Time Past (8 page)

“Who was the pilot?”

He shrugged. “I was in the passenger cabin, didn’t see. But the fittings were humanoid-friendly, so probably a Melot. A Melot met me at Central, anyway, and put me on another transport. This one went from Central to Abelar. I tell you, by this time I was buggered from standing around waiting for Customs inspections and for the ships to leave. You know how they take hours from when the exit permit’s approved to when the jump point actually opens. Not to mention the time getting to the points in flatspace. And then we rendezvous in Abelar flatspace with another ship, half a dozen Melot crew, no markings. I couldn’t see the navigation details, but I reckon it was near where you disappeared.”

That made sense. He’d have to finally go through the same jump point as I did; if he jumped from Central he couldn’t have come to the past because those jumps on the Central network are all set at “present” time. Twelve o’clock in Central is twelve o’clock everywhere else.

“An Serat seems to have a lot of backup,” I said.

“Yeah, but none of it official, you notice? No ConFleet or Confederacy Trader markings on anything. I reckon he’s doing this without Barik and the other Invidi knowing. Anyway, they loaded me into a single-pilot fighter like a bloody droid. Not a word, not so much as a mind-your-step-don’t-forget-the-emergency-exit. And the fighter went through the jump point on autopilot. Not a thing I could do about it.

“The fighter kept going once we left the jump point. I knew it was heading for Earth but I don’t think anyone detected me coming in.”

“Nor me,” I said. “The only reason I can think of is that both your fighter and
Calypso II
contained an Invidi shielding device to avoid detection.” My search of
Calypso II
failed to find one, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

He nodded. “My ship was programmed already—it did nearly forty-eight hours’ burn through the solar system after coming through the jump...”

“That’s a day faster than I was.”

“... hit Earth’s atmosphere and fried, and not a bloody thing I could do about it. I didn’t enjoy that, I can tell you. Sitting there sucking my rations and doing my exercises, waiting for whatever An Serat—or whoever—had decided for me.”

“I know the feeling.”

“The life-pod worked fine and I ended up in the sea. Just off the coast, with a little raft to paddle in. Thoughtful, the Invidi. Bloke in a fishing boat picked me up. He was suspicious at first but I sounded enough like a local to pass. Said I’d got lost and spent the night drifting. Mist as thick as Jupiter. He wasn’t going to make any trouble, the engines on that boat were too damn quiet for plain fishing. No lights or anything. He let me come inshore with him as a family member to get past the harbor checks. He didn’t want anything to do with Customs.

“Then I tried to follow your signal... Good job that transponder is standard equipment now.”

I twisted and felt under my shoulder blade. “That’s what I wanted to say. It must be a different signal. I took the transponder out.”

“Look for yourself.” He passed me the locator, a flat square you could fit in your palm. The smooth syntal molded itself to my hand with heaviness out of proportion to its real weight. Its signal confirmation winked at full strength. I looked at the small thing, solid proof that there was a future and it wasn’t all in my imagination. Then I looked up at Murdoch and smiled—he was even more solid proof.

He half-smiled back, mystified. “Are you sure you got the transponder out?”

I remembered a tiny, bloody splinter on Grace’s finger. “Yes. Unless they put a backup in without telling me.”

“Must be.”

“That would explain why I still couldn’t get past the alarms.” I saw his expression of confusion. “When I tried to go into a shop in the city, something set off an alarm. That’s why I asked Grace to take out the transponder.”

He snorted. “How did you explain it?”

“I said it was a kind of microchip. They put them into dangerous criminals in this country, but I said in my country political prisoners get tagged too.”

“Jeez, what a century.”

“But listen, even after that, I couldn’t get through. I thought it was the Seouras implant, so I just kept away from wired places after that. Maybe it was a backup transponder.”

“So if you want to go through any security barriers, we’ll have to take out the backup too.”

I wriggled my shoulders. “Ouch. I suppose so.” It still might be the Seouras implant which was setting off the alarms, but if so we could do nothing. The implant was a neural connection originally installed in my neck by the Seouras at the time of the Abelar Treaty. I’d agreed to it, so that I could understand what the Seouras were saying and communicate this to the others.

