Story: Columbus Day

Columbus Day (a tale of the Temporal War)

“I claim this land for Spain, and the UFP.” her superior officer joked when they’d crawled out of the wreckage of their time pod. “This IS Columbia, after all.” He always tried to use humor in bad situations, and it had seldom worked. But the two of them had made the best of things, marooned in time.

Camp fires were as comforting to the Barzan species as they were to humans. It was one of the things the two survivors had agreed upon. They passed many an evening warmed emotionally at least by the light of a holographic fire on the hard pan of the flat crater floor where they waited for rescue. There was not enough oxygen to burn anything, and nothing to use as fuel, anyway.

But she’d left it behind. The escape shuttle, the beacon, the holographic fire still burning on its timed schedule, and the body of Commander Sal Gutierrez, late of the Federation Timeship Stratios, lying under a cairn of relatively new rocks. He died on the planet of his origin, but not as he would have wanted.

A subspace signal traveled through time, but not through space, echoing a mayday for the survivors, now in the singular. As time travel operations went, rescue, if it would have come, should have seemed near instantaneous, but the days had turned into months. The time war had brought with it the kind of advancements that seem to be spurred on only by conflict, and the survival suits were proof of that. But anything would fail. Neither of them liked to think about the recycling of foodstuffs or water. But those systems worked well enough. The biggest threat was Earth’s atmosphere. It was not capable of supporting aerobic life.


Attacked by sphere builders on the return home from a mission, the Sratios had broken up in mid-time stream. As far as Oyhida knew, none of the others made it out. She and Gutierrez had been working in the temporal-navigation lab when the attack occurred, with only moments to make it to the escape pod as everything went stutter-stop around them. Their little craft was flung 2.5 billion years back, landing in the first super-continent of Columbia, in a dry interior desert compromising most of the early world’s landmass. The terrain was a sterile ceaseless desert of jagged mountains, craters, and stretches of flat hard-pan rocky terrain unbroken by erosion. The sky was cloudless. Weather ended at the coast, where green seas filled with the beginnings of photosynthetic life were already pumping oxygen into a world that was at first absorbing it into minerals. It was not enough and too soon for Gutierrez when his O2 scrubber failed.


They tried repairs. They both worked desperately on it. Buddy-breathing was not an option. Her Barzan breather would not function properly for him. As the final patch job on the O2 scrubber failed, he told her quietly that it was best for her to save the remaining spares for herself. In fact, it was an order. As the sun sat and the moon loomed large overhead, its freshly pockmarked face more vivid even than the Terraformed Luna, familiar to them both, there was a feeling of desperation. The confidence of the castaways was finally spent.


The holographic fire lit up on schedule. Gutierrez looked at it with an ironic smirk. Solar power would keep it running for centuries. He reached down to his belt and handed his side arm over to Oyhida. “This is too much a temptation to me now. Take it.” he explained. “I don’t want to go out that way. It’s not that I mind going by my own hand, but not violently. No. I never wanted to be in this war. It’s funny. I majored in temporal mechanics in school. Now I’m out of time.”


She’d trained herself against the wastage of tears, but felt them coming, just the same. “I’m sorry, Sal..” she began.


He waved her off. “You can be sorry when the rescue team gets you back to your proper time. I’m the one that’s sorry. I’m sorry to leave you alone, here. I’m sorry I can’t see this ocean before I die, but there’s too much risk of contam..” he paused wheezing, “Contamination. It’s better to stay here. The pod did the right thing. Damn! Don’t want that to be my last words.” he punched his chest angrily where the o2 scrubber resided in his black survival suit and suddenly it started working again, “Well hot damn! Hold on to your torpedo tube, doc. I am not done yet!”


They both laughed.


It did not work forever, though. Eventually that little miracle failed too. But they had some time, two days, in fact. He told her of things that mattered to him, then. His life before joining Starfleet, his family, his passion for Kasseelian opera: he shared it all to her while they lay across from one another in the yellow glow. She listened, asking questions. Family was important to Barzans, and he was all she had, and vice versa. Most of what he said, she knew, were fabrications. Either he lied or he’d bought the memories from a chop shop. Most time agents shied away from real memories, from bitter experience or lore. Things changed and what you clung to tightly could end up having no more significance than a false memory.


He held on to whatever those memories were as he struggled to breathe. She quietly added argon to his mixture as he struggled suffocating. Then he passed out peacefully, never to wake up. She took her survival gear and left the camp , walking in the stark night filled with meteor showers, sleeping in the arid lifeless day of the young Sol.


