Daughter of Time 1: Reader (31 page)

In the modern era, nothing could move people and resources faster than a great story told well. We knew we had a great story, but storytellers we were not. So we looked for them. We sought out poets and playwrights, novelists and musicians. We engaged with those who seemed receptive to initial probes. We sought to help them bring about the telling of their future in a way that would capture hearts and move the narrative across the world. To find Readers. To convince them.

You know how this ends. You are holding the resulting artifact right now. After everything in this long and insane journey, this book is how we have reached you.

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Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. 
—Oscar Wilde

In a base dug into the surface of the Moon, you might not expect to find a sequestered garden where light and shade, marble and trees, life and death are so balanced, so respectfully interlaced, that you feel you are in a holy place.

Yet, there it lies still. The designers must have been both human and Xixian. There was too much there from the human heart – the quiet fountains, the overhanging branches, the marbled columns approached by grass-shrouded marbled footpaths – this could not be from the alien souls of the Xix. But the realization of the place, the amazing simulation of Earth’s atmosphere-filtered sunlight, the acceleration of growth in the towering beeches that could only have been planted a few years before, the slight increase in gravity that spoke of alien technology used sparingly in this base – these had the fingerprints of the Xix all over them.

It was perhaps the most beautiful synergy of human and alien work that I had ever seen. Soft shadows from a spring morning dappled the green grass in front of me with intertwined patterns from the branches and leaves. I stepped softly on the overgrown marbled path, walking silently, solemnly toward a single raised platform of stone. Resting on top and in the center of a marble slab that capped the polished granite was a golden bowl filled with fragrant oil. Floating on the oil was a wick embedded in a light material, perhaps cork sandwiched between two golden pieces of metal in a circular shape. The wick burned softly and steadily over the sea of hydrocarbons.

I knelt down and bowed my head. Using my second sight, I read the words my blind eyes could not:

Richard Cross

2060-2094

His Memory is Eternal

So simple, and all the more powerful for it.

“It’s time, Richard.” I was whispering. “We’re going to try once more today. I’ve found him. He’ll tell our story right.”

With the work of the Xixian scientists finished, our new experiences with the Orb stitching us more tightly together, and our clumsy apprenticeship in exploring minds of the past, we were ready. Limited time and danger had focused our efforts. Already we had repelled two more Dram warship attacks. From newly deployed Xixian sentries hidden from the Dram, reports spoke of a third armada being amassed—the largest one yet. They were determined to destroy us on the Moon. Even if they did not know what we plotted, they suspected I was here, and that was enough.

I was not so concerned about the Dram ships and weapons—I knew how to handle those with the power of the Orb. Something more nebulous was eating at my mind. The last attack had been different. I had more trouble altering space-time to block the attacks. There was interference, and I could localize the source to the Dram ships.
Something
was fighting me at this new level, in the arena of space and time. But I had no knowledge of my enemy. Creature or machine? One or many? Destroyed or returning? Right now, I held the upper hand. But would it last? What was this new challenge from the Dram? Would I soon be overwhelmed? I didn’t know how much time we had left.

We needed a catalyst, a place where a small initial input of energy into Earth Before would turn into a chain reaction. This was where we would push the first domino, be the butterfly wings in America that cause a typhoon in Australia. If there were an America or Australia left. If there were left even a single, elegant butterfly still in existence.

Even after we settled on finding a few
receptive
minds, we were still so clumsy that we tread very lightly. We remembered the problems of our first attempts. We stumbled around lightly, breaking through barriers of space and time, trying to focus on the minds and energies in the shadows of
before
that flitted past our awareness. Initially, we barely made contact.

But then,
such disasters
. Like a bull in a china shop, we smashed and broke and cut ourselves and others in the process. The dangers to my mind were real, and I spent one week in a coma when our efforts went awry, when I entered too deeply into the wrong mind and was nearly consumed. It took the concerted efforts of the Reader ensemble to call me back again. Slowly, painfully, we increased our mastery. Soon I could visit and enter the past minds, interact with them, and return with my health and sanity intact.

But the minds of those I reached!

