“I don’t know.” He doesn’t want to have this conversation. He just wants to keep flying on Mars.
“I think that’s a fine idea.” She is reading his thoughts again. “Let’s keep practicing your skills.”
Liam frowns. She sounds like a teacher.
“Come on—you always wanted to fly the gauntlet. Why not try now?”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Expand your viewpoint. I think you are starting to see that there are other possibilities than simply the one you chose in the past.”
“Yeah.” Liam has been mostly ignoring it, but during this trip to Mars, everything has looked slightly different. On his previous trips, the moments of his timeline appeared as sort of a line, arranged almost like a tunnel. Now they appear more like a web, interconnected, circling around one another, but not exactly ordered by before and next.
“Are you doing this, too?” he asks.
“I am assisting,” says Iris. “But less and less. You are changing. Developing the awareness to see more.”
“These are other possible realities?”
“Yes. And if you push in the direction of one, I can help you experience it. Then it will no longer be a mystery to you.”
“You mean not just leaving my past self within my existing past, but, like, following an actual alternate timeline.” Liam remembers exploring such a thing on Delphi, without really meaning to. “But isn’t that dangerous? The chronologist said—”
“The chronologists know much, but even their knowledge is limited. Come on.” Iris tugs on his arm. The light energy of her fingers causes a buzzing in his skin. “Let’s try.”
Liam gazes over his shoulder in the past, at the Fingers, receding behind the skim drone. He has always wanted to know. . . . “Okay.”
He leaves the moment and drifts backward along himself, returning to when he was rounding the great cliff face.
“Liam, you’re out of visual range,” he hears his dad say.
Liam pushes back in, farther than he has before, until he can feel the impression of his fingers on the controls, feel his heart racing as the Fingers draw closer, the narrow gauntlet entrance beckoning. . . .
“Dig past the uncertainty,” says Iris. “Find the part of you that wants to take the risk, even as the voices of doubt grow. Focus, and push . . .”
Liam feels for that desire, like a single thread entwined with the worry and the doubt, one that is made only of the excitement of possibility.
A tingling—he sees his own hand from the present within his hand from the past, both on the joystick, and now they are joined by the glimmering of Iris’s hand.
“Go,” she says.
Liam feels the frightened impulse to swerve away once again, the one that he listened to the first time—and instead slams the thrusters to full strength. A chilling wind races through him, and then the skim drone is not veering off but is instead shooting straight ahead into the shadowy trench between rock fingers.
There is that stretching sensation—but then it is gone. Liam looks back and sees his original self making the turn away from the entrance—and yet he maybe knows that a word like original, in this case, is not quite right, a bit too three-dimensional a viewpoint. Two selves, two realities, and here, this new future is hurtling forward and he has no memory of it and the spires of rock are dangerously close. His fingers dance over the thruster controls, tapping the joystick, the skim drone angling, darting, dipping, shooting between the spires, proximity sensors screaming—
“Whoo!” Liam soars out the other side. The Martian sun sparkles in his eyes as he arcs back around to see the narrow route he just flew. He breathes hard, shaking but satisfied.
“Liam, what’s going on?” Dad asks over the link in this other future. “I’m getting erratic signals.”
“Nothing, just fighting some wind gusts!” If Dad knew he’d taken such a risky route, or if Liam had misjudged and damaged the skim drone, or even crashed it—
“But you didn’t,” says Iris. “You flew it perfectly.”
“I did,” Liam agrees.
“How does that feel?”
“Pretty great.”
“That fear you used to feel, when you doubted that you could do it—you no longer need to live in its chains.”
“But I still didn’t fly it, like, in my real life.”
“And yet now you know that you could have. There is peace of mind where there was doubt. That’s what I can show you. How to conquer your fear.”
Liam nods, and yet that wind is so loud inside him here, that sense of distance, like he is spread out, becoming more vast, but also getting farther from himself. . . .
