The Seeds of Time (56 page)

They turned back, stepping over the oiled body of a feathered creature that might or might not once have flown.

“How long?” she asked. “How long does Niang have?”

“One hundred seventy-five years—give or take.”

“How can you kill a world in two hundred years?”

“Clio. They
tried
to kill it. Those in the Metal Future were afraid of Niang biota. They had abandoned Earth, and found a few other worlds to inhabit. But they were afraid of Niang, afraid of terrorist attacks like yours. So they experimented with eradication techniques. Eventually they found a kind of anti-DNA phagocyte to do the job. Whatever was left, they set on fire.”

Sickened, Clio turned away. He took her hand, leading her up the first steep slope of the outcropping.

Clio found her footing, climbing ahead. She turned and offered him a hand.

Startled at first, he took it, hosting himself up.

The smog tore, revealing a deeper landscape, but no different, as the sun, setting now behind a mound of hills, infused the air with a dying glow. In the distance, she looked out on the snaking path of the river as it burned with a moving line of fire.

They sat on the rock outcropping, back in Clio’s time, back in the vibrant, sweet-smelling forest. An insect the size of a hawk swooped in front of their faces, hovering, its mica wings a blur, then flitted away. Clio inhaled the sweet air of the forest, her face mask in her lap. This had been her second glimpse of the future. Both times it was a preview of destruction. And this man sitting next to her represented life and hope. Somehow, despite his incredible story, he seemed true. And his Telling, all true. She looked at his profile as he watched the forest, and her heart told her:
Yes
.

He noticed her watching him, and turned to look at her. “More questions?” he asked.

What happens to me?
she wanted to ask. Instead she asked a safer one: “Why didn’t you just go back in your own history and
not
send the ship—the one that crashed? It would be simpler.”

Ashe nodded. “Yes and no. Simpler if it worked. If it didn’t—if for any reason we failed to stop the ship being sent—we wouldn’t get any other chances to set the past right.”

“Just one chance?”

“It depends on when you arrive. Once you travel to your past, everything prior to your arrival becomes fixed. If you arrive on the fourth of July, 1990, then next time you can’t go back and change anything on the third of July, 1990. July third and all previous time is immune to tampering. It’s fixed.” He noted her confused expression. “We’ve never tested it, but it’s true according to the Past Intervention Law—one of the Non-Paradox Laws. I told you before, the universe abhors a paradox. Therefore it also abhors travel to your own history. It does just about everything to prevent it.”

Clio scrunched up her mouth in concentration. “So you
traveled back in time—to the beginning of the problem—so that if you failed, you’d have other chances downstream?”

The insect was back again, treading air about a meter in front of Clio’s face.

“It’s attracted to the glutens in your face mask. Put it in your pocket,” Ashe said.

Clio slipped the mask into the breast pocket of her jumpsuit. After a time, the creature gave up and flew away.

“OK, so we got all these paradox laws,” Clio said. “But why didn’t you just Dive back and steal the FTL from Teeg? In Dive, you could have traveled back a hundred times, each trip a minute or an hour
after
the previous trip, and kept looking for him until you found him.”

“Well, first of all, we have
tried
to find him. He has a labyrinth of caves that he knows like the back of his hand, and he’s paranoid as hell.”

“Was
paranoid,” Clio corrected.

“Was. Tenses get a little mixed up in the Telling of this one. The more important reason we never found Teeg is uncertainty. The Vandarthanan Uncertainty Principle.”

“Another law?”

“Yes, another Non-Paradox Law. Sort of a ‘You can’t have it all’ rule. The universe allows Dive to be accurate about either time or space but not both at the same time.”

“We deal with that one in Dive all the time.”

“Right. The bottom line is that you can’t travel very accurately to the past. It hasn’t mattered to your Biotime missions, because great accuracy was never an issue. You got in the general vicinity of the planet through Dive, and traveled the rest of the way in real space, and it didn’t matter whether it was a million years ago or a million and ten years.”

“But it matters for your mission.”

