Daughter of Time 1: Reader (29 page)

The Orb suddenly fluxed brightly in my mind’s eye. It was a pulse of power, a flash, blinding like a detonation, and it had not been part of our plan. I had not reached out to it as yet. This was not my doing. Instead, I felt
it
reaching out, reaching out to
me
. A tendril of radiance sped at greater than light speeds and targeted me like a missile. I could not move or escape its approach. It struck me as a mental blow and enveloped me. I was surrounded, enfolded into an energy field not of cold indifference, not of some mechanical production, but of something that felt much more organic. Something that felt
alive
. Something that felt more than alive and that had a will of its own:
The Orb was conscious.

And, it spoke to me.

46

In love all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love, are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. 
—Rabindranath Tagore

Once again, I awoke after a long sleep to stare up at the alien form of a Xixian medic. Detectors were positioned around my body, data collected, vital signs examined by the wonders of Xixian technology. The room was dim, and even so the weak light hurt my blind eyes. The occipital lobe at the back of my oblong head may have been obliterated, but my retina could still very much feel pain.

I felt sore and cold, and I blinked several times. Slowly, an awareness beyond the five senses grew, and the consciousness of many creatures washed over me—human and Xixian. And of
another
in the distance. Now that I had experienced it, I would never again lose the sense of its presence. Powerful. Quiescent. Alien and yet more human than myself. I knew something was different. Something profound had happened. I just could not remember.

Close at hand, I felt the mind of Waythrel. I reached out to it.

Hello again, my dear Xix.

The room burst into applause. With my prescience, I scanned the immediate past and saw that a crowd was gathered around my hospital bed, cheering and crying, smiles and melting anxiety washing the room like a rainstorm. I couldn’t help but also smile.

“Were my thoughts so loud?” I asked through a croaked voice.

There was laughter and more tears. Waythrel touched my forehead with one of its many tendrilled fingers. “We are tightly bound now and sense each other as never before. We nearly lost you, foolish human child.”

My sleep had been dreamless, empty, and my memory was a torn patchwork. “What happened, Waythrel? My last memories—they are of you calling for me to open the Orb, and of…something else.”

The entire room was silent. Waythrel continued to stroke my forehead. “You are our prophet, Ambra. Your mind was traumatized, and you can’t remember right now, but a higher power spoke through you.”

“A higher power? What do you mean? What of the Dram? What
happened
?”

“The Dram are gone—where, we don’t know. You opened the Orb, or, perhaps as we understand better now, the Orb opened
for
you. The ships were dragged into the wormholes and sent to some distant place. Even a distant time, perhaps. There is no record of them appearing in any system. The base is secure. As soon as you recover fully, we will return to our training. To our plan.” I felt it reach out to the others with a fluidity and skill I had never sensed in it before. “I think that you will find our performance will improve dramatically.”

I processed this wonderful victory quickly, its other words disturbing me. “What do you mean the Orb opened
for
me?”

“Do you remember nothing, young one? Nothing of the personality that embraced you in the emptiness of space? That brought you back to us because not only our love called out, but because it loved us?”

I sat up straight in the bed and pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. Like some dream reawakening, I felt a golden warmth surround me, a caress of light and gravity penetrating my consciousness. “The Orb,” I whispered as the events came streaming back: the detachment as I was projected into space and encountered the Dram, the emotional call of Waythrel and the other Readers for me to return, and the sudden response to that call from…
the Orb
?

“Yes!” said Waythrel, a happiness, nearly giddiness, spilling from its mind. “The Orb! We were all linked together as your body was dying, as you began to detach from your fleshly form—from us. It came when our breaking hearts cried to you, and it answered our prayers. It spoke to you, and you listened. The Orb opened, the ships were scattered. And you returned.”

“What did it say to me?” My memories were still blocked.

Waythrel was silent. I sensed the smiles around the room, the hundreds of humans and aliens that in joy knew something that I could not yet recall.

I can’t explain it. Not even in the Xixian language. Read, Ambra. Read my mind.

When you first learn a new language, after you have studied for some time the syntax and grammar and begun to spend the necessary days and months immersed in the spoken reality of the tongue, you reach a first important threshold of progress. At this point, you can understand a great deal of what is said to you, sometimes nearly a fluent comprehension. But your speech will lag, flounder, and fail. You will stumble to match the fluency of your understanding with words from your own mind and mouth. So it was here.

Waythrel’s thoughts opened up to me, and poured an experience I cannot describe in this shallow book with these empty and clumsy words. I understood it, I understand it, but I cannot express it. I can only say that all the vague prophecies and poems and scriptures in human history that spoke of the divine were made mute by this vision. It was a singular interaction between a cosmic space-time anomaly and my enhanced and projected consciousness. It was a revelation from the Orb to hundreds of Reader minds interwoven like counterpoint with mine. An entity that scores of alien species had crudely manipulated for gain, so far beneath its true purpose, that it was like ants walking across a discarded telescope to bridge a small stream.
The Orb had spoken
. In this revelation were shards of cosmic truths that even in our enhanced state we could not understand, and in our separated individuality we grasped even less. The divine had entered the room, and we could not even comprehend the dust it scattered. We could only stand in awe.

