Daughter of Time 1: Reader (6 page)

It took me a while to fall asleep that night. In the early hours of the morning, I awoke and was washed over deeply with a powerful vision. In the vision, I stood in an enormous chamber carved out of some strange and unearthly material, like some cross between marble and the sand of an anthill. Odd patterns in unusual color mixtures decorated the walls and floors. Huge moss-green pillars that seemed to grow like trees with numerous branches erupted from the ground and climbed toward the dome-like ceiling, supporting it in a hundred places. Rows of these led forward to a throne of some kind, on which sat a monstrous form, humanoid yet not human. I watched a young man led forward, obviously in pain, by similar humanoid creatures, their insect-like forms towering over him. As he was dragged to the throne, which sat raised above the rest of the floor by a set of many steps, I realized in horror that there were human shapes chained to the walls on either side of the throne.

I won’t describe to you what had happened to them. You might could imagine terrible things, but this would be worse. The creature on the throne turned a set of three eyestalks on what might have been a head toward the man. An artificial sound filled the room as it spoke in a hideous tone. The language was English, if awkward, and clearly translated by some kind of machine, produced in a
basso profundo
with extensive lower frequencies that made the bone and artificial material in my skull vibrate.

“Human Reader—you have lost the time. If you and we cooperate, you to be able to rescue your people. If you do not, these deaths here only a mild beginning will seem.”

The young man was exhausted, yet a fire burned deep in his eyes. I watched him clench his jaw. I knew what he would say; I could not believe it. I wanted to grab him and beg him to stop the pain I saw around that throne and that I felt in those metallic, insectoidal words.

“No!” he cried out. “You can do with me as you wish, but the Other will find her way. She will bring an end to you. You cannot hide—she watches even now!”

The words shook me, and I lost the threads of the vision. The room came into focus. I sat on my bed, cradling my knees. Tears came pouring down my face, and I fell asleep crying like a little child.

I awoke to the sound of my door being opened, and heard the rapid footsteps of someone entering the room.

“Ambra, you must dress now. You must come with me
immediately
.”

It was one of the women, an aide on the experimental team. Her voice dripped with fear.

10

I shall now raise an even deeper-reaching question of fundamental significance, which I am not able to answer. In the ordinary theory of relativity, every line that can describe the motion of a material point, i.e., every line consisting only of time-like elements, is necessarily non-closed. An analogous statement cannot be claimed for the theory developed here. Therefore a priori a point motion is conceivable, for which the four-dimensional path of the point would be an almost closed one. In this case one and the same material point could be present in an arbitrarily small space-time region in several seemingly mutually independent exemplars. This runs counter to my physical imagination most vividly. However, I am not able to demonstrate that the theory developed here excludes the occurrence of such paths.
 —Albert Einstein

The room was dank and yellow. Dank because they had raised the humidity to some absurd level so that moisture dripped from anything it could condense on—glass from the windows, metal on the walls, and the dark-green material like none I’d ever seen that made up the bulk of the funky alien spacesuit in front of me. Yellow because the lights in the room were only yellow, emitting few other wavelengths, which I assume was another effort to comfort Squidy as he (she? it??) swam in the sea of whatever liquid was inside the suit—likely water, or why the humidity?

Squidy was definitely an alien, or else some mutant octopus that had grown intelligent and been provided with an earthsuit by the U.S. government. There was something like a head, which was a dark brownish-green, oblong and squishy like an octopus’s head, but at the same time very different. One difference was the random-seeming patchwork of what I had to conclude were eyes of some sort. The long whiskers extending from many parts of the head gave Squidy the look of a cactus that had forgotten to shave for a few days. The arms were also very octopusesque, with no suckers but tens of very thin tendrils at the end, all of which were dexterous. These “fingers” could manipulate objects that floated inside the suit as well, positioned by some unknown mechanism, composed of materials completely, well, alien.

You are likely asking yourself, “
How does she know all this? She’s blind
.” Amazingly, as I saw these things, it did not surprise me at the time. Something about the stress of the situation shoved my brain into survival mode, and in this mode it learned to integrate my powerful new sense into its general scheme of decoding reality. Only later—much later—when I had time aboard the navships to contemplate, did I piece together what had happened in that session and learn to apply it from that point on, to my great empowerment. It was then that I realized that my highly developed abilities to see into the past had a very practical application to the life of the blind.

So bear with me for now and trust me when I tell you, my descriptions of the event are accurate.

Dr. Talkative was there, too. He looked like he had
Salmonella
poisoning. The female aide walked me in and led me to a chair in the middle of the room. This was the scene out of a nightmare or horror movie: a dentist chair that was made out of metal with no cushions or anything to make it comfortable and was, in this case, also dripping wet from all the humidity. It was designed with many restraints for arms, legs, and head. I felt myself sweating in the dampness as she sat me in the chair and clamped the metal restraints over my wrists. My breathing became labored when my ankles were locked in, and I think I actually began to shake when they placed the metal band around my head. As she snapped it in, my neck was jerked backward so that it was like someone was pulling my head back by the hair. But I couldn’t move my head. I couldn’t move anything. They could do anything to me, and I could not even try to stop them.

“I’m sorry, Ambra,” she whispered, her voice shaking with the tones of pity and fear, and I heard her scamper out of the room. The door to the chamber closed with a loud metallic clank.

