Dream Called Time

by S. L. Viehl

  Shon scanned it. “Dormant infinity crystal.” He moved his scanner around in a slow sweep. “The soil here is saturated with it.”

  “Something is happening down in the pit,” Reever said, and then the ground shook, throwing us all off-balance.

  A transparent bubble rose out of the pit, enlarging as it grew and attaching itself to the sides of the quarry. Wherever it touched stone, it crystallized into clear, three-sided formations.

  The settler paled and babbled something at Reever before he ran off.

  “What did he say?” Shon asked.

  “The translation is difficult,” my husband said. “It was something like, ‘The stars have awakened.’ ”

  “Not the stars.” I watched the upper vault of the bubble solidify into a shining dome. “The crystal has.” Something jabbed into my back, and I whirled around to face the unfriendly settler and a small group of his pals. He held a curved blade fastened to the end of a shaft made from a root that curled around his hand and forearm.

  Reever offered his hands again, palms up, and spoke to him gently. The settler snapped back at him and gestured toward the pit.

  “Tell him we didn’t do this,” I suggested.

  “He knows we did not,” Reever said. “He is ordering us to go into the dome.”

  I saw the hair around Shon’s neck rising. “I think that would probably be a good idea.”

  As the settlers marched us down into the pit, I noticed some of the scars on their hands: slashes that looked exactly like the ones that had disappeared from Reever’s skin. “Duncan.”

  “I know. I see them.” He said something to one of the men, who responded with a snarl. “Jxin children of this time are taught to control their emotions and desires from an early age. These men could not learn those disciplines.”

  “That is why they’re forced to live on the fringes of society,” Joseph said as he met us outside the dome. “They are used for the manual labor that the other settlers do not wish to perform themselves, and they are not permitted to breed outside their caste. But they are not called undesirables in this time. That won’t happen for another thousand years.” He smiled at me. “I had expected to see my son, not my daughter.”

  “I’m your clone, not your kid. Where are the women?”

  “Inside, waiting for you.” He gestured toward the dome, and an archway formed. “Come. Let me show you what you have made possible.”

  We followed Joseph inside the dome, which was still forming on the inside. I saw enormous shafts of infinity crystal shooting up from the rocky ground to serve as supports for the upper dome, and others growing into complex shapes that weren’t as easily identified.

  “What is all this?” I demanded.

  “You must have a name for everything. It is as annoying a habit now as it was when you were a child.” He gazed around, almost beaming with pride. “This is a place of transformation, where the future will shortly be decided. Call it whatever you like.”

  Maggie appeared, dragging a struggling Jarn behind her. Her black eyes told me she was still being controlled by the shifter. At the same time, the settlers seized Reever and Shon from behind and held their sharp blades to their throats.

  “Duncan.” Jarn looked at him and then me. *“Cherijo?”

  I forced a smile. “I’m sorry we had to meet under such unpleasant circumstances, Jarn.” I turned to Joseph. “Why bring her here?”

  “Balance, which now must be restored.” He gestured toward Maggie, who dragged Jarn over to one of the crystal archways. As soon as she thrust her inside, dazzling lights enveloped her, and she vanished.

  I felt sick. “What did you do to her?”

  “She has been sent back to your time. Now that I have you, I have no more use for her.”

  None of it made sense to me, but the shifter was insane, so it probably never would. “Now you’re going to do what? Destroy the Jxin, and the future, and take over the universe?”

  “As much as I wish to, I cannot.” He grabbed my arm. “That is for you to do.”

  “You’re out of luck, then.” I didn’t fight him; there was no need to. “I’m not doing a damn thing for you.”

  “You wish to stop the black crystal, and save your timeline. It’s time you faced the truth about who created it.” He pushed me into the center formation, which was formed from a series of clear crystal panels. “Observe the Jxin, several thousand years after you met young Maggie. They have left their homeworld and have spread out among the stars.” He sneered. “To pass along their precious legacy.”

  I watched the images. They displayed the Jxin being taken from slaver ships and left on hundreds of different worlds. “They weren’t passing anything. They were enslaved.”

  “No, as I’m certain Maggie has told you, they merely needed transportation,” he chided. “Now watch.”

  The enslaved Jxin seemed remarkably unconcerned about their pathetic situations. As they were abused and worked, they began to falter and then fell in their tracks. Their bodies were tossed into pits and off the sides of ships and into enormous fires. Each time a body was destroyed, a faint glow rose from it and twinkled out of sight.

  “They ascended,” Joseph explained, “but the bodies they left behind were riddled with pathogens. They rotted into the ground and infected the plant life, and dissolved into the waters, polluting the aquatics. They tainted the scavengers who devoured their corpses. Even the wind that blew the ashes of their burned remains spread their disease over the face of those worlds.”

  The crystal panels displayed new life emerging on the slaver planets, humanoid life. It crawled down from the trees and out of the swamps and emerged from the woods. The humanoids joined together in tribes and occupied caves, and then began making and using tools to kill game and build crude shelters.

  “I know the Jxin were the founding race,” I told him. “But I don’t believe they used a disease to create life.”

