I glanced at Chet, who lingered in the doorway. “Courage,” he said, stepping forward. “I am an explorer—it is what I decided to be. I can face these secrets…”
He joined me beside the portal. I touched it, opened up my cytonic senses, and sought answers. At first nothing happened. This portal appeared to be damaged, unusable. But I pushed a little more, using the subtle care I’d been practicing, and…yes, I could feel them inside. The memories…
Everything around me faded to flimsy transparency. I remained in the ruins physically—I could feel the broken wall beside me—but they had been overlaid by a vision of the belt as it had existed long ago.
Chet breathed out, turning around. The lightburst was tiny in the distance, little more than a star. The sky was dark, and I counted maybe two dozen fragments floating in the expanse. So this seemed to be the ancient past, like the previous vision.
Our current fragment was much smaller in the past—plus it was empty of structures save for the portal, which stood free and whole, not cracked. It was smaller too, lending further credence to the theory that the portals grew a little—with memories—whenever cytonics used them as transfer points between dimensions.
Moments after the vision began, people popped into existence directly in front of the portal. I stepped away from them in surprise. Humans? They were talking, though I couldn’t understand the language.
“Can you make out any of that?” Chet asked.
“Afraid not,” I said, circling them. They wore robes, and something was kind of familiar about the headdress one was wearing. “I once saw a drawing of Gilgamesh in a book from Old Earth, and he wore clothing and a beard like that.” I pointed to one of the men. “Maybe they’re from somewhere near his civilization?”
Chet hopped back from the portal as something else materialized in front of it. Stones? Yes, a pile of building materials. People began using them to construct something.
“This wasn’t their first visit here,” I said, feeling it was true. There were…sensations to the vision, not just sights. “They want to build a shrine, I think.”
Chet and I watched as time sped up, and walls sprang into existence. The people became blurs, erecting the very structure that Chet and I were standing in. They carved delicate art into the walls, then painted everything with vibrant colors.
Why put something so nice in this strange place? Time slowed again, and the humans—it seemed the construction had taken weeks, maybe months—gathered together out front. Chet and I joined them and saw another fragment swinging closer. This bore a group of people in vibrant red robes. They had pale violet skin, growths like horns, and pure white hair. People from ReDawn…Alanik’s homeworld.
“I know those people,” I told Chet. “They’re the UrDail. The one I met said they’d known humans in the past.”
“How far in the past?” Chet asked, rubbing his chin. “These humans wear ancient clothing.”
“Scud,” I said. “Could this be first contact? The first time humans met with aliens? I thought that didn’t happen until we were in the space age.”
Except Hesho had also told me that the kitsen people had met with humans in Japan centuries before either achieved space travel. They’d traveled using cytonics. Like these, it seemed.
In front of us, the humans greeted the UrDail—who stepped over to our fragment—and I realized this probably wasn’t first contact. The two groups looked familiar with one another, so their first encounters must have happened earlier. Now the humans had built some kind of meeting hall. It wasn’t a shrine, I realized as we followed the people in. It was a place where they sat together at tables, trying to…
Trying to figure out one another’s languages perhaps? Yes, they were writing words, gesturing, explaining to one another. Time sped up again, and I counted dozens of meetings in a matter of minutes—each time the two fragments aligned. I think I even saw some UrDail visit Earth through the portal, while some humans left on the UrDail fragment.
Then…the humans stopped coming.
An alignment happened and the UrDail arrived, but no humans were there to meet them. That occurred several more times, then eventually the UrDail stopped visiting as well.
“So…” I said. “What does this tell us about our powers?”
Chet frowned, inspecting the mural in the vision—which was colorful and vibrant then. “Alien species began meeting in the nowhere. Mixing. But then it ended. Why?”