Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) (29 page)

Soon the two Spheres returned to their pre-merging state. However, each seemed faster, brighter, more powerful. For the next forty-eight hours, unaware if it was night or day, Gale, Rip, and Savina worked constantly on the two Spheres, showing each other where they’d been and the progress that had been made. Theories were discussed and experiments undertaken. With the possibility that more Spheres existed, the chance that the Foundation would react aggressively due to the loss of Savina and her Sphere, coupled with the optimism of being able to pool their resources, they felt a jointly renewed sense of urgency to find answers to the five mysteries and to try to bend the future into something survivable, maybe even something good.

Savina explained the multiverse findings and what she’d discovered about time-shifts. Rip showed her the papers the five scientists, all of whom she knew by reputation, had written on the time-shifts.

“So it is possible. I knew it!” she exclaimed after reading their work. “What if the Cosegans mastered all of this?”

“What?” Rip asked.

“The
multiverse
,” Savina said, as if nothing could be more obvious. “What if they found a way to travel between universes?”

“How could they do that?” Gale asked. “Is that even theoretically possible?”

The question of the physics was an issue Savina had studied at MIT. It came down to the possibilities of which laws would govern —the ones from the universe that contained the Milky Way galaxy and current human existence on Earth, or the neighboring universe.

“Of course it’s possible.”

“But how do you know that?” Rip asked, wanting to hear her explanation in scientific terms.

“Because
anything
is possible. Even traveling across millions of light years. There is always a way. They could be talking to us from there now.”

“So are you suggesting that eleven million Earth years, ” Gale began, “isn’t that long in another universe?”

“Anything is possible given enough time,” Rip said, grasping her concept. “And time is a funny thing.”

“Eternal inflation,” Savina said. “Dark energy pushing away everything at an ever-accelerating rate. The entire world of physics is ever demonstrating the infinite. What are smaller than neutrons and protons? Quarks. And smaller than quarks? Strings, and they form everything, depending on how they vibrate, including extra dimensions.”

“The Spheres are somehow produced in that way?” Gale asked, not sure she understood her own question. She still didn’t know how her plane had been made to vanish.

“Each Sphere shows the observer what they see. Mine shows the multiverse, time-shifts and physics. Rip’s showed him Clastier, ancient cultures, and brought those Divinations to life. Clastier and Malachy’s Spheres showed the flaws and fraud of the Church. When the UQP scientists viewed it, they found time-shift and an understanding of our universe.”

“But they’ve all shown prophetic visions of the future,” Gale insisted.

“Because time is the common denominator to all of us,” Rip said. “Everyone wants to know what’s coming, and a Sphere easily shows us the meaninglessness of time.”

Ironically, it was then that the five authors of the time-shift theory, along with the sniffling professor, knocked on the skyroom’s door. For the next twenty-four hours they argued, envisioned, and debated the possibilities of actually conducting a time-shift experiment and whether or not the multiverse existed.

“Eternal inflation, Dark Energy, string theory, they all point to the existence of the multiverse,” Savina said, “but the Spheres prove it.”

“Then where are the Cosegans?” Dabnowski asked. “What happened to them?”

Before Rip could address the topic, his INU lit up with a call from Booker. Afterwards, Rip whispered to Gale and Savina, “The Foundation is moving up the launch of Phoenix. We may have only weeks to stop it.”

“You know more about it than any of us,” Gale said to Savina. “You must know a way to get to them in time.”

Savina felt guilty about her prior work with the Foundation, which made her even more determined. She looked around the room at the incredible talent and brain-power, and at the two Spheres, which were continuously projecting one astonishing thing after another. “We’ll solve it,” she said. “We need to buy time.”

“We need Crying Man,” Gale said.

Savina’s fascination with their stories of the Crying Man had led to much frustration, as they could not seem to raise him. They all agreed that if they could figure out how to accept the help he had been offering, they could find the answers and change the future.

“The Judge once told me that if the Sphere showed a different future without the plague, climate changes, and World War III, he would be happy to call off the Phoenix Initiative.”

“And you believed him?” Gale asked.

“He’s not a bad man,” Savina replied. “You may think it’s crazy to engineer a plague that will kill half the world’s population, but you’ve seen the future. It’s hellish, and possibly ends in human extinction. The Phoenix Initiative stops all three of the Death Divinations.”

“It seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” Gale said. “There must be a better way.”

“What is it?” Savina asked.

“Crying Man, a representative from the most advanced civilization the world has ever known, has offered to help us,” Gale said. “That is the better way.”

“What if Savina is wrong?” Rip asked. “What if he isn’t real? We don’t know that he isn’t an elaborate AI program.”

“He’s
real
,” Gale insisted.

