Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (8 page)

“Eventually, they will be constrained, shamed, and contained—don’t ask me to explain the shamed part. It’s too far into the future right now for you to need to know. What you should know right now is that a few borders will be redrawn along the back side of Terran space . . . but by doing so, we will have three hundred years of stability and prosperity in the Alliance zone after the Second Grey War ends, if everything goes right.

“Or rather, your descendants will have peace, since we are talking three hundred years, here,” she amended, tipping her head slightly. “At the end of approximately three Terran centuries, those descendants will have to face an enemy that still scares the biological waste out of the Greys. I have plans for dealing with that far-flung war as well . . . but some of the details of that far-distant war are very much dependent on what we all choose to do here and now.”

“I choose seeing these future sights,” the Chinsoiy Fearsome Leader stated in the silence following her words. “
If
safely you can. It is good for one of us to see what you see, viewing sound reasons.”

Ia nodded and stepped away from Myang. Her experiences in facing down Miklinn had given her insight into the true extent of her own abilities, and she had practiced while on board the
Damnation
, mostly with help from Helstead, Harper, and Rico. Spyder had declined, and she hadn’t bothered to ask the rest. But this was not a fellow Human. “If you will rest your body, Fearsome Leader Kzul, I will begin.”

The Glorious Leader moved aside, allowing her counterpart access to a lounger in the dimly seen observation room. The Human analog to the position the Chinsoiy took was akin to a surfer lying on a slanted surfboard. The silicon-based species did not sit quite like anyone else. He shifted twice, then stilled. “. . . I am resting.”

Going slowly, Ia lifted her hand and flipped her mind in, then out. She didn’t need to move but did want to warn the others visually that she was beginning the process. She didn’t want anyone to interfere at the wrong moment.

Chinsoiy brains weren’t like carbon-based ones. She couldn’t accelerate the alien’s thoughts to match her own mental speeds. Her xenotelepathy still wasn’t very strong—not really strong enough for this task, in a way—but she could reach out to Kzul with enough strength
from
the timeplains. In specific, from an alternate life-stream where
she
was a fellow Chinsoiy, as well as the Prophet of a Thousand Years.

Fearsome Leader gasped, plunging into the timeplains without much warning. Glorious Leader flinched, leaning over his slanted perch with the species equivalent of a worried look, but carefully did not touch her counterpart. Neither did the two painted guards, though they stared at the white-haired Human on the other side of the observation glass.

Ignoring them, Ia focused on drawing the reclining alien into that alternate timeline.
She
wasn’t a Chinsoiy, couldn’t think like them with all the nuances required to impart true understanding . . . but one of her alternate selves was. With her Feyori blood awakened, she could and did draw that alternate self out of the other waters so that silicon-based-Ia could accelerate and explain, while carbon-based-Ia trailed behind them for a moment like a third wheel on an awkward, grim date. But only for a moment; without a word, Chinsoiy-Ia passed over the Human counterpart to Fearsome Leader Kzul in the other universe. Together, they guided their respective guests through the minefields of the future.

This
brain, she could speed up through the process, though it cost her effort and energy. Not for splitting her attention and her abilities in half but for splitting them into three parts: one part cushioned the silicon-based Kzul; one part enlightened the carbon-based Human version; and one part consulted with her other self, the Chinsoiy version of the Prophet. Events in the other universe were not happening quite like in this one, but enough alike for this exchange to help. Together, they targeted and tapped, guided and adjusted, double-checking each other’s timelines as well as their own.

Ships and worlds burned. Bombs exploded; a planet boiled its seas into the searing sky. A gaping hole in the night slid by as they raced from system to disintegrating system, disturbingly bleak and black even in the depths of space. A
wrongness
that had to be stopped. She would have to stop that hole from happening in her own universe, but she had to show it so that at least one other in each universe would know what was coming, and confirm that the extra steps she had to take were necessary. That certain under-the-table deals had to be made, to stop it from existing, and to stop a war under way.

