The Seeds of Time (10 page)

Hillis looked at Clio, very calm. As she stood there dumbly, he raised an eyebrow. Well?

They were lovers. Of course. They were lovers
.

“Clio …” Hillis said.

She heard herself saying, “You should lock your door.”

“Clio, I wanted you to know about Zee, but I never got around to saying it.”

“Well, now I know. About you and Zee.” She turned, started to leave. Hillis moved fast, reached for her, grabbed her arm, but she yanked away, pulled the door open.

Hillis slammed the door shut in front of her, pushed her against it, pinning her arms. She closed her eyes, not wanting to look at him.

“Goddamn it, Clio, look at me!”

What did she expect? Hillis was her friend, not her lover, he’d never been anything else. Still, she hated him.

“Oh God,” Zee was saying, still not looking at her.

She turned to him, this usurper. Started to say something, stopped herself. Zee was too easy, too innocent.

She looked up then at Hillis. Met his gaze, and looking
at him, knew it all. Knew Hill’s loneliness, Zee’s vulnerability, her own obsession with men who could never love her. She knew it all, and she determined to be a kind, rational adult.

Then she heard herself saying, “You bastard. You goddamn bastard. You could have told me, you could have given me that much!”

Hillis backed off from her then, leaned against the desk, feet crossed, bracing his arms behind him on the desk. His face was neutral again. “I guess the Dive’s off, huh?”

A fury built inside her. “Off? You think I care who you screw? You think that’s how I make my decisions, like a woman spurned? Maybe you’re not the only hero around, Hillis. I came here tonight to tell you I’d do it. The Dive is on. Even though our careers are on the line, even though they can keelhaul us behind Vanda for a few thousand kilometers just for thinking of doing this, much less catching us. Yeah. The Dive’s on.” She turned to the door, turned back. “But you’re still a thoughtless son of a bitch—whether you save the Earth or not.”

Clio turned, yanking the door open, leaving it thrown open, made her way back down the narrow passageway, past crew quarters and out into Vanda’s main corridor. She walked rapidly, not looking where she was going, not acknowledging a few who nodded at her, not seeing them. Her heart kept feeling betrayal, while her mind kept saying,
Stupid fool bitch
, not his fault that he can’t love you, not his fault.

She found herself outside Loading Bay D. Hand on the observer access door, ready to enter. She opened the door, saw Captain Russo standing on the catwalk above the bay, leaning against the railing looking below. Clio almost turned back. But Russo looked up, waved her over.
What the hell
. Clio approached her, boots clacking on the catwalk grating. She stood next to Russo, looking down on the ship.

Starhawk
was nested in her bay, massive, black and riveted, a hulking foreign thing, somnolent now, like captured
Kong in his hold. Techs were gathered near her belly, dragging hoses to power and fuel her. Preparing for a mission.

“What’s up, Captain? We gonna fly?” Clio felt adrenaline sluicing into her veins.

Russo still leaned against the railing, watching the crew. “Thirteen hundred hours. You didn’t get a crew call?” Her bulky frame hid her excitement, if she felt any. A little squint around the eyes meant that she saw every move the crew below made. And knew enough to stay out of their way until her command came up.

Three panels lay open on the aft fuselage to receive the power cables. Clio’s belly tightened. Looking at the ship gave her a jolt as always, made her yearn. The ship could take her where she wanted to go. Could take her to when. Times she had strapped herself into the pilot’s chair, trusting
Starhawk
with her life, her sanity. Times they had gone down that road together, where time and space converge, and only had each other for company,
Starhawk
’s winking control panel and the hum of hydraulics, her only sensory links to the real world.

“Where is it this time?” Clio asked.

“Called Niang”—she pronounced it Ny-Ang, with emphasis on the second syllable.

“Sounds Chinese,” Clio said, trying to keep a polite conversation going with the brass.

Russo looked up at her, eyes narrowing. “You look like hell.” Clapped her hand on Clio’s shoulder. “Go get some sleep, Lieutenant,” she said, almost motherly. Russo went back to watching the ship, maybe lost in her own problems.

“Yessir. Thank you sir.” Clio left the catwalk, mind racing. Thirteen hundred hours. Planet called Niang.
We’re heading out
.

