The Practice Effect (39 page)

Linnora, too, was looking concerned.

Dennis laughed. “Never mind, Bernie. We never had anything going, anyway. I’m sure you’re better suited to her than I ever would have been. Congratulations. Sincerely.”

Brady shook Dennis’s hand uncertainly. He looked from Dennis to Linnora and back and seemed to understand the situation.

But that only appeared to make him more miserable. The fellow wasn’t merely afraid and homesick. He was in love.

“Well, we’ll see to getting you back to her as quickly as possible,” he told his erstwhile rival compassionately. I’ve got to visit Earth temporarily anyway. I’d like to trade a few local works of art for some items I can buy from N-Mart.”

Dennis had plans. For the sake of both worlds he would make sure Linsee kept a tight guard on the zievatron, restricting the flow between the worlds carefully. They certainly didn’t want to create any paradoxes in time!

But in a limited way trade could probably profit both realities.

Brady shook his head. “Even if we could put a new return mechanism together from those parts you buried, we’d never get it finished in time! Flaster gave me only a few days, and those are about used up!

“And when the airlock mechanism was wrecked, it destroyed the calibration settings. I don’t even know Earth’s reality coordinates!”

“Well, I remember them,” Dennis assured him.

“Oh, yeah?” A touch of Brady’s familiar sarcasm returned. “Well, have you figured out the coordinates for
this
crazy place yet? We never were too sure of them back in Lab One. We just sort of stumbled onto the settings. And now those, too, are ruined!”

“Don’t worry. I can calculate them as well. You see, I think I know not only where we are, but
when
as well.”

Brady stared. And Dennis started to explain.

“Think about the most important discoveries of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries,” Dennis suggested. “Clearly the most dramatic were bioengineering and zievatronics.

“Physics was a dead end by the year 2000. Oh, there were lots of abstract problems, but nothing that seemed to offer a way to bring other worlds within mankind’s grasp. The solar system was a pretty barren place, and the stars remained awfully far away.

“But with recombinant DNA, there appeared the possibility of creating almost any type of viable life-form, for whatever purpose. Work only beginning at Sahara Tech and at other institutions when we were there seemed to be leading to a world filled with wonders—giant chickens, cows that gave yogurt, even unicorns, dragons, and griffins!

“Then there was the zievatron, which promised to reopen the road to the stars relativity seemed to have closed off forever.

“Now imagine both of these trends,” Dennis asked, “taken into the future.

“When, in a hundred years or so, the ziev effect was finally perfected, bands of migrants would travel to other worlds, to colonize or find space for their own diverse ways of life.

“And by that time they wouldn’t take with them many tools, only the very minimum that could fit through the zievatron. After all, when you can tailor-make organisms for any function, why burden yourself with clumsy hunks of metal?

“Self-repairing, semi-intelligent robots made of living matter would drive you to work, toil in the fields, and clean your house. Walking brains would record your messages and recite any information verbatim at command. Fiercely loyal great flying “dragons” with laser eyes would protect your new colonies against any danger. All these specialized organisms would be “fueled” by food generated at special facilities.

“In the future, colonists would not go in starships, nor would they carry cold metal with them. Why should they, when they could simply step through a gate to their new worlds and design creatures for any function?”

Brady scratched his head. “That’s a lot of speculation, Nuel. You can’t tell what’s going to happen in the future.”

“Oh, but I can,” Dennis said with a smile. “Because this is it! This is the future, Brady.”

Brady stared.

“Imagine a group of colonists who belong to a fringe group with antimachine sentiments,” Dennis said. “Let’s say this group finds a beautiful world, accessible through the zievatron. They save up to pay transmission charges and then leave the complicated society of Earth for their paradise, shutting the door behind them.

“At first all goes well. Then, all of a sudden, the complicated bioengineered creatures they depend upon start dying!

“Their scientists finally find a cause. It is a plague, created by another race that plies the ziev space, one with whom man has by this time had skirmishes for several centuries. The enemy are called the
Blecker
, and they have chosen this isolated outpost of humanity to test their new weapon.

“The Blecker had released a disease on Tatir, which is what the world was named. The plague could not kill any life-form capable of independent existence—able to find its own way in the wild—but it destroyed the synthetic food supply. Without that food the delicate symbiotes upon which the colonists’ civilization depended were doomed.

“The scientists of Tatir discovered the attack too late to stop it. The dying was well under way, beginning with the huge but delicate dragons upon whom the planet’s defense relied.

“Desperate, they reopened the zievatron link to Earth, to beg for help.”