The visions flooded me from Waythrel and stimulated at last the full release of my own memories. It was beautiful. It was terrible. It was so vast in space and time, and simultaneously so localized and intimately personal, that it generated mental vertigo. It’s as if you went deep inside yourself to that point of the sharp awareness of existence, and at that dimensionless singularity, from that single point exploded all of universal creation. Trillions of galaxies, their billions of star systems, planets, living forms, civilizations, culture, science, religion blasted like a fire hose through your mind. And at the center of it all, in the middle of a thousand dimensions of complexity was a singularity simple and impenetrable. Eternal. Indestructible. A unified force that bound everything else together, that gave it structure, and that generated the very laws of mathematics and physics underscoring existence.

Of all the words I have in my own language for this thing, there is only one that comes close. It fails badly, it distorts, it lacks—but it is the distant echo of a dream whispered across infinity. It is not God, for the idea of God is too human, too finite. It is not faith or hope, for in the end these fail before the darkness.

The only word I know that I dare use—is Love.

47

The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time, unobscured by the dust of history. 
—Rabindranath Tagore

So, the hunt began for human Readers of the past, and you won’t believe where we ended up the first time we launched ourselves backward in time.

Maybe we were all a little cocky now that the group had become some Orb-integrated, psychic, Dram-warship-trashing space-time commando team. Maybe it was because we were just completely new and clueless to this bizarre new occupation of communal-mind time travel. Or maybe we were a sad collection of broken mortals slowly dying off near our grilled home world, and this was just the best we could manage the first time.

Whatever the reason, none of us, not even the Xix, anticipated the wee little problem of my focusing into the past and zeroing in on the strongest Reader signals I could perceive. It was enough trying to move through the Orb Time Tree, navigate its labyrinths with my hundreds of fellow intellects, discern in the space-time fabric the lights and undulations that bore the unmistakable stamp of humanity, and surf the strings to those points in space-time. Our naive logic sent us straight to the brightest collections of these past Readers. Surely, they would be the ones we needed to persuade to spread the message and form the massive trans-chronological prayer group we envisioned.

Our multidimensional knot of consciousness erupted over the beautiful landscape of an older Earth. An Earth before magma had spilled over its surface. An Earth before concrete and human industrial pollutants had tarnished our solar system’s gem. An Earth radiating life and potential. It was the more primal Earth of our ancestors, and every human mind that I carried with me nearly swooned to drink in the beauty of our planet once again. The azure skies dotted with puffy white, the breezes stirring smells no longer alien, but of home. Green of leaf, brown of branch and soil. Bird’s song. If a disembodied group mind could weep, ours did.

Even the Xix were moved. Sharing our consciousness, they were exposed in an intimate, direct manner to human experiences, memories, and sensations in a way that was only fleeting by the more unconscious space-time telepathy of a standard Reader. Although I could sample the minds of humans and aliens alike by myself, even the most powerful Readers of the Xix were as unconscious in their abilities to Read as any human. But with my mind stitching all the others together, they
saw
. And they felt what it was like to be human. These shared experiences more tightly bound our consciousness.

After a few moments of wonder, we forced ourselves to attend to the business at hand. There was some surprise that we were in an earlier age of human history. Most of us had assumed that we would encounter the most powerful Reader concentrations in the modern age, which provided the additional benefit of many more numbers and the technology to spread our message widely and quickly. But perhaps it was not so strange. Weren’t the faith and devotion of the inhabitants of earlier epochs unique? Maybe their prayers would make up in their intensity for what they lacked in numbers.

I focused our mind more intently. A very strong source of human space-time distortion was near, and I followed the warped pathways through a forest and up a steep slope. There was smoke spilling up to the sky, and the indistinct sounds of voices ahead. With increasing anticipation, our little thought matrix sped upward and broke through the trees and came out into a clearing. It was rocky, the tree line beginning to fail. There was snow and ice covering the ground and a large fire burning in the middle of a rock-lined pit. A loud chanting was underway, rhythmic, accompanied by a strange music.

Banging on animal-hide drums and piping on animal-bone flutes, a group of short men wrapped in wolf hides danced. They were unkempt, bearded, heavily muscled and tanned, even in the cold weather. In the middle, a group of very hardy-looking women presided over some sort of ritual slaughter. A deer lay in the middle of the concentric circles, tied with ropes to the ground, its eyes wide with fear. A woman knelt down beside it and lay a jagged white blade to its neck. She let out a long and sustained howl, and as one, with a final crescendo in the chanting and single powerful drum beat, the music ceased.