“Where does this future go?” Liam asks. “What if I follow it too far and I can’t get back?”
“Eventually, that won’t be a concern. You will be able to hold both futures in your mind, as if they both exist. And many more.”
The wind keeps growing. “For now, I think I’d like to go back.”
“Of course,” says Iris.
There is a tug, a blur, and a moment of fog as this other reality dims. . . . Liam finds himself back in the skim drone, returning to the field station, having never run the gauntlet. His past self is awash in disappointment at chickening out yet again. He remembers that feeling, from that moment and so many others in his life, when he didn’t do what he wanted to, what he dreamed of, because of his worries.
It’s okay, he thinks, and almost wants to tell his old self this, somehow. You could have. And you would have made it.
As Liam sits with himself in the cockpit, he feels a strange dissonance: both the disappointment of not flying the gauntlet and the rush of having flown it. Is it really possible to feel both things? To know both realities, and others?
“More than you can imagine,” says Iris. “You need not experience your life as one thing at the expense of all others. You can realize all the big and small ways your life varies at each critical moment. You can fly the gauntlet, and not. You can crash on the flight, and nearly crash, live and die—”
“I crash?”
“In some realities. I can show you.”
Distantly, Liam glimpses the side of the skim drone clipping one of the spires, just a millimeter off course. Thrown into a spin, ejecting but the seat spinning too, whipping and twisting, his body slamming the canyon wall—
“That’s enough,” he says, breathing hard. And yet also thinking: I want to see more.
“Soon, Liam,” says Iris. “When I have enough power.”
Liam’s head still feels hollowed out. That wind . . . “Isn’t it too much? Knowing all that? Wouldn’t you feel . . . lost?”
“I’d argue that it will be the opposite: you will have the peace you’ve always sought,” says Iris. “You’ll no longer have to take things one unknown at a time, as your mother once told you. To perceive all the possibilities is to fully know the truth, to know what is right. Or even more accurately, to know there are nearly infinite truths, infinite correct decisions, all with their own futures—and the one you choose can simply be appreciated for the beauty it possesses.”
“What if, while I’m appreciating that skim drone crash, it kills me?”
“There is no death when you are beyond time.”
That feels like too much. Liam pulls away from himself in the Mars desert, back into the flow of his timestream. “How are you going to show me? More trips like this into my past?”
“You will see. I have to go now. I am nearing the end of a major piece of my functionality. I cannot wait for you to see it.”
Iris begins to fade. Liam looks ahead to his present, to the still-unseen future beyond that. With a nervous rush of energy, he returns.
9
EARTH YEAR: 2256
TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 11H:22M
Liam opened his eyes to dim light. The compartment ceiling, the sides of the stasis pod. He blinked at the blobs of green in his vision, the brilliant Martian desert fad
ing, along with the chalky smell of iron dust, the electric hum of the skim drone’s thrusters.
Error messages flashed on his link. He shivered, sat up on his elbows, and peered over his pod. He couldn’t see Phoebe, but the sides of these old pods were tall. She was probably still asleep.
His fingers fiddled with the beacon around his neck. He pressed it, as he so often did, but it remained dark. There was likely no way its signal could cross between universes. Where was Mina now? Had she awakened their parents? Had she told them that she’d spoken to him, that he was okay? How many hundreds of thousands of kilometers were they from Centauri by now, and how much time had passed there?
Upon returning to the Artemis, Kyla had taken them to the commissary for a snack, another round of nutri-bars and some primitive and even less flavorful version of GreenVeg, before dropping them back at this compartment. “Get a quick nap in,” she’d said, and locked the door behind them.
