, or spiraled out to become Pluto.” His one eyebrow arched in the center. “In fact, now that I mention it, that explains something that’s been bugging me. We’ve always assumed that the water-erosion features on Mars are incredibly ancient, created at a time billions of years before the era we’re in now. But, really, the only indication of the age of those features is the heavy cratering that overlays them. We made some assumptions about the rate of cratering, and then extrapolated that the water features underneath must be a couple of billion years old. Well, Mars would have been scoured by asteroid impacts after the planet in the belt was pulverized, giving the water-erosion landforms the appearance of being a lot older than they really are. That would explain how Mars could indeed be covered with free-flowing water right now.”

Klicks was smiling, but it made sense to me. “Right!” I said. “The bloody Martian asked us about the fifth planet, then seemed surprised when I told it about Jupiter. In this time, Jupiter’s the sixth planet.” My head was spinning. “Good Christ. And that explains why they’re here on Earth.”

The microwave beeped. “You’ve lost me, Sherlock,” said Klicks.

“Earth would be strategic in such a war,” I said. “When Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from the—the belt planet, but Earth is on the same side as it, Earth could be a great platform for launching attacks.”

“The ‘belt planet’, eh?” Klicks laughed. “It needs a better name than that.”

“Okay. How about—”

“Not so fast. You got to name Earth’s second moon. It’s my turn.”

He had a point there. “Okay.”

Klicks scratched his head. “How about…”

“How about what?”

His grin had slipped away. “Nothing,” he said, making a show of sifting decaf coffee crystals into his steaming cup. “I—I want to sleep on it.”

He wished to name it Tess, of course. That was fine with me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Klicks continued: “That would be one hell of a war, Brandy. Mars laid waste. The other side’s home world reduced to rubble.”

“So you can see that we can’t bring the Hets forward.”

Klicks shook his head. “I’m not sure about that. I’m still not convinced by your virus theory—”

“It’s not my theory, dammit. It’s what the Het told me.”

“And, besides, if fighting wars was enough to disqualify a species from being otherwise decent, you’d have to kiss humanity good-bye, too. Plus, they’ve voluntarily left our bodies twice now.”

“They have to do that,” I said. “They get claustrophobic if they inhabit the same body for too long; they need to constantly conquer new creatures.” Klicks rolled his eyes. “It’s true,” I said. “The Het told me. Look, they knew it would be over three full days until we headed back; sticking around inside our bodies that long would be the viral equivalent of waiting endlessly at the airport. Of course they exited us; they knew they could always reenter just by having a swarm of troodons overpower us, if no other way worked out.”

“You’re putting the worst possible spin on everything,” said Klicks.

My turn to roll eyes. “Look, these creatures can dissociate into components small enough that you’d need an electron microscope to see them. Once they’re loose on Earth in the twenty-first century, there would be no putting