The Seeds of Time (55 page)

She swung around, exasperated, and he noted the look in her eyes. Patiently, he continued his Telling: “No one knows how these things can be, just that they
are
. Two Realities will emerge out of this cloud of probabilities … they will be peopled with the same people, but they will be different Realities. One Reality—mine—is the one in which the seeds survived and changed the Earth. In the other Reality … the seeds die, Clio. The Earth becomes a wasteland.”

“That’s the future that Hillis and I discovered. Why didn’t we find the green, changed Earth?”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Clio. But I do know this: Tandy and his kind will find other worlds to inhabit and ruin. They will argue that worlds can be harvested as humanity grows and moves on. Once they have FTL, nothing can stop them. With this technology and their aggressive spirit, their reality will seize the thrust of evolution. My reality, I’m afraid, doesn’t stand a chance.”

Clio breathed a deep, slow breath. “How can I be in both Realities?”

“I don’t know, Clio. You think I have all these answers. I don’t.”

She looked at his face, seeing what appeared to be a simple, open man, telling something he seemed to believe.
“It’s just a lot to absorb,” she said. “You’re telling me that everything I know is dead wrong and a bunch of stranger-than-hell stuff is true instead.”

“Sit down, Clio.” She stared at him, not liking orders. Then she sat down, facing him. “There’s more,” he said.

“Oh, wonderful.”

“You might as well hear the whole story,” he said.

“And you might as well know that I think this whole thing is crock of shit, Ashe. I’m sorry, but it’s got as many holes as a ventilator grate.” She pointed to Tandy’s side of the tuning fork, etched in the dirt. “If you’ve seen the Cousin way downstream where you live, then you already know what’s going to happen, right? So why bother to change the past? You got yourself two universes, Cousin Realities, or whatever. One is strong, one is going to fizzle, and which is which is already decided. End of story, right?”

“No. We can change it,” he answered. “At great cost and great danger, but we can change it if we’re lucky.”

“Then what the hell did you see when you traveled to your Cousin Universe? Strong or weak Cousin?”

Ashe was already holding up his hand, palm out to her, trying to stop her flood of questions. “When we looked before, we saw a strong Cousin, with FTL. When we look after this successful mission—if it
is
successful—we’ll see a weak Cousin.” He nodded, noting her creased brow. “That’s because …”

Clio interrupted. “You mean your travels to the future and to the Cousin Reality haven’t told you whether you pull off this mission? Don’t future history books talk about it?”

“If you’ll just shut up long enough to learn something maybe you’ll learn something,” Ashe replied mildly. Then, resuming his Telling, he said, “You are talking about the paradoxes that can occur in time travel. You sense that they can’t logically happen, and you’re right.”

Mollified somewhat, Clio waited as he continued.

“Yes, future history books in the Cousin Reality talk about how Tandy brought the FTL home. But after we prevent him, there will be different history books, telling a different story.” He paused, looking directly at her. “Because
when we succeed, and change the outcome of this time of probabilistic uncertainty, Tandy’s future will wink out of existence, and will be replaced by a new future. Still pretty ugly—they’ll still have Dive—but at least they won’t have FTL. And most importantly, they lose the power, the thrust of existence.”

“But your people, from your reality. In
their
minds, they remember seeing a strong Cousin, don’t they?”

Ashe shook his head. “No.”

Clio just stared at him.

He continued. “Our reality winks out too. And is recreated to conform to the new events.”

Clio’s eyes narrowed. “Your world is destroyed?”

“… and is replaced by something I hope is somewhat close to the one I left. We don’t know what we’ll come back to. Nobody does, it’s never been done before.” Ashe drew another tuning fork almost exactly over the old one, but slightly to one side. “This is the new configuration of the Cousin Realities. The tuning fork shifts.”

Clio gazed a long time down on the forked drawing between them. It was crazy. But it
was
coherent. Crazily coherent. She was softening toward this tale, this man. Maybe
she
was crazy. “How do you know all this,” she asked.

“Vandarthanan’s theories, extended a bit. We’re in an era when the time stream is unstable; highly unstable. Because of FTL, and what it means for the future of our galaxy. Vandarthanan’s equations suggested that an instability like this was possible. It’s described in the Non-Paradox Laws.”

“Paradox Laws,” she repeated. Decided to let that one lie for a moment. She got up again, trying to clear her head. “Why do I even for a moment believe all this?”

“Because it’s the truth, Clio. I’ve got no reason to lie to you. In a way, it doesn’t matter what you believe.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because it matters to me … what you think matters to me.”

She turned to gaze unseeing at Niang’s smeared
horizon. “So my humanity, my reality,” she said, “is depraved and deserves to die.…”

“You knew this, Clio, all along you knew this,” he said. “Why else did you bring home the seeds, knowing what they would do to your world and its metal technology.”

“It was a last chance for Earth. I never said my people were evil.”

“Your people! Your people killed your mother, locked up Petya, treated him like a subhuman, hounded you through all your years of hiding. Your people created quarries. Rounded up the unfit, those choosing the wrong life partners, the wrong politics. Your people withheld the vaccine for the Sickness …”

“The vaccine!”

“Of course. They found one, kept it for the chosen few, used the fear of death and epidemic to rein in those who wouldn’t conform. Oh, Clio,” he took her hands in his, facing her squarely. “Clio, you knew all this, somewhere inside. What your people have come to … this dark dominion. You’ve run from it all your life. If your reality someday dries up—someday far from now—isn’t it for the better?”

Clio sank down again, put her head on her knees, shutting her eyes, trying to track, to comprehend it: the universe splitting, the Cousin Realities, the universe destroyed and reborn. She brought her thoughts back to the part she
could
comprehend. She looked at Ashe. “The Earth survives,” she said. “At least in one universe, the Earth survives.”