If help never came, there was little worry about timeline contamination. Eventually, in a few million years, Columbia would break apart, the tectonic cycle kicked into life under miles of ice lasting 200 million years when this world would freeze and nearly go sterile. She knew from her embedded data banks, that Earth would fall victim to its own life’s success in generating oxygen, many years too late for Gutierrez. By the time Earth returned to life, new more complicated forms of that life would be present, and former landmasses would sub-duct into the mantle, devouring what was once upon the surface. Anything of Starfleet that remained up top would be worn away to molecules by time, even the dried mummy of Gutierrez. There would be no microorganisms, no scavengers to return him to nature. For now, on this lifeless surface, nature did not exist.


By the time of the first fern forests and giant centipedes, there would be no trace at all.


“That will be my fate too,” she thought as she continued her long pilgrimage from the camp site across the crater floor, towards the far crater wall. Beyond it lay the world ocean. She could not bear to stay in the camp, though protocol dictated she avoid contact with life processes here. It probably would affect nothing. Minuscule chance. Most of this green single cell life was doomed. Earth would become an ice ball, and very little would survive, save in a few slushy ponds and the deep ocean hot vents smoking black rich minerals to entire ecosystems oblivious to the calamity above. The salvation of Earth would be a long time in coming. She could not affect that, either way. Probably.


For her, death would eventually come, but this lingering was purgatory. She retained real memories, and Barzan familial bonds were intensely strong. Her clan had lived by the sea. “I want to see the ocean,” she said. This was her ocean. No others. The warring species in the Temporal

War so far distant, none of them had taken their first steps yet. Their ancestors were slime.


She thought she saw a being once in the waking hour, as the sun set. She’d taken to talking to her family members, a hallucination of sorts, but an allowed one. This, though, was something else. It glimmered, and seemed to observe, then it was gone. She once drew the sidearm she’d taken from Gutierrez, ready to shoot a lazed-tachyon pulse at some time trooper that had come in to finish the job. But there was no one. She’d walked for weeks. The crater wall was treacherous. Once she’d fallen and broken her leg. Spiral fracture. Her screams were the only thing that would be heard here in what amounted to forever. The suit had no remaining pain killers, but it splinted and took care of her. After days sprawled on a large basaltic rock, she kept climbing. There was nothing left to do.


“Ever the diligent” she said, in a long never ending chat with herself, surmounting the rim of the giant crater, at last “This was so Barzan. And I hate being a stereotype.” Then she drew a breath. The primordial sea, green and extending to the horizon lay miles away. Her suit was breaking down, at last. Fixing the leg break had taken most of its remaining resources and she’d dropped much of her survival gear in that and other falls. “I made it, Sal.”


It was enough to look at it. She would enjoy one last sunset, then do what Gutierrez had been unwilling to do. She was close enough to life processes that dying here could present contamination, and though she’d told herself many promises on the journey, now that she’d arrived, she had to uphold the prime directive. She found a rock to suffice as a chair. Her leg had mended badly. Crouching was an agony. She sat upright, feeling relief from the comfort of a stone, and viewed the ocean. She un-holstered the weapon, setting it to her side for later. She watched the waves, listened to surf crashing.


The observer arose from the water this time, taking more material form. It was undeniable. She glimmered like an emerald, like the sea. It had no signifying features, with a face that like thrown but unfinished pottery, and yet Oyhida called this being she. As it walked across the sand and hard rock debris of the strand towards her, it left wet footprints. There would be no multi-cellular life on this world for hundreds of millions of years, the occasional evolutionary false start notwithstanding.


Oyhida never felt the need to reach for her weapon. No enemy had been identified, and if there were one here before her, then the enemy had already won.


“It’s very early to have you here.” the glimering observer said. Her form was now like liquid crystal, aquas and emeralds and brown strands all displaying complexities of life that would draw a looker into a fractal trap of increasing complexity. It seemed at once overwhelming, and a violation of some unspoken code of privacy.


The being added “Billions of my turns before you should be here, you and the other one.”


“Commander Gutierrez” she said, understanding. “You saw him.”


“He was of me. You are not of me” the visitors voice was soothing, calm. A gentle roll of waves at ebb-tide on a peaceful day. “But he was too far inland. My domain will not be there. Not yet. I have to die before I can grow. You see. Even now I can taste it in the air. Just a little. In millions more of my turns I will be adorned in a garment of ice.”


Oyhida did not see. She had not introduced herself. Starfleet proprieties took over. Centuries of Starfleet training still held true, “I am Lt. Oyoda'Enha, United Federation of Planets.”


The other raised a hand and moved it in a circular gesture, “Planets federate? None that I know. How curious. Though now I think upon it, one of your kind but of mine was here before. Long ago. Near the Beginning. He and another one, not of me. I am here.”


Oyhida did not understand. “Yes.” she agreed, “You are here.”


