Daughter of Time 1: Reader (8 page)

So, in nearly every ship I was on, humans were walled off from the host species in our own climate-controlled cells.
Controlled
was always a loose term, as many ships provided air and temperature that was just slightly better than unsuitable for human life. That was my impression when we entered our chamber on the Sortax ship, although now I know that their efforts were slightly better than average.

At the time, once the doors closed and we were at the mercy of their climate system, it was oppressive. The air was acidic, burning our throats and eyes. It stank in a manner that to the human senses was unidentifiable— alien, and it was sickening. With no instructions or warning, we were provided makeshift seats and straps, and soon the ship blasted off into the sky; several children who were not prepared were sent flying to their deaths or suffered serious injury. It made no sense. If they wanted us, why treat us like this and risk our lives? Some sort of demented natural selection for the best slaves?

The ride to the starship was short, and soon after a jarring docking (I bet such dockings weren’t so bad for Sortax floating in water) and a long wait (likely for the Sortax to leave the ship and to pump out the water for our exit), our hatch-like door opened and we all looked out to see what awaited us.

Amazingly, standing in the doorway were two human beings. They were dressed in robes not too different from our own—thicker, more worn, with strange markings across the back. They were likely in their twenties, although they looked older. As I was to learn, life for humans in space under alien care was shorter than on Earth, full of many more health problems and complications. Most of us did not live beyond forty years, and by the time we hit our thirties, we looked sixty.

A moment of hope and relief swept through the group of children. It was quickly dashed as the men spoke.

“No words,” one barked. “You will do as you are told and prepare to serve the Sortax. This is a training vessel, and you will be instructed in guiding the navships to the Orb portals. Nothing else matters to your existence. If you cannot perform, you will be discarded. You are to report to us or other Human Shepherds. Under no circumstances are you to attempt any contact with non-human residents of any ship. Follow us to your quarters.”

They turned, and marched from the door, leaving us stunned and empty. One by one, we stood up, stretched our sore bodies bounced by the trip through Earth’s atmosphere, and walked through the door to our new life.

       Point τ

I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds.

—Bhagavad Gita

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To delve into the deepest mysteries of nature and discover the underlying truth has been denied us, but with the right imagination, a hypothesis may explain many phenomena.
 —Leonhard Euler

So my new life began – a life of military constraints, claustrophobic imprisonment, long training sessions, and a horrible sense of separation from all that I was. In space, without night or day, without clocks or anything to mark the passage of time, it was hard to know how long we had been there, how long the sessions lasted, so that the orderliness we took for granted and depended on vanished, and soon, all sense of normalcy was lost. For many it became too much. As they lost their connection with Earth, its rhythms, its air, its life, they lost their bearings internally, and their minds with them. These were efficiently removed and never seen again. There doesn’t need to be much guessing as to what happened to them.

It might have been the same with me, because my being is very tied to the Earth, and even in the harsh metallic and sterile center I had been trapped in before transfer to space, I had suffered for the disconnect from the land. You should remember, I am a farmer’s daughter.

In space, it was so much more terrible. I saved myself again by exploring the past, finding some powerful echo of Earth in the lives that had lived before me. When the complete separation in this alien environment would descend on me, I could find some solace in Earth’s past.

For the time being, for all of us who could adapt, in whatever ways we found, we kept very busy learning how to eat the terrible material they gave to us as food, learning how to function in the toxic air, sleep on the metal shelves allotted to each of us, disregard our privacy and cleanliness in an environment not designed to comfort human sensibilities. And, above all, learning to pilot along the Strings that spread from the Orbs.

It finally became clear what we had all been gathered for, the reason our Earth masters had taken us from our homes, trained us, evaluated us, sought to hone our other sense for a specific purpose. For such a crude purpose our gift was channeled, but it served a practical need. Amazingly, our unique talent was the backbone of the entire galactic civilization. We were treated, bred, and trained as beasts of burden, but on our backs thousands of worlds depended. Without us, interstellar travel would grind to a halt.

It was initially a shock for many who had been brought on board to have a new kind of helmet set on their head and to see the world as they had never experienced it. For me, it was like walking for the first time into a bright, sunlit city having only seen by moonlight. Whatever these new helmets did, they channeled the “stuff” of my vision, brightened it with great contrast, yet only in a certain color, so to speak, in a single dimension. It was beautiful in its way, and yet only a tiny part of the whole. But within this part was a skill we were required to learn.

In the beginning, we were subjected to simulations. Always, it was the same. From a disembodied point of view, I would see myself approaching a sphere of light of great complexity. To call a real Orb a sphere is a distortion, as the word suffers from the biased view of humans and aliens who cannot see it as I do—the substructure, layers upon layers not unlike an onion, but casting out in independent dimensions beyond the three we perceive with our eyes. My mind’s other sense could see in these directions, and the Orbs were more like infinite webs whose projection in three-space was a humble sphere.