Brady sat on the edge of his seat, listening intently. “What happened then?” he asked.

Dennis shrugged. “Earth was anxious not to get contaminated. They sent through a powerful device that would scramble the zievways to Tatir for a thousand years, until a cure could be found. When the machine had done its work, neither Earth
nor
the invaders could get through to this world.

“But”—Dennis raised one finger—“before doing that, they sent through a gift!”

From outside they heard Arth’s voice call. “I think th’ critter’s settled down now. I’ll bring him in. You all sit still!”

The curtain parted and Arth entered again. The pixolet rode his shoulder. When it saw Brady it glared but was quiet. It spread its wing membranes and glided over to Linnora’s lap. She stroked the beast and soon it was purring again.

Linnora whispered, “We of the L’Toff never forgot the gift from Earth, did we, my little Krenegee?”

“No, you didn’t,” Dennis agreed. In the centuries of savagery that followed the inevitable fall of Tatir civilization, almost everything was lost. The few machines rusted away and were forgotten. Since most of the transports had been hovercraft, even the principle of the wheel was forgotten.

“Most of the specialized animals died off, leaving only the sturdiest Earth stock and local fauna. The language started to change as virtually all learning and lore were lost.

“The people were soon reduced almost to the level of beasts. It took a long time for the legends of written speech to inspire some genius to reinvent writing.

“Back on Earth they had known all this would happen. And yet they could not help without risking a spread of the infection to the home world.

“So they opened the portal just a crack, before sealing it for a millennium. They sent through the very latest product of their great research—the culmination of two converging fields, biology and reality physics.

“What they sent through was an animal immune to the disease, for it could fend for itself, but one who carried with it a
talent
. That talent would pervade this world and give its people a chance.

“With time, the people of Tatir absorbed some of the talent for themselves. Those who lived closest to the creatures absorbed the most of it and became the L’Toff.”

Dennis finished, “The gift the Earth sent was a miracle, from our twenty-first-century perspective. It saved the people of this planet. And to think I once thought it useless.”

Brady followed Dennis’s look.

“That thing?” He pointed incredulously at the pixolet. The creature preened, and grinned back with a row of needle-sharp teeth.

“Yes, that,” Dennis said with a nod.

“Of course, I’m only going by pieced-together accounts
from legends more than a thousand years old. But I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.

“We can only imagine what the Earth of the fortieth century is like, now that these
Krenegee
have been loose there for centuries. Perhaps the age of biologicals is past and the era of tools has returned there—magical tools beyond belief.

“I’d be glad of it, for the bioengineering did sound a bit questionable, ethically.”

Dennis stood next to Linnora. She and Pix looked up at him and he smiled. Dennis turned back to Brady and concluded, “Now, at last, the barriers to this world are dropping. For some reason a weird intertime path to twenty-first-century Earth was the first to open, perhaps because ours was the first zievatron of all.

“Soon other paths will open. And these people have got to be ready when they do. The Blecker are probably still out there, waiting for a chance to get in.

“That’s why I think I’ll hang around after we fix the return mechanism and send you back home.”

Linnora took his hand. “At least that’s one of the reasons,” he amended.

Brady looked perplexed. “That’s a pretty convincing story, Nuel. Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You still haven’t told me what this
talent
is you’re saying that nasty little thing has! What
was
this gift Earth supposedly sent through?”

Dennis looked surprised. “Oh! You mean nobody’s explained that part of it to you yet?”

“No! And I’ll tell you I can’t take it much longer! Something’s screwy about this world! Did you notice the strange juxtaposition of technologies these people have here? I can’t figure out what’s going on, and it’s driving me crazy!”

Dennis remembered how many times he had sworn vengeance on Brady during his months on Tatir. Right now he had the fellow in his power, but all the malice he had felt before was gone. He decided to satisfy himself with one
little
bit of revenge.

“Oh, I’ll let you figure it out for yourself, Brady. I’m sure a
mind like yours can come up with the answer, if you practice it hard enough.”

Bernald Brady sat there. He had no choice but to fume silently while Dennis Nuel laughed. As the woman, the little man, the alien creature from the future, and his onetime rival all grinned at him, Brady had the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t going to enjoy the learning process much at all.

David Brin is the author of eleven novels, including
Heaven’s Reach, Infinity’s Shore, Sundiver, Startide Rising, Brightness Reef, The Practice Effect, The Postman, Heart of the Comet
(with Gregory Benford),
The Uplift War, Earth
, and
Glory Season
, as well as the short story collections
The River of Time
and
Otherness
. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and has been a NASA consultant and a physics professor. He lives in southern California.