Epilogue

(Epilogue)

Earth time: ?

Aina time: 1:07 AM day 180 of 1451

The phone rang in Mark's home at the village in the middle of the night. He woke slowly and answered it.

"Mark? It's Hiapo. I'm at Spirit House. The Path... It opened. It's no longer a mirror."

"Huh? My gosh! How can it do that without a Ring?"

"I'm not sure. Ha! Kalea and Mayoni once mentioned to me that a free un-popped slip bubble would be infinitely stable. I'd love to ask your two daughters what they meant by that, but I won't pull them from their childhood. That's probably not even possible now anyway. Mark, we're just starting to make measurements. I'm guessing the Path might lead to Earth."

"Oh my gosh! The WFM?!"

"Uh, I think we might be okay. Mark, can you get down here? Bring Kara too if you can. We're also decrypting the X-tree data from the tower, using the numbers Kalea gave me... while she still remembered them. It's a pretty amazing story. Get here when you can..."

"It looks like the weather is finally letting up. The roads should be plowed again in an hour or two. We'll be there as soon as we can. See yah."

Three hours later Mark and Kara walked through Level-zero and into the pre-dawn light of a new planet. Sunrise appeared to be only a few minutes away. The air was quite cool, just above freezing, and they kept on the parkas they had worn from the village. Hiapo was there with a team of scientists who were taking back the telescope they had pulled from the rooftop observatory.

"Oh! Hi Mark! Hi Kara!"

Kara smiled and sang, " * Aloha * Hiapo! * What * do * you * have * for * us? * "

Hiapo laughed. "Ha! Something I remember from a speech you once made Kirahani, from a very long time ago. Something great! Something good! Something wonderful! Take a look around. Recognize anything?"

Kara looked around. "Not really. What a beautiful rustic setting! Uh, the trees do look a bit like Earth... Wait! It's so cold! Do I at least recognize winter?"

"Nope. This is early to mid fall now, if my observations with the telescope are correct."

"Southern hemisphere?"

"No, wait Kara," called Mark. "Take a look at the horizon, to the east. This looks like West Virginia! Some differences, but the general shape... It's the Appalachians! My gosh, this place is so beautiful! Hiapo! What the hell is going on?"

"We have confirmation from star observations with the telescope. It matches the story from the X-tree data. This is Earth, about 6.5 million years in the future."

Mark and Kara were stunned. Kara spoke at last. "The bubble goes through time now, into the future?"

Hiapo shook his head. "No, just the opposite. Going from Aina to Earth, the bubble used to go 6.5 million years into the past. But without the ring, the temporal shift collapsed. We're in synch now. There's an explanation for all this, in the X-tree coding. It explains everything."

"Go on..." said Mark.

"The WFM won the war. They exterminated the Equalists. The WFM quickly built up the population back to four billion and devoted their time to cleaning the planet. They did that, I'll give them that. Not much else. They were monsters. They bred males into an inferior sub-species, as sex pets. They couldn't even talk. Male neural abilities were bred away."

Both Mark and Kara spat on the ground, an old Hopewell tradition for showing disgust.

"Yes, exactly," Hiapo nodded. And then their civilization started slowly to shrink. They were losing 90% of the population every 100,000 years. Around 200,000 years after the war, there were about forty million females on the planet. And probably about the same number of sex pets..."

Mark and Kara nodded.

Hiapo continued. "And then something wonderful happened. The Ring managed to create and launch an X-tree snippet. It threw off the debasement of one of the sex pets in their genetics labs. A male was born, a normal male. His name was Kyle. He fell in love with one of the woman, and incredibly, she loved him back. Her name was Brianna. She renounced her culture, somehow got permission to take-off with Kyle in one of the slip-ships we left on Earth. They came to Aina, not through a time bubble but through space in a slip-ship. They started a new society here on Aina, about 200,000 C.E., about 6,300,000 years ago."

Kara blinked. "It's amazing that the WFM would allow a single woman and a normal male to depart in a slip-ship. The ships are so powerful..."

Hiapo nodded. "There's a history of this, in the X-tree data. We were incredibly, incredibly lucky that no word of Aina was discovered by WFM. With control of the Blue Ring, they could have hunted us down and exterminated us. But through incredible luck, the only explanation was the cover story. The WFM was deeply suspicious, but there was no other explanation around. They finally realized that their bio-weapon had worked too well. There were no males left to interrogate. The female captives were all confirming what their spies had already revealed, the cover story, that a group of male Kilauea security personnel were calling themselves The Builders. The WFM had a few vague references to a Lab-Six at JABSOM, but the name told them nothing."

Hiapo sighed. "By the time they broke into the JABSOM basement lab, the Earth bubble had already popped. They found the lab totally vacant, an empty shell. Of course they were suspicious. The WFM made a few test flights with the ships, but exploration didn't interest them at all. For a long time, the slip-ships just sat in Hawaii. They were extremely well guarded..."

Mark nodded. "I can see it happening. Two thousand centuries start to roll by; the ships are just sitting there... Nobody can maintain vigilance and suspicion that long. But Kyle and Brianna, their children turned into monsters, didn't they? Why?"

Hiapo sighed heavily. "Yes, they did. I don't blame Kyle and Brianna. They were both very noble. But they made a fatal mistake with teaching their children. They taught philosophy, but not worship. The WFM had driven religion into extinction. Kyle and Brianna didn't know! They didn't know that we are the Spirit's children!"

Mark frowned. "Without God's goodness... Hell! You can teach good principles, but people will follow them in pride and conceit."

Hiapo nodded. "Exactly. And that's exactly what happened. It took about two thousand years for their children to multiply and industrialize. The slip-ship was still in orbit. A monstrous society called the Taursar Assembly of the Combine ruled the part of Aina where we are now, below the Northern Plateau. They got to the slip-ship first. The Ring hated their arrogance and intolerance, hated it so much it gave them the tools to destroy themselves with, the genetic knowledge of the WFM and some of its own knowledge of X-tree."

Kara looked on thoughtfully. "What Mayoni called the cookbooks, they were from the Blue Ring... The Taursars... They created the white antelope, didn't they?"

"Yes, as a weapon to rule their northern neighbor. Their neighbors were furious when they realized what had been done to them. Their males were hopelessly addicted to the meat, and they knew it was reducing their neural abilities. The Taursars had a doomsday weapon for protection against the Northern atomics, the red sage grass. The doomsday weapon was the plague. It was designed to activate from an electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast. The Northerners risked an atomic strike anyway, not against the Taursar cities but against the slip-ship. The Northerners couldn't bear the thought of being hit with more bio-weapons. They gambled and lost. The EMP activated the plague, even from high orbit. Then the Taursars realized to their horror that their own vaccine didn't work for them."