Daughter of Time 1: Reader (5 page)

The other thing that saved me was retreating into the past. Not psychologically, where I retreat into
my
past memories to hide (even if there was some hiding going on). I mean
everyone’s
past, including my own. As I learned later, a Reader’s power grows and matures fastest in puberty, and I was right in the middle of that, my whole body changing. It might even have been something I could have obsessed about—my changing body—if it weren’t for all the other stuff that pushed it far to the side. But at the same time that I was impressing them more and more in their little examination room, other things were happening to me, things they didn’t know about. One of the first I noticed was my growing power to enter the past. I still had future visions, but what obsessed me, what came out clearly, in high-resolution detail, and what I began to be able to
control
, were my visions of what
had
happened. Or, as I like to think of it now, what might
have had
happened. Like I said, past, future – both are fluid.

In the dark and pointless hours in my cell, I began to have these long and grand adventures. Journeys into events of the recent—and sometimes not so recent—past. As I learned to control my path through time, with greater skill and experience, and with greater concentration, I could direct myself back further and further. During the first few years I was able to do this, I explored things that were emotional touchstones for me. My childhood, my parents’ lives, my family, important world events that touched me. It wasn’t until much later that the usefulness of Reading the past to the present and future dawned on me. Embarrassing that I didn’t think of it earlier, but I was only thirteen. And I was really screwed up.

This ability also allowed me to compensate for something that was depressing me—my lack of schooling. Most children would be glad to be free of school, but let me tell you, when they won’t let you learn, and years go by and you realize that there is the entire world of human knowledge denied you, passing you by, you might have a different attitude. I became almost traumatized that my captors had not only made my life this hell but that they had also locked me from all the light of humanity, leaving me ignorant, in the dark, powerless. No books to read or music to listen to or art to see. No new ideas or experiences to grow with. Sometimes I felt like panicking, and I would do math problems in my head or try to remember books I had read.

And that of course is what connected things for me. I realized that in the past, I had access to everything humanity had achieved. So, I went looking for it, spending increasing amounts of time pushing myself through past visions, extending them, improving their clarity. As time went on, I actually became able to sit through visions and learn from them, like a student eaves dropping in the shadows of a lecture. Obvious places to linger were schools and libraries, but really, the entire world was open to me as I came to realize. Did I want to learn about great art? I could study at the Louvre. Learn advanced calculus? I could sit at the feet of Newton (not time well spent, let me tell you). The experiences of explorers as they sailed to the New World—I could be there with them or riding in zero-g above the Earth with astronauts. And as the blackness fell down on top of me in all other aspects of life, the visions continued to bring me sight. Through them, I could still see, see as vividly at times as I ever had with my eyes. I was blind, but in a strange way, I was not.

It wasn’t always
easy
to find these visions of the past. When the visions first came, I did not control when or what, even if they tended to involve things close to me. As my skills grew over the years, and as I consciously honed them, I could dance through libraries of visions, flipping through them like pages in some ethereal book, finding those of more interest, and expanding those pages of the past into a landscape. I said I was unlucky and lucky. In this way, I was lucky – I achieved an education no human being had ever experienced. But I would have traded it all in a second to be back on my farm with my parents again.

I became so obsessed with the past that I ended up blocking out nearly all possible future visions. Amazingly stupid, I know, considering how useful future visions might have been. Even worse, I never sought out the history of this place, these people, what and who they were, why they were acting as they did. How much I could have learned, perhaps to help me cope, even escape this terrible place. I don’t know how to explain my inability to realize these things except to say that I had nearly fallen into a black hole of hopelessness, and through the exploration of the past I had found beauty, hope, and light. It saved me, carried me through the experiments, the surgeries, the inhumanity of the place. I needed this different world too much. I guess that maybe part of me purposefully ignored things closer at hand, however
useful
they might have been. The other things were more useful. They kept me sane in an insane life.

8

I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell" and tore it up. 
—Mark Twain

They were all happy, happy voices in the glass room.

The giant helmet came off, and the sounds of the place washed over me once more—the faster flits of motion of the team working with me, their excitement in their motions, breaths, and vocal tones. It was strange – as time went on, as I became better and better at their silly games. It became easier and easier for me, and boredom set in, even as their excitement grew. At first it was such relief to know I was pleasing them so much, and I looked forward to each new session. How quickly it all changed when I think back on it.

It became clear that this device they placed on my head had something to do with stimulating the world of my visions. Strap me in, turn it on, and I could “see” things created in front of me, like some magic laser-disco ball in front of a sighted person. A small child is in awe of the disco ball. In a few years it might seem interesting for a few minutes. If you saw it several times a week as a young teen, well, its secrets were all gone.

