Daughter of Time 1: Reader (7 page)

Time is no specific character of being. In relativity theory the temporal relation is like far and near in space. I do not believe in the objectivity of time. The concept of Now never occurs in science itself, and science is supposed to be concerned with the objective. 
—Kurt Gödel

I’m sure it must be frightening and exciting for kids to leave home for camp, being away from their parents who have always cared for them, living with many strangers, new rules, new dangers and opportunities. Or going off to college, really stepping out for the first time as an adult, even if you have a safety net most of the time to fall back on.
Adventure!

To hell with adventure. I was scared. Terrified, actually. Just a few years before I had lost a beautiful life —a nice home with parents I loved and who loved and cared for me. I eavesdropped on the past and saw them murdered. I was deformed and tortured by the disciples of the organization that had destroyed my family. Now this terrible place seemed like a haven, a refuge compared to the infinite dark and alien that awaited above. Soon these creatures would take me and some untold number of kids with them like trained animals, take us away from our home planet and away from any sense of security or the familiar.

I didn’t know how I would make it. In the coming year I would see many an Earth child
not
make it, grow physically or mentally sick, wasting away or exploding in madness. And the sick were removed efficiently.

For the time being, I sat in my room, wearing the long and featureless robe I had been instructed to put on, my hands in my lap, cold, curled tightly into one another. I had no belongings—no books to read (even if I could read them anymore), no music, no mementos of family, no toys, no evidence of a life of any kind. Only my Red Sox hat, perched on my big head, and I didn’t know if it would survive what was coming. I looked out unseeing over my bare room as the minutes dripped slowly by, one unit of time after the other. Waiting.

The door opened suddenly and I jumped. It was Dr. Talkative, which was unusual, as he had never visited my room. He was alone, which was also unusual, since his staff and team nearly always followed him or lurked nearby. The door closed with a click, and I heard the sound of a metal chair being dragged across the stone floor and placed in front of me. With a sigh and disturbance in the air, Dr. Talkative sat down.

“Ambra, we don’t have much time.
They
will call soon for the children, and we must deliver you to the docking chamber.” His clothes rustled as he shifted his weight, a short silence ensuing as I waited for him to say whatever he was there to say.

“Ambra, it is unfortunate what happened during your examination. Years of work destroyed because that clumsy Sortax representative would not listen to me. I
know
you are capable of so much more.”

Tears started flowing down my cheeks. After everything, after all they had done to me, even after the sense of strength and rebellion the last few years that I had found as I mastered their system, it all evaporated. I crumbled into a small ball and could feel only the desperate guilt of a wayward child.

“I’m sorry!” I sobbed uncontrollably. “I really tried.” Sobs shook my shoulders, and my breath came in gasps.

Then the strangest thing happened. He rose and sat next to me and placed his arm around my shoulders.

“Ambra, listen to me,” he said, and I slowly stifled my sobs. “Humanity is in a terrible place. There is so much you don’t know. Cattle, Ambra. We are nothing more than bipedal cattle to these aliens that rule space, that rule us to the ignorance of most of our kind. I’m sorry for what I have done to you. Years ago, before
They
took me, I would have been ashamed of it. Perhaps I am inside, still. But I became a slave. To succeed within the system I found myself in—that was all that mattered.
Don’t you make this mistake
. Please, Ambra, because I am going to tell you something only I know, something that is important, I believe, for the human race. Something I have buried inside me, denied, rationalized away for years.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing was sane.

“Please, just listen and remember. You can’t process it all now, but you will later.” He paused and then spoke in a whisper, his sentences strangely inflected. It was like hearing scripture.

“Many years ago, when I first came to this place, still working as a staff member with the young children being brought into the facility, a young boy, not much older than you are now, was preparing to ship out, just as you are tonight. I had given him his last series of shots like you got earlier, and was about to send him off, when he spoke to me. He was a very gifted child, second only to you, Ambra, in what he could do with the space-time matrices. He stared at me with his deep-brown eyes —I’ll never forget them or the words that came out of his mouth.

‘Doctor, a woman will come, a young girl. She is the Sunrise, she will see with Truth into the darkest night. She is our hope. She will be the savior of this world in its time of need. You will know her by her sign, and you will understand after you have wronged her. Before the end, you must repeat this to her: Daughter of Time, you must wake, and not fear to gaze forward and walk the path set before you. We are waiting.’
”

He paused and cleared his throat, his voice cracking. “These were his last words before I shipped him off to a life of slavery. I paid them no heed, thought them mad ravings, and pushed them out of my mind. When you came, and my ambition blinded me to everything except your terrible gift, I did not hear his voice, or
would
not hear it. Even as they returned this last year to haunt my dreams.” He paused a moment in silence. “Now, I can’t stop hearing them.”

He cupped my head in his hands: I assume he was also staring into my eyes that could not return the gaze. “I want to say those words again:
Daughter of Time, you must wake, and not fear to gaze forward and walk the path set before you.
Ambra, he meant
you
. He was a powerful Reader, and he forecast your coming. He
saw
you in the fields of Time. Listen to him. He was speaking of you, that you have a part to play for all of us in a possible future. I can’t undo what I have done, but I can try to play my part rightly for the first time. Don’t be afraid, Ambra.
Survive
. You are important beyond the dreams of men.”

