The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  At this, her head finally lifted and her eyes fluttered open. She seemed to see him, though likely not very well in this dark and cool. “You came,” she said, her voice hoarse and scratchy, as it was most times these days. Her head slumped back once more.

  A new light began to flash on his link, a warning: Air Quality Critical.

  Leno took Great-Grandma by both shoulders but could barely budge her, and she was so old, he worried if he tried too hard he would break her.

  “Leno?”

  “Yeah! In here!”

  Dad appeared, crawling on his hands and knees, wearing a headlamp. He crouched beside Great-Grandma and shook his head. “Nia, you should know better.” He glanced around the cave. “She’s always loved this spot,” he said to Leno.

  Great-Grandma mumbled something, faintly.

  “She gets confused,” said Dad. “I shouldn’t have left her alone.” He moved behind her and picked her up by the shoulders. “You’ll have to take her feet. Gently, though. Hopefully she’ll perk up once we’re back outside.”

  They moved carefully through the fissure, meter by meter, and finally reemerged in the narrow canyon. Dad was right; she came to and was soon able to stand, though not without leaning on Dad’s shoulder.

  “You should have stayed at the house!” Dad said as they made their way up the twisting path. “You’re supposed to be the guest of honor at the festival, don’t you remember?”

  It was unclear whether Great-Grandma heard him. “I just wanted to see him,” she mumbled a moment later, between wheezing breaths.

  “Who?” Dad asked, but she sighed and didn’t answer, focused instead on putting one foot deliberately in front of the other.

  “You mean Great-Grandpa?” Leno asked, trailing behind them.

  Great-Grandma seemed to hear this. She smiled and put a wrinkled hand on his shoulder. “You’re a sweet boy.”

  They had just crested the ridge, their houses shimmering in view down the slope, when the first booms sounded in the distance.

  “There you guys are!” said Morena from down by the house. She waved her arm. “Come on!”

  Leno peered through the early-evening haze and saw an explosion of energy flickering over town. “Aww, we’re missing it!”

  “That’s just the opening ceremony,” Dad said. “You two go ahead. Tell Mom to take you over. We’ll catch up.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Leno turned to go when Great-Grandma gently grabbed his arm.

  She smiled gently at him. “Do you have the beacon? And the key?”

  Leno rolled his eyes and tapped his sternum. “You know I always do, Grandma.”

  “And you know what to do when a message comes?”

  “Yes, tell you, or Dad—”

  She finished his sentence with him: “—in that order.” She ruffled his hair and released him. “And if neither of us is here, you send the reply yourself.”

  “I know. Can I go?”

  “Have an adventure,” she said.

  Leno raced down the rocky slope toward Morena.

  “Careful!” Dad said, as he too often did.

  “Oh stop it,” Great-Grandma barked, her voice like dry reeds.

  As he left, Leno turned back to see Great-Grandma slapping Dad’s shoulder gently, some of that old grandma sass that they saw so rarely these days. There was a reason she’d been honored year after year.

  He ran off with his sister, down the hill toward the festival, having no idea what the future would bring, and indeed, no idea how his life would have changed when he returned home.

  12

  TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 08H:55M

  “Earth?” said Liam’s mom, gaping at the new map overhead, and the blue orb glowing at its center. “Our Earth?”

  “Not exactly,” said Barrie.

  “A planet with a ninety-nine-point-seven-percent similarity to Earth,” said the chronologist, consulting his crystal.

  Everyone stared silently. Liam felt a rush: Earth, the way he’d only ever seen it in books and the VirtCom, the way it had been even before his parents’ lifetime, before it had become mostly deserts and fragment oceans. Mom’s eyes were brimming with tears. Dad was peering like he did when a million thoughts were running through his mind. The sight of the little blue planet spun Liam’s nerves, but this feeling was more than that. He’d always considered Mars his home, and yet seeing this image stirred something inside him, some whirring of excitement and longing. This was what a new home for humanity should look like. Air to breathe, oceans to swim in . . . Based on the looks on his parents’ and Mina’s and the Artemis crew members’ faces, they were all feeling something similar.

