Birth of the Alliance (16 page)

“Enough about me and Arthur’s ragtag band of merry men,”" Adam said. “What
have
you been up to? What's your major focus?”

“My main focus is finding the right people for the group. Training them how to use—and not abuse—Energy. I’ve been trying to teach all of them these abilities are meant to help everyone, not just ourselves. I want that philosophy to be part of our day-to-day approach to life.”

Adam shook his head. “Not that. You’ve always had a knack for building things, whether the Wheel or the gears or all sorts of other innovations. What are you working on?”

Will sighed. “A few things, but they’re all part of the same key effort, and that’s figuring out how to reverse ambrosia’s effects.”

Adam’s face fell. “Oh. That. I do remember you mentioning that back at Waterloo. What have you found?”

Will shook his head. “Very little, unfortunately. Elizabeth and I went back to the place we’d found the fruit originally, and—”

“How is she?” Adam asked. “Is she still… around?”

Will frowned. “Of course she is. We haven’t figured out the secret to reverse any aspect of ambrosia, though. I don't know if we’ll ever find the cure. We went to the place where we found the fruit originally to talk to the one man we knew had reversed the effects periodically. But when we got there, he was already dead, killed in a fire set by William. All of the others there were dead as well, so even if he’d passed his secrets along to another, the source of that information was gone.”

Adam nodded. “Those deaths prevented Arthur from getting the secrets of reversing ambrosia. For that, we must be thankful.”

Will stopped walking, and only Adam’s footsteps sounded in the dry underbrush of the forest. When he realized that Will had stopped moving, Adam stopped and turned back toward him. Will’s stare was full of anger. “
Thankful
? Are you kidding? I have people in my group who have eaten ambrosia who’d like to start a family. I’m one of those people, Adam. The only man in the world who was able to provide us with the method to reverse the effects is dead, and you think we should be
thankful
?”

Adam's gaze turned frosty. “You need to develop the ability to think like your enemies, Will. If Arthur got the formula to reversing the ambrosia first, what would happen?”

“He’d have more children?” Will snorted. “Arthur's not the type to want more kids. He didn’t seem to want the one he had.”

Adam face tightened. “I agree, Will. Arthur would not take advantage of the approach himself. Do you suppose he’d make the knowledge public, allowing anyone who wanted the formula to take advantage of it?”

“Well, no, but…” Will stopped, thinking hard. “He wouldn’t let anyone use it, because he has those rules… unless he tricked them into taking it so that they’d get caught breaking a rule. He’d give it to someone thought a traitor, and let them break their oath without knowing it was possible, and then put them to death.”

“Much better,” Adam said, nodding with approval. “But that’s the easy part. What else might Arthur do with such a formula? You’re very, very close.”

Will thought further. And then it hit him. “He’d figure out a way to reverse the immortality, how to make that reversal permanent, so that his enemies would simply die off.”

“Exactly,” Adam whispered. “No need to let them commit the so-called crime of having children. Just reverse the immortality and let them die off slowly, painfully, withering away from old age. It’s what nearly happened to him, remember? And then, at the very end, he can gloat… or he can bribe them to be ever deeper on his side, as he gives them a gift that seemed forever lost. His power over such people would be even greater than it is now.”

Will shook his head. “I wish we’d gotten there before William and gotten the formula from Ambrose. But since we didn’t… I’m at least really happy that Arthur didn’t get it from Ambrose before he died.”

“I agree with your thinking there, Will,” Adam replied. “That's why
I
was the one who killed Ambrose.”

X

Dream

1787 A.D.

Will lost track of the heat of the day, the heavy wind that rolled through the forest clearing, warming the sweat on his back rather than cooling him. He didn’t hear the brief rustling of leaves before the dead wind calmed once more. He couldn’t hear anything other than Adam’s words reverberating within him, couldn’t feel anything other than pure rage against the man. Will roared, a scream of anguish, turned, and threw his fist at the nearest tree. The Energy-enhanced blow didn’t hurt him, but his fist was buried inside the trunk past his wrist.

Adam’s baffled voice reached him. “What on Earth are you doing, Will? Are you trying to call attention to yourself? That’s a pretty good way to do so.”

Will struggled, trying to pull his hand free without further damaging the tree. “Sorry, I’m a bit frustrated. It’s not every day that you learn your ally has killed a man who possessed information essential to your very existence. I’d like to think I’m taking it quite well.”

“Yes, very well,” Adam deadpanned, as Will yanked his hand from the trunk. The damage was so severe that the trunk cracked in half, and the upper half toppled toward the ground. “You’ve killed that poor tree. I’d hate to think of what you might do if you weren’t taking the news well. Would you, perhaps, tear every one of the trees in this grove out of the ground with your bare hands?”

Will snarled, grabbed the ten foot long section of tree, sat it on top of the lower section of the trunk, and dispatched nanos to hold the pieces together while he fed Energy into the joint, willing the tree trunk to reseal itself. “No, but I might kill
you.
Right after I fix this tree. It’s innocent, you know.”

“What’s the problem, Will?” Adam asked, watching Will’s efforts to reseal the tree with interest. “We just discussed the strategic issues with Arthur learning the secrets of ambrosia. He’ll never learn those secrets now. Why the anger?”

“You’re too quick kill to solve a problem, Adam,” Will snapped. “There are other ways to protect Ambrose’s secrets from Arthur. Your solution means that
no one
can learn those secrets. And that fact means two people very important to me might very well die—and if
they
die, so will I. So will Elizabeth.”

As he watched Adam’s face take on an interesting assortment of expressions, Will wondered when his trust would grow enough to share Hope’s real name. Or was that a bit of information as critical as the location of the Cavern?

