Daughter of Time 1: Reader (25 page)

And I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to tell me.

38

I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains. 
—Anne Frank

I sat still in the guest room with Waythrel, partially nauseous from the low gravity on the satellite. The Moon base had been hastily constructed in great secrecy even as the agents of the Dram herded our clueless kind on nearby Earth. There had been no time to be sophisticated, no time for gravitational enhancements or even a crude rotating design to increase average gravity. I had refused lunch, sick from the odd gravity, sick from watching Richard Cross die, sick from watching Earth die one hundred times in my visions, and sick from a long and empty conversation with Waythrel about a dying man’s thoughts.

“I am sorry, Ambra,” it spoke after a long silence. “For all we know, those words were spoken in a decaying brain state and perhaps have no meaning. He may have been speaking nonsense.”

“I don’t believe it,” I whispered softly. “I could feel him fighting to maintain focus, to convey to me something he finally understood. If so, it’s important, and I need to find the answer. If it’s nonsense, then it doesn’t matter.”

“Except that it will drain your energies from other tasks.”

I felt like screaming. “What other tasks, Waythrel? I may have found the strength to do what I did, but I am wounded to the core. Would you feel any differently had Xix been destroyed? How can any creature ever thrive without their home world, even if it is just the knowledge that it is there to return to? We are like limbs cut off from the tree, and we will wither.”

“Ambra! You must not! Or else this sacrifice will be in vain! You are now our best hope for defeating the Dram. You must find strength in that!”

I sighed heavily. “Waythrel, I will try. And that is why I hope to find the meaning of Richard’s last words. I felt a hope in them, a hope specific for my kind. I wish he could have told me more. But that hope is what keeps me going now.”

“Then may it not be a false hope.”

“Take my mind somewhere else, Waythrel. I am too exhausted to seek answers. What has happened since our escape? What do the other worlds know of Earth?”

“The Dram have reverted to full militaristic mode. Their aggression has increased a thousand-fold, and all are harshly reminded once again of how terrible they can be. Information from Dram is censored, but of course we of Xix are able to elude their crude technology and transmit. The Emperor is in critical care. His mind is wrecked by your actions. He babbles nonsense and cries out for protection from humans. The High Inquisitor has followed succession rights and assumed interim control of the Empire until a new Emperor is chosen – an archaic and barbaric ritual of the noble houses that I will save for another time. In the meantime, the military has orders to violently suppress even the hint of any insurrection in the Hegemony. Many innocents are paying with their lives.”

“Yes, I had seen this. So much pain. Even in hope for victory, so much pain.”

“Word of Earth has spread throughout the Hegemony. I am sad to say not so much in concern for Earthlings, but much more for the implications. Firstly, reminders that the Dram are more than willing to slaughter entire worlds, as if this could have been forgotten. Secondly, that the greatest well of Readers to supply the galaxy has been destroyed. I am sorry to make it so clear what worth humans have been to the Hegemony, but this is the hard truth. You have been a resource, a necessary resource, and a great fear is sweeping through the galaxy that this resources has been destroyed.”

“It’s okay, Waythrel. My experiences have made this clear to me, in ways far more painful than your words.”

“Yes. I can’t doubt that. Now, all worlds see that the Dram hold whatever humans may be left, that they fully control all aspects of a scarce resource, without which interstellar travel will cease. The Dram tighten their control of all space with this slaughter.”

Waythrel stood up and began the strange Xixian tap dance as it paced back and forth across the room.

“But one thing the Dram did not suspect – that word of you and your actions would escape. We of Xix have secretly seen to that. Word of one who has opened the Orbs now grows and takes shape. Word that this human also escaped the clutches of the Dram Emperor. Like a spark dropped in a parched land, a fire has kindled and is spreading wildly from world to world. I have never seen anything like it. The Dram strike out mercilessly to stop the blaze, only to find their actions testify to its veracity – they feed the fire in their clumsy efforts to snuff it out.”

Waythrel stopped pacing. “Ambra, you are fast becoming legend.”

I just shook my head. I hardly had the spirit to laugh at this absurdity I had also foreseen. “From slave-freak to legend in a blink of an eye. Waythrel, all I have done is watch passively as my home world was charred black. Do you know if I close my eyes, I hear their screams? Billions of them.” I began trembling as the voices passed over my consciousness again. I fought them back and pushed the vision aside.

“Ambra, legends seldom earn their status, even if you are a heroine in your own way.”

“No.”

“I will not argue with you over your sacrifice, or theirs,” it gestured upward, indicating Earth. “What I mean to say is that legends serve a purpose for those who nurture them and spread them to willing ears. They need hope, Ambra. This oppressed galaxy crushed under the tyranny of the Dram has lost the capacity to believe in victory. Only something larger than themselves, that they can believe is larger than the Dram, can give it back to them. Your feelings in this matter are irrelevant. Your legend grows because they need it, Ambra.”

