The Seeds of Time (64 page)

The lander hummed as Clio braced herself with the handholds, then swung her legs through the main access hatch. All this way. She had come all this way, to the depths of the solar system, to the depths of time, to recover herself, her family.
Petya stays with me, from now on he stays with me. He’s coming along or I don’t fly, is that clear?
And now she had lost him too.

She slumped into the pilot’s seat. Stared at the panels.

From behind her, Ashe placed his hand on her shoulder. “His choice, Clio.”

She pawed her eyes clear. “His choice,” she repeated, “Goddamn it all to hell.”

“His happiness, Clio.”

She swiveled around to face him. “Think I don’t know that? Think it helps?”

Ashe turned to Hocking, grabbing him and pushing him into the copilot’s seat. “Tell Singh that my ship is coming alongside. We have no reason to fire on
Galactique
. They’re coming to take Clio and me on board. But if Singh fires on my ship, I’ll kill you.” He opened a channel.

Hocking paused, swallowing. Then he spoke: “This is Captain Hocking. Do not fire on the Nian ship coming in. They intend to take Timothy Ashe and Clio Finn on board.
Galactique
is in no danger.”

No response to this.

“Do you hear me, Commander Singh? Do not fire.”

Then, over the comm: “There is no Nian ship, Captain.”

“It’ll be here,” Ashe growled.

They waited. Clio punched up visual on
Sun Spot
’s boards and searched the screens. Nothing. And then the screen jumped back a little, away from her, in a visual distortion as though she were looking at the screen through a camera lens. Clio stared at this scene for a moment, then slowly turned her chair to check out the rest of the cabin, all the while thinking,
knowing:
The universe is elastic, and you’re seeing it stretch, sister. Not wanting to look, but looking anyway, she saw
Sun Spot
’s interior gone dim, and then looking at Ashe she saw that he was drained of color, his face and clothes a black-and-white image in the wrong universe. Looking down on her Biotime flight suit, she saw it was bright, even luminous, green.

It had started.

Ashe, apparently oblivious, strode to the bulkhead stowage bins and pulled out a spacesuit. “Put this on,” he said to Hocking. “When my ship undocks from the lander, you may lose cabin pressure.”

Until this moment Clio had shoved from her mind the real terror of what lay ahead: the splitting in two of all things and her fate. It hit her now, that terror. She had faced death before, time and again; and once, almost chose death, asking, Is life always the best thing? Death was no stranger,
had held no power over her. Until now. Looking at Timothy Ashe, her Teller of Trees, her warrior, her true lover … death held power. It mattered.

Her futures were full of death. The universe would split. In each universe, she was quarry-bound. In one, her seeds would not sprout, Tandy would retrieve the FTL technology, Ashe would escape without achieving his goal, and she—she would remain in the lander with Hocking. In the other universe, the seeds would eventually bear fruit, and meanwhile Ashe would steal the FTL circuit from Tandy, and Clio’s fate, no different than her twin. She would remain on the lander. Again, quarry-bound. The Cousin Realities might exchange dominant/subservient roles. But Clio’s role was ever the same. Quarry meat.

Unless … unless …

Clio turned back to the screens. They were still oddly distant, but suddenly she could see a small blip, dead center, materializing as though it had come from behind a curtain. “The ship!” Clio said.
Your ship. It’s coming for you
. Her heart felt like a hot stone.

As Hocking struggled into the suit, Singh’s voice came back: “We have them on screen, Captain. We will hold fire as long as they do the same.”

A transmission came in from the pod, in Ashe’s language. He leaned in to the mike to respond, speaking rapidly … his
lips
moving rapidly. Clio heard nothing. His voice had become invisible.

Clio grasped Ashe’s hand, still solid, and warm, and they waited, silently, as the pod ship moved in, slowly growing to fill the screen.

Ashe looked at Clio. His eyes flicked over her, as his brows lowered.

“Yes,” Clio said. “I know, Timothy. It’s time.” His face, flickering now between color and sepia tones, filled with anguish, telling her that he must have seen in that instant all that she had seen, and what it meant.

Then, through the viewport, Clio saw the tapered and translucent pod nudging up to
Sun Spot
like a whale investigating
a diving bell. The sounds of grappling began outside the lander emergency hatchway.

She heard Ashe say, “Clio. I don’t think …” and then his words were ghosts, but his body blocked the way to the hatch, and he was shaking his head. She knew what he meant to say.

“Don’t tell me I’m not coming, Timothy! One way or another, I’m coming. Don’t you see? It’s death for me either way, death as the world splits, death in a quarry. I want to choose. Now open the damn hatch.”

Ashe waited long moments looking at her, then slowly took the brown package from Clio’s hands.
It goes with him
, she thought. He threw the hatchway bolts, yanking back the door, and the sweet, fecund air of Niang filled Clio’s nostrils. Ashe gave her a boost up and through the hatch, scrambling after her. And they were in a translucent airlock, a narrow sac through which they crawled no more than five meters to the pod’s hatchway entrance. The biotic door split down the middle and parted.

They entered the ship. Ashe held her firmly around the waist with one arm and began to run for the bridge, yelling something in his language, the words, whatever they were, loud and real. “Dive,” he said to Clio, “we have to Dive. Now.”

