The Seeds of Time (54 page)

Here at the camp perimeter they were halted again by a Nianist soldier. A trickle of light from the canopy glinted off the metal studs of his vest, which seemed, on closer inspection, to be the tips of crystals protruding. From under the snug leather cap, wisps of red hair crawled onto a pale brow. Now Clio could see that the sentry was a woman with a heavy dusting of freckles over her nose and cheeks. The woman squinted at Clio, bringing the freckles closer together, exchanging words with Ashe, odd, lilting words now and then punctuated with a word that might be English. She recognized “Clio Finn,” at least. The sentry waved them through and they emerged into the harsh expanse of light filling the Nianist compound.

Within sight were close to three dozen soldiers, some carrying others, wounded, on stretchers. A tall Nian with black skin and white hair pulled back into a single braid strode up to Ashe, engaging him in a fierce, quick conversation, barely noticing Ashe’s wound. His eyes darted at Clio now and then, taking her in with those forays as though she were some animal curiosity. They all stared—those that could spare a moment—gazing up from their tasks, which seemed both familiar and wrong. Some sat on the ground outside tents, holding short rifles and massaging them or probing them with bare fingers as though searching for something. Clio dropped her gaze. A human in Nian country.

They walked toward the middle of the camp, past a dense cluster of troop tents ranged around a large pavilion, flaps drawn aside to reveal a brightly lit interior. Quiet inside. But figures moving, some bent over tables. Unmistakably, a surgery.

“Stay here,” he told her. He left her and disappeared inside.

Clio allowed her legs to give way beneath her, sitting heavily on the ground. Around her ranged some hundred tall, dome-shaped tents. All were bluish in tint like the one she sat near, and all shone with a rubbery wetness much like a membrane. Even in this large encampment, the jungle songs overran, as though the myriad tents housed Niang monkeys and insects. At that moment Clio would not have been much surprised if they did; her thoughts were that chaotic, the camp so filled with otherness.

In the distance, at what must have been the far edge of the compound, rose a high turquoise wall of a plateau crowned by nests of large-gauge artillery. On the right flank of the encampment, just visible, coursed a river—surely the same river, or a tributary, of the one they had crossed near the great cave.

Ashe emerged after a very long while. He now wore the Nianist military garb of studded vest over combat suit. He urged her on with his wounded arm. From its range of movement, it looked fully healed. A noise she had been ignoring for a few seconds now exploded into a major din as a small aircraft darted directly over a clearing next to the surgery tent. In an instant the craft dropped to the ground, roaring. Two crew were poised in the open hatchway and sprang out, pulling stretchers occupied by the wounded, assisted by others who raced from the surgery. The ship then jumped skyward without helicopter blades or noticeable thrusters, seemingly propelled by sheer noise.

Crewmates rushed the casualties to the med tent, except for one soldier who spasmed, arching his back and jerking. A woman in a white jumpsuit hurried to his side, knelt by him, sliding her hand into his chest up to her wrist. Clio slowed her pace, gaping at this spectacle, forgetting to walk, feeling her own chest constrict at the sight, but Ashe took her arm, firmly pulling her from the scene.

Before long they stood at the base of the great plateau, where Ashe led her to a well-worn path that curved sharply up the side of the central rock formation. At the top, the view swept out before her, away and away to the hazy rim
of the world. A sweet wind flowed across her, cooling her skin and sweat-drenched hair. After the hugging forest and the press of ship’s bulkheads, Clio felt a shock of exposure on this aerie, where, it seemed, Niang eagles should nest, not the fat batteries of artillery, hunkered down in rock. Her step must have faltered, since Ashe now had her elbow firmly cupped in his hand and pulled her to near the edge of the plateau.

She dug her feet in as they neared the edge.

“A starship pilot, and afraid of heights?” he asked, stealing a quick look at her.

Damn right, afraid of heights, never having been higher than the top of the shuttle gantry without being firmly enclosed in something.

“There’s a shelf just down here,” he said, leading her down a small culvert to a ledge, broad enough for reassurance, and covered in a spongy material that looked like it could offer some cushion.

Ashe sat and threw open his satchel, taking out slices of dried meat and fruit.

“You hungry?” he asked.