The simulations captured only a faint aspect of this— only when we approached a true Orb did its beauty become apparent to me. Our training sims were not focused on the Orbs, however, but on the tendrils, the glowing Strings that spread from them. The Strings extending from a true Orb traveled in many dimensions, but the sims captured only those that were in the visual three dimensions, and it was along these lines that we were to direct the point of view, the ship in reality, when the time came to navigate in earnest.

We would spend hours guiding little simulated spaceships onto the tendrils, one after another after another. What I would find out later is that the galactic hegemony of the Dram was established through using the tendrils to travel through space-time. The Strings could be used as tunnels, shortcuts between any two Orbs, cutting the travel time between stars and planetary systems from eons into days. I did not understand how this happened or why these Orbs had been placed where they had. For the present, all that mattered was mastering the ability to help the ships navigate.

The ships themselves had the technology to exploit the Strings but not the ability to peer into the space-time matrix and navigate. The starships required Readers for this, some from many of the worlds connected by the Orbs or, increasingly, from the relatively cheap and primitive world of Earth that was enriched in Reader potential and powerless to defend itself from the superior technological development of the aliens that needed our singular talent.

I quickly adapted to the tasks, my unique organ giving me advantages no other human or alien possessed, and which I had not even come to fully appreciate. I was surprised to find that, unlike on Earth, my mastery did not bring me advancement or attention. It was not noticed. It became clear to me after a time that it was not individual humans guiding the navships but the collective, that our overall average effort was being used by the aliens to direct the craft to the appropriate String. In a way it made sense, as individually, not even humans had the skills to perfectly navigate—each person would make too many random errors. But averaged over the whole, the outliers, the mistakes, were smoothed out, and the overall direction was true.

True, but slow, inefficient. I became frustrated as I participated, always sure how to direct the craft, but the overall movement was slow, effective, but not the quickest route through space-time. I was only one of a horde, and no one understood what my potential was.

Increasingly, I was drawn to the Orbs. With them lay much more complexity, something far more interesting and inspiring than hitching rides on Strings. While the sim Orbs displayed little of this, as we progressed in our training we made more frequent approaches to the Orb that lay in orbit between the asteroid belt and Jupiter. It was resplendent,
incandescent
compared to the other objects around us in space. Our bright sun, a ball of radiating energy in the electromagnetic spectrum, was a fairly dim and dull object to me. But the Orb, no larger than a major Earth city in diameter, shrouded a terrible beauty. Within it seemed locked a cosmic potential that called to be reached, explored, tapped.

Soon, in my training sessions, I began to focus more on the Orbs than the purpose they had set for us. I saw these close approaches as a chance to study the Orbs, to engage myself when all else of meaning had been stripped from me. In the Orbs I began to see what seemed to be pathways, like trails in the woods, locked off by iron gates. Roads to the past, the future,
elsewhere
. Was there a latch on the gate? I looked; more and more I looked.

Until one of the group leaders called me aside one day.

“Your scores have dropped. You must raise them or be eliminated.”

It seemed that they monitored the individual performances in the horde.

“What are the Orbs?” I dared to ask.

“The Orbs are a mystery. We do not approach them. We use the space-time distortions they leave to travel through hyperspace between Orbs. Stick to your lessons, or you will face elimination.”

He walked off like a robot, and I knew he meant what he said. As hard as it was, I tore my attention away from the Orbs and back to the assigned task. Soon, our initial group of nearly one hundred was whittled down to less than twenty, as attrition from madness, illness, and poor performance took its toll. Our group was now as optimized as it would get, as I judged from the performances. It seemed the aliens were happy with our progress. Soon we approached the Earth-Orb for the last time and were instructed to guide to a particular String. As we did so, a power surge went through the ship. We maintained our course and approached the String until the spacecraft lay directly in its flow.

What this looked like to the human eye, with its limited sense of a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation, I don’t know. I can guess it was fairly unremarkable. The Orb and Strings would be invisible, and only the slow movement of the starship in the vastness of space would be seen. Then, the ship would suddenly seem to accelerate dramatically, vanishing in seconds to a small point as it exited the dimensions we can perceive.

To my “eyes” it was an utterly different experience. In the bright and glowing stream of the String, there was radiance passing through the ship, through me and all around me like a churning stream growing to a broad river. As I began to be mesmerized by this vision, there was a whirl of equipment being engaged, a strange tug deep inside me, and then, while my body felt as if it were being turned inside out, my mind drowning in showers of infinitely complex patterns of light and dark that erupted and flowed around me, the ship plunged through hyperspace toward a distant world.

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