Daughter of Time 1: Reader (26 page)

“Why untried?” I asked.

“Because we have lacked an understanding of how to proceed technically, and because it has been considered unwise to enter recursive space.”

“Recursive space?”

“It is difficult to explain in this limited language. Should you alter the events of the past from the future, you also alter the future, perhaps impacting even your actions to reach into the past. A circular chain of events, which, simplistically, appears to lead to paradox.”

“Like killing your mother before you were born, so that you would never have been born to kill her.”

“In general terms, yes. These are effects within effects, like procedures in a computer program that call on themselves, potentially looping infinitely in causality. Such loops cannot be followed until they resolve.”

“What does that mean?” I wondered out loud.

“That we cannot predict the consequences of such actions. Why do you ask us this?”

I looked at Waythrel. I had to come clean, tell them my hopes. I knew I couldn’t do it without them.

“Because I think I can save Earth.”

“Save Earth,” asked Waythrel incredulously. “You mean by altering the past?”

“Yes.”

“How, Ambra? Even we of Xix cannot do this.”

“I don’t know exactly how, but I know enough of what I can do that I am hoping with your help I can succeed.” I walked around, almost aimlessly, as I tried to explain the vision, tried to put into words what were insights beyond any words I had. “There is power, Waythrel, enormous power beyond anything you have ever imagined in the millions of latent Readers of Earth.
Earth Before
. Readers that were, but who are no more.”

“I don’t understand, Ambra.”

“They are also
Writers
. Blind Writers, but with latent Writer potential. Some more, some less. I can shape space-time, you know this. So can they, but they cannot direct it. Their prescient organ is too undeveloped. But they can be channeled, Waythrel! Their power refocused!”

“To what end?”

“I can
read
the past. I can
write
in the present. You must see the next step.”

One of the scientists spoke up, excitement radiating from her thoughts. “You believe you can alter the space-time of the past.”

“Yes!” I nearly shouted. “But there are at least two problems that I can see. And probably more I can’t. First—it needs too much energy. Much more than I’ll ever have. To reach backward in time and pull the strings of space-time as we need is beyond me. I know this. That is why I need them.”

“The Earth Readers of the past?”

“Yes! Together we have the strength. Our energies can be combined, guided by me, like a chorus singing together. Tens of thousands. So much more powerful than one voice.”

“What is the second obstacle you mentioned?” Waythrel asked.

“The second—I’ll need a lens to focus this power. Even if I can direct it, the power is still too weak, dispersed like a mist or fog. It must be focused like the light of a star through a child’s glass, a bright spot that sets a piece of paper on fire!”

“What kind of lens? How do you focus such power?” asked another of the scientists.

“You can’t guess? What is the most powerful distorter of space-time known to us in the galaxy?”

I felt the dawning of understanding in the Xixian group, a sense of the audacity of my ideas. Waythrel whispered out. “The Orbs.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “And I know them and how to travel through them. We have thought of them only as tunnels between different spatial points in the Now. But they are…
more
. I have seen infinite doors in the Orbs, opening one behind the other. Not only in space, but also in time.”

One of the Xixian scientists spoke up with agitation. “But each Orb leads to another, either indirectly on the Strings, or, as you have shown, directly, when the Orbs are opened. How can you direct through time what is forced through space? How do the Orbs connect to each other through time?”

This was the part I didn’t know if I understood myself.
And yet I saw
. Maybe I didn’t need to understand. These alien geniuses could figure it out. I would speak simply of what I could see.

“The Orbs do not connect to each other.”

“Ambra,” began Waythrel as I hesitated, “of course they do.”

“No, it seems so, but you cannot
see
. Your instruments cannot probe. They don’t
connect
. I don’t know how it can be, but I have seen it. All those Orbs
do not exist
, not as you believe. There are not many Orbs: there is only
one
.”

“Only one?” whispered Waythrel.

“Yes, only one, and it is in all these places at the same time, an infinite door opening to infinite spaces, infinite times. Spaces far beyond those of the String Tree, the worlds you have discovered the Strings to connect. A door opening to spaces so much farther than we can imagine, galaxies half a universe away….”

Astonished thoughts passed through the group around me. “Not only distant spaces, but also
times
, near and far. The Orb here, the opening of the door in this space, will do as well as any to focus the power of Readers past.”

“And where will you focus this power, Ambra Dawn?”

I looked over to the Xixian scientist who asked the question, awe and fear in his voice as he contemplated the possibilities of my words.

“On that which murdered my people,” I said calmly, firmly. “Richard Cross asked me to change its course. So I will.”

41

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. 
—Oscar Wilde

Months of research followed this conversation. Soon, the best of Xixian minds had transported to the Moon base, and I was introduced to the intellectual stars of their species, minds even many Xix could not fathom.