Murdoch stretched, his shoulders making a faint popping sound. “Halley, why did An Serat send me after you?”

“I’m surprised he ‘sent’ you anywhere,” I said.

I couldn’t reconcile the idea of an Invidi and concrete action. Not that Invidi aren’t good at getting people to do things, but they do it by maneuvering people into situations where we do what we want to do, only it ends up being what the Invidi want. Like An Barik exploited my friend Quartermaine’s desire to know more about the Invidi and asked him to retrieve a device from
Calypso.
Like An Barik used my desire to protect the station from the Seouras to keep himself safe while he waited for
Calypso
to arrive. Or like An Serat used my desire to find out how
Calypso
worked to get me here in the past—although this one was guesswork on my part. Even like how the Invidi had used the Bendarl desire for expansion and the militaristic structure of their society to create ConFleet to keep order in the Confederacy.

There seemed no logical reason for An Serat to want me or Murdoch in the past, yet he obviously did. Unless it was something on
Calypso II
that he wanted. Which didn’t make sense either, because the only things of value on
Calypso II
were the engines, which had come from
Calypso
and An Serat in the first place.

“The only reason I could think of for him to send me after you,” Murdoch continued, “was that he’d met me in the past and knew I had to get here. But why didn’t he say that when he first met us on Jocasta?”

“He didn’t want us to know. Because we’d know and maybe prepare against being sent here.” I thought again. “No, it’s already happened, hasn’t it. Unless when we meet him in the past we tell him that he didn’t tell us...”

“Bloody hell. You really understand this?”

I looked around at the tent. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. We need to separate the history of the history files from our personal histories. Our
desadas.
”

He groaned. “No mystic terms, please.”

Desada
was one of the many Invidi words we knew but did not understand. The usual translation was “fate” or “pivotal life-moment.” Quartermaine, my late friend who was also an Invidi expert, had thought it meant an experience that influenced the rest of one’s life. I didn’t agree.

“I’m redefining it. Think how pleased the linguists will be when we get back. I don’t think
desada
is a single experience. It’s the way the Invidi keep track of their own inner timescapes.”

“Experience always runs the same way?”

“Sort of. If they’re always jumping in and out of different places and times, it would be necessary to keep their own timelines.”

Murdoch shook his head. “Hang on. Say I come back in time and start living my life here. I’m forty-four, right? Bill Murdoch in this history won’t be born for another fifty or so years. What happens when that fifty years is reached?

Will there be two of us? Which is the real one?”

“I guess you’re both real.”

“What happens when that child turns forty-four? Will he then travel into the past, and over and over?”

“I don’t think so. You both have your own lives. Your
desada.
”

He opened his mouth, shut it again. Rubbed his hand over his head and blinked tiredly.

“Unless it’s a different universe,” I added. It wasn’t a theory I thought about often, for the simple reason that if it was true, we could do nothing but start over in this century.

“And the Invidi don’t come, you mean?”

I nodded.

He snorted. “Then we’re gonna find out the answer to the question that’s been bugging everyone for a hundred years.”

What would have happened if the Invidi hadn’t come? Or, as far as we’re concerned, what will happen if the Invidi don’t come?

A wave of cold sickness made me shiver, and I drew my legs closer. If the Invidi didn’t come, we’d be stuck here. Stuck in this place where the struggle to survive consumed the lives of those who had nothing, and the knowledge of their own futility diminished the lives of those who had everything.

No wonder they idolized people like Mandela and Alvarez. There was so little hope otherwise.

I shivered again and leaned back against the wall of the tent, feeling it give slightly, cool against my back through the thin shirt. Murdoch watched me, his face unreadable. His presence filled the tent. I could feel his warmth, reaching out across the bed, banishing the shiver. A strange feeling. Almost like the flush of H’digh pheromones... But that was ridiculous. Not here, not now.

