Free Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson

speech.”
    “Ah.” The silver eagle gave me a sidelong, appraising glance. “In that case, shall we go?”
    “You know, in my day, traveling to another planet typically involved a bit of preparation.”
    The silver eagle took wing, flying up near the lofty ceiling and then spiraling gently down, finally landing gracefully on my shoulder. Folding its wings and regarding me with one silver eye, it said, “I imagine, sir, that is precisely the sort of historical trivia that the Anachronists hope you will share with them.”
    I shrugged, scarcely feeling the weight of the eagle, and made for the door. “I hope I don’t disappoint.”

FOURTEEN

    As we made our way back to the Central Axis, traveling via slidewalks that carried us back the way we’d come, I asked the escort a question that had been nagging me since I’d awoken to the tender mercies of the dog-people. Namely, whether humanity had ever discovered life of extraterrestrial origin as it had expanded out into the galaxy.
    When Wayfarer One left Sol, bound for the distant light of Alpha Centauri B, our principal mission was one of exploration, to find a habitable world for future colonization. A secondary objective, though, and one for which endless contingency plans had been drafted, was the search for extraterrestrial life.
    By the middle of the 22C, no indication had been found that life had arisen anywhere but on Earth. Which is not to say that life hadn’t been found elsewhere—microbial fossils had been located on Mars, and ice worms thrived in the shadow of Titan’s cryovolcanoes—but in every instance these organisms were likely the descendants of spores blasted from Earth’s surface by prehistoric asteroid impacts. Some adhered to the notion of panspermia, which held that life on Earth itself originated from seeds drifting through the cold vacuum of space from somewhere else, but no definitive proof had been discovered.
    In the long millennia that I had slumbered in my coffin sleeper on board Wayfarer One , it seemed, the proof had finally been found.
    Wherever humanity went, the escort explained, it had encountered life in any environment that was suited to support it. But while life appeared to be ubiquitous, intelligence was not.
    “Since the time of the Diaspora,” the escort said as we continued our tour of the megastructure Earth, “anything more complicated than a monocellular organism is vanishingly rare, and the rare organisms of greater complexity that have been discovered have never risen above the level of sophistication found in a primitive cockroach.”
    “Diaspora?”
    “The migration of sentients of terrestrial origin in the millennia before the first threshold was initiated, linking the worlds of the Entelechy. Contact was lost with many individuals and groups—organics, synthetics, and others of blended provenance—over the millennia. On rare occasions, contact is reestablished with one of these lost groups, as with the Exode, often to the benefit of the Entelechy.”
    “So there is intelligence out there,” I said, “but only that which we brought with us.”
    The silver eagle waggled its head in a shrug.
    “That is the prevailing view, sir. But there are those who believe differently. There are theories of older races that spanned the galaxy before the rise of humanity, and which have now disappeared from view. There is no evidence for their existence, of course, but their proponents see inferences everywhere, from the ‘fine-tuning’ of certain cosmological values to the balance of chemical constituents on certain planetary bodies, which some argue is evidence of ancient terraforming. This is known as the Demiurgist Doctrine.”
    I couldn’t help but be reminded of the antiscientific theories of creationist design, which helped transform my paternal grandfather’s homeland into a benighted backwater. His landmark novel, In the Country of the Blind , warned of the dangers of allowing that sort of antirational