The other laughed. The nearby sea danced. “I am. But you do not understand. You are dying. You know that. I can see. You worked hard to get to my shore, to see it. For that I am honored. I am this world. Maybe one day some of mine will call me Gaia. I will be different then, but I will still be here. You can call me that, if you like.”


Oyhida knew she was hallucinating. It could be hypoxia. She did not bother to check her gauge readings on her implanted heads-up display. Best to play along, if the mind wanted it that way. “I am pleased to meet you, Gaia. Are you alone?” It was a strange question to ask, and perhaps it was projection, but it was all she could think to say. She did not want the conversation to die out. She did not want to die alone, even if this illusion was all she could delude herself with.


“I am with you, therefore I am not alone. But even if you were not here, I am never alone. It is funny what you said. There is no federation of planets, for we would know. Until the stars die and kill us, or a tear in everything opens and swallows us, or small beings murder us which is sad but will rarely happen, we always know our own. And whatever my fate is, it is such a long way off. There is so much to do and to let happen. There is so much to watch over.”


Gaia turned away from Oyhida and looked back at her ocean, which stretched around the globe, unbroken. “Time means little to me Oyhida'Enha. But it means a great deal to you. You don’t belong here, not yet.”


The suit was failing. Alarms were going off. “No.” Oyhida admitted, “It was a mistake. Accident.” Each breath was more and more labored.


Gaia seemed to have a thought. “You must see me again, when you are better, when I am older. I will not be the same, but I will be here. And I would like to see you, then.”


“..be great” Oyhida replied, dazed, tunnel vision starting to set in.


Gaia had turned and was walking towards her purposefully, long stride after stride. The sea rose up behind her in a menacing wave, “I will return you to your own, to my sister, one of whom I will always be fond.” And she shoved Oyhida. The Barzan exploded in light.


Vertigo. Light. Change. She still gasped for air. At first all she saw was mint green and heavy cloud, but her eyes soon changed to their default natural state. She was on her back supported by two objects. Oyhida blinked. No need to ask where am I. She was home.


As her eyes adapted she could star to see her better. She struggled to breathe, but a hand reached over her face and tore the mask away as if it were paper. She invulntarily took in a breath of the atmosphere around her. It was home. The tanked air she breathed while on duty could never match all the little subtleties of real natural atmosphere. Moreover she smelled the salty air, hints of honeyweed, and surprisingly enough, a tantalizing supper cooking in the distance.


A head loomed over her, shocking her into full consciousness. Like Gaia it too of multifaceted of water like gems, but within were deeper greens, grays, violet, and deep brown eyes that peered into her. She realized the being was carrying her in its arms. Carrying her towards the shore. Unlike Gaia, it spoke not a word, humming a gentle song of Oyhida’s people instead. This area was calm water seperated by a natural sand embankment that separated it from the waves of Barzan II’s ocean. Until the moon raised sea levels over the sandbank, these glassy calm waters would stay still until late evening. She knew it well. Her family would be out there on the shore cooking communally, having caught their days haul in the tide pool. Overhead were the constellations she knew.


The Barzan people were most famous for their poverty and series of missed opportunities. But they had their saved mythologies and stories like every other culture. And she knew without a doubt from a childhood fascination with the past, she was carried in the arms of the closest human equivalent of a mother goddess of her world. “You are here” she said to the being.


“Yes” the being replied, and paused setting her down now where the water was waist high.


“Is that Oy?” someone cried out in the evening dimness.


“No way! I think it is!” People were getting up, running into the water. Laughter. They thought she was surprising them.


Well she was. Her oldest brother, the best swimmer of them all had given up running in the water and was swimming out to her. Others were joining in.


And soon she’d have to report in, report the loss of the Stratios, and the death of Gutierrez. She’d never be able to explain how she was here, of course. And duty being what it was, if they still trusted her. She’d have to return to the war. But not right now. And one day, if she could, she’d return to a much older Earth, and pick a shore on a newer continent, at random as there was no other solution, and thank a benefactor who had weathered the eons since last they’d met. But for now, she was home.

 

thanks very much! I've been kind of binging on "The Entire History of the Earth" and "PBS Eons" lately on youtube, and wanted to do something with very early Earth. Plus Barzans are just cool

 

Please tell me this is posted on a site where I can fave it.

I came with the intent to skim, and got hooked the entire way. Aside from your incredible writing talent, and creative story, I also can't thank you enough for the non-human protagonist and the human with the non-western name. (Star Trek writers tend to forget that the entire Milky Way isn't in the USA.)

 

Cool little story - I kind of figured the PBS angle (you're not the only one...)

Nifty Gaia counterpart angle. If there's a Gaia, there's got to be a Maia or Oaia... I also liked the angle of the Barzan being largely poor.

Thanks!! rbs

 

Oh, that was lovely!