Kronos I’s splashdown was a matter of when rather than where. Travelling close to the speed of light, carrying the seeds of ten thousand threatened plants, it was calculated to land a century in the future, even if Tiber logged a mere matter of weeks of travel. Simple Einsteinian time dilation, familiar to any high school nerd but only achievable by a team of NASA geniuses.
He put down in San Francisco Bay. Descending, he didn’t recognize the skyline; the Golden Gate Bridge had gone. Had the city suffered another earthquake?
“This is Captain Roger Tiber of NASA mission Kronos I requesting assistance. I am putting down in San Francisco Bay and require assistance. Over.”
He repeated the message five times in clear measured tones, multiple parachutes decelerating the re-entry vehicle, before he hit the water. A craft whose propulsion system he didn’t recognize pulled his capsule to the quayside. An early evening crowd had gathered, curious, bewildered. Drone cameras hovered, transmitting his arrival, he presumed, on whatever passed for news channels in the year 2130, there or thereabouts.
He stood on Kronos I’s nose, a size 13 boot over a soot-stained NASA logo. “My name is Captain Roger Tiber. In the year 2030, I was sent into the future with the seeds of threatened species. The damage our species had done to the planet condemned them, and our efforts to protect them failed. Even in storage they seemed to decay. We hoped that by travelling sufficiently far into the future we would find a verdant planet and healthy soil in which to plant them. I have travelled from your past to ask for your help. I cannot return, but I hope that mankind has learnt from its mistakes and your generation has solved the mistakes of mine.”
A murmur went through the crowd. “I’ve heard about you,” said a voice near the front. “You were lost.”
The words had come from a donkey. Wearing sunglasses, a 49ers baseball cap and a Hawaiian shirt, Tiber had not initially realized it was an animal.
“That donkey spoke,” he blurted.
“Of course,” replied a dog in a hoodie. “Why shouldn’t he talk?”
Tiber looked again at the crowd. He’d seen it as a single entity, but now he took in individuals. Yes, some were human, at the periphery, but there were just as many animals. Dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, pigs, cows. All dressed. All chatting away. In fact, the animals were doing the talking whilst the humans stood sullenly by.
“What year is this?” he asked, suddenly giddy.
He swooned, blinking, rocking back on his heels as his question was answered by several voices at once: “2341.”
He had been away for over three hundred years. How could this have happened? Kronos I must have gone closer to the speed of light than intended, time smeared even thinner. No wonder nobody had expected him. He was a footnote in history. Had been for centuries.
“I had a dog like you,” he declared, pointing at the dog in the hoodie, desperate for something to say.
“What do you mean, ‘had’?” came a shout back from a horse.
“I called him Lucky.”
Tiber was losing his audience. What did he call himself? Did you keep him on a lead and feed him from a can? Was he a hostage? the crowd called back.
“He wasn’t a hostage; he was the family pet.”
At this a collective gasp went through the crowd, nervous laughter in its wake. What the hell? Tiber thought.
“If he’s who he says he is, then he came from before Abercrombie,” said a sheep, sounding as if it was trying to help as — policemen? soldiers? — forced their way through the throng.
“Abercrombie?” Tiber wondered as orangutans in uniform led him towards what looked like an oversized airport metal detector set into the quayside, within which was a block of pure black, impossible to focus on, impossible to discern as either object or absence.
“Who’s Abercrombie?” he asked again, pushing back on his heels. As he was jostled into the rectangle of darkness somebody said something about ‘Meeting the Mayor’.
“…what Abercrombie believed was that animals were morally and intellectually on a par with humans, in their own way. It’s down to Abercrombie that we are where we are today.”
Tiber was in a white room. He had no recollection of arriving, nor of the old man with the white stubble and bright blue eyes who seemed to be partway through answering a question he didn’t recall asking. His NASA spacesuit was gone. In its place he wore a smock, in some blousy silky material. If that was what men wore in 2341…
“Twenty, twenty-first century man began to credit animals with a degree of memory and understanding and problem-solving skills. Abercrombie, in the mid-twenty-third century, asked where this was all going to end? Extrapolating, he predicted, eventually, Man should and would recognize animals as equals.”
“Equals?” said Tiber, doubtfully.
“Two, three hundred years before you were born black men and women were regarded as a lower form of life, bought and sold as slaves. When you left home that idea had become abhorrent. Quite rightly. Well, exactly the same happened with animals.”
“I loved my dog, but I wouldn’t have asked Lucky for legal advice.”
The old man waved away Tiber’s protest. “Abercrombie thought animals, mammals of a particular size, at least, had the mental horsepower to communicate to some degree all along. They already had vocal cords. So why couldn’t they speak? And he showed with some minor bio-engineering their brains, in fact, they could. A new age was upon us. And, if they could use language, were they really lower forms of life? We refer to the era we are in as ‘After Abercrombie’.”
Tiber couldn’t believe what he was hearing, the upshot of the previous three centuries all too strange. “What about opposable thumbs?”
The old man shrugged. “Still very much in their infancy. Most animals prefer to use the assistance of humans. Which, for us, is the preferable option. But I am keeping you from your audience with the Mayor.”
As Tiber pondered recent history, he found himself grabbed by the arms, pinned, his ankles tied. In one smooth motion he was hoisted on to a gurney already in motion, smock removed, stomach down, face pressed upwards.
“What the…” were the last words he uttered as the old man pressed an apple into his mouth, and he was pushed into a hall of…
bears…
huge bears…
with suits and ties and claws like knives and roars like lift-off…
bears everywhere…
eyes that looked at him like he was meat already.
He realized his body sat on a bed of salad and he was surrounded by… pickles.
Walking alongside the old man leant in, a stage whisper over the scrape of knives being sharpened. “Well, slavery is always preferable to being eaten.”
This story originally appeared in the now-defunct Page & Spine in May 2022.
Robert Bagnall was born in Bedford, England, in 1970. He has written for the BBC, national newspapers, and government ministers. Five of his stories have been selected for the annual ‘Best of British Science Fiction’ anthologies. He is the author of sci-fi thriller ‘2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth’ and two anthologies, each of which collects 24 of his eighty-odd published stories. He can be contacted via his blog at meschera.blogspot.com.
Robert, This is a wonderful story, which I delighted in so much, i immediately read twice. From concept to description, it held me throughout. I look forward to reading more of your work.