“But how do we know?” Rip asked.

“Because our little girl is asleep downstairs,” Gale said. “Cira’s alive because he said he would keep her safe, and she’ll see again because he
did
keep her safe.”

Gale, Rip, and Savina, along with the six other scientists, worked late into the night. Everyone was on edge that the NSA might find them and barge in at any moment. With the report that the Foundation was working to unleash Phoenix as soon as possible, there was a strange mix of tension, pressure, elation, and awe as they pushed into the depths of the Spheres.

The next morning, while working through a breakfast prepared by Booker’s staff, Savina suddenly pulled Rip and Gale aside.

“What if,” Savina began in an excited but hushed voice, “Crying Man is not saying ‘help’ as an offer
to
you, but rather he is
asking
for
your
help?”

“Asking
us
for help? It’s Artificial Intelligence. He’s not really inside the Sphere,” Rip said.

“I know what you think,” Savina said. “But pretend everything I said is right, that he could still be alive in some realm, and is trying to talk to us. What if he
is
real? Not
inside
the Sphere, but communicating
through
it.”

The other scientists all stopped their conversations and listened to what had become a heated debate.

“Communicating from where?”

“From the time of the Cosegans.”

“He is talking to us, or at least interacting with us,” Gale said. “I mean, wait until he stands in front of us. You’ll see. I love Crying Man. He’s . . .  he’s
changed
us . . . you know how you feel when you see him. The man has mastered love.”

“But he died eleven million years ago,” Rip interrupted. “We’re just experiencing his avatar.”

“What if the Cosegans are not in the past?” Savina suggested. “What if they are in the future?”

“How could that be?” Rip asked.

“Time is not a line, it is a single instant,” Dabnowski said, joining in the discussion. “Think of it as an infinite loop.”

“The sign for infinity, the sideways figure eight,” another time-shift author added. “No beginning, no end, just always in motion.”

“So the Cosegans are behind us
and
ahead of us,” Savina said.

“That would mean Crying Man is . . . ” Rip started.

“Still alive,” Savina finished.

“Then he really is communicating with us, as a person, in real time,” Gale breathed. Her blue eyes filled with unshed tears at the realization.

“Yes.” Rip nodded slowly. “Oh, what if it’s true . . . ”

“And he needs our help,” Savina said.

“If we save the Cosegans, we save ourselves,” Rip said.

Gale and Rip went searching for the Crying Man within their Sphere. They pulled up all the data they had on every occasion he’d appeared and replicated the conditions. Savina also tried to find him using the same technique in conjuring the exact situation, the only time she’d caught a glimpse of him.

It was nearly ten p.m. when the heavens, thick with stars, changed to blue. Not the blue of the daytime, rather the deep indigo and electric shades Rip had seen in the Cosegan city of light. But the exact hue didn’t really matter, it was the startling fact that the world around them had been so transformed, as if to warn of what Rip knew was about to happen—two worlds colliding.

As the outside air filtered blue and purple light, inside the atmosphere glowed white, and suddenly, standing next to the two Spheres, the Crying Man reached out his arms and turned his palms toward the ceiling.

Rip, as astonished as the rest of them, looked on. He had enough history with the “mythical figure” that he managed to ask the vital question. “Do you need
our
help?”

“Yes,” Crying Man said.

Rip looked quickly around, trying to confirm that Crying Man’s response had actually been audible. Gale nodded.

“How can we help?” Rip asked, trying to adjust to the fact that Crying Man was still alive.

Crying Man’s gaze swept around to all those assembled. Fresh tears ran down his dark cheeks. “We waited so long for you to find us.” He paused and looked directly at Rip. “We are dying.”

Rip, ashamed that he’d never thought to ask if he could help the Cosegans before, took a few seconds to answer. “Why are you dying?”

“Because of this,” he waved his arm as if indicating all of the current world. “You found us in your past, but
our
past is your future.”

Rip looked at Savina.

“As you move steadily toward your own destruction, you are also destroying us.”

Rip tried to put it all together. “The Cosegans’ past is our future,” he said. “You really are before the beginning.”

Crying Man nodded. “We left nine Ohsahs, what you call Eysens or Spheres. We knew who would find them because we have the history. The Spheres were to be found at different intervals during the past five thousand years.” He stopped, faded slightly. “It has been very difficult to get through to you across all time, and with your limited perceptions. And,” he hesitated, “our ability to transcend that continues to weaken. I could not be here without the use of at least two Ohsahs.”

“What happened to the others Spheres, er, Ohsahs?” Rip asked, thinking of the Egyptian pyramids, the Incas, the Mayans . . . could they all have had Spheres?

“They were used to advance your civilizations rather than to help ours,” Crying Man said quietly, yet firmly.

