The Seeds of Time (65 page)

Only one other woman remained on the women’s side. Mina lolled in the great bath, hair tied in a tufted ponytail on the top of her head. She opened one eye.

“How’s the baby,” Clio asked, in the new tongue.

The woman glanced at her abdomen, where a cup of tea on its saucer perched like a frog on a water lily. “A-OK,” she answered, in the old tongue, Clio’s first tongue.

Clio smiled each time she heard the term. Learning went both ways. In this circle at least, most friends were a part of the Finn Telling Path, or Ancient History 101, as Clio sometimes called it.

The shower coursed over her, peeling off the web of sleep. She scraped the shower droplets from her arms, legs, and breasts, then dove into the bath, sending a shock wave coursing toward Mina.

“Sorry!” Clio said, realizing her mistake.

“For nothing,” Mina said. She snatched the capsized cup from the bath. “It was too bitter, anycase.”

“I’ll make you some different cup,” Clio offered, already drying off and stepping half wet into a loose chemise split high on both sides.

Mina, lost in the unrippled waiting of her ninth month, smiled and waved her soon back.

Clio flung herself on the best-looking cycle from the rack and pushed off into the path for a head start from home circle toward the base.

Her cropped hair fluttered in the warm breeze, drying instantly, as she sped down the hill. To her right, the rising sun lit the frondy forest tops in glittering turquoise and pumped the dew skyward, blurring the far horizon. Beneath the nectarine fragrance of Earth, the July harvest of simoetha added its local musk. Clio waved at the fields near the jungle edge, squinting to find Ashe. A man stood, shading his eyes with his arm, and waved back. Eyes in the back of his head, had that man. Or watching for her descent at seven o’sun, yes, likely watching for her.

The rest of the simoetha harvest would soon be brought in by organicals, but the first phase needed human dexterity, and only from the mature men of the village whose hormonal balance calmed the fruited vines. Worst luck for Ashe to draw fieldwork in July, though he claimed it kept him fit. Clio had drawn December, with most food laid in and only a few adventurous weeds to coax into dormancy.

People said their lots suited them, solar opposites in so much else. Burly and slender, dark and fair, biological and mechanical, the calm and the flood. Sisters said their energies had to arc high to meet, drawing down good sexual power. The men shrugged and said opposites attract. Now and for four joyous years they drew down that power and spent it between them without slacking, whether through body or heart.

Clio pumped hard on the flat road, feeling the stretch and good pull of leg, ankle, and pedal. Past the series of domes marking the edge of growlabs, past the tented center
pavilion and the water reclamation vinery, skirting the village center where market would impede her passage.

Hildy waited for her outside the simulation domes, tapping the timespan at her waist as Clio slid to a halt in front of her.

“Did you stop to bring Timothy his lunch?” Hildy asked. The smile at one side of her mouth revealed how likely she thought that excuse.

Clio grinned. “Let’s get started.”

Hildy was due soon in hospice to preside over a regen on a dancer’s toe. She turned her broad shoulder toward the lab, walking in short quick paces to match Clio’s leggy strides.

In the cockpit of the pilot sim they sat in matched chairs, with a box under Hildy’s feet to brace her up.

“Ease her out,” Hildy said.

In response, Clio found her fingerholds and sank deep, opening the channels to ignition and taxiing. The screen showed the runway speeding beneath.

“And breathe,” Hildy said, smiling now almost as broadly as Clio, smiling as Clio repeated her past ten performances in the pilot’s seat.
Made the connections. Broke through to psychochemical exchange. Connected
.

“Oh God,” Clio said. Every day she thought she might sit here and sink her fingers in inert tissue. Only it would be
she
who was inert. But today, again, contact. “I have it Hildy, I can feel it. I flow with it.” She glanced over at Hildy long enough to veer off the flight path and nose into the ditch.

“Well, you flowed with it for a moment there,” Hildy said. She slid her own finger into the console to reset the sim.

Clio rested her forehead in her hands. “It feels like the old days, Hildy.”

“A few rungs below a starship, this solar plane, eh?”

“Not the point.” Clio raised her eyes to smile out of all bounds at her friend. “It’s a start. It’s a hope.”

“When are you going to tell Timothy?”

“Tonight. If you’re sure I’m connecting, if you’re still sure?”

“Clio. We’ve done all the tests. You’re changing, your body is changing. It will be a long time before you can fly, even so. It might be years.” She always told smoothly out, withholding nothing.

“Even so,” Clio said.

“And likely never a spacecraft, Clio. There are limits.”

Clio sunk her fingers into the warm, tingling membrane of the flight console. She felt a smile burst out in answer to Hildy’s Limits.

“Let’s do it again,” she said. Beneath her fingertips, the plane surged forward to flight speed.

