Daughter of Time 1: Reader (28 page)

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Michael came bursting into our room without knocking. Waythrel and I stood unmoving, deep in telepathic communication over our recent progress with the Reader groups, and had to shake ourselves out of the trance. To help us along, the entire base was suddenly plunged into red emergency power lighting as alarms began to sound.

“Dram warships,” he gasped, nearly out of breath. “Five of them surfing off the Orb String.”

“
Five?
” I had seen the damage one of them could do.

“They know we’re here,” he continued. “I don’t know how they discovered, but that doesn’t matter. We were too optimistic. It was bound to happen.”

Waythrel danced around in that impossible Xixian fashion. “Ambra, we have to get you off this moon! Michael, what ships are available?”

“No time! They set this up perfectly and were detected only minutes ago. They came off the Orb Tree at a tremendous velocity, aimed right at us. Already their longer-range weapons have disabled our sensor ships, and we can only track them from Moon systems. The Xix team has taken over, redirected all power to defenses, but it won’t last long.”

I sensed a deep anxiety within Waythrel that was only partially focused on me. “We had no advanced warning, even through our Time Tree relays. This can only mean one thing.”

Michael nodded. “Word came in shortly after the ships appeared. There has been a mass purging of Xix on Dram, and spreading to Dram-controlled worlds.”

“And Xix itself?” I could feel the creature nearly dissolving. Its mental patterns were much simpler now, less complex, primitive emotional-like states dominating the structure.

“No word of any attack. Yet. Maybe, they don’t have the evidence to suspect that much. Maybe, they are just purging Dram in case.”

Waythrel moved quickly. “Michael, there must be a ship we can use to try an escape!”

“You’ll be blown out of the skies in seconds. You know nothing will get by.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Or should we just sit here until they liquefy the base? Is that better?”

He shouted. “I don’t have a plan! We’re helpless!”

My mind raced. I began to feel the first tremors of explosions, likely the initial impacts of Dram weapons on the lunar surface. At that distance, with the generators we had, it would likely be a few minutes before they could effectively target the base. But only a few minutes.

“Michael, assemble the Readers in the meditation chamber.” He stood there quietly, perplexed. I shouted. “Michael! Get all the Readers down there, now!”

I felt a dawning awareness spread across Waythrel’s mental web. “Ambra, no, it is much too dangerous.”

“What is too dangerous? Why do we need the Readers?” His face was completely blank.

I pushed past him, beginning to sprint down the hallway, a blind woman dashing through narrow corridors, feeling with my hands along the walls, feeling with my mind along the Strings. “Waythrel, gather the Xix techs and fire the damn machines up. We’ve only got minutes!”

By the time we had critical numbers, we were starting to take damage. The entire base was rocking with the explosions and impacts.
Five warships!
It was probably enough firepower to destroy an entire metropolis ten times over. They wouldn’t even have to kill us directly—just knock out the life support on this airless and frigid rock. Of course, the Dram would make sure and boil the base away as well.

Waythrel and the Xixian scientists had already powered up the amplifiers or whatever they were that would aid in channeling our space-time manipulations. They performed coolly under pressure, much better than my human brethren.

“Everyone!” I shouted over the din of war and human panic. “Listen to me!”

But it was no use. People were shouting, running around, clutching each other. My voice could not penetrate the cacophony. So I closed my eyes and resorted to more brutal means.

It was a brief burst, but harsh. There were several cries as everyone in the room simultaneously grabbed their skulls, shutting their eyes tightly in pain. Several fell to the floor and slowly stood up again. One did not rise and remained motionless on the floor. They looked at me in dawning understanding. Some looked betrayed.

“I’m sorry!” I screamed, as much to stop my own thoughts of what I had done as to focus their attention. “Listen to me! The Dram will destroy this base in minutes! We can’t beat them in a fight. We can’t stop or repel their weapons.” The room was utterly quiet except for the rumbling from above. I swallowed and pressed on. “We have
one
chance to stop them. When the Orbs are opened, there is a terrible distortion of space-time around them. Unless tightly controlled, there is so much curvature, the Orbs will draw into themselves anything nearby. Even warships.”

I heard Waythrel in my mind.
Ambra, hurry! Time is running out!

“I can open the Orbs, but I can only do it if I’m close to them. And I don’t know if I can control them from this distance. Not without your help! This is the time to use all that we have been practicing for. Right now, I need you to quiet yourselves and harmonize, and reach out with me. Together, maybe we can open the Orb and draw the Dram warships into it!”

“What if you can’t open it from here, even with our help?” a woman called out.

“Then we die as we surely will anyway,” cried Waythrel.

The monk stepped forward, his smile only a weak shadow. “And if you cannot control the Orb?”

I looked at Waythrel and its thoughts echoed my own. “I don’t know. I think it could consume the entire system.”

There was a second or two of buzzing, but a strong earthquake shook the room, and dust rained down on us. Waythrel cried out, “Unless you survive, your star system is already dead! The only risk is delay. Take your positions! Calm yourselves. Find your focus and direct it to Ambra!”

They listened. The Readers crouched and sat. As a group they frantically tried to reach a Zen-like calm. Have you ever tried to reach a Zen-like calm frantically? The ultimate irony: in order to save our lives, we were forced in panic to reach an enlightened state of calmness in which we no longer feared for our lives. It wasn’t working.