A great gray wall approached, lit by the glow of a young sun. Drones robbed planets of their stone and stole stars of their flame . . . and that single, mind-filling wall slowly became two: equally as terrible, and twice as frightening as before. The drones of both avoided that slowly growing void-spot with unseemly haste, even for their great, devouring speed. Avoided it and moved on, stripping system after system with terrifying efficiency.

Darkness stayed when the machine-wielding locusts left. Not the frightening void-within-a-void of that one little glimpse, but an emptiness nonetheless. Bereft of planets, of stars, of even the tiniest wisps of nebulae beyond the faint, far-flung light of distant galaxies, the utter lack of what had once been a thriving galaxy made the military leader keen and flex his membranes. Made his carbon-based counterpart suck in a discomforted breath through a very Human grimace.

Not every alternate-reality version of Ia could do this, or would do it, or even needed to do it. Right now, it helped both of their universes, and that was reason enough to cooperate. Dispassionately, third-corner-Ia watched as the other two parts of her mind worked, keeping focus on the two disparate activities. The silicon-based version took a lot longer to wade through everything, leaving her and her fellow Human to stand there on the timeplains. The Human version of Fearsome Leader glanced at her.

“So . . . you are the Human equivalent of her? A Prophet from another dimension? Why couldn’t you be in ours, rather than settling us with this alien one?”
he asked her, lifting his chin at her counterpart.
“Do you know what we Terrans could do if we had you on our side?”

Silicon-Ia was murmuring in the liquid language of her kind, explaining what Kzul was seeing as the void shifted into the one timeline, and the bleak emptiness re-blossomed with untouched stars. A desert analogy would have been useless to the Chinsoiy’s point of view, so the Chinsoiy version was using other analogies while explaining the desert’s significance versus the garden’s.

Carbon-Ia shook her head.
“You were born in that other universe. I was born in this one. This is the
only
place where these two realities touch, outside the grasp of Death itself.”
She turned to face the male Admiral-General, her brow quirked and her mouth twisted in irony.
“Besides, you
do
have me on your side: the Chinsoiy-me.
That
meioa cares every bit as much for carbon-kind as she does her own silicon-based species—I’ll remind you that in
your
universe, just as in mine, the Chinsoiy are
not
being threatened by the very literal Salik appetite for warfare and destruction, yet she is still bending her abilities and guiding her people to act for your benefit, above and beyond the call of any normal duty.

“Be content with the fact that we both care enough to help you understand, in the hopes that you will help the rest of your universe’s Alliance to understand and act as well. This is why my silicon counterpart is informing
your
counterpart, so that my universe will survive, too.”

He studied her, this Admiral-General Thad Puyen, and dipped his head.
“I see why your counterpart’s Fearsome Leader has made you—her—a Highest Flight Leader.”

Before he could ask another question, the other two ended their conversation. Carbon-Ia handed back control of the Admiral-General to her counterpart and took back her Chinsoiy guest. As the other two faded from view, Fearsome Leader Kzul stared at her, opalescent skin gleaming in the golden light of the timeplains. Silicon-Ia had left them in a section where the purple sky was streaked with greenish peach clouds, echoing the patchy, uncertain future that lay ahead of both universes.

“. . . This a strange place is,”
he stated as the other two left. He lifted an arm, membrane stretching, in order to gesture at the sky.
“Sun-sear feels good on my wings, yet unharmed you stand, unblistered, undamaged. And the blackness-within-black, tasted of the Door for the Dead, as the Dlmvla do say it.”

“The things you saw in the images are true possibilities,”
Ia replied.
“If I don’t set things up just right to stop the coming enemy, with your help, with the others’ help, and by sacrificing a lot to stop what you saw . . . The blackness, the
wrongness
 . . . is the destruction of the fabric of the universe, spreading in accelerated, destructive entropy. Stopping it will not be pleasant, but it will be done, and in doing so, it will put an end to the Grey Wars,”
Ia said.
“The Greys will be ashamed that their technology, clashing with ours, almost destroyed everything, an event that I have predicted, and which will convince them to do what I say.”