“Yes. It matters. We knew we had to get to Niang—the place had to be precisely accurate—so we couldn’t be sure
when
we’d arrive. Give or take a few years, we’d hit it near enough. But not close enough to send a lot of missions back time after time. If we’d been unlucky, we would in fact have
arrived
after
Tandy escaped with the FTL, making his actions immune to our tampering.”

“Because of the Past Intervention Law.” Clio looked to him for confirmation.

“Right. The past would close up behind us.”

“A hell of a maneuverability problem.”

“About as easy as shooting the rapids in Hell’s Canyon in an inner tube.”

“And yet you made it,” she said.

“The Niang team made it, yes. Arrived here two months early, nearly perfect. Mine was a simultaneous mission to Earth …”

“… to sabotage the
Galactique.”

“Yes. I arrived nine years before the first Biotime mission to Niang … and I’ve been stuck in your lovely little world ever since.”

Clio stood up, brushing the dust from her jumpsuit. She turned to look at Timothy Ashe, and in that moment the larger things, the world, the universe, were too big to hold. Things that Ashe, like Hillis, could hold in his mind and sacrifice for, were to her simply too big. She wanted to know about Clio.

“When does the universe split?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He stood to look at her directly. “Soon, we think. When Tandy takes the FTL home, we’re guessing. Or when we prevent him.”

A silence lay between them. He waited, as always, for her questions.

“And what happens to me?” she asked.

He watched her carefully. “What do you want to happen?”

Clio smiled a thin smile. “I don’t want to be a prisoner anymore. Never again.”

“I don’t want you to be a prisoner, either.” He was looking at her darkly, from eyes gone flat black. “You might come back to my world, Clio. Might be able to. There’s great danger. It’s only a theory, and if we fail, you could die.”

“Tell me.”

He hesitated, then said, “Sometime soon this cloud of uncertainty will clear, and two realities will emerge. We think there will be a few moments during which I might be able to take you home. Everything will be in flux, and dimensional rules may suspend for an instant. Whether this is a harmless blink of an eye or the biggest event ripple you can imagine, nobody knows. But when it’s over, I must return to my own time and you … must remain in yours.”

“I can’t come with you.”

“It will be a time of flux, dimensional uncertainty. We don’t know what might be possible. Some of us think there’s a chance.”

“What happens if I don’t make it?”

“At best, you would remain incorporeal and we could return you to your time.”

“At worst?”

“At worst, it won’t be a good time to be in Dive. Anything could happen. It could kill you. Even worse, for a few moments we may enter our Cousin Reality and have to cross over to my own—it’s an extended function of Dive, so it would still be highly dangerous. And there would be two strikes against you.” He paused, running his hand over the top of his head as though sorting through the tangles of his thoughts. “I don’t know which Clio I would be with. If it’s the Clio in my Cousin Reality, I don’t think you would survive both the traverse to my own reality and the jump to the future. In both cases you—normally—cannot be in corporeal form.” He turned away. “It’s bizarre and dangerous. Dangerous for everyone on my expedition, but most of all for you, Clio.”

He turned back to her, and a look of confusion filled his face. “You’re smiling.”

“I thought you were going to tell me I couldn’t go.”

“I almost have,” he said, gently.

“No. You said it would be damn dangerous. It’s not the same.”

He searched her face, starting to say something more. She put her finger to his lips. “Don’t push it, Ashe. I always do what I put my mind to.”

He smiled. “We’ll see.” Then he led her back to the encampment.

In that short journey back, Clio felt buoyant, suffused with a lightness, as though, having heard too much, juggled too many facts and feelings, she had retreated for a time to sheer body. However dog-tired, her legs and arms ran with energy, and her chest, like the bellows of her heart, filled with deep breaths.

She let herself follow Ashe to the places he was determined to show her, let herself meet his friends, some of whom spoke her English. Ashe introduced her to the black man with the braid whom they encountered at the rim of the camp and who was the ground expedition leader and Ashe’s good friend.

“Russell Oaklan,” Ashe said to her as the man turned from a clutch of officers to greet them.

“Clio Finn,” Clio said, now finding his eyes willing to meet hers.