My first serious contacts were still so crude. My skills in this work, and, as importantly, my knowledge and intuition of human psychology, were only very rudimentary. Here I was, a seventeen-year-old girl whose life experiences consisted of the absurd tale you have read, trying to mentally contact minds in the human past that were as different and diverse from her own as could be imagined. As in human antiquity, many believed themselves insane when I spoke to them. Many times my thoughts were twisted and garbled by these minds or rejected as voices, demons, or stray thoughts and never pursued. And some minds shattered with the impact, leaving institutionalized wrecks behind, or human vegetables in place of once-whole persons.

I
did this.
I
risked them, wrecked them, and wrecked them again and again in my efforts to find a way. Slowly, I learned. I learned the subtleties of human thought, human internal deliberation, inspirations, belief, and motivation. I learned when to sense the fragility of a mind, to know when it was strong enough to handle what I had to give it and when it was not. In the end as I perfected my skills, I learned how to direct these minds toward the course I desired, and to do so in a way that left them completely unaware that I had been there at all.

Now I must finish what I left unexplained in the beginning of this book. Now I must tie together what I have done and what I am trying to do. Now everything must come together.

The sounds of the fountains floated above the soft whispering of the leaves as an artificial breeze blew through the beeches. Water trickling, trees quietly speaking, everything still before the monument to the Reader who had helped guide the Resistance, who had given up his life for that cause. I felt the grass on either side of me, breathed in deep the fresh air. The echo of Earth through space and time.

Prayerful.

50

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

—Blaise Pascal

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.

—Georg Cantor

In the end, it was so iconic, that it almost made me laugh.

I walked down the corridor to the new wing built onto the Moon base by the Xixian crews. An area the size of what was once Brooklyn devoted to the power plants and equipment required for this grand experiment. Waythrel opened the door and I stepped in, looking around in shock. Really, it was almost funny.

Imagine an ancient Greek amphitheater, you know, the ones where there are rows and rows of curved benches ascending. The room was like that, with layers of a strange material rising from a center point, like a great satellite dish. At the focus of the room, maybe one hundred feet carved deeply into the Moon, was a chair. And boy, what a chair!

As if going for the greatest stylistic contrast, the chair, a composite of enormous amounts of instrumentation of Xixian design, wires and circuitry, even organic technology, was pitch-black. This showed up wonderfully against the nearly pure white of the material used to build the amphitheater. I didn’t ask why.

I was led down to the focal point and strapped in. It gave me shivers remembering my torture at the hands of the Sortax representative on Earth Before, at a time that seemed centuries ago after all that had happened to me. Initially, I did argue with them about my Red Sox hat. They said it had to come off, as special sensors were to be placed on the giant bald patch, the great ostrich egg-sized protrusion from my tumor in the back of my head. The hat would interfere. Finally, I gave in and let them place the bowl-like device over my head with numerous cords running out of it and into the machinery. My hat I held in my lap.

So, there I was, a seventeen-year-old freak of nature, sitting in an obsidian chair in the center of a giant dish designed to amplify and focus gravitons from and to my tumor. Bowl on head, hat clutched like a teddy bear in hands, my porcelain-white skin shining next to the black chair and black robes I still wore. My flaming red hair, now long and halfway down my back, hung loosely, appearing to extend out from the black bowl and wires, cascading over my shoulders and arms. This is what I had come to—child of nearby charred Earth, growing legend in a galaxy, centered in a seat of strange power of alien design.

I had traveled from my parents’ farm, under knife, through space and torture and dungeons and violence. I had seen the universe as no one had ever seen it. I had become blind and deformed. I had opened the Orb. But even as I was to join with hundreds of other Readers and form that strange, communal consciousness that empowered our travel through space and time, in my heart, I still felt alone. So alone that I still clung to the hat of a boy I knew only briefly before he died.

How could I let anyone near? I had no family. My own kind had betrayed me, mutilated me, and then I had eaten them in return to stay alive. Finally, I had sacrificed all of them that I might live, all to save aliens often so hideous I still shuddered when I looked at them. I was the corrupted Messiah. The anti-Christ. The alien human. Always, to the end, the freak of nature.

So, here I sat, at the bottom of this technological marvel of a hole. Group mind notwithstanding, I was its homunculus, its center, and without me it could not be. Bright orange and white me in a black chair. Ready to reach out to the universe through space and time and literally change history. If I could.

But as alone as I felt, I could not do this alone. The final players had yet to make their appearance. Finally, they must take hold of this dream and make it real and play their necessary part. The time had come for them to fully understand. The ranks of our choir to be massively filled.

It is now
your
time, Reader.

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