The Hunger of Time by Damien & Barnes Broderick & Damien & Barnes Broderick

Author:Damien & Barnes Broderick & Damien & Barnes Broderick [Broderick, Damien & Barnes, Rory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759255128
Publisher: E-reads/E-rights

Thirteen

* * *

Glaciers covered much of the world in the winter of the year 741,717—and winter lasted all year round.

Hugh learned this much within hours of our rude discovery that we’d been returned unconscious to the vacuole and bumped another Pi-by-Feigenbaum multiple into the future. He extruded several instruments through a phase-shifted pucker in the spacetime anomaly, not daring to let any of us emerge in person, and immediately picked up a bunch of digital transmissions from low earth orbit.

It was quickly obvious that they were automated signals, and it took a surprisingly short time to run them out as images on the visual display unit. The script they were written in was nothing we’d ever seen, but the detailed maps and real-time video scans of the planet, viewed from space-borne meteorological platforms (plain old satellites, to non-technofreak me), were perfectly clear. The world had gone back to the ice ages.

And, apparently just for the fun of it, the magnetic poles had flipped. What had been north was now south, and vice versa. Our compass needles pointed in exactly the wrong direction.

The air was very dry, and there was no snow or ice at our latitude. We emerged from the lava-face of the vacuole and found signs of humanity almost at once. But when we crossed the open stretch of grass to the place where we’d buried Grace and piled her grave with a cairn of stones, no slightest trace remained. I was torn. A dozen, a hundred sublime poems of death and loss rushed through me like ghosts—Milton, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath—bringing scant comfort. I had read and studied them, anatomized their structure and social context, but understood nothing at all. This was a knife, and a pressure inside my breast that seemed ready to fell me.

‘It’s not surprising that we find no trace,’ Hugh said, his voice heavy with grief but with a determined edge. ‘Nearly as much time passed while we were locked inside the vacuole as the whole prehistoric gulf from earliest human days to our own home era.’ He glanced around at the smooth walking paths cutting through the long grass in the distance to north and east. ‘Heaven knows what the revived cryonics humans have evolved into by now. They might be as far beyond us as we are from the hominids.’

‘Get real,’ Zanna said rudely. Her own anguish had found a more brutal outlet. ‘Would the super-evolved supermen of the future still be using weather satellites?’

‘Every kind of intelligence will retain a need for information on weather conditions, sweetheart,’ Hugh told her, a little crisply. ‘But I take your point. It is certainly surprising that my little desktop computer and rudimentary antennae were able to detect and unpack their communication protocols.’

‘Not to mention decoding them.’

‘Well, their revived ancestors were from the 20th and 21st centuries, after all,’ I said. ‘Most of them spoke English and used standard American technology. Would they change that much?’

‘Sometimes you really are an idiot, Nat,’ Zanna said. She was back to cosying up to Barong the Gorgeous, back as well to gibing at me at every opportunity.

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