Eternity's Echo

by H. C. Southwark

  Lifting her hand, Ellie hurled the shard down with all her strength, the stone pinging against bedrock and skipping back up to strike her shins like a bullet, falling to her feet.

  “Damn you!” she shouted at Niles. “The world’s ending, but you’re so calm—go to Hell!”

  She nearly threw her pocket-watch at him, but her yelling had the effect of making Niles flinch, and that alone arrested her movement. A brief moment of sanity for her to recognize that tossing away her reaper’s tool was a bad idea, if she needed to escape.

  Glancing at Jude, she saw that he was almost frightened—and realized why. He was frightened of her. Or—frightened for her. What? she wanted to demand, What?

  “Hey,” said John, and Ellie’s attention whirled to him, but he was not speaking to her. He nodded to Jude. “My name’s John Quinton, born 1962, died 1981. You?”

  Jude introduced himself, as always, as a student from Boulder. He sounded a little breathless, kept staring at Ellie warily, and glancing at Niles, who remained quiet.

  “You see this?” John indicated his squinting eye. “Made it m’self. .22 round through the head. Took me hours to die.” When Jude digested this, John said, “Want to know why?”

  When Jude said nothing, just nodded, John continued:

  “So I had this brother, see, was a junkie. And I decide to help him. First, I don’t tell our parents. Then, I hide his stash in my room. And I’m saying Hey, come on now, we can’t keep this up, you gotta clean up, yeah? One night my Ma finds the stash, goes nuts. She thinks it’s mine. I take the beat, but my brother, he keeps taking, yeah?

  “Time passes. I’m out of my folks’ good graces. And I hear my brother, he got in bad with some bad people, he has a couple debts. So I hatch this plan. Get life insurance. Bullet. My brother gets paid, sees death, decides that it isn’t for him, cleans up, goes to school. He’s real smart, my brother. He’s going places I won’t. So I does the deed.

  “But you wanna know what happened? Nothing. That’s what. My brother spends the money on more junk. He drops outta school. He hangs out with his buddies and splurges on hookers and shit. Then when the dough runs out he follows my example. Except he doesn’t join me in the reaper squads. He’s in Hell.

  “So,” said John, “I made a vow. I’m not gonna make the same mistake again. When you see people doing bad to themselves, you don’t help them. You stop them. And if they won’t stop, then you still don’t help them.” He blinked, and the squinty eye swapped. “People make choices but you don’t gotta support them. Sometimes you gotta tell them it’s wrong and you step away. That’s love, see. If love were easy, everybody do it.”

  For a long moment, Jude looked at John—or, Ellie thought, looked away from her, was using John as a substitute because he wanted to think without Ellie in the picture of his vision. But then he nodded. Jude said, “Thank you, I understand.”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Ellie, but Jude was already stepping back. She knew what he would say. She repeated: “No. Don’t you dare. Bargain’s a bargain, Jude.”

  “We tried,” Jude responded. “That’s what we wanted, remember? If the world could be saved, we would be able to save it, but if it can’t, then we won’t. It’s like Cookie said. We’re banging against a wall, here. We need to know when to stop.”

  Ellie was about to tear into him, to yell about how much effort she had put into dragging him around space and time, how the planet was more than just something you ‘tried’ to save—she would have yelled anything—would shout that her family was finally happy—

  But the world went dark.

  Like a light switch had been thrown. One moment, the world was blinding red under the falling, approaching sun—the next everything was black like the insides of eyelids.

  Ellie blinked. Just for a second, she thought that she had gone blind. But then as her eyes began to adjust, she understood that there was still light—faint, yet there.

  Starlight. Gazing up, she saw above was powdered with little lights, like glitter speckled across the dome. And for the first time, since she had been very small, she noticed that there was a splash, a scar of light across the sky. The Milky Way. All her life, except perhaps once when she was very small, the galaxy had been drowned by streetlights.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  Niles answered: “Someone reaped the sun.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Shard Hypothesis.

  “No,” Ellie whispered.

  “Show’s over,” said John. “Time to go home.”

  Ellie hardly heard him or the others responding. She stared up, eyes tracking toward the east, waiting for the sky to lighten once again in a sunrise—but there was no such thing. The sun had been in the west. It did not reappear, like a lightbulb burned out.

  Instead there were the stars. They stood in complete silence, frozen in place regardless of whether time was moving or not. A million tiny eyes looking down at her.

  The Milky Way was a jumble. It did not look like milk—instead, it was a powdery band of light and dark, with blackened dots illuminated by the white of stars behind. Like snow and dirt tossed into the air. Or—like a scab. Like the galaxy was a scar, or even an open wound, across the sky, a source of lifeblood, the seam of a womb.

  How beautiful, came the thought from some part of her mind, still aware.

  I’m glad I got to see this before the end.

  Ellie blinked, and there was something in the corner of her eyes, not tears—some kind of irritant, that stung and burned, like chopping onions. But her eyes felt dry.

  She said, “They don’t look like they’re falling.”

  The two young men were arguing, and only Niles said, “Who doesn’t, Ellie?”