“When did you find out it was this year?” said Murdoch. He turned the chair around and sat on it properly, stretching his legs out beside the bed with a grunt. “I didn’t realize until I saw a newspaper on the fishing boat. A newspaper, would you believe it? Sort of brought it all home to me when the ink came off black on my fingers. Anything that messy had to be real.”

“I tracked Earth communications when I was coming into the solar system,” I said, ignoring the strange feeling of warmth. “That’s why I had to come down to the surface and wait for the Invidi to come. I couldn’t maintain life support in
Calypso II
by myself for five months.”

I told him how I’d ended up on Earth, ending with where Grace took me in.

“We can’t get back through that jump point without Invidi help,” I went on, “either to repair
Calypso II
or lend us another ship. And unless we go back through that jump point, we can’t get back to Jocasta in 2122. At least, I assume the point is stable now, since you came through it.”

“Yeah, that’s weird, isn’t it? I’d assumed it took you to wherever the Sleepers in
Calypso
had jumped from.”

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“So what happened? How did we come through the jump point in this year if that point hasn’t been created yet?”

I rubbed my neck where the Seouras implant formed a roughly circular, raised area under the skin. “I don’t know. That same question’s been driving me mad. All I can think of is that the correspondence was somehow shortened when
Calypso
jumped. Or lengthened when we jumped. Another thing I can’t work out is why it takes the Invidi so long to get here.”

He thought about that one for a moment, then scratched his head tiredly. “Come again?”

“Think about it—neither of us came through the Central-Earth jump point, right?”

“The point we did come through is on a different jump network?”

“Exactly. But we’ve always been told that’s impossible. There is no other jump network. So either the Invidi have been putting one over on all of us...”

“Or some of us. The rest of the Four might be in on this.”

“Maybe. Or...” My voice trailed off.

“Or what?”

“Or, I don’t know. Something else. Something to do with the jump being fixed now but not when
Calypso
went through it. My point is that an off-network jump point being opened ought to have brought the Invidi rushing here to investigate immediately, not five months later. Unless,” I said, half to myself, “this was as close as they could calibrate it. After all, their time scale is presumably hundreds of thousands of years, so five months is incredibly accurate.”

Murdoch stared at me. “Hang on. You’re saying
we
brought the Invidi here?”

“Too big a coincidence otherwise. Jump point opens, they pick it up, come to investigate by opening a jump point on their own network between here and Central. Earth is then connected to the other worlds on the network.”

“Whoa.” He leaned back, nearly fell out of the chair, and righted himself. In the blue pale light of dawn his face looked pasty. “Doesn’t that bother you? That we’re responsible for the single most cataclysmic change in recent human history?”

I shrugged. “It did at first. Now I try to see it from An Serat’s point of view.”

“Which is?”

“He knows I build
Calypso II
using
Calypso
’s engines and come back here. He sends you here from 2122 because he knows he met us here in the past and he needs us to be here so his past self knows to send
Calypso.
”

“That’s a circle.”

I nodded. Whichever domino you tip, they’ll all fall eventually.

“Halley, why’d you do it?”

I could see the line of dominoes clattering down. One, two, three, four... “Do what?”

“Take
Calypso II
through the jump.”

I met his eyes. They were honestly puzzled, and a little hurt. I didn’t want to hurt Murdoch.

“I had to know if it would work. If it really was a jump drive in
Calypso.
”

He frowned and spread his hands helplessly. “What now? You’ve found out it is. What if the Invidi in this time help us get home—what are you going to do with the drive then?”

“Make sure everyone has it. That way the Four don’t have their stranglehold over us. We might finally have some equality within the Confederacy.”

He chewed his lip doubtfully. “Dunno how that’s going to help the neutrality vote. Only thirty-nine days to go.”

“Thirty-nine?” So little time. Ten days until the Invidi arrived here. If we couldn’t contact them or they couldn’t help us immediately, we might not get back in time for the vote. Not that we can do much to influence the outcome, but I wanted to be there.

“Getting the jump drive will help the Nine,” I said. “If we win the neutrality vote, that will help the Nine as well because we’ll be showing the Confederacy that they can’t keep everyone as part of their system forever. It’s a long-term investment.”