Daughter of Time 1: Reader (27 page)

The second phase was working with other Readers. There was, of course, a high proportion of Readers among the humans on the Moon base, and many of them eagerly agreed to work on the project once they had been briefed about our hopes. A few of the most powerful Xixian Readers also participated to flesh out the chorus of power at our disposal. In all, I would estimate that in these secondary experiments, several hundred human and Xixian Readers were employed.

At first, our success was limited. While I could sense the Reader Fields, it was almost impossible to develop any sort of method to organize the energies, to channel the forces in a productive way. Their latent Writer potential was so diffuse, so weak, that it was like trying to pick up a radio signal from Earth in the Andromeda Galaxy, and to focus those radio waves into a laser beam to burn through a sheet of steel. Of course, the final plan was to focus these weak and diffuse manipulations of space-time through the Orbs, but some kind of initial lens was needed. One not so powerful, but that could take a much more diffuse signal and compact it to send to the greater lens. It was like building some kind of telepathic telescope.

It took a long time to solve this problem, months until it was realized that I could not be this lens, that my own power could not solve this problem. While I could focus my thoughts, I could not focus those of the other Readers. Only
they
could do this, but there seemed to be no way to teach them how. The Xix tried as they had trained me, but all efforts failed. Perhaps because my abilities were so great to begin with, the Xixian training was productive. But not here. Not with the average human Reader. We were stalled and getting nowhere.

I had begun to despair when the monk came.

He was an old man, Tibetan, white eyebrows and a bald head perched atop a crimson and orange robe that draped to the ground. The monk stood at the door Waythrel had opened to our chamber, looking neither toward me nor the Xix beside him. His eyes seemed distant, a soft smile always on the edge of his expression. I sensed hesitancy in my Xixian friend.

“Ask him in, Waythrel,” I said, and it invited him inside.

The monk bowed and entered. He walked up to me and knelt, taking the hem of my black robes. I was getting used to this, my gradual deification in the eyes of my species. For whatever reason, they did not brand me with the guilt of my choices, and my abilities appeared almost magical to them. I suppose my strange appearance only added to the mystique. After Waythrel’s words about my becoming a legend, I realized there was little I could do, even if it seemed ridiculous to me. So, I let him prostrate himself.

“I am Chodak, Daughter of Time,” he began.

I gasped. “Where did you hear that name?”

Visions of that terrible dream returned, as did the last words I spoke with Richard. Outside of my visions, I had only heard one other person use that title: the scientist who had helped make me the abomination I was.

“Forgive me, Sighted One,” he said, bowing further, his face nearly touching the ground, his strong accent garbling the words. “It was spoken to me in a dream.”

I took his hands and raised him up. “Please, sit with me. Tell me about your vision.” He nodded solemnly and I thanked him. “And call me Ambra. No titles, please.”

The old monk limped over to the couch in the chamber. We sat side by side as he spoke intensely, the entire time never releasing my hand. His constant smile was blissful.

“It was in my meditations, Ambra Dawn. Always, I see most clearly when in the deepest meditation.”

Waythrel danced over and stood across from us. I sensed a deep concentration in the alien, but could not focus on its thoughts.

“Always, I seek to find you, to find how your Light will deliver us and save us from this darkness. But you are too hard to see, and the light is too bright.” He shook his head, smiling. “Until last night. Then I found my mind
inside
the mind of another. It was difficult to understand how this could happen, but I traveled across the entire galaxy in a single moment and entered. Then I saw you with his eyes.”

Waythrel interrupted. “You entered the consciousness of another?”

The monk shook his head in the negative. “No, truly only his brain. A flesh in which his mind abided. Or so it felt.”

I didn’t know what to think of this. “And what did you see?” I asked.

The old man closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. “A lifetime’s worth of experience in the time of a butterfly’s breath.”

“And did these experiences show you how Ambra prevails?” asked Waythrel.

“No,” he said, opening his eyes, the smile still there. “It was of a different time, a different place. One that made little sense to my small soul.”

I squeezed his hands tightly. “Then why are you here, Chodak? There are many visions. Many futures and many pasts.”

“Because he loved you, Ambra Dawn,” he said simply, his eyes shining. When I did not speak for several moments, he continued. “Not only as we love the One who has become our Light in this dark time. This and more. He loved you also as a man loves a woman in the flesh, and he attended to your every movement. And through his eyes, I saw this. I saw the deepest meditation of a lover for whom all time stops as his beloved simply turns her head to the side or takes a step. Focus and concentration on each detail, each hair strand, each breath. And always filled with adoration. Through his eyes, I also saw
your
eyes. Deep, blind green eyes of sadness, but with the joy of him in them. You were to be married.”

I could hardly breathe. Was this vision a metaphor? Or had this monk seen into a future where some human man might dare care for me? As I have told you, the reality of my deformity, my blindness, the monstrosity of my actions had shut down most normal human thoughts. And there had been no time, no chance to examine the idea of my womanhood. Not a single moment to exist in that human dimension. To shine this light onto it was disorienting. It hurt.