  “The stars,” she forced herself to blink again, though her eyes felt like sandpaper. Heaving in a breath, she tried to center herself, the world feeling off-kilter, the loss of the sun like the loss of a central point, like the end of gravity. Would reapers even reap gravity?

  Finding some solid place to rest her consciousness was hard—her mind was a whirl of tangled possibilities, but as she peeled through the layers what emerged was her mother’s face. Some old memory. Perhaps as dim as a dream—her mother, smiling down at her. Ellie must have been very small. Or else this was her imagination.

  Where were they, now? Her mother, father, Robbie? Were their hearts weighed?

  Her grip tightened over her pocket-watch. She said, “There is still a way.”

  A scoff from John. Jude’s mouth opened, but he seemed unable to think of what to say. Niles alone asked, voice empty of everything but inquiry, “What do you mean, Ellie?”

  “To re-start time,” said Ellie, and she looked over the three of them staring at her, in her mind substituting Niles and John for Cookie and Shawn. Cookie had asked: Why is this so important? She had answerered, Because if that reaper in the past saw us, then...

  “We have to change the past,” said Ellie, finishing the thought.

  Three immediate reactions: John, throwing up his hands, “She’s completely lost it!” And Niles trying to keep a calm face, yet worry showing through the cracks—but Jude, who had heard this argument before, seen Ellie make it, turning curious.

  “Just wait,” he said, over John’s griping. “She said this before. At least hear her out.”

  “I did promise to listen,” said Niles. And even John’s scoffing fell quiet, as Ellie tried to put her thoughts into order, to explain the case. She would only get one chance.

  “If the past can be changed,” said Ellie, “then we could go back and stop the Spindle from breaking. That would undo the damage, everything, even the reaping of the earth.”

  “Hypothetical,” said Niles, “but yes. As a thought experiment.” His gaze was confusing—half speculative, half sad. “Do you have evidence that changing the past is possible?”

  “Maybe,” she said, “When we went back in time, there was a war going on, and a so
ldier was shot. He was dying—we knew we had to leave—his reaper was coming, right? Still, before we left, we were seen by the man’s reaper.”

  “That is unusual,” said Niles. “But it is hardly a case of altering the past. You just appeared for a few seconds and probably were dismissed as inconsequential.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” said Ellie. “The principle is no observing the observer, right? Someone from the future can’t leave a message or interfere with the past. Because that creates paradoxes, circular time loops. The universe won’t let you!”

  “Correct,” said Niles. “There can be no paradoxes. If there were, information becomes unmoored from an origin point—the only reason you get the information is that your future self knew it, but the only reason your future self knew it is because he also received it from the future. Information would just ‘appear’ with no exact origin.”

  “Well, we interfered with this reaper’s assignment,” said Ellie. “She must have gone around asking about us, so we changed the past!” The conclusion seemed obvious.

  “That sounds like speculation,” said Niles. “But when you have a good reason to believe something, you need a better reason to disbelieve it. There are thousands of cases of reapers being unable to change the past. Speculation does not disprove them.”

  “What else could have happened?” Ellie demanded. “She saw us—must have asked about us, used up people’s time that they would have used to do something else.”

  “Even if she talked about you, that does not mean changing the past,” said Niles. “You would have been merely one conversation in dozens that people have every day, and soon forgotten. Time is not completely solid any more than space is. A small inconsequential blip is not changing the past. The principle holds.”

  And Ellie remembered going upstairs with Cookie to find the location of the Spindle from the rulebook—how Susan noticed them and talked to them, just fine, no problem, and how Shawn could not do the same because of his ball-and-chain. In other first case, there was no consequences—the other was impossible because it produced a change.

  “No,” she said, half to herself as much as to Niles. “No, this time in the past, in Jerusalem... it was different. We did change something. We were strangers. We had to have an effect—” and she cast about for a reason, glanced down and saw—

  The glow of the Spindle’s shard at her boot toe. So faint that the stars above shone brighter with contrast. In that moment it seemed like a talisman, and the racing edge of Ellie’s mind caught on an hypothesis. She bent down, snatched it up, felt her finger prick on the edge. She held the shard aloft, and said, “It had an effect. Because of this.”

  Niles contemplated the shard and said, “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  “Because this is from the Spindle of Necessity!” Ellie told herself she was not shouting. “The Spindle is connected to time, right? So maybe having a piece of it affects time.”

  “We did seem to lose time when we jumped with the shard,” Jude added, helpfully. “Each time we jumped, we would experience minutes, but everyone else would feel like days or months. So it is affecting time somehow.”

  “Then, regardless of whether you are losing time, you are losing it in only one direction. Again, this is all speculation,” said Niles. “There is no proof of any change in the past.”

  If Ellie did not know better, she could feel the shard throb against her fingertips—then she recognized that this was merely her own pulse beating against her tight grip. Anger burned through her, the realization that this argument was not going to convince Niles. No matter what she said about Jerusalem and the shard, his would dismiss it. Her hand dropped to her side, plunking the shard back into her coat pocket.

  But—there was another example. She said: “Shawn. When we had the shards, he went back in time and... merged... with his dying past self. That’s changing the past!”