He stopped and exhaled, and then stood up and walked to the door. “My actions have doomed me, Ambra. They will make an example of my tampering. My last hours, my last minutes, I have spent giving this message to you.” The sounds of scurrying feet and raised voices grew from the hallway, and I heard intermixed with it the chilling echoes of the voice translators. It was beginning.
They
were coming for us.

“You’ve never even been given the courtesy to know my name—I who have made you what you are. I’m sorry we have been so inhuman. My name is Frank, Ambra. Frank Fields. Forgive what I have done and remember his words.”

The door opened and then closed quickly, the air pressure blowing against my face, the swelling sounds outside spiking in intensity and then dropping to a muffled drone.

I felt I was going mad.

12

A journey of a thousand miles started with a first step. 
—Lao Tzu

When you first begin to
see
as a Reader, you have no experience, nothing to connect the new sensations to, and your brain works the new information into all its preexisting patterns— images, ideas, emotions. Dreams play things out as your brain tries to process it all. Then, it begins to leak into your days. Visions that are the product of this confusion. That’s as far as most have ever gotten in human history – seers, prophets, madmen. A new sense organ in a minority of the population, hardly developed. Granting visions, often loss of sanity.

An irony is that in all other things, we humans are the idiots of the galaxy, the least evolved intelligence, life-forms considered backward, primitive, and enabled in their technology only by the aid of more advanced life.

In this galaxy where we have so little to offer, our only value is in prescience, this poorly developed sense organ, that rivals, and often exceeds, that found in species far more developed in every other way. An accident of evolution that made us the idiot-savants of space-time.

They
harvested us through human farmers, picked those with real potential, took some of us to God knows where across the galaxy for breeding programs, cloning attempts, and, of course, for the navships. Scattered about star systems and nebulae, entombed in oppressive and harsh prisons, humans serve the space-faring needs of many creatures that are otherwise disrespectful, even contemptuous, of our very existence and presence among them. We are a necessary evil.

With me, the humans they empowered got carried away, and before they realized, my captors had created a monster.
Me
. A monster for all involved, human and
other
. Because, while I am certainly monstrous to my fellow earthlings, my gift is a terrible threat to the galactic hegemony of the Dram – of them, you will hear much more soon. In me, the organ is beyond developed. It has become my dominant sense, unfathomable even to the most powerful Readers of any species. I no longer can see the light of day, but I can see the energy of tomorrow and yesterday. Even though I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, I can say that it isn’t much different in spirit from what I saw with eyes: beauty, horror, and everywhere,
existence
.

As the ship raced through the Earth’s atmosphere, taking me for the first time beyond my home planet, I was still, as far as my potential, very much asleep. A sleep that was, as I tried to explain, more emotional than anything else. I wasn’t ready to accept what I was becoming or to grasp the power my unique insight offered to me. I had to adapt slowly. But the time was coming, and soon the first real steps would be taken. Frank Field’s last words lodged in my mind, buried like lily bulbs waiting for spring.

I suppose a trip into space should be described with lots of vivid images of breaking through the atmosphere, seeing the first blackness and stars, and the sunrise over the edge of the Earth. For me and the fifty or so children onboard, the only thing to describe was the tiny space we were crammed into, turbulence, and the feeling that we were going to asphyxiate.

From the facility on Earth, we were marched in line down a long corridor into a large hangar that opened up to the night sky. The chamber was very large, football field-sized, and in the middle was a spaceship. Now that I know more about these things, it was a surface transport, designed to ferry cargo planet-side from a starship. But at that moment, it was the first time I had seen anything like it, and it was overwhelming. As big as a tanker, shaped like a cross between a flying saucer and the space shuttle, it was ringed with earthsuited Sortax. By the time the chamber was entered, there were no more humans around us. We were alone with monsters from space who were putting us into their ship to take us away.

We all walked quietly in our thin robes, cold and afraid. Several kids could be heard sobbing, and one or two broke down and refused to enter. The response from the Sortax was rapid and harsh. They would extend a dark rod towards the child who would then scream in pain and collapse. The Sortax would command the child to move forward in line, and, after that pain, each did.

Inside, it became clear how alien we actually were. The ship was designed, of course, for its crew, these sea-dwelling Sortax with their many arms and liquid-filled suits. The ship inside was designed with liquid filling nearly all the chambers, and I marvel now at the compensation the Sortax must have used to offset all that extra weight. There were “airlocks” of a kind for the natives (
Them
), that we bypassed without engaging. A short tunnel led to our holding pen, which, once all the children had entered, was sealed off from the rest of the ship.

Sealed off from the rest of the ship.
That essentially describes all the interactions of humans with any of the diverse alien species in the galaxy, as compatible environments rarely existed. Some needed liquid medium like the Sortax, others required some kind of gaseous environment. Often these gases were toxic or otherwise incompatible with our survival. One ironic exception turned out to be the Dram, the Romans themselves. who ruled over all the other species and who required a very similar oxygen and nitrogen content to that on Earth, even if their Earthlike planet was on the other side of the Milky Way. The other were the Xix, who needed only a small modification to an Earthlike atmosphere, which they achieved through a device worn around their necks in our presence, if you could describe the Xix as having necks.