“Then I will need to find a way to live up to it.”

“You have said it. So I can only believe it will be.”

We didn’t speak anymore that night. I was exhausted, even if Waythrel required nothing resembling sleep. I had to rest. I prepared for bed, told my alien roommate goodnight, and collapsed on my mattress, falling instantly to sleep.

Some legend.

39

We cannot define these things without obscuring them, while we speak of them with all assurance. ...our doubts cannot take away all the clearness, nor our own natural lights chase away all the darkness.
 —Blaise Pascal

And the dream came.

I flew through the heavens, launched by my father’s arms. I saw the cold indifference of the distant stars and sensed the evil that lay hidden among them. I passed through my past and sat at my family’s kitchen table to see the demon-man. I ran through the high corn to feel the blow of his henchmen, who dragged me off to be butchered and altered.

But in the darkness, as I lay on my back, staring up the high stalks to the green of the ears of corn, then to the blue canvas of the sky, the sunlight blocked out by the shadow of evil standing over me, as the light faded and blackness closed about me, I did not wake up screaming. Not this time. Not like all the other times.

This time, I floated in the blank emptiness, without light, without sound, without smell. Madness lurked in this sensationless null, yet it sharpened my awareness as I approached the abyss of sanity. I reached desperately out into the nothingness for contact.

Then came a disturbance. So soft at first, I could not tell which sense was being engaged – was it sight, a soft light growing in front of me? Or touch, a cool breeze, a ripple of air like a whisper over my skin? Or did it stir faint memories of cold winters in the plains, when one could barely discern the hint of a smell, that taste of wood smoke from a fire that resonated with ancestral memories of safety in the ice?

None of these. As the sensation grew, it was as if a thousand voices came to be recognized, as some celestial choir, a melody growing in the darkness around me. But this sound was more than sound, it came from the force of personality of the chanters, not from their mouths but from another place deep within. A place I knew more than any human who had ever lived. Their song painted the emptiness around me in a beautiful light, a light I knew, a light I could touch. And as I reached out to this light, it became not just a song I might listen to but a water I could swim within. A clay I could shape.

And then
I knew
.
I understood,
and the voices around me seemed to laugh with joy. From all directions, their energies came to me. I had only to reach out and embrace them.

Then—cold, hard, irregular. I felt it before I saw it. Turning around in this directionless place, seeking, I found a new disturbance. Slowly, a shape unblurred before me. And like a net with infinite dimensions, the light around me bent and surrounded it, enveloped it, and waited.

Everything was still, all the energies potential, like the taut string of a bow with the arrow notched.

I needed only to aim and release the shot.

40

3:2

δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω:

Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.

—Archimedes of Syracuse

“I don’t understand,” Waythrel said again, as we raced up the corridor to meet with the Xixian physicists.

“Waythrel, I don’t have the words, the understanding. I don’t even know if you and the Xix do, so how can I hope to explain rightly?” I gasped out in frustration, as we approached the Xixian wing of the Moon base. “I only have intuition. Like Thel once told me, before I was blind, I didn’t understand the physics of seeing, and yet
I saw
. I don’t know how this can be, or what it means, or how to say it. I only know I believe it and can do it. But I will need
help
.”

Waythrel was silent until reached the doors to the makeshift laboratory. “Then we will try to explain to our scientists. Of course we don’t have the best of them here, or even the best representation of the areas that you need. Only a handful of Xixian technologists spared from other needed activities, sent to this Resistance base to serve multiple functions, mostly as engineers. I hope this will serve.”

The doors opened, and we walked inside. Several Xixian scientists were waiting for us at Waythrel’s request. I could sense the curiosity, expectation, even as I was unable to venture into the complexity of the Xixian thoughts.

“Go ahead, Ambra. It’s your show.” Waythrel stepped slightly to the side, and I was left in front of about five other Xix.

I took a deep breath. I might as well just get to it. They were the experts. They would have to figure out what I meant.

“Thel once told me that space-time is like a gel, an ever-changing fluid where events of past, present, and future depended on the shape of the gel itself.”

One of the scientists spoke up. “A crude description, even in your simple language.”

“Yes, okay,” I said, not wanting to lose their trust in me. “Humans can understand simple causality— events now creating future states. The gel is squeezed one way, and reshaped in future dimensions.”

They were silent, waiting, likely demoralized at my conceptualization of it all. But I had to try. “So, why isn’t it possible for the future to reshape the past?”

There was some exchange of conversation between the alien creatures, and I felt an intense concentration from Waythrel. The one that had spoken to me stepped slightly forward, in shape slightly larger than Waythrel, its coloration a greenish-blue with iridescent stripes, contrasting sharply with Waythrel’s deep-purple spots.

“You distinguish falsely between past, present, and future, so that it is difficult to communicate with you on this topic without distortion. Within these constraints, however, it is something considered long possible, but which has been untried.”