“Look,” Adam said. “I don’t have any interest in you, Elizabeth, or anyone important to either of you, dying. But what you’re saying makes no sense. How is my killing of Ambrose—which hides his secrets from Arthur, which
both
of us agree is a good thing—how is that supposed to cause your death? Or Elizabeth’s?”

It was a fair question, and Will, knowing his own future and past, had never quite considered how he’d tell others about his origins. How he’d been born almost two hundred years into Adam’s future, trained in Energy and given a swarm of intelligent nanobots to command, and sent to the past to act as protector of the woman he’d marry when he was twenty-six years old. Yet if he and Hope didn’t figure out how to reverse the sterilization effects of the ambrosia, his children wouldn’t be born in this time cycle. They’d not be around to rescue Will from danger. Would others fill that role? He wasn’t sure. But without Josh (known in the future as Fil) and Angel, it wasn’t difficult to suspect they’d have trouble getting volunteers to travel in an untested time machine to rescue a pre-neophyte Will. Or send him back in time to rescue Hope from Arthur’s machinations and her likely death at his hands. She’d never leave the North Village, or find the ambrosia. Neither would he. And they’d all eventually cease to exist, because Hope had been protecting Will’s ancestors from death for centuries. If she wasn’t around, they’d die out as well.

So far, though, he was still here. So was Hope. He didn’t know yet if something had gone wrong, at least in the eyes of the future. Was this the sequence that had happened in every other time loop? Had Adam destroyed the village in the past, or had something happened to trigger him to do so this time? If they’d always gotten to Ambrose before Adam killed him off, in past cycles, were they already doomed? Would he live forever, watching the years tick by without seeing his children born when they were due? That would be his own form of hell on Earth. The ultimate punishment for failure.

Still, until he knew, he’d need to continue working on the assumption that every apparent failure was success in disguise. The future called for Adam to be a central figure, and Adam needed to trust the crazy story Will would need him to believe in order to play his part.

Will took a deep breath. “I know it doesn't make sense now, Adam. It will, though. At some point I’m going to ask you to do something for me, something for Elizabeth, something that will seem strange and impossible. And I can’t tell you now, not because I don’t trust you, but because you won’t believe me. You
can’t
believe me. Oh, your telepathy, your empathy… they'll tell you I’m stating the truth. Your mind will still scream out that I must be lying.”

Adam eyed him quizzically. “And now you’re making even less sense, Will. But you also seem to trust me. This request to help… I will most assuredly help you. And I’ll believe you. Why won't you tell me what it is? What could you possibly tell me that I wouldn’t believe? We’ve known each other for
centuries
, Will. We’ve teleported, read minds, flown. What could you possibly tell
me
that I wouldn’t believe?”

Will shrugged. “I suppose it’s because sometimes, even
I
don’t believe the truth. So I’ll tell you the story indirectly. Have you heard of John Adams or Thomas Jefferson?”

Adam considered, and then shook his head. “Should I have?”

“This new country, the United States of America, the one formed out of the former colonies? They're two of the men who've helped to bring it about.”

“Okay.” Adam was clearly uncertain as to why he was getting a lesson in human current events. “What of it?”

“We’ll meet here again in 1826. Men gathered here over the next few months will create a new government for this country. In 1796, John Adams will be elected by the people as their leader, their President. Four years later, he will lose that job to Thomas Jefferson. And on July 4, 1826, Adams and Jefferson will both die, not long after seeing Adams' son become the sixth man elected to that same job.”

Adam’s eyes widened. “Your secret is that you’re able to predict the future? That would explain a lot.”

Will smiled. “I wouldn’t make that claim, Adam. Nor should you, until you see if what I say comes to pass. We'll talk again in about fifty years. If I’m right… well, we’ll see if you’ll be ready to hear what I need to tell you.”

Adam’s look changed to one of intrigue, and he nodded. “Okay. Since the last of your future events occurs on July 4, 1826… we’ll meet here in this city on July 5, 1826.”

Will nodded his agreement. “By the way, where’s Sebastian right now?”

“He's back in Watt. Why do you ask?”

“Just want to know what modes of transportation are open to me. Take care, Adam.”

Adam nodded, and Will teleported to the smaller submarine resting invisibly in the depths of the Schuylkill River.

He took several deep breaths, now that he was out of Adam's sight. He'd wanted to throttle the man, to scream at him and beat him at the word that he’d eliminated what now looked like the only means to the end he and Hope—and now others—so desperately sought. Ambrose had figured out the secret without the continually more advanced equipment the Alliance were creating, had never had robotic cameras smaller than human cells that could travel through the bloodstream to enable remote viewing of the cell-level changes wrought by Energy and ambrosia. Will wondered if, in retrospect, he wasn't moving
farther
away from the answer as the machines and technology advanced. He wondered if he should have focused on finding and talking to Ambrose centuries earlier, rather than working on his submarine. Had he been so confident in his ability to find the answer that he wouldn't even consider asking? It was a moot point now, thanks to Adam’s actions. Unless he built a time machine.

He considered what he’d need to ask Adam to do. Was it odd that he was putting his children’s very lives in the hands of a man whose most notable public actions were a mass execution, the murder of a man who’d figured out how to activate and deactivate aspects of a most amazing food, and for publicly shunning Will at a time when greater courage might have prevented a great deal?

He needed to think. In retrospect, that bafflement over his apparent choice of the guardian of his plan was what prevented him from telling Adam the truth. Perhaps he just needed more proof that it wasn’t a huge mistake.

The random comments from his time in the future suggested that he’d been out of the public, Aliomenti, and Alliance eyes starting in the mid-1990s, roughly corresponding to the time of his own birth. Perhaps the universe wouldn’t allow him to exist twice in the same era, or he’d died, or perhaps he’d just gone so deeply into hiding that no one knew he existed.