  Barrie reached into the map and expanded a panel of data beside the image of Earth. “This universe looks to be about the same age as ours,” he said. “Formed using the exact same configuration. In fact, instead of calling this iteration 90, she’s labeled it 89.1.”

  “You’re saying this place just made another universe,” said Mom. “The entire thing, just like that . . . and it has another Earth?”

  “That is what I’m saying,” Barrie agreed.

  “So it’s what: a copy?” said Dad, his brow wrinkled.

  “I think there may be very subtle ways in which it is different, but it’s very, very close.” Barrie scrolled through more readouts. “The portal into this new universe has opened at a space-time coordinate that would make this version younger than our Earth by about fifty million years.”

  “Why there?” Mina asked.

  “Perhaps it has opened at a moment prior to the evolution of life-forms similar to your own,” said the chronologist. “But far enough along in the evolution of the biosphere that it would be hospitable for you, all of which would make for an ideal time to arrive.”

  “Arrive?” said Liam’s dad.

  The chronologist blinked. “I assume that Dark Star has revealed this planet to you so that you may make a new home there. Perhaps that is the true purpose of this station. To tailor an ideal home to those who use it.”

  “We haven’t exactly been using it,” said Dad.

  “No, but it has been scanning us since we arrived,” said Barrie. “Learning all about us.”

  “It made us a new home,” Mom repeated.

  “To that point, sir,” said Jordy, “the portal to our universe seems to be permanently open now.” He pointed to where the original portal was glowing a similar shade of green.

  “It’s an invitation,” Barrie said. “A home for all humanity.”

  Liam pushed back from the moment. Iris, are you here?

  She shimmers beside him. Yes. What do you think?

  Is it really another Earth?

  It is. Do you like it?

  I mean . . . Liam’s thoughts jumble in his head. Are you really suggesting we should go live there?

  I’m not suggesting anything. But I don’t have to. Iris waves her hand off to her side. Look.

  Liam peers past her and sees that the fog and darkness beyond his present moment have washed away, and there, finally:

  His future.

  It is light filled and green. The bubbles of moments that stretch forward shine with pale-blue-and-white skies. Liam slips ahead in time, his heart racing with anticipation, and sees a flash of ships descending, hundreds of colony cruisers, sees himself stepping from a landing platform into deep green grass, the kind that would hiss against the glass of the savanna biome in the Earth Preserve back home—

  No, this is home. He can feel it like a vibrating string inside him, something complete that never quite was on Mars. In his lungs, beneath his feet. In the colors and smells.

  He pushes forward farther into his future, faster. Prefab dwellings rise on the grasslands. Cruisers and transports blink in the twilight like fireflies, rising into night, up toward the necklace of starliners in orbit. Bats flit overhead—animals he’s never known but always known—as he breathes air that is warm, damp, meant for him. That persistent worry of dome failures, gravit
y loss, pressure suit integrity, all gone. Only the tingle of thunderstorms on the horizon. The white glow of a moon, fat and round, blotches of gray that almost make a face—it’s not quite like the old face, his mother will have said not long after arriving, and it annoys Liam that this Earth, his Earth, still has to be compared to the long-dead one. There is the twinkle too of a second moon—little sister, they call it; this was apparently a comet that became caught in Earth’s orbit, one that didn’t strike the planet, as it might have with just another degree of angle on its trajectory. A not-impact that never caused an extinction.

  Here, on his Earth, there will still be dinosaurs. But they are midsized to small, the great behemoths having evolved into memory on their own. They are mostly like birds, mostly skittish, but there are some species it will be wise not to startle.

  Then a school building, offices, towers rising higher and higher: in the distance, the massive clouds from machinery paving roads, grading hills, mining for materials.