Their secrets faded fast. As I approached my fifteenth birthday, it had been almost two years and six surgeries —a surgery almost every four months—and a lot of time growing into my new abilities. By now the tumor was as big as a squashed softball, and my head had expanded at the back and top so that even the Red Sox hat barely fit with the strap totally open, even though I had torn the stitching to make more room. At least my hair could finally grow back in all the way. I vowed to myself never to cut it again—in the dream place where I had such control over my life.

My whitecoat entourage had grown to a team of at least ten, headed by Dr. Talkative. He loved to tell me how big the tumor was, updating me on its slowing growth, its stabilization within my brain. He was bragging, boasting of his pet project that he had guided, boasting of my achievements with their stupid, limited little manipulations as if
he
had achieved them.

I had learned over time that, whatever it was that they were doing, they didn’t understand much about it. They could set it up, read the output, and know if I was succeeding or not. But they understood nothing beyond that, like people who use a microwave and have no idea what it’s all about inside. They didn’t know what I was seeing, how simple it was all becoming, and how I was realizing that there was a much, much greater world to be perceived by this dramatic new sense I was developing. They made me into this freak, but they didn’t know what they had made.

As I outgrew their disco ball, I was better able to ace those little tests with it. Soon, it became something I could do in the background, while I thought about other things or even explored the past as had become my obsession. That was the case on the day the bad news came.

Just as the team was bubbling over with joy from my latest
bored out of my mind
performance, Dr. Talkative came into the room like a dark cloud. I could sense it in his voice and movements; I could nearly smell the anxiety in his sweat. Everyone else in the room likely figured it out by seeing his face. I bet it looked bad.

“I have some bad news,” he overstated the obvious. He walked over to the computer station and paused a minute. “Fantastic performance today, Ambra.” He sighed. “I think you’ve outgrown us.”

He placed his clipboard down with a clack and stepped back into the middle of the room to address his staff. “And like all children when they grow up, you must move on.”

I heard several audible groans and the shifting sounds of uncomfortable people. One woman spoke up somewhat shrilly. “They can’t come now! She’s just showing us her potential! They won’t care about what she can do, what she could become. They’ll strap her into a navslav ship and she’ll waste away her life like the rest of them!”

While it wasn’t exactly comforting to hear that I was headed for a lifetime of servitude, her outburst opened my eyes, so to speak. Truly startled me for the first time since I had come to this place. To hear them fall from the top of the food chain – it was priceless!
The fear in their voices.
Who were these mysterious
They
that were coming and over which they had no power? After coming to view the whitecoats as my local non-benevolent deities, it was discombobulating, and liberating, to see them shake.

“That’s enough, Katie. It doesn’t matter what we think or want.” He paused a minute and spoke mordantly. “As you know, we have in our enthusiasm…
tampered
with their property. I believe it was a step in the right direction for science, for the potential that lies within the human race. But
They
may be displeased. I don’t have to remind you how serious the punishment can be for infractions.” There was complete silence. I could hear my own heart beat.

“Nevertheless, as your group leader, I will take full responsibility for these actions. I pray you will maintain your appropriate demeanor when our visitors arrive tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” someone called out in disbelief.

“Yes. For some reason, we did not receive their long-range communication. They are entering orbit as we speak. Representatives will arrive in the morning.”

9

Once upon a time, Zhuangzi was dreaming that he was a butterfly dancing and flying about, joyous and free. He had forgotten that he was Zhuangzi. Then he awoke and felt himself solid and sure. But he didn't know anymore if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or, a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuangzi. 
—Zhuang Zhou

In orbit?

What in the world did this mean? Frankly, in my readings and self-education through the accepted annals of human knowledge, the idea of visitors from outer space was an extremely unlikely and fanciful scenario. Like believing in ghosts. Or little blue elves. Sociology argued that human claims of visitation were the modern extensions of being visited by demons or angels, a “projection of our well-documented, overly active imagination contextualized to the modern mythology,” as one lecturer put it. Harvard professor, I think. And science texts, and respected astronomers and astrobiologists had pointed out many clear problems with extraterrestrial visitation. One of the most basic was the fact that the distances between even the closest stars would require centuries of travel. Hyperspace and warp-speed were inventions of science-fiction authors to make their stories possible. How ironic that my future would be intimately tied to hyperspace travel of a very real sort, helping to guide aliens that couldn’t possibly be visiting us. It was a sad case of solid thinking being wrong, even if more admirable, and loony thinking being right. Well, I can tell you—life isn’t fair.