“Be welcome here, Clio Finn,” he said. His smile crossed his face like a brief laser. “This one tells our true … remembrance, that you of heart remem now?” He shrugged, smiling again full into her eyes. “The words of this lose with slack Telling.”

“It’s OK,” Clio said. “I think I got the gist.” She felt her own real smile, that stranger, answer his. “I think he tells OK.”

Russell Oaklan nodded. As Oaklan turned back to his officers, Ashe pointed off toward the clearing where a large, segmented landing craft came for them, settling on the ground with a brief explosive noise. And then Clio let Ashe take her to the mother ship itself, the Nian ship in orbit, because he asked her, and she wanted to believe, to move beyond logic and hope.

The smaller craft grappled onto the sleek white pod ship, diminutive compared with the
Galactique
, and cylindrical, like the oldest of the science-fiction moving pictures. Clio stepped through the rounded airsac into the throat of the ship, where the floor met the bulkheads in close approximation of right angles.

The passageway surged to brightness as they boarded. At once the unmistakable fragrance of Niang came to Clio’s nostrils, a musky underlayment where oil and hot decking should have been.

It was, as Ashe told her, a trained construct, both grown and engineered, the created entity of a decade’s interaction of crystal self-assembly—much like shells or bones—and discreet DNA engineering to build in deep-space tolerances. And it was a Transition ship, faster than the speed of light, a time-Diving pod, and fighting ship. And it lived. At the cellular level, much of this ship was alive, breathing, exchanging fluid, responding to environment and creating environment, including an energy-absorbing and stealthlike profile.

At points the passageway widened to workstations. Clio glanced at two crew members seated at a workbench. Filaments sprouted from the fingertips of their right hands, and were probing the console where a pinprick of light responded now and then. A small, compact woman had threads of some sort inserted into her temples. Clio stopped just past the workstation, leaned against the bulkhead, closed her eyes.

Her stomach wrinkled up in wave after wave. She noticed now a bench underneath her that she hadn’t seen before. Ashe pressed her gently onto it.

“I don’t feel so hot.” She rested her forearms on her thighs.

“Those tendrils patch crew into the deep biological systems so that they can exchange information with the ship.”

That didn’t help. The wave threatened to climb up her breast. Clio breathed deeply. The corridor was very warm and humid.

“I felt that way, Clio,” Ashe said. “When I first saw a lumber mill. You kill to build and create. We guide and prune.” He sat next to her, putting his arm around her. He smelled slightly of sweat, and musky humanness. Despite her nausea, she felt a different, more keen and piercing sensation slide into her belly.

“It’s a gentle way, Clio,” he said.

She rose and pressed down her jumpsuit against her midriff.

One of the crew at the workstation had detached her leads and had come to the opening to gaze at Clio. Ashe challenged her with a snap of his black eyes, and the woman returned to her console.

“Why do they watch me,” Clio said as they made their way deeper into the ship.

“You’re Clio Finn. They all know who you are. From legend.”

“Legend. Great.” Clio glanced back at the technician. “Do I measure up?”

Ashe grinned. “Probably not.”

They entered the bridge extrusion. The control console nestled into the rounded nose of the ship, alight with a sharp glow of crystalline instrumentation surrounded by the melded interstices of ship’s body, also radiating a pale, translucent fire. In this surrounding luminescence, Clio saw two crew members chatting closely. They parted. The one in authority came forward to meet them. Ashe spoke to her, then turned to Clio. “This is Captain Hickory.” The captain nodded to her, eyes narrowing in a careful scrutiny. Her white hair was short and wiry, face nearly seamless, except when she smiled, which she did now. She stepped aside, allowing Clio and Ashe to approach the extended console.

The console was oddly flat, here and there pitted with depressions for fingerholds except where a growth protruded, as in conventional toggles. A flickering from many membranous screens, but no glossy reflections off portals, for the room was devoid of windows, accentuating a womblike feeling—not altogether pleasant. She let the instrumentation display itself before her as she listened to her own breathing in the metal-free quiet.

It was both a ship and a life-form, both familiar and alien. The combination made her irritable and wary, as though such ambiguity were so much worse than outright
difference
. And no metal. No solid, cold absoluteness of metal.