Endworlds - Nicholas Read [38]
Striding along beside him, she had to chuckle. “You really don’t know anything, do you? Size is no indication of strength when you’re dealing with Inter-D’s. Matter gets warped. You can get this enormous thing in one of the other dimensions, and when it falls into our reality it can look tiny, but still carry the same mass. I don’t know why, but most things look smaller here than they really are.”
“It’s them manifolds,” said Vector.
“What?” snapped Jax, eyes still scanning data.
Wot they call Calabi Yau manifolds13. Where stuff in the different dimensions is shrunk, like. The older the Age it comes from, the further away it is from our reality. So the distance makes it look smaller when it projects here.”
“Oui, whatever.” Jax was distracted, swaying from side to side as instruments sniffed the bosonic plane for any hint of the breach they were searching for.
“This happens a lot?” Eastwood asked Vector. “Things from other worlds?”
“All the time, mate.” Tucker leaned in to the conversation. “But until their harmonics drop into tune, you never see the traveler. Different dimensions, different vibrations. It’s why we don’t spot them in normal conditions. Hence we use our visors.”
Castle added: “It’s not really different worlds though. They’re all from this world. It’s more like different Ages, like Vector said.”
Vector mimed a grand theatrical bow without breaking stride.
One eye in a quizzical squint, the youngest addition to the team blurted: “That doesn’t really help much. Most of what you said last night went over my head, me freezing and all.”
Castle and Jax traded a nod, and Castle slipped into stride next to Eastwood as Jax moved to the flanking position, one eye on her scopes at all times.
“Here’s a crash course then,” said Castle, his eyes glancing upwards as he collected his thoughts. “How old is the Earth?”
Eastwood tapped his head with a finger. “How old am I? Memory, remember? Pretend I don’t know anything about history before yesterday.”
“Right. Sorry.” Castle started again as they turned into a junction of several laneways and picked their way across cobblestones through an archway propped up with scaffolding and tattered posters.
“Common knowledge is that the Earth is millions of years old and people have been running around for hundreds of thousands of years since apes turned to men and started walking upright. Trouble is, when you pull your head out of the theories and look at the facts, most written histories and even the oral traditions all show civilization starting around the same time, and it’s much more recent than most people think.”
They were passing a huge courtyard of fountains and carved lions now. “How long is that?” asked Eastwood.
“Other than a few early cave paintings and flint arrowheads and the like, real civilization started about five thousand years ago, all over the planet at the same time. And the thing about it is you don’t see anything half-baked. Alphabets and counting systems all started fully formed, as if they were transplanted from somewhere else instead of being built up by trial and error.”
Tucker leaned in for a moment, one ear on the conversation. “Want to know why?” she teased.
Eastwood nodded as the street started to incline downwards. Castle cleared his throat of the damp morning air and continued: “Because they were transplanted. From former Ages of the Earth.”
Also listening in, Hummer saw the blank look on Eastwood’s face.
“Don’t worry, I make it simple: this area I know about,” he chimed. “Fellow countryman, genius like all Russians, was a guy by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky14. He was famous professor, a big fish like Einstein. But he fell out of fame because his ideas were, how you say, ahead of his time.
“He say that old history is mostly wrong, that things don’t always change slow when big things happen to Earth. Like dam bursts and next day it looks like a million years of erosion on canyon wall. Same with planet. It looks old because things