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with the addition of another chemical from the stimulant patch, I had become a subconscious telepath. I was reading Dllenahkh’s mind from a distance in my sleep. How cool is that? “And we’re going to do what?” I asked them after the detailed explanation had been repeated to me two or three times.
“You going to tell me about the kissing thing or not?” He exhaled audibly. “I suppose it was too much to hope that you would forget that. Kissing is not a Sadiri custom. To us it seems … unhygienic. And yet much of Terran romance appears to center around the practice, to the point where potential partners may even be rejected solely on the basis of a lack of proficiency in this area.” “Well, it is rather unhygienic,” I admitted, “but there are variations, you know, ranging from a kiss on the cheek to the full-on, bite-for-blood kiss. There are plenty of Terran cultures that don’t find the
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hand. He gently uncurled my fingers and turned my palm toward him. I opened my mouth to say, “Oh, yeah, that thing Nasiha and Tarik do.” But the words died on my tongue. First he simply touched his fingertips to mine, which was pleasant enough. Then he lightly traced the length of my fingers, moving slowly, a low hum of sensation for the front of my hand, a warm tingle for the back. Finally, he set his palm to mine. “Ohh!” I exclaimed, enlightened and entranced. It felt like warm, golden light—not the muted gold of late afternoon but something more sharply metallic, conducting its own
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During our close communication, I had seen myself through Dllenahkh’s eyes. It had been disconcerting, even alien.
wanted to get things right, and I had no idea how to go about it.
“Does Sadira have a Day of Remembrance?” I asked Dllenahkh. I meant to say “New Sadira,” but he overlooked the slip and answered directly. “Different tribes have had different ways and times for honoring their ancestors and fallen heroes. There is nothing as specific as this, although in time there may be.” I stopped walking and looked up at him with a small frown. “There hasn’t yet been a ceremony for the loss of Sadira? It’s been well over a year.”
“Although,” he continued in a low voice, “to do so would have meant accepting that there could be no returning to Sadira in our lifetime, nor for many generations to come. I suspect we were not ready to admit that.”
“How did it feel when you were recovering from your injuries and I linked to your mind to speed your body’s healing?”
“It felt like your blood was in my veins. It felt like your neural electricity was in my nerves and brain and spine.
Your awareness was tangled up in mine.
You extend your awareness of yourself beyond the boundaries of your physical body. It’s generally a benign psionic influence—case in point, when you took over the parts of my body that were not under my conscious control and helped me heal faster. That’s also how a mindship pilot operates. He or she becomes the ship—no, wait … not quite. The ship becomes part of the pilot.”
Remember, however, this is due to early training and constant practice. The Sadiri brain is still a human brain, only with more of its potential realized.”
“Zhinuvians have a higher concentration of semiconducting material in their skin, which permits them to talk to machines with greater ease than to other sentient minds.
your ships, unlike the Zhinuvian ships, are alive, not crafted.”
have heard of only one instance of a pilot who gave up his ship willingly. That is the story I am about to share with you now.”
“A mindship can travel in space and time. For most interstellar journeys, a pilot plots a shortcut through the unseen dimensions of space-time in order to travel swiftly between distant points in the visible dimensions. It is also possible to plot a course that makes use of a second dimension of time, but it is a rare and still-experimental practice which is only done far from the usual shipping routes as our scientists continue to assess and document the effects. “In short, we had the technology to send a pilot back to a time before the disaster.
“Naraldi, an experienced and well-traveled pilot, was selected for the mission.
Cutting short the debate, he accepted the three different mission briefs, to be acted on according to his own analysis of the situation.
The mission had been a success, and yet not so, for our fate had not changed and no evidence had been discovered.
“You have read one of these reports, from my own handheld. Do you remember it?”
“The amount of complex multivariate calculus in that report was somewhat off-putting. However, the gist of it was that there are already stable parallel time lines in existence.
Naraldi was not able to change our fate, because he had no way of navigating to our past. He was able to reach many other pasts of different time lines and see other presents and futures as well. But his own line he could not touch.”
That aged face, those sorrowful eyes. Creeping horror stilled me as I absorbed this. “How long was he out there?”
What chronometer could have made sense of his journeys? He was seventy years old when he left, barely middle-aged by our reckoning. Now he appears to be at least fifty years older than that.”
When I spoke to him, he told me he had had some pleasant experiences and some less so, but he had never once been bored.
“There was one very interesting thing that he learned which is extremely relevant to our time line. He discovered, well before the fact, how Ain was quarantined.”
“Anyone trying to enter the Ain system will simply find themselves on the opposite side, having passed only empty space between. The planet has been placed in an elegant pocket of folded space-time, a feat which is well beyond the abilities of anyone from this time—anyone that we know, that is.”
“It may be of interest to you that in one of the time lines Naraldi visited, it was the Ntshune and not the Sadiri who became influential in galactic government.”
“You can do something for me in turn. Tell me about the Caretakers.”
we don’t have reports on them; there’s no branch of study dedicated to them. It’s all folktales and oral history.
My tongue felt strangely heavy as I tried to talk of things I had secretly forbidden myself to discuss. “To Cygnians, the Caretakers are the guardians of humanity.
“If all the tales are true, no one’s seen the Caretakers face to face.
It’s a very boring legend when you think about it—just some people following the music of an invisible Pied Piper, disappearing into one cave near Hamelin, Terra, and emerging from another cave near Hamelin, Cygnus Beta.”
“No one thinks they are gods.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Perhaps a little of all three,” I said.
“Remember your ancestors, dream of your descendants, and work hard while you’re living. It’s … nice to think the universe has a purpose—well, more than one, probably, but at least one of them is about helping humans fulfill their potential as a species.”
“The Caretakers did some fairly interesting things when they went about collecting their endangered humans.
However, there are no Caretakers in our lore. Sadira was always where we started and where we ended, no matter how many years and light-years lay between. In a way, the elders of the family are our Caretakers. There is an old saying that no elder can truly die who has a hundred descendants living.
“Dllenahkh, you told me how Ain was quarantined, but you didn’t tell me who did it. Does anyone know?”
was under the impression that most Cygnians give that honor to the Caretakers.”
Not until that moment, when Dllenahkh looked to the sky and acknowledged the world-girdling poisonous cloud that covered Sadira in perpetual night.
Zero hour plus one year ten months six days
“It’s about Kir’tahsg. I’ve been following the case, and it’s not going well.”
“The government’s been dealing with the children, but they haven’t gone after the cartels. They say that’s a galactic matter.”
“You set yourselves up as the incorruptible guardians of the galaxy. You created a system where everyone had to go to you. Now you’re holding on to that power with a—a hollow government and a skeleton fleet. It isn’t right! Someone has to stop pretending!”
They had been given so much sympathy for so long that the sergeant’s rage was disorienting. Were there others who had stopped feeling sorry for the stricken Sadiri and were instead beginning to question their place and purpose?
And yet … who could help Kir’tahsg now if the Sadiri were too busy surviving to arbitrate the lives of others?
Would it amuse or vex her to learn that although he thought she had looked very pretty all dressed up for the concert, he preferred her like this, in her usual unstudied simplicity of body and mind?
t should be obvious by now that I’m not good at dealing
with change.