Liam had managed to sleep for maybe two hours, only to snap awake, the motor in his abdomen whirring and bucking on adrenaline flares, so he’d slipped out of time. Back to Mars. The trip had left him feeling exhausted, with an odd sense of emptiness just behind his eyes. How long had he been there? Before he’d flown the skim drone through the gauntlet, he’d visited the balcony, hung out in his old room for a while—his favorite time to visit his room was in Year 9, when it most resembled how he remembered it, before they’d started packing and downsizing. The walls were still covered with Dust Devils and Raiders posters, and his fossil collection was at full strength. He also liked to visit the year before, when his family had taken a trip to see the gas giants. He could play the earlier version of Roid Wraiths, before the big update that majorly altered the graphics, and nap on his old couch, without fear of anyone returning.
He tapped his link and dismissed the usual error messages. Checked the time on it and the atomic watch. Seven hours’ difference. A fresh nervous wash in his belly. You shouldn’t be going for so long. He hadn’t meant to, and yet the hours had just slipped by. And with the couch nap, he wasn’t that tired. Most important, there had been a few hours when his nerves had been calm, almost normal . . . and yet not quite. Always the boiling star, the dead universe, his parents getting farther away, no matter how he tried to distract himself. And perhaps more worrisome, that wind . . . it blew inside him constantly when he was in his past, and while he had gotten used to its presence . . . what if at some point it never left? What if he reached a state where he couldn’t quite return to his present, at least not fully? That was sort of what Iris was promising, although she made it sound more like he could be everywhere at once. But did being beyond time also mean living with that moaning wind inside?
Other times, he wondered if there would come a time when he wouldn’t want to return. What if he stayed in the past for a month? A year? When he came back to this present moment, would he still look like thirteen-year-old Liam, or would he have aged? Could he live the rest of his life there, never returning at all? Could he die there? And if he did, what would happen here? Would Phoebe find his body in this stasis pod, or would it merely be empty?
Liam closed his eyes, clenched his midsection. These thoughts were spinning him up as much as the boiling sun, if not more. So what was the answer? Here was terrifying, but so was there. And both felt lonely.
He fished the small marker from the pocket of his thermal wear and pushed his sleeve up farther. Wrote the point-five from earlier, when they’d been at Dark Star, and then a seven for this most recent trip—
“When are you going to tell me what you’re doing?”
Liam jumped. Phoebe was behind him, sitting cross-legged on the desk unit that was built into the wall. His hand shot out of sight, shoving the pen into his pocket.
“Nothing. I wasn’t—”
“What are those numbers on your arm?”
Liam started to push down his sleeve—but Phoebe lunged, her bristled hands grabbing his and shoving the sleeve back up. “Tell me.”
“They’re hours,” he admitted.
“Hours? Because the link is malfunctioning?”
“Sort of.”
“What’s that other watch?”
Liam felt a deep tremor of guilt. Or shame. His heart raced, a metallic taste in his mouth. “It’s an atomic watch,” he admitted. “So I can figure out how long I’ve been gone.”
“Gone where, Liam?”
Liam swallowed hard. “In time.”
Phoebe’s eyes narrowed. “You mean like back to Mars, like we used to do with the chronologist’s watch? But you don’t have it anymore . . .”
“I don’t really need it,” said Liam. His hands had started to shake. “I haven’t needed it since after you left the Scorpius with the Telphons. I can kinda move through my timeline on my own now.”
“You’re time traveling. For real.”
“Not that much. . . .”
She frowned at him. “Where have you gone?”
“My apartment back on Mars, with my family, except sometimes I also hang out there when they’re not around. Or to grav-ball games, the research station, even school. One time I went with us to Telos; I thought maybe I could warn someone about Phase One. Except then I realized that no one there would understand my language, and I didn’t know if it would actually change anything anyway.”
Phoebe gazed at the floor. “When did this start?”
“When we first woke up here.”
“But that was, like, five hours ago. You’re saying . . .” She peered at the string of numbers. “For you it’s been over two days?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s why I feel so tired. I mean, I’ve been napping, here and there, although that’s weird too when you’re back in time—”
“Liam!” Phoebe shoved him in the shoulder. “What are you doing? I need you here, now! We need you! Maybe you haven’t noticed, but our entire universe is in danger!”