A crew member emerged from somewhere, pointing at Clio and yelling back. As they argued, the corridor, the crew member, and Ashe faded to shades of grey. Reaching for Ashe, Clio’s hand went entirely through him. At that moment a high-pitched noise sliced into the corridor, like the sound of deep ice cracking on a vast, frozen lake, a zinging needle of noise that pierced Clio’s head, drowning out her shouts of, “No, no, not yet.…” The noise screamed to fill the ship, driving Clio to her knees in terror.

And then Ashe was beside her, trying to embrace her, but it was like mist surrounding a statue. He could not hold her. She heard herself saying, “Goodbye. Goodbye. I love you … remember me …” but her words froze and broke in front of her.

From deep in the glacial ice, cracking apart forever, she
heard Ashe’s voice escape in an echoing funnel of sound: “Say yes, Clio, say yes, say you’re coming with me … say it!”

The ship was disintegrating before her eyes. The stars poked through the tattered fabric of the bulkheads, and Clio cried out, “I’m coming with you! I belong with you!” And as the screams of the parting worlds drowned out her words, she knelt there whispering to herself, to the universe, “Yes … yes … yes.”

Ashe was gone. She crawled along the floor of the ship, as a cold, heavy fog built up around her, blotting out vision, anesthetizing her muscles. She struggled to keep moving. Everyone was gone, replaced by this grey miasma that sucked up all sight, all sound, as the cold cleaving of space-time reached to take her down to some awful sleep.

And then she saw someone. Emerging out of the fog, a woman appeared, crouching as Clio was, not three meters away. They looked at each other. The woman had short white hair, and dark skin, and wore a light grey flight suit. She appeared as a photo negative.

And then Clio knew. Recognized the curly hair, the eyes, the eyes that recognized
her
. This was Clio Finn. From the Cousin Reality just at this moment created. A breeze stirred the other Clio’s hair. Clio opened her mouth to say,
Why did you come here, you were supposed to stay on the lander …
but her mouth was blocked with ice. She heard instead, saw instead, the other Clio’s mouth move, saying,
No quarry. Not ever again
. Then a thin smile, wobbly and brave. Trying to smile.

Now Clio felt the mist hitting her cheek, as a cold breeze blew toward the right, tearing the fog into streamers. With an ugly moan, it built to a roaring wind, forcing both of them sideways, as the Clio image reached out for her with a wavering arm, with a face now strained with fear.
We are dying
, she said, not in words that Clio could hear but in words that she
knew
, knew without doubt. Clio reached out her own arm, but the gale took her, forcing her sideways, and she skidded on all fours until she hit the corridor edge, where the wind flattened her against the bulkhead. The grey
fog was funneling down and soundlessly disappearing next to her. She could just make out a hole the size of a quarter through which the air in the ship was barreling in a frenzied rush.

She saw her double pulled to the bulkhead, where the hole was churning everything away, saw her brace her arms against the bulkhead, fighting the pull, saw her turn her head to look at Clio for a brief moment, her eyes two black vortices. Clio reached out her arms, struggling against the smash of wind, reached for this fading image of her own self, but then the shadow image simply lifted her hands lightly from the bulkhead and, in a long, slow surrender, closed her eyes. At the same instant she faded to match the insubstantial fog, and collapsed into a thread of smoke, vanishing through the hole. The thinning mist followed her, dissipating as the last smoky tendrils sped through. Then the hole squeezed shut in an instant.

Clio’s eyes watered fiercely from the cold wind. She rubbed at her face with brittle fingers, then stopped when the absolute silence was broken by a shuffling sound. She turned.

Several meters away, a man was staggering to his feet, facing away from her.

“Timothy!” Clio whispered.

He turned and saw her. He was dressed in Biotime green. As she was. He began walking toward her, all the while his form never wavering, and he kneeled down, surrounding her in a massive embrace, while she held him too, solid as worldly flesh.

When they parted for a moment, Captain Hickory stood before them.

“Where are we?” Ashe asked.

“Home,” she answered. “We’re home.”

Clio reached to touch Ashe’s face, at the point where his scar cleaved his eyebrow in two. Her finger touched and rested firmly on his skin.

“Timothy,” she said, “I saw her … I saw
me
. We both tried to reach you. We were on the pod, and there were stars
and ice and fog. And only one of us was going to go home, with you, only one of us survive.”

He held her face between his hands. “Clio, Clio …”

“She died, Timothy. She’s gone.”

He brought her back into his arms. “I’m sorry, Clio. I tried to find you, I fought for you. I couldn’t find you.”

Clio looked beyond his shoulder at a certain point on the ship’s bulkhead, where there was a small dark spot, like a bruise. “It’s OK, Timothy,” she said softly. “She wouldn’t go to the quarry. Not ever again.”

They helped each other to stand. In the dim corridor, the lights surged with a new brightness as the pod ship stabilized. Underneath the smooth, chitinous white of the ship’s bulkheads, a pale turquoise light cast its glow.

A bronze light fell across the pillows, inching its way up to Clio’s face, which was passive in sleep until struck by the warm cane of sun. Her eyelids rippled, then opened.

Her arm flopped down to locate Ashe, found instead the main shaft of light from the eastern windows. She sat up and stared at the timepass. Seven o’sun, and late to be lying in, despite the excuse of last night’s midsummer festival with its deep night-sky painting, still floating on her retinas in pink, chartreuse, gold, and white.

Ashe was in the field long since, and Hildy would be expecting her. Clio threw the covers off and stretched to the low ceiling, allowing the arm of sun to press on her buttocks and the small of her back for a moment. Then she grabbed a robe and rushed to the bathhouse.