I couldn’t help myself, my thoughts leapt over to his mind, and breaking a privacy I always try to respect, I looked and saw that it was true. He spoke the truth of his vision. In his mind I could witness the adoration of a lover from a time yet to be. My own face stared back at me through the memories of the eyes of a possible future.

The monk smiled and patted my hand several times. “He loves and serves, and he awaits you. I came to tell you this, to tell you so that you would know that in a future I found, you will be loved in this way.”

The universe is cruel. More than anyone, I know that there will be no single future, and that even what has been could
unbe
. Was it better to know that there existed the possibility of such love, even knowing it was unlikely to be realized? Or better to never have known, never have felt the imaginative stirrings of affection in a dying life? How could I sit there infatuated with the cyst-inspired hallucinations of an old Buddhist monk?

Waythrel interrupted my thoughts. “Chodak, you said that you see more clearly in your deepest meditations.”

The monk nodded. “It is so.”

“We of Xix understand the focus of consciousness, the stepping out of it and becoming more even as you become less. We trained Ambra in our ways as best we could an alien mind. But you are human,” it said, in a tone I had come to imagine as it smirking, “and a professional.”

“Devotion is not a trade for us.”

“I understand,” it said, continuing to probe. “How did you find this man’s mind in your dream?”

The monk glanced upward and to his left. “I searched for Ambra Dawn and could not see for the light. But there was a tunnel, a path that seemed to lead toward her. One that I might follow without becoming blinded by the light. I turned toward this path, and it took me to him.”

“You
chose
this path? You
directed
your Read?”

And suddenly, I understood. My emotions leapt over toward Waythrel.
Yes, Ambra. Here, we may find our answer.

“Yes,” he nodded. “But only with a great stillness.”

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It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better. 
—Henri Poincaré

And so we stumbled on the process of prayer.

Yes, you heard me right.
Prayer
: An idea from a Buddhist monk who was part of our Reader cohort. You may not know it, but before Earth died, there was a good bit of scientific research that showed that meditation, prayer, whatever you want to call it, has a remarkable ability to alter brain states, focus consciousness, even improve health. Jesus said: “Pray, and it will be as you believe.” Yeah, I know that’s not quite like the Bible has it. But I heard it from the Rabbi’s mouth, so trust me on this one. And he had a good-sized cyst, in case you were wondering.

What seemed to be passed down from generations, and what science seemed to be measuring, was that
prayer
affected the
mind
and the world around the mind. Given the human Writer potential, it should have been obvious what was really going on. Prayer focused and stilled the mind, cut it off from the five senses of the world around it, and allowed our sixth sense the stillness and quiet, the resources it needed to function optimally. And that’s where the magic of humanity is born. “Be still and know that I am God.” In some strange way, we’ve always known the truth.

Our monk had delivered to us an answer to the misdirected energies of our Readers. Waythrel saw the answer before we could ever have hoped to on our own, and that very night we began an intense training in the thousand-year-old practice of Tibetan meditation.

Chodak and I worked together to direct this giant, prophetic prayer group. I had discovered an alien form of meditation with the Xix, but he taught the Earthlings among us a more
human
way. It was far, far more effective, even for me, than the Xixian training. We performed basic meditation practices throughout the day at first over several weeks. But the results were so immediately measurable that we were motivated to continue the arduous hours of stillness for months. I could see the energies brightening. Instead of the diffuse fog around me from this Reader chorus, now there were little will-o’-the-wisp shimmers dancing around each of them.

It felt crazy even to me, despite all the miracles and madness I had seen, but it worked. Intense sessions of meditation and feedback snowballed, and I was soon able to drive the space-time distortions of the Readers into a much more organized and malleable form. You have to understand, individually, each of them was so much weaker than me. They could affect little in the space-time fields. Even groups of ten or twenty had little power. But these focused
prayers
of hundreds of Readers actually registered as a blip on the instruments and became like some congealing blob in a lava lamp to my vision, a clay that I could reach out and touch, tug –
shape
. Saints we weren’t, but we sure began to spike the detectors of the Xix.

Now we were getting close. We had a means to bring together and integrate the power of many Readers in a way that I could channel and control. But still, that wasn’t enough. Not
near
enough, even should the Xix and I succeed in using the Orb to focus the energies one thousand times. It was the combination of moving through time and space that made it so difficult. It wasn’t like adding the difficulties of one to the other. To reach back into the past and alter space-time in a major way was like multiplying the energies involved – thousands, tens of thousands of Readers would be needed. There were not enough left in the galaxy for such a deed, or if there were, gathering them all together would be impossible under the eyes of the Dram and the needs of interstellar travel.

But the numbers
were
there. Waiting, if I could reach them. And so, when the Xix finally came to me and said that they believed they could use the Orb to channel the energies (with my help, of course), all that remained was the little task of getting those tens of thousands onboard with the plan. Tens of thousands who lived decades, hundreds of years ago, on an Earth that no longer existed, in times and cultures diverse and distant. I had to find a way to reach them and convince them all to
pray
for our deliverance.

Thank God, I had an idea. Unfortunately, we first had to deal with an unfriendly visit from our insectoidal hunters.

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