—Excerpt from
Codex Universalis
, ed. 13, 3563

Vandarthanan
, Sri Sarvepalli, described the theoretical mechanics of time travel in a set of complicated equations. Subsequent analysis of these equations by his followers and critics elucidated more of the practical and technical aspects of what has come to be called
Time Diving
. While Time Diving is now commonly used, it is widely recognized that only the most rudimentary understanding of the implications of Vandarthanan’s equations has been achieved, even today. The mathematical elegance of his equations belies their stubborn reluctance to give up their secrets. In his public comments on the development of Time Diving, Vandarthanan expressed his own deep concerns that the dangers of the Time Dive were not fully identified or understood. He became a vocal advocate for strict limits on human exploitation of Time Dive, and was instrumental in promulgating scrupulously conservative procedures for Time Diving; procedures necessary to reduce the risks inherent in time travel. These protocols comprise the longest continuously observed worldwide agreement in human history (see Time Management Conventions, below).

The singularly most dangerous aspect of the Time Dive is the potential for creation of paradox. Though he was
never able to provide empirical proof, Vandarthanan believed that the occurrence of a significant paradox—perhaps, indeed, any paradox—could have cataclysmic consequences. As he said many times in his writings and speeches, “The universe abhors a paradox.” Though Vandarthanan’s equations are still not completely developed or well understood, an analysis of them suggests that an unavoidable time paradox might generate the time-based equivalent of matter-antimatter annihilation, with profoundly destructive local effects.

The Protocols of the
Time Management Conventions of 2014
dictate that
Time Insertions
may only be made at a distance from human presence or activity, reducing the probability of paradox and unintended interference in human proceedings, recent or remote. In addition, in the twenty-first-century Time Dive technology still had not overcome the Time Dive effect of the
Event Ripple
, a local space-time disturbance whose destructive magnitude depends on the “time and distance depth” of the Time Dive. Historical remoteness and physical distance from Earth are both Protocol requirements for Time Diving.

Earth-based Time Diving is prohibited under the Protocols to avoid paradox and interference in the local
Time Stream
. Such a Dive would significantly increase the probability of paradox, such as the Time Diver meeting himself or herself, or changing something—however small—whose multiplicative effect would be significant and inconsistent with the future-time of the Diver. If the Time Dive on Earth is very deep—that is, goes far back in time—any changes, no matter how trivial, become amplified over time in a geometric progression, creating more likelihood of paradox. However, there is less risk for a shallow Time Dive of only a few days, particularly if the Dive destination is remote from human population and activity.

Although Earth-based Time Diving is forbidden by the Protocols, one historical instance occurred in 2019. This now-famous incident, relating to the destruction of the
Space Recon
vehicle
Starhawk
and the two-day near-space
Time Dive of
Lieutenant Clio Finn
, led to the planting of
Niang
seed on Earth.

During the existence of the twenty-first-century Space Reconnaissance program known as Space Recon, Time Diving was used for exploration and biotic mining of Earthlike planets in the galaxy. Before the discovery of
faster-than-light travel technology
, Time Diving allowed humanity to overcome the impossibly vast distances from Earth to star systems outside our own.

Vandarthanan’s equations describe how Dive brings the traveler outside the normal space-time continuum. While the ship is in Dive, it could be said that the galaxy rotates independently “under” (figuratively speaking) the ship and its occupants, such that upon reentering the time stream the Dive ship will have jumped distances unachievable by any other practical means. To return to “now” and home, the Dive mechanism is reversed and travel is directed forward to the approximate place of the Dive Insertion. This moment in time is called the
Future Ceiling
. Upon returning, the Dive ship may then be farther away from the point of Dive Insertion than when it left because of the inherent unpredictability of the movement of the galaxy. The ship then travels in real space the distance to reach home, since the craft is a spaceship as well as a Time Dive device.

Though a Dive ship theoretically travels “forward” in time to return from the past, the mathematics of the process is more akin to a return to a previous state of time, a very different mathematical and practical proposition than traveling forward in time beyond the Future Ceiling.
²

The Time Dive used by Space Recon was always a time shift to the past. In traveling to the future—beyond the Future Ceiling—it is not possible to take physical action of
any kind or to have any physical interaction with people or events beyond the Future Ceiling. Travelers to the future remain observers. It is not true, as is widely thought, that Vandarthanan believed humans would be seen as “ghosts” by people living in the future. Such travelers remain entirely incorporeal, and as such are not visible or perceivable in any way by inhabitants of the future, nor can they affect events, people, or things in the future.

An important corollary to the laws derived from Vandarthanan’s equations is that of the
probabilistic future
. This is the concept that the future can be mathematically described as an array of identifiable
temporal probabilities
whose relative magnitudes depend on what happens now. The future is an ever-changing array of vectors describing possible futures. The farther into the future one travels, the more possible
future vectors
there are and the less likely that any one such vector has a high probability of coming into existence. The idea that the future already exists as a set of mathematically described probabilities—from the perspective of the Time Diver—is an extraordinarily complicated subject in mathematics and difficult to explain in words to a lay readership, adding to the suspicion and mistrust of Vandarthanan’s work among the general public. In addition, the popular and persistent idea of traveling to the future to “find out what happens” is not scientifically possible, since the future—probabilistic and
multi-vectored time
—is inherently indeterminate.