It didn’t matter to me. I was a simple rodent to these developed creatures, but a rat with a power and insight they did not have, who had stimulated a cascade of ideas in their science never seen before. And I gave them a “humanitarian” reason to pursue these ideas—a chance to save an entire planet and perhaps its dominant species, with all the Reader potential held within it.

So they imported minds and equipment, and experiment after experiment was performed. How they did this without discovery by the Dram amazed me. For several weeks, I spoke to Xixian scientific delegations. They listened to my words and questioned me again and again, and developed their theories for making this bold attempt succeed.

Then, for an entire month, I was left alone, as they pursued the implications of my ideas independently. Only Waythrel would keep me updated, telling me of successes and failures, using the simple terms my poor human mind could work with. In the meantime, I fought off the terrible chill that was creeping over me.

You who read this are sitting somewhere on beautiful Earth, surrounded by an ocean of life—humans, other animals, insects, even the bacteria in your gut and on every surface of your body. In some ways you are a small cell in a giant living body scientists called the biosphere—that tiny shell of air and sea and life, paper-thin floating on a lake of magma.

But that lake will be set loose. It has poured over field and stream, peak and valley, sea and city. Burning. Burning them all to ash. You cannot feel what it is like when the great organism of Earth has died, and you, a single, small cell, are cast into the cold of space. Cut off.
Dying
.

That is the feeling I had, the feeling I sensed from the other humans around me. We were dying some kind of death never before cataloged. A death of having the planet to which we belonged murdered. So different from traveling away from it. Traveling, you are cut off as well, but there is some kind of psychic link, some connection, that is like an umbilical cord keeping you alive, feeding you, calming you, until you make your return. Now, Mother Earth was truly, utterly dead. And for those of us who were left, it was getting terribly cold in space.

Expeditions went regularly to that horror around which we revolved each month. Some even ventured to the surface, searching places where the fires had been less fierce, where perhaps some life might still remain. But nothing. Even near the deep-sea vents, where bacteria had thrived near geothermal springs at temperatures near boiling, there was only cooling lava.

And all of it was so pointless. Even if some form of life survived, the biosphere could not be re-created, not in a million years, not in one hundred million. It had taken several hundred million years the first time, and four billion for life intelligent enough to think about itself to evolve. As far as humans or animals or plants were concerned, our planet was gone. The charred cinder we still called Earth might start over, with perhaps something evolving to consider the universe again in another five billion years. By this time, our sun would die, would blow up to a red giant like the one in the Dram system, cooking the Earth beyond salvage. Cheering thoughts.

Only once did I join the surveyors and travel to Earth. We left the Moon base on a Xixian spacecraft, circling around from the dark side of the Moon until we witnessed Earthrise. Not the Earthrise from NASA images, those stirring photographs of a crescent blue-white marble hanging in the blackness of space. Instead, a cinder-shrouded ash heap decorated with rivers and lakes of lava peered like some monster’s eye over the lunar horizon.

Within hours the powerful ship had put us in orbit around Earth, from which we then descended to examine the landscape. Our home was unrecognizable. It was impossible to see very much through the clouds of smoke and ash and the constant yet diminishing plunge of debris from space back to the planet. Things were extremely hazardous as well, and Waythrel and others had strongly protested my traveling. But at different wavelengths the Xixian instruments could cut through the smoke and reveal the ravaged landscape beneath. Without the oceans, the continents were difficult to discern. No polar caps, and it became easy to lose orientation of north and south. And nowhere could be spotted even a single reminder that we had ever been there. Even space had been swept clean of our satellites and space junk by the material hurled into orbit, much of it still waiting to return to Earth and bring more fire in its fall.

A few hours were enough, more than I could bear, and nearly shaking with horror we returned to the equally desolate surface of the Moon.
Equally lifeless
. But Earth was more desolate for what it had once been, for what had been lost and burned or buried in that cataclysm.

Afterward, sitting in my room trying to purge my mind of those images, I remembered visions from my travels into human history. Germany, 1940. The slaughter of millions. Ashes sent into the skies. The word they used years later, that ended up in the history books, came to me. A two-part word, from the ancient Greek:
holos
, “completely” and
kaustos
, “burnt.”
Completely burnt.
The word haunted my mind.

Holocaust
.

42

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
—George Bernard Shaw

In the meantime, the experiments continued. Even as I fought off the terrible chill threatening to freeze my soul and render me helpless, there was that one small seed of hope trying to germinate as the Xix found their way through the maze of science and technology. After a series of experiments performed without my input, they began to include me in the process. At first it was simple things, reaching into the recent past to modify space-time in small ways that they could detect and quantify. Nothing related to the big task at hand, no manipulation of forces through the Orbs or channeling of other Readers to a common task. I guess they wanted to get a sense that I could do even these simple things, and how well I could do them, before they moved on to more difficult, and more dangerous, experiments.