Rip thought of the greed and selfishness of people. He wondered if anyone in the long history of the Spheres had acted differently from him.
What could have been?
Even trying with all of his being to save the future, he’d never thought of saving the past.
And I’m an archaeologist!

“The Ohsahs are complex,” Crying Man continued. “It is not easy for people to find their true meaning, but the Ohsahs were all that we could leave. They are not solid objects, as you think. Ohsahs are contained energy . . . crafted from stars, just like you and me. They hold everything,” Crying Man looked at Savina, “because they are
everything
.”

“So you came from us,” Gale said in a hushed tone. “That means we must have survived.”

“You did once, or we would not have been, and had we never been, you would not have been,” Crying Man said stoically.

“The past depends on the future,” Rip said.

Crying Man nodded.

“Are you alive . . . somewhere?” Rip asked. “Or are you some sort of artificial intelligence program inside the Sphere?”

The scientists in the room waited in breathless anticipation of the answer to this all-important question. It would confirm or deny a hundred theories, and it might create an entirely new way to view time and space.

“I am alive.”

“Eleven million years ago?” Rip asked, astonished. “
And
now?”

“Yes,” Crying Man said.

The silence in the room seemed to echo a cosmic void as all held their breath, trying to force their brains to absorb this information.

“How is that possible?”

But he already knew the answer. Time is a funny thing.

“The understanding of time, in your era, is badly limited,” Crying Man said. “But that is something you will work on. More important is the view of the future you have seen. It is something you can change, and you
must
change, because if you destroy your future, you not only destroy us, but you will erase all that has come before. You will never have been.”

“Can’t you help us?”

“The Spheres are our help,” Crying Man said. “They are all we can do, but they should be enough. We have shown you
everything
.”

“We may fail,” Rip admitted.

Crying Man nodded. “A group of my people have left. They have been gone a very long time,” Crying Man said, looking even sadder. “There was disagreement about how to save human life on Earth.” He walked around the room, looking at each person as he spoke. “The group who left, we call them ‘the Imazes’. They believed the answers were out there, in space.”

As he said the word, the Spheres projected stars all around them so it felt as if they were standing on a small moon looking into the vastness of the universe.

“What happened to them?” Savina asked.

“Another group believed the answers were to be found in the physical world on Earth,” Crying Man said, ignoring Savina’s question. “Almost half of my people were Imazes, most of the thinkers, the ones with the greatest imaginations, and they all went away. The ones who remained, we worked on the Ohsahs project and lived a life of searching.”

“For what?” Rip asked.

“Answers,” Crying Man answered. “A way. For the Imazes. For you.”

“Did you ever see the Imazes again?” Savina asked.

“Some returned every so often, durations equal to fifty of your years, and then it came to be longer periods.”

“Where did they go?” Savina asked.

Crying Man nodded, as if he knew she had guessed.

“The multiverse,” she said. “They went to different universes?”

“Yes.”

“How?” one of the other scientists asked.

“You have not figured it out yet, but you will. You are on the right track with gravitational waves and time-shift points.”

“Did the Imazes find a way?” Rip asked. “To save us?”

Crying Man shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Have they encountered other intelligent life?” one of the scientists asked.

“You have been looking for others,” Crying Man said. “You think beings from other planets have come, but it is my people, the Imazes, the ones you call
Cosegans
, who have been coming. They have returned throughout your history. They have helped you, trying to show you a different way, a way to change you, to
save
you.”

“How could they come over millions of years?” Rip, ever the archaeologist, asked.

Crying Man looked at him with the tired patience of a parent watching a child trying to take his first steps. “Time . . . let go of what you think that means.”

“So all the crazy theories of ancient aliens visiting Earth are true, except they weren’t really aliens at all. They were actually us?”

Crying Man nodded. “Look at the sequence which starts the Spheres. It shows each major visit since the beginning. As the visits get further into the distance, the range is longer, and they return less. It started out millions of years ago with exact times. Eventually, it became specific dates, then a range of days, weeks, months, years, decades, and finally this one—sometime within a hundred years, but that’s not the important part.” Crying Man looked at Savina. “The Imazes are coming only one more time, between now and 2120. It is hard to know when, but it will be their last visit . . . ever.”

“Why?”

“Because after that, it is over,” Crying Man said. “No more chances.”

A heavy hush fell over the room. Although they sat and stood among the stars, their faces were all clearly illuminated, and they exchanged glances ranging from confusion, to concern, to outright terror.

Rip finally spoke. “So humanity might have less than one hundred years left?”

“Or
far
less
than that,” Gale added.

Crying Man nodded. “People should stop looking at how the world is, and start looking at what it can become.”