  “Then you tell me, Doctor: how else could the Jxin have done it?” He produced a small container filled with black liquid. “The Odnallak knew. They had developed a cure for the plague the Jxin intended to release. When my ancestors were destroyed, it created the black crystal. Their final vengeance against the Jxin.”

  He opened the container, spilling the black crystal onto the rocky ground. I staggered backward.

  “It will not harm you. You are as much its child as you are mine,” he said.

  “It’s not a person, Joseph,” I told him. “It’s a rock. A deadly, contagious, malicious rock that, according to you, was created to wipe out all life in the universe, but still, a rock.”

  “You’re wrong. It knows you. It helped me bring you to life.” He smiled. “I showed it to you when you came to me on Terra. Don’t you remember?”

  Central Analysis was a research scientist’s fantasy-land, fully stocked with all the latest in medical examination tech. Some of the scanners were so new I didn’t recognize the models. Several worktables stood ready for human subjects, but there was a sterile, unused feel to the room.

  I wiped up a little dust from a console with my fingertip and examined it. “Been suffering mad-scientist block lately?”

  “I generally work in Development and Engineering.” He pointed to another panel. “Through there.”

  I walked through the door and entered an equally sterile, cold environment. However, here there were signs of ongoing experiments, centrifuges spinning, culture dishes cooking, and an entire wall of containers stuffed with organs and other, less recognizable objects preserved in duralyde solution.

  I nodded toward the wall. “Spare parts in case you mess up?”

  “Some are continuing experiments in cloned organ scaffolding. Others are failures. As were these.”

  He pressed a button on a console, and an entire section of the opposite wall slid away. Behind it were endless rows of glittering plas bubbles, filled with black liquid, and hooked to dozens of data cables. Each had a drone clamped to its base, and from the
flickering lights many were still active.

  That didn’t get my attention as much as the contents of the bubbles. Inside the murky fluid were small, pale objects enmeshed in a web of monitor leads. They were human. Human fetuses in various stages of development.

  Hundreds of them.

  I could feel the color draining from my face. “Embryonic chambers, I presume?”

  “That is correct. This one”—he went over and placed a hand on the only empty chamber—“was where I developed you.”

  I walked toward it, morbidly fascinated. Memories stirred with every step.

  The sea of warm, black fluid . . . the intricate web held my body suspended . . . warm and safe. . . .

  I shoved out of my head the memories of the artificial wombs I had seen in Joseph’s hidden laboratory on Terra. I wanted to vomit. “You put black crystal in the embryonic chambers.”

  “Of course. The crystal may not be benign, but it is immortal,” he said. “I knew if I eradicated the Jxin sequences from the Terran DNA I used to create you, and replaced them with my own, it would not harm you. I was correct. As soon as I introduced your embryo to the fluid matrix, the crystal recognized you. It nurtured you. It gave you the gift of eternal life.”

  “That rock,” I said through my teeth, “is not my mother.”

  He shrugged. “Not in the traditional sense, but it served quite admirably as a surrogate, and it still regards you as its offspring.” He watched my face. “Once we destroy the Jxin, the black crystal will be ours to command. Think of all that we can do with such an ally. Any world we want will be made ours. Our children will live forever.”

  “I’d rather eat black crystal.”

  Dark tendrils wrapped around my feet and inched up my legs, leeching the warmth and the life out of me. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t.

  “I regret that I have to force your hand,” I heard Joseph say. “But once this is done, you will see that it was the only possible cure.”

  Eighteen

  I felt the frigid weight crawling up my body, tightening around my throat before I could scream. Then it inched into my ears, and streamed inside my head, closing off my thoughts to everything but the beautiful darkness inside me.

  As the black crystal filled me, my body accepted it, and my mind expanded. I still saw the crystal panels displaying Joseph’s images, but they were unnecessary to me now. The darkness was not evil or good; it simply was. I felt foolish for ever having feared it.

  What I had always thought of as Jxin DNA was a contagion, a carefully engineered, encoded gene that the Jxin had inserted into their own DNA. They had created it exactly for the reasons Joseph had told me, to infect primitive life-forms on other worlds, and duplicate their evolution. They had believed that by forcing intelligent humanoid life to evolve on other worlds, they were contributing to the future of that level of existence. They saw the infection they spread as a means of reproducing one last time, so that the universe would remain under the control of their offspring.

  It was horrendous. A disease without a cure that they had released without a second thought. By doing so, they had interfered in the natural evolution of millions of worlds. And they had done it out of conceit and pride. They believed their species was superior to all others.

  I understood now what Joseph meant to do. Once I separated the Jxin from my ancestors and destroyed them in this time, I could use the infinity crystal to safely evolve the Odnallak. They would take their rightful place in existence, and one day attain perfection. It would be the Odnallak who traveled to other worlds, and left behind their legacy to existence before they ascended. Life would evolve, not from the plague of the Jxin, but from the same species that had created me.

  “That won’t happen, baby, and you know it,” a voice drawled.

  A light penetrated the cool darkness, glaring into my mind like the unwanted intruder it was.