Sensing the inability to focus, the old monk called out reminders of his teachings, stepping among the Readers calmly, trying to coax them to relinquish their attachments to themselves. To safety. To life itself. To seek a state of detachment where death does not matter in order that we might save our hides. That wasn’t working, either.

I became desperate as more explosions rocked the base. Once again, survival drove me to actions I never would have imagined in saner moments. I thought back to my invasion of the other Readers’ minds, my mental slap to calm them down. I had stunned them all, possibly damaged the mind of one, in order to get their attention. Was my only option disturbance? If I could cause such damage, couldn’t I also heal? I decided that I would try, even if it meant in the end a form of mind control. I sent my thoughts out over the Readers before me, waves of intricate space-time distortions that interacted with their mental fields. At first, everything was out of phase, clashing. As I adapted and sought to know each personality that I touched, one by one, my calming thoughts began to resonate with them. One by one, I drove out the thoughts of fear and panic, and the Readers were freed of them. They could then focus as they had been trained, inwardly seeking to concentrate and redirect their own force fields towards me.

I felt Waythrel’s thoughts from across the room as it deduced what was happening.
I love you, Ambra Dawn
,
but I fear you. Now you control even the thoughts of others.

I didn’t have the luxury to question the ethics of what I was doing. This was the only way I knew to save our lives. And it was probably not even going to work.

45

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.
—Georg Cantor

I floated midway between the approaching Dram warships and the lunar base.

Like in the dreams of Earth from before, I had no body, no damage suffered from the vacuum of space or the scalding radiation of the sun. I was a disembodied sentient knot of space-time, projected from inside the lunar surface, the product of my own mental structure and efforts and the amplification of hundreds of Readers and Xixian space-time modulators.

I didn’t have time to examine how this had happened or what had truly happened to me. Not only to me—but to the entire Reader chorus that strove and connected with me. This projected, multi-dimensional knot of consciousness, the product of the mind-space-time field that Thel had introduced my inadequate human intelligence to, was something new. My consciousness dominated the matrix. I shaped and held it together. But there were hundreds of threads, thousands even, from the thoughts of the other Readers entwined. Not only entwined, but
interwoven
so that we became something more than simply a chorus in harmony. It was almost like the birth of a unified, newborn synergistic mind greater than our individuality. Formed of the combined strength and power of multiple minds, augmented by the advanced technology of the Xix, but like ice melting, transitioning into a new state beyond all that had been known before.
We
had become something
Else
. It was like waking up, except that the being that awoke had just been born.

Some portion of me was still inside, meditating with the others inside Earth’s Moon. But what it was of me, of all of us, that was outside, I to this day do not know. The Xix do not know. It was me but only a part of me. A “me” projected and concentrated, but that could dissolve leaving no damage to the rest of us sitting quietly in lotus position in the middle of a dust-choked room entombed on Earth’s satellite.

The Dram energy weapons passed through me without effect, and their explosive missiles did not detonate. Nor did they impact the base. Already, I had left sharp warpings of space behind me, between me and the base, so that, as the Dram radiation and solid weaponry followed available paths in space-time, they curved, seemingly repelled by the base itself, and scattered harmlessly around the remaining surface of the Moon. It was an intuitive “shield” I constructed, in my efforts to will their weapons away from the base. It was also draining, but I knew I could keep it up longer than they could.

Their inability to target us only fueled the Dram soldiers to anger, and they unleashed a bombardment the likes of which I had never seen, even in the space battles I had witnessed before in my journey. Five powerful Dram warcraft unloaded on the little lunar base and, like some prismatic spray impacting a wall, exploded in light of a thousand colors casting shadows on the Moon’s surface. Part of my mind rejoiced: they were draining their energy supplies dramatically, and when the gravitational vortex came, they would have that much less with which to resist it. I could maintain this shield long enough to debilitate them. I was not in a hurry. In fact, I felt strangely calm.

Ambra, open the Orb!

I discerned the intricate threads of Waythrel’s consciousness calling from within.

Ambra, now! There isn’t time!

It was hard to feel the same desperation out here. Without the full flood of my body’s limbic soup—its adrenaline, cortisol, hormones, oxygen, sugar—I felt a strange form of detached peace. And what was the hurry? The stupid Dram army was just draining its batteries, anyway.

It’s okay, Waythrel. I’ve blocked them. Let them empty their ammunition.

Ambra, please! It’s not about them, it’s about you! Your body—something is wrong. It is losing temperature. Your heart rate is slowing dangerously. You must return! Open the Orb!

Strange.
My body
. Yes, I could still sense it. Back there, linked weakly by a thread to this new me. I guess I would need my body. If I were to continue my journey, end the Dram war, I would need to survive, would I not? Was this motivating? I wasn’t sure that it was. In this new state of being, all my ideas of what was and wasn’t important took on new forms. Eons seemed to shrink to ages, parsecs seemed to be only short trips. Matter and energy and time mixed and spun and transformed in millions of fashions.

So what if my body died? How imprisoned we fleshly creatures were! So blind to the vastness, the openness, the
possibilities
of the universe. Our vision myopic, tunneled by bone and blood and limited mental horizons. What I had become was something very different. I was not unhappy or harmed in this state. To the contrary, I felt empowered, strangely free. I could explore the universe. Perhaps forever.

Ambra! Please, no! We can feel your thoughts. Please, please don’t leave us. Ambra, I am only a Xix, but…I…we…we love you.