She sat down, watching him make a sandwich of dried meat and slices of a yellow gourd that might be a vegetable. He handed it to her.

As they ate, two more medical crafts flew in with wounded, piercing the camp with their landing noise, muffling the uproar of the jungle.

In the bronze light of Niang’s sun, Ashe’s skin took on a tawny cast, like an outdoor creature, not the lab-ensconced botanist he had pretended to be. He watched the jungle top as though seeing individual things, his eyes probing and present to the canopy which to her was all of one piece, the turquoise of endless trees, steaming in the hot sun. She shoved aside these gentle thoughts of Ashe; he was the enemy. She thought of the pictures Tandy had shown her, the carnage of rib cage and heart. The breeze chilled.

Ashe had finished his sandwich. While she worked to regain her appetite, he pulled from the satchel a small medallion on a thong. Etched into what might have been
bone, a spreading tree covered the pendant. “My father gave me this,” he said, rubbing his thumb over the polished surface. “I don’t take it with me to your world, since it could raise questions, but I don’t like being without it.” He looked over at Clio, handing her the medallion, his good eyebrow raised.

Clio took it, examined the familiar-looking tree captured within the ring of bone.

“My grandfather remembered his grandfather who remembered his grandfather who knew the true stories of the Days of Change,” Ashe said. “He lived to be one hundred and forty-four, one of the oldest among my people, so when he taught the stories to my father, and my father to me, we remembered truly. I remember truly. I haven’t been home for many years. But my father is old. Soon his Telling will pass to me. If I’d never left, my vocation would be a Teller of the Old Trees. Instead, I’m a fighter.”

Clio rubbed the bone with her thumb, bringing out the etching with the oil of her skin. From long ago came the image of flickering lightning on the plains in earliest spring and seeing in the distance, as she and Petya trudged from the school bus near Medicine Creek, the exposed bones of the mammoth ash tree in Walter Reesley’s back forty. “It’s the ash tree,” she said. “You have ash trees.”

He didn’t acknowledge the comment, but continued his story as though she hadn’t spoken. “During the Days of Change people had to group together in fortified cities. They learned to be self-sufficient within the city walls. Outside were the Nomatics, the gangs, holding on to the remnants of the Days of Metal. After the last of the automobiles, the Nomatics roamed and marauded with horses. Within two generations the Nomatics lost reading. They adopted war as a vocation. They forgot their humanness and where they had come from. Within the cities we forgot nothing. We had books, and what we didn’t have we wrote down from memory, everyone telling what they knew. As the climate changed, it was hard to preserve books and notebooks made from paper, and recordings biotized. That’s how we became Tellers.”

“And how did you become murderers? Tell that story, Ashe.”

He blew out a long breath through his nostrils, an angry, controlled breath. “We will fight and kill to protect ourselves, how not? Did you think your people have a patent on war?”

They were both silent for a time, then. Finally, Ashe resumed his story.

“After the Change was complete, people began the slow climb back to technology. A technology without metal. The Nomatics faded into obscurity, became agrarian, and they remembered nothing except tales of warrior glory.

“We found ourselves changing physically. Slowly, yet within a lifetime, some people saw that their bodies were changing in small ways. So we were becoming more like Niang. But we had our Telling tradition. So we decided not to forget who we had been, what the planet had been. Because after a while the children didn’t know what raspberries were, or potatoes. Or a pine tree. And this grieved the parents who remembered. And then each family vowed to Tell one piece, and many chose the trees because they missed these most of all.”

Clio took the offered canteen, confused by this talk of pine trees and raspberries and Days of Change. She remembered to swallow. Niang water was cool and citrusy.

“After a thousand years we had caught up and surpassed the knowledge of the Days of Metal, far surpassed. Our science grew from chemistry and biology and bioengineering, out of necessity. Nothing else was compatible with Niang flora. But we still Tell of the Old Trees.”

Clio laid the amulet on the moss between them. “Is there so little beauty, then, in your changed world, that you need to remember the … old things this way?” She thought of the omnipresent turquoise, the tubular themes in branch and leaf, the soaking sweet resins.

He looked at her in some surprise. Then looked out over the forest canopy. “No beauty? No, Clio, Niang
is
our standard of beauty. We Tell the old stories to protect the … Niang beauty.”