The Chinsoiy tilted his head, considering her words, then gestured vaguely at the timeplains around them.
“And this? Visions of future possibles?”

“The things you see right now are only analogs, meioa. Metaphors,”
Ia explained patiently.
“What you see within the rivers are true possibilities, but up here, where it is dry, I have given both of us the ability to see these temporal energies in a way that each of us can understand.”

Kzul tilted his head.
“What energies are seen when not in use of metaphor-analogy? What true-sight is of this?”

The question was a little unexpected. Ia would have thought the alien would want to know more about what he had been shown rather than the very nature of the timeplains. Tipping her own head back, she stared up at the non-hydrous clouds of his homeworld and pondered the question. Slowly, she morphed it to the golden grass and blue skies of a more Human-style world. Morphed it back to her vision of Time in all its infinite varieties.

“I have always seen
this
planetary surface, meioa. It is my starting point for understanding. But for all we see it as a three-dimensional world . . . it is barely two-dimensional, and the underlying reality is very much beyond that.”

Extending a wing-arm, he offered her his fingers, long and oddly jointed.
“Show me.”

The corner of her mind that had been consulting with her counterpart now quickly skimmed the timelines behind the alien’s back. It . . . would not hurt, she realized. It might even help. Nodding slowly, she licked her lips, focused, and stopped the analogy. Stopped the wind, stopped the clouds, stopped even the rippling waters of multiple, multiple lives. In the stillness and the silence, she breathed a single word.

“. . . Time.”

Their view of unending, rolling fields of golden grass and thousands of rivulets shattered into a million overlapping images. Everywhere the pair looked, existence itself vibrated and jostled like waves of sound rolling off a plucked wall-harp string. The sunlight vanished, dropping them into an intense, rich blackness that held as much of everything as that blighted crack in reality had held absolute nothing.

The difference pressed in on them from all sides, cradling and supporting Human and Chinsoiy alike. Little sparks triggering huge, rolling, concentric rings, concentric spheres, concentric hyperspheres . . . If the zero dimension was a point, and the first dimension a line, the second a square, and the third a cube, each one building upon the previous at a right angle to itself . . . then Time was a hypercube, a cube within a cube, each the exact equal in size, but still tucked one within another at a perfect, impossible right angle.

Physics demanded that no one body could occupy the exact same spot as any other, so the hypercubes, the hyperspheres, constantly jostled for dominance in their selected spot, pushing each other back and forth. Each expenditure of fourth-dimensional energy induced a slight change from entropy, a change of willpower. This . . .
this
 . . . was the movement that sentient beings called Time . . . and yet it was so little a thing, such a tiny thing. Little, because there was yet another layer to everything. Because at a right angle to
that
, to the hypercubes and hyperspheres, lay the realm of the multiverse.

Choice after choice lay beyond the hypersphere of Time, overlapping and jostling for place as well, for the nested cube-spheres could move right
or
left, up
or
down, back
or
forth, in
or
out, plus the dimensional choices of yes
or
no . . . and they wanted to move in
all
directions at once.

Like fireworks bursting outward, only to have each spark burst again into new blossoming spheres, and new ones still,
Time
pulsed in an interdimensional heartbeat of dizzying, overlapping magnitude, stretching on into an infinity which neither mind could comprehend, but which wasn’t threatening or maddening at this level of intensity. It simply
was
.

But they weren’t sparks. They were
things
, and they were
actions
. They were
choices
. Some of what they were and some of what they did moved because they were guided by the rules of existence, and some were guided by these tiny scraps of universe made self-aware.

Ia gently extracted them both from the multidimensional view, carefully rebuilding first the faintest glow of dawn, then the sensation of grass underfoot as the tufts came back into view, then the trickling sound of water as the rising sun glimmered off the streams around them.