  I didn’t want her here, but she wouldn’t go. Not until I acknowledged her presence, and listened to more of her nonsense, and then drove her away. “Mother.”

  “After several million years of waiting for the kid to grow up and catch up,” Maggie said, “you’d think she’d call me Mom. But no. It’s Mother.”

  We faced each other in a featureless void, no bodies, no meaningless settings to provide her with her usual amusements. I didn’t have to see her to know why she had come.

  “Joseph told me I would know who created the black crystal. It was you.”

  “Technically it was both of us, but I’ll take the blame. I was very young, Joey. I hadn’t yet learned the value of a good, bald-faced lie.” She drew closer, bathing me in her light. “Don’t feel so superior. You’re still trying to be Daddy’s girl.”

  She was vicious and selfish and had never cared about me. How could I have ever loved her? “Joseph told me the truth.”

  “Joseph told you what you wanted to hear,” she corrected. “I liked that part about how the Odnallak are going to save the future as soon as you kill off all of us. These future saviors would be the same Odnallak who never stop for a nanosecond to think about anyone but themselves and what they want.”

  “Because of you,” I reminded her, “and the way you treated them.”

  “Guilty as charged. When we see trash, we call it trash, and we treat it like trash. Because, oh, what do you know, it is trash, and it always will be.” She appeared in front of me, beautiful and cold in her Jxin form, her hair floating around her as if we were both underwater.

  “If the Odnallak were trash, it was because you made them feel that way.”

  “Oh, please, spare me the eternal sob story of the poor beleaguered, deprived, abused Odnallak.” She swatted the air. “They were defectives who refused to improve themselves. They preferred to steal what they wanted instead of earning it. They always took the easy way out.” She gave me an unpleasant smile. “And what do you know? Now you’re following in their footsteps.”

  “If I don’t destroy the Jxin now, they will exile the Odnallak, and create the same situation that led to their destruction.” I didn’t want to feel this anger. It was tearing at me, making it harder to think. “It’s the only logical solution.”

  “No matter how many mistakes my people and I have made, Cherijo,” she said, “we spent millions of years working toward the wisdom and the compassion we needed to ascend. The Odnallak haven’t. We always tried to be better than we were. The Odnallak didn’t. We will ensure the future of all existence. The Odnallak won’t.”

  Joseph stepped between us. “You’ve done enough damage, Margaret. You’ve hurt our daughter for the last time.”

  “There’s something he hasn’t told you,” Maggie said. “I can end his existence now. I could have done it at any time. We made you and the others so that you existed outside the timeline. No matter how he altered events or shifted time, at any time I could have sent you or one of the others back to destroy the Odnallak and finish this. But my people and I believed you deserved to make the choice freely. He doesn’t.”

  “Shut up,” my father shouted.

  “It’s all right, Joe. She’s all yours now. Cherijo, while he’s telling you all the reasons you have to destroy the Jxin, remember one thing. We never once asked you to destroy the Odnallak.” Maggie spread out her arms. “No matter what you decide, I will always love you, baby.”

  Joseph swept his arm toward her, and black crystal smashed over her, erasing her and her light.

  I felt her go. She disappeared from existence as if she had never been.

  My father turned to me. “That is what must be done, Cherijo. To all of them. Kill them. Remove them from existence now, before they destroy all life.”

  I stared at the blackness where Maggie had been. “She never asked me to kill you.”

  “This is what they do,” he said quickly. “They twist everything so that their lies sound like the truth. You know it isn’t. She’s still trying to pollute your mind. Cherijo.”

  I looked at him. “No
more of this.” I brought up my hands, and let the power building inside me flow through them. “No more.”

  My father did not go quietly, as Maggie had. Before he winked out of existence, he screamed his rage. Then he was gone, and I was alone.

  I emerged from the darkness as I forced the black crystal out of my body, just as I had in the immersion tank on the Sunlace. Something had changed inside me, something that the crystal could not control.

  I looked at the crystal panels around me, and reached out to touch the surface of one. It showed me the settlements where the ancestors of the Jxin and the Odnallak lived. I could feel their simple minds, the manner in which they had already divided themselves, and the first link in the chain of events that would end with the destruction of all life.

  I felt power still growing inside me, and by instinct sent it out into the crystal panel. All around me the shafts and structures began to glow with silvery light. In turn I felt the enormous complexity of the dome, and how it eagerly responded to me, awakening more of the sleeping crystal in the soil, sending out golden tendrils toward the settlement, capturing and imprisoning the Jxin where they stood, holding them suspended in time and space. They would never move again unless I willed it.

  I felt the timeline I existed in, but I also became aware of others, waiting to form. I called up images from them on the crystal panels, and studied the time constructs.

  I discovered that if I destroyed the Jxin, the Odnallak would not save my timeline. Without the Jxin to keep them in check, they would become conquerors and spread throughout the universe, first creating life, then enslaving it. They crushed every rebellion, and destroyed the children in their endless quest for ascension. Nothing I could do would alter their timeline, or its grim conclusion: In their desperation, the Odnallak would once more destroy themselves, creating and unleashing the black crystal.