  “Not really. That’s happened before,” said Niles. As her voice had raised, his softened. “We are invisible. The dying don’t always see us. Shawn ‘merging’ was something his past self was completely unaware of. It might as well not have happened.”

  “Plus,” said Jude, “we got kicked out, right? We were pulled to the present just before the reaper for Shawn showed up. The universe stopped us from changing the past.”

  Who’s side are you on, anyway? Ellie almost yelled at him. She stomped rather than scuffed her boot—the sound like a gunshot in the dim light of the stars. Why are you people doing this? she wanted to demand. I’m trying to save the world, here, and you’re too busy fighting it to see that I could be on to something—we could change the past—

  We have to change the past. It’s the only option. Because otherwise—

  Glancing up, she grit her teeth—the stars looked unmoved, but she knew they were falling, Niles’s astrolabe had said so. What would reach the Earth next? Mars? Venus? Were the reapers going to wait millions of years for whole galaxies to arrive on this dead planet, the entire universe circling in slow motion down the drain?

  A voice from the past came: The whole universe down the drain, and then explodes...

  Like a gift the name came to her. “Keith Smithson.”

  Niles’s confusion was almost comical. He was mirrored by both Jude and John, and Ellie resisted the urge to snigger: I know something you don’t know...

  “I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” said Niles, prompting. He seemed curious, now.

  “My last assignment, before all this happened,” said Ellie. “He was a paradox.”

  John muttered about going off deep ends, but Niles was gentle: “What do you mean?”

  “He only died because I was there,” said Ellie, feeling triumph beginning to rise within her. Almost like she had been waiting to say this for a long time—indeed, she could now recall wanting to ask Niles about it, and here she was:

  “He saw me, walked across the street, got hit by a truck. I was the only reason he was in the street at all. I was sent there to reap him because he was going to die, but I caused his death by being there to reap him from the death I was about to cause.”

  There was a beat. A pause. And Niles said: “You’re right, that is a paradox.”

  Ellie’s breath caught, astounded that Niles would say that. I’m right? she wanted to ask, just to clarify—and she wanted to shout up at the falling stars: I’m right!

  “But it does not disprove anything,” Niles continued, bringing Ellie up short. “It was in the present, so it does not prove you can change the past. What happened was a paradox of free will and destiny—you observed one of the interactions between our world and God’s providence, since He exists outside of time. Also, this was before you had a piece of the Spindle of Necessity, so it doesn’t fit with your original argument about changing the past.”

  “But—” and Ellie grappled for language, found words missing. “But—” the sentence had no ending, and she felt her grip on the argument loosening, her pocket-watch heavy. “But,” she finally managed, “If a paradox can occur in one case, then...”

  “Ellie,” said Niles, voice was as soft as she had ever heard. “I know this is important to you. I know the end of the world is frightening. But look at what you’re saying. Your logic is anfractuous. You jump from idea to idea, because the ideas are not leading you to the conclusion, the conclusion is leading you to the ideas. You don’t want the world to end. But there comes a time when one must face reality and find acceptance.”

  She stared at Niles, waiting for him to continue, but he did not. “Acceptance,” said Ellie, singling out the word. It was flat on her tongue, like soda that had lost carbination.

  “Yes,” said Niles, “There are things we can change, and things we cannot. Acceptance is what makes us able to endure the things we cannot change.”

  “Acceptance,” repeated Ellie. “Like of that,” she said, jabbing her good hand at the Rocky Mountains, which should have stood forever as a m
onument to eternity, but which now were as flat and glistening as pools of water. “And of that,” she jousted her hand at the sky, without the sun, an open wound. “And that,” pointing to the maze of plains.

  “Yes,” said Niles. Something about his voice was divided, caught between relief and sorrow. As though he, too, was accepting something that he did not like.

  “And,” said Ellie, her skin beginning to prickle, to bunch and tighten, her entire body fallen asleep and the circulation not yet restored. Her thumb, moving on its own, flicked and twisted the dials of her pocket-watch. But with her uninjured hand—

  “Acceptance of this—” she grabbed her scarf, pulled tight, cut off her own air.

  Niles’s eyes widened. He seemed as though it had never occurred to him that Ellie could or would flaunt her own death wound like this. Even Jude and John were silent, stunned. Ellie dropped the end of her scarf, daring them to speak.

  She did not need to glance at her pocket-watch to see the time and date she had entered. She had never entered them before, but now she knew that Shawn had been right—entering them was easier than any other coordinates.

  “I’ll show you acceptance!” she shouted. “I’ll show you how to change the past!”

  And she clicked her reaper’s tool. Niles vanished, just as he was opening his mouth—

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Observing the Observer.

  Everything became solid again. Ellie found herself looking at a long set of stairs that stretched up to the pinnacle of the world. But she blinked, forced her mind back into semblance of order, and recognized her own family’s staircase, leading up to the bedrooms. The only light cast from the kitchen, so the top of the stairs was in gloom.

  Why was she here?

  The question came to her, but like a soap bubble, floating, popping when she reached for it. Why here, and not at the Holy Sepulchre, where Obadiah Charon, about three years from this moment, was shattering the Spindle and ending the world?