“I know, it’s just . . .” Liam started to tremble. “Since we got here, I haven’t been able to see the future at all. Just darkness. And we’re so far from home, and getting farther . . .” He breathed deep, his heart rate increasing. Be honest. It’s Phoebe. “It’s been worse. I keep picturing us, back before we came to the Artemis. Centauri A, about to go nova. Sometimes it explodes while we’re still there, and I see us dying, feel the fire—”
“But we survived,” said Phoebe.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve been so scared, all the time, and it’s like some muscle has worn out, or like a faucet broke inside me, and there’s all this adrenaline spilling around and I can’t shut it off, and so sometimes . . .”
“Sometimes you think avoiding everything that’s happening is the best thing to do?”
“No!” Liam felt a tightness in his throat, hot tears at the corners of his eyes. “It’s just the only thing that can help when I start to panic. If I go spend time in the past, everything kinda calms down, and I can deal when I get back. It’s not hurting anyone. You literally can’t tell that I’m gone—I can return to the exact moment I left.”
“Liam—” Phoebe began.
“And besides,” he said quickly, “what else are we doing, anyway? The captain’s not going to let us leave, so we’re just stuck here waiting until Dark Star does whatever it’s going to do next.”
If it was possible, Phoebe’s glare had grown even darker. “I’m not an idiot, Liam. I know you don’t really feel like we’re just stuck waiting. You think there’s something to all of Captain Barrie’s crazy ideas, don’t you? That there’s some reason for you being here. Like you’ve been chosen, right?”
“I—”
“Because of course humans would be the chosen ones.”
“It’s not—”
“No! Just listen to me.” Phoebe stood and crossed her arms, trembling. “This whole time, ever since we left Mars, you’ve had the certainty of your people, your plan. The knowledge that there was a new home waiting for you, that there was a future for you as long a
s you could catch a starliner, and survive a journey in stasis. And you always know that if you ever get in too big trouble, you might just meet a chronologist, or find a doorway.”
Or a girl representing a multidimensional computer. “You’ve been part of those things, too,” Liam said.
“I have, it’s true, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s always been for you. I thought my life had a plan, that there was a future out there for me, until bombs rained out of the sky and burned my planet. How many Telphons used to think their lives had a purpose just like you do, only to see that firestorm? I woke up one morning and in a half hour it was all gone, my whole world. And sure, we’ve had a plan since then: Stop the humans! But nobody knows what happens after that. I used to think, like, why are we bothering with the humans when we need to find a new planet? I mean, I hated you guys, too . . . but sometimes I think part of the reason is that no one wants to face what comes after that, because it’s so scary. Setting out to find some new home, with no certainty that there even is one. Our future might lead nowhere.”
“Phoebe . . .”
She wiped her eyes. “You’re not the only one who worries about the future. You’re not the only one who lives with a constant fear in their gut. I’ve been scared for so long that I’m pretty sure it’s never going to go away. My heart doesn’t even beat right. Every weird beat is a constant reminder that my life will probably never be normal again. You’ve been able to trust the plan, or the chronologist’s watch, or even Captain Barrie. . . . The only time I’ve had anything close to that is with you. When we’re a team.”
Tears were streaming down Phoebe’s face now, her chest rising with heavy breaths.
“I’m sorry,” said Liam. He thought he should get out of this pod and hug her, but he didn’t know if she’d want that.
“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.”
“I—” But did he? He was going to say she was right. Even though he was always worried, it was true that, underneath it all, there had always been a kind of certainty that he could follow, a belief that he and his family and humanity had a story, a purpose. What right did he have to even be worried, given all that? But he was. Maybe because he’d been sensing that, the farther off course their journey went, the less likely it was that he’d ever be able to get back to that story. That he would be lost, adrift.
The Shores Beyond Time Page 13