End of an Era

Klicks closed his eyes. "The individual viral units produce impulses like synapses that can travel short distances. All the units in one of those lumps we’ve encountered are acting together, like the cells of one brain. The bigger the conglomeration, the smarter it is."

"And what about the dinosaurs?"

Klicks’s eyes were still closed, as though he were listening to an internal voice. "Well, without the low gravity caused by the Hets, dinosaurian giantism wouldn’t have occurred. But, beyond that, the Hets have done some direct genetic tinkering recently, fine-tuning existing dinosaurs to be better suited for war. For instance, natural ceratopsians, like Chasmosaurus, had neck frills that were only for bluffing displays. They were just outlined in bone, with skin stretched across. That wasn’t suitable for real battle, so the Hets tweaked them into the genus Triceratops, filling in the open spaces to produce a solid shield of bone."

"Okay, time for Final Jeopardy: who are the Hets fighting?"

"Good Christ! It is the natives of Tess." Klicks looked away. "I — I mean of the belt planet."

"Really? And what’s this garbage about the Martian civilization being a hundred and thirty million years old?"

Klicks looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then his eyes opened wide in astonishment. "The civilization of the viral Martians did arise that long ago, back in what we’d call the early Jurassic. Ten thousand years later — nothing on the scale we’re talking about — they put up the gravity suppressor satellites around Earth. Since the satellites can control gravity, their orbits never decay, and they’re solar-powered, so they never run out of energy. They have indeed been in stationary orbit around Earth for one hundred and thirty million years now."

I shook my head. "That doesn’t make sense. The Het technology is clearly more advanced than ours is, but it’s centuries, maybe even tens of centuries, ahead of us, not a hundred-odd million years. I mean, the rosette-makers, whoever they are, they might have a million-plus-year-old civilization, given that they can move stars around, but the Hets aren’t anywhere near that advanced."

"That’s right," said Klicks, and then his face clouded. "Oh, shit, of course they left the dinosaurs alone until very recently. The Hets, the Hets died out, almost completely. It’s—" Klicks was shaking slightly. "It’s horrible. God, the destruction." He closed his eyes for a moment, then staggered toward his crash couch and held onto it for support. "Brandy, you were right. The Martians are inherently violent. They seethe with the need to conquer."

His breathing was growing ragged; his eyes were haunted, darting. "The original viral globs lived as parasites within different types of Martian animals. But eventually the viruses developed intelligence. They wanted to enslave creatures that had manipulatory appendages. In the Martian seas, there was a creature that looked kind of like a hand — five tubular extensions coming out of one side of a central disk. At the ends of each of their five finger-like tubes, the creatures had circles of extruded iron filaments controlled by sphincter muscles. They’d evolved these appendages to pop open a type of Martian shellfish, but the ancestral Hets enslaved the Hands and used the iron filaments as general manipulators."

Klicks’s head was shaking back and forth, but he seemed unaware that he was doing it. "Eventually the Hands built spaceships for the Hets, ships that moved by polarizing gravity. The Hets visited Earth and the belt planet. On both, they found animal life that might indeed develop intelligence someday. The belt world was small enough for the Hets and their Hands to move around comfortably, but Earth was much too massive. A project was begun to — to marsiform Earth, to make it Mars-like and habitable. The first step was the installation of the gravity-suppressor satellites; as I said, they went into orbit a hundred and thirty million years ago.

"These early Hets saw, hanging there in their southern sky, the rosette, the cluster of arranged suns — yes, it’s that old. They knew there were other creatures out there, somewhere. And they hated that fact — hated that there were minds that they couldn’t reach, couldn’t enslave. The Hets assumed that any intelligence would be as violent as their own, so they forced the Hands to build war machines, ready to meet the rosette-makers whom they felt were bound to come and try to conquer them."

Klicks’s arms were trembling as he spoke. His voice had gone hoarse; sweat appeared on his brow.

"The Hands were small creatures, far too puny to accommodate enough viral material to constitute a very astute slaver mind. And the Hand children were far too small to contain any meaningful concentration of Het viruses and therefore couldn’t be controlled at all. At last, the Hand children turned the war machines their parents had been forced to build against the entire planet. The holocaust was incredible. It wiped out almost all life, including every last one of the Hands and most of the proto-Hets. Both Hand child and Hand adult preferred death to a life of enslavement."

Klicks’s fists were clenching and unclenching like beating hearts. I went to the tap and got him a Dixie cup full of water. He downed it in one gulp. "Mars was left almost completely barren after that uprising," he said. "Without animal vehicles, the viruses were scattered and lost their capacity for intelligence, although the memories of all this were still stored in their RNA. Earth was left unattended, the gravity-suppressor satellites still ru

"On Mars, something like forty million years — correction: eighty million Earth years — passed before the viral life re-evolved into intelligent creatures, the current Hets. But the Hands had done their job well: the only animal life left on Mars was microscopic." He shuddered, his shoulders rising and falling with his ragged breath. "The Hets," he continued, "developed a remarkable bioengineering technology. Viruses, of course, have the i

"At last, intelligence did develop in the natives of Tess." He was so lost in the story that he wasn’t censoring himself anymore. "The Hets set out to enslave those creatures, too. They returned to Tess in their living spaceships and began a terrible war against the natives, a war that still rages on."

Klicks was shaking from head to toe, like a man on an adrenaline high, rage coursing through his system. "God, Brandy, I feel like killing — something. Anything. Everything. It’s such a strong urge, such a primal impulse with them. It’s—" He bolted across the room, grabbed a red metal tool chest off the worktable, and heaved it through the air. It smashed against the curving bulkhead, pliers and screwdrivers and wrenches clanging to the floor. Klicks breathed in and out deeply, his eyes closed.

"Miles?"

He looked at me, a hint of calm returning to his face. "God, that felt good." A pause. "I’m in control now, I think. Do me a favor: don’t ask me any more questions about the Hets. Even the memory of their hatred for life is enough to drive you out of your skull."

"Don’t worry," I said. "I’ve—"

Something fu

I started to turn -