“Try to relax, Ambra,” began Dr. Talkative. “You are property of the Navigation Conglomerate, and a representative of the Sortax is here to examine you. You will speak when spoken to and obey all his requests. Your life and your future depend on his assessment of you today.”

Then Squidy took over. There wasn’t any doubt that it had been in charge the entire time, of course. The sound that came from it shook me even further, as the artificial voice of a translator, while less heavy in lower frequencies, carried a tone and quality I had heard only hours earlier in my dream. It was the same voice of the insect creatures that had tortured and killed the human beings in their throne room.

“They are that, which they changed?” it croaked and rang out.

I didn’t know how to respond.

“He is asking if you are the one that we have worked on. He means our operations with your tumor, Ambra.”

“Yes, I guess, I am.”

“They are that, which were not authorized.” I didn’t respond, assuming it was a statement and not a question. Dr. Talkative squirmed in his seat. Squidy only floated about, making little jerky movements every few seconds.

“They will serve in navslav the ships and supervised. They with value, exchanged for with the Dram.” A small glowing objected floated into the path of several tendrils inside the suit, and the tentacle holding the device reached out toward me.

Suddenly, my mind exploded, and I screamed in agony.

Truly, I had never known pain before. Not the surgeries, not the beatings or electric shocks, nothing prepared me for the fire that was poured inside me. I don’t know how to explain to you. You don’t have my tumor, my sixth sense. Even with my other senses, I had never known such pain. As a light thousands of times too strong for your eyes flooding all your experience, tied to two red-hot iron knives then driven into your sockets at the same time, my new sense that I had grown into, come to explore and know and integrate into my consciousness became the raw skin over which a new and terrible acid was poured. Every muscle in my body convulsed, and I projectile vomited across the room, coating my visitor and Dr. Talkative in the process.

I could not, of course, process this at the time, but suddenly the pain ended, and the world dissolved, and the next thing I knew the sad woman was bent over me calling my name, wiping my face clean, then removing a needle from my arm. She was nearly as pale as me, and sweat beaded on her forehead.

“Ambra, please, talk to me. Are you okay?”

“Mom…I want my mom…” I’m embarrassed now at how weak I became.

The woman had tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Ambra. She’s not here. Please, you need to wake up,
now
.
They
need to question you further.
They
can’t wait for you to get any better,” she said, a suppressed anger in her tone.

She wiped a cold, damp cloth over my face. I tried to focus, to bring my concentration back from the pit of hell that still burned around the edge of my consciousness. Slowly, roughly, it came. The dank room, the two forms in front of me, one horrible, from a nightmare, the other the man who had engineered a series of surgeries on my brain that had left me deformed, different, and, I now knew, terribly vulnerable.

“Ambra,” started Dr. Talkative as the woman once again walked out of the room. “We are sorry for that…disruption. You were being scanned with a device that is designed to probe your powers of perception. Only it is calibrated for a normal Reader. You are not normal. The signal was too strong,” he said, a tone of shock and pity in his voice. Later, when examined by the doctors of the Resistance, I would learn that I had almost died that day.

“Enough,” clanged out the voice translator. “We must again scan.”

“No…please…” I begged them. I would have done anything at that moment to prevent them from scanning me again. Given them anything. Promised anything, said anything. It would not have mattered what—jump off a cliff to my death? Sure. A thousand times easier than being scanned.

“Ambra, it’s ok. We’ve lowered the signal strength considerably. It will be safe now. You must be conscious for the examination. Please let us know if you are in pain.”

“The pain do not constitute,” it injected.

“She may be valuable to the Dram,” Dr. Talkative noted.

“They may be,” it concluded.

It raised the device toward me again. Instinctively I tensed, and while the experience was painful, it was tolerable. If it had not been for the first injury, this scan may have been only uncomfortable, and not painful. Sunlight on a burn hurts,
it burns
, though it does not burn healthy skin. But even as it hurt, it was interesting to some abstract part of my mind. This was the advanced version of the disco ball. Disco-ball 2.0.
The
patterns!
The structure and substructure—it was like nothing I had experienced from these artificial devices. When it ended, after images of dancing shapes in multiple dimensions filled my mind, and stayed with me for days.

“Not authorized. They are for the navships,” it sounded out as the visions faded.

“No! She is more than that! You can’t fry her mind like that and then expect to get a meaningful scan!”

The creature turned its earthsuit-encased form toward Dr. Talkative, who shrank like a shadow when the sun rises. “Not authorized,” it spit out as it turned around and lumbered awkwardly toward a door at the other end of the room.

As it left me and the doctor alone, I felt a kind of relief. A relief even in the presence of a man who had made me into the freak I was. Relief because, however traumatized we both were, whatever he had done to me and whatever had been done to him over the years, we were both human. Until you are in the presence of the alien, the truly alien and not simply strange, you can never know the deep meaning of the presence of another human being. Even your tormenter.

I sat there, wet and stinking in my stained clothes, still strapped into the metal chair and unable to move. My entire body hurt.

He looked at me and closed his eyes. His hand reached out and pressed a button on a controller hanging from a string around his neck. Several seconds passed, and then the door behind me opened, and I heard the sound of footsteps.

“You’ll leave tonight with the other children.”

11