  Liam rushes even farther into the future, the moments around him a blur, and then he sees a stunning vista. He pushes into a moment when he will be sitting atop a mountain, crested with crinkled ice and snow. He is older: nineteen, twenty? He will be up here watching the sunset over folds of snow-laced peaks that seem infinite, sitting with a group of others his age—we will be students, we will be studying abroad. This Earth has three massive continents, and this is the first time I will have traveled to the one that straddles the North Pole. We will be learning about the precursors of an ice age that was to come, but that engineers are working to avoid. Phase Two technology can keep this planet warm and ice-free like we found it. He remembers that his parents will have been happy, engrossed in their work, always thrilled to see him on college breaks, their hair now gray at the temples. Mina will have moved to a city on a far coast, will still be making music, and will be working in sustainable-settlement planning.

  Here Liam will someday sit, on this mountaintop, on this Earth. Alive and safe. He presses farther still into the moment, enough that he can feel the wind, chilly, but so buoyant with vapor, so alive, the atmosphere thick and enveloping, especially when compared to the dry desolation of Mars.

  Mars.

  This is what he will be remembering, as he is sitting here, in the future: he will be watching this sunset and thinking about the ones on Mars. And he will feel a faint echo of that fear he once felt, of the oncoming, unknowable future, and it will be a feeling like he has lived two lives, one on Mars, one here, or maybe three, if you count that time in space with . . .

  He will be happy but also sad, sitting there on the mountaintop, even though this future version of himself can still know the future: sad to be leaving childhood behind, sad because no amount of looking through dimensions this way can ever truly replace the sensation of being in a moment for the first time, the only time. And yet the sadness is also thrilling. It is a spiraling feeling—experienced by present Liam, or future, or past?—to be seeing this mountain view for the first time before he’s seen it, and also to know that his twenty-year-old self remembers seeing this at thirteen, knows it was coming. How all of that suggests that it is meant to be. That it has meaning. But there’s a longing there, too, on Earth, at age twenty, on a mountaintop somewhere on the newly named continents. Someone he misses . . .

  A hand will creep into his. Liam will look at the hand and grip it tight; but at the same time, for less than a second, he will think of someone else, just before he smiles at the girl beside him, whose name will be—

  Not Phoebe. A different girl. A human girl he has been dating for a while. But . . .

  Liam pulls back from the moment, from the mountaintop, back into the timestream, the play of his future a blur of light and movement and laughter and tears.

  Where is Phoebe?

  He drifts back toward his present, trying to catch a glimpse of her lavender face and shining eyes anywhere in his future.

  Iris, he says, do you know where she is?

  It would seem that your future and hers are meant to diverge.

  Liam slides nearly back to the present—there. Finally, Liam sees a moment with Phoebe’s face and presses toward it. Not long from his present. They will be standing together inside a Cosmic Cruiser. Her eyes will be wet. Her lips will move.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  Liam gets closer to himself. “I’ll miss you too,” he hears himself say. Close enough to feel his future heart pounding as they hug. His body shakes, hollowed out inside, a feeling he will remember as far away as those mountaintops, so many years later.

  This good-bye, coming so soon, will never leave him.

  Liam clenches his jaw and sinks away from the moment.

  She’ll always be there, in your memory, says Iris. And for you, with all of your abilities, that can be something more than it could ever be for the others.

  I don’t want her just in my memory, he mutters.

  I know.

  The future is just probability, he insists. This doesn’t have to be how it goes.

  True, Iris says. But you see the life that is ahead of you, now that this Earth is possible. And that’s not just for you. Your sister, your parents, your friends. All of humanity.

  It’s almost like you’re telling me I don’t have a choice.

  Of course not, she says, and seems to smile. There are infinite choices. And we can explore what could have been as much as you’d like. You, Liam, have so much potential, but the rest of your people don’t have the awareness that you do. Much remains uncertain for them. If you don’t follow this future, it could mean death.