“As a warning?”

“A warning. I guess you could say that.”

“So Niang used to be like Earth,” Clio said, venturing her best guess.

He took the medallion and placed it around his neck, under his shirt. “No.”

Clio looked at him in confusion as he stood up and gazed off to the horizon where steaming jungle and low clouds broiled under the peaking sun.

“Earth used to be like Earth,” he said. “Now it’s like Niang. That’s where I live, Clio, on that Earth. That future Earth.”

Clio forced herself to breathe. She watched his solid back, wrapped in the studded leather of his true people. Her own body seemed suspended and paralyzed, rapt by the Telling.

He turned to look at her. Said, very gently, “The seeds grew, Clio. The seeds you brought back from the first Niang mission. That you planted on the Amazon coast, that you released into the ocean. They floated and seeded the world, Clio. You succeeded. You brought home the Green.” His eyes filled with the light of his Telling. “The Earth survived.”

She sat frozen, watching his face, trying to comprehend the three words he had just spoken. She looked past him into the living wall of the jungle. The surround of trees held in the moment, keeping it from flying to pieces. “Survived,” she heard herself whisper.

He kneeled down beside her. He looked at her with great tenderness. “Yes. Because of you.”

“Liar,” she said, still holding at bay that great wave of hope that threatened to engulf her. It hovered there, before her, in the air, in Ashe’s fathomless eyes. “Liar.”

Tears built up on her eyelids. She flicked them off with her hand.

“It’s the truth, Clio.”

She looked out past the gun emplacements to the war camp below, and fairly sneered with cynicism. “And so you’ve come back to murder us—to keep us from Niang—or
what?” Did he think she was stupid, to fall for this little tale of hope?

“I’ve come back to steal your fire.” He settled into a seated position in front of her. Clio let him continue, let him rant on. “We’ve come to retrieve the FTL technology, Clio. To prevent Tandy’s people from taking it. Or die trying.”

“Why?” she blurted out, despite her resolve to let him dig himself deeper into his absurd story.

“It empowers Tandy and his people. When the universe splits, his will be the stronger arm of reality. My universe will die. Maybe not right away, but eventually, it will die.” He paused, waiting for her objections, but he encountered a cold stare. He continued: “During this time, right now”—here he spread his hands wide to encompass the plateau, the vista before them—“the universe is splitting into two Cousin Realities, two future ways of dealing with faster-than-light travel. One is peaceful, one is not.”

He noted the expression on her face. “Ever hear of doppelgängers? Parallel universes? Not a new idea, but until recently in my time, not proven. It explains a lot, in physics and theories of space-time. Vandarthanan laid the theoretical groundwork with equations that proved that parallel universes could exist. That is, two parallel universes can exist. Two Cousin Realities. Not often. But once in a great while. In my time we proved it experimentally. To our great chagrin.” With his finger he drew a figure in a bald patch amid the moss, a figure of a forked stick. “Think of it as a tuning fork—you’ve seen a tuning fork?” Clio nodded, the barest movement possible. “Mine is the left-hand tine of the tuning fork, let’s say, and the one we fear is the right-hand tine. One day, the left side will atrophy and die. Cousin Realities compete for the energy of existence. Only one can endure.”

“So you’re not just from the future. You’re from a different universe, and also from the future. That right?” Clio found herself getting angrier and angrier as his story spun out.

“That’s right,” he continued, oblivious. “Right now,
we’re here,” he said, pointing to the handle of the tuning fork, a short way down from the crotch of the fork. “If I can prevent Tandy’s mission from acquiring the FTL circuit, this time of probabilistic uncertainty will resolve itself in a new way, and my reality will then be the stronger Cousin. His will wither. Not soon. But eventually.”

Clio pushed herself to her feet, looking down on him. “Great. In other words, a galactic pissing contest.”

Ashe didn’t stir. A breeze caught Clio’s hair, cooling her head, if not her brain. She turned from Ashe and gazed out to the turquoise enigma of Niang.

“Which universe am I in, then?” she asked. “The good one or the evil one?”

Ashe paused. “You’re in both … or will be, when the split happens.”