He nodded slowly.

When he slid next to her she allowed him to put his arm around her, and she rested against his side. They sat a long time then, gazing out over the camp to the blue-green world beyond, as a small place within her chest, which had been all bone or rock, began to soften and open. She knew it was hope that would flood in if she let it. For a while she leaned against Timothy Ashe, and let it.

In the compound was a tent given over to washing and showering. Inside, towels and jumpsuits hung from stiff wall extrusions. Glowing patches in the tent ceiling and walls lit the shower compartment and dressing area, but the interior still remained half-murky, as though Clio were inside a jellyfish. When she put on the Nian jumpsuit, it lay on her skin like a thin, rubbery silk.

She met Ashe just outside the tent. She looked at him, struggling against her natural cynicism. Tried to smile. Failed.

His mouth flattened ruefully. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s hard.”

He waited, watching her. As though battle skirmishes weren’t being fought just a few miles away, as though the world didn’t hang in the balance. As though they had all the time in the world.

“I guess I’d like to know what you want from me,” she said, finally articulating the foremost thought in her mind.

“Still think I’m after something, huh?”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You don’t want me to do something, refuse to Dive the ship—take Tandy home?”

“No. You can Dive or not Dive. As I told you before, they can get home without you. You’re free to go back with them.”

Clio was about to say,
And if I don’t want to?
But she stopped herself, afraid, suddenly, of the answer.

Ashe took her by the arm, and walked with her to the edge of the camp.

“Where are we going?” The noises of camp were now entirely submerged beneath the fathoms of jungle song.

Without answering, Ashe led her into the deep forest canopy where, after several minutes’ walk, they came upon an outcropping of rock jutting into the sun. At ground level a panel was set into the rock, a bone-white sheet of no material she could name. She scratched her fingernail down it. Smooth as glass, cool as ice.

“I’ll take you downstream, Clio, to see.” He gestured to the slab before them, apparently a door.

“Your future?”

“No. Theirs.”

She drew back. “The event ripple …”

“Not a problem, Clio … we’ve overcome that. Trust me.”

It was ludicrous.
Trust me
.

Trust this man in the Nianist combat suit. In the unearthly jewel-studded vest. Trust his story of the future at war with the past. The future fighting against Clio’s present, fighting against what would become a parallel future, the Metal Future. A ravaging and insatiable humanity, stealing the thrust of existence with their aggressive spirit.

Yet she stepped forward with him as the door slid sideways into the rock.

Clio paused in front of the dim recess before her. “What will we be in this future? Will we be visible to others?”

“No, not visible,” Ashe said.

“Then like ghosts?”

He raised the good eyebrow. “We are between dimensions, therefore not visible. Nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid. Just curious.”

The door slid closed behind them. They were in a small, domed room, where a gentle light blossomed to dispel the shadows. On Ashe’s side, a hump grew—it seemed right to say
grew
—from near the panel door. His right hand rested upon the bulge a moment; then the tips of
his fingers slipped through the surface a moment to a depth of about six centimeters. As Clio watched, the skin puckered up a moment on her neck, as though something dreadful had touched her. Ashe stood with his fingers dipping into the bulge for several minutes, while the air in the compartment surged and ebbed, accompanied by a low hum almost out of hearing range.

Finally Ashe removed his hand—clean, she noted—and stepped to the panel, which opened.

The first thing Clio noticed was the smell. Something had died. Clio covered her nose, as Ashe put his hand on her back, guiding her outside.

As they stepped through they were surrounded by a veil of fog. An acrid, pulpy smell assaulted Clio’s nostrils. Before them, a ghastly landscape poked now and then from drifts of smoke. Something was burning. Through the brackish air she saw stumps of trees spotting a denuded terrain, split by rivulets of stream water brown with silt or chemical stew. Clio coughed, expelling the gases from her lungs. Ashe removed a small, gelatinous face mask from his pocket, put it on. He looked like he had a centimeter of vaseline covering his face. He handed her another one.

“It will filter the air,” he said. “Don’t fight it.”

Clio took the gluey membrane, pressed it to her face. The mask thinned around her eyes, nose, and mouth, allowing her to see and breathe.

It was coming on toward dusk. The sun strained against the gaseous fabric of the horizon. She and Ashe stood higher above the surrounding land than before, as erosion had cut away and exposed more of the rock. They made their steep descent to the plain, clambering down over jutting rock, yet in an effortless way, as though in partial g. When they began to walk on the soggy ground, they left no footprints, but in every other way the world and their presence in it seemed to be ordinary. As though they had corporeal form.

On the stumps of trees Clio saw lichens crusted with a turquoise pallor like an outbreak of a Niang eczema. But the forest was gone. Gone in every direction, its passing marked
only with stumps and a few fallen trunks collapsed inward in the hollow way of Niang trees.

Clio bent down to examine the blue-green lichens. “What’s happened here? A forest fire?”

He looked at her, frowning. “The killing of a world. What else?”

She crouched down to touch a fallen tree. Her hand went through the collapsed surface, not as through thin air, but as through a sticky liquid. She looked up at Ashe, who looked solid, not like a ghost. But their presence here was ephemeral.

Around her the silences rested fathoms deep. “Who did this, Ashe?”

“The Metal Future. Eventually, they will be capable of this. It’s only a matter of time.”

Somewhere in the distance, the rumble of fire could be heard. But nowhere, the sound of a living creature, other than the sound of their own voices.

“You could call me Timothy, you know.”

An exhaust of smoke moved across the landscape, confining their vision to just in front of their faces. “Let’s get out of here, Timothy,” she said. “I’ve seen enough.”