Clio found her way back to her cabin, staggered to the bed and fell on it. She pushed the thought of the mission from her, pushed it hard, her thoughts returning to Hillis, Hillis and Zee. Hillis and her. She rolled over on her stomach, aroused.

Station was growing quiet. Doors shutting, voices in the corridor now and then.

She sat up, pushing her hair back off her face, rubbing her fingers into her scalp. Went to the mirror, used a brush. Her hair crackled.

Charged up tonight, Antoinette. Got to get out
.

She headed for the door.

In front of his cabin, she paused. Didn’t want to think too much about this. Just get on automatic and do it. What could it hurt?

Knocked. A minute later, a long minute, Teeg opened the door. “Well, Miss Red herself.”

“You alone?” she asked.

He looked at her a second or two. “Not anymore.” Held open the door, and drew her inside.

Clio’s hands were sweating hard as she grabbed the rungs of the flight deck ladder to take her shift.
Dive shift
, it was, and she’d used a few too many little blue pills, for blackout insurance.

A hand on her shoulder. She jumped, nearly striking out at the person behind her. She turned around. It was Zee.

“God, don’t sneak up on me like that!”

Zee backed up a step, at the look in Clio’s eyes. “Cripes almighty,” he said, “you’re jumpy, Clio.”

“Nah. Calm as a coffin.”

This was their first real conversation since that moment in Hillis’ cabin. Zee barely met her eyes, shying away, playing hurt puppy. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Trust me.” He leaned heavily on the word “trust.”

Know what irony is, Zee?
She waited a beat, wondering how tough to be on him. “Maybe I wasn’t born to trust,” she said.

“Come on, Clio. What’s the worst that can happen?”

She was going to say,
Ship blows up … or my career trashed, all-expenses-paid trip to a quarry
, when she saw him smiling. He was joking. She smiled back. “Right,” she said, “all for science.”

Zee’s smile grew, his ears rising slightly as he did. He
moved in closer. “The program’s all set. Just transfer it in from science deck. You’ll be fine.”

Ship’s voice started countdown. “Crew to quarters and Dive sequence in fifteen minutes,” it said.

Clio turned to climb. Behind her, she heard, “I love you, Clio.”

She stopped for a moment, then continued to climb. Zee used these funny words.
Trust. Love
. But who should she trust, and who did he love, really? She left him standing below, and emerged onto the bridge, now dim in pre-Dive mode.

Russo made eye contact. Enough to say, Late again, mister.

As Clio slipped into the pilot seat, Teeg threw her a knowing look. Goddamn. That he could bring
that
up at a time like this. “Get a life, Teeg,” she said. A hurt frown dented his forehead. She turned to her work, ignoring him, stomach fluttering like a jellyfish on a stick.

The moment they hit Dive and she could see that Teeg was out of it, she imported Zee’s program from lower deck and brought it on line, punching in all the capacity of Zee’s jury-rigged memory from science deck, all within six seconds of constant time. And waited while Dive took the ship, and her, straight down to the chasms of time. Eyes blurred as she swung her head to see the chronometer, but she was too slow, as Zee said she would be, to see the flash of numbers
forward
, and by the time her eyes cleared, the ship had reversed, was Diving backward, already a thousand years in past time, heading to two million, give or take. She jabbed the radio receiving toggle off, but no need. The drive was full five hundred years ago.

She looked around her. It was over. Ship still intact. Ran systems checks, yes, ship purring. Checked on Teeg and Russo. Vital signs normal, or as normal as they get in Dive. Checked herself, wondering what normal was. Still alive, by God. And whether they’d gone up a few decades or not—pierced the Future Ceiling or not—was just gravy. Find out soon enough. For now, being alive was enough.

•   •   •

“Play it,” Hillis said.

Clio glanced over at Zee’s console. “I don’t want to hear it, Hill.”

Zee’s cabin was cluttered with books, stacks of paper, and cast-off underwear. On the desk next to his computer, a plastic carton held partially evaporated soup, a glued-in spoon and a broken pencil.

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” Hillis said. “But play it anyway.”

“Don’t try to get me roped into this, Hill. I’ve already done my part.”

