There were more than enough riddles in this for the scientists to argue over for many years to come. How, for example, could the Lambians have been the descendants of their own descendants? Their greed and power lust were seen at last as characteristic of them as a group rather than of the human race as a whole, but
that being so, where had those characteristics originated? The Jevlenese had inherited them from the Lambians, who had inherited them from the Jevlenese that had landed on Minerva. So where and when had it started? Danchekker speculated that their passage through the zone of dislocated spacetime might have induced some form of psychological aberration that had started the whole thing off, but the suggestion was not very satisfying since the meaning of the word “started” in this context was obscure to say the least.
Another enigma arose from the knowledge of subsequent events that the Jevienese would presumably have taken back to Minerva with them. If they knew about the next two hundred years, the war, the millennia after that with the Thuriens, and their own eventual defeat at the hands of VISAR, why would they have allowed those very things to happen? Had they been powerless to change the sequence? Surely not. Had a whole new history somehow been written into the timeloop to erase and replace something else that had existed there “before,” whatever that meant? Or had they perhaps taken few hard records with them in their haste and suffered some kind of stress-induced amnesia such that they arrived not knowing who they were or where they had come from, thus dooming themselves to launch again into an endless, unaltering cycle?
The Thuriens didn’t know the answers to these questions either, which raised issues that were on the fringes of their own theoretical researches. Possibly, one day, future generations of Ganymean and Terran mathematicians and physicists would deduce the strange logic within which such things could happen. Then again, possibly no one would ever know.
But one mystery was solved that had been perplexing the Terrans, the Ganymeans, and the Jevlenese alike-the mystery of the device out beyond Pluto that had responded to that first message beamed from Farside in ancient Ganymean code, and relayed it directly to VISAR. The Thuriens had assumed it was something that the Jevienese had positioned, the Jevienese had assumed it was something that the Thuriens had emplaced, and because of the circumstances neither side had ever been able to challenge the other. And now that it had been destroyed, there was no way of investigating it. So what had it been, and how had it gotten there?
The answer could only be the probe that had gone through the tunnel on the heels of the Jevlenese ships. Naturally it had been
programmed to respond to the conimunications protocols used by its own mother ship, and it had been fitted with an h-link to Thurien. By analyzing the log of messages exchanged during those last few seconds, Shilohin’s scientists established that, just before the tunnel closed behind it, the probe had been in a passive mode awaiting its next command from the Shapieron. Apparently it had waited for a long time. After exiting near Minerva under the impetus that VISAR had imparted in accelerating it in pursuit of the Jevienese ships, it climbed away from the Sun and eventually stabilized in a distant orbit out beyond Pluto. And it waited. And eventually it heard a command that it understood, and relayed it to VISAR because that was what its instructions told it to do. It didn’t know that fifty thousand years had gone by in the meantime.
And so the full circle that linked Minerva and the early Ganymeans, the Lunarians both Lambian and Cerian, Charlie and Koriel, Earth and Homo sapiens, and the Giants’ Star, was complete. It had begun with its own ending, and in the process JEVEX, Broghuilio, and the Lambians had become locked in an unbreakable ioop that was firmly and permanently embedded in the past. Ironically their prison was even more escape-proof than the one that they themselves had devised.
Deprived of their corrupt element, the people of Jevien turned out to be not so unlike human beings anywhere else after all, and set themselves to the task of rebuilding their society with a new mood of cooperation and optimism. This would require a great deal of physical hard work as well as social and political reforms because of the widespread damage, mainly from flooding, that had been caused by the gravitational upheaval of Broghuilio’s spectacular departure, so Calazar installed Garuth as temporary planetary governor to supervise and coordinate the operation. Jevlen would be on probation for a while to come, and for some time there would be no planet-wide system after the pattern of JEVEX; planning and other functions would require extensive informationprocessing capacity nevertheless, and fortunately a machine of just the right size presented itself in the form of zoi~c. The Shapieron was permanently based at Jevlen, and zoit.~c became the nucleus of a new pilot network that one day would assume interplanetary dimensions and be merged into VISAR.