  Okay . . . Liam frowns at her. Her words sound like a warning.

  I know you’re conflicted, that so much of this is confusing, but trust me, she continues. Go back to your present and listen. Experience this timeline, and I think you will agree with me that this future is the best for all. I will be busy processing for a while, but then I will return.

  Isn’t this what you were working to finish?

  This is a very significant part of my system functionality, but not all of it. For you, Liam, there is more. I promised you access to the higher viewpoints, and I will be true to my word. Not much longer now. Okay?

  I guess. In all the commotion, he’d forgotten about seeing time differently. It seemed oddly distant to him now, given all that had happened. Liam reconnected with his matter, his senses, rejoining the moment. Everyone was still gazing up at this new Earth and discussing how to proceed.

  “Liam,” said JEFF’s head, “your link is exhibiting very strange time code errors.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Liam opened the home screen and tapped off the messages.

  “What you’re suggesting is traveling into another universe,” Dad was saying. “Is that even possible?”

  “We got here,” said Mina. “What’s the big deal? Fly through the first portal, then the second.”

  Liam tried to get Phoebe’s attention, but she was blocked from his view by the rest of the Telphons, who had clustered tightly, alternately looking at the map and conversing in increasingly loud voices. The humans began to pause to watch them.

  Tarra noticed this and addressed the room: “Captain Barrie, is it possible for you to search this new universe for a Telos?”

  “A what?” said Barrie.

  “Aaru-5. Does this new universe have a similar version of our home as well?”

  “Let me see . . .”

  “It would be about fifteen light-years from Earth,” said Ariana.

  “In the Aquarius constellation,” Dad added.

  Barrie zoomed out and waved the map along, until he had centered another star system. “Here?”

  “That red dwarf star in the upper left,” said Tarra. “Second planet.”

  Barrie zoomed in. Liam saw multiple planets, and yet the Telphons had already begun to gasp and whisper. There was a planet closest to the star, and a string of others farther out, but in between that first planet and a distant second
one stretched a cloudy ring of asteroids.

  “It appears that in this universe,” said the chronologist, referring to his orange crystal, “the destruction of Telos’s sister Xanos created a chain reaction that destroyed both planets. This was a highly probable event in our universe, one that your planet was incredibly lucky to avoid.”

  Liam saw Phoebe’s ashen expression as she gazed at the map. He hoped she’d look over, but her face fell and she turned to listen to her people talking together quietly again.

  “It seems,” Tarra said a moment later, “that your magic machine has made a new home for you that conveniently excludes us.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Barrie. He recentered the map on the new Earth and enlarged the view of the planet. Mom, Dad, Mina, and the Artemis officers stepped nearer to it, until the blue orb floated between them at shoulder height.

  “If it really is that much like Earth . . . ,” said Dad.

  “How do we know this new universe is even stable?” said Mom, and yet her eyes were rimmed with tears. “Or that this thing won’t blow up that star, too, at some point? Or that the portal will even stay open long enough to get everyone there?”

  Dad shrugged. “It seems to be showing us this place intentionally.”

  “I know, but we’re ascribing purpose and compassion to a giant machine whose origins we don’t know, and whose basic power needs involve the destruction of entire solar systems.”

  “What reason would this machine have to try and trick us?” said Barrie. “Perhaps this is what Dark Star did for its original creators. Perhaps those ancient Architects left it here, in case it might someday be found, so that it could be of help to others. Like us.”

  Liam considered telling them that yes, Dark Star did want to help them. And yet, it would be confusing to explain, and they seemed to be coming to that conclusion on their own.

  “It’s a better solution than Aaru,” said Dad.

  Mom flashed a glance at the Telphons before continuing in a lowered voice. “It’s true what Ariana said. Our best-case modeling of Phase Two was only coming in at eighty-seven percent. And you remember how many other planets we surveyed, looking for a place whose conditions were even remotely close.”