He reached out and grasped her arm. “You can’t always run from everything, Clio. You can’t run forever.”

She jerked away. “I’m not running away.” But it felt like a lie, with Hillis gazing at her with that long blue stare of his. Plus she couldn’t avoid Hillis; they were going to be cooped up together for months, since Dive undershot their Niang target a bit. She was a captive audience.

Hillis nodded at Zee. “Play it.”

Zee looked like he hadn’t slept for days. Dark half-moons under his eyes and the pallor of too much math. He obeyed Hillis, punching the sequence into the keyboard. “I’ve enhanced this as much as I can,” he said. “It’s a continuous, repeating transmission. Hard to tell the year it originated, but my guess is maybe fifty to seventy-five years … up.”

“How do you …” Clio began, but Zee held up his hand for quiet. A static-filled transmission eked out of the speakers.

“Good evening,” a male voice began. “I send you greetings. This is my last broadcast. I should be home tonight with my family, as you are. I soon will be, if I manage to slip through the street gangs that have now, it seems, taken over New York City. The recent gallant fight of our city police aided by the National Guard was a last stand against chaos. And futile. Those who have not yet succumbed to the Sickness and cholera—and despair—are either looting their neighbors or barring the doors against
the villains. It’s come to that. Here, in this formerly great city as elsewhere in the nation and the world.”

Clio closed her eyes. Yeah, it was going to be bad.

“… somehow, with the aid of our brave crew here at the station, we’ve managed to come to you tonight out of determination to tell you this last story.

“You who are left to listen may be willing to hear what I have to say. If not, then at least I leave this broadcast as a beacon for the future. If our civilization should rise again somehow. If we should have visitors from the vast universe that we had just begun to explore when disaster overtook us. For it is conceivable that the cosmos contains intelligent life—life more intelligent than we ourselves have been. If ever they should look over the ruin of our planet, and our civilizations, I would offer … not an explanation—for that is hardly possible—but simply one human being’s summation of events. And a last few words for the departed. For Earth.

“In the years when we still had the luxury to argue over who was to blame for ecological disaster, some of us said that the worst had come upon us suddenly. Come upon us in a manner no peoples, no governments, could have prevented. And, in truth, in the last years, one calamity did follow another with unrelenting swiftness: crop failures, civil mayhem, pestilence, UV die-offs, and infestations of every kind.

“Yet, before the final upheavals, we had many decades of tremors. If, in the last years of the twentieth century, some did cry wolf too often, surely the warning cries of the last twenty years were the cries of wisdom.

“Why, then, did we do so little until it was too late? Not because we lacked the scientific understanding to comprehend our environment. Not because of greed—though I don’t discount its contribution. Not because we were too busy with other things. Not even—as some have said—that we secretly wished for our own annihilation. It may be the case that the answer is a more basic one. That we could not imagine that the Earth could succumb. It had always been here. It had always been our home, our provider, our
enduring world. It would always live and succor us—would it not? So finally, I believe we may have perished from a simple failure of the imagination.

“And the great adventure that was Space Recon? For twenty-five years our hopes rode with these crews. These brave men and women became our ideals, our folk heroes. And a peculiarly American kind of hero worship it was: we were facing the problem head-on, with bravery, technology, drama. No problem that can’t be solved with ingenuity and courage. Supply-side reigns, not only on Earth, but in the heavens. They would bring home their treasures, the holds of their ships would be filled with booty. We could continue living as we wished. We didn’t need to change. This is what Space Recon allowed us to believe. We needn’t change.

“Ultimately, they failed to find viable life. And though we hounded the Service out of existence, much of our anger should have been directed at ourselves. Because our own lives weren’t viable. We could not sustain ourselves, our populations, our rampant development, our consumerism, our combustion engines, our sprawling cities. And we could not imagine life without them.

“We could not imagine life without them. What’s left is dust. You who may, in future times, come upon this broadcast, take note. We were not always thus. Once we were full of life and promise, a variegated and diverse patchwork of peoples and communities. We nurtured our young, created great art, sought out learning and science, and strove to understand our Creator, and abide by what we perceived was His will. The Earth was lush and green, and filled with creatures, remarkable and thriving.